Affairs in France^[256]

Paris, Jan. 17, 1860

Louis Napoleon has been converted to Free-trade, and is about to inaugurate a new era of peace. He can hardly fail to be enrolled as a member of the Society of Friends[257], and the year 1860 will, in the annals of Europe, be recorded as the year I of the Millennium. This extraordinary news going the round of the London Press dates its origin from a letter of Louis Bonaparte published in the Moniteur, dated Jan. 15, 1860, and addressed to Mr. Fould, Minister of State[a]. The first effect of the letter was to send the Funds down at Paris and to send them up at London.

Now, before all things, it seems necessary to scrutinize somewhat closely the corpus delicti—that is, the Imperial letter—upon which the whole superstructure of the new era is about to be reared. Louis Bonaparte informs Mr. Fould that

"the moment has arrived for applying ourselves to the means of giving a greater development to the different branches of national wealth."

The almost identical announcement[b] appeared in the Moniteur of January, 1852, when the Coup d'état inaugurated the era of the Crédit Mobilier, the Crédit Foncier, and other Crédits ambulants[258]. And this is not all. Since that eventful epoch, every yearly financial bulletin issued under the auspices of the French autocrat has laid all its stress upon and proved by an awful array of official figures the circumstance that the Empire had been as good as its word, and that, under its fostering sway, all the branches of national industry had taken an immense development.

Thus one finds himself in a fix. Either the proclamations of the Coup d'état were untimely, and the financial bulletins issued after the Coup d'état were spurious, or the present proclamation is a mere hoax.

At all events, this much appears incontrovertible, on the own showing of the new Imperial manifesto, that the economical benefits which French society was to derive from the resurrection of Bonapartism belong not to the past, but to the future tense. Let us, then, see by what new contrivance the happy economical change is to be brought about.

In the first instance, Louis Bonaparte tells Mr. Fould, who must have been somewhat startled at the profound discovery of his master, that "our foreign commerce must be developed by the exchange of products," a stupendous truism, indeed. Foreign commerce consisting in the exchange of national products for foreign products, it cannot be denied that, to develop French foreign commerce, the exchange of French products must be developed. The principal result which Louis Bonaparte expects from the new development of French foreign commerce he is about to start, is "to spread prosperity among the working classes," the which, as implicitly confessed by the man of the Coup d'État, and as shown by recent French writers (see, for instance, the works of the late Mr. Colins[c]), have visibly decayed within the last ten years. Unhappily, one great fact strikes the most superficial observer. French foreign commerce has made immense strides from 1848 to 1860. Amounting in 1848 to about 875 millions francs, it has risen to more than double that sum in 1859. An increase of commerce by more than 100 per cent in the short space of ten years, is a thing almost unprecedented. The causes that have brought about that increase are to be found in California, Australia, the United States, and so forth, but certainly not in the archives of the Tuileries[259] It appears, then, that despite the immense increase of French foreign commerce within the last ten years—an increase to be traced to revolutions in the markets of the world quite beyond the petty control of the French police—the situation of the mass of the French nation has not improved. Consequently, there must have been at work some agency powerful enough to frustrate the natural results of commercial progress. If the development of French foreign commerce accounts for the apparent ease with which the second Empire has been allowed to indulge its expensive vagaries, the prostration of the nation, despite its doubled exports, betrays the cost at which that Imperial ease is purchased. If the Empire could not have subsisted without that development of French foreign commerce, that commercial progress has failed with the Empire to bear its legitimate fruits.

The Austrian Emperor, having banished the deficit from his States by dint of a ukase, why should Louis Bonaparte, by dint of another ukase, not command the increase of French foreign commerce? Still he apprehends some hitch in his way.

"We must first," he says, "improve our agriculture, and free our industry from all interior impediments which place it in a position of inferiority."

