Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day. William Walton

      INTRODUCTION

       Table of Contents

      INTRODUCTION

       Table of Contents

      Well, the heights and depths which we are called upon to contemplate are not unendurable, but they are certainly in many respects unexcelled. "France," says one of her most eloquent and dignified historians, "has justly been termed the soldier of God;" "Other continents have monkeys," says a learned German philosopher; "Europe has the French." Any community or locality which offers, or is considered by intelligent observers to offer, such a range as this, is certainly worthy of high renown and deep research, and it is not too much to say that Paris justifies her fame. Within her walls the human mind has displayed its loftiest development, and the human passions their most insane excesses; her art and her literature have erected beacon-lights for all the ages to come, and have but too frequently fallen into the depths of more than swinish filth; her science of government has ranged from the Code Napoléon to the statutes of Belial himself; her civilization has attained an elegance of refinement unknown to the Greeks, and her cigars and lucifer-matches are a disgrace to Christendom!

      Happily, as in several other human institutions, there is more of good than of bad. The so-called "seamy side" of cities is not like that of flour-bags—equal in extent and importance to the fair outer surface that meets the eye. Much as has been published of the depravity of Paris, it is not that, but the splendid activity of her material and intellectual civilization, the serious confronting of the heavy problems of humanity, the intelligent accumulation of the treasures of the mind and the hand, legislation, literature, art, science, that impress the intelligent visitor. Moreover, it is the annals of unhappy nations only that are said to be interesting, and it is impossible that a quick human interest should not attach to the contemplation of this capital which has attacked so many problems, maintained so many struggles, and endured such crushing reverses. In the light of her most troubled history the import becomes clear of the galley on her shield, and her motto: "Floats, but sinks not." But few capitals have been more frequently, apparently, on the point of being submerged. Even as these lines are being written, it is agitated by the protracted and cumulating effects of a military and social agitation which, in the language of the President of the Cabinet of Ministers, "is deplorable, which paralyzes all commerce and creates a situation intolerable to all."

      NDEED, it may be said that the present moment is the most critical, the most dramatic, in the long history of the city and the nation, and that an entirely new interest will henceforth attach itself to this crowned capital which sees herself in the inevitable future forever uncrowned. Never before has the pitiless march of events, the pitiless accumulation of irrefutable evidence, the testimony of so many observers, at home and abroad, so seemed to demonstrate that all the methods of government had been exhausted, and that the nation had attained her summit of power and was doomed to steady decline. Down to Louis XIV, her hope was thought to lie in the consolidation of the royal authority and the suppression of the feudal power of the nobles; down to 1789, in the tiers état and the States-General; after the Commune of 1871, in the maintenance of a Republic supported by universal suffrage. The ideals of 1830 and of 1848 have been practically attained; there are, finally, no new and more liberal political expedients to hope for—and never has France seen herself so distanced by her neighbors. Her contemporary literature groans with the accumulation of these facts—from the ineptitude of her rulers, national and colonial, down to the dependence upon the foreigner for wood for her street pavements and the canned provisions for her army. Behind that "gap in the Vosges" upon which, as one of her statesmen remarks, she cannot forever fix her gaze, she sees her

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