Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859 Part 18

I asked Tocqueville, when we were in our own room, as to the feelings of the religious world in France with respect to heretics.

'The religious laity,' he answered, 'have probably little opinion on the subject. They suppose the heretic to be less favourably situated than themselves, but do not waste much thought upon him. The ignorant priests of course consign him to perdition. The better instructed think, like Protestants, that error is dangerous only so far as it influences practice.

'Dr. Bretonneau, at Tours, was one of the best men that I have known, but an unbeliever. The archbishop tried in his last illness to reconcile him to the Church: Bretonneau died as he had lived. But the archbishop, when lamenting to me his death, expressed his own conviction that so excellent a soul could not perish.

'You recollect the d.u.c.h.esse in St.-Simon, who, on the death of a sinner of ill.u.s.trious race, said, "On me dira ce qu'on voudra, on ne me persuadera pas que Dieu n'y regarde deux fois avant de d.a.m.ner un homme de sa qualite." The archbishop's feeling was the same, only changing _qualite_ into virtue.

'There is something amusing,' he continued, 'when, separated as we are from it by such a chasm, we look back on the prejudices of the _Ancien Regime_. An old lady once said to me, "I have been reading with great satisfaction the genealogies which prove that Jesus Christ descended from David. ca montre que notre Seigneur etait Gentilhomme."'

'We are somewhat ashamed,' I said, 'in general of Jewish blood, yet the Levis boast of their descent from the Hebrew Levi.'

'They are proud of it,' said Tocqueville, 'because they make themselves out to be cousins of the Blessed Virgin. They have a picture in which a Duc de Levi stands bareheaded before the Virgin. "Couvrez-vous donc, mon cousin," she says. "C'est pour ma commodite," he answers.'

The conversation pa.s.sed to literature.

'I am glad,' said Tocqueville, 'to find that, imperfect as my knowledge of English is, I can feel the difference in styles.'

'I feel strongly,' I said, 'the difference in French styles in prose, but little in poetry.'

'The fact is,' said Tocqueville, 'that the only French poetry, except that of Racine, that is worth reading is the light poetry. I do not think that I could now read Lamartine, though thirty years ago he delighted me.'

'The French taste,' I said, 'in English poetry differs from ours. You read Ossian and the "Night Thoughts."'

'As for Ossian,' he answered, 'he does not seem to have been ever popular in England. But the frequent reference to the "Night Thoughts," in the books and letters of the last century, shows that the poem was then in everybody's memory. Foreigners are in fact provincials. They take up fas.h.i.+ons of literature as country people do fas.h.i.+ons of dress, when the capital has left them off. When I was young you probably had ceased to be familiar with Richardson. We knew him by heart. We used to weep over the Lady Clementina, whom I dare say Miss Senior never heard of.

'During the first Empire, we of the old _regime_ abandoned Paris, as we do now, and for the same reasons. We used to live in our chateaux, where I remember as a boy hearing Sir Charles Grandison and Fielding read aloud. A new novel was then an event. Madame Cottin was much more celebrated than George Sand is now. For all her books were read, and by everybody. Notwithstanding the great merits of George Sand's style, her plots and her characters are so exaggerated and so unnatural, and her morality is so perverted, that we have ceased to read her.'

We talked of Montalembert, and I mentioned his _sortie_ the other day against the clergy.

'I can guess pretty well,' said Tocqueville, 'what he said to you, for it probably was a _resume_ of his article in the "Correspondant." Like most men accustomed to public speaking, he repeats himself. He is as honest perhaps as a man who is very _pa.s.sionne_ can be; but his oscillations are from one extreme to another. Immediately after the _coup d'etat,_ when he believed Louis Napoleon to be Ultramontane, he was as servile as his great enemy the "Univers" is now. "Ce sont les nuances qui se querellent, non les couleurs;" and between him and the "Univers" there is only a _nuance_. The Bishop of Agen has oscillated like him, but began at the other end. The other day the Bishop made a most servile address to the Emperor. He had formerly been a furious anti-Bonapartist. "How is it possible," said Montalembert, "that a man can rush so completely from one opinion to another? On the 4th of December in 1851 this same Bishop denounced the _coup d'etat_ with such violence that the President sent me to the Nuncio to request his interference. Now he is on his knees before him. Such changes can scarcely be honest." Montalembert does not see that the only difference between them is that they have trod in opposite directions the very same path.'

