granite rock overlaid with a shallow drift of detritus. In politics,
especially in Parliament, the most distracting flurries of dust succeed
and displace one another with a sort of constant inconstancy. Penetrate
them, and you come upon an economic and social fabric characterised by
massive stability. Nobody who bears this in mind will be blinded by
whatever chances to be the latest sand-storm. _La nouvelle France_ was
not abolished by the political manœuvre that placed M. Doumergue at the
head of the State. It remains, and it grows stronger. This new France
means the birth into the moral order of Europe of a fresh and strong
reality. What had been for many years a mere vision, glimmering through
banked clouds, has become a tangible and habitable fact. The election
of President Poincaré, accepted on all sides as the token of a profound
change of spirit, has not in its results belied the prophets. Now,
beyond all doubt, deference must be paid to the tradition which regards
the French as an instantaneous, and, so to say, hair-trigger people.
Formulæ seem to change as rapidly as fashions; and the possibility of
return to a period of Saturday-to-Monday ministers has not yet been
banished to the limbo of the ridiculous. Allowance must be made for
the swiftness, the genius for falling into line, the brief passions of
unanimity so “temperamental” to the Republic. But at the end of the
account the change has lost nothing of its impressiveness. It is a
true, not a false dawn.
M. Poincaré stands for many things: it is no mere flourish of words
to say that through him France heard and obeyed the call of her past.
She deliberately reverted to her origins, and her traditional sources
of strength. The new France put itself to school to old France.
Intellect, family tradition, gracious manners, thrift, minute industry,
a certain austere discipline of thought, and with all that an immense
cheerfulness, able to _ça ira_ itself out of any desperate pass--such
was _la douce France_ of M. René Bazin and of history. The folly must
not be imputed to me of supposing that the election of President
Poincaré restored, or will restore, that submerged world. But that
is the atmosphere evoked by his personality. The good M. Dupont and
that amiable plumpness, M. Durand, being of the earth earthy, and of
Latin earth into the bargain, are in no danger of being transformed
into angels of light. They will wink and chuckle as before over their
dominoes and their aperitives; they will try to anticipate each other
with the latest ambiguity of the comic paper and the vaudeville. But
they are none the less conscious of the new orientation, and they
adapt themselves to it with a purr of satisfaction. The lines on
which reconstruction proceeds are in the nature of things that are
inevitable. Patriotism is once more in fashion: were Hervé to revive
his brilliant dream of planting the tricolour on the dunghill he
would run some risk of being planted there himself. It is, no doubt,
unfortunate that the national idea should in our day find expression
universally in the increasing diversion of capital from productive
industry to unproductive armaments. Signs are not lacking that the
excess, or rather the frenzied debauch of which Europe has in this
regard been guilty, has created an impossible situation. The so-called
“strike of capital” even indicates that the point has been reached
at which the disease must either generate its own cure, or else kill
the patient. But while your ten competitors are arming more and more
heavily, it is foolish to stand in your shirt chanting the praises of
a millennium which obstinately refuses to arrive. France has accepted
the Three Years’ Service Law; and it is certain that no ministry of
the near future will dare to repeal that measure. This increase of the
army by fifty per cent. is expensive: it is a defeat for the party of
reason, if you will, and a triumph for that of violence. But it is
an act of sacrifice rendered necessary by events. Any possibility of
repeal is ruled out by the opening of old wounds in Alsace-Lorraine.
And because the Army Act must stand, the Loan must go through. On
that point, doubt is inadmissible: _la nouvelle France_ has made up
its mind. The conditions of issue of the new Rente, its immunity or
otherwise from taxation, even its amount, are questions in controversy.
The discussion on them, so far as it has proceeded, has been of extreme
interest as an illustration of French acumen in public finance; it
may become a text-book instance in due course, and it might even be
studied with profit by the financiers of the new Irish Land Act. The
French Treasury has already lost by the delay, but, borrowing in its
own market, it will at all events operate on better terms than any
of the other borrowing nations, now clamouring for admission to it.
But however details may be arranged, the fact that there must be an
issue is a thing settled. The new France is, in short, possessed of
the spirit of sacrifice. The patriotism that is in fashion is sincere
enough to pay the piper from whom it has called the tune.
