Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 368, June 1846

But the Workman, after all, is not so well off as he looks in his Sunday's best. Work fluctuates, and at times there is a want of work altogether: moreover, there are wicked cabarets and cafés, that play havoc with his four or five francs per diem. And, above all, there is that tremendous rival, with lungs of iron that know no rest, and never cease, whom men call Machinery, and who laughs the skill and strength of man to scorn. "It is humiliating," says the historian, "to behold, in presence of machinery, man fallen so low. The head is giddy, and the heart oppressed, when, for the first time, we visit those fairy halls, where iron and copper of a dazzling polish seem moving of themselves, and to have both thought and will, whilst pale and feeble man is the humble servant of those giants of steel." No reverie, no musing is allowed in the temples of Machinery. The Lollards, those mystic weavers of the middle ages, received their name, because, whilst working, they lulled, or hummed in an under tone some nursery rhyme that cheered then in their labour: for it is wisely said by our author, who can speak like a prophet and a sage when he will – shame to him when he speaks otherwise! – that "in the manual labours subject to our impulse, our inmost thought becomes identified with the work, puts it in its proper place; and the inert instrument, to which we impart the movement, far from being an obstacle to the spiritual movement, becomes its aid and companion. The rhythm of the shuttle, pushed forth and pulled back at equal periods, associated itself (in the case of the Lollards) with the rhythm of the heart; in the evening, it often happened, that, together with the cloth, a hymn, a lamentation, was woven to the self-same numbers." No human heart beats harmoniously with the thunder of machinery, whose abode is the real hell of ennui. "It seems, during those long hours, as if another heart, common to all, had taken its place – a metallic, indifferent, pitiless heart." Pitiless, indeed, if it degrade the human creature to the level of the brute. "The manufactory is a world of iron, a kingdom of necessity and fatality. The only living thing there is the severity of the foreman; there they often punish, but never reward. There man feels himself so little man, that as soon as ever he comes out, he must greedily seek the most intense excitement of the human faculties, that which concentrates the sentiment of boundless liberty in the short moment of a delicious dream. This excitement is intoxication, especially the intoxication of love." The workman becomes vicious; but extreme physical dependency, the claims of instinctive life, which once more revert to dependency, moral impotency, and the void of mind, are the causes of his vices. Talk of the bondage of the peasant! What is his slavery to that of the workman! He was at least a happy child. He lived in the air and played. He was at liberty, whilst his body and his strength were forming: the chains did not gall him till his wrist was hard: he was not called upon to suffer, before his spirit was sufficient to cope with life. Yes, there is positive bondage here.

And the Artisan? Is he at liberty? As an apprentice-boy, he is already in bondage. "Whatever annoys or irritates his master or his master's wife, falls very often upon his shoulders. A bankruptcy happens, the apprentice is beaten: the master comes home drunk, the apprentice is beaten: the work is slack or pressing, he is beaten all the same." Apprenticeship over, the artisan marries – has a wife, family; expense, misery! His children grow up, and the mother (we are in France, and M. Michelet speaks) is ambitious. Drawing will be serviceable, says the mother, to her boy in his business. She pinches herself for a few sous for crayons and paper, and a miserable artist is made of one who would have proved a good workman. Or an inspired artist, the child of labour, is left an orphan and a beggar in the midst of his aspirations and struggles towards distinction: to subsist, he must desert art, and become a workman like his father. "All his life he will curse his fate; he will work here, but his soul will be elsewhere." If he weds, and has a family – that family will become less and less loved. "A man embittered in such a struggle, and wholly intent on personal progress, considers every thing else of little value. He weans himself even from his native land imputing to it the injustice of fate." And so there is imprisonment and hatred also here.

