The new president, though the nominee of chance, was an excellent
choice. The grandson of Lazare Carnot, the "organizer of victory" of the
Convention, he was also a man of unsullied probity. The tradition of his
family name, only less glorious than that of Bonaparte in the annals of
the Revolution, was welcome to France, almost ready to throw herself
into the arms of a soldier of fortune, while his blameless repute
reconciled some of those whose opposition to the Republic had been
quickened by the mean vices of Grévy. But the name and character of
Carnot would have been powerless to check the Boulangist movement
without the incompetency of its leader, who was getting the democracy at
his back without knowing how to utilize it. The new president's first
prime minister was M. Tirard, a senator who had held office in six of
Grévy's ministries, and he formed a cabinet of politicians as colourless
as himself. The early months of 1888 were occupied with the trial of
Wilson, who was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for fraud, and with
the conflicts of the government with General Boulanger, who was deprived
of his command for coming to Paris without leave. Wilson appealed
against his sentence, and General Boulanger was elected deputy for the
department of the Aisne by an enormous majority. It so happened that the
day after his election a presidential decree was signed on the advice of
the minister of war removing General Boulanger from the army, and the
court of appeal quashed Wilson's conviction. Public feeling was
profoundly moved by the coincidence of the release of the relative of
the ex-president by the judges of the Republic on the same day that its
ministers expelled from the army the popular hero of universal suffrage.
Boulangism.
Boulanger's flight.
As General Boulanger had been invented by the Radicals it was thought
that a Radical cabinet might be a remedy to cope with him, so M. Floquet
became president of the council in April 1888, M. de Freycinet taking
the portfolio of war, which he retained through many ministries. M.
Floquet's chief achievement was a duel with General Boulanger, in which,
though an elderly civilian, he wounded him. Nothing, however, checked
the popularity of the military politician, and though he was a failure
as a speaker in the Chamber, several departments returned him as their
deputy by great majorities. The Bonapartists had joined him, and while
in his manifestos he described himself as the defender of the Republic,
the mass of the Monarchists, with the consent of the comte de Paris,
entered the Boulangist camp, to the dismay both of old-fashioned
Royalists and of many Orleanists, who resented his recent treatment of
the duc d'Aumale. The centenary of the taking of the Bastille was to be
celebrated in Paris by an international exhibition, and it appeared
likely that it would be inaugurated by General Boulanger, so
irresistible seemed his popularity. In January 1889 he was elected
member for the metropolitan department of the Seine with a quarter of a
million votes, and by a majority of eighty thousand over the candidate
of the government. Had he marched on the Elysée the night of his
election, nothing could have saved the parliamentary Republic; but again
he let his chance go by. The government in alarm proposed the
restoration of _scrutin d'arrondissement_ as the electoral system for
_scrutin de liste_. The change was rapidly enacted by the two Chambers,
and was a significant commentary on the respective advantages of the two
systems. M. Tirard was again called to form a ministry, and he selected
as minister of the interior M. Constans, originally a professor at
Toulouse, who had already proved himself a skilful manipulator of
elections when he held the same office in 1881. He was therefore given
the supervision of the machinery of centralization with which it was
supposed that General Boulanger would have to be fought at the general
election. That incomplete hero, however, saved all further trouble by
flying the country when he heard that his arrest was imminent. The
government, in order to prevent any plebiscitary manifestation in his
favour, passed a law forbidding a candidate to present himself for a
parliamentary election in more than one constituency; it also arraigned
the general on the charge of treason before the Senate sitting as a high
court, and he was sentenced in his absence to perpetual imprisonment.
Such measures were needless. The flight of General Boulanger was the
death of Boulangism. He alone had saved the Republic which had done
nothing to save itself. Its government had, on the contrary, displayed
throughout the crisis an anarchic feebleness and incoherency which would
have speeded its end had the leader of the plebiscitary movement
possessed sagacity or even common courage.
