The History of the French ... Translated by W. Bellingham

Front matter

THE HISTORY OF THE FRENCH. 1!Y JEAN CHARLES LEONARD SIMONDE DE SISMONDI, Chevalier de la Legion d'honneur ; Associe etranger de 1' Institut de France, de 1' Academie imperiale de St. Petersbourg, de 1' Academie royale des Sciences de Prusse, de 1* Academie royale des Sciences de Turin, membre honoraire de 1* Universite de Wilna, de 1' .Academie Italienne, de eelles des Georgofili, de Cagliari, de Pistoia, de Palerme, de Chiavari de San Miniato, de Val d' Arno, de Cortona ; de' 1' Academie Romaine d' Archeologie, ct de la Societe Pontaniana de Naples. TRANSLATED BY WILLIAM BELLINGHAM, of Lincoln's inn. VOL. I. LONDON: ALEXANDEE BLACK, FOREIGN BOOKSELLER TO THE QUEEN, 8, WELLINGTON STREET, NORTH. 1849. J. W. GROVE, PRINTER, 6, TRINITY STREET, SOUTHWAKK. THE MEROVINGIAN AND CARLOVINGIAN DYNASTIES.

THE HISTORY OF THE FRENCH. BY JEAN CHARLES LEONARD SIMONDE DE SISMONDI, Chevalier de la Legion d'honneur ; Associe stranger de l'lnstitut de France, de l'Acade'mie imperiale de St. Petersbourg, de l'Academie royale des Sciences de Prnsse, de l'Academie royal des Sciences de Turin, Membre honoraire de 1'Universite de Wilna, de l'Academie et la Socie'te des Arts de Geneve, de T Academie Italienne, de celles des Georgofili, de Cagliari, de Pistoia, de Palerme, dc Chiavari, de San Miniato, de Val d'Arno, de Cortona ; de' l'Academie Romaine d'Archeologie, et de la Societe Pontaniana de Naples. TRANSL-iTED BY WILLIAM BELLINGHAM, of Lincoln's inn. VOL. I. LONDON: ALEXANDER BLACK, FOREIGN BOOKSELLER TO THE QUEEN, 8, WELLINGTON STREET NORTH. 1850, 1. W. GROVE, PRINTER, TBINITY STREET, SOUTHWARK. THE TRANSLATOR'S

Preface

. The unanimous praise which the Histoire des Francais has produced from the greatest living historians, the European reputation of its Author, and the want of a continuous History of the French in our language, sufficiently accounts for the appearance of this book. Whether it be in consequence of the length of the work having daunted translators, or the expensiveness of the publication having dulled the speculativeness of publishers, I know not ; but certain it is, that the History of the French, which is on all hands admitted to be the best, is as yet unknown to the English language. The value of a translation, compared with the original, cannot for a moment be entertained ; but yet, until we have some universally known tongue, people must be dependent on, and contented with, translations, to be informed of the literature of Foreign countries.

It has been my constant endeavor to render the Author's meaning by, as nearly as the idiom of the languages would allow, an exact translation of his own words. It is rarely that the members of a sentence can be transposed without affecting the original meaning, and therefore, though sometimes at the risk of awkwardness, I have kept closely to the order of tbe Author's words; for it seems to me that, to quote the words of a recent reviewer, "the best translation is that in which least of the original is lost — least lost on those qualities which are the most important. The native air and real meaning of a work are more essential qualities, than the charm of its numbers, or the embellishments and the passion of its poetic style. The first is the metal and the weight ; the second is the plating and the fashion." Fidelity has been the important mark at which I have aimed ; and if in its search I have lost the graceful composition, or the THE TRANSLATOR'S

PREFACE.

. VI masculine eloquence of the great original, be but my end attained, and I shall have struck a quarry well worth the shot, though the killing hath cost the bright feathers. It is hoped that improvement will be found as the translator has progressed, and that it be taken as earnest of his constant anxiety to improve in his task, and of his hope that the last volume shall be deemed more worthy — however still unworthy — of the great original than the first. He is not insensible to the difficulty of his undertaking, its laboriousness, its length and its responsibility. Those only who know the original are aware of the labors of the translator. When a Hallam trans lates a Guizot, and a Macaulay presents a version of a Michelet, a perfect translation may be expected ; till then the Public must rest contented with the more humble productions of inferior minds.

