BROUGHAM ON THE LATE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE.

Tnis " Letter to the Marquess of Lansdowne, K.G., Lord President of the Council, by Lord Brougham, F.R.S., Member of the National Institute," originates in the fact that the two Peers were in office at the time of the Reform Bill ; and that Lord Brougham, "in constant communication with our lamented friend and colleague Althorp " wrote a "very elabo- rate work" on Political Philosophy. Thus doubly qualified, by practice and theory, by experience and speculation, Lord Brougham pours into the ear of "my old and excellent friend "—whom, by the by, he flaps a little in passing—his ideas of the late Revolutions in France and Ger- many: how that in France was first brought about, how Germany imi- tated France, and how contrary to Political Philosophy it all is ; as Lord Brougham illustrates from internal evidence, the examples of Rome and Greece, and of the British and American constitutions. This more direct matter is varied by some digressions as to the evils of anonymous writing in newspapers ; some remarks on the system of national propagandism, set forth by Lamartine and Ledru-Rollin, (but not acted upon, except in the small invasion of Belgium); as well as various incidental topics, touched upon in Lord Brougham's wonted way. In a literary point of view the Letter is but so-so; exhibiting little more of the author than a trite mannerism—the style without the strength or raciness of Henry Brougham. The substance is still worse—extreme, or so obvious as to be common, or so crotchety as to pass beyond the startling into the absurd. The true pinch of the case—the essential principle, which, ever operating, at last gives rise to fatal events, or renders accidents fatal—is altogether overlooked.

The great moral of the late French Revolution was the moral of selfish- ness; and of a selfishness so intense that it overruled the influences of education, training, experience, and observation of the most varied and ex- tensive kind. At an age of understanding, Louis Philippe had looked on the ruin of his kinsman through a weak yielding to the selfishness of others; he had seen an intense selfishness of the most gross and criminal kind con- duct his own father to the scaffold ; he had observed the downfall of Na- poleon, through a selfishness somewhat theatrical, but splendid and lofty. Yet two of these men had excuses for their conduct. Louis the Sixteenth had hereditary right and custom to plead in any resistance he might offer to the encroachments of the Revolution. Napoleon hat! rescued France from anarchy, but succeeded to the Revolutionary wars : he might have said with some truth that he had created the splendours of the Empire, but had been compelled to take its foreign entanglements. Louis Philippe had no excuse to allege. If the Revolutions of 1789 and 1830 had any meaning at all, the family rights of kings were at an end in France. Not only was this clear as an historical act, and his own elec- tion to the throne a still more convincing proof of it, but he acknow- ledged his perception of the truth by the phrase with which he duped old Lafayette—" a throne surrounded by Republican institutions." But no sooner was he fixed in his seat than he began to work for his selfish objects ; at first, perhaps, on the principle of Louie the Fourteenth, "L'etat c'est moi," though without the flashy polish and splen- dour of the Grand Monarque : latterly he sank down into open dynastic selfishness. Unlike Louis the Fourteenth or Napoleon, he did not aim at raising himself by aggrandizing the state, but pursued his family. ob- jects in a vulgar spirit. He was said to have patiently submitted to shghts or something more from a brother monarch; he was conceived to have sacrificed the interests as he certainly ran counter to the opinions of France in favour of his sordidly ambitious family affairs. No man was safe with him. His earlier supporters, anxious to carry out the principles on which he accepted the crown, were first bamboozled and then discarded. Thiers, if not betrayed, was abandoned ; and even Guizot, with all his services, was thrown overboard for the chance of a gain by the sacrifice. It may seem ascribing too much to a remote and apparently uncon- nected cause to mention the Spanish match ; but its reckless and unscru- pulous pursuit first opened the eyes of foreigners to the real character of the man—at home he seems to have been earlier understood. By breaking the connexion with England, be was driven to a seemingly closer alliance with the despotic powers, to the use of despotic language,

and the exhibition of despotic tendencies. These things, with the corrup- tion of his government, the iucreased taxation, his resistance to all re- form, and his latter manner of treating France as a sort of family appa- nage, alienated from him the whole of his peculiar supporters, the indus- trious middle classes or National Guards, while it encouraged the Re- publicans of all grades ; rendering his throne, all-powerful as it seemed, like an enchanted castle that vanished into air at the destined hour when any one has courage to blow the trumpet.

