MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS OF THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF FRANCE.

BY FRANCIS J. GRUND.

[SEE ENGRAVING.]

Alphonse de Lamartine, the present Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of France, was born in 1792, at Saint Pont, near MÂcon, in the Department of the Saone and Loire. His true family name is De Prat; but he took the name of De Lamartine from his uncle, whose fortune he inherited in 1820. His father and uncle were both royalists, and suffered severely from the Jacobins during the revolution. Had they lived in Paris their heads might have fallen from the block, but even in the province they did not escape persecution—a circumstance which, from the earliest youth of Lamartine, made a deep and indelible impression on his mind. His early education he received at the College of Belley, from which he returned in 1809, at the age of 18 years.

The splendor of the empire under Napoleon had no attractions for him. Though, at that period, Napoleon was extremely desirous to reconcile some of the old noble families, and for that purpose employed confidential ladies and gentlemen to correspond with the exiles and to represent to them the nobility of sentiment, and the magnanimity of the emperor; Lamartine refused to enter the service of his country under the new rÉgime. So far from taking an interest in the great events of that period, he devoted himself entirely to literary studies, and improved his time by perambulating Italy. The fall of Napoleon did not affect him, for he was no friend of the first revolution, (whose last representative Napoleon still continued to be, though he had tamed it;) and when, in 1814, the elder line of Bourbons was restored, Lamartine returned from Naples, and entered, the service of Louis XVIII., as an officer of the garde-du-corps. With the return of Napoleon from Elba he left the military service forever.

A contemporary of Chateaubriand, Delavigne and Beranger, he now devoted himself to that species of lyric and romantic poetry which at first exasperated the French critics, but, in a very short time, won for him the European appellation of "the French Schiller." His first poems, "MÉditations PoÉtiques," which appeared in Paris in 1820, were received with ten times the bitter criticism that was poured out on Byron by the Scotch reviewers, but with a similar result; in less than two months a second edition was called for and published. The spirit of these poems is that of a deep but undefined religion, presentiments and fantastic dreams of another world, and the consecration of a noble and disinterested passion for the beau ideal of his youth, "Elvire," separated from him forever by the chilly hand of death. In the same year Lamartine became Secretary of the French Legation at Naples, and in 1822, Secretary of the Legation in London—Chateaubriand being at the time minister plenipotentiary.

But the author of the GÉnie du Christianism, les Martyrs, and Bonaparte et des Bourbons, "did not seem to have been much pleased with Lamartine, whom he treated with studied neglect, and afterward entirely forgot as minister of foreign affairs. Chateaubriand, shortly before taking the place of Mons. Decazes in London, had published his MÉmoires, lettres, et piÈces authentiques touchant la vie et la mort du Duc de Berri,"[3] and was then preparing to accompany the Duke of Montmorency, whom, in December 1822, he followed as minister of foreign affairs to the Congress of Verona. It is very possible that Chateaubriand, who was truly devoted to the elder branch of the Bourbons,[4] may at that time have discovered in Lamartine little of that political talent or devotion which could have recommended him to a diplomatic post. Chateaubriand was a man of positive convictions in politics and religion, while Lamartine, at that period, though far surpassing Chateaubriand in depth of feeling and imagination, had not yet acquired that objectiveness of thought and reflection which is indispensable to the statesman or the diplomatist.

After the dismission of Chateaubriand from the ministry, in July, 1824, Lamartine became Secretary to the French Legation at Florence. Here he wrote "Le dernier chant du pÉlerinage d'Harold," (the Last Song of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,) which was published in Paris in 1825. Some allusions to Italy which occur in this poem, caused him a duel with Col. Pepe, a relation of General Pepe—who had commanded the Neapolitan Insurgents—in which he was severely wounded. In the same year he published his "Chant du Sacre," (Chant of the Coronation,) in honor of Charles X., just about the time that his contemporary, Beranger, was preparing for publication his "Chansons inÉdittes," containing the most bitter sarcasm on Charles X., and for which the great Chansonnier was afterward condemned to nine month's imprisonment, and a fine of 10,000 francs. The career of Lamartine commences in 1830, after he had been made a member of the Academy, when Beranger's muse went to sleep, because, with Charles X.'s flight from France, he declared his mission accomplished. Delavigne, in 1829, published his Marino Falieri.

While in London, Lamartine married a young English lady, as handsome as spirituelle, who had conceived a strong affection for him through his poems, which she appreciated far better than his compeer, Chateaubriand, and requited with the true troubadour's reward. With the accession of Louis Philippe, Lamartine left the public service and traveled through Turkey, Egypt, and Syria. Here he lost his daughter, a calamity which so preyed on his mind that it would have incapacitated him for further intellectual efforts, had he not been suddenly awakened to a new sphere of usefulness. The town of Bergues, in the Department of the North, returned him, in his absence, to the Chamber of Deputies. He accepted the place, and was subsequently again returned from his native town, MÂcon, which he represented at the period of the last Revolution, which has called him to the head of the provisional government.

