The Express.
London, England, 1861-01-26 00:00:00

(Stamped, ld. Additional.) (T WOPENCE .

FRANCE.

-4- ---
RECEPTION OF ABBE LACORDAIRE AT
THE ACADEMY
(now out OWN

oowironarr.)
PARK FRIDAY MORNING.

M. de Laconlaire began his speech by thanking
the Academy for electing him, and more particu-
larly for having chosen him as the successor of M.
de Tooqueville. Then proceeding at once to the
duty imposed by the rules of the Academy upon
every new member, of pronouncing an eulogy
upon his immediate predecessor, he described M.
de Tooqueville as a man who bad died too young to
pekes time au accomplice of his glory," and who,
,whether as regards his ago or his wors, had left
behind him but an "unfinished edifice." Notwith-
standing this preliminary qualification, be pro-
ceeded to laud the memory of M. de Tooqueville in
glowing terms, which, with every appearance of
sincerity, came fully up to the academic standard.
He was a man "superior to his century ;" a poli-
tical man who belonged to no party. He was not
a legitimist ; for, "although his soul shrank from
destruction, and be could smoothing that had been
secular and glorious perish without heaving an
eloquent sigh, as soon as this debt of his generous
nature was paid he looked straight before him
towards the future with aublenching eye. He
looked among the living /or summon to the
dead, and the Women& of • ehivairesm
immutability never prevented him from
sowing good sued in the open furrow."
He was not an entire partisan of that " liberal
opinion born of the 18th century, strengthened in
the first drankeenees of our national assemblies,
and then extinguished, or rather set to sleep, by the
oppressive breath of oar immortal victories,' be-
came in this opinion there was an irreligious
element for which the monk Lacordaire says M. de
Tooqueville bad no sympathy. This observatiou is
followed by a comparison between M. de Tooque-
ville's opinions on Christianity and those of Mon-
tesquieu' as expressed in the 24th book of his
Esprit des Lois, but which is to the advantage of the
modern writer in this respect, that he had not, like
Montesquieu, any Litres Pavanes to!repent of. As
he was neithera thorough republican, nor a thorough
royalist, so neither was he devoted beyond measure
to the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe, which
perpetuated "in another form, between a new peo-
ple and its new masters, the class division which far-
merly existed between the nobility and the ems-
monalty." Neither bad he given his whole soul to
the rising tide of democracy. He did not regard
the people as "the natural sovereign of humanity,
the most perfect legislator, the best magistrate,
the incarnation of the idea of au honest man, the
most humane of all masters and father,, the
greatest captain in battle, and the best eouncillorin
good or evil days."
After thus eloquently showing what were not
M. de Tocqueville's opinions, M. de Lscordaire
Martians from any attempt to define exactly what
they were, and proceeds to describe the simplicity
of his country life at his family estate in Nor-
mandy, his unanimous election to the Legislative
Assembly in 1848, and his reluctant and doubtful
adhesion to the republic' which he served for a
time as Minister of Foreign Affairs.
A very long passage in the speech is devoted to
M. de Tooquev. 's book on America, and the union
in that new country of the " liberty "—of late made
small account of in France—with the most perfect
"equality," is greatlyymised. The only allusion
to existing. unhappy circumstances in the United
/hates is in a phrase which states that M. de
Tooqueville denounced "that inhuman and impious
plague of slavery for which fifteen states are now
ready to sacrifice the glory and the very existence
of their country."
In speaking of M. de Tooqueville's qualified
though great admiration of American institutions,
the orator alluded to the excesses of democracy,
which invoke as a counterpoise "a despotism which
is unlimited because all its acts are done in the
name of the people—in the name of the security of
all, but to the prejudice of the liberty of every in-
dividual."

