have treated most ably of the municipal institutions of France, M. Augustin Thierry is perhaps the most learned and conscientious of French historians, and M. Mortimer-Ternaux is a trustworthy narrator of the Reign of Terror, because he writes not for effect but for truth, and every statement is corroborated by authentic and original documents of the period. We have already noticed the two first volumes of his work in our review of Louis Blanc's History of the Revolution' (Edin. Rev. vol. cxviii. p. 101), but since then it has been continued, and it well deserves further attention.

The military disasters of France in August last were followed, as it was evident they would be, by a political revolution; for the legislative body existing on the 3rd September was restrained by the opposition of the Empress from taking the necessary steps to meet the emergency by any legal provision. The consequence was that what had not been done by law was done by force; and on the 4th September, a selfconstituted Government, deriving its principal strength from the mob of Paris, and composed of the leading members of the late Parliamentary opposition, installed itself at the Hôtel de Ville. Pressure from without, in the shape of the Prussian invasion, gave to this Provisional Administration a slight degree of stability; it assumed the modest and appropriate title of the Defence Government; M. Jules Favre was enabled to negotiate, though with signal incapacity, at Ferrières; General Trochu retained for some time, through his high moral qualities, a degree of respect to which his military talents hardly entitled him; M. Gambetta proceeded in his balloon to rouse the nation by revolutionary means; and M. Picard succeeded in rescuing his colleagues from the first insurrection of the Commune de Paris on the 31st October. But whilst these authorities carried on with indifferent success their hopeless contest against the organised military power of Germany, they were themselves. training in the streets and suburbs of Paris an army still more formidable to themselves and to France. The first step of the Government of the 4th September had been to give arms to the people, and whilst the siege of Paris lasted the whole male population was drilled, prepared to fight, and taken into the pay of the State. Against the Germans, these raw and illdisciplined troops were powerless: but upon the conclusion of the peace, M. Jules Favre having most unwisely refused the offer of Count Bismarck to disarm the National Guard or Paris, the city remained in the possession of legions of armed citizens, well provided with rifles, cannon, and ammunition. Never at any period of the entire Revolution had the insur

rectionary forces of Paris been so well prepared for a mortal struggle. They were in possession of all the stores accumulated for the defence of the capital against a siege of unprecedented magnitude. The population was exasperated by deception and humiliated by defeat. All the ordinary pursuits of life and industry had been suspended by the siege and superseded by military service. Large numbers of the floating revolutionary population of Europe flocked to Paris: larger numbers of the tranquil and terrified residents in that devoted city had hastened to escape from it. It seemed as if the moment, long foreseen in the fevered dreams of the democratic regenerators of mankind, had actually arrived, and that the Universal Democratic Confraternity of Nations was about to be enthroned in the first city of continental Europe. The experiment has actually been made; and deeply as we deplore the ruin and bloodshed caused by this protracted contest, it cannot be denied that some good results may be anticipated from this demonstrative example of what the Government of the Commune is worth. We have no desire to exaggerate either its follies or its crimes. We will acknowledge that it was at first less sanguinary and less addicted to plunder than its enemies had anticipated. But it has been supremely arbitrary and supremely stupid. In the name of liberty, it destroyed every condition of freedom: in the name of the common interests of the city, it reduced that city to the depth of ruin, drove away the wealthier classes and pauperised the lower, extinguished all productive industry, frightened away credit and capital, and, at last, food itself would have been wanting if the population had not been enormously diminished. On economical principles alone, putting aside its military and political absurdities, the Commune of Paris could not fail to reduce one of the first cities of the world, in a few months, to a wilderness and a solitude. The interruption of productive labour and the cessation of the means of exchanges, by which the commodities indispensable to the support of life are procured, must bring about this result. An earthquake, or the eruption of a volcano, would not be more fatal and scarcely more prompt in its effects. For as the wants of all classes of society in great cities are necessarily provided for from day to day, and cities themselves produce none of the first elements of life, the moment the mechanism of their highly artificial system is stopped they begin to perish. Immense numbers of human beings are driven to seek the means of subsistence elsewhere. All that constitutes the strength and wealth of a great capital-the presence of the

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supreme rulers of the State, the authority of law and justice, the studious population of the schools, the galleries of art, the pursuit of pleasure, the influx of strangers, the relations of society, the steady financial circulation which is the life of trade, the power of universal exchange, the investment of capital, the employment and security of labour, and all the myriad ramifications of demand and supply by which the wants of mankind are provided for-all these things may cease to be. Under the terrible stress of war and revolution, we have seen them cease to be: but the Commune has far more to answer for than the arms of the enemy, for what the German forces overthrew was but an army and a state; the revolution of the Commune shook to its foundation the whole structure of society. The creed of the members of the International 'Association' is simply this-that the old social order must be destroyed, and destroyed by their hands. A power formed by the overthrow of law is itself devoid of law. The members and servants of this ephemeral government were themselves ephemeral, rising to the surface from the dregs and bursting when they reach the outer air, like bubbles from the depth of some boiling pool. If any higher intelligence existed to direct the acts and policy of the Commune, it was mysterious, secret, and carefully withdrawn from observation and control. Meanwhile, the people, in whose name these things were done, were incited, bought, or compelled to spend their lives in a hopeless and desperate resistance, for some cause which has not been defined, and some leader whose very name is unknown. Victory itself over such antagonists leaves it equally difficult to conciliate and to subdue them; they can only be destroyed. If they began as fanatics, they ended as incendiaries, assassins, and thieves.

