The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Introduction
• Textual Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Essays On Politics and Society
• Mignet’s French Revolution 1826
• Modern French Historical Works 1826
• Scott’s Life of Napoleon 1828
• Alison’s History of the French Revolution 1833
• The Monster Trial 1835
• Carlyle’s French Revolution 1837
• Armand Carrel 1837
• Michelet’s History of France 1844
• Guizot’s Essays and Lectures On History 1845
• Duveyrier’s Political Views of French Affairs 1846
• Vindication of the French Revolution of February 1848 1849
• Appendices
• Appendix A: Guizot’s Lectures On European Civilization (1836)
• Appendix B: French Texts of Material Quoted In Vindication of the French Revolution of February 1848 (1849)
• Appendix C: Textual Emendations
• Appendix D: Index of Persons and Works Cited, With Variants and Notes

ARMAND CARREL

1837

EDITOR’S NOTE

Dissertations and Discussions, 2nd ed. (1867), I, 211-83, where the title appears as “Armand Carrel. / Biographical Notices by MM. Nisard and Littré”; the title is footnoted, “London and Westminster Review, October 1837.” Reprinted from L&WR, XXXVIII (Oct., 1837), 66-111, where it is headed: “Art IV.—Armand Carrel, his Life and Character. From the French of D. Nisard. Preceded by a Biographical Sketch, abridged from the French of E. Littré. London: Hooper (not yet published).” (For reasons given in the Textual Introduction, cii above, references in the text are not to this work, but to Jean Marie Napoléon Désiré Nisard, “Armand Carrel,” La Revue des Deux Mondes, XII [Oct., 1837], 5-54; and Emile Littré, “Notice biographique,” in Oeuvres littéraires et économiques d’Armand Carrel, ed. Charles Romey [Paris: Guillaumin and Lecou, 1854], 5-66.) Running titles: “Armand Carrel.” Signed “A.” Also pamphlet offprint, with a title page reading: “Life and Character / of / Armand Carrel. / From the ‘London and Westminster Review,’ No. XI and LIV. / London: / Printed by C. and W. Peynell, / Little Pulteney Street. / MDCCCXXXVII.” Repaginated [1]-47, [48] blank. Identified in Mill’s bibliography as “An article entitled ‘Armand Carrel’ in the same number of the same review [as ‘Parties and the Ministry’]” (MacMinn, 49). A copy of the pamphlet reprint in Mill’s library, Somerville College, has no corrections or emendations.

The following text, taken from the 2nd ed. of D&D (the last in Mill’s lifetime) is collated with that in D&D, 1st ed., the pamphlet offprint, and that in the L&WR. The two long quotations from Mill’s letter of 25 Nov., 1833, are collated with the original as printed in Earlier Letters. In the footnoted variants, “33” indicates the letter to Carlyle in Earlier Letters, “37¹” indicates L&WR, “37²” indicates the pamphlet offprint, “59” indicates D&D, 1st ed. (1859), and “67” indicates D&D, 2nd ed. (1867).

For comment on the essay, see lxii-lxvii and c-ciii above.

Armand Carrel

^athese little works are^a the tribute paid by ^btwo^b distinguished ^cwriters^c to one whose memory, though he was but shown to the world, the world will not, and must not be suffered to let die.^[*] Cut off at the age of thirty-six by that union of misfortune and fault (Schicksal und eigene Schuld)^[†] to which it has been asserted that all human miscarriages are imputable, he lived long enough to show that he was one of the few, never ^dso few as in these latter times^d , who seem raised up to turn the balance of events at some trying moment in the history of nations, and to have or to want whom, at critical periods, is the salvation or the destruction of an era.

^e We seize ^fthe^f opportunity to contribute what we can, as well from our own knowledge as from the materials supplied by MM. Nisard and Littré, towards a true picture of a man, more worthy to be known, and more fit to be imitated, than any who has occupied a position in European politics for many years. It has not been given to those who knew Carrel, to see him in any of those situations of outward power and honour, to which he would certainly have forced his way, and which, instead of being honours to ^ghim^g , it was reserved for him perhaps to rescue from ignominy. The man whom not only his friends but his enemies, and all France, would have proclaimed President or Prime Minister with one voice, if any of the changes of this changeable time had again given ascendancy to the people’s side, is gone^h ; and his place is not likely to be again filled in our time. But there ⁱareⁱ left to us his memory, and his example ^jWe can still^j remember and meditate on what he was, how much and under how great disadvantages he accomplished, and what he would have been. We can learn from the study of him, what we all, but especially those of kindred principles and aspirations, must be, if we would make those principles effectual for good, those aspirations realities, and not the mere dreams of an idle and self-conceited imagination.

Who, then, and what was Armand Carrel? “An editor of a republican newspaper,” exclaims some English Tory, in a voice ^kby^k which it is doubtful whether the word “republican” or “newspaper” is uttered ^lin^l the most scornful intonation. Carrel was the editor of a republican newspaper: his glory consists precisely in this, that being that, and by being that, he was ^mthe greatest political leader of his time^m . And we do not mean by a political leader one who can create and keep together a political party, or who can give it importance in the State, or ⁿevenⁿ who can make it deserve importance, but who can do any and every one of all these, and do them with an easy superiority of genius and character, which renders competition hopeless. Such was Carrel, Ripened by years and favoured by opportunity, he might have been the Mirabeau or the Washington of his age, or both in one.

The life of Carrel may be written in a few sentences. “Armand Carrel,” says M. Littré,

Thus far M. Littré, a man who does not cast his words at random—a witness, whose opinions indeed are those of Carrel, but whose life is devoted to other pursuits than politics, and whose simplicity and purity of character, esteemed by men who do not share his opinions, peculiarly qualified him to declare of Carrel that which ^othe best^o men in France, of whatever party or shade of opinion, feel, M. Nisard, the representative of a much fainter shade of liberalism than M. Littré, does but fill up the same outline with greater richness of detail, with the addition of many interesting traits of personal character, and with a more analytical philosophy. From the two together we have learned the facts of the early life of Carrel, and many particulars of his habits and disposition, which could be known only to familiar companions. On the great features which make up a character, they show us almost nothing in Carrel which we had not ourselves seen in him: but, in what they have communicated, we find all those details which justify our general idea; and their recollections bear to our own the natural relation between likenesses of the same figure taken from different points. We can therefore, with increased confidence, attempt to describe what Carrel was; what the world has lost in him, and in what it may^p profit by his example.

The circumstance most worthy of commemoration in Carrel is not that he was an unblemished patriot in a time of general political corruption; others have been that, others are so even at present. Nor is it that he was the first political writer of his time: he could not have been this, if he had not been something to which his character as a writer was merely subsidiary. There are no great writers but those whose qualities as writers are built upon their qualities as human beings—are the mere manifestation and expression of those qualities: all besides is hollow and meretricious, and if a writer who assumes a stile for the sake of stile, ever acquires a place in literature, it is in so far as he ^qassumes^q the stile of those ^rwhose stile is not assumed^r ; of those to whom language altogether is but the utterance of ^stheir feelings, or the means to their practical ends^s .

Carrel was one of these; and it may even be said that ^t being a writer was to him merely an accident. He was neither by character nor by preference a man of speculation and discussion, for whom the press, if still but a means, is the best and often the sole means of fulfilling his vocation. The career of an administrator or that of a ^umilitary commander^u would have been more to Carrel’s taste, and in either of them he would ^vprobably^v have excelled. The true idea of Carrel is not that of a literary man, but of a man of action, using the press as his instrument; and in no other aspect does his character deserve more to be studied by those of all countries, who^w are qualified to resemble him.

He was a man called to take an active part in the government of mankind, and needing an engine with which to move them. Had his lot been cast in the cabinet or in the camp, of the cabinet or of the camp he would have made his instrument. Fortune did not give him such a destiny, and his ^xprinciples^x did not permit him the means by which he could have acquired it. Thus excluded from the region of deeds, he had still that of words; and words are deeds, and the cause of deeds. Carrel was not the first to see, but he was the first practically to realize, the new destination of the political press in modern times. It is now beginning to be felt that journalism is to modern Europe what political oratory was to Athens and Rome, and that, to become what it ought, it should be wielded by the same sort of men: Carrel seized the sceptre of journalism, and with that, as with the ^ybaton^y of a general-in-chief,^z ruled amidst innumerable difficulties and reverses that “fierce democracy,”^[*] which he perhaps alone of all men living, trampled upon and irritated as it has been, could have rendered at once gentle and ^apowerful^a .

Such a position did Carrel occupy, for a few short years in the history of his time. A brief survey of the incidents of his career and the circumstances of his country, will show how he ^bacquitted^b himself in this situation. That he committed no mistakes in it, we are nowise concerned to prove. We may even, with the ^cmodesty^c befitting a distant observer, express our opinion as to what his mistakes were. But we have neither known nor read of any man of whom ^dit could be said^d with assurance that, in Carrel’s circumstances and at his years, he would have committed fewer; and we are certain that there ^ehave^e been none whose achievements would have been greater, ^for whose^f errors nobler or more nobly redeemed.

Carrel was the son of a merchant of Rouen. He was intended for business, but his early passion for a military career induced his father (a decided royalist) to send him to the Ecole Militaire of St. Cyr. “His literary studies,” says M. Nisard,

On leaving St. Cyr he entered the army as a sub-lieutenant, the grade answering in the French army to that of an ensign in the English.

In this early direction of the tastes and pursuits of Carrel, we may trace the cause of almost his only defects, and of his greatest qualities. From it he doubtless derived the practicalness (if the word may be pardoned) in which the more purely speculative Frenchmen of the present day (constituting a large proportion of the most accomplished minds of our age) it may be said without disrespect to them, are generally deficient; and of which in England we have too much, with but little of the nobler quality which in Carrel it served to temper and rein in. It is easy to be practical, in a society all practical: there is a practicalness which comes by nature, to those who know ^hlittle^h and aspire to nothing, exactly this is the sort which the vulgar form of the English mind exemplifies, and which all the English institutions of education, whatever else they may teach, are studiously conservative of, but the atmosphere which kills so much thought, sobers what it spares, and the English who think at all, speculating under the restraining influence of such a medium, are guided more often than the thinkers of other countries into the practicalness which, instead of chaining up the spirit of speculation, lights its path and makes safe its footsteps.

What is done for the best English thinkers by the influences of the society in which they ⁱgrow upⁱ , was done for Carrel by the inestimable advantage of an education and pursuits which had for their object not thinking or talking, but doing. ^jHe who thinks without any experience in action, or without having action perpetually in view; whose mind has never had anything to do but to form conceptions, without ever measuring itself or them with realities,^j may be a great man; thoughts may originate with him, for which the world may bless him to the latest generations^k . There ought to be such men, for they see many things which even wise and strong minds, which are engrossed with active life, never can be the first to see. But the man to lead his age is he who has been familiar with thought directed to the accomplishment of immediate objects, and who has been accustomed to see his theories brought early and promptly to the test of experiment; the man who has seen at the end of every theorem to be investigated, a problem to be solved; who has learned early to weigh the means which can be exerted against the obstacles which are to be overcome, and to make an estimate of means and of obstacles habitually a part of all his theories that have for their object practice, either at the present or at a more distant period. This was essentially Carrel’s distinguishing character among ^lthe popular party in his own country;^l and it is a side of his character which, naturally perhaps, has hardly yet been enough appreciated in France. In it he resembled Napoleon, who had learnt it in the same school, and who by it mastered and ruled, as far as so selfish a man could, his country and age. But Napoleon’s really narrow and imperfectly cultivated mind, and his peremptory will, turned aside contemptuously from all speculation, and all attempt to stand up for speculation, as bavardage^m . Carrel, born at a more fortunate time, and belonging to a generation whose best heads and hearts war and the guillotine had not swept away, had an intellect capacious enough to appreciate and sympathize with whatever of truth ⁿandⁿ ultimate value to mankind there might be in all theories, together with a rootedly practical turn of mind, which seized and appropriated to itself such part only of them as might be realized, or at least might be hoped to be realized, in his own day. As with all generous spirits, his hopes sometimes deceived him as to what his country was ripe for; but a short experience always corrected his mistake, and warned him to point his efforts towards some more attainable end.

Carrel entered into life, and into a military life, at a peculiar period. By foreign force, and under circumstances humiliating to the military pride of the nation, the Bourbons had been brought back. With them had returned the emigrants with their feudal prejudices, the ultra-Catholics with their bigotry and pretensions to priestly domination. Louis XVIII, taking the advice of Fouché, though in a different sense from that in which it was given, had lain down in the bed of Napoleon, “s’était couché dans les draps de Napoléon”—had preserved that vast net-work of administrative tyranny which did not exist under the old French government, which the Convention created for a temporary purpose, and which Napoleon made permanent;^[*] that system of ^obureaucracy^o , which leaves no free agent in all France, except the man at Paris who pulls the wires; which regulates from a distance of several hundred miles, the repairing of a shed or the cutting down of a tree, and allows not the people to stir a finger even in their local affairs, except indeed by such writing and printing as a host of restrictive laws permitted to them, and (if they paid 300 francs or upwards in direct taxes) by electing and sending to Paris the two-hundredth or three-hundredth ^pfractional^p part of a representative, there to vote such things as the Charter of Louis XVIII placed within the competency of the national council.^[*] That Charter, extorted from the prudence of Louis by the necessities of the times, and “broken ere its ink was dried,” alone stood between France and a dark, soul-stifling and mind-stifling despotism, combining ^qsome of^q the worst of the evils which the Revolution and Napoleon had cleared away, with the worst of those which they had brought.

