The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 4, April, 1852Various
History
The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 4, April, 1852
Various
Art, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- History -- Periodicals
In pursuance of this solitary permission on the part of the authorities,
the Paris journals have contained reports of two remarkable speeches,
the one uttered by Count Montalembert on his being elected to the seat
in the Academy, rendered vacant by the death of M. Droz; the other
spoken by M. Guizot, in the form of an address of welcome to the new
academician, M. de Montalembert. Now in the speeches of these, the first
authorized orators of the new despotic _regime_, we find so little to
awaken the susceptibilities of even M. Bonaparte's police, that we have
heard with unaffected wonder of the scissors of the censorship having
been applied even to them. The philosophy of the speeches is terribly
Conservative. M. Bonaparte himself could have desired no other. If his
highness the President had embraced the two academicians after their
speeches, and decorated them with the Grand Cordon of his new Order, it
would have been but a tribute justly due to these lay preachers of
absolutism.
Eulogy of Droz was the theme which afforded Count Montalembert the
opportunity to ventilate his opinions, as M. Guizot's theme was the
eulogy of Montalembert. Montalembert depicted how Droz, who had reached
youth at the commencement of the great revolution, joined in all its
theories, its hopes, and its excesses, anathematizing kings and priests,
and believing in the happy and final reign of pure democracy; and how
all this the same Droz lived to unlearn and to correct, and to settle
down as quiet and as arrant a Conservative as ever supported monarchic
government and a restored church. This is the true path of repentance,
exclaimed Montalembert, and the only road to wisdom.
The compliment to tergiversation, which M. Montalembert thus paid to
Droz, M. Guizot applied to Montalembert himself, whom he (M. Guizot) had
remembered commencing his political career in full opposition,
thundering against corrupt majorities, against kingly influence, and
even against that want of spirit which preferred being at peace with
neighbors to provoking them. But all that sort of constitutional
opposition leads, as the people have seen, to the triumph of socialism;
and so all wise people, like M. Montalembert, naturally become sick of
it, and abandon it, betaking themselves for a preference to the old
political religion of legitimacy and worship of absolutism. Of all the
national disgraces inflicted upon France by M. Bonaparte's triumph, we
know of none greater than such a hymn to servility, such anathemas and
farewells to constitutional freedom, uttered by these two Talleyrands of
the professorial and ecclesiastical schools, who have been changing
principles all their lives, and now proclaim at last that absolutism is
the only anchor to hold by.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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