It may be said, and perhaps with truth, that the Republicans' both Moderate and Red, were conspiring against the Throne ever since 1830, or at least ever since they found bow Louis Philippe was deceiving them. But this was sorely the business of Louis Philippe to discover and baffle: that he was unable to do so in the long run, was his fault, not his mis- fortune. The events since February show how numerically small that party is, and how really powerless, even with the odds in their favour. That these men by accident and a coup d'etat overthrew the Monarchy, is obvious ; but they could not have done so had not France, alienated by the selfishness of the Monarch, stood aloof from him. The evident wish of the French people to avoid war, under difficult circumstances and amid great temptations, lessens the praise which the admirers of the "Napoleon of Peace" used to claim for him. The task was evidently Mt so difficult as they would have us believe. Universal suffrage, tried under circumstances the most favourable to wild, extreme, and exagge- rated opinions, has shown that the bulk of France is conservative, ac- cording to the French view. If the Revolution has done nothing else, it has enabled foreigners to see the distinction between the majority of the French people, and the noisy, violent, shifting, unscrupulous, un- principled adventurers of Paris ; a distinction which Louis Philippe ought to have been able to discover without such an experiment.

Of these and other essentials of the subject Lord Brougham recognizes nothing. He goes over the obvious and vulgar facts of the Revolution in the spirit of a state paper straining after political .philosophy, and in the style of a " counsellor " retained for Louis Philippe. The French people ..---National Guards as well as Red Republicans—are well handled ; the instability of all French institutions is predicated from the downfall of the King, in a three-days row, whom a three.days row had sufficed to set ; and attachment to a constitution in France is pronounced im- possible,—the philosophy of the idea being derived from Burke. The crime of having driven away "my respected friends" is the animating sentiment of the piece. But Lord Brougham admits that the King was not quite faultless. The Peerage for life was an error; it was a mistake to allow the National Guards to choose their own officers ; there were too many plaeemen in the Legislature, and magistrates held seats ; the constitu- ency was too limited. "It was sevestly urged upon the late Government by their real and zealous friends—of whom I certainly accounted myself one—that the franchise should be extended considerably. This, and the exclusion of placemen to a certain degree, would have made the Government as popular as could reasonably be required. In pressing this upon my respected friends,—whom since their loss of power I am the more proud so to name, because their extraordinary merits, their talents, their acquirements, their literary and professional fame, survive their fall,—my opinion WM backed, not merely by that of those who agreed with us in our great measure of 1831 and 1832, but I verily believe as much supported by those who widely differed from us—men for whom I entertain a great respect—one of whom I re- vere, as all must ever do who feel grateful for his immortal services rendered to his country and to mankind. My belief was, and so I represented, that after ex- periencing the inevitable consequences of refusing all reform, and how much greater a change had resulted from the refusal, he would himself, if consulted, have given his opinion in favour of a moderate change in France, even by the ex- perience of England. Of course, I am speaking without the least authority when I state such to be my belief; but I am speaking of one of the wisest, the most candid, the most magnanimous of men, and one upon whom no lesson of experi- ence was ever thrown away."

The non-abolition of the law of inheritance is set down as another fault: but as Lord Brougham admits this proposal could not be enter- tained, on account of the public feeling on the subject, the retention seems rather a destiny than a fault. But there were yet other errors. "I have expressed my very decided opinion that the refusal of certain reforms was unwise; that it was unhappy none can doubt. But other errors, I am bound to confess, were added to this ill-fated refusal; errors calculated to strengthen the Opposition in proportion as they injured the Ministry; but nothing more. The supporters of one party might take advantage of them, and regard them as singu- larly fortunate for themselves; their adversaries might struggle to palliate those faults, and their adherents might lament them; that was all.

"Among the chief of the errors I certainly reckon the ill-advised appoint-

ment of Id. Herbert to succeed M. errors, (du Nord) as Minister of Justice.

"The somewhat humble line of defence which the Ministers took on the question of place-selling generally, did them much harm. They did not deny the hints charged, but professed to think them justified by former practice, and promised to do so no more. Their predecessors very indignantly denied all know- ledge of such proceedings in their time, and showed themselves very eager to make this unqualified disclaimer. The awkward circumstance, too, of the pre- cedent cited to allow that judicial decision warranted the sale of places, viz. the CABO of a tobacco-licence, a thing always bought and sold notoriously, greatly in- creased the bad effect of the disclosure.

"But the finishing-blow was given to the Ministry's chance of weathering the storm by the prohibition of a public banquet, that had been prepared with some parade, and was expected to attract a great concourse of guests. The ground of the prohibition made it worse, for it was the forgotten law of the Convention; an authority extremely ill-chosen, even had the decree ever been acted on, which it never was, either at the troublous time of its promulgation, or in the more tran- quil seasons that succeeded."

