During the Old Monarchy, France made great advances in practical philosophy, but scientific knowledge was still confined within very circumscribed limits. The Revolution has enabled scientific and literary men to diffuse their acquirements over the surface of the Republic. A short review of the leading periodicals of the day will demonstrate their respective objects.
The first of those periodicals, in point of respectability and talent, is the Journal de Physique, edited and conducted by one of the ablest and most virtuous men in France, Dr. de la Metherie. I have already mentioned he had been imprisoned during those days of persecution, when it was the fashion to oppress every man of worth and talents. But to this hour no ground has ever been given for his arrestation. He is now Professor of Mineralogy in the College de France, and receives for this £100 per annum. As editor of the Journal de Physique he receives £200 a year, and this is the whole emolument his literary labours bring him.
The Annales de Chimie is a publication which merits attention, and I believe every eminent chemist in France contributes to its contents and reputation.
Annales de l’Agriculture Française is published by Tessier, and is now advanced as far as the twelfth volume. It is one of the best and most valuable publications extant in the Republic, and has afforded great encouragement and information to the cultivator. Although Tessier is the editor of the work, Monsieur Hugard is the principal manager. He is an honest, indefatigable and learned man. He was brought up as a practising farrier in his father’s shop, to which circumstance he is indebted for the beginning of his knowledge (now that of an expert) upon the diseases and treatment of horses and other cattle.
He has a sound and vigorous intellect, looks as plump and jolly as John Bull, and possesses all the good nature of that character.
Annales Statistiques is likely to prove one of the most valuable productions of France. It is extremely well printed on good paper, and a number appears every month.
Bibliothèque Commerciale is a new work determined to diffuse information upon subjects of commerce and navigation.
Annales des Arts et Manufactures. This is a periodical publication, accompanied by a number of engravings.
The editor is one O’Reilly, an Irishman, once a pronounced and violent Jacobin.
As citizen O’Reilly, in the year 1792, he succeeded in expelling two Englishmen from White’s in the Rue des Petits Pères, because they opposed the maniac Irish propositions of Citizen Lord Edward Fitzgerald and the two unhappy Sheares, all of whom met a tragic fate in Ireland.[8] O’Reilly, however, remained in France and thereby saved himself from the fate which his deserts fully entitled him. The Colonel Commandant of Tyrone in Ireland during the rebellion, informed me that Citizen O’Reilly had been hanged. I was therefore not a little astonished one day in Paris, when about to sit down to dinner at a party to which I had been invited, to see my old friend enter the room, quite debonnair and dressed or rather masked à la française. In this land of magic I had been so accustomed to see supposed dead men once more in the flesh, that I eyed this ghost for a considerable time before addressing him, but he hearing my name mentioned, at once exclaimed: God bless me! is it you, Mr. Yorke? do you not recollect me? “Upon my word, sir, yes; you are so much like a gentleman of my acquaintance who had the misfortune to be hanged four years since in Ireland, that I could swear you were the very man.” After some explanation, I found he had escaped the hands of Jack Ketch, and is now, as he expressed it, “a French citizen and no subject of the King of England.” He seemed desirous of taking every opportunity to affront the English and asperse our Government.
This man would not have occupied so much of my space did I not know him to be one of the rankest conspirators against our country. He ran away from England on account of the debts which he had incurred as one of the proprietors or managers of the Opera House, and set up in Paris as a persecuted Irish patriot. From the year 1792 to the present hour he has been ceaselessly engaged in plots against England, and his hatred increases daily against our country to whose genial soil he knows he can never return. He has fought against England in the French armies, and glories in the fact. He is a favourite with Bonaparte in consequence of his suggesting a new plan of gun vessels for transporting an invading army to our shores. He is an ardent and active member of the Irish Club in Paris, and avows his heart and soul are bound up in the hope and desire of emancipating Ireland. After he left the army he returned to Paris and commenced the periodical work I have already mentioned. It is in high esteem, and its sale must be great or his means of subsistence amply supplied by the Government, for he has a press of his own, lives in style and keeps his girl.
Bibliothèque Britannique, printed at Geneva, has a great sale in Paris. It is edited by Messrs. Picter and Mourin, and contains a digest of the most valuable philosophical treatise in our language.
Mazarin Encyclopædie ou Journal des Sciences, Lettres et Arts, edited by A. L. Millier, keeper of the antiques and medals in the National Library, is considered one of the most valuable periodical journals in France.
La Decade Philosophique, Littéraire et Politique, appears three times every month, and has the greatest circulation of any other periodical work in France. But this is no evidence of its superiority. It is a farrago of modern philosophical trash and impiety. It is a critical review, a poetical repository, a novelists’ magazine, a political register, a literary advertiser, a theoretical reporter, a herald of folly, a base and servile declaimer in favour of the ruling power, and a recorder of obscenity and atheism.
Ginguené,[1] member of the National Institute and the Senate, is the avowed editor of this political decade. This person, before the era of the Republic, was employed as a secretary by Madame Necker. Being patronised by Marmontel, he soon became a man of consequence. He next became the tool of Mirabeau, then the spaniel of Danton. Then a first-rate Jacobin, a hireling of the Directoire, and now a humble servant of the First Consul. Such a career deserved a rich reward in such a Republic as this of France.
He was accordingly preferred to the post of Director of Public Instruction, but he solicited a more brilliant destiny, and was accordingly turned into an ambassador and sent to Turin to assist General Bruno in preparing the dethronement and exile of the Piedmontese sovereign. On his return to Paris he has been temporarily gratified by a membership in the Conservative Senate, and the editorship of this periodical, a lucrative situation.
I could mention many more interesting literary works and periodicals of the highest literary interest, but I have commemorated enough works of uncommon merit, edited and produced most of them by men of great ability and furnished with means and opportunities of increasing the knowledge they already possess. It is but a tribute of justice which every man owes to superior genius to declare that in point of real science, experimental philosophy and literary merit, “France is without a rival.”