*

rious gentlemen is not all the benefit that can he derived from an interchange of daily opinion between France and England. And now, at the moment when French journals arrive more cheaply to our hands, let us enquire into their character and their influence; the opinions and the classes they represent; and the advantages and the causes of a general newspaper system altogether different from our own.

If you happen to see, sitting in one of the classic chairs of the Palais Royal, a little grocer with rather a pinched-in mouth and a pair of dusky brown spectacles-or if you happen to see a good, fat, red-faced dealer in sausages, with just sufficient wrinkles about the eye-brow to show a kind of lurking anxiety to have something-besides an ill-natured wife to find fault with-if you happen, I say, to see either of these gentlemen particularly busy over a paper some fine summer

* See Appendix for what has been done.

These are the principal newspapers of Paris, and but a short time since the newspapers of Paris formed the French press. Since the revolution the number of provincial journals has very considerably increased: partly owing to the long provincial agitation by which the downfall of the Bourbon dynasty was preceded; partly owing to the commercial movement which has lately taken place in France, and which, awakening attention to local affairs, teaches men to benefit the state in improving their own canton or their own

commune.

The principal provincial newspapers are:
Journal de Rouen,

Précurseur de Lyon,

Mémorial Bordelais,

and the journals of Nantes, Marseilles, and Hâvre.

evening in the Palais Royal, be sure that paper is the Constitutionnel!

The Constitutionnel took its birth at the restoration, and was founded by MM. B. Constant, Etienne, Jay, etc. The shares, originally worth 5,000 francs, are now worth 2, or 300,000, and produce frequently upwards of 20,000 francs a

year.

The immense advance of this paper gives an interest to the manner in which it is conducted. This manner is a peculiar one. Let us transport ourselves into a large room, where a number of people are assembled, all shouting, spouting, disputing!-Let us listen! the value of an opinion is discussed, as the value of rice, indigo, or any other marketable commodity might be. Here we are amidst the shareholders of the Constitutionnel, who thus debate, week by week, the best course for the paper to adopt-i. e. the course most likely to please its readers.

To

Those readers are what would be called in France la petite bourgeoisie,* a class singularly averse to great changes, and never quite satisfied with what exists. A class that requires in its journal a mixture of satire and plain sense-but of that kind of plain sense which is mixed up with a tolerable share of popular prejudice. For the small French shopkeepers there are but two colours-black and white. The devil, for them, has still immense horns and a long swishy tail. There is no idea to which they do not give some material form, or with which they do not connect some pet or popular name. please these good folks, you must paint in your expressions, and here is where the Constitutionnel has always been most successful. "Les jésuites à robe courte," "les seïdes du pouvoir," such were the terms in which this journal spoke of that awful sect, the hobgoblin of the restoration! Never did there rise a morning that it did not hold forth upon the disciples of Loyola and their dire machinations; while the chuckling citizen felt a self-conceited pleasure in hearing of the great power and the terrible plans of his mysterious enemy. The Constitutionnel has another quality not to be forgotten. It is

* The small shopkeepers.

the best teller of a murder, out and out, among its cotemporaries. It dwells upon every horrible particular-it dilates and gloats upon every abominable fact-it would have lived a century on Thurtell's murder or the Cock-lane ghost-a strong proof, by the bye, of what I said in speaking of the drama, viz. that a taste for horrible tales and terrible spectacles results rather from a coarseness of manners than from a depravity of morals.

I observed, a few minutes since, that the petite bourgeoisie are averse to all great changes, and never quite satisfied with what exists. This is just the tone of their organ. No paper has such a horror of a revolution, or sees the red cap of '93 so visibly in the front of a republic-yet no paper protests so constantly against being ministerial. ""Tis a great pity—no one regrets it more; but not a party, not a person, not an opinion, is just what it should be." This is the tone of the Constitutionnel; when it attacks the government more openly, it does so not upon a principle but an act; the brutality of a police agent, the bad lighting of a street, the extravagance of a fête. If any doubtful case of home policy arrive, off the Constitutionnel starts with some question of foreign policy. The French have been insulted at Ancona; the English wish to take possession of Algiers; the Prussians are meditating an ingress into France; out comes the tri-coloured flag; your eyes are dazzled with the glory of France; a day or two afterwards, when opinion is decided, the Constitutionnel returns home, and takes the popular party.

