THE FRENCH PRESS LAWS.
ENGLISH opinion on French Press Laws is rendered powerless in France by a failure to understand one of the conditions of the problem, viz., the opinion of ruling Frenchmen as to the influence of their Press. All English statesmen hold, though occasionally with serious reserves, that the influence of a Free Press is, on the whole, favourable to good government ; that its ill-effect on those who govern, who are, for example, rendered timid by incessant and irresponsible criticism, is compensated by its good effect on the governed, who are enabled, by reading an attractive form of political literature and an intelligible record of events, to form reasonable opinions. Men are easier to govern on our system, when they are not dependent on Members for all knowledge of facts and all discussions on principles. All French statesmen, on the other hand, including M. Thiers, or even M. Gambetta as much as M. Buffet or M. Rouher, hold that a Free Press is essentially a solvent, and not a constructive power, which may act slowly or rapidly according to circumstances, but which always in the long-run dissolves governments, and which in France, owing to local circumstances, acts with un- usual rapidity and force. The Press there has a lever, the Army of the Revolution as it is called,—that is, the crowd of enthusiasts, dreamers, proletaires, and roughs in the great cities—which it can use as an army to overthrow, by actual descents into the street, governments which have seemed to fail. It is in the hands of men who possess in the highest degree the art of making governments seem to fail, who wield the weapons of ridicule and invective as they were never wielded since Attica was conquered, who can make life intolerable to great administrators, and render the intellectual or moral acceptance of good governments im- possible. They can, if left unfettered, strike Ministers, how- ever good or great, as Aristophanes struck Socrates, and with the same result, a loss of esteem which makes a sentence to the hemlock easy to procure. Governments, and above all free governments, must consist- of personages, and no personage in France, if attacked by Edmond About, Henri Rochefort, and -Paul de Cassagnac all at once and all set free, can
-retain respect enough to be efficient. And it is the interest of these men to use their weapons with their utmost force. Owing partly to the nature of the French people, who are, though not essentially frivolous, essentially suspicious and depreciatory, partly to the con- - centration of French life in Paris, and partly to the great importance of individualities, there exists in France no road to reputation so swift and sure as the writing of crushing leaders. A penman once recognised as high in his art is a power whom the strongest Sovereign or Minister will court. Moreover, whenever France is free the quickest road to a portfolio is not the Tribune, or the Prefecture, or the Army, but the journal ; and the journalists of to-day, if they can but - overthrow their rivals, are the Ministers of to-morrow. The result is that every government, no matter what, is the butt of men who can make it so ridiculous, that on the first on- slaught, which these same men can also order, there is no one to defend it. It is paralysed by a well-founded or unfounded intellectual contempt. It is not this or that government which is threatened by a free Press, but government itself, which
under such attacks becomes impossible. Even, again, if "this evil should be cured, say, by the American system of fixed terms of office—a most difficult law to maintain in a country with a capital—government tends always to fall more and more to mediocrities. The beat men in France will not bear this treatment. The circumstances and prepossessions and ideas which give English Statesmen fortitude under Press attacks are wholly wanting in France. French Statesmen can rely neither on their birth, nor their wealth, nor their services, but must look for distinction to their
characters—using that word in its widest and best sense, as including popular appreciation of their special intellectual as well as moral gifts—and will not endure the " brutalisation " of those characters by incessant and irresistibly clever attack. They would as soon be bludgeoned as criticised without reserve.
They will rather retire from public life as the_best Americans do, and leave the work of the State to men who seek office for pay, or to the men with a certain callousness of temperament
which, while it strengthens them against the penmen, shows by its existence that they are either stupid or are not in essence thoroughly French. Napoleon III. had this callousness and was not stupid, but it was because he was not, of his inner nature, French.
