SOCIALISM IN FRANCE.

(From The Standard, January 29.)

THERE is a curious movement going forward just now in France which the Government, although watching does not prohibit. It is an attempt to revive the Socialist Propaganda of 1848, which, in its aim was a disinterring of ideas that went to sleep in 1793 and only woke up for a moment in 1830. The agitation, if such it may be called under the eye of a police commissary is by no means confined, as some think, to Paris but rambles through the principal manufacturing cities of France Lyons, St. Etienne, Rouen, Rhiems, Lille, Mulhausen, and Cambrae for at none of these meetings are held similar in purpose and character to those conventions in the popular ball-rooms of the capital. Viewed even superficially the facts are remarkable.

Nothing is better known to Frenchmen than that an assembly of more than twenty persons for the discussion of public question is, unless officially authorised illegal. But these conventions, singular to say, are so authorised and it is even suspected that they receive Imperial encouragement, and yet they proclaim war against society and property, and their orators utter treason in defiance of the Emperor; whereas one tenth of their indiscretions, if perpetrated by a coterie of opposition journalists, would entail prosecutions fines and imprisonment without end. Examined more carefully, and apart from the shifting aspects of French politics, they possess a stronger interest, and betrays deeper meaning.

The first impression from the whole affair is, that the communist mind in France, notwithstanding the innumerable apostles of its creed who have appeared and vanished, has not developed by one iota since the days of the great Revolution ; the second that it attracts few, if any, converts ; the third that our sprinkling of English communists simply parrot the alphabet of the French utopians, and are incapable of projecting a single thought beyond it. The opinions represented are, of course for the most part, those of working men, not the most proficient or valuable of their class whose mission it is to make war upon all superiority, whether in talent, rank, or wealth. It is interesting, if rather disheartening to note how, whenever these spasmodic resurrections of old crotchets take place the unvarying programme of a bygone age is reproduced, unchanged, without addition or diminution ; without so much as a coat of fresh varnish. It abolishes presumption. ; it abolishes marriage ; it abolishes the family to establish in their stead, a glorious nothing. Among its oracles are women who must have danced in the Saturnalia of 1793, old boys whose lectures on economy would be wonderful were they not acquired by rote from the writings of philosophers who long ago had their day. And what is this precious scheme destined for the redemption, in an earthly sense, of mankind? The foremost, the paramount necessity, is that of denying the existence of Divine Justice; the next, a general code against every institution of modern society as a corollary of this, the extirpation of the middle classes ; afterwards, a law canceling all private titles to property ; then another law rendering it penal to employ or command either capital or credit; next, of course, a universal distribution in order that the artisan may never more be degraded by receipt of wages.

Now, if we are asked, is not this a caricature of the beliefs entertained by the, French communists, the answer must be distinctly No; and if whether these beliefs are prevalent among French workmen as a body, the reply must be distinctly No, again. The leaven has been present for seventy years, but it has not yet leavened one-twentieth of the lump. When we read the speeches of the gentry who hold forth in the Prô-aux-Clercs, in the Salle du Vieux Chene, or the Folies Belleville, we are simply reading quotations, garbled, and half-forgotten, from Reynal and Helvetius, in their most frantic moods, when they gave vent to their most ludicrous crudities. Here is a social reformer, who computes that France is inhabited by forty millions, of whom three millions enjoy landed or other property. Why not, he demands, subject the three to the thirty-seven millions, by confiscating their possessions ? Who can help being reminded of those seditious tracts which, in the last century, were hawked by pedlars from village to village, from town to town, from chateau to chateau, throughout the length and breadth of France, when the new illuminati were preaching to masses of discontent the very doctrines now enunciated to idle audiences by the levellers of the Redoute and the Rue Meufletard?

Actually, indeed, in more than one great city of the Empire, these heroes of a tribune, at which the police stare in apathy, have bethought themselves of utilising a similar machinery. Not content with freedom of speech in an orchestral gallery—a freedom occasionally interrupted by official admonitions when their eloquence waxes feverish—they aspire to a printing-press, a secret circulation of journals, and the inauguration of a grand fraternity or order of convulsionist Freemasons, who are to prepare us for the coming "liquefaction" of society, when society shall be ready to be poured into new moulds. Well, the soil, the houses, the harvests, the mines, the manufactures, the personal opulence, the shipping, the banks, the capital, the investments of every description belonging to France, are to be appropriated in the bulk, and equitably divided. There must be nobody in need of wages, and nobody capable of paying them. The shopkeepers will be suppressed. Man alone is left, and his supreme and solitary task is to be that of self-development.

An astonishing fact is, that the individuals who utter this jargon are not in every respect totally imbecile. They know a good deal of books ; they have a very fair mastery of language ; they can epitomise history, as understood by them, with considerable adroitness ; their sarcasms are often vivacious, and there is a marvellous amount of ingenuity, combined with courage, in their economical calculations. Thus, one of them placidly undertakes to prove that the ideas of commerce being a curse and of labour being a blessing are perfectly reconcileable. He insists, too, upon being regularly supplied with employment while scouting the notion of an employer. He appeals to the sacred right of fighting if wages be low, and threatens the same appeal unless wages are abrogated altogether. And their argument has certainly one effect-they are persuaded by it themselves. But, out of that circle, their crudities do not travel far, or find adoption by the race of clearer thinkers, with skilful hands, who represent the vital industry of France.

It is another characteristic circumstance that great regenerators of this kind can be satisfied with nothing less than the prospect of an entire tabula rasa. The earth, for the due advancement of their theories, must be virgin again ; even its charities are crimes, even its associations for mutual help in sickness and misfortune are blunders—they palliate, that is, they conceal the evil. All, in order to be tolerable, must be transformed. We hear of speakers at Lyons, supervised by commissaries, like those of the Parisian dancing-rooms, declaring that the existing cities are too large, and that the population should be compelled to spread itself more evenly over the land ; that trade is selfish because it favours particular ports; whereas it ought, under compulsion, to heap and crowd once more with riches the crumbling quays and grass-grown streets of decaying seaboard towns, such, we suppose, as Honfleur. But it would be a mistake to imagine that in this army of communists who, in the cant they have inherited from their predecessors of the first Republic, announce that they have "begun to march " again, there is the slightest principle of cohesion. They agree in crying out for "collective property," but what does it signify ? upon one man's lips "national workshops ;" upon another, no workshops at all, but the "spontaneity of existence," whatever that may mean; to the intellect of a third the prohibition at once of " fertile industry " and of "luxury"—generally, that is, labour without capital, men without masters, agriculturists without landlords, ships without shipowners, commerce without speculation, money without wages, universal without individual prosperity ; France belonging, at the same time, to all and to none ; society a phantasmagoria of the past, and man "developing " from a new babyhood.

There is no great harm in these teachings ; they amuse the half-educated folk who enunciate and listen to them ; they are too stale to be startling, too vague to be formidable. Yet they illustrate a peculiar French idiosyncrasy which goes on for ever hankering after some parallelogrammic state of things wherein the artisan is to be lord of all, and no one else permitted to have a voice or occupy a place in the commonwealth. Whatever may be the Emperor's policy in thus indulging the craving of the communists for beating the air, the institutions of that thousand-times-condemned offender, Society, stand about where they did, and are not seriously menaced when an intrepid socialist, pointing to three millions of persons representing property, asks, "Shall they be extinguished ! " and answers, " Well, that is what we mean to do ! "

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