Victorian Political Thought on France and the French

Victorian Political Thought on France and the French Georgios Varouxakis Victorian Political Thought on France and the...

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Victorian Political Thought on France and the French Georgios Varouxakis

Victorian Political Thought on France and the French

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Victorian Political Thought on France and the French Georgios Varouxakis Lecturer in Politics Aston University Birmingham

© Georgios Varouxakis 2002 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–80389–2 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Varouxakis, Georgios, 1966Victorian political thought on France and the French/Georgios Varouxakis. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–80389–2 1. Great Britain – Foreign relations – France. 2. Public opinion – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 3. Political science – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 4. Great Britain – Intellectual life – 19th century. 5. Great Britain – Foreign relations – 1837–1901. 6. France – Foreign relations – Great Britain. 7. France – Foreign relations – 19th century. 8. France – Foreign public opinion, British. I. Title. DA47.1.V27 2001 327.41044–dc21 10 11

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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To the memory of my father, Emmanouel G. Varouxakis, deceased suddenly and prematurely a month after I completed this book, and to my mother, Chryssoula Varouxakis, the Cretan farmers who worked very hard to enable me to play the Euro-intellectual in London, Paris, Cologne, Amsterdam.

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Contents Acknowledgements

ix

List of Abbreviations

xi

Epigraph

xii

1

Introduction: Victorian ‘Public Moralists’, Ethnocentrism and the View of France

2

Was France ‘the Most Civilised of Nations’? I A vague question, a vague concept … II Mill on civilization III England and France IV Arnold on civilization V Arnold on civilization in France and England

31 31 35 43 47 51

3

French Politics Through British ‘Glasses’ I The revolution of 1830 and the July monarchy II The revolution of 1848 and the Second Republic III From Louis Napoleon’s coup to the beginnings of the Third Republic

57 58 66 80

4

French National Character and French Politics I Nations, races and national character II French national character and politics

103 105 117

5

Grandeur and Frenchness: Nationalism, International Relations and French National Character I In the shadow of Bonaparte: French national character and international politics, 1830–48 II The revolution of 1848 and the Second Republic

131

vii

1

133 149

viii Contents

III Caesarism and the world: British thinkers on the foreign policy of the Second Empire IV ‘Francophobes’, ‘Francophiles’ and the Franco-Prussian war

152 156

Epilogue: La France éternelle? Comparing with Other ‘Glasses’

164

Notes

171

Bibliography

204

Index

218

Acknowledgements The first debt of the author of a book like this is to the editors of the Collected Works of the thinkers concerned. The reader will become fully aware of the extent of my debt to the respective editors from the frequency of references to their editions. Still, I do need to single out here some of them: R.H. Super for the Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold; John M. Robson and his colleagues at the Mill Project of the University of Toronto for The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill; and Norman St John-Stevas for The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot. They have made the very conception of a book like this possible and its execution a much more congenial task than it would otherwise have been. Many thanks are also due to Cecil Y. Lang for The Letters of Matthew Arnold; to Charles Richard Sanders, Kenneth J. Fielding and Clyde de L. Ryals for The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle; and to J. Rufus Fears for the Selected Writings of Lord Acton. Among scholars, friends and colleagues, my greatest debt is to Fred Rosen, who guided my first steps in the early 1990s and made those years at UCL the most productive of my life so far. The wisdom of his scholarly advice was only matched by his unbounded generosity and kindness. His support since then has been by no means less vital. I am very grateful to Gregory Molivas for having been, during the last 11 years, such as indispensable friend and such an inspiring example in moral standards, unwarranted humility and undaunting perseverance in the face of more adversity than the reader wants to know. Paschalis M. Kitromilides, my teacher in the history of political thought at the University of Athens, will always have my deep gratitude for inspiring me to follow what turned out to be my calling. This book owes its very existence to a conversation with John Gaffney in a Birmingham pub, and his support and encouragement after the initial conception of the idea was also very important. I am most grateful to him for all this. Michael Sutton has been an extremely valuable friend whose advice I cannot dispense with any more than his refreshingly Irish, gentlemanly company. This book owes more to his wise suggestions since it was first conceived than his disarming modesty will allow him to realize, and even more to his very presence at Aston. I am also very grateful to David J. Howarth for all the great times we had together during our years at Aston, as well as for the innumerable things I learnt from him. ix

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Acknowledgements

No matter what he thinks, he is a ‘cosmopolitan intellectual’ par excellence. While at Aston University I have been fortunate to have had many meetings and conversations with colleagues from the neighbouring University of Birmingham. These have increased my fascination with the topics discussed in this book and have also taught me a great deal. I am grateful to Jeremy Jennings, Peter Lassman, Martyn Cornick, Ceri Crossley, John Breuilly, Jennifer Birkett and several others in the University of Birmingham for much more than they can imagine. I have incurred great debts for support of all kinds to the following people: Michael Avgoustianakis, James H. Burns, John W. Burrow, Gregory Claeys, Janet Coleman, Stephen Conway, Bernard Cottret, Roger Crisp, Michael Drolet, Cécile Fabre, Mikaël Garandeau, Douglas Johnson, Libby Jukes, Cécile Laborde, Justine Lacroix, Sheila Lecoeur, Athena S. Leoussi, Jonathan Riley, Philip Schofield, Cordula Schumann, Nikos Sitaropoulos and Geraint Williams. I am grateful to Ann Marangos for her hard work with my typescript and for her patience. Much of the research for this book was supported by grants, scholarships or fellowships from the following bodies: The Sophia Saripolou Foundation of the University of Athens; the Central Research Fund of the University of London; the Royal Historical Society; the Scouloudi Historical Awards of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London; and the Leventis Foundation. I am deeply grateful to them.

List of Abbreviations Collected Letters: Carlyle, Thomas (1970–85), The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (Duke–Edinburgh edition), 12 vols, General Editor Charles Richard Sanders, co-editor Kenneth J. Fielding, Durham, NC. Collected Letters: Carlyle, Thomas (1987– ), The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (Duke–Edinburgh edition), senior editors Clyde de L. Ryals and Kenneth J. Fielding, Durham, NC and London. Critical and Miscellaneous Essays: Carlyle, Thomas (1899), Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 5 vols, London. CW: Mill, John Stuart (1963–91), The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, 33 vols, general editor F.E.L. Priestley and subsequently John M. Robson, Toronto and London. Letters: Arnold, Matthew (1996–2000), The Letters of Matthew Arnold, 4 vols, ed. Cecil Y. Lang, Charlottesville and London. OC: Tocqueville, Alexis de (1951– ), Oeuvres, Papiers et Correspondances d’Alexis de Tocqueville, édition definitive sous la direction de J.-P. Mayer, Paris. Prose Works: Arnold, Matthew (1960–77), The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, 11 vols, ed. by R.H. Super, Ann Arbor. Selected Writings: Acton, [First Baron], John Emerich Edward DalbergActon (1985–88), Selected Writings of Lord Acton, 3 vols, ed. J. Rufus Fears, Indianapolis. The Letters: Macaulay, Thomas Babington (1974–81), The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay, ed. Thomas Pinney, Cambridge. The Works: Carlyle, Thomas (1897–1904), The Works of Thomas Carlyle, 30 vols (centenary edition, edited with an introduction by H.D. Traill), London. Works: Bagehot, Walter (1965–86), The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, 15 vols, ed. Norman St John-Stevas, London.

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The number of contrasts between England and France affects so many things, and affects those things so much, that as soon as we cross the French border into any other foreign country ‘one of the first and most natural observations is what an English look things have’. Nearest to us as France is in space, in essence it is farthest from us. (Walter Bagehot) Or, quel Français ne se méprend sans cesse sur l’Angleterre? Quel Anglais ne méconnait pas la France ou les Français? Peu de nations s’étant fréquentées autant que les nôtres se seront ignorées plus radicalemant. (‘Now, which Frenchman does not incessantly misapprehend England? Which Englishman does not misjudge France or the French? Few nations, having been associated with each other as much as ours, will be more radically ignorant about each other.’) (Charles Maurras)1

1 Introduction: Victorian ‘Public Moralists’, Ethnocentrism and the View of France

I wish one could get some better knowledge of the general French mind, short of living there. Emerson once remarked to me on the oddness of our total want of apprehension, – our absolute incapacity for sympathy with them. I look on from afar with vague respect and interest – but no reading helps me even a step towards the threshold of the temple of their mind. What can one do? Must one give it up? (Harriet Martineau, letter of 29 July 1844) The chief fruit which I carried away from the society I saw, was a strong and permanent interest in Continental Liberalism, of which I ever afterwards kept myself au courant, as much as of English politics: a thing not at all usual in those days with Englishmen, and which had a very salutary influence on my development, keeping me free from the error always prevalent in England … of judging universal questions by a merely English standard. ( John Stuart Mill, Autobiography)1 This book examines the perceptions and representations of France and the French in the writings of some politically sophisticated members of British society during what Elie Halévy has referred to as ‘that great epoch during which the British people cherished the splendid illusion that they had discovered in a moderate liberty, and not for themselves alone but for every nation that would have the wisdom to follow their example, the secret of moral and of political stability’.2 Halévy’s remark 1

2


offers a justification for the distinctly political focus of this enquiry. Given that ‘the British people’ conceived their ‘splendid illusion’ primarily in political terms, the aim of this book is to highlight how the view of France and comparisons with France with regard to politics affected, reinforced or challenged, British self-perceptions. As one of the things the Victorians (or, at any rate, political thinkers and writers among the Victorians) took most pride in was that they held ‘the secret of moral and of political stability’ thanks to their unique understanding and application of a certain idea of liberty (Halévy’s ‘moderate liberty’), this book dissects the role of comparisons with the foreign country par excellence (the anti-England, to paraphrase Michelet), in the formation, development and shape of the beliefs concerned. Parts of the book (especially Chapters 3 and 4) will also chart the growing belief among the intellectual élites of Victorian society that their ‘secret’ of liberty was not going to travel as easily as they and their foreign admirers had hoped it would. They came to believe more and more that the ‘national characters’ of other nations might incapacitate them from enjoying the boon the British were enjoying, and that there might be something in the ‘English national character’3 that held the secret to the enjoyment of that moderate and orderly liberty. As young Bagehot put it in 1852, the failures of the Continental revolutions of 1848 had taught people that Burke was right, that politics was a matter of sense and circumstances; and, moreover, Bagehot added, that by far the most important of these circumstances was ‘national character’. It will be one of the themes highlighted here that the French revolution of 1848 and its aftermath (culminating in Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état) was one of the most important influences on British political thinking in the nineteenth century. And as Morley was to observe later, it affected more than one aspect of British intellectual attitudes, in some cases even to an extent that the first French Revolution had not done. Identifying the thoughts and utterances of certain people as ‘political thought’ requires some explanation, and the selection in the Victorian context has its peculiarities.4 With the exception of Mill, none of the thinkers discussed in this book has undisputed ‘canonical’ status in the history of political thought or philosophy, though some come closer to it than others. Stefan Collini’s felicitous term ‘public moralists’ may be a good way of describing the ‘unusually articulate individuals’5 whose pronouncements on France and the French are examined in this book. And I hope I might be excused for using sometimes the term ‘intellectuals’ in the sense it acquired later, although it was not used at the time and certainly did not serve as a self-description of the people referred to.

Victorian ‘Public Moralists’, Ethnocentrism and the View of France 3

If any term did, it was ‘sage’, for some of them, Carlyle first and foremost. But then ‘sage’ would leave out people like Mill, who was decidedly not a sage, opined Arnold – and later scholars agreed.6 Nor would people like Bagehot or Nassau Senior fit in that category or have any pretensions to doing so. Senior was, as Bagehot put it, the closest England had to what on the Continent was called ‘a publicist’: ‘He devoted much of his time to temporary politics, but has always dealt with them in an abstract and philosophical manner. He always endeavoured to deal with the permanent aspects of them, he addressed only thoughtful men, he was a “didactic member” of the republic of letters; and this we suppose is the idea of a publicist.’ (And his style left a lot to be desired, would add others.)7 As for Bagehot himself, he was ‘a journalist with neither the time, nor much inclination, for the creation of systems’. Which does not change the fact that (or which may be the reason why) for some, he was ‘The Greatest Victorian’.8 James Fitzjames Stephen was neither a ‘sage’ nor a systematic philosopher either, but he was, as his brother Leslie remarked (and Collini highlighted), ‘one of the circle … which forms the higher intellectual stratum of London society; and is recruited from all who have made a mark in any department of serious work’.9 Acton and Macaulay were primarily historians (very different from each other, Acton despising Macaulay and his ‘school’) but also important figures of the Victorian intelligentsia through their connections and influence. And Morley ‘was not an original thinker, but his thinking is well worth studying in so far as it does involve the interaction of several major schools of thought’.10 However, selection is slightly easier to make and justify in a book like this than in a general history of Victorian political thought, as there is a major additional criterion on offer. Interest in France in terms of politics and at least some distinctive contributions to public debate about France, French politics, and Franco-British comparisons provide the necessary qualifications for inclusion in this book. Of course, this criterion is more useful in justifying who is included than in accounting for omissions; some eclecticism is inevitable, as there are always more people who could legitimately claim one’s attention. This is why pronouncements on France, comparisons with France, and views on Britain’s relations with France uttered by several other figures, some major and some lesser, will be dispersed throughout the book, as they complement the picture that this work aspires to paint. The criterion is the significance, sometimes representativeness and some other times originality, and sophistication of what each of the authors who receive some attention here wrote on France. Those like Matthew Arnold (1822–88), Walter Bagehot (1826–77) and

4


John Stuart Mill (1806–73), who wrote on France, the ‘French character’ and French politics so much and with such original or authoritative a voice, as to have something of interest to say no matter what the subject under discussion, will be omnipresent in all chapters. Others will have a very prominent place in one or two chapters but a lesser presence in others, depending on the topic. Nassau William Senior (1790–1864) cannot but have pride of place when foreign affairs are concerned (Chapter 5), but he simply did not have that much of interest to say on subjects such as civilization for instance. On foreign affairs he was a competent judge indeed, by Victorian standards something of a specialist. And something that adds value to his pronouncements on France is what Bagehot saw as his peculiar choice of title to the remembrance of posterity: his volumes of ‘journals’ and ‘conversations’ with French and other Continental statesmen, political thinkers and other important people, whom he approached with the right letters of introduction from home during his many journeys to their respective countries.11 Such conversations and enquiries did no harm at all to his competence and credentials to cover foreign affairs for The Economist for several years. James Fitzjames Stephen (1829–94) was not particularly interested in France per se, or any foreign country as such, and least of all in the opinion of foreigners on England. Yet he is significant for the purposes of this book exactly because of his reactions to other thinkers’ pronouncements on France and Anglo-French comparisons, and because of the interesting place he holds in Victorian discussions of Englishness, patriotism, and their relation to liberalism. He was one of the most consistent, vehement and, some think, influential critics of what Arnold and Mill were up to, in their cultural criticism and in their uses of France for its purposes, and was hurt, no less, by what he saw as their lack of patriotic attachment and unfairness to the object of his adoration.12 Similar considerations of representativeness and balance of diverging outlooks would dictate the inclusion of someone like Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), had there been no other reasons. It would be distorting to focus too much on the views on France of people like Mill and Arnold only, because, no matter how critical, they were seen to be partial to France. In any case, the man who was soon to become the author of a history of The French Revolution, was, as he was writing to Mill in 1832, ‘very curious about France’.13 The more he satisfied his curiosity, though, the less he liked the ‘ever talking, ever gesticulating French’. His sympathies were firmly to the north-east of France, with Germany and the Germans. In this, Carlyle was in the mainstream. On the contrary, Mill’s and Arnold’s tediously reiterated exhortations to look to France for inspiration was the exception.14


Others were neither ‘Francophile’ nor ‘Francophobe’ in their feelings or tastes, but simply had a keen interest in the country opposite and in its politics. Thus, Bagehot deserves and receives a lot of attention in this book, as he contributed some of the most memorable Victorian writings on French politics, to say nothing of his immortalized depiction of the differences between the ‘national characters’ of the ‘clever’yet-unsuccessful French and the ‘stupid’-yet-successful English. Lord Acton (1834–1902), ‘the most prominent Catholic intellectual and publicist in Victorian England’,15 was, arguably, one of the most cosmopolitan and Continent-oriented Britons ever. No matter how sporadic and epigrammatic his utterances sometimes were, his insights are often remarkable. Besides his historical work on France and other Continental countries (including what one would call contemporary history), his familiarity and personal and family connections with Continental European statesmen, diplomats and intellectuals were such, that he always knew a lot about the contemporary politics of Continental countries before others did, and was often seen as playing a crucial role behind the scenes, and influencing people as important as Gladstone. Given this cosmopolitan background and outlook Acton did receive his fair share of what Mill and Arnold had grown used to receiving long before they died, from the ‘leading journal’, where one reads in his obituary ‘that perhaps one of his imperfections was a “want of national fibre”’.16 William Rathbone Greg (1809–81), Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–59) and John Morley (1838–1923) all wrote interesting things about France or contributed useful Franco-British comparisons in their books, articles in Reviews, or correspondence, and we will come across their contributions on various occasions in different chapters. As John Burrow has noted, one of the things which places Macaulay (as well as Stubbs) ‘emphatically in the Whig tradition is that the chief foil to English political development, the cautionary tale which in modern history replaces Rome as history’s greatest warning, is France.’17 John Morley ended up, by the time of the Franco-Prussian War, being decidedly pro-German (which he remained until 1914, when he resigned from the cabinet on that count). But this does not mean that he was not interested in France – how could this be the case with ‘Mill’s representative on earth’? In fact, in a letter to Harrison in 1874 he described his principal claim to distinction as an author up to then as having consisted in ‘writing about dead Frenchmen’ (referring, obviously, to his series of portraits of eighteenth-century French authors and statesmen).18 And he (as well as many others) made ample use of the examples offered by the new politics of Third-Republican France for the

6


purposes of domestic British politics in the early 1870s.19 As for Frederic Harrison (1831–1923), his unqualified Francophilia gives him an undisputed claim to our attention. For Harrison and the other British Comtists (Beesly and Congreve primarily) Paris was, decidedly, the ‘centre of civilization’, and France the country on which the future of ‘the West’ depended most. Among all the thinkers discussed in this book, they were the most consistently Francophile, jusqu’au bout.20 This book does not purport to be exhaustive of what Victorian public moralists said or thought about France. There are several aspects of their discussions of things French which do not receive here as much attention as someone else would wish to accord them. And some themes indirectly related to the subjects of this book, such as discussions of the French Revolution in British thought, or views of France and the French in British literature, have been competently written about already. In fact, this latter remark leads to one of the main reasons for the existence of this book. While there has been an excellent literature on British views of France, it has focused mainly on various literary genres, but references to political thinkers and political texts are either absent or cursory. Thus, it is rather typical to find, in one of the best existing contributions to this field, statements such as the assertion that Matthew Arnold ‘was the first “serious” author, apart from Carlyle to have expressed interest in France since the Revolution’.21 No matter what one may mean by ‘“serious” author’, this statement may have to be qualified. There was a ‘serious’ author (if anything, too serious and too earnest some times) who had a compulsive interest in France before Arnold, and, in fact, played a significant role in Carlyle’s interest in France (constructive as well as destructive role, it has to be said!22). I am referring, of course, to J.S. Mill, who is either absent, or mentioned very briefly in all such general accounts. Also, unless his deliberate playfulness in his mid-twenties disqualifies him from the status of a serious thinker, Bagehot displayed a keen interest in France in his journalism from the aftermath of Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état onwards (which gives him temporal priority over Matthew Arnold’s prose writings).23 More generally, as existing accounts do not focus on politics and political thought, it is inevitable that even when they do pay attention to various utterances of this or that political thinker no full picture can emerge from them of the distinctly political ‘certaine idée de la France’ which this book aspires to offer. To go back to him, then, the interest of Matthew Arnold in France was immense, and his conversance with French literature, criticism and thought (to say nothing of French education), impressive.24 And, as he


put it in the last years of his life, ‘[t]o France I have always felt myself powerfully drawn.’25 Though it has attracted incomparably less attention than in Arnold’s case, the same was true of Mill. The editors of his Collected Works have calculated that the one word which appears more times than any other in the author’s oeuvre is ‘France’.26 And he also went even further than Arnold in his expression of his feelings, claiming once that France was ‘that country, to which by tastes and predilections I am more attached than to my own’. And he said enough again to show that he probably meant much of this statement when, in his Autobiography, he came to the appraisal of the advantages of his early acquaintance with France and ‘the free and genial atmosphere of Continental life’, and his appreciation of the profession (in France) of ‘elevated’ sentiments (detrimentally absent among the English), or ‘the contrast between the frank sociability and amiability of French personal intercourse, and the English mode of existence in which everybody acts as if everybody else … was either an enemy or a bore’.27 Contemporaries on both sides of the English Channel had noticed his extraordinary interest in France. Some were more appreciative than others.28 Mill himself was by no means less explicit about the extent of his involvement with France. He seems to have believed that no Briton knew France better than he did.29 And, in this context, we could also remind ourselves of his assessment of the experience in his Autobiography (to the effect that it kept him ‘free from the error always prevalent in England … of judging universal questions by a merely English standard’).30 The same was true of Arnold. It is not just that he was posing in his published writings as an outsider and a connoisseur of France in order to convince or enhance his authority, as Fitzjames Stephen would have one believe. He did that as well. But Arnold did also genuinely believe, from early on, that he was fortunate to have placed himself in some sort of – what his Greek heroes would call – epoche, at a distance from the current of English thought, and see what the rest of his countrymen did not see. Being a sort of self-appointed outsider thanks to being conversant with Continental thought was not just a strategy through which to lecture his compatriots more authoritatively (as they complained). He frankly believed that it was making his judgement better, his outlook more comprehensive and advanced, to his benefit and theirs. If they had chosen insularity and allowed ‘The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea’ to separate them from the continent of which they once were part,31 he would not. He would keep abreast of the European movement, he would keep in touch with what was central, advanced, not insular. In 1848 he was writing in a letter to his sister that England had fallen

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intellectually ‘so far behind the continent’ that one should expect to see Englishmen more and more rediscovering the wheel, simply because ‘not 20 English people’ knew to what point ‘the intellectual work of the world’ had then arrived; ‘so profoundly has activity in this country extirpated reflexion’.32 ‘Meanwhile I shall proceed on my way, thankful for the circumstances that have made me awake to the necessity of somehow getting my head above the present English atmosphere in order to accomplish anything permanent.’33 Bagehot also, though he cannot be compared with Mill or Arnold in extent of deliberate and life-long involvement with, and evocation of, France, nevertheless did adduce his residence in France (for almost a year, from August 1851 until the next summer) as entitling him to speak with exceptional authority on the rights and wrongs of Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état of December 1851. And, like Mill, Bagehot used to complain of English ignorance of, and inattention to, France and French developments.34 In other words, the extensive ‘Francology’ – if I am allowed the expression – of Mill, Arnold, and other Victorian authors cannot be explained simply by assuming that they tried to make use of the evocation of a foreign country as a rhetorical and argumentative weapon, in their struggles for reforms, or ‘culture’, or whatever else, at home. It is not simply a case of the grass being greener on the other side of the Channel, nor simply a matter of Mill or Arnold asserting that the French were doing these things (or, some of these things at any rate) better, in order to exhort their compatriots to imitate or surpass their neighbours. Though that was the case as well in many of their writings on France, there was much more to the whole affair than just a skilful reversal of earlier anti-French stereotypes which had been used by groups of different shades of opinion in the service of their respective purposes.35 The almost compulsive interest in France and the ubiquitous references to France, French thought, and French examples, in the voluminous writings of these two authors, and the vivid though less sustained interest on behalf of other thinkers discussed in this book, should be viewed in the context of broader tendencies and preoccupations of Victorian intellect, all of which converged in convincing these thinkers (and many others besides) that there was much more than curiosity in being curious about what was happening and being reflected in other countries, and – many of them thought – France in particular. To start with, one has to note the pervasiveness of the belief in the existence of ‘national characters’. There is nothing new about asserting that the Victorians talked of different ‘national characters’, but the


extent and pervasiveness of their belief in the importance of national character is rarely appreciated, and it will be one of the things this book will try to highlight. Another of these tendencies that encouraged interest in France was, very simply, a strong belief in the benefits of comparison. Comparison would prevent ethnocentric myopia or smugness from taking hold of society. It would show a society both what its flaws were, and how to try to combat them, as well as what its comparative advantages were, which it would thereby learn to cherish and appreciate. As an author put it in an article on ‘French Thought’ in the Saturday Review: ‘we have got so settled a way of thinking about everything, and are taught to be so firmly convinced that it is the right way – that, were it not for France, we should find any novelty of thought either impossible or only the prize of very gifted and courageous minds. It is France that presents for us the modern world under an aspect different from our own, and it is France that contrives to supply us with new matter for the elucidation of this contrast.’36 And, according to Mill, ‘unless we do possess this knowledge, of some other people than ourselves, we remain, to the hour of our death, with our intellects only half expanded’. This was because: ‘Improvement consists in bringing our opinions into nearer agreement with facts; and we shall not be likely to do this while we look at facts only through glasses coloured by those very opinions. But since we cannot divest ourselves of preconceived notions, there is no known means of eliminating their influence but by frequently using the differently coloured glasses of other people: and those of other nations, as the most different, are the best.’37 As he had put it three decades earlier, the study of a foreign country, like the study of history, conduced to the expansion of one’s intellectual horizon, and it went some way towards making amends for the accident of birth of one’s being born in a particular country and epoch. Because, nations, as much as individuals, until they had compared themselves with others, were ‘apt to mistake their own idiosyncrasies for laws of our common being, and the accidents of their position, for a part of the destiny of our race’. As a result, ‘[t]he type of human nature and of human life with which they are familiar, is the only one which presents itself to their imagination’. Therefore: The correction of narrowness is the main benefit derived from the study of various ages and nations: of narrowness, not only in our conceptions of what is, but in our standard of what ought to be. The individualities of nations are serviceable to the general improvement, in the same manner as the individualities of persons: since none is

10 Victorian Political Thought on France and the French

perfect, it is a beneficial arrangement that all are not imperfect in the same way. Each nation, and the same nation in every different age, exhibits a portion of mankind, under a set of influences, different from what have been in operation anywhere else: each, consequently, exemplifies a distinct phasis of humanity; in which the elements which meet and temper one another in a perfect human character are combined in a proportion more or less peculiar. … when each nation beholds in some other a model of the excellencies corresponding to its own deficiencies; when all are admonished of what they want, by what others have (as well as made to feel the value of what they have by what others want), they no longer go on confirming themselves in their defects by the consciousness of their excellencies, but betake themselves, however tardily, to profiting by each other’s example.38 But, though he preached that one should become conversant with more than one nation, Mill did not practice the study of all of them equally. As early as 1832 he had assured his French Saint-Simonian friends of Le Globe (18 April 1832) that, in undertaking to write for their paper, his first motive was his desire to contribute towards enabling their two nations, ‘each of which possesses so many of the elements of greatness and goodness, but developed in an unequal degree, to understand each other’. And he asserted that those ‘laws of human and of external nature’ which had made ‘the characters of the two nations different’, were ‘[a]n arrangement which … is a subject of rejoicing; for it furnishes the philosopher with varied experiments on the education of the human race’.39 Similarly, Arnold spoke on various occasions, referring to the different national characters of the French and the English, of ‘the great use which two unlike characters may find in observing each other. Neither is likely to have the other’s faults, so each may safely adopt as much as suits him of the other’s qualities.’40 And, according to Bagehot, writing in 1863, ‘[t]he American nation has very much the sort of faults which “only children” are said to have.’ What the Americans needed most was ‘a little general political society, – equal competitors in the political race, not only to sober their pretensions, but to give them the wholesome sense of close foreign observation and the wholesome duty of observing vigilantly in their turn’. For ‘both the restraint and the variety this would give to their politics would do them a great deal of good’.41 On the other side of the Channel also, Chateaubriand, in his Mémoires d’outre tombe, had insisted that better knowledge of other nations may help a nation to improve itself, and that this was a good reason why universalist plans to eradicate national differences were a folly.42 Which


brings us to the next idea that was widely diffused among the Victorians, an idea closely related to the previous one, to the effect that diversity was not only beneficial but also indispensable. As Guizot had taught in 1828, and Mill ‘dinned into people’s ears’ in Britain,43 diversity prevented stagnation and was among the sine qua non of progressiveness and improvement.44 Thus, the existence of different national cultures or racial groups within close proximity of one another was a great blessing for them all, and this was seen by many, probably following and adapting Guizot mainly, and then reinforced by Henry Maine’s Ancient Law (particularly in Bagehot’s case),45 as the major cause of Europe’s ‘progressiveness’ and difference from other civilizations, contemporary or ancient. Mill, Bagehot and Acton were the most vociferous advocates of diversity, but the idea was widespread in various forms, versions and nuances, and Arnold was also keen to apply it to diversity among as well as within nations. Bagehot, in the 1863 text referred to already, wrote, with regard to what he called the ‘dull uniformity of American life’ that ‘the experiment of one nation for one continent has turned out on the whole far from well’, because ‘there is inevitably a terrible uniformity about the American national character, a frightful want of play and variety in its political life.’ That is why ‘[t]he sincerest well-wishers to the American people … would … see with satisfaction the growth of any specific national peculiarities in different parts of the continent’.46 Bagehot sang the praises of racial diversity and fusion also in his major work on national character, Physics and Politics, as well as, emphatically, in an article he wrote after the Franco-Prussian war in which he argued that all other arguments should be left aside and Alsace and Lorraine should not be annexed by Germany, but rather be left to France, because, from a moral point of view, the world had more to gain by the added diversity that the presence of two provinces of Germanic racial stock contributed to France, than by the addition of two more Germanic provinces to the newly formed German Empire.47 The same idea occurs in Arnold, repeatedly. According to Frederic Faverty (commenting primarily on Arnold’s pronouncements in On the Study of Celtic Literature but also in his correspondence): ‘Arnold’s defense of Celtic studies is motivated also by a romantic preference for picturesque diversity over monotonous uniformity. … Diversity in climate and in race is salutary. A Europe completely Anglicized, or completely Gallicized, would be frightfully dull.’48 Now, all this has very truly been stated by Arnold time and again, but we should beware of construing it simply as some sort of exoticist fad of his, and should rather place it by the side of the


same attitude expressed by Bagehot (despite their differences in other – not unrelated – respects49), Mill, Acton and several others. In early 1861, Arnold was writing in his correspondence that he thought it would be good for the Americans if the Union were to break up, because ‘climate and mixture of race will then be enabled fully to tell: and I cannot help thinking that the more diversity of nations there is on the American continent the more chance there is of one nation developing itself with grandeur and richness: it has been so in Europe – what should we all be if we had not one another to check us and to be learned from: imagine an English Europe! how frightfully borné and dull! or a French Europe either, for that matter’.50 On another occasion Arnold wrote to his mother on 21 January 1865, criticising those who, with their ‘liking of the United States’ tended ‘to foster the pure English element in us, I think, to excess’: ‘I hate all over-preponderance of single elements, and all my efforts are directed to enlarge and complete us by bringing in as much as possible of Greek, Latin, Celtic culture; … To be too much with the Americans is like living with somebody who has all one’s own bad habits and tendencies.’ And for Mill, the importance of diversity and of averting the dangers of the over-preponderance of any single element, power, or value can hardly be overestimated.51 The same was true of Lord Acton, with particular reference to racial and ethnic diversity.52 Another, closely-related again, idea that was abroad at the time was a belief in the complementarity of different cultures, national ‘spirits’, or ‘races’. It was universally believed that each national or racial or (what we would call) ethnic group53 had distinctive character traits. But it was, at the same time, assumed by many – though not all – thinkers that such traits were alterable and improvable and that human groups (‘nations’, ‘races’) could usefully learn from each other, or share their best traits by simply mixing, by forming one population composed of different racial origins, and imparting on each other their best qualities, while, by the fusion, the worst characteristics of each would be stifled into extinction. Who you mixed with was important, of course, so complementarity of traits was vital. Some kind of heterosis was the ideal of many Victorians, Arnold, Mill, and Bagehot most prominent among them. This notion, applied in the concrete context of Victorian Britain was bound to influence – or, in turn, be influenced by – considerations related to the ethnic groups or ‘races’ that composed Britain and, most prominently, the Irish question. Now, Victorian discussions on the Irish were, more often than not, inextricably linked with discussions on the French, as most Victorian thinkers, along with many French thinkers and historians (a tendency that became prevalent in France after the


Franco-Prussian war) considered the French and the Irish to belong to the same family of nations, or ‘race’, the Celtic (some would be more precise and stress the Celtic subdivision the Irish and the French both belonged to as being the ‘Gaelic’). Although more will have to be said on this in Chapter 4, it needs to be emphasised here that it was a commonplace among Victorian writers to speak of the characters of the Celt and of the Teutonic English as being as different as two characters could be, and, therefore, highly complementary. The political implication was that the Irish should remain part of the Kingdom and mix with the English to the mutual benefit of both. Now this could easily be interpreted as politically motivated and spurious (and there has been no shortage of scholars, some of them inspired by the so-called postcolonial school, to come forward with such interpretations). However, reducing all discussions of such issues to little more than attempts by the ideological mouthpieces of the ruling elites (or, at any rate, by prejudiced racists and English supremacists) to keep the Irish subdued would be to impoverish our understanding of Victorian thought irreparably. Although it would be presumptuous of me to generalize this assertion too much, it is my argument that some of the Victorian thinkers discussed in this book, Arnold and Mill most prominent among them, were genuinely convinced of the advisability of the fusion of Celtic with English – or Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic – character traits in the interests of the emergence of a nation with qualities superior to both groups (in fact, Arnold insisted that the English were already partly Celtic, but that they should give more prominence to their Celtic element, and combat the detrimental preponderance of the Teutonic element in them – ‘philistinism’ being a Teutonic characteristic). It is here that France comes in, because, the French being seen as primarily Celtic by most of their British neighbours, the same applied to them. Mutual influences and exchanges between the English and the French were seen, therefore, as bound to be beneficial, if the right balances were kept. In a culture fond of binary distinctions and pairs of opposites, the Celt and the Saxon represented two complementary opposites, like feminine and masculine (in fact, quite literally, as it was one of the commonplaces of the time to attribute ‘feminine’ qualities to the Celt and ‘masculine’ qualities to the Teuton). The seriousness with which some Victorians discussed this idea may go some way towards indicating that its evocation in the case of the Irish (and other Celts in Britain) was not as spurious as some twentieth-century scholars would have one believe. Thus, Mill, who, like Arnold and others, often spoke of the English and the Irish as belonging to ‘two races, perhaps the most fitted of any two in


the world to be the complementing counterpart of one another’,54 also frequently insisted that it was the French, more than any other people, who possessed the qualities in which the English were most deficient (which is not as much of a contradiction as it may sound, given that Mill was adamant that the French and the Irish belonged to the same race, and shared ‘Gaelic blood’55). Consequently, these two peoples were, so to speak, complementary for each other. As he wrote to Auguste Comte, he found in his works ‘une autre idée à laquelle j’ai toujours tenu beaucoup, et peutêtre seul parmi mes compatriotes. Je suis comme vous intimement persuadé que la combinaison de l’esprit français avec l’esprit anglais est un des besoins les plus essentiels de la réorganisation intellectuelle’. (‘another idea to which I have always adhered, and perhaps alone among my compatriots. I am, like yourself, deeply convinced that the combination of the French spirit with the English spirit is one of the most essential requirements of intellectual reorganization’.) The French ‘spirit’ was necessary to this fusion to enable them to arrive at general concepts (the English being averse to any kind of generalization in moral or social matters). On the other hand the English spirit was equally needed in order to prevent conceptions from being too vague, a flaw that was predominant ‘chez les intelligences secondaires’ in France. He concluded: ‘Je crois que c’est Voltaire qui a dit: “Quand un français et un anglais s’accordent, il faut qu’ils aient pleinement raison.”’56 (‘I think it was Voltaire who said: “When a Frenchman and an Englishman agree, they must be completely right”.’) And Mill was not just joking (in fact, one wonders if Mill ever joked!) when, referring to one more of the differences between the French and the English in a letter to his friend d’Eichthal, he exclaimed that ‘[i]t is as I have long thought a clear case for the croisement des races’.57 Finally, another theme of Victorian thought that came to bear on at least some people’s outlook and preoccupations with regard to France was the strong desire to avoid ‘half-truths’58 and to try to synthesize the half of truth contained in each of every pair of opposing propositions in order to reach or approximate truth. The idea of half-truths and of the need to avoid the sin of one-sidedness, through combination of the different parts of truth and many-sidedness (Vielseitigkeit) was mainly a German importation – partly directly through perusal of German authors (Mill reminisced in his Autobiography how impressed he was by ‘Goethe’s device, “many-sidedness”’59) and partly through Coleridge and his ‘school’ with their attack on what they saw as the noisy clamour of competing half-truths. English and French viewpoints were sometimes seen as half-truths needing synthesizing.


All these ingredients of the Victorian Zeitgeist, ideas discernible from one another and yet closely interrelated, converged in producing the main reasons for which some of the Victorian thinkers were bound to look to France for intellectual reinforcement for domestic purposes. Domestic they were, though. The idea was, as Kipling was to put it in another context, in 1891, ‘What should they know of England who only England know?’. Few things are more clear than that even those with the strongest interest in, and attachment to France and (some, at least) things French, were adamant to themselves and to their readership that what they were up to had a domestic agenda. Learning as much as possible about a foreign country was going to be extremely useful in order to enlarge one’s horizon so one would be better equipped to understand one’s own society. It was like the study of history, equally useful for now and here. But, no matter how long or prolonged the foreign excursions, one always had to have ‘Ithaca’ in mind.60 Bagehot was explicit about this in discussing the uses of foreign literature in an article he contributed to the first number of his own (and Hutton’s) – characteristically named – National Review: ‘For the English, after all, the best literature is the English. … Of course, a man who has not read Homer is like a man who has not seen the ocean. There is a great object of which he has no idea. But we cannot be always seeing the ocean. … we live on the shore. … The use of foreign literature is like the use of foreign travel. It imprints … a deep impression of great and strange, and noble objects; but we cannot live with these.’ Therefore: ‘Let us be thankful if our researches in foreign literature enable us, as rightly used they will enable us, better to comprehend our own. … Let us understand ourselves.’61 And Mill who has very deservedly been called ‘the least parochial of writers’62 said something similar when he admitted that one can never really get to know completely a foreign culture, or when he was writing to Comte that his main preoccupation was the study of the English national character.63 No less so Arnold, when he decided to compose a short apologia pro vita sua, in ‘A Courteous Explanation’ (1866), in order to ‘disclaim that positive admiration of things foreign’ which had ‘often been imputed’ to him.64 He wrote in his letter to the Pall Mall Gazette in reply to the two letters of ‘Horace’ (purportedly a French person) that he had no apologies to make, if his attacks on English shortcomings were damaging to the propaganda of French Orleanist liberals who needed to point to the excellencies of the English liberal parliamentary system in their struggles against Napoleon III at home (which is part of what had been complained against him by ‘Horace’). For he was writing for the benefit of England, not France, and his Anglo-French comparisons were


aimed not at convincing the English to imitate their French counterparts, but rather at producing a better breed than either the existing French or the existing English middle classes.65 Arnold’s need to write this ‘Courteous Explanation’ is characteristic. It is well known that his efforts to show his fellow-countrymen their weaknesses and point to the merits of foreign lands, France in particular, were not very appreciated by most of his contemporaries – and some times by Englishmen of later generations. ‘People in England often accuse me of liking France and things French far too well’, he remarked in ‘Numbers’, and ‘all I recommend is set down to my French mania’, he once complained to his mother.66 It is also generally believed that few of these attacks were as forceful as those by James Fitzjames Stephen, who responded to Arnold’s strictures on the English in ‘The Function of Criticism’, as Collini has aptly put it, ‘with the delicacy of a wounded rhinoceros’ (in his ‘Mr. Arnold and his Countrymen’).67 As Stephen noted near the beginning of that article: ‘It is … to be noticed that his [Arnold’s] points are always of the same kind. His self-imposed mission is to give good advice to the English people as to their manifold faults, especially as to their one great fault of being altogether inferior, in an intellectual and artistic point of view, to the French.’68 Now, Arnold was not alone. It has been noted that ‘[t]he superiority of other lands and peoples, in the arguments of the sages, is a significant tactic’. Thus: ‘Carlyle’s Germany, Arnold’s France, are models of what England lacks’. According to George Watson: ‘It is hard to imagine a sage without a foreign enthusiasm.’ Watson also maintained that ‘Mill was a Francophile’ and ‘[t]he Brownings were enthusiasts for Italy’.69 All this is very true. However, Watson is less accurate when he asserts: ‘But both Mill and the Brownings lack that edge of hostility for English things that makes a foreign civilization, in the writings of the sages, a calculated reproach to the homeland.’ It will be one of the things that should emerge from this book that, though by no means uncritical in his attitude towards France and the French (after all, Arnold was, if anything, even more critical than Mill by the end of his life), Mill belonged to exactly the same category as Arnold and has been at least as often as Arnold accused of displaying, to an excess, exactly ‘that edge of hostility for English things that makes a foreign civilization … a calculated reproach to the homeland’. In fact, Stefan Collini has more recently argued the opposite to that which Watson asserted, in reference to Mill, noting that the role of ‘the cultural critic who constantly appeals to the alleged virtues of another contemporary society as a way of correcting, or, less ambitiously, of condemning, the deficiencies of his


native country’, had one ‘obvious danger’, in ‘the tendency (or perhaps it is really the necessity) to trade in stereotypes, and especially to homogenize one’s own culture in order to produce a liberatingly uncomplicated target’. John Stuart Mill, ‘may be thought of as one of the first to occupy this role in its recognizably modern form. He was certainly marvellously adept at exploiting its opportunities for effective cultural criticism, though he was also, I would suggest, far from immune to its dangers’. Collini speaks of Mill’s ‘exasperated antagonism to what he regarded as the “merely empirical” character of English political reflection’, and argues that ‘his unrelenting, self-defining, antagonism to a stereotype of English complacency obscured any more appreciative view of the cogency of the Whig case in particular or of the intellectual strengths of this style of thought in general’.70 In the end, Collini is in full agreement with Alexander Bain’s criticism of Mill in this respect (which he quotes).71 Bain said of Mill that ‘[h]e always dealt gently with [the] faults [of France], and liberally with her virtues’ and that ‘his habitual way of speaking of England, the English people, English society, as compared with other nations, was positively unjust, and served no good end’; adding that ‘Mill had a great partiality for France, until the usurpation of Louis Napoleon; and his opinion of England was correspondingly low.’ Even more critical of Mill’s depreciation of the English character and his ‘one-sided and declamatory counter-eulogy of things foreign’, with particular reference to his ‘perilous assumptions’ and ‘half-truths’ about the merits of the French, had been F.T. Palgrave in his (anonymous) review of Mill’s Autobiography in the Quarterly Review.72 And there was a number of articles (unearthed and analysed by Collini) written shortly after Mill’s death in 1873 (first obituaries and then review articles on the occasion of the posthumous publication, later in 1873, of his Autobiography) where Mill was – with almost tedious persistency – accused of being ‘un-English’.73 But there was no need for Mill to die for such accusations to be aired. A Frenchman was noticing already in 1859: M. Mill a … un autre … mérite … peu commun en Angleterre, c’est une curiosité sympathique des idées, des aspirations et des littératures du continent, et notamment de la France. Peu d’Anglais connaissent la France aussi bien, et ont pour elle autant de goût. Comme tous les esprits élevés, qui veulent accroître la civilisation de leur patrie en la comparant à des civilisations différentes, il dédaigne de flatter son pays, et ne craint point de lui signaler les qualités de ses rivaux, qu’il voudrait lui voir acquérir. S’il a encouru un reproche parmi


ses compatriotes, c’est d’être le censeur un peu morose de l’Angleterre et le panégyriste un peu complaisant de la France.74 (‘Mr Mill has another … virtue which is not common in England, viz. a sympathetic curiosity for the ideas, aspirations and literatures of the Continent, and notably those of France. Few Englishmen know France so well, and have for her such a relish. Like all elevated spirits, who want to enhance the civilization of their homeland by comparing it to different civilizations, he despises flattering his country, and does not fear at all to point out to it the qualities of its rivals, which he would like to see it acquire. If he has incurred a reproach among his compatriots, it is that of being the rather morose censor of England and the rather indulgent panegyrist of France.’) In the same year, Mill’s purported partiality received the compliment of the attention of the most vociferous defender of John Bull among the thinkers discussed in this book, James Fitzjames Stephen. Reviewing the selection of his essays which Mill had just published under the title Dissertations and Discussions, Stephen remarked that ‘it is almost impossible to read Mr Mill’s Essays without arriving at the disagreeable conclusion that his habitual sentiment towards the nation of which he is so distinguished an ornament is one of profound settled disapprobation, amounting to something which is too calm to be contempt, but which in most men would assume that form’. Moreover, ‘in his present work he not only makes the same statement in a stronger form, and repeats it with greater frequency, but continually institutes comparisons between this country and France, to the disadvantage of the former’. The French and the English were ‘rarely if ever compared, throughout the whole of these two volumes, except in such a manner as to indicate a marked preference for the former’. However – and this is a tribute to his perspicacity – the man who has come to be identified as the author of ‘almost Xenophobic’75 attacks on Arnold’s eulogies of the French and disparagement of the English (and who ‘is chiefly known as John Stuart Mill’s most scathing critic’76), at least on this occasion, made an observation which is of fundamental importance for what I want to emphasize here (although it did not prevent him from going on to criticise Mill on that count). After voicing his complaint Stephen remarked: ‘Possibly much of this may arise from the fact that Englishmen are the audience who are to be addressed. If Mr. Mill had been writing for French readers, and had cared enough for their welfare, he would probably have said as many unpleasant things about them as he has said about us, and he would no


doubt have found a certain satisfaction in pointing out the strong points of the English intellect and English institutions’.77 This is exactly what Mill was doing, to an extent greater than Stephen could (only) suspect perhaps. Because he ‘cared enough for their welfare’, and given his belief that ‘since not errors but half truths are the bane of human improvement … [t]he great instrument of improvement in men, is to supply them with the other half of the truth, one side of which only they have ever seen: to turn round to them the white side of the shield, of which they seeing only the black side, have cut other men’s throats and risked their own to prove that the shield is black’,78 Mill pursued persistently what one might call a deliberate strategy. There is a clear difference between the public as opposed to the private Mill. While in his correspondence he emerges fairly critical, from very early on, of what he considered to be faults in the French character, he raised his criticisms less often (and never as severely) in his public writings, where he chose to set the emphasis on extolling what he regarded as qualities in the French character and exhorting – directly or indirectly – the British to emulate them or at any rate appreciate them. It also appears that Mill was too sensitive to other people in Britain criticising the French, even when he had himself raised the same or similar criticisms earlier. He seems to have believed that his own criticisms were constructive, because he censured France ‘en ami’, which was not always the case with others.79 Thus, though understandable – in view of the harshness of some of his comments on the English – his contemporaries’ criticisms of Mill’s partiality against the English and in favour of the French failed (with Stephens’ partial and paradoxical exception) to notice the exact nature of what Mill was up to. A criticism like Bain’s (that Mill’s way of speaking of the English was ‘positively unjust, and served no good end’) misses the point, especially as far as its latter part is concerned: it was Mill’s conviction that he did serve a very ‘good end’ by being over-critical of England and the English while, on occasions, extolling liberally the virtues of France. He was not a starry-eyed Francophile. But he believed that it would serve no purpose to confirm the English in their antiGallican prejudices by adding to the common-place expositions of the faults of the French; and, more generally and more significantly, he was profoundly loath to offering any encouragement of ‘the already ample self-conceit of John Bull’, as he believed others were doing.80 Thus, in the case of the French, what was needed was ‘to place by [the] side’ of the faults of the French ‘those excellencies which are often the bright side of the same qualities’. This attitude constituted a deliberate strategy


of a man who considered himself one of ‘the moral teachers of England, those who [were] labouring for the regeneration of England’s national character’.81 In the article where the above phrases occur,82 Mill attacked vehemently an outstandingly Anglophile Frenchman, Philarète Chasles, for having criticized in a review of Edward LyttonBulwer’s England and the English (1833) that British author’s harsh criticisms of some faults in the English national character. The worst of these so-called vices of the English character was, according to LyttonBulwer and Mill, ‘the universal and all-absorbing struggle to be or to appear rich’. The French reviewer had taken issue with the strictures of the author of England and the English and retorted by extolling the beneficial consequences of the English ‘spirit of commerce’. But according to Mill, Bulwer’s ‘harshness’ on the English was ‘deserved’. He opined that such commendation of the English as that attempted by Chasles was ‘worse than the ancient antipathy’ between England and France. His retort to the French reviewer was: ‘We want you to sympathize in our virtues, not in our faults’, adding that ‘[t]he disposition to hold fast by a favourite vice does not stand in need of any foreign support’.83 It was his belief that the reverse of this statement was true as well, that prompted Mill to write publicly in the way he did: it seemed to him that the eradication of favourite vices did stand in need of ‘foreign support’ – in the shape of his use of France as a mirror to England. Something similar was at work with Arnold. He was far from blind to France’s imperfections or flaws. But, as he wrote in a letter, he believed that Carlyle, ‘[i]n “preaching earnestness to a nation which had plenty of it by nature, but was less abundantly supplied with several other useful things”, Carlyle was carrying coals to Newcastle. Among these “other useful things”, as Arnold for years had been pointing out, intelligence was chief’.84 Now, ‘intelligence’ is exactly what France had in full display where it was least to be found in other countries, among the masses of its people. And, therefore, instead of ‘singing hosannahs’ to the virtues and advantages of what his own country possessed, he saw his role as consisting in reminding her relentlessly of what she lacked. As his role-model, Renan, had set about to inculcate in France what she most lacked, morals, so would he, in England, inculcate what England lacked, intelligence.85 And as with ‘intelligence’, so with the role of the state. He is generally seen as having held France as a model for what England should imitate. (Bagehot accused him that, no less than his supposed opponents, the Comtists, ‘Mr. Harrison and Mr. Beesly’, who wanted ‘to “Frenchify the English institutions”’, ‘[h]e, too, asks us to imitate France’.86) This is something of a ‘half-truth’. What Arnold did


was to insist that England needed to learn from the advantages of state action and organization in France and introduce more of it than it had, reducing its excessively individualistic attitudes. Yet, all along, from the first time he offered publicly this exhortation to the English in ‘Democracy’ (1861) onwards, he was adamant (as he reminded a French correspondent in 1878), that, on the other hand, it was true that in France the action of the state was excessive and that France needed to ‘cultivate the side of individual character and activity more than, perhaps, you have done’. This balanced view of his was ‘an opinion not commonly held, I admit, in England’.87 People like J.F. Stephen or R.H. Hutton (Bagehot’s friend) accused Mill of having exaggerated the uniformization of English society in his time.88 And, more generally, many commentators, then and since, have suggested that Mill or Arnold exaggerated the dangers facing England and the flaws present in the English character. But much of that was deliberate. Both of them knew their Greek well, to have read – in the original, of course – what Aristotle had to say (The Politics, Book V, 1308a24): ‘So it is the duty of those who have the interests of the polity89 at heart, to invent fears and bring distant dangers near.’ It is arguable that Mill and Arnold were aware of an extent of exaggeration in what they were saying, or rather, in their own terms, that they were stressing and highlighting incessantly one aspect of what was true, the half of truth, as they saw it, which was neglected or ignored by their contemporaries in their country. Finally, there is one more issue that should be addressed here, the question of ‘patriotism’ in Victorian political thought and its relevance for what is discussed in the book, as well as – no less, arguably – the relevance of what is discussed in this book for scholarship on Victorian political thought and patriotism. In recent years Julia Stapleton has produced some excellent work and performed a laudable task in drawing attention to the national–patriotic dimension of the writings of self-appointed defenders and definers of real ‘liberalism’ such as J.F. Stephen, R.H. Hutton, and several other thinkers later (most of her work focuses on the period 1850–1950). And she is right in asserting that people like J.F. Stephen and Hutton developed their patriotic discourse in direct and explicit opposition to the utterances of people like Mill (and Arnold, one could add). It does not follow, however, that this was the only strand of ‘patriotic’ liberal thought at the time in question, or – what comes to the same thing – that they were right in attributing lack of patriotism to Mill and Arnold. One must complement the extremely interesting results of existing scholarship with a distinction between at


least two concepts of patriotism (and in some respects more than two, as I will suggest further on). As Stapleton has recently argued: ‘Above all, the growth of English national consciousness after 1850 took place in reaction to the perceived absence of patriotism of any description90 among the forces of British radicalism.’ Stapleton goes on to comment that: ‘This perception was not entirely groundless. The English/British patria appeared in much radical discourse on citizenship only as an object of abuse.’ After citing Richard Cobden and John Bright in this connection, she goes on to include Mill among the radicals who were justly seen as unpatriotic: ‘Similarly, for John Stuart Mill, displays of Anglophilia such as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s in 1849 were to be treated as beneath contempt while the mean inheritance of aristocratic rule continued to blight all aspects of English life and character.’91 I do not think that Mill’s rejection (in a letter to Harriet Taylor, his future wife) of Emerson’s praise of the English in a lecture in Boston proves what it is adduced here as proving about Mill’s attitude towards patriotism or the English patria. In the letter in question Mill wrote: ‘Did you notice that most bête and vulgar say by Emerson in a lecture at Boston, about the English? It is hardly possible to be more stupidly wrong – and what sort of people can he have been among when here?’92 In a footnote, the editors of Mill’s Later Letters noted: ‘What JSM objected to most in Emerson’s lecture is difficult to determine.’ They make two guesses, one of which is: ‘it may have been the praise of English culture (“they surpass all others in general culture – none are so harmoniously developed”)’.93 Anyone who will read Chapter 2 of this book will understand why I would argue that this must have been what Mill found most objectionable in Emerson’s lecture. One could find much more striking texts written by Mill, and published during his time, and read by his critics, in which he tried to shame his compatriots into improving themselves. In any case, though, this does not reflect lack of patriotism, unless one means by ‘patriotism’ the ‘my country right or wrong’ attitude. Now, apparently this is what J.F. Stephen had in mind when he was identifying ‘the chief shortcoming of his master turned adversary [Mill] as a lamentable want of patriotism’.94 And, James Fitzjames’s brother, Leslie Stephen, in his volume on J.S. Mill (and apparently including Bentham and James Mill in the observation), opined: ‘Patriotism, indeed, was scarcely held to be a virtue by the Utilitarians. It meant for them the state of mind of the country squire or his hanger-on the parson; and is generally mentioned as giving a sufficient explanation of unreasoning prejudice.’95 But Mill spoke innumerable times favourably of ‘patriotism’, of ‘patriotisme éclairé’,96 or an enlightened


principle of cohesion as he described it in ‘Coleridge’ and repeated it in A System of Logic.97 In fact – no less mistakenly – he has also been seen as exactly the opposite, an English nationalist who joined in ‘the system of mystical and nationalist enthusiasm enunciated by Wordsworth’.98 Divergences as wide as those between Stapleton’s (and many of his English contemporaries’) view of Mill and that of the assertion just quoted by Gerald Newman (and there are many different views of him in between) are indicative both of how subtle and nuanced Mill’s position vis-à-vis nationhood and patriotism was, and, at the same time, of the confusion and divergent understandings as to what patriotism means, both during his time and during ours. This is a long story,99 but a few things have to be said here, to the extent that they place Mill and Arnold in one group, and the Stephens and most of their contemporaries in another (according to one of the several, I would argue, categorizations of implicit or explicit definitions of patriotism one could attempt, using different criteria each time). Mill was not one of the radicals who purportedly ignored or were hostile to ‘patriotism’. What is true is that Mill, as well as Arnold, would have no truck with a certain conception of patriotism, very widespread in their time as well as in ours, which saw patriotism as consisting of ‘a cherishing of bad peculiarities because they are national or a refusal to adopt what has been found good by other countries’. This he called ‘nationality in the vulgar sense of the term’,100 which corresponds in the main to what Arnold was to call ‘this native instinct’.101 This is the conception of ‘patriotism’ which the Utilitarians ‘scarcely held to be a virtue’, this is what ‘meant for them the state of mind of the country squire or his hanger-on the parson’. When contemporaries accused Mill or Arnold of anti-patriotism or un-English sentiments, it was because Mill and Arnold were vociferously hostile to, and contemptuous of, all manifestations of feelings and attitudes arising from such a conception of ‘patriotism’. To the extent that the ‘English national consciousness’ whose growth took place ‘after 1850 … in reaction to the perceived absence of patriotism of any description among the forces of British radicalism’, was the flag-waving variety of patriotism, then Mill and Arnold were indeed strangers to it, indeed its enemies. J.F. Stephen wrote in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: ‘I do not envy the Englishman whose heart does not beat hight as he looks at the scarred and shattered walls of Delhi or at the union jack flying from the fort at Lahore.’102 And, as Stapleton notes, despite his dislike of popular literature, Stephen made an exception to praise Macaulay, because, as his brother Leslie had put it, ‘he strongly sympathised with the patriotism represented by Macaulay’.103 Among the things J.F. Stephen found worthy of praise in


his article on Macaulay was that ‘[h]e was … full of patriotic feelings … He was an enthusiastic Englishman’.104 On the other hand, Mill, while in the process of reading the first two volumes of Macaulay’s History of England, wrote to Harriet Taylor that he perceived ‘no very bad tendency in it as yet, except that it in some degree ministers to English conceit’.105 And we will see in Chapter 2 that, for similar reasons, Arnold did not appreciate Macaulay at all. Mill’s disciple, Morley, accompanied his strictures on Macaulay’s vulgarity of style with a scathing reference to his complacent pandering to ‘the commonplaces of patriotism’.106 Very simply, ministering to English conceit, or giving encouragement to ‘the already ample self-conceit of John Bull’ was not a patriotic thing to do in Mill’s or Arnold’s eyes. The man who loved his country should offer his countrymen what they most needed; and, in the context of complacent, smug, ethnocentric post-1815 Britain, this did not mean reinforcing their self-conceit. Mill was very clear from a very young age as to what loving one’s country meant and what it did not mean. During the 1820s – when he spent much of his time attacking the Edinburgh Review’s ‘offerings both to national antipathies and to national vanity’ (on account of its unfavourable comments on the French), as well as the Quarterly Review’s and Walter Scott’s complacency with things English as opposed to everything French107 – Mill, at the age of twenty (in 1826), had this to say on the issue in the review article ‘Modern French Historical Works’: Though we have not, like so many of our contemporaries, made it our grand occupation, to impress our countrymen with a deep sense of their own wisdom and virtue, and to teach them how proud they ought to be of every thing English, more especially of every thing that is English and bad; we are far from being unconscious how much they have really to be proud of, and in how many respects they might be taken as models by all the nations of the world. If we saw them in any danger of forgetting their own merits, we too might preach them a sermon on that hacknied text. But it is not their failing to underrate themselves, or to overrate other nations. They are more in need of monitors than adulators;108 and we cannot but think that it may be of some use to them to know, that if there are some points in which they are superior to their neighbours, there are others in which they are inferior; that they may learn something from other nations, as well as other nations from them. And, further on in the same article (talking of the reactions in France of those who were attacking historian J.P. Dulaure for his exposure of


French vices), Mill went on, in no different spirit. What he said is worth quoting, as it is, so to speak, a pre-emptive reply to J.F. Stephen and to all others who were to criticise Mill subsequently on this count, and it illustrates his clear understanding and articulation of two distinct conceptions, two sorts of ‘patriotism’: We own that we are in general predisposed in favour of a man whom we hear accused by a certain class of politicians of being an enemy to his country. We at once conclude, that he has either actually rendered, or shown himself disposed to render, some signal service to his country. We conclude, either that he has had discernment to see, and courage to point out, something in his own that stands in need of amendment, or something in another country which it would be for the advantage of his own to imitate; or that he loved his country well enough to wish it free from that greatest of misfortunes, the misfortune of being successful in an unjust cause; or … that he has given his countrymen to know, that they once had vices or follies which they have since corrected, or (what is worse still), which they have yet to correct. Whoever is guilty of any of these crimes in this country, is a fortunate man if he escapes being accused of un-English feelings. This is the epithet which we observe to be appropriated to those, whose wish is that their country should deserve to be thought well of. The man of English feelings is the man whose wish is, that his country should be thought well of; and, above all, should think well of itself, peculiarly in those points wherein it deserves the least. The modern English version of the maxim Spartam nactus es, hanc exorna, may be given thus – England is your country, be sure to praise it lustily. This sort of patriotism109 is, it would appear, no less in request with certain persons in France… . Accordingly, M. Dulaure’s bold exposure of the vices and follies of his countrymen in the olden time, has been thought by many persons extremely un-French.110 Similar things can be said of Arnold. In their own eyes Mill and Arnold were consciously and deliberately engaged in profoundly patriotic exercises, which, they thought, would benefit the ‘English nation’ far more than the John Bull versions of patriotism associated with their critics or targets such as J.F. Stephen. Stephen was in good company. Herbert Spencer was one more of the people who accused Arnold, directly, of ‘anti-patriotism’.111 And yet, as Collini has remarked: ‘Arnold was not unappreciative of England’s fortunate political development, and, as his correspondence reveals, he was responsive to an idea of national


greatness … and inhabited his own Englishness with ease and some pride’. But, continued Collini, ‘these deep emotional allegiances only made him detest English complacency and parochialism the more, and his diverse essays in social criticism were united by the purpose … of teasing, educating, and shaming his countrymen into a greater awareness of these shortcomings’.112 This is very true. And I would go further: Arnold’s was a particular version of patriotic feelings, or a particular version of how one should cope with such feelings, a particular way of promoting the right kind of patriotism. It may not be completely accidental that, during the year when he was reflecting on the issues involved in writings like ‘My Countrymen’, he had put in his list of books to be read, in 1866, Bolingbroke’s ‘The Idea of a Patriot King’.113 And a revealing quote from that essay appears in ‘My Countrymen’, when Arnold’s supposed foreign friends remark that ‘this sentence of your Lord Bolingbroke is true: “The opinion of mankind, which is fame after death, is superior strength and power in life”.’114 This seems to me to be an important key to understanding Arnold’s brand of patriotism (which, in this particular respect, he shared with Mill). Instead of ignoring what the rest of Europe and the world thought of Britain, as most other Victorian thinkers did, to say nothing of the British public a large,115 Arnold and Mill believed that it was part of being a good patriot to strive to improve one’s country’s image abroad, to make its voice heard and respected, and all this for the right reasons, for commendable achievements, distinctions and contributions to the common fund of civilization, which other nations would recognize as well. And they believed that a very good way of inculcating in the British people the right kind of patriotism, the patriotism that feeds on the right feelings and aspires to the right sort of collective-national distinction and greatness, was to make them aware of, and sensitive to, the judgements of an international ‘tribunal of public opinion’ – to use two of Bentham’s coinages in one go. There is no doubting the extent to which Arnold cared for his country’s prospects, greatness and consideration among nations. He was writing to his sister: ‘I am convinced that as Science, in the widest sense of the word, meaning a true knowledge of things as the basis of our operations, becomes, as it does become, more of a power in the world, the weight of the nations and men who have carried the intellectual life farthest will be more and more felt’. This being the case: ‘That England may run well in this race is my deepest desire; and to stimulate her and to make her feel how many clogs she wears, and how much she has to do in order to run in it as her genius gives her the power to run, is the object of all I do.’116 He repeated time and again his foreign friends’ warning to


England: ‘Unless you change, unless your middle class grows more intelligent, you will tell upon the world less and less, and end by being a second Holland.’117 And similarly he dismissed the view taken by the ‘devotee[s] of Anglo-Saxonism’, those who thought that it did not matter if England were to decline because her offspring in America would take over the leadership of the world. ‘I … do not feel quite satisfied with these plans of vicarious greatness, and have a longing for this old and great country of ours to be always great in herself, not only in her progeny.’118 Also, there is no doubt that one of the things about France which Arnold most admired and envied was the very developed patriotism which he found there. This is what attached German and Protestant Alsace to France, Celtic and Catholic – unlike, alas, what was the case with Celtic and Catholic Ireland in its relation with Germanic and Protestant England. What he tried to do in relation to Ireland he obviously saw as eminently patriotic.119 And one of the things Arnold remarked about French education was the way in which it inculcated such strong patriotism.120 And yet, he was being accused of anti-patriotism by many. Not failing to notice, Arnold duly mocked those who criticised him on this count.121 But it is important to examine how he addressed the question of his country’s greatness, what exactly he meant by greatness. When, in Culture and Anarchy, he castigated ‘[f]aith in machinery’ as being ‘our besetting danger’, and argued that things like ‘freedom’, ‘population’, ‘coal’, ‘religious organisations’, were not ends in themselves, as ‘every voice in England’ was accustomed to speak of them, but rather ‘machinery’, means to the proper ends of life, Arnold came to ‘the strange language current during the late discussion as to the possible failure of our supplies of coal. Our coal, thousands of people were saying, is the real basis of our national greatness; if our coal runs short, there is an end of the greatness of England.’ Arnold saw things differently: But what is greatness? – culture makes us ask. Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admiration. If England were swallowed up by the sea tomorrow, which of the two, a hundred years hence, would most excite the love, interest, and admiration of mankind, – would most, therefore, show the evidences of having possessed greatness, – the England of the last twenty years, or the England of Elizabeth, of a time of splendid spiritual effort, but when our coal, and our industrial operations depending on coal, were very little developed?122


In other words, greatness is to be admired and loved by the rest of the world. Independently of this statement in Culture and Anarchy, Arnold, like Mill, had his own views as to what is and what is not patriotism, or, what is healthy and defensible patriotism and what is sheer prejudice. Commenting, in a letter to his mother (10 March 1866), on one of the many attacks he had received on account of ‘My Countrymen’, he wrote: ‘I should be sorry to be a Frenchman, a German, or American, or anything but an Englishman; but I know that this native instinct which other nations, too, have, does not prove one’s superiority, but that one has to achieve this by undeniable, excellent performance.’123 Note the word ‘prove’. Again Arnold has in mind some sort of international tribunal of public opinion, in front of which it would not be enough for Englishmen, Frenchmen, Americans and so on to boast they were great and superior following their ‘native instinct’, but rather would have to ‘prove’ their superiority and greatness ‘by undeniable, excellent performance’, presumably in identifiable, commonly accepted domains of excellence. Obviously he and J.F. Stephen would be unable to agree, as long as Arnold would insist on ‘achieving’ proofs of one’s superiority in a commonly held (pan-European or pan-Western) system of values and criteria, while Stephen would retort that foreigners were in no position to judge the achievements of England and very few Englishman cared or should care what foreigners thought of them. It is here that lies the greatest difference between people like J.F. Stephen, on the one hand, and Arnold and Mill on the other. Whereas the latter went out of their way to elevate the opinion of foreigners (or, at any rate, ‘civilized’, continental European foreigners) as one of the major concerns of the English nation and its governments, Stephen dismissed this criterion and argument as squarely and as explicitly as one could. In this, Arnold and Mill were at one. Besides the clear exposition of how Mill thought a nation should entertain and cope with the ‘desire to shine in the eyes of foreigners and to be highly esteemed by them’ that we will discuss in Chapter 5, it should be noted here that he had offered another striking account of his views on these matters in a work that turned out to be very influential on political theory on international relations, his article ‘A Few Words on Non-Intervention’.124 One could even say that this article alone (published in Fraser’s Magazine in December 1859) should have exculpated Mill from any charges of lack of patriotism, for its first half was, among other things, a panegyric of the even-handedness and morality of England’s foreign policy (the opening sentences are striking in this respect). But it was more than that. In this article (which, characteristically, Mill sent to French periodicals in order to have it reviewed in


France125), one of his intentions was to dissipate the all but universal belief, on the part of Continental thinkers and public, that British foreign policy was quintessentially selfish and hypocritical, and to convince foreigners that this was far from being the case; and, on the other hand, and more importantly, his aim was to caution British statesmen against using a discourse (justification of acts or failures to act purely on grounds of national interest) which gave rise to foreign perceptions about English selfishness. It would be ‘foolish attempting to despise all this’: ‘Nations, like individuals, ought to suspect some fault in themselves when they find they are generally worse thought of than they think they deserve; and they may well know that they are somehow in fault when almost everybody but themselves thinks them crafty and hypocritical.’126 This is not how J.F. Stephen saw things. In his ‘almost Xenophobic review’,127 ‘Mr. Arnold and the Middle Classes’ (an attack on Arnold’s ‘My Countrymen’), nothing comes out more strongly than his determination not to let the perceptions of ignorant foreigners influence British practice. Arnold’s article having been written as if the author was reporting things he had been told by his foreign friends or read in foreign newspapers (the ‘gang of foreign Balaams’ as Stephen called them128), Stephen commented that ‘My Countrymen’ was ‘written apparently in order to teach that degraded part of creation, the British middle classes, what the intelligent foreigners think about them.’ Yet, he retorted: Really it is not worth the trouble to make such a long journey for such a small piece of news. What we are is a matter of some importance; what other people think of us is a matter on which Mr. Arnold, charm he never so wisely, will never persuade one Englishman in ten thousand to take the faintest interest. ‘What do I care’, is the unexpressed feeling of the typical Englishman, ‘whether some man who happens by accident to have heard my name (which he can neither pronounce nor even spell) does or does not despise the person whom he associates with it? I would not walk across the room to make him think me a hero or to prevent him from thinking me a rogue.’129 Having said all the above, there was an important difference between Mill and Arnold. One of the things Mill wanted the British to be proud and solicitous of was their liberty. Pride in England’s unique understanding and appreciation of liberty, and, by implication, alertness to cherish and preserve it against any dangers, was a very important ingredient of the kind of patriotism Mill wished to inculcate. In this respect and to this extent, Mill was much closer to J.F. Stephen than to Arnold,


who kept protesting against English boasting about liberty, which, though he did value it, was not a virtue in itself, but just a means to ends the English had yet to learn to appreciate.130 On the other hand, what places Mill and Arnold in the same category, as opposed to people like J.F. Stephen, was that their patriotism was cosmopolitan, outwardlooking. Not cosmopolitan in the sense that they aspired to the creation of a universal republic, abolition of nations, and the like, but cosmopolitan in the vocabulary, the arguments, the criteria they would accept and promote as valid and commendable.131 This is one more dimension of the attitude of some of the dramatis personae of this book towards foreign countries, and towards the foreign country par excellence, in particular, that well deserves more attention than it has so far received.