The elections of 1889 showed how completely the reactionaries had
compromised their cause in the Boulangist failure. Instead of 45% of the
votes polled as in 1885, they obtained only 21%, and the comte de Paris,
the pretender of constitutional monarchy, was irretrievably prejudiced
by his alliance with the military adventurer who had outraged the
princes of his house. A period of calm succeeded the storm of
Boulangism, and for the first time under the Third Republic parliament
set to work to produce legislation useful for the state, without rousing
party passion, as in its other period of activity when the Ferry
education laws were passed. Before the elections of 1889 the reform of
the army was undertaken, the general term of active compulsory service
was made three years, while certain classes hitherto dispensed from
serving, including ecclesiastical seminarists and lay professors, had
henceforth to undergo a year's military training. The new parliament
turned its attention to social and labour questions, as the only clouds
on the political horizon were the serious strikes in the manufacturing
districts, which displayed the growing political organization of the
socialist party. Otherwise nothing disturbed the calm of the country.
The young duc d'Orléans vainly tried to ruffle it by breaking his exile
in order to claim his citizen's right to perform his military service.
The cabinet was rearranged in March 1890, M. de Freycinet becoming prime
minister for the fourth time, and retaining the portfolio of war. All
seemed to point to the consolidation of the Republic, and even the
Church made signals of reconciliation. Cardinal Lavigerie, a patriotic
missionary and statesman, entertained the officers of the fleet at
Algiers, and proposed the toast of the Republic to the tune of the
"Marseillaise" played by his _pères blancs_. The royalist Catholics
protested, but it was soon intimated that the archbishop of Algiers'
demonstration was approved at Rome. The year 1891 was one of the few in
the annals of the Republic which passed without a change of ministry,
but the agitations of 1892 were to counterbalance the repose of the two
preceding years.
The papal encyclical, 1892.
The first crisis arose out of the peacemaking policy of the Pope.
Following up his intimation to the archbishop of Algiers, Leo XIII.
published in February 1892 an encyclical, bidding French Catholics
accept the Republic as the firmly established form of government. The
papal injunction produced a new political group called the "Ralliés,"
the majority of its members being Monarchists who rallied to the
Republic in obedience to the Vatican. The most conspicuous among them
was Comte Albert de Mun, an eloquent exponent in the Chamber of
legitimism and Christian socialism. The extreme Left mistrusted the
adhesion of the new converts to the Republic, and ecclesiastical
questions were the constant subjects of acrimonious debates in
parliament. In the course of one of them M. de Freycinet found himself
in a minority. He ceased to be prime minister, being succeeded by M.
Loubet, a lawyer from Montélimar, who had previously held office for
three months in the first Tirard cabinet; but M. de Freycinet continued
to hold his portfolio of war. The confusion of the republican groups
kept pace with the disarray of the reactionaries, and outside parliament
the frequency of anarchist outrages did not increase public confidence.
The only figure in the Republic which grew in prestige was that of M.
Carnot, who in his frequent presidential tours dignified his office,
though his modesty made him unduly efface his own personality.
The Panama scandal.
When the autumn session of 1892 began all other questions were
overwhelmed by the bursting of the Panama scandal. The company
associated for the piercing of the Isthmus of Panama, undertaken by M.
de Lesseps, the maker of the Suez Canal, had become insolvent some years
before. Fifty millions sterling subscribed by the thrift of France had
disappeared, but the rumours involving political personages in the
disaster were so confidently asserted to be reactionary libels, that a
minister of the Republic, afterwards sent to penal servitude for
corruption, obtained damages for the publication of one of them. It was
known that M. de Lesseps was to be tried for misappropriating the money
subscribed; but considering the vast sums lost by the public, little
interest was taken in the matter till it was suddenly stirred by the
dramatic suicide of a well-known Jewish financier closely connected with
republican politicians, driven to death, it was said, by menaces of
blackmail. Then succeeded a period of terror in political circles. Every
one who had a grudge against an enemy found vent for it in the press,
and the people of Paris lived in an atmosphere of delation. Unhappily it
was true that ministers and members of parliament had been subsidized by
the Panama company. Floquet, the president of the Chamber, avowed that
when prime minister he had laid hands on £12,000 of the company's funds
for party purposes, and his justification of the act threw a light on
the code of public morality of the parliamentary Republic. Other
politicians were more seriously implicated on the charge of having
accepted subsidies for their private purposes, and emotion reached its
height when the cabinet ordered the prosecution of two of its members
for corrupt traffic of their offices. These two ministers were
afterwards discharged, and they seem to have been accused with
recklessness; but their prosecution by their own colleagues proved that
the statesmen of the Republic believed that their high political circles
were sapped with corruption. Finally, only twelve senators and deputies
were committed for trial, and the only one convicted was a minister of
M. de Freycinet's third cabinet, who pleaded guilty to receiving large
bribes from the Panama company. The public regarded the convicted
politician as a scapegoat, believing that there were numerous
delinquents in parliament, more guilty than he, who had not even been
prosecuted. This feeling was aggravated by the sentence passed, but
afterwards remitted, on the aged M. de Lesseps, who had involved French
people in misfortune only because he too sanguinely desired to repeat
the triumph he had achieved for France by his great work in Egypt.
