The Sun.
London, England, 1863-09-24 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

Les Institutions Politiques, Judiclaires, et Adminis-
tratires d'Angleterre. Par Charles de Franque-
ville, Auditeur au Conseil d'Etat, Avocet ala
Cour Imperiale. 1 Tome, pp. 559. Paris:
Hachette et Cie.
A distinguished Frenchman has, in this singularly
interesting and exceedingly able work, taken not
only a very tolerant but a most generous view of
our English Institutions. M. de Franqueville is a
man of note amongst our Gallic neighbours. This
his very position indicates. He is Auditor of the
Council of State, besides being a barrister at law
in practice and a man of letters with some repute.
tion. He has enjoyed the advantage of mixing in
English society as well as in French society. When
he writes, as in the volume under notice, about our
insular institutions, "Political, Judicial, and Ad-
ministrative," he writes, no doubt, after the accu-
mulation of large stores of knowledge in regard to
those institutions from books, but he writes also, it
should be especially borne in mind, from his own
vigilant, sustained, and thoughtful observation.
The treatise here presented by him to our consi-
deration—for in a philosophical sense the work is
a genuine treatise in its character, a treatise we:l-
- throughout, ample in its scope, and
having the broadest, and, so to speak, the most
massive principles for its very foundation—the
treatise here submitted to our examination by
M. de Franqueville has been quite manifestly
from beginning to end, a labour of love with the
writer of it, Like his illustrious fellow-country-
man, the Count de Montalembert, in these particu'
Lars, if in no others, M. de Franqueville, besides
being an earnest, a conscientious, and a devoted
ultramontanist, is, with the whole fervour of a
most generous nature, in his political sympathies,
a thoroughgoing Anglo-maniac. A time was when
the cultivation of a frivolous and besotted Anglo-
mania was the passing passion of the hour among
a certain class of French politicians. Outwardly
it manifested itself, this tendency towards the imita-
tion of English ways and methods of doing things,
by the adoption of some of the more flagrant absurdi-
ties then prevalent on this side of the Channel in the
way of costume, as well as in the adoption of some of
our most conspicuous social and domestic habitudes.
These extravagances, occurring (it Play be recalled
to mind by even the most superficially instructed
student of modern history), during the evil days of
the first, that is, of the Great French Revolution.
While yet in England the vulgar notion of a French-
man was almost identical with the idealised cari-
cature of that personage painted in Hogarth's
picture of Calais Gate, a caricature afterwards
exaggerated to the most grotesque extravagance of
ridicule in the Frog-eating Spindle-shanks r,our-
trayed in the gaudily-coloured etchings of Gilray
and Rowlandson—multitudes of people on the op-
posite side of the Channel, prominent politicians
many of them, were acting, it may be, in a not less
mistaken, but certainly also in a far more
generous spirit : wearing among other things
the buckskins and top-boots, then forming
a portion of the ordinary garb of Englishmen;
carrying in their right hand a bulbous-headed
walking-stick ; having at their heels a
tamed, though ferocious-looking specimen of the
genus bulldog ; in their hours of conviviality, it
may be, some of them exchanging the savoury ra-
gout for the tough beef-steak, or the nip of absinthe
for the equally nauseous flavour of gin-and-bitters.
It was not that these earlier and merely superficial
Anglo-maniacs hated us less (that is to say, than
Englishmen and Frenchmen were then mutually
taught, idiotically to hate each other) but that they
hated their own rulers, their own institutions, their
own Government more. There was a malignity in
that Anglo - mania, though the evidences of
it were nothing short of the ridiculous. In
noble contrast to the Anglo-mania of past days in
France, is an intellectual and philosophical Anglo-
mania, if such it can justly be called, like that
manifested by a rarely gifted man of genius like
the Count.de Montalembert, or, again as the work
to which we are here desirous of directing the
attention of our fellow-countryman, admirably well
evidences, by an enlightened and accomplished ob•
server like M. de Franqueville. Subscribing to
Buffon's famous axiom, "la style c'est l'hoinme," we
I would here, before adding another syllable in regard
to the goodly volume before us, give in the way of
illustration at leasnone brief extract, as an average
exemplar of the way in which M. de Franqueville's
work is written. Remarking upon the ex-
traordinary difference discoverable at a glance
between the French and the English administrator
our author goes on to remark :—" Li quelques rares
employes, d'un flues facile, d'une exquise politesse,
d'une inepuisable complaisance pour les citoyens
qui, par le plus grand des hasards, ont affaire a une
administration publique. Point de cerbere ran-
gorge dans une cravate blanche, le con orne de la
ctiaine d'argent traditionelle; un simple gentleman
en redingote fait fonction d'huissier ; it parait sur-
prise, mail non pas mecontent, d'apercevoir nu
etranger, et it s'empresse de se mettre a see ordres.
