Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18.djvu/83

1866.] in some land where the spirit of religious enterprise is not yet dead.

In the outskirts is St. Gervais, the church of the monastery to which William the Conqueror was carried, out of the noise and the feverish air of the great city, to die, and which witnessed the strange struggle, in his last moments, between his rapacious passions and his late-awakened remorse. So insecure was the state of society, that, when he whose iron hand had preserved order among his feudal nobles had expired, those about him fled to their strongholds in expectation of a general anarchy. Government was still only personal: law had not yet been enthroned in the minds of men. Even the personal attendants of the Conqueror abandoned his corpse,—a singular illustration of the theory, cherished by lovers of the past, that the relations of master and servant were more affectionate, and of a higher kind, in the days of chivalry than they are in ours.

Among the workingmen of Rouen, there probably lurks a good deal of republicanism, akin to that which exists among the workingmen of Paris. Unfortunately it is of a kind which, though capable of spasmodic attempts to revolutionize society by force, is little capable of sustained constitutional effect, and which alarms and arrays against it, not only despots, but moderate friends of liberty and progress. The outward appearances, however, at Rouen are all in favor of the Zouave and the Priest; and of the dominion of these two powers in France, if they can abstain from quarrelling with each other, it is difficult to foresee the end.

I have spoken bitterly of the French Empire. It has not only crushed the liberties of France, but it is the keystone and the focus of the system of military despotism in Europe. Bismarck, O'Donnell, and all the rest who rule by sabre-sway, are its pupils. It is intensely propagandist,—feeling, like slavery, that it cannot endure the contagious neighborhood of freedom. It has to a terrible extent corrupted even English politics, and inspired our oligarchical party with ideas of violence quite foreign to the temper of English Tories in former days. It is killing not only all moral aspirations, but almost all moral culture in France, and leaving nothing but the passion for military glory, the thirst of money, and the love of pleasure. It is reducing all education to a centralized machine, the wires of which are moved by a bureau at Paris; and we shall see the effects of this on French intellect in the next generation, "Ils ont tué la jeunesse," were the bitter words of an eminent and chivalrous Frenchman to the author of this article. Commerce is no doubt flourishing, and money is being made by the commercial classes, at present, under the Empire; but the highest industry is intimately connected with the moral and intellectual energies of a nation; and if these perish, it will in time perish too.

I have no means of knowing whether the morality of the court and the upper classes at Paris is what it is commonly reported to be; though, assuredly, if the performances of Thérèse are truly described to us, strange things must go on in the highest circles. Historical experience would be at fault, if a military despotism, with a political religion, did not produce moral effects in Paris somewhat analogous to those which it produced in Rome. The fashionable literature of the Empire, which can scarcely fail to reflect pretty accurately the moral state of the fashionable world, is not merely loose in principle, (as literature might possibly be in a period of transition between a narrower and an ampler moral code,) but utterly vile and loathsome; it seeks the materials of sensation novels from the charnel-house as well as from the brothel.

At Dieppe, my last point, I visited that very picturesque as well as memorable ruin, the Chateau d'Arques. It is a monument of the great victory gained near it by the Huguenots under Henri IV. over the League. This and the other Huguenot victories, alas! proved bootless; and it is melancholy to visit the fields where they were won.