signs of the times; living in dreams of the past and visions of the future; but strong in this one point, that they alone of all the parties which divided France, had a living political faith, firm religious convictions, earnest ancestral and traditional affections, a distinct principle to fight for, and an acknowledged banner to rally round. Though not numbering many adherents or vassals even in the remoter and less altered provinces, their position in society as the undoubted heads of the polite and fashionable world, and embracing the oldest and most respected families of the ancient aristocracy, gave them a certain influence which, much as the prestige of high birth has been dissipated in France, was still not inconsiderable.

Next to them came the Imperialists—those whom recollections of former glory, and worship of the memory of the most wonderful man of modern times, attached to anything that bore the name or the impress of Napoleon. Their chief strength lay in the army, whose veterans looked upon their great captain almost as on a demigod, whose soldiers had known no spoil, and whose marshals no glory, since the empire had departed, whose thoughts were always dwelling on the campaigns of Jena and Marengo, who were constantly thirsting to renew the triumphs of Austerlitz, and to wipe out the discomfiture of Waterloo. But, besides the army, this party could count a great number of adherents among the middle classes, who remembered how Napoleon had restored order and stability at home, while he extended the boundaries and the influence of France abroad; how he had opened by force new Continental markets for their produce; how he had stimulated industry, protected commerce, and covered the land with roads, bridges, and public institutions. Among the commercial people, too, there were many who regretted the times when commissaries and contractors grew wealthy in a single year, and when a hardy speculation or a glorious campaign supplied wherewithal to found and endow a family. The peasantry of France, too, were Buonapartists almost to a man, as far as they had any political predilections at all. It was Napoleon who had re-organized society after the horrors of the Revolution. If it was Napoleon who had taken their sons and brothers as conscripts, it was he also who had led them on to renown, and often to wealth and distinction. He wrote his name indelibly on the very soil in every department of France; his is literally the only name known in the agricultural provinces and among the ignorant and stationary cultivators of the land. The demagogues who agitated France and the ruffians who ruined her before his time, as well as the monarchs who have ruled her since, have passed away and left no trace, but Napoleon is remembered and regretted everywhere; his is

Orleanists and Republicans.

5

the only fame which has survived the repeated catastrophes of sixty years, and floats uningulfed on the waters of the deluge. Many of the peasantry have never realized his death. Many even believe, incredible as it may seem, that it is he himself who now rules France. The overwhelming majority which elected Louis Napoleon to the Presidency surprised no one who has had an opportunity of conversing with the peasantry in the less visited districts of the country.

The third party was the Orleanists, or adherents of the existing dynasty. They were numerous and powerful, and comprised many sections. They included a great majority of the middle ranks, nearly the whole of the commercial classes, and fivesixths of the practical, sober, and experienced politicians of the land. Besides those who were attached to the government by long connexion, by old habit, by services rendered or benefits received, the Orleans dynasty rallied round it all the friends of constitutional liberty, all admirers of the English system, all who hoped by means of the Charter-imperfect and mutilated as it was-and of the two Chambers-restricted as was the suffrage, and corrupt as was often the influence brought to bear upon the elections gradually to train France to a purer freedom, and a higher degree of self-government; to tide over the period of national boyhood and inexperience, and navigate the vessel of the state through the rocks and shoals which menaced it, into smoother waters and more tranquil times;-all the moneyed men, too, to whom confusion, uncertainty, and change are fraught with impoverishment and ruin; all that class, so numerous, especially in Paris, who lived by supplying the wants of travellers and foreign residents; all whose idol was order, by whatever means it might be enforced, and at whatever price it might be purchased, and who saw no chance of peace or stability save under Louis Philippe's rule; and, finally, all belonging to that vast and indescribable section of every nation, who owned no allegiance, who worshipped no ideal, who sacrificed to no principle, whom Dante has scorched with his withering contempt, as neither good nor bad, but simply, and before everything, selfish. The strength of this party lay in its wealth, in its political experience, in its cultivation of the material interests of the country, in the sympathy of England, and in all those nameless advantages which long possession of the reins of power under a government of centralization never fails to confer.

Lastly, came the Republicans, divided, like the Orleanists, into many sections. There were the Republicans on principle stern, honest, able and uncompromising, of whom Cavaignac may be taken as the living, and Armand Carrel as the departed type. They had clear, though often wild conceptions of liberty

an intelligible though an impracticable political theory; they worshipped a noble though generally a classical ideal, for which they were as ready to die and to kill, as any martyr who was ever bound to the stake. They belonged to the same order of men as the Cromwells and the Harrisons of England, and the Balfours of Scotland, with the difference, that their fanaticism was not religious but political. Still they were, for the most part, estimable for their character, respectable in talents, and eminently formidable from the concentrated and resolute determination of their zeal.-There were the Republicans by temperament-the young, the excitable, and the poetic, who longed for an opportunity of realizing the dreams of their fancy, whose associations of freedom and renown all attached themselves to the first phase of the old Revolution, and whose watchword was "the year 1793." Such are to be found in nearly all countries. Their mental characteristic belongs rather to the time of life than to the nation or the age. Still they have played a prominent part in all French convulsions. The Ecole Polytechnique has an historical fame. Then there were the Socialist republicans, whose hostility was directed less against any dynasty or form of government, than against the arrangements of society itself; who conceived that the entire system of things was based upon a wrong foundation, and who saw, in the overthrow of existing powers, the only chance of remodelling the world after their fashion. Of these Louis Blanc was the leader; and among his followers were hundreds of thousands of the operative classes, soured and maddened with privations, thirsty for enjoyment, and intoxicated with the brilliant and beautiful perspective so eloquently sketched out before them-but, for the most part sincere, well-meaning, ignorant, and gullible, and easily dazzled and misled to wrong by the lofty and sonorous watchwords which their mischievous guides knew so well how to pronounce.-Lastly, there were the wretches who in troubled times come at the heels of every party, to soil its banner, to disgrace its fortunes, to stain its name-who profit by its victory, and slink away from it in defeat. The idle, who disdained to labour; the criminal who lived by plunder; the savage whose element was uproar; men who hated every government, because they had made themselves amenable to the laws of all; thieves and murderers, whom the galley and the prison had disgorged-all these obscene and hideous constituents stalked forth from their dens to swell the ranks of the Republicans, and to pillage and slay in the name of the Republic.