Lord Brougham might have said, as he must have seen, that if the slightest electoral reform had been granted, or even promised, the Revolu- tion could not have taken place, in its present shape, since there would have been no banquet or procession to forbid.

Of the Revolution be gives an equally onesided, poor, and untrue "ac- count." It was all done by ruffians and felons combining on a sudden, the National Guards standing by with folded hands ; the extemporized Provisional Government was subsequently rendered secure by newspaper editors, both in France and England, assailing the dynasty and puffing the Republic. According to Lord Brougham, this is how the Revolution was done. " Any revolutionary movement was as much out of the question a few how* before the Monarchy ceased to exist, as it is at this moment in Elighind; as it ever had been in France, from the month of July 1830 or of July 1815. "But these few hours completely changed the face of affairs. The mob, led by a few agitators, got the upper hand; the National Guards, afraid of having their shops attacked, their windows and toys broken [fudge l] declined to do their dn- ; noanfficient number of troops was assembled, Efib I] and these were ill dis- tributed; some hundreds of young men, eager to distinguish themselves, headed the multitude; a number of boys from schools took part in the fray; a more powerful body of banditti, discharged from the galleys and the prisons, and always congregated in the capital front whencesoever they came, joined in the disorder which is so congenial to them, eager for the pillage which they sorely foresaw; the Abdication took place, the Regency was proposed and excepted both in the streets and in the Chamber of Deputies; when all of a sudden an armed mob rushed in, overpowering the sentinels, terrifying the members, who fled in all directions; and some one, apparently giving vent to the emotion that filled his bosom, exclaimed, like the woman in the German play, A sudden thought sttikes me ! Let us swear an eternal Republic, and let us vow to live together under it.' No sooner said than done; the Monarchy is abolished, the Republic installed; and the mob instantly name eight dictators, to rule with absolute power over the free commonwealth, and, using the authority of the sovereign people against their persons, to domineer over that people in their own name."

When the last of the Bourbons made his exit from Paris in a " cab" Galled from the nearest " stand," and immediately vanished from men's eyes,—being, as it turned oat, engaged in a game of hide-and-seek,—the common sense of common people seemed to consider that the business of the dynasty was done, for the time at least, and that all which remained for the French to do was to avoid anarchy, and take the sense of the nation as quickly as might be as to the form of the constitution, for the Re- public was universally " accepted." Such is by no means a true read. ing according to Lord Brougham. He " speaks of his own knowledge," that the Royalist defeat and Republican triumphs were mainly owing to the press.

" Among the persons who had brought about the Revolution, and who had pro- fited by its success, were an unprecedented proportion of literary men—not au- thors of works which gave them lettered renown, but editors and writers, news- mongers' and dealers in daily papers; a class of men well known for the influence which they exert, considerably above their merits ample as those are—an influ- ence in great measure derived from the constant repetitionof their doctrines, their familiar acquaintance with the topics of the day, and their habit of partly falling in with the feelings of those they address, partly leading them, a habit necessary to the suceess of their trade. Hence it was observed, that the press, (it is termed, as if there were no other, and sometimes the public press, as if a private one were constantly at work,) generally speaking, in Europe and America, but also in England itself, almost entirely joined the cause of the Revolution. Some few most creditable exceptions there were; but I speak of the common run of news- papers; and I can take upon me to affirm that this support, wholly unexpected at Paris, had a most powerful influence in encouraging the small Republican party, in silencing the voice of the country at large, and in striking with dismay the Royalist party of whatever shade. I speak of my own knowledge when I make this assertion: I add, also of my own knowledge, that nothing is more firmly be- lieved by the illustrious exiles, than their having to thank the English news- papers for the sudden turn which some of their own journals took against them, and for the all but hopeless state in which the public opinion of France for the present lies prostrate as to their cause."

In dealing with the larger features of his subject, our political philosopher utters general truisms, which become false instead of philosophical in his application. Thus, he attacks their universal suf- frage : but, however bad universal suffrage may be, it was a neces- sity of the occasion in France, if not in Germany. The Whig theory of the social compact had become a fact. The previous Government was destroyed ; existing institutions, if not a cause of the destruc- tion, were distrusted, discredited, and quite unequal to the crisis. An appeal to the nation at large was both a logical conclusion and a practi- cal necessity: for what else could be done? what class or classes were to be excluded? on what grounds ? and, in France at least, by what shadow of right, or with what degree of safety ? In a like feeling he denies any right to the Provisional Governments : but they had the right of neces- sity, and of consent, tacit if,not expressed. And as for the French As- sembly, it seems difficult to imagine a clearer title. The choice may have been unwise, their conduct may be foolish; but a higher authority than that of the whole nation it is in vain to seek for. It is very pro- bable that nothing but a sense of this enabled the Assembly to do what it did, and is even now doing, against the anarchists.

