WILL the reflective reader ask himself why it is that French journalists absorb so much larger a share of public attention than the newspaper writers of other countries? They are not more argumentative than the English, they are unquestionably less wise than Germans, they yield to the Americans in the versatility of polemical invective, and even to the Irish in their favorite art of screaming about nothing; as to epigrammatic wit, the Italians with their pasquinades are, in this respect, more than their masters. Frenchman themselves explain the interest they excite by pretending that they are the leaders of human thought; but this is a little piece of vanity with not much truth in it. The French are great adapters and magnifiers of other men's ideas, but their genius is not of the inventive sort. All that is practical in their political theories comes to them from England or America; and when the Communalists raised the standard of rebellion in the name of what seemed to them a new and indispensable right-that is, local self-government-they were only claiming an institution which has flourished in Britain for now five hundred years. Even in philosophy, the Encyclopædists of the eighteenth century, who are credited by their countrymen with having been the first apostles of rationalism, did nothing but follow the lead of Hobbes and Locke; and as their writings were at bottom rather attacks upon Popery and the Jesuits than deliberate impeachments of the Christian dogma, it may be said that they were virtually continuers of the Reformation. The Revolutionists of '93 certainly seemed to go a good way in experimental novelty, but there is scarcely a single one of their vagaries which, if we look to it, can be accepted as original. When they beheaded their king and republicanized the calendar, they repeated acts perpetrated with much less fuss and disorder by the Roundheads; their Rights of Man were a plagiarism-on paper, for few of the "Rights" took living effect of Magna Charta and of the Retti

del Popolo promulgated by Thomas Aniello (Masaniello) at Naples in 1648; their Goddess Reason had been imagined so far back as 1535 by that Anabaptist fanatic John Bokkold-better known as John of Leyden-who stirred up Munster against its bishop-prince, and held anarchical revels in the city for six months; and even that queerest of Republican innovations, which consisted in placing military commanders under the constant supervision of civil commissioners, was simply borrowed from the Dutch, whose meddlesome deputies, as we know, hampered and plagued Marlborough almost to perdition. France, it may be urged, has artistic and literary renown, a great name in science, immense military glory, and a moral influence reaching far beyond the confines of her own territory; but these again are catch phrases which do not bear very close examination. France has owned neither a Michael Angelo nor a Rubens, a Dante nor a Shakespeare, a Galileo nor a Newton, a Mozart nor a Rossini. As to military glory, before Napoleon, who was a Corsican, vanquished the armies of disunited and distracted Germany, the military annals of France offered a long series of such crushing defeats as Cressy, Poictiers, Agincourt, Pavia, Blenheim, Ramillies, Malplaquet, Oudenarde, and Rosbach, only chequered, here and there, by a few easy triumphs over weak neighbors, or by noisy internecine struggles, so that now-adays partisans of the white flag are reduced to boasting over the one victory of Fontenoy, which was gained not by a Frenchman, but by Marshal Saxe, a German. Turning now to moral influence, we see that whereas an Englishman finds his language, literature, and institutions thriving over a third of the globe, and whereas Spaniards, Portuguese, Dutchmen, and Germans can point to prosperous settlements of their founding in North and South America, Africa and Australia, Frenchman have done so little to propagate their name and customs by coloniz

ing, that Algeria itself would retain not a trace of them if once the garrisons were removed. To be sure all these circumstances need not constitute a reason why we English should be indifferent to the French, but they make us wonder why such a comparatively inferior nation should arouse so much more attention than ourselves, as they undoubtedly do. Great as our own power, and successful as our own institutions may be, we, as Englishmen, cannot be in perpetual adoration before them; but that foreign States should rank us rather below than on a line with the French, and should have done so from time immemorial, both when France reared her head and crowed and when she lay bruised under our feet, is a mysterious thing which can only be accounted for by seeking the causes of France's popularity outside her actual achievements or deserts. But we need not search far. Frenchmen owe their popularity not so much to their qualities as to their defects, though it should be noticed that their defects, being exempt from hypocrisy, often wear an honester look than other people's virtues. If the French affected British propriety, German gravity, Spanish superciliousness, or if they were servile as the Italians, we might speak in severe terms of their ungovernable natures, their inordinate bumptiousness, factiousness, and immorality. But how be angry with men who are the first to laugh at their own vices, and who yet retain self-respect enough to show that they think none the worse of themselves for being sinners? It is in this inner consciousness of innocence that lies the great charm of the French; they do wrong, but there is such a smiling candor in their waywardness that it disarms censure. British and German vice is an ugly thing because it is underhand and cloaked with a pretense of respectability which renders it doubly offensive. If we look at a crowd of young English people disporting themselves loosely in a casino, we see at once by their constrained attitudes or by their boisterous gaiety that they are ill at ease and trying to stifle the prickings of their consciences which tell them that they are misbehaving themselves. Some, perhaps, are cynically dissolute, but the majority are ashamed of themselves, and will slink away from the place of riot, dreading to be seen, and consequently throwing upon themselves and their dissipation an air

