withstanding the zealous opposition of the Ministers, it was carried by a majority of 98 to 55.

In the short space of time which had elapsed from the introduction of the proposition of M. Barthélemy, till its adoption by the Chamber of Deputies, the agitation which it caused had extended from Paris to the departments, where numerous petitions were in preparation against it. Perceiving the impression which it had made, some members of the Chamber of Deputies thought that it would be inexpedient to wait till the fate of the proposition was decided in the Upper Chamber; and accordingly, on the 3d of March, M. le Chevalier Lafitte proposed, in the Secret Committee of the Lower Chamber, that an address be presented to the King, stating, that the Chamber considered the maintenance of the law of elections, such as it now stood, and its punctual execution, as the chief guarantees of public tranquil lity, and the most solid basis of a constitutional monarchy; and that, in consequence, the Chamber supplicated his Majesty to preserve that law in full and complete force. To this proposition, the Keeper of the Seals, M. de Serré, answered, that the Ministry shared in the sentiments which it expressed; but that, in the present state of matters, it appeared to him unseasonable and premature. proposition was accordingly withdrawn; and the discussion of the question, which so much interested all parties, suspended till the 15th of March, when the resolution of the Peers was presented to the Chamber of Deputies. The commission appointed to examine into the nature of this resolution, presented its report to the Secret Committee on the 18th; on which occasion Count Beugnot, who brought up the report, declared, that he saw nothing in the proposition but vague, un

The

certain, and insignificant generalities, and that, moreover, it was far from respectful to the King. "In the inconvenience, said he, which it pretends to point out, it has no other object in view than to cause that be discussed and decided in 1819, which had been discussed and decided in 1817 relative to the law of elections. Of one of these inconveniences, the difficulty of assembling the electors at the principal place of the department, the commission has been able to obtain no proof. In point of fact, ever since there were elections in France, the number of voters has uniformly borne an inconsiderable proportion to the absolute number of electors. The commission asks, where, and in what Electoral College have individuals been received, who, having been recently enrolled as liable to the patentes, had only paid a twelfth part of that tax? No such thing, for example, has been found in Paris; where, in the interval between the assembling and the dissolution of the Electoral College, only four patentes had been delivered. We therefore require that persons, places, and facts, be condescended on, in order that we may ascertain whether the author of the proposition has deceived himself, or been deceived. For if none of his allegations are correct, upon what, I ask, can we reason? We cannot distinguish whether it be an existing abuse which he pretends to remove, or a possible abuse which he desires to prevent. Article 40. of the Charter calls to the nomination of depu. ties, those who pay a direct tax to the amount of 300 francs; and surely, by the expression" who pay," can only be understood those who have actually paid the full amount of that tax, and not those who having only at the last election paid a twelfth part of the patente, decline the payment of the remainder."

On the 20th, the discussion was resumed, when M. Martin de Gray first addressed the Chamber. He accused the partisans of this measure of bad faith, and of a desire to cause the aristocratical influence of the great proprietors to predominate in the elections, and to usurp, or rather to paralyse the democratical part of the constitution, so essential to its existence, by submitting the elections to oligarchical influence. "Before the Revolution," said he, "the privileged classes enjoyed a double representation; but the Chamber of the tiers état was elected in a manner incomparably more democratical than yours. In 1789 the tiers état obtained a representation equal to that of the two other orders; but the aristocracy, such as it can now exist in France, is represented by the Chamber of Peers, while all orders are equally admissible into the elective chamber. Does the aristocracy wish to engross the whole representation? to seize upon the Electoral Colleges and Chamber of Deputies, and to bring us back to the state of 1789?" He then went into a variety of other topics of a somewhat declamatory cast, and concluded by conjuring the Chamber to preserve and maintain inviolate liberty, public tranquillity, and the constitutional monarchy.

