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 Front Page arrow Titles (by Subject) arrow 166.: DEATHS OF CASIMIR PERIER AND GEORGES CUVIER EXAMINER, 20 MAY, 1832, PP. 329-30 - The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIII - Newspaper Writings August 1831 - October 1834 Part II

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

166.: DEATHS OF CASIMIR PERIER AND GEORGES CUVIER EXAMINER, 20 MAY, 1832, PP. 329-30 - John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIII - Newspaper Writings August 1831 - October 1834 Part II [1831]

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The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIII - Newspaper Writings August 1831 - October 1834 Part II, 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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166.

DEATHS OF CASIMIR PERIER AND GEORGES CUVIER

EXAMINER, 20 MAY, 1832, PP. 329-30

This article on the deaths of Périer and Cuvier is headed “London, May 20, 1832.” Though presumably included in the entry in Mill’s bibliography given at No. 116, it is listed in the Somerville College copy of the Examiner not as “Article on France” but as “Obituary Notice of Casimir Périer, and of Cuvier”; it is there enclosed in square brackets.

m. casimir périer is dead:

  • He should have died hereafter—
  • There would have been a time for such a word.1

On no view of French politics has France any good to expect from his ceasing to be Minister. His successors, whosoever they be, will be chosen from no other party, nor will act upon any other views of policy, than his; but without the vigour of purpose, the resolute determination to make all things bend to his conviction, by which he gave a sort of dignity to the most uninspiring cause which any statesman ever devoted himself to uphold. In any other hands than his, all the evil of his system will become more evil, all the redeeming good which was in it will dwindle away. He was at least an able man—at least a brave man—not other than an honest man thus far, that the main springs of his conduct were public, not private motives. He was less scrupulous in the means he used for compassing what he deemed good ends, than a sound morality will approve. But where, save in a few instances, have been the French Ministers, of whom this might not be said? He should have lived, until there had been a hope of his being replaced by a better man, not by some one (it matters not whom) among a hundred worse.

We have been no admirers of the policy of M. Périer’s Ministry. But it is not one short twelvemonth’s alienation, which can efface from our memory the unwearied public services of fifteen years. We cannot forget, that to him, more than to any man, belonged the overthrow of the Villèle Administration; the first decisive check to the royalist faction: whose encroachments upon all that France had gained by her revolution, were then only stopped in their formidable advance. And the bodily constitution which has at length succumbed to a long series of labours and vexations, was first broken by the fatigues of the daily and hourly struggle of life and death which he maintained with Villèle at the tribune of that memorable chamber, which contained three hundred creatures of the Jesuits, and but sixteen representatives of the people.

This arduous contest, in which he displayed talents which excited the admiration even of the courtiers of Charles X (of him alone, among the leaders of the liberal party, they never spoke without respect) will be his chief title to the friendly remembrance of posterity; and to this, in order that the remembrance may be as affectionate as possible, let it go down to posterity that he in reality sacrificed his life. For it is ill dying a martyr to a falling cause, when that cause is also one which ought to fall. Cranmer and Latimer and Ridley2 will live for ever; but is it for his martyrdom that we remember Sir Thomas More? Devotion to a long line of kings, or to a constitution which has stood the shock of ages, though now rotten, and worm-eaten, and harbouring unclean vermin, we can understand. But to die for a temporary compromise, a patch-work of yesterday, a thing constructed on no principle, to which no human being ever carried hypocrisy so far as to pretend to have any attachment, to which nobody affects to look for any guidance, but only for keeping him from being robbed or murdered;—to be martyred for worshiping at an empty shrine—without an oracle, without a God, without even an idol; no Gothic cathedral or Grecian temple, but a wooden shed, run up in a hurry, because any shelter was better than the open sky, and which men resort to, not because it is good, but because they know not whither to seek for any other—is a death little worthy of an apotheosis; no dying for one’s country, but a common suicide.

It is not by this that M. Périer will hereafter be known. Happily for his fame, while the last year of his life, from the insignificance of its permanent results, will sink gradually into comparative oblivion, the former years, because their consequences become every day more momentous, will loom greater and greater in the distance, even as they recede from the eye of mankind still moving onward. And when the noisy and acrimonious disputes of the present day shall be stilled, and he and his contemporaries shall be judged, with those large allowances of which all the men of the present generation stand so sorely in need; then may the close of his career again be profitably reverted to, as a lesson of indulgence rather than as a subject of reproach; and errors, for which he has so cruelly suffered, and the evil effects of which shall long since have been cured and past away, may perhaps render him more interesting to men of those days, than even if his character had been a more perfect one.

For ourselves, we shall hereafter speak of him no otherwise than in honour; he now belongs to history; his greatest enemies may now be content that their quarrel with him should be buried in his grave.

Almost at the same time, France has lost another of her most eminent men, the celebrated naturalist, Cuvier; the most distinguished, perhaps, among the physical philosophers of his age; and less honourably noted, as the humble servant of all governments. M. Cuvier was far vainer of being supposed a man of importance in politics, than of his immense merit and reputation as a man of science, and was the laughing-stock of Paris, for the ridiculous consequence which he attached to his title of Baron. Yet, although a conseiller d’état for some fifteen years, and latterly a Peer of France, he continued lecturing at the Ecole de Médecine on comparative anatomy and physiology till within a few days of his death: a striking fact, and one which throws great light on the state of feeling in France on many important matters.

[1 ]Macbeth, V, v, 17-18; in The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 1337.

[2 ]Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556), Archbishop of Canterbury, died at the stake for refusing to abet the return of England to Catholicism under Mary; Hugh Latimer (1485?-1555), Bishop of Worcester, having suffered for his puritan religious convictions all his life, was finally burnt at the stake after Mary’s accession; Nicholas Ridley (1500-55), Bishop of Rochester, then London, was burnt at the stake with Latimer for his reformed opinions.