The capital once more effected a change in the government, and by the
familiar methods,--on the 4th of September, 1870, the mob invaded the
Chamber and overturned the Empire. In the civil war that followed the
withdrawal of the Germans--brought about by the _Commune_ and the
_Internationale_, the former, with the pretext of restoring to the city
its legitimate rights by giving back to it the election of its municipal
officers, and the second, a socialism which was practical anarchy,
repudiating patriotism, denouncing capital as theft, aiming to overthrow
all society--it was again the capital which acted. In the private
correspondence of one of those leaders of revolt, the nihilist
Bakounine, lately published, he writes to his confidant: "What do you
think of this desperate movement of the Parisians? Whatever the result
may be, it must be confessed that they are brave enough. That strength
which we have vainly sought in Lyon and in Marseille has been found in
Paris. There is there an organization, and men determined to go to the
bitter end. It is certain that they will be beaten, but it is equally
certain that there will be henceforth no salvation for France outside
the social revolution. The French state is dead, and cannot be revived."
In the number of the _Contemporary Review_ for March, 1898, may be found
an admirable condensation of the history of France for the last hundred
years (quoted, without comment, in a Parisian journal), in the shape of
a résumé of the various street cries heard in Paris during that period.
(It is probably scarcely necessary to explain that _A bas_ is "Down
with" and _Conspuez_, practically, "Spit upon.") In 1788, the people
cried: _Vive le roi! Vive la noblesse! Vive le clergé!_ In 1789: _A bas
la noblesse! A bas la Bastille! Vivent Necker et Mirabeau! Vivent
d'Orléans et le clergé!_ In 1791: _A bas les nobles! A bas les prêtres!
Plus de Dieu!_ [No more God!] _A bas Necker! Vivent Bailly et Lafayette!
A bas Bailly!_ In the first half of 1793: _A bas Louis Capet! A bas la
Monarchie et la Constitution de 1791! Vive la République! Vivent la
liberté, l'égalité, la fraternité! Vivent les Girondins!_ In the second
half of the same year: _A bas les nobles, les riches et les prêtres!
Vivent les Jacobins! Vive Robespierre! Vive Marat, l'ami du peuple! Vive
la Terreur!_ In 1794: _A bas les Girondins! Vive la Guillotine!_ In 1794
and 1795: _A bas la Terreur et ses exécuteurs! A bas Robespierre!_ From
1795 to 1799: _Vive le Directoire! Vive Bonaparte! A bas le Directoire!
Vive le Premier Consul! A bas la République! Vive Napoléon empereur!
Hourrah pour la guerre et la Legion d'honneur! Vive la Cour! Vive
l'impératrice Joséphine!_ From 1809 to 1813: _A bas le Pape! A bas
Joséphine! Vive Marie-Louise! A bas Napoléon, l'oppresseur, le tyran! A
bas les Aigles! Vive le Roi légitime! Vive les Alliés!_ In March, 1815:
_A bas les Alliés! A bas les Bourbons et les Légitimistes! Vive
Napoléon!_ In June of the same year: _A bas l'aventurier corse!_ [the
Corsican adventurer!] _A bas l'armée! A bas les traitres Ney et
Lavalette! Vive le roi Louis le Desiré!_ From 1816 to 1830: _Vive
Charles X le Bien-aimé! A bas Charles X et les Bourbons! Vive
Louis-Philippe, le roi citoyen!_ In 1848: _A bas Louis-Philippe! Vive
Lamartine!_ In 1849: _A bas Lamartine! Vive le Président! A bas la
liberté de la Presse et les Clubs!_ In 1850: _Vive Napoléon!_ In 1851:
_A bas l'Assemblée! Vive l'Empereur!_ In 1852: _A bas la République!
Vive l'Empire!_ In 1855: _A bas la Russie!_ In 1859: _A bas l'Autriche!
Vive l'Italie! Vive Garibaldi!_ In 1869: _A bas l'Empire autoritaire!
Vive l'Empire parlementaire! Vive Ollivier!_ In May, 1870: _Vive la
Constitution! Vive la Dynastie impériale!_ In July: _A Berlin! A
Berlin!_ In September: _A bas l'Empire! Vive la République! Vive
Trochu!_ In October: _A bas Trochu! Vive la Commune! Vive Gambetta!_ In
1871: _Vive Thiers! A bas Gambetta!_ In March: _Vive la Commune! A bas
Thiers!_ In May: _Vive Thiers! Vive Mac-Mahon! A bas la Commune!_ In
1872: _Vive Thiers! Vive la République!_ In 1873: _Vive Mac-Mahon!_ In
1874: _Vive l'Amnistie! A bas Mac-Mahon!_ In 1879: _Vive Grèvy! A bas
Gambetta!_ In 1881: _Vive Gambetta! A bas Grèvy! Vive Lesseps!_ In 1887:
_Vive Carnot! Vive Boulanger!_ In 1889: _A bas les Panamistes! A bas
Boulanger!_ In 1895: _Vive le Tsar!_ In 1898: _Vivent la liberté,
égalité, la fraternité! A bas les Juifs! Vive l'Armée! Conspuez Zola!_
And in the latter part of the same year may be added: _Vive Picquart_,
_Vive la Révision! Vive Zola!_ and, naturally, _A bas!_ and _Conspuez!_
all three.
