of the constitution, that however much a Liberal may be disposed to
complain of them, as of treason against those sublime ideas with which
the ambitious plebeian is apt to cover his designs, he would none the
less think it a preposterous notion that M. le Prince de Montmorency,
for instance, should continue to live in the Rue Saint-Martin at the
corner of the street which bears that nobleman’s name; or that M. le Duc
de Fitz-James, descendant of the royal house of Scotland, should have
his hotel at the angle of the Rue Marie Stuart and the Rue Montorgueil.
_Sint ut sunt, aut non sint_, the grand words of the Jesuit, might be
taken as a motto by the great in all countries. These social differences
are patent in all ages; the fact is always accepted by the people; its
“reasons of state” are self-evident; it is at once cause and effect, a
principle and a law. The common sense of the masses never deserts them
until demagogues stir them up to gain ends of their own; that common
sense is based on the verities of social order; and the social order is
the same everywhere, in Moscow as in London, in Geneva as in Calcutta.
Given a certain number of families of unequal fortune in any given
space, you will see an aristocracy forming under your eyes; there will
be the patricians, the upper classes, and yet other ranks below them.
Equality may be a _right_, but no power on earth can convert it into
_fact_. It would be a good thing for France if this idea could be
popularized. The benefits of political harmony are obvious to the least
intelligent classes. Harmony is, as it were, the poetry of order, and
order is a matter of vital importance to the working population. And
what is order, reduced to its simplest expression, but the agreement
of things among themselves--unity, in short? Architecture, music, and
poetry, everything in France, and in France more than in any other
country, is based upon this principle; it is written upon the very
foundations of her clear accurate language, and a language must always
be the most infallible index of national character. In the same way
you may note that the French popular airs are those most calculated to
strike the imagination, the best-modulated melodies are taken over by
the people; clearness of thought, the intellectual simplicity of an idea
attracts them; they like the incisive sayings that hold the greatest
number of ideas. France is the one country in the world where a little
phrase may bring about a great revolution. Whenever the masses have
risen, it has been to bring men, affairs, and principles into agreement.
No nation has a clearer conception of that idea of unity which should
permeate the life of an aristocracy; possibly no other nation has so
intelligent a comprehension of a political necessity; history will never
find her behind the time. France has been led astray many a time, but
she is deluded, woman-like, by generous ideas, by a glow of enthusiasm
which at first outstrips sober reason.
So, to begin with, the most striking characteristic of the Faubourg
is the splendour of its great mansions, its great gardens, and a
surrounding quiet in keeping with princely revenues drawn from great
estates. And what is this distance set between a class and a whole
metropolis but visible and outward expression of the widely different
attitude of mind which must inevitably keep them apart? The position of
the head is well defined in every organism. If by any chance a nation
allows its head to fall at its feet, it is pretty sure sooner or later
to discover that this is a suicidal measure; and since nations have no
desire to perish, they set to work at once to grow a new head. If they
lack the strength for this, they perish as Rome perished, and Venice,
and so many other states.
This distinction between the upper and lower spheres of social activity,
emphasized by differences in their manner of living, necessarily
implies that in the highest aristocracy there is real worth and some
distinguishing merit. In any state, no matter what form of “government”
is affected, so soon as the patrician class fails to maintain that
complete superiority which is the condition of its existence, it ceases
to be a force, and is pulled down at once by the populace. The people
always wish to see money, power, and initiative in their leaders, hands,
hearts, and heads; they must be the spokesmen, they must represent the
intelligence and the glory of the nation. Nations, like women, love
strength in those who rule them; they cannot give love without respect;
they refuse utterly to obey those of whom they do not stand in awe.
An aristocracy fallen into contempt is a _roi faineant_, a husband in
petticoats; first it ceases to be itself, and then it ceases to be.
And in this way the isolation of the great, the sharply marked
distinction in their manner of life, or in a word, the general custom
of the patrician caste is at once the sign of a real power, and their
destruction so soon as that power is lost. The Faubourg Saint-Germain
failed to recognise the conditions of its being, while it would still
have been easy to perpetuate its existence, and therefore was brought
low for a time. The Faubourg should have looked the facts fairly in the
face, as the English aristocracy did before them; they should have seen
that every institution has its climacteric periods, when words lose
their old meanings, and ideas reappear in a new guise, and the whole
conditions of politics wear a changed aspect, while the underlying
realities undergo no essential alteration.
