VICTOR HUGO'S INDICTMENT

(From the Times of January 2.)

Paris, Dec. 29.

Two judicial transactions have recently very much occupied the attention of our public here, namely, the declaration of the jury in the prosecution against the Society of the Friends of the People, and Victor Hugo's indictment against the Comedie Française. Political societies with periodical sittings, &c., are prohibited by article 29 of our penal code. This article, which has been inveighed against as a remnant of the imperial despotism, whilst it is in existence should be enforced; indeed, the minister who would not insist on its execution would justly risk his official responsibility, not the less so that it is the only check that the present affords against the flooding of France with Jacobin societies and affiliations, with all their baneful consequences. To what horrors should we not be again exposed if all the ruffians, and scoundrels and fanatics of France, by means of those Jacobin affiliations should usurp, as they did fatally on a former occasion, the functions of government ? We should have a renewal of the dreadful scenes of 1793. The transaction which has called forth these remarks is worthy of your notice. A ministerial ordinance commands the Society of the Friends of the People to forthwith dissolve them- selves. Some of its rescant members are prosecuted in a court of justice. The verdict of the jury is an acquittal, but the Court of Assize, in proclaiming this verdict, at the same time declare the society to be suppressed. The foreman of the jury, however, contrary to every regulation by which the conduct of a juryman should be guided, takes it upon him to formally declare, that the article 291 (under which the society was suppressed) is a violation of the charter of 1830; and upon this extraordinary declaration, the journals of the movement, regardless that the interpretation of laws belongs but to those, the legislature, who made them, ring the changes to the effect that there is no law against every citizen enrolling himself a member of any club or political society, whatever. The Minister, therefore, is plainly bound to oppose a bold front to such a menacing torrent, and there can be little doubt that his efforts will be successful.

With respect to the other transaction, a man of genius, and of the most fruitful imagination, whose most extravagant productions abounds in numberless beauties, but who, either through some defect of taste, or through the very libertinage (dévergondage) of a morbid literary ambition, has absurdly laboured to make the French language retrograde to the barbaric times anterior to Rousart, and who, by a natural independence, holds in disdain all modern literature—the founder too of a school of poetry which contains a number of enthusiastic followers. Victor Hugo has just instituted a prosecution against the Comedia Française, and with a view, to use his own words, "to crush their power with four articles of the charter of 1830." M. Hugo has adorned—I should rather say, disgraced—the French-drama with a new production, entitled Le Roi s'amuse,—a production at once the most extravagantly absurd, and the most scandalously immoral that could be submitted to the eyes of an indignant public. Public decency called upon the authorities to spare the moral feelings of families so gross an outrage, by suppressing the license of the Comedie Française; but forsooth our young literary fry would not listen to such an ignominious proposition against the French theatre. A decree of the empire arms the executive with the power of thus protecting public morals, and though the existence of this power may till this moment have remained a dead letter, surely there will be an end to government, and indeed to legislation, if a public theatre should he permitted with impunity, and with the most open audacity, to offend public decency with the most libidinous representations of gross adultery and practical assassination. M. Hugo then impeaches the power of the Comedie Française to suppress the representation of his piece, and thus the question of this kind of theatrical censorship is brought before a legal tribunal. Odillon Barratt, the leader of the parliamentary opposition, offers his services as counsel to Victor Hugo, and I know not how the applause of a fanatical band of youthful litterateurs can reconcile to him the gross contradiction between this open resistance of all theatrical censorship with his emphatic admissions on other occasions of the necessity of the preventive censorship. To be sure, an open contradiction is but a feeble obstacle in the way of Odillon Barron, who, by this and other recent acts, has demonstrated on a large scale his incapability to direct the affairs of a nation, or indeed to successfully apply himself at all to great political questions. The honours of the day, however, have not fallen to him, but to M. Chain D'Estrange, a young advocate. The tribunal will not pronounce an opinion for a few days to come, and it is generally believed that it will not come to any decision other than a declaration of its incompetency to pronounce one.

 The Sydney Gazette 8 June 1833,