DE LAMARTINE, MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS OF THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF FRANCE. BY FRANCIS J. GRUND. [SEE ENGRAVING.] ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE, the present Minister of Legation at Naples, and in 1822, Secretary of the But the author of the Génie du Christianism, les Martyrs, and Bonaparte et des Bourbons, “did not seem to have been much pleased with Lamartine, whom he treated with studied neglect, and afterward entirely forgot as minister of foreign affairs. Chateaubriand, shortly before taking the place of Mons. Decazes in London, had published his Mémoires, lettres, et pièces authentiques touchant la vie et la mort du Duc de Berri,”* and was then preparing to accompany the Duke of Montmorency, whom, in December 1822, he followed as minister of foreign aflairs to the Congress of The splendor of the empire under Napoleon had no Verona. It is very possible that Chateaubriand, who attractions for him. Though, at that period, Napoleon was truly devoted to the elder branch of the Bourwas extremely desirous to reconcile some of the old bons,† may at that time have discovered in Lamarnoble families, and for that purpose employed con- tine little of that political talent or devotion which fidential ladies and gentlemen to correspond with the could have recommended him to a diplomatic post. exiles and to represent to them the nobility of senti- | Chateaubriand was a man of positive convictions in ment, and the magnanimity of the emperor; Lamar-politics and religion, while Lamartine, at that period, tine refused to enter the service of his country under the new régime. So far from taking an interest in the great events of that period, he devoted himself entirely to literary studies, and improved his time by perambulating Italy. The fall of Napoleon did not affect him, for he was no friend of the first revolution, (whose last representative Napoleon still continued to be, though he had tamed it ;) and when, in 1814, the elder line of Bourbons was restored, Lamartine returned from Naples, and entered, the service of Louis XVIII., as an officer of the gardedu-corps. With the return of Napoleon from Elba he left the military service forever. A contemporary of Chateaubriand, Delavigne and Beranger, he now devoted himself to that species of lyric and romantic poetry which at first exasperated the French critics, but, in a very short time, won for him the European appellation of "the French Schiller." His first poems, "Méditations Poétiques," which appeared in Paris in 1820, were received with ten times the bitter criticism that was poured out on Byron by the Scotch reviewers, but with a similar result; in less than two months a second edition was called for and published. The spirit of these poems is that of a deep but undefined religion, presentiments and fantastic dreams of another world, and the consecration of a noble and disinterested passion for the beau ideal of his youth, "Elvire," separated from him forever by the chilly hand of death. In the same year Lamartine became Secretary of the French though far surpassing Chateaubriand in depth of feeling and imagination, had not yet acquired that objectiveness of thought and reflection which is indispensable to the statesman or the diplomatist. After the dismission of Chateaubriand from the ministry, in July, 1824, Lamartine became Secretary to the French Legation at Florence. Here he wrote "Le dernier chant du pélerinage d'Harold," (the Last Song of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,) which was published in Paris in 1825. Some allusions to Italy which occur in this poem, caused him a duel with Col. Pepe, a relation of General Pepe-who had commanded the Neapolitan Insurgents-in which he was severely wounded. In the same year he published Life and Death of the Duke de Berry. *Memoirs, Letters and Authentic Papers Touching the He followed them in 1815 into exile; and in 1830, after the Revolution of July, spoke with fervor in defence of the rights of the Duke of Bordeaux. Chateaubriand refused to pledge the oath of allegiance to Louis Philippe, and left in consequence the Chamber of Peers, and a salary of 12,000 francs. From this period he devoted himself entirely to the service of the unfortunate duchess and her son. Against the exclusion of the elder branch of Bourbons he wrote "De la nouvelle proposition relative au banissement de Charles X. et de sa famille." (On the New Proposition in regard to the Banishment of Charles X. and his Family,) and "De la restoration et de la monarchie elective." (On the Restoration and on the Elective Monarchy,) and several other pamphlets, which, after the apprehension