These ideas demand further development which form an essential part of
this episode; they are given here both as a succinct statement of the
causes, and an explanation of the things which happen in the course of
the story.
The stateliness of the castles and palaces where nobles dwell; the
luxury of the details; the constantly maintained sumptuousness of the
furniture; the “atmosphere” in which the fortunate owner of landed
estates (a rich man before he was born) lives and moves easily and
without friction; the habit of mind which never descends to calculate
the petty workaday gains of existence; the leisure; the higher education
attainable at a much earlier age; and lastly, the aristocratic tradition
that makes of him a social force, for which his opponents, by dint
of study and a strong will and tenacity of vocation, are scarcely a
match-all these things should contribute to form a lofty spirit in a
man, possessed of such privileges from his youth up; they should
stamp his character with that high self-respect, of which the least
consequence is a nobleness of heart in harmony with the noble name that
he bears. And in some few families all this is realised. There are
noble characters here and there in the Faubourg, but they are marked
exceptions to a general rule of egoism which has been the ruin of this
world within a world. The privileges above enumerated are the birthright
of the French noblesse, as of every patrician efflorescence ever formed
on the surface of a nation; and will continue to be theirs so long as
their existence is based upon real estate, or money; _domaine-sol_ and
_domaine-argent_ alike, the only solid bases of an organized society;
but such privileges are held upon the understanding that the patricians
must continue to justify their existence. There is a sort of moral
_fief_ held on a tenure of service rendered to the sovereign, and here
in France the people are undoubtedly the sovereigns nowadays. The times
are changed, and so are the weapons. The knight-banneret of old wore
a coat of chain armor and a hauberk; he could handle a lance well and
display his pennon, and no more was required of him; today he is bound
to give proof of his intelligence. A stout heart was enough in the days
of old; in our days he is required to have a capacious brain-pan. Skill
and knowledge and capital--these three points mark out a social triangle
on which the scutcheon of power is blazoned; our modern aristocracy must
take its stand on these.
A fine theorem is as good as a great name. The Rothschilds, the Fuggers
of the nineteenth century, are princes _de facto_. A great artist is in
reality an oligarch; he represents a whole century, and almost always he
is a law to others. And the art of words, the high pressure machinery
of the writer, the poet’s genius, the merchant’s steady endurance,
the strong will of the statesman who concentrates a thousand dazzling
qualities in himself, the general’s sword--all these victories, in
short, which a single individual will win, that he may tower above the
rest of the world, the patrician class is now bound to win and keep
exclusively. They must head the new forces as they once headed the
material forces; how should they keep the position unless they are
worthy of it? How, unless they are the soul and brain of a nation,
shall they set its hands moving? How lead a people without the power of
command? And what is the marshal’s baton without the innate power of
the captain in the man who wields it? The Faubourg Saint-Germain took to
playing with batons, and fancied that all the power was in its hands.
It inverted the terms of the proposition which called it into existence.
And instead of flinging away the insignia which offended the people,
and quietly grasping the power, it allowed the bourgeoisie to seize the
authority, clung with fatal obstinacy to its shadow, and over and over
again forgot the laws which a minority must observe if it would live.
When an aristocracy is scarce a thousandth part of the body social, it
is bound today, as of old, to multiply its points of action, so as to
counterbalance the weight of the masses in a great crisis. And in our
days those means of action must be living forces, and not historical
memories.
