The long duration of the Méline government was said to be a further sign
of the arrival of an era of party government with its essential
accompaniment, ministerial stability. But in the country there was no
corresponding sign that the electorate was being organized into two
parties of Progressists and Radicals; while in the Chamber it was
ominously observed that persistent opposition to the moderate ministry
came from nominal supporters of its views, who were dismayed at one
small band of fellow-politicians monopolizing office for two years. The
last election of the century was therefore fought on a confused issue,
the most tangible results being the further reduction of the
Monarchists, who secured only 12% of the total poll, and the advance of
the Socialists, who obtained nearly 20% of the votes recorded. The
Radicals returned were less numerous than the Moderates, but with the
aid of the Socialists they nearly balanced them. A new group entitled
Nationalist made its appearance, supported by a miscellaneous electorate
representing the malcontent element in the nation of all political
shades from monarchist to revolutionary socialist. The Chamber, so
composed, was as incoherent as either of its predecessors. It refused to
re-elect the radical leader M. Brisson as its president, and then
refused its confidence to the moderate leader M. Méline. M. Brisson, the
rejected of the Chamber, was sent for to form a ministry, on the 28th of
June 1898, which survived till the adjournment, only to be turned out
when the autumn session began. M. Charles Dupuy thus became prime
minister for the third time with a cabinet of the old concentration
pattern, and for the third time in less than five years under his
premiership the Presidency of the Republic became vacant. Félix Faure
had increased in pomposity rather than in popularity. His contact with
European sovereigns seems to have made him over-conscious of his
superior rank, and he cultivated habits which austere republicans make
believe to be the monopoly of frivolous courts. The regular domesticity
of middle-class life may not be disturbed with impunity when age is
advancing, and Félix Faure died with tragic unexpectedness on the 16th
of February 1899. The joys of his high office were so dear to him that
nothing but death would have induced him to lay it down before the term
of his septennate. There was therefore no candidate in waiting for the
vacancy; and as Paris was in an agitated mood the majority in the
Congress elected M. Loubet president of the Republic, because he
happened to hold the second place of dignity in the state, the
presidency of the Senate, and was, moreover, a politician who had the
confidence of the republican groups as an adversary of plebiscitary
pretensions. His only competitor was M. Méline, whose ambitions were not
realized, in spite of the alliance of his Progressist supporters with
the Monarchists and Nationalists. The Dupuy ministry lasted till June
1899, when a new cabinet was formed by M. Waldeck-Rousseau, who, having
held office under Gambetta and Jules Ferry, had relinquished politics
for the bar, of which he had become a distinguished leader. Though a
moderate republican, he was the first prime minister to give portfolios
to socialist politicians. This was the distinguishing feature of the
last cabinet of the century--the thirty-seventh which had taken office
in the twenty-six years which had elapsed since the resignation of
Thiers in 1873.
Anti-Semitic movement.
It is now necessary to go back a few years in order to refer to a matter
which, though not political in its origin, in its development filled the
whole political atmosphere of France in the closing period of the 19th
century. Soon after the failure of the Boulangist movement a journal was
founded at Paris called the _Libre Parole_. Its editor, M. Drumont, was
known as the author of _La France juive_, a violent anti-Semitic work,
written to denounce the influence exercised by Jewish financiers in the
politics of the Third Republic. It may be said to have started the
anti-Semitic movement in France, where hostility to the Jews had not the
pretext existing in those lands which contain a large Jewish population
exercising local rivalry with the natives of the soil, or spoiling them
with usury. That state of things existed in Algeria, where the
indigenous Jews were made French citizens during the Franco-Prussian War
to secure their support against the Arabs in rebellion. But political
anti-Semitism was introduced into Algeria only as an offshoot of the
movement in continental France, where the great majority of the Jewish
community were of the same social class as the politicians of the
Republic. Primarily directed against the Jewish financiers, the movement
was originally looked upon as a branch of the anti-capitalist propaganda
of the Socialists. Thus the _Libre Parole_ joined with the revolutionary
press in attacking the repressive legislation provoked by the dynamite
outrages of the anarchists, clerical reactionaries who supported it
being as scurrilously abused by the anti-Semitic organ as its republican
authors. The Panama affair, in the exposure of which the _Libre Parole_
took a prominent part soon after its foundation, was also a bond between
anti-Semites and Socialists, to whom, however, the Monarchists, always
incapable of acting alone, united their forces. The implication of
certain Jewish financiers with republican politicians in the Panama
scandal aided the anti-Semites in their special propaganda, of which a
main thesis was that the government of the Third Republic had been
organized by its venal politicians for the benefit of Jewish immigrants
from Germany, who had thus enriched themselves at the expense of the
laborious and unsuspecting French population. The _Libre Parole_, which
had become a popular organ with reactionaries and with malcontents of
all classes, enlisted the support of the Catholics by attributing the
anti-religious policy of the Republic to the influence of the Jews,
skilfully reviving bitter memories of the enaction of the Ferry decrees,
when sometimes the laicization of schools or the expulsion of monks and
nuns had been carried out by a Jewish functionary. Thus religious
sentiment and race prejudice were introduced into a movement which was
at first directed against capital; and the campaign was conducted with
the weapons of scurrility and defamation which had made an unlicensed
press under the Third Republic a demoralizing national evil.