of the duchess in France, caused his own imprisonment. Chateaubriand, in fact, was a political writer as well as a poet. His "Genius of Christianity, published in 1802, reconciled Napoleon with the clergy, and his work, "Bonaparte and the Bourbons," was by Louis XVIII. himself pronounced "equal to an ariny." his "Chant du Sacre," (Chant of the Coronation,) | ment toward objective reality, without which it is in honor of Charles X., just about the time that his impossible to individualize even genius. To our contemporary, Beranger, was preparing for publica- taste, the "Meditations" are superior to his "Har tion his "Chansons inédittes," containing the most monies," in other words, we prefer his præludium bitter sarcasm on Charles X., and for which the great to the concert. The one leaves us full of expecta Chansonnier was afterward condemned to nine tion, the other disappoints us. Lamartine's relimonth's imprisonment, and a fine of 10,000 francs. gion is but a sentiment; his politics at that time were The career of Lamartine commences in 1830, after but a poetical conception of human society. His he had been made a member of the Academy, when religion never reached the culmination point of faith; Beranger's muse went to sleep, because, with his politics were never condensed into a system; Charles X.'s flight from France, he declared his his liquid sympathies for mankind never left a premission accomplished. Delavigne, in 1829, pub- cipitate in the form of an absorbing patriotism. lished his Marino Falieri. When his contemporary, Beranger, electrified the masses by his "Roi d'Yvetot," and "le Senateur,” (in 1813,) Lamartine quietly mused in Naples, and in 1814 entered the body guard of Louis XVIII, when Cormenin resigned his place as counsellor of state, to serve as a volunteer in Napoleon's army. While in London, Lamartine married a young English lady, as handsome as spirituelle, who had conceived a strong affection for him through his poems, which she appreciated far better than his compeer, Chateaubriand, and requited with the true troubadour's reward. With the accession of Louis Philippe, Lamartine left the public service and traveled through Turkey, Egypt, and Syria. Here he lost his daughter, a calamity which so preyed on his mind that it would have incapacitated him for further intellectual efforts, had he not been suddenly awakened to a new sphere of usefulness. The town of Bergues, in the Department of the North, returned him, in his absence, to the Chamber of Deputies. He accepted the place, and was subsequently again returned from his native town, Mâcon, which he represented at the period of the last Revolution, which has called him to the head of the provisional govern ment. Lamartine's political career did not, at first, interfere with his literary occupation, it was merely an agreeable pastime-a respite from his most ardent and congenial labors. In 1835 appeared his "Sonvenirs, impressions, pensées et paysages pendant un voyage en Orient, &c." This work, though written from personal observations, is any thing but a description of travels, or a faithful delineation of Eastern scenery or character. It is all poetry, without a sufficient substratum of reality-a dream of the Eastern world with its primitive vigor and sadness; but wholly destitute of either antiquarian research or living pictures. Lamartine gives us a picture of the East by candle-light-a high-wrought picture, certainly; but after all nothing but canvas. Shortly after this publication, there appeared his "Jocelyn, journal trouvé chez un curé de village," a sort of imitation of the Vicar of Wakefield; but with scarcely an attempt at a faithful delineation of character. Lamartine has nothing to do with the village parson, who may be a very ordinary personage; his priest is an ideal priest, who inculcates the doctrines of ideal Christianity in ideal sermons without a text. Lamartine seems to have an aversion to all positive forms, and dislikes the dogma in religion as much as he did the principles of the Doctrinaires. It would fetter his genius or oblige it to take a definite direction, which would be destructive to its essence. It is here worthy of remark, that Lamartine, from the commencement of his political career, did not take that interest in public affairs which seriously interferred with his poetical meditations; on the contrary, it was his muse which gave direction to his politics. He took a poetical view of religion, politics, morals, society, and state; the Chambers were to him but the medium for the realization of his beaux ideals. But it must not be imagined that Lamartine's beaux ideals had a distinct form, definitive outlines, or distinguishing lights and