By a combination of good sense and ^rfolly^r , of which it is difficult to say which ^swas^s most profitable to the cause of freedom, the Bourbons saw the necessity of giving a representative constitution, but not that of allying themselves with the class in whose hands that constitution had placed so formidable a power. They would have found them tractable enough; witness the present ruler of France,^[†] who has “lain down in the sheets of Napoleon” with considerably more effect. The Constitution of 1814, like that of 1830 which followed it, gave a share of the governing power exclusively to the rich:^[‡] if the Bourbons would but have allied themselves with the majority of the rich instead of the minority, they would have been on the throne now, and with as absolute a power as any of their predecessors, so long as they conformed to that condition. But they would not do it: they would not see that the only aristocracy possible in a wealthy community, is an aristocracy of wealth: Louis during the greater part of his reign, and Charles during the whole of his, bestowed exclusively upon the classes which had been powerful once, those favours which, had they been ^tshared^t with the classes which were powerful ^unow^u , would have rendered the majority of those classes the most devoted adherents of the throne. For the sake of classes who had no longer ^vthe principal^v weight in the country, and whose power was associated with the recollections of ^wall^w which the country ^xmost^x detested, the Bourbons not only slighted the new aristocracy, but kept both them and the people in perpetual alarm, both for ^ywhatever^y was dearest to them in the institutions which the Revolution had given, and which had been cheaply purchased by the sacrifice of a whole generation, and even for the “material interests”^[*] (such as those of the possessors of national property) which had grown out of the Revolution, and were identified with it. The Chamber of Deputies, therefore, or, as it might have been called, the new Estate of the Rich, worked like the Comitia Centuriata of the Roman Commonwealth, which, in this respect, it resembled. Like the Comitia Centuriata, it was, from the principle of its constitution, the organ of the rich; and like that, it served as an organ for popular purposes so long as the predominant section of the rich, being excluded from a direct share in the government, had a common interest with the people. This result might have been foreseen; but the Bourbons either did not foresee it, or thought themselves strong enough to prevent it.

At the time, however, when Carrel first entered into life, any one might have been excused for thinking that the Bourbons, if they had made a bad calculation for the ultimate ^zduration^z of their dynasty, had made a good one for ^aits present interests^a . They had ^bput down,^b with triumphant success, a first attempt at resistance by the new aristocracy.

A Chamber of furious royalists, elected immediately after the second restoration (afterwards with affectionate remembrance called the chambre introuvable, from the impossibility of ever ^cagain^c getting a similar one), had sanctioned or tolerated excesses against the opposite party, worthy only of the ^dmost^d sanguinary times of the Revolution; and had carried their enterprises in behalf of feudalism and bigotry to a pitch of rashness by which Louis, who was no fanatic, was seriously alarmed: and in September 1817, amidst the applauses of all France, he dissolved the Chamber, and called to his councils a semi-liberal ministry. The indignation and alarm excited by the conduct of the royalists, produced a reaction among the classes possessed of property, in favour of liberalism. By the law as it then stood, a fifth part of the Chamber went out every year:^[†] the elections in 1818 produced hardly any but liberals; those in 1819 did the same; and those of 1820, it was evident, would give the liberal party a majority. The electoral body too, as, fortunately, electoral bodies are wont, had not confined its choice to men who represented exactly its own interests and sentiments, but had mingled with them the ablest and most honoured of its temporary allies, the defenders of the “good old cause.”^[*] The new aristocracy could still hear, and not repudiate, the doctrines of 1789, pronounced with the limitations dictated by experience, from the eloquent lips of Foy, and Benjamin Constant, and Manuel. It could still patronize a newspaper press, ^efree for the first time since 1792^e , which raised its voice for those doctrines, and for an interpretation of the charter in the spirit of them. Even among the monied classes themselves there arose, as in all aristocracies there will, some men whose talents or sympathies make them the organs of a better cause than that of^f aristocracy. Casimir Périer had not yet sunk the defender of the people in the defender of his counting-house; and Laffitte was then what he is still, and will be to the end of his disinterested and generous career. Among the new members of the legislature there was even found the Abbé Grégoire, one of the worthiest and most respected characters in France, but a ^gconspicuous member of the Montagne party in the Convention^g .^*

This rapid progress of the popular party to ascendancy was not what Louis had intended: he wished to keep the liberals as a counterpoise to the priestly party, but it never entered into his purposes that they should predominate in the legislature. His “système de bascule”, literally ^hsystem of see-saw^h , of playing off one party against another, and maintaining his influence by throwing it always into the scale of the weakest, required that the next move should be to the royalist side. Demonstrations were therefore made towards a modification of the electoral law; to take effect while the anti-popular party had still a majority, before the dreaded period of the next annual elections. At this crisis, when the fate of parties hung trembling in the balance, the Duc de Berri, heir presumptive to the throne, fell by the hand of an assassin. This catastrophe, industriously imputed to the renewed propagation of revolutionary principles, excited general horror and alarm. The new aristocracy recoiled from their alliance with liberalism. The crime of Louvel was as serviceable to the immediate objects of those against whom it was perpetrated, as the crime of Fieschi has been since. A change of ministry took place; laws were passed restrictive of the press, and a law which, while it kept within the letter of the charter by not disfranchising any of the electors, created within the electoral body a smaller body returning an additional number of representatives.^[*] The elections which took place in consequence, gave a decided majority to the feudal and priestly party; an ultra-royalist ministry was appointed; and the triumph of the ⁱretrogradesⁱ , the party of ancient privileges, seemed assured.

It is incident to a country accustomed to a state of revolution, that the party which is defeated by peaceful means will try violent ones. The popular party in France was now in a similar situation to the popular party in England during the royalist reaction which followed the dissolution of the last parliament of Charles II. Like them, they had recourse to what Carrel afterwards, in his History of the Counter-Revolution in England, called “the refuge of weak parties,” conspiracy.^[†] The military revolutions in Spain, Portugal, and Naples, had ^jinspired^j many ardent spirits in France ^kwith a desire to follow the example^k : from 1820 to 1822 ^lCarbonaro^l societies spread themselves over France, and military conspiracies continually broke out and were suppressed. It would have been surprising if Carrel, whose favourite heroes even at school were Hoche, Marceau, and Kléber, whose democratic opinions had attracted the notice of his superiors at St. Cyr, and to whose youthful aspirations no glory attainable to him appeared equal to that of the successful general of a liberating army, had not been implicated in some of these conspiracies. Like almost all the bravest and most patriotic of the young men in his rank of society entertaining liberal opinions, he paid his tribute to the folly of the day; and he had a narrow escape from discovery, of which M. Littré gives the following narrative.

Nine years later, M. Joubert was heading the party which stormed the Louvre on the 29th of July, and Carrel had signed the protest of the forty-two journalists, and given, by an article in the National, the first signal of resistance.^[†] This is not the only instance in the recent history of France, when, as during the first French Revolution, names lost sight of for a time, meet us again at the critical moments.

These attempts at insurrection did the Bourbons no damage, but caused them some uneasiness with regard to the fidelity of the army. The counter-revolutionary party, however, was now under the conduct of the only man of judgment and sagacity who has appeared in that party since the Revolution; M. de Villèle. This minister ^madopted (though, it is said, with misgiving and reluctance)^m the bold idea of conquering the disaffection of the army by sending it to fight against its principles. He knew that with men in the position and in the state of feeling in which it was, all depended on the first step, and that if it could but be induced to fire one shot for the drapeau blanc against the tricolore, its implicit obedience might be reckoned on for a long time to come.ⁿ Accordingly, constitutional France took the field against constitutional government in Spain, as constitutional England had done before in France—in order that Ferdinand, save the mark! might be restored to the enjoyment of liberty: and the history of the campaign, by which he was restored to it, ^ofurnishes^o a curious picture of a victorious army putting down by force those with whom it sympathized, and protecting them against the vengeance of allies whom it despised and detested.

At this period, political refugees, and other ardent lovers of freedom, especially military men, flocked to the Spanish standard; even England, as it may be remembered, contributing her share, in the persons of Sir Robert Wilson and others. Carrel, already obnoxious by his opinions to his superior officers, and now placed between the dictates of his conscience and those of military discipline, acted like Major Cartwright at the opening of the American war: he threw up his commission rather than fight in a cause he ^pabhorred^p . Having done this, he did what Major Cartwright did not: he joined the opposite party, passed over to Barcelona in a Spanish fishing-boat, and took service in the “foreign liberal legion,”^[*] commanded by a distinguished officer, Colonel Pachiarotti, an Italian exile.

We shall not trace Carrel through the vicissitudes of this campaign, which was full of hardships, and abounded in incidents honourable to him both as an officer and as a man. It is well known that in Catalonia the invading army experienced from Mina, Milans, and their followers, almost the only vigorous resistance it had to encounter; and in this resistance the foreign legion, in which Carrel served, bore a conspicuous part. Carrel himself has sketched the history of the contest in two articles in the Revue Française,^qmuch remarked at the time^q for their impartiality and statesmanlike views, and which first established his reputation as a writer.^[†]

In September 1823, the gallant Pachiarotti had already fallen; supported on horseback by Carrel during a long retreat after he was mortally wounded, and recommending with his dying breath to the good offices of the ^rpersons present^r , “ce brave et noble jeune homme.” What remained of the legion, after having had, in an attempt to relieve Figueras, two desperate encounters with superior force, at Llado and Llers, in which it lost half its numbers, capitulated,^* and Carrel became the prisoner of his former commanding officer, the Baron de Damas. As a condition of the surrender, M. de Damas pledged himself to use his utmost exertions for obtaining the pardon of all the French who were included in the capitulation. Though such a pledge was formally binding only on the officer who gave it, no government could without ^sdishonour^s have refused to fulfil its conditions; least of all the French cabinet, of which M. de Damas almost immediately afterwards became a member. But the rancour which felt itself restrained from greater acts of vindictiveness, with characteristic littleness took refuge in smaller ones. Contrary to the express promise of M. de Damas (on whose individual honour, however, no imputation appears to rest), and in disregard of the fact that Carrel had ceased to be a member of the army before he committed any act contrary to its laws, the prisoners, both officers and soldiers, were thrown into gaol, and Carrel was among the first selected to be tried by military law before a military tribunal. The first court-martial declared itself incompetent. A second was appointed, and ordered to consider itself competent. By this second court-martial he was found guilty, and sentenced to death. He appealed to a superior court, which annulled the sentence, on purely technical grounds. The desire of petty vengeance was now somewhat appeased. After about nine months of rigorous and unwholesome confinement, which he employed in diligent studies, chiefly historical, Carrel was brought a third time to trial before a third court-martial, and acquitted; and was once again, at the age of twenty-four, turned loose upon the world.

After some hesitations, and a struggle between the wishes of his family, which pointed to a counting-house, and his own consciousness of faculties suited for a different sphere, he became secretary to M. Augustin Thierry, one of that remarkable constellation of ^tcotemporary^t authors who have placed France at the head of modern historical literature. Carrel assisted M. Thierry (whose sight, since totally lost, had already been weakened by his labours) in collecting the materials for the concluding volume of his longest work, The History of the Conquest of England by the Normans:^[*] and it was by M. Thierry’s advice that Carrel determined to make literature his profession. M. Nisard gives an interesting account of the manner in which the doubts and anxieties of Carrel’s mother gave way before the authority of M. Thierry’s reputation.

Here then closes the first period of the life of Carrel; and the second, that of his strictly literary life, begins. This lasted till the foundation of the National, a few months before the Revolution of July.

The period of six years, of which we have now to speak, formed the culminating point of one of the most brilliant developments of the French national mind: a development which for intensity and rapidity, and if not for duration, for the importance of its durable consequences, has not many parallels in history. A large income not being in France, for persons in a certain rank of society, a necessary of life; and the pursuit of money being therefore not so engrossing an object as it is here, there is nothing to prevent the whole of the most gifted young men of a generation from devoting themselves to literature or science, if favourable circumstances combine to render it fashionable to do so. Such a conjuncture of circumstances was presented by the state of France, at the time when the Spanish war and its results seemed to have riveted on the necks of the French people the yoke of the feudal and sacerdotal party for many years to come. The Chamber was closed to all under the age of forty; and besides, at this particular period, the law of partial renewal had been abrogated, a septennial act had been passed,^[†] and a general election, at the height of the Spanish triumph, had left but sixteen Liberals in the whole Chamber of Deputies. The army, in a time of profound peace, officered too by the detested émigrés, held out no attraction. Repelled from politics, in which little preferment could be hoped for by a ^uroturier^u , and that little at a price which a Frenchman will least of all consent to pay—religious hypocrisy; the élite of the educated youth of France precipitated themselves into literature and philosophy, and remarkable results soon became evident.

