The Modern Régime - II

"To treat of the Church, the School, and the Family, describe the modern milieu and note the facilities and obstacles which a society like our own encounters in this milieu," such was the programme of the last section of The Origins of Contemporary France. The present volume is a continuation of the first part of this programme; after the commune and the department, after local societies, the author was to study moral and intellectual bodies in France as organised by Napoleon. This study completed, this last step taken, he was about to reach the summit. He was about to view France as a whole, to comprehend it no longer through a detail of its organs, in a state of formation, but its actual existence. Sadly, of this last volume only the part relating to the Church and to public instruction was written, for the intervention of death suddenly arrested the pen. Yet, for those who have followed him thus far it is already clear that the great defect of the French community is the dissociation of individuals, isolated, dwindling, and prostrate at the feet of the all-powerful State, rendered incapable by remote historical causes, and yet more so by modern legislation, of "spontaneously grouping around a common interest". If the conclusion is not written, whoever knows the author's thought may divine it. Thus, the work, such as it is, is essentially finished; it already contains his ideas in full; the intelligent eye has only to follow them and to note their consequences and combination.