THE DISEASE OF FRANCE.
THE real hideousness of the hideous events which have taken up the last ten weeks in Paris seems to most Englishmen, familiar with and even accustomed to measuring the horrors of the Great Revolution, their comparative cause- lessness, the want of sufficient reason for the outbreak of passions so fearful. We can understand and have a right to palliate the hideous outbreak of passion which caused the mas- sacres of the first Revolution. The people, delivered from a yoke more minutely hateful than any which we can now clearly imagine, ground down by social injustice, and having just tasted the sweetness of freedom, feared that they were about to be betrayed to their old oppressors, and took that horrible vengeance which multitudes, once made sensible of their great power, and always sensible of their great weakness, are apt to take when panic strikes them. We may not unreasonably or unjustly say that the atrocious and rapidly degenerating class-tyranny of the reigns which preceded the Revolution, were far more responsible for the vengeance wreaked upon the innocent members of those classes who subsequently suffered, than the bloodthirsty rulers who were the mouthpiece of the people's rage and fear. But now where is there any analogous justification for the horrors of the civil war in France ? for the bloodthirst of Versaillists and Communists alike, for the vindictiveness which sought to destroy Paris rather than leave it to France, and which murdered the innocent 'hostages' of the party of Order • for that fear and fury manifested towards Paris in the National Assembly which threw so many Moderates into the arms of the Red Republic, which decreed the ill-treatment and even execution of many of the first prisoners taken from the Com- mune and so began the competition in murder, for the horrible massacres by which the successes of the Regulars have been followed, and for the proclamations by which M. Thiers has apparently sought to stimulate passions which it was his first duty to control ? Surely here is a problem even more painful and difficult of solution than that of the Reign of Terror itself. It may be, and is true, that the Reign of Terror pro- duced an infinitely larger number of causeless executions than this struggle, where the executions on either side have been as yet mostly limited to one or two days of supreme violence. But granting that the flow of blood has been, as far as the guillotine or the capital sentences passed by the combatants have been concerned, far less terrible, the causes for deadly passion have also Apparently been so far inferior to those of the Great Revolution that the net result seems at once more calamitous and more inexplicable. A civil war that arises from slight causes must always be a more sinister phenomenon than a civil war arising from causes inscribed conspicuously on the history of centuries,—for it seems to show, not so much that political passions are strong, as that national affections, the mutual regards and reverence of people of the same blood and language for each other, are weak. It may be very noble to offer your life for a mere political principle ; but it is very far from noble to take another's life for the same political principle, unless compromise involve a clear and positive sin ;—now, in the pre- sent state of France, all ideas of clear and positive sin, as con- nected at least with politics, are almost obsolete ; and perhaps on that very account the passions of parties have risen to their highest point. The absence of a high standard of obligation by which to measure political duty, itself tends, we conceive, to centre violent passions on petty issues. And the same is true, of course, of the absence of a strong patriotic tie between the members of the same nation ; if that wastes away, it is pretty certain that party passions will supply its place, and grow stronger at its cost.
Can it be true, then, that since the Great Revolution, national feeling has dwindled in France, and that, by its atrophy, partizan creeds and animosities have profited ? We fear that at least there have grown up in France what Mr. Disraeli, with much less truth in relation to England, talked of thirty years ago as "two nations" instead of one,—the nation of the secret societies of the cities, and the nation of the small landed proprietors of the provinces. As Mr. Frederic Harrison said truly enough in that article in which he celebrated some- what prematurely the praises of the Commune before its disin- terestedness had been tried, "The social condition of the great cities was not homogeneous with that of the rural districts. Paris has one religious, political, and social ideal, and the country people another. The attempt to force either to submit to the ideal of the. other, has ended in a bitter struggle." But even that is not the whole truth. It is not the heterogeneousness of the creed of the town and country population only, but in a great measure the secret organization of the former which has separated them into two sections with so little of common aim, so much of deadly animosity between them. It has been the secresy even more than the difference of aim which has estranged the two parties. It has sown fear in the mind of the rural party, for we always fear what we know to be working in the dark by means we don't understand ; and it has sown selfishness in the mind of the secret societies them- selves, for selfishness always comes of that sort of absolute separateness of conversation and aim which is necessary to keep a secret. Only where a whole nation, like the Italians before the recovery of Italy, is thus banded together, can a really large patriotism survive the great trial of secret proceedings. The cities of France have not only lost all influence over the country, but have inspired positive hatred there by the dread felt of their secretly organized associations; and the rural districts have, in their turn, stimu- lated and rendered necessary the secrecy they dreaded, by the support they gave to the tyranny of Caasarism on the express understanding that it would wage war with these teachers of esoteric doctrines, and ferret them out of their lairs. We hardly care to determine whether the rural party who ren- dered the secrecy necessary, or the city party which rather revelled in the secrecy and seemed to enjoy the plotting almost as much as its aims, were the most responsible for the estrangement which his resulted. Doubtless the former would be the more culpable, if they had not also been the more ignorant, and the least able to understand the evils they were causing. But the result is the same. These great rami- fications of the organizations of secret doctrines,—always and naturally the more violent because they were secrek—have concentrated the patriotism of those who belonged to them on the society instead of the nation ; while the dread of these associations has concentrated the patriotism of those who have for so many years ruled France, on the party of order,' instead of the nation. Thus has the national feeling of France been undermined, and the sacredness of the strongest social ties been demoralized, by that sense of the urgent necessities of conspiracy, and that fear of conspiracy, which are the surest solvents of the sense of obligation. We need hardly say that if this cause of moral schism in France is to cease, it can only be by the help of a Government which, while guarding order, encourages as much as possible the openest speech, even with regard to doctrines which sections of the Community think subversive of all order,—a very dim hope at present. There is one thing more subversive of order than the most subversive doctrine openly avowed, and that is the same doctrine secretly organized.
