THE POWER OF PARIS.
-w -HEN did the unique power of Paris among all modern cities arise ? "An Anglo - Parisian Journalist," writing in the current Fortnightly Review, dates Parisian sway from the Revolution. "The Parisians," he says, "took to politics more than a hundred years ago." We should be inclined to say that it was a good deal more than a hundred years ago. Putting aside Henry IV.'s famous saying, that his good city of Paris was worth several Masses, one sees in such works as the Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz a very clear indication of the importance of Paris long before the Revolu- tion. The building of the huge palace at Versailles made of a small provincial town the centre of Court life and of fashion, it is true ; but at the same time, we associate the literary and intellectual life of the Grand Siècle with Paris. It is instinc- tively with Paris that we unite the names of Corneille and lifoliere, as, later on, with Voltaire, Morellet, D'Holbach, and the Encyclopmdists generally. The mind of France was en- throned in Paris long before the National Assembly met at Ver- sailles, and the transference of the seat of authority to Paris was not, as it seems to us, due to the fact that the Parisians had just taken to politics, but because it was instinctively recog- nised that there was the real brain of France. It can scarcely be said that either London or Paris has been created by Royalty; these cities stand on a quite different footing from Berlin and St. Petersburg, which were made by Monarch and which, in consequence, still wear an artificial aspect. But, until Tudor times, English Kings held their Court in various places, London owing its greatness not to their favours, but to trade and geographical position. In France the Valois loved the fertile meadows and woodland of Touraine rather than the capital ; Louis XIV. took to Versailles, Napoleon I. spent much of his time at Malmaison, and Napoleon IIL at Compiegne. Paris was made essentially as a city of culture, as truly as London was made by trade; and we cannot but think that this was due to the great tradition of the medimval University of Paris, chief and VP° of all the mediasval seats of learning. The intellectual qualities of Abelard, who might almost be called a medimval Renan, have been in no small degree the intellectual qualities of historic Paris down to our own time.
Paris, then, is in a sense, as its citizens boast, a kind of modern Athens, in which the purely intellectual movement is keener than in any other community of men since the great days of the city of the Violet Crown, unless we except Florence. It is, too, the same kind of intellectual movement, that of the finest critical analysis. There were great poets in Athens as there have been great poets in Paris, in both cities there were great moralists and orators, but we feel that in both the dominant " note " was neither poetic imagination, passionate moral fervour, nor grand appeal to civic duty, but the very finest and most subtle criticism. As Aristophanes represented the temper of Athena more truly than Socrates, 80 Voltaire expressed the very heart of Paris as Condorcet never could. Paris has, therefore, given an intellectual lead to France unexampled in modern history, not merely because the led in the great Revolution, but because she dazzled and dominated the French mind by her concentrated brilliance of intellectual power. Doubtless the Revolution raised Paris to a degree of political greatness she had not known before, but this was because the men of power were there before, and because they had created for themselves a political constitu- ency which became easily the focus of French life. Goethe, in an interesting conversation with Eckermann, noted this fact, and deplored the hopeless provincialism of Germany, with its absence of a well-defined, cultivated society,—a society which as clearly condemns any intellectual Wise as the French Academy condemned and destroyed bad literary form.
But can we say with the Fortnightly Review writer that Paris is really the French nation, and that the "provincials are the hewers of wood and carriers of water, whose savings enable the capital to be merry, fickle, and to have cakes and ale" ? In particular, can we say that Paris is politically France, and that France is politically Paris? This verdict, it may be observed, is directly opposed to the judgment of Taine, who, in his posthumous work on provincial France, expresses the opinion that French life has been, in the main, organised for the benefit of the peasant and the bourgeois, with the result (which he, as an aristocratic thinker, deplored) that a very high average of material comfort has been attained with a loss of initiative, of high refinement, of independent thinking,—a loss, in short, of the very qualities which we are inclined to attribute to critical, intellectual Paris. It is certain that the traits which Taine ascribes to the provincial cities of France are not those of Paris, and so we must assume a certain gulf existing between Paris and the provinces,—a gulf which manifested itself in the Revolutions of 1793 and 1848, if not of 1830. We may say roughly, we think, that 1789 represented entire France, excepting parts of Brittany, but that 1793 and 1848 represented Paris pure and simple. The Bourbon Re- storation was too intimately blended with foreign intrigue for us to speak with certainty on the attitude to it of the nation as a whole. The coup d'gtat of 1851 was undoubtedly made with the belief that the peasantry were eager for security and deliverance from the Parisian yoke. The War of 1870, so far as France and not Prussia brought it about, was made by the Parisians, not by the provincials, who had, m a matter of fact, declared with surprising unanimity for Peace at the elections the year before to the Corps Legislatif. Since that time we may say of the various political move- ments in France that solid, sober Republicanism has charac- terised the provinces, that Socialism has grown in all the large towns, but that sensational politics, as exemplified in the Boulangist movement, have been chiefly manifest in Paris. Can we, from a consideration of these various instances, arrive at any conclusion as to the assertion made in the Fortnightly that Paris is France and that France is Paris ?
On the surface it might seem as though Paris were to be Classified as progressive and humanitarian, the provinces as narrow and reactionary ; and that is the general view taken. The great thinkers and men of letters are concentrated in Paris, they do the nation's thinking, and so they influence by their revolutionary ideas the world of Parisian life, which itt its turn drags the slower-moving provincials behind it. 80 the argument would run. But the question is not whether Paris leads the intellectual life of France; of course it does to a degree unexampled. The real question is whether for political purposes Paris is France. We do not think she is except at those crises when her highly critical intellectual solvent is needed to break up existing forms. That is her special function, and that function she performs with supreme power and success. When Paris oversteps this limit, and endeavours to impose on France her own politics, she fails and will continue to fail. Let us recur to history. The early stages of the Revolution of 1789 were made by France as a whole; they meant, in a word, the uprooting of Feudalism and the creation of a landholding nation. The results of that movement have been enduring ; not only has neither Emperor nor Bourbon nor Orleanist attempted to undo them, but they have based their power on the broad foundation of the peasantry. But look at 1793 and the reign of the Commune, and you see that its record was short-lived, its work abortive, and its yoke thrown off by provincial France. The Revolution of 1848 was made by Paris, it virtually lasted only a few weeks, its one political legacy being universal suffrage ; it was a lamentable failure from the point of view of social order and political progress. But the Empire which followed, and which was built on peasant and bourgeois consent, lasted, with all its corruption, for twenty years, and might, under a reformed system, have lasted longer had it not been for a fatal war forced on France by Parisian hysterics, and passively acquiesced in rather than acclaimed by the nation. The Boulangist plot was hatched and supported by the clever Rocheforts and Lagnerres of Parisian life, but it took no hold of the solid business men of Lyons and Bordeaux. In a word, the steady stream of French life, so far as political evolution goes, appears to us to have been impelled by the provincials, while the great catastrophic forces have been directed from Paris. The former movement has succeeded because it is the outcome of sobriety, industry, and a saving bon sens which the world recognises as peculiarly French. The latter movement proceeds entirely from the speculative intellect; it is analytic, destructive, powerful to a degree as a solvent, but weak for purposes of social construction. Goethe lamented, as we have said, that Germany had no Paris ; but if he were living to-day he might well admit that it is better to have a Ham- burg, a Munich, a Dresden, a Leipzig, rather than that all culture, all criticism, all initiative, should centre in Berlin. The power of Paris, like the lightning of a tropical storm, is a dazzling and fascinating spectacle; but we must look rather to the more silent forces of character for the power which in the long run controls even the exceptionally intelli- gent life of the French nation.
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