But it is in the region of ideas, rather than in that of current
policy, that we must seek for the key to the future. It would be
extravagant to say that the mocking hatred of Christianity has been
banished, and that the vendetta against the Church is at an end.
Despite M. Briand’s famous _apaisement_ speech, despite the success of
M. Poincaré’s “national” programme, the State has not yet returned even
to a position of neutrality. But the vivid colour of hope dominates the
horizon. Combes-ism is no longer opposed as unjust, it is dismissed
as vulgar. The boulevards may not have shed their scepticism, but at
all events they recognise religion as one of the ideal forces that
make men good citizens and gallant soldiers. As the army recovers its
prestige there is a return to the spirit of that strange and burning
remonstrance of Alexandre Dumas, the younger--
“Had I been Bazaine” (he wrote), “I would have set up a statue of the
Virgin in the midst of my army on the Fifteenth of August--not because
it was _Saint Napoleon_ but because it was _Sainte Marie_--and I would
have delivered battle against the God whom King William carries about
in his pocket, behind whom he speaks like a ventriloquist, and who is
not the God of battles, for the very simple reason that there is no God
of battles. I would have said to my soldiers: ‘My children, I place
the Virgin in your midst. See in her your daughter, your betrothed,
your wife, your sister, your mother. Over there is a masked “God” who
menaces her with insult. Defend her! Honour her feast with a victory!’
And the Germans would have been defeated. There is, there will always
be, in the French soldier something of the Frank of Clovis, something
of the Crusader of Saint Louis.”
The essence of truth distilled in that last sentence will more and
more impose itself. If soldiers will not fight on an empty stomach,
still less will they fight on an empty soul. A shrug, a sensualism,
an epigram, and the “lie of religion” is shattered beyond repair: so
far, so good. But with religion there has gone the whole category of
the ideal. In a world from which all values have been expelled, except
the values of appetite, there remains no principle of sacrifice. The
only maxim which it is capable of evolving from its own resources
is that of egotism, enlightened by prudence; for that _credo_ men
will do many things, but they will not die. Such a gospel may for a
time be expounded, and even practised, by the noisy minorities who
make laws and write books: the anonymous shoulders of the common
people are strong enough to carry that and heavier burdens. But the
peculiar weakness of any such philosophy is that it has only to be
generally accepted in order to become impossible. Egotism and the
pleasure-calculus will procure a brief, if not very respectable,
ecstasy for the masters, as they loll in their carved and curtained
litters, turning over with a languid hand the latest bibelot of
selfishness. But let that point of view infect the bearers of the
litter, and they will set it down with disturbing roughness. Morality
begins where hedonism ends. In France the evolution, whether conducted
in the personal consciousness of a master like Bourget, or in the
general mind and being, has followed the same curve to the same issue.
After Renan there was but one refinement possible: M. Anatole France
appeared. But the signs of dissolution have, of late, been accumulating
about this specialist in _patchouli_ and paganism. For instance, he has
been translated into English. Anatomists like M. Michaut, whose book
is one of the literary events of recent years, have made the tour of
his philosophy from Dan to Beersheba, and found all barren. Through the
_sociologisme_ of writers like Guyau, and the _solidarité_ of writers
like Bourgeois, the new France has come back to the old sanities.
The experiment of the passing generation consisted essentially in an
attempt to live without a brain or a conscience. That experiment, it
is curious to note, was pushed to its extreme by an English-writing,
French-trained Irishman, Mr. George Moore. It has reached its Vale. A
rhapsodist in the last issue of the _Sociological Review_ bewails, but
at any rate confesses, the change. It is bad enough that “reactionary”
illusions like patriotism should be returning to honour. But when you
find University students going to Mass----Going on week-days. And
Bergson and mysticism, construed as a tonic of action, setting the
fashion.