shades. His imagination has never been plastic, and his fancy was far better pleased with the magnitude of objects than with the artistical arrangement of their details. His conceptions were grand; but he possessed little power of elaboration; and this peculiarity of his intellect he carried from literature into politics. Shortly after his becoming a member of the French Academy, he publishes his "Harmonies politiquestion and productive genius. The scene is laid in a et religieuses." Between the publication of these "Harmonies," and the "Poetical Meditations," with which he commenced his literary career, lies a cycle of ten years; but no perceptible intellectual progress or developement. True, the first effusions of a poet are chiefly marked by intensity of feeling and depth of sentiment. (What a world of emotions does not pervade Schiller's "Robbers," or Goethe's "Götz of Berlichingen, with the iron hand!") but the subsequent productions must show some advance *Political and Religious Harmonies. Paris, 1830. 2 vols. As late as in 1838 Lamartine published his "La chute d'un age. This is one of his poorest productions, though exhibiting vast powers of imagina chaotic antediluvian world, inhabited by Titans, and is, perhaps, descriptive of the author's mind, full of majestic imagery, but as yet undefined, vague, and without an object worthy of its efforts. Lamartine's time had not yet come, though he required but a few years to complete the fiftieth anniversary of his birth. The year following, in 1839, he published his *Souvenirs, Impressions, Thoughts and Landscapes, during a Voyage in the East. Paris, 1835. 4 vols. Jocelyn, a Journal found at the House of a Village Priest. Paris, 1836. 2 vols. The Fall of an Angel. Paris, 1838. 2 vols. "Recueillements poétiques," which must be looked | few individual exceptions, had taken a material upon as the commencement of a new era in his life. Mahomed was past forty when he undertook to establish a new religion, and built upon it a new and powerful empire; Lamartine was nearly fifty when he left the fantastic for the real; and from the inspiration without an object, returned to the only real poetry in this world-the life of man. Lamartine, who until that period had been youthful in his conceptions, and wild and bizarre in his fancy, did not, as Voltaire said of his countrymen, pass "from childhood to old age," but paused at a green manhood, with a definite purpose, and the mighty powers of his mind directed to an object large enough to afford it scope for its most vigorous exercise. His muse was now directed to the interests of humanity; he was what the French call un poete humanitaire. Thus far it was proper for us to follow the life of the poet to understand that of the statesman, orator, and tribune. Men like Lamartine must be judged in their totality, not by single or detached acts of their lives. Above all men it is the poet who is a self-directing agent, whose faculties receive their principal impulse from within, and who stamps his own genius on every object of his mental activity. Schiller, after writing the history of the most remarkable period preceding the French Revolution, "the thirty years' war," (for liberty of conscience,) and "the separation of the Netherlands from the crown of Spain," felt that his energies were not yet exhausted on the subject; but his creative genius found no theatre of action such as was open to Lamartine in the French Chamber, in the purification of the ideas engendered by the Revolution; and he had therefore to content himself with bringing his poetical conceptions on the stage. Instead of becoming an actor in the great world-drama, he gave us his Wallenstein and Don Carlos; Lamartine gave us himself as the best creation of his poetic genius. The poet Lamartine has produced the statesman. This it will be necessary to bear in mind, to understand Lamartine's career in the Chamber of Deputies, or the position he now holds at the head of the provisional government. Lamartine, as we have above observed, entered the French Chamber in 1833, as a cosmopolite, full of love for mankind, full of noble ideas of human destiny, and deeply impressed with the degraded social condition not only of his countrymen, but of all civilized Europe. He knew and felt that the Revolution which had destroyed the social elements of Europe, or thrown them in disorder, had not reconstructed and arranged them; and that the reorganization of society on the basis of humanity and mutual obligation, was still an unfinished problem. Lamartine felt this; but did the French Chambers, as they were then organized, offer him a fair scope for the development of his ideas, or the exercise of his genius? Certainly