WILLIAM BELLINGHAM. In a work of this description there often are references which few readers care to consult, even if they could do so. To save such readers the trouble of constant diversion from the text to all the references, a num ber (52), has been used; those notes which contain additional information, are referred to by a letter (A), and the translator's notes by the usual signs of an asterisk (*), &c. Foreign weights, measures, and monies, have their equivalents generally enclosed in brackets [ ] in the text. To each volume a Chronological and Analytical Table is appended ; and for the easy verification of the translation, the paging of the French edition is retained in this table. The index to the whole will be published at the conclusion of the work, and it will be made as complete as possible ; for certainly, to use the words of Mr. de Morgan, " No writer is so much read as the one who makes a good index, — or so much cited."

THE LIFE & WRITINGS OF SISMONDI.* Jean Charles Leonard Simonde de Sismondi, was by birth a Swiss. His family, of which he was the last representative was originally from Tuscany. It was from protecting, with his body, the emperor Henry VI., to preserve him from the dagger of an assassin, that one of his ancestors received as the device and war cry of their house ; Cara f6 m'e la vostra ! When Otho III. marched into Italy, in 930, he brought with him a gentleman of Cologne, who established himself at Pisa. This was the father of Chinzica Sismondi, who was the first of the historian's family to be handed down to posterity by reason of her superiority over her fellow citizens. Whilst a Pisan fleet was gone to fight the Saracens in Campagnia, Murat, king of Sardinia, attempted, in 1005, to surprise the city.

He had burned one quarter of the town, when the citizens of the other quarters, buried in profound repose, became aware of their danger. .All fled, for the fire and sword and Mussulman revenge, persued. Chinzica alone, thinking of nought save the honor of her adopted city, flew to the bridge and alarmed the palace of the consuls. The tocsin recalled the flying christians to their arms : throwing themselves on the Mussulmen, they forced them to embark in haste ; and to preserve the memory of her who saved their town, they gave her name to the burned suburb, which they rebuilt ;t and her statue still existing, half sunk into the wall of that quarter testifies the admiration with which her noble daring was regarded by her contemporaries.! 'Tis not until two centuries later that we find the mention of the name in the records of Pisan.

In the war of the Lombardian cities with Frederick the H., the Pisans taking the side of the emperor, did not wish to permit the holding of the council convoked by Gregory IX., at St. John of Latran. The Genoese, who had engaged to convey the French prelates to Rome, had armed afleet of twenty seven galleys under the orders of Jaques Malocello, to secure their passage. Ugolino Sismondi, who at this time (1241) commanded the Pisan fleet, to which were united some Neapolitan vessels, had orders to attack the Genoese ships ; he awaited Malocello between Melorta and the isle of Giglio, which is opposite Leghorn. On the 3rd of May, they appeared, escorting the fathers of the Western Church who were returning to Rome, and did not refuse the combat. The fight was long and bloody ; but never was victory more complete than that of Sismondi.

Of the twenty-seven Genoese galleys hesank threeand took nineteen. Four thousand Genoese were made prisoners and led into Sicily. Two cardinals, a great number of bishops and prelates were carried to Pisa, where they were shut up in the chapter of the cathedral and loaded with silver chains, to show the respect for them even in their captivity. Finally, immense treasures were transported to that town; and the admiral measured out by the bushel, to the Pisans and their auxiliaries the Neapolitans, the money acquired by the victory. Frederick the II. granted the title * Nearly the whole of this Biography is taken from the Quarterly Review, vol. 72, and Magasin Piltoresque, No. 43. Where no alteration seemed to be required by the nature of the publication, passages have been copied entire. t Chinzica Sismondi Biog.

