M. THIERS AS A WARNING.
IN the new number of the Fortnightly 1?eview we find the first instalment of a series of conversations between Thiers and the late Mr. Senior, held in 1852 after the coup d'Itat, conversations in which it was a deliberate part of M. Thiers' purpose to make his own political life and aims better known to the English people. So far as these conversations have been now given to us, we find in them a groat deal more to warn than 'to admire, a great deal more to amuse than to help. But they are full of teaching, and especially we would recommend theta to the careful reading of that class of English politicians who are now displaying, in relation to England, precisely the same kind of big, boastful, pinchbeck patriotism which M. Thiess flaunted in Mr, Senior's eyes in relation to France. We are now told in effect day after day that the one thing to-keep in view is the safety and prosperity of the British Empire, —that we ought to be so full of that, that no other political aim need interest us seriously in the comparison ; that justice to other nations, the legitimate hopes of other races than the English, should count for little or nothing in that comparison ; that, in a word, we should institute a sort of cult, which might be called British Empire-worship, and leave all the other moral interests of the world to fight their own way or lose their own way, as they might. Well, that is precisely the condition of mind which M. Thiers appears to have displayed, in relation to France, in 1852, during his conversations with Mr. Senior,—and to us, reading them a quarter of a century, later, a more pitiable exhibition can hardly be imagined. That all France is now mourning for him is due not to anything done in virtue of the ambitious and almost blatant motives here so ostentatiously put forward, —indeed, as far as possible from that,—but rather to the example of fortitude in adversity, of self-denial and even renunciation, of straightforward political humility and modesty, of the power to open his own eyes to disagreeable facts, and to help France to open her still more firmly-closed eyes to the same facts, which M. Thiers exhibited in the best and simplest and least ambitious .years of his life, which, fortunately for him, were the seven last years. We are regretting him now, and his country is regretting him now, for qualities the very opposite of those in which he tried to entrench him- self when conversing with Mr. Senior in 1852,—when in fact, he talked a rather more brilliant French equivalent for that new and slavish idolatry of Empire for its own sake, of which
the Pall Mall Gazette has recently constituted itself the high priest.
M. Thiers' most amusing confidences are those which he permits himself in relation to the advice he gave to Prince
Louis, when he first became President of the Republic, between the end of 1848 and the coup d'etat. According to M, Thiers, he himself was at this time the one potent spirit to whose influence, at once wise and beneficent, the Prince-President could not help according at least the reluctant respect due to unques- tionable power, and to whose advice the Prince always recurred when he was in a real strait. Listen, now, to the way in which he discusses the policy of war, and notice the only motive which induced him, if we can trust his own account of him- self, to advise against it, and the compunction which he subsequently experienced on the ground of that advice :—
", As to war,' I used to say, it is Incompatible with the commercial and manufacturing improvement which I promise to you. It will pro- duce distress, want of employment, secret societies, revolutionary pasaions, in Abort, everything that you most wish to avoid. Tho policy of aggrandiselnont is a Lit one When a country is orerflowing with sapOrfluons capital and unemployed energy. It may then be who to find vont for both across the frontier ; but when we aro struggling to recover the losses of a revolution, our diplomacy'ought to be honest and conciliatory. We ought not to try to pick quarrels abroad vilion wo are suirrounded by enemies at home.'—' I am not sure,' continued Thiers, 'that us respects war my advice was wise. Ever since 1848 our foreign policy has been subordinate to Our domestic .difliculties. We have been too insecure at home to assume the tone which belongs to us abroad.'" "The policy of aggrandisement is a fit one, when it country is overflowing 'with superfluous capital and unemployed energy ;" —our idolators of empire have never exadly gone so far as that, without even so inueli as raising the question as to the right or wrong of 'the war itself,—perhaps the atmo- sphere of public opinion they breathe would hardly permit it, —but have they not cbme almost as close to it as they dared ? 'Even more cynical is the humility with which Thiers bo- gins to fear that he has been wrong, to doubt whether he sheuld not have advised war,—war for its own sake,—instead of discountenancing it, kr he adds with a frank irdmorality quite deliciously naïf :—' But the hostility of the Assembly, Which arose from his obvious determination to bemide an 'usurper, produced all the insecurity and distress which were to be feared from war, withont the compensation of military 6_11.CCE183. Perhaps it tvoidd have been better, if I had allowed htny to .over-run the Continent." Has any modern statesman ever surpassed that sentence in cynicism, selfishness, and that shortosightedness which comes of illimitable conceit personal and national ? To have discountenan bed war only because the commercia. 1 condition of France was bad, and then to have regretted discountenancing it, on the ground
that from other causes much the same distress had arisen as would have arisen from war, " without the compen- sation of military success," was brazen enough, but the con- ceited self-reproach with which M. Thiess half regrets hold- ing the fierce dog hack, when he was ready for his spring,— without even condescending to count the possibility of failure as an element in the case either way, surpasses any- thing we ever met with in the shape of political effrontery. Even Lord Beaconsfield could hardly match that, outside his own romances.