wholly disreputable. In the same way a young Spaniard who stalks off grandly from a house of debauchery to pay his orisons at the shrine of his patron saint, and who, in speaking to a tailor whose bill he does not intend to pay, adopts a tone of grandiloquent haughtiness, is a grotesque creature exciting little sympathy. But a Frenchman who laughingly brags that he has got the better of his tailor, and French people of both sexes who revel at casinos, are all in their ways funny and seductive; because there is not one among them, man or woman, but feels that his or her mission in this life is amusement, and that there is no reason to make a secret of the matter. Viewed in this light Frenchmen occupy towards the rest of the world the position filled in private circles by those merry, bright-witted rakes who, with impunity, do and say things for which steadier persons would be ostracised. They are in fact the spoiled children of this earth, whom we love in our own despite, and towards whose extravagances, political and social, we shall always feel indulgently. We do not envy them their institutions, and often, aloud, we thank Heaven that we are not as these men are; but inwardly, we rejoice that there should be a nation ever ready to put our own unspoken thoughts into words, and to fling stones for us at the many fallacies, humbugs, and prejudices which we dare not assail ourselves. In this respect the encouragements we bestow on the French resemble not only the kindness we cherish for rakes, but also the patronage which noblemen of old used to vouchsafe to court jesters, whom they egged on to say spiteful things and to play pranks against big people who could not be molested otherwise. If the jester was whipped for his pains, the nobles put on a virtuous expression which seemed to say that he had quite deserved it; and so we, when the French have got into trouble through trying, with our warm approval, to effect something-say a Revolution or the establishment of a Republic-which we have not the slightest desire to see attempted on our shores; so we moralize finely over their failure, and say, "What could you expect of such a people?" After the cruel humiliations of their late war and the Commune, it looked as if the French had awoke to a sense of the cat'spaw part they had been made to play by

other nations, and their serious writers inveighed in bitter terms against the foreigners who had always goaded them on to ridiculous or perilous adventures at home and abroad, and then left them in the lurch. "Foreigners," they said, "were delighted to see us liberate the Italians, but they gave us no help, and would have given us none if our generous folly had drawn down on us, as it very nearly did, a coalition of all Germany. It pleased them again to see us try to civilise Mexico, and found there an empire which should check the United States; but they left us to manage this, as also the settlement of the Roman question, single-handed; just as they would have had us, single-handed, go forth to free the Poles, defend the Danes, and save Saxony and Hanover from being swallowed up. As to home matters, foreigners seem to regard our country as an insensible body politic on which the most venturesome experiments can be practised as in corpore vili; and demagogues like Gambetta, Louis Blanc, and Delescluze are enthusiastically applauded by the very men who are loudest in denouncing the Radicals of their own lands. We have been pricked on, in short, to act as the Quixotes and clowns of Europe; and if now and then we appeared to lead. other nations, we did so only like those unluckly sappers who walk in the van of armies. It is not the sappers who have settled the line of march; those who did that are behind, but the sappers are sent in front to clear the way and run the risks of ambush."

This is the substance of what Frenchmen wrote in the first hours that followed defeat; but their fit of perspicacity was short-lived. Now that thirty months have elapsed, they have resumed their old habit of laughing at themselves and at others, of blustering, quarrelling, cutting capers, and shouting; and Europe surveys them with the same wondering curiosity as before, setting them down for a people who are decidedly incorrigible, and who, victorious or beaten, will continue to amuse, frighten, and scandalize other nations to the end of the chapter. This being so, it may please the reader to be introduced familiarly to the score or so of journalists who sway French people, such as they are, and make up what is popularly called "the great voice of the French Press." The present writer speaks of them from person

al knowledge, and will endeavor to sketch them, as far as may be, in their natural colors.

II.