XJniverselle. % Encyc. Melrop. art Pisa. LIFE AND WRITINGS VIII of count to Ugolino Sismondi ; but his dignity became extinct with him, and did not pass to any other branch of his family. Not long after, in 1282, the energies of Pisa were again called forth in the war with that republic against the Genoes The former were once more headed by a descendant of the family of the brave Chinzica. Ginicello Sismondi chased the enemy's fleet from the mouths of the Arno, and with thirty galleys carried desolation into the Levant, took and pillaged Porto Venere, and menaced Genoa : but in the midst of these exploits, on the 9th September, 1282, his fleet was assailed by so violent a tempest, that one half of it was destroyed.* But the ascendancy of the house of Sismondi was over for a time, and its great ness was only to be renewed, but in quite another and more glorious manner, in our own day.

At the fall of the Republic of Pisa, in 1392, the Sismondi were obliged to seek a refuge in France, and they settled at the Cote de St. Andre, in Dauphiny : their descendants adopted the opinions of the Reformers and remained in France till the Edict of Nantes in 1685. To that result of the intolerance and bigotry of Louis XIV. France is indebted for the loss of the honor of giving birth to her greatest historian, and Switzerland for having sent into the world one more bright name as a memento of her hospitable reception of the fugitive from arbitrary cruelty. Once more in search of a place of refuge, the family of Sismondi bent their steps towards Geneva, the home of many an exiled wanderer for religion's sake, and in that city they were admitted citizens, and enrolled among its aristocracy.

But as citizens of the republic of Geneva, they renounced not the service of the kingdom wherein they had at first been hospitably received. Gedeon de Sismondi, the father of the historian, who was like his grandfather, in the service of France, only quitted its army to take orders. In 1770, he married Susan Girod, and settled as a pastor, in the village of Bossex, at the foot of Mont Saleve. Three years after this union, on the 9th of May, 1773, was born Jean Charles Leonard, the subject of this sketch. The historian first saw the light at Geneva, and here was laid the basis of an education which was to prepare him to become a master spirit of his age. His classical instruction was pursued in the college of his native town ; but it was in his own family that he learned that practical good sense, that warm heartedness, which dictated his writings and pervaded his whole life.

The childhood of Leonard was passed in comfort and affluence at Chatelaine, an exceedingly beautiful situation at the confluence of the Rhone and the Arve commanding bright views of river, lake and mountain ; sur rounding the dwelling were pleasant gardens, full of sweet flowers ; all around a scene of tempered sublimity and amenity. He was first placed at the college or high school of Geneva, where he gave to the casual observer but slight promise of his future talent. With the most touching, and as we should say feminine, tenderness of disposition, and which he retained throughout his life, he combined a stern and passive heroism. Sismondi's extreme sensibility exposed him to the constant bullying of his rude and coarse comrades. This persecution threw him, as it were, upon the resources of the imagi nation ; and his very annoyances stimulated him to profit far more by rather a superficial and low standard course of instruction, than he would have done had he been left at ease.

He acquired a sound and tasteful knowledge of Latin and Greek ; but was especially remarkable for the rarest of all school boy virtues, that of working on, and because the task was set him, seeking only to please his teachers and his parents — a duty which he always kept before his eyes to the last. For others, Sismondi was the warmest advocate of free-will and independence from all subjection ; yet no writer who ever expatiated upon the obligation of single- Biagrophie Universclle, vol. xlii, pp. 433-4. These articles were written by Sismondi. minded and simple obedience to all authority as a divine ordinance, practise it more honestly and implicitly in the various relations in which he was placed by the 'ftpointment of Providence. Lift us here, once for all, remark that Sismondi never dreamed of exercising the privilege so foolishly, or rather so wickedly, asserted for ' genius,' of setting at nought the decencies of human society, or the duties imposed upon mankind.

Hence he was removed at the due age to the Auditoire, bearing, in the scheme of public education of Geneva, the same relation to the college that the university among us does to the school. But presently his filial obedience was put to the test ; he was required to quit his home, and to sustain what, to all men, young or old, is one of our heaviest burthens : the being driven to engage in a course of life which is an employment, but not a vocation, a pursuit for which you have no call. Entertaining the strongest repugnance towards mercantile pursuits, he was placed in the counting-house of the eminent firm, Eynard and Co. at Lyon. A sudden change in the fortunes of the Sismondi family, hitherto affluent, had compelled his father to adopt this determination. Like most of the opulent Genevese, they had invested the whole of their money in the French funds.