The national intellect seemed to make a sudden stride, from the stage of adolescence to that of early maturity. It had reached the era corresponding to that in the history of an individual mind, when, after having been taught to think (as every one is) by teachers of some particular school, and having for a time exercised the power only in the path shown to it by its first teachers, it begins, without abandoning that, to tread also in other paths; learns to see with its naked eyes, and not through the eye-glasses of its teachers,^[*] and, from being one-sided, becomes many-sided^[†] and of no school. The French nation had had two great epochs of intellectual development. It had been taught to speak by the great writers of the seventeenth century,—to think by the philosophers of the eighteenth. The present became the era of reaction against the ^vnarrownesses^v of the eighteenth century, as well as against those narrownesses of another sort which the eighteenth century had left. The stateliness and conventional decorum of old French poetic and dramatic literature, gave place to a licence which made free scope for genius and also for absurdity, and let in new forms of the beautiful ^was well as many^w of the hideous. Literature shook off its chains, and used its liberty like a galley-slave broke loose; while painting and sculpture passed from one unnatural extreme to ^xanother^x , and the stiff school was succeeded by the spasmodic. This insurrection against the old traditions of classicism was called romanticism: and now, when the mass of ^yrubbish^y to which it had given birth has produced another oscillation in opinion the reverse way, one inestimable result seems to have survived it—that life and human feeling may now, in France, be painted with as much liberty as they may be discussed, and, when painted truly, with approval: as by George Sand, and in the best writings of Balzac. While this revolution was going on in the artistic departments of literature, that in the scientific departments was still more important. There was reaction against the metaphysics of Condillac and Helvetius; and some of the most eloquent men in France imported Kantism from Germany, and Reidism from Scotland, to oppose to it, and listening crowds applauded, and an “eclectic philosophy” was formed. There was reaction against the irreligion of Diderot and d’Holbach; and by the side of their irreligious philosophy there grew up religious philosophies, and philosophies prophesying a religion, and a general vague feeling of religion, and a taste for religious ideas. There was reaction against the premises, rather than against the conclusions, of the political philosophy of the Constituent Assembly: men found out, that underneath all political philosophy there must be a social philosophy—a study of agencies lying deeper than forms of government, which, working through forms of government, produce in the long run most of what these seem to produce, and which sap and destroy all forms of government that lie across their path. Thus arose the new political philosophy of the present generation in France; which, considered merely as a portion of science, may be pronounced ^zgreatly^z in advance of all the other political philosophies which ^ahad yet existed;^a —a philosophy rather scattered among many minds than concentrated in one, but furnishing a storehouse of ideas to ^bthose^b who meditate on politics, such as all ages and nations could not furnish previously; and inspiring at the same time more comprehensive, and therefore more cautious views of the past and present, and far bolder aspirations and anticipations for the future. It would be idle to hold up any particular book as a complete specimen of this philosophy: different minds, according to their capacities or their tendencies, have struck out or appropriated to themselves different portions of it, which as yet have only been partially harmonized and fitted into one another. But if we were asked for the book which up to the present time embodies the largest portion of the spirit, and is, in the French phrase, the highest expression, of this new political philosophy, we should point to the Democracy in America, by M. de Tocqueville.^[*]

It was above all, however, in history, and historical disquisition, that the new tendencies of the national mind made themselves way. And a fact may be remarked, which strikingly illustrates the difference between the French and the English mind, and the rapidity with which an idea, thrown into French soil, takes root, and blossoms, and fructifies. Sir Walter Scott’s romances have been read by every educated person in Great Britain who has grown up to manhood or womanhood in the last twenty years; and, except the memory of much pleasure, and a few mediocre imitations, forgotten as soon as read, they have left no traces that we know of in the national mind. But it was otherwise in France. Just as Byron, and the cast-off boyish ^cextravagances^c of Goethe and Schiller which Byron did but follow, have been the origin of all the sentimental ruffians, the Lacenaires in imagination and in action, with which the Continent swarms, but have produced little fruit of that description, comparatively speaking, in these islands; so, to compare good influences with bad^d , did Scott’s romances, and especially Ivanhoe,^[†] which in England were only the amusement of an idle hour, give birth ^e(or at least nourishment)^e to one of the principal intellectual products of our time, the modern French school of history. M. Thierry, whose Letters on the History of France gave the first impulse, proclaims the fact.^[*] Seeing, in these fictions, past events for the first time brought home to them as realities, not mere abstractions; startled by finding, what they had not dreamed of, Saxons and Normans in the reign of Richard I;^f thinking men felt flash upon them for the first time the meaning of that philosophical history, that history of human life, and not of kings and battles, which Voltaire talked of,^[†] but, writing history for polemical purposes, could not succeed in realizing. Immediately the annals of France, England, and other countries, began to be systematically searched; the characteristic features of society and life at each period were gathered out, and exhibited in histories, and speculations on history, and historical fictions. All works of imagination were now expected to have a couleur locale; and the dramatic scenes and romances of Vitet, Mérimée, and Alfred de Vigny, among the best productions of the romantic school ^gin those years^g , are evidences of the degree in which they attained it. M. de Barante wrote the history of two of the most important centuries ^hin^h his country’s annals, ⁱfrom the materials, and often in the words,ⁱ of Froissart and Comines.^[‡] M. Thierry’s researches into the early history of the town-communities, brought to light some of the most important facts of the progress of society in France and in all Europe.^[§] While Mignet and Thiers, in a style worthy of the ancient models, but with only the common ideas of their time, recounted the recent glories and sufferings of their country, other writers, among whom Auguste Comte ^jin his commencements,^j and the founders of the St. Simonian school were conspicuous, following in the steps of ^kVico, Herder, and Condorcet^k , analyzed the facts of universal history, and connected them by generalizations, which, if unsatisfactory in ^lsome^l respects, explained much, and placed much in a new and striking light; and M. Guizot, a man of a greater range of ideas and greater historical impartiality than ^mmost of^m these, gave to the world those immortal Essays and Lectures,^[*] for which posterity will forgive him ⁿthe grave faults of hisⁿ political career.

In the midst of an age thus teeming with valuable products of thought, himself without any more active career to engross his faculties, the mind of Carrel could not remain unproductive. “In a bookseller’s back-shop,” says M. Nisard (for the young author, in his struggle for subsistence, for a short time entered seriously into the views of his family, and embarked some money supplied by them in an unsuccessful bookselling speculation), “on a desk to which was fastened a great Newfoundland dog, Carrel, one moment absorbed in English memoirs and papers, another moment caressing his favourite animal, conceived and wrote his History of the Counter-Revolution in England.”^[†] It was published in February 1827; and though the age has produced historical works of profounder philosophical investigation, yet in its kind, and for what it aims at, it deserves to be considered one of the most finished productions of that remarkable era.

It is a history of the two last Stuarts, of their attempts to re-establish Popery and arbitrary power, their temporary success, and ultimate overthrow by the Revolution of 1688. Their situation and conduct presented so close a parallel to that which the two last Bourbons at that time exhibited in France, that the subject was a favourite one with the French writers of the period. There could not have been a more natural occasion for violent republicanism, or any kind of revolutionary violence, to display itself, if Carrel had been the fanatic which it is often supposed that all ^odemocratic^o reformers must be. But we find no republicanism in this book, no partisanship of any kind; the book is almost too favourable to the Stuarts; there is hardly anything in it which might not have been written by a clear-sighted and reflecting person of any of the political parties which divide the present day. But we find instead, in every page, distinct evidence of a thoroughly practical mind: a mind which looks out, in every situation, for the causes which were actually operating, discerns them with sagacity, sees what they must have produced, what could have been done to modify them, and how far they were practically misunderstood: a statesman, judging of statesmen by placing himself in their circumstances, and seeing what they could have done; not by the rule and square of some immutable theory of mutable things, nor by that most fallacious test for estimating men’s actions, the rightness or wrongness of their speculative views. If Carrel had done nothing else, he would have shown by this book that^p, like Mirabeau, he was not a slave to^p formulas;^[*] no pre-established doctrine as to how things ^qmust be^q , ever prevented him from seeing them as they ^rwere^r . “Everywhere and at all times,” says he, “it is the wants of the time which have created the conventions called political principles, and those principles have always been pushed aside by those wants.”^[†] “All questions as to forms of government,” he says in another place, “have their ^sdata^s in the condition of society, and nowhere else.”^[‡] The whole spirit of the new historical school is in these two sentences. The great character by which Carrel’s book differs from all other histories of the time, with which we are acquainted, is, that in it alone are we led to understand and account for all the vicissitudes of the time, from the ebb and flow of public opinion; the causes of which, his own practical sagacity, and a Frenchman’s experience of turbulent times, enabled Carrel to perceive and interpret with a truth and power that must strike every competent judge who compares his short book with the long books of other people. And we may here notice, as an example of the superiority of French historical literature to ours, that, of the most interesting period in the English annals, the period of the Stuarts, France has produced, within a very few years too, the best, the second-best, and the third-best history. The best is this of Carrel; the second-best is the unfinished work^* of M. Guizot, his History of the English Revolution^t ;^[§] the third in merit is M. Mazure’s History of the Revolution of 1688, a work of^u greater detail, and less extensive views, but which has brought much new information from Barillon’s papers and elsewhere, is unexceptionable as to impartiality, and on the whole a highly valuable accession to the literature of English history.^[¶]

The style of the Histoire de la Contre-Révolution, according to M. Nisard, did not give Carrel the reputation he afterwards acquired as a master of expression. But we agree with M. Nisard, a most competent judge, and a severe critic of his ^vcotemporaries^v , in thinking this judgment of the French public erroneous. We already recognise in this early performance, the pen which was afterwards compared to a sword’s point (il semblait écrire avec une pointe d’acier).^[*] It goes clean and sharp to the very heart of the thing to be said, says it without ornament or periphrasis, or phrases of any kind, and in nearly the fewest words in which so much could be told. The style cuts the meaning into the mind as with an edge of steel. It wants the fertility of fancy which Carrel afterwards displayed; an indispensable quality to a writer of the first rank, but one which, in spite of the authority of ^wCicero and^w Quintilian,^[†] we believe to be, oftener than is supposed, the last rather than the first quality which such writers acquire. The grand requisite of good writing is, to have something to say: to attain this, is becoming more and more the grand effort of all minds of any power, which embark in literature; and important truths, at least in human nature and life, seldom reveal themselves but to minds which are found equal to the secondary task of ornamenting those truths, when they have leisure to attend to it. A mind which has all natural human feelings, which draws its ideas fresh from realities, and, like all first-rate minds, varies and multiplies its points of view, gathers as it goes illustrations and analogies from all nature. So was it with Carrel. The fashion of the day, when he began, was picturesqueness of style, and that was what the imitative minds were all straining for. Carrel, who wrote from himself and not from imitation, put into his style first what was in himself first, the intellect of a great writer. The other half of the character, the imaginative ^xpart^x , came to maturity somewhat later, and was first decidedly recognised in the Essays on the War in Spain, which, as we have already said, were published in the Revue Française, a periodical on the plan of the English reviews, to which nearly all the most philosophical minds in France contributed, and which was carried on for several years with first-rate ability.

The editor of this review was M. Guizot. That Guizot and Carrel should for a time be found not only fighting under the same banner, but publishing in the same periodical organ, is a fact characteristic of the fusion of parties and opinions which had by this time taken place to oppose the progress of the counter-revolution.

The victory in Spain had put the royalists in complete possession of the powers of government. The elections of 1824 had given them, and their septennial act secured to them for a period, their chambre des trois cents, so called from the 300 feudalists, or creatures of the feudalists, who, with about 100 more moderate royalists, and sixteen liberals of different shades, made up the whole Chamber. It is for history, already familiar with the frantic follies of this most unteachable party, to relate all they did, or attempted; the forty millions sterling which they voted into their own pockets under the name of compensation to the emigrants, their law of sacrilege, worthy of the bigotry of the middle ages; the reestablishment of the Jesuits, the putting down of the Lancasterian schools, and throwing all the minor institutions of education (they did not yet openly venture upon the ^yUniversity^y ) into the hands of the priests.^[*] The madmen thought they could force back Catholicism upon a people, of whom the educated classes, though not, as they are sometimes represented, hostile to religion, but ^zeither simply indifferent or^z decidedly disposed to a religion of some sort or other, had for ever bidden adieu to that form of it, and could as easily have been made Hindoos or Mussulmans as Roman Catholics. All that bribery could do was to make hypocrites, and of these (some act of hypocrisy being a condition of preferment) there were many edifying examples; among others, M. Dupin, ^asince^a President of the Chamber of Deputies, who, soon after the accession of Charles X, devoutly followed the Host in a procession to St. Acheul.^* If our memory deceive us not, Marshal Soult was another of these illustrious converts; he became one of Charles X’s peers, and wanted only to have been his minister too, to have made him the Sunderland of the French 1688.

In the meantime, laws were prepared against the remaining liberties of France, and against the institutions dearest to the people, of those which the Revolution had given. Not content with an almost ^cconstant^c censorship on the newspaper press, the faction proposed rigid restraints upon the publication even of books below a certain size. A law also was framed to re-establish primogeniture and entails, among a nation which universally believes that the family affections, on the strength of which it justly values itself, depend upon the observance of equal justice in families, and would not survive the revival of the unnatural preference for the eldest son. These laws passed the Chamber of Deputies amidst the most violent storm of public opinion which had been known in France since the Revolution. The Chamber of Peers, faithful to its mission as the Conservative branch of the Constitution, rejected them.^[*] M. de Villèle felt the danger, but a will more impetuous and a judgment weaker than his own, compelled him to advance. He created (or^d the King created) a batch of sixty-six peers, and dissolved the Chamber.

But affairs had greatly altered since the elections of 1824. By the progress, not only of disgust at the conduct of the faction, but of a presentiment of the terrible crisis to which it was about to lead, the whole of the new aristocracy had now gone over to the people. Not only they, but the more reasonable portion of the old aristocracy, the moderate royalist party, headed by Chateaubriand, and represented by the Journal des Débats, had early separated themselves from the counter-revolutionary faction of which M. de Villèle was the unwilling instrument. Both these bodies, and the popular party, now greatly increased in strength even among the electors, knit themselves in one compact mass to overthrow the Villèle Ministry. The ^eAide-toi Society^e , in which even M. Guizot acted a conspicuous part, ^fbut which was mainly composed^f of the most energetic young men of the popular party, conducted the correspondence and organized the machinery for the elections. A large majority was returned hostile to the ministry: they were forced to retire, and the King had to submit to a ministry of moderate royalists, commonly called, from its most influential member, the Martignac Ministry.