That French agriculture is badly in want of improvement, is the standing topic of French economists; but how is Louis Bonaparte to do the thing? In the first place, he will grant loans to agriculture at a moderate "interest." French agriculture is notoriously the concern of more than two-thirds of the French nation. Will Louis Bonaparte impose taxes upon the remaining third, in order to grant loans "at a moderate rate" to the majority of the nation? The idea is in fact too preposterous to be insisted upon. On the other hand, it was the confessed aim of his Crédits Fonciers to direct loanable capital to the land. The only thing they have proved efficient in is not in ameliorating agriculture, but in ruining small freeholds and accelerating the concentration of landed estates. After all, we have here again the old worn-out panacea—institutions of credit. Nobody will deny that the second Empire marks an epoch in the development of French credit, but that it has overshot the mark, and that, with its own credit, its credit-fostering influence has gone to the wall. The only novelty seems to be that the semi-official credit machinery having been stretched and worked to its utmost, Louis Bonaparte now dreams of converting the Government itself into a direct loan-shop. While any such attempt must be fraught with immense dangers, it would as necessarily collapse as did his grain granaries, intended to screw up the prices of corn[260]. Draining, irrigating, and cleaning the ground, are all very good things in their different lines, but their only possible effect is to multiply agricultural products. They cannot raise, and they are not intended to raise, the prices of those products. Now then, even if Louis Bonaparte should find by some miraculous methods the ways and means required for those ameliorations on a national scale, how are they to mend the depreciation of agricultural produce which the French peasant has labored under for these five years? But then, Louis Napoleon. will set about a consecutive amelioration of the means of communication. The coolness with which this proposition is made, beats even Bonapartist impudence. Look only to the development of French railways since 1850. The annual expense for these "means of communication" amounted, from 1845 to '47, to about 175,000,000 of francs; from 1848 to '51, to about 125,000,000; from 1852 to '54, to nearly 250,000,000 (double the expenditure of 1848-'51); from 1854[d] to '56, to nearly 550,000,000; from 1857 to '59, to about 500,000,000. In 1857, when the general crisis broke in upon the commercial world, the French Government stood aghast at the immense sums still required for the railways in progress or already conceded. It prohibited the railway companies from raising, by means of securities, debentures, &c., more than 212,500,000 francs annually, interdicted the getting up of new companies, and circumscribed within fixed limits the work to be annually undertaken. And, after all this, Louis Bonaparte speaks as if railways, canals, and so forth, were now first to be invented! A forcible reduction of the canal dues, which he hints at, is, of course, an operation involving the breach of public contracts, frightening the capital embarked in those enterprises, and certainly not calculated to allure new capital into the same channels. Lastly, to find a market for agricultural products, manufacturing industry is to be stimulated. Yet, as we have already stated, manufacturing industry has made immense strides during the second Empire, but with all that, with the unprecedented increase of exports, with the immense development of railways and other means of communication, with the exaggeration of a credit system formerly unknown in France, French agriculture languishes, and the French peasantry decays. How shall we account for the strange phenomenon? The fact that 255,000,000 of francs are added yearly to the funded debt, not to speak of the impost of blood for the army and the navy, offers a sufficient answer. The Empire itself is the great incubus whose burden grows in a greater ratio than the productive powers of the French nation.

Louis Bonaparte's prescriptions for French industry, if we deduct all that is mere phraseology, or is still looming in the future, are simply these: Suppression of the duties on wool and cotton, and successive reductions on sugar and coffee. Now, this is all very well, but all the gullibility of English free-traders is required to call such measures free trade. Whoever is acquainted with political economy, knows full well that the abolition of duties on agricultural raw material forms a main item in the doctrine of the mercantile school of the eighteenth century. These "interior impediments" which weigh upon French production, are as nothing if compared with the octrois[261], dividing France into as many independent countries as there are towns, paralyzing the internal exchange, and barring the creation of wealth by crippling its consumption. Those octrois, however, have increased under the Imperial regime, and will continue to increase. The diminution of duties on wool and cotton is to be made up by suppressing the sinking fund, so that the last restraint upon the growth of the public debts, although merely nominal, will be done away with.

On the other hand, the woods are to be cleared, the hills to be leveled, and the moors to be drained, by applying to those purposes the 160,000,000 of francs said to form the remnant disposable from the last war loans, in three yearly installments, which will make less than 54,000,000 of francs on an annual average. Why, the embankment of the Loire alone, so pompously announced by the Imperial Cagliostro some five years ago, and then no longer thought of, would absorb the whole sum in less than three months. What then remains of the manifesto! "The inauguration of an era of peace," as if that era had not long since been proclaimed at Bordeaux. "L'Empire c'est la paix."[e]

Notes