Il est assurement plus facile de voir un minister
d'Angleterre qu'un chef de division franeais. Les
bureaux sont propros et nets. Oa y voit peu de
dossiers, encore moins de cartons. Une petite cor-
beille d'osier contient trois ou quatre feuilles de
papier etoneees de so trouver ensemble, et destieees
i etre pliees le soir, puffs entourees d'un petit
fil rouge [how delicately the red tape is
hinted at l], avant de retourner i poussiere
qui les attend. Presque tontes lee admi-
nistrations sent reunies, i Whitehall, dans un
metric e eeiment dont la vue seule est plus eloquente
que tous lee discours, Point de ces etiquettes ma-
jestueuses, sur lesquelles le mot bureau aime, chez
nous, a staler sa toute-paissance ; de petites plaques
de cuivre bien discretes se desputent la partie in-
ferieure de trois portes etroites, et indiquent les
noms des ministeres, dont Biles annoncent l'entree-
Le temple de la bureaucratic anglaise est moles
grand que lintel parieculier de l'un des ministres
Peris." Time will come, however, M. de Pranque;
vine, when in regard to that last peculiarityol
ours, we are all cherishing the hope of being able
to say with Moliere's Medecin Malgre Lui--a
Meanine
have changed all that" completely ! g
the restricted character and unimposing ap-
pearance of our public offices. As
our
author himself might learn any day, when
next he happens to be over
here in London by
strolling down in the direction of Whitehall and
remarking the extent of the clearance there made
to the west of Downing-street. Excellent though
the arrangement of this work of M. de Franque-
ville'a undoubtedly is, in the way of affording its
reader a comprehensive and comprehensible survey
of our English Institutions—our institutions at once
political, judicial, and administrative—it is upon
the liberality of the whole tone of it that we
would here particularly be understood to pro-
nounce our opinion--not carelessly, or casually,
or out of mere idle compliment, but with
an emphasis of approval to which, according,
to our thinking, that same liberality of tone
so eminently entitles it. Divided into four books,
the volume considers, in the first, The State and the
Church; in the second, Justice and Legislation;
in the third, the Central Administration; in the
fourth end last, the Local Administration. Than
which division of his theme, into four quarters, none
could by possibility ensure to the treatise more in-
stant lucidity or more ayeunetrical completeness.
a
Subdividing the first book again into four chapters,
M. de Franqueville comments in the first upon our
Constitution in its entirety. In the second, he con-
siders the Executive Power under halt a dozen
sections—l, the Sovereign ;2, the Royal Family;
3, the Royal House; 4, the Civil List; 5, the Privy
Council ; 6, the Cabinet. Chapter three relates
in five sections to-1. The Parliament; 2. The
Nobility ; 3. The House of Lords ; 4. The House
of Commons; 5. The Bills introduced into the Legis-
lature, and there by " passing" transformed into
enactments, Chapter the fourth and last of the first
book relates, in its turn, under two heads, first,
to Protestantism, and, secondly, to what is natu-
rally of especial interest to the writer as a Catholic,
to the Catholic religion in the United Kingdom,
nay to a certain extent even it might be said, in
the whole vast area of the Bietish empire.
A couple of chapters, he finds sufficient for his
second bo,:,k cr diTizion. The earlier of the two re-