REVOLUTION IN FRANCE.

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume IV, Issue 313, 29 July 1848, Page 3

REVOLUTION IN FRANCE.

I The London Examiner observes in its x caustic manner — "Most appropriately the 5 best account of Louis Philippe's exit from j the Tuileries appears in the Courier de Spectacles, for the finale belongs to pantomime. A wilful old monarch has upset his own p throne in k eking over a dining table. The r war with the Reform-banquet knife and fork . has ended in war to the kuife with monarchy. [ Never was so grand an event precipitated by ' so idle, so ridiculous a cause. The engineer tied down the safety-valve, and crack ! in the j twinkling of an eye the machine was blown to [ atoms. Af er a disappearance of some days, r he found his way to England ; but his retreat ; should be Vienna, the quarter to which all i his recent policy has been addressed. In . consistency he should repair to the Emperor, i and show him to what great monarchs may . come by despotic counsels ; so far as raeie safety is concerned, Louis Ph'ilippe might walk the streets of Paris unmolested and uninsulted. His ruined tool Guizot escaped in the appropriate disguise of a servant, It was to this that Louis Philippe had reduced him — the mere instrument of the meanest purposes. All the liveried folks who arrive from the opposite coast are received as M. Guizot. "The intense selfishness of Louis Philippe has been his ruin. lie has thought of nothing but making his family great and holding his people in subjection. He fancied he had succeeded in both. He made sure that he had the people under his heel, sind that he could crush them at pleasure. The demand for reform was to be insolently and arbitarily put down, as it was practically a revolt against the corruption he had lavished so much gold in effecting. The people were not to meet for discussion on February 22, under paiu of massacre, and on February 24, the Royal family were scattered fugitives. Louis Philippe did not understand his position, and no despot ever does understand his position ; for as his encroachments have succeeded he fails to discover the exhaustion of patience, and the dogged spirit of resistance to which he is approaching. As they say in the East, there is a hair that breaks the camel's back. "Ominously indeed did adulation style Louis Philippe the Napoleon of peace. The parallel is exact in all but the greatness. The wrongs to Spain were disastrous to the one as to the other ; and the King of the Barricades fought his Waterloo in the stieets of Paris. And what a Waterloo ! With a hundred thousand bayonets around him he fell before unarmed, naked men. He had contrived to take the heart out ol his very myrmidons. A fey/ thousands of workmen devoted themselves to overthrow his government, none cared to defend it. The monarchy had been sapped, and down it toppled to the giound, with the whiff and wind of an insurrection. " How courts and aristocrats will chuckle at seeing a king made by the people, as unceremoniously unmade. How democracies will rejoice at seeing him, who so persecuted them at home and abroad, the victim of popular force. How poets and moralists will build ti eir theme thereon, exclaiming that hope, justice, and retrii.ution, are still extant in the world below. " M. Guizot spent a long, an active, and influential life, in furthering the development and defending the principles of constitutional freedom ; and throughout the same period his energies and labours were devoted to binding together the moral and material force of the two great constitutional countries. In the service of Louis Philippe he not only forgot, but turned his back, upon both the one and the other. But Guizot'a talents inspired the King with too much confidence, and the King's confidence rendered Guizot too bold, until their combined imprudence pro- ! yoked the shivering of the spell on which the power of both rested. " The error by which these statesmen, the monarch and the, minister, have fallen, was their undervaluing the force of the liberal and i popular principle. At home they evidently < deemed it, if not extinct, at least so con- '< temptible that they might safely tread out its last spa r k. Although M. Guizot was cer- < tainly very unpopular throughout the country, i •the election which took place last year gave '< him a still larger majority than beforp. This < progress, in parliament, of the party and the < ideas really in declension throughout the na- ■ tion, inspired the oppositiou with the necessi- > ty of parliamentary reform. By reform they < meant nothing extreme or radical. They merely required the clearing the Chamber of < so many salaried employes of the Govern- i ment, the admission of professional men to -