In the field of politics, as such, the most interesting new fact is
the attitude of the Conservatives. For a long time, in the hope of
discrediting the Republic, they made it a principle to support not the
best but the worst Republican. A gradual process, culminating in the
shock of Casablanca and Agadir, has made manifest the hopelessness
of such merely negative action, if it could be called action. They
have come down into the arena. President Poincaré was their first
achievement. The Three Years’ Law of the Barthou Ministry was their
second. If at the following elections the ancient apathy and the
modern _m’enfichisme_, as it is styled, can be overcome, they will
reach the third, and that will be permanent. The five pistol-shots of
Madame Caillaux may very well prove to have been the first effective
dissipation of a slumber.
The alignment of parties is, at all events, clearer than ever before.
On the one side, the Radicals and Radical-Socialists “unified” at Pau.
The essential principle and foundation of this group is the existence
of a state of war between the friends and enemies of the Republic.
The point of view is that of Jacobinism, but for the guillotine of
purification there has been substituted the administrative machine. It
is understood that the “eating of curates” is the normal occupation of
all adherents; but, of course, one appetite will exceed another. The
better is the unappeasable enemy of the merely good--
_Un pur trouve toujours un plus pur qui l’épure._
On the other side the new party of appeasement of MM. Briand and
Barthou. Its leaders and members have come to it, as to every central
position, from different camps and by different routes. Hammered upon
from the outside by German aggression, they demand domestic peace as
the first condition of national security. They ask for a _république
aérée et habitable_. They propose an army strengthened and increased
through the sacrifices of the rich and the middle classes. It is
a synthesis of Déroulède and Millerand, of militarism and social
transformation.
M. Jaurès and his integral Socialists may, of course, be trusted to
find their place among the “pacifists.” The late Herr Bebel led the
German Social Democrats back to an acceptance of the national idea; but
not so M. Jaurès. A strategist at once bold and astute, who has never
known the responsibilities of office, to whom _la patrie_ is only a
gunmaker’s advertisement, he will almost certainly co-operate with the
reorganised _bloc_.
It is for the prophets to tell us what the elections will bring forth.
For us, plain onlookers, the life of the most interesting and logical
nation in Europe has come to a crisis, the solution of which may
notably react not only upon civilisation and humanity--those great
abstractions--but upon ourselves, and the little parts we play in each.
THE SOLDIER-PRIESTS OF FRANCE
It makes me a little proud to remember that I was one of the few
writers in these countries to announce and celebrate the birth of
_la nouvelle France_ long before the coming of the war. For many
years the Republic has been in ill repute in the Catholic world. Men
thought of her as the home of Renan and scepticism, of Gambetta and
anti-clericalism, of Combes--the unspeakable Combes--and persecution,
of Anatole France and refined sensualism, of a score of lesser writers
and plain pornography. That interpretation of her life was never true
although it had elements of truth in it. Even in the old France there
were two strains: there was Rabelais as well as Pascal, Montaigne
as well as Bossuet, Voltaire as well as St. Francis de Sales. There
is, indeed, lodged in the very mind and temper of France a seed of
perilous adventure. Her courage is a constant temptation to dally with
the blasphemous and the foul: her lucidity--for vague and furtive
innuendoes are like a toothache to French style--doubles the offence
when she lapses.
But on the other hand there was something peculiarly obnoxious in the
circumstance that these attacks on France proceeded in great part from
German sources. That there were many splendid Catholics in Germany was
of course true. They were strong enough in numbers and organisation
to have done something finer than throw themselves into the arms of
Prussianism. The failure of the Centre Party in that regard will lie
as a heavy cloud on its future. But that German Catholics should have
lent themselves, as they did, to a systematic denigration of France in
foreign periodicals was contemptible. The truth is that every German
in the modern period has become infected with the superstition that
he belongs to the chosen race. Matthew Arnold--who, for the rest, did
not himself believe very luminously in God--started in these countries
the notion that the war of 1870 was, as he called it, the judgment
of Judæa on Greece. That a Protestant God should have thus judged a
country whose old title was that of “eldest daughter of the Church,”
was an interpretation of events peculiarly agreeable to militant
Protestants both in England and Germany. But that Catholics should
have assimilated such a view was remarkable. It is true that French
policy played disastrously into the hands of Bismarck. Gambetta’s
error of anti-clericalism led from disintegration to disintegration.
