French & English

No country can be more favourable than France for the observation of that process by which a startling novelty is taken after a short time under the protection of the most sober conservative feeling.

France is at the same time willing to make hazardous experiments, and yet extremely conservative by natural disposition. The consequence of these two apparently opposite tendencies in the same nation is that the results of successful experiments are preserved for continuous practical application, and the rest very soon discarded and forgotten. Sometimes an experiment has been partially successful and is thought to have failed temporarily, not from any want of applicability in the idea itself, but owing to unfavourable circumstances. In such cases the experiment is not likely to be lost. It will be tried again, at least once, or more than once.

The two tendencies, experimental and conservative, have both been manifested many times in French constitutions. How many there have been of them I cannot inform the reader. Dicey gives a minimum of sixteen; there may have been more. The number of them is of no importance; the state of mind that produced them is alone of any real importance.

It has commonly been assumed that a state of mind which could produce so many constitutions was animated by the love of change. This is exactly the opposite of the truth. Those who love change on its own account provide for it by the most elastic arrangements in order to leave everything open. The state of feeling that induces men to bind themselves, or try to bind themselves, by written rules for their future guidance is a desire for order and permanence. All that can be truly said against the French experimenters is that their hopes of orderly arrangements were premature. Even when producing disorder they have been lovers of order and desired it, though during many years, in the eagerness of inexperience, they failed to perceive that their political life was still too much unsettled to be cast into fixed forms. At last, without abandoning the safeguard of a written constitution (that of 1875 has already a respectable antiquity), they have provided for future changes by making revision possible under conditions that have hitherto completely assured the maintenance of order.

The reader perhaps remembers how eloquently Sir Henry Maine described the dislike to change which is inherent in large bodies of mankind. “Vast populations, some of them with a civilisation considerable but peculiar, detest that which in the west would be called reform. The entire Mohammedan world detests it. The multitude of coloured men who swarm in the great continent of Africa detest it, and it is detested by that large part of mankind which we are accustomed to leave on one side as barbarous or savage. The millions upon millions of men who fill the Chinese empire loathe it and (what is more) despise it.... There is not the shadow of a doubt that the enormous mass of the Indian population hates and dreads change, as is natural in the parts of a body-social solidified by caste.”[29]

Sir Henry Maine afterwards pointed out that the enthusiasm for change was not only comparatively rare but also extremely modern. “It is known but to a small part of mankind, and to that part but for a short period during a history of incalculable length. It is not older than the free employment of legislation by popular governments.”

The intention of the passages quoted is to depreciate the love of reform in modern life, and is therefore unfriendly to popular government as we know it, but this unfriendly intention does not deprive the quotations of their truth. All that, and much more written by the same author on that subject, is strictly true. He went on to point to the intense and universal conservatism of women, “in all communities the strictest conservators of usage and the sternest censors of departure from accepted rules of morals, manners, and fashions.”

This constant strength of conservative instinct is not counterbalanced by any equivalent reforming instinct. It is not our hereditary habit of mind that leads us to reform, but our occasional fits of reasoning and of intellectual unrest.

My belief about the French is that their real tendency is decidedly not revolutionary but towards a democratic conservatism, and that they move towards this end by gradually including first one thing and then another in the catalogue of fixed usages.

An intelligent French writer has maintained that every race in the world advances towards a certain ultimate civilisation which is naturally its own, and that when this civilisation is attained there may be an end to change for centuries, or even, as in China, for thousands of years. He believed that France was rapidly approaching the complete development of that peculiar kind of civilisation for which the French genius is fitted, and might afterwards enter upon a changeless time of very long duration.

The decimal system of weights and measures and the decimal coinage are good examples of a recent innovation established at first by law and already protected by conservative usage. I never met with a Frenchman who desired to go back to the old complicated system; indeed the facility of calculation by the decimal method has spoiled the French for any other. I see no reason why the present decimal systems should not endure with French civilisation. They are exactly in accordance with the scientific turn of the race, and with its love of promptitude, clearness, rapidity, and uniformity.[30]

Then there is the division of the country into departments. The old historical provinces were too large for administrative purposes, the departments are highly convenient. Being named after the natural features of the country, they at once convey to the mind an idea of their situation in physical geography. The division could not have been better done; it has now become as familiar to the French as division by counties is to the English, and the two may be equally durable.

The same may be said of the highly-organised and extremely convenient system of departmental administration. It has survived several great changes of government, and is likely to outlive any others that may occur in the future. Some slight modifications may be introduced, such as the suppression of useless sub-prefectures.

The French University, which has schools in every department of France, and academic examining bodies in seventeen (including Algeria), is one of those institutions of Napoleon I. which seem likely to last with his code. It answers to the desire in the middle classes for a widely-spread Latin and mathematical education. This education may be modified in future years without destroying the University.

Universal suffrage has always been so difficult to abolish that nobody has attempted it, though no institution can be more cordially detested by some influential classes. The universality of military service has greatly increased the strength of universal suffrage, as every man may be called upon to die for the country, and therefore thinks that he has a natural right to vote. We are familiar with the phrase “a stake in the country.” Every Frenchman has at least one stake in the country—his life. There is not the most remote probability that universal suffrage will ever be repealed.