To the arguments of M. Martin de Gray, M. de la Bourdonnaye replied, that, by the existing law, inscription into the roll for the payment of the patentes, and the payment of one-twelfth of the contribution, conveyed an unquestionable right to the privileges of an elector, and that the prefects were the sole judges of the validity of such enrolments. In support of this statement M. de Villèle cited the case of the department of the Gard, where, in 1817, the number of electors was 991,

whereas, in 1818, it had risen to 1598. To this assertion M. de Saint-Aulaire, President of the College of the Gard in 1818, answered, that the deputies of that department having, at the ballot, obtained 1000 out of 1400 suffrages, it mattered little that there were a few persons whose right to vote would not have borne a scrutiny. But it did not surely follow from this, that these bad votes had been created by the influence of the prefect. As to the influence exercised by the Government in this election, it was legitimate, as it had no other object than to persuade the Protestants that they might appear at the elections without danger of being assassinated. "You speak," said the orator, of the elections of 1818, "but you seem to forget of what took place at the elections 1815, when, four days before the voting commenced, thirteen Protestants were murdered, and the rest fled in consternation to the mountains. This is what the partisans of this proposition call peace; ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant! Last year the deputies of 1815 again presented themselves to the colleges: the crimes then committed had not been punished, and terror was in consequence excited: it became the duty of the Government to destroy all ground for alarm."

On the sitting of the 22d, the discussion was resumed, but little new in the shape of argument was addressed on either side. "Each of us," said M. de la Fayette, " knows so well why he attacks the law of elections, and why he defends it, that we can hope for little additional light on the subject." Perhaps the reader may think that we have dwelt longer than was necessary on the discussion of this ill-timed proposition; but it is strongly illustrative of the French character, and may serve to throw

light on the state both of parties and opinions in France at this period. Nothing could surely be more premature than to propose to decide as to the effects of a law which had been only a year in operation; and nothing more unreasonable than to expect that the good which it unquestionably produced should be unalloyed by those partial abuses and inconveniences which are inseparable even from the wisest and most enlightened acts of legislation. In this state, and without the assured lights of experience to guide them, the maxim, Laissez faire au temps, ought to have overruled every objection. This seemed to be the sentiment of a great majority of the chamber, and, accordingly, when the vote was put, par appel nominal, the resolution was rejected by 150 to 94. If we consider that the chamber consists of only 258 members, 251 of which actually sit, the number of deputies present on this occasion will sufficiently mark the interest which the discussion had excited.

Our readers are already acquainted with the proceedings of the legislative body, during last session, in relation to the press, and with the rejection in the Chamber of Peers of the project of a law for restraining its abuses which had previously passed the Chamber of Deputies, though only by the small majority of 11. This powerful engine, which acts so directly on public opinion, and in no country more instantaneously or forcibly than in France, still, however, required to be put under some regulation; and accordingly the new Ministry, instructed no doubt by the fate of the project of last year, brought forward, on the 22d of March, three distinct measures, considerably more liberal in their provisions, and forming together a sort of legislative code on this

important subject. The first of these was merely declaratory of the crimes and offences which may be committed by means of the press, or by any other method of publication, and resolved the description of such crimes and offences into the four following heads: 1. Public provocation to crime or offence; 2. Public offences against the person of the King; 3. Outrages against public morals; and, 4. Defamation and public injury. It also abrogated certain rigorous articles of the penal code, together with the whole law of the 9th of November 1815. In explaining the principles by which the Ministry had been guided in preparing this description of the offences of the press, the Keeper of the Seals particularly alluded to the substitution of the word defamation for the word calumny, which had been hitherto employed in similar laws. The latter word he considered as conveying the idea of the falsehood of the facts imputed; which was unnecessary, as no man had a right to publish facts relative to the life or conduct of another, the publication of which, however true, was calculated to do him a real injury: he had therefore introduced the former word, which pointed out the intention to injure, on the one part, and, on the other, the injury sustained.

The second project related to the mode of prosecuting and punishing libels. In the project of last year, the deposit of a copy of a work in the office of police was held equivalent to publication, which, as our readers will perceive by referring to our last volume, article France, gave rise to long and keen discussions, and was finally rejected even by the Chamber of Deputies by whom the project was passed. In the new project it was proposed to seize the whole impression of a work denoun

ced as libellous, before judgment, but only after publication; while, in the case of the public, the offender could only be prosecuted in the place where the deposit had been made; and, in the case of a civil party, in the place where publication had been effected, provided the party prosecuting had his residence in that place. Simple injuries were, as heretofore, to be remitted to the police correctionnelle, while graver offences were to be sent to a jury for their verdict. The difficulty here seemed to be to draw a distinct line of demarcation between what are denominated" simple injuries," and referable to the correctional police, and offences proper to be sent to a jury; a difficulty which was by no means removed, during the discussion, and which, in our opinion, vitiates the whole provisions of the project. In prosecutions at the instances of private individuals, it was rendered incompetent for the defendant to offer to prove the truth of the defamatory matter imputed; but this was expressly allowed in the case of public functionaries, against whom any charges of corruption or misconduct had been preferred through the medium of the press. The reason assigned for this provision appears to be judicious; namely, that the private life of functionaries concerns only themselves, whereas their public life is in some measure the property of all. It is not stated, however, whether in the cases which were to be referred to a jury, they were to decide only on the fact of publication, or on the law and the fact together. This appears to be an important omission.