_Thursday, May_ 5.--Tocqueville and I dined with M. and Madame de Bourke, and met there General Dumas and Ary Scheffer.

We talked of Delaroche's pictures, and Scheffer agreed with me in preferring the smaller ones. He thought that Delaroche improved up to the time of his death, and preferred his Moses, and Drowned Martyr, painted in 1853 and 1855, to the other large ones, and his Girondins, finished in 1856, to the earlier small ones.

We pa.s.sed on to the increased and increasing population of Paris.

'The population of Paris,' I said, 'is only half that of London, while that of the British Islands is not three-fourths that of France. If you were to double the population of Paris, therefore, it would still be proportionally less than that of London.'

'That is true,' said Tocqueville, 'but yet there are many circ.u.mstances connected with the Parisian population each of which renders it more dangerous than the London one. In the first place, there is the absence of any right to relief. The English workman knows that neither he nor his family can starve. The Frenchman becomes anxious as soon as his employment is irregular, and desperate when it fails. The English workmen are unacquainted with arms, and have no leaders with military experience.

The bulk of the Frenchmen have served, many of them are veterans in civil war, and they have commanders skilled in street-fighting. The English workmen have been gradually attracted to London by a real and permanent demand for their labour. They have wives and children. At least 100,000 men have been added to the working population of Paris since the _coup d'etat._ They are young men in the vigour of their strength and pa.s.sions, unrestrained by wives or families. They have been drawn hither suddenly and artificially by the demolition and reconstruction of half the town, by the enormous local expenditure of the Government, and by the fifty millions spent in keeping the price of bread in Paris unnaturally low.

The 40,000 men collected in Paris by the construction of the fortifications are supposed to have mainly contributed to the revolution of 1848. What is to be expected from this addition of 100,000? Then the repressive force is differently const.i.tuted and differently animated. In England you have an army which has chosen arms as a profession, which never thinks of any other employment, and indeed is fit for no other, and never expects any provision except its pay and its pension. The French soldier, ever since 1789, is a citizen. He serves his six years because the law and the colonel force him to do so, but he counts the days until he can return to his province, his cottage, and his field. He sympathises with the pa.s.sions of the people. In the terrible days of June, the army withstood the cries, the blessings, the imprecations and the seductions of the mob, only because they had the National Guards by their side.

Their presence was a guarantee that the cause was just. The National Guards never fought before as they did in those days. Yet at the Chateau d'Eau, the miraculous heroism and the miraculous good luck of Lamoriciere were necessary to keep them together. If he had not exposed himself as no man ever did, and escaped as no man ever did, they would have been broken.'

'I was there,' said Scheffer, 'when his fourth horse was killed under him. As the horse was sinking he drew his feet out of the stirrups and came to the ground without falling; but his cigar dropped from his mouth.

He picked it up, and went on with the order which he was giving to an _aide-de-camp._

'I saw that,' said Tocqueville. 'He had placed himself immediately behind a cannon in front of the Chateau d'Eau which fired down the Boulevard du Temple. A murderous fire from the windows in a corner of the Rue du Temple killed all the artillerymen. The instant that Lamoriciere placed himself behind it, I thought that I saw what would happen. I implored him to get behind some shelter, or at least not to pose as a mark.

"Recollect," I said, "that if you go on in this way you must be killed before the day is over-and where shall we all be?"'

'"I see the danger of what I am doing," he answered, "and I dislike it as much as you can do; but it is necessary. The National Guards are shaking; if they break, the Line follows. I must set an example that everyone can see and can understand. This is not a time for taking precautions. If _I_ were to shelter myself, _they_ would run."'

'How does Lamoriciere,' I asked, 'bear exile and inactivity in Brussels?'

'Very ill,' said Scheffer. 'He feels that he has compromised the happiness of his wife, whom he married not long before the _coup d'etat._'

'Changarnier at Malins, who lives alone and has only himself to care for, supports it much better.'

Tocqueville and I walked home together.

'Scheffer,' he said, 'did not tell all that happened at the Chateau d'Eau. Men seldom do when they fight over their battles.'

'The insurgents by burrowing through walls had got into a house in the rear of our position. They manned the windows, and suddenly fired down on us from a point whence no danger had been feared. This caused a panic among the National Guards, a force of course peculiarly subject to panics. They turned and ran back 250 yards along the Boulevard St.