Yet the conversation about the intervention in Italy in 1849 is in perfect agreement with all that M. Thiers here says about his advice as to the general policy of war. He cares nothing in the comparison, and avows that he cares nothing, for the welfare of Italy ; he cares nothing in the comparison, and avows that he cares nothing for the welfare of religion ; what ho cares for is the ascendancy of France, and that alone. Let us quote again his confessions to Mr. Senior :-
"It was not for the sake of the Roman people, it was not for the sake of the Pope, it was not for the sake of Catholielem that we wont to Rome. It was for the sake of France ; it was to plant the French flag on the Castle of St. Angelo; it was to maintain our right to have one-half of Italy, if Austria seized tho other. Rather than see the Austrian eagle on the flagstaff that rises above the Tibor, I would destroy a hundred constitutions and a hundred religions. I repeat, therefore, that we, the planners of the Roman expedition, acted as statesmen."
Nor were these now views. Let us see what he said about permitting Spain to become Constitutional in 1822 :—
"I maintained that the Government in sending the expedition acted wisely, both for the interests of the throne and the interests of the nation. That it was essential to the safety of Franco that Spain should be under her control ; that if Spain continued constitutional,—that is to say, if tho feelings of the people were to influence her policy, the antipathy of the SPaniards towards the French would make her a rival or an enemy, instead of a submissive ally. That it was the duty, therefore, of every French Government to put down every Spanish constitution ; that the expotlitiono instead of being opposed, would be popular With the army, to which it offered both fame and revenge, that it would Meet with no serious resistance in Spain, end would establish the Bourbon throne, by giving to it the prestige of political success and military glory," His tone is just the same about Hungary, and the surrender of Kossuth by Turkey,—pure, unabashed, gross national selfish- ness and vanity, without the least vein or trace of a nobler feeling. It is impossible to find in history a more honest adhesion to the policy of working in every way for the ascend- ancy of a single nation, without a scruple or a question as to the rightness of trampling every other national interest under one's feet, than these conversations of M. There with Mr.
Senior.
And what came of that policy ? The very man who re- proached himself for not letting Louis Napoleon "overrun the Continent," overran the Continent himself in his old age, to beg alliances, after his hapless pupil had ignominously failed in attempting that rather difficult operation. There is not a country against which Thiers rails in these conversa- tions, which has not secured its independence of France, and has not benefited the world by that independence. Italy is free and strong. The Pope's temporal power is departed. Spain is at least wholly independent of French tutelage. Hungary is once more powerful, so powerful as to be only too willing to play off on the struggling Slavic nationalities the same cynical policy which Thiers would have played off on her. Austria herself, though not competing with France in Italy, lids at least as much power there as France has, or is likely to have. All the grand foreign policy of M. Thiers has vanished to the winds, and all his dynastic dreams have been spon- taneously given up. His reputation survives only because he was able at the last moment to let all these barbarous and vulgar ambitions pass away out of his mind, and yet not lose courage and not lose love for France. It may be that his prediction as to the relative places which France and England will occupy in the histories of the future may prove trite. In the only pleasant passage of his conversation, he says :—
"'What a nation is France! how mistaken in her Object's, hoW absurd in her means, yet how glorious in the results of her influence and of her example! I do not say that we are a happy people, I do not say that we are good neighbours ; we are always in hot- water ourselves, and are always the pest and the plague of all who have anything to do with us ; but after all, we are tho salt of thebitith. We are always fighting, always inquiring, always inventing, AlWays destroying prejudices and breaking up institutions, anti Supplying political science with now facts, new experiments, and new warnings. Two or three thousand years hence, when civilisation has passed on its westward course, when Europe is in the state in Which we Tim See Asia Minor and Syria and Egypt, only two of her children will be
remembered. One a sober, well-disposed good boy ; the other a riotous, unmanagoablo spoilt child ; and I am not sum that posterity will not like the naughty boy the best."
Certainly it is not always the least vain and selfish child which attracts the most interest in the world ; and let us add that France is something much more than vain and selfish, and that even if her vanity and selfishness were to disappear com- pletely, we believe her naivete', her freshness of vision, the grace and purity of her impulses, the ease with which she adapts herself to the strangest circumstances, would make her as in. teresting as ever. But if M. Thiers did what he could till h was an old man to render France more like a spoilt child than ever, he certainly did something in his extreme age to bring the spoilt child to reason, and to give her the humility and clear- ness of vision which add a fresh charm even to such simplicity and vivacity as have been always hers. For a picture, how- ever, of the spoilt child in her worst tantrums, it is hardly possible to do better than go to these conversations between M. Thiers and Mr. Senior ; and we think it one by which many English politicians of the present day would do well to take warning.
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