2 Was France ‘the Most Civilised of Nations’?

She [George Sand] asserts that France is the most civilised of nations, and that its pre-eminence in civilisation it owes to equality. (Matthew Arnold) To France, then, must be ascribed this honour, that her civilization has reproduced more faithfully than any other the general type and fundamental idea of civilization. It is the most complete, the most veritable, and, so to speak, the most civilized of civilizations. (François Guizot) The History of England is emphatically the history of progress. … In the course of seven centuries the wretched and degraded race have become the greatest and most highly civilised people that ever the world saw … (Thomas Babington Macaulay)1

I

A vague question, a vague concept …

In the early- and mid-nineteenth century (certainly up to the FrancoPrussian War), few ideas made for so much consensus in that most divided hexagonal country as the belief that France was ‘the most civilised of nations’. Statements such as Tocqueville’s reference to England, in 1835, as the world’s most civilized country (‘au milieu du pays le plus civilisé du monde’), were not typical.2 In any case, Tocqueville was referring to material comfort during a journey and thus was using the notion of civilization ‘in the narrow sense’, according to the distinction he had been taught when he had attended admiringly Guizot’s lectures 31


on the History of Civilization in Europe. Most French thinkers, no matter how different their justifications might be, would agree with the assertions of Sand or Guizot cited in the epigraph of this chapter. As Senior remarked about France in 1842: ‘Her civilization is great: she believes that it is unrivalled.’3 What did other Victorian thinkers make of such claims? Was France ‘the most civilised of nations’? Most certainly not, would reply someone like Macaulay (and Charles Kingsley, and Richard Cobden, and John Roebuck, and Robert Lowe and many another Victorian) who extolled England’s primacy in ‘civilization’. Not where it mattered, in politics, would say Lord Acton. By all means, and Paris was the ‘centre of civilization’, would reply Frederic Harrison and other British Comtists. Although the French are apt to make exaggerated claims about it, they certainly do come closer to it than we do, because their masses are so much more civilised than ours, would reply M. Arnold. It depends on what you mean by ‘civilization’, would be J.S. Mill’s reply. Interestingly, though, that very question, and the distinction between two meanings of ‘civilization’, which Mill (and, to an extent and with variations, authors such as Thomas Arnold, Matthew Arnold or Walter Bagehot) accepted as valid, had been imported from France. It was one of the gifts offered to the British by an Anglophile French Protestant whose influence on Britain (as well as on the rest of Europe) can hardly be overestimated. I am alluding to the intellectual [François Pierre] Guillaume le Conquérant, Guizot the historian–philosopher. The story of the term ‘civilization’ is a complicated one, and it has been told by story-tellers as superb as Lucien Febvre.4 What needs to be stressed here is the fact that ‘civilization’ (which was, Terry Eagleton tells us, ‘largely a French notion’5), initially ‘named both the gradual process of social refinement and the utopian telos towards which it was unfolding.’6 One of the developments that took place during the nineteenth century in Britain, as the consequences of the Industrial Revolution and their social and cultural implications were becoming more and more obvious, is the emergence of attempts by some writers to separate the descriptive from the normative aspects of the word ‘civilization’ (as a result of the realization that ‘civilization as a fact’ did not necessarily correspond with ‘civilization as value’).7 The first to strike vociferously as well as effectively (influentially, that is) was Coleridge. In On the Constitution of Church and State (1830), he declared that ‘civilization is itself but a mixed good, if not far more a corrupting influence, the hectic of disease, not the bloom of health, and a nation so distinguished more fitly to be called a varnished than a polished people; where this civilization is not grounded in cultivation, in the harmonious development

Was France ‘the Most Civilised of Nations’? 33

of those qualities and faculties that characterise our humanity’. And Coleridge wound up chapter V by talking of ‘the permanent distinction, and the occasional contrast, between cultivation and civilization’ and of ‘this most valuable of the lessons taught by history … that a nation can never be a too cultivated, but may easily become an over-civilized race’.8 Substitute ‘culture’ for ‘cultivation’, and then much of the above, most notably ‘the harmonious development of those qualities and faculties that characterise our humanity’, must sound familiar to any one acquainted with Matthew Arnold’s prose writings of the 1860s–1880s. However, Arnold did not follow the same strategy as Coleridge. Instead of opting for the direct confrontation with ‘civilization’ (encapsulated in statements such as the one referring to ‘the permanent distinction, and the occasional contrast, between cultivation and civilization’), Arnold chose, as did Mill before him, to include what he meant by cultivation or ‘culture’ as an indispensable part of the ideal civilization that had to be aspired to. Coleridge and his followers (the Germano-Coleridgean school, in Mill’s terms) had launched a direct offensive on the notion of civilization itself, challenging and denying the positive normative connotations of the term. Mill and Arnold were unwilling to offer the positive associations of the term ‘civilization’ to their opponents, the philistine ‘enemies of culture’.9 Rather, they challenged the common uses of the term, uses such as Macaulay’s or Cobden’s, and argued that ‘civilization’ was more complex and comprehensive than its casual uses in England implied; and that, therefore, if their compatriots wished to really be ‘the greatest and most highly civilised people that ever the world saw’ (as Macaulay was telling them they were already), they would have to complement their one-sided, ‘narrow’, ‘external’, ‘material’, ‘mechanical’ civilization, by what was missing in order for it to become real civilization.10 Still, as both Mill and Arnold kept complaining, most authors in England spoke of civilization as if it meant only progress in the external operations of mankind, its conquest of nature, industrial and commercial advances, business, material well-being, railroads and steam-boats, and sometimes good political institutions. Macaulay was remarkably popular, but that was hardly surprising, thought thinkers such as Arnold or Morley. It was because he was giving expression to the views, feelings and prejudices of the low-educated, the vulgar and superficial, by being one of those ‘singing hosannahs to our actual state of development and civilisation’.11 Macaulay was ‘the great apostle of the Philistines’.12 Another contemporary account that could not agree more with Arnold’s (in fact, it seems that Arnold had read it, as he refers to evidence adduced in it) about Macaulay’s shallowness, superficiality, vulgarity of


style and complacent pandering to ‘the commonplaces of patriotism and freedom’, and his focusing on ‘the external and the superficial’, was that by John Morley, published in 1876.13 Lord Acton had also harsh words to say on Macaulay and his imitators on account of their professing ‘the notion of perpetual progress’, their ‘indulgence in self-gratulation and admiration of the present time’ [and of our own country in particular, would add Arnold and Morley and Mill] and their focus on ‘what in their eyes is the first consideration – material well-being’.14 Another prominent panegyrist of England’s commercial civilization and its primacy in the world was Richard Cobden with his boasting that ‘commerce is the grand panacea, which, like a beneficent medical discovery, will serve to inoculate with the healthy and saving taste for civilization all the nations of the world’; or that ‘our steam boats, that now visit every port of Europe, and our miraculous railroads, that are the talk of all nations, are the advertisements and vouchers for the value of our enlightened institutions’. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Cobden also attracted Arnold’s criticisms for equating civilization simply with ‘the general diffusion of material well-being’.15 Cobden’s reference to ‘the value of our enlightened institutions’ brings us to one more dimension, by no means negligible. A distinction between two kinds of civilization, which was completely different from those of Mill and Arnold, was drawn by Acton. The upshot of Acton’s treatment of the concept of civilization was (as in the case of Macaulay, Cobden and so many others, though through a different route) to establish the superiority of England, particularly vis-à-vis France, Ireland and other ‘Celtic’ nations. Acton distinguished between ‘two kinds of civilisation, social and political’, which ‘are wholly unconnected with each other. Either may subsist, in high perfection, alone.’ The Celtic race (both ‘[t]he Celts of these islands’ and ‘the Celts of Gaul’) ‘has exhibited to the world an unparalleled political incapacity’. Before the English invasion of Ireland, ‘there was probably as much material, certainly as much spiritual, culture in Ireland as in any country in the West; but there was not that by whose sustaining force alone these things endure, by which alone the place of nations in history is determined – there was no political civilisation. The State did not keep pace with the progress of society’. This was ‘the essential and decisive inferiority of the Celtic race, as conspicuous among the Irish in the twelfth century as among the French in our own. They gave way before the higher political aptitude of the English’.16 Most writers and thinkers, however, were more casual. Very simply, they did not even attempt or pretend to define civilization; they did not recognize any need to do so, but rather took for granted that it meant whatever they understood by it. After all, Henry Thomas Buckle could


write a remarkably ambitious History of Civilization in England (1857–61) without coming up with anything approaching the straightforwardness of Guizot’s definition of civilization.17

II

Mill on civilization

One of the few earnest attempts to define civilization was made by the younger Mill. Long before Matthew Arnold made a name (and many an enemy) by chiding the English middle class (and, along with them, the whole English nation) for their ‘philistinism’ and the hardness of their ‘imperfect civilisation’, Mill had done so in his own, no less forceful, way. Mill’s insistence on the importance of culture or mental cultivation as a necessary accompaniment and counter-balancing element to the influence of the commercial civilization is usually associated with the influence on his thought of what he called the Germano-Coleridgean school.18 However, there is one more source for Mill’s thinking about civilization, which deserves more attention than it has received. Guizot’s definition of civilization and his historical illustration of this definition was also an important component of Mill’s conception of civilization. In the first place, it will be shown that Mill (and other British thinkers later) adopted Guizot’s definition of civilization, which probably constituted the closest approximation to precision that the term had received in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the second place, moreover, what makes the significance of Guizot’s definition of civilization and its impact on Mill and other British thinkers more relevant to what is discussed in this book is the fact that Guizot had used a comparison between England and France in order to illustrate the distinction that constitutes the most novel aspect of his definition. That historicoethnological illustration was no less favourably received by Mill than the definition itself, and was used by him in the context of his attacks on what he saw as the narrowness of his own country’s civilization. France and England exemplified two different conceptions of civilization, two different versions of what constituted a highly civilized country. Mill came closest to offering a definition in an article he published in 1836 under the title ‘Civilization’.19 As he stated from the beginning: ‘The word civilization … is a word of double meaning. It sometimes stands for human improvement in general, and sometimes for certain kinds of improvement in particular’: We are accustomed to call a country more civilized if we think it more improved; more eminent in the best characteristics of Man and Society; farther advanced in the road to perfection; happier, nobler,


wiser. This is one sense of the word civilization. But in another sense it stands for that kind of improvement only, which distinguishes a wealthy and populous nation from savages or barbarians. It is in this sense that we may speak of the vices or the miseries of civilization; and that the question has been seriously propounded, whether civilization is on the whole a good or an evil? Assuredly, we entertain no doubt on this point; we hold that civilization is a good, that it is the cause of much good, and not incompatible with any; but we think there is other good, much even of the highest good, which civilization in this sense does not provide for, and some which it has a tendency (though that tendency may be counteracted) to impede. Mill maintained that ‘The present era is pre-eminently the era of civilization in the narrow sense.’ On the other hand: ‘We do not regard the age as either equally advanced or equally progressive in many of the other kinds of improvement. In some it appears to us stationary, in some even retrograde.’20 He then proceeded to use the word ‘in the narrow sense’: not that in which it was ‘synonymous with improvement’, but that in which it was ‘the direct converse or contrary of rudeness or barbarism’: In that sense, ‘[w]hatever be the characteristics of what we call savage life, the contrary of these, or the qualities which society puts on as it throws off these, constitute civilization’. Mill identified these characteristics as being dense populations dwelling in fixed habitations; development of agriculture, commerce, and manufactures; combined action of large bodies of human beings for common purposes and desire for social intercourse; and, finally, arrangements in society to protect persons and property and maintain peace.21 After asserting that the main characteristics of ‘civilization in the narrow sense’ appeared more or less simultaneously and were interrelated, he went on to write that ‘[t]hese elements exist in modern Europe, and especially in Great Britain,22 in a more eminent degree, and in a state of more rapid progression, than at any other place or time’.23 His first biographer found Mill’s definition of civilization in this article ‘inadequate’.24 The reason may be that Mill had linked the idea of civilization with topics that were not considered relevant to it in contemporary British thought until then. The definition given at the outset must have been the result of Mill having recently reviewed Guizot’s Histoire de la Civilisation en Europe and Histoire de la Civilisation en France, where one more attempt at a definition of civilization occurs (by way of presenting and commenting upon Guizot’s definition). The definition given in the two reviews of the French historian’s work was Guizot’s


own, but Mill endorsed it. The distinction Mill drew in the opening paragraphs of ‘Civilization’ between civilization as ‘human improvement in general’ and ‘civilization in the narrow sense’ was his way of accommodating the narrow sense in which the term civilization was used in Britain (and in which he was, in the main, to use it himself in that particular article, in order to highlight the shortcomings of ‘civilization in the narrow sense’) with the broader sense it was accorded by Guizot, which Mill had approved and elaborated upon in his review of the French historian some months earlier. It should be noted first that Mill was by no means alone in grappling with Guizot’s treatment of this concept – though he may have been the first to do so in Britain (he certainly thought so himself at any rate: in a letter to R.B. Fox, of 16 April 1840, Mill told his correspondent that of all he had attempted in his reviewing career in the London and Westminster Review, he had only three successes: ‘… My third success is that I have dinned into people’s ears that Guizot is a great thinker and writer, till they are, though slowly, beginning to read him – which I do not believe they would be doing, even yet, in this country but for me’).25 In an exhaustive study of the history of the idea of civilization in France in the period 1830–70, R.A. Lochore commenced his account by remarking: ‘François Guizot is in our period the great authority on the idea of civilization. Whenever a writer asks what civilization is, his first care is to make a judgment, usually respectful, of Guizot’s conception of it.’ The same centrality has been accorded to Guizot by Lucien Febvre in his seminal study on ‘Civilisation’, as well as by Georges Gusdorf.26 Mill wrote two reviews of Guizot’s early historical works, the first in 1836 and the second in 1845. Only the second review was authored entirely by Mill himself. The first was written initially by Joseph Blanco White for Mill’s London Review, but Mill was apparently not satisfied with it and exercised his editorial powers to make extensive amendments to the text. As there is ample evidence to suggest that Mill regarded this review as his own work,27 and as the main ideas expounded in the first review were repeated more elaborately in the second, both of them will be treated here as Mill’s own in terms of the views they expressed. A brief idea of the French historian’s conception of civilization can be gained by quoting from Mill’s (and BlancoWhite’s) 1836 review: Two things (says M. Guizot) present themselves to the mind, when we assert that a country is highly civilized: an organization of the


national body, which makes the advantages of union greatly preponderate over the inconveniences and necessary evils of social restraints; and a free and vigorous development of the mental powers and moral faculties in individuals. When we say that a country advances in civilization, we may mean that external life is becoming more secure and more agreeable – that mankind are improving their physical condition, subduing the powers of nature more and more to their use, and so improving their social arrangements, that all the conjunct operations which constitute social life are better performed than before: Or we may mean that the mental faculties of mankind are unfolding themselves – that a higher spiritual culture is introducing itself – that the individuals of whom society is made up, are advancing more and more towards the perfection of their nature – that the national mind is becoming wiser, nobler, more humane, or more refined, and that more numerous or more admirable individual examples of genius, talent, or heroism are manifesting themselves.28 Guizot argued emphatically, and the reviewer repeated, that, for a country to be regarded as really progressing in ‘civilization in its largest sense’, it must progress in both these respects, and the two elements must advance in parallel: ‘the improvement of society and outward life, and that of the inward nature of man’. In fact, ‘[i]f either improves and the other does not improve along with it, we have no confidence in the reality, or in the durability of the improvement; we do not consider it as a permanent advance in civilization’. When either of these two elements ‘gets the start, it is soon arrested till the other has overtaken it; and for the healthy and rapid advancement of both, it is of great importance that their development should take place pari passu’. Guizot asserted that, while other countries had advanced more rapidly than France in either of these two constituents of civilization, it was in France alone that they had advanced harmoniously together.29 Mill repeated the distinction between civilization in the narrow sense and civilization as human improvement in general (and the implicit or explicit higher evaluation of the latter) in important later writings such as the second review of Tocqueville (1840) and the Political Economy (1848, last edition 1871). In the latter work he drew a distinction between the relative merits of certain kinds of progress of the social body as a whole and the progress of man as an individual.30 Civilization in the narrow sense meant better co-operation between people, and Mill thought this was a positive development. But it affected at the same time


the character of individual man in a negative manner, and means should be found by which these ‘points of inferiority’ of modern men and women might be compensated. He wrote that this latter question belonged to a different enquiry and could not be further discussed in that part of the Political Economy. This question was addressed in works like the bulk of the essay on ‘Civilization’, ‘Sedgwick’s Discourse’, or the latter part of the second (1840) review of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. What Mill proposed, very briefly, was the preservation, reinforcement, or creation, by artificial means (by means, that is, not arising of themselves, automatically, from the tendencies of modern commercial civilization), of institutions, bodies, classes, and influences that would counteract the overwhelming tendencies of ‘civilization in the narrow sense’. As such, he described endowed universities that would teach the classics, history, and other subjects properly, in order to ‘send forth minds capable of maintaining a victorious struggle with the debilitating influences of the age, and strengthening the weak side of Civilization by the support of a higher cultivation’;31 the preservation of a leisured class, an agricultural class, and a learned class,32 as well as various other devices, were proposed in the years between 1835 and 1840, as means by which some of these tendencies could be resisted. In all these devices there was plenty that betrayed also the influence of Coleridge and the Coleridgeans.33 However, between 1835 and 1840 Mill came increasingly to place his worries about the over-preponderance of the commercial spirit in Britain in the context of a broader theory about the perniciousness of the over-preponderance of any principle, value, or power in society and the all-importance of the preservation of diversity and a degree of antagonism (‘systematic antagonism’, or ‘antagonisme organisé’ as he put it on various occasions). This is not simply the old Coleridgean concern but rather that concrete concern of Mill, Coleridge, Carlyle, Arnold and many others, about the rampant commercialism of their own society put in the context of the grand historical ‘lesson’ which, as I have argued elsewhere, Mill had come to learn from the perusal of Guizot’s Histoire de la Civilisation en Europe. This far from negligible idea was retained in later important writings and employed in Mill’s argumentation in favour of diversity in both On Liberty and Representative Government.34 An interesting example of Mill’s continued employment of the distinction between two different kinds of improvement occurs in his second review of Tocqueville. In that work he voiced his disagreement with Tocqueville’s attribution of most of the main characteristics of American society to democracy (in the sense of equality of conditions) and retorted


that what Tocqueville had presented as results of democracy were in fact ‘the tendencies of modern commercial society’.35 He alerted his readers to the dangers of ‘the commercial spirit’ becoming the exclusively preponderant value and passion in society and eclipsing all others. He repeated the distinction between civilization in the narrower sense and another, wider kind of improvement, when he asserted that ‘[t]he spirit of commerce and industry is one of the greatest instruments not only of civilization in the narrowest, but of improvement and culture in the widest sense’. It should not, nevertheless, be allowed to preponderate completely, or the result would be Chinese stationariness. To corroborate his argument he adduced the authority of Guizot and treated his readers to one of the many renditions of the historical lesson which he had found in Guizot. And concluded that in the case of Britain and America it was ‘[t]he spirit of commerce and industry’ that constituted the ‘one element of human improvement’ which was threatening to overpower all others.36 It may not be without interest in this context to compare the younger Mill’s conception of civilization with that of the man who first taught him on the subject, his father James Mill. Not surprisingly for a Scotsman of his generation perhaps, Mill père was fond of the term civilization and used it extensively in the History of British India. His thought on these subjects was clearly influenced by John Millar’s classification of ‘nations’ in a scale of civilization.37 Though he did not go far towards offering anything like a definition of civilization, the elder Mill did pronounce on his paramount criterion and test of civilization: ‘In looking at the pursuits of any nation, with a view to draw from them indications of the state of civilization, no mark is so important, as the nature of the End to which they are directed.’ Accordingly, ‘[e]xactly in proportion as Utility is the object of every pursuit, may we regard a nation as civilized. Exactly in proportion as its ingenuity is wasted on contemptible or mischievous objects, though it may be, in itself, an ingenuity of no ordinary kind, the nation may safely be denominated barbarous’. And further on, after lamenting the imprecise and indiscriminate use made of the term civilization ‘by most men’, the elder Mill remarked that ‘[i]t is not easy to describe the characteristics of the different stages of social progress. It is not from one feature, or from two, that a just conclusion can be drawn’. Rather, it is ‘from a joint view of all the great circumstances taken together, that their progress can be ascertained; and it is from an accurate comparison, grounded on these general views, that a scale of civilization can be formed, on which the relative position of nations may be accurately marked.’38 To all intents and


purposes, James Mill equated civilization with social progress. It is obvious that his son’s idea of civilization had become more complex. The distinction between two kinds of civilization (manifested, for instance, in references to ‘the higher elements of moral and intellectual, as distinguished from material, civilisation’) is also explicit in Bagehot’s writings. Given that it is clear that Bagehot had read Guizot’s Histoire de la Civilisation en Europe, it might not be too far-fetched to suggest that he was one of the people who adopted Guizot’s distinction, either directly from Guizot, or through reading Mill’s exposition of it (for it is also clear that Bagehot had been reading, and often referred to, Mill’s articles in various Reviews).39 We will see further on that, in different terms, Arnold was also to adopt a similar distinction. The question of Mill’s stance vis-à-vis civilization has given rise to a number of misunderstandings (only partly accounted for by the general imprecision surrounding the use of the term). Bernard Semmel has written that ‘in his essay on Coleridge, Mill wrote that while he was cheered by the increase of physical comforts and knowledge in the new civilization, nonetheless, in the authentic Christian–Stoic vein, he preferred the position of Coleridge, Carlyle, and the German philosophers, whom he called “worshippers of independence”’. In the opinion of these latter thinkers, ‘the advantages of civilization had been purchased by the repression of the virtues of individual courage and “self-relying independence”’. According to Semmel, ‘Mill agreed that this was too high a price to pay and joined the conservatives in denouncing the “effeminate shrinking from the shadow of pain”, the subordination of the denizens of mass civilization to artificial, monotonous, passionless lives, the destruction of any clear individuality, and the demoralization produced by the “great inequalities in wealth and social rank” of commercial society.’40 This is not what Mill said in ‘Coleridge’ (1840). In the passage to which Semmel referred, Mill spoke of differing views of civilization as an instance of an issue concerning which both sides had a portion of truth in what they supported, but ignored the portion of truth their opponents put forward. Both were right to this extent, and both were wrong, in missing the other side of the question. He went on arguing about the dangers of half-truths and the advisability of combining them, and it was in this context that the discussion of the two opposite attitudes towards ‘civilization’ was introduced as an illustration of the opinion just stated: ‘Take for instance the question how far mankind have gained by civilization. One observer is forcibly st[r]uck by the multiplication of physical comforts; the advancement and diffusion of knowledge; the decay of superstition; the facilities of mutual intercourse; the softening of manners; the decline of


war and personal conflict; the progressive limitation of the tyranny of the strong over the weak; the great works accomplished throughout the globe by the co-operation of multitudes: and he becomes that very common character, the worshipper of “our enlightened age”’.41 This was one of the two common attitudes. On the other hand, ‘[a]nother fixes his attention, not upon the value of these advantages, but upon the high price which is paid for them’; this ‘price’ being all the consequences of ‘civilisation’ which Semmel enumerated in the passage quoted here earlier. And Mill concluded: ‘The man who attends to these things, and to these exclusively, will necessarily infer that the savage life is the perfection of human nature; that the work of civilization should as far as possible be undone; and from the premises of Rousseau, he will not improbably be led to the practical conclusions of Rousseau’s disciple, Robespierre.’42 Nowhere in the text is there any indication that Mill ‘preferred the position of “the worshippers of independence”’, as Semmel claimed. On the contrary he was adamant that their contentions represented a half-truth. This is an instance of what he must have meant when he wrote in his Autobiography that he ‘applied to … Coleridge himself, many of Coleridge’s sayings about half-truths’.43 But if any more explicitness is needed, this is what he went on to say, immediately after having presented the two above attitudes towards civilization: ‘No two thinkers can be more entirely at variance than the two we have supposed – the worshippers of Civilization and of Independence, of the present and of the remote past. Yet all that is positive in the opinions of either of them is true; and we see how easy it would be to choose one’s path, if either half of the truth were the whole of it, and how great may be the difficulty of framing, as it is necessary to do, a set of practical maxims which combine both.’44 It is clear that in this text, intended not as an analysis of the concept of civilization but as an illustration of the need to combat half-truths and of the merits of many-sidedness, Mill was referring to what was talked of in Britain as civilization (that is, civilization in the narrow sense).45 This passage helps illustrate Mill’s position with regard to this civilization, as it states concisely both the relative merits and the defects that he considered to be the results of this process. In fact, Mill said no less than the same things in the essay on ‘Civilization’, where he had been no less explicit than he was in ‘Coleridge’ that he did not consider civilization in the narrow sense to be an evil, any more than he considered it to be an ideal.46 Yet, in both cases (‘Civilization’ and ‘Coleridge’) he has been misconstrued as attempting ‘to extol the past at the cost of the present’ (by Bain), as offering an ‘indictment of contemporary civilization’ (by Gertrude Himmelfarb), or as joining the conservatives in


denouncing the characteristics of the civilization of a commercial society (by Semmel).47 In later writings he kept the same attitude towards civilization ‘in the narrow sense’: he found it incomplete, a poor ideal in itself if it did not lead any further, but by no means a negative development. He even came to speak of it, more explicitly in later years, as probably a necessary stage on the road to a superior, higher, fuller improvement of mankind.48

III

England and France

Mill had started reflecting on the march of civilization from quite early, and it was his observation of the differences between England and France that had led him to some of his first conclusions. In a letter to his Saint-Simonian new friend Gustave d’Eichthal in 1829, where he articulated his observations on the early essay of Comte, Système de Politique Positive, one of Mill’s major objections was that Comte had allowed for ‘only one law of the development of human civilisation’. Mill invited d’Eichthal, who had studied England, to reflect whether this was true: ‘Is it not clear that these two nations, England and France, are examples of the advance of civilisation by two different roads, and that neither of them has, nor probably ever will, pass through the state which the other is in?’.49 Mill studied the different ‘roads’ by which civilization had been advancing in the two countries and a great part of this study was devoted to the historical development of the two nations. One of his favourite historians, and, moreover, one who affected his views on the respective character of the civilizations of England and France considerably was Guizot. I have mentioned already that Guizot had claimed for France a primacy in civilization on the grounds of its being the only country in which the two major components of civilization, the progress of society and the progress of man, had, throughout its history, advanced in parallel and kept abreast of each other. Although other countries had advanced more rapidly than France in either of these two constituents of civilization, in no other country had they developed so harmoniously together. In order to prove this point the French historian resorted to a brief survey of what he considered to have been the march of civilization in England, Germany, Italy, and Spain. His account was reproduced by Mill (and Blanco-White) in the review of 1836.50 On England Guizot had remarked that the direction of English civilization had been towards the improvement of the social arrangements, and of everything relating to external life: ‘its physical comfort – its freedom – and even its morality; but still, external well-being, and


such inward culture only as has a direct and evident bearing on external well-being’. And: ‘Society, in England has developed itself more nobly and more brilliantly than man: immediate and narrow applications have been more thought of than principles: the nation makes a greater figure in history, than the individuals who compose it.’ An ‘absence of interest in general and commanding views’ had been ‘at all periods’ characteristic of the nation. ‘The spirit of England is practical. The nation has had, and still possesses, great minds; but neither in number nor power … do they bear a due proportion to the colossal growth of the external, the social civilization of the country.’51 Germany, Italy, and Spain were also discussed in this context.52 From this comparison Guizot concluded that France was ‘the best suited to illustrate the general character and growth of European civilization’. The reviewer goes to some length to justify the French historian’s claim. It is maintained that Guizot’s choice was not due to national vanity. He chose to study in more detail the march of civilization in France because, ‘in that remarkable country, the advance of the two elements of civilization – the internal and the external development – has always been more parallel and harmonious than either in England, Germany, or Italy’. After citing Guizot’s contentions about the parallel development of man and society in France at length, the reviewer commented that ‘[t]his description, which, as applied to the present French character, is strikingly just, M. Guizot proves to have been true in all former periods, by a most able general view of his country’s history’.53 These views were not repeated in the second review of Guizot’s works. There Mill concentrated on the historical lesson concerning the causes of stationariness or extinction of oriental or ancient civilizations, on Guizot’s historiographical merits, and on his exposition of the historical causes that accounted for the differences in the development of civilization in England from those of the continental countries, in particular, France. But the specific and explicit claim articulated by Guizot that France was the country where ‘civilization has appeared in its most complete form’, the country whose civilization had ‘reproduced more faithfully than any other the general type and fundamental idea of civilization’ and ‘[i]t is the most complete, the most veritable, and, so to speak, the most civilized of civilizations’,54 was not mentioned by Mill in the second review – nor, indeed, anywhere else. Thus it is doubtful if Mill fully shared Guizot’s value-judgement concerning France’s superiority or primacy in civilization. What he certainly did retain from Guizot in this context, in any case, was the French historian’s analysis of the historical development and the main characteristics of civilization


in England. The historical sketch, referring to the circumstances of the conquest of England and the differences from the French experience cannot be followed here.55 But a recurring theme in Mill’s writings was a description of the main characteristics of English civilization which corresponded with Guizot’s pronouncements to the same effect (in his First Lecture in Civilisation en France) and on one occasion Guizot’s authority was adduced directly to corroborate his British admirer’s argument. In 1835 Mill had published an article entitled ‘Sedgwick’s Discourse’, where he took to task the English universities.56 The end for which endowed universities existed, ‘or ought to exist’, was ‘to keep alive philosophy’. They should provide ‘the education by which great minds are formed’ and aspire ‘[t]o rear up minds with aspirations and faculties above the herd, capable of leading on their countrymen to greater achievements in virtue, intelligence, and social well-being’. He challenged the performance of English universities with regard to these purposes. His argument focused on what he saw as England’s very poor record in individual eminence in the field of intellect and ‘higher pursuits’. Thus Mill (employing a technique that was to be used par excellence by Matthew Arnold in later decades57) complained that, according to ‘the general opinion of Europe’, the celebrity of England, ‘in the present day’, rested upon ‘her docks, her canals, her railroads’: In intellect she is distinguished only for a kind of sober good sense, free from extravagance, but also void of lofty aspirations; and for doing all those things which are best done where man most resembles a machine, with the precision of a machine. Valuable qualities, doubtless; but not precisely those by which man raises himself to the perfection of his nature, or achieves greater and greater conquests over the difficulties which encumber his social arrangements. Ask any reflecting person in France or Germany his opinion of England; … the feature which always strikes him in the English mind is the absence of enlarged and commanding views.58 … Instead of the ardour of research, the eagerness for large and comprehensive inquiry, of the educated part of the French and German youth, what find we? … not a vestige of a reading and thinking public engaged in the investigation of truth as truth, in the prosecution of thought for the sake of thought. … Guizot, the greatest admirer of England among the Continental philosophers, nevertheless remarks that, in England, even great events do not, as they do everywhere else, inspire great ideas. Things, in England, are greater than the men who accomplished them.


But what seemed to Mill most objectionable was the striking discrepancy between this poor state of affairs in one aspect of life in England, and prodigious advances in other respects, such as in wealth, the humanization of the manners of the people, the refinement of tastes, the power of co-operating for a common object, ‘the diffusion of reading, of philanthropy, of interest in public affairs’ and so on.59 Obviously he agreed with Guizot’s account of English civilization as being developed only as far as the conquest of nature and the arrangements of social life were concerned (‘external’ or ‘social’ civilization, in Guizot’s words) with no corresponding development of the intellectual capacities of individuals. Though Mill’s comments on French life and civilization would take at least a whole book were they to be examined in detail, a broad outline of the nature and tone of his pronouncements may be useful in the context of his comparisons between the kind of civilization that had taken hold of England, and the state of affairs in France. Though he did not speak again of France as being the most ‘civilized’ country as he had done in the 1836 review of Guizot, he did speak, repeatedly, of things that he found commendable and worth imitating in the civilization and life of France. The relevant comments fall into three main categories. In the first place, Mill thought that intellect and intellectual eminence were much more valued in France than they were in England. People of cultivation and superior education were, first, more likely to be met with in France – thanks to its having been spared the curse of the ‘sabbathless pursuit of wealth’ that had taken possession of all minds in Britain –, and secondly, were more deferred to. In particular the significance and influence of men of intellect through the medium of the press (best exemplified in his role-model, Armand Carrel) was a French peculiarity that he found well worthy of praise.60 In the second place, Mill believed that people enjoyed life more in France. They were happier, because they were not obsessed with ‘getting on in the world’, an obsession that was the principal fault of the English people. The ‘commercial spirit’ was not so preponderant in France, where there were many other values and passions in currency – some of them more commendable than others of course.61 Bagehot also thought that ‘[t]here is in truth a certain pause upon enjoyment, and a certain careful consideration of it in France, which in England there is not’. And, in an attempt to account for the difference, he adduced the authority of ‘Mr. Mill, who speaks of the indifference to enjoyment that characterises all countries over which the shade of “Puritanism” has passed.’62 A third theme was the French openness and receptivity to enlarged views and generalized conceptions, which Mill contrasted, more often


favourably than not, with the English tendency to attend only to narrow applications and to reject anything that did not admit of immediate proof or did not lead to immediate practical results. However, he saw disadvantages in the exaggeration of the French propensity,63 and that is why he preferred the combination of the two ‘spirits’, that would eliminate the disadvantages of either.64 The similarities between what Mill saw – and sought – in France at least from the early 1830s onwards, and what Matthew Arnold was to say around three decades later are too striking to need much to be said about them. Mill observed and highlighted in France some characteristics opposed to those that he considered to be the worst deficiencies of his own country’s civilization. In fact, he would say himself (as would – and did – Arnold) that he came to the awareness of these deficiencies (and to the awareness that they were deficiencies) thanks to his focus on a foreign country,65 and moreover, a country best suited to function as a mirror or foil to England, France. He certainly did believe that France was the country best suited to correct – through example and influence – some of the worst defects of England’s narrow civilization. As a Frenchman wrote of him in the Revue de Deux Mondes, Mill wanted to enhance the civilization of his country by comparing it to different civilizations, and in this attempt he did not hesitate to apprise his compatriots of those assets of other countries, especially France, which he wanted his country to acquire.66

IV

Arnold on civilization

It is reported of Dr Thomas Arnold (‘Celt-hating’ though he was), during one of his visits to France, that ‘[b]y August 1830 he had come to realise why Guizot could place France at the head of European civilisation on the grounds that she was superior both to Germany in social progress and to England in producing more advanced and enlarged minds’. And, as soon as his children were old enough he took them to France with him.67 With such a father, it would have been surprising had ‘Matt’ not shown a keen interest both in France and in the grounds for that superiority in civilization that was claimed for her. And we saw earlier (note 51), that it was part of Matthew Arnold’s schooling at Rugby to read Guizot, as well as that much later, in 1875, he was recommending Guizot’s Histoire de la Civilisation en France for the improvement of the Oxford curriculum.68 It should be no surprise, then, if some of the things that follow ring bells.69 Identifying the deficiencies of his country’s ‘civilisation’ and thus helping improve it was a major preoccupation for Arnold. He often


spoke as if this is what he saw as his vocation. In ‘Irish Catholicism and British Liberalism’ (1878) he described himself as ‘one of a disinterested class of observers, who … set themselves to observe honestly and to report faithfully the state and progress of our civilisation’. Earlier, in ‘My Countrymen’ (1866), he had put in the mouths of his foreign interlocutors what were to become his hackneyed strictures on the philistines, winding up their tirade of criticisms by declaring that ‘the capital, pressing danger of England, is the barbarism of her middle class; the civilisation of her middle class is England’s capital, pressing want.’70 Arnold described his reaction to his foreign friends’ indictment of his country as being that it determined him to go on trying to keep his mind fixed on the deficiencies they had pointed out, ‘instead of singing hosannahs to our actual state of development and civilisation’. His task was, rather: ‘to enquire, perhaps too curiously, what [the] present state of English development and civilisation is … that is, I am sure, invaluable exercise for us just at present. Let all persist in it who can, and steadily set their desires on introducing, with time, a little more soul and spirit into the too, too solid flesh of English society’. When he gave the lecture that was published as ‘Equality’ in 1878, he told his audience, that ‘it is in its effects upon civilisation that equality interests me’.71 In his best-known essay in ‘Political and Social Criticism’ – as the subtitle described Culture and Anarchy (1867–69) –, in asserting the importance of ‘culture’, he was adamant about what was at stake: ‘But, finally, perfection … is a harmonious expansion of all the powers which make the beauty and worth of human nature, and is not consistent with the over-development of any one power at the expense of the rest.’ It was clear, then, that culture has ‘a very important function to fulfil for mankind’. He then stressed: ‘And this function is particularly important in our modern world, of which the whole civilisation is, to a much greater degree than the civilisation of Greece and Rome, mechanical and external, and tends constantly to become more so.’ Moreover: ‘But above all in our own country has culture a weighty part to perform, because here that mechanical character, which civilisation tends to take everywhere, is shown in the most eminent degree.’ In fact, ‘nearly all the characters of perfection, as culture teaches us to fix them’, were confronted ‘in this country with some powerful tendency which thwarts them and sets them at defiance’. The idea of ‘perfection as an inward condition of the mind and spirit’ was ‘at variance with the mechanical and material civilisation in esteem with us, and nowhere, as I said, so much in esteem as with us’.72 And, in a strain unmistakeably reminiscent of Carlyle’s castigation of ‘the Mechanical Age’ or ‘the Age of


Machinery’ in Signs of the Times (1829), Arnold continued: ‘Faith in machinery is, I said, our besetting danger; … always in machinery, as if it had a value in and for itself’, the machinery in question being ‘freedom’, ‘population’, ‘coal’, ‘wealth’, ‘even, religious organisations’. Almost everybody in England was ‘accustomed to speak of these things as if they were precious ends in themselves, and therefore had some of the characters of perfection indissolubly joined to them’. It was Arnold’s self-appointed role to help his countrymen distinguish the means towards perfection (the ‘machinery’) from the goal itself, and to prevent them from mistaking one or more of the parts that constituted ‘civilisation’ or ‘humanisation’ for the whole.73 One may think that it ill befits Arnold to demand precision in definitions or consistency in their use. Was he not, after all, the target of Frederic Harrison’s scathing satire in ‘Culture: A Dialogue’ (‘the wittiest of the replies to “Culture and its Enemies”’) exactly on that count?74 Yet, that being as it may, Arnold did often make remarks about the inadequate uses of the term ‘civilisation’ or the failure of authors who employed it to define it.75 As he was still complaining in the very last year of his life, ‘people use the term civilisation in the loosest possible way, for the most part attaching to it, however, in their own mind some meaning connected with their own preferences and experiences’. Thus, the most common meaning attached to the term was ‘that of a satisfaction, not of all the main demands of human nature, but of the demand for the comforts and conveniences of life’. ‘Partial and material achievement’ he claimed, ‘is always being put forward as civilisation. We hear a nation called highly civilised by reason of its industry, commerce, and wealth, or by reason of its liberty or equality, or by reason of its numerous churches, schools, libraries, and newspapers.’76 Or, as he had put it in 1881: ‘Business is civilisation, think many of us; it creates and implies it. The general diffusion of material well-being is civilisation, thought Mr. Cobden … ; it creates and implies it.’ Arnold’s response was: ‘Not always. And for fear we should forget what business and what material well-being have to create, before they do really imply civilisation, let us, at the risk of being thought tiresome, repeat here what we have said often of old.’ The suggestion that he risked being thought tiresome was well justified: he had offered his readers in various Reviews versions of what follows time and again for a couple of decades. It is worth quoting, as it is one of his most straightforward statements of what he considered to be the elements that constituted civilization: ‘Business and material well-being are signs of expansion and parts of it; but civilisation, that great and complex force, includes much more than even that power of expansion of


which they are parts. It includes also the power of conduct, the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, the power of social life and manners.’77 Given his vivid interest in the issue, it is not surprising that the initial title Arnold had proposed in 1878 to his publisher for the collection of recent essays that was eventually published as Mixed Essays in 1879 had been ‘Literature and Civilisation – Mixed Essays’. Nor is it any more surprising that in the Preface to the Mixed Essays he chose to discuss, again, ‘civilisation’. He said in that Preface that, although nearly twenty years separated the first of the essays from the last, and despite the variety of subjects touched by the volume, yet it had ‘a unity of tendency’. That unity of tendency was inextricably linked to ‘civilisation’: ‘What then is civilisation, which some people seem to conceive of as if it meant railroads and the penny post … ?’: ‘Civilisation is the humanisation of man in society. Man is civilised when the whole body of society comes to live with a life worthy to be called human, and corresponding to man’s true aspirations and powers.’78 Now, ‘[t]he means by which man is brought towards this goal of his endeavour are various’: ‘First and foremost of the necessary means towards man’s civilisation we must name expansion.’ What was ‘expansion’? ‘All the conveniences of life by which man has enlarged and secured his existence – railroads and the penny post among the number – are due to the working in man of this force or instinct of expansion.’ But the manifestation of it ‘which we English know best, and prize most, is the love of liberty’. Then he came to ‘[t]he other great manifestation of the instinct of expansion’, which is ‘the love of equality’. In the same strain as in some of the essays re-printed in Mixed Essays – most notably, ‘Democracy’ (1861) and ‘Equality’ (1878) – he insisted on the importance of equality for civilization: ‘Of the love of equality we English have little; but, undoubtedly, it is no more a false tendency than the love of liberty. Undoubtedly, immense inequality of conditions and property is a defeat to the instinct of expansion; it depresses and degrades the inferior masses. The common people is and must be, as Tocqueville said, more uncivilised in aristocratic countries than in any others.’79 Arnold summed up thus: ‘I put first among the elements of human civilisation the instinct of expansion, because it is the basis which man’s whole effort to civilise himself presupposes. General civilisation presupposes this instinct, which is inseparable from human nature; presupposes its being satisfied, not defeated.’80 Now, ‘[t]he basis being given, we may rapidly enumerate the powers which, upon this basis, contribute to build up human civilisation’: These were ‘the power of conduct, the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, the power of social life and manners’.81


V

Arnold on civilization in France and England

Arnold concluded his Preface to the Mixed Essays by summing up what was ‘the line of thought which the essays in the present volume follow and represent’. He stressed with regard to what he had called ‘the conditions of civilisation’ (‘[e]xpansion, conduct, science, beauty, manners’), that ‘they all of them hang together, that they must all have their development, that the development of one does not compensate for the failure of others; that one nation suffers by failing in this requisite, and another by failing in that’.82 No surprise, therefore, in that he spent much of his time discussing the respective failings and strengths of the countries he was most familiar with. Arnold’s inconsistencies notwithstanding, some of these supposed failings and strengths he repeated so many times, that they can be taken to represent firm opinions he wanted to impart to his readers. He came closest to offering a sketch of the strengths and weaknesses of each of a number of nations, in terms of the ‘elements’ or ‘conditions’ of ‘civilisation’, in the essay ‘Equality’ (1878).83 Thus, the ‘Hebrew nation’ was pre-eminent in keeping and observing the law that had been given to them by their lawgiver. ‘The Hellenic race’ was pre-eminent in ‘[t]he power of intellect and science, the power of beauty, the power of social life and manners’. Coming to ‘[n]ations now existing’, England was characterised, ‘in a remarkable degree, by a sense of the power of conduct. Our feeling for religion is one part of this; our industry is another. What foreigners so much remark in us, – our public spirit, our love, amidst all our liberty, for public order and for stability, – are parts of it too’. Then, ‘the power of beauty’ was the privileged domain of the Italians. As for ‘[t]he power of knowledge’, it was ‘eminently an influence with the Germans’. And: ‘Finally, there is the power of social life and manners. And even the Athenians themselves, perhaps, have hardly felt this power so much as the French.’84 The French possessed ‘l’esprit de société, the spirit of society, the social spirit’. Most people in England were ‘not disposed … to attach all this importance to social intercourse and manners’. Yet, ‘the power of social life and manners is truly… one of the great elements in our humanisation. Unless we have cultivated it, we are incomplete.’ But, ‘above all things, it is a promoter of equality’.85 The French people, ‘with its congenital sense for the power of social intercourse and manners’, from the first moment when ‘it came into existence’, ‘was on the road to equality’. It had been ‘the spirit of society’ which had mainly impelled the French to make the French Revolution. As a result, unlike what was the case with the wretched English masses, even ‘the most cultivated man may find himself in sympathy’ with a French peasant, and ‘may feel that he is talking to an


equal’. Arnold used quotations from one of Philip Gilbert Hamerton’s (very successful and influential) books on France, extolling the ‘intelligence’ of the French peasants.86 That was why ‘France is the country where the people, as distinguished from a wealthy refined class, most lives what we call a humane life, the life of civilised man.’ There was ‘a general equality in a humane kind of life’. This was ‘the secret of the passionate attachment’ with which France inspired all Frenchmen. There was ‘so much of the goodness and agreeableness of life there, and for so many’. It was ‘the secret of her having been able to attach so ardently to her the German and Protestant people of Alsace, while we have been so little able to attach the Celtic and Catholic people of Ireland. France brings the Alsatians into a social system so full of the goodness and agreeableness of life; we offer to the Irish no such attraction’.87 It was the secret, finally, of ‘the prevalence … in other continental countries of a legislation tending, like that of France, to social equality. The social system which equality creates in France is, in the eyes of others, such a giver of the goodness and agreeableness of life, that they seek to get the goodness by getting the equality’. Those in England who attributed what they saw as France’s ‘fearful troubles’, and all its other problems to its equality were wrong.88 France owed her problems to her deficiencies in the other elements of full civilisation or humanisation, but not to equality, which, on the contrary, was the greatest civilising agency in that country; with so impressive results, that even France’s critics were astonished at her civilisedness and proclaimed her to be the most civilised nation. This was the beginning of Arnold’s last decade, when he was at his most austere and priggish. And this text was written some years after the defeat in the Franco-Prussian war had shown beyond any doubt for Arnold how low the French had fallen in terms of morality and ‘conduct’, due to their cult of the goddess Aselgeia, or Lubricité. Bearing these in mind, one should not be particularly surprised to read that: ‘The power of conduct is the greatest of all. And without in the least wishing to preach, I must observe … that for the power of conduct France has never had anything like the same sense which she has had for the power of social life and manners.’ As for ‘[t]he sense for the power of intellect and knowledge’, it ‘has not been adequate either’. And, to complete his list, ‘[t]he sense for beauty has not been adequate’.89 Then, ‘if a nation laying no sufficient hold upon the powers of beauty and knowledge, and a most failing and feeble hold upon the power of conduct, comes to demoralisation and intellectual stoppage and fearful troubles, we need not be inordinately surprised. What we should rather marvel at is the healing


and bountiful operation of Nature, whereby the laying firm hold on one real element in our humanisation [social spirit] has had for France results so beneficent.’90 But Arnold did not write ‘Equality’ in order to discuss its results in France simply. ‘We have to see whether the considerations which we have been employing may not be of use to us about England.’ The English had several ‘good’ things that could in fairness be said of them. They had ‘energy’ and ‘honesty’, and ‘a strong sense for the chief power in the life and progress of man, – the power of conduct’. These things applied to ‘the English people as a whole’. Then he spoke of the separate classes with their traits and, especially, their failures, and did not fail to deliver one more attack on the English middle class which, ‘driven by its sense for the power of conduct’, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, ‘entered the prison of Puritanism, and had the key turned upon its spirit there for two hundred years.’ Not knowing, ‘that to the building up of human life there belong all those other powers also, – the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, the power of social life and manners’. As a result they created, for themselves and for the whole nation in which they became predominant, a narrow, hard civilization, a way of life ‘against which the instinct of self-preservation in humanity rebels’. As for the lower classes, ‘it does not appeal, this mob, to the principles of ’89 … ; it does not insist on the rights of man; what it wants is beer, gin, and fun’. This contrasted sharply with the accounts of all competent observers about the ‘amount of civilisation’ possessed by even the most illiterate class in France. This was thanks to France’s equality. England’s inequality had the opposite result: ‘And now what has this condition of our middle and lower classes to tell us about equality? How is it, must we ask, how is it that, being without fearful troubles, having so many achievements to show and so much success, having as a nation a deep sense for conduct, having signal energy and honesty, having a splendid aristocracy, having an exceptionally large class of gentlemen, we are yet so little civilised?.’91 His conclusion was that, just as France owed her ‘fearful troubles’ to ‘other things’ (meaning her deficiency in the power of conduct and, to a smaller degree, her insufficient hold upon the powers of beauty and knowledge) and owed ‘her civilisedness to equality’, so England owed her ‘immunity from fearful troubles to other things’ (meaning the English people’s ‘energy’, ‘honesty’, and the ‘power of conduct’), and her ‘uncivilisedness to inequality’. Thus: ‘surely it is easy to see that our shortcomings in civilisation are due to our inequality’; or, in other words, ‘that the great inequality of classes and property … has the natural and necessary effect … of


materialising our upper class, vulgarising our middle class, and brutalising our lower class. And this is to fail in civilisation’.92 Elsewhere, Arnold has spoken to the effect that France, though far from perfect, came closer to the ideal of civilization than England, at least to the extent that a far greater number of people in France were more ‘civilised’, and lived a life closer to being ‘civilised’, than their counterparts in England. If we remember that for Arnold ‘Civilisation is the humanisation of man in society. Man is civilised when the whole body of society comes to live with a life worthy to be called human, and corresponding to man’s true aspirations and powers’,93 we can see why this wider dispersion of a civilized life in France, among the masses, was so important for Arnold, and made her, in his eyes, seem closer to the ideal of civilization than England. Besides the fact that the masses were incomparably more civilised in France than in England, also the civilisation of the middle class in France was far greater than ‘the bad civilisation of the English middle class’, most notably thanks to the uniform and better education of the French middle class. This was by no means a case of Arnold having been starry-eyed or having had illusions about the French early, and then come to be frustrated. Rather, he was adamant from very early on about what he saw as their flaws, although his strictures on these flaws acquired an added emphasis in the last decade of his life or so. But already in his mid-twenties, he was rather clear about what he admired about the French and what he did not. In letters in early March 1848 he was exclaiming: ‘In a few years people will understand better why the French are the most civilized of European peoples: when they see how fictitious our manners and civility have been – how little inbred in the race.’94 Or: ‘It is … this wide and deepspread intelligence95 that makes the French seem to themselves in the van of Europe. People compare a class here with a class there the best in each, and then wonder at Michelet’s and Guizot’s vanity.’ However, they failed to see that the ‘final expression up to the present time of European opinion, without fantastic individual admixture, was current there: not emergent here and there in a great writer, – but the atmosphere of the commonplace man as well as of the Genius. This is the secret of their power’.96 But he also noticed that ‘moral indignation that People does not feel’,97 which indicates how early his belief was that the French were deficient in morality. In England and the Italian Question (1859), he noted that one of the reasons why French participation in the war in Italy was popular at home was that the French people ‘were sensible also to the gratification of playing before the world the brilliant part of generous and disinterested liberators of such a country as Italy’. The common people were constantly saying that


it was ‘une belle guerre’, and then followed ‘a string of commonplaces, taken from the journals, as to the achievements of Italy in the cause of civilisation and her claims upon the gratitude of the world’. It was to the honour of France, he continued, it was what distinguished her from all other nations, ‘that the mass of her population is so accessible to considerations of this elevated order’. It was ‘the bright feature in her civilisation that her common people can understand and appreciate language which elsewhere meets with a response only from the educated and refined classes’.98 The closest Arnold came to a definite answer to the question that provided the title of this chapter was what he had said in 1861, in ‘Democracy’: Every one knows how Frenchmen proclaim France to be at the head of civilisation, the French army to be the soldier of God, Paris to be the brain of Europe, and so on. All this is, no doubt, in a vein of sufficient fatuity and bad taste; but it means, at bottom, that France believes she has so organised herself as to facilitate for all members of her society full and free expansion; that she believes herself to have remodelled her institutions with an eye to reason rather than custom, and to right rather than fact; it means, that she believes the other peoples of Europe to be preparing themselves, more or less rapidly, for a like achievement, and that she is conscious of her power and influence upon them as an initiatress and example. In this belief there is a part of truth and a part of delusion. I think it is more profitable for a Frenchman to consider the part of delusion contained in it; for an Englishman, the part of truth.99 Thus, to sum up, Arnold believed that the French excelled in the power of manners and society, the social spirit. This social spirit generated and in turn fed on equality, which was the secret of the fierce patriotic attachment of all its inhabitants to France. What ‘so strongly attached to France the Germanic Alsace’ was ‘the wonderfully attractive power of French civilisation’.100 Thanks to this equality, the masses, the common people (notably the peasants, who were, then, the vast majority of the nation) were far more civilized than the masses anywhere else (incomparably more so than their brutalised counterparts in England). But also the middle class was more civilized in France than their vulgarised English counterparts; this was thanks both to equality (to their not being subjected to the corrupting and depressing influences of having another class – aristocracy – above them to imitate or defer to), and to


the educational system of France – the lycée system resulted in all of them having the same, good, secondary education, as good as what only the aristocracy were getting in England, and much better than what most of the middle classes were receiving in England. The French, the whole people, including the masses, had ‘intelligence’; it was ‘the intelligence of their idea-moved masses’ which made the French ‘politically in the van of Europe’.101 As to their deficiencies, the greatest was moral. They did not have a sufficiently strong sense of the power of conduct. As he put it in his later writings (especially after their defeat in the Franco-Prussian war), they were given to the worship of the goddess Lubricité. Or, as he put it in ‘Equality’ (1878): ‘You know the French; – a little more Biblism, one may take leave to say, would do them no harm.’ But, meanwhile, the English, who had exhibited too much ‘Biblism’, or ‘Biblism’ too exclusively, to the detriment of a more harmonious development of all the powers that would make for a full civilization or humanisation, should borrow more ‘intelligence’ and imitate the ‘equality’ of their neighbours, as these were among the things they lacked most.