not. The French Chamber was divided into two great dynastic interests-those of the younger and elder Bourbons. The Republican party (the extreme left) was small, and without an acknowledged leader; and the whole assembly, with direction. During seventeen years-from 1830 to 1847-no organic principle of law or politics was agitated in the Chambers, no new ideas evolved. The whole national legislation seemed to be directed toward material improvements, to the exclusion of every thing that could elevate the soul or inspire the masses with patriotic sentiments. The government of Louis Philippe had at first become stationary, then reactionary; the mere enunciation of a general idea inspired its members with terror, and made the centres (right and left) afraid of the horrors of the guillotine. The government of Louis Philippe was not a reign of terror, like that of 1793, but it was a reign of prospective terror, which it wished to avoid. Louis Philippe had no faith in the people; he treated them as the keeper of a menagerie would a tame tiger-he knew its strength, and he feared its vindictiveness. To disarm it, and to change its ferocious nature, he checked the progress of political ideas, instead of combating them with the weapons of reason, and banished from his counsel those who alone could have served as mediators between the throne and the liberties of the nation. The French people seemed stupified at the contre-coups to all their hopes and aspirations. Even the more mode. rate complained; but their complaints were hushed by the immediate prospect of an improved material condition. All France seemed to have become industrious, manufacturing, mercantile, speculating. The thirst for wealth had succeeded to the ambition of the Republicans, the fanaticism of the Jacobins, and the love of distinction of the old monarchists. The Chamber of Deputies no longer represented the French people-its love, its hatred, its devotionthe elasticity of its mind, its facility of emotion, its capacity to sacrifice itself for a great idea. The Deputies had become stock-jobbers, partners in large enterprises of internal improvements, and timidly conservative, as are always the representatives of mere property. The Chamber, instead of representing the essence of the nation, represented merely the moneyed classes of society. Such was the Chamber of Deputies to which Lamartine was chosen by an electoral college, devoted to the Dynastic opposition. He entered it in 1833, not a technical politician or orator as Odillon Barrot, not as a skillful tactitioner like Thiers, not as a man with one idea as the Duke de Broglie, not as the funeral orator of departed grandeur like Berryer, nor as the embodiment of a legal abstraction like Dupin, or a man of the devouring ambition and skill in debate of François Pierre Guillaume Guizot: Lamartine was simply a humanitaire. Goaded by the sarcasm of Cormenin, he declared that he belonged to no party, that he sought for no parliamentary con. quest-that he wished to triumph through the force of ideas, and through no power of persuasion. He was the very counterpart of Thiers, the most sterile orator and statesman of France. Lamartine had studied the French Revolution, he saw the anarchical condition of society, and the ineffectual attempt to compress instead of organizing it; and he con ceived the noble idea of collecting the scattered | which was soon in every man's mouth, and being fragments, and uniting them into a harmonious set to music, became for a short period the German edifice. While the extreme left were employed in Marseillaise. Lamartine answered the German will removing the pressure from above, Lamartine was the Marseillaise de paix, (the Marseillaise of peace.} quietly employed in laying the foundation of a new which produced a deep impression; and the fall of structure, and called himself un démocrate con- the Thiers' ministry soon calmed the warlike spirit servateur.* He spoke successfully and with great throughout Europe. force against the political monopoly of real property, against the prohibitive system of trade, against slavery, and the punishment of death.