The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Marquis D'Argenson: A Study In Criticism; Being The Stanhope Essay: Oxford, 1893, by Arthur Ogle.

In maintaining his policy, d'Argenson had to struggle against the irresistible current which was carrying the Monarchy to destruction. Since the death of Louis XIV., private convenience had been the only criterion of national interest. Dubois and Fleury, for their own purposes, had dismantled the tradition of French foreign policy; and though an effort had been made to re-establish it by Chauvelin and his pupil d'Argenson, their work could not long stand against the forces of disintegration. After d'Argenson's withdrawal no further attempt was made, and he lived to see the complete surrender of those cherished principles he had striven so bravely to maintain. D'Argenson admired and reverenced Richelieu; and he has been laughed at for aspiring to be his worthy successor.[378] Banished from power until the age of fifty, he could never attain the eminence of his master. He could only defend for the last time the policy which that master had bequeathed to France.

His defence was in vain. The collapse abroad heralded the collapse at home. It was only in 1789 that the French Monarchy surrendered its charter to the French People. It had resigned it, thirty-three years before, into the hands of Maria Theresa.

V.
1747-1757.
A momentous decade—The Journal—Private life.

It was on the 10th of January, 1747, that d'Argenson's ministry came to an end. For a year or so he found it a little hard to support his banishment from power; but it is plain that after that time his personal ambitions were gradually forgotten amid the press and play of wider interests. It is true that he never quite dismisses his hopes of office, and that he even fondles the pretty, courtier-like phrase with which he will accept an invitation to return; but there is none of the ardent, even feverish anticipation which clouds the period before his ministry; and we feel that when he speaks of his own prospects it is with the smiling, tranquil air of a man who is fond of pleasant dreams. He was far from being unhappy. The ten years that preceded his death were a period when a man of d'Argenson's character will desire rather to watch than to work.

Though his outward life meanwhile was devoid of incident, it was inwardly full of stir and excitement. Throughout these years society in France was passing through the most critical of all its phases. Men's veins were tingling with that new wine with which the old bottles were already bursting; while across the history of the time is writ the word of omen—Revolution. It is this that lends to d'Argenson's pages such a vivid power and fascination.

The chief interest of his retirement was the composition of that Journal which is, and which he evidently designed to be, the most important commentary on a momentous period. He spared no pains to obtain direct and definite information, securing correspondents at the Court, in the Parlement, in the army, and in every department of the public service; while in handling events he added to the industry of the chronicler the grasp and acumen of a political expert. It is from these pages that we catch the impression of d'Argenson's power. We feel that a man cannot act in one year like a blind, blundering doctrinaire, and write like a statesman in the next. It may be useful to glance very lightly at the history of the time as it appeared to one of its most sagacious observers. In doing so we are in the hands of a cicerone who is not satisfied to speak by rote.

In December, 1747, after speaking sorrowfully of the national prospects, d'Argenson writes:—

Two years after these words were written a profound change had taken place. The terms of the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle had created grave discontent; and it was fanned to the heat of fury by the news that the idol of the Parisian populace, the English Prince Charles Edward, was to be expelled from France. His violent arrest at the doors of the Opera aroused bitter indignation, which d'Argenson shared.

People did more than talk. The event gave rise to some of the most venomous tirades that indignation ever wrung from helplessness; and curiously enough, it was the starting point of that alert and violent opposition which vexed the country for forty years. The excitement occasioned by it had not subsided when a renewal of the great struggles between the Crown, the Clergy, and the Parlement, gave a new motive to popular passion. The clergy refused to administer extreme unction to those who had not accepted the Bull Unigenitus; they were opposed by the resolution of the Parlement of Paris; the Crown interfered on behalf of the clergy; and Church and Crown united their forces in an endeavour to coerce the Parlement. At the same time the attempt of the Controller-General Machault to force the vingtième upon clergy and people alike united the Church and the Parlement in opposition to the Crown. The Crown, incapable of pursuing a policy of its own, allowed itself to be buffetted between the two parties; it was regarded with alternate scorn and fury; and popular feeling rallied in support of the outraged Parlement of Paris. The Church too was feared, hated, and afterwards despised;[381] and every day added to the influence and prestige of the rising party of Enlightenment.[382]

