From the Puritan son of New England, pass now to a different character.
René Louis de Voyer, Marquis d’Argenson, a French noble, was born
18th October, 1694, and died 26th January, 1757; so that his life
lapped upon the prolonged reigns of Louis the Fourteenth and Louis
the Fifteenth. At college the comrade of Voltaire, he was ever
afterwards the friend and correspondent of this great writer. His own
thoughts, commended by the style of the other, would have placed him
among the most illustrious of French history. Notwithstanding strange
eccentricities, he was often elevated, far-sighted, and prophetic,
above any other Frenchman except Turgot. By the courtiers of Versailles
he was called “the Stupid” (_la Bête_), while Voltaire hailed one of
his productions, yet in manuscript, as the “work of Aristides,” and
pronounced him “the best citizen who had ever reached the ministry,”
and the Duc de Richelieu called him “Secretary of State for the
Republic of Plato.”[322]
Except a brief subordinate service and two years of the Cabinet
as Minister of Foreign Affairs, his life was passed in meditation
and composition, especially on subjects of government and human
improvement. This was his great passion. “If I were in power,” he
wrote, “and knew a capable man, I would go on all fours and seek him,
to pray him to serve me as counsellor and tutor.”[323] Is not this a
lesson to the heedless partisan?
In 1725 he became an active member of a small club devoted to hardy
speculation, and known, from its place of meeting at the apartment
of its founder, as _l’Entre-Sol_. It is to his honor that he mingled
here with the Abbé Saint-Pierre, and sympathized entirely with the
many-sided, far-sighted plans of this “good man.” In the privacy of his
journal he records his homage: “This worthy citizen is not known, and
he does not know himself.… He has much intelligence, and has devoted
himself to a kind of philosophy profound and abandoned by everybody,
which is the true politics destined to procure the greatest happiness
of men.”[324] In praising Saint-Pierre our author furnished a measure
of himself.
His “Considérations sur le Gouvernement Ancien et Présent de la
France,” a work which excited the admiration both of Voltaire and
Rousseau, was read by the former as early as 1739, but did not see the
light till some years after the death of the author. It first appeared
at Amsterdam in 1764, and in a short time there were no less than
four editions in Holland. In 1784 a more accurate edition appeared in
France, and in 1787 another at the command and expense of the Assembly
of Notables. Here was a recognition of the people, and an inquiry how
far democracy was consistent with monarchical government. Believing
much in the people and anxious for their happiness, he had not ceased
to believe in kings. The book was contained in the epigraph from the
“Britannicus” of Racine:--
“Que dans le cours d’un règne florissant,
_Rome soit toujours libre_, et César tout-puissant.”
Other works followed: “Essays in the Style of those of Montaigne”;
and the “Journal and Memoirs,” in nine volumes, published tardily.
There still remain in manuscript: “Remarks while Reading”; “Memoirs of
State”; “Foreign Affairs, containing Memoirs of my Ministry”; “Thoughts
since my Leaving the Ministry”; and especially, “Thoughts on the
Reformation of the State.” In all these there is a communicativeness
like that of Saint-Simon in his “Memoirs,” and of Rousseau in his
“Confessions,” without the wonderful talent of either. The advanced
ideas of the author are constantly conspicuous, making him foremost
among contemporaries in discerning the questions of the future. Even
of marriage he writes in the spirit of some modern reformers: “It is
necessary to press the people to marriage, _waiting for something
better_.”[325] This is an instance. His reforms embraced nothing
less than the suppression of feudal privileges and of the right of
primogeniture, uniformity of weights and measures, judges irremovable
and salaried by the State, the dismissal of foreign troops, and the
residence of the king and his ministers in the capital embellished by
vast squares, pierced by broad streets, “with the _Bois de Boulogne_
for country.” This is the Paris of latter days. Add to this the
suppression of cemeteries, hospitals, and slaughter-houses in the
interior of Paris,--and many other things, not omitting omnibuses,
and even including balloons. “Here is something,” he records, “which
will be treated as folly. I am persuaded that one of the first famous
discoveries to make, and reserved perhaps for our age, is to find the
art of flying in the air.” And he proceeds to describe the balloon.[326]
His large nature is manifest in cosmopolitan ideas, and the inquiry if
it were not well to consider one’s self “as citizen of the world” more
than is the usage. Here his soul glows:--
“What a small corner Europe occupies on the round earth! How
many lands remain to be inhabited! See this immense extent of
three parts of the world, and of undiscovered lands at the
North and South! If people went there with other views than
that tiresome exclusive property, all these lands would be
inhabited in two centuries. We shall not see this, but it will
come.”[327]
And then, after coupling morals and well-being, he announces the true
rule: “An individual who shall do well will succeed, and who shall do
ill will fail: _it is the same with nations_.”[328] This is just and
lofty. In such a spirit he cherished plans of political reconstruction
in foreign nations, especially in Italy. The old Italian cry was his:
“The Barbarians must be driven from Italy”; and he contemplated “a
republic or eternal association of the Italian powers, as there was a
German, a Dutch, an Helvetic,” and he called this “the greatest affair
that had been treated in Europe for a long time.” The entry of Italy
was to be closed to the Emperor; and he adds: “For ourselves what a
happy privation, if we are excluded forever from the necessity of
sending thither our armies to triumph, but to perish!”[329]
The intelligence that saw Italy so clearly saw France also, and her
exigencies, marking out “a national senate composed equally of all
the orders of the state, and which, on questions of peace and war,
would hold the kings in check by the necessity of obtaining supplies”;
also saw the approaching decay of Turkey, and wished to make Greece
flourishing once more, to acquire possession of the holy places, to
overcome the barbarians of Northern Africa by a union of Christian
powers, which, “once well united in a kind of Christian Republic,
according to the project of Henry the Fourth detailed by the Abbé
Saint-Pierre, would have something better to do than fighting to
destroy each other as they now do.”[330] Naturally this singular
precocious intelligence reached across the Atlantic, and here he became
one of our prophets:--
“Another great event to arrive upon the round earth is this.
The English have in North America domains great, strong,
rich, well regulated. There are in New England a parliament,
governors, troops, white inhabitants in abundance, riches, and,
what is worse, a marine.
“I say that some fine morning these dominions may separate from
England, rise and erect themselves into an independent republic.
“What will happen then? Do people think of this? A country
civilized by the arts of Europe, in a condition to communicate
with it by the present perfection of its marine, and which
will thus appropriate our arts in proportion to their
improvement,--patience! such a country in several centuries
will make great progress in population and in refinement; such
a country in a short time will render itself master of America,
and especially of the gold-mines.”
Then, dwelling on the extension of commercial freedom and the
improvement of the means of communication, he exclaims, with lyrical
outburst:--
“And you will then see how beautiful the earth will be! what
culture! what new arts and new sciences! what safety for
commerce! Navigation will precipitate all nations towards each
other. A day will come when one will go about in a populous
and orderly city of California as one goes in the stage-coach
of Meaux.”[331]
The published works of D’Argenson do not enable us to fix the precise
date of these remarkable words. They are from the “Thoughts on the
Reformation of the State,” and the first three paragraphs appear
to have been written as early at least as 1733, while his intimacy
with the Abbé Saint-Pierre was at its height; the fourth somewhat
later;[332] but all preceding Turgot and John Adams. Each, however,
spoke from his own soul, and without prompting.