In France, unluckily, the noblesse were still so puffed up with the
notion of their vanished power, that it was difficult to contend against
a kind of innate presumption in themselves. Perhaps this is a national
defect. The Frenchman is less given than anyone else to undervalue
himself; it comes natural to him to go from his degree to the one above
it; and while it is a rare thing for him to pity the unfortunates
over whose heads he rises, he always groans in spirit to see so many
fortunate people above him. He is very far from heartless, but too
often he prefers to listen to his intellect. The national instinct which
brings the Frenchman to the front, the vanity that wastes his substance,
is as much a dominant passion as thrift in the Dutch. For three
centuries it swayed the noblesse, who, in this respect, were certainly
pre-eminently French. The scion of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, beholding
his material superiority, was fully persuaded of his intellectual
superiority. And everything contributed to confirm him in his belief;
for ever since the Faubourg Saint-Germain existed at all--which is
to say, ever since Versailles ceased to be the royal residence--the
Faubourg, with some few gaps in continuity, was always backed up by the
central power, which in France seldom fails to support that side. Thence
its downfall in 1830.
At that time the party of the Faubourg Saint-Germain was rather like
an army without a base of operation. It had utterly failed to take
advantage of the peace to plant itself in the heart of the nation.
It sinned for want of learning its lesson, and through an utter
incapability of regarding its interests as a whole. A future certainty
was sacrificed to a doubtful present gain. This blunder in policy may
perhaps be attributed to the following cause.
The class-isolation so strenuously kept up by the noblesse brought about
fatal results during the last forty years; even caste-patriotism was
extinguished by it, and rivalry fostered among themselves. When the
French noblesse of other times were rich and powerful, the nobles
(_gentilhommes_) could choose their chiefs and obey them in the hour
of danger. As their power diminished, they grew less amenable to
discipline; and as in the last days of the Byzantine Empire, everyone
wished to be emperor. They mistook their uniform weakness for uniform
strength.
Each family ruined by the Revolution and the abolition of the law of
primogeniture thought only of itself, and not at all of the great family
of the noblesse. It seemed to them that as each individual grew rich,
the party as a whole would gain in strength. And herein lay their
mistake. Money, likewise, is only the outward and visible sign of
power. All these families were made up of persons who preserved a high
tradition of courtesy, of true graciousness of life, of refined speech,
with a family pride, and a squeamish sense of _noblesse oblige_ which
suited well with the kind of life they led; a life wholly filled with
occupations which become contemptible so soon as they cease to be
accessories and take the chief place in existence. There was a certain
intrinsic merit in all these people, but the merit was on the surface,
and none of them were worth their face-value.
Not a single one among those families had courage to ask itself the
question, “Are we strong enough for the responsibility of power?” They
were cast on the top, like the lawyers of 1830; and instead of taking
the patron’s place, like a great man, the Faubourg Saint-Germain showed
itself greedy as an upstart. The most intelligent nation in the world
perceived clearly that the restored nobles were organizing everything
for their own particular benefit. From that day the noblesse was doomed.
The Faubourg Saint-Germain tried to be an aristocracy when it could
only be an oligarchy--two very different systems, as any man may see
for himself if he gives an intelligent perusal to the list of the
patronymics of the House of Peers.
The King’s Government certainly meant well; but the maxim that the
people must be made to _will_ everything, even their own welfare, was
pretty constantly forgotten, nor did they bear in mind that La France is
a woman and capricious, and must be happy or chastised at her own good
pleasure. If there had been many dukes like the Duc de Laval, whose
modesty made him worthy of the name he bore, the elder branch would have
been as securely seated on the throne as the House of Hanover at this
day.
In 1814 the noblesse of France were called upon to assert their
superiority over the most aristocratic bourgeoisie in the most feminine
of all countries, to take the lead in the most highly educated epoch the
world had yet seen. And this was even more notably the case in 1820. The
Faubourg Saint-Germain might very easily have led and amused the middle
classes in days when people’s heads were turned with distinctions, and
art and science were all the rage. But the narrow-minded leaders of
a time of great intellectual progress all of them detested art and
science. They had not even the wit to present religion in attractive
colours, though they needed its support. While Lamartine, Lamennais,
Montalembert, and other writers were putting new life and elevation into
men’s ideas of religion, and gilding it with poetry, these bunglers in
the Government chose to make the harshness of their creed felt all over
the country. Never was nation in a more tractable humour; La France,
like a tired woman, was ready to agree to anything; never was
mismanagement so clumsy; and La France, like a woman, would have
forgiven wrongs more easily than bungling.