D'Argenson's attitude throughout the controversy may be summed in a single word. He was with the Parlement against the Church, and with both against the Crown. It is often an occasion of wonder that Machault's proposal to bring the clergy under the ordinary fiscal arrangements of the realm should have met with such violent opposition. In a single sentence d'Argenson reveals the reason:—

Such a passage alone is sufficient to show the deep distrust into which the Government had fallen. The organ of that distrust was the Parlement of Paris. D'Argenson at first had trembled for its existence; he soon saw that the forces behind it were irresistible.

So acute an observer could not fail to see that the most alarming features of the struggle were the indirect results which it might produce. It had scarcely begun when he devoted to it one of the boldest and most penetrating of all his reflections.

These eight years of clamour and coercion, violence and weakness, produced a very profound impression upon French society, and upon d'Argenson himself.

This last word suggests one final reflection, which is prompted by a hundred passages of d'Argenson's Journal, and which, to us at least, is of singular interest. Ten or twenty years before, Frenchmen had been proud of their own government, and had laughed at that of England as a masterpiece of absurdity. After 1750 a change took place. It was not that they had begun to admire the English constitution or the balance of powers commended by Montesquieu; of that they knew little and comprehended less. What they were impressed with was none other than that very spirit of noise and turbulence and apparent disorder which they had before regarded with contemptuous wonder. As they watched their country outstripped in the race, they came to feel that there was some virtue in a rude independence: and that the government of England, anomalous as it appeared, was consistent with national honour and prosperity. If it be allowed, in deference to French protest, that the influence of English philosophy upon the Revolution was slight and circuitous, it is no less true that the influence of the English people and polity was rapid, powerful and direct. In fanning the glow of revolutionary feeling during these seven or eight years at least, the comparative excellence of the English government was only less operative than the worthlessness of the French. It is a fact of which we hear very little, but with which d'Argenson at any rate was deeply impressed.

Interlocked with the political battle, there proceeded a spiritual conflict of far more broad renown. Again light had become darkness; and out of the darkness came the world-old cry, "Let there be Light!" Again with d'Argenson's bright intelligence may we watch the movement of emancipation.

He gives us momentary glimpses of men then painfully struggling into fame, and now as illustrious as their enemies are obscure. Here is the great Encyclopædist, as he first appeared to d'Argenson:

In the very centre of light and learning, this Jesuit influence was at work. Here is a little picture of an election to the Académie Française:

To-day, penetrated with the power and impalpability of the spirit, we have lost faith in the arm of flesh. To d'Argenson however, it seemed as though the Unholy Office establishing in France would flourish as fatally as its Spanish prototype.

Among the "honnêtes gens tranquilles, qui ne maîtrisent pas leur langue," none had more reason to tremble than d'Argenson. For some time a remarkable political work of his [395] had been circulating quietly among the Philosophic party; and his religious opinions were at least as licentious as any to be found even among the clergy.[396] By political profession he was an adherent of the Gallican Church; by private conviction he was a deist after the manner of Voltaire, but with none of Voltaire's apostolic bitterness. Deist or Gallican, he was a confirmed enemy of obscurantism in all its forms.[397] His habitual attitude towards it is prettily illustrated in the following passage:

The great movement was in its infancy when d'Argenson died; but he lived long enough to see that there was much in the old society besides the Sorbonne [399] which was "now no more than a carcass." He tells us how Madame de Pompadour invited Diderot and d'Alembert to resume the work upon the Encyclopædia which their Jesuit enemies had been unable to continue: and his reflections from time to time enable us to measure the growing influence of the Philosophic leaders. In May, 1754, was written this eloquent tribute to their advancing power.

And before blotting his page, he enables us to comprehend in a single glance the parallel movements of the time.

We have only to compare Citizen d'Argenson with the former Absolutist of 1732 to realise the rate at which France was travelling.