Mingled with this combination of the wild and the commonplace there are some better things—a judicious remark, or bit of curious statistics. This account of the Austrian and Prussian Assemblies is of the latter class.

"I have seen a curious page of statistics in the hands of some German friends, who must be well informed on a subject that interests them so nearly. It was an account of the elections for some of the provinces that sent members to the Vienna Assembly. Universal suffrage, untried universal suffrage, was the canon of election; and its results were so different from those which it had produced in France, that one could not avoid being deeply struck with the danger of transferring any political institution from country to country, and the mischiefs occasioned by want of political experience in the conduct of pub- lic affairs. Of about three hundred Deputies chosen, not half a dozen were what we should call gentlemen in condition and in education. Many of the peasants elected were proprietors to a small extent, an inferior kind of yeo- manry. There was a column for the members that could read and write; it was but indifferently filled: the column of mere readers was better supplied with figures; of the wholly ignorant there was a fair proportion, almost enough to have satisfied my misguided and worthy friend the late Minister of Public In- struction, in his zeal against education considered as an accomplishment of law- givers. The peasants are represented to be men tolerably well-informed for their station, and on subjects connected with their calling and rank in life; but whose ideas reach no higher than the parish steeple, or further than the bounds of that humble district.. But how, saith the wise man how can he get wisdom that holdeth the plough, and that glorieth in the goad; that driveth oxen, and is oc- cupied in their labours, and whose talk is of bullocks?' Yet to such men so ap- pointed is committed the greatest of tasks on which mortal man can be em- ployed—not the holding of the plough, but of the lawgiver's pen; and their talk 1.3 to be not of bullocks, bat of the highest matters that can occupy the human mind, the forming of a constitution! That this talk would be strange to those simple beings were they able to communicate with one another, is certain; how will it be now, when, being assembled in the same place, they are found no to speak in the same tongue—when at least eighty out of the three hundred pre- sent use the Sclavonian, which no German understands, and are unable to coin-

prebend a word of the Saxon, which alone the German speaks? Yet so it is; and such is the result of universal suffrage transplanted to the Austrian dominions, which, unlike France, knew nothing of any suffrage before.

"At Berlin a somewhat similar Chamber has been collected by a similar but less, extended right of voting: I find the following to be the enumeration, which I have from a source of the highest credit. Of the four hundred members, sixty are of classes fit to choose reprebentatives, considerable landowners, dignified and -beneficed clergy, judges of supreme courts, merchants and manufacturers of note, men of letters, lawyers of reputation: these sixty form an important but a small body. No less than 260 are petty lawyers and attornies, inferior judges or rather justices, curates, subordinate teachers, small tradesmen, and manufac- tarers: about eighty are common day-labourers. There may be nearly the same number of men who have some property, and as many who can write but very in- differently, being persons of no education. I am little surprised, and less edified, to have from the same high authority an account which leaves little doubt how large a part faction and the spirit of political adventure is likely to play in this Prussian Constitueut Assembly. There is a Conservative body or Droite of about 130; a Republican or Gauche of 110; a Moderate or Centre of 100. These sections are marshalled under leaders eager to play the most unprincipled and selfish game of faction, with all its headlong violence, all its profligatejobbing, all its unscrupulous intrigue. Not more than sixty of the whole are persons of no party, and who may be appealed to on behalf of the public interests with any chance of the appeal being heard."

The singular feature in the late Revolutions is, that France, from whom war was looked for almost immediately, should have been peaceable, while neighbouring countries are either plunged in war or directly threatened by it. Perhaps Lord Brougham gives the true solution of the greater comparative quietude externally, and upon the whole internally too.