The short interval of eighteen months, during which this ministry lasted, was the brightest period which France has known since the Revolution; for a reason which well merits attention; those who had the real power in the country, the men of property and the men of talent, had not the power at the Tuileries, nor any near prospect of having it. It is the grievous misfortune of France, that being still new to constitutional ideas and institutions, she has never known what it ^gis^g to have a fair government,^h in which there ⁱisⁱ not one law for the party in power, and another law for its opponents. The French government is not a constitutional government—it is a despotism limited by a parliament; whatever party can get the executive into its hands, and induce a majority of the Chamber to support it, does practically whatever it pleases; hardly anything that it can be guilty of towards its opponents alienates its supporters, unless they fear that they are themselves marked out to be the next victims; and even the trampled-on minority fixes its hopes not upon limiting arbitrary power, but upon becoming the stronger party and tyrannizing in its turn. It is to the eternal honour of Carrel that he, and he almost alone, in a subsequent period far less favourable than that of which we are speaking, recognised the great principle of which all parties had more than ever lost sight;—saw that this, above all, was what his country wanted; unfurled the banner of equal justice and equal protection to all opinions, bore it bravely aloft in weal and woe over the stormy seas on which he was cast, and when he ^jsank, sank^j with it flying. It was too late. A revolution had intervened; and even those who suffered from tyranny, had learnt to hope for relief from revolution, and not from law or opinion. But during the Martignac Ministry, all parties were equally afraid of, and would have made equal sacrifices to avert, a convulsion. The idea gained ground, and appeared to be becoming general, of building up in France for the first time a government of law. It was known that the King was wedded to the counter-revolutionary party, and that without a revolution the powers of the executive would never be at the disposal of the new aristocracy of wealth, or of the men of talent who had put themselves at the head of it. But they had the command of the legislature, and they used the power which they had, to reduce within bounds that which ^kby peaceable means^k they could not hope to have. For the first time it became the object of the first speculative and practical politicians in France, to limit the ^lpower^l of the executive; to erect barriers of opinion, and barriers of law, which it should not be able to overpass, and which should give the citizen that protection which he had never yet had in France, against the tyranny of the magistrate: to form, as it was often expressed, les moeurs constitutionnelles, the habits and feelings of a free government, and establish in France, what is the greatest political blessing ^menjoyed^m in England, the national feeling of respect and obedience to the law.

Nothing could seem more hopeful than the progress which France was making, under the Martignac Ministry, towards this great improvement. The discussions of the press, and the teachings of the able men who headed the Opposition, especially the Doctrinaires (as they were called), M. Royer Collard, the Duc de Broglie, M. Guizot, and their followers, who then occupied the front rank of the popular party, were by degrees working the salutary feelings of a constitutional government into the public mind. But they had barely time to penetrate the surface. The same madness which hurled James II from his throne, was now fatal to Charles X. In an evil hour for France, unless England one day repay her the debt which she unquestionably owes her for the Reform Bill,^[*] the promise of this auspicious moment was blighted; the Martignac Ministry was dismissed, a set of furious émigrés were appointed, and a new general election having brought a majority still more hostile to them, the famous Ordonnances were issued,^[†] and the Bourbon Monarchy was swept from the face of the earth.

We have called the event which necessitated the Revolution of July, a misfortune to France. We wish earnestly to think it otherwise. But if in some forms that Revolution has brought ⁿconsiderableⁿ good to France, in many it has brought ^oserious^o ill. Among the evils which it has done we select two of the greatest^p : it stopped the progress of the French people towards recognising the necessity of equal law, and a strict definition of the powers of the magistrate; and it ^qchecked, and for a time almost suspended,^q the literary and philosophic movement which had commenced.

On the fall of the old aristocracy, the new oligarchy came at once into power. They did not all get places, only because there were not places for all. But there was a large abundance, and they rushed upon them like tigers upon their prey. No precaution was taken by the people against this new enemy. The discussions of the press in the years preceding, confined as they had been both by public opinion and by severe legal penalties, strictly within the limits of the Charter,^[‡] had not made familiar to the public mind the necessity of an extended suffrage; and the minds even of enlightened men, as we can ^rpersonally testify^r , at the time of the formation of the new government, were in a state of the utmost obtuseness on the subject. The eighty thousand electors had hitherto been on the side of the people, and nobody seemed to see any reason why this should not continue to be the case. The oligarchy of wealth was thus allowed quietly to instal itself; its leaders, and the men of literary talent who were its writers and orators, became ministers, or expectant ministers, and no longer sought to limit the power which was henceforth to be their own; by degrees, even, as others attempted to limit it, they violated in its defence, one after another, every salutary principle of freedom which they had themselves laboured to implant in the popular mind. They reckoned, and the event shows that they could safely reckon, upon the King whom they had set up; that he would see his interest in keeping a strict alliance with them. There was no longer any rival power interested in limiting that of the party in office. There were the people; but the people could not make themselves felt in the legislature; and attempts at insurrection, until the resistance becomes thoroughly national, a government is always strong enough to put down. There was the aristocracy of talent: and the course was adopted of buying off ^sthis^s with a portion of the spoil. One of the most deplorable effects of the new government of France, is the profligate immorality which it is industriously spreading among the ablest and most accomplished of the youth. All the arts of corruption which Napoleon exercised towards the dregs of the Revolution, are put in practice by the present ruler upon the élite of France: and few are they that resist. Some rushed headlong from the first, and met the bribers half way; others held out for a time, but their virtue failed them as things grew more desperate, and as they grew more hungry. Every man of literary reputation who will sell himself to the government, is gorged with places and loaded with decorations. Every rising young man, of the least promise, is lured and courted to the same dishonourable distinction. Those who resist the seduction must be proof against every temptation which is strongest on a French mind: for the vanity, which is the bad side of the national sociability and love of sympathy, makes the French, of all others, the people who are the most eager for distinction, and as there is no national respect for birth, and but little for wealth, almost the only adventitious distinctions are those which the government can confer. Accordingly the pursuits of intellect, but lately so ardently engaged in, are almost abandoned; no enthusiastic crowds now throng the lecture-room; M. Guizot has left his professor’s chair and his historical speculations, and would fain be the Sir Robert Peel of France; M. Thiers is trying to be the Canning; M. Cousin and M. Villemain have ceased to lecture, have ceased even to publish; M. de Barante is an ambassador; Tanneguy Duchâtel, instead of expounding Ricardo, and making his profound speculations known where they are more needed than in any other country in Europe, ^tbecame^t a Minister of Commerce who dared not act upon his own principles, and is waiting to be so again; the press, which so lately teemed with books of history and philosophy, now scarcely produces one, and the young men who could have written them are either placemen, or gaping place-hunters, disgusting the well-disposed of all parties by their avidity, and their open defiance of even the pretence of principle.^u

Carrel was exposed to the same temptations with other young men of talent, but we claim no especial merit for him in having resisted them. Immediately after the Revolution, in which, as already observed, he took a distinguished part, he was sent by the government on an important mission to the West: on his return he found himself gazetted for a prefecture; which at that time he might honestly have accepted, as many others did whom the conduct of the government afterwards forced to retire. Carrel used sportively to say that if he had been offered a regiment, he perhaps could not have found in his heart to refuse. But he declined the prefecture, and took his post as editor and chief writer of the National, which he had founded a few months before the Revolution, in conjunction with MM. Mignet and Thiers, but which M. Thiers had conducted until he and M. Mignet got into place. Carrel now assumed the management: and from this time his rise was rapid to that place in the eye of the public, which made him, at one period, the most conspicuous ^vprivate^v person in France. Never was there an eminence better merited; and we have now to tell how he acquired it, and how he used it.

It was by no trick, no compliance with any prevailing fashion or prejudice, that Carrel became the leading figure in politics on the popular side. It was by the ascendancy of character and talents, legitimately exercised, in a position for which he was more fitted than any other man of his age, and of which he at once entered into the true character, and applied it to its practical use. From this time we are to consider Carrel not as a literary man, but as a politician, and his writings are to be judged by the laws of popular oratory. “Carrel,” says M. Nisard,

and he recognised, that there is not only action upon the outward world, there is also action upon the spiritual world of thought and feeling, the action of the artist, the preacher, and the philosopher. “Thus completed,” says M. Nisard, “Carrel’s idea is the best theory of the art of composition:”^[*] as indeed it is; and it was the secret of Carrel’s success.

Of his eminence as a writer, there is but one opinion in France, there can be but one among competent judges in any country. Already, from the time of his Essays on the War in Spain, “nothing mediocre had issued from his pen.”^[‡] In the various papers, literary or political, which he published in different periodical works,

“All the qualities,” continues M. Nisard,

This from so sober a judge, and in an age and country which has produced Paul Louis Courier, is, we may hope, sufficient.

Both M. Littré and M. Nisard^[*] compare Carrel’s political writings, as literary productions, to the letters of Junius;^[†] though M. Nisard gives greatly the superiority to Carrel. But the comparison itself is an injustice to him. There never was anything less like popular oratory, than those polished but stiff and unnatural productions; where every cadence seems pre-determined, and the writer ^zknew^z the place of every subsequent word in the sentence, before he finally ^aresolved^a on the first. The Orations of Demosthenes, though even Demosthenes could not have extemporized them, are but the ideal and unattainable perfection of extemporaneous speaking: but Apollo himself could not have spoken the Letters of Junius, without pausing at the end of every sentence to arrange the next. A piece of mere painting, like any other work of art, may be finished by a succession of touches: but when spirit speaks to spirit, not in order to please but to incite, everything must seem to come from one impulse, from a soul engrossed for the moment with one feeling. It seemed so with Carrel, because it ^bwas^b so. “Unlike Paul Louis Courier,” says M. Littré, “who hesitated at a word, Carrel never hesitated at a sentence;”^[‡] and he could speak, whenever called upon, in the same style in which he wrote. His style has that ^cbreadth^c , which, in literature, as in other works of art, shows that the artist has a ^dcharacter^d —that some conceptions and some feelings predominate in his mind over others. Its fundamental quality is that which M. Littré has well characterized, la sûreté de l’expression;^[§] it goes straight home; the right word is always found, and never seems to be sought: words are never wanting to his thoughts, and never pass before them. “L’expression” (we will not spoil by translation M. Littré’s finely chosen phraseology) “arrivait toujours abondante comme la pensée, si pleine et si abondante elle-même;” “and if one is not conscious of the labour of a writer retouching carefully every passage, one is conscious of a vigorous inspiration, which endows everything with movement, form, and colour, and casts in one and the same mould the style and the thought.”^[¶]

It would have been ^ein complete contradiction to^e Carrel’s idea of journalism, for the writer to remain behind a curtain. The English idea of a newspaper, as a sort of impersonal thing, coming from nobody knows where, the readers never thinking of the writer, nor caring whether he thinks what he writes, as long as they think what he writes;—this would not have done for Carrel, nor been consistent with his objects. The opposite idea already to some extent prevailed in France: newspapers were often written in, and had occasionally been edited, by political characters, but no political character ^f(since the first Revolution) had^fmade itself by a newspaper. Carrel did so. To say that during the years of his management Carrel conducted the National, would give an insufficient idea. The National was Carrel; it was as much himself as was his conversation, as could have been his speeches in the Chamber, or his acts as a public functionary. “The National,” says M. Littré, “was a personification of Armand Carrel; and, if the journal gave expression to the thoughts, the impulses, the passions of the writer, the writer in his turn was always on the breach, prepared to defend, at the peril of his life or of his liberty, what he had said in the journal.”^[*]

He never separated himself from his newspaper. He never considered the newspaper one thing and himself another. What was said by a newspaper to a newspaper, he considered as said by a man to a man, and acted accordingly. He never said anything in his paper, to or of any man, which he would not have both dared, and thought it right, to say personally and in his presence. He insisted upon being treated in the same way; and generally was so; though the necessity in which he thought himself of repelling insult, had involved him in two duels before his last fatal one. Where danger was to be incurred in resisting arbitrary power, he was always the first to seek it: he never hesitated to throw down the gauntlet to the government, challenging it to try upon him any outrage which it was meditating against the liberty or the safety of the citizen. Nor was this a mere bravado: no one will think it so, who knows how unscrupulous are all French governments, how prone to act from irritated vanity more than from calculation, and how likely to commit an imprudence rather than acknowledge a defeat. Carrel thwarted a nefarious attempt of the Périer Ministry to establish the practice of incarcerating writers previously to trial. The thing had been already done in several instances, when Carrel, in a calm and well-reasoned article, which he signed with his name, demonstrated its illegality, and declared that if it was attempted in his own case he would, at the peril of his life, oppose force to force.^[†] This produced its effect: the illegality was not repeated; Carrel was prosecuted for his article, pleaded his own cause, and was acquitted; as on every subsequent occasion when the paper was prosecuted and he defended it in person before a jury. The National, often prosecuted, was never condemned but once, when, by a miserable quibble, the cause was taken from the jury to be tried by the court alone; and once again before the Chamber of Peers, an occasion which was made memorable by the spirit with which Carrel spoke out in the face of the tribunal which was sitting to judge him, what all France thinks of one of the most celebrated of its proceedings, the trial and condemnation of Marshal Ney.^[*] Nothing on this occasion could have saved Carrel from a heavy fine or a long imprisonment, had not a member of the Chamber itself, General Excelmans, hurried away^g by an irresistible impulse, risen^h in his place, acknowledged the sentiment, and repeated it.^[†]

Without these manifestations of spirit and intrepidity, Carrel, however he might have been admired as a writer, could not have acquired his great influence as a man; nor been enabled without imputation on his courage, to keep aloof from the more violent proceedings of his party, and discountenance, as he steadily did, all premature attempts to carry their point by physical force.

