Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 401, March 1849. Various

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      Ye know not where ye tread!

      AFTER A YEAR'S REPUBLICANISM

      The revolutionary year has almost closed; the anniversary of the days of February is at hand. A Year's Republicanism has run the course of its unchecked experience in France: to believe its own boast, it has ridden boldly forward, seated upon public and popular opinion, in the form of the widest, and, upon republican principle, the honest basis of universal suffrage; it has been left to its own full career, unimpeded by enemies either at home or abroad. And what has been the result of the race? – what has been the harvest which the republican soil, so carefully turned over, tilled, and manured, has produced?

      It would be a useless task to recapitulate all the different stages of the growth of the so-called fair green tree of liberty, and enumerate all the fruits that it has let drop from time to time, from the earliest days of last spring, to the tempestuous summer month of June; and then, through the duller, heavier, and gloomy months of autumn, to those of winter, which brought a president as a Christmas-box, and which have shown a few scattered gleams of fancied sunshine, cold at the best, and quickly obscured again by thick-coming clouds of dis-accord, misapprehension, and startling opposition of parties. All the world has had these fruits dished up to it – has handled them, examined them, tasted them; and, according to their opinions or prejudices, men have judged their savour bitter or sweet. All that can be said on the subject, for those who have digested them with pleasure, is, that "there's no accounting for tastes." In calculating the value of the year's republicanism which France has treasured up in its history, it is as well, then, to make no further examination into the items, but to look to the sum-total as far as it can be added up and put together, in the present aspect of affairs. In spite of the openly expressed detestation of the provinces to the capital – in spite of the increasing spirit of decentralisation, and the efforts made by the departments to insure a certain degree of importance to themselves – it is still Paris that reigns paramount in its power, and as the influential expression, however false in many respects it may be, of the general spirit of the country. It is upon the aspect of affairs in Paris, then, and all its numerous conflicting elements, that observation must still be directed, in order to make a résumé, as far as it is practicable, of this sum-total of a year's republican rule. The account must necessarily be, more or less, a confused one, for accounts are not strictly kept in Republican Paris – are continually varying in their results, according as the political arithmeticians set about their "casting up" – and are constantly subject to dispute among the accountants: the main figures, composing the sum-total, may, however, be enumerated without any great error, and then they may be put together in their true amount, and according to their real value, by those before whom they are thus laid.

      One of the most striking figures in the row, inasmuch as the lateness of the events has made it one of the most prominent, is to be derived from the position and designs of those who declare themselves to be the only true and pure republicans in the anomalous Republic of France, as exemplified by that revolutionary movement which, although it led to no better result than a révolution avortée, takes its date in the history of the Republic beside the more troublous one of May, and the more bloody one of June, as "the affair of the 29th of January." Paris, after the removal of the state of siege, had done its best to put on its physiognomy of past years, had smeared over its wrinkles as best it might, and had made sundry attempts to smile through all this hasty plastering of its poor distorted face. Its shattered commerce still showed many rags and rents; but it had pulled its disordered dress with decency about it, and set it forth in the best lights; it had called foreigners once more around it, to admire it; and they had come at the call, although slowly and with mistrust. It had some hopes of mending its rags, then, and even furbishing up a new fresh toilette, almost as smart as of yore; it danced and sang again, although faintly and with effort. The National Assembly clamoured and fought, it is true; but Paris was grown accustomed to such discordant music, and at most only stopped its ears to it: ministers held their portfolios with ticklish balance, as if about to let them fall; but Paris was determined not to care who dropped portfolios, or who caught them: there were clouds again upon the political horizon, and distant rumblings of a crisis-thunderstorm; but Paris seemed resolved to look out for fine weather. All on a sudden, one bright morning, on the 29th of January, the smile vanished: the troubled physiognomy was again there; the revolutionary air again pervaded it; and foreigners once more, not liking the looks of the convulsed face, began to start back in alarm. The rappel was again beaten, for the turning out of the national guards at the earliest hour of the morning: that drumming, which for many months had filled the air incessantly, again deafened sensitive ears and harassed sensitive nerves. The streets were thronged with troops, marching forwards in thick battalions; while before them retreated some hundreds of those nameless beings, who come no one knows whence, and go no one knows whither – those mysterious beings, peculiar to revolutionary cities, who only appear like a cloud of stinging dust when the wind of the revolution-tempest begins to blow, and who in Paris are either brigands or heroes of barricades, according as the language of the day may go – back, back, grumbling and threatening, into the faubourgs, where they vanished until the gale may blow stormier again, and meet with less resistance. The garden of the Tuileries was closed to the public, and exhibited an armed array once more among its leafless trees; the Champs Elysées had again become a camp and a bivouac; cannon was again posted around the National Assembly. Formidable military posts surrounded every public building; the streets were crowded with the curious; thick knots of men again stood at every corner; people asked once more, "What's on foot now?" but no one at first could answer: they only repeated from mouth to mouth the mysterious words of General Changarnier, that "he who should venture to displace a paving-stone would never again replace it;" and they knew what that meant. Paris was, all at once, its revolutionary self again; and, in some degree, so it remained during the ensuing weeks – with cannon displayed on hazardous points, and the great railway stations of the capital filled with battalions of soldiers, bivouacking upon straw in courts and salles d' attente; and huge military posts at every turn, and thick patrols parading gloomily at night, and palaces and public buildings closed and guarded, just as if retrograde monarchy were about to suppress fervent liberalism, and a "glorious republic" had not been established for a country's happiness wellnigh a year already; just as if republicans, who had conspired darkly a year before, had not obtained all they then clamoured for – a republic based upon institutions resulting from universal suffrage – and were conspiring again. And so it was. A deep-laid conspiracy – a conspiracy of republicans against a republic, which they chose to call deceptive and illusory – was again on foot. They had possessed, for nigh a year, the blessing for which they had conspired, intrigued, and fought; and they conspired, intrigued, and would have fought again. One of the figures, then, to form the total which has to be summed up as the result of a year's republicanism, is – conspiracy; conspiracy more formidable than ever, because more desperate, more bloody-minded in its hopes, more destructive in its designs to all society.

      In spite of the denegations of the Red-republican party, and the counter-accusations of their allies the Montagnards in the Assembly, the question of all Paris, "What's on foot now?" was soon answered; and the answer, spite of these same denegations, and counter-accusations, was speedily understood and believed by all France. A conspiracy of the ultra-democrats, Red republicans and Socialists, (all now so shaken up together in one common dark bag of underhand design, that it is impossible to distinguish the shades of such parties,) was on the point of breaking out in the capital: the 29th of January had been fixed upon by the conspirators for their general insurrection. The Red republicans (to include all the factions of the anarchist parties under that title, in which they themselves rejoice, although the designation be derived from "blood") had felt how strong and overpowering had become the clamour raised throughout the land against that National Assembly which had run its course, and was now placed in constant opposition, not only to the president of the republic, as represented by his ministers, but to the general spirit and feeling of the country at large; they were aware, but too feelingly, that, should the Assembly give way before this clamour, in spite of its evidences of resistance, and decree its own dissolution, the elections of a new Legislative Assembly by that universal suffrage which had СКАЧАТЬ