"My alarm I confess to be great as to the consequences of this most ill-advised course. 1 regard Germany as in a position of more danger than France herself, from social convulsion, and all the worst evils of popular excess. She has had none of the experience of revolution, which in France has habituated all orders of the people to lead a life of change; her multitudes are not accustomed to the dreadful excitement in which the French have lived; the first fit may overpower the constitution, and produce terrible disorders. The leaders have no experience whatever of popular government; and all the institutions of the state are formed upon a plan which would require great skill with much temperate discretion to fit for the novelties that the agitators seem resolved to introduce. Above all, there is the intoxication generally prevailing which a great change is sure to Create, and the fantastic tricks which boys play under such an untried influence, and only to excite merriment, are aptto be frightful and destructive when strong men are submitted to the inspiration which for the first time suspends reason and lets loose brute force. Nor can I shot my eyes to the peculiarities of national character which distinguish the Germans. In many important particulars most estimable—in honesty, industry, kindliness of nature—they are not surpassed. Yet with this is combined an exaltation of fancy, near akin no doubt to that brilliant genius of which it is the exaggeration, but very apt to lay snares for the judg- ment and impair if not subdue the reasoning powers. The excellent and per- severing German is accordingly often observed to be of a bewildered intellect, the slave of fantastic theory, prone to visionary belief, nay, with all his good-nature, apt to engage in odd, unintelligible brawls; insomuch that we speak of a German quarrel as something known in Germany more than in other countries; while a German speculation is conceivedlo be something romantic, and a German romance something wild. Even their kindly dispositions I should little trust, if the po- pular excitement, working upon the theatrical, visionary, unearthly imagination, should drive them beyond the bounds of sober demeanour. The Parisian or Si- cilian mob may be naturally more ferocious, the German populace more ridiculous; yet, where sound reason is wanting, who shall tell to what excesses the vagaries of the disturbed brain may lead? Corruptio optimi pessimo; and I own I have my fears of a German mob, and its ideologue leaders.* "I must remember, too, in comparing the two countries, and it is no little part of my fear, that there is wanting in Germany the recollection of former sufferings from the reign of anarchy and blood; a recollection which in France is ever upper- most, which has been so even during the late excesses, and which indeed alone seems to have set bounds to them. The balk of the Parisians at first showed in- difference to the violence of the comparatively few agitators; but when the dread of a Red Republic began to haunt them, even the National Guard, passive in Fe- bruary, was ready to act in Jane; and the voices which at one moment had seemed to lift M. Lamartine above all his rivals, left him, with a singular accord, as soon as he formed his most inconceivable or most suspicious junction with tbe party that panted for the guillotine as an instrument of government, and the assignats as a resource of finance. This interval of firmness and good sense in so long a course of feebleness and folly, was altogether the effect of those dreadful recollec- tions which are engraves on men's minds ever since 1794; which they who had passed through that tremendous crisis, and have now followed its victims, de- scribed without ceasing to their children that yet survive, but of which some still live to tell the story with far more impression than any tradition can make. In Germany, this corrective or preventive is wanting; neither tradition nor memory affords it there."

The only practical suggestion of any value in Lord Brougham's Letter is, to remove the sittings of the Assembly to Dijon, Orleans, or Tours, in order to get rid of the mischievous influence of Paris. Such a change, even if predetermined by the Assembly and the Executive, could only be carried out at the time of a fresh provocation—some new attack upon the Assembly, or another conflict in the streets. It has been objected, that the power to effect this must be so despotic, that the Assembly it permitted could sit in safety anywhere. This scarcely meets the point. The sudden outbreak of an armed mob or an army of conspirators is what has to be guarded against ; and for such purpose removal to a dis- tance would be sufficient. Had the Assembly in February been sitting even at Versailles, it is probable that the Revolution would not have been so easily accomplished, or the Provisional Government so readily established. Had the National Guard been less alert by half an hour in May, the Assembly of Universal Suffrage might have been expelled, and a Red Re- public proclaimed; to have been followed, no doubt, by a civil war with the Provinces. It is not sustained power, but sudden blows, that the Legislature and the Executive have to fear from Paris ; and from these distance would preserve them. But the change could only be made un- der a condition which looked like a necessity.

In the remarks we have made upon Louis Philippe, it must not be supposed that we undervalue the difficulty of governing the French by him or any one, from the impulsive character of the people, the total want of different classes or estates to act as checks and breakwaters to sudden violence, (the first Revolution having reduced society, politically speaking, to a dead level,) the absence of colonizing and commercial en- terprise, and the presence of actual want. All we say is, that he accept-

", T as page was written on the 25th of September ; and on the day after arrived the horrid accounts from Frankfort, to confirm my worst fears." ed the throne on understood expectations or positive promises, both of which he disappointed; that he carried out a sordid principle of family aggran, dizement, and, in the pursuit of his personal objects, treated a great and sensitive people in a huckstering style, that would not have been attempted by his predecessors in ages of greater submission to unshaken authority; that the Revolution shows that there was a fund of quiet sound sense and rational conservatism in France, to afford him a safe base for pro- gressive reform; and if he did not find it out, it was his business to have done so.