It is here worthy of remark, that Lamartine, from the commencement of his political career, did not take that interest in public affairs which seriously interferred with his poetical meditations; on the contrary, it was his muse which gave direction to his politics. He took a poetical view of religion, politics, morals, society, and state; the Chambers were to him but the medium for the realization of his beaux ideals. But it must not be imagined that Lamartine's beaux ideals had a distinct form, definitive outlines, or distinguishing lights and shades. His imagination has never been plastic, and his fancy was far better pleased with the magnitude of objects than with the artistical arrangement of their details. His conceptions were grand; but he possessed little power of elaboration; and this peculiarity of his intellect he carried from literature into politics.

Shortly after his becoming a member of the French Academy, he publishes his "Harmonies politiques et religieuses."[5] Between the publication of these "Harmonies," and the "Poetical Meditations," with which he commenced his literary career, lies a cycle of ten years; but no perceptible intellectual progress or developement. True, the first effusions of a poet are chiefly marked by intensity of feeling and depth of sentiment. (What a world of emotions does not pervade Schiller's "Robbers," or Goethe's "GÖtz of Berlichingen, with the iron hand!") but the subsequent productions must show some advancement toward objective reality, without which it is impossible to individualize even genius. To our taste, the "Meditations" are superior to his "Harmonies," in other words, we prefer his prÆludium to the concert. The one leaves us full of expectation, the other disappoints us. Lamartine's religion is but a sentiment; his politics at that time were but a poetical conception of human society. His religion never reached the culmination point of faith; his politics were never condensed into a system; his liquid sympathies for mankind never left a precipitate in the form of an absorbing patriotism. When his contemporary, Beranger, electrified the masses by his "Roi d'Yvetot," and "le Senateur," (in 1813,) Lamartine quietly mused in Naples, and in 1814 entered the body guard of Louis XVIII., when Cormenin resigned his place as counsellor of state, to serve as a volunteer in Napoleon's army.

Lamartine's political career did not, at first, interfere with his literary occupation, it was merely an agreeable pastime—a respite from his most ardent and congenial labors. In 1835 appeared his "Souvenirs, impressions, pensÉes et paysages pendant un voyage en Orient, &c."[6] This work, though written from personal observations, is any thing but a description of travels, or a faithful delineation of Eastern scenery or character. It is all poetry, without a sufficient substratum of reality—a dream of the Eastern world with its primitive vigor and sadness, but wholly destitute of either antiquarian research or living pictures. Lamartine gives us a picture of the East by candle-light—a high-wrought picture, certainly; but after all nothing but canvas. Shortly after this publication, there appeared his "Jocelyn, journal trouvÉ chez un curÉ de village,"[7] a sort of imitation of the Vicar of Wakefield; but with scarcely an attempt at a faithful delineation of character. Lamartine has nothing to do with the village parson, who may be a very ordinary personage; his priest is an ideal priest, who inculcates the doctrines of ideal Christianity in ideal sermons without a text. Lamartine seems to have an aversion to all positive forms, and dislikes the dogma in religion as much as he did the principles of the Doctrinaires. It would fetter his genius or oblige it to take a definite direction, which would be destructive to its essence.

As late as in 1838 Lamartine published his "La chute d'un age."[8] This is one of his poorest productions, though exhibiting vast powers of imagination and productive genius. The scene is laid in a chaotic antediluvian world, inhabited by Titans, and is, perhaps, descriptive of the author's mind, full of majestic imagery, but as yet undefined, vague, and without an object worthy of its efforts. Lamartine's time had not yet come, though he required but a few years to complete the fiftieth anniversary of his birth.

The year following, in 1839, he published his "Recueillements poÉtiques," which must be looked upon as the commencement of a new era in his life. Mahomed was past forty when he undertook to establish a new religion, and built upon it a new and powerful empire; Lamartine was nearly fifty when he left the fantastic for the real; and from the inspiration without an object, returned to the only real poetry in this world—the life of man. Lamartine, who until that period had been youthful in his conceptions, and wild and bizarre in his fancy, did not, as Voltaire said of his countrymen, pass "from childhood to old age," but paused at a green manhood, with a definite purpose, and the mighty powers of his mind directed to an object large enough to afford it scope for its most vigorous exercise. His muse was now directed to the interests of humanity; he was what the French call un poete humanitaire.

