From the London Review.

HISTORY AND TIMES OF M.

GUIZOT.

stated and paid correspondents to enable them to keep up with the higher gossip of its drawing-rooms, in politics, in science, and in speculative philanthropy.

Too many autobiographies of eminent | sons of wealth and refinement, in England Frenchmen, that have appeared within Germany, and Italy, used to have their the last quarter of a century, are characterized by a gross and repulsive egotism. At once sentimental and heartless, the heroes of these stories are self-adoring to a degree that is quite astounding, full of bitterness and insult towards their rivals, and breathing but mere disdain towards the few they called their friends. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand and of Lamartine are the most illustrious and most of fensive examples of this class. After such works, it is a relief to meet with a man, great both by his public career and his literary labors, who tells us his remembrances in a style of frank simplicity, without overrating his own importance, and without, on the other hand, falling into those affected suggestive reticences which betray the more refined type of self-complacency. He is really the writer he proposed to be at the outset-faithful to his friends, just to his adversaries, and not over-lenient towards himself.

The Memoirs carry us back no farther than 1807, when M. Guizot, as well as we can calculate approximately, was a young man of nineteen; a preceptor, we believe, in the family of the Duc de Broglie. He enjoyed the privilege of admission to the few remaining drawing-rooms at Paris which retained the traditions of a time that had passed away forever; its taste for intellectual pleasures, for social sympathy, and for conversation, without any other object than the pleasures of exchanging thought, together with its liberal toleration of diversities of origin, rank, and ideas; those characteristics, in short, which had made Paris the intellectual center of Europe, to such an extent, that, for the half-century preceding the Revolution, not only princes, but private per

*Memoirs: a Contribution to the History of my own Times. (Mémoirs pour servir à l'Histoire de mon Temps.) By M. GUIZOT. Vols. I. and II. Leipzig, Paris, Geneva. 1858 and 1859.

The few remaining survivors of the liberal and philosophical aristocracy of the eighteenth century, who used to meet each other at Madame d'Houdetot's, Monsieur Suard's, and the Abbé Morellet's, had not abjured the principles and the aspirations of the generation which had brought about the Revolution, and along with it such great disasters and such cruel disappointment. They remained sincerely liberal, says M. Guizot; but with the reserve of men who had succeeded little and suffered much in their projects of reform. "They prized the freedom of thought and speech, but did not aspire to power. They detested despotism, and were ever blaming its acts; but without doing any thing to restrain or to overthow it. It was an opposition of enlightened and independent spectators, who had no chance and no wish to become actors.”

It required a kind of courage under the Empire to assume even this harmless attitude of independence. None but those who personally witnessed those evil days can conceive the degree of timidity and restraint that was almost universal; and how, at the least glimpse of a trespass upon the forbidden ground of politics, men's features became cold, and their words official. "They only who have once lived under the air-pump, know what a charm there is in liberty to breathe.” When France did obtain liberty to breathe, the disinterested talkers of these privileged drawing-rooms were succeeded by more practical men, who went to the opposite extreme of party spirit and party animosity that terrible disease of free countries which narrows the horizon of the wisest, makes them see every thing in a false light, and is fatal at once to large views and generous feelings.

flight of Louis XVIII., and his own return from Elba: "They have allowed me to come, just as they allowed him to go away."

M. Guizot himself hated the rule of Napoleon with all the energy of a first passion. He felt that the nation was degraded and demoralized, and the very de- The Restoration saw Guizot, for the velopment of its faculties arrested under first time, a man in office-the comparthe despot's sway. It is evident that the atively humble one of Secretary to the system of Napoleon III. must recall to the Minister of the Interior. The return of mind of the veteran liberal that under Napoleon, of course, sent him back to his which he chafed in his youth. But no lectures in the University. Towards the parallel is drawn intentionally. There are close of the Hundred Days, the young exno allusions slightly veiled; no words of secretary was dispatched to the emigrant double application intended to afford the court by a committee of constitutional writer or the reader the feminine pleasure royalists at Paris, to plead with Louis of wounding the nephew through the XVIII. personally, in their name, against uncle's doublet. The strongest anti-im- the reäctionary influences by which he perialist passages in the book are to be was letting himself be surrounded. The found in the Appendix, in speeches pro- summary of the impression made upon nounced, or documents composed, when him by the monarch is not very compliLouis Napoleon was in obscurity. M.mentary: "A mind with a fair measure Guizot is a foe who will only strike in earnest, and in front; and it is easy to surmise that he possesses the haughty consciousness that the antagonism of his principles to all forms of despotism is so self-evident as to make any particular application of them superfluous.

