M. GUIZOT has shared the usual fate of eminent persons in France, where it is much more common than with us to publish biographies of living men, in being made the hero of numerous narratives, not one of which gives a tolerable account of his motives and actions. Such ephemeral productions are below criticism, and even where they have a temporary life, they may be safely left to perish from their inherent feebleness. It is with a far more important purpose than to rescue M. Guizot from the vapid perversions of bad biographers that we are about to attempt a review of his distinguished career. From the hour that he entered into public life, he has been an influential actor in the great events which were passing around him, and for many years he was, in power as well as reputation, the leading statesman of 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

1. Biographie de M. Guizot. Par E. Pascallet,

Paris, 1841. 8vo.

2. M. Guizot. Par un Homme de Rien. Paris (sans date). 8vo.

VOL. XXXII. NO. I.

at the root and corrupt the tree, we know no better method of indicating the political errors and prospects of France than in connection with the persevering but fruitless endeavors of this illustrious statesman.

It was on the 3d 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

1

French judges still call a condamnation par

contumace.

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 twenty-seven years of age at his 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 fifty-four 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 recognized marriages. They were hardly reckoned amongst moral beings. Even in the towns where, as at Nimes, they formed a large and respectable body of many thousands, the French Protestants, notwithstanding the elo

quent 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 highminded 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 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.

典

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 intellect.

It is to Voltaire and his coterie that the infidel

ity of France in the eighteenth century is generally ascribed: but it must be remarked that amongst a ity would have excited disgust instead of sympatruly religious people these attacks upon Christianthy. Voltaire was really the child of an antecedent infidelity, as well as the parent of much of the subsequent license. Sceptical notions had already eighteenth century; and there is extant a letter of spread widely over France in the beginning of the 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 Paris-counting 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 Patimes twelve of them were to be found together in ris alone contained 50,000 atheists; and that somethe same house.

ual 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 ardor,* 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 honor 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 feature in 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 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 impeial police. After contributing to the Pub

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.

liciste 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 predilec tion 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 civilization 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 translation of Gibbon, which gave

*The first French translation of Gibbon was

published by Leclerc de Sept-Chênes, who was the instructor of Louis XVI. in the English language.

It is now a well-authenticated fact that Louis XVI. was the translator of a portion of the first volume, and that he only desisted from his task when he reached the chapter where Gibbon attacks the historical foundation of Christianity. This translation

birth to such important results, was published | in thirteen volumes, in 1812; and the new commentary of M. Guizot was received with considerable favor. It is characteristic of the youthful annotator that, with all his admiration for the great historian, he emphatically censured the predilection shown by Gibbon for material grandeur over moral fortitude, as evinced in his depreciation of the heroic courage of the Christian martyrs, and his exaltation of the ferocious exploits of Tamerlane.

We have seen that M. Guizot was a contributor to one of the few periodicals which the Bonaparte government allowed to exist. These journals afforded some slight resource to several distinguished persons whom the Revolution had ruined. Among them was Mlle. de Meulan, whose family had been formerly wealthy, and who now contrived, by great talent, and still greater courage, to eke out her means by the use of her pen. This was a harassing life, and her health soon failed. On becoming acquainted with the fact, M. Guizot, to whom she was scarcely known, sent to the Publiciste several articles in her name. She at last discovered the friend who had so delicately assisted her, and the consequence of the intimacy which resulted was, that, though Mlle. de Meulan was much older than M. Guizot, and might almost have been his mother, a marriage ensued. The union proved a happy one; and, what was of no slight importance, Mme. Guizot, whose moral tales and educational writings are among the best French works of that description, repaid to some extent the original obligation, and was a literary as well as a domestic helpmate to her husband.

Though M. Guizot was already considered one of the future luminaries of France, he was never employed by the Imperial Government. Baron Pasquier, then Préfet de Police, and who, under Louis Philippe, we have seen at the head of the Chamber of Peers, wished to have him appointed an auditeur to the Conseil d'Etat, which was a sort of nursery of the imperial functionaries. He spoke of him to the Duke of Bassano, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, who in the year 1810 directed M. Guizot to draw up a memoir on the exchange of the English prisoners at Morlaix with the French prisoners in England. All the necessary documents were put into his hand, and he digested a paper which was

of Louis XVI. makes part of the publication of Leclerc de Sept-Chênes, and was adopted in a revised

form in the edition of M. Guizot.

submitted to Bonaparte, who undoubtedly was not pleased with it, as the author never heard any thing more on the subject. The plan of M. Guizot was devised with the bonâ fide intention of facilitating the exchange, while Bonaparte only wanted to impress the French public with the belief that he was making pacific offers to England, and that England rejected them. About the same time, M. Guizot, who, through the influence of the then Grand Master of the university, Fontanes, had been elected a professor in the Faculty of Letters of Paris, received an intimation that his introductory lecture was expected to contain an eulogium on the master of France. The lecture was delivered without the panegyric, and M. Guizot had thenceforth nothing to hope from the Imperial Government. From what we now know of the philosophical turn of his mind, and his habit of developing general principles, it is evident that he could never have found much favor with Bonaparte, who always discountenanced speculative men.

It was not until the Restoration that M. Guizot entered into political life, and he was still too young to take a prominent part, because, by the Charte of 1814, no one could be elected a member of Parliament under forty years of age. It was not easy to put in practice the Constitution granted by Louis XVIII., for constitutional liberty was a boon to which the bulk of the nation were strangers. There was neither political education nor political ideas among the people. The few true constitutionalists of 1789 had either perished on the scaffold or died in indigence and exile. The Republicans had generally bowed to the imperial despotism; and, under any circumstances, it was not amongst the partisans of the government of 1793 that the supporters of rational freedom were to be sought. There was, indeed, such a perversion of ideas on the subject, that in the eyes of the masses the soldiers of Bonaparte represented the liberal party, from the mere fact that they were engaged in defending the national independence against foreign armies. The émigrés, the natural and legitimate supporters of the new régime, were so totally unacquainted with the existing state of France, and were so disliked by the nation, that, instead of adding strength to the government, they were a source of excessive embarrassment. Their habits and claims, their political and religious prejudices, were looked upon with suspicion, while their antiquated costume and demeanor were the theme of general ridicule. Above all, a rejected dynasty, brought back