3 French Politics Through British ‘Glasses’

Again, France provides the example, for of course by the nineteenth century the traditional Whig gratitude for deliverance from despotism, Popery, and wooden shoes, was supplemented, notably in 1848, by self-satisfaction at an escape from the obviously related fate of revolution. (John W. Burrow) Fifty years ago there was only one nation which could even try to form a free government, and that one – France – tried and failed. We now see how great her difficulties were. … But though we may explain the failure of France, it was not the less a momentous and disastrous failure. It has created and diffused a sort of belief that free governments are much more difficult than they in truth are, and has led English-speaking persons, both here and in America, to pity other nations, and bless themselves that they have better political abilities than all foreigners, and especially than those ‘poor French’. (Walter Bagehot)1 The above statements are indicative of what was at stake. Victorian smugness was thriving on the difficulties of France, for France was the first country that came to mind every time the Victorians saw themselves in a comparative light. This examination of responses to French politics among British political thinkers is divided into three parts. First, I shall focus particularly on giving the gist of the verdict on the malaise of French politics presented to the British public in the 1830s by the British thinker who followed political developments in France and wrote about them more than any other at that time. The thinker in question was 57


J.S. Mill and his views on the significance and results of the revolution of July 1830, and on French politics in the years that followed (both in his innumerable articles in the Examiner between 1830 and 1834 and in his overall assessment of the politics of France in those years, in the significant article ‘Armand Carrel’ of 1837), are worth looking at is some detail. Also, a brief assessment will be offered of Mill’s attitude towards Armand Carrel (the personality in whom he was most interested), as well as of his overall attitude towards the parties and factions active in French politics during the July Monarchy (1830–48). The Revolution of 1848 and its aftermath brought French politics to the centre of Victorian political concerns. The reason for the immediate interest was clearly articulated by Arnold: ‘If the new state of things succeeds in France, social changes are inevitable here and elsewhere – for no one looks on seeing his neighbour mending without asking himself if he cannot mend in the same way.’ And Carlyle’s first comment was that ‘the Event is indeed great, and ought to be affecting to all of us, – and didactic to the race of conscious and unconscious Humbugs on this side of the water too’.2 Several thinkers, therefore, took an interest and started writing about the politics of France in 1848. Part II will discuss their responses to the Revolution of 1848 and the Second Republic. British views and attitudes were even more affected by the failure of the revolutionary and republican experiments in France and the success of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in abolishing the republic and establishing his authoritarian Second Empire. The quotation from Bagehot cited in the epigraph of this chapter refers to these developments. In Part III we shall be dealing with the pronouncements of a number of British thinkers on French politics from the coup d’état of 2 December 1851 through the Second Empire (authoritarian, and then, in the 1860s, liberalised) to the political developments and constitutional debates of the first years of the French Third Republic in the 1870s and 1880s.

I

The revolution of 1830 and the July monarchy

As Macaulay’s nephew and biographer has commented, 1830 had a peculiarity among French revolutions, at least as far as British reactions were concerned: ‘What was passing among our neighbours for once created sympathy, and not repulsion, on this side [of] the Channel. One French Revolution had condemned English Liberalism to forty years of subjection, and another was to be the signal which launched it on as long a career of supremacy. Most men said, and all felt, that Wellington must follow Polignac’.3 Lord Macaulay himself, while arguing that the revolutions of

French Politics Through British ‘Glasses’ 59

1848 had done no good at all (or rather, that there was no harm that they had not done), did differentiate between 1848 and 1830: he accepted the parallel many Frenchmen drew between the French 1830 and the English 1688 and told some of them (in conversations in 1858) that ‘The only revolutions which have turned out well have been defensive revolutions; – ours of 1688; the French of 1830’. And, like Trevelyan and Macaulay, Bagehot also excepted 1830 from the French revolutions that had damaged the cause of liberalism among France’s neighbours.4 But what about the response of the hot-blooded young radical who, as Macaulay put it ironically in a letter on 19 August 1830, had just rushed to Paris apparently ‘to preach up the republic’?5 J.S. Mill’s assessment of the effects of the July Revolution was not totally free from ambiguity. While it started by rousing his ‘utmost enthusiasm, and gave [him], as it were, a new existence’, he ended up, in ‘Armand Carrel’ (1837), calling the events that had led to it ‘a misfortune to France’ and ‘an evil hour for France’.6 How did this shift come about? Probably the salient feature of Mill’s initial comments on the July Revolution was his astonishment at what he saw as the exemplary behaviour of ‘the people’ (‘the common people’, ‘the workmen of Paris’), and ‘the more exhilarating views which it opens of human nature’.7 He went out of his way to praise their wisdom, maturity, and virtue, claiming that he mixed and conversed extensively with many of them, as indeed with ‘persons of all classes’.8 He took a more sober view as early as the beginning of October 1830, admitting that the majority of the population were ‘undoubtedly quiescent’.9 The realization of the limits of the people’s demands and political awareness led him to focus his hopes more and more on the press and particularly the progressive circles of ‘young men’ rather than on immediate pressure by ‘the common people’ themselves. In the series of articles entitled ‘Prospects of France’ which he wrote for the Examiner during the second half of 1830, Mill tried to defuse the alarm at the state of France caused by articles in the British press and most notably in The Times. He argued strenuously in support of an extension of the suffrage as the only means of preventing the newly enfranchised bourgeoisie from becoming ‘a narrow oligarchy’ that would just replace the old oligarchy.10 He continued to report on French affairs almost on a weekly basis. His enthusiasm of the first weeks was increasingly qualified. Though gravely disappointed by the actions and failures of those who had come to power since July he did not want another revolution to occur, ‘for as it is the second blow which makes the quarrel, so it is the second convulsion which annihilates future stability’.11 In his perception of developments in France one of the turning points seems to have been the insurrection


of 5–6 June 1832. In an article of 24 June 1832 he gave vent to his frustration both with the French government’s way of suppressing the uprising that started in Paris during General Lamarque’s funeral, but also, implicitly at least, with the stance of some extreme republican activists and secret societies.12 The measures taken by the French Government (which had placed Paris under a state of siege) appeared to him to be a blow to any notion of a government of law. He commented: ‘How many years, rather how many ages, of legal protection seem necessary to engender that habitual reverence for law which is so deeply rooted in the minds of all classes of Englishmen, from the prince to the pauper!’. It was ‘the vainest of fancies to look for any improvement in the government or in the condition of the people’, when ‘even honest men are apt to consider any misconduct on the part of the Government a full justification for civil war, and when every King, every minister, considers every act of resistance to Government a justification for suspending the constitution and assuming dictatorial power’.13 He continued reporting on French politics in an astonishing number of articles, but he was patently more and more frustrated with developments there, or lack thereof, while in Britain the first Reform Bill had been passed, and things started looking more optimistic to the young radical. Meanwhile, between 10 October and about 20 November 1833, he visited Paris, where he made Carrel’s acquaintance, and attended meetings of the republicans.14 In articles he wrote after his return he showed himself more optimistic than before on the prospects of French politics.15 No matter whether the new Paris experience had affected his views on the state of France (and, consequently, on the outcome of the July Revolution) or not, it remains the case that, in his more sober later assessment of the whole period in ‘Armand Carrel’ (1837)16 Mill came to say that the July revolution (or rather, the events that led to it) had been a misfortune after all, because it stopped the progress the French ‘national mind’ was making towards developing the constitutional mores that France desperately lacked.17 By 1837 he had come to believe that the meagre fruits of the July revolution were not worth the price paid; the price being not so much the violence of the revolution itself, but, much more importantly, longer-term developments.18 The whole thing had been a ‘misfortune for France’ because it interrupted the progress that was being made during Martignac’s tenure of office and, what was more, it apparently prevented the resumption of progress, because of the precedent it established to resort to insurrection whenever there were abuses or grievances. He asserted that the short interval of eighteen months, during which the moderate Martignac ministry lasted, ‘was the brightest period which France has


known since the [French] Revolution’.19 This was so ‘for a reason which well merits attention’: ‘those who had the real power in the country, the men of property and the men of talent, had not the power at the Tuileries, nor any near prospect of having it’.20 In this context, Mill embarked upon an analysis of what he thought by now was one of the most serious deficiencies afflicting French political culture (or, as he put it later in his Representative Government, French ‘national character’21): ‘It is the grievous misfortune of France, that being still new to constitutional ideas and institutions, she has never known what it is to have a fair government, in which there is not one law for the party in power, and another law for its opponents.’ Rather, whatever party could get hold of the executive, and induce a majority of the Chamber to support it, ‘does practically whatever it pleases; hardly anything that it can be guilty of towards its opponents alienates its supporters, unless they fear that they are themselves marked out to be the next victims; and even the trampled-on minority fixes its hopes not upon limiting arbitrary power, but upon becoming the stronger party and tyrannizing in its turn’.22 It was ‘to the eternal honour of Carrel’, Mill went on, that ‘he, and he almost alone’, in a subsequent period far less favourable than that of the Martignac Ministry, ‘recognised the great principle of which all parties had more than ever lost sight; – saw that this, above all, was what his country wanted’ and ‘unfurled the banner of equal justice and equal protection to all opinions’. Yet, ‘[i]t was too late. A revolution had intervened; and even those who suffered from tyranny, had learnt to hope for relief from revolution, and not from law or opinion.’23 The revolution that had intervened was, of course, the July Revolution of 1830. Things could have been different, however, had it not happened, because, during the Martignac Ministry, all parties were equally afraid of a convulsion.24 And: ‘The idea gained ground, and appeared to be becoming general, of building up in France for the first time a government of law.’25 As the King was in close alliance with the reactionary party, and the powers of the executive were thus beyond the ambition of ‘the new aristocracy of wealth, or of the men of talent who had put themselves at the head of it’, and as, at the same time, these latter had the command of the legislature, ‘they used the power which they had, to reduce within bounds that which by peaceable means they could not hope to have’ (‘opposition is the school of liberalism’, Acton has remarked26). Thus: For the first time it became the object of the first speculative and practical politicians in France, to limit the power of the executive; to erect barriers of opinion, and barriers of law, which it should not be


able to overpass, and which should give the citizen that protection which he had never yet had in France, against the tyranny of the magistrate: to form … les moeurs constitutionnelles, the habits and feelings of a free government, and establish in France, what is the greatest political blessing enjoyed in England, the national feeling of respect and obedience to the law. Thus, ‘Nothing could seem more hopeful than the progress which France was making, under the Martignac Ministry, towards this great improvement.’ Yet, ‘[i]n an evil hour for France … the promise of this auspicious moment was blighted’. Charles X dismissed the Martignac Ministry and appointed ‘a set of furious émigrés’, and when these latter fared abysmally in the new general election, ‘the famous Ordonnances were issued, and the Bourbon Monarchy was swept from the face of the earth’. Mill then proffered his definitive verdict on the outcome of the July Revolution: ‘We have called the event which necessitated the Revolution of July, a misfortune to France. We wish earnestly to think it otherwise. But if in some forms that Revolution has brought immense good to France, in many it has brought unspeakable ill.’ First and foremost: ‘it stopped the progress of the French people towards recognising the necessity of equal law, and a strict definition of the powers of the magistrate’.27 It was this recognition or the cultivation of the ‘moeurs constitutionnelles’ that Mill came to regard as the main need of France, and the experience of the 1830s taught him that these took more than a revolution to develop and take root – it is characteristic that in ‘Centralisation’ (1862) he came to stress, in the context of French politics, ‘that a people are not and cannot be free, unless they have learnt to dare and do for themselves, not fitfully, at intervals of a generation, by turning out one set of masters and putting in another, but in the practice of daily life’.28 This had been the lesson of studying French politics for more than three decades. Armand Carrel’s main recommendation to Mill was the French journalist’s commitment to the set of principles and practices that Mill had come by the mid-1830s to consider all-important for France. Mill’s admiration for Carrel was so intense, that it has led to various comments and explanations of a personal and psychological nature. Referring to the article ‘Armand Carrel’ that he was about to publish (the year after the valiant French journalist had been killed – perhaps as befitted a former soldier and a man particularly sensitive to his ‘honour’ – in a duel), Mill wrote to Molesworth: ‘I never admired any man as I did Carrel; he was to my mind the type of a philosophic radical man of action in this epoch. I have endeavoured to bring out this idea and


many others’.29 In existing Mill scholarship the emphasis given to ‘this idea’ has overshadowed and led to the neglect of the ‘many others’. It is indisputable that as a ‘man of action’, through his influential journalism, his pronounced character, and his ascendancy over a section of the republican movement thanks to the mere medium of his journalism, Carrel was certainly very attractive to Mill, and no less than a role model.30 But there were also other aspects, equally important, to the British thinker’s admiration for Carrel. One of the other ideas Mill endeavoured to ‘bring out’ in his article of 1837 was that Carrel’s political position was best suited to the circumstances of France, accompanied by the assertion that Carrel was unique – and lonely – in the path he followed. We saw that Mill, by the time he wrote ‘Armand Carrel’, had come to consider the set of principles he described alternatively as ‘equal justice and equal protection to all opinions’, ‘a government of law’, or ‘les moeurs constitutionnelles’, to be of paramount importance to France’s political progress. ‘A free, full, and fair representation of the people was his object.’ And ‘without condemning the Republic of the Convention … he preferred to cite as an example the Republic of the United States’, ‘because it presented to France an example of what she most wanted – protection to all parties alike, limitation of the power of the magistrate, and fairness as between the majority and the minority’.31 According to his British fan, the editor of Le National had attempted to combat the extreme views and watchwords of the extreme republicans of the Société des Droits de l’Homme and to unite all republican factions in a more moderate programme for a conservative republic, which would not frighten the bourgeoisie. From accounts of Carrel’s life and ideas, the one stressing most the aspect of his politics Mill chose to emphasise in 1837 was Nisard’s, from which Mill quoted extensively in his own article.32 Among the statements Mill chose to quote from Nisard’s text was that introduced with the comment: ‘But the greatest disappointment which Carrel suffered was the defeat not of republicanism, but of what M. Nisard calls his “théorie du droit commun”’; meaning: ‘those ideas of moderation in victory, of respect for the law, and for the rights of the weaker party, so much more wanted in France than any political improvements which are possible where those ideas are not’.33 Carrel had defended ‘the idea of a government offering securities to all parties against its own lawful and necessary instinct of self-preservation’. The powerlessness of such principles had been for him ‘a severe shock’, because: ‘Carrel had faith in these generous views’ and had adopted them ‘with stronger conviction perhaps than his republican theories, to which he had committed himself hastily, and under the


influence of temporary events rather than of quiet and deliberate meditations’. The quotation from Nisard went on to present the extent of Carrel’s disappointment on realising that he had remained ‘the sole defender of the common rights of all’, shortly before the end of his life (1836). Whereupon Mill commented that he could ‘conceive few things more melancholy than the spectacle of one of the noblest men in France … dying convinced against his will, that his country is incapable of freedom; and under whatsoever institutions, has only the choice, what man or what party it will be under the despotism of’.34 A precise identification of the content of Carrel’s liberalism is not easy, in the sense in which it may be for political philosophers, because Carrel, according to Mill’s own admission, was not a systematic thinker. But both Mill’s comments on him and those of other contemporaries, as well as those of later historians, portray Carrel as a political activist faithfully attached to a set of ideas that were regarded, in the context of France in the 1830s, as quintessentially liberal and also as marking Carrel out from the majority of his fellow republicans who had other priorities.35 The Orleanist liberal Albert de Broglie wrote in 1859 that ‘c’est par un goût cordial et un respect véritable pour la liberté que Carrel était vraiment novateur et s’écartait des habitudes de la doctrine républicaine’. According to de Broglie, Carrel was immune to his fellow republicans’ advocacy of administrative centralisation, and stood for communal liberties and ‘le gouvernement du pays par lui-même à tous les degrés’ (‘the government of the country by itself in all degrees’). And ‘il réservait avec soin et même avec une sorte de jalousie la liberté légitime de l’individu contre le despotisme anonyme et collectif de la foule’ (‘he reserved with care and even with a sort of jealousy the legitimate liberty of the individual against the anonymous and collective despotism of the multitude’).36 This brings us to the minimal possible definition and common denominator of French liberalism in the early nineteenth century. George Armstrong Kelly has pointed to ‘a kind of fissure in the culture of liberalism’ and he used Constant and Tocqueville to illustrate the existence of different strands of liberalism in France at the time in question. But he recognized as a common overarching thread their determination to ‘put liberty first’.37 Though they may not have meant exactly the same things by ‘liberty’ or ‘freedom’, de Broglie, Nisard, Mill and many later historians saw Carrel as putting liberty first. It was this quality, rather than Carrel’s half-hearted republicanism, that appealed to Mill. It is noteworthy that in 1833–34 Mill praised Carrel for his moderation and sobriety as well as his struggles for freedom of the press. It was only in 1837 that he came to stress Carrel’s ‘théorie du droit commun’, the


‘moeurs constitutionnelles’, his concern for the rule of law, for securities against the encroachments of the executive, and protection of all parties alike. Though the two aspects are not unconnected, there was more in the later essay than in the articles of 1833–34. This development (besides showing perhaps some influence from Nisard’s work on Carrel) must reflect Mill’s overall appreciation of the outcome of the July Revolution and the deficiencies it showed in French political attitudes and culture. His most acute disappointment must have come after the insurrections of April 1834 in Lyons and Paris and their aftermath. In the articles on French politics in the early 1830s Mill emphasized accountability, the recognition of the need for an extension of the suffrage, liberty of the press and so on.38 In 1837 he seemed to be much more preoccupied with some deeper traits of ‘the national mind’ that had to be altered if any constitutional and institutional measures were to give fruit. These preoccupations were to increase as frustrations disillusioned Mill about the chances of rapid progress (the fatal frustration was to come in December 1851). Now, to sum up very briefly Mill’s overall attitude towards the parties and factions that existed in France at the time in question,39 it is clear, in the first place, that between the extreme and insurrectionary republicans of the Société des Droits de l’Homme and the moderate republicans such as Carrel40 Mill was decidedly in favour of the latter, while at the same time trying to defend the former from some of the accusations that had been raised against them (which he knew would not fail to cause damage to the whole movement).41 In the second place, with regard to republican as opposed to non-republican (‘dynastic’, ‘Constitutional or Monarchical’) opposition, Mill did not have strong opinions.42 But his support for the non-republican opposition party was qualified, due to what he saw as the incompetence of the leaders of that party. As he put it, ‘the men whose opinions fitted them for composing such a party’, had lost popular influence because they had been, in the past, ‘merely carping at the measures of Government in detail, without wedding themselves to any principle’. This was not the way to govern Frenchmen! What attracted Mill to ‘the Republican opposition out of doors’ was that they were ‘bolder, more consistent, and … abler men’ than Odilon Barrot and his followers.43 In ‘Armand Carrel’ he did not conceal his regret that Carrel expended his valuable gifts in advocating a republic. Mill would have preferred him to have joined forces from the beginning with the most progressive liberal elements of the nonrepublican opposition to demand the extension of the franchise in a way that would not frighten the bourgeoisie – as any association with republicanism did, due to the memories of the first Republic.44 It is


characteristic that he wrote in 1848 that the republicans had succeeded because at last they had adopted (during the banquets campaign) the extension of the franchise rather than the establishment of a republic as their aim.45

II

The Revolution of 1848 and the Second Republic

When the news of revolution in Paris started reaching Britain in 1848, it was bound to excite great interest. ‘The Revolution of February 1848 was an earthquake’, Macaulay was to write three years later.46 Some were terrified at what was going on; but there was a lot of self-congratulation at the stability of British institutions also – a combination captured well in a statement by Macaulay, again, on 13 March 1848: ‘Strangely troubled times these. But ours is the best nook of the earth after all.’47 There was genuine and strong unease as well though, and for a short while even some panic. The Chartist movement was to try what turned out to be its last gasp during the spring that followed the French Revolution of February 1848. On 4 March the Northern Star, the official paper of Chartism, called the event of late February ‘the most glorious in the annals of the human race’, adding, ‘in a telling juxtaposition, “let the cry be ‘the Republic for France, and the Charter for England’”’.48 The elation of the Chartists might have been predictable, but they were in good company. Many were excited, in the beginning at least. Carlyle, for once, was in ‘sacred joy’ at the late news (even if it came from corrupt, sensual Paris).49 He wrote to Emerson that the event was ‘shewing once again that the righteous Gods so yet live and reign! It is long years since I have felt any such deep-seated pious satisfaction at a public event’.50 Carlyle wrote an article entitled ‘Louis-Philippe’, published in the Examiner of 4 March 1848.51 In apocalyptic language, the author of The French Revolution saw the events as a result of a ‘divine Nemesis’ against ‘[s]ophist Guizot, sham-king Louis-Philippe, and the host of quacks’. No matter how peculiar to him his style was,52 there was nothing idiosyncratic about his judgement on the regime’s worst sin: Louis Philippe had relied for his rule solely on ‘the vulpine capabilities’: ‘by easy appeal to what was bad and false and sordid, and to that only, has he endeavoured to reign’. This was a verdict shared by many indeed.53 It emerges from his correspondence of the time that this was not the only article on French affairs that Carlyle had written for the Examiner. As he explained to his mother on the second, ill-fated article, it was found to be unpublishable, because ‘it ope[n]ly approved of at least the attempt by France to do something for the guidance and benefit of the


workpeople’; and ‘our poor Editor [John Forster] (really it was a necessity with him), after struggling all he could, was obliged to suppress it’.54 To another correspondent he was writing, on 7 March, that he considered ‘this new Republic, whatever may become of it, an immense fact’, because the new French Government ‘must actually attack the “Labour Question”, and either do something in it, or be blown in pieces’. This same ‘grand “Question”, when it gets across the water to ourselves, as it of course must soon do, and men begin to look seriously (with life-anddeath feeling) what they can do in it, – is certain, as I think, to dissipate our “universe of cant”, at an amazingly accelerated rate’.55 At the same time, he wrote to another correspondent (24 March) that, besides finding the ‘immense explosion of democracy’ in France and throughout Europe ‘very joyful’ (inasmuch as it taught ‘that all mortals do long towards justice and veracity’), at the same time he found it ‘unutterably sad’, ‘that … all the world, in its protest against False Government, should find no remedy but that of rushing into No Government or anarchy (kinglessness), which I take this republican universal suffragism to inevitably be’. He predicted that ‘abundance of fighting’ was in store for them and ‘long years and generations of weltering confusion, miserable to contemplate’, before anything can be settled again.56 All the same, he had a soberly critical comment on reactions at home and their unfairness to the revolutionaries and their Provisional Government: ‘All over London people are loud upon the French, Hôtel de Ville especially; censure universal, or light mockery; no recognition among us for what of merit those poor people have in their strange and perilous position at present. Right to hurl out Louis Philippe, most of us said or thought, but there I think our approval ended.’57 However, he himself gave the French some credit, as compared with his fellow-countrymen: ‘The what next upon which the French had been thinking, none of our people will seriously ask themselves.’ Only himself was, ‘in vain’, striving to explain that the ‘organisation of labour’ was precisely ‘the question of questions for all governments whatsoever; that it vitally behoved the poor French Provisional to attempt a solution’; and although he did not expect them to succeed ‘by their present implements and methods’, still all governments had to make some advance towards solving it more and more, ‘or disappear swiftly from the face of the earth without successors nominated’.58 And on 29 April 1848, the Examiner published Carlyle’s ‘Repeal of the Union’, where the sage gave vent to his alarm at what he saw as the spread of ‘anarchy’ and advocated force against the spectre of such anarchy in Ireland.59 Among other things, he was worried that, if Ireland were to be totally dissevered from England, ‘M. Ledru Rollin could not


desire a better Republic … ready to fraternise with him to all lengths, and sure to be a great favourite with her French sister.’60 Now, as Arnold was informing his friend Clough on 24 May, it was rumoured that ‘an article in the Examiner signed M. in answer to Carlyle on Ireland’ was ‘Mill’s, they say’. Mill’s it was, indeed.61 Carlyle’s erstwhile friend attacked him for encouraging ‘the already ample self-conceit of John Bull’; and yet, according to Mill, England’s record of ruling Ireland for five centuries was far from satisfactory. ‘Physician, heal thyself!’, was Mill’s retort. England had no mission at that moment to keep other nations out of anarchy. On the contrary, it would ‘have to learn, from the experience which other nations are now in a way of acquiring, the means by which alone it can henceforth be averted from herself.’ France was emphatically not ‘rushing headlong into anarchy’, as the author of ‘Repeal of the Union’ had claimed. On the contrary, the conduct of the people of Paris during the crucial first six weeks after the revolution had been exemplary.62 Mill evidently had assumed the role of vindicating (and, in some cases, idealizing) the designs and doings of the French revolutionaries against their detractors. He would do so again a year later, at a larger scale. But Carlyle was not particularly impressed. As the social experiment went on in France (and following the June insurrection), he wrote to a correspondent: ‘The Gospel according to your friend George [Sand] is getting itself put in action in these days, and certainly, so far as I can judge, the Heavens never saw the like before!’ The bets were, ‘that France, if it do not shew more sense than we yet see symptoms of, will become a big Ireland, and may look out for some fate like that of Poland at the close of the account!’.63 As a number of features of Victorian thinking on France converge in it, W.R. Greg’s (anonymous) article (‘The Fermentation of Europe’) in The Economist of 1 April 1848 is a useful epitome of the reactions of many to the French 1848 and to French politics more generally. The article prompted Arnold to seriously consider ‘the responsibility of sending back a paper’, presumably to criticise the author’s assertions and defend the French.64 It also ended up being used in a parliamentary debate in the House of Commons by David Urquhart, as extracts from it had been reproduced in ‘placards which were posted about the town on the memorable 10th April’ (the day of the Chartist procession from Kennington Common).65 The article was subtitled: ‘Why we have no hopes for France; why we have much hope for Italy and Germany; why we have no fears for England.’ Most of it deals with France, on which his verdict is given from the beginning: ‘The day for the regeneration of that unlearning and impure country has not yet dawned.’ He neither


regretted the fall of the July Monarchy, nor disapproved the proclamation of a republic. Though no republican himself, Greg had harsh words to say against ‘that unwise monarch’, who had been destroying the freedom and completing the ‘demoralisation’ of his country.66 Rather than nostalgia for the July Monarchy or any quarrel with republicanism itself, the reasons why he was pessimistic about the prospects of France were ‘the character and condition of the people’, ‘the mode in which the revolution was effected’, ‘all the proceedings of the provisional government’ and ‘the conduct and manifested animus of the nation, ever since the memorable 24th of February’: In the first place, there does not seem to be now in France, any more than at any previous period, the slightest conception of, or care for what we in England call personal liberty – the liberty of the subject. Their only idea of liberty seems to be equality. Political rights – the right of suffrage – the right to a free press – the abolition of the exclusive rights and privileges of others, they comprehend and contend for. But individual freedom – the right of unfettered action and speech – the right of every man to do what he likes so long as he interferes not with the equivalent right of others – exemption from all unnecessary restraint, and from all authority but that of recorded and adjudicated law – security against the illegal exercise of power by the agents of the government – these, the French do not ask for, and seem not to comprehend the importance of.67 He continued in the same strain: ‘Not only have they no habeas corpus, but in all their many opportunities they have never, we believe, asked for … this sine qua non of freedom.’ And ‘(if we except a short period in 1789,) there has never been a struggle for liberty: what have been termed such, have … been simply struggles for the administration of a tyranny’. Many other Victorians would agree (or come to agree later), some almost verbatim.68 The main reason for this was the centralized form of their government. To the French imagination, ‘the simplest, shortest, and easiest way of conquering their liberty’, when oppression had become unbearable, had always been to seize upon the reins of power. ‘Other nations wring concessions from their governors: the French “cashier” their governors, and become governors themselves.’69 He then went to great length to give his readers an idea of just how much the government did, and, moreover, was expected and demanded to do, in France, due to the habits of the nation and the nature of the organization of French administration. These two facts, then, ‘the centralised


system of administration which pervades all France’, and ‘the utter absence of all conception of the true nature of personal liberty,’ joined to ‘another feature of the national character, as prominent and yet more deplorable, viz., an entire want of that perception of what is due to others, that clear sense of the rights of others, which lies as the basis of all real freedom’ would, to his mind, explain what he referred to as ‘the astounding proceedings of the provisional government’, since they took power.70 Greg blamed the Provisional Government (as Brougham and Senior did as well) of overstepping the brief of a provisional, caretaking government. He focused on measures that he saw as flagrant invasions of the freedom of the subject. Again: ‘But it is the unchanged national character of the French which most inclines us to despair.’71 They seemed ‘utterly destitute of moral courage’, because they did not dare risk being in a minority. Thus, each time a ‘wild’, ‘bold’, and ‘inconsiderate’ minority declared itself to be the government, no one knowing how few they were, and every one fearing lest they be left behind if they delayed to join them, that minority ended up appearing as representing the majority. Such had been ‘the history of every popular government in France’. Such was the case with the current republican government, which he maintained to be in truth ‘supported heartily by a very small minority of the population’.72 Although Greg had no objections to the establishment of a republican form of government per se, he believed that the French of his time were unable to sustain it, because for a republic to be either safe or stable, three conditions were necessary: ‘a pervading … sense of justice and morality; a vivid idea, at least, if not a habit of municipality, or selfgovernment; and material well-being, or a steady progress towards it, on the part of the lower classes’. According to him, ‘all these elements of security and hope are wanting in France’. As far as the first condition was concerned, ‘a profound demoralisation’, of one kind or another, prevailed in French society. The masses of the people were not possessed of ‘that rectitude of feeling, that sense of justice, that quick perception and ready acknowledgment of the rights of others, without which democracy cannot fail to become the most grinding and intolerable of all tyrannies’.73 In the second place, what was needed in order ‘to instruct and practise a people in habits of self-government’ was ‘[r]eal and efficient, not merely nominal municipal institutions’.74 People who had not been experienced in the administration of parish affairs, could not be competent to undertake the administration of an empire. However, in France the government was ‘a bureaucracy’. ‘The people have never governed themselves, even during the most levelling periods of their democracies; they are governed by the minister in Paris, through his infinitely numerous


agents and subordinates.’ Every licence was granted by the central authority. Yet: ‘Republican institutions, and a centralised administration, involve ideas radically contradictory and hostile.’75 Thirdly, he had ‘no hopes for France’, on account of ‘the deplorable material condition, and the still more deplorable material prospect, of her lower classes’. Being ‘bad enough’, this condition was ‘steadily deteriorating’ as a result of the actions of the provisional government. The commerce of France was gradually decaying, because of the system of monopoly and protection ‘so long perseveringly pursued, and still so dear to that uneconomic people’.76 The condition and prospects of agriculture were still more alarming. He sided with those who argued ‘that this gradual decline in agricultural position is the natural and inevitable result of a law to which, as the offspring and embodiment of their crotchet of equality, the people cling with a fanatical attachment, the law of equal partition’. (Arnold, but also Mill the political economist, would not agree here at all; they saw much good in the practice Greg denounced.) But this was not all. The new government was ‘occupied with all its might, and with all its ingenuity, in exasperating all these fatal maladies’, not least ‘by taking, as it were, the whole unemployed population into its pay; by establishing wages without labour, and national workshops without even the aim or the pretence of producing exchangeable commodities’. All this being the case, only one hope remained, ‘a prompt and energetic counter-revolution’. Given his conviction that the provisional government and ‘its hearty well-wishers’ were a small and insignificant minority of the nation, while the ‘men of property, the friends of order’, looked on their proceedings ‘with discontent, anger, and alarm’, all that was wanting was a ‘rallying point – a standard of revolt’. If there were ‘any great or daring man … to commence an opposition’, a single week would suffice to send the leaders of the provisional government to prison and ‘save France from the universal ruin which threatens to engulph it. But can such a salient, central, initiative man be found?’.77 Yes, it turned out some months later; his name was, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. As critical of the Provisional Government as he was, Greg did at least recognise unequivocally the faults of the previous regime, as did most accounts in Britain. But even discredited Louis Philippe did have his vindicators. One of the most aggressively critical accounts of the Revolution and of the Provisional Government came from that veteran Whig politician, Lord Brougham, who launched an offensive against what he saw as ‘the most extraordinary Revolution which ever altered the face of affairs in a civilized country’. (Lord Brougham may have felt


particularly called upon to write such a pamphlet, in order to dispel rumours that had been spread, to the effect that he was a sympathiser with the Revolution, if one is to judge by what the Examiner was informing its readers on 15 April 1848.78) For him the February Revolution was a very strange and unprecedented event, the ‘work of some half-dozen artisans, met in a printing office’, ‘a handful of armed ruffians, headed by a shoemaker and a sub-editor’, for which he could find no ground nor pretext. Brougham could not understand why the French should overthrow the ‘illustrious prince [Louis Philippe], who, with extraordinary ability and complete success, had, in times of foreign and domestic difficulty, steered the vessel of the State in safety and in peace during a period of seventeen years’.79 He upbraided the Provisional Government for almost everything they did. It was fitting therefore, that the man who appointed himself as the Tom Paine of this French Revolution, chose as his specific target – thus elevating him as its Burke80 – Brougham’s Whig Lordship. It was not the first time Mill had pointed his sword (well, his pen, at any rate) against Brougham, in defence of maligned Frenchmen.81 But this time the scale of the attack required a full counter-offensive. It took the form of a long article in the Westminster Review in April 1849. But before coming to his ‘Vindication’ of the French Revolution of February 1848 against its ‘assailants’, we should have a look at Mill’s earlier reactions, in his correspondence. He responded to the events of February with enthusiasm. He was ‘hardly yet out of breath from reading and thinking about it. Nothing can possibly exceed the importance of it to the world or the immensity of the interests which are at stake on its success’.82 His excitement was, however, clearly qualified from the beginning by an awareness of the dangers and problems lying ahead. He welcomed the republic since it had been established. Yet, he was not blind to its precariousness.83 Lamenting the fact that the man best qualified to direct such a movement, Carrel, was dead, he remarked that ‘[w]ithout Carrel, or, I fear, any one comparable to him, the futurity of France and of Europe is most doubtful’.84 Besides the absence of such a leader, he saw other serious dangers. The first was that of war, and the second was the inordinately high expectations raised by the spread of ‘Communism’. Meanwhile a National Assembly was to be called, ‘elected no doubt by universal suffrage, in which all the sense and all the nonsense of France will be represented, and in which there is pretty sure to be at once a schism between the bourgeois and the operatives – a Gironde and a Montagne, though probably without any guillotine’.85 His subsequent correspondence shows that, though remarkably open-minded towards experiments aiming at the


improvement of the lot of the ‘operatives’, Mill sympathised more strongly with the politics of the ‘Gironde’ – faithful to his youthful aspiration to become himself ‘a Girondist in an English Convention’.86 Around May 1848 he wrote to Armand Marrast, chief editor of the paper once edited by Carrel, offering his services in the form of articles for Le National.87 Taking into account that historians have usually described the distinction between the more moderate republicans and the more radical republicans as exemplified by the differences between the two principal republican newspapers, Le National and La Réforme respectively,88 Mill’s choice to contribute to the new government’s efforts through Le National is itself an indication of his preferences. Following the insurrection of June 1848 Mill wrote in a letter (30 September 1848), first with regard to the Provisional Government that was no longer in office, stressing his belief that ‘the principal members of the Provisional Government, and many of the party who adhere to them, most purely and disinterestedly desired (and still seek to realize) all of “liberty, equality and fraternity”, which is capable of being realized now, and to prepare the way for all which can be realized hereafter’. As for his own attitude towards them: ‘I feel an entireness of sympathy with them which I never expected to have with any political party.’ As if in order to leave no doubt as to which members he was referring to, Mill immediately proceeded to praise Lamartine, whose ‘beautiful Histoire des Girondins’ he advised his correspondent to read. ‘I think his whole conception of the great socialist questions, so far as there stated, and especially of the question of Property, as summed up in his criticism on the measures of the Convention at the end of the fifth volume, everything that can be desired’.89 But though the ‘entireness’ of Mill’s sympathy was reserved for Lamartine and the moderate republicans, he expressed a great degree of sympathy also for one of the more radical republicans, though he hinted that it was more his feelings than his opinions that he sympathised with: ‘I also sympathise very strongly with such socialists as Louis [Blanc], who seems to be sincere, enthusiastic, straightforward, and with a great foundation of good sense and feeling, though precipitate and raw in his practical views.’ Carlyle could not have agreed more.90 On 10 December 1848 the presidential election took place, and Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was elected with a sweeping majority, defeating the candidacies of the moderate republicans, Eugène Cavaignac91 and Lamartine, as well as the more radical republicans Ledru-Rollin and Raspail. Bonaparte soon aligned himself with the conservatives in the Assembly, the ‘party of order’. The elections for the Assembly, held on


13 May 1849, were also disastrous for what Mill had called ‘Lamartine’s party’,92 though many republicans were elected under a more radical banner, as Mill was to explain to a correspondent on 28 May 1849. Commenting first on the ‘extraordinary’ election of Louis Bonaparte as President of the Republic, he told his correspondent that the result was that France ‘having had the rare good fortune of finding two men in succession of perfectly upright intentions, enlightened principles and good sense, Lamartine and Cavaignac’, has chosen ‘to reject both and be governed by a stupid, ignorant adventurer who has thrown himself entirely into the hands of the reactionary party’. Yet, the legislative elections of May 1849 that had just ended had much disappointed the ‘reactionary’ party, for though they were to have a majority in the new assembly, ‘the number of the Montagne or red republican party (who are now all socialists) have increased fourfold,93 while the moderate republican party also musters a considerable number’. The French people were at the moment ‘divided into two violent parties’: on the one hand there were ‘the furious friends of “order”’, and on the other, ‘the Socialists, who have generally very wild and silly notions and little that one can sympathize with except the spirit and feelings which actuate them.’ Unlike them, ‘[t]he party who attempt to mediate between these two extremes’, as the Provisional Government had earlier striven to do, was weak, and was disliked by both extreme parties. ‘The chance for France and Europe entirely depends now on the respite which has been obtained and on the possibility of the maturing by this middle party, of rational principles on which to construct an order of society which, retaining the institution of private property (but facilitating all possible experiments for dispensing with it by means of association) shall studiously hurl all inequalities out necessarily inherent in that institution.’94 He added that a great source of hope for France lay in the fact that the most powerful and active section of the Socialists were ‘the Fourierists headed by Considérant’, who were ‘much the most sensible and enlightened both in the destructive, and in the constructive parts of their system’, and ‘eminently pacific’.95 On the other hand, there was the great danger ‘of having a firebrand like Proudhon, the most mischievous man in Europe, and who has nothing whatever of all that I like and respect in the Socialists to whom he in no way belongs.’96 Mill’s assessment of Proudhon’s influence was not idiosyncratic. According to the first of Bagehot’s ‘Letters on the French Coup d’État of 1851’ (10 January 1852), it was Proudhon’s theories in particular that had led to the almost paranoid fears of the Parisian property-owners by 1851, and thus to their approval of Louis Napoleon’s coup, which they thought would save them from ‘anarchy’.97


Meanwhile, in April 1849, Mill had published in the Westminster Review one of the most seminal articles of his entire output as a political thinker and writer, under the title ‘The French Revolution of 1848 and Its Assailants’, and later selected to be reprinted in his Dissertations and Discussions collection as ‘Vindication of the French Revolution of February 1848’. Using his far from negligible skills of persuasion Mill tried to vindicate almost everything the Provisional Government had done and to refute almost all of Lord Brougham’s reproaches against it. Like Bagehot, Senior and Greg, Mill could not help finding some fault with their political economy, when he came to discuss the droit au travail proclaimed by the Provisional Government. Along with his disagreement with the provision in the new constitution for the direct election of the President of the Republic by the people, this was Mill’s only other explicit disagreement with what they had done or declared. And even with regard to this issue, Mill’s own objection was different than that of the British detractors of the Provisional Government, as he raised his crotchet of the need for population control against the proclamation of the right to work. Now, the creation of ateliers nationaux was the necessary consequence of the declaration of the right to work. Some measure of that nature would have been necessary after any revolution. Thus, ‘[i]t was the misfortune, not the fault, of the Provisional Government, that the numbers requiring employment were so much greater than at any former period, and that the other circumstances of the case were such as to render the creation of these ateliers eventually the greatest calamity of the time, since it soon became impossible to provide funds for continuing them’, while the first attempt to dissolve them produced the insurrection of June 1848. Mill argued that it had not been the fall of the monarchy, or the foundation of the republic, that caused the complete temporary paralysis of industry and commerce; rather (and here again his analysis dovetailed with that of Bagehot’s and Senior’s, and Acton’s, though Mill’s attitude towards socialism was far more sympathetic than that of these thinkers), it was ‘the appearance on the stage, of the unexpected and indefinitely dreaded phenomenon of Socialism.’ It was because Socialism was so widely diffused among a large portion of the workers, that the first step towards the abolition of the ateliers nationaux ‘became the signal for a determined attempt, by a large section of the workmen of Paris, to follow up the republican revolution by a Socialist one’. As for the insurrection of June 1848 itself, it was ‘from no inherent tendency in the principles of the Socialist chiefs’ that it had broken out. Rather, it arose ‘from the suddenness and unexpectedness of the Revolution of February, which, being effected mainly


by Socialists, brought Socialist opinions into a position of apparent power, before the minds of the community generally were prepared for the situation, or had begun seriously to consider this great problem’. Hence hopes had been raised ‘of an immediate practical realization, when nothing was yet ripe – when discussion and explanation had nearly all their work to do; and as soon as the first inevitable retrograde steps were taken, the frustration of premature hopes provoked a fatal collision’. Therefore, if the Revolution of February were to disappoint ‘the glorious expectations which it raised’, this collision would be the cause. It had ‘divided the sincere Republicans, already a small minority, into two parties at enmity with one another’.98 It had ‘alienated from the only Republican party which has any elements of stability, the greater part of the effective strength of the democracy’; and it had filled the bourgeoisie with ‘such intense terror at the bare thought of great social changes’, that they were ready to support any government which would release them from the fear of a second Socialist insurrection. ‘These things are lamentable; but the fatality of circumstances, more than the misconduct of individuals, is responsible for them.’99 In 1848 Matthew Arnold was 25. It is obvious from his correspondence of the time that, from the moment the February Revolution broke out, he was keenly interested (in fact, for some time, absorbed, as he wrote to his sister100) in what was going on in France. How could he not? More than the fate of France was at stake: ‘What agitates me is this: if the new state of things succeeds in France, social changes are inevitable here and elsewhere – for no one looks on seeing his neighbour mending without asking himself if he cannot mend in the same way’. What was the problem with that? It was ‘the state of our masses’ that worried him in the inevitable impending agitation. Their plight was such, ‘that their movements now can only be brutal plundering and destroying.’ And even if they were to wait, there was ‘no one, as far as one sees, to train them to conquer by their attitude and superior conviction: the deep ignorance of the middle and upper classes, and their feebleness of vision becoming if possible daily more apparent’. Therefore: ‘You must by this time begin to see what people mean by placing France politically in the van of Europe: it is the intelligence of their idea-moved masses which makes them politically as far superior to the insensible masses of England as to the Russian serfs.’101 Working (not very heavily, apparently) as private secretary for Lord Lansdowne (Lord President of the Privy Council in Lord John Russell’s Whig government) at Lansdowne House, Arnold had access to the latest information, before the newspapers had published it.102 In letter after letter, he was commenting, informing his


friends and relatives (not least his very excited mother), sending them issues of the Parisian daily Le National. He attended the demonstrations of ‘the great mob’ in Trafalgar Square on 6 March and had been ‘a constant attender of the emeutes’ in London.103 He was even tempted ‘to attempt some political writing’; but the time for such ventures of his had not come yet.104 In a letter to his sister he was trying to explain to her that England was ‘far behind the Continent’. Reading British newspapers one was ‘struck with the fact of the utter insensibility one may say of people to the number of ideas and schemes now ventilated on the Continent – not because they have judged them or seen beyond them, but, from sheer habitual want of wide reading and thinking. Like a child’s intellectual attitude vis a vis of [sic]105 the proposition that “Saturn’s apparent diameter subtends an angle of about 18”.’ The boasted ‘practical virtues’ of the English ‘never certainly revealed more clearly their isolation’. As a result: ‘I am not sure but I agree in Lamartine’s prophecy that 100 years hence the Continent will be a great united Federal Republic, and England all her colonies gone in a dull steady decay.’106 But Arnold did not remain so impressed by the French (or their political leaders at any rate) for very long. As his friend Arthur Hugh Clough – the ‘republican friend’ of Arnold’s sonnet ‘To a Republican Friend, 1848’ (1849) – wrote about him to his brother, Tom Arnold, on 16 July, ‘Matt was at one time really heated to a very fervid enthusiasm, but he has become sadly cynical again of late’.107 Walter Bagehot was even younger than ‘Matt’ in February 1848 (exactly 22). As he wrote to his mother (24 March 1848), he thought that people were ‘rather hard on the Provisional government. No doubt they are the most quizzable of existing men, and are not well up in Adam Smith’. But one ought to consider the difficulties of their situation. Also, ‘one cannot expect the rules of Political Economy to be very strictly observed in a time of such confusion when nations must be prepared to sacrifice national wealth to national preservation. Besides French statesmen (Turgot excepted) never have understood much about Political Economy’.108 Judging from what he wrote in his correspondence, Bagehot certainly did not regret the fall of Louis Philippe’s system. As he was to write later, it was ‘a system of regulated corruption’.109 In a letter full of that facetiousness that makes much of his correspondence such a delight to read, he described vividly the panic-stricken preparations to counter the expected Chartist revolution on 10 April, the date fixed by the National Convention for the grand procession from Kennington Common. He seemed to worry a bit less than the Government did, but only just.110


Nassau Senior’s main response to the revolution of 1848 and its immediate aftermath was in his ‘Sketch of the Revolution of 1848’ in the Edinburgh Review of January 1850.111 He argued that ‘The theory to which we attribute the revolution of 1848 is a disguised Socialism.’ It was the theory which almost every Frenchman cherished, ‘that the government exists for the purpose of making his fortune, and is to be supported only so far as it performs that duty. His great object is, to exchange the labours and risks of a business, or of a profession, or even of a trade, for a public salary’. To satisfy this ‘universal desire’, ‘every government goes on increasing the extent of its duties, the number of its servants, and the amount of its expenditure.’ For these purposes the French government ‘pays and feeds 500,000 soldiers and 500,000 civilians!’. This had detrimental effects on the national character (a point he corroborated with a long quotation from Dunoyer’s La Révolution du 24 Février, adducing the French economic thinker’s arguments to this effect). According to Senior, the ‘place-hunting of the higher orders, the socialism of the lower, the intense centralisation of France’ all ‘arise from the same deep-rooted error as to the proper functions of government’, from the theory ‘that it is in the power of the State to correct the inequalities of fortune’.112 His attitude towards Lamartine was mixed. On the one hand, he could not resist praising him: ‘M. de Lamartine has preached peace to those who panted for war; moderation to those who desired nothing but extremes; and reason to those who knew only passion.’ Being ‘armed with no force but his own voice, he has convinced the prejudiced, guided the passionate, and subdued the ferocious’.113 This was the attitude of most thinkers and politicians in Britain during the first two months following 24 February.114 On the other hand, regarding him as chiefly responsible for the preference of the establishment of the republic over the proposal to install a regency, he disagreed with Lamartine’s premises, to the effect that ‘the Regency could not maintain itself, and that the only stable government was a Republic based on universal suffrage’. He did not accept Lamartine’s assertion ‘that in the beginning of 1848 an overwhelming majority of the French were republicans’. According to Senior, there were precious few ‘theoretic republicans’. The rest of those who revolted ‘were communists and socialists, whose object, to which they gave the name of a republic, was a class of institutions to which M. de Lamartine is quite as much opposed as Guizot or Louis-Philippe could be’.115 Besides what was written in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution of 1848 or during the short time when the Second Republic existed, how thinkers came to assess what happened and its long-term significance later is no less interesting. Although more will be said in


this respect in the next chapter, it is worth looking here, first, at Lord Acton’s theory of what had happened, with the benefit of some hindsight, in 1878. Acton attributed 1848 to the coalition of republicanism and socialism forged when they shared the ground of political wilderness in the 1840s. Once the strict prohibitive laws had been passed by the July monarchy in 1836, and had silenced the republican party, ‘the term Socialism made its appearance in literature’. Even Tocqueville, who was then writing the second part of his Democracy in America failed to appreciate ‘the power which the new system was destined to exercise on democracy’. Until then, democrats and communists had stood apart. And although the socialist doctrines had been defended ‘by the best intellects of France’, they ‘excited more attention as a literary curiosity than as the cause of future revolutions’. However Towards 1840, in the recesses of secret societies, republicans and socialists coalesced. Whilst the Liberal leaders, Lamartine and Barrot, discoursed on the surface concerning reform, Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc were quietly digging a grave for the monarchy, the Liberal party, and the reign of wealth. They worked so well, and the vanquished republicans recovered so thoroughly, by this coalition, the influence they had lost by a long series of crimes and follies, that, in 1848, they were able to conquer without fighting. The fruit of their victory was universal suffrage. From that time the promises of socialism have supplied the best energy of democracy. Their coalition has been the ruling fact in French politics. It created the ‘saviour of society’, and the Commune; and it still entangles the footsteps of the [Third] Republic.116 The other appraisal also comes from the 1870s. Given that John Morley was barely ten years old in 1848, it is not his reactions at the time that can be of interest here, but rather his assessment of the impact of 1848 and its aftermath on an aspect of British thought that deserves some attention. He was to argue in On Compromise (1874): ‘The influence of France upon England since the revolution of 1848 has tended wholly to the discredit of abstract theory and general reasoning among us, in all that relates to politics, morals, and religion.’ This was because: ‘In 1848, not in 1789, questions affecting the fundamental structure and organic condition of the social union came for the first time into formidable prominence. For the first time these questions and the answers to them were stated in articulate formulas and distinct theories.’117 What was more, they inflamed souls and imaginations so much, that thousands of men went to the streets to fight and die ‘for the realisation of their generous dream of a renovated


society’. Those were ‘premature attempts to convert a crude aspiration into a political reality, and to found a new social order on a number of uncompromising deductions from abstract principles of the common weal’. They ‘have had the natural effect of deepening the English dislike of a general theory’. It was not only the Socialists who were responsible for ‘the low esteem into which a spirit of political generalisation has fallen’ in Britain and other countries, ‘in consequence of French experience’. Morley’s intellectual ‘father’ had taught him long before 1848 that this was a tendency of the French more generally. ‘Mr. Mill has described in a well-known passage the characteristic vice of the leaders of all French parties, and not of the democratic party more than any other.’ Morley then treated his readers to a long quotation of the passage from the System of Logic, where Mill wrote that the ‘commonplaces of politics in France’, were ‘large and sweeping practical maxims, from which, as ultimate premises, men reason downwards to particular applications, and this they call being logical and consistent’. Thus, they were ‘perpetually arguing’ that this or that measure ought to be adopted, because it was a consequence of the principle on which the form of government was founded, the principle of legitimacy, or the principle of the sovereignty of the people. Whereupon Mill commented that given that ‘no government produces all possible beneficial effects, but all are attended with more or fewer inconveniences; and since these cannot be combated by means drawn from the very causes which produce them; it would be often a much stronger recommendation of some practical arrangement that it does not follow from what is called the general principle of the government, than that it does’.118 According to Morley, ‘The English feeling for compromise is on its better side the result of a shrewd and practical, though informal, recognition of a truth’ which Mill had expressed in terms of method in the passage from the System of Logic which Morley had quoted. Now: ‘The disregard which the political action of France has repeatedly betrayed of a principle really so important, has hitherto strengthened our own regard for it, until it has not only made us look on its importance as exclusive and final, but has extended our respect for the right kind of compromise to wrong and injurious kinds.’119

