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Political Parties in France.

253

the internal administration depends on the impulse and direction given to it by its chiefs.

'According to the instructions of the minister, any given law is executed loosely and indulgently, or strictly, or not at all. Under Faucher all is rigour and vigour. All the strings are stretched to the utmost. National guards are disbanded. Mayors are dismissed. Journals are suspended. The hand of Government is everywhere felt, and everywhere presses heavily.'

Saturday, May 17.-I found Tocqueville with us this afternoon when I returned from the Duc de Broglie's.

He asked me what were the Duc de Broglie's views,' and was glad to hear that he was determined to stand by the Republic.

'The Monarchical parties,' he said, 'are contemptible; the Legitimists are hated and feared by nine-tenths of the people; the Orleanists are a set of generals without an army; the Bonapartists have an army but no leaders.'

But he does not share the Duke's expectation that on the question of revision the minority will yield.

'It might yield,' he said, 'if the majority were compact and earnest; it might yield if the majority were cordially supported by the nation. But the nation is divided; it knows that the Constitution is faulty, but it is not sure that it will be exchanged for anything better. It would see with pleasure a few points selected for amendment, but it looks forward with terror to a new Constituent

1 See Senior's Journals in France, vol. ii. p. 200.—ED.

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Mischievousness of Precedents.

255

publicans and opposed by the Montagne. I do not share this conviction. Under our system of voting by lists, a compact minority which concentrates all its votes on its own candidates, has a great chance of beating a divided majority which supports as many candidates as it contains factions. I should not be surprised at seeing Rouge representatives from many of the departments on which the anti-Republican parties now rely. So clearly do I see the dangers of the revision, that I could not bring myself to vote for it, if I saw any other less dangerous course. But danger surrounds us on every side. Great and general as the alarm is, I believe it to be less than that which is justified by our situation.

'The Constitution,' he added, 'with all its defects might be endurable, if we could only believe in its permanence. But we read History. We see that republican institutions have never lasted in France, and we infer that those which we have now must be short-lived. This reading of History is our bane. If we could forget the past, we might apply a calm impartial judgment to the present. But we are always thinking of precedents. Sometimes we draw them from our own history, sometimes from yours. Sometimes we use the precedent as an example, sometimes as a warning. But as the cir cumstances under which we apply it always differ materially from those under which it originally took place, it almost always misleads us.

'We indicted Louis XVI. for conspiracy against the

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Improbability of Re-election.

257

President together could effect a coup d'état. Neither of them could do so in opposition to the other.

'The last means is to be re-elected, though an illegal candidate, by an overwhelming majority. If this be his plan, his whale conduct is opposed to it. For that purpose he ought to be on good terms with the Assembly he is constantly attacking it. He ought to appear to have no selfish views: all that he does seems to be prompted by personal motives-by vanity as respects the present, by ambition as respects the future. His administration ought to be as conciliatory as the safety of the country will allow it to be. Its roughness and insolence, its arbitrary dismissal of public functionaries, its suspension of newspapers, its interference in elections, the rudeness of its subordinates--in short, its generally irritating and unscrupulous character, are making enemies every day. In my own department, La Manche, one of the most conservative in France, the Rouge candidates, though happily still in a minority, are twice as strong as they were six months ago. Either he does not know what his ministers are doing, or he does not know what the effect of such a system must be.'

'Though the revision of the Constitution,' I said, 'is impossible at present, the time for it must come. Do you think that an Upper Chamber will be one of the elements of the new one?'

'I hope,' he continued, 'that it will be. I voted for it and I shall vote for it again. A single Chamber seems to me to be a bad instrument of legislation. Still, however, as an antagonistic force, as a means of