Many quite sober-minded and thoughtful Frenchmen are now of opinion that representative government, after several unsuccessful attempts, is firmly and finally established in their country. I dare hardly go so far as to assert so much, but I am fully convinced that, if not now, it will be ultimately the fixed form of government in France.

As an example of a reform which has not been preserved I may mention the republican calendar. It was both beautiful and rational in its observation of nature, and was certainly an improvement upon the old calendar in the choice of names, but it fell into disuse from its inconvenience. It was only national and not international as a calendar ought to be. In times like these, when the French decimal coinage is already an international system, it would be a reactionary measure to go back to a national calendar. It will only be revived if several other nations agree to use it at the same time, which is not likely to happen.

In England it is easy to point to several institutions, once quite new and having the character of innovations, which the spirit of conservatism immediately adopted and has since defended quite as resolutely as if they were of immemorial antiquity. The most wonderful of these is the Church of England. The more one learns of the temper of aristocracies, the more astonishing it seems that a great aristocracy can ever have changed the outward form of its religion. Try to imagine the French noblesse becoming “evangelical,” or think in our own day of the utter hopelessness of any project for converting the English gentry to Wesleyan Methodism! Such transformations are unthinkable, yet the fact remains that the English nobility and gentry did once go over en masse to the new communion, and that they have been as conservative of it ever since as if it were still the faith of their ancestors. Anglicanism is every whit as strong in England as the older Church is in France, though Roman Catholicism is a natural growth formed by the evolution of the religious sentiment through ages. The strength of Anglicanism as a social and political institution is proved by nothing more clearly than this, that in our own day, in many individual cases, it actually outlives Christianity. I mean that in these cases all dogma is rejected or explained away, whilst the Anglican name and customs are preserved.

Catholic Emancipation was most vigorously resented by English conservative sentiment in the third decade of the present century. In its ninth decade not only are Catholics on a footing of political equality with their fellow-subjects, but their superior clergy are treated with a deference and a consideration never given to Protestant Dissenters. The most venerated ecclesiastic in England is a Cardinal. Whenever the Catholic party in France is in conflict with the State it is sure of conservative sympathy in England.[31] Any attempt to replace Catholics under the ban would now be resented by the upper classes.

The revolutionary monarchy has now been so loyally adopted in England that we only remember its revolutionary origin when historical students remind us of it. For the common people, especially for the religious, Her Majesty reigns by divine right. There seems to be a shade of impiety and even a perceptible odour of treason in the crude assertion that she reigns simply by Act of Parliament.

On the other hand, popular claims that were once violently resisted assume, when they have been admitted, the character of indefeasible rights. Every extension of the suffrage is a popular gain, not for a time only, but for ever. Every gain made by the friends of religious toleration, and by those who work in hope for a future condition of religious equality, is a sure and permanent gain. There is a great deal of conservatism in England, there is little or no reaction. Indeed, the words “reaction” and “reactionary” are scarcely English words at all in a political sense; they are French words. No Englishman ever has that spiteful hatred of the present which distinguishes the French réactionnaire.

There is a species of conservatism both in England and France which is maintained by mutual antipathy. Each country clings desperately to its old ways when a better way has been shown by the other, and if one of them feels compelled, at last, to follow the other’s example, the utmost care is taken to disguise the imitation, so that it may not seem to be an acknowledgment of superiority. The reader may remember how unwillingly Thiers admitted the merits of railways, how he visited the north of England to see and try them, and how he reported unfavourably to his government, saying that railways might answer for England, but could never be suitable to France. The parallel instance is the well-known English unbelief in the Suez Canal, a French undertaking.

Here are two other examples, the English unwillingness to accept the French decimal systems, because they are French, and the unwillingness, on the other side of the Channel, to take the British penny postage stamp as it was. The English monetary system is inconvenient, but it is not intolerable, and may be retained for centuries; the system (or chaos) of weights and measures is incoherent and intolerable. Few Englishmen could part with the pound sterling without a pang, but surely it need not cost them much sorrow to see the extinction of the pound troy, which is two hundred and forty pennyweights, of the pound avoirdupois, which is two hundred and fifty-six drams, and of the apothecaries’ pound, which is two hundred and eighty-eight scruples. The objection to the metrical system is not absolute, the English are coming to it slowly, it is already legal, and men of science have long since adopted it. The French objection to the penny post is gradually giving way to the desire for increased cheapness, and now the letter has got down to three sous; but why this reluctance, on both sides, to adopt the neighbour’s good invention in its simplicity?[32]

France and England do gradually learn from each other against their will. The consequence is that their political habits are slowly assimilating. The English have adopted the closure, and are tending towards earlier parliamentary sittings. In elections they have accepted the French system of secret voting, and in course of time they will accept the French principle of “one man, one vote.” In 1888 the English at last adopted the French Conseils Généraux.