III From Louis Napoleon’s coup to the beginnings of the Third Republic The success of President Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in staging a coup d’état in December 1851 and then declaring himself Emperor a year later, with no significant resistance from the French population, convinced most


in Britain that (as some of them believed or suspected already), the French were unfit for freedom. It is interesting to look, as an example or snapshot, at what two Victorian thinkers had to say, during the same year, 1858, while Napoleon III and his (still, fully authoritarian and unreformed) Empire were thriving in France, in response to the hopes and aspirations of French liberals they both liked and sympathised with. According to his biographer, in the course of the year 1858, ‘several of those eminent Frenchmen who refused to bow the knee before the Second Empire had frequent and friendly conversations with Macaulay on the future of their unhappy country’. But they failed to convince him to share their hopes. Thus: On the 15th of May, he says: ‘Montalembert called. He talked long, vehemently, and with feeling, about the degraded state of France. I could have said a good deal on the other side; but I refrained. I like him much.’ A fortnight later: ‘Duvergier d’Hauranne called. … How he exclaimed against the French Emperor! I do not like the Emperor or his system; but I cannot find that his enemies are able to hold out any reasonable hope, that, if he is pulled down, a better government will be set up. I cannot say to a Frenchman what I think; – that the French have only themselves to thank; and that a people which violently pulls down constitutional governments, and lives quiet under despotism, must be, and ought to be, despotically governed. We should have reformed the government of the House of Orleans without subverting it. We should not have borne the yoke of Celui-ci for one day.120 Acton said almost the same thing in reference to what he saw as Montalembert’s pleasing illusions concerning ‘the deeper causes which make liberty impossible in France’, which the Frenchman could not see, according to his British fellow-Catholic. ‘The servitude of the whole nation is justified by the servility of the majority. The long duration of a despotism, exercised by a man of no conspicuous virtues and of no conspicuous ability, bespeaks a nation singularly fitted for such a yoke.’121 But what did the man who had spent so much time following and reporting French politics in the 1830s and 1840s think of developments after the coup d’état? Already before it, by the summer of 1851, Mill wrote to Bain that he was ‘for the first time downhearted about French affairs’. Some months later ‘the fatality of December, 1851’ came to confirm his worst fears. Mill entertained for the rest of his life a consistent and intense loathing for the new despot of France and for his system.122 He had scarcely anything to say about French politics for more than a


decade, at least in his extant correspondence.123 But in the early 1860s, as the gradual liberalization of the Second Empire had commenced, things seemed to be stirring in France, and Mill’s hopes were growing accordingly. It was in 1862 that he reviewed the works of Dupont-White and Odilon Barrot in ‘Centralisation’.124 He praised a new and hopeful generation of writers, ‘libéraux’ of the opposition, most of whom were not republicans.125 In 1864, Mill rejected an invitation which would have resulted in his meeting Louis Philippe’s fourth son, the Duc d’Aumale, who lived in England, because ‘my sympathies with the Republican party in France are so strong that I cannot willingly place myself under an obligation to a conspicuous person of any other party’.126 In fact, it would have been difficult for him to even speak of a ‘republican party’ some years earlier. But after the election of May 1863 it had been ‘resuscitated’, as John Plamenatz put it. Mill was delighted at that election result and months later he was still expressing his joy at ‘the wonderful resurrection of the spirit of liberty in France’.127 He came to discuss French politics more extensively on the occasion of the election of May 1869. He was living in Avignon, whence he wrote to his old friend, Gustave d’Eichthal, on 8 May 1869, that he was following with the greatest interest the ‘mouvement électoral du moment’ (‘the electoral movement of the moment’). One of the things he remarked about the political situation was that ‘[d]es hommes intelligents d’ici’ (‘intelligent men here’) were complaining that the opposition men who reappeared in the political scene were for the most part ‘des démocrates autoritaires de l’école de la Convention, et non des hommes de la nouvelle école libérale’ (‘authoritarian democrats of the school of the Convention, and not men of the new liberal school’).128 The legislative elections took place (23–24 May 1869) and they resulted in a very spectacular increase in the power of the opposition, in which the republicans had a big share.129 A few days after the elections, Mill wrote to Louis Blanc (30 May 1869), accompanying the expression of his joy at the remarkable renaissance of public spirit in France with the statement: ‘Je voudrais pourtant plus de concorde dans l’opposition démocratique et libérale, et que les électeurs ne préferassent pas un Rochefort à un Jules Favre’ (‘I would wish, however, for more concord within the democratic and liberal opposition, and for the electors not to have preferred a man like Rochefort to a man like Jules Favre’). It is not clear whether Mill knew it or not, but, if he did not, there is a certain irony in the fact that Blanc, who had ‘refused the request of democrats in St Etienne to stand as their candidate in the legislative elections’, had ‘supported the candidature of Henri Rochefort against his old enemy Jules Favre’!130 The same day Mill wrote to


d’Eichthal that the electoral result was a sign of immense progress. However, he added: ‘mais il eût été à désirer que le parti démocratique par excellence se fût mieux entendu avec ceux qui mènent la liberté de front avec la démocratie. Il est fâcheux que Jules Favre risque de n’être élu nulle part, et qu’un homme comme Carnot soit rejeté’ (‘but it would have been desirable that the democratic party par excellence were to act more in concert with those who put liberty abreast with democracy. It is unfortunate that Jules Favre risks not being elected anywhere, and that a man like Carnot has been rejected’).131 Rochefort (whose election Mill was not so enthusiastic about) was one of what Plamenatz has called ‘the Jacobins’, a clubiste. As for the two men whose apparent failure to be elected Mill seems to have regretted so much, they were among those whom Louis Girard called ‘républicains libéraux’, who, during the 1869 election ‘étaient en difficulté devant des adversaires qui les qualifiaient d’orléanistes’ (‘were in difficulty in front of adversaries who described them as Orleanists’).132 The adversaries Girard referred to were the more radical republicans (Plamenatz’s ‘Jacobins’) such as Rochefort. According to Plessis: ‘The republicans carried all the larger cities, but at the same time they split into radical democrats … and moderates; the former did not hesitate to stand, often successfully, … against prominent republicans.’133 Obviously, then, Mill was not in favour of republicans indiscriminately, but of those of them who, as he put it, combined their desire for democracy with a desire for liberty, the ‘hommes de la nouvelle école libérale’ (‘men of the new liberal school’). He referred to republicans of the moderate variety as ‘the French liberals’ and ‘the best liberals in the French … chambers’.134 Following the impressive increase in the votes of the opposition, Louis-Napoleon further liberalized his regime with decrees that ‘virtually re-established parliamentary government’. In December 1869 he invited Emile Ollivier to form a government (of mixed affiliations), which the latter did on 2 January 1870. According to Plamenatz ‘On January 2nd, 1870, France became the only democratic parliamentary monarchy among the great powers.’ These events can account for Mill’s exuberance on 12 January 1870, when he wrote to d’Eichthal in an evidently sanguine vein concerning the political situation in France and the prospects for the future.135 But then, in July 1870, following the Ems telegram, France declared war on Prussia. Mill’s outlook concerning France became more bleak than ever. He thought he was confirmed in his fear that the French were more concerned with national aggrandizement than with liberty. He wrote to a French correspondent (who had written to solicit British mediation) that the impending punishment of the defeated French was


not unreasonable and that it should be hoped that if it would teach ‘les classes lettrées de la nation à voir dans les sacrifices qui sont devenus inévitables, une leçon pour ne plus jamais se laisser aller à préférer des rêves d’agrandissement au dehors, à la recherche de la liberté et du progrès moral et social au dedans’ (‘the literate classes of the nation to see in the sacrifices that have become inevitable, a lesson [in order] never again to abandon themselves to prefer dreams of aggrandizement abroad to the quest for liberty and for moral and social progress at home’); and if that punishment could convince ‘l’immense majorité da la nation à ne se laisser gouverner que par eux-mêmes’ (‘the immense majority of the nation not to allow themselves to be governed by anyone but themselves’), then it could be hoped, that the sad events of that year, whatever their dénouement, could become the date of ‘une véritable régénération pour la France’ (‘a true regeneration for France’).136 In September 1870 the Empire fell and the Third Republic was proclaimed. A new ‘government of national defence’ was formed, among whose six members, all but one (Rochefort) were moderate republicans. It included such favourites of Mill’s as Jules Favre and Jules Simon. Yet, this was not enough for him to forgive the republican government its continuation of a war Mill regarded as immoral. On 6 January 1871 he wrote to Morley that he ‘greatly regret[ted]’ to see the political leaders of the working classes ‘led away by the Comtists and by the mere name of a republic into wishing to drag England into fighting’ for a French government which dreaded to face any popular representation and was forcing the French peasantry ‘into going up against their will to place themselves under the fire of the German armies’.137 On 4 October 1872 Mill wrote to Thomas Smith, Secretary of the International Working Men’s Association of Nottingham, who had sent him a copy of his pamphlet The Law of the Revolution. Though he ‘warmly’ approved much in the principles of the Association, he took issue with their phraseology. Phrases, such as ‘the principles of the political and social revolution’, wrote Mill, had no meaning. (He did not wish to remember, perhaps, that he had used it himself in the 1840s.138) In fact: ‘“The Revolution” as a name for any set of principles or opinions, is not English.’ What they meant by ‘the principles of the Revolution’ could only be guessed at from a knowledge of French, ‘in which language it seems to mean the political ideal of any person of democratic opinions who happens to be using it’.139 It was not good ‘to adopt this mode of speech from the French’: ‘It proceeds from an infirmity of the French mind which has been one main cause of the miscarriages of the French nation in its pursuit of liberty and progress; that of being led away by phrases and treating abstractions as if they were realities which have a will


and exert active power.’140 He had said no less than that in October 1830, when he wrote in an Examiner article that he ‘regret[ted] as much as it is possible for anyone to do, the habit which still prevails in France, of founding political philosophy on this [‘the sovereignty of the people’] and similar abstractions’.141 (But then at least he was more optimistic as to the malleability of the French national character, and expected it to be a question of time when the French would get rid of this habit, as the word ‘still’ indicates.) The French susceptibility to ideas, which Arnold found so commendable, and which Mill himself had, long before Arnold, forcefully recommended as a corrective to the obsession of the English national character with the concrete and practical, certainly had its downside (this is why Mill often recommended that the two national spirits should be combined). It was hindsight based on more than forty years of close attention to French politics and intellect that had led Mill to believe that this tendency of ‘the French mind’ to be led away by abstractions was one of the main causes for the failure of liberty and progress in France. He identified others as well. A second was the French people’s propensity to give national glory and aggrandizement precedence over liberty at home, and to entrust to whoever promised them to lead them to grandeur abroad unlimited powers. Mill was far from alone in believing this (and more will need to be said on this question in Chapter 5). A third, related, cause of ‘the miscarriages of the French nation in its pursuit of liberty and progress’ was that there was a failure in the French ‘national character’ to appreciate the value and real meaning of liberty.142 A symptom of this deficiency was to desire to govern others more than not to be governed by them, and therefore to allow any degree of concentration of power in the government and its organs, provided that everyone had a chance of wielding some share of power over his fellow-citizens or receiving the government’s favours. As Mill put it bluntly in Representative Government (1861), this was a characteristic of a people who cared more about equality than liberty. In ‘Centralisation’ (1862) he spoke of ‘this confounding of the love of liberty with the love of power, the desire not to be improperly controlled with the ambition of exercising control’, as being ‘both a psychological error, and the worst possible moral lesson’.143 Acton would probably agree.144 Chateaubriand would probably agree too.145 And, also in ‘Centralisation’, Mill wrote that Louis Napoleon’s despotism had taught ‘the chief representatives of French intellect’ a lesson about what it was ‘in the social system and national habits of their country, which made it possible for them, in the sixty-second year of their struggle for freedom,146 to be thrown back for


an indeterminate period into a political servitude no less complete than before its commencement’. Since the time of Louis Napoleon’s coup ‘it has become the habitual theme of the principal leaders of opinion in France that liberty is a more precious thing than equality; that equality in slavery makes slavery still more slavish’.147 It was his firm conviction that liberty had to go hand in hand with equality as far as possible, that determined his attitude towards the various political factions or parties that contended for influence in France. No matter how many shifts one can detect in his attitude in other respects, he was consistent, for more than four decades, in opting for the ‘progressive’ forces that did not sacrifice liberty to equality, to the republic, ‘the Revolution’, or to any other value or ‘abstraction’. Now, it is time to move to the judgments of the man who undertook to offer to the British public a coverage of French politics, almost as close as that of Mill in the 1830s, during most of the period covered in this last part of the chapter. From the immediate aftermath of the coup d’état, which he had witnessed in Paris, until close to his death (1877), Bagehot had a lot to say on the French political scene. As the young lad was writing to his mother, some weeks before the coup d’état, on 20 October 1851, President Bonaparte owed much of his popularity to ‘the general spirit of timidity and depression which is the general sentiment here in the middle and especially in the commercial classes’. They would support ‘[a]nybody who is in’, because they dreaded any change and lived ‘by the mercantile credit that Revolutions are certain to destroy’. The existing constitution was not liked, and the Republic was ‘felt to be rather a lame and impotent conclusion after being introduced with so great a flourish of trumpets four years ago.’148 Once Louis Napoleon had staged his coup, on 2 December, Bagehot got excited with the first-hand experience of barricade raising, an activity he was eager to assist on 4 December around the Boulevard St Martin. The leaders of the barricade-builders were formidably-looking armed ‘Montagnards’, in whom he saw – and dreaded – ‘sallow, sincere, sour fanaticism, with grizzled moustaches, and a strong wish to shoot you rather than not’.149 As for his preferences: ‘I wish for the President decidedly myself as against M. Thiers and his set in the Parliamentary World;150 … and also as against the Red party who, though not insincere, are too abstruse and theoretical for a plain man. … I am in short what they would call a réactionnaire, and I think I am with the majority – a healthy habit for a young man to contract.’ To his friend and UCL-mate R.H. Hutton, he wrote: ‘I think M. Bonaparte is entitled to great praise. He has very good heels to his boots, and the French just want treading down, and nothing


else – calm, cruel, business-like oppression, to take the dogmatic conceit out of their heads.’ This was because ‘[t]he spirit of generalisation which, John Mill tells us, honourably distinguishes the French mind,151 has come to this, that every Parisian wants his head tapped in order to get the formulae and nonsense out of it’. And ‘it would pay to perform the operation, for they are very clever on what is within the limit of their experience, and all that can be “expanded” in terms of it, but beyond, it is all generalisation and folly’.152 The lightness of tone in these letters to his mother, his father, and his closest friend may not be surprising. But Bagehot displayed a similar mood in his published ‘Letters on the French Coup d’État of 1851’, a series of seven letters published in a Unitarian paper, the Inquirer, between 10 January and 6 March 1852 (written from Paris while he was spending what turned out to be almost a whole year there). This was his twenty-sixth year, and this should be remembered when the tone of these letters is judged. For judged and criticised they certainly were, ‘those abominable, those most disgraceful letters on the coup d’état’, and some people did not forgive him for writing them ‘for years after’. Not without cause. As his friend Hutton aptly wrote: ‘They were light and airy, and even flippant, on a very grave subject.’153 In the first Letter Bagehot insisted that it was necessary to distinguish between two different questions, the temporary dictatorship of Louis Napoleon ‘to meet and cope with the expected crisis of [18]52’, on the one hand; and, on the other, ‘the continuance of that dictatorship hereafter’ and the new Constitution that Bonaparte was proposing. To Bagehot, in opposition to ‘much English writing and opinion’, the first point, the temporary dictatorship, seemed to be a clear case. The political justification of Louis Napoleon was in ‘the state of the public mind’ immediately preceding the coup d’état, the general fear that was abroad in France due to the clash between President and Assembly that was expected to erupt in May 1852 – when Prince Louis Napoleon’s term in the Presidency of the Republic was to be completed.154 Five weeks earlier, there was a universal and excessive tremour. What was dreaded especially was socialism. There was an expectation that ‘the followers of M. Proudhon, who advisedly and expressly maintains “anarchy” to be the best form of government, would attempt to carry out their theories in action’.155 His readers should ‘not be misled by any highflown speculations about liberty or equality’. The first duty of a government was ‘to ensure the security of that industry which is the condition of social life and civilised cultivation’. No danger could be more formidable than ‘six months’ beggary among the revolutionary ouvriers’, immediately


preceding the date of the expected convulsion. It was from this state of things that Louis Napoleon had saved France. ‘The effect was magical. … Commerce instantly improved.’156 As he clarified in the second letter,157 he believed that ‘a Constitution, Equality, Liberty, a Representative Government’, ‘common law and constitutional action’ were all very important of course, and he was not suggesting that ‘the sale of éntrennes or the manufacture of gimcracks’ were more important. But that was not the issue. It was not the items produced that mattered, but rather ‘the hands and arms which their manufacture employs – the industrial habits which their regular sale rewards – the hunger and idle weariness which the certain demand for them prevents’. These were the facts of life of ‘commercial civilisation’. And, ‘To keep up this system we must sacrifice everything. … at all hazards, and if we can, mankind must be kept alive.’158 He again insisted on the nature of ‘the French socialism’, enlightening his readers about the writings of ‘M. Proudhon, who is perhaps their ideal and perfect type’ – an assertion that was in direct opposition to what Mill had written to the effect that Proudhon ‘in no way belong[ed]’ to the socialists.159 Bagehot’s third letter for the Inquirer was entitled ‘On the New Constitution of France, and the Aptitude of the French Character for National Freedom’. It was what he himself called ‘a dull disquisition on national character’ and will have to be discussed in more detail in the next chapter, along with its sequel, the fourth letter.160 The gist of it was that due to the traits of their national character the over-logical and excitable French were unfit for the kind of liberty enjoyed in England, as they were completely unable to work a parliamentary government, which presupposed habits of mutual forbearance and compromise. Now, in Letter V,161 Bagehot argued that the numerous failures of the French ‘in the attempt to establish a predominantly parliamentary government’ had ‘a strong family likeness’. The constitutions of France had perished ‘either in a street-row or under the violence of a military power, aided and abetted by a diffused dread of impending street-rows, and a painful experience of the effects of past ones’. The Republic of February 1848 had perished in December 1851 mainly from the terror inspired by the fear that Paris might again see a repetition of the ‘days of June’ of 1848. The conclusion was clearly ‘that the first want of the French is somebody or something able and willing to keep down street-rows, to repress the frightful elements of revolution and disorder which, every now and then, astonish Europe’. He therefore assumed ‘that the first condition of good government in this country is a really strong, a reputedly strong, a continually strong, executive power.’162 Such a strong


executive was not, in practice, compatible with a parliamentary government in the case of ‘a vain, a volatile, an ever changing race’. If you have to deal with ‘a mobile, a clever, a versatile, an intellectual, a dogmatic nation, inevitably, and by necessary consequence, you will have conflicting systems – every man … always giving his own suffrage to what seems good in his own eyes – many holding to-day what they will regret to-morrow – a crowd of crotchety theories and a heavy percentage of philosophical nonsense’. Bagehot made a concession that was hardly a compliment to the French, suggesting that, though they were not completely unfit for freedom, they were fit only for small doses of it; implying also, given the example used, that they were somehow at a more primitive stage in the history of freedom. It did not at all follow, he explained, that because France was unfit for a government in which a House of Commons would be the sovereign power in the state, as it was in England, France therefore was ‘fit for no freedom at all’. No, he had an example to the contrary, he thought, English constitutional history. For centuries, the House of Commons had been ‘but a third-rate power in the state’; and ‘yet we do not cease to proclaim … that the English people never have been slaves’. It may, therefore, well be that as England had been in the past ‘free under a constitution in which the representative element was but third-rate in power and dignity’, ‘France and other nations may contrive to enjoy that advantage from institutions in which it is only second-rate’. Now, of this sort was the Constitution of Louis Napoleon. According to it, the Corps Législatif was not the administrating body, not even ‘what perhaps it might with advantage have been, a petitioning and remonstrating body’; but it possessed ‘the legislative veto, and the power of stopping en masse the supplies’.163 In the seventh and last letter,164 Bagehot recapitulated his arguments and insisted that, in order ‘to combine the maintenance of order and tranquillity with the maximum of possible liberty’, he hoped ‘that it may in the end be found possible to admit into a political system a representative and sufficiently democratic Assembly, without that Assembly assuming and arrogating to itself those nearly omnipotent powers’, which in England it ‘properly and rightfully’ possessed, ‘but which in the history of the last sixty years, we have, as it seems to me, so many and so cogent illustrations that a French chamber is, by genius and constitution, radically incapable to hold and exercise’. When all was said and done: ‘I therefore fall back on what I told you before – my essential view or crotchet about the mental aptitudes and deficiencies of the French people.’ These latter caused him to believe that the French would not be able to make parliamentary government work, for


any ‘omnipotent’ Assembly in France would ‘resemble the stormy constituent and the late chamber, rather than business-like formal ennui-diffusing parliaments to which in our free and dull country we are felicitously accustomed’. Finally, he considered and dismissed the hopes of ‘a school of political thinkers not yet in possession of any great influence, but, perhaps, a little on the way thereto’, who had ‘improved or invented a capital panacea’, whereby ‘all nations are, within very moderate limits of time, to be surely and certainly fitted for political freedom’, no matter how old, stubborn, or ‘how long ago cast and constructed be the type of [national] character to which the said remedy is sought to be applied’. The ‘panacea’ in question was ‘the foundation or restoration of provincial municipalities’. But, despite having possible partial advantages, ‘rural and provincial institutions won’t so alter and adapt all national characters, as to fit all nations for a parliamentary constitution’. The conclusion was that ‘[w]e are left then, I think, with the French character pretty much as we find it’. Now, ‘[w]hat stealthy, secret, unknown, excellent, forces may, in the wisdom of the Providence, be even now modifying this most curious intellectual fabric, neither you nor I can know or tell. Let us hope that they may be many’.165 But meanwhile, ‘we must take the data which we have, and not those which we desire or imagine’: ‘Louis Napoleon has proposed a system: English writers by the thousand … proclaim his system an evil one. What then?’166 Yet, a lot was to change in the following decade. When he started writing on French politics in The Economist in the early 1860s he had come to see more of the drawbacks of the system that Louis Napoleon (now Emperor Napoleon III) had put to practice for more than a decade. Although by then the authoritarian Empire had begun gradually but steadily to give way to a more and more liberalised Empire, he was adamant now that, in any case, it was a bad regime in the long run. It has to be stressed that Bagehot had different preoccupations and a different agenda in the 1860s. In the 1852 articles he had argued that Louis Napoleon’s system was the best possible form of government for the French, because of the traits of their national character. However, in the 1860s he was faced with attempts from various quarters to present Napoleon’s system (‘Imperialism’, ‘Bonapartism’, or ‘Caesarism’) as an intrinsically good form of government and a model to be followed by the emerging new states of Europe (particularly Italy), but even, some thought, by Britain. Thus he referred, in 1867, to ‘[a] school of thinkers who have great influence on young Englishmen’ and who argued that ‘[p]arliamentary government is complex, dilatory, and inefficient. An


efficient absolutism chosen by the people, and congenial to the people, is far better than this dull talking, which does little, invents nothing, and prevents everything’.167 He was obviously referring to the Comtists, of whom he wrote in Physics and Politics that they (‘Mr. Harrison and Mr. Beesly’) ‘want to “Frenchify the English institutions” – that is, to introduce here an imitation of the Napoleonic system, a dictatorship founded on the proletariat’, because of their wish ‘to “organise society”, to erect a despot who will do what they like, and work out their ideas’.168 His first such exposition of the flaws of the Second Empire was in an article entitled ‘France or England’, published in The Economist on 5 September 1863.169 The whole article was a response to a speech made by the French Emperor’s main ally and minister, Persigny, who had ‘raised … a political question, perhaps the most important to Europe and the world than any other’. Persigny had maintained that the French system was a better form of government than that of England. The stakes were high: ‘In the present state of the world it is impossible to overrate the importance of such a proposition.’ At that very time, large parts of Europe were changing or seemed likely to change their form of government – and Bagehot was far from alone in discussing the chances of each of the two alternative models, the British and the French, to be adopted by them (particularly Italy).170 Persigny had argued that ‘it would be more natural for them to follow the example of France, for its prestige is greater’. Bagehot conceded that the government of France at the time had a number of ‘certain and considerable secondary excellences’. The economic and material progress of France under it had been undeniable. And, at the same time, the Empire was popular with the overwhelming majority of the French people. The reason was that the French people ‘care little for the play and spectacle of parliamentary conflict which the Empire denies them’, while they ‘care much for the social equality – equality of impotence if you like, but still equality – which the Empire ensures’, and also ‘care much for the visible efficiency’ both at home and abroad, which was its ‘palpable and certain characteristic’. Yet, a government could be ‘suitable to the tastes and predilections’ of a particular people at a particular time, and could also ‘confer great benefits on that people at that time’, and yet that government ‘may not be intrinsically good or generally desirable’. The French Government was an instance of this. First, there was no security that the head of an absolute government should be a superior man, nor any reason to expect that Louis Napoleon’s successor would possess his qualities. Then, although there was truth in the boast of the supporters of his system that the French Emperor followed the opinions of France, it was


also true that his system had ‘no organised method of improving the condition of France’. Broaching a question he was to dilate upon both in The English Constitution and in Physics and Politics,171 Bagehot argued that ‘parliamentary government lives by discussion, a free press has its life in argument and dissertation’. As a result of these, in really free countries ‘a public opinion is formed, that daily improves, that hourly adapts itself more nicely to the exigencies of the hour, that by continual learning comes to know great principles and understand great questions’. Following such a ‘progressive and learning guide’, the government was bound to improve. But in France no such ‘machinery’ existed. Therefore, public opinion in France was ‘at the very best unimproving and stationary’, or rather, it was ‘likely even to retrograde’. The government of France was following ‘the wishes of the people, – that is, of the uninstructed mass, who are influenced by passion rather than argument, whose notions to-day are the debris of the educated theories of yesterday, only mistaken and distorted, who have no accurate information, who are incapable of careful thought.’ The continual following of that ‘low opinion’ would ‘deteriorate all opinion’.172 Bagehot continued criticizing (while describing) the French régime three months later, in two articles on ‘The Emperor of the French’.173 Napoleon III owed his ‘paramount and dangerous power’ to the fact that he embodied in himself ‘the characteristics and desires’ of his nation, while at the same time he was also the representative ‘and to a considerable extent the sympathising organ’ of a great party which was spread over all nations.174 He was ‘the Crowned Democrat of Europe’. Both at home and abroad he had ‘a contract’ with the agencies that had elevated him to his position, and in order for them to keep him there he had to rigidly fulfil the terms of that contract. At home he ruled ‘over the middle classes, in defiance of the educated classes, and by the support of the lower classes and the army.’ In order, therefore, to retain his popularity with France he had to always please the populace, the peasantry, and the army. Now France loved two things above all others, ‘gain and glory’. Through his foreign policy the Emperor had managed to satisfy their thirst for ‘glory’, without, at the same time indulging in any of the kind of risky operations and adventures that would endanger their businesses or increase taxation (which would interfere with their thirst for ‘gain’). Thus, ‘[t]o France certainly he has amply fulfilled his obligations’.175 But he had ‘another master besides France to satisfy, – a power at once his master and his tool – viz., the revolutionary party throughout Europe – the democratic element in continental states – the discontented and oppressed Nationalities – those, in a word, who are fond of


describing themselves as the adherents and devotees of “the Principles of 1789”’. He thoroughly understood this party’s strength, nature, and designs, not least thanks to his own early Carbonari connections. And, moreover, he also believed in that party.176 He was convinced that the ‘Principles of 1789’ would prevail in the end, that ‘in the perennial contest between democracy and its rivals’, democracy would win. And he believed that the tendency of things was ‘towards the establishment in all lands of the sovereignty of the people, delegated to and embodied in the sovereignty of one man’. He was determined to be ‘the exponent, the patron, and the leader’ of this tendency. This conviction was ‘the key to nearly all his policy’. His doctrine, ‘his idée Napoleonienne’, was ‘the administration of one man sustained by the great body of the people, imbued with their sentiments and wishes, but endowed with sagacity to sift them, to guide them, to modify and enlighten them, but also with full power to enforce and establish them.’ Now, ‘There is vast might, because there is much truth, in this conception of individual will and talent based upon brute force, backed by it and wielding it. But herein also lies the greatest danger of modern civilisation’. And it was ‘the devotion of Louis Napoleon to this conception, the clearness with which he apprehends it, and the vigour with which he grasps it, that renders him the most formidable foe that the higher elements of moral and intellectual, as distinguished from material, civilisation ever had’.177 Bagehot offered another, more detailed, anatomy of the Emperor’s system in March 1865 in ‘Cæsareanism as it now exists’.178 After drawing parallels with Julius Cæsar, who had been ‘the first instance of a democratic despot’, he explained that the French Emperor’s system had very little to do with ‘the despotisms of feudal origin and legitimate pretensions’. Unlike them, ‘Louis Napoleon is a Benthamite despot. He is for the “greatest happiness of the greatest number”. He says, “I am where I am, because I know better than any one else what is good for the French people, and they know that I know better.”’179 The welfare of the masses, ‘the present good of the present multitude’ was the object of his rule. The Empire gave to the French ‘the full gratification of their main wishes’. No former French government had done as much for free trade, the promotion of railways, and roads, and industry, as that of Napoleon III. Consequently: ‘If, indeed, as is often laid down, the present happiness of the greatest number was the characteristic object of government, it would be difficult to make out that any probable French government would be better, or indeed nearly so good as the present.’ But ‘if not the present happiness of the greatest number but their future elevation be, as it is, the true aim and end of government, an estimate of the Empire will be


strangely altered.’ It was ‘an admirable government for present and coarse purposes, but a detestable government for future and refined purposes’. In the first place, it stopped ‘the teaching apparatus’, by forbidding newspaper articles and the popular speeches. Thus: ‘France, as it is, may be happier because of the Empire, but France in the future will be more ignorant because of the Empire.’180 (One cannot fail to notice the similarity of Bagehot’s criticisms of the Second Empire to this effect – here, but also in ‘France or England’ in 1863 – with the criticisms raised by the young and oedipally inclined J.S. Mill on Bentham’s thought, in his ‘Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy’ (1833) especially, but also in ‘Bentham’ (1838).181 The parallel becomes almost explicit by Bagehot’s statement that ‘Louis Napoleon is a Benthamite despot.’) Now, this outcome, ‘[t]he deterioration of the future’, was only one of the inherent defects of the imperial system. The second was ‘the corruption of the present.’ An ‘enormous concentration of power in an industrial system ensures an accumulation of pecuniary temptation’. Finally, the third disadvantage of the system of Napoleon III was that it completely destroyed credit.182 To complete the picture of Bagehot’s appraisal of the Empire we need to look also at what he had to say immediately after its collapse. In ‘The Collapse of Cæsarism’,183 he interpreted the ‘marvellous failure’ of the French imperial system to effect even the military organization of France, as a proof of the profound flaws of Louis Napoleon’s system (something Mill did also in his correspondence of the time). It was Cæsarism that had ‘utterly failed’ in France, meaning by Cæsarism, that peculiar system of which Louis Napoleon was the great exponent, which tried ‘to win directly from a plebiscite, i.e., the vote of the people, a power for the throne to override the popular will as expressed in regular representative assemblies, and to place in the monarch an indefinite “responsibility” to the nation, by virtue of which he may hold in severe check the intellectual criticism of the more educated classes and even the votes of the people’s own delegates’. Cæsarism was ‘[a] virtually irresponsible power obtained by one man from the vague preference of the mass for a particular name’. It was the absence of all ‘intermediate links of moral responsibility and co-operation’, between the throne and the people, which was in the very nature of Cæsarism, that had caused the reverses suffered by France since the beginning of the war. There was no check on the Cæsar except ‘the wishes of the masses of the people’, and that was often the source of the system’s weakness. Apparently, according to Bagehot (as well as to later historians), Louis Napoleon had not been able to enforce the new conscription law he had proposed in order to modernize the French armed forces because it was unpopular, and he


needed the support of the masses for his plebiscite.184 In his final judgment on Louis Napoleon in 1873, after the former Emperor’s death had brought to the fore the disease (stone) that had blighted his last years, Bagehot showed himself again more indulgent to the recently deceased. In spite of his failure, he believed Louis Napoleon’s powers before the illness started crippling his mind had been ‘very considerable’. He had been the most ‘insighted, not farsighted’, of France’s modern statesmen. He had perceived long before anybody else ‘the spell’ which the name of his uncle threw over Frenchmen; as well as that the peasantry were ‘the governing body’, and would support a strong executive which would secure their properties; he had been the first statesman to perceive the ‘latent power existing in the idea of nationalities’, when others regarded it as a mere chimera; he had been the first French statesman to realize the advantages of a free-trade; the only one who managed ‘to conciliate the Papacy, or rather to master it, without breaking with the republicans’; and the only Frenchman who ‘ventured to declare that England was the best ally France could have’. His greatest flaw had been his incapacity to find competent agents to serve him, due to his own insecurities, which made him jealous of able men. ‘To declare him a great man may be impossible in the face of his failures, but to declare him a small one is ridiculous. Small men dying in exile do not leave wide gaps in the European political horizon.’185 Meanwhile, before the Franco-Prussian War and the fall of the Empire, in May 1870, Bagehot was advising the liberals to heed the lessons of the plebiscite which had just given a resounding endorsement of Napoleon’s rule and his recent reforms in the direction of further liberalization, and to rally to the Empire as long as the Emperor was liberalizing his regime. His argument was that, as ‘France is not a country to be governed without some appeal to the imagination’, there were really only two options open to the French, either a socialist republic or an Empire. The Empire appealed to the imagination of the peasantry ‘as a symbol of stability and magnificence’. The republic would appeal to the imagination of the operative classes ‘as a symbol of equality and fraternity’. These were the only two systems that could gain the degree and intensity of popular attachment necessary for stability in France. The reason why he recommended the Empire was that, unlike the republic, which had not yet been tried properly and would have to go through a ‘fanatical’ stage, in order to satisfy the imaginative needs of the class that were its main supporters (and therefore be socialistic and ‘red’), the Empire had exhausted its fanatical stage: ‘A blind popular feeling once fairly on the wane is the best conceivable cement for a political system; and if you can engraft


upon it rational and liberal principles, which shall win support by their own intrinsic merit, you come very near the best conceivable form of government.’ That was really the case in England, opined the author of The English Constitution, and the French liberals would do well to find a similar arrangement by availing themselves of the Empire.186 However that might have been, events were to happen differently, because of the Franco-Prussian War. In the beginning of September 1870, after the Emperor’s defeat and capture in Sédan, the Empire fell and a provisional government of republicans came to power. Writing a few days later, Bagehot opined that there was no reason to be optimistic about the chances of the recently declared republic to be more lasting than its predecessors, because the French were lacking the commonest and most elementary aid to stability, ‘an ancient government resting on recognised dignity and ineradicable veneration’. The closest France came to the feeling of uncritical deference of the English masses to the Queen, which made England ‘coherent’, was loyalty to the Empire, thanks to the myth of the first Napoleon particularly. But now that was over, for the foreseeable future, due to the humiliating defeat of the Emperor at Sédan. Thus, there was ‘no government now possible in France that is helped by an hereditary attachment or the prestige of glory.’ Consequently, France was left ‘to make a government on grounds of pure argument and reason’. But, in France, there was ‘no large number and no powerful order of persons holding opinions on the grounds of reason and argument’. Rather, the dominant fact in France was the existence of two intense political passions, ‘the passion of property among the country peasants’, and ‘the passion for socialism among the town ouvriers’ – it was, therefore, again a question of which system would satisfy the imaginative needs of the two main political bodies of France.187 And, ‘unhappily’, these two passions were entirely opposed and incompatible with each other. He feared that the choice could only be made by force. A vicious circle, obviously modelled on the experience of 1848, seemed to him inevitable. The worst thing of all was that ‘the most desirable governments for France, as a philosopher, or at any rate as an Englishman would judge, are very popular nowhere’. These most desirable forms of government, ‘the political Republic – the Republic without socialism’, and ‘the Orleanist monarchy’, appealed neither to the passions of the peasants nor to those of the ouvriers of the towns.188 They rested on pure reason, and were weak accordingly. And the list of problems was not over yet. Reiterating what he had focused on almost tediously in 1852, he asserted: ‘The parliamentary system … is an exotic in France and has never yet thriven there. And the defect goes very deep. Frenchmen as yet have never shown


themselves able to bear exciting discussion.’ A French Assembly was ‘not a deliberating Senate, but a yelling mob’. It was the national character again. Steady discussion was impossible in a nation ‘naturally excitable’, ‘prone to hope and prone to terror, both to exaggeration’.189 In spring 1871 Bagehot showed himself critical of the ‘defenders of the Commune in England’, ‘the literary advocates’ of its policy, meaning obviously the Comtists.190 He came to endorse M. Thiers’s ‘conservative republic’ in September 1872, subscribing to Thiers’s argument that the republic was the form of government which divided Frenchmen the least under the circumstances – because, Bagehot argued, it had the advantage of dividing the apparent responsibility for the war and for France’s failure in it the most. But then, there was a great danger to which the republican form of government was particularly liable, ‘the danger of harming a financial reputation’, given that the Republic had been proclaimed on 4 September 1870 ‘by fanatics, and it was associated with absurdly superstitious hopes’. Nothing was more important for France after the defeat at Sédan than ‘to shake off all delirium, and to face the alarming facts of conquest and an empty Exchequer, as soberly and as prosaically as she could’. Now, ‘[f]ortunately for the republican form of government, the war with the Commune came to give a thoroughly conservative, or even ultra-conservative … tone to the administration of the Provisional Republic. But this at least it did – it effectively severed the name of the Republic from the creed of the delirious Republicans’, leaving it ‘perfectly open to M. Thiers to identify the idea of the Republic with the soberest possible conceptions of government’.191 However, eight months later, on the occasion of the fall of President Thiers and his succession by Marshal MacMahon, Bagehot offered his readers some more sobering thoughts, as the very title (‘The Ultimate Evil of French Politics’) suggests.192 As far as he was concerned, he wrote that ‘our sympathies are as much for a republic in France as for a monarchy in England’. He believed that the greatest blessing to France would be a free government, and that a republic was ‘the only form of such government easily possible there’193 – given that, a constitutional monarchy such as that of England was, in France, ‘an exotic and alien’, and would not last long; which meant that ‘any monarchy which endures will there come to be a despotism’.194 But his wishes were one thing, and whether the French peasantry really understood what the republic meant enough for them to support it was another. In any case, the ultimate problem was that: ‘On this occasion, as before so often, the real difficulty of France is the apathy of the French people.’ They were opposed to socialism, and resolved to fight for property, but they were resolved on nothing else.


They were ‘destitute of political conviction’. This being the case: ‘This inert mass is the natural prey to vigorous politicians. The real question is, What minority shall impose its creed on the majority and shall govern in its name? And while this is so, though one government may be more or less better than another, none can be really good.’195 The success of Bonapartists in a series of by-elections in 1874 brought to the fore an issue Bagehot felt particularly competent to comment on, in May 1874, in ‘The Prospects of Bonapartism in France’.196 He tried to explain to uncomprehending Englishmen that there was ‘something to a Frenchman dearer than free thought, much dearer than parliamentary government, dearer even than successful foreign policy, and that is fixity. … He lives in the constant presence of a revolutionary force; he is always imagining an outbreak of it; he has heard of the terrors of ‘93, and has seen the losses of the Commune’. Frenchmen believed that the Empire had preserved them from such calamities. People in this mood could not expect a government that would offer them the longed-for ‘sensation of fixity’ to emerge from the Assembly then existing, ‘for the Assembly was never more hopelessly divided against itself’. And there was no reason to be more optimistic about the likelihood of any of its successor assemblies to succeed in founding a fixed government. If the Assembly of the day were to be dissolved, the new assembly would most probably be ‘more consistently republican than the present’. And, as it would be republican, it would have to make the republic. But ‘though its members will be agreed that the government shall bear that name, they will, if they resemble present republicans in France, be agreed on little else’: ‘Between the republic of M. Thiers and of M. Gambetta, between that of the moderate left and of the extreme left, between that which is desired for socialist and that which is desired for political ends, there are immense differences.’197 Bagehot changed his mind about many things concerning the prospects of French politics, but he never abandoned his ‘crotchet’ since the early 1850s, to the effect that the French were unable to sustain an assembly, because of their national character. It would take a long time, he continued, for an assembly so divided to give its consent to any sort of constitution, ‘especially as it will probably be very loquacious and very disorderly, as other French assemblies have been’. And ‘when, after long labour, the constitution emerges, what is the chance that it will be a constitution which will work?’ If, he continued, it were to be worked by Americans, ‘it would not be difficult to make something which will “pull along” somehow’. ‘But the new constitution will have to be worked by the French – who are unused to republics, who have never been able to combine either for


monarchy or republic, who cannot bear compromises, who will not endure being outvoted.’ A new constitution which was to be worked by such a people ‘ought to be a masterpiece of political skill’. This being the case, then, there was no wonder that people who wished ‘soon to possess a firm and strong government’, turned fondly to the memory of the Empire.198 Now, not only was this progress of Bonapartism easy to account for, it was also ‘by no means the grave misfortune which many liberals believe it to be, but, on the contrary, is an improvement in the present politics of France, and a thing to be glad of in the present sad state of that country’. Returning to the main argument he had used in 1852, he maintained that France was ‘fit for a consultative, but not yet fit for a representative government’. In a consultative government the first power was the person at the head of the executive, and the assembly was just a consultative body. In the abstract there was no doubt that parliamentary government (the government in which it was the elected assembly that was supreme) was better, because it was ‘essentially a government of discussion’ which was conducive to the formation of a public opinion, the whole process being the best mode of ‘training nations not only in political thought, but in all thought’. But France did not really have a choice between the two forms. First, parliamentary government required ‘that a nation should have nerve to endure incessant discussion and frequent change of rulers’. But both present evidence and past experience proved that France did not possess that ‘nerve’. She was ‘anxious for one thing above all others’, ‘fixity’. She wanted, ‘above all things, to see who is to be her ruler’. To the mind of the common Frenchman a change of ministry was ‘a portentous event; it amounts to much and it threatens more’. More than anything else, Frenchmen wished for a stable government, and parliamentary government seemed to them ‘more than any other unstable’. The French were ‘naturally excitable, uncontrollable, and sensitive to risk; they have been so used to political misfortune that they now are scared at any shadow’. There were generally ‘two simultaneous, but contrary, excitements; one of the revolutionist, who wants to revive the Commune: the other of the peasant or the shopkeeper, who fears the Commune. And the passion of each tends to intensify the passion of the other’. Moreover, these ‘frenzies’ worked on ‘the most inflammable and least stoical of national characters’. That was why: ‘There is no soil so unsuitable to parliamentary government.’ And there was more: ‘This difficulty lies in the character of the nation, but there is a second in the character of its parliaments. They have always been – at least, since there was universal suffrage – unruly and excitable past English belief.’199


While the incredibly ‘unruly and excitable’ French Assembly and its constituent Committee were discussing in order to reach consensus on a new Constitution (which they were to do earlier than Bagehot expected, as he was to acknowledge, in early 1875), the British constitutional expert vouchsafed to offer them some advice, in two articles, one of them boldly entitled: ‘A Suggestion for the Future Government of France’.200 He even printed at the foot of the article ‘the heads of such a Constitution as, according to our English ideas, France might fairly make, drawn up by one who has had great experience in such matters, and who has been in the habit of weighing them carefully for many years.’ Hardly presumptuous of the author of The English Constitution to say as much about his recommendations perhaps. It is more the implicit belief that ‘English ideas’ was what the French needed that is interesting here. Starting from the fundamentals then, he opined that the Constitution would have to be ‘not monarchical but republican’, as the materials for a constitutional monarchy such as that of England did not exist in France. The French had ‘no monarch whom the nation would accept as such’. The main support of monarchy in England – inherited loyalty – did not exist in France. ‘Royalty has not been so successful there as to excite it; the remembrance of the old régime rather inspires aversion.’ But that was not all. In words particularly reminiscent of Mill’s argument to the same effect in the ‘Vindication’ (1849), Bagehot continued that, in addition, there was perhaps ‘something in the very essence of constitutional royalty not very suited to the logical structure of the French mind’. ‘A king who reigns but does not govern’, was for them ‘a sort of logical nondescript’.201 Therefore, the only monarchy possible in France was the Empire, and that was one ‘not based on English ideas but on the very opposite of English ideas’. According to the author of The English Constitution, the mainspring of the English Constitution was ‘the election of the principal executive, the Premier and the cabinet, by the legislature’. He proposed to the French to retain this ‘invaluable secret of the English Constitution’. He wanted Marshal MacMahon (the then President of the Republic) and his successors to be ‘expressly entrusted with the power of dissolution’.202 The Constitution which Bagehot proposed to the French had no House of Lords in it. The House of Lords was ‘so peculiarly English’ that it was ‘impossible to transplant it’. ‘The peculiar feelings which make such an hereditary assembly possible in England do not exist in France; on the contrary, they are opposed to one of the strongest of French social instincts – the instinct of equality.’203 A few months later, he was happy to announce, in ‘The Conservative Republic’,204 that, despite his earlier predictions to the contrary, the


French National Assembly had contrived to come up with a new Constitution ‘with a promptness, a display of discipline, a power of combination, an indifference to party interests and party motives, which fairly deserves the sincerest admiration’. In his assessment of this new Constitution Bagehot differs from subsequent historians and political scientists who, with the benefit of hindsight (and particularly of the implications for constitutional practice of the backlash provoked by President MacMahon’s quasi-coup d’état of 16 May 1877, the so-called ‘seize mai’ crisis), have assessed the new régime as having been a parliamentary and not a presidential Republic. Unable to predict the degree to which the President’s power of dissolution (with the approval of the Senate) of the popular chamber would become inoperative in practice as a result of the precedent of MacMahon’s failed and embarrassing attempt to use it, Bagehot seems to have overestimated the leeway offered to the President by the new Constitution. Thus he remarked that ‘[t]he focus of strength in the new Republic’ was the President, who was ‘a far more important officer than either the American President or the French President of 1848’. Given the subsequent history of the Third Republic, which became, to all intents and purposes, a byword for parliamentary predominance at the expense of having a strong executive (which is what General De Gaulle later believed he had to rectify, as he expressed it most famously in his Bayeux speech), there is no gainsaying some exaggeration in statements like the following: ‘In fact, the French President’s position will combine the power of an American President – greatly magnified by the longer term of power and by the right of re-election – with many of the attributes of a constitutional Prime Minister … ’ or ‘[i]ndeed, it is not very easy to conceive, outside Russia, a position of more influence and grandeur than that of the new French President, if only he is wise enough to foster, instead of to smother, the constitutional life over which he is to preside’.205 On the other hand, of course, one has to concede to Bagehot that this latter proviso is vital, and that it was as a result of MacMahon’s attempt to ‘smother’, instead of to ‘foster’ the constitutional life over which he was to preside, that the Presidents of the Third Republic turned out to have so little power in practice after 1877. It may also be said in defence of Bagehot’s perspicacity that he did come to foresee, in his last article on French politics before his death, the probability of a clash between conservative President MacMahon and the – increasingly liberal and republican – representative chamber, which actually was to erupt a couple of years later.206 As one would expect, given their differences over republicanism and the monarchy at home as well as other things,207 Harrison had a different


perspective on the politics of the new republic than that of Bagehot (who died in 1877). He was as hostile as one could be to Marshal MacMahon and his preferred prime minister, the Duc de Broglie, and his hero was Gambetta, whom he duly met in Paris. In a series of reports he sent to The Times from France (particularly from the provinces) and in some long articles in Morley’s Fortnightly Review in the 1870s Harrison offered a highly partisan picture of mature, peaceful and patient republicans and workmen opposed to discredited conservatives and priests. As Mill had done so often in the 1830s and 1840s in different contexts, Harrison tried to convince British readers that there was nothing for the friends of order to fear from the French republicans under Gambetta, who were simply the equivalent of sober British radicals.208 In any case, Harrison was not particularly representative – and he himself later grew disillusioned with Gambetta and Ferry and consequently with French politics.209 The fact that the French did manage to install a ‘parliamentary’ rather than ‘personal’ government does not mean that most of their neighbours outre-Manche ceased to see French politics as problematic, illiberal, and as a cautionary warning. In the mid-1880s, Herbert Spencer, at any rate, was not too impressed. France had not been saved by its parliamentary politics from what was its worst defect in Spencer’s (and most of his compatriots’) eyes: since, vast and complex and possessed of all the resources, the administrative organization once developed and consolidated, must become irresistible. And if there needs proof that the periodic exercise of electoral power would fail to prevent this, it suffices to instance the French Government, which, purely popular in origin, and subject at short intervals to popular judgement, nevertheless tramples on the freedom of citizens to an extent which the English delegates to the late Trades Unions Congress say ‘is a disgrace to, and an anomaly in, a Republican nation.’ The final result would be ‘a revival of despotism. A disciplined army of civil officials, like an army of military officials, gives supreme power to its head – a power which has often led to usurpation, as in medieval Europe and still more in Japan – nay, has thus so led among our neighbours, within our own times’.210 As most of Spencer’s compatriots would put it, there was something in the ‘national character’ of the French that led them to end up living with (and even crave for) despotism. But that is another chapter.

4 French National Character and French Politics

Nothing can be more ridiculous indeed than the way in which we [the English and the French] exaggerate each other’s vices and extenuate our own. The whole is an affair of prejudice on one side of the question, and of partiality on the other. Travellers who set out to carry back a true report of the case appear to lose not only the use of their understandings, but of their senses, the instant they set foot in a foreign land. The commonest facts and appearances are distorted, and discoloured. They go abroad with certain preconceived notions on the subject, and they make every thing answer, in reason’s spite, to their favourite theory. In addition to the difficulty of explaining customs and manners foreign to our own, there are all the obstacles of wilful prepossession thrown in the way. It is not, therefore, much to be wondered at that nations have arrived at so little knowledge of one another’s characters; and that, where the object has been to widen the breach between them, any slight differences that occur are easily blown into a blaze of fury by repeated misrepresentations, and all the exaggerations that malice or folly can invent! (William Hazlitt) The excitable and anxious French character, though not liable for all errors which have been charged to it, was nevertheless a perpetual cause of evil, which aggravated every calamity and darkened every good future. (Walter Bagehot)1 ‘National character’ is an elusive concept, more often employed than defined. In political thought, talk of national characters has been 103


understandably discredited since the Second World War, as embarrassment about the political implications of the concept came to compound the difficulties inherent in its very nature – related to the perplexities inherent in the notions ‘character’ and ‘nation’ themselves. (In the social sciences, in some sense, the opposite is the case, and the study of ‘national character’ and related categories were particularly developed after 1945).2 Earlier political thinkers, however, were more casual about these matters and collective characteristics and their significance for politics have been among the concerns of political thought and historiography at least since Aristotle, or rather earlier still.3 Besides cursory references in the works of most thinkers, some proceeded to theoretical discussions of the very category, like David Hume’s essay ‘Of national characters’, for instance. And Montesquieu and Voltaire were far from alone in making much of the differences of character between ‘nations’.4 In the nineteenth century such references intensified, reinforced by the greater currency that the idea of ‘nationality’ acquired. In Victorian Britain in particular, the language of ‘character’ became all-pervasive, as concern with character in general, individual or collective, and the effects of actions or institutions on it, proved to be one of the major preoccupations of ‘public moralists’.5 Discussions of national characters went on well into the twentieth century, and political theorists as well as political scientists have been among the contributors.6 In nineteenth-century Britain, references to national or cultural characteristics were inextricably associated with ‘race’, and the term race was often substituted for nation or nationality. A methodological difficulty that can perplex the examination of these issues arises from the fact that sometimes ‘race’ was used in the sense that the terms ‘culture’ or ‘nation’ have today, without, that is, necessarily implying any belief in the doctrine of biological and hereditary transmission of mental, moral, or psychological traits.7 Thus, here, when I say that a thinker was not a racist or racialist, I mean that he did not subscribe to this latter, rather than that he did not dally with the language of race – this, they all did. Despite the ‘political incorrectness’ of their discourse, by the standards of our more sensitive age, there might be some point in not dismissing all Victorian references to national character in the lump before studying the commonplaces, the individual differences, and the nuances. Of course there is no gainsaying that there was a lot of nonsense, ignorance, ethnocentrism or sheer prejudice and a disturbing degree of physical determinism and reliance on the importance of the racial factor in most of that discourse. Yet, lumping all writers who used the terms national character or race together would be a mistake. They did

French National Character and French Politics 105

not all agree on what national character meant, nor on what were the factors in its formation. Then, no less importantly, there was the explicitness, unclouded by considerations of ‘political correctness’, of what the Victorian thinkers and writers had to say about different nations, particularly their own and the one on the other side of Dover. Much of what they had to say was unfounded or silly, but this does not alter the fact that the whole discourse on national characters is particularly revealing of how societies perceived one another, and, in this case, how the Victorians saw their neighbours, as well as, through the ubiquitous explicit or implicit comparisons, themselves. Having said all the above, and though the differences or nuances that are discernible between individual thinkers prove very interesting, on the whole, the most remarkable conclusion one can draw is the striking degree of agreement, the ubiquitousness and quasi-universality of certain themes, images, stereotypes, comparisons or parallels. It will be shown in this chapter that, in this respect, the significance, for Victorian thought, of observing France could hardly be overestimated. The first part will discuss briefly the status of national character in Victorian political thought and its relation with the concept of ‘race’. The second part will deal with some of the stereotypical views of the French, as well as of the English character, emerging through comparisons, with particular focus on those views related to politics and political capacity or fitness.

I

Nations, races and national character

Carlyle subscribed to racial determinism and also, more or less explicitly, believed that the negroes were born servants to the whites who were ‘born wiser’. He wrote an ‘Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question’ in 1849 asserting such views and proposing that the ‘idle’ emancipated slaves of the West Indies should be bestowed the boon of work by the ‘beneficent whip’. And, predictably, he took Governor Eyre’s side during the controversy that divided sharply the Victorian intelligentsia in the late 1860s.8 As far as his views on the French were concerned, overall, he had a more or less racial contempt for the ‘ever-talking, ever gesticulating French’9 – who, as he noticed with horror since his first visit to Paris, also copulated too much, besides other vices such as ‘eating, everlasting eating’!10 Carlyle’s affections were reserved for the Teutonic Germans (one of the things for which he was quoted during the nineteenth century was his ‘famous contrast of the Gallic fire fit for “roasting eggs” with the Germanic fire needed for “smelting metals”’).11 He was one of the


leading ‘Teutomaniacs’ – as M. Arnold dubbed his exceedingly proTeutonic contemporaries – who usually combined pro-German leanings and predilections with a belief that the English themselves were exclusively descended of sturdy Germanic, Teutonic racial stock. Besides Carlyle, other leading ‘Teutomaniacs’ were Charles Kingsley, and historians of the school of E.A. Freeman, one of the authors in the Saturday Review who ‘saw all things in Teutonism’, as Arnold put it.12 Matthew Arnold knew well what he was talking about, for one of the most fervent admirers of the Germanic races, ‘the most moral races of men that the world has yet seen’, was his own father, who has been dubbed ‘that Teuton of Teutons, the Celt-hating Dr. Arnold’.13 His son said almost as much, only with the tact required by a son writing to his mother about his deceased father.14 Now, to go from the father to the son, ‘[f]ew of England’s major authors have devoted as much attention as has [Matthew] Arnold to the study of national characteristics’. And yet, even for the scholar who has done more than anyone else to clarify them, ‘Arnold’s speculations on the subject are confusing.’15 Arnold endeavoured to bolster up his comparisons and assertions with ‘scientific’ data from the then emerging ethnological–anthropological studies and disciplines, not only in his most ‘ethnological’ venture, On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867),16 but also in many of his other writings. It is clear, however, that his was a superficial acquaintance with the researches of specialists in the emerging fields concerned and that he pursued his ethnological interests and comparisons as a dilettante.17 He indulged in lengthy discussions of racial traits and allowed race a very important part in the formation of national character. He was explicit about the major importance of race in Celtic Literature, for example in a statement,18 which, according to Lionel Trilling ‘seems to have direct reference to [H.T.] Buckle’s insistence on the non-racial determinants of culture’.19 However, Faverty, who notes that ‘[w]ith him, race is the determining factor’20 also remarks cogently that there is an ‘underlying confusion’ in Arnold’s argument in that ‘at one and the same time he regards racial qualities as constant and yet alterable’. Unlike what was the case with more orthodox believers in the allimportance of race (such as the physician and ethnologist Robert Knox, who was adamant that racial traits cannot be changed, for the qualities of race are ‘eternal, unalterable’21), Arnold’s labours ‘were all directed to the one great end of changing the English race, of bettering it’, believing that such change could be brought about at will, if only greater prominence were to be given to one or another of the three racial strains that he thought made up the English blend, the Germanic, the Celtic, and


the Norman.22 By stressing the virtues of the Celtic element, he hoped to lessen the preponderance of the Teutonic element in the English. We have seen (Chapter 2) that consistency was not always Arnold’s paramount consideration. On this particular issue, however, the following pages will show that he was in good company indeed. One more important clarification is required if we are to place Arnold correctly in the context discussed here. Once more, Faverty’s remarkable book proves the best guide, in stressing that, although ‘Arnold was, and is still, regarded as the champion of the Celts, the sympathetic friend of France, and the arch-enemy of Philistinism, that evil flower, sprung from Teutonic soil’, and although it is true that ‘many of his most significant essays are devoted to praise of the Celtic and French elements in modern civilization’, one should not lose sight of the fact that ‘a consideration of his work as a whole shows that he placed his deepest trust in the “serious Germanic races”’: ‘Theirs were the sterling virtues, theirs the solid, if also unhappily the stolid, qualities which the world must fall back on at last.’ By pointing out their defects, he was hoping to enable them ‘to become stronger still’. The Teutons had some very regrettable faults, but they also had some very significant redeeming traits in their energy, their honesty, and their morality.23 Now, what was it that Arnold said about the ‘Celts’? Which groups did he include under the name? And what were his sources in these racial and ethnological classifications and characterizations? To start by answering the last question first, almost all Arnold’s pronouncements on these subjects are traceable to French sources. The first influence came from Ernest Renan.24 However, other influences are clearly identifiable in an issue as important as (to come to an answer to the second of the questions) who the Celts were. Renan had identified four groups as constituting the Celtic ‘race’: (a) the inhabitants of Wales and Cambria, and those of Cornwall (the Cymry); (b) the inhabitants of French Brittany who spoke Bas-Breton; (c) the Gaels of the North of Scotland who spoke Gaelic; (d) the Irish. In his own definition, Arnold included these four ethnic groups, but, significantly for the purposes of this book, he added the French as predominantly Celtic, following in this two French historians, Amédée Thierry (Histoire des Gaulois (1835)) and Henri Martin (Histoire de France (1855–60)) – after the Franco-Prussian War this view was to become mainstream in France.25 And, following another Frenchman, the physician W.F. Edwards, Arnold came to regard the English themselves as partly Celtic, as having a Celtic leaven much more substantial than most of them were aware of.26 Thus, as W.F. Edwards (and, increasingly from the 1860s, several British ethnologists) argued,


Arnold believed that the English were a Mischvolk and in his Celtic Literature he tried to show them what this meant. But what about the French? The fact that Arnold joined a number of distinguished French historians (and, as we will see further on, most of his British contemporary thinkers, all the way from Francophobe Carlyle to Francophile Mill) in ascribing to them a Celtic racial origin, does not mean that they were a ‘pure’ race. Far from that. He saw the French population as being made up historically of three races: the [Celtic] Gaul, the Roman, and the Frank. More precisely, and although at some point the Teutonic ‘blood’ of the Frank had been involved also, they were mainly Celtic in blood, though Latin in their civilization.27 More precisely still, Arnold came to develop a theory concerning the historical evolution (and degeneration or racial fall) of the French nation, in which race and morality were directly linked. Although he held a similar view, to an extent, earlier, his historical theory acquired at the very least an added emphasis after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and the crushing defeat of France. To all intents and purposes, Arnold came up with a racial explanation of the débâcle of 1870. It was due to the gradual dying out of the Germanic element in the French nation. The best moment in French history had been the Middle Ages, when the Germanic element in the French blend was at its strongest. Through a gradual decline France had come to its nineteenth-century sensuality and worship of the goddess Aselgeia or Lubricité (respectively, Greek and French for lustfulness or lechery), which led to its humiliating defeat in the hands of the moral and masculine Teutons of Bismarck. First there was the original Gaul, the Celtic basis of the French nation, characterized by all the gaiety, sociability, sentimentality, as well as presumptuousness attributed to the Celts in general. Then, with the Roman conquest, a new breed emerged, the Gallo-Latin, retaining the Gaulish qualities but having superadded on them Latin order, reason, lucidity, as well as sensuality, or at least sensuousness (although he had identified sensuality as a Celtic trait also in Celtic Literature). Finally, with the Frankish conquest the third component was added. The Frenchman who emerged from the fusion of the Gallo-Latin with the Germanic qualities of the Franks was as good a crossbreed as one could hope for, as Arnold put it in ‘Numbers’ (1885). But this happy balance did not last. Starting from France’s refusal to accept the Reformation – to all intents and purposes a Germanic creation – France began to shed off the Germanic part of her nature through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, until the Germanic construction of medieval Old France was swept away completely with the French Revolution and its aftermath.


As a result, of the Frenchman of his own day Arnold thought that ‘the German in him has nearly died out, and the Gallo-Latin has quite got the upper hand’. This meant that ‘the chief source of seriousness and of moral ideas is failing and drying up in him, and that what remains are the sources of Gaulish salt, and quickness, and sentiment, and sociability, and sensuality, and rationality.’ The same things he stressed in ‘A French Worthy’, published in Morley’s Pall Mall Gazette on 8 November 1882.28 To an extent not sufficiently stressed in extant scholarship, Arnold’s emphasis on the preponderatingly Celtic nature of the French emerged after the French humiliation in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 (being striking in diverse works from his 1872 review of Renan’s Réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France to his lectures in America in the last years of his life – particularly but not exclusively ‘Numbers’ (1885)).29 The difference is clear from a careful comparison of his post1870 statements with his pronouncements in Celtic Literature (1867). In this pre-1870 work, Arnold stressed that the Frenchman was not a ‘Celt proper’, like the Irishman, but rather, as he repeatedly called him, a ‘Latinized’ race of Celtic racial stock.30 As he put it in Celtic Literature: The French people have … an undoubtedly Celtic basis, yet so decisive in its effect upon a nation’s habit and character can be the contact with a stronger civilisation, that Gaul, without changing the basis of her blood, became, for all practical intents and purposes, a Latin country, France and not Ireland, through the Roman conquest. Latinism conquered Celtism in her, as it also conquered the Germanism imported by the Frankish and other invasions; Celtism is, however, I need not say, everywhere manifest still in the French nation; even Germanism is distinctly traceable in it … . But the governing character of France, as a power in the world, is Latin; such was the force of Greek and Roman civilisation upon a race whose whole mass remained Celtic … .31 Now, in his review of Renan’s work Réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France (1871), published in March 1872, instead of stressing the differences of the Latinised French from other Celtic races (as he did in Celtic Literature in 1867), Arnold came to stress the differences of the Celtic French from other, ‘truly Latin’ races. Reviewing the history of France he found no literary giants like those produced by Greece, Renaissance Italy, Germany or England: ‘Probably the incapacity for seriousness in the highest sense … is here what keeps France back from perfection. For the Greeks and the Romans, and a truly Latin race like the Italians, have


this seriousness intellectually, as the Hebrews and the Germanic races have it morally.’32 Only ‘seriousness’ was ‘constructive’: Latin Gaul had been a Roman construction, medieval ‘Old France’ had been a Germanic construction; yet, ‘France has been since 1789 getting rid of all the plan, cramps, and stays of her original builders, and their edifice is in ruins; but is the Celt, by himself, constructive enough to rebuild?’.33 Now, there is a great and confusing number of characteristics attributed to the Celts by thinkers, historians and ethnologists in the nineteenth century and it would require more space than we can spare to even delineate the main outlines of the image of the Celt.34 Yet, those traits that are directly or indirectly related to politics and political capacity cannot be passed over without some notice. The major characteristic on which Arnold based his analysis of the Celts’ achievements and failures in Celtic Literature he presented as follows: ‘Sentimental – always ready to react against the despotism of fact; that is the description a great friend35 of the Celt gives of him.’36 It was, commented Arnold, not a bad description of the sentimental temperament, for ‘it lets us into the secret of its dangers and of its habitual want of success’: ‘Balance, measure, and patience, these are the eternal conditions … of high success; and balance, measure and patience are just what the Celt has never had’.37 After discussing how what he had ascribed to them disqualified them ‘[e]ven in the world of spiritual creation’, he came to the ways in which it ‘lamed’ them even more in business and material civilization, as well as in politics. ‘The skilful and resolute appliance of means to ends which is needed both to make progress in material civilisation, and also to form powerful states, is just what the Celt has least turn for.’38 To hasten to the later, the Celt ‘has … been ineffectual in politics’. And: ‘For ages and ages the world has been constantly slipping, ever more and more, out of the Celt’s grasp. “They went forth to the war”, Ossian says most truly, “but they always fell”.’ This does not mean that Arnold rejected the Celtic genius and Celtic traits (far from it, in fact, as the opposite consideration was what had prompted him to write Celtic Literature, as his correspondence shows39): ‘And yet, if one sets about constituting an ideal genius, what a great deal of the Celts does one find oneself drawn to put into it!’. The problem arose only when the Celtic traits he had described were allowed to be over-preponderant, to the exclusion of all others. The sensibility of the Celt, if everything else were not sacrificed to it, was ‘a beautiful and admirable force’. Thus, even ‘the extravagance and exaggeration of the sentimental Celtic nature has often something romantic and attractive about it, something which has a sort of smack of misdirected good’. The characterisation that followed rings various bells: ‘The Celt,


undisciplinable, anarchical, and turbulent by nature, but out of affection and admiration giving himself body and soul to some leader, that is not a promising political temperament, it is just the opposite of the Anglo-Saxon temperament, disciplinable and steadily obedient within certain limits, but retaining an inalienable part of freedom and self-dependence.’ Yet: ‘but it is a temperament for which one has a kind of sympathy notwithstanding’. And very often, ‘more than sympathy’: ‘one feels, in spite of the extravagance, in spite of good sense disapproving, magnetised and exhilarated by it’.40 By making these points Arnold hoped to achieve two things, closely related to each other. For one thing, the political ineffectualness of the Celts was one more reason why the Irish should not sever themselves from England but stay as part of the Kingdom (this helped the part of Celtic Literature’s message which was directed to them); for another, and more importantly, all these arguments were converging towards making the main point of the whole book, that each racial element had virtues that were admirable in themselves, but which became flaws if they were left to preponderate exclusively in a people’s or a person’s character. What was needed was to mingle, to fuse different racial elements and the intellectual and moral characteristics that originally went with them. So, he meant literally phrases such as ‘if one sets about constituting an ideal genius’. Now, there was a thinker who could not agree more. Mill spoke earnestly of the combination of the French with the English spirit as being indispensable to intellectual reform, or of Armand Carrel as being such an ideal man because, – it seemed to Mill – he combined English with French qualities. And, like Arnold who had an autobiographical interest in the mixture of Celt with Teuton (cherishing his Cornish origins from his mother’s side), John Mill could not help remembering that he was the son of a Scottish father and an English mother. Mill not only devoted much attention to the study of national characteristics, but also earnestly hoped to develop a scientific disciple of the study of national character, his notorious ‘political ethology’. It has to be stressed here that he went out of his way, especially from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, to discard and discredit racial theories and to assert the idea of ‘mind over matter’ – as he put it once41 – in terms of how national characters are formed and can be changed. Unlike what some twentieth-century commentators would have one believe, Mill did not accept racial determinism.42 On the very contrary, he was on the forefront of fighting what he saw as the increasingly unpalatable deterministic applications to which new (and old) theories about race were being put with the sanction of purportedly ‘scientific’


proofs. National character was malleable for Mill, who believed in ‘the astonishing pliability’ of human nature and hence was hopeful about the prospects opened by the study of the factors influencing its formation.43 On all sorts of issues and occasions, including the mental capacities of blacks, slavery, the American Civil War, the Governor Eyre controversy, the question of Irish backwardness and discontent and many more, Mill not only consistently but also militantly stood up against claims to the effect that there were racially determined inequalities of capacities or even permanent and unalterable differences. He insisted vociferously and repeatedly that environmental and historical causes could account amply for most existing differences among human groups and that proper education and human will and endeavour could alter beyond any recognition what were supposed to be the innate characteristics of various human groups.44 But was there really one collective character for each nation, a single character for the entire nation, or were there distinctions to be made between different classes, educational and cultural backgrounds and various other sub-divisions of the population? Peter Mandler has recently argued that adopting the category of national character and ‘[t]hinking about the English as a nation’ threatened to collapse class distinctions and ‘while that might have been attractive to democrats, for the non-democratic majority of the English political and intellectual elite it was a fatal flaw’.45 Mandler’s main argument is that, instead of imagining and subscribing to an organic English nation, ‘English observers unwilling to embrace a full democracy’ preferred to stick to what Mandler calls the ‘civilisational perspective’ which they had inherited from the Scottish Enlightenment, a perspective that ‘remained potentially universal, available to all peoples’, in ways that contemporary Herder-influenced, organicist, German visualisations of the nation or the race did not. Although there is great merit in the argument concerning the persistence of a ‘civilisational perspective’, his assertion that the democratic implications of conceptualizing an English nation with one shared national character prevented non-democrats from reaching such conceptualizations of the English nation and such uses of national character needs to be qualified. For how does Mandler’s theory apply to someone like James Fitzjames Stephen? He was far from keen on democracy, but he nevertheless believed that the same national character was shared by all the classes of the nation and that its main traits remained unchanged through centuries. In attacking Buckle’s History of Civilization in England, Stephen retorted that he could not ‘conceive’ how any one could seriously maintain that an ordinary working man in his own time


was ‘a very different being from a working man under the Tudors’: ‘Alter the spelling and the grammar, and Shakespeare’s common soldiers might write home letters from India or the Crimea.’ And this was not all: ‘Even between different classes living in the same age, the moral identity is more important than the intellectual disparity’.46 And Stephen was not the only non-democrat to speak of nations as possessing each of them one character, unchanging throughout the ages. Lord Acton would fit with him very well in this respect. He clearly conceptualized the different national characters of England and France and what he saw as their decisive effect on the institutions of each country, which could not be transplanted to the other.47 And, reviewing, in 1858, the first volume of the same work, T.H. Buckle’s History of Civilization in England (1857), Acton came to the point where ‘Mr. Buckle declares … that “original distinctions of race are altogether hypothetical” … ; in support of which view that eminent positivist Mr. Mill is very properly quoted’.48 This was in Acton’s view a ‘great absurdity’: ‘For the same race of men preserves its character, not only in every region of the world, but in every period of history, in spite of moral as well as physical influences.’ In fact, ‘[t]he most amusing example of a nation’s fidelity to the character which it obtained on its first appearance in history’ was afforded by France, the reviewer went on, and quoted the ‘judgments of the ancients upon the Gauls’ collected by ‘the most eloquent and accomplished philosopher in Germany’, Ernst von Lasaulx: ‘“Gaul pursues two things with immense industry, – military matters and neat speaking.” “Through instability and levity of mind they were meditating the overthrow of the government.” “Almost all men of Gaul are revolutionists, and are easily and quickly excited to war.” “In council they are unstable, and generally revolutionary.” “The French [sic; original: “Galli”], to whom levity is natural.” “A most restless kind of men, always wanting to set up a king or an empire.”’49 The clear implication was, of course, that Acton’s readers were expected to recognise in all these traits attributed by the ancients to the Gauls the traits of their contemporary French nation – which proved Acton’s point about the perseverance of racial traits. Earlier in that same review Acton had criticised Buckle for not having thought fit to make himself acquainted with, among other books indispensable for treating ‘the great problems of civilisation which he tries to solve’, M. de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’Inégalité des Races Humaines.50 Now, Roman stereotypes of the Galli aside, Acton had his own views on the French and their character, as well as on the relation between their character traits and those of the Irish. His belief in the existence of


an unchanging, ‘Celtic’, French character is clear. Although there is a bewildering variety of versions and nuances as to the extent and the kind of the similarities, parallels between the French and the Irish fellow-‘Celtic’ characters were the stock-in-trade of Victorian national characterology, and Acton was just one example. In a review of Goldwin Smith’s Irish History, published in January 1862, Acton, after making the distinction between ‘two kinds of civilisation, social and political’, asserted that the Celts were not among the ‘progressive, initiative races’, as the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Teutons were (‘the only makers of history, the only authors of advancement’). Rather, the Celts belonged to those other races, that often attained to ‘a certain pitch of cultivation’ which they were ‘unable either to communicate or to increase’, thus being ‘a negative element in the world’. The Chinese, the Hindus, the Huns, and the Slavonians were such peoples, as well as ‘the Celts of Gaul’. The Roman and German conquerors had not altered their character as it had been drawn two thousand years earlier. ‘They have a history, but it is not theirs; their nature remains unchanged, their history is the history of the invaders.’ And in a statement popular among a school of thought in France Acton opined that the French Revolution was ‘the revival of the conquered race, and their reaction against the creations of their masters’. But, ‘it has been cunning only to destroy; it has not given life to one constructive idea, or durability to one new institution; and it has exhibited to the world an unparalleled political incapacity, which was announced by Burke, and analysed by Tocqueville’. This lack of what he called ‘political civilisation’ ‘is the essential and decisive inferiority of the Celtic race, as conspicuous among the Irish in the twelfth century as among the French in our own. They gave way before the higher political aptitude of the English’.51 Thus, Matthew Arnold’s doubts as to whether ‘the Celt, by himself, [was] constructive enough to rebuild’ what he had destroyed (starting with the French Revolution) were far from idiosyncratic. Besides his father’s assertions (in his History of Rome and elsewhere) that the ‘Kelts or Gauls’ were a purely negative and destructive element in history, most of Arnold’s contemporaries shared (with more or less extremism) E.A. Freeman’s ‘Teutomaniac’ attitudes towards the Celts.52 On the other hand, Arnold, who had accepted the Tocquevillean thesis about the inevitability of democracy, did differentiate clearly sometimes between the collective characters of different social classes – despite his belief in the existence of national characters as well.53 But he also had his own way of accommodating the two beliefs and of elevating the character traits of one class into representative of the whole nation.


