THE

CHURCH QUARTERLY REVIEW.

N° XCII. JULY 1898.

ART. I.-BODLEY'S 'FRANCE.'

France. By JOHN EDWARD COURTENAY BODLEY. Volume I. Introduction. Book I. The Revolution and Modern France. Book II. The Constitution and the Chief of the State. Volume II., Book III. The Parliamentary System. Book IV. Political Parties. (London and New York, 1898.)

It would have been more in accordance with the actual scope and purpose of these two interesting volumes if Mr. Bodley had given them a more specific name than that which stands first upon their title-page. So general a term leads the intending student to expect an encyclopædic view of the almost innumerable items which make up our complex European civilization, or at least to suppose that the title includes such subjects as the Central Administration, the Judicial and Financial Systems, the Church, the Army, and the essentially modern but all-important question of the mutual relations of Capital and Labour. The present instalment of Mr. Bodley's work is, however, judiciously confined within narrower limits. The volumes before us deal only with the relations of modern France with the Revolution and with the working of French political institutions, and we are promised a further work upon the other elements of a modern State which we have enumerated. We are much mistaken if the perusal of the present portion of Mr. Bodley's onerous and useful task does not whet the reader's appetite for the additional feast in store for him. For the work before us is no dry disquisition on abstract politics. Its writer wields a pointed pen and possesses no mean skill in the disposition of his facts. He is not mastered by the huge mass of particulars he has

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gathered, but he can marshal and handle them with all the skill of a practical literary strategist. The fullness of his information displays itself in the sparkling richness of his pages, and an agreeable vein of humour, kept well under control, runs through them and gives piquancy to his narrative. So pleasant is the guise in which Mr. Bodley presents his mature and well-reasoned conclusions that the reader is as unconscious that he has been studying political philosophy as was M. Jourdain that he habitually spoke in prose. It is a crowning merit that the volumes are written in a spirit of judicial impartiality. Mr. Bodley's is not indeed a work of colourless neutrality, but with full sympathy and admiration for the great nation whose institutions he is describing, the author bases his conclusions on the impregnable rock of ascertained and established fact.

Before we proceed to the consideration of those facts and of the conclusions which Mr. Bodley deduces from them, it may be helpful to determine what are some of the fundamental and essential criteria by which the failure or success of any system of democratic government may be justly estimated. Without venturing upon disputable ground we think it will be universally conceded that a successful government should embody the national genius and spirit, and should at least have a tendency to further and foster high national ideals. It should secure stability for the constitution, and should enlist the services of its ablest citizens in its legislative and administrative departments. It is of no mean importance that its institutions should be able to awaken and to sustain general interest in their proceedings. More than all, by insisting upon the implicit and absolute incorruptibility of its functionaries it should uphold a lofty standard of national honour, and at least should not encourage the growing power of the plutocracy and that adoration of wealth which is the bane and threatens to be the ruin of modern peoples. Of course in the application of such tests it is by the general tendency of established institutions rather than by their action in isolated instances that we shall rightly judge them; and if we find after wide inquiry that the existing régime is largely at fault in every one of the particulars we have enumerated, we cannot escape the conviction that the system of government, however defensible in theory or however well adapted to people under different circumstances, is in the case under investigation a complete failure.

We are anticipating Mr. Bodley's verdict in affirming that the existing constitution of France glaringly fails to satisfy

any one of these conditions. Instead of kindling widespread enthusiasm its parliamentary system is the subject of apathetic indifference, qualified only by supreme contempt for the politicians who manipulate its destinies. Amidst the ranks of public men of all parties one looks in vain for names of eminence in statecraft or intellect; the foremost men of the country are conspicuous by their exclusion from the Senate and the House of Representatives, and the shifting ministries represent no broad political principles, but only personal jealousies and petty squabbles. The taint of pecuniary corruption has scandalized and wrecked successive cabinets, and the violence of party antagonism deters men of high character and sensitive nature from the political arena. Of course there are men of high ability in the French Cabinet, but there are no longer names like those of Thiers or Gambetta around which the nation could rally; and such is the instability of the constitution that it was all but upset by such a charlatan as General Boulanger. The volumes before us furnish the explanation of so singular a condition of affairs.

Mr. Bodley helps us to realize in his Introductory Chapter how great is the difficulty of his self-imposed task, and what are the hazards attending any attempt to forecast the political future where a multitude of conditions, unknown and impossible to foretell, will modify the issue. None save the painstaking student of contemporary history can fully comprehend how intricate are the problems in the government of a nation 'which is the most complex product of civilization on the face of the globe' (p. 5). 'It is writing the history of a kaleidoscope,' said Cardinal Manning to the author; and it needs intimate acquaintance with the numerous parti-coloured pieces separately and with their diversified combinations. Seven laborious years spent alternately in Paris and in the provinces were all too brief for generalizations which should include the brilliant capital and the great manufacturing centres of France, the contrasted communities of Brittany and Provence and the Pyrenees, life in city and châteaux, amongst the vineyards which furnish the wealth of France, and the mining and industrial regions which feed its labourers, and the pastoral territories far removed from the toil and turbulence of the towns-all too brief, when M. Taine conceived his Origines de la France Contemporaine in early manhood, and left them forty years later still incomplete. But in the course of such a permanent residence the true significance of the little things whereof life is so largely composed is gradually revealed.

