the hope h except want of talent, to promotion in the army or state, had brought many into office, and flattered many more with the hope of distinction. If the nation could have been guaranteed against these advantages, the recal of the Bourbons would have followed in the first interval of repose after the convulsions of jacobinism were over. Those who have contemplated the French nation only at a distance, by the signs which have reached them through the false medium of the Paris journals, or the distorting atmosphere of the British gazettes, may be of a different opinion; but it is impossible to mix long with this people, and to study its dispositions by such lights as conversation and books throw out, without coming to that conclusion. An honest attachment to liberty is always firm but never turbulent; for opinions which are violent are bottomed on passion, not on principle. Now the French were so frantic in their love of liberty, that Tom Paine, who was the most extravagant democrat in America, was a man of such exceeding moderation here, that they would not listen to him when he proposed to make a present of the King and royal family to the Americans. The fact is, that although the storm of the revolution laid prostrate every institution in this realm, it did not destroy the monarchical habits of the people. When the violence of the gale came on, such opinions, fled for concealment into the recesses of every man's mind; but they lay there as in their hiding places, ready to come out on the first occasion; and so they did, like those crucifixes, images, and pictures of the royal family, which, until the restoration, were supposed to have been broken and destroyed. The men who felt most conscious of the concealment of such desires, pretended to be most infatuated with liberty; for knowing themselves to be hypocrites, they suspected their neighbours of being so likewise, and hence originated the foul system of punishment on suspicion. The fierce and ferocious intolerance of Jacobinism did irreparable injury to the cause of liberty. By banishing from social intercourse that tranquillity which is the solace of age, and that candour and security without which existence is no blessing, it destroyed the charm of domestic life; and by holding up a spectacle of discord and cruelty as the necessary consequence of a republic, it disgusted many even with liberty itself. The atro of cious system of domiciliary visits, and the license of suspicion, which unbridled all the vice of society to devour all its virtue, and which were in themselves the legitimate offspring of that anarchical tyranny which the French mistook for freedom, caused most good men to regret the comparative happiness they had enjoyed under the old government, and to wish for its restoration. Their tree of liberty had blossomed superbly, it is true, but it had hitherto brought forth nothing but bitter fruit. Laws and constitutions alone never did, nor ever can, create a republic-they may ordain its existence and model its parts, but unless education has nursed up to proper vigour the sentiment of public virtue, a nation may adopt a republican constitution of government, but will never preserve it. "Liberty," said Lord Bolingbroke, "is a tender plant, which will not flourish unless the genius of the soil be proper for it, nor will any soil continue to be so long, which is not cultivated with incessant care." In France its seeds were scattered loosely over the soil, without any previous preparation to receive them-they quickened, I admit, but had not time to take any deep root before the ignorant hands that went out to cultivate them, mistook them for the noxious weeds that had sprung up plentifully enough along with them, and destroyed them together. The vanity of living at Court, and the silly ambition of being thought to possess its favours, had made the French the light and frivolous people they were before the revolution; and we know that vanity and frivolity are not republican virtues.When, therefore, Madame de Stael said, that power depraved the French more than other men, she mistook an apparent for a real cause; since if the habits of education and the example of the court had, in the minds of Frenchmen, so worn the links of the chain of principle, that they were ready to give way the moment they were put in use, it is not to the cause which tightened, but to that which weakened them, that the defect is ascribable. As the court had never recognized any other proof of merit than success, a good fame had been of little or no importance; and Tacitus has said, perhaps with truth, "contemptu famæ, contemni, virtutem." MY DEAR SIR, LETTER X. Paris, March 16th, 1820. The dismemberment of the Directory in 1797, was fatal to the cause of republicanism in France. The democratical despots who usurped the administration of the government, scoffed at rational liberty, and transported many of its best friends out of France, to pine and perish in the pestilential heats of Cayenne. They quarrelled with America; invaded Switzerland; made a mad expedition into Egypt, and lost the ascendancy in Italy. The nation breathed somewhat more freely, it is true, under the irregular pressure of their tyranny, than during the hot colli. sion of '93, but it became every day more and more fatigued by a political system, whose schemes were disastrous abroad and dis graceful at home. When under their direction, General Bona¬ parte discovered the invasion of England to be an experiment too perilous for his ambition, and that he had not yet sufficient weight of reputation to stand in balance against the Directory, he planned, with