Thus far it was proper for us to follow the life of the poet to understand that of the statesman, orator, and tribune. Men like Lamartine must be judged in their totality, not by single or detached acts of their lives. Above all men it is the poet who is a self-directing agent, whose faculties receive their principal impulse from within, and who stamps his own genius on every object of his mental activity. Schiller, after writing the history of the most remarkable period preceding the French Revolution, "the thirty years' war," (for liberty of conscience,) and "the separation of the Netherlands from the crown of Spain," felt that his energies were not yet exhausted on the subject; but his creative genius found no theatre of action such as was open to Lamartine in the French Chamber, in the purification of the ideas engendered by the Revolution; and he had therefore to content himself with bringing his poetical conceptions on the stage. Instead of becoming an actor in the great world-drama, he gave us his Wallenstein and Don Carlos; Lamartine gave us himself as the best creation of his poetic genius. The poet Lamartine has produced the statesman. This it will be necessary to bear in mind, to understand Lamartine's career in the Chamber of Deputies, or the position he now holds at the head of the provisional government.

Lamartine, as we have above observed, entered the French Chamber in 1833, as a cosmopolite, full of love for mankind, full of noble ideas of human destiny, and deeply impressed with the degraded social condition not only of his countrymen, but of all civilized Europe. He knew and felt that the Revolution which had destroyed the social elements of Europe, or thrown them in disorder, had not reconstructed and arranged them; and that the re-organization of society on the basis of humanity and mutual obligation, was still an unfinished problem. Lamartine felt this; but did the French Chambers, as they were then organized, offer him a fair scope for the development of his ideas, or the exercise of his genius? Certainly not. The French Chamber was divided into two great dynastic interests—those of the younger and elder Bourbons. The Republican party (the extreme left) was small, and without an acknowledged leader; and the whole assembly, with few individual exceptions, had taken a material direction. During seventeen years—from 1830 to 1847—no organic principle of law or politics was agitated in the Chambers, no new ideas evolved. The whole national legislation seemed to be directed toward material improvements, to the exclusion of every thing that could elevate the soul or inspire the masses with patriotic sentiments. The government of Louis Philippe had at first become stationary, then reactionary; the mere enunciation of a general idea inspired its members with terror, and made the centres (right and left) afraid of the horrors of the guillotine. The government of Louis Philippe was not a reign of terror, like that of 1793, but it was a reign of prospective terror, which it wished to avoid. Louis Philippe had no faith in the people; he treated them as the keeper of a menagerie would a tame tiger—he knew its strength, and he feared its vindictiveness. To disarm it, and to change its ferocious nature, he checked the progress of political ideas, instead of combating them with the weapons of reason, and banished from his counsel those who alone could have served as mediators between the throne and the liberties of the nation. The French people seemed stupified at the contre-coups to all their hopes and aspirations. Even the more moderate complained; but their complaints were hushed by the immediate prospect of an improved material condition. All France seemed to have become industrious, manufacturing, mercantile, speculating. The thirst for wealth had succeeded to the ambition of the Republicans, the fanaticism of the Jacobins, and the love of distinction of the old monarchists. The Chamber of Deputies no longer represented the French people—its love, its hatred, its devotion—the elasticity of its mind, its facility of emotion, its capacity to sacrifice itself for a great idea. The Deputies had become stock-jobbers, partners in large enterprises of internal improvements, and timidly conservative, as are always the representatives of mere property. The Chamber, instead of representing the essence of the nation, represented merely the moneyed classes of society.

Such was the Chamber of Deputies to which Lamartine was chosen by an electoral college, devoted to the Dynastic opposition. He entered it in 1833, not a technical politician or orator as Odillon Barrot, not as a skillful tactitioner like Thiers, not as a man with one idea as the Duke de Broglie, not as the funeral orator of departed grandeur like Berryer, nor as the embodiment of a legal abstraction like Dupin, or a man of the devouring ambition and skill in debate of FranÇois Pierre Guillaume Guizot: Lamartine was simply a humanitaire. Goaded by the sarcasm of Cormenin, he declared that he belonged to no party, that he sought for no parliamentary conquest—that he wished to triumph through the force of ideas, and through no power of persuasion. He was the very counterpart of Thiers, the most sterile orator and statesman of France. Lamartine had studied the French Revolution, he saw the anarchical condition of society, and the ineffectual attempt to compress instead of organizing it; and he conceived the noble idea of collecting the scattered fragments, and uniting them into a harmonious edifice. While the extreme left were employed in removing the pressure from above, Lamartine was quietly employed in laying the foundation of a new structure, and called himself un dÉmocrate conservateur.[9] He spoke successfully and with great force against the political monopoly of real property, against the prohibitive system of trade, against slavery, and the punishment of death.[10] His speeches made him at once a popular character; he did not address himself to the Chamber, he spoke to the French people, in language that sunk deep into the hearts of the masses, without producing a striking effect in the Legislature. At that time already had the king singled him out from the rest of the opposition. He wished to secure his talents for his dynasty; but Lamartine was not in search of a portefeuille, and escaped without effort from the temptation.