Condemnation of Captain Dreyfus.
An adroit feature of the anti-Semitic campaign was an appeal to national
patriotism to rid the army of Jewish influence. The Jews, it was said,
not content with directing the financial, and thereby the general policy
of the Republic, had designs on the French army, in which they wished to
act as secret agents of their German kindred. In October 1894 the _Libre
Parole_ announced that a Jewish officer of artillery attached to the
general staff, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, had been arrested on the charge
of supplying a government of the Triple Alliance with French military
secrets. Tried by court-martial, he was sentenced to military
degradation and to detention for life in a fortress. He was publicly
degraded at Paris in January 1895, a few days before Casimir-Périer
resigned the presidency of the Republic, and was transported to the Île
du Diable on the coast of French Guiana. His conviction, on the charge
of having betrayed to a foreign power documents relating to the national
defence, was based on the alleged identity of his handwriting with that
of an intercepted covering-letter, which contained a list of the papers
treasonably communicated. The possibility of his innocence was not
raised outside the circle of his friends; the Socialists, who
subsequently defended him, even complained that common soldiers were
shot for offences less than that for which this richly connected officer
had been only transported. The secrecy of his trial did not shock public
sentiment in France, where at that time all civilians charged with crime
were interrogated by a judge in private, and where all accused persons
are presumed guilty until proved innocent. In a land subject to invasion
there was less disposition to criticize the decision of a military
tribunal acting in the defence of the nation even than there would have
been in the case of a doubtful judgment passed in a civil court. The
country was practically unanimous that Captain Dreyfus had got his
deserts. A few, indeed, suggested that had he not been a Jew he would
never have been accused; but the greater number replied that an ordinary
French traitor of Gentile birth would have been forgotten from the
moment of his condemnation. The pertinacity with which some of his
co-religionists set to work to show that he had been irregularly
condemned seemed to justify the latter proposition. But it was not a Jew
who brought about the revival of the affair. Colonel Picquart, an
officer of great promise, became head of the intelligence department at
the war office, and in 1896 informed the minister of his suspicion that
the letter on which Dreyfus had been condemned was written by a certain
Major Esterhazy. The military authorities, not wishing to have the case
reopened, sent Colonel Picquart on foreign service, and put in his place
Colonel Henry. The all-seeing press published various versions of the
incident, and the anti-Semitic journals denounced them as proofs of a
Jewish conspiracy against the French army.
Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards.