He found a clear correspondence between what Amédée Thierry had described as character traits of the Germanic or Teutonic race and what he saw as the traits of the ‘Philistines’ of the English middle classes. According to Arnold, ‘[m]ultitudes, all the world over, have a good deal in common; aristocracies, all the world over, have a good deal in common’; and as ‘[t]he man of the multitude has not yet solidified into the typical Englishman’, while ‘the man of the aristocracy has been etherealised out of him’; as a result: ‘The typical Englishman is to be looked for in the middle class’.54 It therefore seems to me that no clear distinction between democrats and non-democrats can be drawn in relation to the thinkers who believed in the existence of one national character for the whole nation. A Victorian thinker who addressed directly and explicitly the question (which, he wrote, had ‘puzzled’ him a lot) whether there was one character for an entire nation and how it came to be formed and to change, was Bagehot. What has been described as ‘[h]is most intellectually ambitious work’, Physics and Politics, ‘one of the earliest attempts to work out the implications of Darwinism for social thought’, was directly dealing with national character.55 The book was subtitled: ‘Or thoughts on the application of the principles of “Natural Selection” and “Inheritance” to Political society’. As Mandler correctly points out, ‘[i]ts title (and for that matter its opening pages) have misled commentators into taking it as clear evidence of the biologising effect of Darwinian thought’. Yet, it was not.56 Bagehot explicitly rejected biological racial inheritance as well as climate as explanations of how each national character was formed or changed. So, how come there was so much diversity? ‘But what are nations? What are these groups which are so familiar to us, and yet, if we stop to think, so strange; which are as old as history … ? What breaks the human race up into fragments so unlike one another, and yet each in its interior so monotonous?’.57 He discarded the usual explanation that such distinctions could be accounted for ‘by original diversity of race’. There may have been originally distinct great racial groups, but this could not account for subsequent differentiations. Consequently, nations were the product of two great processes: ‘one race-making force which, whatever it was, acted in antiquity, and has now wholly, or almost, given over acting’; and ‘the other the nation-making force … which is acting now as much as it ever acted, and creating as much as it ever created’.58 According to Bagehot, national character was the result of chance predominance of some types and ‘unconscious imitation’ by the rest. What was at work was the principle of ‘elimination’, the ‘use and disuse’ of


organs which naturalists spoke of. ‘At first a sort of “chance predominance” made a model, and then invincible attraction, the necessity which rules all but the strongest men to imitate what is before their eyes, and to be what they are expected to be, moulded men by that model.’59 It was difficult, he admitted, to understand the effect of ordinary agencies upon the character: ‘We get a notion that a change of government or a change of climate acts equally on the mass of the nation, and so are we puzzled – at least, I have been puzzled – to conceive how it acts.’ But such changes, he maintained, did not at first act equally on all people in the nation. ‘On many, for a very long time, they do not act at all. But they bring out new qualities, and advertise the effects of new habits.’ As a result, ‘the effect of any considerable change on a nation is thus an intensifying and accumulating effect’. It acted with its maximum power only on ‘some prepared and congenial individuals’; in them ‘it is seen to produce attractive results, and then the habits creating those results are copied far and wide’.60 Physics and Politics was not, however, Bagehot’s only or even first ‘disquisition on national character’. Two decades earlier he had written his youthful series of Letters on the French Coup d’état. The third of these Letters was entitled, ‘On the New Constitution of France, and the Aptitude of the French Character for National Freedom’.61 In discussing any Constitution, Bagehot argued, there were ‘two ideas to be first got rid of’. First, ‘the idea of our barbarous ancestors’, expressed in the terms ‘Why can’t they have Kings, Lords and Commons like we have? What fools foreigners are.’ The second ‘pernicious mistake’ was that of regarding politics as simply ‘a subdivision of immutable ethics’, and of therefore believing that there are ‘certain rights of men in all places and all times’, on which government should be based, and that accordingly ‘a single stereotype government’ should prevail all over the world. In response to these ideas, ‘Burke first taught the world at large … that politics are made of time and place … that, in fact, politics are but a piece of business – to be determined in every case by the exact exigencies of that case: in plain English – by sense and circumstances’.62 This was ‘a great step in political philosophy’, though, according to Bagehot, ‘it now seems the events of 1848 have taught thinking persons … further’: ‘They have enabled us to say that of all these circumstances so affecting political problems, by far and out of all question the most important is national character.’ Why was this so? ‘In that year the same experiment – the experiment, as its friends say, of Liberal and Constitutional Government – as its enemies say of Anarchy and Revolution – was tried in every nation of Europe – with what varying futures and differing


results!’. The effect of those events had been ‘to teach men – not only speculatively to know, but practically to feel’, how absurd it was to expect the same kind of institutions to be suitable or possible ‘for Scotchmen and Sicilians, for Germans and Frenchmen, for the English and the Neapolitans’. As a result, people now knew that ‘[w]ith a wellbalanced national character … liberty is a stable thing’. A ‘really practical people’ would work even the most absurd set of institutions. Whereas, on the other hand, ‘the best institutions will not keep right a nation that will go wrong’. Because ‘paper is but paper’. A nation which applied ‘good judgment, forbearance, a rational and compromising habit to the management of free institutions’, would ‘certainly succeed’; whereas ‘the more eminently gifted national character will but be a source and germ of endless and disastrous failure, if, with whatever other eminent qualities, it be deficient in these plain, solid, and essential requisites’. Now, if the secret for success in this world was so simple, how could one get such a character? That is where things cease to be simple: ‘The formation of this character is one of the most secret of marvellous mysteries.’ On this issue, the only thing that was certain was that all men and all nations have a character, ‘and that character, when once taken, is, I do not say unchangeable – religion modifies it, catastrophe annihilates it – but the least changeable thing in this ever-varying and changeful world’. Races exhibited the same physical traits and characters for centuries or even millennia. And in a metaphor that should give believers in the malleability of national characters the shivers, Bagehot opined: ‘There are breeds in the animal man just as in the animal dog. When you hunt with greyhounds and course with beagles, then, and not till then, may you expect the inbred habits of a thousand years to pass away, that Hindoos can be free, or that Englishmen will be slaves’.63 If we compare statements such as these with what he came to write in Physics and Politics, a couple of decades later, it is obvious that in 1852 he stressed the fixity of national characters much more than he was to do in the later work. When he wrote Physics and Politics, besides the benefit of older age Bagehot was equipped with Darwinian theory which in his hands offered ways in which to explain the formation and changes of national character.

II

French national character and politics

Bagehot’s question in the Letters to the Inquirer (by no means peculiar to him in the nineteenth century) was: could the French be free? Again, without being alone in doing so, he was perhaps among the most


explicit and thorough in making this from the beginning of his speculations a question of ‘national character’ and its fitness or unfitness for freedom. Given what has been said already about the intellectual context in which such discussions took place at the time, one is bound to ask what he thought of the French ‘racial’ origins. It is worth looking first at what he had to say on this issue in his mature work, Physics and Politics, where, as we saw, he rejected racial explanations. Discussing the first causes of the progressiveness of some few nations in the early stages of civilization, he went out of his way to stress the importance (after, at the previous, more primitive stage, ‘legality’ and ‘the thick crust of custom’ had achieved the primary aim of cohesiveness), of diversity, variety, ‘the principle of variability’. Bagehot had read (and referred to) his Sir Henry Maine,64 as well as his Guizot and his Mill, and he was by now one of the most prominent exponents of the importance of diversity and variety.65 After singing the praises of the precautiously mixed political institutions of the ‘Teutons’ and other Aryans (Greeks, Romans), Bagehot came to another dimension where variety led to progressiveness: ‘The mixture of races was often an advantage, too. Much as the old world believed in pure blood, it had very little of it.’ Not all mixtures were successful, and ‘sometimes the crossing answered, sometimes it failed. But when the mixture was at its best, it must have excelled both parents in … variability, and consequently progressiveness’. And Bagehot declared: ‘There is more life in mixed nations. France, for instance, is justly said to be the mean term between the Latin and the German races. A Norman, as you may see by looking at him, is of the north; a provençal is of the south, of all that there is most southern.’ This part of Physics and Politics is a typical and enlightening example of how confused the whole national and racial characterology could end up being in the nineteenth century. Even in his most ambitious work, a work purporting to apply ‘scientific’ theories and principles, Bagehot comes close to falling in the pitfalls and inconsistencies that we saw were characteristic of Arnold’s approach. Just when one might be prepared to concede that, after all, and roughly speaking, to say that France was a mixture between Germanic and Latin descent, or northern and southern physique and temperament, may make some (little) sense, Bagehot suddenly, within the same breath, remembered the ubiquitous yet elusive Celts as well, and therefore went on to write: ‘You have in France Latin, Celtic, German, compounded in an infinite number of proportions: one as she is in feeling, she is various not only in the past history of her various provinces, but in their present temperaments.’ This was a good thing in his opinion, diversity being so conducive to


progress. Like the Irish and the Scottish elements ‘in the English House of Commons’, ‘the variety of French races contributes to the play of the polity; it gives a chance for fitting new things which otherwise there would not be’.66 Similar views were expressed by Bagehot even more emphatically in the 1870 article ‘Are Alsace and Lorraine Worth Most to Germany or France?’.67 However, elsewhere in Physics and Politics he wrote something which did not bode well for the French. As he put it in the end of Chapter 4, talking of the reasons why order and civilization were ‘so unstable even in progressive communities’: ‘We see frequently in states what physiologists call “atavism” – the return, in part, to the unstable nature of their barbarous ancestors.’ The ‘scenes of cruelty and horror’ that had taken place in the great French Revolution, and which happened, more or less, in every great riot, were ‘the outbreak of inherited passions long repressed by fixed custom, but starting into life as soon as that repression was catastrophically removed, and when sudden choice was given’. Thus: ‘Even some very high races, as the French and the Irish, seem in troubled times hardly to be stable at all, but to be carried everywhere as the passions of the moment and the ideas generated at the hour may determine’.68 Now, in the Letters to the Inquirer in early 1852, Bagehot’s question was whether the French character was ‘a fit basis for national freedom’. He hastened to offer his readers a preliminary answer that was phrased in a way calculated to attract their attention: ‘I fear you will laugh when I tell you what I conceive to be about the most essential mental quality for a free people, whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent, and on a large scale; it is much stupidity’.69 Present experience as well as ‘the facts of history’ proved this assertion. He compared the dull and unimaginative, unspeculative Romans with the Greeks, who were ‘the perfection of narrow and accomplished genius’ with their achievements in art, philosophy, science. And yet, the Romans were the winners, ‘the great political people in history’ (next to the English, he alluded). ‘Why do the stupid people always win, and the clever people always lose?’. Now, back to the nineteenth century, ‘in real sound stupidity’, the English were ‘unrivalled’: ‘Whose company so soporific? His talk is of truisms and bullocks; his head replete with rustic visions of mutton and turnips, and a cerebral edition of Burn’s “Justice”! Notwithstanding, he is the salt of the earth, the best of the English breed. Who is like him for sound sense?’. On the other hand, ‘a Frenchman … can’t be stupid; esprit is his essence, wit to him as water, bons-mots as bons-bons.’ What was the consequence? The outbreak of 1848 had been accepted in every province in France, but it


stopped at the Belgian frontier: ‘Once brought into contact with the dull phlegm of the stupid Fleming, the poison was powerless.’ The conclusion was evident for Bagehot. In fact, ‘stupidity’ was ‘nature’s favourite resource for preserving steadiness of conduct and consistency of opinion’. It enforced concentration: ‘people who learn slowly, learn only what they must’. Thus, ‘[t]he best security for people’s doing their duty is that they should not know anything else to do; the best security for fixedness of opinion is that people should be incapable of comprehending what is to be said on the other side’. And, as if he had not been explicit enough, or provocative enough, he declared: ‘I … maintain that nations, just as individuals, may be too clever to be practical, and not dull enough to be free’.70 How far this was true of the French, he enquired in the next letter (IV, ‘On the Aptitude of the French Character for National SelfGovernment’71). The ‘experiment’ of establishing political freedom in France was by his time sixty years old; and yet, ‘the best that we can say of it is, that it is an experiment still’. Given that there had been ‘half-adozen new beginnings – half-a-dozen complete failures’, Bagehot could not ‘help feeling a suspicion … that there is some lurking quality, or want of a quality, in the national character of the French nation which renders them but poorly adapted for the form of freedom and constitution which they have so often, with such zeal and so vainly, attempted to establish’.72 This might be what he called a ‘want of stupidity’. He believed all ‘competent observers’ would agree that: the essence of the French character is a certain mobility; that is, as it has been defined, a certain ‘excessive sensibility to present impressions’, which is sometimes ‘levity’, – for it issues in a postponement of seemingly fixed principles to a momentary temptation or a transient whim; sometimes ‘impatience’ – as leading to an exaggerated sense of existing evils; often ‘excitement’, – a total absorption in existing emotion; oftener ‘inconsistency’ – the sacrifice of old habits to present emergencies; and yet other unfavourable qualities. Bagehot treated his readers to a long illustration of how these qualities reflected themselves in the literature of the French, in their attempts at historiography, and in their poetry. It seemed to him that the quality which he had been trying to delineate was ‘sufficiently near’ to what was meant by ‘cleverness’: ‘For this quickness in taking in … the present, gives a corresponding celerity of intellectual apprehension, an amazing readiness in catching new ideas and maintaining new theories … , a


concentration in what occurs, so as to use it for every purpose of illustration, and consequently … quick repartee on the subject of the moment, and bon-mots … and these qualities are rather like what we style cleverness.’ On the other hand, what he called ‘a proper stupidity’ kept a man ‘from all the defects of this character’: ‘it chains the gifted possessor mainly to his old ideas; it takes him seven weeks to comprehend an atom of a new one; it keeps him from being led away by new theories’. It restrained him within his old pursuits, habits, and traditional beliefs. He was ‘very slow indeed to be “excited”’, and ‘[y]ou always know where to find his mind’.73 Now, this was ‘exactly what, in politics at least, you do not know about a Frenchman’. Thus, a parliament composed of people possessed of such a character as the French would be like ‘a House of Commons all Disraelis’ (Disraeli being ‘the witty orator, the exceedingly clever littérateur, the versatile politician’): ‘do you imagine that Parliament would work? It would be … “a box of matches”’.74 The same quality acted on the French in another way, and produced ‘their passion for logical deduction’. The habitual mode of argument of the French was ‘to get hold of some large principle or principles; to begin to deduce immediately; and to reason down from them to the most trivial details of common action.’ Their fundamental maxim was ‘Il faut être conséquent avec soi-même’ (‘One has to be consistent with oneself’).75 And ‘in a world, the essence of which is compromise, they could not well have a worse’. He believed that this was a consequence of that same ‘impatience of disposition’ to which he had before alluded. ‘Nothing is such a bore as looking for your principles – nothing so pleasant as working them out.’ Following here on the footsteps of Macaulay, Bagehot pointed to Bacon as the embodiment of English ways of thinking, with his warnings against deduction,76 juxtaposing them with the ‘Méditations’ of Descartes, where one found in every page ‘nothing but the strictest, the best, the most lucid, the most logical deduction of all things actual and possible, from a few principles obtained without evidence, and retained in defiance of probability’. This tendency applied to all fields of life and thought, from religion to politics. In politics he found ‘the same morbid appetite for exhaustive and original theories’ which was characteristic of such ‘clever impatient people’. It was as necessary for a public writer ‘to have a system’ as it was for him to have a pen. ‘His course is obvious; he assumes some grand principle – the principle of Legitimacy, or the principle of Equality, or the principle of Fraternity – and thence he reasons down … to the details of every-day politics.’ Could ‘any intellectual food be conceived more dangerous or more stimulating for an over-excitable population?’.


It was the same in parliament: ‘every one had a psalm, had a doctrine, had a tongue, had a revelation, had an interpretation’. No two Conservatives would ‘agree what to conserve; no Socialist could practically associate with any other’. And yet, assemblies needed ‘compromise’.77 Bagehot continued applying and invoking incessantly what he himself called his ‘crotchet’ about the French character time and again, both in the rest of the Letters to the Inquirer and in his subsequent writings on French politics. No question of French politics could be discussed without focusing primarily on what you need to do ‘[i]f you have to deal with a mobile, a clever, a versatile, an intellectual, a dogmatic nation’, ‘a vain, a volatile, an ever changing race’.78 His pronouncements focused particularly on the extent to which that character incapacitated the French for parliamentary government and he came time and again to deplore ‘the uncompact, unpractical, over-volatile, over-logical indecisive, ineffectual rule of Gallican parliaments’.79 Like Bagehot, J.F. Stephen, Arnold, Mill and other Victorians, Acton attempted to ‘appreciate at its just value the praise which is claimed by Frenchmen, and allowed them by all fair minds’, that of being ‘logical’: ‘“We are logical”, they say; “we carry out principles to their full development, and sacrifice facts to reason; we are preëminently rational”: whereas “the English are more practical, but less reasonable; they do not think, or carry out their principles; … fortune favours them, but their minds are of an inferior order”.’ Acton drew one more of his hackneyed parallels between the national characteristics of the French and those of the Irish. ‘We may note the French characteristic in the Irish mind. … much the same spirit rules in Ireland as in France, and with the same political results.’ Both nations were led to ‘personify government, to look up to it as a personal ruler … and to expect it to guide, direct, and govern every thing’. Instead of regarding government as ‘a temporary committee – a kind of national vestry, elected to carry on the national business for a time in accordance with the national feeling’, they considered government ‘as a providence, omnipotent, and therefore answerable for every ill’. And, as government was ‘the great master of the supplies’, there was nothing they coveted so much as a place under its pay. ‘The national ambition is to be an employé’.80 His aim being to appraise the French boast about being ‘logical’, he made remarks which are reminiscent of similar ones by Bagehot or J.F. Stephen, who did not appreciate the self-congratulation of the French in this respect:81 ‘They reason out logically the first and simplest idea of government; they do not return upon the notion, analyse it, and modify their feelings in respect to it.’ This it was ‘to be logical; … to be half-educated in


a great national system of shallow and showy learning – to have sharpened intellects without practised judgments’. Such people were ‘qualified almost naturally’ for hacks, for reporters, ‘for almost all the secondary employments of literature’; but they were not ‘fitted for a great imperial view of things, for command, for combination, for justice, for the highest walks in philosophy’. Therefore: ‘The boasted superiority of our intellectual neighbours is really an inferiority’, because the practical education of the illiterate Englishman was, in its results, ‘much nearer to the most developed learning than the half-finished literary culture of France, which only makes a man logical and consistent in taking the part for the whole, in wearing half-truths threadbare, and in seeing no limit to his own capacity’. Even J.F. Stephen pales into moderation compared to this. Acton clarified that these traits were the result of ‘French culture’: ‘Not that such a way of viewing things is peculiar to the Frenchman; give the illiterate Englishman the French culture, and he will soon have the French ideas’.82 John Morley also was not very impressed by French ways of thinking. A major argument he used to justify his apostasy from Comtist positivism in his correspondence with Frederic Harrison, Richard Congreve and other Comtists was ‘what he considered the excessive Frenchness of positivist attitudes’.83 During the long debates he and the Comtists entered into, following the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war and its aftermath, he accused them of having become ‘worshippers of abstractions’ and ‘penetrated with the vices of French political thinking’. During that war, according to Hamer, Morley ‘rejoiced that it would now be Germany and not France which would be the cultural centre of Europe and the model of social development. German military hegemony was acceptable in part because it would give scope for German social and cultural dominance in Europe’.84 He spoke of the Communards of Paris as ‘phrase-mongering curs, whom an Uhlan or two will suffice to send howling back into their dens’. The Commune would fail, he believed, and: ‘The new society will have to be perfected … not by Celts, but by Teutons, who can take deeper draughts”’.85 Now, what about Morley’s mentor? Mill had a genuine desire and hope to proceed to the ‘scientific’ study of national character. He had envisaged in his System of Logic (Book VI, Chapter V) the creation of a new branch of science. The title of that chapter was: ‘Of Ethology, or the Science of the Formation of Character’. And among the ‘hypothetical or abstract sciences’ which could profitably be ‘carved out of the general body of the social science’ there was one, which deserved special notice, ‘being of a more comprehensive and commanding character than any of the other


branches into which the social science may admit of being divided’. He referred to ‘what may be termed Political Ethology, or the theory of the causes which determine the type of character belonging to a people or to an age’. Of all the subordinate branches of the social science, this was ‘the most completely in its infancy’, the causes of the formation of national character being ‘scarcely at all understood’, and ‘the effect of institutions or social arrangements upon the character of the people’ being ‘generally that portion of their effects which is least attended to, and least comprehended.’ Yet, he argued, ‘the laws of national (or collective) character’ were ‘by far the most important class of sociological laws’.86 Scholars have missed no opportunity to highlight or mock his failure to go far beyond formulating the project of a science that would study national character and asserting its urgency. Notwithstanding this epistemological failure, I have argued elsewhere, first, that the category of national character came to be, eventually, considerably more significant in Mill’s thought than the cursory nature of references to it by subsequent students would suggest; and, secondly, that it was Mill’s life-long study of France and the French, and the conclusions to which this study led him regarding both the French and what he called the ‘English national character’, that informed decisively his views on this concept and its significance.87 Both his statements to that effect and the evidence provided by the amount of his writings on France at the time (as well as the frequency of Franco-British comparisons that occur in those writings), go a long way towards indicating that Mill did have the object of finding out, for himself and for his readers, ‘those laws of human and of external nature which have made the characters of the two nations [English and French] different’, ‘deeply at heart’.88 It was this search that constituted his principal ‘ethological’ enquiry throughout his life. The first exercises of this search were given scope in Mill’s newspaper writings of the early 1830s, the greatest number of which (in the early years of the decade especially) dealt with France, its politics and its prospects after the revolution of July 1830. What should be emphasized regarding these newspaper writings of the early 1830s is Mill’s extraordinary reliance on the generation factor. He claimed repeatedly that the French had undergone ‘some rather remarkable metamorphoses since the days of their grandfathers’ and were now ‘a far more serious people than the English’, their national character being ‘grave, earnest, and enthusiastic’. He presented to his readers some of the characteristics of the generation of young men, ‘la jeune France’, which distinguished them from their predecessors and justified the high hopes he had set on them in the aftermath of the July Revolution.89 Discussing at length what he called ‘the entire question between the gerontocracy


and the young men’, he explained to his readers the superiority of the young men to the older generations in terms of their respective experiences, related to the circumstances of France and the institutions under which the two groups had received their early impressions.90 In addition to the young men’s unpalatable nationalism (which he came slowly to realise the extent of ),91 it was mainly the frustration of his hopes for rapid progress in France in the early 1830s that was to prove decisive in leading Mill to attribute more and more importance to durable elements in the national character and rely comparatively less on what a change of generation could effect. It is revealing to compare the tone of his statements on France at different periods. In an article he wrote following the Paris insurrection of June 1832, the failure of the French to show the ‘habitual reverence for law’ which was ‘so deeply rooted in the minds of all classes of Englishmen’ was described as an historical accident. England was more fortunate in that it had a long history of rule of law, which engendered this salutary habit in the English nation. Though Mill’s words were hardly complimentary for the French, he did not present them as a people inherently deficient in terms of ‘national character’, but only as a people placed in less favourable circumstances, suffering from bad laws and precedents.92 And on 9 February 1834, he had written in the Examiner, concerning a bill introduced by the French government aimed at the suppression of cheap political publications: ‘We shall watch the progress of this Bill. There is no doubt that it will pass; for public opinion is not yet sufficiently advanced in France, to maintain any struggle in behalf of freedom of discussion for its own sake, when they take no personal or party interest in those who are the victims of the infringement.’ The implication being, that it was a matter of time, hopefully, when public opinion would reach that advanced stage.93 In 1837, in ‘Armand Carrel’ (although already quite frustrated, as we saw in Chapter 3), he wrote of a habit he was later (Representative Government) to present as a serious defect of the French national character, in terms that would suggest that he hoped, then (1837), that it was only a question of time when the French would be able to form better ‘constitutional moeurs’. Thus, in 1837 it was ‘the grievous misfortune of France, that being still new to constitutional ideas and institutions’, she had not yet known what it was to have a fair government. A chance had occurred before the July Revolution, under the moderate Martignac ministry. The July Revolution had ‘intervened’. But there was still hope for France, though probably not in the immediate future.94 Then, more ominously, the revolution of 1848 and its aftermath (Louis Napoleon’s coup) ‘intervened’. We have seen (Chapter 3) that


Mill’s writings and correspondence during 1848 and 1849 do not evince any excessive optimism, but rather a clear awareness of the obstacles that had to be overcome before a representative government with universal manhood suffrage (such as the Second Republic started by being) could be secure in France. But an analysis of his pronouncements on the chances of success of such a government in the ‘Vindication’ of April 1849 leaves one with the impression that Mill was not clear and positive as to whether it was the state the French were in at the moment he was writing (the so-called ‘state of society’), or something deeper and more ineradicable in their ‘national character’, that was most likely to impair the success of the republican experiment.95 However, he seems to have grown more conclusive and to have come to regard the French character as more rigid by 1861, as some references to the French in his Representative Government indicate. In Chapter IV (‘Under What Conditions Representative Government is Inapplicable’), he wrote of ‘positive defects of national character’ as being one of the ‘infirmities or short-comings in a people … which pro tanto disqualify them from making the best use of representative government’.96 In that context he spoke of two very different ‘states of the inclinations’ which affected decisively the efforts of individuals and nations: one was ‘the desire to exercise power over others’; the other was ‘the disinclination to have power exercised over themselves’. He argued that: ‘The difference between different portions of mankind in the relative strength of these two dispositions, is one of the most important elements in their history’.97 Thus, he went on, ‘[t]here are nations in whom the passion for governing others is so much stronger than the desire of personal independence, that for the mere shadow of the one they are found ready to sacrifice the whole of the other’.98 Each one of them was willing, ‘like the private soldier in an army, to abdicate his personal freedom of action into the hands of his general, provided the army is triumphant and victorious, and he is able to flatter himself that he is one of a conquering host’.99 A government ‘strictly limited in its powers and attributions, required to hold its hands from overmeddling, and to let most things go on without its assuming the part of guardian or director’, was not to the taste of such a people. In their opinion, the possessors of authority could ‘hardly take too much upon themselves, provided the authority itself is open to general competition’. An average individual among them preferred ‘the chance, however distant or improbable, of wielding some share of power over his fellow-citizens, above the certainty, to himself and others, of having no unnecessary power exercised over them’. These, Mill went on, were ‘the elements of a people of place-hunters’.100 By


such a people ‘equality alone is cared for, but not liberty’.101 And the contests of political parties among such a people were ‘but struggles to decide whether the power of meddling in everything shall belong to one class or another, perhaps merely to one knot of public men or another’. With such a people, ‘the more popular the institutions … the more monstrous [is] the over-government exercised by all over each, and by the executive over all’. The remark that follows leaves very little doubt as to which national character Mill had in mind throughout this presentation of the tendency in question: It would be as unjust as it would be ungenerous to offer this, or anything approaching to it, as an unexaggerated picture of the French people; yet the degree in which they do participate in this type of character, has caused representative government by a limited class to break down by excess of corruption, and the attempt at representative government by the whole male population to end in giving one man the power of consigning any number of the rest, without trial, to Lambessa or Cayenne, provided he allows all of them to think themselves not excluded from the possibility of sharing his favours.102 On the other hand, ‘[t]he point of character which, beyond any other, fits the people of this country for representative government, is, that they have almost universally the contrary characteristic’. They were ‘very jealous of any attempt to exercise power over them, not sanctioned by long usage and by their own opinion of right’. But they cared ‘very little for the exercise of power over others’.103 Clearly, Mill’s view had hardened. In the early writings, France was faring badly because it had not known better things, because of bad institutions and misgovernment, lack of experience, but he was eager to see changes that would enable France to ‘speedily outstrip all the rest of the world in the career of civilization’.104 In Representative Government, on the other hand, one is left with the impression that the character of the French made them more or less unfit for free government. Earlier he relied heavily on the generation factor and the jeune France. When he was disappointed he came to attribute more importance to ‘national character’, or rather, what comes to the same thing, he came to consider ‘national character’ more durable and obstinate, less easily and less rapidly changeable than he thought in the 1830s. To the extent that a turning point should be sought, it seems to have been the aftermath of 1848, the fact that the establishment of a representative government with universal manhood suffrage ended up in Louis Napoleon’s becoming


Emperor almost unopposed. It seems that Bagehot’s appraisal of the impact of 1848 and its aftermath on explanatory models applies, to a certain extent, to Mill as well.105 By the time he wrote his Representative Government Mill had abandoned the ambition he had spelt out in earlier writings of establishing a scientific study of differences of national character with the express purpose of thereby identifying the institutions most appropriate to carry each particular society to the next stage of progress of which it was susceptible. What he did, instead, in Representative Government, was to focus on representative democratic government as the best government only for the most advanced stage of civilization. What is implicit, though, – as can be seen from the remarks quoted above – is that he had come to believe that the free representative government he was proposing was the most appropriate form of government only for a particular national character, that of the English and the Americans; liberalism for one national character, if I can paraphrase a felicitous expression used elsewhere.106 For the rest he despaired of solutions. All he had to offer were hints. The fact that the thinker who had initially most stubbornly resisted subscribing to most of his compatriots’ views and stereotypes on the character and prospects of the French, ended up sharing some of the most fundamental of their perceptions about their neighbours is particularly revealing. Before concluding, some comparisons may be interesting. Arnold attributed the malaises of France to her fall in moral terms, due mainly to the shedding off of her (weak, in any case) Germanic inheritance. The problem was insufficient ‘morality’, France was weak in the ‘power of conduct’. Liberty was not an issue with Arnold. If anything, he got himself involved in controversies because he kept asking his compatriots to stop boasting about their liberty as if it were an end in itself, while it was only a means.107 For Arnold the problem of France was not that the French did not understand or value true liberty, but rather that they had weak morality and were abandoned to sensuality. In his mind, the goddess Aselgeia or Lubricité and L’homme sensuel moyen were directly related to the gospel of natural rights developed by France. As he put it: ‘from her ideal of the average sensual man France had deduced her famous gospel of the Rights of Man, which she preaches with such an infinite crowning and self-admiration’.108 He criticised his hero, Renan, who, like many Frenchmen after the defeat in the war of 1870, had attributed France’s fall to ‘want of faith in science’, retorting that in France the great defect was ‘want of faith in conduct’.109 The majority, people such as Bagehot, Mill, Greg, Macaulay, Acton and many more, saw the problem primarily in more political terms, and


stressed the political unfitness of the French for the kind of freedom enjoyed by the English. But they did not all talk of exactly the same thing, appearances notwithstanding. Bagehot’s main emphasis was on the idea that their national character prevented the French from being able to make ‘a solely and predominantly parliamentary government’ work. Because they were ‘excitable, volatile, superficial, over-logical, uncompromising’, mobile, vain, and so on, they did not seem able to ever agree on a course of action in an assembly, but would rather squabble incessantly – until a military despotism would sooner or later become inevitable in the people’s eyes. That is why the French needed a strong executive, and an assembly that would not be as omnipotent as the British House of Commons. Having said this, he did also speak of the French as not caring enough for the liberty offered by a parliamentary system, because they were more preoccupied with other things, such as security of property (the peasants and bourgeois), or equality (the urban workers), as well as ‘glory’ (all of them). These remarks bring him closer to what the others who spoke of a French failure to appreciate freedom had to say, than his main focus, which was his tediously reiterated ‘crotchet’ about the quarrelsomeness of French assemblies, due to the French character’s excitability and mobility and attachment to logic which made them averse to compromise. This is not exactly the same thing as what Mill, Acton, or Greg said. For them (differences of formulation and emphasis notwithstanding) the major problem was that the French did not even have the right conception of what liberty (in the sense of ‘liberty of the moderns’) meant, or at any rate had no sufficient attachment to such a conception of liberty as to prefer it to other values or abstractions (main rivals being equality, national glory and aggrandizement, and dreams of increased security under a despot). Another thing that one cannot help noticing in the end of this chapter is the astonishing persistency of the Celtic stereotype and the extent to which it can so often be traced behind the surface of different thinkers’ respective pronouncements on the French. Some resonances can still be found today.110 The same perennial traits of the Gauls that Acton quoted as gleaned by a German authority from the wisdom of ancient Roman authors emerge, with different formulations and nuances, time and again in discussions on the French character and politics. The ineffectualness in politics noticed by Arnold in Celtic Literature was the same thing as Acton’s lack of ‘political civilisation’ and ‘unparalleled political incapacity’, ‘as conspicuous among the Irish in the twelfth century as among the French in our own’. The Celt’s


readiness to ‘react against the despotism of fact’ in Arnold’s Celtic Literature111 resonates even in Mill’s comments during the FrancoPrussian War about ‘cette facilité à croire ce qui est agréable, et à résister à l’évidence des faits, qui est propre aux habitudes du français’ (‘that ease to believe what is pleasant, and to resist the evidence of facts, which is characteristic of the habits of the French’),112 to say nothing of Carlyle’s castigation of French illusions (see Chapter 5). The list could be very long, as all the ingredients of Acton’s list reverberated throughout the pronouncements on France discussed in this chapter. The same applies to Chapter 5.

5 Grandeur and Frenchness: Nationalism, International Relations and French National Character

[V]oyez ce qui est advenu de ce que nous avons eu, un seul instant, un homme à caractère français à notre Foreign Office [Palmerston]. Vous savez que j’aime la France, mais j’avoue qu’il en est assez d’une seule en Europe. ( J.S. Mill, letter to Alexis de Tocqueville, 20 February 1843) It is difficult, we are inclined to say impossible, to state what is the doctrine of France on this, and indeed on any point of international law. During the last two hundred years she has tried almost every form of government, almost every kind of ruler, and almost every variety of fortune. … Her external policy has of course been influenced in its details by her fortunes. But … it has been directed by one leading principle. That principle is – that France, or, as she usually calls herself, the Great Nation, is entitled, directly or indirectly, by actual coercion or by influence, to govern the rest of Europe; and that all means are to be adopted, and all principles are to be avowed, by which that end can be obtained. (Nassau W. Senior)1 It is well known that, on the French side, a perception of English perfidy has been persistent and all but unanimous. Not that this was a French peculiarity. Nor was it a recent phenomenon. At least as early as the twelfth century German authors were complaining about perfidia anglica. And, in the thirteenth century, Spanish texts blamed the English of treachery, adding that they ‘have false hearts’. As Eugen Weber has 131


remarked, this attribution of treachery to the English ‘would in time become commonplace’.2 Increased contact and familiarity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries only confirmed the image and gave it concrete ‘evidence’. As one would expect, the successive wars of the eighteenth century and then the wars of the French Revolution and the Empire did not make things better. ‘Perfidious Albion’ had a selfish foreign policy, wanted to divide and rule, was obsessed with acquiring new markets, and certainly could not be trusted. According to H.D. Schmidt, from the beginning of 1794 onwards, there was a deliberate and systematic government policy of raising French sentiments of hostility towards England, initiated by Robespierre and continued by his successors of the Directory, who launched ‘a campaign of hatred on a nation-wide scale’. This policy was continued and perfected by Napoleon. Classicism contributed, and the Roman idea of Punic perfidy was enlisted: Albion, the modern maritime and commercial power, was the new Carthage, and had to be destroyed by the French, who saw themselves as the successors to the Romans and Cato.3 By the time of the Middle East crisis of 1840, the view of English bad faith, disloyalty and treacherousness was all but universal in France. As Martyn Cornick has argued, Larousse’s Grand Dictionnaire universel came to add credibility and ‘scientific’ respectability to the stereotype in its entries on England and the English, especially the long one on ‘Albion’.4 Thus, it is not accidental that even England’s foremost champions and admirers in France failed to controvert those particular aspects of criticisms against their object of admiration that referred to its foreign policy.5 In the light of all this, a question arises inescapably. Did British political thinkers in the nineteenth century have anything like an equivalent to the French stereotype of ‘perfidious Albion’? A tentative straightforward answer can be given from the beginning: Yes, there was a rather persistent picture of the French in terms of their comportment in foreign affairs, which was, all British thinkers agreed more or less, a direct consequence of their national character. In their international behaviour the French were warlike; volatile; easily excitable; easily susceptible to being seduced by leaders promising them glory abroad; vindictive and envious vis-à-vis the English; unfair and impervious to considerations of justice; not respectful of international treaties, law and conventions; overambitious; inordinately vain, touchy and other such unpleasant things. Such national characterology with regard to international attitudes and comportment received a particular additional impetus from the early Victorian period onwards. There are reasons for that. In the first place, one has to remember the general preoccupation with ‘character’

Grandeur and Frenchness 133

already mentioned in the previous chapter. In the second place, it was the gradual democratization of politics which induced more and more thinkers (particularly after the publication of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America) to believe and assert that what a nation thought and how it felt on issues of foreign policy and international relations did count to an extent that was unprecedented. Nassau Senior was writing in 1842: ‘Among the changes which have altered the political world during the last hundred years, one of the most remarkable, though it has been little remarked, is the degree in which the great and permanent bodies which now constitute nations, have assumed, in their mutual relations, an individual character.’ While the manners of an Englishman and a Frenchman differed much less in the nineteenth century than they did in the seventeenth century, ‘the conduct of the two countries as nations, their behaviour towards each other, and towards other independent communities, was then much more governed by similar causes than it is now’. In fact, until recently, the conduct of a nation in the international scene depended principally on the accident of the character of kings or ministers. ‘But now that in almost every country the people interfere in public affairs, often direct them, and almost always influence them, the conduct of a nation must always be affected, and often is governed, by the general disposition of the millions who constitute it.’ In other words, ‘it becomes a permanent reflection of the national character, and it is tinged with all the peculiarities with which climate, race, religion, institutions, and past history, have coloured that character’.6 Whereas previous generations of Englishmen ‘at one time feared the ambition of Louis, and at another relied on the courage of Frederic’, ‘We dread the ambition of France, and rely on the prudence of Prussia’. In the three great countries which enjoyed the most popular institutions, ‘the British Empire, France, and the United States of America’, it was now ‘the character of the nation’ that determined the conduct of the government.7

I In the shadow of Bonaparte: French national character and international politics, 1830–48 In his ‘France, America and Britain’, published in the Edinburgh Review for April 1842, Senior went on, therefore, to consider in detail ‘the public character of the three great nations’ in their comportment on the international scene. He commented that he would ‘endeavour to perform the task fairly, though aware of the great difficulty of preserving real impartiality on the subject, and of the danger, perhaps we might say the certainty, that the portrait, if it be really impartial, will be unpopular’.


It certainly did not upset T.B. Macaulay (who found it ‘very clever and good in many parts’). But James Stephen and Lord Jeffrey, who both approved fully of it and found it impartial and comprehensive, shared the author’s fears as to how the article would be received, both at home and in the two foreign countries concerned.8 Reactions in the latter seem to have worried the author himself no less, for, while he sent to Tocqueville his latest articles along with a letter, on 10 May 1842, he did not include the article in question in the enclosures; ‘probably for fear of offending the Frenchman’s sensibilities’, comments his biographer.9 And offend most Frenchmen’s sensibilities he certainly would, given how relentlessly censorious of French international behaviour the article was. It certainly raised the objections of the British thinker who still considered himself, in the 1840s, something like France’s intellectual ambassador in Britain. Four years after the publication of the article, we find Mill writing to the editor of the Edinburgh Review that he would have preferred it if the latter (Napier) had not ‘left out the passage controverting the warlike propensity of the French’ in his own article for the Edinburgh (‘Duveyrier’s Political Views of French Affairs’), precisely ‘because I think the Edin.[burgh Review] has lately been sometimes very unjust to the French – I allude to Senior’s otherwise excellent articles which he and I have sometimes had disputes about’.10 What was it, then, that Senior had said of the French? First of all, it should be noted that, despite his references to ‘race’ quoted earlier, in the bulk of the article he spoke of the French character as having become what it was – as far as attitudes towards foreign affairs were concerned – by Napoleon’s corrupting influences (a view shared by Mill in several of his newspaper articles on France of the early 1830s).11 Until the Revolution, the French people had no influence on the policy of their country. Then, with the Revolution, ‘the power which the crown had abused for centuries passed to demagogues, whose influence depended on their popularity, and whose popularity could be maintained only by satisfying the desires, or flattering the prejudices, of the new sovereign – the people’. Hardly better was what followed, as from the hands of these demagogues it passed to those of a soldier ‘intent on conquest’. Napoleon’s great object was ‘to seduce the people, by gratifying the passions which are strongest among uneducated politicians – vanity and ambition’. Thanks to his talents he was able ‘to offer military glory to the one, and extension of territory to the other’. Inevitably, in order to supply ‘profusely’ ‘these intoxicating bribes’, ‘all treaties, all engagements, all faith, and all law, public and private, were to be disregarded’. It was Napoleon’s business, therefore, ‘while he inflamed and


perverted their ambition, to stifle their feelings of morality and justice’. In both attempts he was equally successful. Thus, his boast, ‘that millions joined in his views, was, unhappily for those millions, well founded’. Senior concluded his introductory comments on France by undertaking to ‘consider the national character which has grown up under such influences. If the picture be unfavourable, no one will be surprised when he reflects on the education which the nation has received’.12 He found that among the most striking qualities of France was ‘her pride’. He referred to a speech by Tocqueville in the Chamber of Deputies on 30 November 1840,13 where that ‘most acute and most philosophical’ statesman had ‘proclaimed from the tribune, that pride, nourished by the victories and triumphs of more than two hundred years of war, is now the only remaining link that keeps her in a social state’. The most paradoxical thing, however, was that, in the midst of her ‘overweening self-estimation’, France seemed ‘always beset by doubts as to the reality of the grounds on which it is founded’.14 Proud as she was of her glory and of her power, she could not forget that at sea she had been ‘unsuccessful for centuries’. Her population was almost stationary, her agriculture was declining, and ‘her commerce bearing every year a less proportion to that of her neighbours’, to say nothing of her relative backwardness in railways. She was ‘restlessly anxious, therefore, to support her claims by the suffrage of her neighbours, and in constant fear that the verdict may be against her’. All her conduct had reference, ‘not so much to its effects on her own happiness, as to the opinions of the world around her’. Thus, while believing herself to be the object of general admiration, France was, at the same time ‘always watching to detect and punish an insult’. Next to pride, another prominent part of France’s character was ‘her ambition’. She desired ‘not happiness, but power’; and aimed at increasing that power, not by improving her own resources, but by appropriating those of others. ‘She still clings to the barbarous doctrine of the middle ages, that a nation becomes great, not by the growth of its own population, the increase of its own capital, and the improvement of its agriculture and manufactures, but either by seizing the territory and incorporating the subjects of its neighbours, or by obtaining a preponderating influence over their councils.’ She was ‘checked by no feeling of justice, of faith, or of public morality’. ‘She does not even pay to virtue the homage of hypocrisy. She avows that a solemn treaty of peace is a truce to be broken by her as soon as it suits what she supposes to be her interest.’ All these aggressive propensities were supported by ‘fearless daring’. Chateaubriand’s dictum, ‘La France est un soldat’, was apposite: ‘She has


the virtues as well as the vices of that unsocial profession. No nation is so little deterred by the dread of war; none supports its actual presence with more intrepidity.’15 In every other civilized country the preservation of peace was held the great duty of a statesman. In France, however, as the recent crisis (of 1840, over the Middle East) proved, Thiers could say ‘that he trusted he should not be considered very culpable for having occasioned the probability of war’. And, in one more reference to his friend and correspondent’s belligerent speech of 30 November 1840, Senior went on: ‘In what other country could a statesman have declared that, rather than that the Eastern Question should be settled without French intervention, or that France should be supposed to be unprepared for war,16 … he would plunge into a thousand wars? Yet such were the words of De Tocqueville.’ France was ‘anxious to extend her territory to the limits which, because she thinks them convenient, she calls natural’. She was burning to avenge her defeat in the Napoleonic wars. And, above all, she was ‘anxious to punish those whose resistance occasioned those wars to terminate in her defeat, and to weaken those whose power overbalances her own’. Senior noted what he saw as the paradox of the boldness with which France met danger being ‘joined to a remarkable tendency to fear it where none exists’. While possessing ‘the largest army, the strongest fortifications, the most compact frontier, and the most warlike population in Europe’, France was as apprehensive of being attacked, invaded, and overrun, as if she were in the circumstances of much more vulnerable countries. Unlike Mill, he dismissed the explanation that France’s ‘vivid recollection of the calamities of 1814 and 1815’ accounted for her ‘constant state of anxiety and apprehension’. Rather, Senior believed the real causes of France’s constant anxiety to be, first, ‘the consciousness of her own plans, and a tendency to believe that other nations are as rapacious and as unscrupulous as herself’; and secondly, the fact that she knew that she was ‘an object of fear and of dislike to every people and to every sovereign around her’. He thought that France was of course right in believing that they would gladly see her weakened. ‘But in fearing that, while she leaves them unattacked, they will attack her’, she was ‘grossly deceived’. Very simply: ‘There is not a country in Europe, except France, mad enough to engage voluntarily in war.’17 Senior wound up his comparison between the three nations with ‘some remarks on the degree in which the character of each seems to deteriorate or improve’ during the nineteenth century, while the influence of the people on their public conduct had been ‘constantly increasing’. In the public character of France he saw little change. ‘Her


ambition, her thirst for admiration, her indifference to the means by which it is to be obtained – perhaps we might say her desire to be admired rather for her courage than for her forbearance, rather for her power than for her justice – her want of faith and of candour – the unreasonableness of her resentment, and the fierceness of her hate’ had been ‘as conspicuous during the last few years as during any portion of her history’. As far as Anglo-French relations were concerned, he hoped much from the Commercial Treaty, which both governments had long been ‘anxious to sign’, and was being ‘delayed only in fear of the Journalists of Paris’. This treaty could prove important: ‘Commerce, manufactures, and the desire for individual advancement, may, in time, direct to peaceful pursuits the restless ambition and vanity which now seek to be gratified by participating in the general glory of the nation.’18 But while he wished for his country to have with France ‘as much of commercial intercourse as is possible’, he at the same time wished her ‘to have as little as is possible of diplomatic intercourse’. Because, as long as the French character would continue unreformed, any durable alliance between the two countries was impossible. There was a reason for this: ‘If the present hostility of France to England had arisen merely from the recollection of past defeats, it would wear out as those defeats receded more and more into the obscurity of history.’ However: ‘Her hostility springs from far deeper sources.’ Sixty years earlier, towards the close of the American war, France was ‘the most powerful kingdom in the world’. In the post-1815 world, this was no more the case. France looked at the change ‘with a mixture of grief and terror’. ‘She fears, that if her neighbours outstrip her in the next half century as much as they have done in the last, she will sink to a secondary power.’ Now: To a bystander, the remedy appears to be obvious. If she would cease to waste the resources of her subjects by a grinding taxation, for the purpose of maintaining armies and fleets of no use but to keep up the enmity of Europe; if she would cease to throw, annually, thousands of men and millions of money into the vortex of Algiers; if she would modify the barbarous Tariff which excludes her from foreign commerce; if she would abolish the restrictions and monopolies which fetter and diminish her internal production, consumption, and exchange; in short, if she would liberally and honestly cultivate the arts of peace – there is no nation whose rivalry she need fear. But ‘the selfish short-sighted interests of large classes, and the vanity, impatience, and ignorance of all, seem to render such measures as these,


for the present, impracticable’. Therefore, ‘[s]elf-condemned … to slow progress herself’, France wished to impede the progress of others. Since she could not overtake them, she wished ‘to drag them back’. And of all her rivals, England was ‘the most powerful, and therefore the most detested’. The other British thinker who followed French foreign affairs, FrancoBritish relations, and French debates regarding foreign policy very closely, during most of his life-time, was Mill. That the preservation of peace in western Europe and of a good atmosphere in the relations between ‘the two greatest nations in the world’19 was of paramount importance to Mill from very early on is clear from his writings in the Examiner on French affairs in the early 1830s. Though clearly his main aim there was to vindicate the policies of the French left, the so-called ‘parti du mouvement’, rather than to criticise them, he did show himself increasingly impatient with what he saw as their excessive concern with the affairs of Belgium and Poland and the danger that this attitude posed for peace, and consequently for the cause of reform in France – and, no less, in Britain. Thus, criticizing, on 19 December 1830, the French for discussing in the Chambers nothing but military preparations, he declared that he had been ‘shocked and disgusted’ by the language of the French press concerning the Polish revolution. If a war, unhappily for France and for Europe, were shortly to break out, Mill went on, ‘though undertaken by that country, as it probably would be, for no selfish object’, he greatly feared that, under its influence, in less than a twelvemonth, ‘the national character would again be perverted, as it was by Napoleon’; ‘the rage for victory and conquest’ would become again the dominant passion in the breasts of Frenchmen. And he elaborated: and the national feeling once turned in that direction, we know the barefaced profligacy, the systematic and unheard-of disregard of every principle of international morality, and of the most sacred rights of independent nations, which made the foreign policy of the directory, and of the empire, a disgrace to civilisation. That war began with as much purity of purpose, on the part of the French nation, as the present one will do, if the French government accepts the invitation; which, while we now write, is probably under its consideration, to assist the Poles against the three Robber-powers.20 In another article he opined that, if war were to come, the defeat of France would stop the march of civilization for another half century. Speculating on the war’s vicissitudes, Mill believed that, during the


course of France’s inevitable initial successes, ‘the ignominy of invasion, and the inevitable horrors of war and devastation’, would again rouse the national antipathies which a peace of unusual length had so greatly mitigated. While, ‘instead of soldier-citizens, five hundred thousand military ruffians, demoralized and brutalized like those of Napoleon, might once more overspread Europe, and after enslaving foreign countries under the forms of liberty, might return prepared to be the tools of any new usurper in inflicting still worse slavery upon their own’.21 And on 6 February 1831, he made his first direct public reference to the attitude of the French character towards war. It is clear that he was not at one with what Senior was to write eleven years later, and yet his argumentation is quite ambivalent if not tortuous: ‘The French are not, as is sometimes asserted, fond of war, but they have not the deep-rooted abhorrence of it, which so large a proportion of ourselves have; it is one of our few points of natural superiority.’ The French were ‘kept out of unjust war, not by a proper sense of its evils, but by a sentiment of national morality, which forbids infringement upon the rights of other nations’.22 (This is certainly not what Senior was to assert in 1842.) But besides the earnest desire to see peace preserved, Mill also made concerted efforts during the early 1830s – as he was to go on doing throughout his life – to contribute to the easing of tensions between British and French public opinion. His first aim was to commend the French opposition, the parti du mouvement, to the British. It is interesting to examine in this context his attempt to defend, in the end, the socalled ‘war party’ in France, from April 1831 onwards, adopting their arguments in favour of counter-intervention as a support for nonintervention. It would be easy and tempting to account for his having taken this position simply in terms of strategy, as an attempt by a British radical, at a time when radical reform (the first Reform Bill) was at stake at home, to present the French radicals in the brightest possible light – by justifying an aspect of their policy that was least likely to commend them to the British public. However, I have argued elsewhere that such an explanation would not be valid, as Mill continued advocating the theory of counter-intervention to enforce non-intervention which he adopted in the process of following attentively the argumentation of the French Left (particularly during the first four months of 1831) for the rest of his life. And what has come to be seen (not least during the Cold War) as one of the two major liberal theories on intervention/non-intervention, the theory Mill formulated most famously in ‘A Few Words on NonIntervention’ (1859), was the direct result of his having considered and finally adopted the argumentation of the French opposition in 1831.23


Independently of this theory, Mill went out of his way to stress in his newspaper writings that The Times and the rest of the British press were wrong in attributing anti-English feelings to the French liberals.24 A comparison of what Mill was writing in his articles in the Examiner and elsewhere with regard to such issues, and what was actually taking place in France (particularly, for instance, in the case of Carrel’s vehemently anti-English tone in Le National25), leaves no doubt that Mill aimed more at contributing to the amelioration of mutual feelings and relations rather than at depicting accurately the climate in France.26 This was part of a strategy Mill had about Franco-British relations and mutual feelings and his own role in ameliorating them – as he made explicit in some letters and as emerges clearly from some of his articles.27 In discussing Senior’s article of 1842 we had a foretaste of the impressions made on British thinkers by the French stance during the Middle East crisis of 1840. One could assume that it must have affected the 20-year old Matthew Arnold similarly to his father when the great headmaster had taken his sons on what was to be his last visit to France before his death. Once they reached Paris in late July 1840 (just when the content of the Treaty of London of 15 July became known in the French capital), Dr Arnold is reported to have been ‘saddened by the violence of the newspapers against England and by the animosity of some of the people’.28 The crisis was over the Near East, where France’s protégé, the Pasha of Egypt, Mehemet Ali, had made moves which – particularly after he conquered Syria – put in danger the integrity or even the very existence of the Ottoman Empire (under whose suzerainty he held his Egyptian dominions). What brought matters to a head and sparked off a crisis that threatened a war between France and Britain, was the treaty of 15 July 1840 concluded between Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia, stipulating that the Pasha should evacuate Syria or face concerted action against him by these powers. The exclusion of France from this treaty, which was not known in Paris before 26 July, was received by the French press as a humiliating act against France, insulting to French honour, and there was an outcry for war. The main players in all this diplomatic drama between Britain and France had been Palmerston and Thiers.29 Whatever the case with young Matt’s feelings during those difficult days with his father in Paris, no speculation is necessary as to the reactions to the Franco-British rift of another major British thinker who was old enough, articulate enough, and felt involved more than enough to comment extensively on that issue. The crisis of 1840 led to Mill’s most outspoken statements concerning Franco-British relations, French


attitudes towards foreign affairs, and the respective attitudes of various politicians on both sides of the Channel towards the possibility of war between Britain and France. It was in the context of this crisis that Mill’s stance in Franco-British disputes has been judged as somewhat ethnocentric. John C. Cairns has observed in his Introduction to Mill’s Essays on French History and Historians, when writing on his disagreement with Tocqueville on the Middle East crisis, that: ‘Clearly Mill never understood Tocqueville’s concept of national prestige, or his fears for the health of the French national spirit; across more than a century thereafter, few Englishmen did: it remained an impenetrable mystery for most of them, and Mill, for all his francophilism, appeared scarcely better equipped to penetrate it.’30 It will be shown in the following pages that Mill did show considerable understanding and receptiveness to French arguments. His attitude was more complicated and subtle than simply one of Anglocentric scolding of Tocqueville and the French. That he showed himself critical of what he saw as the excesses of French reactions to the crisis of 1840 may not mean that he ‘never understood’ Tocqueville’s point. It would be fairer to say that Mill understood but did not fully agree with the way French reactions were expressed. What is more, an examination of Mill’s correspondence at the time in question shows a steady pattern. He was incomparably more critical of the French when writing to Tocqueville or D’Eichthal, than he was when writing to British correspondents, with whom he attempted, on the contrary, to explain the French point of view and to stress how untenable and provocative to the French Palmerston’s handling of the whole affair had been. In letters to British correspondents in the autumn of 1840, Mill expressed his ‘great trepidation’, and his indignation at ‘the two most lightheaded men in Europe, Palmerston and Thiers’, who threatened to ‘embroil the whole world and do mischief which no one now living would have seen repaired’. No less was his resentment at the ‘antigallican tone’ in various British periodicals, as well as at the apparent pretence on the part of British writers to ‘know’, each of them, ‘the whole French people, intus et in cute’. He informed his British friends that the universal war fervour in France was not due to love of war, for they disliked it, but because they felt themselves ‘blessé and humiliated as a nation’. Unlike Senior (who, we saw already, did not think this was a sufficient explanation for what he saw as French paranoid fears and touchiness) Mill’s comment was that ‘[t]his is foolish, but who can wonder at it in a people whose country has within this generation been twice occupied by foreign armies? If that were our case we should have plenty of the same feeling’.31 As weeks went by, he was relaxing in the


belief that the immediate danger of war was over, but this did not make him very optimistic. The evil already done was ‘incalculable’: ‘the confidence which all Europe felt in the preservation of peace’ would not for many years be re-established and ‘the bestial antipathies between nations and especially between France and England have been rekindled to a deplorable extent’. He grounded whatever hope there was on the French character ‘which as it is excitable by small causes may also be calmed by slight things – and accordingly alternates between resentment against England and Anglomania’.32 By far the most interesting exchanges on the crisis over the Eastern Question were those between Mill and Tocqueville. In his capacity as a French Deputy, Tocqueville had delivered a speech in the Chamber of Deputies on 30 November 1840 (the speech referred to by Senior in ‘France, America, and Britain’), which had caused surprise and consternation to his friends and admirers in Britain. The speech in question represented ‘the most belligerent moment of his parliamentary career’.33 On 18 December 1840 Tocqueville wrote to Mill, expressing his grief at the rupture of the intimate alliance between their two countries, but also laying the blame for the situation exclusively on the British side as well as stressing the need for a people such as the French to have their orgueil national kept alive and encouraged at any price.34 Mill wrote back on 30 December 1840.35 Besides his British friends and Tocqueville, Mill discussed the developments in Franco-British relations with one more Frenchman, Gustave d’Eichthal. A collation of Mill’s letters to d’Eichthal with those he wrote to Tocqueville allows us to have a clear picture as to the message which Mill wanted to bring home to his French correspondents. There are three main themes. First, the fact that a Liberal government was in power had prevented reactions against its policy, which would have certainly taken place had the Tories been in power, the Tories being considered anti-Gallican, while the Liberals were not suspected of anything of the kind.36 Secondly, Palmerston was able to get away with his policy towards France because of the excessive French reactions that followed, which alienated those who would otherwise have stood up for the French alliance against the Foreign Secretary and made them think that he must have had good reasons for his policy in the first place. Thirdly, the English public were not interested in the Eastern Question or foreign affairs in general, and this was one more reason why they failed to react (a view shared by Senior, who also tried to make it clear to Tocqueville in his correspondence with him). As for Palmerston, Mill declared that, for his part, he ‘would walk twenty miles to see him hanged, especially if Thiers were to be strung up along with him’.37


Replying to Mill’s letter of December 1840, Tocqueville wrote, on 18 March 1841, that the circumstances had given birth to two extreme and equally dangerous parties in his country. One of them was dreaming of conquests and loved war either for its own sake or for the revolutions to which it could give birth. The other one had a love of peace which had ‘as its sole principle not the public interest, but the taste for material well-being and softness of heart’, and would sacrifice everything for peace.38 He placed himself between these two extremes. He could not approve the revolutionary and propagandist language of most of the champions of war, but to join those who were crying for peace at any price would be even more dangerous. Tocqueville argued that ‘the greatest malady that threatens a people organized as we are is the gradual softening of mores, the abasement of the mind, the mediocrity of tastes’. One should not ‘let a nation … like ours … take up easily the habit of sacrificing what it believes to be its grandeur to its repose, great matters to petty ones’. It was not healthy to allow such a nation to believe ‘that its place in the world is smaller, that it is fallen from the level on which its ancestors had put it, but that it must console itself by making railroads and by making prosper in the bosom of its peace, under whatever condition this peace is obtained, the well-being of each private individual’. It was necessary that the leaders of such a nation ‘should always keep a proud attitude, if they do not wish to allow the level of national mores to fall very low’.39 After a long interval, and only when Tocqueville apparently took the initiative again by sending him his discourse to the Académie Française, Mill wrote back on 9 August 1842 to thank him, and returned to the subject of the Franco-British rift: I have often, of late, remembered the reason you gave in justification of the conduct of the liberal party in the late quarrel between England and France – that the feeling of orgueil national is the only feeling of a public-spirited and elevating kind which remains and that it ought not therefore to be permitted to go down. How true this is, every day makes painfully evident – one now sees that the love of liberty, of progress, even of material prosperity, are in France mere passing unsubstantial, superficial movements on the outside of the national mind and that the only appeal which really goes to the heart of France is one of defiance to l’étranger – and that whoever would offer to her satisfaction to that one want, would find the whole of her wealth, the blood of her citizens and every guarantee of liberty and social security flung down at his feet like worthless things. Most heartily do I agree with you that this one and only feeling of a


public, and therefore, so far, of a disinterested character which remains in France must not be suffered to decay. The desire to shine in the eyes of foreigners and to be highly esteemed by them must be cultivated and encouraged in France, at all costs. It is worth noting how Mill transformed the ‘defiance to l’étranger’ – which he deplores – into ‘the desire to shine in the eyes of foreigners …’ – which he finds far more acceptable. Having said as much, however, he proceeded to lecture Tocqueville on more commendable ways of having his compatriots esteemed abroad: But, in the name of France and civilization, posterity have a right to expect from such men as you, from the nobler and more enlightened spirits of the time, that you should teach to your countrymen better ideas of what it is which constitutes national glory and national importance, than the low and grovelling ones which they seem to have at present… . Here, for instance, the most stupid and ignorant person knows perfectly well that the real importance of a country in the eyes of foreigners does not depend upon the loud and boisterous assertion of importance, the effect of which is an impression of angry weakness, not strength. It really depends upon the industry, instruction, morality, and good government of a country:40 by which alone it can make itself respected, or even feared, by its neighbours; and it is cruel to think and see as I do every day, to how sad an extent France has sunk in estimation on all these points (the three last at least) by the events of the last two or three years. The attitude of the French seemed puerile on Mill’s side of the Channel. Their apparent unwillingness to come to an open breach while at the same time their ill humour was ‘breaking out on all petty secondrate occasions’, was not understood by the English: ‘it makes them feel the French to be a nation of sulky schoolboys’.41 Mill then laid claim to peculiar impartiality: ‘I myself make, I hope, all due allowances, certainly very great ones, for all this’, but there were not, he was convinced, half a dozen other persons in England who did so, or in Germany either according to the best information he could obtain.42 He was right, in both assertions. And in one of his several letters to D’Eichthal at the time of the crisis itself (25 December 1840), Mill concluded by indulging in one of his pet generalizations about national character: ‘It is impossible not to love the French people and at the same time not to admit that they are children – whereas with us even children are carehardened men of fifty.