A name that is often quoted in London papers is that of M. John Lemoinne, who writes for the Journal des Débats. There are plenty of English Essayists as clever as M. Lemoinne, whose names are not known to the public, and never will be; but to see a Frenchman write sound sense without rhapsody appears so strange a thing on this side of the Channel that whenever M. Lemoinne puts his hand to a long leader we hear of it from Lerwick to Land's End. Perhaps it ought to gratify us that M. Lemoinne was brought up in England, owed his first successes to a thorough knowledge of English literature, and speaks our language with a musical purity not often found even amongst us natives. He is now fifty-eight, and is a thoughtful, undemonstrative man, who wears a white neck-cloth, and has passed his manhood in wondering why France should not adapt herself to British institutions. About two years ago he let himself be converted to Republicanism, much as a man is converted to swallowing a black-draught; but he readily seized on the Fusion as a pretext for changing sides again, and on the evening when the Count de Chambord's letter of renunciation was made public there was not an unhappier face in Paris than M. Lemoinne's. In his solemn way, M. Lemoinne has two bugbears 1st, the British newspaper which writes up M. Gambetta in one column and sneers down Sir Charles Dilke in the next; and 2nd, the British politician of the Palmerston school, who asserts that Frenchmen are not fit for liberty, and can only be managed by a government like the Second Empire. Full two-thirds of the leaders M. Lemoinne has ever penned are protests against the latter proposition, and during the Empire M. Lemoinne was backed up by a most distinguished phalanx of Anglophilists such as MM. St. Marc Girardin, Eugène Forcade, Prévost Paradol, and Edouard Hervé, the last of whom alone survives. Of these gentlemen it may truly be said that they knew the British Constitution as well as if it were an invention of their own. When Mr. Bright thundered against this or that "superannuated contrivance," when Mr. Beales's good

friends pulled up the Park railings, when Mr. Stuart-Mill lent his countenance to woman suffrage or crotchety agrarian schemes, and when Mr. Disraeli dished the Whigs in the ingenious fashion we remember, M. Lemoinne and his co-thinkers all uttered piercing cries as if they were being personally molested. For all that, they made few proselytes outside the ranks of educated Frenchmen. Parisians approved their articles because the Débats and other papers in which their effusions were published were much disliked by the Emperor; and being disagreeable to the reigning potentate has always been a powerful element in French politics. But average Parisians were sceptical as to the panaceal properties of the British Constitution for distempers of the body politic; and after the fall of Napoleon III. the Anglophilists were carried onwards by the tide of events, or left high and dry miles behind it. M. Hervé, who is editor of the Journal de Paris and an amiable, scholarly writer, much terrified by the unwashed face of Democracy-M. Hervé still does battle for Westminster customs in his journal, which is the organ of the Orleans family; but M. Lemoinne can scarcely be said to have any opinion, except that everything and everybody are going wrong. A short while since, he declared ruefully that Reason had ceased to have a voice in public matters, and he is in just such a frame of mind as may cause us to hear any morning that he has retired from militant journalism. The readers of the Revue des Deux Mondes would not complain of this, for they might get a new series of literary essays like the Life of Brummel, English Electoral Habits, and Caroline of Brunswick, which first drew public notice on M. Lemoinne some thirty years ago; but journalists at once learned, able, and temperate are everywhere so scarce that one must hope M.Lemoinne will be content to take the world as he finds it, nor be disgusted because he cannot lift it out of its wayward grooves. M. Lemoinne is not decorated, nor has he ever sought a post under Government, though he could long ago have had his pick of good places for the asking. The reason of this abstinence is that M. Lemoinne looks upon journalism as being itself a profession, the bâton in which is a character for independence and truth, which character M. Lemoinne has got. A prefectship would be no promo

tion, and indeed it might put him in grievous straits for if M. Lemoinne were appointed prefect, he would not fail to commence ruling on British principles. With Hallam for his daily guide, Blackstone for his philosopher and friend, he would measure the length of his prerogatives by those of a Lord-Lieutenant; whereat the Ministry of the Interior, perceiving that he neither imprisoned any body, nor suppressed newspapers, nor had recourse to the military to disperse meetings of orderly citizens assembled to discuss politics, would conclude that he had none of the qualifications necessary to a French official, and dismiss him with ignominy.

To speak of M. Louis Veuillot in the same breath with temperate journalism seems a strong measure, but the shock may be broken by coupling with M. Veuillot's name that of M. Ernest Renan, M. Lemoinne's colleague on the Débats. Now, M. Renan is the champion of free-thought and M. Veuillot the beadle of Catholic orthodoxy; yet by a freak of fate, these two gentlemen, who stand at the opposite poles of journalism, happen to be the two most skilful and pungent writers of their own language. The most courtly and classical among French writers is Count de Rémusat; the most academical in purism M. Guizot or M. Barthélémy St. Hilaire; the sweetest and softest, M. Octave Feuillet; and the most Parisian, M. Edmond About: but for extent of vocabulary, and for a complete mastery of all the resources of the French tongue, there are no two such penmen as MM. Renan and Veuillot; and if only M. Renan shared M. Veuillot's love for controversy, there might be some hot skirmishes now and then to keep the Boulevards lively. Unfortunately, M. Renan writes seldom, and he never gives heed to personal attacks. A man of fifty with quiet, winning manners, a pleasing voice, and a handsome face, clean shaven as a priest's, no one would take him for the best abused man on the face of the globe-the author who, with his Life of Jesus, has sowed doubt broadcast, earned at M. Veuillot's hands the title of "wholesale peopler of madhouses and Antichrist," and been solemnly excommunicated by the Pope. Yet the strangest thing about M. Renan is, that having been educated for holy orders, he has retained none of the casuistry of Romish seminaries. He refused ordination (and thereby renounced