The future minister and parliamentary orator became known, as a writer, by his critical notes on Gibbon's Decline and Fall, and by his contribution to the Annals of Education. M. Fontanes, then Master of the University, was so favorably impressed by his talents and character, that he founded, expressly for him, the Professorship of Modern History. It was in December, 1812, that M. Guizot first appeared in the character of lecturer, before an audience more select than

numerous.

of common-sense and independence, superficial with dignity, politic in conversation, and careful of appearances, thinking and understanding little about the real substance of things, and almost equally incapable of the faults which ruin and the successes which secure the future of royal races."

Returning to Paris with the court after the battle of Waterloo, Guizot was restored to his post, and was soon afterwards advanced to that of Master of Requests in the Council of State-a body which may be explained to English readers as a sort of Privy Council, with positive and not merely nominal functions. In June, 1820, MM. Royer Collard, Guizot, and others of their friends, were struck off the list of the Council of State, for having given all the opposition in their power to a new electoral law, intended to make the representative system of France even less popular than it had been. This liberal section of the royalist party, who contended for liberty without revolution and order without despotism, were nicknamed the Doctrinaires. The measure which first threw them into formal opposition to the government had been suggested by the panic consequent on various revolutionary plots, and, above all, upon the assassination of the Duc de Berri.

While Napoleon was wearing out the remnant of his good fortune and his power in the desperate struggle of the spring of 1814, M. Guizot had occasion to travel in the center and south of France. He was painfully affected by the lassitude of the popular mind, its morally helpless and prostrate state. The nation had become so unused to decide upon its own interests, and work out its own destiny, that it was wholly devoid of political wisdom and settled purpose. It was a people of perplexed spectators, who hardly knew what It can be gathered, from various indiissue they ought to hope or fear from the cations, that the loss of his place was a terrible game of which they were the serious matter to M. Guizot, in a pecuniary stake, now execrating Napoleon as the point of view. He betook himself, for the author of so much suffering, and anon third time, to his historical pursuits; but celebrating him as the defender and the Abbé Frayssinous, now Master of the avenger of their country. As the Em- University, thought that his lectures had peror himself expressed it, after the a dangerous tendency, and suppressed

them in October, 1822. The Martignac ministry allowed him to begin them again after an interval of five years. The lectures of the winters of 1828-9, and 182930, afterwards given to the world, became the celebrated works on The History of Civilization in Europe, and The History of Civilization in France. M. Cousin was, at the same time, Professor of Philosophy, and M. Villemain of Literature: a brilliant trio, of whom France, and the liberal party especially, was justly proud.

there is always more or less between po-
litical personages." (!) He was over-im-
passionable. His first impulses frequently
carried him too far; and one of his great-
est faults was the fidgety nature which
made it impossible for him to conceal a
very natural and commendable uneasiness
about the future prospects of his children.

M. Guizot became Minister of the Interior in the first Cabinet of Louis Philippe; a most laborious office, partly because he was the principal spokesman of the ministry in the Chamber; but While in favor with the early govern- chiefly because he had to make the most ments of the Restoration, M. Guizot had extensive changes among the vast num been sometimes selected as royal commis- bers employed in every department of sioner, to plead at the bar of the Chamber public service. "I had to bear the presof Deputies in favor of measures proposed sure of all the pretensions, hopes, enmities, by government-a curious and somewhat offers, complaints, and dreams, that drew superfluous office in the organism of the to my office, by thousands, from all corFrench legislature. He had since pub-ners of France, solicitors and denouncers, lished several works on political subjects; the projectors and the inquisitive, busyand contributed to The Globe, and other bodies and idlers." The over-tasked journals of his party. But he did not be- Minister soon perceived the evils of the come a member of the Chamber until his French centralization, and the folly of election for Lisieux in January, 1830. the French tendency to look to the gov Thus the first session in which he bore a ernment for every thing. Those countpart was the momentous one which issued less details which in England, America, in irremediable conflict between Charles and even in Holland, are settled by local X. and his people, the violation of the con- authorities, are all referred to a central stitution by the monarch, and the Revo- authority under the administrative system lution of July. established by Louis XIV. and Napoleon. At this moment a bridge can not be mended, nor a religious meeting opened, in any corner of France, without permission from a minister in Paris, founded on a formal report, and a pompous list of considerations! It was the misfortune of the eighteen years' experiment of constitutional monarchy in France, that it found no habits of local self-government among the people; so that it was obliged to work upon discordant principles liberty and the representative system on the one hand, centralization on the other; a state of things in which, as M. Guizot says judiciously, the government will either neglect local affairs, or else make them subservient to its own interests; "and the whole administration, from the hamlet to the palace, become a mean of government in the hands of the political parties that contend for supremacy." To put the matter in more homely phrase ology, the bureaucracy is the saddle on the nation's back; and whoever is skillful enough to leap into the saddle, has the nation at his mercy.