It is as I have long thought a clear case for the croisement des races.’43 In another letter (23 February 1841) he explained to D’Eichthal that the continuing fortifications of Paris and the armaments on the part of the French appeared to most people in Britain ‘impossible to be accounted for except by aggressive designs on the part of France’. It was therefore ‘in vain to say as those who know the state of the French mind do, that the purpose is merely defensive, because to every Englishman the idea that there is the least disposition anywhere to commit aggression against France appears so utterly senseless that no one can believe such an idea to be sincerely entertained in France’.44 Mill generalized, again: ‘There is something exceedingly strange and lamentable in the utter incapacity of our two nations to understand or believe the real character and springs of action of each other. I am tempted to write a pamphlet or a review article on that very subject, but that I fear it would produce no effect.’45 Meanwhile, Mill’s exchanges with Tocqueville concerning relations between their two countries were not over yet. The occasion that led them to discuss foreign affairs once more had been Tocqueville’s position on the question of the Right of Search and the new Treaty on the Right of Search that Guizot had signed in December 1841, which infuriated the majority of the French deputies.46 On 9 February 1843 Tocqueville wrote to Mill asking for his help. He had delivered a speech in the House of Deputies on the question of the Right of Search, in which he had been very critical of the Guizot government, but this was on account of its handling of the affair which had caused – or at least increased – he asserted, the renewed tension in Anglo-French relations, rather than on account of the professed aim of its policy – peace and good relations with England.47 The speech was misinterpreted and distorted in England, as was much of the debate in the French Chamber.48 None of the distortions of his speech had angered Tocqueville more than that by Lord Brougham. Tocqueville sent the speech to Mill, and asked him to set the record straight in England.49 Mill responded to the call and wrote a letter that was published in the Morning Chronicle (20 February), in which he defended Tocqueville from the accusations raised against him by Brougham. But he did not miss the opportunity to again try to ‘do some good’ with the French by returning to the broader question of Anglo-French relations and assessing once more the whole situation since 1840. He wrote to Tocqueville on 20 February 1843, sending him the letter he had had inserted in the Morning Chronicle, that same day.50 He observed that the letter was necessary, because in Britain people believed that Brougham was right and Tocqueville wrong. This, commented Mill, was the result of the peak to which


passions had risen. He confided to Tocqueville that he had suffered at the manner in which his [Tocqueville’s] conduct on those unfortunate questions of foreign policy had been regarded in England. And here Mill grasped the opportunity to comment that he was not surprised at all that the English did not understand France any more than the French understood England: ‘Vous même n’avez vous pas dit, dans le discours en question, que les Anglais ont trouvé le moyen de chasser la France de l’Espagne? Ne dirait-on pas que comme la plupart de vos compatriotes vous croyez les Anglais tout occupés d’étendre leur territoire et leur importance au dehors?’ (‘You yourself, have you not said, in the speech in question, that the English have found the means to chase the French out of Spain? Couldn’t one say that like most of your compatriots, you consider the English completely absorbed by the desire to extend their territory and their importance abroad’).51 Yet, he swore that there were not two Englishmen who were sufficiently preoccupied with Spain for them to have had for a single moment any idea of competing with France for influence in that country. And more generally, he remarked once more, thankfully, the British public never occupied themselves with foreign affairs. Otherwise, Europe would be all the time on fire: ‘voyez ce qui est advenu de ce que nous avons eu, un seul instant, un homme à caractère français à notre Foreign Office. Vous savez que j’aime la France, mais j’avoue qu’il en est assez d’une seule en Europe’ (‘Look what happened by the fact that we had, for a single instant, a man with a French character in our Foreign Office. You know that I love France, but I admit that it is enough to have only one France in Europe’).52 The ‘homme à caractère français’ in the British Foreign Office was, of course, Palmerston. Mill’s strong opinions and feelings (very strong even by his standards) on the importance of good Franco-British relations and a good climate between the two peoples influenced decisively his estimation of personalities and parties. Although he did help Tocqueville out in 1843, the fatal exchange between them two years earlier led to a clear cooling of their relations on Mill’s part. No less indicative was the conspicuous reversal of his – previously very negative – attitude towards Guizot in his capacity as a politician. Guizot owed this to his vital role in averting war and helping to forge a Franco-British entente cordiale in spite of all the odds. Guizot had ‘done what perhaps no other man could have done and almost certainly none so well’.53 Mill could not find words to express his admiration for Guizot, ‘who now stands before the world as immeasurably the greatest public man living’.54 Thus, Mill’s correspondence during the crisis of 1840 and its aftermath suggests that he did understand the resentment felt by the French and


that he was vehemently opposed to Palmerston’s handling of the affair. But at the same time he disapproved strongly of the direction French reactions took, and was infuriated by the prospect that France and Britain could go to war. What he objected to most strongly was the notion that French ‘honour’ was worth starting a Franco-British war that would take European society back to the situation of 1815. He did recognized the need for the French to aspire to more than Guizot’s notorious (and misunderstood) injunction ‘enrichissez vous’. When, in 1849, he offered his analysis of the causes of the fall of the July monarchy, Mill wrote that a major characteristic of the government of Louis Philippe, ‘discreditable’ and ‘fatal to the government’, had been that ‘[i]t wrought almost exclusively through the meaner and more selfish impulses of mankind. Its sole instrument of government consisted in a direct appeal to men’s immediate personal interests or interested fears.’ Louis Philippe had striven ‘to immerse all France in the culte des intérêts matériels, in the worship of the cash-box and of the ledger’. Yet, stressed Mill: ‘It is not, or at least it has not hitherto been, in the character of Frenchmen to be content with being thus governed. Some idea of grandeur, at least some feeling of national self-importance, must be associated with that which they will voluntarily follow and obey.’ He would have agreed with Bagehot’s assertion that ‘France is not a country to be governed without some appeal to the imagination’.55 Thus far Mill would go along with Tocqueville. It has been seen already (Chapter 2) that he was far from content with a society whose members cared about nothing but their economic and social advancement and the satisfaction of their material needs. But his reaction to the crisis of 1840 revealed the limit to how far he was prepared to go in this direction. He wanted the French – and, of course, the British – to aspire to unselfish goals, to something higher and loftier than their own material well-being. But his advocacy of selfless aspiration fell short of endorsing pandering to chauvinistic nationalist feelings and instincts as a means to this end. Mill adopted a middle position between what he saw as French extremism and irrationality on the one hand and English failure to understand the French on the other. He saw himself in a dual role. When addressing the French (Tocqueville and d’Eichthal) he emphasised the irresponsibility, puerility, and irrationality of their compatriots. In the case of Tocqueville, Mill more or less tactfully indicated to his French correspondent what he regarded as his own failings and misunderstandings. On the other hand, when writing to his British friends, he stressed the untenableness of the British position, Palmerston’s provocative treatment of France, and the like, and did his best to minimize the negative


impression Tocqueville’s speeches in the Chamber had made on them, by passing on to them the Frenchman’s explanations for his position. In each case Mill tried to assist that half of truth which was most in need of assistance. This was part of the war which Mill, along with Arnold and other contemporaries, was waging against ethnocentric ‘half-truths’. Mill had again some interesting comments to make in 1846, when he came to review two books that had been published in 1842 and 1843 by an old acquaintance of his, the former Saint-Simonian Charles Duveyrier. The second of these books included an extensive exposition of its author’s views and proposals concerning France’s foreign policy.56 It was with regard to this article that Mill wrote to the editor of the Edinburgh Review, shortly after its publication: ‘I cannot complain of your having left out the passage controverting the warlike propensity of the French, though I should have been glad if it had been consistent with your judgment to have retained it.’ The opinion was ‘a very old and firm one’ with him, he went on, and ‘founded on a good deal of personal observation’. ‘And I am sure you will admit that national importance, and consideration among other nations, may be very strongly desired and sought by people who would rather have it in any other way than by war.’ And then Mill went on to explain that he thought that the Edinburgh Review had ‘lately been sometimes very unjust to the French’, on account of ‘Senior’s otherwise excellent articles which he and I have sometimes had disputes about’. Mill must have been referring to Senior’s ‘France, America, and Britain’, but also ‘The Law of Nations’, of April 1843, where Senior was no more indulgent with regard to French foreign policy.57 In the parts of the article that were eventually published Mill praised Duveyrier’s endeavours to divert ‘the national amour propre’ ‘into a rational and pacific channel’. The French author had argued that it was not war, nor territorial extension, by which national greatness and glory were now acquired: ‘By the arts of peace France must henceforth render herself famous’. The ‘social and mental advantages’ which France had bought at so dear a price through the struggles of the last half century had made it ‘her part to assume the initiative in perfecting the machinery and the principles of civil government’, and France should serve ‘comme un atélier d’essai au profit du globe entier’.58 Duveyrier advised France ‘to renounce, once for all, the popular object of the Rhenish frontier’, which he called a ‘misérable intérêt de vanité’. To acquire the respect of Europe, France’s foreign policy, he argued, ‘must be not war and aggrandizement, nor propagandism, but Arbitration and mediation’. Mill was doubtful whether other nations would be willing to accept French mediation, given France’s past record and reputation for


overmeddling. Yet, having said this, he conceded: ‘If, however, men have a taste for meddling, it is better that they should meddle to befriend others, than to oppress and domineer over them; and M. Duveyrier is doing a useful thing, in inculcating upon his countrymen the superiority of the more philanthropic mode of indulging the propensity.’59 If, as Mill was convinced by now (being far from alone in this conviction), it was an ingredient of the French national character to seek national grandeur and to desire ‘to shine in the eyes of foreigners and to be highly esteemed by them’ (which was a charitable way of describing what Senior called their ‘vanity’),60 then he would very much prefer to see the national amour propre diverted ‘into a rational and pacific channel’. A few months after he had reviewed Duveyrier, Mill reiterated this wish. Commenting on a concrete result of ‘the general want of enterprise of the French nation with respect to industrial improvements’, he suggested that: ‘The thing would be soon done if the love of industrial progress should ever supplant in the French mind the love of national glory, or if the desire of national glorification should take that direction.’61 Despite Mill’s differences from Senior with regard to ‘the warlike propensity of the French’, one cannot fail to notice the similarity of this statement with Senior’s concluding remarks in ‘France, America and Britain’ quoted earlier. After all, Mill and Senior were both, among other things, British political economists. Several French political economists and thinkers, besides Duveyrier, were also making such recommendations for the improvement of their country’s ‘national character’ and its adaptation to the needs of modernization and industrialization. It was in 1846 that the ‘Spanish marriages’ crisis came to poison Franco-British relations. In the context of a lot of intrigue, despite previous understandings with the British government that this should not happen, Guizot and Louis Philippe managed to have young Isabella II of Spain as well as her sister marry on the same day two princes, one of them a non-French Bourbon and the other Louis Philippe’s son. His role in this affair, perceived as unashamedly perfidious in Britain, made Guizot very unpopular even among his most ardent admirers. Only Arnold was lenient in his judgment on Guizot’s conduct. And Acton adjudicated later, in 1888, that the French had done nothing unheard of after all.62

II

The revolution of 1848 and the Second Republic

The revolution of February 1848, the installation of a Republic in France, and the lofty declarations of its new foreign minister regarding the Treaties of 1815 and the aspirations of oppressed nationalities


provoked a lot of anxiety in the rest of Europe, including Britain, not least out of fear that the Irish nationalists would be encouraged. But Lamartine’s subsequent comportment reassured foreign governments, not least the British.63 In the ‘Sketch of the Revolution of 1848’ which he contributed in the Edinburgh Review for January 1850, Senior challenged the (by then) widespread impression that Lamartine had been a pacific foreign minister in 1848. Though he did see the mortal dangers that a war would bring in its wake for ‘the Moderate Republican party’ and tried, therefore, anxiously to preserve peace at that particular period, the general tendency of ‘his political feelings’ was not pacific, for it was ‘ambitious’; and ‘ambition is always warlike – especially in France’. Senior found enough evidence to corroborate this view in the Frenchman’s book he was reviewing in that article, the Histoire de la Révolution de 1848.64 But even more than Lamartine’s reflections and recommendations in that book, Senior took exception to his acts as foreign minister of the Provisional Government of the Second Republic for the two crucial months following the Revolution of February 1848. The first and most controversial of these acts was the famous Manifesto of 6 March. In that Manifesto he declared, wrote Senior, that the French Republic regarded the treaties of 1815 as no longer binding on her; though she accepted as a matter of fact their territorial demarcations. And also ‘that when the hour for the reconstruction of any oppressed nationalities shall appear to France to have arrived, in the decrees of Providence, the French Republic will think herself justified in arming for their protection’. According to Senior: ‘Among the attacks which have lately been made on that weak defence of civilisation, international law, this manifesto appears to be the boldest and the most mischievous.’65 That the Treaties of 1815 had been extorted by force was not a good ground for repudiating them, according to Senior, given that ‘[e]very disadvantageous peace is extorted by force’. Now, the offer of assistance to oppressed nationalities, ‘when translated into intelligible language, is an offer of the armed interference of France to detach from their existing government any portions of a composite empire, distinguished by race or language from their fellow-subjects, which she may think fit to consider oppressed, and called by Providence to separate independence’. Given that ‘almost every kingdom of Europe’ was ‘a union of distinct nations’, this was, in fact, ‘a threat on the part of France to interfere by force in the domestic concerns of almost every government in Europe – and to interfere for the express purpose of dismembering it’. Even worse: ‘It is an open encouragement to the barbarous feeling which leads men to quarrel because they differ in


language or in race; … and has done more, within the last year, to retard the civilisation of Europe than can be repaired during the remainder of the century.’66 Besides the highly controversial Manifeste of 6 March, another of Lamartine’s measures that Senior found objectionable was, ‘in a time of profound peace, and with a national income inferior by about twelve millions sterling to the national expenditure, to endeavour to raise the army from 370,000 men to 580,000’. This was a military force ‘which, in proportion to the population of the country, is about three times as large as that of England, and twice as large as that of Russia – an army … destined, if it be maintained, from its magnitude when compared with the resources of the country, to ruin its finances, and ultimately to destroy the little that it has retained of liberty’.67 Senior was far from alone. In his onslaught on the French Revolution of February 1848 and almost everything the Provisional Government of France had done or stood for, Lord Brougham gave pride of place to the declaration of intent by the new French government with regard to foreign policy, in the shape of the Manifeste aux Puissances of 6 March issued by the new Foreign Minister. As Brougham interpreted it, the new French government: ‘Held out the hand of fellowship to the insurgents of all nations … M. Lamartine … assured the people of all other countries of assistance from France in case they should fail to work out by force their own emancipation’; in other words, ‘he promised that France would help all insurgents who might be defeated by their lawful rulers in their rebellion against established authority’. Brougham’s venom was particularly directed against ‘[t]hat new-fangled principle, that new speculation in the rights of independent states, the security of neighbouring governments, and indeed the happiness of all nations, which is termed Nationality, adopted as a kind of rule for the distribution of dominion’. It seemed to him to be ‘the notion preached by the Paris school of the Law of Nations and their foreign disciples’, ‘that one state has a right to attack another, provided upon statistically or ethnologically examining the classes and races of its subjects, these are found to vary’.68 One of those alleged ‘foreign disciples’ of ‘the Paris school of the Law of Nations’ came to the defence of Lamartine and the Provisional Government a few months later. His sustained and bold endorsement of the principles of foreign policy proclaimed by the Provisional Government was among the highlights of Mill’s ‘Vindication of the French Revolution of February 1848’.69 This was the most radical and extreme formulation of Mill’s views on a number of theoretical issues in international relations, particularly concerning the sanctity or otherwise of treaty obligations, the desirability and criteria of foreign intervention,


and the principle of ‘nationality’. Although this is too long a story to follow here,70 it should be stressed that the whole exposition was a heated and unequivocal defence of all the acts, declarations and intentions of the foreign policy of the Provisional Government under Lamartine. Regarding the treaties of 1815, the gist of his argument was ‘that engagements extorted by a certain kind and measure of external force, are not binding’.71 As for the Manifesto, besides the fact that ‘nationality’ was a defensible principle with some qualifications, Lamartine had subsequently behaved impeccably in discouraging all national delegations that had asked for French help to revolt. The truth is that Lamartine had to strike some very subtle balances in 1848, and to that extent his defenders such as Mill were closer to doing him justice than his detractors were.72 When it became clear to them (not least thanks to Lamartine’s reassurances in private) that the Republic would remain pacific, the political establishment of Britain were satisfied that Lamartine, although he had to make some declarations and gestures to please the gallery at home and meet some of the expectations of excited foreign, nationalities, could nevertheless be trusted not to stir up real trouble – least of all in Ireland. 73

III Caesarism and the world: British thinkers on the foreign policy of the Second Empire It has been aptly remarked that ‘English political life in the 1850s and early 1860s was marked by an unusual preoccupation with foreign affairs’.74 Among other reasons for this, there was the contribution of the new wave of continental refugees who sought security in England after the failure of the revolutions of 1848. But there were other contributing factors as well. The perennial apprehension (some would say approaching to paranoia) of a French invasion of England had been given, understandably, additional impetus once a Bonaparte was again at the helm in France. As Bagehot put it in one of his letters to the Inquirer in January 1852, ‘[t]he strong apprehension of a Napoleonic invasion has, perhaps, now caused more substantial misery in England than once the Wars of the Roses’.75 Near the end of the decade, in 1858, Harriet Martineau was lamenting ‘the setting in of the old epidemic – the French-invasion panic’.76 And well into the 1860s, Senior believed that, although Napoleon III did not wish for (but rather dreaded) a war with England, he nevertheless was ‘preparing the means of making one’, with ‘the long-continued, systematic attempt to inflame against England the old national enmity of France’ through the medium of the


provincial papers – all of them in the hands of the government – which constantly denounced ‘the perfidy and malignity of England’.77 And when the Franco-Prussian war broke out in 1870, Mill was convinced that England would be the next country the Emperor would declare war against and he was frantically urging his English friends for military preparations. This was the culmination of an extraordinary detestation of the French Emperor. Alexander Bain has written of Mill that ‘up to the fatality of December, 1851, he had a sanguine belief in the political future of France’.78 The comment is made in the context of French politics in general, rather than of French foreign affairs in particular, but the two are intimately linked for Mill, and few instances prove this more strikingly than the complete reversal of his position with regard to French foreign policy and ambitions after 1851. After Louis Napoleon’s coup of December 1851, Mill shifted his interest, and, especially, his hopes, away from France. As far as matters of international politics were concerned, it was mainly to Britain that he turned. He was in good company. Tocqueville, the old opponent of France’s alliance with Britain, now came to regard Britain and the strengthening of its role in the world as the only hope for the survival of liberty.79 It is difficult to overestimate the extent to which Mill’s loathing for Napoleon III affected his views on the international role of France. Perhaps the most characteristic indication of this extent is what Mill wrote to the Italian patriot, Pasquale Villari, on 28 March 1859. He told his correspondent (referring to the expectation of many Italians to be liberated from Austrian rule and united thanks to the aid of France), that he feared that the illusion to which the national mind of Italy had fallen at that moment could prove fatal. He assured Villari that the most dangerous enemy of the future of humanity at that time was the man whose help the Italians were invoking.80 It was surely not generous sentiments that would incline him to wage war against Austria for the sake of Italy.81 Then he remarked: ‘La France, même libre, veut beaucoup trop imposer son joug aux autres peuples’; and her present ruler, by flattering ‘ce défaut national’,82 wished to use Frenchmen in order to enslave the Italians in order to then keep them both subjugated by each other, in the same way as Austria was using the diverse peoples it was dominating against one another. No less interestingly, Mill confided with regard to his own feelings: ‘C’est navrant pour un ami de la liberté d’être forcé de souhaiter le succès même de l’Autriche contre une puissance plus retrograde encore et plus malfaisante qu’elle.’ Because what the perfidious tyrant of France wanted was nothing but ‘l’accroissement et l’affermissement de son pouvoir, et il n’y a pas de plus grand mal sur la terre’.83


This letter shows clearly the extent of Mill’s abhorrence of Bonapartism, which was so overwhelming as to lead him to confess to wishing the victory of Austria, because he considered Louis-Napoleon’s France even more retrograde and mischievous than even Austria – Austria being, at that time, a byword for reaction in the eyes of most liberals (except Acton!), ‘a state whose government is incurably opposed to the modern spirit, and the most retrograde in Europe’, in Matthew Arnold’s words, that same year.84 It is worth emphasizing that, from what he wrote in the letter o Villari, in 1859 Mill also believed by then in the existence of a ‘défaut national’ in the French character, a desire to impose French rule on other peoples – and he was adamant that this applied to the French even when they were free. And as the Roman question continued being in the limelight, Mill wrote in a letter (24 September 1862, to J. Chapman) that, though he agreed entirely with him ‘as a matter of feeling’ in the case of Italy, yet, he could not think the immediate incorporation of Rome with the Kingdom of Italy ‘of such vital importance to Italy or to the cause of freedom and progress’, as to be worth a war between England and France, while, on the other hand, ‘there would be nothing so likely to turn the French nation against all we wish for, and make them identify themselves with their present ruler, as any attempt by a foreign power to act upon them by intimidation.’ Italy had already Britain’s moral support and events had proved that this was ‘much’. Louis Napoleon was ‘detested in Italy’, and the longer he remained in Rome, the more certain it would become that he would have no influence over the destinies of Italy ‘but what force, or intrigue and corruption, may give him’.85 ‘This is not a thing of small importance: for it was a great question whether Italy would form its character as a selfgoverning nation on French ideas or on English, and this question is now rapidly deciding itself in favour of English.’86 Quite an impressive statement for a man who had spent so much of his energy in the 1830s and 1840s in attempting to teach ‘French ideas’ to the English themselves!87 It appears, however, that Mill came to assume a slightly more optimistic outlook on the attitude of the French towards war and peace, in the course of the 1860s. This development accompanied a more positive view of the prospects of French thought in general and French politics, with the gradual liberalization of the French regime and the election results of 1863. Thus, he was writing with satisfaction in January 1864 on ‘the wonderful resurrection of the spirit of liberty in France, combined with a love of peace which even sympathy with Poland does not prevail over’.88 His interest in the progress of the desire for liberty in France went hand in hand with his interest in the desire for peace in


that country. He was by now convinced that these two goals were closely connected, and that liberty would remain precarious in France without peace and a desire for peace. There were other manifestations warranting some reluctant optimism in the late 1860s.89 Yet, this relative optimism that the French penchant for l’orgueil national could take peaceful directions and forms was to be tested fatally by the advent of the Franco-Prussian war, when Mill spoke once more of the ‘très grands défauts’ in the French character, which were always there, in the so called ‘plus beaux jours de la France’ no less than in 1870–71.90 Given the importance Bagehot accorded national character, it would be worth our while to examine what he thought of the tendencies of the French character with regard to foreign affairs. We have seen (Chapter 3) that in the second of his two articles on ‘The Emperor of the French’ (5 December 1863) he explained that the Emperor was ‘the Crowned Democrat of Europe’, and emphasized the dangers of such a position, given that he had ‘a contract’, both at home and abroad, whose terms ‘must be rigidly fulfilled’. At home, in order to go on ruling, he had to please ‘the populace, the peasantry, and the army’: ‘Now France loves two things above all others – gain and glory’.91 Both the French peasant and the French bourgeois ‘thirst for wealth with an inordinate longing’. Yet, at the same time, both were ‘singularly susceptible to what Goëthe calls “the tyranny of ideas”. They are easily carried away by political sympathies and by the cravings of national vanity’.92 This was true ‘even still more strongly’ of the populace of the towns. The French were ‘delighted when seeing their country so influential, so disturbing, so dictatorial in Europe, and are ready to worship the man who has made her so’.93 Yet at the same time they were ‘little inclined to pay the natural price for so distinguished a position’. The peasants would not endure the additional taxation that would be required. And the middle classes would not tolerate ‘the interruption to industry and commerce consequent on extensive wars’. On both these points most foreign observers would agree with Bagehot.94 This having been said, however, Napoleon III was most likely to undertake such wars as could be waged without increased taxation, by means of loans raised at home; or such wars as could be made to generate an increased demand for French products or to entail an extension of France’s foreign commerce; ‘such wars as eventuate, or promise to eventuate, in accession of territory’;95 such wars ‘as are not too difficult or dangerous, and hold out hopes of feeding ancient grudges or gratifying long disappointed hopes’, and, finally, ‘such wars … as bring France grandly before the eyes of the world as the defender of oppressed nations and the champion of crushed democracies,96 – such wars, and


such only, are likely to be undertaken by the Emperor’. France ‘demands of him that he shall exhibit her unceasingly in the blended attitude and colours of the peacock and the eagle’. And ‘[t]hus far he has succeeded wonderfully in giving his exacting nation precisely what she wants, and avoiding precisely what she detests and dreads’. Never, except under the first Napoleon, and during a short period of Louis XIV’s reign, had France been ‘so influential, or at least so disturbing (and that is what Frenchmen really like),97 as she is now. Then for glory, or what in Gallic eyes passes for such, Louis Napoleon has given her her fill’.98 That is why Bagehot judged that ‘To France certainly he has fulfilled his obligations.’ Now, addressing the prospects of the foreign politics issue that was the main focus of attention at the time, the French occupation of Rome, Bagehot believed that Napoleon III would make no change until he were forced to do so, because the situation, as it was, ‘flatters French vanity – so strange a thing is that national passion, and such sad garbage can it feed on’.99 Throughout his coverage of Louis Napoleon’s foreign policy Bagehot exhibited a keen awareness of the Emperor’s vulnerability to the shifting moods of public opinion in France. When the rise of Prussian power in Europe had become conspicuous, after the Prussian victory over Austria, and it was becoming obvious that France was losing its position as the greatest power of continental western Europe, he started sharing the worries of many: ‘The vital question is the disposition and tendency of the French nation, and upon that the evidence … is as bad very nearly as it can be. … If she means to fight for her old place in Europe, – and at present it looks as if she did mean it, – the life of the present generation will be very different and far sadder than that which we had hoped for it.’100 He showed himself more hopeful at later stages, arguing that neither Napoleon III nor Bismarck would be as foolish as to desire a war.101 But when the war was declared, like everyone else he was convinced that it was ‘a crime (for it is no less)’ committed by Napoleon III, worse than ‘[t]he most desperate act of a midnight conspirator’. The main explanation he could find was not very original: ‘It is said (and is we fear true) that war is popular in Paris, because Prussia is grown suddenly great, and because France has less prestige and is less thought of since she had so large a neighbour.’102

IV ‘Francophobes’, ‘Francophiles’ and the Franco-Prussian war Bagehot was far from alone in being shocked, when the war broke out; nor in blaming it squarely on the French side. The perfidy used by


Bismarck in order to provoke a war (which he thought would promote his plans to complete German unification fast) was not known until much later. Thus, Victorian thinkers, as well as the broader public, saw the war in the way Bagehot did. With the exception of the Comtists, who defended them to the last (although, even Harrison later claimed that he had been critical initially),103 the French had very few friends among the intellectuals outre-Manche. As time went by and the Germans were continuing a war they had already won, laying siege to (and starving) Paris for several months, and demanding reparations such as the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine, public opinion in Britain started to shift and became increasingly sympathetic to the suffering French.104 Not so their intellectual friends though – again, Comtists excepted. In fact, two of the most critical of all British observers were no other than Arnold and Mill.105 Their attitude towards the Franco-Prussian War is an appropriate epilogue to this chapter, to the extent that it shows the strength and purchase of the views discussed in the previous pages. To put it simply, it is revealing if two of the foremost ‘Francophile’ thinkers of Victorian Britain were as critical of France’s international behaviour and ‘character’ as Mill and Arnold turned out to be on this occasion. That Mill, the man who had so earnestly tried to argue publicly in defence of the French and counteract popular perceptions on exactly this count, in the 1830s and 1840s, was now as convinced as he turns out to have been that the war was a result of the attitudes towards politics, internal and international, he had grown used to expect from the French and of the qualities of the French ‘character’ that had been increasingly exasperating him for decades goes a long way towards indicating how widespread the stereotypical view of the French concerning international comportment was in Victorian Britain. Thus, the only staunch and almost unflinching supporters of France throughout the duration of the Franco-Prussian war and also during the time of the Commune of Paris (March–May 1871) were the Comtists, Frederic Harrison, Edward Spencer Beesly, Richard Congreve, and the congregationalists of their positivist church in Chapel Street.106 On returning from his honey-moon in late October Harrison found British public opinion warming up to France after the substitution of the Republic for the Empire and increasingly sympathetic to the plight of besieged Paris. He also found his fellow-positivists, Beesly and Congreve, having contributed very considerably to this change of popular mood, and urging the British government to take arms in behalf of the new French government. He himself set out contributing a number of articles in support of France (both for the educated elites in Morley’s


Fortnightly Review, and for the working class, in the Bee-Hive) and asserting France’s claims on Britain’s assistance (in one of them so movingly that he is said to have led George Eliot to tears). When defeated Communards sought refuge in Britain, Harrison and his wife were instrumental in helping them.107 Besides the Comtists, the other British thinker who, without being uncritical of France, was more hostile to – and presciently apprehensive of – Prussia’s aggrandizement was Acton. Even more significant than his reactions to the war while it was taking place (he spent most of that time in Bavaria, and he was more preoccupied with the fate of Rome and the departure of the French soldiers thence as a result of that war), was his assessment of its causes later, in his historian’s hat. Thanks both to his research and to his intimate connections with so many European statesmen and diplomats he came to establish factors like Bismarck’s bellicosity and ardent desire to provoke a war long before other historians came to accept them.108 Besides trying to convince initial sympathizers of France like Ruskin (successfully, in the end), to shift their sympathies to Prussia,109 elderly Thomas Carlyle’s public reaction was to send an article-length letter to The Times, which was published on 18 November.110 There he endeavoured to explain that ‘this cheap pity and newspaper lamentation over fallen and afflicted France’ showed, on the part of England, ‘a most profound ignorance as to the mutual history of France and Germany, and the conduct of France towards that Country, for long centuries back.’ The author of the History of Frederick the Great (1858–65) had no problem finding examples of French perfidy at the expense of the Germans. ‘No nation ever had so bad a neighbour as Germany has had in France for the last 400 years; bad in all manner of ways; insolent, rapacious, insatiable, unappeasable, continually aggressive.’ Anarchic, vainglorious France had brought her plight on herself by wilfully insulting her sober neighbour, thus ‘testifying to gods and men what extent of rottenness, anarchy and hidden vileness lay in her’. France had made her Great Revolution, ‘proclaiming … that shams should be no more. … For that we all infinitely love and honour France’. But, alas, all that was ‘but half the battle, and the much easier half’. The ‘infinitely harder half’ was that ‘of achieving, instead of the abolished shams which were of the Devil, the practicable realities which should be veritable and of God’. That ‘farther stage’ of the battle must, he was convinced, be ‘under better presidency than that of France, or it will forever prove impossible. The German race, not the Gaelic, are now to be protagonist in the immense world-drama; and from them I expect better issues.’111 One of the things he


insisted upon repeatedly was that France looked ‘delirious’ and ‘refuses to see the facts that are lying palpable before her face, and the penalties she has brought upon herself’; ‘deception and self-deception’, ‘Given up to strong delusion … till, at last, the lie seems to them the very truth’. (Carlyle was not alone in thinking this.112) He summed up: ‘That noble, patient, deep, pious and solid Germany should be at length welded into a Nation, and become Queen of the Continent, instead of vapouring, vainglorious, gesticulating, quarrelsome, restless and over-sensitive France, seems to me the hopefulest public fact that has occurred in my time.’113 As for Alsace and Lorraine, these were German territories which had become French through ‘the cunning of Richelieu’ and ‘the grandiose long-sword of Louis XIV’. ‘There is no law of Nature that I know of, no Heaven’s Act of Parliament, whereby France, alone of terrestrial beings, shall not restore any portion of her plundered goods when the owners they were wrenched from have an opportunity upon them. To nobody, except to France herself for the moment, can it be credible that there is such a law of Nature.’ (Other ‘Teutomaniacs’ added their voices to the same effect.)114 Yet, there was someone closer to home, who, though he did not believe there was such a ‘law of Nature’, thought there was another law that militated against severing the two provinces from France, a law related to the beneficial effects of ethnic and racial diversity and of achieving the right ‘mix’. We have already seen that Bagehot disagreed with those who approved of the annexation of the provinces by Germany. He argued that ‘the very trivial military considerations which at present absorb so much more than their fair share of attention’ were far less important than whether, from a moral point of view, the annexation and re-Germanisation of Alsace and Lorraine ‘would be a gain or a loss, in moral resources, to the world at large; whether it would enrich Germany more or less than it would impoverish France?’ But though his recommendation was in favour of France (given that he was asking that the provinces remain in her possession), his rationale was not necessarily flattering, as far as the French ‘character’ was concerned. France needed to keep its two Germanic provinces in the hope that they might contribute some sound Germanic character traits to counterbalance the numerous flaws of the French character. Even excepting Alsace and Lorraine, France was fortunate to have a particularly diverse ethnic mix which made for several valuable qualities. ‘But in all these there is wanting one of the most important of all contributions to the elements of a great nation – the German fidelity, domesticity, and thoroughness of character.’ The ‘plodding tenacity’, the ‘unambitious faithfulness of


the German mind and character’, were precisely the kind of qualities which France could borrow from Alsace and Lorraine better than from anywhere else.115 As for Morley, he saw Prussia’s war aims as essentially ‘moral’, whereas France was a power whose ‘causes and aims were immoral’. After the war he regarded Germany as the virile guardian of the European peace. What others saw as the growing threat of German militarism Morley viewed as legitimate and necessary reaction to French aggressiveness and provocativeness. He associated the revolutionary outbreak of Parisian Communism with his fear of an invasion of Europe by ‘barbarous’ Russia, as he subscribed to views predicting the natural alliance between French socialism and the ‘Russian democracy’ (in 1877 Morley commented on the extraordinary survival of ‘the Commune in Russia … as the social unit’ for so long). He insisted that it was in the ‘interests of the highest civilisation’ that a strong Germany should be able to withstand the dangers of a Russian–Slavonic expansion in Europe. Moreover, it was the combination of the character traits of the Slavs with those of the French that he feared as the greatest danger to European civilization, and this led him to dread a Franco-Russian alliance.116 With such views Morley continued to oppose the Entente with France in the first years of the new century, and to dismiss any suggestion that Germany could be a threat. He insisted that the foundations of a Europe ‘inhabited by good Europeans’ must be an Anglo-German understanding, these two Teutonic countries being best fitted to be allies. Morley persisted in these views until August 1914, and resigned from the Cabinet because he could not convince his colleagues against binding Britain with France.117 What about Morley’s intellectual ‘father’? Mill’s first recorded reaction to the war was provoked when he was asked if he approved of a proposed public demonstration in favour of Prussia, called for by friends of his such as Henry Fawcett (then MP for Brighton) and Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke (MP for Chelsea). As he wrote to Fawcett, Mill ‘highly approve[d] of having a demonstration’ and hoped there would be many of them. He stressed, at the same time, that, although ‘[a] time may come when it will be the duty of every one to speak out’, he did not wish to do so himself in public. And as he wrote to Morley who had asked him to write an article for his Fortnightly Review, he ‘would rather that this task should devolve on any one than’ himself. ‘It is only an evident call of duty that would make me willing to write and publish all I think about the conduct of the French from first to last and about their claim, aggressors as they were, and defeated as they are, to dictate the terms of


peace.’118 The statement leaves little doubt as to the tone of such an article, were he to be forced to write it; he does sound angry, nothing less. Arguably, Mill did not want to speak publicly on the war, because of the severity of what he had to say on the conduct of the French and their ‘character’.119 Gleaning the gist of what he did write in private correspondence leads to such a conclusion. As far as his initial reaction is concerned, it is worth quoting what he had to say only a week after the official declaration of war by France, in his ‘confidential’ letter to Fawcett, for nothing but his own words can convey the urgency of the message he wanted to bring home to the British people, albeit by proxy, as it were. The points of most importance were, ‘that the English public should know, and shew that it knows’, that the war had been brought on ‘wholly by Napoleon’; that the Prussians were ‘fighting for their own liberty and for that of Europe’; and that England was bound to protect Belgium, and that ‘our utmost efforts can only, if Napoleon lives, defer war, not prevent it.’: Our turn must come. Therefore, that our people ought to arm at once, taking the responsibility off the Government, which is right to be prudent and silent. The Volunteers ought to be armed with the newest and best rifle by public subscription. It is not a time for talking about peace and the horrors of war when our national existence may be soon at stake. At the same time it is wrong to attribute the war to France. Neither in justice nor in prudence ought we to do so. The Germans are right in saying that it is Napoleon, and not France, they are fighting, and Napoleon, if he lives, and is successful in humbling Prussia, will attack England, the fourth of the great powers that fought at Waterloo.120 As he wrote in various other letters, this was ‘perhaps the most unprovoked attack in modern European history’, ‘[o]ne of the wickedest acts of aggression in history’, ‘une agression injuste’. It was ‘important that a striking retribution should fall on the aggressor [in] an unprovoked war’.121 And in a statement reminiscent of Thucydides’ explanation of the real cause of the Peloponnesian War, as much as that given by Bagehot and many others to account for this war, Mill opined: ‘The pretended grievance was a mere sham; the cause of war was that France could not bear to see Germany made powerful by union.’122 But the justice of the case was only one of the considerations involved. First of all, what made things urgent, was Mill’s genuine conviction that Britain itself was in danger, that, if Napoleon III were to be


successful, he would then attack Britain. This led him to show a great interest in military preparations and to give his full approval for schemes to introduce conscription and citizen militia.123 He thus deplored ‘the utterly false and mistaken sympathy with France’ and expressed repeatedly his frustration with those in Britain (the Comtists, mainly) who clamoured for support for France, even to the extent of asking for their country to go to war with Germany in order to aid France. Apparently his greatest disappointment was that ‘the political leaders of the working classes’, ‘led away by the Comtists and by the mere name of a republic’, were very keen to help France.124 In an ideal world, he did not wish the provinces to be annexed by Germany though. Populations should not be transferred without being asked. On the other hand, the Germans did have ‘a just claim to as complete a security as any practical arrangement can give, against the repetition of a similar crime’. Yet: ‘Unhappily, the character and feelings of the French nation, or at least of the influential and active portion of all political parties, afford no such security.’ That is why he believed that the two provinces should become independent or autonomous under the guarantee of neutrals, for some decades, and then to decide by referendum whether to join Germany or France. But he feared that the Germans would not accept this.125 As on so many other occasions, the paramount consideration for Mill, the ‘public moralist’, happened to be the long-term effects of the events and their outcomes on the collective character and morality of those concerned.126 Thus, most crucial to his appreciation of the situation was the educative value of the experience; the French had to learn some lessons from what happened. These lessons included, firstly, the necessity for the French people (who, he insisted, were not responsible for this war any more than by having allowed, through political apathy, the talking classes to lead them into it) of caring about politics and not leaving them to one or a few; secondly, the impotence (even in military terms) of despotic regimes, due to the effects of the corruption that is endemic to them127 (a point made forcefully also by Bagehot); and, thirdly, the futility of seeking aggrandizement and grandeur abroad rather than real liberty and progress at home.128 All three of these ‘lessons’ are assembled together in Mill’s letter of 27 August 1870 to D’Eichthal, which Mill wound up with the exhortation that the French nation, which was certain to become great again sooner or later, would need to content itself with being one of the great powers of Europe, without pretending to be the only, or even the first. France would need to recognise for international relations as for the relations of civil life, the principle that made her own glory, the


principle of ‘égalité’.129 What Mill (along with Carlyle, Arnold, and many others) could not forgive was that the French, after they were defeated, would not accept to pay the price by offering Germany a reparation proportional to the enormity of the injustice done to it. While they would be the first to demand annexation of territory when victorious, the French did not accept that the rule or habit of nations at war should apply to them once defeated.130 Like Mill, Matthew Arnold had no doubts as to whose fault it all was. It had not been the Empire, as some of the French thought, that had been ‘their destruction’; rather, ‘what has been their destruction has been their sensuality’. The ‘mischief lay in the sensuality itself and in the French not recognising it as a danger to them’.131 Arnold was blaming Aselgeia, Lubricité. Mill at least, for all his priggishness, never blamed the misadventures of the French to their sexual habits. But Arnold was not too idiosyncratic in attributing the decline of France to sexual promiscuity. Many people in France, from Taine to various anthropologists, were criticising ‘the young Frenchmen who devoted their lives to the love of women to whom they became enslaved’, and attributing the nation’s defeat ‘to the immorality of the women on whom the moral welfare of French men depended’.132 And, similarly to Mill and Carlyle, Arnold expressed a strong resentment of the French expectation that they should be somehow excepted from what applied to others in such cases, in a letter to his mother around the beginning of the siege of Paris: ‘but the French provoke one by their incorrigibility, by their persisting in regarding themselves and Paris as something to which another measure is to be meted than is meted to the rest of the world, and by their utter failure to see that in their own fatal want of morality and seriousness is the source of their disasters.’133 Thus, Comtists excepted, most of the British thinkers came, in their pronouncements on the Franco-Prussian war and its outcome, to agree with Senior’s complaint quoted in the epigraph of this chapter, against what he saw as France’s demand that she be an exception to rules of international morality and behaviour, that there was one law for the rest of the nations and another for the Grande Nation. And they were all so convinced that, the French character being what it was, there could be no doubt as to who was responsible for causing the war. Reputations and stereotypes have a price!

Epilogue: La France éternelle? Comparing with Other ‘Glasses’ France is not a country to be governed without some appeal to the imagination. The Empire appeals to the imagination of the peasantry in one way – as a symbol of stability and magnificence. The republic would appeal to the imagination of the operative classes in another way – as a symbol of equality and fraternity. (Walter Bagehot) the legacy of the Revolution is not liberal Republicanism, but Bonapartism. … Bonapartism left in French political culture a certain idea of how strong yet popular government could be carried out. Like the Bonapartes, de Gaulle was a guarantee of the revolution (against vichyste counter-revolution), a guarantee of order (against Communists and the ultra-nationalism of Algérie Française), and a symbol of France’s greatness. … Like the Bonapartes, he was able in consequence to play a dynamic and creative role, founding new political institutions and promoting economic modernisation. Finally, like them he gave the regime a face … (Robert Tombs) We saw in the introductory chapter that several Victorian thinkers applied themselves to observing France out of a reliance in the benefits of, as Mill put it, ‘frequently using the differently coloured glasses of other people’. Although doing so on a larger scale would require more than another book, it may be a fitting way of concluding this one to try to somehow put in a comparative light the ‘glasses’ of the Victorians by juxtaposing some of their major preoccupations, emphases and conclusions regarding France with those of late-twentieth-century scholars and thinkers. Such an exercise is bound to be selective and simply suggestive, but it may still be worth attempting. One of the things Bagehot claimed most emphatically on the prospects of France in the 1870s was that there were some things about the Bonapartist Empire that made the French look back to it nostalgically, even shortly after it was discredited by the humiliating defeat of Sédan. Although the pretender was too young (and, two years after 164

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Bagehot’s death, the Prince Imperial fell under the spears of Zulus in Africa, making the restoration Bonapartists were hoping for impossible), Bagehot thought that the inevitable Republic that was in the process of being established was lacking something vital for the needs of the French ‘national character’. He wrote in 1874: ‘Until it is succeeded by some system of equal fixity, the Empire will always be remembered with sadness. … Forms will change and names will alter; but sooner or later the French will set up some government which gives them the sensation of fixity. Perhaps it is not in the temperament of any nation – it certainly is not in theirs – to be satisfied with anything less.’1 Now, many people think that that ‘system of equal fixity’ has been de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic with its enhanced presidential role.2 The editor of Bagehot’s Collected Works was not alone in believing, in 1968, that: ‘We have had to wait until our own time to see his judgments on France vindicated.’3 And, commenting on Bagehot’s views on Napoleon III’s foreign policy, and the extent to which it was satisfying the profound desire of the French for ‘glory’, Norman St John-Stevas opined that ‘[t]he judgment was shrewd and today could be applied with equal justice to the effect of the foreign policy of General de Gaulle. Indeed much of what Bagehot wrote about the France of his day still has relevance today. The parallels between Napoleon III and President de Gaulle are striking’.4 Without reference to Bagehot, claims about the similarities between Bonapartism and the rule and Constitution of de Gaulle have been made by many people – not least by future ‘Emperor’ François Mitterrand, in the 1960s (in his characteristically entitled Le Coup d’état Permanent),5 but also by scholars of different persuasions and nationalities, from both sides of the British Channel and of the Atlantic. Robert Tombs, as indicated in the epigraph of this Epilogue, has argued that the distinctive thread of modern French history, the outcome of the French Sonderweg since the Revolution, has been Bonapartism, transmuted into de Gaulle’s ‘imperial Republic’, and – his strong criticisms whilst in opposition notwithstanding – adopted in most important respects by Mitterrand, a President who deliberately adopted an imperial style and whose foreign policy looked to many, to use Stanley Hoffmann’s felicitous phrase, as ‘Gaullism by any other name’. One of the most influential contemporary French thinkers and intellectuals, Pierre Rosanvallon, also thinks that ‘Bonapartism is the quintessence of French political culture’, a political culture which, interestingly for our purposes, he considers to be ‘illiberal’. Rosanvallon has recently offered an excellent analysis of ‘Cæsarism’ as a system of ‘illiberal democracy’, as a pathological aberration of democracy itself, illustrating its

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claim to be suppressing liberties in the name of democracy.6 In that analysis Rosanvallon referred briefly to Bagehot as ‘l’un des très rares contemporains à avoir tenté de conceptualiser positivement le césarisme moderne’ (‘one of the very rare contemporaries to have attempted to conceptualize positively modern caesarism’), giving reference to Bagehot’s 1865 article ‘Caesareanism as it now Exists’.7 Although one might find some fault with what he argues about Bagehot’s analysis of Caesarism, that may be because it is based on this one article of 1865 perhaps. But a fuller picture of Bagehot’s diagnosis of the characteristics and philosophical and political foundations of Louis Napoleon’s system as the one attempted here (particularly in Chapter 3) would show remarkable similarities with much of what Rosanvallon had to say in the end of the twentieth century. However, what is more important for our purposes than the question of Rosanvallon’s appreciation of Bagehot is his assertion that ‘le bonapartisme constitue la quintessence de la culture politique française’ (‘Bonapartism constitutes the quintessence of French political culture’) as well as that ‘Le bonapartisme est aussi … la clé de comprehension de l’illibéralisme français’ (‘Bonapartism is also … the key for understanding French illiberalism’). In January 2001, at a lecture delivered to the Académie Française, Rosanvallon argued that French political culture is illiberal because it is characterized by a ‘monist vision of the social and the political’, which has as it major consequence to dissociate ‘l’impératif démocratique et le développement des libertés’ (‘the democratic imperative and the development of liberties’). He notes that this is a ‘curiosité historique’ (this is part of the notorious ‘French exception’8). Rosanvallon emphasizes that: ‘Selon la vision anglaise, la liberté naît de la pluralité. La liberté naît de la pluralité car elle empêche que puisse se mettre en place un pouvoir qui l’emporterait sur les autres’ (‘According to the English vision, liberty is born out of plurality. Liberty is born from plurality because it [plurality] prevents any one power from prevailing over the other powers’);9 while, ‘selon la vision française, la liberté naît de la généralité. C’est la capacité de la généralité à absorber tous les particuliers qui est véritablement la condition de la liberté’ (‘according to the French vision, liberty is born out of the generality. It is the capacity of the generality to absorb all particulars which is the true condition of liberty’). Further on he argues that Bonapartism is the quintessence of French political culture. ‘C’est en lui qu’ont prétendu fusionner le culte de l’Etat rationalisateur et la mise en scène d’un peuple un’ (‘It is in it [Bonapartism] that the cult of the rationalizing state and the emergence of a united people have supposedly been fused with each other’). That is why, he continues, Bonapartism is also ‘the key for the comprehension of French

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illiberalism’: ‘c’est parce qu’il est une pathologie interne à l’idée démocratique. … il est amené à limiter les libertés au nom d’une conception de la démocratie’. (‘it is because it is an internal pathology of the democratic idea. … it has been led to the limitation of liberties in the name of a conception of democracy’).10 But he does not think that the illiberal characteristics he talks of ended with the Second Empire. ‘La République après 1870, a-t-elle rompu avec cela, en rétablissant les libertés et en écartant au moins pour un moment le spectre du pouvoir personnel? Rien n’est moins sûr. J’irai jusqu’à dire que la culture politique républicaine n’est à certains égards qu’un bonapartisme aseptisé et édulcoré’ (‘Has the Republic, after 1870, broken with all this, by re-establishing liberties and by putting aside, at least for a while, the spectre of personal power? Nothing is less certain. I shall go as far as saying that republican political culture is, in some respects, no more than a sanitized and sweetened Bonapartism’). Nor is this a feature of the Third Republic only: ‘Sommes-nous sortis de cette culture illibérale? Bien des éléments de notre actualité politique, sociale ou économique sont là pour donner une réponse négative à cette question. … Cette question est donc toujours d’actualité’ (‘Have we broken free from this illiberal political culture? Many elements in our current political, social and economic state are there to give a negative response to this question. … This question, therefore, is still timely’).11 Rosanvallon has argued similarly about the ‘illiberalism’ of ‘French political imagination’ in the past as well, and asserted, in Jeremy Jennings’s words, that ‘[t]he “central question” remained that of who held power rather than what form should that power take, “the dynamic of sovereignty” pushing France between the opposites of absolute monarchy and a radical republic with no thought to sovereignty’s limitation. It has been, Pierre Rosanvallon writes, “the kings of war and the kings of glory that [the French] admire”. Their ideal has been only “to democratize absolutism”, a secret aspiration given flesh in the “republican monarchism” of de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic.’12 Others have argued to more or less the same effect.13 Again, similarities with remarks by some of our Victorians are too obvious to need comments. And, in one of the most discussed works written by political thinkers and historians in France in the last two decades, Rosanvallon argued in 1988 that one of the ‘équivoques de la culture politique française’ (‘ambiguties of French political culture’) is ‘une tendance permanente de confondre les registres du libéralisme et de la démocratie’: ‘La confusion entre le libéralisme et la démocratie conduit à mal distinguer l’exigence de participation politique et la demande d’état de droit. … On confond ce qu’on pourrait appeler le vote de souveraineté et le suffrage protecteur’ (‘a permanent

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tendency to confound the registers of liberalism and those of democracy’: ‘The confusion between liberalism and democracy leads [the French] to a failure to distinguish between political participation and the demand for the rule of law. … They confound what one could call the vote of sovereignty and protective suffrage’). Although it is not exactly the same thing, this has clear similarities with a distinction Mill had made in the introductory chapter of On Liberty and his attribution of the erroneous and confused attitude to the majority of Continental liberals.14 Rosanvallon is not alone. In varying contexts and terms, most political thinkers, intellectual historians, and intellectuals who evaluate liberalism positively in France today speak of the failure of liberalism to take root in French political culture, or, what is no less significant, of the prevalence within French liberalism itself, when it was mainly formed, in the nineteenth century, of a peculiar school which subordinated the rights of individuals and which tended to ‘effacer l’individu, au profit de l’Etat, des notables et de l’esprit de corps’ (‘efface the individual, to the benefit of the state, the notables and the esprit de corps’). This is the ‘paradoxe du libéralisme français’ highlighted in a remarkable recent study by Lucien Jaume.15 Now, why did liberalism fail in France to the extent that it did, why is French political culture still seen as ‘illiberal’ by some of its most eminent observers, and why is it that most observers believe that what proved much more successful was a form of neo-Bonapartism dressed in republican garments (given that a concatenation of circumstances in the 1870s meant that Bonapartism as a party in its own right had no chance). An arguably plausible answer was given by Bagehot, especially in his writings of the 1870s. ‘France is not a country to be governed without some appeal to the imagination.’ The Bonapartist Empire appealed to the imagination of great sections of Frenchmen in one way, the republic (meaning a republic with socialist aspirations, in this instance) in another.16 And although he believed that liberal Orleanism represented ‘everything [he] wish[ed] to see represented – secure property, rational freedom, parliamentary government’, France did ‘not care for parliamentary government, or for what we call rational liberty’. Thus: ‘Intelligent adherents, “meet though few”, the Orleans dynasty can count, but the gross common mass do not care for them.’17 Such a regime rested on pure reason, and was weak accordingly; because, in France, ‘[e]very opinion … is, in the Baconian language, “steeped in the humours of the affections”. There is no large number and no powerful order of persons holding opinions on the grounds of reason and argument’, as ‘[p]oor Pr[é]vost-Paradol’, a high-minded liberal, found out

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when he failed abysmally in his attempt to be elected a deputy.18 A liberal regime such as the Orleans Monarchy or the moderate ‘political Republic’ appealed neither to the passions of the peasants nor to those of the town ouvriers. That is why he believed in May 1870 that rallying to the liberalised Empire was the best chance the liberals had of achieving a stable regime which appealed to the imagination of as large a majority of Frenchmen as the peasants, and commanded their passionate attachment; the liberals should utilize it and slowly try ‘to engraft upon it rational and liberal principles, which shall win support by their own intrinsic merit’ little by little, as the English system had evolved thanks to the stability gained by the unthinking attachment of the masses to the monarch.19 The fact that a ‘conservative’ or ‘political republic’ did manage to survive eventually does not completely invalidate his verdict, because, as he was to argue himself not long after he wrote the above lines, it had been the bloody suppression of the Commune that had won the Republic of M. Thiers the support of people who would have never accepted a regime bearing that name otherwise. Still, it was by ‘an appeal to the imagination’ that the republic managed to survive and become popular gradually. ‘Nineteenth-century France needed to be given an epic account of itself by its political elites, and this is what the republicans ultimately provided the country with.’20 According to Sudhir Hazareesingh, this is where republicans and Bonapartists outdid the liberals, and this explains the failure of liberalism in France charted by Lucien Jaume and lamented by him as well as by Rosanvallon and many others today. ‘For the liberals, the nineteenth century was a failure not only of policy, institutions and interest articulation, but most importantly … a failure of imagination.’21 Bagehot could not have agreed more. The main weakness of his analysis of French politics and their prospects was his near-obsessive insistence on the inability of the French, due to their ‘national character’, to ever make parliamentary government work, as they would squabble too much, and their assemblies would resemble yelling mobs, and matchboxes and so on. In the case of the prospects of parliamentarism one could find some more merit in the approach of Mill in the 1830s, viewing some of the weaknesses evinced by the French as inevitable results of the lack of experience and acquaintance with the mechanisms of constitutional government and hoping that they would improve with experience. There may be some things wrong with French assemblies today, but not necessarily those things that Bagehot anticipated. However, in his insistence that for a form of government to be successful in France it needed to be able to appeal to the imagination of the majority of the

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French and to attract some kind of affective attachment to it (partly attributing this need to ‘national character’ and partly to the concrete historical antecedents or lack thereof); in his insistence that France wanted, ‘above all things, to see who is to be her ruler’,22 and that ‘[f]orms will change and names will alter; but sooner or later the French will set up some government which gives them the sensation of fixity’ which the Empire had given them, and which many people think is what de Gaulle’s neo-Bonapartism – as they see it – gave the French with the Fifth Republic; and in his insistence (not particularly original with him, this latter) that France wanted ‘glory’ and a government needed to offer her a ‘showy international position’23 if it were to be popular, Bagehot came closest among the Victorians to offering a diagnosis that accords with what political theorists, political scientists and historians have come to think of French political culture with the benefit of hindsight. Given that Arnold was not particularly inclined to analyse purely political issues, among the thinkers with a sustained and life-long interest in France discussed here the other one who could have been expected to come up with an overall diagnosis was Mill. We saw in Chapter 3 what his verdict was about the malaises of French politics. But, for all the validity of his insights, he was perhaps too attached to an outlook based on rationality, as well as, at the same time, too passionately averse to Louis Napoleon and Bonapartism, for him to have been able to articulate an overall assessment of French political culture as down-to-earth as that of Bagehot.24 It was left to the author of The English Constitution, in the capacity of the ‘publicist’ (in the sense he himself gave the term in reference to Senior), to formulate the best that Victorian political thought had to offer on French politics during the Second Empire and the crucial first years during which the constitutional physiognomy of the Third Republic was at stake. If and to the extent that what he offered is not sufficiently satisfactory, it may be the limitations of time, place, and discourses that are to blame, and particularly the rather counter-productive and facile reliance on ‘national character’ as an explanatory tool, which sometimes led to circular or tautological explanations.

