From Fraser's Magazine. was at once the blessing and the weakness CHARLES DE MONTALEMBERT.⚫ of his life. When what Mrs. Oliphant FROM hero-worship to biography - from terms "the soft tranquillity of those narsuch fictions as the author of the Chroni-row childish skies" was exchanged, after cles of Carlingford can produce to such Mr. Forbes' death, for a colder and rougher portraits as she can paint-there is only atmosphere, the boy had been already in one step. Accordingly, a new biography ceeded to school, early habits gave place great measure formed. When college sucfrom her hand is welcome, and we can believe that this memoir of M. de Monta- to early plans, for already we hear this lembert has been to Mrs. Oliphant a thor- very young reasoner determine to write a oughly sympathetic piece of work. More great work on the philosophy of Christianfinished than the Life of St. Francis, it ity, and then, again, these early plans get bears also fewer marks of haste, but she mixed up with early friendships, with Rio, must forgive us for thinking it inferior in who was to be the associate of his future execution and movement to her excellent labours, and with the Abbé Studach, who Life of Edward Irving. The difference be- first opened to Montalembert that portion tween the subjects made this probable; thought to which Schelling had given a of the world of German speculative

Catholic tinge.

that which followed the death of his sister He travelled also, until the year 1830, Elise, saw him established in Paris, a Paris just entering on a new year of disquiet.

The first French Revolution, so far from

the difference between the creeds and races perhaps made it unavoidable. For Mrs. Oliphant is of one kindred and tongue with the orator who so passionately tried to throw over the Kirk of Scotland, "the most severe and uncompromising of Christian churches," a light that never was on sea or shore. She could learn from kins-correcting kings or exhausting the explofolk and acquaintance many details of the sive forces of France, had left the country Scottish drama which was to assume at watchful and irritable; and if some looked last all the proportions of a tragedy, but, on that condition with hope, others again great as is her power of sympathy, Mrs. could only regard it with dread or with disOliphant could hardly denationalize her- gust. And France was not religious. She self enough to measure correctly the influ- had a church, the work of Napoleon and ences that surrounded M. de Montalem- of a Concordat; but, in the new heavens bert. We have here a Frenchman who, with a few ardent Catholics, is to attempt a Catholic revival between the pauses of two French revolutions; and the subject, perhaps from its very strangeness and novelty, has attracted her. The memoir is carefully elaborated, and yet it lacks completeness, while Mrs. Oliphant is too often betrayed into indulgence for her hero's sentimental pedantries, perhaps because she has tried to write a biography of which French Catholics in general and the Montalembert family in particular should have no reason to complain.

The book opens with an account of Charles de Montalembert's childhood, which was almost entirely spent in the society of his grandfather, the Indian merchant and naturalist, Mr. James Forbes. This pair of friends, an old man and a young child, when living in the library at Stanmore, make a picture pleasant to the mind and to the eye, and there the little Charles grew in knowledge and reverence and docility, and in that ready, charming, spontaneous docility of the heart, which

Memoir of Count de Montalembert. By Mrs. Oliphant. William Blackwood and Son, 1872. Edinburgh and London.

and new earth which had, so to speak, appeared after the subsidence of the great deluge, the religious element was wanting,

and Catholicism seemed, to use Montalembert's own expression, to be a corpse, with which nothing remained to be done but charitably to bury it. The pious and liberal gifts of more than forty generations had perished with them; the 40,000 fiefs and arrière-fiefs once held by the Gallican Church, when taken from her grasp, had accrued to a horny-handed peasantry; and, after a thousand years of life, the religious orders had ceased to exist.