'Even now,' says Mr. Bodley, 'when I know the French provinces as few foreigners can know them, the familiar scenes of daily life which meet the casual view give me pleasurable sensations as keen as when I was a passing stranger. A bishop blessing little children in the aisles of his cathedral, a group of white-coifed peasant women in a market-place, or a red-legged regiment swinging through a village to the strains of a bugle march, has now for me not merely the sentimental or picturesque interest of former days. I know, indeed, that the lives of many of these people are neither ideal nor idyllic, but I recognize now in these provincials, with all their failings, the true force of France which keeps her in the front rank of nations, in spite of the follies, governmental and otherwise, committed in her beautiful capital' (i. 9).

Nothing short of settled residence in the country for a term of years with undistracted devotion to its study could qualify any one for the investigation of the functions and working of its national institutions. It has been wittily and acutely said that there are two moments for writing: one when the writer knows nothing of his subject, the other when after long study he has mastered it; and Mr. Bodley has striven to combine the freshness of early impressions with the more trustworthy conclusions of wider knowledge.

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'If I had confined myself,' he says, 'to a few instructive tours, alternating sojourns in anti-republican châteaux with visits to provincial towns to see the authorities, I should have got some vivid impressions of contradictory phases of French life, auxiliary to my sedentary studies, without acquiring a competent knowledge of France. itinerant in a strange land, whether lodged in an inn or beneath a hospitable roof, has no real experience of the working of its institutions. The government of the country, the administrative, judicial and fiscal systems, although he has glimpses of their machinery and hears much of their advantages or inconveniences, have no practical purport for him. They only become realities to the student who submits himself to the conditions of existence of the people he is studying. Then as a householder, a tax-payer, or, if needs be, as a litigant, in unrestricted and unfavoured commerce with all classes of the population, he can turn to profit the daily incidents of life, or even its vexations' (i. 23).

It is from the vantage ground thus gained that the writer has taken his deliberate survey, and it is from thence that he traces his long-drawn indictment against the existing system of parliamentary government. He finds the great French nation, once the most joyous and débonnaire race in Europe, weighed down by a spirit of the acutest pessimism. He finds its genial sociability and politeness curdled into political antagonisms, pursued with the coarsest ferocity. He finds its

thirst for glory, which, if it be a malady of noble minds, is one that promotes national esprit de corps, deadened by its dismemberment into groups with separate aims, which distract it from the united pursuit of a common purpose. He finds distributed daily throughout the country tens of thousands of cheap journals, which, expressing every shade of opinion, from the doctrine of the Commune to reactionary clericalism, have one feature in common, the scurrilous aspersion of public men' (i. 40). Nor are these merely the prejudiced strictures of an alien; eminent French writers bear similar testimony that France is in full decadence, and that Frenchmen have lost the pride of nationality, although its more thoughtful statesmen do not accept the humiliating theory that their great democratic nation can only recover its high position under the patronage of absolutist Russia. The one indispensable panacea for the malady under which France languishes will be a 'form of government capable of working well with the permanent institutions of the country. These are the Centralized Administration and Manhood Suffrage, and even though the master whom France is always looking for arrive, he will not enjoy a long reign unless he be apt to combine those elements' (i. 45).

No student of French contemporary history omits to trace its connexion with the Revolution; but we need not follow Mr. Bodley through his rapid sketch of the varying ' appreciations' pronounced by native and foreign authorities on the great upheaval, nor need we dwell with him on M. Taine's audacity in venturing to question its philosophy and its prestige. The one result which it is essential that the reader should bear constantly in mind, wrought by the destructive energy of that nameless orgie, that monstrous fray into which madmen, incapables and miscreants, rushed,' was that anarchy desolated the land—the administration was an absolute chaos, the finances mismanaged, society honeycombed with dissoluteness and corruption. So deep and widespread was the disorder that France could hardly have escaped extinction had not the cry of foreign invasion welded the nation together for resistance, and bred on the field of battle a hero who was also a master of the science of government. The enmity of Europe was the salvation of France.

Mr. Bodley's admiration for the First Napoleon is unbounded, but he gives adequate reasons for maintaining that he was not only the saviour of the Revolution but also the maker of modern France, 'who displayed the most colossal gifts of government and organization ever possessed by a