Notes Epigraph 1. Bagehot, Works, VIII, p. 177; Maurras 1928, pp. 8–9.

1 Introduction: Victorian ‘Public Moralists’, Ethnocentrism and the View of France 1. Martineau 1990, p. 97; Mill, CW, I, p. 63. 2. Quoted in Collini 1999, p. 76. 3. The question of ‘English’ as opposed to ‘British’ always bedevils studies of the period which wish to convey what the authors were saying, while trying to not adopt their identification of ‘Britain’ and ‘British’ with ‘England’ and ‘English’ as much as possible (cf. Collini 1991, pp. 6–7). Here ‘England’ and ‘English’ will feature more prominently than ‘Britain’ and ‘British’, because ‘England’ is what the thinkers discussed were talking about most of the time. In an attempt to define his terms (uncharacteristic for the time) Nassau Senior clarified that he would go on in the pages to follow to speak of ‘England – using the word England as a concise appellation for the nation inhabiting the British islands.’: Senior 1842, p. 17. 4. Cf. Jones 2000, pp. ix–x. 5. Collini 1991, pp. 1–3. 6. Arnold, Letters, III, p. 222 (18 January 1868). Cf. Watson 1973, pp. 254–6 and passim. 7. Bagehot, ‘Senior’s Journals’ (1871), Works, II, pp. 374–86. Cf. what James Stephen wrote to the editor of the Edinburgh Review on Senior’s style: Napier 1877, p. 363. 8. Burrow 2000, p. 84; G.M. Young, ‘The Greatest Victorian’, reprinted in: Bagehot, Works, XV, pp. 207–13. 9. Collini 1991, p. 13. 10. Hamer 1968, p. 384. 11. Bagehot, ‘Senior’s Journals’, Works, II, pp. 374–86. 12. Cf. Arnold, in a letter to his mother: ‘Fitzjames Stephen is evidently more vexed than I expected … ’: Letters, III, p. 11. 13. Collected Letters, VI, p. 242. 14. Mill complained in a letter to Comte (22 March 1842): ‘Il est … fort à regretter que les penseurs de nos deux pays soient loin d’avoir les uns pour les autres l’estime qu’ils méritent. … Les Anglais cherchent plus volontiers des idées nouvelles chez les allemands que chez les français.’ (‘It is highly regrettable that the thinkers of our two countries are far from having for each other the regard which they deserve. … The English look more willingly for new ideas among the Germans than among the French.’): CW, XIII, pp. 508–9. Cf. Brandes 1924, p. 199.

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172 Notes 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

Jones 2000, p. 63. See Himmelfarb 1952, pp. 185–7. Collini et al. 1983, p. 194. Hirst 1927, I, p. 269. For Morley and Mill see Collini 1991, p. 103 (and passim). See Finn 1993, pp. 275–6. Frederic’s son, Austin Harrison, has reported that his father once hit him on the jaw for making fun of the French army: Kent 1978, p. 96. Cf. Harrison 1884; Congreve 1884; Harrison (Royden) 1971; Vogeler 1984, pp. 95, 97–105, 127–31; Kent 1978, pp. 96–9; Finn 1993, pp. 273–92. Campos 1965, pp. 15–16. It is a matter of notoriety that Mill’s maid burnt the first manuscript of Carlyle’s French Revolution. For books fully dedicated to British intellectuals’ views of France covering roughly the period discussed in this book see: Campos 1965; Marandon 1967. For other works covering Franco-British intellectual relations or mutual perceptions see: Gibson 1995; Cornick 1994, 1996, 1997; Bédarida et al. 1980; Connoly 1985. For a former period see: Eagles 2000; Newman 1975, 1987; Colley 1992. Among a huge literature on the French Revolution and Britain see: Crossley and Small 1989; Dickinson 1989; Schofield 1986, 2000. For parts of the other side of the story, French views of Britain, cf.: Jennings 1986; Aron 1965; Cornick 1995, 2000; Reboul 1962; Taine 1864, 1872; Boutmy 1904; Ratcliffe 1977; Cottret 1991. On aspects of Arnold’s relationship with France see: Harding 1964; Sells 1935; Brown 1931; Campos 1965, pp. 13–48. ‘Numbers’, Prose Works, X, p. 154. O’Grady 1991, p. xxix. On Mill’s relationship with France or French thought see: Mueller 1956; Filipiuk 1991; Cairns 1985; Apchié 1931; Chass 1928; Vaysset-Boutbien 1941. CW, XIII, p. 536; CW, I, pp. 57–63. Mill had spent a year in France at the age of 14 with the family of Samuel Bentham, Jeremy’s brother. Cf. Charles James Fox’s earlier exclamations about being ‘French at heart’: Eagles 2000. See, for some examples: Stephen (Leslie) 1900, III, pp. 12–13; Bain 1882, pp. 78, 93, 161; Forcade 1859, p. 989; Palgrave 1874, pp. 166–7; Brandes 1924, p. 199; Morley 1873, pp. 670–1; Bagehot, ‘The Late Mr. Mill’, Works, III, p. 557. See, for instance: CW, XII, p. 78; XIII, p. 431. CW, I, p. 63 (the fuller statement is quoted in the epigraph of this Introduction). Cf. A System of Logic, where Mill referred to the tendency of ‘English thinkers’ to tacitly assume ‘empirical laws of human nature’ which were ‘calculated only for Great Britain and the United States’. ‘Yet, those who know the habits of the Continent of Europe … ’ knew better than do that: CW, VIII, pp. 905–6. From his 1852 poem ‘To Marguerite – Continued’: Arnold 1950, p. 182. Cf. Guizot 1972, pp. 271–3. Emphasis added: Letters, I, pp. 107–8 (11 May 1848). Frenchmen were duly appreciative. Arnold’s first foray into political matters, his pamphlet England and the Italian Question earned him a lot of gratitude in France and no lesser a figure than Villemain spoke of Dr Arnold’s son as one ‘who judges us perfectly’ (Arnold, Letters, I, p. 493; Honan 1981, p. 304). And as Arnold was

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34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50.

51.

proud to tell his audiences in America, Sainte-Beuve had written to him in the same flattering vein (‘Numbers’, Prose Works, X, p. 154. Cf. Brown 1931). Mill’s ‘curiosité sympathique’ about things French was no less noticed. (Cf. Forcade 1859, pp. 988–9; Chass 1928). Works, IV, p. 31, 131, 137. Bagehot sometimes quoted or referred to Mill as an authority on France: see, for instance, Works, VIII, p. 180; XII, p. 328. On the anti-French stereotypes and their uses see: Newman (Gerald) 1975; Newman (Gerald) 1987, pp. 139–53, 237–44, and passim. ‘French Thought’, Saturday Review, 14 February 1863, pp. 196–7. See, for Arnold’s evident satisfaction with this article: Letters, II, p. 190. Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St. Andrews (1867), CW, XXI, p. 226. ‘State of Society in America’ (1836), CW, XVIII, p. 94. CW, XXIII, p. 443 (this article was first published in Le Globe in French, on 18 April 1832). ‘Democracy’, Prose Works, II, p. 16. Cf. ‘A Courteous Explanation’, Prose Works, V, pp. 33–4; On the Study of Celtic Literature, Prose Works, III, pp. 291–395. ‘The “Monroe Doctrine” in 1823 and 1863’, Works, IV, pp. 98–9. Chateaubriand 1850, II, p. 965. Guizot 1997 [first published in French in 1828; first published in two English editions in 1837]. Cf. Mill, CW, XIII, p. 427. On Guizot’s influence on Mill’s advocacy of diversity and ‘systematic antagonism’ see: Varouxakis 1999. Cf. Burrow 1988, pp. 115–24; Collini et al. 1983, pp. 157–8, 204. Maine 1861. Mill had also commended Maine’s work repeatedly. Bagehot, Works, IV, pp. 98–9. Works, VII, pp. 56–7; VIII, pp. 187–91. Faverty 1951, p. 120 (the author gives reference to (a) Celtic Literature, and (b) Letters, ed. by Russell, I, p. 130). Cf. Jones 2000, pp. 63–8. Jones entitles this section of the book: ‘Culture and Democracy: Matthew Arnold versus Bagehot’ and offers an excellent analysis of a fundamental difference between the two thinkers in their respective approaches to cultural authority versus diversity and ‘discussion’ within a polity. (Cf. Kent 1978, pp. 94–5.) However, I am arguing here that they were at one when it came to the usefulness of ethnic or racial diversity. Letters, II, p. 49 (28 January 1861). That Arnold went on immediately following the statements quoted to recommend to his sister something (related to America) from the latest volume of Guizot’s memoirs may not be a completely accidental association, given how forcibly Guizot had argued exactly to the effect ‘what should we all be [in Europe] if we had not one another to check us … ’ and given also how well-versed in Guizot Arnold was (see also infra, Chapter 2). Emphasis added: Arnold, Letters, II, p. 370. The over-preponderance of single elements was exactly what Guizot had blamed for the rapid extinction of ancient civilizations such as that of Greece or the stunted growth and subsequent stationariness of oriental civilizations, in the Second Lecture of his Histoire de la Civilisation en Europe (Guizot 1997, pp. 28–32). And Mill, who had ‘dinned into people’s ears that Guizot is a great thinker and writer, till they are, though slowly, beginning to read him’ (CW, XIII, p. 427–16 April 1840), also dinned into their ears his ‘profound’ historical lesson;

174 Notes

52. 53.

54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66.

see, for some examples: CW, XX, pp. 267–70, 306–7, 380–2; XVIII, pp. 196–7, 273–4; XIX, pp. 397, 458–9; XIII, pp. 502–3. Cf. Varouxakis 1999, pp. 296–305. See ‘Nationality’, Selected Writings, I, pp. 409–33 (especially pp. 424–6, 432). Victorian thinkers were far from clear or consistent in defining and distinguishing between these different kinds of groups. See more on these issues in Chapter 4. Chapter XVI, Considerations on Representative Government (1861). For an example, see: CW, XX, p. 235 (‘Michelet’s History of France’, 1844). CW, XIII, pp. 508–9. Cf. Newman (Gerald) 1987, pp. 1–2: ‘Voltaire … characteristically observed that “when a Frenchman and an Englishman think the same, they must certainly be right.” The remark captured both the dissimilarity of the two national patterns of thought, and the conviction that truth was a province specially shared between them.’ CW, XIII, p. 457. Cf. Mill, CW, I, pp. 169–71; XII, p. 42; Arnold, Prose Works, II, p. 11; V, pp. 33–4; VIII, p. 8; Arnold, Letters, IV, pp. 442–3; Bagehot, Works, IV, p. 113 (‘People [in England] are so deafened with the loud reiteration of many halftruths … ’); Stephen 1867, pp. 78–9 (‘Mr. Arnold has a strong grasp of one aspect of the truth, and it is a very important one, but he falls into a very common kind of mistake when he puts it forward as the whole truth.’). CW, I, p. 171. Cf. Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy’s masterpiece under that title. A couple of Joachim du Bellay’s poems would do as well. Bagehot, ‘William Cowper’, Works, I, pp. 263–306, 263–4. Collini 1999, p. 143. According to Peter Mandler, ‘Mill never developed his theory of national character, or applied it specifically to the English’ (Mandler 2000, p. 238). The latter part of this statement, which is an assertion made also by Janice Carlisle in a different context (Carlisle 1991, pp. 144–5), has to be qualified. The English character – the character of the whole nation, not just of ‘the dispossessed’, as Carlisle argues (and here Carlisle is wrong, whereas Mandler is right in asserting that Mill did talk of the character of the whole nation) – and its improvement was Mill’s main preoccupation throughout his reflection and discussions on national characters. There are texts which go some way towards indicating that it was the study of the peculiarities of the English character that was in the centre of his ‘ethological’ concerns. Besides his general theoretical assertion that one can never get to know a foreign country as well as one’s own (CW, XVIII, p. 93), there is also his emphatic statement in a letter to Comte that since his early youth he had been occupied in the study of the English character, accompanied by the complaint that Continental observers were falling into gross misunderstandings of the character of their insular neighbour: CW, XIII, pp. 696–7 (26 March 1846). Cf. CW, XV, p. 656. Letters, III, p. 22 (24 March 1866). Prose Works, V, pp. 32–6. Prose Works, X, p. 154; Letters, III, p. 7. For attacks on Arnold’s ‘anti-patriotism’ see: Spencer 1873, pp. 475–502; Wingfield–Stratford 1913, II, pp. 390–9. Cf. Collini 1993(a), pp. 276–7; Faverty 1951, pp. 5–6, 188.

Notes 175 67. Collini 1993(a), pp. 276–7. 68. Stephen 1864(b), p. 683. Cf. Stephen 1866(a), p. 163: ‘Mr. Arnold may rest his reputation on this. Noble disdain for all shopkeepers, past, present, and future … cannot well go much further. … and, in order to do so more effectually, he puts his curses into the mouths of a gang of foreign Balaams, who certainly do the work for which they were fetched more efficiently than their prototype.’ 69. Watson 1973, 254–6. 70. Collini 1999, pp. 131–2, 134, 136. 71. Collini 1999, p. 139. 72. Bain 1882, pp. 78, 161; Palgrave 1874, pp. 166–7; cf. ibid., p. 155. 73. Collini 1991, pp. 312–14, 319–23. 74. Emphasis added: Forcade 1859, pp. 988–9. When Michelet published the fifth volume of his Histoire de France, which he spoke of as ‘ce volume si peu favorable aux Anglais’ (‘this volume [which is] so little favourable to the English’), he asked Gustave d’Eichthal if he could help him to enlist for its defence ‘la haute impartialité d’un Anglais, de M. Mill’ (‘the high impartiality of an Englishman, M. Mill’) (quoted – from a letter by Michelet to Gustave d’Eichthal – in Mill, CW, XIII, 432–3n). (On Michelet’s difficult relation with England cf. Crossley 1997.) So did Tocqueville when he was accused of bellicosity by Lord Brougham in 1843 (see infra, Chapter 5). 75. Cf. Dawson and Pfordresher 1979, p. 198. 76. Stapleton 1998(a), p. 243. 77. Emphasis added: Stephen 1859(c), pp. 76–7. Stephen did not allow this qualification to influence him too much though: ‘Still, after making allowances for these and other similar causes which may have accidentally heightened the contrast which he has drawn between this country and France, enough remains to make us feel that England is treated with scanty justice, whilst France receives much more than its due’ (ibid., p. 77). 78. CW, XII, p. 42. Cf. Autobiography, CW, I, pp. 169–71, where Mill spoke of half-truths, and of ‘the battle about the shield, one side of which was white and the other black’. Cf. also his comments on half-truths in ‘Coleridge’, CW, X, p. 123. Cf. Turk 1988, pp. 213–32. 79. We will come across examples of Mill’s attempts to combat half-truths and bring the British and the French together (most notably in times of international crises) in Chapter 5. To mention just one possible example here, it is arguable that Mill’s stubborn refusal to make any public statements concerning the Franco-Prussian War, while he had, at the same time, strong feelings and urgent recommendations to make to the British public (which he made, as it were, by proxy), was part of his determination to not put any oil in what he always saw as the fully flamed fire of British anti-Gallicanism. While he was speaking to Frenchmen all his mind in letters about what he saw as their responsibility for the war, the punishment they deserved, the lessons they should learn from that just punishment, and the ‘très grand defaults’ of their ‘caractère national’, he replied to British friends who were asking him to join them in public demonstrations against the French that, while he agreed with them, yet: ‘But, while I do all I can in private, I think it best for the present, both for public and for private reasons, that my

176 Notes

80. 81.

82. 83. 84. 85.

86.

87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

95. 96. 97. 98.

99. 100.

name should not appear. This letter therefore is confidential’ (CW, XVII, p. 1795. Cf. ibid., p. 1767). For a man who was living half of the year in Avignon, the ‘private reasons’ may be easy to guess. The ‘public’, though, may be connected with what I am discussing in this Introduction. ‘England and Ireland’, CW, XXV, p. 1096. On the occasion where he said this in 1848 he meant Carlyle. He had used this phrase while speaking of Lytton-Bulwer, but there can be little doubt that he regarded himself as one of ‘the moral teachers of England’, ‘labouring for the regeneration of England’s national character’. ‘The English National Character’ (June 1834): CW, XXIII, 717–27. Emphasis added. Faverty 1951, p. 68. Cf. Arnold’s (mis-)quotation of Goethe as having written that ‘Der Engländer ist eigentlich ohne Intelligenz’: Letters, IV, p. 442. Cf. Coulling 1974, p. 20. For Arnold’s attitude towards Renan see, for instance, Letters, IV, p. 14; and: Faverty 1951, p. 54. Bagehot was referring on this occasion to Arnold’s recommendation of the role of Academies like the Académie Française: Physics and Politics, Works, VII, pp. 50–2. Letters, IV, pp. 443–3; ‘Democracy’, Prose Works, II, pp. 3–29 (Introduction to: The Popular Education of France, 1861). See Stapleton 2000, p. 248. In original: ‘politeia’; some translate it as ‘constitution’. In either case, the message is the same. The translation is mine. The former emphasis (‘absence’) is in the original, the latter is mine. Stapleton 2000, p. 247. CW, XIV, pp. 15–16. CW, XIV, p. 16, fn. 11. Emerson’s speech had been reported in The Times of 14 March 1849 (for more see: Hayek 1951, p. 142). Stapleton 2000, p. 249. Cf. the remark of his brother, Leslie Stephen, that what J.F. Stephen desiderated in Mill’s theory of liberty was ‘the great patriotic passions which are the mainsprings of history’: see Stapleton 1998(a), p. 247. Stephen (Leslie) 1900, III, pp. 12–13. See supra, on strictures on Mill’s unEnglishness. CW, XVIII, pp. 86–9, 182–3; XVII, p. 1769. CW, VIII, p. 923. Newman (Gerald) 1987, pp. 243–4. The issue of what has been said of Mill’s attitude to nationality/nationalism more generally is huge, and I will try to limit myself here to what applies directly to his relation to France and what he had in common with Arnold. For more on the broader questions, see my forthcoming book on Mill on Nationality (London: Routledge). Cf. Varouxakis 2001; Varouxakis 2002. This phrase occurs in the oft-quoted (not least as the epigraph in Maurizio Viroli’s book trying – unconvincingly, in my opinion – to distinguish between a bad ‘nationalism’ and a good ‘patriotism’ (see Viroli 1995)) passage where Mill outlined the three conditions of stability in political society, including as one of these conditions ‘a strong and active principle of

Notes 177

101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129.

130. 131.

cohesion among the members of the same community or state’: CW, VIII, p. 923 (A System of Logic, Book VI, chapter X). Letters, III, pp. 17–18. See Stapleton 1998(a), p. 251. Stapleton 1998(a), p. 244. Stephen 1866(b), p. 208. CW, XIV, p. 6. Morley, ‘Macaulay’, in: Morley 1970, pp. 73–97. CW, I, pp. 307–11; XX, 17, p. 60. Emphasis added. Emphasis added. CW, XX, pp. 17, 21–2. Cf. what Mill wrote to Macvey Napier on 20 October 1845: CW, XIII, p. 683. Spencer 1873; cf. Wingfield-Stratford 1913. Collini 1993(a), p. 276. See Prose Works, V, p. 370, editor’s ‘Critical and Explanatory Notes’. ‘My Countrymen’, Prose Works, V, p. 27. Cf. Senior 1842, pp. 18–20; Stephen 1866(a), p. 162; Mill, CW, XXI, p. 112. Emphasis added. Letters, II, p. 367 (6 January 1865). Cf. Coulling 1974, pp. 21–2. ‘My Countrymen’, Prose Works, V, p. 27. ’My Countrymen’, Prose Works, V, pp. 29–31. Cf: ‘The Incompatibles’ (1881), Prose Works, IX, pp. 238–85 (especially pp. 242, 270–1). For more on this see infra, Chapter 2. Prose Works, II, pp. 131–2, 392. See ‘Dedicatory Letter’ (1871), Friendship’s Garland, Prose Works, V, p. 355. Prose Works, V, pp. 96–7. Emphasis added: Letters, III, pp. 17–18. CW, XXI, pp. 109–24. See his letter to J.W. Parker: CW, XV, p. 652. It was duly reviewed, very favourably, in the Revue des Deux Mondes (Forcade 1859). CW, XXI, p. 112. Cf. Senior 1842. Dawson and Pfordresher 1979, p. 198. Stephen 1866(a), p. 163. Emphasis added: Stephen 1866(a), p. 162. Senior believed that England did not care at all about what foreigners thought of her, and contributed an interesting analysis of the reasons for English disregard for the opinion of foreigners (Senior 1842, pp. 18–20, 31, 32–3, 42, and passim). Letters, III, p. 17; Prose Works, V, pp. 32–6. An analogy one can think of is Mill’s rationale for his rejection of the secret ballot. He wanted people to vote openly in order for them to feel constrained to make electoral choices which they would be able to justify publicly in front of their fellow-constituents, choices therefore for which they could invoke reasons based on common interests and shared principles. If one applies this idea to the international arena, nations would have to ‘prove’ their greatness by invoking what they were contributing to the common fund of humanity, to civilization, and what they were excelling in according to commonly accepted criteria.

178 Notes

2

Was France ‘the Most Civilised of Nations’?

1. Arnold, ‘Equality’ (1878), Prose Works, VIII, p. 279; Guizot, The History of Civilization in France, in: Guizot 1972, p. 279; Macaulay, ‘Sir James Mackintosh’ (1835), in: Macaulay 1874, p. 325. 2. Tocqueville, OC, VI, 1, p. 291. 3. Senior 1842, p. 6. Senior also wrote of England that she over-estimated her civilization (ibid., p. 18). 4. Febvre 1973. Cf. Gusdorf 1971; Lochore 1935. 5. He continues: ‘ – then, as now, the French were thought to have a monopoly on being civilized – ’: Eagleton 2000(a), p. 9. 6. Eagleton 2000 (a), p. 9. Cf. ibid.: ‘ … civilization is part-descriptive, partnormative: it can either neutrally designate a form of life (“Inca civilization”), or implicitly commend a life-form for its humanity, enlightenment and refinement. The adjective form “civilized” does this most obviously today’. 7. In fact, ‘[o]ne reason for the emergence of “culture”, then, is the fact that “civilization” was beginning to ring less and less plausible as a value-term’: Eagleton 2000(a), pp. 10–11. 8. Coleridge 1972, pp. 33–4, 37–8. See also: Morrow 1990, p. 145; Williams (Raymond) 1961, pp. 74–8; Holmes 1982, pp. 60–1. 9. That Arnold included Mill as one of these enemies caused the latter to protest and is obviously unfair, as the rest of this chapter should make clear. Cf. Robson ( John M.) 1968, pp. 125–6. 10. Yet cf., on Macaulay: Clive 1973, pp. 77–9. 11. The phrase is Arnold’s: ‘My Countrymen’, Prose Works, V, p. 27. 12. Arnold, ‘Joubert’ (1864), Prose Works, III, p. 210. For examples of Arnold attacking Macaulay for his complacent statements about England’s progress and civilization see: Prose Works, V, pp. 17, 51; III, 257. Cf. ibid., pp. 316–17. 13. Morley, ‘Macaulay’, in: Morley 1970, pp. 73–97. The evidence that Arnold must have read Morley’s essay on Macaulay in the Fortnightly Review (1876), is in Arnold’s ‘A French Critic on Milton’ (1877), Prose Works, VIII, p. 170 (adducing evidence to be found in: Morley 1970, p. 74). 14. Acton, ‘Review of Philp’s History of Progress in Great Britain’, Selected Writings, II, pp. 31–3. 15. Arnold, ‘The Incompatibles’, Prose Works, IX, p. 271. Cobden’s statement is quoted in: Thomson 1950, p. 32; on Macaulay’s complacency over civilization see also: Houghton 1957, pp. 39–40, 44, 123, 269; Forbes 1951–52, p. 21. More generally, on the concept of civilization in Britain at the time, cf.: Lochore 1935, pp. 2–3; cf. also Burrow 1985, pp. 80–93. 16. Acton, ‘Mr. Goldwin Smith’s Irish History’, Selected Writings, II, pp. 67–97, pp. 73–7. 17. On Buckle and his History see: Semmel 1976, pp. 370–86. I am mentioning Guizot here because both the title and the whole conception of the project (studying the history of civilisation in England by comparing it with the histories of the countries around it) are clearly reminiscent of Guizot’s Histoire de la Civilisation en France (1829–32). For a very casual and all-embracing use of ‘civilisation’ cf. Senior 1842, pp. 5–6. 18. See Turk 1988, pp. 172, 178–9.

Notes 179 19. In London and Westminster Review, 3 (April 1836); reprinted in Dissertations and Discussions, I, pp. 160–205; now in: CW, XVIII, pp. 117–47. 20. CW, XVIII, pp. 119–20. 21. Cf., on Guizot’s account of these elements of civilization: Mancini 1994, pp. 88–9. 22. Emphasis added. Cf. CW, XXIII, pp. 589, 721; XII, p. 37; XIII, p. 622. 23. CW, XVIII, pp. 120–1. 24. Bain 1882, p. 48. 25. CW, XIII, p. 427. Now, it may or may not be a simple coincidence that Mill’s (and Blanco-White’s) first review recommending Guizot to the British public appeared in January 1836, and two English translations of the Histoire de la Civilisation en Europe (1828) appeared the next year, in 1837: General History of Civilisation in Europe, from the Fall of the Roman Empire to the French Revolution, trans. D.A. Talboys (Oxford: Talboys, 1837); and Lectures on European Civilization, trans. P.M. Beckwith (London: Macrone, 1837). 26. Lochore 1935, p. 9 (characteristically, chapter I of the book is entitled ‘Before and after Guizot’, pp. 9–17); Febvre, 1973, pp. 240–7; Gusdorf 1971. Cf. Crossley 1993, pp. 82–8; Rosanvallon 1985, pp. 191–3. 27. The first: London Review, 2 (January 1836); now in: CW, XX, pp. 367–93; the second: Edinburgh Review, 82 (October, 1845); reprinted in Dissertations and Discussions, II, pp. 218–82; now in: CW, XX, pp. 257–94. The works reviewed by Mill were: François P.G. Guizot, (I) Essais sur l’Histoire de France (1823); (II) Cours d’Histoire Moderne; containing: Histoire Générale de la Civilisation en Europe (1828); and Histoire Générale de la Civilisation en France, 5 vols (1829–32). That Mill regarded the review article of 1836 as basically his own is evident by his letter to Henry S. Chapman: CW, XII, p. 284. The extent of his own contribution can be surmised from his letters to Blanco White of 21 October 1835 (ibid., p. 280) and 24 November 1835 (ibid., p. 285). Cf. CW, XIII, p. 427. 28. Emphasis added: CW, XX, p. 374. For this definition in its author’s text see: Guizot, 1972, pp. 140–59. 29. CW, XX, p. 374. Cf. CW, XX, p. 266 (Mill’s second review of Guizot, in 1845). 30. Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy (hereafter: Political Economy): CW, III, pp. 707–8. 31. ‘Civilization’: CW, XVIII, p. 143; see also ibid., pp. 138–46; and ‘Sedgwick’s Discourse’: CW, X, pp. 31–74 (especially pp. 33–5). 32. See ‘Tocqueville on Democracy in America [II]’, CW, XVIII, pp. 197–200. 33. On Coleridge’s views on the ‘overbalance of the commercial spirit in consequence of the absence or weakness of the counter-weights’, see: Morrow 1990, pp. 115–21. 34. See Varouxakis 1999 (especially pp. 296–305). A question that is bound to arise in this context is: If Guizot’s historical works were so significant in Britain, why have there not been more acknowledgments of his importance and influence on their thinking by individual thinkers? Besides the murkiness of ‘influence’ in general, there are at least two other, more concrete answers, one general and one specific to Britain. To start with the general, one reason why Guizot has received less attention than he deserves, and, in our specific example, why Mill’s indebtedness to Guizot had not received its

180 Notes

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

due by students of Mill’s thought, must be the similarity of many of Guizot’s views to those of Tocqueville. This similarity has led scholars to attribute to Tocqueville’s influence a number of ideas that both Mill and Tocqueville, and many others all over Europe, found in Guizot. The similarity in many of the pronouncements of the two French thinkers is due to the fact that Tocqueville was profoundly influenced by Guizot, whose pupil he was, literally. There is ample evidence that he regularly attended Guizot’s lectures (that were later published as Cours d’Histoire Moderne) in the years 1828–30, kept notes, and read – more than once – the published version. The notes Tocqueville kept have been published in his Oeuvres Complètes, XVI (Mélanges), pp. 439–534 (for the evidence to this effect see: Varouxakis 1999, p. 294 and particularly note 9). Now, as regards Guizot’s influence and recognition in Britain, there is one more reason. Guizot had become very unpopular in Britain because of the Spanish marriages affair (1847) and his popularity received a final blow when the regime under which he was the dominant minister was toppled as well as disgraced in February 1848. Here is what Macaulay wrote in a letter of Guizot, when the latter was in exile in England, in March 1848: ‘I left a card with Guizot, but did not ask to see him. I purposely avoided meeting him on Friday at Lord Holland’s. The truth is that I like and esteem the man. But I think the policy of the minister both at home and abroad detestable. At home it was all corruption, and abroad all treachery’ (Macaulay, The Letters, IV, p. 362 – 13 March 1848). On Mill’s seesaw attitude towards Guizot as a statesman see infra, Chapter 5. CW, XVIII, pp. 191–2. Emphasis added: CW, XVIII, pp. 196–7. On China as a cautionary tale with regard to stagnation see: Burrow 1988, pp. 115–24. J.S. Mill, Autobiography, CW, I, p. 11 (first draft: p. 10); cf. Thomas 1979, pp. 105–6. Emphasis (both times) added: Mill (James) 1975, pp. 224, 228–9. See, for instance, Bagehot, Works, IV, p. 108; also references specifying ‘commercial civilization’ or ‘material civilisation’: ibid., pp. 35, 88. For Bagehot’s comments on Guizot and his writings, see ibid., pp. 55–6, 440–4. Emphasis (both times) added: Semmel 1984, pp. 90–1 (reference is given to: Mill, ‘Coleridge’, (1840), CW, X, pp. 123–5). Emphasis added. Emphasis added: CW, X, p. 123. Mill had made remarks to the same effect on Rousseau’s critique of ‘what is called civilization’ in On Liberty: see CW, XVIII, p. 253. Cf. CW, XXI, p. 187 (on ‘the calamitous influence of Rousseau’). CW, I, p. 171. CW, X, p. 123. Raymond Williams, commenting on the part of the text from Mill’s ‘Coleridge’ where Mill had presented the arguments of those who fixed their attention ‘upon the high price which is paid for’ the advantages of ‘civilization’, and apparently not being attentive to Mill’s two uses of ‘civilization’ in the other texts discussed here, opined: ‘This is an aggregation of a number of kinds of criticism of what Mill calls “Civilization”, but which, from the details of certain of its points, might better be called Industrialism’ (Williams (Raymond) 1961, p. 67). It would have been closer to Mill’s terminology to say ‘civilization in the narrow sense’.

Notes 181 46. Cf. CW, XVIII, p. 119. 47. Bain 1882, p. 48; Himmelfarb, 1973, p. xvi; Semmel 1984, pp. 90–1. Cf. the short treatment of Mill on ‘civilization’ in Francis and Morrow 1994, pp. 148–50. Cf. Professor Semmel’s more recent attempt to present Mill as much closer to the ‘conservatives’ than he ever was, in Semmel’s contribution in: Eisenach 1998, pp. 49–76. 48. See: Political Economy, CW, III, pp. 754–5 (note the changes in later editions); Representative Government, CW, XIX, pp. 409–10; ‘A Few Words on NonIntervention’ (1859), CW, XXI, p. 116. Cf. CW, XV, p. 778. 49. CW, XII, p. 37 (8 October 1929 – emphasis in original). 50. Guizot, Histoire de la Civilisation en France (First Lecture): see Guizot 1972, pp. 266–80. Mill, CW, XX, pp. 374–7. 51. Emphasis added. These views of England and its ‘narrow’, ‘social civilization’ had also been inculcated from a very early age in another of our Victorians, the young Matthew Arnold whilst he was a Sixth-Former at Rugby: ‘He also digested, at least in part, [Guizot’s] Histoire de la Révolution d’Angleterre, en 1640, for Sixth-Form French, along with Guizot’s choleric view of the British as practical and sound in action, but lost and indignant in the realm of ideas’ (emphasis added: Honan 1981, p. 42). And, long later, he still appreciated Guizot’s historical works. We find Arnold in 1875 writing in a letter his recommendation for the improvement of the Oxford curriculum: ‘If they merely put in these works in other languages into their History curriculum – Thucydides, Tacitus, and, either Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois, or Guizot’s [History of] Civilisation in France, the Tripos would be incalculably improved, and would be a real training’ (Letters, IV, p. 292). In the latter work Arnold must have found terms which he used very often in his frequent denunciations of the civilization of England and of its middle class, their ‘social civilisation’, or their ‘narrow civilisation’. 52. CW, XX, pp. 374–7. Cf., again, what young Matthew Arnold had to say on the Germans in a letter, in 1848, some of which seems almost verbatim taken from these pages of Guizot’s Histoire de la Civilisation en France: Letters, I, p. 114. 53. CW, XX, p. 378. 54. Guizot 1972, pp. 269, 279. 55. See CW, XX, pp. 290–4. 56. CW, X, pp. 31–74. 57. Cf. Stephen 1866a, p. 163. 58. Cf. Guizot 1972, pp. 271–3; also Mill, CW, XX, pp. 374–5. 59. CW, X, pp. 34–5. 60. See, for instance, ‘The English National Character’ (1834): CW, XXIII, pp. 717–27; also: CW, XII, pp. 38–9, 192; XIV, p. 95; XXIII, pp. 443–7, 527–8. Cf. Bagehot, Works, IV, pp. 113–14: ‘Intellect still gives there [in Paris], and has always given, a distinctive position. To be a membre de l’Institut is a recognised place in France; but in London, it is an ambiguous distinction to be a “clever fellow”.’ 61. See CW, XXIII, p. 721. Cf. ibid., 375. And in a letter to Sarah Austin (26 February 1844) Mill had written about Samuel Laing’s latest book on the continental countries: ‘It is strange to find a man recognizing as he does that the Norwegian, and German, and French state of society are much better for the happiness of all concerned than the struggling, go-ahead English and American

182 Notes

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71.

72.

73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82.

state, and yet always measuring the merit of all things by their tendency to increase the number of steam engines, and to make human beings as good machines and therefore as mere machines as those’ (CW, XIII, p. 622). Cf. Laing 1842. Laing has been called ‘one of the few overt defenders of philistinism in Victorian times’, who rejected ‘culture and learning entirely’ and had concluded ‘that there is a fundamental antagonism, no less, between capitalism and culture’: Porter 1991, p. 355. ‘One Difference Between France and England’, Works, VIII, p. 180. Cf. A System of Logic (1843), CW, VIII, pp. 946–7. Cf. CW, XIII, pp. 508–9. Cf. CW, XVIII, pp. 93–4; Arnold, Letters, I, pp. 107–8. Forcade 1859, p. 989 (cf. supra, Chapter 1). Harding 1964, pp. 15–16. On references to Dr Arnold as ‘Celt-hating’ see Poliakov 1971, p. 64; cf. Faverty 1951, pp. 76–7. See, on the first point: Honan 1981, p. 42; and, on the second: Letters, IV, p. 292. Cf. Crossley 1993, p. 84: ‘There is in fact an Arnoldian ring to many of Guizot’s pronouncements for, like the author of Culture and Anarchy, he understands civilisation in the broad sense as a moral force, as a humanising power which brings the inward moral and spiritual development of the individual into harmony with the forms of social and collective life.’ Emphasis added: Prose Works, V, pp. 3–31, p. 20. ‘Irish Catholicism and British Liberalism’ (1878), Prose Works, VIII, pp. 321–47, p. 327; ‘My Countrymen’, Prose Works, III, pp. 3–31, pp. 27–8; ‘Equality’ (1878), Prose Writings, VIII, pp. 277–305, p. 284. He went on: ‘The idea of perfection as a general expansion of the human family is at variance with our strong individualism. … Above all, the idea of perfection as a harmonious expansion of human nature is at variance with our want of flexibility, with our inaptitude for seeing more than one side of a thing. … ’: Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism, Prose Works, V, pp. 85–229, particularly pp. 94–5. Prose Works, V, pp. 96–9. Arnold often spoke of ‘civilisation’ and ‘humanisation’ as being interchangeable: ‘And man is not to be civilised or humanised, call it which you will, by thwarting his vital instincts.’: emphasis added: ‘Preface to Mixed Essays’ (1879), Prose Works, VIII, p. 371. Coulling 1974, pp. 190–2; cf. Eagleton 2000b, p. 14; Vogeler 1962. Moreover, on Arnold’s attitude towards definitions, cf. Holloway 1953, pp. 221–2. See, for example: ‘Equality’, Prose Works, VIII, p. 286. ‘Civilisation in the United States’ (1888), Prose Works, XI, pp. 352–3, 356–7. Cf. ‘My Countrymen’ (1866), Prose Works, V, pp. 21–2. Emphasis added: ‘The Incompatibles’ (1881), Prose Works, IX, p. 271. Cf. ‘Civilisation in the United States’ (1888), Prose Works, XI, p. 352. Cf. ibid., p. 356. Cf. Mill, Autobiography, CW, I, p. 177. Cf. Mill’s explicit acceptance, in his later writings and correspondence, that ‘civilization in the narrow sense’ was probably a necessary stage on the road to a fuller improvement of mankind (see supra). ‘Preface to Mixed Essays’ (1879), Prose Works, VIII, pp. 370–2. ‘Preface to Mixed Essays’ (1879), Prose Works, VIII, p. 372.

Notes 183 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

3

‘Equality’, Prose Works, VIII, pp. 277–305. Prose Works, VIII, pp. 286–8. Emphasis added. Cf. Hamerton 1876. For very interesting remarks on Hamerton’s writings and impact see: Marandon 1967, passim. He repeated this even more emphatically and expanded on the issue in: ‘The Incompatibles’ (1881), Prose Works, IX, pp. 242, 270–1. Arnold was discussing extensively in ‘Equality’ Sir Erskine May’s Democracy in Europe: A History, London, 1877. Cf. Letters, IV, p. 163. Prose Works, VIII, pp. 285–93. Emphasis added. ‘Equality’, Prose Works, VIII, pp. 293–9. We may note here that this insistence was a major difference in emphasis between Arnold’s definition of civilization and that of Guizot, who had emphasised the intellectual and moral development of individuals, of great examples of individual excellence, without insisting on the spread of these qualities throughout society as a prerequisite of true civilization. Emphasis added: Letters, I, p. 91. In a letter of 3 August 1859 Arnold had again referred to ‘what Sainte-Beuve calls an “intelligence ouverte et traversée”’: Letters, I, p. 481. Letters, I, pp. 89–90 (6 March 1848). Cf. ibid., pp. 107–8. Emphasis added: Letters, I, p. 84 (28 February 1848). Cf. ibid., p. 95 (10 March 1848). Prose Works, I, pp. 65–96, pp. 78–9. ‘Democracy’ (Introduction to: The Popular Education of France), (1861), Prose Works, II, pp. 3–29, p. 11. Cf. ‘Edoardo Fusco’ (1876), Prose Works, VIII, p. 8. ‘The Incompatibles’ (1881), Prose Works, IX, pp. 238–85, p. 270. Cf. ibid., p. 242. Letters, I, p. 95 (10 March 1848).

French Politics Through British ‘Glasses’ 1. Collini et al. 1983, p. 196; Bagehot, ‘The Gains of the World by the Two Last Wars in Europe’ (1866) Works, VIII, p. 158. 2. Arnold, Letters, I, pp. 94–5 (10 March 1848); Carlyle, Collected Letters, XXII, p. 256 (27 February 1848). 3. Emphasis added: Trevelyan 1908, p. 117. 4. Trevelyan 1908, p. 654. Cf. on Macaulay’s attitude towards the Revolution of 1789 and the lessons (in favour of reform) he wished the British Parliament to draw from it in 1832: Collini et al. 1983, pp. 196–7. Bagehot wrote in 1869: ‘A defeat of French Liberals is not their defeat only; it is a defeat of all Liberals. Throughout Europe for years free action and free thought were beaten and helpless because of the calamities of 1793 and the calamities of 1848.’: Works, IV, p. 134. 5. The Letters, I, p. 282. 6. Autobiography: CW, I, p. 179; ‘Armand Carrel’, CW, XX, p. 192. 7. CW, XII, pp. 55–6, 60. Cf. Bain 1882 p. 42.

184 Notes 8. CW, XII, p. 55. For what the crowd seems to have asked for in July 1830 see: Newman (Edgar Leon) 1975, pp. 17–40. For a survey of historians’ divergent views on what happened in 1830 see Pilbeam 1991, pp. 1–12. 9. CW, XXII, p. 143. Cf. ibid., pp. 134–40. 10. CW, XXII, pp. 130–3. Cf. CW, XII, p. 59; XXII, pp. 144–6. 11. CW, XXII, p. 288. 12. For Carrel’s – quite similar – stance, see: McLaren 1971, pp. 154–5. 13. CW, XXII, pp. 485–6. Cf. ‘Armand Carrel’: CW, XX, pp. 200–1. 14. See letters to Carlyle: CW, XII, pp. 194–7, 218–9; cf. ibid., pp. 191–4. 15. CW, XXIII, pp. 692–5 (30 March 1834). Cf. ibid., pp. 662–3 (12 January 1834). Cf. Robson (Ann) 1986, p. lxix. 16. CW, XX, pp. 167–215. For an account that connects adeptly Mill’s journalistic coverage of French affairs in the early 1830s with the reform agitation at home see Robson (Ann) 1986, pp. xliv–lxxi. 17. It must have been the events that took place a month after he wrote his most optimistic article (of 30 March 1834: CW, XXIII, pp. 692–5), the April 1834 insurrections and their aftermath, that shuttered any hopes Mill might still have retained for progress in France as a result of the July Revolution. 18. Cf. Williams (Geraint) 1989. 19. Cf. Girard 1985, pp. 104–6. Interestingly, Girard entitles the part of his account which covers the period Mill referred to ‘Le ministère Martignac: une occasion manquée?’ (‘The Martignac ministry: a missed opportunity?’). 20. CW, XX, pp. 190–1. Cf. ‘Centralisation’, CW, XIX, p. 582. 21. See CW, XIX, p. 420. 22. ‘Armand Carrel’: CW, XX, p. 191. Cf. ‘Centralisation’: CW, XIX, p. 582. Cf. also Tocqueville’s remark on French attitudes to centralisation quoted in Mayer 1939, p. 20. 23. Emphasis added. Cf. Bagehot’s later remark (in September 1870) that ‘By long and painful experience, France has attained what may be called a routine in revolutions.’: Works, VIII, p. 182. 24. Cf. CW, XXII, p. 146. 25. Emphasis added: CW, XX, p. 191. 26. Selected Writings, I, p. 422. 27. Emphasis added: CW, XX, pp. 191–2. 28. Emphasis added: CW, XIX, p. 583. Bagehot was to speak similarly of governmental change by ‘spasms of revolutionary ardour’ (see infra, Part III). 29. CW, XVII, pp. 1977–8. The article was published in London and Westminster Review in October 1837. 30. In particular with regard to Carrel’s impact on Mill’s editorial ventures and ambitions, see Robson and Robson 1985, pp. 235–8, 240–1, 248. Mill seems to have given Carrel no less credit for his qualities as a commentator of the French political scene. As he wrote, in September 1835, to no less a commentator of that scene than Tocqueville, about Carrel, ‘him I conceive to be, next to you [the] best authority I know on the state of France’: CW, XII, p. 272. Cf. ibid., p. 309. 31. Emphasis added: CW, XX, p. 206. 32. See, in particular on the dimension referred to here, CW, XX, 209–10, where Mill quotes from Nisard’s article on ‘Armand Carrel’ in the Revue des Deux Mondes of October 1837 (see: Nisard 1837, pp. 14–15, 16).

Notes 185 33. CW, XX, p. 209. 34. Emphasis added: CW, XX, pp. 209–11. 35. Jennings 1991, p. 513; Collingham 1988, p. 181; Jardin and Tudesq 1983, p. 113; McLaren 1971, pp. 324–5. 36. Broglie 1859, pp. 24–5. Cf. Zeldin 1973, p. 500. 37. Kelly 1992, pp. 2–6. 38. See, for instance, CW, XXIII, pp. 694–5. 39. The conclusions presented here are based on the examination of a bewildering number of newspaper writings and letters; but a useful text that somehow epitomises his attitude can be found in: CW, XXIII, pp. 661–3. 40. Cf. CW, XII, pp. 193–4. On the divisions among the republicans see: Collingham 1988, pp. 137–9; Plamenatz 1952, pp. 38–48. 41. Cf. CW, XX, pp. 203–7. 42. See, for instance: CW, XXIII, pp. 340–1, 530, 661–3. 43. CW, XXIII, p. 662. Cf. CW, XXIII, pp. 589–90; I, p. 203; XII, pp. 256, 281–2. 44. CW, XX, pp. 200–1. 45. CW, XIII, p. 731. 46. The Letters, V, p. 210. 47. The Letters, IV, p. 362. 48. Prochaska 2000, p. 81. On the Chartist agitation of this year see also: Halévy 1951, pp. 236–72; Finn 1993, pp. 60–106. 49. Collected Letters, XXII, p. 256 (27 February 1848). 50. Collected Letters, XXII, p. 257 (28 February 1848). Some weeks later, when the Chartist agitation was reaching its peak, Emerson reported to Matthew Arnold that ‘Carlyle was much agitated by the course of things: … He gives our institutions as they are called – aristocracy – Church – etc. five years, I heard last night’: Arnold, Letters, I, p. 101 (12 April 1848). 51. Carlyle 1892, pp. 1–13. 52. Cf. Arnold’s comments to that effect: Letters, I, pp. 91, 93. 53. Cf. Bagehot, Works, IV, pp. 67–8; Acton, The History of Freedom and Other Essays, quoted in Fasnacht 1952, p. 183; Mill, CW, XX, pp. 325–6; cf. Tocqueville 1985, pp. 142–6, 149–52. 54. Collected Letters, XXII, pp. 274–5 (22 March 1848); cf. ibid., pp. 260–1 (letter to John Forster, 5 March 1848). 55. Collected Letters, XXII, pp. 264–5. Cf. ibid., p. 274 (22 March 1848). 56. Cf. Collected Letters, XXII, pp. 278–9. 57. Emphasis added. 58. Collected Letters, XXII, pp. 276–8 (24 March 1848). 59. Carlyle 1892, pp. 15–52. 60. Carlyle 1892, pp. 19–20. 61. ‘England and Ireland’, CW, XXV, pp. 1095–1100 (The Examiner, 13 May 1848). For Arnold’s comment see: Letters, I, p. 109. 62. CW, XXV, pp. 1099–1100. 63. Collected Letters, XXIII, p. 176 (letter to Geraldine E. Jewsbury, 13 December 1848). On ‘George Sandism’ in Britain at the time see: Thomson 1977. 64. Letters, I, p. 101. 65. Hansard, 3rd series, XCVIII 1848, pp. 712–13. 66. In this Greg differed from Lord Brougham or Senior, who both defended Louis Philippe (the former incomparably more than the latter).

186 Notes 67. Emphasis added: Greg 1848, pp. 365–6. 68. Cf. Acton, Selected Writings, II, p. 73: ‘ … there is something in the French nation which incapacitates it for liberty; … what they have always sought, and sometimes enjoyed, is not freedom; … their liberty must diminish in proportion as their ideal is attained’. Cf. also: Acton, Selected Writings, III, p. 15; Mill, CW, XIX, pp. 420–1. 69. Cf. Acton, Lectures on the French Revolution, quoted in Fasnacht 1952, p. 111; Mill, CW, XX, pp. 210–11; XIX, p. 420. 70. Emphasis added: Greg 1848, p. 366. 71. Emphasis added. 72. And like most observers, Greg thought that another discouraging feature of the situation was ‘the singular absence of all great men’, with the partial exception of Lamartine (again typical). For the extent to which Lamartine was the darling of the ruling elites in Britain, even of those most apprehensive about the new republic, see: Bensimon 1999. 73. Cf. Acton, Selected Writings, III, p. 600. 74. Cf. Hazareesingh 1997a. 75. Cf. Acton, ‘Nationality’ (1862), Selected Writings, I, pp. 414–5; ‘“Bureaucracy” by Richard Simpson’, Selected Writings, I, pp. 518–30. 76. Cf. Bagehot, Works, XII, pp. 271–2; IV, p. 112. Even while in his most exuberantly Francophile phase, Mill agreed also: see CW, XXIII, p. 402. 77. Greg 1848, p. 368. 78. See: The Examiner, 1848, p. 243. 79. Brougham 1848, pp. 14, 24. 80. For this parallel between Burke-Paine and Brougham-Mill see Levin 1998. 81. The previous occasion was when he came to the defence of Tocqueville in 1843. 82. CW, XIII, p. 731 (29 February 1848). 83. For Mill’s first comment on the form of government see, in particular: CW, XX, pp. 330–1. However, as he was to argue in 1849 (in the ‘Vindication of the French Revolution of February 1848’), though a republic was ‘the most natural and congenial of all forms of free government’ for France (because of the traits of the French national character), ‘it had two great hindrances to contend with’, namely ‘the political indifference of the majority’ and ‘the dread inspired by the remembrance of 1793 and 1794’. These two causes ‘will render its existence, even now when it is established, more or less precarious’: CW, XX, p. 332. 84. CW, XIII, 731–2 (29 February 1848)); cf. Bain 1882, p. 94. Mill was expressing a view shared by many in France in 1848: see McLaren 1971, pp. 57–8; and Robson ( John M.) 1985, p. cviii (n. 40). 85. CW, XIII, pp. 731–2. Cf. ibid., pp. 733–4. 86. Autobiography: CW, I, p. 67; cf. CW, XX, p. 12. 87. CW, XIII, pp. 735–6. 88. See: Plamenatz 1952, pp. 58–9; Agulhon 1983, pp. 16–18. 89. Cf. CW, XX, pp. 355–6. On the composition of camps within the French government, cf. Matthew Arnold in a letter to A.H. Clough: ‘The Prov[isional] Gov[ernment] is said to be divided – Garnier Pages [sic] Cremieux [sic] and Marie versus Ledru Rollin, Flocon – and Louis Blanc. Lamartine neutral – inclining to the first set.’ (Letters, I, p. 92–8 March

Notes 187

90. 91.

92. 93. 94.

95. 96.

97. 98.

99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

106. 107.

108. 109. 110. 111.

1848). Cf. Agulhon 1983, pp. 32–3; Zeldin 1973, pp. 484–94; Plamenatz 1952, pp. 40–1, 85 (n.1). On the fate of what Mill called Lamartine’s ‘beautiful’ book, cf. Fortesque 1987. Mill, CW, XIII, pp. 739–40. Carlyle, Collected Letters, XXII, pp. 274–5 (22 March 1848). Cf. Bagehot, Works, XII, p. 326. Unlike his deceased brother, Godefroy (whose intimacy with Jane Welsh Carlyle while in exile in London had given rise to a lot of gossip), Eugène Cavaignac was not one of the radical republicans, but rather a moderate. CW, XIV, p. 12. Cf. Plamenatz 1952, p. 84–5. He gave an example of what he meant by the last phrase: ‘As an example I may mention the grand idea of the Provisional Government, that of making all education, even professional, gratuitous … ’. Cf. ‘England and Ireland’ (13 May 1848), CW, XXV, pp. 1099–1100. CW, XIV, pp. 32–4. Cf. what Mill had written to Harriet Taylor on Proudhon (ca. 31 March 1849): ibid., p. 21 (starting with the statement: ‘I heartily wish Proudhon dead’). For the importance of the revolution of 1848 and its aftermath, and of France more generally, for the development of Mill’s views on socialism see Mueller 1956 pp. 170–259 (though somewhat dated). On the development of Mill’s views on socialism and their connection with his theory of freedom see: Claeys 1987, pp. 122–47. Works, IV, p. 32; cf. Works, XII, p. 326. Mill conveniently presented the divisions among the republicans and among the members of the Provisional Government itself as having started after the June insurrection. Senior’s account which speaks of serious divisions and enmities long before seems to be much more accurate in this respect (Senior 1973a). CW, XX, pp. 353–4. Letters, I, p. 94. Letters, I, pp. 94–5 (10 March 1848). And ‘thus, quite suddenly, he became a political oracle’: Honan 1981, p. 134. Letters, I, p. 92 (8 March 1848). Letters, I, p. 94 (10 March 1848). The phrase ‘vis a vis of’ is one of many examples of what the overzealous defender of John Bull at the time meant, when he wrote of Arnold: ‘He is so warm upon this subject [of French intellectual superiority] that he has taught himself to write a dialect as like French as pure English can be.’: Stephen 1864b, p. 683. Letters, I, p. 98 (28 March 1848). Arnold, Letters, I, p. 112. The statement from Clough’s letter is quoted in Murray 1996, p. 74. On Clough’s exchanges with Arnold on France in 1848 see also: ibid., pp. 73–4, 77–8; and: Honan 1981, pp. 134–7, 141. Cf. Murray 1996, pp. 72, 74, 78. Works, XII, pp. 271–2. Cf. Greg 1848, p. 367; Mill, CW, XXIII, p. 402. Works, IV, pp. 67–8. Works, XII, pp. 274–5 (8 April 1848). Senior 1973(a). This was a review article on Lamartine’s Histoire de la Révolution de 1848. He had already commented on the revolution earlier, with the review article ‘The French Republicans’ (Senior 1848).

188 Notes 112. 113. 114. 115. 116.

117. 118.

119. 120. 121. 122.

123. 124. 125.

126.

127.

128. 129. 130. 131. 132.

133. 134. 135. 136.

Senior 1973(a), pp. 1–4. Senior 1973(a), pp. 7–8. Cf. Bensimon 1999. Senior 1973a, pp. 28–32. Emphasis (both times) added: Acton, ‘Sir Erskine May’s Democracy in Europe’ (1978), Selected Writings, I, p. 79 (the ‘saviour of society’ alluded to was, of course, Louis Napoleon). Emphasis added: Morley 1997, pp. 60–1. Mill, CW, VIII, pp. 946–7; Morley 1997, p. 61. In Morley’s On Compromise reference is given to: Mill, A System of Logic, Book VI, Chapter XI; in fact, the text quoted by Morley is from Book VI, Chapter XII. Emphasis added: Morley 1997, p. 62. On Morley’s intentions in On Compromise see: Kent 1978, pp. 124–35. Emphasis (both times) added: Trevelyan 1908, p. 654. Acton, ‘The Count de Montalembert’ (1858), Selected Writings, III, p. 15. Cf., ibid., p. 12. Which makes Christopher Harvie’s comments on him in this respect quite unfair. In fact Mill’s attitude was exactly like that of Harvie’s academics ‘who loathed the Emperor with almost irrational intensity’: see Harvie 1976, p. 154. See CW, XV, p. 534 (30 June 1857). CW, XIX, pp. 581–613. CW, XIX, p. 584. (For Dupont-White’s special and complex case see: Hazareesingh 1997(b)). And on 17 September 1862, Mill wrote to T. Gomperz: ‘In Europe things appear to be going on well, as far at least, as mental progress is concerned. This is very visible in the higher order of writers in France’: CW, XV, p. 795. Cf. ibid., p. 952. Cf. Girard 1985, pp. 188–9. CW, XV, p. 929 (18 March 1864). Arnold received a couple of such invitations as well: Letters, III, pp. 13, 51 (his reasons for rejecting them were more practical). In May 1863 the Republicans had won eight of the nine seats in the capital: see Plamenatz 1952, p. 124. For Mill’s comments see: CW, XXXII, p. 141; CW, XV, p. 917. CW, XVII, p. 1597. Cf. letter of 18 May 1869: ibid., p. 1604. Plessis 1985, pp. 164–5; Plamenatz 1952, p. 132. Pilbeam 1995, p. 247. CW, XVII, p. 1609; ibid., 1611. Plamenatz 1952, pp. 130–1; Plessis 1985, pp. 164, 169; Girard 1985, p. 201. Girard was referring to Jules Favre, Hippolyte Carnot and Garnier-Pagès. Cf. Plamenatz 1952, p. 115, where Jules Favre and Jules Simon are referred to as being among the leaders of the ‘moderate republicans’. Plessis refers, as an example, to Carnot’s defeat by a fellow republican: Plessis 1985, pp. 164–5. Mill was referring to ‘the Temps newspaper’ and to ‘Jules Favre, Jules Simon, Carnot, Garnier Pagès, Lanjuinais’: CW, XVI, pp. 1224–5 (29 December 1866). Plamenatz 1952, p. 132. Cf. Nicolet 1982, pp. 148–9; Mill, CW, XVII, pp. 1683, 1718, 1726, 1730. CW, XVII, p. 1769 (letter to F.B. Arlès-Dufour, 29 October 1870). Cf. ibid., 1774–5.

Notes 189 137. Emphasis added: CW, XVII, p. 1795. Cf. Plessis 1985, pp. 169–70. 138. ‘Duveyrier’s Political Views of French Affairs’ (1846), CW, XX, p. 297. 139. Cf. Claeys 1987, pp. 143–4, on Mill’s worries about the popularity of ‘the essentially “Continental” doctrine of revolution’ during these years. 140. Emphasis added: CW, XVII, p. 1911. Cf. CW, XXII, p. 150; XX, p. 255; XIX, p. 595. Cf. also what Bagehot had to say in September 1872: Works, VIII, pp. 214–15. 141. ‘Prospects of France, IV’, Examiner, 10 October 1830: CW, XXII, pp. 149–50. 142. See, for example, CW, XVI, p. 1304, where he spoke of ‘the superiority of England over France in the love and practice of personal and political freedom’. Cf. CW, XIX, p. 565. 143. CW, XIX, pp. 420–1; ‘Centralisation’, CW, XIX, p. 610 (the emphasis is mine). Mill wrote in The Subjection of Women that ‘[t]he love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal antagonism. Where there is least liberty, the passion for power is the most ardent and unscrupulous’. ‘The desire of power over others’ was ‘a depraving agency among mankind’: CW, XXI, p. 338. 144. Acton wrote that the purpose of all the Continental governments, framed on the pattern of ‘the ideas of 1789, incorporated in that [French] Constitution of 1791’ was ‘not that the people should obtain security for freedom, but participation of power. The increase in the number of those who share the authority renders the authority still more irresistible’: ‘Cavour’ ( July 1861), Selected Writings, I, p. 441. 145. ‘Chateaubriand had grumbled that the French do not like liberty, but go instinctively to power’: Weber 1990, p. 186. 146. In a review article that same year Lord Acton described ‘the attempt of France to establish a durable edifice on the ruins of 1789’ as ‘the vicious circle of the last seventy years’: Acton, Selected Writings, II, p. 76. 147. Emphasis added: CW, XIX, p. 583. 148. Works, XII, pp. 321–2. Reports on the disillusionment with the Republic were coming long before 1851. As Macaulay wrote from Paris on 11 September 1849: ‘No private person shows, as far as I have seen, the least love or respect for the present form of government. The word republic is hardly uttered without a sneer’: The Letters, V, p. 72. Cf. ibid., p. 75. And Ruskin reported in October 1848 that the bourgeoisie were, ‘as well as the soldiery, thoroughly sick of the republic’: quoted in Batchelor 2000, p. 75. 149. Works, XII, pp. 323–4. Cf. Works, IV, pp. 32–3. 150. Macaulay too was for the President. He wrote in a letter on 3 December 1851: ‘I am, on the whole, for the President and the army. … It is idle to complain that an army domineers over a society in which whatever is not army is Chaos.’: The Letters, V, p. 210. 151. The phrase from Mill is to be found in A System of Logic, Book VI, Chapter XII (CW, VIII, p. 946), and is immediately followed by the text where Mill criticised severely the results of French ‘geometrical’ reasoning, in the passage quoted by Morley in On Compromise (see supra, Part II). 152. Works, XII, pp. 326, 327, 327–8. See also ibid., pp. 329–30. 153. See: St John-Stevas 1965, pp. 51–2. It may also need to be remembered that Bagehot was just recovering from some kind of depression, which was the real reason for his sojourn in Paris (see ibid., pp. 49–52). Like with so many other Englishmen before and since, it worked: Paris did wonders for his

190 Notes

154.

155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160.

161. 162. 163. 164. 165.

166. 167. 168. 169. 170.