In other countries Catholicism had also

much to depress her, and much to deplore, but France had been the scene of her greatest disasters; and so France ought to be, in the opinion of young Montalembert and his friends, the scene of her most striking revival. And their wish became father to the event. What a Stolberg, a Balmès, a Thun, or a Galitzine did in other lands was outdone in France, until the Church there grew to count among champions all the country had noblest, most cultivated, and best.

her

Their enthusiasm was contagious. Yet the saddest part of their history is that theirs was nothing but an enthusiasm:

that whatever force the movement possessed expended itself in emotional discussions, and emotional articles and emotional measures; that it seemed to lend its countenance to a clergy guilty of teaching the miracle of La Salette; and that, after one splendid anachronism, it collapsed. Not, however, without raising the tone of a portion of the society that surrounded them, for that was true which Mdme. Swetchine said in writing of Paris : " It is true that nowhere is God more sinned against than He is here, but that nowhere is He also more loved." How Montalembert and his friends loved, and how their love, when diverted from its legitimate objects, God and the country, and deprived of its legitimate expression, was maimed and crippled by its subservience to Rome, it will be the business of this paper to show.

pended his spare energies in opening a school which was speedily closed by the police, and in writing warnings in the Avenir - warnings to France which read like the knell of a society and of a country. By these remarks the Avenir was brought into collision with the authorities and suspended. This, as we know, was not to be Montalembert's last experience of this sort of political situation, and just now, even though it startled him, it did not depress him. He and his colleagues were young, and as Lacordaire wrote, “However cruel time may be, it can take nothing from the happiness of the year that is just gone." To understand the expression one must have been young oneself, or have been born when religion was hardly named in France. Then to have lived to see the revival of faith, and the resuscitaThe most prominent of this band of tion of such charitable orders as that of friends was M. La Mennais, so unpropheti- St. Vincent de Paul, might well have cally christened Félicité. A Catholic, a caused a joy which the police of Louis Royalist, and above all a Breton, he was Philippe could not take away. . . . "Those the very man to head a religious move- men," Lacordaire adds, "who have not ment. Already in middle life, his bold lived in both periods, can never represent pages had for some years stirred the minds to themselves what was the passage from of the thinking classes in France. Most the one to the other. As for us, we, who likely from his temper to be a keen partisan, he was as likely to become a journalist as a reformer. Accordingly when Montalembert came accouru du fond de l'Irlande, as he says, to join a society whose watchwords were "God and Liberty," his first visit was to La Mennais. On every point they can hardly have agreed, since La Mennais was a Republican, with a brain that, like that of Buchez, teemed with social extravagances. As "helpers of humanity," however, he and his young disciple soon stood pledged to one another; the Avenir journal was started, and Montalembert, who had felt his life objectless and tasteless, found it transfigured when following in the channel of Catholic liberty.

And on the horizon, which he felt to be always widening, a new star was yet to rise.

have been of both epochs, who have seen the shame and the honour, our eyes at the recollection fill with unsummoned tears, as we give thanks to Him who is unspeakable in His gifts."

More coadjutors now added themselves to the young reformers. Albert de la Ferronays, young, gifted, and supersensitive, was there; and thither came the Père Gerbet, afterwards Bishop of Perpignan, that "mystic angel who was such a fit director for Alexandrine de la Ferronays, and upon whose wonderful Credo de la Douleur many a sobbing face has surely been pressed; there also Rio reappeared, full of impulses toward medieval art, and of love for that Italy to which, in November 1831, when the Avenir had fairly made shipwreck, the little colony transferred themselves.

With no small emotion they found themselves actually in Rome, and under the shadow of St. Peter's chair. They burned with high hopes that here at least they would be understood, and thus their aspirations for the welfare of Catholic Christendom would deserve and receive the ex-blessing of its august head. But the notes that had been too loud for the cabinet of Louis Philippe sounded just as ill-omened in the ears of the Pope. The policy of the Papacy with regard to merit has often nay, generally been that of the Tarquins with regard to poppies, and Liberty

In the autumn of that year he first met Henri Lacordaire, and he saw in him a priest in very deed, a teacher elect to suffering, "one predestined to genius and to glory." It is needless to say that a strong friendship was made between them, though at first the two men seem to have changed their rôles since the Avenir was suspended for two papers, which were the work of Lacordaire, while Montalembert's mind was occupied in deciding whether he would or would not become a priest. He finally decided against it, and then ex

and Infallibility can never kiss each other. Thus the "Society for the Defence of Religious Liberty "met with no sympathy. An "accueil très-réservé was all that was accorded to its leaders, and before many weeks they were asked to consent to the withdrawal of all their plans, and to see the downfall of all their hopes.

