France. The objects at which he has steadily aimed, and the reasons why he failed to attain his ends, are little understood; and as the history involves the causes of the frequent revolutions which have distracted his country, and a description of the evils which still lie at the root and corrupt the tree, we know no better method of indicating the political errors and prospects of France than in connexion with the persevering but fruitless endeavours of this illustrious statesman.

It was on the 3rd Germinal, an II. (5th April, 1794), the very day of the execution of Danton, that the national guard of Remoulins seized a gentleman, who said his name was François Giraud, of Nîmes. The capture took place in the middle of the night at the ci-devant Croix de Ledenon-ci-devant, because the very name of the Cross was then forbidden by a republic which had proclaimed unbounded religious freedom. The next day the prisoner was interrogated by the Comité de Surveillance of the commune of Remoulins. Having been conveyed to Nîmes without delay, he was on the 19th of the same month condemned to death by sentence of the judges of the Criminal Court, and immediately executed. He had originally been suspected of undefined conspiracies against the unity and indivisibility of the Republic, but as he did not think proper to obey the summons the court paid no attention to the charges. He was condemned solely for his contumacy, and ipso facto outlawed and executed,a proceeding similar to what the French judges still call a condamnation par contumace. The original sentence, of which we subjoin an extract, may still be seen among the archives (greffe) of what is now the Imperial Court of Nîmes:—

'The tribunal, having heard the public accuser, pronouncing judgment without any appeal whatever, according to the powers conferred on it by the Représentant du Peuple on the 8th of the present month, and according to the law of the 23rd Ventose last, which says,—

"Every one accused of any conspiracy against the Republic, who will not obey the summons, shall be put hors de la loi,”

'Has declared and declares that the accused is hors de la loi, and consequently orders that the said accused shall be delivered within twentyfour hours to the executioner and put to death.

'Further, according to the 2nd article of the law of the 4th of September last (old style), which says,—

"All the property of individuals who at Marseilles, or in the neighbouring departments, rise against the National authority is to be confiscated, and specially applied to the indemnification due to the persecuted patriots in the same localities,"

6

The tribunal orders also that the property of the said accused shall be confiscated for the benefit of the republic, and specially applied to the indemnification due to the persecuted patriots in these districts. 'And

And in consequence of the said confiscation the tribunal orders, according to the law of the 19th Brumaire last, that the children of the said accused, if he has any, shall be received into the Foundling Hospital, and brought up according to the law of the 1st of July last.'

This document is not an exceptional one, and thousands of the same kind may be found in the greffes of the Courts of France. The country-La Vendée and the émigrés exceptedwas not then, as many contend, labouring under the convulsive agitation of a revolutionary agony; but was, on the contrary, strongly supporting the government, and the more illegal and tyrannical it became the more the enthusiasm increased. France was fighting en masse against Europe on behalf of these rulers. The populace were butchering the élite of society for the glorification of the Convention, and cheering the members of that assembly who were inaugurating the guillotine in the provinces. In the language of a clever and courageous author, M. Vitet, the people seemed only to employ their voices to vituperate, and their hands to throw mud at, their victims. It was in a word a nation which, several months after the fall and death of Robespierre, ordered the apotheosis of the execrable Marat, and erected public altars to him in Paris.

The gentleman who called himself Giraud, in order to prevent the friend in whose house he was found from incurring any danger, disclosed his true name as soon as he was in the hands of his judges, and, refusing the generous offer of a compassionate gendarme, who volunteered, at the peril of his own life, to contrive his escape, marched to the scaffold. His true name was Guizot, the father of the celebrated statesman, whom, as we have just seen, the merciful republic ordered to be thrown into a foundling hospital, there to receive such an education as might suit the authors of the tragedy.

M. Guizot is descended from an ancient family, which was divided into two branches. The Catholic branch was established in Limousin and at Toulouse, and in the sixteenth century, furnished several Capitouls, or chief civic magistrates, to that town; the Protestant branch had settled at Nîmes, where, amongst his numerous ancestors, we shall mention only the illustrious Castelnau family, with which the family of Sir J. Boileau, Bart., is connected. The Boileaus (who left France for England at the revocation of the Edict of Nantes) derive their descent from the celebrated Etienne Boileau, who was prévôt des marchands under the reign of St. Louis, and was the author of an exceedingly interesting work called the Livre des Métiers.

M. Guizot, who perished from the revolutionary mania in 1794, was a lawyer, and, though only 27 years of age at his death,

death, had earned a high reputation in his native town. He had married, in 1786, Mademoiselle Elizabeth Sophia Bonicel, whose father was a respectable Protestant vicar. Her rare worth, and her attachment to the memory of her husband, whom she mourned at the end of her life, after 54 years of widowhood, almost as deeply as on the day of his death, inspired every one with admiration. She never parted for a single moment with the last letter which she received from him, and always wore it, enclosed in a case, next her heart. At the period of the birth of the future statesman (4th October, 1787) the French Protestants had not acquired the civil rights which, but two months after, Louis XVI. conferred on them. They had no churches, no public worship, no recognised marriages; they were hardly reckoned amongst moral beings. Even in the towns where, as at Nîmes, they formed a large and respectable body of many thousands, the French Protestants, notwithstanding the eloquent denunciations of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and other enemies of persecution and intolerance, were not allowed to offer in common their prayers to the Almighty. In order to hear the exhortations of their pastors, they were obliged to repair to some remote and concealed spot-they called it the Desert-to which they were frequently tracked by the police, who dispersed them by firing at them as if they had been wild beasts. In her youth, Madame Guizot, who all her life was conspicuous for her firm attachment to her religious principles, had often joined the congregation at the Desert, in defiance of the fusillades by which the meetings were constantly terminated. Persecution indeed never fails to increase the devotion of high-minded persons to the faith of their fathers, and it is evident how hopefully the French Protestants must have received the announcements of the reforms which were promised in 1789. But as their religious and moral principles were still unimpaired, while those of the Catholics had generally given place to sceptical or atheistical notions,* they