Bismarck has left on record statements of his reasons for embarking on
the _Kulturkampf_, which for frigid wickedness of purpose cannot be
equalled in political literature.
“The laurels of Sadowa and Sedan do not satisfy my ambitions, I have a
more glorious mission, that of making myself master of Catholicism.”
“The enemy of Germany is Pontifical Rome. That is the danger which
menaces the relations of Germany and France. If France identifies
herself with Rome she constitutes herself by that fact alone the sworn
enemy of Germany.”
France made her mistakes, but before the war she had begun to correct
and cancel them. The gradual return to fair play from the midnight
bigotry of Combes to the policy of appeasement of M. Briand, and the
execution of that policy by M. Poincaré was very marked in all its
stages. And in the measure in which that correction of old mistakes
and tyrannies is made, not only in France but under every other Allied
Flag, will the coming victory repay the blood that is buying it. But
that German Catholics should have held up their country before the
world as a shining model, and France as an abandoned and degenerate
nation, is a thing intelligible only to those who know the vanity and
self-exaltation of the modern German. While they were thus fabling,
who really spoke for Germany in the ear of the world? These are the
Germans. Schopenhauer with his scientific pessimism, truer indeed
and nobler than any light philosophy of pleasure, but profoundly
anti-Christian. Treitschke, who taught that the State is above all
moral laws. A line of theologians from Strauss to Harnack and his
contemporaries, who claimed to have shredded into mere rags of myth
the historical beginning of the Christian faith and fold. Nietzsche,
who “transcended morality” for the individual as Treitschke had done
for the State, and preached pride, pleasure and domination as the
cardinal virtues. Nietzsche who wrote--
“They have said to you: Happy are the peaceful! but I say to you: Happy
are the warriors, for they shall be called not the sons of Jehovah, but
the sons of Odin, who is greater than Jehovah!”
Who else stood for German thought? Haeckel, whose _Riddle of the
Universe_ carried its vulgar “omniscience” of materialism in sixpenny
editions all round the world. And the Catholic spokesmen of such a
people cried out to Heaven against the country of Coppée and de Mun, of
Bazin, Barrès, Bourget, Ferdinand Brunetière and all the noblest voices
of our time. One trivial touch is worth adding to the picture. The
Catholic Committee of Action in France has established a fact, which,
indeed, was already known, namely, that great numbers of the obscene
books which disgrace some bookstalls in Paris are normally printed in
French in Budapest, Vienna and certain German cities.
Such was the contrast between the two peoples. The sins of France were
in process of amendment. The corruptions of thought for which she was
responsible had this mitigating quality: that they were such as destroy
only those who practise them. And the true France, devoted to the
establishment of a régime of world-peace, held out hospitable hands to
every ideal of gracious import in science, religion and literature,
wherever it arose. The essential sin of Prussia, on the contrary,
was, that, worshipping only force, she planned the subjugation of all
Europe. The goal of domination at which she aimed could be reached only
through an ocean of blood. She willed war, she willed murder, and to
prepare her way she sought to impose on the world a picture in which
she appeared as a Knight of the Holy Ghost “in shining armour,” and
all the other non-Germanic nations as robber-empires, degenerates,
incompetents.
These words of introduction were necessary in view of the systematic
libelling of France which goes on in certain obscure papers, and which
proceeds, as all the world knows, chiefly from German organisations
in the United States. But the purpose of this article is not
controversial, but positive. It is concerned merely to give a random
glimpse of the heroism with which at this moment in the trenches,
the camps, and the hospitals the priests of France are serving the
tricolour of the transfigured Republic.
A literature on the subject is already in existence. The book of the
Abbé Klein, well known for his luminous study of the United States,
has been translated into English: for that reason, and also because
it is less rich in detail, I do not draw on it. The pictures of war
which follow are derived mainly from a collection of soldiers’ letters,
edited by Ernest Daudet, from _Les Soutanes sous la Mitraille_, by
the Abbé René Gaell, _prêtre-infirmier_, and from _Le Clergé, Les
Catholiques, et la Guerre_, by Gabriel Langlois, with a preface by Mgr.
Herscher, Archbishop of Laodicea.