In his peroration the Abbe made a most eloquent
allusion to the members of the body to which he is
now admitted. In an elegantly turned phrase he re-
gretted that usage prevented him from speaking
the praises of the living as he had done of the
dead. This sacrifice to conventionalitieb was painful
to him in an assembly wherein he saw before him
the direct heirs of the first literary glories of modern
times—" Orators who for thirty years had been
triumphant at the tribune or the bar (Berryer) ;
poets who had discovered new vibrations of har-
mony in thoughts and words (Laniartine) ; histo-
rians who bad- disinterred our national antiquities
and told to this generation the courage of our
fathers in the camp and the forum (Thiers) ; pub-
licists who had written in favour of right against
the regrets of despotism and the dreams of Utopia
(St. Marc Girardin) ; statesmen who had governed
stormy assemblies by their word and had brought
nothing away from power but the consciousness of
having worthily wielded it (Guizot) ; philosophers
who had revived the school of Plato, St. Augus-
tine, Descartes, and Bossuet, and inscribed their
names in the great army of eloquent wisdom (Mon-
talembert) ; writers wholiad cultivated perfection
of style with idolatry, and whose art and cunning
was not paled by age (Scribe)."
Again returning to K de Tocqueville, he spoke
of him as a man who, like Chateaubriand, when
he exclaimed, "No ; I will never believe that
I am writing amidst the ruins of the monarchy,"
might Lave said, "No ; I will never believe that I
am writing amidst the ruins of liberty." Once
more thanking the Academy for his own election,
he declared that he considered the members as
"the senate of thought and the prophetic represen-
tation of his country's future," and, therefore, that
he was essentially called to take his seat by the
country itself, which saw in him " the symbol of
liberty accepted and fortified by religion.
M. Guizot commenced his reply to the noviciate
by alluding in the following terms to the striking
fact that lie is a protestant, while M. de Lacordaire
is not only a Roman catholic but a monk :
" What would have happened, air, if you and I
had met six centuries ago, and if we had then been
able to exercise a reciprocal influence upon our
destinies ? I have no wish to awaken recollections
of discord and violence, but I should not respond
to the sentiments of the generous public which is
listening to us, or to those of the great public be-
ycind these walls, which takes such an intense
interest in your election, if I were not, like the
rest of the world, proud and delighted at the splen-
did contrast between the spectacle which we are
now witnessing and that which we should have
seen under similar circumstances in former times.

Six hundred years ago, sir, if my fellow-religionists
had met you, they would have assailed you furiously
as an odious persecutor ; while those of your per-
suasion, ardent to enflame the zeal of the con-
querors against heretics, would have cried out upon
us, Strike, strike them all, the Lord will know his
own.' You have it at heart, air, and I am far from
contesting your arguments—you have it at heart
to clear the memory of the illustrious founder of
the order to which you belong from such barbarities.
It is, in fact, not him, but to his century and to all
parties during many centuries, that the blame of
this intolerance is to be imputed. I am not in the
habit of speaking of my own time and of my own
contemporaries in terms of complaisant admira-
tion, but I cannot refrain from expressing the joy,
nay I will say the pride, I feel at the spectacle
which the Academy presents this day. You and I,
sir, are the living and fortunate witnesses of the
sublime progress which has been achieved in the
understanding and respect of justice, conscience,
right, and those divine laws, so long contemned,
which regulate the mutual duties of men with re-
gard to God and faith in God. lkio one now

strikes another in the name of Goil. No one pre-
sumes to usurp the rights and anticipate the decrees
of the Sovereign Judge."
The rest of M. Guizot's speech will not in all
probability be thought striking beyond the sphere
of those, and those must necessarily be Frenchmen
alone, who appreciate and admire the cold correct-
ness of his style. He called to mind the well-
known fact that M. de Laoordaire was in his youth
a member of the Paris bar, and narrated the fol-
lowing anecdote :—" Thirty-six years ago an emi-
nent man, your guide then and now your brother
and mine on these benches, M. Berryer, who
was even then as he is at the present day the pride
and glory of that bar at which you werea tyro, said
to you ; lam afraid of your rich and wandering
imagination, the ardent temerity of your thoughts,
and the exuberance of your language ; the inde-
pendence and passionate contests of the bar are not
suited to the great natural abilities which you
poises'. You want the control of a strong and se-
vere authority. Go into the cbnrch, and you will
become an eminent preacher.' This advice was
followed, and a few years later M. Berryer listened
with admiration to the eloquence of his former
pupil in the pulpits of the Sthnialas College and the
cathedral of Notre Dame."

Onizot afterwards indulged in a very long
and somewhat bitter invective against democracy,
with the views of which he evidently thought that
both M. de Imeonlairs, and his predawn= M. am
Tooquwellb, were very serionaly alfeeted, radar
the complimentary tone which is traditional in the
Academy, he congratulated M. de Lacordaire for
having on two occasions in his life—in 1831, when
he was a writer in the Astray, and in 1848, when
he sat on the benches of the Legislative Assembly—
pulled up short when he was going too rapidly down
to the democratic abyss. He skipped rapidly over
the Papal question, by admitting with Abbe; Laoor-
dab's) that " if good intentions sufficed to govern
men" Pius IX. might have been the liberator of
Italy, but was sure that the new member had not
spoken his whole mind ou the subject, because the
Academy was not the place for such a discussion.
After once more denouncing democracy as a poli-
tical school which "respected and acknowledged no
rights but its own," he concluded a speech couched,
as far as it is political, in most vague and general
terms, and not committing the orator to any
opinions as to the leading facts of the hour,
by a review of M. de Tocqueville's two greab
works, " Ddmocratie en Amdrique" and "L'Ancien
&kiss, et Is R4volution." The scope*, his gnu-
meut was somewhat too transparently this—thA
M. de Tooqueville, in his later and more perfect
work, corrected the errors which he bad imbibed
during his American travels, and, under the
guidance of experience, approached more nearly
More his death to right opinions—namely, the
opinions of M. Ouizot.

HUNGARY.

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