IMPERIAL OBSCURANTISM.
slipping down that fatal
TrEggroove which leads from despotism to darlmess. At the of the French is still
very beginning of his rein he felt it necessary to place the
press in irons, lest it should the people ideas inconsistent with a Napoleonic regime. His Government claimed under certain' formulas the power of imprisoning any journalist and heavily mulcting any newspaper proprietor, who wrote of permitted to be published any sentence calculated to bring Imperialism itself, its head, its servitors, or its agents into contempt. That power was unscrupulously used, but was soon found insufficient. Indifference is to a lover even worse than contempt, and the Toyer who was wooing the confidence of France found it needful to be praised. Journal after journal was brought up, publicist after publicist salaried, and decorated, and fed until it seemed at one time as if all the wit, and learning, and literary vigour of France had been secured to swell one scrannel hymn of adulation. The free press was in fact suppressed throughout France, but even this also was insuffi- cient. Men might write freely in books, and pamphlets, and reviews, and the public driven away from the papers might mad them, so pamphlets were seized, and books prohibited, and printers' licences withdrawn until authors who could not be Bonapartists ceased also to be politicians. Still the breeze blew too freely, a thought once uttered is not extinguished by the punishment of the speaker, and it was necessary to pre- vent the utterance. So the censorship was revived, and a " man in black " invited any editors in the name of the Imperial Government not to mention anything it wished to remain concealed. Still there was too much light. Events themselves proved as refractory as if Provi- dence had taken sides against Napoleon, and a system of suppressions was gradually organized till at the pre- sent moment no Frenchman can discover from a French publication resolutions passed in the Senate of the United States. The obscurity was now almost complete, but still there was one chink left. A few Frenchmen might, after some delay and at considerable expense, obtain copies of foreign journals, or even of journals published out of France in the French tongue. It was resolved therefore to prohibit the entrance of all which were, had been, or might be too free, and this week a decree has been issued permanently excluding the Independence Beige from the territories of the Empire. opinion, comment, news, telegrams, and foreign views have all been suppressed alike, and profound obscurity rests over the land. Even this will be found insufficient. There are men with eyes so constituted that after a little effort they can see even in. the dark, provided the darkness is not absolute, can in. fact concentrate those rays which other eyes are unable to perceive. Letters may flash sueh rays into Paris, and letters therefore must in the end be inspected en masse, and every one which under a laugh, that so rooted is his horror of authority as a
contains anything more instructive than a moral disquisition be suppressed. Nay, may it not be necessary to go even
farther, and stop all Frenchmen residing abroad from writing dangerous things to France ? They may be punished par contumace, their French property seized, themselves sentenced,
their English friends warned that by French law they are criminals. Nay, may it not even be possible, as the offence
of publication is committed in France, to induce foreign Governments to give them up ? A Bit was brought in last year to enable the Courts to punish in France the offences committed by Frenchmen out of France, and though rejected it is to be this year brought forward again. Extradition treaties, too, can be modified. A dozen ex- planations have been offered of the sudden annoyance of the Imperial Government at the " failure " of its treaty with England, but they are all evidently unfounded. The Gazette des Tribunaux said France never obtained her criminals and England did, and France therefore for her honour must keep all English murderers, forgers, swindlers, and such like, safe in Paris. Unfortunately in the last eleven years France has surrendered' fourteen criminals to England and England twenty-four to France. Another journal affirmed that France was hurt because English forms of justice were tedious and " obsolete," but the Minister of Justice scarcely suspects England of wanting French villains in addition to her own. Meanwhile all official journals in chorus chant the same reassuring refrain, that France will make no demandlor the extradition of politicaloffenders. That we heartily believe. The Emperor of the French is not a politician who cries for the moon, or asks in order to be refused, or who has any doubt as to the very few points which a British Government will not discuss. But neither do we believe that he breaks through the Federation of Europe without a purpose, and in this case his purpose, we feel assured, is another and a severe blow at the freedom of the press. May not the Agence Haves be in the right, and a law be demanded' from England under which any "foreigner guilty of an act of conspiracy against a foreign power will be given up, provided such act would have been punishable if committed against the Government under' which he resides ?" That clause would invest the French Government with terrible power, for, be it remembered, it is not through the lenity of the law, but through the lenity of the practice, that the English system of political libel is so light. The Duc d'Aumtde might, we dare say, be easily proved guilty in England of doing all for which we have ourselves convicted Mr. Luby, and under this law he must be given up. The Agence lianas may be uninspired, but we cannot avoid the suspicion that some design of this kind, some logical conclusion to this steady policy of obscurantism, must lurk under a notice apparently so hostile to all the social interests of France. Should it succeed, an impossibility with Earl Russell in power, the darkness over France would be complete, and as it is the rays are few and far between. Even now no man can get authorization for a. new journal, or find in the papers which exist any trace of opinion, or read the news before it has been mutilated, or hope for a translation from any foreign paper not devoted to the Imperial regime. Even now no book sells in Paris publicly which a censor has not read, no book can be imported which condemns Napoleon, no pamphlet can reach the peasantry, from a tract to an almanack, without the official imprimatur. Darkness is necessary to authority, and darkness has settled down upon the land. And, be it remembered, this is no tem- porary arrangement carried out in a panic, but a policy which has grown more and more settled for fifteen years. The young have grown up under it. The men under thirty were all boys when it began, the men who in maturity can remem- ber to have read a free article in France are becoming white- haired. An entire generation of a great people has grown up deprived of light, and when this regime falls, as fall it must, must gaze out on the illumination which will folio* with eyes habituated to bear only the faintest ray.
What wonder if they stagger, as they will ? The result of the system patiently carried out by a great man is sufficiently shown in the speeches of those lads at Liege. They are all of the Napoleonic generation. The eldest of them was eight when the reign of obscurantism began, has been educated under its auspices, has been kept from perniciously free writing, preserved from noxious telegrams, walled off from evil reports of foreign discussion, kept as in a glass ease to imbibe the full benefit of the. hot Napoleonic air. And he travels to Liege to tell the world, which hides a shudder
necessary evil in itself, that in his view the first necessity of humanity is to abolish God. The boy's mental eyes have been dimmed till his moral sight is blasted. A whole generation of Frenchmen is growing up thus unaccustomed to politics except as theories for the salon, untrained to discussion, unused to freedom, with no experience of opposition, unacquainted with history, unaware of the forces which have arisen outside its own shadowy world lighted by faint half-lights. And that generation, thus raw and ignorant, has been deliberately taught, taught by Government, that the only method of resisting autho- rity is by secret conspiracy, and taught by the recoil of its own heart from this systematic oppression that authority, divine or human, is only a name for force. Let those who dream of Utopias, who think • that war is ending and revolution moderated, that passion will no more rule nations and igno- rance will not again interrupt progress, tell us what this new generation, thus blinded, thus trained, and thus convinced, will do with France.
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