The third project respected the journals and periodical publications, which it proposed to relieve from the control of the censorship, but obliged to find security to a certain amount, in guarantee of the fines

they might hereafter incur in virtue of the preceding laws, and subjected to the formality of deposit, without, however, interfering with their publication. The obligation to find security, in order to guarantee the payment of fines that may be inflicted for offences to be committed, though it resembles one of the provisions contained in the act of last session of the British Parliament, relative to the stamp duty to be levied on publications which had hitherto been exempted from that tax, appears to us to be extremely oppressive, when directed against the periodical press in general, and not, as in our country, against that part of it merely which, taking advantage of the law, had established a regular traffic in sedition and blasphemy, which were thereby circulated at a cheap rate. We do not wonder, therefore, that it was keenly, though we may regret to say ineffectually assailed. The editors of journals were, moreover, subjected to another hardship. They were not only rendered amenable to the same penal laws, and the same forms of procedure, as the authors of other publications, but were made liable to double the fine inflicted upon other writers for the same offence, and in case of a second conviction to quadruple that amount.

Such is a brief outline of the regulations, or rather restrictions, to which by these laws the press was to be subjected. As usual, they were referred to a committee, where they experienced no other alteration than some modification in the terms, and some limitation of the punishments awarded, that is to say, in the term of imprisonment and the amount of the fines, it being left at the discretion of the judge to inflict either, or both of these punishments. For the sake of convenience, these projects were discussed in succession, and in

the order above given; numerous amendments were proposed in both Chambers, but almost invariably negatived; and though the majorities, in some instances, were not great, they were sufficient to show that the new Ministry had a decided ascendancy in both Chambers, that in the Peers being rendered the more complete by the extraordinary measure of creating sixty new Peers at once, who took their seats on the 24th of April, the very day in which the first project, after having passed the Lower, was carried to the Upper Chamber. The Ministry appear to have considered the addition of this unprecedented batch of new Peers necessary to secure a complete ascendancy in the Upper House; and they were probably induced to advise the measure from the circumstance that the law of last year relative to the press had been thrown ont in the Peers. How precarious, and we may add, how inexperienced a Government must be which resorts to such violent expedients to ensure a majority, it is needless to say: Sir Robert Walpole understood how to manage these matters by other means; and from all we have seen or read of the French Legislative Body, we have no reason to believe them inaccessible to the same argument.

We cannot enter at any length into the detailed discussion of these laws; but it may be interesting to mention a few prominent points. In presenting the report of the Committee on the first project, M. Courvoiser made some very just and pointed remarks, on the vagueness of the terms which had been used in the project of last year, in defining some of the crimes and offences which it was proposed by that law to punish, and contrasted these with the precision of the law submitted to the Chamber. He admitted the neces

sity of checking attempts to disseminate infidelity and blasphemy; but was convinced, if punishment had been awarded against what that law termed an outrage to religion, a door might have been opened to intolerance. Religion, said he, is composed of three parts; the doctrines believed, the form of worship practised, and the morality inculcated. The doctrines and the forms differ; the morality is as invariable as nature and reason. The law, therefore, which recognises different forms of the Christian religion, and which affords all of them equal protection, cannot, without being inconsistent with itself, forbid to one of them the exposition and defence of its peculiar tenets and practices. But this sect perhaps sees nothing in the doctrines and forms of its opponent but an outrage to religion; and what seems to the friends of one form to be orthodox doctrine, may to the partisans of another seem idolatry and superstition. The law, however, affords them all equal protection; wherefore the text of this law ought equally to secure to them the liberty to which they have a just claim, and the respect which is undoubtedly their due. Upon these grounds, he thought the term outrages against public morals, which had been substituted in the law of this year, a more legitimate description of the particular class of offences which it was proposed to reach; for morality forming a part of all forms of religion, and being indeed the great end to the promotion of which they were directed, the above description had at once the precision and generality which was required in such a law. These remarks, however, did not prevent the expression from being strongly objected to, on the very grounds on which the honourable member had rested his eulogy.