The fortune which they enjoyed, and which Sismondi never valued " leisure which should be employed in developing all the intellectual faculties ; superfluity which should be devoted to solacing every misery" were compromised, and by the bankruptcy of France they were reduced to the verge of absolute poverty. In this particular instance of the ruin occasioned by the funding system, a system so peculiarly expressive of the characteristics, moral as well as political, belonging to the ' age of civilization,' enthusiasm for M. Necker had as much weight with the Genevese as confidence in the investment, or desire of profit. Future historians will, however, have to seek and trace out the wonderful influence which finance, in every sense, now possesses in the affairs of nations ; nor will the philosophic philologer fail to mark how curiously the sense of justice or injustice depends upon the sound of a word. ' Confiscation' for treason, the punishment inflicted for the betraying the implied trust placed in you by the government, would make the blood of an American boil over ; but he chews his tobacco with the greater zest when the treasury of his state is enriched by ' repudiation,' inflicted because you trust the government which betrays you.

Sismondi could not abide his mercantile employment : the work was wholly against his taste. His situation would have been altogether unsupportable, had not duty sustained him. In order to fulfil the wishes of his parents, and that because\hey were his parents, he applied himself heart and soul to his drudgery, and became a thoroughly good clerk, mastering, in particular, all the mysteries of book-keeping. No training could appear less calculated to form the future historian ; but in after life he acknowledged gratefully that, though distasteful, the education was most profitable to him. To this hard discipline he ascribed hishabits of order and method, his patience in posting his matter over and over again, his power of rapid calculation, but, above all, his tendency to apply to the inquiries, commonly called the science, of political economy, the lessons afforded by the annals of history.

The fearful outbreak of the revolution at Lyon compelled Sismondi (1792) to return to Geneva : he was, however, followed by the storm. His father had never meddled in the least with public affairs ; but merely because he belonged to the antient aristocracy, he was the object of cruel persecution. A ' domiciliary visit' cleared the house of every article of value. A contribution was imposed upon the family which amounted to a confiscation of their property : father and son were both cast into prison ; but, as no charge could be even pretended against them, they were soon liberated. ,1 l> X The Genevese, from their long established colonies, can hardly be said to visit England, where the Sismondi now sought refuge, as strangers. The family first placed themselves as boarders in the house of a country clergyman, and thence removed to Tenterden.

Leonard afterwards established himself in London. During his residence in England, he turned the whole of his time to profit. Whilst he was here, he, in a manner, entirely identified himself with the country : the English language became the common speech of his family, and he acquired no ordinary degree' of fluency in it, whether in composition or in conversation. He applied himself earnestly to the Study of the English Constitution and the English Law, partly through books, far more by diligently attending courts of justice, acquiring a thorough familiarity equally with the principles, and with the forms and practice of our English policy. These pursuits, however, did not lead him to neglect any portion of our national literature. Quick in bis perceptions, but methodical in his studies, his residence of eighteen months in this country gave him an accurate knowledge of our institutions and character.

He judged without partiality or prejudice ; hence, in after life, he was enabled to investigate our peculiar position with respect to commerce, manufacture, and agriculture, not as a theorist, but as one who thoroughly knew his ground. Quite unconsciously, he was receiving another portion of the education intended to fit him for the tasks he had afterwards to accomplish. Leonard, and we believe his father and sister, would have been perfectly well satisfied to continue in England ; but Madame de Sismondi became ill of the maladie du pays ; the Heimweh, for which we would fain substitute such an English compound as the Home-grief (Home-sickness, though a good old expression, is hardly intense enough). Energetic as she was, her sufferings, both of mind and body, where such as to admit of no palliation or cure, except a return to her own country ; and to Geneva accordingly they did return in the most dismal period of the reign of terror.

