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arise from an intentional fire. Such fires are symptoms of popular discontent. They preceded the revolution of 1830. They have become frequent of late in this country.

Monday, April 10.-Tocqueville and I drove this morning to Azy-le-Rideau, another Francis I. château, on an island formed by the Indre. It is less beautifully situated than Chenonceaux; the river Indre is smaller and more sluggish than the Cher; the site of the castle is in a hollow, and the trees round it approach too near, and are the tall and closely planted poles which the French seem to admire. But the architecture, both in its outlines and in its details, is charming. It is of white stone, in this form, with two curtains and

four towers. The whole outside and the ceilings and cornices within are covered with delicate arabesques.

Like Chenonceaux, it escaped the revolution, and is now, with its furniture of the sixteenth century, the residence of the Marquis de Biancourt, descended from its ancient proprietors.

1854.]

French Aristocracy.

83

As we sauntered over the gardens, our conversation turned on the old aristocracy of France.

'The loss of our aristocracy,' said Tocqueville, ‘is a misfortune from which we have not even begun to recover. The Legitimists are their territorial successors; they are the successors in their manners, in their loyalty, and in their prejudices of caste; but they are not their successors in cultivation, or intelligence, or energy, or, therefore, in influence. Between them and the bourgeoisie is a chasm, which shows no tendency to close. Nothing but a common interest and a common pursuit will bring them together.

'If the murder of the Duc d'Enghien had not made them recoil in terror and disgust from Napoleon, they might have perhaps been welded into one mass with his new aristocracy of services, talents, and wealth. They were ready to adhere to him during the Consulate. During the Restoration they were always at war with the bourgeoisie, and therefore with the constitution, on which the power of their enemies depended. When the result of that war was the defeat and expulsion of their leader, Charles X., their hostility extended from the bourgeoisie and the constitution up to the Crown. Louis Philippe tried to govern by means of the middle classes alone. Perhaps it was inevitable that he should make the attempt. It certainly was inevitable that he should fail. The higher classes, and the lower classes, all equally offended, combined to overthrow him. Under the Republic they again took, to a certain extent, their place in the State. They led the country people, who

came to the assistance of the Assembly in June 1848. The Republic was wise enough to impose no oaths. It did not require those who were willing to serve it to begin by openly disavowing their traditionary opinions and principles. The Legitimists took their places in the Conseils-généraux. They joined with the bourgeoisie in local administration, the only means by which men of different classes can coalesce.

'The socialist tendencies which are imputed to this Second Empire, the oath which it most imprudently imposes, its pretensions to form a dynasty, and its assertion of the principle most abhorrent to them, elective monarchy, have thrown them back into disaffection. And I believe their disaffection to be one of our great dangers a danger certainly increased by the Fusion. The principal object of the Fusion is to influence the army. The great terror of the army is division in itself. It will accept anything, give up anything, dare anything, to avoid civil war.

Rather than be divided

between the two branches, it would have adhered to the Empire. Now it can throw off the Bonapartes without occasioning a disputed succession.'

'When you say,' I asked, 'that the Legitimists are not the successors of the old aristocracy in cultivation, intelligence, or energy, do you mean to ascribe to them positive or relative inferiority in these qualities?'

'In energy,' answered Tocqueville, 'their deficiency is positive. They are ready to suffer for their cause, they are not ready to exert themselves for it. In intelligence and cultivation they are superior to any other class in

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1854.] Society in the Eighteenth Century.

85

France; but they are inferior to the English aristocracy, and they are inferior, as I said before, to their ancestors of the eighteenth century. There existed in the highest Parisian society towards the end of that century a comprehensiveness of curiosity and inquiry, a freedom of opinion, an independence, and soundness of judgment, never seen before or since. Its pursuits, its pleasures, its admirations, its vanities, were all intellectual. Look at the success of Hume. His manners were awkward; he was a heavy, though an instructive, converser; he spoke bad French; he would pass now for an intelligent bore. But such was the worship then paid to talents and knowledgeespecially to knowledge, and talents employed on the destruction of prejudices-that Hume was, for years, the lion of all the salons of Paris. The fashionable beauties quarrelled for the fat philosopher. Nor was their admiration or affection put on, or even transitory. He retained some of them as intimate friends for life. If the brilliant talkers and writers of that time were to return to life, I do not believe that gas, or steam, or chloroform, or the electric telegraph, would so much astonish them as the dulness of modern society, and the mediocrity of modern books.'

In the evening we discussed the new scheme of throwing open the service of India and of the Government offices to public competition.

'We have followed,' said Tocqueville, 'that system to a great extent for many years. Our object was twofold. One was to depress the aristocracy of wealth, birth, and connexions. In this we have succeeded.

The École Polytechnique, and the other schools in which the vacancies are given to those who pass the best examinations, are filled by youths belonging to the middle classes, who, undistracted by society, or amusement, or by any literary or scientific pursuits, except those immediately bearing on their examinations, beat their better-born competitors, who will not degrade themselves into the mere slaves of success in the concours. Our other object was to obtain the best public servants. In that we have failed. We have brought knowledge and ability to an average; diminished the number of incompetent employés, and reduced, almost to nothing, the number of distinguished ones. Continued application to a small number of subjects, and those always the same, not selected by the student, but imposed on him by the inflexible rule of the establishment, without reference to his tastes or to his powers, is as bad for the mind as the constant exercise of one set of muscles would be for the body.

'We have a name for those who have been thus educated. They are called “polytechnisés." If you follow our example, you will increase your second-rates, and extinguish your first-rates; and what is perhaps a more important result, whether you consider it a good or an evil, you will make a large stride in the direction in which you have lately made so many-the removing the government and the administration of England from the hands of the higher classes into those of the middle and lower ones.'

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