In November, 1837, he was re-elected to the Chamber from Bergues and MÂcon, his native town. He decided in favor of the latter, and took his seat as a member for that place. He supported the MolÉ ministry, not because he had become converted to the new dynasty, but because he despised the Doctrinaires, who, by their union with the Liberals, brought in the new Soult ministry. He was not satisfied with the purity of motives, he also wanted proper means to attain a laudable object. In the Oriental question, which was agitated under Soult, Lamartine was not felt. His opposition was too vague and undefined: instead of pointing to the interests of France, he pointed to the duties of humanity of a great nation; he read Milton in a counting-room, and a commercial Maclaurin asked him "what does it prove?"

In 1841 his talent as an orator (he was never distinguished as a debater) was afforded ample scope by Thiers' project to fortify the capital. He opposed it vehemently, but without effect. In the boisterous session of 1842 he acted the part of a moderator; but still so far seconded the views of Thiers as to consider the left bank of the Rhine as the proper and legitimate boundary of France against Germany. This debate, it is well known, produced a perfect storm of popular passions in Germany. In a few weeks the whole shores of the Rhine were bristling with bayonets; the peasantry in the Black Forest began to clean and polish their rusty muskets, buried since the fall of Napoleon, and the princes perceiving that the spirit of nationality was stronger than that of freedom, encouraged this popular declaration against French usurpation. Nicolas Becker, a modest German, without pretension or poetic genius, but inspired by an honest love of country and national glory, then composed a war-song, commencing thus:

which was soon in every man's mouth, and being set to music, became for a short period the German Marseillaise. Lamartine answered the German with the Marseillaise de paix, (the Marseillaise of peace,) which produced a deep impression; and the fall of the Thiers' ministry soon calmed the warlike spirit throughout Europe.

On the question of the Regency, Lamartine declared himself in favor of the Duchess of Orleans as Regent, should Louis Philippe die during the minority of the Count of Paris, and it is our firm belief that he would have accepted that Regency even in February last, if the king had abdicated a day sooner. Lamartine never avowed himself a Republican; but was left no alternative but to eclipse himself forever, or become its champion.

The star of Lamartine's political destiny rose in the session of 1843, when, utterly disgusted with the reactionary policy of Guizot, he conceived the practical idea of uniting all the elements of opposition, of whatever shade and color, against the government. But he was not satisfied with this movement in the Chamber, which produced the coalition of the Dynastic right with the Democratic left, and for a moment completely paralyzed the administration of Guizot: he carried his new doctrine right before the people, as the legitimate source of the Chamber, and thus became the first political agitator of France since the restoration, in the legitimate, legal, English sense of the word. Finding that the press was muzzled, or subsidized and bought, he moved his countrymen through the power of his eloquence. He appealed from the Chamber to the sense and the virtue of the people. In September, 1843, he first addressed the electors of MÂcon on the necessity of extending the franchise, in order to admit of a greater representation of the French people—generous, magnanimous, bold and devoted to their country. Instead of fruitlessly endeavoring to reform the government, he saw that the time had come for reforming the Chamber.

In the month of October, of the same year—so rapidly did his new political genius develop itself—he published a regular programme for the opposition; a thing which Thiers, up to that moment, had studiously avoided, not to break entirely with the king, and to render himself still "possible" as a minister of the crown. Lamartine knew no such selfish consideration, which has destroyed Thiers as a man of the people, and declared himself entirely independent of the throne of July. He advocated openly the abolition of industrial feudalism, and the foundation of a new democratic society under a constitutional throne.

Thus, then, had Lamartine separated himself not only from the king and his ministers, but also from the ancient noblesse and the bourgeoisie, without approaching or identifying himself with the Republican left wing of the Chamber. He stood alone, admired for his genius, his irreproachable rectitude, his devoted patriotism, but considered rather as a poetical abstraction, an impracticable Utopist; and yet he was the only man in the Chamber who had devised a practical means of regenerating the people and the government. Lamartine was now considered a parliamentary oddity rather than the leader of a faction, or the representative of a political principle; but he was indeed far in advance of the miserable routine of his colleagues. He personated, indeed, no principle represented in the Chamber, but he was already the Tribune of the unrepresented masses! The people had declared the government a fraud—the Chamber an embodied falsehood. At last Marrast, one of the editors of the National, (now a member of the provisional government,) pronounced it in his paper that the French people had no representation, that it was in vain to attempt to oppose the government in the legislature: "La Chambre," said Marrast, "n'est qu' un mensonge."[11]