Look at the Manufacturer. The manufacturers of France have, generally speaking, all been workmen. Six hundred thousand have become manufacturers or tradesmen since the peace. "Those brave men, who, returning from war, wheeled suddenly to the right-about towards Industry, charged as for an onset, and without difficulty carried every position." But they brought to commerce more of the violence of military life than the sentiment of honour, and treated unmercifully two classes of individuals, viz. the workman and the consumer. Towards the latter they behaved as the female shopkeepers ransomed the Cossacks in 1815. They sold at false weight, false die, false measure. With respect to the former, they applied to industry the great imperial principle – sacrifice men to abridge warfare. Men were pressed in town and country, and the conscripts of labour were placed at the pace of the machine, and required to be, like it – indefatigable. The successors of these men, the present manufacturers, pay the penalty of their fathers' misdeeds. Their reputation is gone in the market – they cannot get on. "Most of them would be heartily glad to retire if they could; but they are engaged, they must go on —march! march!" Such men are not likely to be tender-hearted. They are unfeeling to their workmen, for the money-lender is unfeeling to them. To live, the manufacturer must borrow. To get back his interest he has recourse to the workmen, for the consumer is on his guard. The former present themselves in crowds, and are obtained at any price. But a glut in the market compels the manufacturer to sell at a loss; the lowness of wages, which is death to the workman, is no longer profitable to the master, and the consumer alone gains by it. May not bondage and hatred be discerned in the present condition of the French manufacturer?

We come to the Tradesman. "The tradesman is the tyrant of the manufacturer. He pays him back all the annoyance and vexations of the purchaser." The purchaser of to-day wishes to buy for nothing: he requires two things, a showy article and the lowest price. The tradesman must deceive or perish. His life is made up of two warfares – one of cheating and cunning against the purchaser; the other of vexations and unreasonableness against the manufacturer. We have said that no one can talk more wisely than the author of The People when he is so disposed. The picture of the tradesman is drawn with a masterly hand. The original may be found here as well as in France, and is, in truth, the creation of the unwholesome time in which we live rather than of any particular city or state.

"The repugnance for industry exhibited by the noble republics of antiquity, and the haughty barons in the middle ages, is doubtless unreasonable, if by industry we understand those complicated fabrics which require science and art, or a grand wholesale trade, which requires such a variety of knowledge, information, and combination. But this repugnance is truly reasonable when it relates to the ordinary usages of commerce, the miserable necessity in which the tradesman finds himself of lying, cheating, and adulterating.

"I do not hesitate to affirm, that, for a man of honour, the position of the most dependent working man is free in comparison with this. A serf in body, he is free in soul. To enslave his soul on the contrary and his tongue, to be obliged, from morning till night, to disguise his thoughts, this is the lowest state of slavery.

"It is singular that it is precisely for honour that he lies every day, viz. to honour his affairs. Dishonour for him is not falsehood, but bankruptcy. Rather than fail, commercial honour will urge him on to the point at which fraud is equivalent to robbery, adulteration to poisoning; a gentle poisoning, I know, with small doses, which kill only in the long run.

"The manufacturer, and even the artisan, have two things which, in spite of work, render their lot better than that of the tradesman —

"First. —The tradesman does not create; he has not the important happiness – worthy of a man – to produce something – to see his work growing under his hand, assuming a form, becoming harmonious, responding to its framer by its progress, and thus consoling his ennui and his trouble.

"Secondly. – Another awful disadvantage, in my opinion, is, the tradesman is obliged to please. The workman gives his time, the manufacturer his merchandise, for so much money: that is a simple contract which is not humiliating, neither has occasion to flatter. They are not obliged, often with a lacerated heart and tearful eyes, to be amiable and gay on a sudden, like the lady behind the counter. The tradesman, though uneasy, and tormented to death about a bill that falls due to-morrow, must smile, and give himself up by a cruel effort to the prating of some young fashionable lady, who makes him unfold a hundred pieces, chats for two hours, and, after all, departs without a purchase. He must please, and so must his wife. He has staked in trade, not only his wealth, his person, and his life, but often his family."

We need not ask, is bondage here? or stay to inquire whether the condition of the tradesman thus described is likelier to engender love or hatred towards mankind.

