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Subject Area: Political Theory
Collection: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill

100.: FRENCH NEWS [22] EXAMINER, 17 APR., 1831, P. 249 - John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXII - Newspaper Writings December 1822 - July 1831 Part I [1822]

Edition used:

The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXII - Newspaper Writings December 1822 - July 1831 Part I, ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, Introduction by Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).

Part of: Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, in 33 vols.

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Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


100.

FRENCH NEWS [22]

EXAMINER, 17 APR., 1831, P. 249

This item is headed “London, April 17.” For the entry in Mill’s bibliography, see No. 55. The item is listed as “Article on France” and enclosed in square brackets in the Somerville College set.

the fifteen years of the restoration never furnished anything approaching to the deplorable exhibition which the French Government is making in the face of Europe, on the trial of the pretended Republican Conspirators of December.1 The prosecution cannot establish the most trifling point. The witnesses who were most relied on, are brought forward, and have nothing to say; complaining in many cases, that the eagerness of the Judge before whom they made their preliminary depositions, had converted the merest trifles into facts of the gravest import. It is evident that the government has kept innocent men in prison for several months, and now puts them on trial for their lives, on no evidence whatever; proceeding upon idle reports, and the suggestions of its own morbid and unmanly apprehensions. One of the witnesses summed up his opinion of the whole affair, in words which are borne out by every fact which has transpired: “There are two sorts of men who have exaggerated these tumults: terrified men, who take alarm at every thing, such men as may now be seen exhibited at the Théâtre des Variétés; and some others, who were willing to stake the lives of their fellow-citizens against a ribbon, or a place. But they will reap nothing from it but infamy.”2

The Chamber of Deputies have refused to adopt the amendment, by which the Peers had cut off a large proportion of the new electors;3 but it has adopted, on the proposition of M. Casimir Périer, an additional article,4 which provides that the electoral lists shall be made out from the tax-books of 1830, instead of 1831; which will prevent the new taxes, now about to be imposed, from operating to augment still further the number of electors. This distrust and jealousy of the people, shown at the very moment when the hand of the tax-gatherer is to be thrust deeper into their pockets, has created the most lively dissatisfaction among all but the admirers of the “juste milieu,” or statu-quo system.

[1 ]For the riots in December, see No. 72, n4. Godefroi Eléonore Louis Cavaignac (1801-45) and Auguste Joseph Guinard (1799-1874), republicans, commanders in the artillery of the National Guard, were accused with seventeen others of giving weapons to the people during the disturbances demanding the death of the ex-Ministers. The prosecutors were MM. Miller (b. ca. 1789), appointed avocat-général in 1830, and Hardouin (b. ca. 1789), a conseiller at the Cour Royale de Paris since 1821. The trial had begun on 6 Apr., 1831.

[2 ]Godefroy Levasseur (an artillery captain), testimony at the trial on 10 Apr., 1831, Le National, 11 Apr., p. 3.

[3 ]The amendment (adopted by the Peers on 30 Mar. and rejected by the Deputies on 9 Apr.) had excluded the centimes additionnels (the annually adjusted tax always levied in addition to the basic tax) from the calculation of a voter’s qualification, thus lowering the potential electorate by about 70,000 names. (The Peers acquiesced on 16 Apr.)

[4 ]Titre VII, Art. 79 (Bull. 37, No. 105 [19 Apr., 1831]).