Lamartine had thus, all at once, as if by a coup-de-main, become "a popular greatness." He was the man of the people, without having courted popularity—that stimulus (as he himself called it) to so many noble acts and crimes, as the object of its caresses remains its conscious master or its pandering slave. Lamartine grew rapidly in public estimation, because he was a new man. All the great characters of the Chamber, beginning with Casimir Perrier, had, in contact with Louis Philippe, become either eclipsed or tarnished. Lamartine avoided the court, but openly and frankly confessed that he belonged to no party. He had boldly avowed his determination to oppose the government of Louis Philippe, not merely this or that particular direction, which it took in regard to its internal and external relations; but in its whole general tendency. He was neither the friend nor the enemy of a particular combination for the ministry, and had, during a short period, given his support to Count MolÉ, not because he was satisfied with his administration, but because he thought the opposition and its objects less virtuous than the minister. In this independent position, supported by an ample private fortune, (inherited, as we before observed, by his maternal uncle, and the returns of his literary activity,) Lamartine became an important element of parliamentary combination, from the weight of his personal influence, while at the same time his "utopies," as they were termed by the tactitioners of Alphonse Thiers, gave but little umbrage to the ambition of his rivals. He alone enjoyed some credit with the masses, though his social position ranked with the first in the country, while, from the peculiar bend of his mind, and the idealization of his principles, he was deemed the most harmless aspirant to political power. The practical genius of the opposition, everlastingly occupied with unintellectual details of a venal class-legislature, saw in Lamartine a useful co-operator: they never dreamt that the day would come when they would be obliged to serve under him.

And, in truth, it must be admitted that without the Revolution of February, Lamartine must have been condemned to a comparative political inactivity. With the exception of a few friends, personally devoted to him, he had no party in the Chamber. The career which he had entered, as the people's Tribune, placed him, in a measure, in opposition to all existing parties; but it was even this singular position of parliamentary impotence, which confirmed and strengthened his reputation as an honest man, in contradistinction to a notoriously corrupt legislature. His eloquence in the Chamber had no particular direction; but it was the sword of justice, and was, as such, dreaded by all parties. As a statesman his views were tempered by humanity, and so little specific as to be almost anti-national. In his views as regards the foreign policy of France he was alike opposed to Guizot and Thiers; and, perhaps, to a large portion of the French people. He wished the external policy of France governed by a general principle, as the internal politics of the country, and admitted openly the solidarity of interests of the different states of Europe. He thus created for himself allies in Germany, in Italy, in Spain; but he lacked powerful supporters at home; and became the most impracticable man to carry out the aggressive views of the fallen Dynasty. Thiers never considered him a rival; for he considered him incapable of ever becoming the exponent of a leading popular passion: neither the present nor the future seemed to present a chance for Lamartine's accession to power. L'homme positive, as Thiers was pleased to call himself at the tribune of the Chamber, almost commiserated the poet statesman and orator.

Lamartine never affected, in his manner or in his mode of living, that "republican simplicity" which is so often nothing but the frontispiece of demagoguism. He despised to flatter the people, for whom he cherished a generous sentiment, by vulgar appeal to their ignoble prejudices. He gratified his tastes where they did not come in conflict with morality or justice, and thus preserved his individuality and his friends, in the midst of the swelling tide of popular commotion and conflicting opinions. Guizot affected in his dÉhors that severity and simplicity of style, which won for him the soubriquet of "the Puritan;" bestowed by the sarcasm of the Parisians, to punish his egotism, his craving ambition and his love of power. While Guizot was penetrating the mysteries of European diplomacy, under the guidance of Princess Lieven, Lamartine's hÔtel, in the Rue de l'UniversitÉ was the rÉunion of science, literature, wit, elegance and grace. His country-seat near Paris was as elegantly furnished and artistically arranged as his palace in the Faubourg St. Germain; and his weekly receptions in Paris were as brilliant as they were attractive by the intelligence of those who had the honor to frequent them. The Élite of the old nobility, the descendants of the notabilities of the Empire, the historical remnants of the Gironde and the Jacobins, the versatility of French genius in every department, and distinguished strangers from all parts of the world were his guests; excluded were only the men of mere accidental position—the mob in politics, literature and the arts.