The Official, too, is enslaved. A vast proportion of men on the Continent are officials. Great efforts and great sacrifices are undergone to make the hope of the humble house a government servant. And in France what does this mean? It means to serve a hard master, and to receive ill wages for the service, to be subject to instant dismissal at the will of an arbitrary overseer, to pass a life of changes, journeys, and sudden transportations. A baker's boy at Paris earns more than two custom-house officers, more than a lieutenant of infantry, more than many a magistrate, more than the majority of professions; he earns as much as six parish schoolmasters.

"Shame! infamy! The nation that pays the least to those that instruct the people (let us blush to confess it) is France. I speak of the France of these days. On the contrary, the true France, that of the Revolution, declared that teaching was a holy office, that the schoolmaster was equal to the priest. I do not conceal it; of all the miseries of the present day, there is not one that grieves me more. The most deserving, the most miserable, the most neglected man in France is the schoolmaster. The state, which does not even know what are its true instruments and its strength, that does not suspect that its most powerful moral lever is this class of men – the state, I say, abandons him to the enemy of the state – bondage; heavy bondage! I find it among the high and the low in every degree, crushing the most worthy, the most humble, the most deserving!"

The Rich Man and the Bourgeois do not escape the curse that attaches to every other class: they too are in bondage. The ancient bourgeoisie was characterized by security, the present has no such characteristic. It lives in timidity and fear. It has risen from the Revolution, aspires to nobility, feels none, and is jealous of the advancing masses. The ancient bourgeois was consistent. "He admired himself in his privileges, wanted to extend them, and looked upwards. Our man looks downwards: he sees the crowd ascending behind him, even as he ascended; he does not like it to mount; he retreats, and holds fast to the side of power. Does he avow to himself his retrograde tendency? Seldom, for his part is adverse to it; he remains almost always in this contradictory position – a liberal in principle, an egotist in practice, wanting, yet not willing. If there remain any thing French within him, he quiets it by the reading of some innocently growling, or pacifically warlike newspaper."

The rich man of to-day was poor yesterday. He was the very artisan, the soldier, the peasant, whom he now avoids. He has the false notion, that people gain only by taking from others. He will not let his companions of yesterday ascend the ladder by which he has mounted, lest in the ascent he should lose something. He does not know that "every flood of rising people brings with it a flood of new wealth." He shuts himself up in his class, in his little circle of habits, closes the door, and carefully guards – a nonentity. To maintain his position, the rich man withdraws from the people – is insulated – and, therefore, in bondage.

Here let us stop. What is it that we have seen? The peasant in fetters, the workman oppressed, the artisan crippled, the manufacturers embarrassed, the tradesman corrupted, the official in misery, the rich man exiled – all in bondage, all hating one another, and all constituting the life and marrow of the great and civilized country, to whose deplorable condition M. Michelet especially invites our attention. Deplorable, said we? Oh, far from it! The calamity that would crush any other nation, has a far different effect upon France. Bondage and hatred may exist, misery may eat like a canker-worm at the heart of the empire; but France, great, glorious, military, and beautiful, is consumed only to rise phœnix-like, fairer and younger, from her ashes. The French peasant may be in fetters, but he is also the nobleman of the world – the only nobleman remaining, "whilst Europe has continued plebeian." (!) "It is said the Revolution has suppressed the nobility, but it is just the reverse; it has made thirty-four millions of nobles. When an emigrant was boasting of the glory or his ancestors, a peasant, who had been successful in the field, replied, 'I am an ancestor.'" "The strongest foundation that any nation has had since the Roman empire, is found in the peasantry of France." "It is by that that France is formidable to the world, and at the same time ready to aid it; it is this that the world looks upon with fear and hope. What, in fact, is it? The army of the future on the day the barbarians appear." If such is the picture of a peasantry in bondage, what must we expect from a peasantry at liberty? The workmen, as we have seen, are vicious enough, yet they are the most sociable and gentlest creatures in the universe. Nothing moves them to violence; if you starve them, they will wait; if you kill them, they are resigned; they are the least fortunate, but the most charitable; they know not what hatred is; the more you persecute, the more they love you. If in our haste we called these men degraded, we recall our words, for M. Michelet says that they stand amongst the highest "in the estimation of God." We told you just now, always upon the authority of our author, what rascals the French manufacturers were; and how the unfeeling masters of to-day are paying the penalty of their fathers' frauds and evil practices. We hinted, too, at the symptoms of decay already visible in their condition. But we did not tell you that France manufactures, in a spirit of self-denial that cannot be too strongly commended, for the whole world, who come to her, "buy her patterns, which they go and copy, ill or well, at home. Many an Englishman has declared, in an inquiry, that he has a house in Paris to have patterns. A few pieces purchased at Paris, Lyons, or in Alsatia, and afterwards copied abroad, are sufficient for the English and German counterfeiter to inundate the world. It is like the book-trade. France writes and Belgium sells." It was stated that the official is cruelly paid for his labour, and M. Michelet further hints, that peculation is but too often the grievous consequence. In England this would be fatal to a man's self-respect, and subject him to bondage in more ways than one. But, across the Channel, Providence miraculously interposes, and even rescues the official in the hour of difficulty, for the honour and glory of la belle France. "Yes, at the moment of fainting, the culprit stops short without knowing why – because he feels upon his face the invisible spirit of the heroes of our wars, the breath of the old flag!!"