Whatever may have been Carrel’s individual opinions, he did not, in the National, begin by being a republican; he was willing to give the new chief magistrate a fair trial; nor was it until that personage had quarrelled with Lafayette, driven Dupont de l’Eure and Laffitte from office, and called Casimir Périer to his councils for the avowed purpose of turning back the movement, that Carrel hoisted republican colours. Long before this the symptoms of what was coming had been so evident, as to embitter the last moments of Benjamin Constant, if not, as was generally believed, to shorten his existence. The new oligarchy had declared, both by their words and their deeds, that they had conquered for themselves, and not for the people: and the King had shown his determination that through them he would govern, that he would make himself necessary to them, and be a despot, using them and rewarding them as his tools. It was the position which the King assumed as the head of the oligarchy, which made Carrel a republican. He was no fanatic, to care about a name, andⁱ was too essentially practical in his turn of mind to fight for a mere abstract principle. The object of his declaration of republicanism was a thoroughly practical one—to strike at the ringleader of the opposite party; and, if it were impossible to overthrow him, to do what was possible—to deprive him of the support of opinion.

Events have decided against Carrel, and it is easy, judging after the fact, to pronounce that the position he took up was not a wise one. We do not contend that it was so; but we do contend, that he might think it so, with very little disparagement to his judgment.

On what ground is it that some of the best writers and thinkers, in free countries, have recommended kingly government—have stood up for constitutional royalty as the best form of a free constitution, or at least one which, where it exists, no rational person would wish to disturb? On one ground only, and on one condition:—that a constitutional monarch does not himself govern, does not exercise his own will in governing, but confines himself to appointing responsible ministers, and even in that, does but ascertain and give effect to the national will. When this condition is observed—and it is, on the whole, faithfully observed in our own country—it is asked, and very reasonably, what more could be expected from a republic? and where is the benefit which would be gained by opening the highest office in the State, the only place which carries with it the most tempting part ^j(to common minds)^j of power, the show of it, as a prize to be scrambled for by every ambitious and turbulent spirit, who is willing to keep the community, for his benefit, in the mean turmoil of a perpetual canvass? These are the arguments used: they are, in the present state of society, unanswerable; and we should not say a word for Carrel, if the French government bore, or ever had borne, the most distant resemblance to this idea of constitutional royalty. But it never did: no French king ever confined himself within the limits which the best friends of constitutional monarchy allow to be indispensable to its innocuousness: it is always the king, and not his ministers, that governs; and the power of an English king would appear to Louis Philippe a mere mockery of royalty Now, if the ^kchief functionary^k was to be his own minister, it appeared to Carrel absolutely necessary that he should be a responsible one. The principle of a responsible executive appeared to him too all-important to be sacrificed. As the king would not content himself with being king, there must, instead of a king, be a removable and accountable magistrate.

As for the dangers of a republic, we should carry back our minds to the period which followed the Three Days, and to the impression made on all Europe by the ^lbravery^l , the ^mintegrity^m , the gentleness and chivalrous generosity, displayed at that time by the populace of Paris—and ask ourselves whether it was inexcusable to have hoped everything from a people, of whom the very lowest ranks could thus act? a people, too, among whom, out of a few large towns, there is little indigence; where almost every ⁿpeasantⁿ has his piece of land, where ^othe number of landed proprietors is more than half the number of^o grown-up men in the country, and where, by a natural consequence, the respect for the right of property amounts to a superstition? If among such a people there could be danger in republicanism, Carrel saw greater dangers, which could only be averted by republicanism. He saw the whole Continent armed, and ready at a moment’s notice to pour into France from all sides. He thought, and it was the principal mistake which he committed, that this collision could not be averted; and he thought, which was no mistake, that if it came, nothing would enable France to bear the brunt of it but that which had carried her through it before, intense popular enthusiasm. This was impossible with Louis Philippe: and if a levy en masse was to be again required of all citizens, it must be in a cause which should be worth fighting for, a cause in which all should feel that they had an equal stake.

These were the reasons which made Carrel declare for a republic. ^pThey^p are, no doubt, refuted by the fact, that the public mind was not ripe for a republic, and would not have it. It would have been better, ^qprobably^q , instead of the republican standard, to have raised, as Carrel afterwards did, that of a large parliamentary reform. But the public as yet were still less prepared to join in this demand than in the other. A republic would have brought this among other things, and although, by professing republicanism, there was danger of alarming the timid, there was the advantage of being able to appeal to a feeling already general and deeply rooted, the national aversion to the principle of hereditary privileges. The force of this aversion was clearly seen, when it extorted even from Louis Philippe the abolition of the hereditary peerage: and in choosing a point of attack which put this feeling on his side, Carrel did not show himself a bad tactician.

Nor was it so clear at that time that the public mind was not ripe. Opinion advances quickly in times of revolution; at the time of which we speak, it had set in rapidly in the direction of what was called “the movement;” and the manifestation of public feeling at the funeral of General Lamarque, in June 1832, was such, that many competent judges think it must have been yielded to, and the King must have changed his policy, but for the unfortunate collision which occurred on that day between the people and the troops, which produced a conflict that lasted two days, and led to the memorable ordonnance placing Paris under martial law.^[*] On this occasion the responsible editor of the National^[†] was tried on a capital charge for an article of Carrel’s,^[‡] published just before the conflict, and construed as an instigation to rebellion. He was acquitted not only of the capital, but of the minor offence; and it was proved on the trial, from an official report of General Pajol,^[§] the officer in command, that the conflict began on the side of the military, who attacked the people because ^r(as at the funeral of our Queen Caroline)^r an attempt was made to change the course of the procession, and carry Lamarque’s remains to the Pantheon. But, the battle once begun, many known republicans had joined in it; they had fought with desperation, and the blame was generally thrown upon them; from this time the fear of émeutes spread among the trading classes, and they rallied round the throne of Louis Philippe.

Though the tide now decidedly turned in favour of the party of resistance, and the moderate opposition headed by M. Odilon Barrot and M. Mauguin lost ^sthe greater part of^s its supporters, the republican opposition continued for some time longer to increase in strength: and Carrel, becoming more and more indisputably at the head of it, rose in influence, and became more and more an object of popular attention.

It was in the autumn of 1833 that we first saw Carrel. He was then at the height of his reputation, and prosperity had shed upon him, as it oftenest does upon the strongest minds, only its best influences. An extract from a letter written ^tnot long^t after will convey in its freshness the impression which he then communicated to an English observer.

This is a first impression, but it ^kwas^k confirmed by all that we afterwards saw and learnt. Of all distinguished Frenchmen whom we have known, Carrel, in manner, answered most to Coleridge’s definition of the manner of a gentleman, that which shows respect to others in such a way as implies an equally habitual and secure reliance on their respect to ^lhimself^l .^[†] Carrel’s manner was not of the self-asserting kind, like that of many of the most high-bred Frenchmen, who succeed perfectly in producing the effect they desire, but who seem to be desiring it: Carrel seemed never to concern himself about it, but to trust to what he was, for what he would appear to be. This had not always been the case; and we learn from M. Nisard, that in the time of his youth and obscurity he was sensitive as to the consideration shown him, and susceptible of offence. It was not in this only that he was made better by being better appreciated. Unlike vulgar minds, whose faults, says M. Nisard, “augment in proportion as their talents obtain them indulgence, it was evident to all his friends that his faults diminished, in proportion as his brilliant qualities, and the celebrity they gave him, increased.”^[*]

One of the qualities which we were most struck with in Carrel was his modesty. It was not that common modesty, which is but the negation of arrogance and overweening pretension. It was the higher ^mquality^m , of which that is but a small part. It was the modesty of one who knows accurately what he is, and what he is equal to, never attempts anything which requires qualities that he has not, and admires and values no less, and more if it be reasonable to do so, the things which he cannot do, than those which he can. It was most unaffectedly that he disclaimed all mastery of the details of politics. I understand, he said, the principles of a representative government. But he said, and we believe him to have sincerely thought, that when once a genuinely representative legislature should have been assembled, his function would be at an end. It would belong to more instructed men, he thought, to make laws for France; he could at most be of use in defending her from attack, and in making her laws obeyed. In this Carrel did himself less than justice, for though he was not, as he truly said, un homme spécial, though he had not ⁿprofoundlyⁿ studied political economy or jurisprudence, no man ever had a greater gift of attaching to himself men of special acquirements, or could discern more surely what man was fit for what thing. And that is the exact quality wanted in the head of an administration. Like Mirabeau, Carrel had a natural gift for being Prime Minister; like Mirabeau, he could make men of all sorts, even foreigners, and men who did not think themselves inferior to him but only different, feel that they could have been loyal to him—that they could have served^o and followed him in life and death, and marched under his orders wherever he chose to lead: sure, with him, of being held worth whatever they were worth, of having their counsels listened to by an ear capable of appreciating them, of having the post assigned to them for which they were fittest, and a commander to whom they could trust for bringing them off in any embarrassment in which he could ever engage them.

Shortly after we first knew Carrel, we had an opportunity of judging him in one of the most trying situations in which the leading organ of a movement party could be placed; and the manner in which he conducted himself in it, gave us the exalted idea which we never afterwards lost, both of his nobleness of character, and of his eminent talents as a political leader.

A small and extreme section of the republican body, composed of men, some of them highly accomplished, many of them pure in purpose and full of courage and enthusiasm, but without that practicalness which distinguished Carrel,—more highly endowed with talent for action, than with judgment for it,—had formed themselves into a society, which placed itself in communication with the discontented of the labouring classes, and got under their command the greater part of the insurrectionary strength of the party.^* These men raised the cry of social reform, and a modification of the constitution of property,—ideas which the St. Simonians had set afloat, in connexion with a definite scheme, and with speculative views the most ^aenlarged, and in several respects the most just,^a that had ever been connected with Utopianism^b. But^b these republicans had no definite plan; the ideas were comparatively vague and indeterminate in their minds, yet were sincerely entertained, and did not, whatever ignorant or cowardly persons might suppose, mean plunder for themselves and their associates. The Society published a manifesto, in which these aspirations were dimly visible, and in which they reprinted, with their adhesion, a Declaration of the Rights of Man, proposed by Robespierre in the National Convention,^[*] and by that body rejected. This document was harmless enough, and we could not see in it any of the anti-property doctrines that appeared to be seen by everybody else, for Paris was convulsed with apprehension on the subject. But whether it was the name of Robespierre, or the kind of superstition which attaches to the idea of property in France, or that the manifesto was considered a preliminary to worse things supposed to be meditated by its authors, the alarm of the middle classes was now thoroughly excited: they became willing to join with any men and any measures, in order to put down not only this, but every other kind of republicanism; and from this time, in reality, dates the passionate resistance to the democratic movement, which, with the assistance of Fieschi, was improved into the laws of September 1835,^[†] by which laws, and by the imprisonment and exile of its most active members, the republican party has been for the present silenced.

The conduct by which the prospects of the popular party were thus compromised, Carrel had from the first disapproved. The constitution of property appeared to him a subject for speculative philosophers,^c not for the mass: he did not think that the present idea of property, and the present arrangements of it, would last for ever unchanged, through the progressive changes of society and civilization; but he believed that any improvement of them would be the work of a generation, and not of an hour. Against the other peculiar views of this revolutionary party he had combated both in private and in the National. He had taken no part in their projects for arriving at a republic by an insurrection. He had set his face against their notion of governing by an active minority, for the good of the majority, but if necessary in opposition to ^dits^d will, and by a provisional despotism that was to terminate some day in a free government. A free, full, and fair representation of the people was his object; full opportunity to the nation to declare its will—the perfect submission of individual crotchets to that will. And without condemning the Republic of the Convention ^eunder the extraordinary circumstances which accompanied its brief career^e , he preferred to cite as an example the Republic of the United States; not that he thought it perfect, nor even ^fa^f model which France ought ^gin all respects^g to imitate, but because it presented^h to France an example of what she most wanted—protection to all parties alike, limitation of the power of the magistrate, and fairness as between the majority and the minority.

In the newspaper warfare, of an unusually vehement character, stirred up by the manifesto of the revolutionary republicans, Carrel was the last of the journalists to declare himself. He took some days to consider what position it most became him to assume. He did not agree in the conclusions of this party, while he had just enough of their premises in common with them, to expose him to misrepresentation. It was incumbent on him to rescue himself, and the great majority of the popular party, from responsibility for opinions which they did not share, and the imputation of which was calculated to do them so much injury. On the other hand, the party could not afford to lose these able and ⁱenergeticⁱ men, and the support of that portion of the working classes who had given their confidence to them. The men, too, were many of them his friends; he knew them to be good men, superior men, men who were an honour to their opinions, and he could not brook the cowardice of letting them be run down by a popular cry. After mature deliberation, he published in the National a series of articles, admirable for their nobleness of feeling and delicacy and dexterity in expression: in which, without a single subterfuge, without deviating in a word from the most open and straightforward sincerity, he probed the question to the bottom, and contrived with the most ^jexquisite^j address, completely to separate himself from all that was objectionable in the opinions of the manifesto, and at the same time to present both the opinions and the men in the most advantageous light, in which, without disguising his disagreement, it was possible to place them.^[*] These were triumphs which belonged only to Carrel; it was on such occasions that he showed, though in a bloodless field, the qualities of a consummate general.