Martin, carrying with them the Line and Lamoriciere himself. He endeavoured to stop them by outcries, and by gesticulations, and indeed by force. He gave to one man who was trying to run by him a blow with his fist, so well meant and well directed that it broke his collar bone.'

'At length he stopped them, re-formed them, and said: "Now you shall march, I at your head, and the drummer beating the charge, as if you were on parade, up to that house." They did so. After a few discharges, which miraculously missed Lamoriciere, the men in the house deserted it.'

'What were you doing at the Chateau d'Eau?' I asked.

'We were marching,' he said, 'with infantry and artillery on the Boulevard du Temple, across which there was a succession of barricades, which it was necessary to take one by one.

'As we advanced in the middle, our sappers and miners got into the houses on each side, broke through the party walls, and killed the men at the windows.'

'Those three days,' he continued, 'impress strongly on my mind the dangers of our present state.'

'It is of no use to take up pavements and straighten streets, and pierce Paris by long military roads, and loop-hole the barracks, if the Executive cannot depend on the army. Ditches and bastions are of no use if the garrison will not man them.'

'The new law of recruitment, however, may produce a great change. Instead of 80,000 conscripts, 120,000 are to be taken each year. This is about all that are fit for service. They are required to serve for only two years. If the change ended there our army would be still more a militia than it is now. It would be the Prussian Landwehr. But those ent.i.tled to their discharge are to be enticed by higher pay, promotions, bounties, and retiring pensions--in short, by all means of seduction, to re-enter for long periods, for ten, or fifteen, or perhaps twenty years. It is hoped that thus a permanent regular army may be formed, with an _esprit de corps_ of its own, unsympathising with the people, and ready to keep it down; and such will, I believe, be the result. But it will take nine or ten years to produce such an army--and the dangers that I fear are immediate.'

'What are the motives,' I asked, 'for the changes as to the conscription, the increase of numbers, and the diminution of the time of service?'

'They are parts,' he answered, 'of the system. The French peasant, and indeed the _ouvrier_, dislikes the service. The proportion of conscripts who will re-enlist is small. Therefore the whole number must be large.

The country must be bribed to submit to this by the shortness of the term. The conscript army will be sacrificed to what is to be the regular army. It will be young and ill-trained.'

'But your new regular army,' I said, 'will be more formidable to the enemy than your present force.'

'I am not sure of that,' he answered. 'The merit of the French army was the impetuosity of its attack, the "furia Francese," as the Italians called it. Young troops have more of this quality than veterans. The Maison du Roi, whose charge at Steenkirk Macaulay has so well described, consisted of boys of eighteen.'

'I am re-editing,' I said, 'my old articles. Among them is one written in 1841 on the National Character of France, England, and America,[1] as displayed towards foreign nations. I have not much to change in what I have said of England or of America. As they have increased in strength they have both become still more arrogant, unjust, and shameless.

'England has perhaps become a little more prudent America a little less so. But France seems to me to be altered. I described her as a soldier with all the faults of that unsocial character. As ambitious, rapacious, eager for nothing but military glory and territorial aggrandis.e.m.e.nt. She seems now to have become moderate and pacific, and to be devoted rather to the arts of peace than to those of war.'

'France _is_ changed,' answered Tocqueville, 'and when compared with the France of Louis XIV., or of Napoleon, was already changed when you wrote, though the war-cry raised for political purposes in 1840 deceived you. At the same time, I will not deny that military glory would, more than any other merit, even _now_ strengthen a Government, and that military humiliation would inevitably destroy one. Nor must you overrate the unpopularity of the last war. Only a few even of the higher cla.s.ses understood its motives. "Que diable veut cette guerre?" said my country neighbour to me; "si c'etait contre les Anglais--mais _avec_ les Anglais, et pour le Grand Turc, qu'est-ce que cela peut signifier?" But when they saw that it cost only men, that they were not invaded or overtaxed, and that prices rose, they got reconciled to it.

'It was only the speculators of Paris that were tired of it. And if, instead of the Crimea, we had fought near our own frontiers, or for some visible purpose, all our military pa.s.sions, bad and good, would have broken out.'

[Footnote 1: This article is republished in the _Historical and Philosophical Essays_. Longmans: 1865.--ED.]