At the end of 1897 M. Scheurer-Kestner, an Alsatian devoted to France
and a republican senator, tried to persuade his political friends to
reopen the case; but M. Méline, the prime minister, declared in the name
of the Republic that the Dreyfus affair no longer existed. The fact that
the senator who championed Dreyfus was a Protestant encouraged the
clerical press in its already marked tendency to utilize anti-Semitism
as a weapon of ecclesiastical warfare. But the religious side-issues of
the question would have had little importance had not the army been
involved in the controversy, which had become so keen that all the
population, outside that large section of it indifferent to all public
questions, was divided into "Dreyfusards" and "anti-Dreyfusards." The
strong position of the latter was due to their assuming the position of
defenders of the army, which, at an epoch when neither the legislature
nor the government inspired respect, and the Church was the object of
polemic, was the only institution in France to unite the nation by
appealing to its martial and patriotic instincts. That is the
explanation of the enthusiasm of the public for generals and other
officers by whom the trial of Dreyfus and subsequent proceedings had
been conducted in a manner repugnant to those who do not favour the
arbitrary ways of military dictatorship, which, however, are not
unpopular in France. The acquittal of Major Esterhazy by a
court-martial, the conviction of Zola by a civil tribunal for a violent
criticism of the military authorities, and the imprisonment without
trial of Colonel Picquart for his efforts to exonerate Dreyfus, were
practically approved by the nation. This was shown by the result of the
general elections in May 1898. The clerical reactionaries were almost
swept out of the Chamber, but the overwhelming republican majority was
practically united in its hostility to the defenders of Dreyfus, whose
only outspoken representatives were found in the socialist groups. The
moderate Méline ministry was succeeded in June 1898 by the radical
Brisson ministry. But while the new prime minister was said to be
personally disposed to revise the sentence on Dreyfus, his civilian
minister of war, M. Cavaignac, was as hostile to revision as any of his
military predecessors--General Mercier, under whom the trial took place,
General Zurlinden, and General Billot, a republican soldier devoted to
the parliamentary régime.
Political results of Dreyfus agitation.
The radical minister of war in July 1898 laid before the Chamber certain
new proofs of the guilt of Dreyfus, in a speech so convincing that the
house ordered it to be placarded in all the communes of France. The next
month Colonel Henry, the chief of the intelligence department, confessed
to having forged those new proofs, and then committed suicide. M.
Cavaignac thereupon resigned office, but declared that the crime of
Henry did not prove the innocence of Dreyfus. Many, however, who had
hitherto accepted the judgment of 1894, reflected that the offence of a
guilty man did not need new crime for its proof. It was further remarked
that the forgery had been committed by the intimate colleague of the
officers of the general staff, who had zealously protected Esterhazy,
the suspected author of the document on which Dreyfus had been
convicted. An uneasy misgiving became widespread; but partisan spirit
was too excited for it to cause a general revulsion of feeling. Some
journalists and politicians of the extreme Left had adopted the defence
of Dreyfus as an anti-clerical movement in response to the intemperate
partisanship of the Catholic press on the other side. Other members of
the socialist groups, not content with criticizing the conduct of the
military authorities in the Dreyfus affair, opened a general attack on
the French army,--an unpopular policy which allowed the anti-Dreyfusards
to utilize the old revolutionary device of making the word "patriotism"
a party cry. The defamation and rancour with which the press on both
sides flooded the land obscured the point at issue. However, the Brisson
ministry just before its fall remitted the Dreyfus judgment to the
criminal division of the cour de cassation--the supreme court of
revision in France. M. Dupuy formed a new cabinet in November 1898, and
made M. de Freycinet minister of war, but that adroit office-holder,
though a civilian and a Protestant, did not favour the anti-military and
anti-clerical defenders of Dreyfus. The refusal of the Senate, the
stronghold of the Republic, to re-elect M. Scheurer-Kestner as its
vice-president, showed that the opportunist minister of war understood
the feeling of parliament, which was soon displayed by an extraordinary
proceeding. The divisional judges, to whom the case was remitted, showed
signs that their decision would be in favour of a new trial of Dreyfus.
The republican legislature, therefore, disregarding the principle of the
separation of the powers, which is the basis of constitutional
government, took the arbitrary step of interfering with the judicial
authority. It actually passed a law withdrawing the partly-heard cause
from the criminal chamber of the cour de cassation, and transferring it
to the full court of three divisions, in the hope that a majority of
judges would thus be found to decide against the revision of the
sentence on Dreyfus.
Second trial of Dreyfus.