As a means of Government the Secret Committee of the Commune was odious and contemptible, but as an engine of social war it was terrific, for in the frenzy of despair, it let loose all the powers of destruction. We shall not attempt to describe in detail what no words have yet been found to describe the appalling spectacle of Paris as it appeared in the month of May in this year, an awful prelude to the most tremendous catastrophe in the history of man. The streets and avenues looked large and vacant, for in place of the gay and busy crowds once wont to throng them, a few bands of rude and drunken soldiers made the solitude more desolate. Half the combatant army of the Commune was believed to consist of fugitives, adventurers, and criminals from every sink and every jail in Europe. Their courage was inflamed by

liquor and rewarded by debauchery. Such indeed was their state of physical gangrene that every blow was fatal, and the wounded were outnumbered by the dead. These demons of misrule held entirely at their mercy all that still existed in the city. Terror was everywhere. Terror reigned. A mysterious power, whose source was as unknown as its name, seemed to direct at will the fury of these myrmidons, and certainly carried on an intrepid resistance without the walls. But they were the ministers of public and private vengeance. Whatever spoke to them of the obligations of religion was an object of abhorrence; whatever spoke to them of the past glory of their country was an object of scorn; they polluted the churches, they trampled on the Cross, they cast down the Column; they defied alike their country and their God; insomuch that those of the city who witnessed these things, exclaimed in their anguish, that assuredly the Ancient Curse, the curse of Rome, of Jerusalem, of Babylon, had fallen upon themselves and upon their children.

But the darkest forecast was exceeded by the doom and destruction of the chief buildings in that great capital. The world had yet to learn what crimes may be committed by a democracy without veneration and without law. In that supreme paroxysm of blood and fire, the passions of man did their worst. In those dreadful days the Revolution still triumphed; but its triumph annihilated the very seat of its own power. All ties and all traditions were sacrificed. Ruin passed in a torrent of fire over the city. The murder of the hostages -guiltless men torn from the altars and the seats of justice to perish for the guilt of others-was a crime equalled only by the martyrdom of the Carmes and the Abbaye in 1792; and it was expiated by a sanguinary and indiscriminating massacre of the insurgent populace. If any doubt or disbelieve the tremendous force of self-destruction which lies in the lower strata of great communities and may burst forth with volcanic fury, this example is given them to be a record for ever. If any can witness such events and such calamities, doubting and disbelieving that the world's history is governed by eternal justice and almighty power, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead.'

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'Well roars the storm to those that hear

A deeper voice across the storm,

Proclaiming social truth shall spread
And justice, e'en tho' thrice again
The red fool-fury of the Seine
Should pile her barricades with dead.

The fortress crashes from on high,
The brute earth lightens to the sky,
And the vast on sinks in blood

Encompassed by the fires of hell.' *

Such was the climax of the history of the Commune of Paris. Why is it then that the very name of the Commune of Paris is a name of terror and turbulence, whilst that of the City of London is synonymous with good order and ancient unambitious civic administration? How comes it to pass that municipal freedom and government either exist not at all in France, or exist for purposes, and in a shape, incompatible with the very existence of the State? When an Englishman is told that the citizens of Paris were contending for the right of electing their own magistrates, and for the civic freedom which the Empire denied them, he naturally sympathises with a cause so nearly allied to his own rights and experience. But in no respect are the two countries more widely different than in the nature of their municipal institutions. That difference is vast and important enough to account for much of their entire political and social history; in order to sound it, it is necessary to go back to the very root of their social constitution. The answer, then, we have to make to this question, is that it may be shown from the history of the French people that they have never possessed or practised, either by law or tradition, those established municipal rights of self-government which have been the basis of freedom and civilisation in the chartered cities and municipalities of Italy, Germany, Flanders, England, and even Spain; that what were termed the municipal rights of France have served alternately, either to disguise the action of the central power of the State, or to disintegrate the kingdom; that the municipal forces, which have at times broken out with revolutionary violence in French history, have commonly originated in spontaneous military movements of the citizens, placing them in opposition to the law and not in subordination to it; lastly, that the tendency of these armed Communes has invariably been to overleap the proper bounds of municipal authority, to challenge the State itself by claims of sovereignty, and in the end to make war upon it. The Communes of France have alternately proved to be instruments of despotism or centres of sedition. The all-important element of political life which municipal freedom can alone supply, by attaching men to the conduct of their own

* Tennyson's In Memoriam,' cxxv.