THE RED SPECTRE.
MROUHER has intimated to the French Chamber that . the Government will not permit any more Socialist debates, and we shall probably hear no more for some time of those wild lyrics against property, marriage, and the Deity which have so startled France. They were allowed for a time, in order that the middle classes might see on the very eve of an election how deep is their need of support from a strong and determined Government ; and that object attained, the lecturers will again be reduced to the silence which has been unbroken for eighteen years. Whether the bourgeoisie will draw the deduction the Emperor of the French intends, that he alone is strong enough to protect them, remains to be seen ; but we suspect the little glimpse allowed of the abyss will have considerable effect in strengthening the throne. Frenchmen of the more observant and temperate class, men like the extremely thoughtful person who now and again lets us know through the Times what reflective France is pondering on, know that the abyss is very deep, the fires within intensely hot and dangerous. It is the custom in England to believe, or at least to assert, that the Frenchmen who can deliberately design to make a tabula rasa of society, to declare all wealth the immediate property of the State, to abolish wages, and to organize industry into one huge co-partnership directed by universal suffrage and controlled by the bayonet, who would abolish marriage, declare God non-existent, and make reason the sole judge of all principles of action, must be a few hair-brained fanatics, no more dangerous to France than the Fifth Monarchy men were to the Protectorate. How can it be possible, they ask, to upset property in a country where, of seven million heads of families, five millions are owners of the soil, where the whole of the healthy male adults have learned military discipline, and where la famille fills so immense a space in the thoughts and affections of every human being? They forget that in France, of all countries, the feeling which we may best describe as political Soofeeism, the spirit of utter revolt for the sake of revolt, the spirit that made Proudhon say, " Granted a God, why are we to obey him rather than ourselves ? " has taken the strongest hold over men's imaginations. They do not hate social order for what it produces, but for being, for presuming to exist, and to require obedience ; and would, if their own scheme of life were established, a scheme which, according to Prescott, was once realized in ancient Peru, descend into the streets in order to attack that. Why their ideas should have so terrible an attraction for suffering Frenchmen it would be hard to explain, except by a suggestion which most of our readers will consider far too favourable to France. The spirit of revolt catches hold of and allies itself with the best instinct of French nature, the passion for fraternity, for a bond of amity among men stronger than Catholicism has yet yielded, a passion which has repeatedly made itself manifest in France, and may one day yet evolve there a form of Christianity nobler than the world has yet seen in action. Be the cause what it may, the attraction exists, and is intensely felt by large classes of French society ; by the workmen of the cities, who, though not wretched on the whole, pass intervals of almost unimaginable wretchedness, during which they are haunted by the fear that makes the best men cruel, the fear of death by hunger ; by the peasantry without land, whose position is really deplorable, and made infinitely worse by the nearness of their contact with men who, though entirely of their own class, are yet comparatively secure ; and by a section among the peasantry themselves, who, though proprietors, are yet drowned in hereditary mortgages, who pass lives of incessant toil, and of thrift such as puts the thrift of Scotchmen to shame, in a vain effort to " work the dead horse." None of these men are fanatics in the true sense of the word ; none of them would do perhaps the tenth of all that is threatened in these lectures, but the wild speeches express, if not their ideas, at least their feelings, and they read them, as hundreds among ourselves read the Masque of Anarchy, with a pleasure not born of agreement with Shelley, but of a certain sympathy with the eloquent attack on a defective scheme of society. Unfortunately, this sympathy, inactive among English republicans, or exhaling itself in England in words more or less eloquent, in France becomes active, because of the possibility of overthrowing, if not society, at least the Government. The Socialists, if not as wild as their poets, —for these orators are their poets, just as Ernest Jones was, in truth, the poet, rather than the leader, of the Chartists,— are united in the desire to have the great machine in their own hands, and in their readiness, on an opportunity, to fight for its possession. Fortunately for France they are Frenchmen, soldiers by a will higher than that of the Legislature, and must, before they can fight at all, see a military chance of success. They reserve their effort for the day when their main body, the Socialists of Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles, can march with effect upon central points which if carried involve victory, or rather the temporary possession of that centralized power which, as they think, can effect all things. That victory is, as we read the circumstances of France, unlikely even for a moment—it is a remarkable fact. that even in the cities the middle class, once roused to fight, has never been beaten—and as a permanent fact is impossible. The possessors of property are five to two at the lowest estimate, and are all drilled men. But the mere assault, the mere declaration of war, would work such extreme mischief, would create such an unspeakable amount of misery, would so widen the chasm between the Haves and the Have-nots, already too wide, that any Government is justified in• using any means warranted by national exigency,—that is, any means justifiable by morals,—to prevent its commencement ; and we cannot wonder that the fear of insurrection drives the propertyholders back upon the belief that they still need rather a General than a ruler ; that society threatened by forcible assault needs a military organization ; that the centres, at all events, must be guarded by a sort of state of siege. If there were time, under the system of French administration, to summon France to meet internal danger, that state of siege could easily be lifted, but it is impossible to hold down Paris and leave the empire free.
How long this fear will influence Frenchmen it is not for a foreigner to predict. Experience shows that it dies away now and again, and France once more risks change ; but it might last long, were it not for the growth of a belief that France as now organized is too strong for her "anarchical " parties, that they could be controlled without the annoyances incidental to despotism, that a Chamber, for example, with Ministers removable from day to day might maintain order as completely as an Emperor. In this point of view the recent extension of the military organization has probably increased rather than diminished the desire for liberty, for it has made France more confident, not only as against Prussia, but as against the internal enemy, the Red Spectre who, as Frenchmen think, can be kept passive only by irresistible physical force. The force is there, and being there, the danger of armed revolt will be to most French imaginations diminished. Still the danger is considerable, and the belief in the danger very deep, and the licence allowed to the poets of anarchy may have brought thousands of votes to the Imperial side, and diminished the hostility of that powerful section in the French Opposition which holds very nearly the ideas of the English Radicals. They believe, as we understand them, that to suppress religion by armed force is, if possible, even a greater crime than to establish it by persecution ; that the abolition of marriage is uncivilized nonsense, as, were it carried, every man would fight for his love with his own hand, as he did before society arose ; and that the idea of property, though not sacred in the full sense of that word, that is, not beyond human legislation, has been proved by the experience of ages to be essential to that modicum of liberty, or rather Of individualism, without which progress is impossible. There may be limits to the right without end, but the right itself is our preservative against becoming the serfs of the State, doing its will and not ours, against a suppression of the individual such as even Catholic monasticism has not secured. La Trappe is without either property or marriage, but La Trappe is not the highest ideal of a new society.
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