However little he may be believed, the experienced observer of characters with whose remembrances we have to do, does not hesitate to affirm that Louis Philippe was not an ambitious man. Moderate and prudent, notwithstanding his active mind and lively impressions, that Prince had long foreseen the chance that might raise him to the throne; but it was with more anxiety than satisfaction. The feeling predominant in his mind was the determination not to be involved in the consequences which might follow the faults of the elder branch of his house. He wished to be neither conspirator nor victim; and, as he said himself three months before the Revolution: "Come what will, I will not separate my lot, and that of my children, from the fate of my country."

Moreover, as King, Louis Philippe was not, according to M. Guizot, the exaggeratedly wary and plotting character, which he has been considered by many. "In his oral or written demonstrations, he gave, perhaps, a little more room than was necessary to that acting, of which

It is no wonder that the Minister of the

Interior soon became unpopular. He became noted for his uncompromising resistance to all revolutionary tendencies; and he had incurred the hostility of all those whose pretensions, or vanity, or local animosity, or blind impatience, he had been unable to satisfy. After holding office only about three months, he withdrew from the Cabinet, along with his friends, M. Casimir Perier and the Duc de Broglie. These statesmen had not much confidence in their more radical associates, M. Lafitte, etc. They were aware, too, that it would be easier for the more popular ministers to resist the reigning outcry for the blood of the ministers of Charles X.

"In England," he says, "it was the nation itself that, from 1830 to 1853, insisted energetically upon peace. It was moved to do so by good sense, and by the understanding of its true interests, by its taste for the productive activity of peaceful life, and by its Christian spirit. Among this people Christian beliefs are not simple rules for private life, nor mere satisfactions given to the heart and intellect; they enter into political life, and bear upon the conduct of public men. It is generally the dissenting communities first of all that rouse ject recommended in their eyes by religious themselves to the pursuit of some practical ob

reasons. The movement soon communicates

itself to the whole Christian Church of the country, then to civil society, and the government in its turn is obliged to follow."

From this time forward until 1848, M. Guizot may be considered as the most Under the influence of this spirit, Engeminent working statesman of his country. land bore with the revolution of July and He was oftener in than out of office, some- all its consequences, the fall of the kingtimes head of the Cabinet, and occupied dom of the Netherlands, the independthe post of ambassador to this country at ence of Belgium, the dislocation of the a most important juncture. His policy old European coalition against France: was distinguished by two leading features we may add, it bore too with aggravated -the determination to maintain the peace provocation from the United States. M. of Europe, and the most persevering and Guizot confesses his own countrymen did vigilant host ility to what he believed to not imitate this pacific spirit. They rebe the anarchical principles of the repub-mained restive and pugnacious under the lican party. As regards the former, the policy of Louis Philppe and his ministers, Sort of passion for peace which prevailed sighed for war, and patronized revolution. in Europe for those eighteen years was, "France, though she can not suffer revoas he says, a rare and a grand spectacle. lutions at home, even when she has Never did so many events, which might allowed them to be made, is still fond of lead to war, occur within so short a time revolutions abroad. The movement the revolution in France itself, and the caused by her example gives her pleaprolonged agitation that followed it; re- sure, and she fondly thinks that in all her volutions on all its frontiers, in Belgium, imitators she will find friends." Switzerland, and Spain; revolutions at- As has been already intimated, resistance tempted in Germany, Poland, and Italy, to the revolutionary spirit in all its forms with all the international questions and was the struggle of M. Guizot's public complications that naturally arose from life. It is true, as he says, that he alterthem; the Ottoman Empire more and nately defended liberty against absolute more tottering; Asia more and more dis- powers, and order against revolution; puted between Russia and England; but circumstances rendered his agency in France making conquests in Africa; the latter respect by far the more promiin conflict from various causes in the New monarchy to be the form of government circumstances which seemed to make it once to liberty and to public quiet. The et no war grew out of these natural to France, the most favorable at moral ideas went for something in this being inconsistent with the habits and The increasing empire of republican régime, on the other hand, result; the resolution with which Louis wishes of the classes who are the natural was also a great point gained; but M. to the dominion of bad passions, and can Philippe embraced the policy of peace, friends of order, is necessarily given over Guizot evidently considers the self-denial only find a momentary strength in vioand pacific spirit of the English people lence and anarchy. It puts forth at the to have been the most effectual influence outset the noblest motives, but it is only

World: and

inevitable.

for good.

y

in order to

persevering.

He believes

cover the march and prepare