THE POSSIBLE DECADENCE OF FRANCE. T HE English, and for that
matter the French, observers• who predict the decadence of France, always appear to us to omit some important factors in their calculation ; but they have many arguments to allege in support of their melancholy theory. Mr. F. Myers, for example, who in the Nineteenth Century for May makes himself their spokesman, draws a picture full of shadows, yet neverthe- less, for the moment, true to life. He holds that France is losing one after another all " illusions," using that word as her own description of all non-material ideas. She is losing belief not only in her own religion, but in the moral government of the world, and in all the restraints which spring from the idea of responsibility to a power higher and holier than man. Nothing seems true to her sons but what is visible, and most of that is mirage. She is losing her belief in utopias at the same time as her belief in individual claims, and has no more hope in Socialism than in the Bourbon. The feeling towards General Boulanger is rather a mania than a loyalty, and while there are no reverenced chiefs of parties, no dream commands the kind of assent which impels men to great self-sacrifice. She is losing even her sense of the attractiveness of love, reducing it steadily by incessant analysis to a purely material passion developed by circumstance and essential to the race, but with no necessarily ideal quality bound up with it. And, finally, she is losing belief in her own personality, and widening the domain of determinism —that is, the range of self-acting destiny—until personal will has no meaning, and a Frenchman is in his own eyes almost a machine, obeying impulses given from without, but not from above. The result of this decay of the ideal is a selfish pessimism so operative and so widespread that it actually affects the population, the people refusing to bring children into a world with so little hope before it. The total population of France would sink but for immi- gration ; and in Normandy, the richest and most advanced of her great provinces, the birth-rate has sunk to nineteen for each thousand of the population, less than half the normal rate, and scarcely more than half the rate, thirty- three, in Brittany, where alone some relics of faith survive.
Mr. Myers supports his contention with evidence from literature, art, and statistics ; and no one can deny that on the surface of things, his opinion is correct, that France seems to be decaying in energy, rotting in morals, and declining in native population ; that her people are weary of all that is, as the rise of Boulangism like a miasmatic exhalation sufficiently shows ; and that they lack, at the same time, the energy to secure the reforms which they desire, but which, in the general lack of hope and energy of mind, they are unable to define. Art is sensual, literature analytical, politics a scramble for office, or for the spread of ideas about which those who spread them are themselves half-sceptical. The only faith with any fervour in it is the irreligion, or rather anti- religion, which breaks out on occasion in the Chamber ; and the men who profess that usually add that the time for carrying their theories into practice is,—well, not just now. There is not the faith to seek an ideal, and not the nerve to base life openly on a pagan but instructed utili- tarianism. France keeps the Day of the Dead without believing that they will live again, and all creeds are dying down without human reason being enthroned in their stead. If the symptoms of the moment can be trusted, France will within fifty years be a Pagan State, the Japan of Europe, full of readiness to experiment, saturated with a kind of art, but at bottom Asiatic in her refusal to advance towards an energetic and consistent, or even a new, life. But then, can the symptoms be trusted ? Is there not something arrogant or even insolent in sup- posing that observers, be they who they may, can judge a whole people by its momentarily visible classes, or prove a nation decadent on the evidence derived from the incidents of half a generation ? Every nation has its in- tervals of torpor, malaise, lack of hope and energy; and in the England which allowed the Pretender to reach Derby, there was not a symptom of the England which only eleven years later commenced to lay the foundations of the present Empire. Who would have dreamed of Plassey after Preston Pans ? yet the soldiers who fled from the one field were not middle-aged when they might have stood victors on the other. It is the very nature of France to exhibit spasms of lassitude which extend through her whole being, moral as well as mental. Where is the evidence that she is worse, or feebler, or more devoid of men than under Louis XV., when Belleisle was accounted a soldier, and Fleury a statesman, and Diderot an apostle of progress, when Church and Army and people seemed all rotting together, and in their rottenness evolved the generation who made the Revolution, and whose faults, enormous as they were, certainly did not include lack of energy ? Population has sunk in France before now, and from the very same cause, the hopelessness which Mr. Myers regards so justly as the worst feature of the mental situa- tion. What do we really know of the body of the French people, which toils so steadily and bears so much, and must have within it such untold possibilities of producing leaders ? They certainly send up wretched representatives ; but if a period of comparative failure in Parliamentary life indicated approaching extinction, where would Ger- many be, or, for that matter, England either ? Is there a man coming forward here, unless it be Mr. Balfour ? Is the literature upon which pessimist prophecies are founded really written for France—certainly her masses do not read it—or for a jaded class, grown numerous in all countries, which demands everywhere literary absinthe, and nowhere out of France itself is reckoned to be representative ? England was not immoral when the Restoration debauched its visible class. We agree with Mr. Myers and the pessimists in their description of the political life of France ; but ought we to leave out of account the signs of deep unrest and discontent of which Boulangism is one, and the growing dissatisfaction with peace another, and the fretful savagery of all political criticism a third ? France may be growing Asiatic, but at least there is no sign of that tranquil self-complacency with her own con- dition, with her government, her social system, her pro- ductiveness, which is at once the evidence and the cause of Asiatic immobility. France has existed at least seven centuries, has been conquered again and again, has had long periods of torpor, has gone visibly rotten at least twice, and has always hitherto found in herself some spring of recuperative energy. She may have lost it for ever now, for nations can die ; but to assume the fact upon the evidence as yet produced, is bad, because over-audacious, history. Even as regards religion, about which the testimony is most complete, France is no more Pagan than she was during the great spasm of disbelief, extending really from 1749, when the " Encyclopedie " began to appear, to 1815, during which a generation grew up every man of whom had either been taught that the supernatural was a ridiculous illusion of the mind, or had never heard of its conceivable existence.
We cannot say, as we see some excellent persons do, that to predict the decay of a people like the French is to deny the Providential government of the world, for we do not know what is the purpose of Providence, which may intend to waste Frenchmen as it has wasted Australians from all time ; but we can say that this want of hope for others shows something of exhaustion in our own springs of mental energy, and even in our calmness of judgment. If we have not faith, we must go by evidence ; and the evidence is that within the white man's dominion, though the waves seem at intervals to recede, the tide is still steadily on the rise. Of that dominion France is a vital portion ; and till the evidence is irresistible, to expect her decay is weak rather than wise. If she is dying, why should the rest of the white peoples, without whom the world would be lost in torpor, expect a continuance of their vigour ? They have not shown in history more energy than Frenchmen, more resource, more of the qualities which make a race important among the peoples of the world. It is far more probable, judging from her past, that France, which is just creeping up to the period, eighteen years, after which with her a new cycle begins, is on the point of some considerable change, some new out- burst of energy, some development of herself which will interest or instruct or, it may be alarm, the whole world. There is little evidence of it as yet, for Boulangism is probably only a start in sleep ; but there is as much, if we consider her past history, as there is for the pessimist view which now obtains such credence even among the best of her own children. They, like Mr. Myers, and, indeed, all other observers, may be mistaking the thoughts of those who talk for the thoughts of the people who are silent. If we are not to have faith, we must trust experience, and experience shows that the white nations do not die, but only suffer change, and that France, in par- ticular, has survived strange attacks which seemed as if they would dissolve the very muscle and fibre of her mental being.
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