In the deliberations of the republican party among themselves, Carrel was more explicit. The society which issued the manifesto, and which was called the Society of the Rights of Man, made an overture to a larger society, that for the Protection of the Liberty of the Press, which represented all the shades of republicanism, and invited them to adopt the manifesto. The committee or council of the association ^kwas^k convened to take the proposal into consideration: and Carrel, though on ordinary occasions he absented himself from the proceedings of such bodies, attended. At this deliberation we had the good fortune to be present, and we shall never forget the impression we received of the talents both of Carrel and of the leader of the more extreme party, M. Cavaignac. Carrel displayed the same powerful good sense, and the same spirit of conciliation, in discussing with that party his differences from them, which he had shown in his apology for them to the public. With the superiority of a really comprehensive mind, he placed himself at their point of view; laid down in more express and bolder terms than they had done themselves, and in a manner which startled men who were esteemed to go much ^lfarther^l than Carrel, the portion of ^mphilosophic^m truth which there was in the premises from which they had drawn their erroneous conclusions; and left them less dissatisfied than pleased, that one who differed from them so widely, agreed with them in so much more than they expected, and could so powerfully advocate a portion of their views. The result was that Carrel was chosen to draw up a report to the society, on the manifesto, and on the invitation to adopt it. His report, in which he utters his whole mind on the new ideas of social reform considered in reference to practice, remained unpublished: Carrel did not proclaim unnecessarily to the world the differences in his own party, but preferred the prudent maxim of Napoleon, il faut laver notre linge sale chez nous.^[†] But at a later period, when the chiefs of the extreme party were in prison or in banishment, the republican cause for the present manifestly lost, himself publicly calumniated (for from what calumny is he sacred whom a government ⁿdetests?ⁿ ) as having indirectly instigated the Fieschi atrocity, and his house searched for papers on pretence of ascertaining if he was concerned in it, which the cowardly hypocrites who sought to involve him in the odium never themselves even in imagination conceived to be possible; at this time, when no one could any longer be injured by setting his past conduct in its true light, Carrel published his Report on the Robespierre Manifesto: and under the title of Extrait du dossier d’un prévenu de complicité morale dans l’attentat du 28 Juillet,^[*] it subsists for any one to read, a monument at once of the far-sighted intellect of Carrel, and of his admirable skill in expression.

During the rapid decline of the republican party, we know little of what passed in Carrel’s mind; but our knowledge of him would have ^oled us to surmise^o what M. Nisard states to be the fact, that he became sensible of the hopelessness of the cause, and only did not abandon the advocacy of it as an immediate object, from a sense of what was due to the consistency which a public man is bound to maintain before the public, when it is the sacrifice of his interest only, and not of his honesty, that it requires of him; and of what was due to the simple-minded men whom he had helped to compromise, and whose whole stay and support, the faith which kept them honest men, and which saved them from despair, would have expired within them if Carrel had deserted them. As is beautifully said by M. Nisard,

^sThe doubts and misgivings, however, which Carrel is stated to have so painfully experienced, never affected the truth of his republican principles, but at most their immediate applicability. The very foundation of Carrel’s character was sincerity and singleness of purpose; and nothing would have induced him to continue professing to others, convictions which he had ceased to entertain.

^tWhile^t Carrel never abandoned republicanism, it necessarily, after the laws of September, ceased to be so prominent as before in his journal. He felt the necessity of rallying under one standard all who were agreed in the essential point, opposition to the oligarchy; and he was one of the most earnest in demanding an extension of the suffrage; that vital point, the all-importance of which France has been so slow to recognise, and which it is so much to be regretted that he had not chosen from the first, instead of republicanism, to be the ^uimmediate^u aim of his political life.^s

But the greatest disappointment which Carrel suffered was the defeat not of republicanism, but of what M. Nisard calls his “théorie du droit commun;”^[†] those ideas of moderation in victory, of respect for the law, and for the rights of the weaker party, so much more wanted in France than any political improvements which are possible where those ideas are not.

“I affirm,” says M. Nisard,

We can conceive few things more melancholy than the spectacle of one of the noblest men in France, if not the noblest, dying convinced against his will, that his country is incapable of freedom; and under whatsoever institutions, has only the choice, what man or what party it will be under the despotism of. But we have not Carrel’s deliberate opinion; we have but his feelings in the first agony of his disenchantment. That multitude of impartial men in all quarters of France, who responded for a short time so cordially to his voice, will again claim the liberties which, in a moment of panic, they have surrendered to a government they neither love nor respect, and which they submit to and even support against its enemies, solely in despair of a better.

But Carrel was not one of those whom disappointment paralyzes; unsuccessful in one worthy object, he always found another. The newspaper press, gagged by the September laws, no longer afforded him the same instrument of power, and he meditated a total or partial retirement from it, either to recruit himself by study, se retremper par l’étude, for which, even at an earlier period, he had expressed to us an earnest longing, or to write what he had for some time had in view, the History of Napoleon. But he would have been called from these pursuits into a more active life; at the impending general election, he would have been chosen a deputy, having already been once put up without his knowledge, and defeated only by one vote. What course he would have struck out for himself in the Chamber, we shall never know, but it is not possible to doubt that it would have been an original one, and that it would have been brilliant, and most beneficial to his country. So immensely the superior of all his rivals in the qualities which create influence, he would probably have drawn round him by degrees all the sections of the popular party; would have given, if any one could, unity, decision, and definiteness to their vague plans and divided counsels; and the destiny which he could not ^yconquer^y for himself as President of a Republic, he might one day have gloriously fulfilled as minister under a reformed legislature, if any such reform could in France (which he regarded as impossible) render royalty compatible with the prevalence of the popular interest. These are vain dreams now, but the time was, when it was not foolish to indulge in them. Such dreams were the comfort of those who knew him, and who knew how ill his country can supply his place. ^zHe was at once the Achilles and the Ulysses of the democratic party^z and the star of hope for France in any new convulsions, was extinguished when Carrel died.

It is bitter to lose such a man; bitterest of all to lose him in a miserable duel^a . But ill shall it fare with the government which ^bcan rejoice in the death of such an enemy^b , and the time may come when it would give its ^cmost precious treasures^c to recal from the grave the victim whom, whether intentionally on its part or not, its enmity has sent thither. The heir to the French throne^[*] is reported ^d to have said of Carrel’s death, that it was a loss to all parties; he, at least, will probably live to find it so. Such a government as that now existing in France cannot last; and whether it end peacefully or violently, whether the return tide of public opinion shall bear the present reigning family aloft on its surface, or whelm them in its depths, bitterly will that man be missed, who alone, perhaps, would have been capable of saying to that tremendous power. Thus far shalt thou go, and no ^efarther^e .^[†] There are in France philosophers superior to Carrel, but no man known by such past services, equal like him to the great practical questions which are coming, and whose whole nature and character speak out like his, to the best qualities and noblest sympathies of the French mind. He had all that was necessary to give him an advocate in every French breast, and to make all young and ardent Frenchmen see in him the ideal of their own aspirations, the expression of what in their best moments they would wish to be.

His death is not to be confounded with the vulgar deaths of those who, hemmed in between two cowardices, can resist the fear of death, but not the^f meaner fear of the tongues of their fellow-creatures. His duel was a consequence of the system which he adopted for repelling the insults to which, as a journalist identifying himself with his journal, he was peculiarly exposed; and which, not only for his influence as a public man, but for the respectability of the press, and for preserving that high tone of public discussion from which he himself never swerved, he thought it necessary not to pass unpunished. His system, alas! is sufficiently refuted by its having cost so precious a life, but it was his system. “He often repeated,” says M. Littré,

He died a martyr to the morality and dignity of public discussion: and though even that cause would have been far better served by his life than by such a death, he was the victim of his virtues, and of that low state of our civilization, after all our boasting, which has not yet ^hcontrived^h the means of giving ⁱtoⁱ a man whose reputation is important to him, ^jprotection^j against insult, but ^kleaves^k him to seek reparation sword in hand, as in the barbarous ages. While he lived, he did keep up in the press generally, something of that elevation of tone which distinguished it under the Restoration, but which in the débordement of political and literary profligacy since the Revolution ^lof 1830^l , it had become difficult to preserve: and all we ^mknow^m of the state of newspaper discussion since his death, exalts our sense of the moral influence which Carrel exercised over the press of France.

Carrel was of middle height, slightly made, and very graceful. Like ⁿmostⁿ persons of really fine faculties, he carried those faculties with him into the smallest things; and did not disdain to excel, being qualified to do so, in^o things which are great only to little men. Even in the details of personal equipments, his taste was watched for and followed by the amateurs of such matters. He was fond of all bodily exercises, and had, says M. Nisard, un peu de tous les goûts vifs,^[*] more or less of all strong and natural inclinations; as might be expected from his large and vigorous human nature, the foundation of strength of will, and which, combined with intellect and with goodness, constitutes greatness. He was a human being complete at all points, not a fraction or frustum of one.

“The distinctive feature of his character,” says M. Nisard,

There are stories told of him like those told of Goldsmith, or any other person of thoughtless generosity.^r As is often the case with persons of strong impulses, he was of a careless character when not under excitement, and his inattention sometimes caused inconvenience to himself, and made him give unintentional offence to others. But on occasions which called into action his strong will, he had the eye of an eagle: “he seized with a glance, as on a field of battle, the whole terrain on which he was placed; and astonished above all by the sureness of the instinct with which he divined the significance of small things. Small things,” continues M. Littré, “are those which the vulgar do not perceive; but when such things have produced serious effects, pause, quite disconcerted, before the irrevocable event which might so easily have been prevented.”^s[*]

His conversation, especially on political subjects, M. Nisard, comparing him with the best conversers in a country where the art of conversation is ^tfar^t more cultivated than it is here, declares to be the most perfect he ever heard: and we can add our testimony to his, that Carrel’s writings in the National seemed but the continuation of his conversation. He was fond of showing that he could do equal justice to all sides of a question: and he would

We have marked^w these traits of character, because they help to complete the picture of what Carrel was, and, while they give reality to our conception of him, and bring him home to the feelings as a being of our own flesh and blood, they all give additional insight into those great qualities which it is the object of this paper to commemorate. The mind needs such examples, to keep alive in it that faith in good, without which nothing worthy the name of good can ever be realized: it needs to be reminded by them that (as^x is often repeated by one of the ^ygreatest writers^y of our time) man is still man.^[*] Whatever man has been, man may be; whatever of heroic the heroic ages, whatever of chivalrous the romantic ages have produced, is still possible, nay, still is, and a hero of Plutarch may exist amidst all the pettinesses of modern civilization, and with all the cultivation and refinement, and^z the analyzing and questioning spirit of the modern European mind. The lives of those are not lost, who have lived^a enough to be an example to the world; and though his country will not reap the blessings his life might have conferred upon it, yet while the six years following the Revolution of 1830 shall have a place in history, the memory of Armand Carrel will not ^butterly perish^b

[a-a]371,2 This little work is

[b-b]371,2 a

[c-c]371,2 writer

[[*] ]Cf. John Milton, The Reason of Church Government (1641-42), in The Prose Works, ed. Charles Symmons, 7 vols. (London: Johnson, et al., 1806), Vol. I, p. 119.

[[†] ]Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, 3 vols. (London: Fraser, 1837), Vol. II, p. 220.

[d-d]371,2 , alas! so few as in our modern Europe

[e]371,2 We, too, have somewhat to say of Carrel, and since the evil hour to France and to the world in which he perished, we have not ceased to look for an opportunity such as the work of M. Nisard presents to us

[f-f]371,2 that

[g-g]371,2 ,59 him

[h]371,2 , He is gone

[i-i]371,2 ,59 is

[j-j]371,2 It is still given to us, to

[k-k]371,2,59 in

[l-l]371,2 with

[m-m]371,2 one of the greatest political leaders in all history

[n-n]+59,67

[[*] ]Translated from Littré, “Notice,” pp. 5-6.

[o-o]371,2 all good

[p]371,2 still

[q-q]371,2 gives himself

[r-r]371,2 who give themselves no stile

[s-s]371,2 a feeling, or the means to an end

[t]371,2 the

[u-u]371,2 general

[v-v]371,2 certainly

[w]371,2 aspire and

[x-x]371,2 conscience

[y-y]371,2 truncheon

[z]371,2 rallied the scattered hosts round him, and

[[*] ]John Milton, Paradise Regained, in Poetical Works (London: Tonson, 1695), p. 55 (Bk. IV, l. 266 [l. 269 in later eds.]).

[a-a]371,2 formidable

[b-b]371,2 comported

[c-c]371,2 humility

[d-d]371,2 we could say

[e-e]371,2 has

[f-f]371,2 his

[g]371,2 , and those details, so foreign to a school life, delighted him before he could understand them. Never was there an earlier or a more decided vocation

[[*] ]Translated from Nisard, “Armand Carrel,” p. 34.

[h-h]371,2 nothing

[i-i]371,2 move

[j-j]371,2 When a man sets himself to thinking, whose business it has never been to act, he

[k]371,2 ; but before his thoughts can be acted upon, they must be recast in the mould of other and more business-like intellects. There is no limit to the chimeras which a man may persuade himself of, whose mind has never had anything to do but to form conceptions, without ever measuring itself and them with realities

[l-l]371,2 Frenchmen,

[m]371,2 ; nor, indeed, was he far wrong as to such speculations as he chiefly had knowledge of

[n-n]371,2 or

[[*] ]See Loi sur le mode de gouvernement provisoire et révolutionnaire (14 frimaire an II; 4 Dec., 1793), Lois, et actes du gouvernement, VIII, 100-13, and Loi concernant la division du territoire de la république et l’administration, Bulletin 17, No. 115 (28 pluviôse an VIII, 17 Feb., 1800), Bulletin des lois de la république française, I, 1-94.