The leaders were differently affected by the Papal censure.

child, in the terrible punishment of their enemies; but tell them there is a God in the midst of these crumbling theories, of this volcanic agitation, of the peoples, and they will shake off the dust from their feet against you."

life of Paris. Again, as before, these men reasoned with the Parisians of God, of liberty, of courage, of justice, and of judgment to come. Again, as before, a corrupt and truthless society listened to them with wonder, or turned a deaf ear, so that the friends might again have asked, as they had done before," Where is the tie that has not been broken? Where is the cause that has not been distrusted? La Mennais, with strong passions and Where is the principle that reigns as masself-love, clung to his plan as his plan, and ter over one single soul? An indescribaat times fancied that he could coax, or ble vertigo has seized on men: no one lead, or even force the Pope to his way of knows where he is going; no one wishes thinking. He failed, as every one knew he to go where his fate urges him. They lie; must, and as he neither could nor would they heap oath upon oath; yet all their brook the disappointment, he wandered vain words, in which God is not so much away. One more ungrateful son of the as once named, are quickly effaced from Church the Ultramontanes declared him the recollection of men. . . . They believe to be, while their opponents pointed to with a blind faith in the immortal power him as one more martyr to liberty; a fall- of a family, in the miraculous destiny of a ing star whose brightness attracted some disciples; a living protest to the incompatability of Romish tenets and pretensions with freedom of thought or action, or with the new necessities of a new age. La Mennais the rebel, with his high temper and marked individuality, started with a determined absolute sense that he was right, and in the right. Lacordaire and Montalembert had rather an absolute and determined wish to serve God and society, and if the means and the machinery that they had first adopted were disapproved of by the head of the Church, they were able to submit. They were willing also to try again at another time and in another way. Lacordaire left Rome, however, and the next time that he arrived formally to ask for the Pontifical blessing was in 1844, when he planned that revival of the Dominican brotherhood which lived and died at La Quercia and at Nancy. Montalembert also left Rome. He travelled, and falling in love with the memory of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, he followed her footsteps from fact to legend, from castle to city, threw together the materials for his first work, a life of that royal saint, went to Pisa and read extracts from his notes to Albert and Alexandrine de la Ferronays, and did not return to Paris till the year 1835, when he came to take his seat in the Chamber of Peers. He was twenty-five years of age.

Once more then he and Lacordaire could hold counsel together, and Ozanam and Rio and Mdme. Swetchine were with them to witness Montalembert's parliamentary début, and to hear those conferences of the priest which made the pulpit of Notre Dame the centre of the religious

66

The bishops of France looked rather coldly on this pair of plain-spoken friends. "Le bruit," said one prelate, ne fait jamais du bien, et le bien ne fait jamais du bruit;" and though in France a mot like this is damaging indeed, Montalembert found himself in 1844, obliged to risk some more noise for the cause of education, which he had so long advocated, and for the constitutional policy which has been so often attempted in France. He spoke well and worked well, and if we were abruptly asked to say what, with all his enthusiasm and his good intentions, Charles de Montalembert really did for his country, we should reply, that, in the face of a Government whose educational policy was neither more nor less than a monopoly, he tried to obtain for all ranks a liberal education, of which the basis was a faith in Christianity; and that again, before the elections of 1846, he roused the electors, and begged them to realize the responsible power which was lodged in their hands.

In consequence of his exertions one hundred and thirty deputies came up to that parliament pledged to the cause of religious and educational liberty; a liberty subject only to constitutional restrictions. When we remember that the clouds were already gathering for the storm of 1818, it is not necessary to ask what became of the hundred and thirty members, of their influence and their votes. In a French

political convulsion it is not the men of order or education who are heard; it is the men of extremes, extremes of absolutism and extremes of democratic violence which, by changing the nature but not the degree of tyranny, smother at last the principles of freedom.