If the revolution, political and moral, was the chief, it was not the only interest of d'Argenson's Journal. His pages reflect the many-featured life of a great and old society.[403] We can only advert to his luminous criticism of economics and finance:[404] his strange apologies for the debauchery of the King: and the heart-sick comparisons which he sometimes makes between the condition and government of France and England. He beheld, with apprehension and despair, the avowed resolution of the English nation to destroy the colonial influence of France; he beheld, with astonishment and alarm, the abandonment of the traditional French foreign policy by the Treaty of Versailles in 1756. He was oppressed more than all by the critical state of the interior. His descriptions of the French provinces are the most striking examples of d'Argenson's power. They display, not merely a mastery of facts, but a masterful hold upon their meaning; and they are informed by the pure and unaffected habit of humanity which he had learnt in an older than the Philosophic school. Again, "C'est par le cœur que son esprit est grand!"

Unkindly were it to lay down the Journal without a grateful reference to d'Argenson's style. It is a vexed question, though all that is necessary has long been said with the noble generosity of Ste. Beuve. Those of d'Argenson's friends who were gifted with a pretty wit used to tell him that he wanted style. What they meant was that he wanted stylishness. In those days, before Buffon had let in light upon the darkness, the meaning of style was very undefined. People used the word to denote delicacy and refinement. To those qualities d'Argenson could never pretend. His diction was of a heterogeneous character, the language of polite society mingling with expressions from the gutter or the farmyard, or places more unsavoury still. The structure of his sentences is often erratic, and he is never embarrassed by the importunities of grammar. Such necessary niceties he regarded with unconcern, or as a mark of coxcombry or pedantry; in learning and literature he hated both. What he valued was mother wit; and he was content to express it in his mother tongue. He was not inclined to cavil at a word which had been good enough for Rabelais, nor was French the less French for being Tourangeau, as that great master proved. Such licence however as he took, he could well afford to take. D'Argenson's style resembles his statesmanship. Delicacy, finesse, those smaller aptitudes that come by practice, he had never been able to acquire; yet he displays no slight command of the larger qualities of style. His writing wins us, not by the charm of symmetry and grace, but by the kind of rude dignity which comes of will and energy and power. He cleaves his way to his own meaning with a certain two-handed effectiveness by no means unimposing; and we have never to fear having lost one jot or tittle of the idea he is trying to convey. Often ungrammatical, he is never obscure. The reader has scarcely a knot to unravel in the whole nine volumes of his Journal. Though unformed and unrefined by art, his literary instinct is of the surest. He never misses the point of a story, or fails to convey it to his readers. His handling of episodes, grave, sure and convincing, compels the regret that he was not born poor, in order that he might have achieved distinction as a master of style. But the binding charm of d'Argenson is his perennial flow and freshness. Brisk, alert, ever unwearied, his reader cannot weary of him. His vitality scatters the dust from his pages, leaving them bright as the day they were written. He is a foe, as ever, to pomp and ceremony; his narrative opens readily, it closes with a clasp. He has none of St. Simon's breadth of elaboration; yet he has something which makes us feel, as we lay down the ninth volume, that we owe the writer no grudge, and that if life were long enough, we would open a tenth with unblunted curiosity and pleasure.

Indeed the style is a faithful reflection of the man—perhaps the most faithful we possess. Known only through his acts, we know him only as he was spoilt by his unhappy training. It is in his writings that we see the real man, as he was by himself and as he strove to be with others. In the world he was stiff, shy, rudely straightforward, despising chicanery and abhorring clamour. Alone in his library he was another being, free, natural, powerful, and great. From the windows he could look out upon a world unthinking, heedless, the prey of knaves and the sport of fools, and needing to be guided by a philosopher and an honest man. His belief that he was wise and strong enough to give such guidance may be called an illusion, if any one thinks it worth while. Within those walls the illusion, if illusion it was, was a very natural one; and natural or not, we have no right to complain, for it has bequeathed to us one of the most interesting of journals and revealed to us one of the most interesting of men.

