The Press.
London, England, 1856-08-23 00:00:00

(Second Notice.)

ACCORDING to M. de Toequeville, the revolution
of 1789, viewed philosophically, was but one
epoch in the great revolutionary movement,
which began many years earlier, and has not
yet reached its final consummation. When
the debris was cleared away, and the Empire
stood out in clear outline before the eyes of
Europe, men might have recognised the iden-
tical fabric which had been reared by the later
Bourbons. That they did not do so is simply
attributable to the fact that before 1789 the
system of centralisation was veiled behind ghost
of ancient formalities, customs, and traditions,
and because, also, there existed alongside of it
the two ancient orders of the nobility and the
clergy, who, though completely detached from
its working, were still associated with it in the
national mind, and so interwoven with the
whole social state as to obscure the progress
of the movement by which they were gradually
overshadowed :
Under the social condition of France anterior to the
revolution of 1789, as well as at the present day, there
was no city, town, borough, village, or hamlet in the king-
dom—there was neither hospital, church fabric, religious
house, nor college, which could have an independent will
in the management of its private affairs, or which could
administer its own property according to its own choice.
Then, as now, the executive administration therefore
held the whole French people in tutelage; and if that in-
solent term had not yet been invented, the thing itself
already existed.
Again :
Amongst the nine or ten constitutions which have been
established in perpetuity in France within the last sixty
years, there is one in which it was expressly provided that
no agent of the Administration can be prosecuted before
the ordinary courts of law without having previously ob-
tamed the assent of the Government to such a prosecu-
tion. This clause appeared to be so well devised that
when the constitution to which it belonged was destroyed,
this provision was saved from the wreck, and it has ever
since been carefully preserved from the injuries of revolu-
tions. The administrative body still calls the privilege
sectinid to them by this article one of the great conquests
of 1789; but in this they are mistaken, for under the old
monarchy the Government was not less solicitous than it
is in our own times to spare its officers the unpleasantness
of rendering an account in a court of law, like any other
private citizens. The only essential difference between
the two periods is this : before the revolution the Go-
vernment could only shelter its agents by having recourse
to illegal and arbitrary measures ; since the revolution it
can legally allow them to violate the laws.
Before 1789, all classes in France above the
lowest were growing more and more like one
another. This state of things has found its
legitimate issue in the present condition of
France :

Education and habits of life had already created a thou-
sand other points of resemblance between these two classes
of men. The middle class man was as enlightened as the
noble, and, it deserves to be remarked, his acquirements
were derived from the very same source. The same light
shone upon both. 'Their education hail been equally
theoretical and literary. Paris, which became more and
more the sole preceptor of France, had ended by giving to
all minds one common form and action.
At the end of the eighteenth century no doubt some
difference was still perceptible between the manners of the
nobility and those of the middle class, for nothing assimi-
lates more slowly than that surface of society which we
call manners; at bottom, however, all men above the rank
of the common people were alike; they hail the same ideas,
the same habits, the same tastes • they indulged in the
same pleasures, read the same bode, and spoke the same
... . .