171. 172. 173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178.

spirits, as his (highly recommended) letters to his mother and friends testify (Works, XII, pp. 320, 324, 330–1, 331–2). Works, IV, p. 30. The President’s term was non-renewable, according to the Second Republic’s Constitution. Louis Napoleon had failed to assemble the necessary three fourths majority in the National Assembly that would allow a constitutional amendment to go through, which would give him a second term in office, which he ardently desired. It was a constitutional deadlock, and no solution in sight, except a violent or revolutionary one. This is exactly what Mill had warned against in the ‘Vindication’, in April 1849. Cf. Bagehot, Works, IV, p. 40; Mill, CW, XIV, pp. 21, 34. Works, IV, pp. 29–34. Works, IV, pp. 35–44. Works, IV, pp. 36–7. Works, IV, pp. 40–1. Cf. Works, XII, pp. 32, 326, 328; Mill CW, XIV, pp. 32–4, 21. Works, IV, pp. 45–53. The fourth letter (‘On the Aptitude of the French Character for National Self-Government’) continued the same topic: Works, IV, pp. 54–62. ‘On the Constitution of the Prince-President’, Works, IV, pp. 63–70. Emphasis added: Works, IV, pp. 63–4. Works, IV, pp. 63–9. Works, IV, pp. 77–84. Apparently such ‘stealthy, secret, unknown, excellent, forces’ were soon to be at work, especially in the 1860s, preparing the French for democratic citizenship to an extent Bagehot could not guess. Major among them were, as Sudhir Hazareesingh has recently shown, exactly forces related to the municipalism which Bagehot discarded as insufficient to change the habits of the French ‘character’. See Hazareesingh 1997a; 1998, pp. 233–305, and passim. Cf. Greg 1848, p. 367. Works, IV, pp. 81–3. Works, IV, p. 117. Works, VII, p. 50. Works, IV, pp. 89–94. A year earlier, Mill had expressed a similar concern, with regard to whether Italy ‘would form its character as a selfgoverning nation on French ideas or on English’ (CW, XV, p. 798 – 24 September 1862). And, during the two previous years (in 1861 and in 1862), Acton spoke similarly of an English and a French political model which other Continental nations had to chose between, in his articles ‘Cavour’ (Selected Writings, I, pp. 441–2), and ‘Nationality’ (ibid., pp. 414–15, 424). Works, V, pp. 165–396; VII, pp. 17–144 (see especially: ibid., p. 143). Works, IV, pp. 89–94. Works, IV, pp. 101–4 (The Economist, 28 November 1863); Works, IV, pp. 105–9 (The Economist, 5 December 1863). Works, IV, pp. 101–4. Cf. Arnold, Prose Works, I, p. 81. Works, IV, pp. 105–7. Cf. Arnold, Prose Works, I, p. 77. Arnold would agree: cf. Prose Works, I, pp. 81–2. Works, IV, pp. 107–8. ‘Cæsareanism as it now exists’, Works, IV, pp. 111–19 (The Economist, 4 March 1865).

Notes 191 179. 180. 181. 182.

183. 184. 185.

186. 187. 188. 189. 190. 191. 192. 193.

194. 195.

196. 197. 198. 199.

200.

201.

202. 203.

Emphasis added: Works, IV, p. 111. Works, IV, pp. 111–14. Cf. Works, IV, p. 129. See, particularly, CW, X, pp. 9, 105. Works, IV, pp. 114–16. Bagehot launched one more attack on Napoleon III’s system in August 1867 in ‘The Mercantile Evils of Imperialism’, Works, IV, pp. 117–19. Works, IV, pp. 155–9 (The Economist, 20 August 1870). Works, IV, p. 159. ‘The Emperor Napoleon’, Works, IV, pp. 161–4 (The Economist, 11 January 1873). For the work that made the idea of Louis Napoleon as a ‘small man’ popular see Hugo 1852; cf. Robb 1997, pp. 308–9, 320–2. ‘The Liberals and the Emperor’, Works, IV, pp. 147–50 (The Economist, 21 May 1870). Cf. Works, IV, pp. 148–50. Cf. what Bagehot wrote of the Orleans Monarchy in June 1871: Works, VIII, pp. 201–2. ‘Do the Conditions Requisite for a Stable Government Exist in France?’, Works, VIII, pp. 182–6 (The Economist, 10 September 1870). Works, VIII, pp. 197–9. Cf. Harrison (Royden) 1971; Kent 1978, pp. 96–7. ‘Constitutional Tendencies in France’, Works, VIII, pp. 213–16 (The Economist, 14 September 1872). Works, VIII, pp. 217–21 (The Economist, 31 May 1873). See, for one more expression of Bagehot’s wholehearted support for the new republic and for his hopes arising from ‘M. Thiers’ astute policy of gradually accustoming France to associate order and strength, and a certain limited amount of liberty, with the name and form of a republic.’: ‘The Imperialist Manifesto’ (25 January 1873), Works, IV, pp. 167–8. Cf. Bagehot, Works, VIII, pp. 236–7; Mill, CW, XX, pp. 331–2. Works, VIII, pp. 220–1. Cf. Mill’s comments at the time of the FrancoPrussian war, concerning the political indifference of the mass of the French people and its disastrous consequences (CW, XVII, p. 1769) and his conclusion that ‘[t]he peasantry of France like to women of England have still to learn that politics concern themselves.’ (ibid., pp. 1774–5). Works, IV, pp. 169–72 (The Economist, 30 May 1874). Works, IV, pp. 171–2. Works, IV, p. 172. Emphasis added: ‘Why an English Liberal may look without disapproval on the progress of Imperialism in France’, Works, IV, pp. 173–7 (The Economist, 6 June 1874). Works, VIII, pp. 236–41 (The Economist, 15 August 1874). The first article where he offered such advice was: ‘French Politics’, Works, VIII, pp. 231–5 (The Economist, 20 June 1874). For Mill’s assertion that ‘constitutional royalty is in itself a thing as uncongenial to the character and habits of the French … as it is suited to the tone of thought and feeling characteristic of England’ and his elaborate argumentation supporting it see: CW, XX, pp. 331–2. Cf. Works, VIII, p. 230. Works, VIII, p. 238. These had been the arguments used by Mill already in the early 1830s to explain to the British readers (in the Examiner in particular) why Guizot’s and the other Doctrinaires’ endeavours to create an upper house

192 Notes

204. 205. 206. 207.

208. 209. 210.

4

in France in imitation of their beloved British experience were misplaced and doomed (see CW, XXII, pp. 200–01, 343; XXIII, p. 682). Works, VIII, pp. 242–5 (The Economist, 6 March 1875). Works, VIII, pp. 242–5. See: ‘The Results of the French Elections’, Works, VIII, pp. 246–9 (The Economist, 26 February 1876). Cf. Kent 1978, pp. 144–6. Cf. Bagehot, Physics and Politics, Works, VII, pp. 50–1 (then Bagehot was accusing them of wishing ‘to introduce here an imitation of the Napoleonic system, a dictatorship founded on the proletariat’; but in the 1870s Harrison was completely disillusioned with Bonapartism and a staunch republican: cf. Prochaska 2000, pp. 123–6). See, on this last point: Harrison 1879; cf. also Harrison 1874; 1877. For an excellent brief account see Vogeler 1984, pp. 127–31. Vogeler 1984, p. 131. Spencer, The Man versus the State (1884), in: Spencer 1982, pp. 1–177, p. 67. Cf. also: Spencer, ‘Over-legislation’ (1853), in: Spencer 1982, p. 322.

French National Character and French Politics 1. Hazlitt 1970, pp. 103–4; Bagehot, Works, VIII, p. 158. 2. Cf. Noiriel 1995, pp. 9–10. For an account of uses of ‘national character’, ‘political culture’, and related categories in the social sciences especially since the 1940s see: Claret 1998. 3. Cf. Bagehot’s statement: ‘“Motley was the wear” of the world when Herodotus first looked on it and described it to us … ’: Works, VII, p. 80. 4. Hume 1994, pp. 78–92. Cf. Ferguson 1995. 5. On the ‘Idea of Character’ in Victorian Britain see Collini 1991, pp. 91–118. 6. Barker 1927, 1950; cf. Claret 1998. In some quarters, it is still used today even among political philosophers: see Scruton 2000, pp. 43–67 (chapter 3: ‘English Character’). 7. See, for instance, George Stocking’s remarks on Leslie Stephen’s use of ‘race’ (Stocking 1987, pp. 138–9). For the confusion and imprecision characterizing the use of the type of race not just in common discourse, but also among specialists, see Banton 1987, pp. xii–xv, 29–32. On race in Victorian though more generally see: Watson 1973, pp. 198–212; Rich 1994, p. 779; Bolt 1971. Even more attention was attached to the role of race in France at the same time. See Barzun 1965, p. 6, and passim; Seliger 1958, pp. 273–82. On the question of race in French historiography at this time see Barzun 1932; Crossley 1993, pp. 56–7, 90–2. On Tocqueville’s reflections see: Schleifer 1980, pp. 62–72; Drescher 1968, pp. 274–6. On Hippolyte Taine see R.A. Jones’s contribution in: Hearnshaw 1933, pp. 222–50; and Burrow 2000, pp. 85–6, and passim. 8. Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, IV, pp. 348–83. Cf. Le Quesne 1993, pp. 83–4; Houghton 1957, pp. 212–13. On the Governor Eyre Controversy see: Semmel 1962. 9. Carlyle compared (favourably, of course) to the talkative French the English, who were ‘a dumb people’, and expressed themselves not in speech but in deeds: ‘their Epic Poem is written on the Earth’s surface’: Carlyle, ‘The English’, Past and Present, in: The Works, V, pp. 157–8.

Notes 193 10. Heffer 1995, p. 78; Kaplan 1983, pp. 104, 331–3. 11. Faverty 1951, p. 27. Carlyle did write in a letter predicting disaster for France (in late 1848) that he and his wife ‘hope[d] better things; having a kind of love for these beautiful unhappy little fools, after all.’ But the compliment is at best mixed even in that statement! (Collected Letters, XXIII, pp. 176–7). 12. Faverty 1951, pp. 25–6, and more generally on the ‘Teutomaniacs’, pp. 13–40. 13. Faverty 1951, p. 76. Cf. ibid., pp. 97, 98; Poliakov 1971, p. 64. 14. M. Arnold, Letters, III, p. 18 (10 March 1866). 15. Faverty 1951, pp. 3, 78. 16. [Hereafter: Celtic Literature]: Prose Works, III, pp. 291–395 [first published as a series of articles (based on lectures delivered in Jesus College, Oxford) in The Cornhill Magazine in March, April, May, and July 1866]. 17. Cf. Pecora 1997–98; Faverty 1951, p. 191 and passim; Trilling 1974, pp. 232–43. The 1860s was an important decade in terms of the flourishing of such ‘scientific’ disciplines. Shortly before Arnold came to write the lectures that became his On the Study of Celtic Literature, James Hunt had left the Ethnological Society of London and had founded (1863) the breakaway Anthropological Society, in order to promote more directly the relevance of the study of racial traits for political and social issues (for more see: Rainger 1978; Burrow 1968, pp. 121, 130). 18. Prose Works, III, p. 353. 19. Trilling 1974, p. 235. Cf. Pecora 1997–98, p. 361. After the publication of his History of Civilization in England (1857–61), the historian Henry Thomas Buckle emerged, next to his mentor J.S. Mill, as the favourite target of those who asserted the importance of racial inheritance in the formation of national character – that is, the vast majority of Victorian thinkers, historians, and anthropologists. Usually the attacks on Buckle were accompanied by simultaneous onslaughts on the main culprit, Mill (and sometimes Bentham along with him). Cf. Acton, ‘Buckle’s Philosophy of History’ (1857), Selected Writings, III, pp. 457–8. For Huxley’s contributions see: Huxley 1865, 1870; Rainger 1978, pp. 64–5; Mandelbaum 1971, pp. 207, 455 (n. 69); Varouxakis 1998(a). Besides Mill and Buckle, another luminary of the anti-racialist camp in the mid-Victorian period was – significantly – a scientist, T.H. Huxley. 20. Faverty 1951, p. 78. Cf. Trilling 1974, p. 233: ‘Arnold embraced the whole of the racial assumption’. 21. On Knox see: Sternhell 1987, p. 414; Burrow 1968, p. 130; Faverty 1951, p. 73. 22. Faverty 1951, pp. 74–5. Cf. for similar remarks: Trilling 1974, pp. 236, 239 (fn). 23. Faverty 1951, pp. 76–7 (and more generally pp. 76–110). The Englishman’s prime defect was lack of intelligence or critical thought, what Arnold called (following, once more, his French mentors) their ‘unintelligence’. At the same time, ‘energy’ was the ‘strong point and favourable characteristic’ of the English. Such views were common-place at the time and by no means original with Arnold (cf. Langford 2000, pp. 29–82, and passim). With English ‘energy’ and its twin in the German (fellow-Teutonic) nation, ‘steadiness’, Arnold associated ‘honesty’, regarding it as a Teutonic trait. Last but far from least, as we saw earlier, the English had morality, they possessed the ‘power of conduct’, like the rest of the Teutons. 24. La Poésie des Races Celtiques (published as part of Renan’s Essais de Morale et de Critique, 1859).

194 Notes 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

Cf. Leoussi 1998; Citron 1987. Faverty 1951, pp. 121–3. Cf. Pecora 1997–98, p. 363. Faverty 1951, pp. 95, 124. ‘Numbers’, Prose Works, X, pp. 155–9; ‘A French Worthy’, Prose Works, X, pp. 89–93. Cf. ‘Renan’s “La Réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France”’ (1872), Prose Works, VII, P. 45. Arnold’s explanation of the decline of France as the result of the dying out of the Teutonic element in the population was not so idiosyncratic, although he put his own stamp on the way he formulated it of course. It was widely held in the nineteenth century that the most ‘virile’, ‘solid’ and ‘serious’ element in modern western civilization was the Teutonic. E.A. Freeman, Thomas Carlyle or Thomas Arnold were in good company in strenuously asserting this. For all sorts of imaginative or hair-raising explanations of the defeat of France in 1870 in racial terms and particularly in terms of the French Celts’ defects see Cornick 1996 (particularly pp. 150, 155 (n.43)). For an instance where the author could have raised the issue that something happened between 1867 and 1872 which may have affected Arnold’s views or at the very least his emphasis, see Faverty 1951, p. 137. That there is a contradiction when the proposition that racial extraction determines character and intellectual and moral traits, is accompanied, within the same breath, by the assertion that in the case of the French, it is not their overwhelmingly Celtic blood but rather their Latin civilization that gives the nation its character is one of the ‘confusions’ alluded to earlier. Cf. Trilling 1974, p. 239 (fn) – Trilling was referring to Arnold’s assertion regarding the English admixture; yet, the argument applies to both cases. Prose Works, III, pp. 349–50. Emphasis added. Arnold continued here: ‘and it may be remarked in passing that this distinction makes the conditions of the future for Latin Italy quite different from those of Celtic France.’ Cf. Greg 1848, p. 368. Emphasis added: Prose Works, VII, p. 48. For more see Pittock 1999, pp. 1–20 and passim; Romani 1997; Rich 1994; Chapman 1992; Kruta 2000. ‘Monsieur Henri Martin, whose chapters on the Celts in his Histoire de France are full of information and interest.’ Emphasis in the original: Prose Works, III, p. 344. Cf. Mill, CW, XVII, p. 1769. Prose Works, III, p. 343. In the detailed exposition that follows Arnold referred to ‘the Latinised Frenchman’ as one of the successfully sensuous races, successful because they had also ‘the talent’ to make the bent they shared with ‘the Celt proper’ (‘sensuousness’) serve to a practical embellishment of their mode of living. This made them successful in material civilization to an extent the Celt proper was not. In other words, he did not identify the French with the Celtic trait he was describing, but rather grouped ‘the Latinised French’ next to the Greek and Latin races in contradistinction to ‘the Celt proper’ – such as the Irishman. (Cf. what I argued earlier about the difference between Celtic Literature and works written after the Franco-Prussian War.) Letters, II, p. 370; III, pp. 14, 18, 44, 46, 48. Cf. Orr 1988; Dudley Edwards 1986. Emphasis added: Prose Works, III, pp. 344–8. CW, XX, p. 238.

Notes 195 42. For some examples (among many) see: Pecora 1997–98, p. 372; Steele 1970; Mazlish 1975, p. 407. 43. CW, XVIII, p. 145. Cf. Bain 1882, pp. 78–9. 44. For more on Mill on race see: Varouxakis 1998(a). 45. Mandler 2000, p. 232. 46. Stephen 1858, pp. 495–6. Cf. Stephen 1862, p. 82. 47. See, for instance: ‘The Count de Montalembert’ (1858), Selected Writings, III, pp. 9–16 (particularly p. 12). 48. Cf., for other similar attacks on Buckle and Mill jointly: Varouxakis 1998a, pp. 26–8. 49. Acton, ‘Buckle’s Philosophy of History’ (1858), Selected Writings, III, pp. 457–8, 449. Cf. Carlyle’s remarks on the persistence of the qualities of the Gauls described by Julius Caesar and on the French retaining this ‘old Gaulish and Gaelic Celthood’: Carlyle, The Works, III, pp. 109–110; cf. ibid., pp. 42, 101. Such continuities in stereotypes on the French running back to Julius Caesar or Tacitus were rather common-place. Cf. Weber 1990. 50. It seems, however, that Acton did not remain all his life as convinced of the importance of the racial factor as he seems to be in this review, given what he came to write in some of his extant manuscripts (see Himmelfarb 1952, pp. 182–3). 51. Emphasis added: Acton, ‘Mr. Goldwin Smith’s Irish History’, Selected Writings, II, pp. 73–7. 52. On Dr Arnold’s view see: Stanley 1860, I, p. 77. On Freeman’s see: Faverty 1951, p. 30; Burrow 1981, passim. 53. See, for an instance, ‘Equality’, where he made such a distinction, explaining that what he had written ‘so far’ applied to ‘the English people as a whole’, and then going on to identify the specific character traits of the different classes: Prose Works, VIII, p. 293. 54. A French Eton or Middle-Class Education and the State, Prose Works, II, pp. 306–7. Cf. Faverty 1951, pp. 43–4. 55. See Jones 2000, p. 67. Cf. Collini et al. 1983, p. 164. Physics and Politics came out as a book in 1872 [first published in a series of five essays in the Fortnightly Review between 1867 and 1872]. The full text is in: Works, VII, pp. 15–144. 56. Mandler 2000, p. 234. 57. Works, VII, p. 65. 58. Works, VII, p. 67. 59. Works, VII, pp. 37–8. 60. Works, VII, p. 80. Cf. ibid., p. 121. 61. Works, IV, pp. 45–53. 62. Works, IV, p. 48. 63. Works, IV, pp. 48–50. 64. On Maine cf. Burrow 1966, pp. 137–78. 65. Nuances are significant and it should be noted that the way Bagehot’s view of the importance of variety is expressed in Physics and Politics (as well as his insistence in other works on the need for the existence and contributions of men of different characters in each parliament and in each cabinet), is reminiscent of Machiavelli’s arguments in the Discourses.

196 Notes 66. Works, VII, p. 57. On views concerning the racial mix that made up France among French historians in the nineteenth century see: Crossley 1993, pp. 200–1, 204–7; Citron 1987; Barzun 1941. 67. Works, VIII, pp. 187–91 (The Economist, 24 September 1870). 68. Works, VII, pp 104–5. 69. Works, IV, pp. 50–51. 70. Works, IV, pp. 50–53. 71. Works, IV, pp. 54–62. 72. Works, IV, pp. 54–5. 73. Cf. Faverty 1951, p. 56, for an instance of what Arnold had to say on similar issues (the examples from Arnold could be multiplied easily). 74. Works, IV, pp. 56–7. 75. Cf. Morley 1997, p. 61; Mill, CW, VIII, pp. 946–7; Stephen 1859(d). 76. Cf. Macaulay, ‘Lord Bacon’ (1837), in: Macaulay 1874, pp. 349–418. See also: Houghton 1957, pp. 39–40, 123. According to Houghton (p. 123), Macaulay’s ‘essay on Bacon is the locus classicus of Victorian anti-intellectualism’. 77. Works, IV, pp. 54–62. 78. Works, IV, pp. 67, 66. 79. Works, IV, p. 78. Three years later Bagehot found an opportunity to strike again: ‘If France had more men of firm will, quiet composure, with a suspicion of enormous principle and a taste for moderate improvement: if a Whig party, in a word, were possible in France, France would be free.’: Bagehot, ‘The First Edinburgh Reviewers’ (October 1855), Works, I, pp. 309–41, p. 321. Cf. Collini et al. 1983, pp. 168–9. 80. Cf. Mill, on the French as ‘a people of place-hunters’, CW, XIX, p. 420; CW, XXII, p. 159; CW, XX, p. 193. Also: Senior 1973, pp. 1–4, 28–9. 81. Cf. Stephen 1859(d), 1864(b). 82. Acton, ‘“Bureaucracy” by Richard Simpson’ (1859), Selected Writings, I, pp. 525–7. 83. Hamer 1968, p. 28. Cf. supra, chapter 3, Part II. 84. Hamer 1968, pp. 361–2. 85. Emphasis added: Hamer 1968, p. 362. 86. CW, VIII, pp. 900–7. 87. For more see Varouxakis 1998(b). This claim is not meant to ignore or play down the importance of Mill’s interest in, and conversance with, other national or cultural groups, such as the inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent and Ireland. For their significance in this context, see, for instance, Robson ( John M.) 1998, pp. 338–71. 88. ‘Comparison of the Tendencies of French and English Intellect’: CW, XXIII, pp. 442–3. On the proportion of Mill’s articles on France to his overall output see: Robson and Robson 1982, pp. 76–7 (n.12). 89. CW, XXII, pp. 308–9. Cf. CW, XII, pp. 63–5. 90. CW, XXII, pp. 154–6. Mill was by no means alone in attributing importance to the generation factor in France at the period in question: See Spitzer 1987, pp. 3, 4, 270(n.3) and passim. 91. Cf. Spitzer 1987, p. 10, and passim; McLaren 1971, pp. 59–60. Cf. Mill, CW, XXII, pp. 214–5. 92. CW, XXIII, pp. 485–6 (24 June 1832). 93. Emphasis added: CW, XXIII, p. 683.

Notes 197 94. CW, XX, pp. 190–2. 95. For more on this issue see Varouxakis 1998(b). 96. CW, XIX, p. 418. He noted that in regard to the ‘infirmities’ he was about to refer to it was ‘not … obvious that the government of One or a Few would have any tendency to cure or alleviate the evil.’: ibid. 97. CW, XIX, p. 420. 98. Emphasis added. Cf. ‘Centralisation’ (1862), CW, XIX, pp. 610–11. Cf. Montesquieu 1989, p. 155. 99. Cf. Benjamin Constant, ‘The Liberty of the Ancients compared with that of the Moderns’, in: Constant 1988, p. 316. 100. Cf. CW, XXII, p. 159; and CW, XX, p. 193. For the same view on the French cf. also: Senior 1973, pp. 1–4, 28–9; Acton, Selected Writings, I, pp. 525–6. 101. Cf. ‘Centralisation’: CW, XIX, p. 583. 102. CW, XIX, pp. 420–1. The ‘representative government by a limited class’ which ‘[broke] down by excess of corruption’ was, obviously, the July Monarchy; ‘the attempt at representative government by the whole male population’ was that made with the installation of the Second Republic. 103. CW, XIX, p. 421. 104. CW, XXII, p. 134. 105. ‘[T]he events of 1848 have taught thinking persons … that of all … circumstances … affecting political problems, by far and out of all question the most important is national character’ (Bagehot, Works, IV, pp. 48–9.). 106. Miles Taylor uses the phrase ‘Liberalism in one country’: Taylor 1995. 107. As he put it himself in a letter to his mother (24 March 1866) explaining what he had tried to do in his letter to the Pall Mall Gazette, in response to the criticisms of ‘Horace’ (see supra, chapter 1): ‘I was glad to have an opportunity to disclaim that positive admiration of things foreign, and that indifference to English freedom, which have often been imputed to me – and to explain that I do not disparage freedom, but take it for granted as our condition, and go on to consider other things.’: Letters, III, p. 22. See also Arnold’s letter to the Pall Mall: ‘A Courteous Explanation’, Prose Works, V, pp. 25–6. 108. Quoted in: Trilling 1974, p. 345. As Trilling goes on to comment: ‘The French defeat in the Prussian war was retribution for a personal lubricity resulting in political confusion.’: ibid. 109. Prose Works, VII, p. 44. 110. Cf. Judt 1992, p. 308: ‘It is a long-standing particularity … of the French that they are, in the words of Caesar describing his Gallic subjects, rerum novarum cupidi’ [avid for novelties]. 111. Prose Works, III, p. 344. 112. CW, XVII, p. 1769.

5 Grandeur and Frenchness: Nationalism, International Relations and French National Character 1. Mill, CW, XIII, p. 571; Senior 1843, p. 366. 2. Weber 1990, pp. 169, 170. 3. See Hampson 1998, pp. 120–44.

198 Notes 4. Schmidt 1953, pp. 607–11; on the significance of the crisis of 1840–41 see ibid., pp. 613–14. For more on the period of the French Revolution see Hampson 1998. On Larousse’s Dictionnaire see Cornick 1995. To mention but one example among many, in what constituted ‘[t]he most sustained and bitter commentary upon England’ ( Jennings 1986, p. 81), Alexandre Ledru-Rollin’s De la décadence de l’Angleterre (1850), ‘[s]ubject to particular venom was English foreign policy’: ibid., p. 82. Cf. Buruma 1999, p. 129. 5. Thus, Montalembert, who, according to Jeremy Jennings, ‘wrote De l’Avenir politique de l’Angleterre [1856] as a riposte to what he saw as the mounting unfair criticism of England’, nevertheless ‘made no attempt whatsoever to defend England’s colonial and foreign policy which, under Palmerston’s guidance, seemed to embody a contempt for liberty and the rights of the weak.’: Jennings 1986, p. 75. Cf. Aron 1965, p. 20 (on Tocqueville). For some British comments on Continental perceptions of the selfishness of British foreign policy see: Mill, CW, I, p. 263; Arnold, ‘My Countrymen’, Prose Works, V, pp. 3–32 (particularly p. 8); Senior 1865, pp. 135–7; Bagehot, Works, VII, p. 131. 6. Emphasis added. 7. Senior 1842, pp. 1–2. 8. Napier 1877, pp. 372–3, 375. 9. Levy 1970, p. 127. 10. CW, XIII, p. 701 (1 May 1846). Cf. Mill’s statement in 1831: CW, XXII, p. 259. 11. Cf. CW, XXII, pp. 214–15. 12. Emphasis added: Senior 1842, pp. 4–5. Machiavelli would have disagreed, if he could read the article from the grave. He would have told Senior ‘that the French have always behaved in the same way’, ‘full of avarice, pride, ferocity, and untrustworthiness’. This was what he wrote of them in Chapter FortyThree of The Discourses, where the Florentine insisted ‘that nations retain the same habits of life over long periods’ (Machiavelli 1994, pp. 216–17). 13. See Tocqueville’s speech in: OC, III, 2, pp. 288–301. The speech had been reported at length in The Times on 2, 3 December 1840. See also: Lawlor 1959, pp. 43–66; Drescher 1964, pp. 152–61; Aron 1965, pp. 17–20; Boesche 1987, pp. 62–5, 212. 14. Cf. Mill, CW, XIII, pp. 536–7. 15. Cf. Mill, CW, XXII, p. 259. 16. Cf. Mill, CW, XXII, p. 214 (Examiner, 19 December 1830). 17. Emphasis added. 18. Emphasis added. 19. CW, XXII, p. 303; cf. CW, XXIII, p. 644; XX, p. 125. 20. CW, XXII, pp. 214–15. 21. Emphasis added: CW, XXII, pp. 299–300 (10 April 1831). 22. CW, XXII, p. 259 (6 February 1831). Cf. CW, XIII, p. 701; XXII, p. 284; XXIII, p. 665. 23. See Varouxakis 1997. 24. See CW, XXII, pp. 182–4; cf. CW, XII, p. 115. 25. Cf. McLaren 1971, p. 265. 26. See, among many examples: CW, XXIII, pp. 466–7. 27. CW, XII, pp. 121–2. Cf. CW, XII, p. 115; XXIII, pp. 643–6; XXII, pp. 182–3. 28. Harding 1964, p. 16.

Notes 199 29. See: Collingham 1988, pp. 221–39; Johnson 1963, pp. 268–72; Bullen 1974, pp. 17–24. 30. Cairns 1985, pp. xx, xviii. Raymond Aron has also paid some attention to the exchanges between Mill and Tocqueville on this crisis, regarding them as characteristic of broader and recurring attitudes in the two countries with regard to their relationship with each other. Aron appears to side, though tacitly, with Mill against Tocqueville (Aron 1965, pp. 17–20). See also Todorov 1993, pp. 191–207, especially 195–7. Todorov is more overtly critical of Tocqueville’s stance. 31. CW, XIII, pp. 445–6 (letter to John Sterling, 1 October 1840). 32. Emphasis added: CW, XIII, p. 448 (letter to R.B. Fox, 25 November 1840). 33. Drescher 1964, pp. 155–6. See Tocqueville’s speech in: OC, III, 2, pp. 288–301. 34. OC, VI, 1, pp. 330–1. 35. CW, XIII, pp. 457–60. 36. Cf., on the Liberal party’s Francophiles or ‘Foxites’: Bullen 1974, pp. 2–4, 20–4. 37. Emphasis added: CW, XIII, pp. 459–60. Two years later, Mill wrote to Tocqueville again, referring to the same affair and the same man: ‘Je voudrais qu’on crucifiât le premier homme qui osât dire à la tribune d’un peuple des injures contre un autre peuple. Il faut des générations entières pour guérir le mal que cela peut faire dans un jour.’: CW, XIII, p. 571 (20 February 1843). 38. Tocqueville 1985, pp. 149–52 (the original: OC, VI, 1, pp. 334–6). 39. Tocqueville 1985, pp. 150–1. 40. Cf. Bentham: ‘national honour consists in justice’; and: ‘the glory of being able to hit the hardest blow ought to be left to schoolboys’: quoted in: Conway 1989, p. 93. 41. Cf. Senior’s statement (in his article of that same year) that the way the French were influenced by their resentment against England resembled that of ‘a child, and an ill-educated child’. 42. CW, XIII, pp. 536–7. 43. CW, XIII, pp. 456–7. 44. This is exactly what Senior asserted in ‘France, America, and Britain’ in 1842. 45. Emphasis added: CW, XIII, p. 465. Cf. CW, XIII, pp. 467–8, 472. 46. See Lawlor 1959, pp. 67–8. Cf. the explanation of the reasons that must have forced Guizot to pursue such a policy on that instance given to Senior by a Frenchman and reported by him in: Senior 1973(b), p. 139. 47. Though there were some hints at Tocqueville’s themes from 1840, the speech was not bellicose: see OC, III, 2, pp. 338–52, p. 341. Rather, this speech should be seen as the first step in the process suggested by Drescher, of Tocqueville’s imperceptibly moving from calls for great acts in foreign affairs towards ‘vehement pleas for the salvation of political action at home’: see Drescher 1964, pp. 161–2. Though Tocqueville was to attack once more the notion of the Anglo-French alliance in the future (in 1845: see ibid., pp. 162–6), he had by no means done so on the occasion in question, in 1843. 48. See Lawlor 1959, pp. 83–4, 89. 49. OC, VI, 1, pp. 339–40 (9 February 1843). 50. ‘Lord Brougham and M. de Tocqueville’: CW, XXIV, pp. 841–4. 51. CW, XIII, p. 570. For Tocqueville’s statement alluded to by Mill, see: OC, III, 2, p. 346. Cf. Mill, ‘A Few Words on Non-Intervention’, CW, XXI, pp. 114–5.

200 Notes 52. Emphasis added: CW, XIII, p. 571. 53. CW, XIII, pp. 451–2 (19 December 1840). Mill did not exaggerate the importance of Guizot’s role, given the difficulties of the task he had set himself in trying to avert war and revitalize the (extremely unpopular) Anglo-French alliance (see: Bullen 1974, pp. 23, 26–8 and passim; Bullen 1991, pp. 187–201; Johnson 1963, pp. 268–73). The significance of the crisis of 1840 can hardly be exaggerated either. Senior reported (with apparent agreement) that in 1849 a French interlocutor explained to him that it was the humiliation felt by the French then, and the powerlessness of Guizot’s and Louis Philippe’s governments to gratify French susceptibilities that led to the fatal increase in the regime’s unpopularity and consequently to the Revolution of 1848 (Senior 1973(b), p. 139). 54. CW, XIII, pp. 454–5 (23 December 1840). Cf. CW, XIII, pp. 456–7; XX, pp. 185–6; 259; XII, p. 61; XIII, pp. 654, 714. Significantly, it was again a question of foreign policy and Franco-British relations, the Spanish Marriages, that modified, to an extent, Mill’s favourable view of Guizot (CW, XIII, p. 714). 55. Emphasis added: Mill, ‘Vindication … ’, CW, XX, p. 325. Bagehot, Works, IV, p. 149. 56. Duveyrier 1843. 57. Letter of 1 May 1846, CW, XIII, p. 701. See Nassau Senior, ‘France, America, and Britain’, in the Edinburgh Review, 75, for April 1842, pp. 1–48; the particular reference to France is in pp. 4–10 (reprinted in Senior 1865, pp. 1–90; on France see pp. 6–17). Cf. Senior 1843, pp. 303–73 (especially p. 366). Cf. also ‘Parisian Morals and Manners’, Edinburgh Review, 78 (July 1843), p. 156 (this article – also very critical of the French – was not written by Senior). 58. CW, XX, pp. 313–14 (from Duveyrier 1843, I, pp. 127, 129). 59. CW, XX, p. 314. (The French were perceived, as Bagehot was to put it two decades later, as ‘the … interfering French nation’: Works, IV, pp. 128–9.) 60. Senior 1842. 61. Mill, ‘The Quarterly Review on French Agriculture [2]’, CW, XXIV, pp. 1050–1 (Morning Chronicle, 11 January 1847). See also Mill’s comments on A. de Vigny’s Souvenirs de Servitude et de Grandeur Militaires in: ‘Writings of Alfred de Vigny’ (1838): CW, I, pp. 488–93. Cf. Rosenblum 1982, pp. 263–8. 62. See: Macaulay, The Letters, IV, p. 362 (13 March 1848); Mill, CW, XIII, p. 714; Arnold, Letters, I, p. 95 (Arnold believed that it was the King who had lied, not Guizot); Acton, ‘Review of Bright’s History of England’ (1888), Selected Writings, I, p. 166. Cf. Senior 1973(b), pp. 139–40. 63. See Chastain 1988; Bensimon 1999. 64. Senior 1873(a), pp. 60–1. 65. Senior 1973(a), p. 62. 66. Emphasis added: Senior 1973(a), pp. 64–5. Cf. Senior 1973(b), I, p. 262: ‘This barbarous feeling of nationality … has become the curse of Europe.’ 67. Senior 1973(a), pp. 60–6. 68. Brougham 1848, pp. 120–2, 126. 69. CW, XX, pp. 317–63 (on foreign policy: pp. 340–8). 70. See more on this: Varouxakis 1997, pp. 70–5. 71. Cf. Arnold, ‘England and the Italian Question’ (1859), Prose Works, I, pp. 85–6. 72. For more on Lamartine’s predicament at the time and on how he acquitted himself see: Chastain 1988.

Notes 201 73. For more see Bensimon 1999. 74. Kent 1978, pp. 23–5. Cf. Harvie 1976, pp. 97–115. 75. Bagehot, Works, IV, p. 36. Cf. Bagehot, ‘Continental Alarms’, Works, IV, pp. 121–5 (5 October 1867). 76. Martineau 1990, pp. 156–7 (letter to Henry Reeve, 24 June 1858). 77. Senior 1865, pp. 123–7. 78. Bain 1882, p. 93. 79. See Drescher 1964, pp. 170–92. 80. Cf. Bagehot, Works, IV, p. 108. 81. Cf. Arnold, ‘England and the Italian Question’ (1859), Prose Works, I, p. 92. 82. Emphasis (both times) added. 83. CW, XV, pp. 610–11. 84. Arnold, ‘England and the Italian Question’, Prose Works, I, p. 95. 85. Cf. Arnold, Prose Works, I, p. 92. 86. Emphasis added: CW, XV, p. 798. 87. Cf. Bagehot, ‘France or England’ (1863), Works, IV, pp. 89–94; Acton, ‘Cavour’ (1861), Selected Writings, I, pp. 441–2; Acton, ‘Nationality’ (1862), ibid., pp. 414–15, 424. 88. CW, XV, p. 917. 89. Cf. CW, XVI, p. 1288 (4 July 1867). 90. CW, XVII, p. 1864. 91. Emphasis added. 92. Cf. Arnold, Prose Works, I, pp. 78–9. 93. Emphasis added. Something similar was noticed also by a German observer who knew the French well: ‘Whoever in France possesses and understands national feeling, exercises an irresistible magic charm on the masses, and may lead or drive them at will’: Heine 1893, VIII, pp. 219–20. Cf. Marx 1991; Senior 1865, pp. 120–2. 94. Cf. Senior 1865, pp. 123–4. This far, Arnold also would agree with everything Bagehot argued. See: ‘England and the Italian Question’ (1859), Prose Works, I, pp. 75–96, especially pp. 75–8. 95. Arnold had a different view on this point in 1859. 96. Arnold would agree fully on this point: cf. Prose Works, I, p. 78. 97. Cf. Henri Martin’s characterisation of their supposed ancestors: ‘Eblouir ses amis et faire trembler ses ennemis est la grande ambition du Gaulois’ (‘To astound his friends and to make his enemies tremble is the great ambition of the Gaul’). (quoted in Faverty 1951, p. 130). Cf. also Mill, CW, XV, p. 917. 98. Emphasis (latter) added: Works, IV, pp. 105–7. 99. Emphasis added: Works, IV, p. 109. Arnold had another explanation (shared by many later historians), that the Emperor, over-estimating the influence of the Catholic clergy in France, was trying to placate them: Prose Works, I, pp. 88–91. 100. Works, IV, pp. 127–30 (The Economist (14 December 1867). 101. ‘Continental Alarms’, Works, IV, pp. 121–5, The Economist, 5 October 1867. His first reason for optimism was ‘the vagueness of the subject matter of the quarrel. It is difficult even for the French [emphasis added] to go to war from mere jealousy of the increasing power and prosperity of a rival nation, which has done them no wrong, … which is simply endeavouring … to carry out those doctrines of nationality which France has always proclaimed as sacred’ (p. 122).

202 Notes 102. Works, IV, pp. 151–3. 103. Harrison 1911, II, pp. 2–3: ‘Like nearly all English politicians, certainly all Liberals to a man, I had been a hearty opponent of the French pretext for commencing war’. And ‘all through the summer and autumn … I had warmly hoped for German victories, with the final extinction of the Imperial dynasty and the Napoleonic Legend’. 104. See: Raymond 1967; Cornick 1996. 105. But then, probably they saw the matter in the way Carlyle put it, in November 1870: ‘If, among this multitude of sympathetic bystanders, France have any true friend, his advice to France would be, To abandon all that, and never to resume it more.’: Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, V, pp. 49–59, p. 55. 106. See Vogeler 1984, pp. 97–105 (cf. ibid., pp. 94–5); Kent 1978, pp. 96–7; Harrison 1971. 107. Vogeler 1984, pp. 98–105. As Vogeler has put it very succinctly, Harrison’s essays and letters ‘convey his sense of a civilization betrayed by a ruthless European power and the influential classes in England, and of France at once the scapegoat and potential saviour of the West’ (ibid., p. 100). Cf. Finn 1993, pp. 273–92. 108. Acton 1907(a), (b); Himmelfarb 1952, pp. 183–4; Mathew 1968, pp. 204–10, 356; Hill 2000, pp. 464–5(n.38). 109. See Batchelor 2000, pp. 227, 250. Cf. ibid., p. 257. 110. Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, V, pp. 49–59. 111. Emphasis added. 112. Cf. Mill, CW, XVII, p. 1769. 113. Emphasis added: Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, V, pp. 56–7, 59. 114. Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, V, p. 52. Arch-Teutomaniac E.A. Freeman was among those who wrote also in support of the German claim to AlsaceLorraine (The Times, 18 February 1871). 115. ‘Are Alsace and Lorraine Worth Most to Germany or France?’, Works, VIII, pp. 187–91 (The Economist, 24 September 1870). 116. Hamer 1968, pp. 360–1, 363–4. Cf., on Marx’s predictions, Wheen 1999, pp. 323–4. 117. Hamer 1968, pp. 363–8. 118. Emphasis added: CW, XVII, 1795 (6 January 1871). Cf. CW, XVII, p. 1767. 119. Cf. my remarks in Chapter 1, note 79. 120. Letter to H. Fawcett (26 July 1870): CW, XVII, pp. 1753–4. Cf. CW, XVII, p. 1761. 121. CW, XVII, pp. 1764–5; cf. ibid., pp. 1767, 1769. 122. CW, XVII, p. 1799. 123. See: CW, XVII, pp. 1760–1, 1795–6, 1805–6. Italy also should prepare for war, he wrote to Villari: CW, XVII, p. 1807 (16 February 1871). 124. CW, XVII, pp. 1774, 1795; cf. ibid., pp. 1798, 1806. 125. Emphasis added: CW, XVII, p. 1767; cf. ibid., p. 1795, 1807, 1777. 126. Cf. Collini 1991, pp. 132–3, 144–9. 127. CW, XVII, pp. 1799–1800. 128. CW, XVII, pp. 1769, 1774–5. 129. CW, XVII, pp. 1761–2. 130. See CW, XVII, pp. 1764–5, 1767, 1769, 1795; cf. ibid., p. 1807.

Notes 203 131. Letters, III, p. 437 (29 September 1870). 132. See Leoussi 1998, pp. 139–40, 193–4 and passim. Cf. Swart 1964. 133. Emphasis added: Letters, III, p. 434 (14 September 1870).

Epilogue: La France Éternelle? Comparing with other ‘Glasses’ 1. Bagehot, ‘The Prospects of Bonapartism in France’, Works, IV, p. 170 (The Economist, 30 May 1874). 2. De Gaulle himself argued that his constitution was ‘consistent with … the traits of our national character’ (quoted in: Cerny 1980, p. 44). 3. Emphasis added: St John-Stevas 1968, p. 24. 4. St John-Stevas 1968, p. 20. 5. See Tombs 1994, pp. 175–6. 6. Rosanvallon 2000, pp. 183–221. 7. Rosanvallon 2000, p. 219. For Bagehot’s article referred to see: Works, IV, pp. 11–16. 8. Cf. Furet et al. 1988. 9. In this Rosanvallon echoes somehow Guizot (on whom he wrote a seminal book in 1985: Rosanvallon 1985): See Guizot 1997, pp. 228–9. Cf. Mill, CW, XX, pp. 290–4. 10. For more on what he means by this see: Rosanvallon 2000, pp. 183–221. 11. Rosanvallon 2001. 12. Jennings 1996, p. 86 (referring to: Rosanvallon 1994). 13. Cf. Tombs 1994, p. 173: ‘Because of this centrality of the State in the life of society, all … political struggles focus, in the last analysis, on influencing or securing control of the apparatus of the State.’ 14. Furet et al. 1988, pp. 175–7; Mill, CW, XVIII, pp. 218–19. 15. Jaume 1997. 16. Bagehot, ‘The Liberals and the Emperor’, Works, IV, p. 149 (The Economist, 21 May 1870). Cf. quotation in the epigraph of this Epilogue. 17. Works, VIII, p. 202 (3 June 1871). 18. Works, VIII, p. 184. On Prévost-Paradol as belonging to the minority current of French liberalism, the ‘libéralisme du sujet, de la conscience ou de l’individu’ (‘liberalism of the subject, of the conscience or of the individual’) see Jaume 1997, p. 19. 19. Works, IV, p. 150. 20. Hazareesingh 1999, p. 26. 21. Hazareesingh 1999, p. 26; cf. Hazareesingh 1994, pp. 207–30. In this same context, de Gaulle made no secret of his hope, ‘in Chateaubriand’s phrase, “to lead them [the French] there by means of dreams”’ (Cerny 1980, p. 80). 22. Works, IV, p. 175 (The Economist, 6 June 1874). 23. Works, IV, p. 135. 24. It is at least arguable that Mill did not attempt anything like a thorough assessment, in book or article form, of the prospects of French politics in the last years of his life because he did not like what he would have come up with.

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216 Bibliography Stephen, James Fitzjames (1865) ‘Mr. Matthew Arnold amongst the Philistines’, Saturday Review, 19 (25 February 1865), pp. 235–6. Stephen, James Fitzjames (1866a) ‘Mr. Arnold on the Middle Classes’, Saturday Review, 21 (10 February 1866), pp. 161–3. Stephen, James Fitzjames (1866b) ‘Lord Macaulay’s Works’, Saturday Review, 22 (18 August 1866), pp. 207–9. Stephen, James Fitzjames (1867) ‘Mr Matthew Arnold on Culture’, Saturday Review, 24 (20 July 1867), pp. 78–9. Stephen, Leslie (1900) The English Utilitarians, 3 vols, London. Stocking, George W., Jr. (1968) Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology, New York. Stocking, George W., Jr (1987) Victorian Anthropology, New York. Sutton, Michael (1982) Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism: the Politics of Charles Maurras and French Catholics 1890–1914, Cambridge. Swart, Koenraad W. (1964) The Sense of Decadence in Nineteenth-Century France, The Hague. Taine, Hippolyte (1864) Histoire de la littérature anglaise, Paris. Taine, Hippolyte (1872) Notes sur l’Angleterre, Paris. Taylor, A.J.P. (1993) The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy 1792–1939, London. Taylor, Miles (1995) The Decline of British Radicalism, Oxford. Thomas, William (1979) The Philosophic Radicals: Nine Studies in Theory and Practice 1817–1841, Oxford. Thomson, David (1950) England in the Nineteenth Century (1815–1914), London. Thomson, Patricia (1977) George Sand and the Victorians: Her Influence and Reputation in Nineteenth-century England, London and Basingstoke. Tocqueville, Alexis de (1872) Correspondence and Conversations with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, ed. by M.C.M. Simpson, 2 vols, London. Tocqueville, Alexis de (1951– ) [referred to as OC]: Oeuvres, Papiers et Correspondances d’Alexis de Tocqueville, édition definitive sous la direction de J.-P. Mayer, Paris. Volumes referred to here are: Vol. VI, 1: Correspondance Anglaise: Correspondance d’Alexis de Tocqueville avec Henry Reeve et John Stuart Mill; Vol. VI, 2: Correspondance Anglaise: Correspondance et Conversations d’Alexis de Tocqueville et Nassau William Senior; Vol. IX: Correspondance d’Alexis de Tocqueville et d’Arthur de Gobineau; Vol. III, 2 Ecrits et Discours Politiques; Vol. XVI: Mélanges. Tocqueville, Alexis de (1957) Voyages en Angleterre et en Irlande, ed. J.P. Mayer, Paris. Tocqueville, Alexis de (1985) Selected Letters on Politics and Society, ed. Roger Boesche, Berkeley. Tocqueville, Alexis de (1988) [1856] The Ancien Régime, with an Introduction by Norman Hampson, London. Tocqueville, Alexis de (1994) [1835, 1840] Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J.P. Mayer, Hammersmith, London. Todorov, Tzvetan (1993) [1989] On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism and Exoticism in French Thought (trans. from the French), Cambridge, Mass., and London. Tombs, Robert (1994) ‘Was there a French Sonderweg?’, European Review of HistoryRevue Européenne d’Histoire, Vol. 1, 169–77. Tombs, Robert (1996) France 1814–1914, Harlow, Essex.

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Index on French politics, 86–101 on French racial origins, 118–22 on the French revolution of 1848, 77 ‘Letters on the French Coup d’Etat of 1851’, 74, 87 on Napoleon III, 92–5 on national characteristics, 115–17 Physics and Politics, 11, 91, 92, 115, 116, 117, 118–19 Bain, Alexander, 17, 29, 42, 81, 153 Barrot, Odilon, 82 Bentham, Jeremy, 22, 26, 94, 172(n27), 199(n40) Blanco-White, J.B., 37 Bonapartism, 98–9, 164–5, 165–7 Bright, John, 22 Broglie, Albert Duc de, 102 Brougham, Lord Henry Peter, 71–2, 145, 151 Buckle, Henry Thomas, 106 History of Civilization in England, 34, 112–13, 178(n17), 193(n19) Burke, Edmund, 2, 116 Burrow, John W., 5, 57

Acton, Lord, 3, 5, 34, 61–2, 81 on the Franco-Prussian war, 158 on the French national character, 122–3 on the French revolution of 1848, 79 on national character, 113–14 ambition, France, 135 Ancient Law, 11 Aristotle, The Politics, 21 Arnold, Matthew, 3, 6–7, 10, 20–1, 26, 29, 31, 106–10, 140 ‘A Courteous Explanation’, 15–16 on civilization, 33, 47–50; in France and England, 51–6 Culture and Anarchy, 27–8, 48 ‘Democracy’, 21, 55 England and the Italian Question, 54 ‘Equality’, 50, 51, 53, 56 on the Franco-Prussian war, 153 on the French national character, 128 on the French revolution of 1848, 76–7 Mixed Essays, 50, 51 On the Study of Celtic Literature, 11, 106, 108, 109, 110–11, 130 Arnold, Thomas (Dr), 32, 47, 106, 140 Arnold, Tom, 77 Aron, Raymond, 198–9(n30) Austria, 153, 154 Bagehot, Walter, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 46, 57, 152, 164–5 on Caesarism, 93, 94, 165–6 on civilization, 41 ‘The Conservative Republic’, 100–1 The English Constitution, 92, 96, 100, 170 on the Franco-Prussian war, 159–60 on French foreign affairs, 155–6 on the French national character, 15, 88, 90, 103, 117–22, 129, 169

Caesarism, 93, 94, 165–6 Carlyle, Thomas, 3, 6, 20 and the Franco-Prussian war, 158–9 The French Revolution, 4, 66 History of Frederick the Great, 158 ‘Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question’, 105 on race, 105–6 on the revolution of 1848, 66–8 Signs of the Times, 49 Carrel, Armand, 62–5, 72, 111, 184(n30) Cavaignac, Eugène, 73, 74 Celtic race, 13, 34, 106–11, 114, 129–30

218

Index 219 Chartism, 66 Chasles, Philarète, 20 Chateaubriand, François René, 135 Mémoires d’outre-tombe, 10 civilization, 31–3 Arnold on, 51–6 Bagehot on, 41 definitions, 35, 36–7 in England and France, 43–7 meanings of, 32–4 Mill on, 35–47 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 77 Cobden, Richard, 22, 32, 34, 49 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 39 Mill on, 41–2 On the Constitution of Church and State, 32–3 Collini, Stefan, 2, 3, 16–17, 25–6 commerce, 35, 39, 41, 49 communism, 72 comparison, 9 Comte, Auguste, 14, 15 Système de Politique Positive, 43 Comtists, 91, 97, 123, 157 Constant, Benjamin, 64, 197(n99) Cornick, Martyn, 132 Le Coup d’état Permanent, 165 Crossley, Ceri, 175(n74), 182(n69) culture, 33, 35, 48, 49 Culture and Anarchy, 27–8, 48 Dalberg-Acton, John Emerich Edward, see Acton, Lord Darwinism, 115 d’Aumale, Duc, 82 de Broglie, Albert, 64 de Gaulle, Charles, 101, 164, 165, 167, 170, 203(n2), 203(n21) d’Eichthal, Gustave, 43, 142, 144 democracy, 112, 114, 128 Democracy in America, 39, 79, 133 Dissertations and Discussions, 18, 75 diversity, 11–12 Dulaure, J.P., 24 Dunoyer, Barthélemy Charles Pierre Joseph, La Révolution du 24 Février, 78 Dupont-White, Charles, 82 Duveyrier, Charles, 148

Eagleton, Terry, 32 The Economist, 4, 68, 90, 91 Edinburgh Review, 24, 78, 133, 148, 150 Edwards, W.F., 107–8 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 22 England definition, 171(n3) foreign policy, 29 national character, 115 perfidy, 131–2, 153 refugees in, 152 social arrangements, 43–4, 46 uniformization of society, 21 universities, 45 England and the English, 20 England and France, civilization compared, 43–7 England and the Italian Question, 54 The English Constitution, 92, 96, 100, 170 Essays on French History and Historians, 141 ethnic groups, complementarity, 12–14 Examiner, 58, 59, 66, 67, 72, 85, 138, 140 expansion, 50 Faverty, Frederic E., 11, 106, 107 Favre, Jules, 82, 83 Fawcett, Henry, 160 Febvre, Lucien, 32, 37 foreign countries, comparisons with, 2 foreign literature, 15 Fortnightly Review, 102, 158, 160 France ambition, 135 attitude to war, 139 character, 19 education system, 56 elections (1869), 82–3 foreign policy, 138–40, 148, 152–6 and the Irish, 14 liberalism, 64 logical thinking, 122–3 politics, 57–8, 114, 128–9 pride, 135

220 Index France – continued Provisional Government, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75 racial origins, 108–10, 118–22 republicans, 63, 65–6 revolution of 1830, 58–60 revolution of 1848, 2, 66–80, 149–52 Acton on, 79 Arnold on, 76–7 Bagehot on, 77 Carlyle on, 66–8 Morley on, 79–80 Senior on, 78 Tocqueville on, 79 sexual promiscuity, 163 Third Republic, 84 uprising of 5–6 June 1832, 60 see also French national character; revolution of 1848 France and England, civilization compared, 43–7 Franco-Prussian war, 52, 83–4, 96, 123, 156–63 Arnold on, 153 Mill on, 160–3 Morley on, 160 Fraser’s Magazine, 28 freedom, 117–18 Freeman, E.A., 106, 114 French national character, 85, 97, 98, 103–30, 132–3, 134 Acton on, 122–3 Arnold on, 128 Bagehot on, 88, 90, 117–22, 129, 169 and international politics (1830–48), 133–49 Mill on, 123–7 and politics, 117–30 The French Revolution, 4, 66 Gambetta, Léon Michel, 102 Gauls, 113 Germany, 105–6, 123 see also Franco-Prussian war Girard, Louis, 83 Gironde, 73 Le Globe, 10

Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, Comte de, 113 Goldwin Smith, Irish History, 114 government of law – rule of law, 60–5 greatness, national, 25–8, 143–4 Greg, William Rathbone, 5, 68–70 Guizot, François P.G., 11, 31, 32, 35, 36–8, 40, 43–4, 45, 145, 146, 149, 179–80(n34) Histoire de la Civilisation en Europe, 36, 39, 41, 47 Histoire de la Civilisation en France, 36, 43–4 Gusdorf, G., 37 Halévy, Elie, 1 half-truths, 14, 42, 148, 175–6(n79) Hamerton, Philip Gilbert, 52 happiness, 46 Harrison, Frederic, 6, 32, 49, 101–2, 157–158 Hazareesingh, Sudhir, 169, 186(n74), 190(n165), 203(n20), 203(n21) Hazlitt, William, 103 Heine, Heinrich, 201(n93) Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 42 Histoire de la Civilisation en Europe, 36, 39, 41, 47 Histoire de la Civilisation en France, 36, 43–4, 181(n51) History of British India, 40–1 History of Civilization in England, 34, 112–13, 178(n17), 193(n19) History of England, 23–4 History of Frederick the Great, 158 Hoffmann, Stanley, 165 human improvement, 35–6, 37, 39 Hume, David, 104 Hutton, R.H., 21, 86, 87 Inquirer, 87, 88, 117, 119, 122, 152 intellect, 46 intelligence, 20, 56, 76 of French peasants, 52 Ireland, 34, 67–8, 111, 122 and the French, 14 Irish question, 12–13 see also Celtic race

Index 221 Irish History, 114 Italy, 54, 153, 154 Jaume, Lucien, 168 Jennings, Jeremy, 185(n35), 197(n4), 198(n5) Jones, H.S., 172(n15), 173(n49) Judt, Tony, 197(n110) Kelly, George Armstrong, 64 Kingsley, Charles, 32, 106 Kipling, Rudyard, 15 Knox, Robert, 106 Lamartine, Alphonse Marie Louis de, 73, 74, 78, 150, 151–2 The Law of the Revolution, 84 liberalism, 168–9 France, 64 liberty, 2, 86, 129, 153, 166 Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, 23 Lochore, R.A., 37 London and Westminster Review, 37 Louis Philippe, 66, 71, 72, 147 Lowe, Robert, 32 Lytton-Bulwer, Edward, England and the English, 20 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 3, 5, 31, 32, 33–4, 58–9, 66, 134 History of England, 23–4 on Napoleon III, 81 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 195(n65), 198(n12) Macmahon, Marshal, 97, 100, 101–2 Maine, Henry, 118 Ancient Law, 11 Mandler, Peter, 115, 174(n63) on national character, 112 Martignac Ministry, 60, 61, 62 Martineau, Harriet, 1, 152 Martin, Henri, 107 Marx, Karl, 201(n93), 202(n116) ‘Mechanical Age’, 48–9 Mémoires d’outre-tombe, 10 Michelet, Jules, 2 middle classes, 16, 29, 48, 54, 76, 155 Middle East crisis (1840), 136, 140, 141

Mill and Tocqueville on, 142–7 Millar, John, 40 Mill, James History of British India, 22, 40–1 Mill, John Stuart, 1, 4, 9–10, 11, 14, 16–17, 19–20, 22, 23, 24–5, 111, 131, 145 on Anglo-French affairs, 141, 146 ‘Armand Carrel’, 58, 59, 60, 62–3, 65, 125 Autobiography, 7, 17, 42 ‘Centralisation’, 82, 85 on civilization, 35–47 ‘Coleridge’, 41–2 Collected Works, 7 dislike of Napoleon III, 153–4 Dissertations and Discussions, 18, 75 Essays on French History and Historians, 141 ‘A few words on non-intervention’, 28, 139 on the Franco-Prussian war, 160–3 on the French elections (1869), 81–3 on French foreign policy, 138–40 on the French national character, 123–7 on Ireland, 68 Later Letters, 22 on the Middle East crisis (1840), 142–4 on national character, 111–12, 123–6 Principles of Political Economy, 38–9 ‘Prospects of France’, 59 Representative Government, 61, 85, 127, 128 on the revolution of 1848, 72–3, 75–6 ‘Sedgwick’s Discourse’, 45 System of Logic, 80, 123–4 on the Third Republic, 84–5 on works of Duveyrier, 148–9 Mitterrand, François, Le Coup d’état Permanent, 165 Montalembert, Charles Rene Forbes, 81, 198(n5)

222 Index Montesquieu, Charles-Louis, 104 Morley, John, 2, 5, 34, 79–80, 123 and the Franco-Prussian war, 160 On Compromise, 79–80 on the revolution of 1848, 79–80 Morning Chronicle, 145 Napoleon III, 8, 17, 71, 73, 80–102, 152, 153–4, 156, 161–2 Bagehot on, 92–5 declared Emperor, 80–1 Macaulay on, 81 Senior on, 135 Le National, 73, 77 national character, 2, 8–10, 15 Acton on, 113–14 Bagehot on, 115–17 concept, 103–4 English, 115 Mandler on, 112 Mill on, 110–11 see also French national character national greatness, 25–8, 143–4 National Review, 15 Newman, Gerald, 23 Nisard, J.M.N.D., 63–4 Northern Star, 66 Ollivier, Emile, 83 On Compromise, 79–80 On the Constitution of Church and State, 32–3 On the Study of Celtic Literature, 11, 106, 108, 109, 110–11, 130 openness, 47–8 Ossian, 110 Palgrave, F.T., 17 Pall Mall Gazette, 15, 109 Palmerston, Henry John Temple, 141, 142, 146, 147 patriotism, 21–8 perfidy, of England, 131–2, 153 Persigny, Jean Gilbert, Duc de, 91 Physics and Politics, 11, 91, 92, 115, 116, 117, 118–19 Plamenatz, John, 82 The Politics, 21 pride, in France, 135

Principles of Political Economy, 38–9 Proudhon, Pierre Joseph, 74, 87 Quarterly Review, 17, 24 race, 104–10, 134, 192(n7) Carlyle on, 105–6 races, complementarity, 12–14 La Réforme, 73 refugees, in England, 152 Renan, Ernest, 20, 107, 109 Representative Government, 61, 85, 127, 128 republicans, France, 63, 65–6 revolution of 1848, Senior on, 150 La Révolution du 24 Février, 78 Revue de Deux Mondes, 47 Right of Search, 145 Rochefort, Henri, 82, 83 Robson, John M., 178(n9) Roebuck, John, 32 Rosanvallon, Pierre on Bagehot, 165–6 on French ‘illiberalism’, 165–8 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 42 Saturday Review, 9, 106 Schmidt, H.D., 132 Scott, Walter, 24 Second Republic, 149–52 Semmel, Bernard, 41–2 Senior, Nassau W., 3, 32, 131, 133 ‘France, America and Britain’, 133–4 on the French revolution of 1848, 78 on international politics, 133–8 on Napoleon III, 135 on the revolution of 1848, 150 ‘The Law of Nations’, 148 Signs of the Times, 49 Smith, Thomas, The Law of the Revolution, 84 socialism, 75 social spirit, 55 Spain, 146 ‘Spanish marriages’ crisis, 149 Spencer, Herbert, 25, 102, 174(n66) Stapleton, Julia, 21–3

Index 223 Stephen, James Fitzjames, 3, 7, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 25, 29, 112–13 Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, 23 Stephen, Leslie, 22 St John-Stevas, Norman, 165, 189(n153) stupidity, 119–22 Système de Politique Positive, 43 System of Logic, 80, 123–4 Taylor, Harriet, 24 Teutonic race, 13, 105–6, 107 Thierry, Amédée, 107, 115 Thiers, Louis Adolphe, 97, 98, 141, 169 Third Republic, 96, 101 The Times, 59, 102, 140 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 31, 38, 39–40, 135, 141, 145–6, 153

Democracy in America, 39, 79, 133 on the Middle East crisis (1840), 142–4 on the revolution of 1848, 79 Todorov, Tzvetan, 199(n30) Tombs, Robert, 164, 165 Trilling, Lionel, 106 uniformization of English society, 21 Urquhart, David, 68 USA, 11–12, 39–40 Villari, Pasquale, 153 Voltaire, 14, 104 Watson, George, 16 Weber, Eugen, 131 Westminster Review, 72, 75 Wordsworth, William, 23

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