CHAPTER XI.

LETTERS. OPINION. THE PRESS.

I. Literature after 1870.-Principal characteristics of the times-Surviving influences: Auguste Comte, Balzac, Victor Hugo, Michelet, George Sand.

II. Realism-Consequences of the War-Perplexity and disDrama: Alex

illusions-Renan-Taine-Flaubert-The

andre Dumas fils, Victorien Sardou, Henri de Bornier. III. The Novel-Naturalism-Emile Zola-Alphonse Daudet. -Poets-The contemporary Parnassus-Leconte de Lisle -Sully-Prudhomme-José-Maria de Hérédia-François

Coppée.

IV. Educational literature-Foundation of the School of political science-Democratic literature-Serial publications -Magazines and illustrated papers.

V. Opinion-The Press-Newspaper régime.-Great political party papers-The popular press-The halfpenny newspaper-The provincial press.

FRA

I

RANCE, so cruelly stricken, wished to live. The richness of her soil, the labour of her people, the indulgence of Nature, had helped her. She now stood up; but she would not have been herself if a thirst for glory had not come back to her with the flush of health. As long as France exists, rays will emanate from her.

A rich intellectual, artistic and scientific harvest grew and developed during the years which followed the war. This, to foreigners, was a first surprise.

France had been deleted from the list of great nations; she now appeared, shedding a flood of light. An active propaganda had been led against her, pursuing her defeat in the very face of opinion. But universal opinion had been misled or deceived: it was now turning back, slowly, unwillingly, but surely. There was still, in diminished France, enough strength, enough genius, to run a fresh race and to open fresh roads to humanity.

When the nineteenth century came into its long historical inheritance, French unity was made; there was a common language, a willing adhesion, and a strong national feeling. The Revolution had completed the work of the feudal and administrative monarchy. France had a mind and a soul.

The French nationality at first asserted itself by the energy with which it had distinguished itself from the "Catholicity" of the Middle Ages; but it was also characterised by the moderation with which it had accomplished this separation. This indeed had not gone as far as a schism; it had broken neither with tradition, with existing conditions nor with individual conscience.

Limited, though not closed, autonomous but universal, France stands in the centre of Europe, throughout the ages, hospitable unto all and shedding her light over all. Her ideal was attained in her own eyes, only in those too short periods when equilibrium is reached, within her and outside her.

Gallicanism, tempered monarchy, Cartesian rationalism, such were, before the Revolution, the French solutions of the religious, political and philosophical problems.

France gave the supreme formula of her history, and perhaps that of the history of the world when,

at the end of the sixteenth century, over the hideous charnel of religious wars, she was first to utter, by the mouth of Henry IV., the word "tolerance."

Tolerance is not only reconciliation between man and man, it is appeasement within Man himself : it is inward unity through the choice which virility makes between juvenile ardour and senile pusillanimity ; a fundamental harmony balancing inward discords.

The seventeenth century left an ineffaceable memory in the mind of the nation through a measured combination of religion, political institutions and social activity, in a vigorous body, the heart was beating at its fullest. But the ideal, when it is realised, soon becomes exhausted. The crown renounced toleration by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Gallicanism became exasperated at the assembly of French clergy in 1682. Descartes led to Spinoza. The thinker becomes a free-thinker as soon as he calls himself a philosopher. New horizons were opening; the elements were let loose.

French rationalism traversed the eighteenth century under the guise of Philosophism. It generalised its thesis and its action by proclaiming the Rights of Man." What universal principle could be broader than that which affirmed the equality of all?

And yet, in the Frenchman of the Revolution, the universal man did not efface the citizen, any more than in St. Louis, the Crusader, the Catholic Faith smothered nascent patriotism. The force of expansion, born of a powerful centralisation, produced an age of grandeur and heroism, of propaganda through words and actions.

The Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars broke

this impulse. The morrow of an invasion is always a time of despair. The Bourbon Restoration, the Ultramontanism of the congregation of Joseph de Maîstre, the neo-Christianism of Chateaubriand, Romanticism, in fact, organised an opposition to Rationalism and to the sensualism of Condillac and the Encyclopædists.

Philippism, and the eclecticism of Victor Cousin attempted to conclude a "concordat "concordat " between religion and irreligion, between authority and freedom. This mean term lacked frankness and vigour. The eighteenth century had left its roots in the ground. They began to grow again towards the end of Louis Philippe's reign. In 1843, after the failure of the Burgraves, romanticism died. In philosophy, in politics, and in literature, a new tide was rising : Realism.

Realism

The prince of poets, Lamartine, was but for a short time the applauded leader of the nation. The Emperor Napoleon III. reached the throne at the same time that Taine, having vanquished and succeeded Cousin, reigned over the Schools. In religious questions, the half-measures of the Liberal Christianism of 1840 were set aside by the decisions of the Vatican Council and by the brutal polemics of Louis Veuillot.

Imperial Realism, an offspring of Positivism (itself the issue of Philosophism) took up the work of Universalism and propaganda. France, the elder sister of other continental nations, scattered her principles far and wide, at her own risk presiding over the birth of nationalities.

Contradictions

This was a singular and confused period, when equilibrium, seeking to establish itself, was suddenly lost in servitude, in glory, and in

defeat. Democracy wrenched universal suffrage from Cæsar; a reign which was but a long succession of wars was filled with dreams of universal brotherhood; the unbelieving Empire risked its repose, its very existence, in order to defend the independence of the Holy See. Finally a catastrophe was brought about by these contrasts. The glory of this enthusiastic people is always very near martyrdom.

Such was the state of things in 1871.

The gaping wound left by the war cruelly hurt the soul of France; perhaps, however, it was a salutary pruning. The inward humiliation which it produced, the bitter pain, the disillusion which remained, mortified vanity and, mixed with the unavoidable pessimism of defeat, a leaven of prudent and measured activity.

This period is softened, tempered, half-veiled. After the first tears had been dried, souls wished to reconcile sentiment with reason, Naturalism with Idealism, Tradition with Progress.

The lesson had borne its fruit. In the half-light of dawn or dusk, a procession emerged; scientific creators, searching Nature and experience, Pasteur, Renan, softened in his negation, Taine, still eager, but with a change of direction; sculptors of glorified defeats, painters of consoling Nature, songsters of Latin France, Puvis de Chavannes and Bizet; in short, the founders of a new France, the prudent organisers of a representative Republic, wise apostles of Opportunism.

Some men survive themselves in their works; others survive their own authority. It is well to recall a few names and great influences of the preceding generation.