of the nation before formulating its constitution. Doubtless the first
operation is much more tedious and difficult than the second. How much
time, how much study, how many observations rectified one by the
other, how many researches in the past and the present, over all the
domains of thought and of action, what manifold and age-long labors
before we can obtain an accurate and complete idea of a great people.
A people which has lived a people's age, and which still lives! But it
is the only way to avoid the unsound construction based on a
meaningless planning. I promised myself that, for my own part, if I
should some day undertake to form a political opinion, it would be
only after having studied France.

What is contemporary France? To answer this question we must know
how this France is formed, or, what is still better, to act as
spectator at its formation. At the end of the last century (in 1789),
like a molting insect, it underwent a metamorphosis. Its ancient
organization is dissolved; it tears away its most precious tissues and
falls into convulsions, which seem mortal. Then, after multiplied
throes and a painful lethargy, it re-establishes itself. But its
organization is no longer the same: by silent interior travail a new
being is substituted for the old. In 1808, its leading characteristics
are decreed and defined: departments, arondissements, cantons and
communes, no change have since taken place in its exterior divisions
and functions. Concordat, Code, Tribunals, University, Institute,
Prefects, Council of State, Taxes, Collectors, Cours des Comptes, a
uniform and centralized administration, its principal organs, are
still the same. Nobility, commoners, artisans, peasants, each class
has henceforth the position, the sentiments, the traditions which we
see at the present day (1875). Thus the new creature is at once stable
and complete; consequently its structure, its instincts and its