As to the administration of the Third Republic, it may be illustrated
with tolerable exactness, and without too much malice, by two extracts
from the _Figaro_ of the summer of 1898, in which will be recognized
certain great theories of universal aptitude on the part of its citizens
not at all unlike those which prevail on the part of the public
functionaries of our own beloved country. The first of these articles
appeared at the period when the precarious Brisson ministry was in
process of formation, after several ineffectual attempts on the part of
other statesmen summoned to this task by the President of the
République. It may be premised that the care taken to identify M. Durand
by the department which he represents is rendered necessary by the fact
that his family is as prevalent in France as Smith or Jones in
English-speaking lands.
"At noon, M. Peytral requested Durand (of the Loir) to enter his
cabinet and offered him the portfolio of Minister of the Finances.
"Durand, who had never been minister, accepted with _empressement_.
"'I am acquainted with our financial system from the bottom up,' he
said. 'This is, therefore, excellent.'
"'Truly,' replied Peytral. 'I was not aware of it.'
"But about half-past one of the afternoon, in consequence of the refusal
of one of the members of the future cabinet, M. Peytral was obliged to
change the combination. He summoned again M. Durand (of the Loir) and
said to him:
"'My dear colleague, I appeal to your patriotism. I have need of the
portfolio of the finances. Will you be good enough to do me the friendly
office to accept the Public Works?'
"M. Durand reflected a second.
"'I came near being an engineer,' he replied, 'I believe that I could be
able to render great service to the country in this new ministry.'
"And after having been Minister of the Finances from noon to half-past
one, he was Minister of Public Works from half-past one to three.
"At two o'clock, M. Peytral sent a _petit bleu_ [telegram, so called
from the color of the official paper] to Durand (of the Loir) to invite
him to call for the third time.
"'I have just perceived, my dear colleague,' he said to him, 'that my
combination is not workable. It is not the Public Works that you
require, nor the Finances, it is the Marine.'
"And Durand accepted the Marine, which he preserved up to half-past
five, the hour at which the political necessities threw him upon the
Public Instruction and Religion.
[Illustration: TYPE OF THE GARDE MUNICIPALE. MILITARY OF THE CITY OF
PARIS. After a drawing by L. Marchetti.]
"But rivalries suddenly sprang up. It was necessary to make new
arrangements in order to appease the Isambert group. Durand left the
Public Instruction.
"He was, during twenty minutes, Minister of War; he had the Post-Office
and Telegraphs three-quarters of an hour; he was Minister of Foreign
Affairs at a quarter to seven.
"Finally, at seven o'clock, M. Peytral convoked him once again and said
to him:
"'My dear colleague, I appeal in this moment to all your republican
energy and to your patriotic disinterestedness. My cabinet is
constituted. You are no longer a member of it.'
"'Good,' replied Durand, coldly. 'I hereby give notice of my intention
to interpellate the government.'"
The second of these contemporary documents professes to relate actual
facts. "We announced, the other day, that the ex-deputy Fabérot, not
re-elected at the late elections, had philosophically resumed his former
occupation of journeyman hatter.
"Another victim of universal suffrage, the barber Chauvin, has also
returned to his dear razors. Is it quite certain, moreover, that he ever
left them, even in the Chamber of Deputies?
"However this may be, he has just reopened his shop. Only, M. Chauvin
has abandoned his former quarter of the Rue des Archives, and has
established himself in Passage Tivoli, near the Gare Saint-Lazare,
where, in the most democratic fashion, he will shave you for twenty
centimes and cut your hair for six sous.
"This melancholy return to former surroundings has, moreover, nothing in
it but what is very honorable,--only, it is necessary that the customers
should be notified.
"Which we hereby do."