D'Argenson's life during these last ten years is seen upon an engaging background, the château and domain of Segrez, about thirty miles from Paris. It was a very charming place, which its master loved, and was fond of describing both with pen and pencil.[405] He used to liken it to the Elysian Fields,[406] and if his own affectionate sketches of it are to be trusted, the hyperbole may readily be pardoned. There he passed the years of his retirement, organising his correspondence, inditing his Journal, entertaining his friends, and protecting the peasantry against the revenue officers.[407] Sometimes too in moments of blissful idleness, he would prop himself up in that portable reading cabinet which M. Aubertin has made so famous,[408] and laugh and weep through a translation of "Tom Jones,"[409] a new book by that ingenious writer, Mr. Henry Fielding. His life was broken by an occasional visit to the Court or to his family estates in Touraine; and he was constantly in and out of Paris. Often might he be seen descending from the mud-bespattered coach, reading with affright and horror some placards which the police had not yet torn down, condoling with one of his learned friends in the agitated court of the Palais de Justice, denouncing the Jesuits in the company of d'Alembert, or hurrying away to preside at a meeting of the Academy of Letters.[410] But his heart was always thirty miles away. We can picture him, after an exciting month at Paris, arriving at Segrez, handing off his cloak, flinging himself into the arms of some cherished chair, and dreaming of a week of peace and solitude.

At this time d'Argenson presents a pleasant picture, the picture of a man who has striven, and not in vain. He had not obtained all he had hoped for, but what he had achieved was no little thing. It is easy to have the defects of one's qualities; it is harder to acquire, as d'Argenson had done, the very qualities of his defects. The vices of his nature he had employed more usefully than many virtues. Cut off from the many, he had won his way into the ranks of the elect; if he could not be witty, he could at least be wise. Fortune had decreed his failure as a politician: she could not deny him the secondary distinction of being, as a political thinker, the foremost man of his time. And this was the end of a lifelong struggle, not unworthy of his stubborn blood. True that he had faults, and retained them to the last; and to the last he strove to quell them. They were in spite of him; his greatness was his own. Faults though they be, they are not unamiable; their generous admission extorts generosity: and they have forgiven them most readily who have known them best. If, under the pen of M. Edmond Scherer [412] and others less distinguished than he, they have been raised to a hateful prominence of contumely, they have been reduced to their due place of utter subordination by the humanity and the insight of an Aubertin [413] and a Ste. Beuve.

The Marquis d'Argenson died on the 26th of January, 1757. Rousseau five years afterwards inscribed his epitaph—

VI.
1737-1755.
The "Considérations"—The Plan of 1737—The Plan of 1755.

"Il faut être autant en garde contre la réforme que contre les abus."—"Considérations" (1784).

It was not to be imagined that the man who watched so anxiously the progress of the malady, and marked with such sensitive precision the quickening of the pulse, could do so from a mere cold interest in social pathology. D'Argenson felt the distemper as if it had been his own. He was devotedly, even extravagantly patriotic; and his political criticism might have been less pungent had the subjects of invective been less personal to himself. He could have neither patience nor charity for men who could fiddle while Rome was burning. Powerless as he was, he was at least above that reproach.

Seven years after d'Argenson's death there appeared a very remarkable book. It was called

"Considérations sur le Gouvernement de la France,"
or
"Jusqu' où la Démocratie peut être admise dans le Gouvernement Monarchique."

It was written by him in 1737, the year of Chauvelin's disgrace. It is upon this work or upon notices of it that d'Argenson's reputation as a political thinker is principally based. It is necessary to examine it carefully, and in the light of the circumstances under which it was composed. The author would turn in his grave could he hear the verdict which has generally been passed upon it; for if there was one imputation which d'Argenson abhorred and strove to avoid, it was that of being a visionary possessed by chimeras.