lucrative preferment, which had been promised him) because his master, M. Dupanloup, now Bishop of Orleans, was unable to solve some doubts that had beset him; and ever since he first put a pen to paper he has abided by two maxims: to make his own meaning clear, and never by a subterfuge to avoid facing the argument of an adversary. M. Renan may be accept ed as the incarnation of that French passion for logic which will take nothing for granted, but must have it all proved by rule of thumb. The consequence is, that instead of being a Republican, he is a theoretic Monarchist (without reference to particular dynasties), reflection having convinced him that Republicanism, however sound in doctrine, has invariably broken down (save in small States) in practice. This is a bitter pill for Republicans of the Louis Blanc type to swallow; but the great difference between M. Renan's style of reasoning and theirs is that they will make no allowance for facts which do not tally with their preconceived notions and prejudices, whereas M. Renan starts with out any prejudice, and aims solely at discovering abstract truth. M. Louis Blanc, whom we have all of us met in London or Brighton at the period when he was English correspondent to the Temps, and who now divides his time between fidgety silence in the National Assembly and occasional dogmatic contributions to the Red Rappel-M. Louis Blanc, with his systematic one-sidedness, would make any fairtempered man hate Republicanism, and he has made such men hate it by the thousand. A dainty homunculus (as Mr. Carlyle might call him), smaller in stature than even M. Thiers, with a wizen, hairless face, dapper hands, feminine voice, and a feline method in conversation, he has been surnamed the Jesuit of Republicanism, and is the originator of that sound theory that Republicanism is a law of nature, and that nations have no right to set up kings, even if it suits them. Premissing all his arguments with this hypothesis, he rejects. lessons of history, experience, facts, knowledge, and all expedient policy in short, and is, in his own way, every whit as intolerant as the most fanatical of Legitimists. Indeed, if there be Legitimists so hot, it is because there are Republicans so fractious-pragmatical little men, who ride big hobbies over the likes and dislikes of mankind, and would have all humanity

bow to an ideal power of Democracy, as absurdly overcolored as the daubs which are hung up outside shows to set clowns agape. M. Louis Blanc cannot understand that a man of M. Renan's intellect should be so feeble as to look at two sides of a question; and M. Renan is at a loss to conceive why a man should swear that the whole earth is red because his own spectacles happen to be scarlet. M. Louis Blanc will go to his final judgment with the ten volumes of his Histoire de la Révolution under his arm, and he will point to his panegyric of Robespierre with the satisfaction of one who has done his best to promote goodwill and confusion among men. M. Renan will reach his death-bed unshaken in the belief that if MM. Robespierre and Louis Blanc had flourished together, the one would have eaten up the other and left the world but little the better for being abandoned to the incisive experiments of the survivor.*

But to return to M. Louis Veuillot, who hates MM. Renan and Louis Blanc with equal piety. This modern Torquemada has not always been the ferocious Ultramontanist we behold him now. Like Augustine of Hippo he passed his early life among the profligates, contributing to comic news sheets, fighting duels with actors whom he had quizzed and brother journalists whom he had libelled, and publishing a novel, L'Honnête Femme, much less edifying in its tendency than the title might suggest. But having gone on a tour to Rome in 1838, when he was just five-andtwenty years old, the religious ceremonies of Easter week wrought such a powerful effect on him that he came back an altered man. Good-bye to songs and suppers, revelries and profane literature. M. Veuillot's friends laughed at the change that had come over him, and augured that it would wear off; but M. Veuillet growlingly anathematized them, and from that time to this he has been busy classing his fellow

The writer thinks it well to state that, in expressing his admiration for M. Ernest Renan's impartiality and good faith as a logician, he offers no opinion on the Life of Jesus, which is not in those who heard his lectures when he was Profesquestion here. M. Renan is not infallible; but sor of History at the College de France, and those who read the political and literary articles which he contributes from time to time to the Debats and Revue des Deux Mondes, must do him jus

tice as a reasoner, however much they may differ from his views on Christianity.