' the election, and some similar changes. None were vital. In favour of tl'is reform, pattly i admitted by ministers, nearly a hundred bant quets had been held, with the usual speechi- ( fying, in the provinces. It was proposed naturally to wind up the series of provincial dinners by a metropolitan one. But here the stupid policy intervened. Clause 191 of the Penal Code foi bade more than twenty Frenchj men to meet in order lo talk politics. The 1 Cabinet was divided. M. Guizot, we bei lieve, was for letting the dinner take place. The King was for preventing it. Louis Phi- , lippe had the story of O'Connell before his i eyes, and he wished to have agitation stopped ; at its birth. It really seemed as if the desire was to provoke the 6meute, in order to show beyond mistake the immensely superior power of the Government and of the armed force, and thus for ever preclude the idea of a liberal opposition appealing to popular success, or making use of popular agitation. We have little doubt that this was the intention ; and that it failed, as such knavery and folly generally fails, from an utter miscalculation as to means and resources." A letter from Paris (March 3) says :—: — " We are now assisting at the most loathsome and, at the same time, the most ludicrous and most instructive spectacle. The stairs of the Hotel de Ville (the seat of the provisional government), the vestibules, the saloons, are literally besieged by, or crowded with a multitude of those men who, till the 23rd of February, were so satisfied, so confident, so devoted. The ex-apostates ot liberty, now the apostates of servitude, are the loudest among the accusers of the late government, and the warmest admireis of the new one. I have seen, I have heard, among them, men who were in the familiarity of Louis Philippe ; others who were assiduous at the evening reunions of the gentle and unfortunate Marie Amelie (the Queen); others who were the most fanatical worshippers of Guizot ; all emulating one another in the violence of their palinodes." He proceeds to observe: — "Probably we shall have more abdications. Leopold has long been wearied of the cares of royalty, and the short-lived kingdom of Belgium may settle dowu into a republic without any violent change. At Madrid, the tidings of the deposal of the Kiug ot the French cannot but produce a strong re-action, and Christina will find her game at an end. The Italian sovereigns who have come to timely arrangements with their subjects, will have reason to congratulate themselves, and we trust that the lesson will not be lost upon other governments, that the most usurious of all creditors is a people to whom just reforms have been too long denied." He raises his warning voice against foreign interference :—": — " Let every one remember that the dreadful deeds perpetrated in 1792 and 1793 were occasioned by the coalition of all the kings of Europe against France ; and that the same causes would produce the same effects, not on France, where the aristocracy is nearly extinct, but on the monarchies and aristocracies of the restof Europe;" and then alludes to the provisional government and its acts :—: — " The provisional government (I do not include the four secretau'es) is composed of gentlemen as upright, as humane, and as talented as any country can boast of. None of them (and I know them all) will permit or overlook any excess ; but they are without power to resist the armed population and the only means by which they can maintain it in a quiet state, is to yield to their demands. " The decrees of the provisional government concerning the working classes, are, undoubtedly, indications of their actual influence in the management of the affairs of the country. But, to infer fiom that, the prevalence of communism among them, and to predict the speedy abolition of the right of property, and the equal division of lands, chattels, and capital among all the citizens, is a most unfounded conclusion. There are communists in Paris, but they do not amount to one in a hundred of the working men. Cabet, an ex-member of the House of Deputies, is their leader, and the : name of Cabet has not yet been pronounced. He has not been chosen to share in the labors of the committees lately appointed. So much for the influence of communism ! " One only of the letters which I have received alludes to foreign affairs. It announces a communication from M. de Lamartine to all the foreign ministers resident in Paris, and adds : — "As to the continental powers, we care very little about them, They may like or dislike our republic as they please, provided they do not renew the insolences and provocations of 1830. Our only anxiety is to- be on good terms with England ; but we fear that the influence of our revolution on Belgium, Hanover, the Germanic Confederation, and Spain, may be such as to divide the two countries.' " Another letter says, * The proclamation of the republic, wrong in principle and in mode, is, however, beneficial in its effects. It has dissolved a coterie, and established as ,

power, though republic is only a word. But it shows- determination ; and already we see, as in 1814, 1815, and 1830, all the officials of the government tendering their adhesion and their services. Dupin, Seguftr, liugeaud himself, declare for the republic ! On the project of the French Government to ensure the working man a fair day's wages for a fair day's work, the Examiner pithily remarks: — "A Government that undertakes to employ and feed people, simply pledges itself to eventual bankruptcy. Legislative interference between masters and men, and the regulation of wages by other laws than supply and demand, can have but one conclusion, that of turning masters into men, not men into masters — that is, of exhausting or expelling capital, destroying commerce, and pauperising the; country. • The operation of turning France into one great workhouse involves the difficulty of perpetuating the ratepayers." The National says — " One of the pre-oc-cupations of the moment is the necessity of setting some order in our finances, and to restore to the budget an equilibrium long since destroyed. We do not pretend to indicate here the ensemble of the measures proper to bring about that result. It is the task of the national assembly to do so. But it appears to us useful to give the chief points of a curious document distributed in the chambers on the eve of their dissolution. In virtue of an article inserted in the budget of 1848, the late government had got drawn up a comparative table of the salaries of functionaries of all kinds in the civil and military services. The periods compared are the first and last years of the reign of Louis Philippe. Salaries in 1831. Justice 15,563,780fr. Foreijjn Affairs 4,871,200 Public Instruction and Worship . . 31,221,665 Interior 707,000 Commerce and Public Works .... 12,725,400 War 44,989,784 Marine and Colonies 8,359,308 Finance 82,983,072 201,421,209fr. Salaries in 1848. Justice 22,048,770fr. Worship 32,739,830 Foreign Affairs 6,041,350 Public Instruction 6,306,980 In'eiior 9,911,192 Agriculture and Commerce 2,174,878 Public Works 5.527,930 War 65,904,057 Marine and Colonies 17,395,098 Finance 96,750,882 264,800,967fr. What first strikes in these two pictures is that from 1831 to 1848, the amount of salaries has increased upwards of sixty-three millions, so that it would suffice to take at present the budget of 1831 as our starting | point, in order to realise on the moment, without any shock, an annual saving equal to the sixth part of the interest of our funded debt. It may be that in some instances this augmentation in the salaries may correspond to an increase in the number of persons employed, but these can only be exceptions without importance. The visible, patent, incontestible result, is a well-imagined system of exhausting the treasury to the profit of functionaries, and at the same time of keeping vp in the country that wild taste for public functions, which conducts individuals to depravation, and states to destruction. If there be any reform urgent for the republic, it is this one. In presence of the disordered appetites which have been produced, of that thirst for places which would destroy the purest regime, it is important to fix at once a limit before which the passion must stop short. If, from 1841 to 1848, the* salary of functionaries resembled a rising tide, it is full time to declare that henceforward the opposite movement will prevail." The Daily News observes :—": — " One of th» last acts of M. Ciemieux, a trusted leader of the Reform party, in the disso ved Chamber, and now a member of the Government, was to vindicate the claim to liberty of worship of the prosecuted Baptists oi Soissons ; and the feeling which animates the popular party may be inferred from the language of a programme which was on Friday extensively placarded on the walls of Paris. This document is headed, * The wishes of the people,' and contains the following declarations of principle :—: — ' Absolute freedom of religion. * Absolute independence of conscience. • The Church to be independent of the State.' " Also, " Protection to all the weak, and to women and children. Peace and holy alliance amongst all nations.'