* It is to Voltaire and his coterie that the infidelity of France in the eighteenth century is generally ascribed; but it must be remarked that amongst a truly religious people these attacks upon Christianity would have excited disgust instead of sympathy. Voltaire was really the child of an antecedent infidelity as well as the parent of much of the subsequent license. Sceptical notions had already spread widely over France in the beginning of the eighteenth century; and there is extant a letter of the Princess Palatine-the mother of the Regent Orleans-in which she expresses herself thus:- I do not believe that there are at this moment in Pariscounting ecclesiastics as well as laymen-one hundred persons who hold the Christian faith, even to the extent of believing in the existence of our Saviour! I shudder with horror!' A whole century before, the Père Mersenne, the celebrated friend of Pascal and Descartes, had stated in his Commentary on Genesis (printed in 1623) that Paris alone contained 50,000 atheists; and that sometimes twelve of them were to be found together in the same house.

took

took a much less prominent part in the horrors which succeeded. Some even tried to resist, and, like M. Guizot's father, perished in the attempt.

*

After the dreadful catastrophe the unfortunate widow displayed a Roman firmness. Left with two infants (M. Guizot had a younger brother, who died about fifteen years ago), and surrounded with implacable foes, she never lost her presence of mind. She saw that henceforth her duty in life was to devote herself exclusively to the training of her children, and believing that France could not afford them a religious, moral, and intellectual education, she collected all the pecuniary means which remained to her, and, as soon as she was permitted to leave Nîmes, went with her children to Geneva, where she remained for six years superintending their studies. The young Guizot made rapid progress in classical studies, in philosophy, and in mathematics, to which latter science he applied himself with ardour, under the celebrated professor Lhuillier. His aptitude for acquiring languages was astonishing. We have ourselves heard him reciting the most beautiful Canzoni of Petrarch, which he had learned by heart at Geneva more than forty years before; and he was so familiar with German, that his first historical essay (on the study of history) was originally written in that language, and printed in the Morgenblatt in the year 1809. But what conferred more honour upon him than even his literary progress were the regular habits of life, the reflective mind, the philosophic views, the feelings of impartiality and justice, and, above all, the moral courage, which we consider to be the distinguishing features of his character. All who have known M. Guizot intimately have observed how little there is in him of the peculiar French element. In his speech, in his writings, in his countenance, in his conduct, there is a steadiness and seriousness which is the reverse of national, and which, doubtless, he owes to Geneva. This peculiarity, while it was one of the causes of the esteem with which he was regarded abroad, did not contribute, we suspect, to make him popular in France, where esprits and volatile characters (bons enfans) are often more appreciated than strong, reflective minds, and stern, inflexible dispositions.

In the year 1805 M. Guizot left Geneva and went to Paris to study jurisprudence. There the steadiness of his conduct and the precocity of his talents gained him the friendship of several

*M. Thiers was also very skilful in mathematics; and we have been assured that in his early life he composed a treatise on trigonometry, which has never, however, been published.

eminent

eminent men, and among them of M. Stapfer, formerly Minister Plenipotentiary of Switzerland in Paris, who acted the part of a father to him, and under whose direction he applied himself to German philosophy and theology. M. Suard, who, with his learned circle, then exercised a great literary authority in Paris, no sooner became acquainted with the young étudiant en droit, than he proposed to him to furnish some articles to the Publiciste, a periodical which two years later was suppressed by the imperial police. After contributing to the Publiciste and Les Archives Littéraires, M. Guizot in the year 1809, published a Dictionary of Synonymes in two volumes, which is still a standard work in France, and has frequently been reprinted. In common with nearly all men who have become distinguished as authors, he paid a passing tribute to poetry by writing a tragedy, Titus Sabinus, the subject of which he borrowed from the Fourth Book of Tacitus. It has never been published. It is a curious fact that a man who has placed himself at the head of the modern historical school of his country did not, at the beginning of his literary career, show any strong predilection for the study. While he applied himself to almost every other branch of knowledge, the pursuit to which he was to owe so much of his fame was rather neglected. The reasons which finally induced him to turn his attention to it are stated in a letter which he addressed some years ago to a friend, and which now lies before us :

'It was in Paris in the year 1808, when I began to think about a new translation of Gibbon, with notes and corrections, that I became interested in historical inquiries. The history of the establishment of Christianity inspired me with a passionate interest. I read the fathers of the Church, and the great works of the German writers relating to that period. Never did any study more captivate my mind. It was by those researches, and by the philosophy of Kant, that I was led to the study of German literature. As to my investigations into the history of the ancient legislation of Europe, I undertook them when I was appointed in 1811 professor of modern history, at the Faculty of Letters in Paris, and with a special view to my lectures on the origin of the modern civilisation of Europe. I then plunged into the original chronicles, charters, the civil and ecclesiastical laws of the barbarians and of the middle ages. The works of the modern historians, especially the Germans, helped me much, but, while studying them, I always consulted the original documents, and verified the accuracy of their statements. I thus learnt to entertain the greatest esteem for the German historians, but not to follow them implicitly. They have great knowledge and much penetration, but not always accurate views, nor sufficient political intelligence. They seldom depict correctly the characters and manners of different nations, and they do not even follow with complete exactness the order of events.'

The