" THERMIDOR." T HE correspondents are making too much of the
pro- hibition of Thermidor. Though the incident is in many ways a significant one, and typical of a characteristic of the French nature with which Englishmen are utterly out of sympathy,•it does not prove, as M. de Blowitz tries to make out, that "the Republic is the Revolution in per- manence." To declare, as he does, that the decree dis- allowing the performances "hands over Prance" to the revolutionaries, is nonsense. Under the circumstances, a dramatic interdict was absolutely necessary as a measure of police, and it is ridiculous to accuse the Government of truckling to the mob. A riot in the pit or galleries of a theatre is specially difficult to quell ; but the authorities would most assuredly have been face to face with one if they had allowed Thermidor to continue in the bills. Already the friends of Robespierre had begun to pelt M. Coquelin with whistles and coins, and on the last performance a very little more would have provoked an encounter between the rival portions of the audience. It may be said, perhaps, that in order to uphold the liberty of the theatre, M. Constans ought to have taken measures to secure order in the house ; but a moment's reflection will show that no such measures are possible. You cannot put a constable in every other seat of the stalls, pit, and galleries ; but unless you do, there is no preventing an audience from using cat-calls, insulting the actors, and shaking fists in each other's faces. An open-air assembly, when it becomes riotous, can be moved on ; but in a seated theatre there is nothing to be done but to leave things alone, or to stop the performance. The Austrians in Italy devised, we believe, a third alternative, but it is not one which the Parisians would prefer to prohibition. For example, a popular tumult began in a theatre at Milan, and threatened to grow serious. At a sign from an official inside the house, down went the curtain. The next thing the audience heard was the tramp of armed men, and in another minute the curtain was raised again to show a line of white soldiers covering the house with rifles, which it was no secret were loaded with ball-cartridge. Such action will no doubt usually stop rioting, but the French Government may well be excused for not adopting it, Whatever the rights and wrongs of the quarrel, it is impossible, in a country where the people belong to the Latin races, to tolerate a play which tends to provoke riot. No course but prohibition is consistent with the maintenance of public order. Even in England managers have to with- draw or modify plays in obedience to the clamours of a mob. Only the other day an extravaganza, Joan, of Arc, had to be greatly altered because the Socialists would not allow a strike to be burlesqued upon the stage. It is true the authorities did not interfere, but their inability to pre- vent hostile demonstrations was quite as efficient an interdict of the piece as any formal injunction. What strikes us as the noteworthy fact about the inci- dent, is that the Revolution is still so burning a question that a dramatic author cannot hurl epigrams against the heads of the loaders of the Terror without provoking a storm of rage and. indignation. Very nearly a hundred years have elapsed since the Committee of Public Safety sent its victims to the scaffold, and yet the issues evi- dently appear as real to the people of Paris as if they belonged to the period of the Coup d'Vtat. We must take what would be an analogous ease in English history to see i the full significance of this fact. Suppose n 1845 there had been a pla,v acted in London satirising the Whigs and. the successful House of Hanover, and extolling the Jaco- bites who died at Cullod.en a hundred years before ? The performances would have passed almost without com- ment, or at any rate they would have caused no rage and anger that was not purely factitious. No doubt the French Revolution went deeper, and was an event on a far larger scale than the Jacobite Rebellion ; but that is not the true explanation of the difference we are noticing. We take it that what makes the French so sensitive and the English so indifferent to the events of the past, is the fact that the former have the historic imagination, while we have not. Memories play a very large part among the Latin and Celtic races. The Anglo-Saxon, however, forgets everything except his language. It has been said that this is because he has always won, and that memories of defeat and failure are what get burnt into men's minds ; but there is little foundation for the assertion. The men of Somerset were beaten at Sedgemoor, and beaten after a local enthusiasm of the most intense kind had been created for "the cause ;" yet after only two hundred years, not a legend remains. You may stand in the old bed of the Bussex shine and learn that the people still call the land " grave-ground," and occasionally dig up a skeleton ; but neither there nor under the shadow of the Weston Zoyland church-tower will you find any indigenous tradition of the battle. The villagers have learnt from the occasional sight-seer, or possibly even by some dim hereditary recital, the fact of the battle ; but the notion of taking sides in. regard to such an event is not entertained for a moment. The country-lads who were mowed down at the Somersetshire Thermopylre awaken not a particle more enthusiasm than do Kirke's lambs. Neither the one set of combatants nor the other excite the slightest popular interest. In France, however, things only two hundred years old still stand out quite clear, while matters of a hundred years ago are actually living. In not a few of the depart- ments the peasants feel the an cien regime, with the corvee, the gabelle, and the seignorial rights so near them that they regard it as nothing less than an act of self- preservation to vote against a reactionary candidate. If the Republic were done away with, they think that the old. order, which they know so well, thanks to the gift of historic imagination and to a habit of maintaining tradi- tions, would return again. Something of the same feeling inspires the whole reactionary party : they realise the Terror so vividly that they cannot escape from the fear that it may revive. Again, the modern extremists enter so closely into the actual spirit of the Jacobins, that they feel the necessity for taking strong measures against aristocrats, plutocrats, and other enemies of the people. To them an attack on Robespierre or Danton means much more than a mere piece of historical criticism. It is an attempt to undermine the basis of the Revolution. But the Revolution was a blessing to humanity. Therefore, all attacks upon it are wicked, and ought to be suppressed. And here comes in the characteristic French plan of looking to pure reason rather than to facts. An English- man would argue : I approve of the results of the Rddelu- tion ; but these are hard facts which cannot be altered by people who throw stones at Robespierre. If they attempt to interfere with the results of the Revolution, they must be stopped ; but nothing else really matters. Even if they succeed in proving the men who made the Revolution to have been one and all knaves, it need not greatly concern us. It all happened a long time ago ; and whether they were good or bad in inten- tion, the country keeps its substantial advantages.' The Frenchman, however, cannot argue like this. Destroy the intellectual basis of the Revolution, and he feels that all is lost. If, then, his mind is Made up in favour of the Revolution, he cannot bear to see its promoters represented as cowards, knaves, and fools. To admit the possibility of this would be to deny the absoluteness of his theories, and he therefore resents controversy as the Roman Church in former times resented all heretical speculation. For the extreme French Republican, there is no mean between abasing Robespierre and desiring to bring back the Bastille and lettre8 de cachet. Those, therefore, who bring the Jacobins into hatred, ridicule, and contempt, are necessarily traitors to the Republic. It is, we fancy, much the same with the Monarchists. They often talk as if to attack the ancien rdgime, and to uphold the abolition of privilege, were the same thing as condoning the Terror. Each party feels they dare not be impartial, but must take one side or the other, and then go all lengths ; and thus it happens that any sensational reminder of the great controversy throws the whole nation into a frenzy. In 1833, Victor Hugo's Le Boi amvse was forbidden, because it outraged the feelings of the Royalists ; and now Thermidor is put under a ban, because it wounds the Republicans. Both acts seem to us arbitrary, but in all probability they are both justifiable. The atmosphere of a French theatre is too highly charged with electricity to make it a convenient place in which to conduct a heated political controversy:
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