and of fighting, and the indifference to life which characterise the lowest classes in Paris, necessarily make them take part in every émeute. They will now fight for the National Guards; left to themselves they would have fought against them. But as Gardes Mobiles, they are in fact soldiers: always under arms, and liable to be sent on any service; but with double the pay of the regular army, and with the privilege of choosing their own officers. It is impossible that the regular army (La Ligne as I always hear it called) can long tolerate this comparison. A Pretorian body, selected from the best of the regular army, is an object of envy. Here we have a Pretorian body selected from the refuse of society. It cannot, however, be disbanded: such a measure would double the anarchical force. It will be sent therefore to some place in which it will be destroyed by the enemy or by the fatigues of the first campaign. Perhaps towards Italy to perish in a mountain campaign in the Alps. Perhaps to Algiers to melt away under a tropical sun.

In the meantime they make an amusing part of the armed population of Paris. They have been thrown together without classification, so you see marching side by side boys apparently of fifteen and men of fifty, tall rawboned ruffians and little scamps not half the height of their own muskets. They are said to have acquired tolerable habits of drill, but their general behaviour has very little that is military. At their posts they are sitting, lying down, and smoking, and their head-quarters in the Champs Elysées is a sort of fair. You see fifty

1848.]

Character of Lamartine.

49

of them in their uniforms filling the carriages of a merrygo-round or crowding before a puppet-show.

We talked of English statesmen, and Molé pronounced an eulogium on Lord Lansdowne-one of the wisest, the best-informed, and, above all, the least vain man that he had ever known. Next to him Lord Aberdeen was the favourite.

Friday, May 26.—I breakfasted with the Tocquevilles. We talked of Lamartine.

Tocqueville said 'that it was difficult to speculate as to his conduct, as he is an incoherent, inconsistent thinker and actor-that he feared that Lamartine looked on the present unsettled state of things as favourable to his pre-eminence; that if he had thrown over Ledru Rollin and the Anarchists, which he might have done with perfect ease, in fact by merely remaining passive, he would certainly, for a time, have been at the head of the moderate party, though he would have had in it formidable rivals, but that among the Anarchists he is supreme. That it flatters his vanity to be worshipped by his own party, at least by the party now in power, and to be worshipped by the other party as the man who tempers and diminishes the mischievousness of his associates. Though in debt he is not corruptible by money. He does not receive company because he says, "Je n'ai pas le sou."'

Tocqueville asked him, why he did not require a salary from the Assembly. He answered, Because it might diminish his influence.

Tocqueville expressed a fear that the Republicans would try to economise by taking away the salaries of the priests. He would rather, if possible, increase them. They have considerable influence among the peasantry, and are indeed supposed to have affected materially the return of the present Assembly, and if they were better paid, a better class would enter the Church. He wishes too to alter their education, which is now carried on in seminaries admitting no others; so that they come into a world, of which they know nothing, to direct it.

I mentioned Guizot's remark to me, that in the Revolution of 1789 the 'Peuple' considered the high-born and the rich as personal enemies; abolished their titles, burnt their houses, confiscated and subdivided their estates, drove them into exile, put them to death, and tried, by enforcing equal partition among their descendants, to prevent the recurrence of large fortunes ; but that in 1848 the 'Peuple' treated them not as enemies, but as slaves, not as a class to be hunted down, but to be kept in preserves, and consumed from time to time as the wants of the 'Peuple' required.

Tocqueville said that the remark was very just, and that he had himself perceived the gradual transition in the minds of the people, from dislike of the rich, to indifference, and ultimately to the sort of affection which one feels for one's milch cows, or one's poultry yard.

'During the Restoration,' he said, 'I was thought an aristocrat, and was unpopular in my department. After 1830 the people felt that they had beaten us down, and

The Revolutions of 1848 and 1789.

51

1848.] that there was little ground for any apprehension of our recovering our power. Still there was just enough fear of us to make them distant and cold. But this time, in 1848, all is changed. The people feel that as a political party, the gentry are extinct. They elected me by an immense majority; they would not injure any of my father's châteaux for all the world. They are quite ready to tax us, but they have no wish to plunder us, much less to do us any personal harm.'

He went on to say that one of the most striking changes which he had witnessed was the decrease of the influence of women. Formerly, every young artist, or poet, or preacher, or even politician, must come out chaperoned by some patroness. The ladies in the salons of the Faubourg St. Germain were the terror of Bonaparte. Under the Restoration they decided elections, influenced majorities in the Chamber, and were still more powerful at court. But now their influence is crushed by the magnitude of the events. No female hand has meddled with this revolution.

[Mr. Senior left Paris on the 27th.-ED.]

CORRESPONDENCE.

London, January 29, 1849.

My dear M. de Tocqueville,-I have begged Mr. Bancroft to take with him copies of two papers of mine in the last Edinburgh Review,' which, I think, may interest you and Madame de Tocqueville.

My time since I left you in Paris in May has been spent partly in Ireland, partly in the West of England, and partly, I am sorry to say, in my own room, under an attack of bronchitis, from which I recovered about three weeks ago. Yours has been more agreeably and more usefully employed. I was delighted, like the rest of the world, with your defence of property. Mrs. Grote thinks of making it a peg for an article on Pauperism.

We are to have Committees in each House on the Irish poor laws.

They will contain illustrations valuable to a political economist. Experiments are made in that country on so large a scale, and pushed to their extreme conse quences with such a disregard to the sufferings which they inflict, that they give us results as precious as those of Majendie.

I am sorry that you have resigned the mission to Brussels, though I fear that the Congress may separate with little result. The pretensions of Austria and of Sardinia are separated by a gulf which diplomacy cannot fill.

It

I very much fear, from a very long conversation which I had yesterday with the Sardinian Minister, Marquis Sauli, that the people of Piedmont and Genoa will force their Governments into a fresh war with Austria. seems that they think their honour requires them to make a second fight. I only hope that, if they are beaten, as I fear must be the case again, they will acquiesce in a second defeat.