It is really very difficult to go on satisfactorily with such a writer as this. If there be truth in the picture which he draws of his country's misery, there must be falsehood in the language with which he paints her pre-eminence, and battles for her unapproachable perfection. If she be perfect, the vital sores that have been presented to us exist not in her, but only in the imagination of the enthusiastic and deluded writer. Upon one page it is written that the situation of France is so serious, that there is no longer room for hesitation. France is "hourly declining, engulfed like an Atalantis." Five minutes afterwards, "the idea of our ruin is absurd, ridiculous. For who has a literature? Who still sways the mind of Europe? We, weak as we are. Who has an army? We alone." What is the conclusion which any unprejudiced reader would draw from the painful details which M. Michelet has deemed it his paramount duty to bring before the notice of mankind, and especially to the consciences of the French nation itself? Simply this – that France, disabled and diseased, is weak, and feebler than many other nations of the world. The conclusion of M. Michelet is the very opposite one. "Let France be united for an instant, she is strong as the world. England and Russia, two feeble bloated giants, impose an illusion on Europe. Great empires, weak people!" So it is throughout. M. Michelet leaves far behind him the butcher, who would not suffer any man to call his dog an ugly name but himself. You must not only utter no syllable of condemnation against his glorious country, but you must be prepared to regard the abuse of the author as so much panegyric.

The means of enfranchisement suggested by the poetic historian are as fanciful as the bondage itself appears to be. Freedom for every class is to be gained by LOVE. Love for the native country: in other words, Frenchmen of every class are to believe that there never existed, that there never will exist, a country so great as their own; and then, as if by a charm, all their troubles will cease, their sorrow will be turned into joy – their imprisonment to liberty, such as mankind have never yet witnessed, such as no children of the great human family are capable of enjoying, but the darlings and favourites of God – beloved France. In the nursery, we do not correct the young by flattery and cajolery. The surgeon does not hesitate to cut to the marrow, if the safety of the patient depend upon the bold employment of the knife; but neither monitor nor doctor in France may approach the faults and corruptions of her people without doing homage to the one, and viciously tampering with the other. What but insult is the following balderdash offered to a great people as a remedy for physical suffering – cruelty – oppression – want?

"Say not, I beseech you, that it is nothing at all to be born in the country surrounded by the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Rhine, and the ocean. Take the poorest man, starving in rags, him whom you suppose to be occupied solely with material wants. He will tell you it is an inheritance of itself to participate in this immense glory, this unique legend, which constitutes the talk of the world. He well knows that if he were to go to the most remote desert of the globe, under the equator or the poles, he would find Napoleon, our armies, our grand history, to shelter and protect him; that the children would come to him, that the old men would hold their peace, and entreat him to speak, and that to hear him only mention those names, they would kiss the hem of his garment."