But the time for Lamartine had not yet come, though the demoralization of the government, and the sordid impulses given by it to the national legislature were fast preparing that anarchy of passions which no government has the power to render uniform, though it may compress it. The ministry in the session of 1845 was defeated by the coalition; but the defection of Emil de Girardin saved it once more from destruction. Meanwhile DuchÂtel, the Minister of the Interior, had found means, by a gigantic system of internal improvement, (by a large number of concessions for new rail-ways and canals,) to obtain from the same Chamber a ministerial majority, which toward the close of the session amounted to nearly eighty members. Under such auspices the new elections were ushered in, and the result was an overwhelming majority for the administration. The government was not to be shaken in the Chambers, but its popular ascendancy had sunk to zero. The opposition from being parliamentary had become organic. The opposition, seeing all hopes of success vanish in the Chambers, now embraced Lamartine's plan of agitating the people. They must either fall into perfect insignificance or dare to attack the very basis of the government. The party of Thiers and Odillon Barrot joined the movement, and by that means gave it a practical direction; while Lamartine, Marrast, Louis Blanc, and Ledru Rollin were operating on the masses, Thiers and Odillon Barrot indoctrinated the National Guards. While Thiers was willing to stake his life to dethrone Guizot, the confederates of Lamartine aimed at an organic change of the constitution.

Was Lamartine a conspirator? may here be asked. We answer most readily, no! Lamartine is what himself says of Robespierre, "a man of general ideas;" but not a man of a positive system; and hence, incapable of devising a plan for attaining a specific political object. His opposition to Louis Philippe's government was general; but it rested on a noble basis, and was free from individual passions. He may have been willing to batter it, but he did not intend its demolition. The Republic of France was proclaimed in the streets, partly as the consequence of the king's cowardice. Lamartine accepted its first office, because he had to choose between it and anarchy, and he has thus far nobly discharged his trust. If he is not a statesman of consummate ability, who would devise means of extricating his country from a difficult and perilous situation, he will not easily plunge it into danger; if he be not versed in the intrigues of cabinets, his straight forward course commands their respect, and the confidence of the French people. This is not the time for Europe to give birth to new ideas—the old Revolution has done that sufficiently—but the period has arrived for elaborating them, with a view to a new and lasting organization of society. The present revolution in Europe need not forcibly overthrow any established political creed; for there is no established political conviction in Europe. The people have arrived at a period of universal political scepticism, which, like scepticism in religion, always prepares the soil for the reception of the seed of a new faith. The great work of the revolution is done, if the people will but seize and perpetuate its consequences. Such, at least, are the views of Lamartine, and with him of a majority of European writers, as expressed in the literature of the day.

The history of the Girondists contains Lamartine's political faith. It is not without its poetry and its Utopian visions; but it is full of thought and valuable reflections, and breathes throughout the loftiest and most noble sentiments. Lamartine, in that history, becomes the panegyrist and the censor of the French Revolution. He vindicates with a powerful hand the ideas which it evolved; while he castigates, and depicts with poetic melancholy its mournful errors and its tragic character. He makes Vergniaud, the chief of the Girondists, say before his execution—"In grafting the tree, my friend, we have killed it. It was too old. Robespierrie cuts it. Will he be more successful than ourselves? No. This soil is too unsteady to nourish the roots of civil liberty; this people is too childish to handle its laws without wounding itself. It will come back to its kings as children come back to their rattle. We made a mistake in our births, in being born and dying for the liberty of the world. We imagined that we were in Rome, and we were in Paris. But revolutions are like those crises which, in a single night, turn men's hair gray. They ripen the people fast. The blood in our veins is warm enough to fecundate the soil of the Republic. Let us not take with us the future, and let us bequeath to the people our hope in return for the death which it gives us."[12]

It is impossible that Lamartine should not have felt as a poet what he expressed as a historian, and his character is too sincere to prevent him from acting out his conviction. In describing the death of the founders of the first French Republic, Lamartine employs the whole pathos of his poetic inspiration.

"They (the Girondists) possessed three virtues which in the eyes of posterity atone for many faults. They worshiped liberty; they founded the Republic—this precautions truth of future governments;—at last, they died, because they refused blood to the people. Their time has condemned them to death, the future has judged them to glory and pardon. They died because they did not allow Liberty to soil itself, and posterity will yet engrave on their memory the inscription which Vergniaud, their oracle, has, with his own hand, engraved on the wall of his dungeon: 'Rather death than crime!' 'Potius mori quam foedari!'"

