their daily breakfast. To deprive them of their habitual intellectual pabulum, and to render it so innutritious and insipid as it would inevitably become under a censorship, would render the President almost as unpopular with the Parisians as if he were to endeavour, actually and without metaphor, to starve them into allegiance. The support then of the thousand writers, and the million readers of France, Louis Napoleon can only conciliate by respecting the freedom of the press.

Lastly, and above all, Louis Napoleon must beware of relying on the PRIESTS. They are about the worst, the weakest, and the most treacherous reed upon which he could lean. We regard the tendency he has shewn in this direction with more jealousy than any of his other proceedings. It looks like a projected coalition between the two armies of despotism-the military and the ecclesiastical. It is true that one of the saddest and most menacing features of the present aspect of French society is the absence of a religious spirit. It is true that any one who should reanimate religion in the nation would be the greatest of human benefactors. But playing into the hands of the Jesuits will have precisely a contrary effect. They are the notorious and irreconcilable enemies of the central ideas which lay at the bottom of the great French Revolution, and which are still inshrined in the hearts of the whole nation,-viz., the sovereignty of the people, as opposed to the divine right of kings, and the reign of equal justice, as opposed to class privileges. All that the country has of noble in its recent history is arrayed against the priests. All the long years of its degradation and dishonour are associated with their rule. Everything generous and lofty, everything popular and stimulating, in its literature, has proclaimed relentless war against priestcraft under any form. Right or wrong, priests in general, and Jesuits in particular, are hated by everything in France, (except moral ignorance and rare fanaticism, and legitimacy, with its sinister and ulterior designs,) as the foes to enlightenment, the upholders of humbug, the allies of despotism, and the serpents who creep into and poison domestic life. The restoration of them, even to most modified and regulated influence, was one of the most daring, difficult, and unpopular of Napoleon's achievements. Notwithstanding the strong reasons which then existed for doing it, notwithstanding the consummate skill and caution with which he did it, it was a reactionary step, which his supporters could hardly tolerate or forgive. The attempt to associate the priests once more to State authority had done much to undermine the influence of Charles X., before their mischievous advice led him to that attack upon the press by which he forfeited his throne. The active intellects of the French nation, in immense preponderance-it is most

Perils of the Priestly Alliance.

599

deplorable that it should be so, but it is so-regard Christianity as a deception and a chimera; and their religious teachers must resemble the Archbishop of Paris much more, and the Bishop of Chartres much less than the great body of them do at present, before this sad error can be rectified. And so long as this is the case, any truckling to the priests, any favouritism towards them, any signs of an intention to re-impose upon the nation a system which its intellectual leaders believe to be a sham, will be resented as an insult. Christianity itself is a glorious truth as well as a great fact; but to the educated portion of the nation the substitution of priestly despotism in its place presents the system which Rousseau discredited, which D'Alembert, Helvetius, and Condorcet, and all the great literary names connected with the social and political changes of the 18th century, won their fame by contending with and overthrowing. The French may endure the restoration of the Imperial despotism-never that of priestly sway. They may again come under the dominion of the Bastile-never under that of the Inquisition. Louis Napoleon could scarcely commit a blunder which will more surely and more righteously combine against him all that is virulent and all that is selfish, all that is noble and all that is vicious, all that loves freedom and all that loves fame, all that loves truth and all that loves power, in the intellectual and social world of France,-than by holding out a hand of favour and alliance to the Jesuits. The army will despise him for it. The Salons will ridicule and sneer at him for it. The Press will hate him for it almost to a man. The stern Puritan Guizot, the unprincipled and brilliant profligate Thiers, the learned, eloquent, and democratic historian Michelet, the richly-gifted and artist-minded George Sand, the dignified and honoured philosopher Victor Cousin, even the disgracefullypopular ransacker of moral cesspools and obscene cloaca, Eugene Sue, men who could join in nothing else, who have scarcely one other sentiment in common,-would all unite in one wild cry of mingled scorn, indignation, and disgust at the Ruler who could dream of replacing France under the broken crozier and the stained and tattered surplice of the priest.

Nor could the support of the clergy, thus dearly purchased as it must be, ever be relied on by Louis Napoleon. He can scarcely be weak enough to imagine that an organized hierarchy, whose head and centre is in Rome, can ever give faithful or cordial adherence to a man who has risen on the ruin and succeeded to the inheritance of anointed kings. He cannot believe that the servants of a Church whose first dogma, and whose pervading idea is the supremacy of Divine Right, can in their hearts espouse a cause based on military usurpation, and sanc

VOL. XVI. NO. XXXII.

2 Q

tioned by an appeal to universal suffrage. He cannot flatter himself that the alliance between the child of popular sovereignty and the proclaimers of royal sacredness and inviolability, can ever be more than a treacherous and hollow truce. He must know

that by the necessity of the case, the Catholic clergy-such of them especially as receive their impulse from Rome—are secret and zealous Legitimists; that they regard him only as a warming-pan; and that they propose to use him as the restorer of an edifice which, when ready, the old and rightful heirs are to inhabit, as the instrument for the recovery of a patrimony which, as soon as it is secured against the common enemy, they intend to transfer to the legal owner. Knowing all this, we can scarcely suppose, however Louis Napoleon may coquet with the Jesuits for a temporary purpose, that he will commit the enormous blunder of calling them into his councils, or sharing with them his power.

We have said that we are not sanguine as to Louis Napoleon's success in the position which he has so violently and unwarrantably seized. The chapter of accidents is always too rich in France to induce us to venture on a prophecy. Our object in this paper has been to trace the causes which have led to the catastrophe; to explain the reasons why we think the French nation may have been altogether on a wrong tack in their endeavour to naturalize a parliamentary government; to call attention to the irreconcilability of such government with the centralized and bureaucratic administration which is apparently so popular, and is certainly so fixed; and to shew how the powers which are held by the President, may be wielded for the benefit of his country, if he be really animated by a patriotic spirit, and gifted with adequate capacities.

Since this Article was in type, the President has published his Constitution and fulminated his decrees of banishment. The first we have no time nor space to criticise: the latter we cannot pass over without the expression of our conviction that they are a great blunder, as well as a great crime. Such indiscriminate and illegal severity has alarmed and staggered his supporters, and enraged more than it has terrified his enemies. It is an indication and confession of weakness,-a wanton trampling upon legal forms, a menacing inauguration of a reign of terror. Already the murmurs of the Parisian salons have warned him of his mistake and his danger. Confiscation has now followed proscription, and the whole arsenal of tyranny seems to be opened.

NOTE TO ART. IV. IN NO. XXXI,

WE deeply regret to find, that in our Review of Mr. Newman's "Hebrew Monarchy," in last Number, through an unfortunate, and of course unintentional and quite accidental mistake, words have frequently been put into quotation-marks which are not his, but which were supposed to convey his meaning. Arguments and sentiments have also been imputed to him which we understand he disowns. As language is attributed to Mr. Newman which is not literally his, we are anxious to take the earliest opportunity of calling the attention of our readers to the circumstance. They can judge for themselves, by comparing his Work with our Review, whether his meaning has been conveyed in substance. But it is due to him and to them to offer this apology for not having conveyed it in his own form of expression.

INDEX

TO THE

SIXTEENTH VOLUME OF THE NORTH BRITISH REVIEW.