If the noblesse meant to reinstate themselves, the better to found a
strong oligarchy, they should have honestly and diligently searched
their Houses for men of the stamp that Napoleon used; they should
have turned themselves inside out to see if peradventure there was a
Constitutionalist Richelieu lurking in the entrails of the Faubourg; and
if that genius was not forthcoming from among them, they should have set
out to find him, even in the fireless garret where he might happen to
be perishing of cold; they should have assimilated him, as the English
House of Lords continually assimilates aristocrats made by chance; and
finally ordered him to be ruthless, to lop away the old wood, and cut
the tree down to the living shoots. But, in the first place, the great
system of English Toryism was far too large for narrow minds; the
importation required time, and in France a tardy success is no better
than a fiasco. So far, moreover, from adopting a policy of redemption,
and looking for new forces where God puts them, these petty great folk
took a dislike to any capacity that did not issue from their midst; and,
lastly, instead of growing young again, the Faubourg Saint-Germain grew
positively older.
Etiquette, not an institution of primary necessity, might have been
maintained if it had appeared only on state occasions, but as it was,
there was a daily wrangle over precedence; it ceased to be a matter of
art or court ceremonial, it became a question of power. And if from
the outset the Crown lacked an adviser equal to so great a crisis, the
aristocracy was still more lacking in a sense of its wider interests, an
instinct which might have supplied the deficiency. They stood nice about
M. de Talleyrand’s marriage, when M. de Talleyrand was the one man among
them with the steel-encompassed brains that can forge a new political
system and begin a new career of glory for a nation. The Faubourg
scoffed at a minister if he was not gently born, and produced no one of
gentle birth that was fit to be a minister. There were plenty of nobles
fitted to serve their country by raising the dignity of justices of
the peace, by improving the land, by opening out roads and canals, and
taking an active and leading part as country gentlemen; but these had
sold their estates to gamble on the Stock Exchange. Again the Faubourg
might have absorbed the energetic men among the bourgeoisie, and opened
their ranks to the ambition which was undermining authority; they
preferred instead to fight, and to fight unarmed, for of all that
they once possessed there was nothing left but tradition. For their
misfortune there was just precisely enough of their former wealth left
them as a class to keep up their bitter pride. They were content with
their past. Not one of them seriously thought of bidding the son of the
house take up arms from the pile of weapons which the nineteenth century
flings down in the market-place. Young men, shut out from office, were
dancing at Madame’s balls, while they should have been doing the
work done under the Republic and the Empire by young, conscientious,
harmlessly employed energies. It was their place to carry out at Paris
the programme which their seniors should have been following in the
country. The heads of houses might have won back recognition of their
titles by unremitting attention to local interests, by falling in with
the spirit of the age, by recasting their order to suit the taste of the
times.
But, pent up together in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where the spirit of
the ancient court and traditions of bygone feuds between the nobles and
the Crown still lingered on, the aristocracy was not whole-hearted in
its allegiance to the Tuileries, and so much the more easily defeated
because it was concentrated in the Chamber of Peers, and badly organized
even there. If the noblesse had woven themselves into a network over
the country, they could have held their own; but cooped up in their
Faubourg, with their backs against the Chateau, or spread at full length
over the Budget, a single blow cut the thread of a fast-expiring life,
and a petty, smug-faced lawyer came forward with the axe. In spite of M.
Royer-Collard’s admirable discourse, the hereditary peerage and law of
entail fell before the lampoons of a man who made it a boast that he had
adroitly argued some few heads out of the executioner’s clutches, and
now forsooth must clumsily proceed to the slaying of old institutions.
There are examples and lessons for the future in all this. For if there
were not still a future before the French aristocracy, there would be
no need to do more than find a suitable sarcophagus; it were something
pitilessly cruel to burn the dead body of it with fire of Tophet. But
though the surgeon’s scalpel is ruthless, it sometimes gives back life
to a dying man; and the Faubourg Saint-Germain may wax more powerful
under persecution than in its day of triumph, if it but chooses to
organize itself under a leader.