Well would it be, if those who place confidence in ' national character,' ' intelligence,' and the like, were to study the revolutions of Calvin's commonwealth. Though the classes of society, the demarcations of the different orders were sharply defined, yet none of the elements of exasperation between rank and rank which existed in France were to be found here. Religion, however undermined by philosophy, had, ostensibly at least, her full sway ; and the city may be said to have constituted one great family, and in which the family quarrels of preceding generations, if not_ entirely forgotten, appeared to be put to rest. It is the most pleasant of the social comforts in a small town or community that you are everywhere at home. No Genevese, from the highest to the lowest, was a strano-er to another ; every face was that of an acquaintance, if not a friend ; yet as soon as the passions of political rancour had their full effect, all bonds were broken, and nowhere, perhaps, has there been a stronger exemplification of the contao-ious, or rather demoniacal, madness excited by the shedding of blood.

Men who were previously quiet, mild, and harmless citizens and fathers of families, became infuriate: one individual, a smith, a good-tempered, merry fellow perhaps he maybe yet living— caused upwards of fifty of his fellow-citizens to be shot with the greatest glee. Let it be recollected that these horrors were perpetrated, not by a profligate, enthusiastic, or fanatical population, but by sober, shop-keeping burgesses, men naturally as money-getting and as quiet as the ratepayers o{ London or Edinburgh. The four Syndics of the Republic, not merely blameless, but magistrates distinguished by their integrity and the conscientious discharge of their "duties were accused of treason against the nation, and condemned to die. At this juncture the Sismondi family removed to Chatelaine, and one of the proscribed M. Caila a most intimate friend of theirs, fled thither in hope of safety.

They concealed the fugitive in a shed in their garden, which stood on the very verge of the French frontier, and it was agreed that, on the first alarm, he should cross the line. Madame de Sismondi entrusted her son with the duty of acting as sentinel. In the midst of the night he heard the measured tramp of the approaching gens d'armes, and rushed to the door of the shed ; but the door was fastened. Caila, old and deaf, slept so soundly that Sismondi could not rouse him ; the soldiers, who had now entered the garden, made at once for the shed, having evidently received information of Madame's arrangement. The Genevese revolutions have always exhibited abundant perfidiousness on a small scale, the petty spites and mean chicaneries of society corrupting into base or sanguinary treachery. Leonard had no resource but to stand on the defensive, in the expectation that the noise and bustle would awaken the sleeper ; he was, however, struck to the ground by the but-end of a carbine.

Caila now awakened : instead of attempting to escape, he quietly surrendered himself, and Madame de Sismondi saw him carried off to certain death. She fell on her knees in prayer. — Thus she continued till the morning, when she heard the distant shots of the fusillade. Geneva now became hateful, and a family consultation being held, they deter mined to sell Chatelaine, and abandon their desolated country. It was a heart break, thus to wrench themselves from the once happy spot, but there was no help, go they must. With the world before them, they yearned for Italy, and determined to settle in Tuscany, the seat of their ancestors, their antient Fatherland. The pilgrims crossed the Alps in the month of October, 1795, and arrived at Florence in the same month ; they agreed after holding another council — for in this most affectionate family, parents and children always acted as possessing but one interest and one mind — that it would be most expedient to invest the produce of their Genevese property in land, so that their farm might serve as a home, and as a means of support and maintenance.

Whilst his parents and his sister rested at Florence after the fatigues of a forced retreat, and of a second exile, Charles alone and on foot, set out in search of their future residence. He had been struck in England by the magnificent aspect of districts deserted by man, but the best cultivated in the world, and by the most ingenious and economical processes. In Tuscany beauties of another kind not only pleased his eye, but enchained his heart. Instead of verdant and boundless plains, vast and uniform crops, he everywhere encountered numerous small farms, between which the most indistinct inclination of the land, the slightest alteration in the soil, immediately determines some change. There it seemed that the mind of a master had traced each furrow, that his caressing hand had directed the growth of every shrub.

Instead of wandering under the solitary shade of immense parks of gigantic trees, rich solitudes abandoned to the graceful pleasures of the fallow deer, and to the enjoyments of some rich and satiated idler, the attention of Sismondi followed the smiling undulations of hills, planted with olives, mulberrry-trees, fig-trees, and fruit-trees of all kinds, the feet of which were prolonged and lost in the waving yellow of the harvest, or upon the variegated and velvety carpet of flowers of the artificial meadows. Wheat, maize, rye, vegetables, flax, or hemp, divide fields, which, supported from terrace to terrace by embankments of turf, are often not broader than four feet. When deviating from the high road, the young man began to ascend those narrow paths which no wheel had desecrated, and which, only accessible to the tiny horses of the mountains, loaded with packsaddles, wind among the olives, the vines, and various objects of cultivation, he found the side of the hill studded with agree able abodes, well built, well provisioned, the master of one of which received him hospitably, and hastened to admit him to the abundant, though frugal table, which his happy family surrounded.