Such were the political parties, in the midst of whose noisy and furious hostility France was called upon to constitute a strong and stable government, on the morrow of that amazing catastrophe, which, on the 24th of February 1848, had upset

The Task of France.

7

a constitution, chased away a dynasty, and left society itself in a state of abeyance, if not of dissolution. The Provisional authorities-partly self-elected, partly voted in by acclamation, partly foisted in by low and impudent intrigue-had proclaimed a Republic, without waiting to give the nation time to express its volition in the matter, and without any intention of deferring to this volition even when expressed. To establish and consolidate a Republican form of government was thus the task assigned to the country;-a task which the existence of the several parties we have enumerated would alone have sufficed to make perplexing and difficult enough. But impediments far more serious were behind. All things considered, the problem was probably the hardest ever set before a nation:to reconstruct society on a stable foundation, with all the usual elements of society absent or broken up, without a monarch, without an aristocracy, without a religion, -with no principle unquestioned, with no truth universally admitted and reverenced, with no time-honoured institution left standing amid the ruins. She had to do all this, and more, in spite of nearly every obstacle which the Past and the Present could gather round her, and in the absence of nearly every needed instrument for the work. With antecedents in her history-with monuments on her soil-with arrangements in her social structure-with elements in her national characterwhich seemed peremptorily to forbid and exclude republicanism, she endeavoured to construct a republic, and seemed resolved to be satisfied with nothing else. With no honest, high-minded, or venerated statesmen standing out like beacon-lights among the multitude, whom all were emulous to love, honour, and obey, she was called upon to undertake a work which only the loftiest intellects operating upon the most trusting and submissive people could satisfactorily accomplish. She set herself to rival and surpass in their most difficult achievements nations that differed from her in nearly every element of their national life. With a pervading military spirit-with a standing force of nearly half a million, and an armed and trained population amounting to two millions more with a centralized despotic bureaucracy-with Versailles and the Tuileries ever recalling the regal magnificence of former days-with an excitable temper, an uncommercial spirit, and a subdivided soil-she is endeavouring to imitate and exceed that political liberty, and hoping successfully to manage those democratic institutions, which have been the slow and laborious acquisitions of Britain, with her municipal habits and her liberal nobility; of America, with her long-trained faculty of self-government, her boundless and teeming territory, and her universally diffused material wellbeing; of Switzerland, with her

mountainous regions and her historic education; and of Norway, with her simple, hardy, and religious population, and her barren and untempting soil.

Let us look a little more closely into a few of those peculiarities in the national character and circumstances, which appear to render the present struggles of the French after a constitution at once stable and democratic, so difficult if not so hopeless.

And, first, as to RACE. Races of men, like individuals, have their distinct type, their peculiar genius, which is the product of their origin, their physiological organization, their climate, and the development of civilisation through which they have passed,-which is, in fact, their inheritance from ancient times. Few European nations are of pure blood; almost all contain several elements, and are the more sound and vigorous for the admixture. The French and the English have in common something of the Norman and something of the Teutonic blood; but in England the prevailing element is the Saxon subvariety of the Teutonic; in France the prevailing element is the Gallic sub-variety of the Celtic. From our Norman conquerors we derive that intellectual activity, that high resolve, those habits of conquest and command, so characteristic of our upper ranks, and which have spread by intermarriage through all classes. From our German forefathers we inherit our phlegm, our steadiness, our domestic habitudes, and our unhappy addiction to spirituous liquors. The predominance of Frank and Norman blood gave to the old aristocracy of France those generous and noble qualities which so long distinguished the class; but since it was submerged in the great deluge which desolated the closing years of the last century, the Celtic element which pervades the great mass of the people has shone forth paramount and nearly unmodified. Now, the Teuton and the Celt have characteristics and capacities wholly dissimilar. According to the masterly analysis of our first ethnographical authority, M. Gustaf Kombst, the distinctive marks of the former are slowness but accuracy of perception, a just, deep, and penetrating, but not quick or brilliant intellect. The distinctive peculiarities of the Celt, on the contrary, are quickness of perception, readiness of combination, wit, and fertility of resource. The passion of the Celt is for national power and grandeur; that of the Teuton for personal freedom and self-rule. The Teuton is hospitable, but unsocial and reserved; the Celt is immoderately fond of society, of amusement, and of glory. The one is provident and cautious; the other impetuous and rash. The one values his own life, and respects that of others; the other sets little value upon either. Respect for women is the characteristic of the Teuton; passion