With much of this argument Englishmen will not agree, believing that every power in the State, if left alone, will find its proper place, but it is certain that cool Frenchmen of great ex- perience and strong Liberal convictions do believe it, that it is one of many reasons why they admit that government must be " strong," and that it is the true ground of the public tolerance for laws which strike us as outrageously oppressive. M. Gambetta would admit perplexity on the point as freely as M. de Broglie. The statesmen may be all wrong, and are cer- tainly wrong thus far, that freedom has never in France been honestly tried, for Louis Philippe, if he did not dragoon the Press, did corrupt it ; but the statesmen rule, and the problem is,—given their conviction to discover a Press Law which shall not seriouslyinterfere with temperate discussion, and shall secure in France that result which in England is secured partly by law, but chiefly by opinion. Journalists here cannot pillory the Queen, or accuse Mr. Disraeli of being bribed, or descant on Mr. Cross's habit of granting immunities from the laic— all of which things have been done against French personages by French journalists since 1848—without penalties quite as much dreaded as heavy fines. Our system, in fact, as the late Mr. Mowbray Morris showed the House of Commons, is one of rigid though invisible repression. Napoleon tried to solve the problem by investing the Executive with the power of suppression ; and no doubt he did solve it on one side, but then, on the other, he abolished not only free discussion but the whole race of " publicists." John Lemoinne was a mere survival, and had the Empire lasted, publicity in its highest sense would have become extinct. M. Thiers tried freedom, modified by absolute power in the military command- ants of great cities ; but that scheme, though not, as he worked it, fatal to all discussion, is fatal to all exposure of military abuses, and to all tranquillity on the part of publicists, who, if not tranquil, become savage. M. Buffet, again, is trying legal repression, but he takes power to repress so many things that he is landed in the old dilemma, that if he uses his powers impartially and steadily there will be no free Press at all, and if he does not use them impartially or steadily, there will be either license, in the French statesmen's sense, or unfairness of the kind which provokes Revolutions. A censorship would be easier to work than his Bill, and French experience in the theatres shows that a very strict censorship is consistent with vitality ; but besides the physical difficulties, which are nearly insuperable, and the public hatred of the system, no censorship in France would be, or could be, fair. The dominant party would never be content merely to protect the State, but would always protect itself as the Monarchists did when they allowed "Rabagas," which was a satire on the Left, and withdrew a play—we have forgotten its name—which was perverted into a satire on the Extreme Right. Compulsory anonymity, if it could be secured, would gradually ameliorate the French Press, by extinguishing personal interest and vanity, but it cannot be secured without the consent of those affected, who will not consent. You could not suppress a paper, because M. About always began his contributions with the letter A. Sieyes, if' he were alive, and making Constitutions, would be desperately tempted to place in the Cabinet a Director-General of Publicity, with very great powers, but compelled to use them on his responsibility to the Chamber ; but he would, we suspect, find himself in the difficulty that no competent man would be found to accept the office. He would be sure, like the Censor of Plays, to make occasional blunders, and then his life would be such a torment to him. The Press would be apt to combine for his destruction, and against a com- bined Press resolved " to employ the microscope," to report, that is, every word, gesture, or expression of the victim, no French Parliamentary official could stand a month. He might as well live under a colossal lens. There is, in fact, no plan which, under the conditions we have stated, is perfectly satisfactory, and only one we know of which might reasonably
be tried. It is not quite certain that the principle of the English Civil Law a libel, which is the infliction of a severe fine on the proprietor for the errors of his journal, would not work in France. Suppose the English Civil Law of libel were made to include " the Government," as if it were a person, and the journal found guilty by a jury fined in proportion to the offence, would not the proprietary exercise a very effective and it might be severe censorship ? Our impression is that they would, and that moderation would become in France as it is in England, one of the qualifying attributes of a journalist; but a Frenchman, we fear, would reply with two disheartening cautions. " You could not trust the Ministers to institute the actions only in State interest, and you could not trust the juries to return verdicts on the merits." Is not that equiva- lent to saying that, granted the conditions insisted on by French statesmen, the problem is insoluble ?
But are those conditions correct ? We do not know. French- men of experience insist that they are, and there is nothing in the history of France to show that they are wrong. The only answer from experience may be incorrect. A free French Press exists in Belgium and Geneva, and neither Geneva nor Belgium show any tendency to disappear.
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