From the barn floor (the only platform of any extent that can be found upon the eight or nine acres which each cotter cultivates) the young traveller overlooked the country ; his eyes everywhere met the delightful sight of ease and happiness. If the peasant halted a moment from his multifarious labours, which from " morn till dewy eve," exercised all his activity without provoking disgust, it was to come under the orange-tree and jessamine, the ornament of his cot, to point out to his guest some beauty which the admiration of the stranger might have forgotten in the midst of this delightful landscape. In listening to these honest people Sismondi might convince himself that if healthful labor had respected the suppleness of their bodies, if healthy and sufficient nourishment maintained the vigor of their limbs, the sentiment of perpetuity, the stability of the present, the hope of the future, were not less favorable to the development of their understanding, whilst their religion exercised a no less salutary influence upon their poetical feelings, their affections and their morality.

Leonard's choice was made ; his research terminated. He conducted his parents to Pescia, near which, at Valchiusa, was for sale a small podere or farm, with a still smaller house. The price of the sale of Chatelaine sufficed to buy this tiny domain, which a petty proprietor carried on, as are nearly all the lands in that part of Tuscany, by a mezzainolo, or under farmer, who, for the rent of the land, which he cultivated with the aid of his family, the house which he inhabited, the cattle, and the implements of agriculture which he employed, paid half of the produce of his labors. Thus was found accomplished on a little nook of land, by a simple and primitive contract, and by industry alone, what Sismondi has consecrated his entire life to demand for all and in all : the stable association of capital and labor, of manu facturer and workman, of proprietor and cultivator ; the former finding all the capital which the sweat of the latter fertilises, both having an equal interest in the improvement of the property, the profit of which they partake in common.

Sismondi had just been removed from the desk : he now, all but literally, put his hand to the plough, superintending the management of the podere. Thus employed, his occupation entered into combination with the studies which he unre mittingly pursued, and he acquired that peculiar train of thought which influenced all his writings, namely, the valuing constitutions and forms of government, not as grounded upon abstract principles, but as subservient to the practical welfare of the people. Hence also may be deduced his strong predilection for agriculture as the source of national prosperity ; and, living, as he did, in the midst of an agricultural population, he obtained a degree of practical knowledge rarely possessed by men of literature. His sister married and settled at Pescia, where she resided till her recent death.

Sismondi himself retained the property, and revisited it at various periods during the remainder of his life. Thus was the historian of the Italian Republics nursed for the great task which he ultimately performed: no man is fully qualified to write the history of a country, unless he knows the country itself; unless he has trod its earth, drunk its streams, felt its breezes, sunned himself beneath its sky. He passed his time, not solitary, yet in seclusion, delighting in the lovely scenery, and still more in the converse of the happy and unspoiled peasantry amongst whom he dwelt. Even here he did not escape persecution : he kept himself entirely quiet, therefore neither party could understand him. He was first suspected, and then arrested as an aristocrat by the French: again, in one of the risings of the Tuscans against their oppressors, he was arrested as a Frenchman, because Geneva, his native country, was then annexed to France.

Four times was he placed in con finement, and his poor mother trembled for the days of a son whom she loved to idolatry. Yet the young man was not irritated against the doctrines in the name of which his fortune had been destroyed and his life threatened. He only learned that "every work of liberty has need of time, and that in revolutions the bayonet and guillotine, blind powers, at first replace all the force which order lately borrowed from respect or habit." However, in spite of all these troubles he constantly pursued his studies ; and he began the composition of his ' Recherches sur les Constitu tions des Peuples Libres,' a work never completed, but which was in fact the foundation of all his subsequent historical productions ; whilst, at the same time, his constant intercourse with the peasantry more and more confirmed him in his doctrine of considering the history of the people as the groundwork of the history of nations.