† His speeches made him at once a popular character; he did not address himself to the Chamber, he spoke to the French people, in language that sunk deep into the hearts of the masses, without producing a striking effect in the Legislature. At that time already had the king singled him out from the rest of the opposition. He wished to secure his talents for his dynasty; but Lamartine was not in search of a portefeuille, and escaped without effort from the temptation. On the question of the Regency, Lamartine declared himself in favor of the Duchess of Orleans as Regent, should Louis Philippe die during the minority of the Count of Paris, and it is our firm belief that he would have accepted that Regency even in February last, if the king had abdicated a day sooner. Lamartine never avowed himself a Republican; but was left no alternative but to eclipse himself forever, or become its champion. The star of Lamartine's political destiny rose in the session of 1843, when, utterly disgusted with the reactionary policy of Guizot, he conceived the practical idea of uniting all the elements of opposition, of whatever shade and color, against the government. But he was not satisfied with this movement in the Chamber, which produced the coalition of the Dynastic right with the Democratic left, and for a moment completely paralyzed the administration of Guizot: he carried his new doctrine right before the people, as the legitimate source of the Chamber, and thus became the first political agitator of France since the restoration, in the legitimate, legal, English sense of the word. Finding that the press was muz In November, 1837, he was re-elected to the Chamber from Bergues and Mâcon, his native town. He decided in favor of the latter, and took his seat as a member for that place. He supported the Molé ministry, not because he had become converted to the new dynasty, but because he despised the Doctrinaires, who, by their union with the Liberals, brought in the new Soult ministry. He was not satisfied with the purity of motives, he also wanted proper means to attain a laudable object. In the Oriental question, which was agitated under Soult, Lamar-zled, or subsidized and bought, he moved his countine was not felt. His opposition was too vague and undefined: instead of pointing to the interests of France, he pointed to the duties of humanity of a great nation; he read Milton in a counting-room, and a commercial Maclaurin asked him "what does it prove?" trymen through the power of his eloquence. He appealed from the Chamber to the sense and the virtue of the people. In September, 1843, he first addressed the electors of Mâcon on the necessity of extending the franchise, in order to admit of a greater representation of the French people-generous, magnanimous, bold and devoted to their country. Instead of fruitlessly endeavoring to reform the gov ernment, he saw that the time had come for reforming the Chamber. In 1811 his talent as an orator (he was never distinguished as a debater) was afforded ample scope by Thiers' project to fortify the capital. He opposed it vehemently, but without effect. In the boisterous session of 1812 he acted the part of a moderator; but In the month of October, of the same year-s0 still so far seconded the views of Thiers as to con- rapidly did his new political genius develop itself— sider the left bank of the Rhine as the proper and he published a regular programme for the opposition; legitimate boundary of France against Germany. a thing which Thiers, up to that moment, had stuThis debate, it is well known, produced a perfect diously avoided, not to break entirely with the king, storm of popular passions in Germany. In a few and to render himself still "possible" as a minister weeks the whole shores of the Rhine were bristling of the crown. Lamartine knew no such selfish conwith bayonets; the peasantry in the Black Forest sideration, which has destroyed Thiers as a man of began to clean and polish their rusty muskets, buried the people, and declared himself entirely independsince the fall of Napoleon, and the princes perceiv-ent of the throne of July. He advocated openly the ing that the spirit of nationality was stronger than abolition of industrial feudalism, and the found athat of freedom, encouraged this popular declaration tion of a new democratic society under a constituagainst French usurpation. Nicolas Becker, a tional throne. modest German, without pretension or poetic genius, but inspired by an honest love of country and national glory, then composed a war-song, commencing thus: No, never shall they have it, The free, the German Rhine; A conservative Democrat. He had already, in 1830, published a pamphlet, Contre la peine de mort au peuple du 19 Octobre, 1830. (Against the Punishment of Death to the People of the 19th October, 1830.) Thus, then, had Lamartine separated himself not only from the king and his ministers, but also from the ancient noblesse and the bourgeoisie, without approaching or identifying himself with the Republican left wing of the Chamber. He stood alone, admired for his genius, his irreproachable rectitude, his devoted patriotism, but considered rather as a poetical abstraction, an impracticable Utopist; and yet he was the only man in the Chamber who had |