romantic audacity, the conquest of Egypt and India. The society of scientific men, which he gathered around him on this occasion, gave a moral splendour to the enterprize, which no other military crusade ever possessed, and he knew full well that the natural propensity of mankind to exalt whatever is at a distance, would induce them to exaggerate the magnitude of his exploits, and give to his name an expansive power on the national vanity. He rightly conjectured, that whilst his rivals were exhausting the measure of their popularity at home, it might be easy, if the expedition were unfortunate, to attribute the calamity to them; and should it prove successful, he might erect for himself a civilized kingdom in the land of the Ptolomies, and afterwards, according to the prosperity of circumstances, extend the horizon of his ambition. But perhaps, unhappily for the future tranquillity of the world, and the progress of political reformation, the navy of England overtook his expedition at the mouths of the Nile. The victory of Aboukir not only destroyed the machinery of his philosophers, but deprived him of the means of procuring such reinforcements as might have established his colony, and kept him forever after amused by visions of oriental conquest. The loss of his fleet relieved him from blame for the failure of the expedition; the idle triumphs of his arms elated the vanity of his nation; and his opportune return to France at the moment of general dissatisfaction with the Directory, aided the projects of his ambition. He presently succeeded, therefore, in taking the government into his own hands, in order, as he declared, to consecrate the sovereignty of the people, and secure the eternal triumph of liberty and equality. As he was a man who considered mankind as nothing, and himself as every thing, his military mutilation of the constitution saved in appearance, but ruined in reality, the liberties of France. The new Consular Constitution, by reserving to him the sole right of initiating or proposing a law, put the legislative power absolutely into his hands; and by investing him only with the right of ordering the prosecution of the executive officers of government, clothed him with a power as odious and despotical as that of the old regime, and to which nothing but the blaze of glory which then environed him, could have reconciled the French people. It is somewhat remarkable, that the day on which this Consular Constitution was proclaimed, and Bonaparte entered on his career of tyranny, (the 14th of December, 1799,) was the day in which Washington, the noblest friend of liberty that the revolutions of the world have produced, expired in another hemisphere. It would seem indeed, to have been a day on which "freedom shrieked, and hope for a season bade the world farewell." During the first two years of the Consular Government, however, France had cause to rejoice at the ascendancy of Bonaparte. His exertions to restore her internal tranquillity, and her external greatness, were praiseworthy in the extreme; and his merit in these particulars has been much overlooked, especially by the accomplished Madame de Stael. As I by no means think the French people so unjustifiably fickle as their frequent * changes of government have led many to imagine, inasmuch as great restlessness and frequent change of position are natural in a suffering body, I must beg your particular attention to the confusion and disorder that prevailed in France at the close of 299, and the masterly ability with which Bonaparte allayed them before the peace of Amiens in 1802. When he returned from Egypt, not only were the French armies fast retreating before those of the Allies, and the whole of the brilliant conquests he had made in Italy in '96, lost by a series of defeats; but the navy of France was destroyed-her commerce annihilated-a civil war organized in more than one fourth of the departments, and the spirit of insurrection daily breaking out in the others. The highways were so infested by gangs of robbers and assassins, that the funds of the public treasury, if they had not been already pillaged in the houses of the receivers of the revenue, could but seldom reach the capital in safety. The nation was Scourged by at least two most odious laws, those of "hostages, and forced loans," and threatened at the same time by the villanous canaille of Paris, with an agrarian division of property. The national treasury was exhausted without the means of replenishing itself, and had been saved from the opprobrium of bankruptcy only by the most violent exactions. The Directors themselves, at the head of the government, were without energy of will or harmony of opinion, and alternately the sport of either party, as the majority happened to fluctuate in the two councils; whilst the sound part of the nation, the friends of law and rational liberty were wandering in exile, or condemned at home to an impotent neutrality. Such was the condition of France after ten years of trouble and convulsion. In addition to these public grievances, the spirits of men were so worn down and fatigued by insecurity of life and property, that they longed for repose, and would have been pleased with the consolidation of any government that promised to be durable. Some wished to get back again such of their friends as proscription had chased out of the country, whilst others desired a solid guarantee for the acquisitions they had made of national or church property. Many trembled at the remembrance of the reign of terror, and many perhaps preferred the inglorious tranquillity of the old regime, * See Lacretelle. |