The consideration of this book is not so easy as it at first appears. It is less known than it certainly deserves to be, and we are dependent for our knowledge of it upon a couple of old editions, published in 1764 [415] and 1784. The work consists of a number of dissertations on the past history and present condition of the French Government, which serve as the setting for its central feature, a Plan or project of reform. In the preface to the edition of 1784, which was issued by the d'Argenson family, the previous publication is noticed, and we are told that it is grossly imperfect, and that unwarrantable liberties have been taken with the author's text. Upon consulting the earlier edition, the discrepancies are at once apparent, and nowhere so noticeably as in the very Plan which is the most important section of the work. To begin with, the Plan which, in 1784, is given in the form of a royal proclamation in thirty-four articles, appears in the issue of 1764 as an informal draft consisting of fifty-two. And the difference is not of form alone; for on comparing the two Plans we find that they are as far apart as are the poles asunder, and that the second might represent, at the ordinary rate at which history proceeds, a century's advance in breadth of thought. In some bewilderment we turn to the four manuscripts preserved in the Library of the Arsenal;[416] and confusion is further confounded by the discovery that it is with the very Plan of this maligned edition of 1764 that that of the manuscripts coincides. The manuscripts themselves are clearly authentic: for they bear annotations in d'Argenson's handwriting. A question at once arises as to the authenticity of the scheme of 1784. A comparison of the texts establishes the fact that in spite of the impeachment of one editor and the apologies of another, both editions are equally genuine, and represent different stages of the work. Moreover it is evident that that of 1784 is mainly a revised and enlarged version of the original, and was probably executed about the year 1750; and further, that in it the editor, without a word of explanation, has incorporated a Plan, a Chapter and a Conclusion, of much later date and with a very different purpose.

The "Considérations," as written in 1737, is founded upon two principles. D'Argenson felt that for the rapid and decisive action which a great nation should be able to employ, a strong and united government was necessary: and that in the Monarchy France possessed such a government. He saw at the same time that that government had charged itself with a multitude of minute concerns which it could not possibly understand or supervise, and that consequently the rural districts were neglected, and local administration throughout the country was in a shameful state of nullity or disorder. He proposed therefore to disband the great army of subaltern officials who worked or shirked in the pay of the Sub-delegates, and with an emancipation of thought which is truly astonishing, to hand over their duties to popular control. With that object he devised the following scheme.

Henceforth the business of each city, borough or village (ville, bourg et village), should be managed by a committee of the inhabitants, to the number of five or more. Persons eligible for service in that capacity should be nominated in an annual meeting of the inhabitants; and the officers should be appointed from among the nominees by, and at the discretion of, the Sub-delegate. The latter, while ceasing to interfere directly in parochial concerns, should maintain a general control and supervision, and should have a discretionary power to displace the local officers for dereliction of duty or other misconduct. In matters affecting more than one district the local authorities might confer together, after specifying the subjects of the conference, and obtaining from the Sub-delegate a formal warrant. The national taxes should henceforth be raised in the form of a communal grant, equal in amount to the sum hitherto obtained from the taille; it was to be assessed upon the inhabitants of the district by the local authority, and paid in by them to the Financial Receivers, who should be, in addition to the Intendants and Sub-delegates, the only royal officers. The reform should be introduced gradually, and might be submitted to experiment in certain districts in the neighbourhood of Paris, and in the wards of Paris itself. In any attempt to introduce it, the authority of the Crown must be scrupulously maintained.[417]

Such are the principal, and from a constitutional point of view, the only essential features of the project of 1737. It is with this scheme that M. Martin deals in his notice of d'Argenson. He concludes a summary of it with a critical remark which is characteristic of the tone not infrequently held with regard to d'Argenson and his proposals. He says:—

"Monarchy without nobility, without a judicial aristocracy, and without a bureaucracy, royalty suspended without supports at an enormous height above a democratic society—there is d'Argenson's dream: illusion of a noble heart!" etc.

"Un ministre stipule pour le Roi, mais il travaille et craint pour lui-même."—"Considérations" (1764).