This paper, with all its faults, however-common in its sentiments, and not peculiarly elegant in its language-is, notwithstanding, the most useful, as well as the most popular in France; because it constitutes a kind of intermediate link between the higher bourgeoisie and the people, and fills up that space between the legal and the illicit papers, which is so unfortunately and fatally vacant in England.

As the Constitutionnel is the organ of the petite bourgeoisie, the Débats is the organ of the great bourgeoisie in France.

No paper has been so attacked for a variation in its principles as the Journal des Débats, formerly Journal de l'Em

pire. The principles it has advocated have been different, but the party it has remained attached to has ever been the

same.

The Journal des Débats has always represented the bourgeoisie supérieure; the higher branch of that body which we call the middle classes in England, and which is, more than any other, interested in the maintenance of order, in the security of property, and in peace.

The advocate of the empire, when the empire was a guarantee for that political stability, without which commerce and industry find it difficult to exist-in turn imperialist, royalist, carlist, and philipist-advocating no particular dynasty, and only leaving Charles X. when his monarchy became as much a struggle between two castes as between two opinions—such has ever been the Journal des Débats ;-organ of the most important class in France, and naturally invested with a corresponding importance. No paper has so large a circulation in Paris, nor is any paper sustained with more tact and ability.* To any one wishing to see the progress made by France in the Jast fourteen years, and the progress made more especially by that class which is now at the head of affairs, I recommend a comparison between the Journal des Débats of 1834, and a paper of the same title in 1820. You see a

pigmy by the side of a giant. In the first place the Débats of 1820 is about one quarter of the size of its robust successor; then look at the paper, at the printing! and above all compare the style and the writing!

In short, in this paper and its progress behold a type of the body it is addressed to.

As early, however, as 1815, MM. Villemain and Salvandy mingled in the politics, and MM. Geoffroi and Hoffman in the literature of the Débats. M. Bertin de Vaux, the present peer, was also one of its principal supporters; and along its pages has at times glanced the eloquent and fantastic pen of M. de Châteaubriand.

The Gazette de France has some resemblance to the Standard of England. It is written with singular talent, and

* I believe, almost entirely the property of Messrs. Bertin.

advocates monarchical principles with liberality, eloquence and ability. A royalist paper* among a people of republican feelings its sale increases.

The Gazette de France was in its glory at the time of M. de Villèle; it opposed, M. de Polignac; and since the revolution of 1830, has taken a singular and most subtle direction. During the restoration it attacked openly and ingeniously the constitutional doctrines that were then in vogue, always respecting, as the despotism of Bonaparte would have respected, the French passion for equality; and contending, with much impudence and plausibility, that it was an absurd prejudice to suppose that birth had ever been any barrier to the success of intelligence. It has now, keeping in view, however, its ancient course, and departing as little as possible from its ancient principles, taken a yet bolder and more popular tone of discussion.

To the charter of the restoration, its system of election and centralization, it opposes an enlightened view of the ancient constitution which Richelieu and Louis XIV destroyed; contriving thus to trim up a very decent romance from the chronicles of those dead times. Already, in a masterly and well known view of the revolution of 1789, there had been fashioned from disjointed fragments a political Frankenstein of this description. I say a political Frankenstein-for as the magnificent but horrible creation of Mrs. Shelley was not a man resuscitated, but the shreds and patches of a variety of men combined into one form, so the constitution of M. le Maistre was not the constitution of any one time, but the bits and pieces of a variety of times, such as had never in reality existed, and harmonized together, and which, now for the first time wrought into a compact shape, bore a pale and livid aspect among existing things.

It is, however, this creation of M. le Maistre which the Gazette reproduces and applauds.

The regenerated resurection of the old provincial governments the organization of primary assemblies, which, in

It is in this paper that the ancient Etoile and the old Journal de Paris are now melted down. MM. de Peyronnet and Villèle were among its contributors.