And now it is easy to give a summary of this semi-political survey. The
wish to re-establish a large fortune was uppermost in everyone’s mind;
a lack of broad views, and a mass of small defects, a real need of
religion as a political factor, combined with a thirst for pleasure
which damaged the cause of religion and necessitated a good deal of
hypocrisy; a certain attitude of protest on the part of loftier and
clearer-sighted men who set their faces against Court jealousies; and
the disaffection of the provincial families, who often came of
purer descent than the nobles of the Court which alienated them from
itself--all these things combined to bring about a most discordant state
of things in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. It was neither compact in its
organisation, nor consequent in its action; neither completely moral,
nor frankly dissolute; it did not corrupt, nor was it corrupted; it
would neither wholly abandon the disputed points which damaged its
cause, nor yet adopt the policy that might have saved it. In short,
however effete individuals might be, the party as a whole was none
the less armed with all the great principles which lie at the roots of
national existence. What was there in the Faubourg that it should perish
in its strength?
It was very hard to please in the choice of candidates; the Faubourg
had good taste, it was scornfully fastidious, yet there was nothing very
glorious nor chivalrous truly about its fall.
In the Emigration of 1789 there were some traces of a loftier feeling;
but in the Emigration of 1830 from Paris into the country there was
nothing discernible but self-interest. A few famous men of letters, a
few oratorical triumphs in the Chambers, M. de Talleyrand’s attitude
in the Congress, the taking of Algiers, and not a few names that found
their way from the battlefield into the pages of history--all these
things were so many examples set before the French noblesse to show that
it was still open to them to take their part in the national existence,
and to win recognition of their claims, if, indeed, they could
condescend thus far. In every living organism the work of bringing
the whole into harmony within itself is always going on. If a man is
indolent, the indolence shows itself in everything that he does; and,
in the same manner, the general spirit of a class is pretty plainly
manifested in the face it turns on the world, and the soul informs the
body.
The women of the Restoration displayed neither the proud disregard
of public opinion shown by the court ladies of olden time in their
wantonness, nor yet the simple grandeur of the tardy virtues by which
they expiated their sins and shed so bright a glory about their names.
There was nothing either very frivolous or very serious about the woman
of the Restoration. She was hypocritical as a rule in her passion, and
compounded, so to speak, with its pleasures. Some few families led
the domestic life of the Duchesse d’Orleans, whose connubial couch was
exhibited so absurdly to visitors at the Palais Royal. Two or three kept
up the traditions of the Regency, filling cleverer women with something
like disgust. The great lady of the new school exercised no influence at
all over the manners of the time; and yet she might have done much.
She might, at worst, have presented as dignified a spectacle as
English-women of the same rank. But she hesitated feebly among old
precedents, became a bigot by force of circumstances, and allowed
nothing of herself to appear, not even her better qualities.
Not one among the Frenchwomen of that day had the ability to create a
salon whither leaders of fashion might come to take lessons in taste and
elegance. Their voices, which once laid down the law to literature, that
living expression of a time, now counted absolutely for nought. Now
when a literature lacks a general system, it fails to shape a body for
itself, and dies out with its period.
When in a nation at any time there is a people apart thus constituted,
the historian is pretty certain to find some representative figure,
some central personage who embodies the qualities and the defects of the
whole party to which he belongs; there is Coligny, for instance, among
the Huguenots, the Coadjuteur in the time of the Fronde, the Marechal de
Richelieu under Louis XV, Danton during the Terror. It is in the nature
of things that the man should be identified with the company in which
history finds him. How is it possible to lead a party without conforming
to its ideas? or to shine in any epoch unless a man represents the ideas
of his time? The wise and prudent head of a party is continually obliged
to bow to the prejudices and follies of its rear; and this is the
cause of actions for which he is afterwards criticised by this or that
historian sitting at a safer distance from terrific popular explosions,
coolly judging the passion and ferment without which the great struggles
of the world could not be carried on at all. And if this is true of
the Historical Comedy of the Centuries, it is equally true in a more
restricted sphere in the detached scenes of the national drama known as
the _Manners of the Age_.