In this judgment M. Martin displays somewhat less than his usual acumen. Certain abusive privileges might have been touched: but not a rank in the social hierarchy connecting the Crown with the tiny democratic communities, would have been menaced by d'Argenson's scheme.[418] Moreover to speak of "Royalty" and "democratic society" in connection with it, is to employ large words to describe what is after all a very little thing; by using these wide and general terms the idea is dilated and swollen till it becomes grotesque. What d'Argenson proposed was simply to dismiss the score or so of clerks, tax-collectors and hangers-on who managed parochial affairs under the direction of the Sub-delegate without sympathy or regard for the wishes of the people: and to transfer these affairs to a little parish council, consisting, for example, of the neighbouring squire, the village curé, a couple of farmers, and an erudite cobbler or so, who would look after the roads, assist the poor, assess and collect the parochial taxes, and attend to all matters which were not beyond the capacity of half-a-dozen intelligent countrymen, guided and supervised by the Sub-delegate. The two poles upon which the system revolved were not "royalty" and "a democratic society,"[419] but in plain prose, the bureau of the Controller-General at Versailles, and the parish room or the inn parlour of the village of Argenson in the "généralité" of Touraine. In fact we have an almost exact parallel in the by no means fantastic relations which exist in nearly every parish in England between the local School Board and the Education Department at Whitehall.

It cannot be supposed, as M. Martin would appear to imply, that the Crown and the Vestry could neither co-operate nor co-exist. D'Argenson, in drafting his proposal, presumed upon both sides at least the average amount of sense which is ordinarily devoted to matters of government. So far as he could see, there was no reason why the parish councils should ever dream of giving trouble; and he could not conceive any Government perverse enough to provoke them to a national combination for resistance. He imagined, on the other hand, that local affairs would be managed better, and could not be managed worse, than they were; and that in any case life would be awakened in the provincial districts, and that they would be rescued from the torpor of death into which they were rapidly subsiding. Surely this was something more than the illusion of a noble heart.

It is entirely in accordance with the fitness of things that the best criticism of d'Argenson's plan is that of one of his own contemporaries, who was better able than any one now can be to understand the difficulty which pressed for solution. Voltaire, as we have seen, received the manuscript about eighteen months after its completion; and his quick intelligence was in no danger of mistaking

"Le temps de l'Aristocratie est passé quand le Despotisme
s'est établi sans son secours."—"Considérations" (1784).

the meaning of his friend's proposal. He wrote to him:—[420]

"It seems to me that you have elucidated in a consecutive system the vague ideas and the heartfelt wishes of every good citizen.

"Is not England a standing witness to the truth of your ideas? The King with his Parliament is legislator, as in France with his Council. The rest of the nation is governed according to municipal laws, as sacred as those of Parliament itself. The love of law has become a passion among this people, because every one is interested in the maintenance of the law. All the highroads are kept in order, hospitals founded and maintained, commerce flourishing, without the necessity of a decree of Council. This idea is the more admirable in that you are yourself a member of this Council, and that in you the love of your own authority yields to the love of the public good."[421]

There was only one point on which Voltaire was at variance with his friend; and its consideration will lead us to that other proposal for which, nearly twenty years later, the present was abandoned by its author. Before leaving this scheme of 1737 a few concluding reflections have to be made.

To us in England at the present day this Plan seems a very modest one; but we may readily forget the breadth of thought, the marvellous political instinct, which could have conceived it in the France of 1737. To realise the depth of d'Argenson's discernment, we have only to compare the "Considérations" with the famous book by which it was evoked,[422] "L'Histoire de l'ancien Gouvernement de la France." M. de Boulainvilliers and d'Argenson had been struck by the same evils; but the former attributed them to the iniquitous usurpation by which the people had been withdrawn from the protection of their feudal lords, and subjected to oppression by the irresponsible minions of the royal authority. His remedy was a reversion to the society of the thirteenth century. D'Argenson's proposal was a very different one. He saw very clearly that as a great political instrument the French noblesse existed no longer; and that if local government was to be reformed, the reform must come from the people themselves. If these shopkeepers, peasants and the rest, had no political tradition or knowledge, they were primarily concerned in acquiring it; and he enunciates, perhaps for the first time, the great principle of all democratic development, the principle that in matters of government interest is more valuable than intelligence. Astonishing as it may seem, he had perfect confidence in the men to whom he proposed to entrust a modest share of influence and power: and he expressed it in a few golden words which suggest the spirit of his scheme:—

"Insensiblement ces magistrats, quoique paysans, se ressentiront de leur caractère, et en prendront le véritable esprit, qui éloigne également de la basse soumission et de l'insolence."[423]

Even to Rousseau, the tramp of genius, who had eaten black bread and slept in cabins, the democratic faith came gradually and as an inspiration; but what are we to think of the French nobleman who had conceived it twenty-five years before as he talked with the labourers round his château?