Lamartine is visibly inclined in favor of the Girondists—the founders of the Republic; but his sense of justice does not permit him to condemn the Jacobins without vindicating their memory from that crushing judgment which their contemporaries pronounced upon them. He thus describes, in a few masterly strokes, the character of Robespierre:

"Robespierre's refusal of the supreme power was sincere in the motives which he alleged. But there were other motives which caused him to reject the sole government. These motives he did not yet avow. The fact is that he had arrived at the end of his thoughts, and that himself did not know what form was best suited to revolutionary institutions. More a man of ideas than of action, Robespierre had the sentiment of the Revolution rather than the political formula. The soul of the institutions of the future was in his dreams, but he lacked the mechanism of a popular government. His theories, all taken from books, were brilliant and vague as perspectives, and cloudy as the far distance. He contemplated them daily; he was dazzled by them; but he never touched them with the firm and precise hand of practice. He forgot that Liberty herself requires the protection of a strong power, and that this power must have a head to conceive, and hands to execute. He believed that the words Liberty, Equality, Disinterestedness, Devotion, Virtue, incessantly repeated, were themselves a government. He took philosophy for politics, and became indignant at his false calculations. He attributed continually his deceptions to the conspiracies of aristocrats and demagogues. He thought that in extinguishing from society the aristocrats and demagogues, he would be able to suppress the vices of humanity, and the obstacles to the work of liberal institutions. His notion of the people was an illusion, not a reality. He became irritated to find the people often so weak, so cowardly, so cruel, so ignorant, so changeable, so unworthy the rank which nature has assigned them. He became irritated and soured, and challenged the scaffold to extricate him from his difficulties. Then, indignant at the excesses of the scaffold, he returned to words of justice and humanity. Then once more he seized upon the scaffold, invoked virtue and suscitated death. Floating sometimes on clouds, sometimes in human gore, he despaired of mankind and became frightened at himself. 'Death, and nothing but death!' he cried, in conversation with his intimate friends, 'and the villains charge it upon me. What memory shall I leave behind me if this goes on? Life is a burthen to me!'"

Once, says Lamartine, the truth became manifest. He (Robespierre) exclaimed, with a gesture of despair, "No, I was not made to govern, I was made to combat the enemies of the people!"

These meditations on the character of Robespierre, show sufficiently that Lamartine, though he may not as yet have taken a positive direction in politics, has at least, from his vague poetical conceptions, returned to a sound state of political criticism, the inevitable precursor of sound theories. His views on the execution of the royal family are severe but just.

"Had the French nation a right to judge Louis XVI. as a legal tribunal?" demands Lamartine. "No! Because the judge ought to be impartial and disinterested—and the nation was neither the one nor the other. In this terrible but inevitable combat, in which, under the name of revolution, royalty and liberty were engaged for emancipating or enslaving the citizen, Louis XVI. personified the throne, the nation personified liberty. This was not their fault, it was their nature. All attempts at a mutual understanding were in vain. Their natures warred against each other in spite of their inclination toward peace. Between these two adversaries, the king and the people, of whom the one, by instinct, was prompted to retain, the other to wrest from its antagonist the rights of the nation, there was no tribunal but combat, no judge but victory. We do not mean to say that there was not above the parties a moral of the case, and acts which judge even victory itself. This justice never perishes in the eclipse of the law, and the ruin of empires; but it has no tribunal before which it can legally summon the accused; it is the justice of state, the justice which has neither regularly appointed judges, nor written laws, but which pronounces its sentences in men's consciences, and whose code is equity."

"Louis XVI. could not be judged in politics or equity, but by a process of state. Had the nation a right to judge him thus? As well might we demand whether she had a right to fight and conquer, in other words, as well might we ask whether despotism is inviolable—whether liberty is a revolt—whether there is no justice here below but for kings—whether there is, for the people, no other right than to serve and obey? The mere doubt is an act of impiety toward the people."

So far the political philosophy of Lamartine, the legal argument against the king, strikes us as less logical and just. We may agree with him in principle, but we cannot assent to the abstract justice of his conclusions.

"The nation," says the head of the present provisional government of France, "possessing within itself the inalienable sovereignty which rests in reason, in the right and the will of each citizen, the aggregate of which constitutes the people, possesses certainly the faculty of modifying the exterior form of its sovereignty, to level its aristocracy, to dispossess its church of its property, to lower or even to suppress the throne, and to govern themselves through their proper magistrates. But as the nation had a right to combat and emancipate itself, she also had a right to watch over and consolidate the fruits of its victories. If, then, Louis XVI., a king too recently dispossessed of sovereign power—a king in whose eyes all restitution of power to the people was tantamount to a forfeiture—a king ill satisfied with what little of government remained in his hands, aspiring to reconquer the part he had lost—torn in one direction by a usurping assembly, and in another by a restless queen or humble nobility, and a clergy which made Heaven to intervene in his cause, by implacable emigrants, by his brothers running all over Europe to drum up enemies to the Revolution; if, in one word, Louis XVI., KING, appeared to the nation a living conspiracy against her liberty; if the nation suspected him of regretting in his soul too much the loss of supreme power—of causing the new constitution to stumble, in order to profit by its fall—of conducting liberty into snares to rejoice in anarchy—of disarming the country because he secretly wished it to be defeated—then the nation had a right to make him descend from the throne, and to call him to her bar, and to depose him in the name of her own dictatorship, and for her own safety. If the nation had not possessed this right, the right to betray the people with impunity, would, in the new constitution, have been one of the prerogatives of the crown."