[o-o]371,2bureaucracy

[p-p]+59,67

[[*] ]Charte constitutionnelle, Bulletin 17, No. 133 (4 June, 1814), Bulletin des lois du royaume de France, 5th ser., I, 197-207, the electoral qualifications are given in Art. 40, p. 203.

[q-q]+59,67

[r-r]371,2 absurdity

[s-s]371,2 has been

[[†] ]Louis Philippe.

[[‡] ]Charte constitutionnelle (1814), Art. 38, p. 203; Charte constitutionnelle, Bulletin 5, No. 59 (14 Aug., 1830), Bulletin des lois du royaume de France, 9th ser., Pt. 1, I, Art. 32, p. 56.

[t-t]371,2 even shared

[u-u]371,2now

[v-v]371,2 any real

[w-w]371,2 everything

[x-x]+59,67

[y-y]371,2 all that

[[*] ]The phrase “intérêts matériels” appears in Nisard, “Armand Carrel,” p. 25; Mill had earlier used it in a letter (25 Nov., 1833) to Carlyle (quoted extensively below, pp. 201-2, 204n-5n), in Earlier Letters, ed. Francis E. Mineka, Collected Works, Vols. XII-XIII (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), Vol. XII, p. 192.

[z-z]371,2 interests

[a-a]371,2 their own

[b-b]371,2 resisted, and

[c-c]371,2 after

[d-d]+59,67

[[†] ]Charte constitutionnelle (1814), Art. 37, p. 203.

[[*] ]William Wordsworth, Sonnet XIII (1807) of “Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty,” in The Poetical Works, 5 vols. (London: Longman, et al., 1827), Vol. III, p. 139 (l. 12).

[e-e]371,2 then for the first time free

[f]371,2 an

[g-g]371,2 regicide

[* ][59] He has been called a regicide, had the assertion been true, it was equally true of Carnot and many others of the noblest characters in France, but the fact was otherwise Grégoire was absent on a mission during the trial of Louis XVI, and associated himself by letter with the verdict, but not with the sentence.

[h-h]371,2system of see-saw

[[*] ]See Loi sur la publication des journaux et écrits périodiques (31 Mar., 1820), Bulletin 356, No. 8494, Bulletin des lois du royaume de France, 7th ser., X, 385-7, Loi relative à la censure des journaux (26 July, 1821), Bulletin 464, No. 10,933, ibid., XIII, 33-4; and Loi sur les élections, Bulletin 379, No. 8910 (29 June, 1820), ibid., X, 1001-6.

[i-i]371,2 retrograde party

[[†] ]Carrel, Histoire de la contre-révolution en Angleterre, sous Charles II et Jacques II (Paris: Sautelet, 1827), p. 326.

[j-j]371,2 suggested to

[k-k]371,2 the idea of imitation

[l-l]371,2Carbonaro

[[*] ]Translated from Littré, pp. 7-8.

[[†] ]Both the protest and the article appeared in the single-sheet edition of the National for 27 July, 1830.

[m-m]371,2 conceived, or if he did not conceive, adopted

[n]371,2 That first shot he judged, and judged truly, that it would not refuse to fire

[o-o]371,2 would furnish

[p-p]371,2 detested

[[*] ]See Carrel, “De la guerre d’Espagne en 1823,” Revue Française, III (May, 1828), 168.

[q-q]371,2 remarkable

[[†] ]“De l’Espagne et de sa révolution,” Revue Française, II (Mar., 1828), 261-91, and “De la guerre d’Espagne en 1823,” ibid., III (May, 1828), 131-73.

[r-r]371,2 bystanders

[* ]M. de Chièvres, aide-de-camp of M. de Damas, was the officer through whose exertions, mainly, terms were granted to the legion; and Carrel, who never forgot generosity in an enemy, was able, by the manner in which he related the circumstance, to do important service to M. de Chièvres at a later period, when on trial for his life upon a charge of conspiracy against the government of Louis Philippe. The particulars are in M. Littré’s narrative [pp. 32-5].

[s-s]371,2,59 infamy

[t-t]371,2 contemporary

[[*] ]Jacques Nicolas Augustin Thierry, Histoire de la conquête de l’Angleterre par les Normands (1825), 2nd ed., 4 vols. (Paris: Sautelet, 1826).

[[*] ]Translated from Nisard, pp. 36-7.

[[†] ]Charte constitutionnelle (1814), Art. 38, p. 203; Loi relative au renouvellement intégral et septennal de la chambre des députés, Bulletin 672, No. 17,159 (9 June, 1824), Bulletin des lois du royaume de France, 7th ser., XVIII, 321-2.

[u-u]371,2parvenu

[[*] ]See Carlyle’s letter to Mill (13 June, 1833), in The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. Charles Richard Sanders, et al., Vol. VI (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1977), pp. 402-3.

[[†] ]See Goethe’s remark reported in Characteristics of Goethe. From the German of Falk, Müller, etc., trans. Sarah Austin, 3 vols. (London: Wilson, 1833), Vol. I, pp. 12-13. Cf. John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, in Autobiography and Literary Essays, ed. John M. Robson and Jack Stillinger, CW, Vol. I (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), p. 171.

[v-v]371,2 narrowness

[w-w]371,2 and almost all forms

[x-x]371,2 the other

[y-y]371,2 garbage

[z-z]371,2 unspeakably

[a-a]371,2 have yet existed in the world.

[b-b]371,2 all

[[*] ]Alexis Henri Charles Maurice Clérel, comte de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, 2 vols. (Paris: Gosselin, 1835); completed by 2nd pt., 2 vols. (Paris: Gosselin, 1840).

[c-c]371,2 extravagancies

[d]371,2 ones

[[†] ]Ivanhoe, a Romance, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Constable, 1820).

[e-e]+59,67

[[*] ]Jacques Nicolas Augustin Thierry, Lettres sur l’histoire de France (1827), 5th ed. (Brussels: Hauman, 1836), pp. 71-2.

[f]371,2 all

[[†] ]See “Histoire” (1784), Dictionnaire philosophique, in Oeuvres complètes, 66 vols. (Paris: Renouard, 1817-25), Vol. XXXVI, p. 419.

[g-g]+59,67

[h-h]371,2 of

[i-i]371,2 in the style and from the materials

[[‡] ]Amable Guillaume Prosper Brugière, baron de Barante, Histoire des ducs de Bourgogne de la maison de Valois, 1364-1477, 13 vols. (Paris: Lavocat, 1824-26).

[[§] ]Thierry, Lettres, pp. 223ff. (Letters xiii ff.)

[j-j]+59,67

[k-k]371,2 Herder and Johannes von Müller

[l-l]371,2 many

[m-m]371,2 all

[[*] ]François Pierre Guillaume Guizot, Essais sur l’histoire de France (1823), 2nd ed. (Paris: Brière, 1824); Cours d’histoire moderne: Histoire générale de la civilisation en Europe, depuis la chute de l’empire romain jusqu’à la révolution française (Paris: Pichon and Didier, 1828); and Cours d’histoire moderne. Histoire de la civilisation en France, depuis la chute de l’empire romain jusqu’en 1789, 5 vols. (Paris: Pichon and Didier, 1829-32).

[n-n]371,2 his despicable

[[†] ]Translated from Nisard, p. 39.

[o-o]371,2 radical

[p-p]371,2 he too, like Mirabeau, was not a man of

[[*] ]See p. 161 above.

[q-q]371,2must be

[r-r]371,2were

[[†] ]Translated from Carrel, Histoire de la contre-révolution en Angleterre, p. 65.

[s-s]371,2data

[[‡] ]Translated from ibid., p. 3.

[* ][67] Since completed. (1866.)

[t]371,2 , which, it is said, he is now completing

[[§] ]François Pierre Guillaume Guizot, Histoire de la révolution d’Angleterre depuis l’avènement de Charles ler jusqu’à la restauration de Charles II, 1st pt., 2 vols. (Paris: Leroux and Chantpie, 1826-27). The work was completed in six volumes by the addition of Histoire de la république d’Angleterre et de Cromwell (1649-1658), 2 vols. (Paris: Didier, 1854), and Histoire du protectorat de Richard Cromwell et du rétablissement des Stuart (1658-1660), 2 vols. (Paris: Didier, 1856).

[u]371,2 much

[[¶] ]François Antoine Jean Mazure, Histoire de la révolution de 1688, en Angleterre, 3 vols. (Paris: Gosselin, 1825), using, inter alia, the letters of Paul de Barillon.

[v-v]371,2 contemporaries (witness his criticisms on Victor Hugo and Lamartine, inserted in this Review) [“Victor Hugo,” London Review, II (L&WR, XXXI) (Jan., 1836), 389-417, and “Lamartine,” London and Westminster Review, IV & XXVI (Jan., 1837), 501-41.]

[[*] ]Littré, p. 6.

[w-w]+59,67

[[†] ]See Cicero, De oratore (Latin and English), 2 vols., trans. E.W. Sutton (London: Heinemann, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942), Vol. I, p. 80 (I, xxv, 113-14); Quintilian, Institutio oratoria (Latin and English), trans. H.E. Butler, 4 vols. (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1921), Vol. III, p. 211 (VIII, iii, 2).

[x-x]371,2 half

[y-y]371,2 Universities

[[*] ]See, respectively, Loi concernant l’indemnité à accorder aux anciens propriétaires des biens-fonds confisqués et vendus au profit de l’état en vertu des lois sur les emigrés, les condamnés et les déportés, Bulletin 30, No. 680 (27 Apr., 1825), Bulletin des lois du royaume de France, 8th ser., II, 229-38. Loi pour la répression des crimes et des délits commis dans les édifices ou sur les objets consacrés à la religion catholique ou aux autres cultes légalement établis en France, Bulletin 29, No. 665 (20 Apr., 1825), ibid., pp. 221-5, two speeches (26 May and 4 July, 1826) by Denis le comte Frayssinous recognizing the presence of the Jesuits. Moniteur Universel, 29 May, 1826, p. 820, and 6 July, 1826, p. 1021 (the Edit du roi, concernant la société des jésuites, of Nov., 1764 [Paris, Simon], by Louis XV, which banished the Jesuits, was still in effect), and Ordonnance du roi relative à l’administration supérieure de l’instruction publique, aux colleges, institutions, pensions, et écoles primaires, Bulletin 664, No. 16,774 (8 Apr., 1824), Bulletin des lois du royaume de France, 7th ser., XVIII, 200-3.

[z-z]371,2 on the contrary

[a-a]371,2 now

[* ][59] Also memorable as almost the only man of political distinction who has given in a similar adhesion to the present despotism b(1859.)b

[c-c]371,2 periodical

[[*] ]Projet de loi sur les successions et les substitutions (5 Feb., 1826), Moniteur Universel, 11 Feb., 1826, p. 168 (rejected by the Peers on 8 Apr.; ibid., 12 Apr.); Projet de loi sur la police de la presse (27 Dec., 1826), ibid., 30 Dec., 1826, p. 1730 (withdrawn by ordinance; ibid., 19 Apr., 1827), see also Ordonnance du roi portant la remise en vigueur des lois des 31 mars 1820 et 26 juillet 1821, Bulletin 170, No. 6439 (24 June, 1827), Bulletin des lois du royaume de France, 8th ser., VI, 729.

[d]371,2 more properly

[e-e]371,2 society Aide-toi

[f-f]371,2 and composed mainly

[g-g]371,2 was

[h]371,2 one

[i-i]371,2 was

[j-j]371,2 sunk, sunk

[k-k]+59,67

[l-l]371,2 powers

[m-m]371,2 we enjoy

[[*] ]2 & 3 William IV, c. 45 (1832).

[[†] ]Ordonnance du roi qui suspend la liberté de la presse périodique et semi-périodique, Ordonnance du roi qui dissout la chambre des députés des départemens, Ordonnance du roi qui réforme, selon les principes de la charte constitutionnelle, les règles d’élection, et prescrit l’exécution de l’article 46 de la charte, Ordonnance du roi qui convoque les colléges électoraux d’arrondissement pour le 6 septembre prochain, les colléges de departement pour le 13, et la chambre des députés pour le 28 du même mois, Bulletin 367, Nos. 15135-8 (25 July, 1830), Bulletin des lois du royaume de France, 8th ser., XII, 33-4, 35, 35-9, 39-40.

[n-n]371,2 immense

[o-o]371,2 unspeakable

[p]371,2 and most permanent

[q-q]371,2 put a stop, or nearly so, to

[[‡] ]Charte constitutionnelle (1814), Art. 8, p. 200.

[r-r]371,2 testify from our own knowledge

[s-s]371,2,59 these

[t-t]371,2 was

[u]371,2 Are we wrong in saying that the July Revolution has been a misfortune to France?

[v-v]+59,67

[[*] ]Translated from Nisard, pp. 32, 33. The references are to Gaius Julius Caesar, Commentariorum de bello gallico, Vol. I of C. Julii Caesaris quae exstant opera, 2 vols. (Paris: Barbou, 1755); and Napoléon I, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de France sous Napoléon, 7 vols. (Paris: Didot, 1823-24).