When Louis Philippe was sent into exile by the most "purposeless and severely punished of revolutions," the Chamber of Peers was doomed. M. de Montalembert might then have felt for a moment as if his career was closed, but he was returned ere long as deputy for the Department of Doubs, and allowed to raise his voice again for the causes he had at heart. Lord Normanby says of his first appearance in the Assembly, "Upon my first visit to the Assembly this morning (June 23), even in the midst of the agitation caused by the struggle already begun, I heard that an intense sensation had been produced yesterday by the first great speech of M. de Montalembert, in his new character of représentant du peuple, and upon the subject of the proposed decree authorizing the Government to take possession of the railroads. He made this an occasion for stating his opinion boldly, as he was sure to do upon the general state of the country."

bided their time. By a stroke of unexampled daring and rascality they possessed themselves, on one memorable morning in December, of the chief power and places in the State, and on that day the legitimate career of all honest and constitutional statesmen in France was ended. M. de Montalembert's fate was no exception to the general rule. Not that he altogether ceased to protest. The incident in his life with which the English public is most familiar, is his condemnation in November 1858 for articles published in the Correspondant, said to contain "attacks on universal suffrage; on the rights of the Emperor; on the respect due to the laws, and to the Government of the Emperor," while they were also of a nature to disturb the public peace. We extract a portion of Mrs. Oliphant's account of the trial and its consequences:

The penalties attached to these accusations were serious; not only were the culprits liable to sentences of imprisonment, varying from three months to five years, and to fines varying from 500 to 6,000 francs, but they were subeither expelled from French territory, or be shut ject to a lasting surveillance, and might be up in some French or Algerian town. The trial The successful orator himself was in the lembert. The court was crowded with the best was therefore no child's play to M. de Montahabit of saying that the year 1819 was the and highest audience that Paris could collect. most brilliant one of his life. It must To hear the first of French lawyers plead, and have been one of many hopes and fears. one of the most illustrious of French orators France seemed to pause before confirming submit to an examination, was enough to ator choosing a form of government, and the tract a crowd. . . . M. de Montalembert was many, the very many, men of merit and examined as to the meaning of the passages alability who at that time, like Montalem-leged as libellous—whether he did not mean to bert, wished for a "manly and regulated liberty," did at moments believe themselves to be approaching the fulfilment of their hopes. Setting aside the party, of brilliant and eager Republicans, it did seem as if France possessed in a Berryer, a De Tocqueville, a Guizot, a Rémusat, a Faucher, a Duvergier de Hauranne, a Falloux, a Montalembert, a Kergolay, a De Beaumont, and a De Broglie the ten righteous men who might have saved a city and nation, could the Government but be confided to such hands. But property was menaced by the Communistic tone of the great towns, and the party, so called, of order, was, not unnaturally, bent on establishing a "strong government," one which would secure property and peace. And for the ten righteous men we have named, the President, Louis Napoleon, had among his personal friends quite as many men of precisely opposite description. They had not been so much as named for office in his first cabinet, but not the less had they

...

No one

describe the Imperial Government by the words
"the chroniclers of anti-chambers, the atmos-
phere charged with servile and corrupt mias-
that he went to breathe an air more pure, to
mas," and whether he did not imply, by saying
take a bath of life in free England, an attack
on the institutions of his country..
who has ever seen M. de Montalembert can haye
any difficulty in representing to himself the
curiously significant position in which the fool-
ish malice of his persecutors thus placed him.
With his imperturbable composure, that "aris-
tocratic calm" which his critics had so often re-
marked, he stood before all Paris, with the curl
of sarcasm about his lips, enjoying, there can
be no doubt, from the bottom of his heart this
unlooked-for chance of adding a double point to
every arrow he had launched.
gravity with which he acknowledges each damn-
denied, the suave and serious composure of his
ing implication as an historical fact not to be
aspect, the irresistible and undeniable force of
that polished reiteration, the ironical disavowal
of any attack "in the sense implied by the
law," all make up the most characteristic pic-
ture which could possibly be given of the man.

The calm