Within the nation the moral result of the Panama affair was a general
feeling that politics had become under the Republic a profession
unworthy of honest citizens. The sentiment evoked by the scandal was one
of sceptical lassitude rather than of indignation. The reactionaries had
crowned their record of political incompetence. At a crisis which gave
legitimate opportunity to a respectable and patriotic Opposition they
showed that the country had nothing to expect from them but incoherent
and exaggerated invective. If the scandal had come to light in the time
of General Boulanger the parliamentary Republic would not have survived
it. As it was, the sordid story did little more than produce several
changes of ministry. M. Loubet resigned the premiership in December 1892
to M. Ribot, a former functionary of the Empire, whose ministry lived
for three stormy weeks. On the first day of 1893 M. Ribot formed his
second cabinet, which survived till the end of March, when he was
succeeded by his minister of education, M. Charles Dupuy, an
ex-professor who had never held office till four months previously. M.
Dupuy, having taken the portfolio of the interior, supervised the
general election of 1893, which took place amid the profound
indifference of the population, except in certain localities where
personal antagonisms excited violence. An intelligent Opposition would
have roused the country at the polls against the régime compromised by
the Panama affair. Nothing of the sort occurred, and the electorate
preferred the doubtful probity of their republican representatives to
the certain incompetence of the reactionaries. The adversaries of the
Republic polled only 16% of the votes recorded, and the chief feature of
the election was the increased return of socialist and radical-socialist
deputies. When parliament met it turned out the Dupuy ministry, and M.
Casimir-Périer quitted the presidency of the Chamber to take his place.
The new prime minister was the bearer of an eminent name, being the
grandson of the statesman of 1831, and the great-grandson of the owner
of Vizille, where the estates of Dauphiné met in 1788, as a prelude to
the assembling of the states-general the next year. His acceptance of
office aroused additional interest because he was a minister possessed
of independent wealth, and therefore a rare example of a French
politician free from the imputation of making a living out of politics.
Neither his repute nor his qualities gave long life to his ministry,
which fell in four months, and M. Dupuy was sent for again to form a
cabinet in May 1894.
Assassination of president Carnot.
Casimir-Périer president, 1894.
Before the second Dupuy ministry had been in office a month President
Carnot died by the knife of an anarchist at Lyons. He was perhaps the
most estimable politician of the Third Republic. Although the standard
of political life was not elevated under his presidency, he at all
events set a good personal example, and to have filled unscathed the
most conspicuous position in the land during a period unprecedented for
the scurrility of libels on public men was a testimony to his blameless
character. As the term of his septennate was near, parliament was not
unprepared for a presidential election, and M. Casimir-Périer, who had
been spoken of as his possible successor, was elected by the Congress
which met at Versailles on the 27th of June 1894, three days after
Carnot's assassination. The election of one who bore respectably a name
not less distinguished in history than that of Carnot seemed to ensure
that the Republic would reach the end of the century under the headship
of a president of exceptional prestige. But instead of remaining chief
of the state for seven years, in less than seven months M.
Casimir-Périer astonished France and Europe by his resignation.
Scurrilously defamed by the socialist press, the new president found
that the Republicans in the Chamber were not disposed to defend him in
his high office; so, on the 15th of January 1895, he seized the
occasion of the retirement of the Dupuy ministry to address a message to
the two houses intimating his resignation of the presidency, which, he
said, was endowed with too many responsibilities and not sufficient
powers.