The great question of the army, of its relations with the civil
authority and of the apparent hopelessness of any attempt to reconcile
its maintenance and effectiveness with the democratic evolution of the
age,--never a more burning question in France than at the present
day,--scarcely admits of any of these pleasantries. But seldom have the
amenities of discussion more completely disappeared than in the polemics
now raging over the trial for treason of an officer of the general
staff. One of the more recent of these dispassionate studies of the
military problem appears in an article by M. Sully-Prudhomme in the
_Revue des Deux Mondes_, and the failure of his attempt to solve the
antinomy is striking. "To say, with Renan," he prefaces, "that 'war is
essentially a thing of the ancien régime,' is to say that it is not of
the essence of the new one; and as formerly war would be considered as
destitute of any cause in the case where there were no enemies, that is
equivalent to supposing that to-day no people have enemies. Such an
assertion assuredly does not express Renan's meaning. He intended to
say, doubtless, that in our day the use of force to decide international
conflicts is in contradiction with the moral principles professed by
civilized nations; in other terms, that, logically, they should never
have enemies.
"Would to God that it were so! Unfortunately, we know only too well that
in reality this is not so. Therefore, no people, having a due regard for
their preservation and their independence, can reasonably diminish their
military forces, nor even risk diminishing them, unless other peoples do
as much. For any one who has informed himself in this respect as to the
dispositions of the greater number of them, this simple remark will
suffice to condemn in any one of them any attempt at individual reform
in its military laws in any manner tending to compromise its security in
the midst of the others."
But he finds, very naturally, that all the qualities of the military
spirit, and those conducive to military power, are becoming "more and
more incompatible with the inclinations of the individual, and contrary
to the expansion of his intellectual and impassioned life." None of the
methods proposed to diminish this incompatibility--civilizing war by an
attempt to reduce its horrors, modifying the rigors of discipline,
specializing and restricting the military service--are available; the
last two, indeed, are directly at variance with the necessities of the
actual situation. For the acceptance thus rendered necessary of this
survival of the past, this persistence of war and all its consequences,
he finds that the intelligence may recognize the fact that to place
itself under the direction of those more competent is not necessarily to
abdicate, that an unprejudiced examination will demonstrate the
necessity of military obedience. For the soul, for the spiritual
qualities, he finds nothing in the progress of modern ideas "to aid in
the perfecting of the instruments and the apprenticeship of death." The
blind fanaticism of the Mohammedans, the unquestioning faith of the
early Christians, which faced extinction even with joy, have been
replaced among modern men by sceptical, questioning, and even material
philosophies which "offer us really nothing which is worthy a sincere
faith in a dream, in a survival eternal and heavenly." So true is this,
that, were he able, by enlightening him, to detach a Breton conscript
from his blind faith which enables him to die bravely for the honor of
the country, he would not do so, he would "prefer to betray philosophy."
"A ridiculous compromise, perhaps, but certainly less disastrous than a
defeat. This is one of the ironical inconsequences to which war condemns
us, and for which it alone is responsible. Whilst waiting for its
suppression, let us resign ourselves to submit to it, and let us
endeavor to make the best of its violences; it imposes upon us at least
the cultivation of the virile virtues, the esteem of a labor which does
not enrich, and which places us in a position to interrogate very
closely, willingly or unwillingly, the profundity of the tomb."
Another writer, who concerns himself more exclusively with military
matters, M. Abel Veuglaire, arrives at an equally depressing conclusion.
He, too, finds nothing to quite replace the old-time qualities which fed
the military spirit. The soldier of the last century, under the rod of
his corporal, did not rebel because he had been made an artificial
being, brutalized, deprived of all those sentiments which, if they could
excite enthusiasm, could also produce discouragement. In him, the desire
for wine and pillage, the eagerness for quarrel, the sentiment of a
point of honor, were carefully substituted for the family affections and
the consciousness of moral duties. The promise of plunder and the fear
of the gallows, a certain pride in his corps or his regiment, a certain
_esprit cocardier_, made of him a soldier. But the moral worth of the
modern recruit is derived from his family or from his school. "Very
scarce, indeed, are those whom the regiment transforms. Scarcer still
are those whom it will transform in the future. We are dupes of an
illusion. We see the young men leave the military service very different
from what they were when they entered it. We exclaim that the discipline
is wholesome, that the air of the barracks is vivifying, that the
regiment is a school of moral tendencies at the same time that it is a
sanitary establishment. Ah, no!... I do not believe, in fact, that the
moral qualities, that the civic virtues, are acquired in the caserne. If
they exist in a condition more or less latent in the recruit when he
arrives, they may be developed in him through the care of the officers,
as, moreover, they run the risk of shrivelling up if their cultivation
is neglected. But the result of this tardy education is always
sufficiently meagre. The evil natures, the vicious characters,
accentuate their defects, instead of attenuating them, under the
compression of discipline. It is not strong enough to master the souls
rebellious at the bottom. It chastises misconduct; it has no authority
over thought.... Therefore, it would be logical to diminish the duration
of the military service strictly to the minimum necessary to learn the
trade."
[Illustration: LIFE IN THE CASERNE: AN ESCAPADE.