This is a pretty fair specimen of revolutionary reasoning; but it is rather a definition of Democracy, as Lamartine understands it, than a constitutional argument in favor of the decapitation of "Louis Capet." Lamartine is, indeed, a "Conservative Democrat," that is, ready to immolate the king to preserve the rights of the people; but he does not distinguish in his mind a justifiable act from a righteous one. But it is a peculiarity of the French mind to identify itself so completely with the object of its reflection, that it is impossible for a French mind to be impartial, or as they will have it, not to be an enthusiast. The French are partisans even in science; the Academy itself has its factions.

We have thus quoted the most important political opinions expressed in his "Girondists," because these are his latest political convictions, and he has subscribed to them his name. We look upon this his last work, as a public confession of his faith—as a declaration of the principles which will guide him in the administration of the new government. Lamartine has been indoctrinated with the spirit of revolution; but it is not the spirit of his youth or early manhood. Liberty in his hands becomes something poetical—perhaps a lyric poem—but we respectfully doubt his capacity to give her a practical organization, and a real existence. High moral precepts and sublime theories may momentarily elevate a people to the height of a noble devotion; but laws and institutions are made for ordinary men, and must be adapted to their circumstances. Herein consists the specific talent of the statesman, and his capacity to govern. Government is not an ideal abstraction—a blessing showered from a given height on the abiding masses, or a scourge applied to mortify their passions; it is something natural and spontaneous, originating in and coeval with the people, and must be adapted to their situation, their moral and intellectual progress, and to their national peculiarities. It consists of details as well as of general forms, and requires labor and industry as well as genius. The majority of the people must not only yield the laws a ready submission, but they must find, or at least believe, it their interest to do so, or the government becomes coercion. The great problem of Europe is to discover the laws of labor, not to invent them, for without this question being practically settled in some feasible manner, all fine spun theories will not suffice to preserve the government.

Lamartine closes his history of the Girondists with the following sublime though mystic reflection: "A nation ought, no doubt, to weep her dead, and not to console itself in regard to a single life that has been unjustly and odiously sacrificed; but it ought not to regret its blood when it was shed to reveal eternal truths. God has put this price on the germination and maturation of all His designs in regard to man. Ideas vegetate in human blood; revolutions descend from the scaffold. All religions become divine through martyrdom. Let us, then, pardon each other, sons of combatants and victims. Let us become reconciled over their graves to take up the work which they have left undone. Crime has lost every thing in introducing itself into the ranks of the republic. To do battle is not to immolate. Let us take away the crime from the cause of the people, as a weapon which has pierced their hands and changed liberty into despotism. Let us not seek to justify the scaffold with the cause of our country, and proscriptions by the cause of liberty. Let us not pardon the spirit of our age by the sophism of revolutionary energy, let humanity preserve its heart; it is the safest and most infallible of its principles, and let us resign ourselves to the condition of human things. The history of the Revolution is glorious and sad as the day after the victory, or the eve of another combat. But if this history is full of mourning, it is also full of faith. It resembles the antique drama where, while the narrator recites his story, the chorus of the people shouts the glory, weeps for the victims and raises a hymn of consolation and hope to God."

All this is very beautiful, but it does not increase our stock of historical information. It teaches the people resignation, instead of pointing to their errors, and the errors of those who claimed to be their deliverers. Lamartme has made an apotheosis of the Revolution, instead of treating it as the unavoidable consequence of misgovernment. To an English or American reader the allusion to "the blood sacrifice," which is necessary in politics as in religion, would border on impiety; with the French it is probably a proof of religious faith. Lamartine, in his views and conceptions, in his mode of thinking and philosophizing, is much more nearly allied to the German than to the English schools; only that, instead of a philosophical system, carried through with a rigorous and unsparing logic, he indulges in philosophical reveries. As a statesman Lamartine lacks speciality, and for this reason we think that his administration will be a short one.

With respect to character, energy, and courage, Lamartine has few equals. He has not risen to power by those crafty combinations which destroy a man's moral greatness in giving him distinction. "Greatness" was, indeed, "thrust upon him," and thus far he has nobly and courageously sustained it. He neither courted power, nor declined it. When it was offered, he did not shrink from assuming the responsibility of accepting it. He has no vulgar ambition to gratify, no insults to revenge, no devotion to reward. He stands untrammeled and uncommitted to any faction whatever. He may not be able to solve the social problem of the age; but will, in that case, surrender his command untarnished as he received it, and serve once more in the ranks.