Félix Faure president, 1895.
This time the Chambers were unprepared for a presidential vacancy, and
to fill it in forty-eight hours was necessarily a matter of haphazard.
The choice of the congress fell on Félix Faure, a merchant of Havre,
who, though minister of marine in the retiring cabinet, was one of the
least-known politicians who had held office. The selection was a good
one, and introduced to the presidency a type of politician unfortunately
rare under the Third Republic--a successful man of business. Félix Faure
had a fine presence and polished manners, and having risen from a humble
origin he displayed in his person the fact that civilization descends to
a lower social level in France than elsewhere. Although he was in a
sense a man of the people the Radicals and Socialists in the Chambers
had voted against him. Their candidate, like almost all democratic
leaders in France, had never worked with his hands--M. Brisson, the son
of an attorney at Bourges, a member of the Parisian bar, and perpetual
candidate for the presidency. Nevertheless the Left tried to take
possession of President Faure. His first ministry, composed of moderate
republicans, and presided over by M. Ribot, lasted until the autumn
session of 1895, when it was turned out and a radical cabinet was formed
by M. Léon Bourgeois, an ex-functionary, who when a prefect had been
suspected of reactionary tendencies.
The Bourgeois cabinet of 1895 was remarkable as the first ministry
formed since 1877 which did not contain a single member of the outgoing
cabinet. It was said to be exclusively radical in its composition, and
thus to indicate that the days of "republican concentration" were over,
and that the Republic, being firmly established, an era of party
government on the English model had arrived. The new ministry, however,
on analysis did not differ in character from any of its predecessors.
Seven of its members were old office-holders of the ordinary
"ministrable" type. The most conspicuous was M. Cavaignac, the son of
the general who had opposed Louis Bonaparte in 1848, and the grandson of
J.B. Cavaignac, the regicide member of the Convention. Like Carnot and
Casimir-Périer, he was, therefore, one of those rare politicians of the
Republic who possessed some hereditary tradition. An ambitious man, he
was now classed as a Radical on the strength of his advocacy of the
income-tax, the principle of which has never been popular in France, as
being adverse to the secretive habits of thrift cultivated by the
people, which are a great source of the national wealth. The radicalism
of the rest of the ministry was not more alarming in character, and its
tenure of office was without legislative result. Its fall, however,
occasioned the only constitutionally interesting ministerial crisis of
the twenty-four which had taken place since Grévy's election to the
presidency sixteen years before. The Senate, disliking the fiscal policy
of the government, refused to vote supply in spite of the support which
the Chamber gave to the ministry. The collision between the two houses
did not produce the revolutionary rising which the Radicals predicted,
and the Senate actually forced the Bourgeois cabinet to resign amid
profound popular indifference.
Franco-Russian alliance.
The new prime minister was M. Méline, who began his long political
career as a member of the Commune in 1871, but was so little compromised
in the insurrection that Jules Simon gave him an under-secretaryship in
his ministry of 1876. After that he was once a cabinet minister, and was
for a year president of the Chamber. He was chiefly known as a
protectionist; but it was as leader of the Progressists, as the
Opportunists now called themselves, that he formed his cabinet in April
1896, which was announced as a moderate ministry opposed to the policy
of the Radicals. It is true that it made no attempt to tax incomes, but
otherwise its achievements did not differ from those of other
ministries, radical or concentration, except in its long survival. It
lasted for over two years, and lived as long as the second Ferry
cabinet. Its existence was prolonged by certain incidents of the
Franco-Russian alliance. The visit of the Tsar to Paris in October
1896, being the first official visit paid by a European sovereign to the
Republic, helped the government over the critical period at which
ministries usually succumbed, and it was further strengthened in
parliament by the invitation to the president of the Republic to return
the imperial visit at St Petersburg in 1897. The Chamber came to its
normal term that autumn; but a law had been passed fixing May as the
month for general elections, and the ministry was allowed to retain
office till the dissolution at Easter 1898.
1899: death of President Faure.