One of the most striking features of this Plan of 1737 is the care which is taken to safeguard the royal authority. The local officers are placed under the absolute control of the Sub-delegates, and the unit of popular action is nothing more formidable than the parish or the ward. "Divide et impera" was the legislator's device. To us who have daily experience of the harmonious working of local and central institutions, this solicitude may appear a little singular. To d'Argenson however it was not so. His devotion to the Crown was hereditary; and he shared the belief in the sovereign virtues of monarchical government which was held unanimously in 1737. Any project which would tend in the slightest degree to impair the authority of the Crown, could neither be proposed by him nor listened to by others. It was this point which drew from Voltaire his only suggestion of dissent. The poet had been travelling in England and Holland; and his natural reverence for the Monarchy had been qualified by an acquaintance with republican societies. He had very little faith in Louis XV., and he expresses the real weakness of his friend's proposals in a single trenchant line. D'Argenson had averred [424] that when the King has nothing to think of but governing, he will always govern well.

"Well then," exclaims Voltaire, "for God's sake let the King think of governing!"[425]

At that date, with the history of Louis Quatorze behind him, and before him his hopes of Louis Quinze, d'Argenson could have no uneasiness upon that score. It took twenty years of experience of the Monarchy at close quarters, of further knowledge of the actual principles by which it was conducted, to show him how far and fatally the reality fell short of the ideal design. In the few years that elapsed between his disgrace and death, he came to understand that excellent as absolutism may be in theory, it has certain disadvantages in fact: and that for one monarch who is found to satisfy the standard of sovereign virtue, there are twenty who fall immeasurably beneath it. At the cost of the convictions of a lifetime he accepted the truth that the only warrant of the people against anarchy or oppression lay in their own power of self-defence; and he felt that if strength and virtue were to be restored to the Government, the people must be placed in a position where they would at once be able to assist it to do good, and have absolute power to prevent it doing harm. What the country needed was no longer a great administrative reform, but nothing less than a national constitution.

That constitution d'Argenson endeavoured to work out; and the fruit of his reflections was the scheme published in 1784. It cannot be discussed in the light of experience; for it never was, nor had a chance of being, submitted to the test of practice. It was not until twenty-eight years after the author's death that it first saw the light; and by that time popular demands had become loud and instant, while a constitutional ideal of a wholly different type had taken possession of the mind of France. Still there is a certain sense developed by acquaintance with history and politics which enables us to estimate with approximate justice the worth of any particular project in relation to a given set of circumstances; and upon that sense it is necessary to rely. There is reason to suggest that if examined in the light of such knowledge as we have of the state of the Government and of popular feeling about the year 1755, the constitution d'Argenson conceived at that time is by no means least among the many proofs of his extraordinary political wisdom.

As few documents of so much importance are so inaccessible or so little known,[426] a brief abstract of this remarkable scheme may not be without use. In presenting it, the form of the original, that of a royal proclamation, is, so far as possible, preserved; while some striking passages, which illustrate the prevailing tone and spirit, are given in

"Les Rois n'aiment point à être Tyrans; mais la plupart le sont sans le savoir."—"Considérations" (1784).

d'Argenson's own words. In considering it, it is necessary to remember two things. In the first place, though popular criticism is irascible and alert, it has yet made but little way; the people, though beginning to despise the monarch, are still devoted to the monarchical tradition. Further it has to be borne in mind that when the Government did endeavour to act with vigour and to prosecute measures of constructive reform, it was hampered and clogged at every turn by the influence of the privileged orders: while there was no great popular organisation upon which it could lean for support.

The Constitution is set forth in thirty-four articles, the substance of which is as follows:—

V. 1747-1757. A momentous decade—The Journal—Private life.

VI. 1737-1755. The "Considérations"—The Plan of 1737—The Plan of 1755.

V.
1747-1757.
A momentous decade—The Journal—Private life.

VI.
1737-1755.
The "Considérations"—The Plan of 1737—The Plan of 1755.