Yes – the thing has come to pass in Africa, at Tahiti, on the coast of Madagascar, whence the savages repulsed, with vindictive hatred, their French invaders, and refused even to correspond with them save through the medium of another nation. The feelings with which the natives of the Marquesas regard at the present moment the embroidered gentry, who, "protected by their grand history," and headed by that valiant fighting man, Rear-Admiral Du Petit Thouars, took unwarrantable possession of their shores, are of course faithfully described in the above nonsensical outburst; and are not, as every body knows, those of fear and utter detestation for a crew of wicked mountebanks and gold-laced ruffians. Of course the children come to Du Petit Thouars, and the old men hold their peace, and kiss the hem of his regimentals; and that's the very reason why the said Du Petit points the fatal tubes of his heavy, double-banked frigates and corvettes at the fragile bamboo sheds that lie timidly and harmlessly in a grove of cocoa-nuts.

"For our part, whatever happens to us, poor or rich, happy or unhappy, while on this side of the grave, we will ever thank God for having given us this great France for our native land; and that not only on account of the many glorious deeds she has performed, but because in her we find especially at once the representative of the liberties of the world, and the country that links all others together by sympathetic ties – the initiation to universal love. This last feature is so strong in France, that she has often forgotten herself(!!) We must at present remind her of herself, and beseech her to love all the nations less than herself.

"Doubtless, every great nation represents an idea important to the human race. But, gracious heaven! how much more true is this of France! Suppose for a moment that she were eclipsed, at an end, the sympathetic bond of the world would be loosened, dissolved, and probably destroyed. Love, that constitutes the life of the world, would be wounded in its most vital part. The earth would enter into the frozen age, where other worlds close at hand have already landed."

We have never wittingly done injustice either to France or her people; but we confess we had no notion of the claims of both upon our regard and applause, until they were prominently put before us by her somewhat Quixotic historian.

In the first place, if you would heap up all the blood, the gold, the efforts of every kind, that each nation has expended for disinterested matters that were to be profitable only to the world, France would have a pyramid that would reach to heaven; "and yours, oh nations! all of you put together – oh yours! the pile of your sacrifices would reach up to the knee of an infant!"

And then God enlightens it more than any other nation, for she sees in the darkest night, when others can no longer distinguish. "During that dreadful darkness which often prevailed in the middle ages, and since, nobody perceived the sky. France alone saw it."

Rome is nowhere but in France. Rome held the pontificate of the dark ages – the royalty of the obscure; and France has been the pontiff of the ages of light.

Every other history is mutilated. France's is alone complete. Take the history of Italy, the last centuries are wanting; take the history of Germany or of England, the first are missing; take that of France, with it you know the world. Christianity has promised, France has performed. "The Christian had the faith that a God-made man would make a people of brothers, and would, sooner or later, unite the world in one and the same heart. This has not yet been verified, but it will be verified in us." The great and universal legend of France is the only complete one; other nations have only special legends which the world has not accepted. The natural legend of France, on the contrary, "is an immense, uninterrupted stream of light, a true milky way, upon which the world has ever its eyes fixed." An American once said, that for every man the first country is his native land, and the second is France. This surely was praise sufficient. But M. Michelet is very greedy of praise. "How many," says he, "like better to live here than in their own country! As soon as ever they can break for a moment the thread that binds them, they come, poor birds of passage, to settle, take refuge, and enjoy here at least a moment's vital heat. They tacitly avow that this is the universal country." Beau Brummel certainly avowed it; but then he, "poor bird of passage," flew in a night from his own nest, to settle, take refuge, and enjoy a moment's vital peace in France, away from duns and creditors. Many, in similar circumstances, would unquestionably prefer Paris to London, provided they could break the thread which attaches them to their domestic responsibilities. France is the infant Solomon sitting in judgment. Who, but she, has preserved the tradition of the law? She has given her soul to the world, and the world is living on it now; but, strange condition! "what she has left is what she has given away. Come, listen to me well, and learn, oh nations! what without us you would never have learned: —the more one gives, the more one keeps. Her spirit may slumber within her, but it is always entire, and ever on the point of waking in its might."