Priests and ecclesiastical students are serving in the armies of the
Republic in many capacities. Some are chaplains, regularly attached to
the army ambulances and hospitals: the old virus of anti-clericalism
was still active enough to delay their nomination till the eleventh
hour. Others are doing the same work, but as volunteers under a scheme
inaugurated by the late Comte de Mun. Still others are employed as
stretcher-bearers or hospital attendants. The balance, the great
majority, are fighting side by side with their fellow-citizens as
plain soldiers of the Army of Liberation. This inclusion of priests
in the ranks is peculiar to France. It dates from the adoption of
the Two Years’ Law, when, on the shortening of the term of military
service, all exemptions were suppressed. It is hardly to be denied that
the measure was inspired less by logic than by malice. But in actual
working out it has recoiled singularly on those who saw in it a lever
for the disintegration of the Church. The soldier-priests have been the
little leaven that has leavened the whole mass.
It is impossible to estimate the total number engaged under all these
heads. We do know that there are not less than twenty thousand occupied
in the care of the wounded, and that sixty thousand is a conservative
total estimate. They are sown through every corps of the Grand Army,
and their influence would seem to be as great with the _gamin_ and
the _gouailleur_ of Paris as with the simplest peasant of Brittany or
Alsace.
The first picture that seizes the imagination is the return of the
soldier-priests from all the ends of the earth to give their answer to
the crime of Prussia. From foreign universities, from Constantinople,
Jerusalem, Madagascar, the Americas, from Ireland itself they came,
trooping at the sound of the bugle of defence. It is, of course,
foolish to suppose that all, or most of them, had been driven into
enforced exile: most of them were voluntarily engaged in teaching
or missionary work, but some were, in the truest and saddest sense,
exiles. What matter! Their mother France had sinned, but her sins
were as snow against the scarlet brutality of Prussia. M. Bompard,
the French Ambassador at Constantinople, gives in his official report
a vivid picture of the priests of every Order eagerly imploring
facilities--almost quarrelling in their ardour--to return to France and
the flag without a moment’s delay.
“If I live for a hundred years,” writes the Archbishop of Laodicea,
“I shall never forget the spectacle I witnessed at the station of
Fribourg (Switzerland) during the days of mobilisation.... I saw a
great crowd of compatriots who, with shouts of ‘France for ever!’
‘Switzerland for ever!’ were streaming into the last train. Among them
I noticed many young men wearing soutanes or other ecclesiastical
costume. When I learned that they were expelled religious I could not
forbear expressing to them my gratitude and enthusiasm. I shall never
forget the generous eagerness with which they were flying to the help
of France. They declared themselves ready to do their duty, their
whole duty. A sympathetic crowd surrounded them, cheering heartily. I
shall always have before my eyes that picture of waving handkerchiefs,
of young manly faces, radiant with faith and hope. The mobilisation
appeared to me in all its beauty ‘symbolised by a sword surmounted by a
cross.’”
So they returned, and, once in the field, their record is almost
monotonous in its heroism. Mgr. Herscher truly describes the collection
of incidents and letters assembled by M. Langlois as a “breviary of
patriotism.” You find in it a cloud of witnesses testifying to the
fashion in which, with the first roar of the guns, religion came back
to honour.
“There are neither pagans nor sceptics here,” writes one young soldier.
“Everybody is glad, if he has five minutes, to spend them before the
altar. Before the war many were ashamed to be seen kneeling or making
the sign of the Cross; you find no one like that now.”
“The cannon,” says another, “is a good converter.” “Nothing gives you
the feeling of absolute dependence on God so well as twenty-four hours
in the trenches.” “If my friends saw me now,” runs the confession of
a Parisian, “they would certainly not recognize me, me the mocker who
believed in nothing. I am transformed.” The chief anxiety of those who
have strayed, and come back, is to let their people at home know that
they died in the faith of Christ. “Tell my wife, father, to teach the
little one her prayers. That is the best of all!” runs a typical last
message.
“I do not fear death,” writes a fatally wounded boy of twenty-two. “I
have seen it and see it too close this moment: there is nothing horrid
about it, for it leads to happiness.”