[[*] ]Translated from Nisard, pp. 33-4.

[[†] ]Translated from ibid., p. 33.

[[‡] ]Translated from ibid., p. 49.

[w-w]371,2 He has this in common with the great writers, that

[x-x]371,2 been before

[y-y]371,2polémique

[[§] ]Translated from ibid., pp. 49-50.

[[*] ]Littré, p. 38; Nisard, pp. 50-1.

[[†] ]Junius: Including Letters by the Same Writer, under Other Signatures, (Now First Collected), 3 vols. (London: Rivington, et al., 1812).

[z-z]371,2 knows

[a-a]371,2 determines

[b-b]371,2was

[[‡] ]Translated from Littré, p. 37.

[c-c]371,2breadth

[d-d]371,2character

[[§] ]Ibid.

[[¶] ]Ibid. (partly translated.)

[e-e]371,2 a solecism in

[f-f]371,2 had ever yet

[[*] ]Translated from ibid., pp. 37-8.

[[†] ]Carrel, “Du flagrant délit en matière d’impression et publication d’écrits,” National, 24 Jan., 1832, pp. 1-2.

[[*] ]Carrel, Speech in the House of Peers (16 Dec., 1834), reported in National, 17 Dec., 1834, pp. 1-4.

[g]371,2 as

[h]371,2 up

[[†] ]Rémi Joseph Isadore Exelmans, Speech in the House of Peers (16 Dec., 1834), reported in National, 17 Dec., 1834, p. 2.

[i]371,2 he

[j-j]+59,67

[k-k]371,2 king

[l-l]371,2 heroism

[m-m]371,2 purity

[n-n]371,2 one

[o-o]371,2 there are more landed properties than there are

[p-p]371,2 All of them

[q-q]371,2 doubtless

[[*] ]Ordonnance du roi qui met la ville de Paris en état de siège, Bulletin 161, No. 4204 (6 June, 1832), Bulletin des lois du royaume de France, 9th ser., Pt. 2, Sect. 1, IV, 662.

[[†] ]J.B. Alexandre Paulin.

[[‡] ]“Qu’il faut craindre de rendre les modérés violens en se moquant de la modération,” National, 31 May, 1832, p. 1.

[[§] ]See the report of Claude Pierre Pajol, National, 30 Aug., 1832, p. 2.

[r-r]+59,67

[s-s]371,2 almost all

[t-t]371,2 soon

[u-u]33,371,2coterie

[v-v]33,371,2moustaches (which many of the republicans have taken to wearing)

[w-w]33,371,2moustaches

[x-x]33 ascendancy

[y-y]33 it, instead

[z-z]33,371,2 that

[a-a]33 your] 371,2 the

[[*] ]Carlyle, letter to Mill (24 Sept., 1833), in Collected Letters, Vol. VI, p. 445, Carlyle is referring to Mill’s tone in his review of Alison’s History of the French Revolution, p. 111-22 above.

[b-b]+59,67

[c-c]33 infantinely

[d]33,371,2 , as they all say, when he is among his intimates, and indeed I could see that myself

[e-e]33,371,2de la façon de la Convention

[f-f]33 hands; he

[g-g]33 property

[h-h]+371,2,59,67

[i-i]33 generally

[j]33 those

[[*] ]John Stuart Mill, letter to Carlyle (25 Nov., 1833), pp. 194-6.

[k-k]371,2 has been

[l-l]371,2 yourself

[[†] ]Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend (London: Gale and Curtis, 1812), p. 243.

[[*] ]Translated from Nisard, pp.22, 23.

[m-m]371,2 modesty

[n-n]371,2 systematically

[o]371,2 him

[* ]The following extract from the letter already quoted, contains a picture of one of the most remarkable of these men. We have no reason to believe that he is a specimen of the rest, for he is as completely an individual as Carrel: “Ap man whose name is energy; who cannot ask you the commonest question but in so decided a manner that he makes you start:q who impresses you with a sense of irresistible power and indomitable will; you might fancy him an incarnation of Satan, if he were your enemy or the enemy of your party, and if you had not associated with him and seen how full of sweetness and amiableness and gentleness he isr. . . . Hisr notion of duty is that of a Stoic; he conceives it as something quite infinite, and having nothing whatever to do with happiness, something immeasurably above it, a kind of half Manichean in his views of the universe: according to him, man’s life consists of one perennial and intense struggle against the principle of evil, which but for that struggle would wholly overwhelm him: generation after generation carries on this battle, with little success as yet; he believes in perfectibility and progressiveness, but thinks that hitherto sprogresss has consisted only in removing some of the impediments to good, not in realizing the good itself: that, nevertheless, the only satisfaction which man can realize for himself is in battling with this evil principle, and overpowering it; that after evils have accumulated for centuries, there sometimes comes one great clearing-off,t one day of reckoning called a revolution: that it is only on usuchu rare occasions, very rarely indeed on any others, that good men get into power, and then they ought to seize the opportunity for doing all they can, that any government which is boldly attacked, by ever so small a minority, may be overthrown, and that is his hope with vrespectv to the present government. w He is xmuch more accomplishedx than most of the political men I yhave seeny ; has a wider range of ideas, converses on art, and most subjects of general interest, always throwing all he has to say into a few brief energetic sentences, as if it was contrary to his nature to expend one superfluous word.” [Mill to Carlyle (25 Nov., 1833), pp. 196-7.]

zThere can be no indelicacy in now saying, that the original of this picture was Godefroi Cavaignac.z

[a-a]371,2 just and enlarged

[b-b]371,2 , and having no fault whatever except that they were impracticable but

[[*] ]See p. 126 above.

[[†] ]Loi sur les crimes, délits et contraventions de la presse et des autres moyens de publication, Bulletin 155, No. 356 (9 Sept., 1835), Bulletin des lois du royaume de France, 9th ser., Pt. 1, VII, 247-56; Loi sur les cours d’assises, Bulletin 155, No. 357, ibid., pp. 256-9; and Loi qui rectifie les articles 341, 345, 346, 347 et 352 du code d’instruction criminelle, et l’article 17 du code pénal, Bulletin 155, No. 358, ibid., pp. 259-62.

[c]371,2 and

[d-d]371,2 their

[e-e]+59,67

[f-f]371,2 the

[g-g]+59,67

[h]59 or seemed to present

[i-i]371,2 active

[j-j]371,2 consummate

[[*] ]Carrel, “Du nouveau procès entre la république et le tiers-parti,” National, 27 Oct., 1833, pp. 2-3; “La révolution et le tiers-parti,” ibid., 29 Oct., 1833, p. 1, and unheaded article, ibid., 30 Oct., 1833, p. 2.

[k-k]371,2 were

[l-l]371,2 further

[m-m]371,2 eternal

[[†] ]“Allocution de l’empereur aux membres du corps législatif présens à l’audience du ler janvier 1814,” in Histoire parlementaire de la révolution française, ed. Philippe Joseph Benjamin Buchez and Prosper Charles Roux, 40 vols. (Paris: Paulin, 1834-38), Vol. XXXIX, p. 460.

[n-n]371,2,59 detests!

[[*] ]Paris: Paulin, 1835.

[o-o]371,2 enabled us to predict

[p-p]371,2 so without ostentation

[q-q]371,2 an

[r]371,2 the

[[*] ]Translated from Nisard, pp. 8-9.

[s-s]371,2 [paragraphs in reverse order]

[t-t]371,2 But while

[u-u]+59,67

[[†] ]Ibid., p. 14.

[v]371,2 If sometimes vague menaces escaped from him in the excitement of controversy, they made no one doubt him who was not interested in doubting him, and in ruining his noblest claim to the confidence of his country. . .

[w-w]371,2 made

[x]371,2 Sustained in these by a point of honour against doubts growing ever stronger, must he doubt of the others too?

[[*] ]Translated from ibid., pp. 14-15, 16.

[y-y]371,2 have conquered

[z-z]371,2 Deprived of him, French politics are now a blank

[a]371,2 with such an adversary [Emile de Girardin]

[b-b]371,2 deems such services worthy of reward

[c-c]371,2 dearest blood

[[*] ]Ferdinand, duc d’Orléans.

[d]371,2 by M. Nisard [p. 54]

[e-e]371,2 further, here shall thy proud waves be stayed

[[†] ]See Job, 38:11.

[f]371,2 still

[g-g]371,2 hatreds

[[‡] ]Translated from Littré, pp. 58-9.

[h-h]371,2 found out

[i-i]+59,67

[j-j]371,2 redress

[k-k]371,2 obliges

[l-l]+59,67

[m-m]371,2 hear

[n-n]371,2 all

[o]371,2 those

[[*] ]Nisard, p. 31.

[p]371,2 the vagueness of which is its beauty.

[q]371,2 I do not diminish the merit of his generosity, by saying that there was in it a certain improvidence, which was but his confidence in the future. He drew upon the future to meet the demands of his liberality. Exposed by his position to incessant applications, he often had recourse to the purses of his friends to relieve sufferings, perhaps not of the most authentic kind, and ran into debt to give alms. [Ibid.]

[[†] ]Translated from ibid., p. 21.

[r]371,2 M. Nisard tells of his pawning his watch to relieve a person not in extreme necessity, and of his taking the cloth off his horse on a winter evening, to throw it over a poor man whom he saw in the streets, shivering with cold [P. 22.]

[s]371,2 Carrel was never reduced to say “who’d have thought it.” “Everybody,” says M. Littré, “thinks of great things, superior minds alone take proper account of small ones.” [Translated from Littré, p. 62.]

[[*] ]Translated from Littré, p. 62.

[t-t]+59,67

[u-u]371,2 He wished by this to demonstrate

[v]371,2 the

[w]371,2 all

[x]371,2 it

[y-y]371,2 noblest spirits

[[*] ]Thomas Carlyle; see, e.g., Sartor Resartus (1833-34), 2nd ed. (Boston: Munroe, 1837), p. 299 (Bk. III, Chap. xii), “Characteristics,” Edinburgh Review, LIV (Dec., 1831), 383.

[z]371,2 all

[a]371,2 long

[b-b]371,2 perish utterly from among men

[[†] ]Tacitus, Agricola, in Dialogus, Agricola, Germania (Latin and English), trans. Maurice Hutton (London: Heinemann, New York, Macmillan, 1914), p. 250 (46).

[* ][59] Also memorable as almost the only man of political distinction who has given in a similar adhesion to the present despotism b(1859.)b

[* ]The following extract from the letter already quoted, contains a picture of one of the most remarkable of these men. We have no reason to believe that he is a specimen of the rest, for he is as completely an individual as Carrel: “Ap man whose name is energy; who cannot ask you the commonest question but in so decided a manner that he makes you start:q who impresses you with a sense of irresistible power and indomitable will; you might fancy him an incarnation of Satan, if he were your enemy or the enemy of your party, and if you had not associated with him and seen how full of sweetness and amiableness and gentleness he isr. . . . Hisr notion of duty is that of a Stoic; he conceives it as something quite infinite, and having nothing whatever to do with happiness, something immeasurably above it, a kind of half Manichean in his views of the universe: according to him, man’s life consists of one perennial and intense struggle against the principle of evil, which but for that struggle would wholly overwhelm him: generation after generation carries on this battle, with little success as yet; he believes in perfectibility and progressiveness, but thinks that hitherto sprogresss has consisted only in removing some of the impediments to good, not in realizing the good itself: that, nevertheless, the only satisfaction which man can realize for himself is in battling with this evil principle, and overpowering it; that after evils have accumulated for centuries, there sometimes comes one great clearing-off,t one day of reckoning called a revolution: that it is only on usuchu rare occasions, very rarely indeed on any others, that good men get into power, and then they ought to seize the opportunity for doing all they can, that any government which is boldly attacked, by ever so small a minority, may be overthrown, and that is his hope with vrespectv to the present government. w He is xmuch more accomplishedx than most of the political men I yhave seeny ; has a wider range of ideas, converses on art, and most subjects of general interest, always throwing all he has to say into a few brief energetic sentences, as if it was contrary to his nature to expend one superfluous word.” [Mill to Carlyle (25 Nov., 1833), pp. 196-7.]

zThere can be no indelicacy in now saying, that the original of this picture was Godefroi Cavaignac.z

[b(1859.)b]-67

[p]33 very different man from Carrel is Cavaignac; he is president of the Société des Droits de l’Homme, who are the active stirring revolutionary party, who look up to Robespierre, and aim at l’égalité absolue, he is for taking the first opportunity for overthrowing the government by force, and thinks the opportunity must come in a few months, or a year at farthest, a

[q]33,371,2 a man

[r. . . . Hisr]33 intense in everything, he is the intensest of atheists, and says, “je n’aime pas ceux qui croient en Dieu” because “it is generally a reason for doing nothing for Man” but his

[sprogresss]33 progress

[t]33 [EL reads on]

[usuchu]33 such

[vrespectv]33 [EL reads regard]

[w]33 His notion of égalité absolue is rather speculative than practical he says he does not know whether it should be by an equal division of the means of production (land and capital) or by an equal division of the produce: when I stated to him the difficulties of both he felt and acknowledged them, all he had to propose were but a variety of measures tending towards an equalisation of property: and he seems to have a strange reliance on events, thinking that when the end is clearly conceived, the circumstances of the case would when power is in the right hands, suggest the most appropriate means. Cavaignac is the son of a Conventionalist and regicide.

[xmuch more accomplishedx]33,371,2 a much more accomplished man

[yhave seeny]33 saw there

[zThere can be no indelicacy in now saying, that the original of this picture was Godefroi Cavaignac.z]+59,67