Mr. Harrison has pointed out another great characteristic of the Communistic party in Paris and elsewhere, which has also tended greatly to sap national sentiment and diminish the repulsiveness of civil war. It is this :—" The people of Paris believe not in any God, nor in any man. But they have a religion of their own, for which they are ready to die. That religion is the faith that capital and its holders must adapt themselves to nobler uses, or they had better cease to exist." There is no doubt that this active denial of so much which is the common background of life to most nations, diminishes vastly the sense of mutual respect and national faith. Cast away faith in the unseen, and you begin imme- diately to measure people by what is most seen$, and to forget more and more that which is least seen, even though not wholly unseen. It may be quite true that this practical Atheism is almost as general (and, of course, even more culpable) in those who do recognize an unseen and mysterious rule over every heart, as it is in those who have come to the open avowal of Atheism, and who, as a consequence, have very little disposi- tion to put their trust "in any man," who supersede their leaders as soon as they see the glimmering of a policy displeas- ing to themselves. But though you may have practical Atheism where there is no theoretic Atheism, you are pretty sure to have more of it where the intellect is always enforc- ing the Atheism of the heart. And politically, the first result of this repudiation of all the mystery of human life, is a passion- ate self-confidence of judgment on comparatively very small questions of material interests, which leads men to stake the greatest issues on the smallest dogmas. Of course, if your sole religious creed is, as Mr. Harrison says the Parisian creed is, that capital and its holders must adapt themselves to nobler uses, or they had better cease to exist,—you will be disposed to stake, on the chance of getting the power to re-cast the relations between Capital and Labour, at least as mach as the French Puritans risked in the struggle for freedom of I worship, and much more than the Irish Catholics ' risked in the struggle for emancipation. Expunge all the regions of faith which make the question of the distribution of wealth comparatively small, and you will find that there will be fanatics as well prepared to draw the sword for a theory of capital, as ever were fanatics for a theory of religion. And this is the real result of both the theoretical and practical Atheism of France,—that, on comparatively small and very difficult and unsettled ques- tions, Frenchmen fight with a bitterness and virulence which would be almost impossible to men who really believed that there was a higher life and far greater issues outside the world of such conflicts, than ever could be found in it. True, the Communists of Paris have believed far more earnestly in " fraternity " than the rural party, and have sought to realize it at the cost of great sacrifices to themselves. But then their only test of fraternity has been the visible willingness to recast pro-
. prietary arrangements, and they have been apt to think no one deserving of being treated as a brother who did not acquiesce in this narrow, not to say mean, test of brotherhood.
On the whole, we should say, that the terrible ferocity of the strife, as compared with the apparent smallness of the aims fought for, is due chiefly to the real atrophy of those national affections which render civil war fearful,—and that this, again, is due partly to the cruel restraints imposed on the intelligence of the towns by the fears of the country, and the consequent organization of that intelligence into secret societies, which have made a conspiracy of half the patriotism of France, and alienated the other half ;—partly to the terrible dissolution of that spiritual faith whiclialone ensures that the selfish and material interests of life should not wholly absorb the minds of the people, and that the " fraternity " which has always been, and still is, the genuine and noble ideal of the French ouvrier, shall not be limited to men of one party and one creed,—and this, too, a party and creed based on vague speculative views about some of the most questionable and perplexing of economic theories, in the consideration of which self-interest is certain to have far more influence than scientific reason.
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