This flagrant confusion of the legislative with the judicial power
displayed once more the incompetence of the French rightly to use
parliamentary institutions; but it left the nation indifferent. It was
during the passage of the bill that the president of the Republic
suddenly died. Félix Faure was said to be hostile to the defenders of
Dreyfus and disposed to utilise the popular enthusiasm for the army as a
means of making the presidential office independent of parliament. The
Chambers, therefore, in spite of their anti-Dreyfusard bias, were
determined not to relinquish any of their constitutional prerogative.
The military and plebiscitary parties were now fomenting the public
discontent by noisy demonstrations. The president of the Senate, M.
Loubet, as has been mentioned, was known to have no sympathy with this
agitation, so he was elected president of the Republic by a large
majority at the congress held at Versailles on 18th February 1899. The
new president, who was unknown to the public, though he had once been
prime minister for nine months, was respected in political circles; but
his elevation to the first office of the State made him the object of
that defamation which had become the chief characteristic of the
partisan press under the Third Republic. He was recklessly accused of
having been an accomplice of the Panama frauds, by screening certain
guilty politicians when he was prime minister in 1892, and because he
was not opposed to the revision of the Dreyfus sentence he was wantonly
charged with being bought with Jewish money. Meanwhile the united
divisions of the cour de cassation were, in spite of the intimidation of
the legislature, reviewing the case with an independence worthy of
praise in an ill-paid magistracy which owed its promotion to political
influence. Instead of justifying the suggestive interference of
parliament it revised the judgment of the court-martial, and ordered
Dreyfus to be re-tried by a military tribunal at Rennes. The Dupuy
ministry, which had wished to prevent this decision, resigned, and M.
Waldeck-Rousseau formed a heterogeneous cabinet in which Socialists, who
for the first time took office, had for their colleague as minister of
war General de Galliffet, whose chief political fame had been won as
the executioner of the Communards after the insurrection of 1871.
Dreyfus was brought back from the Devil's Island, and in August 1899 was
put upon his trial a second time. His old accusers, led by General
Mercier, the minister of war of 1894, redoubled their efforts to prove
his guilt, and were permitted by the officers composing the court a wide
license according to English ideas of criminal jurisprudence. The
published evidence did not, however, seem to connect Dreyfus with the
charges brought against him. Nevertheless the court, by a majority of
five to two, found him guilty, and with illogical inconsequence added
that there were in his treason extenuating circumstances. He was
sentenced to ten years' detention, and while it was being discussed
whether the term he had already served would count as part of his
penalty, the ministry completed the inconsequency of the situation by
advising the president of the Republic to pardon the prisoner. The
result of the second trial satisfied neither the partisans of the
accused, who desired his rehabilitation, some of them reproaching him
for accepting a pardon, nor his adversaries, whose vindictiveness was
unsated by the penalty he had already suffered. But the great mass of
the French people, who are always ready to treat a public question with
indifference, were glad to be rid of a controversy which had for years
infected the national life.
Real character of the Dreyfus agitation.
The Dreyfus affair was severely judged by foreign critics as a
miscarriage of justice resulting from race-prejudice. If that simple
appreciation rightly describes its origin, it became in its development
one of those scandals symptomatic of the unhealthy political condition
of France, which on a smaller scale had often recurred under the Third
Republic, and which were made the pretext by the malcontents of all
parties for gratifying their animosities. That in its later stages it
was not a question of race-persecution was seen in the curious
phenomenon of journals owned or edited by Jews leading the outcry
against the Jewish officer and his defenders. That it was not a mere
episode of the rivalry between Republicans and Monarchists, or between
the advocates of parliamentarism and of military autocracy, was evident
from the fact that the most formidable opponents of Dreyfus, without
whose hostility that of the clericals and reactionaries would have been
ineffective, were republican politicians. That it was not a phase of the
anti-capitalist movement was shown by the zealous adherence of the
socialist leaders and journalists to the cause of Dreyfus; indeed, one
remarkable result of the affair was its diversion of the socialist party
and press for several years from their normal campaign against property.
The Dreyfus affair was utilized by the reactionaries against the
Republic, by the clericals against the non-Catholics, by the
anti-clericals against the Church, by the military party against the
parliamentarians, and by the revolutionary socialists against the army.
It was also conspicuously utilized by rival republican politicians
against one another, and the chaos of political groups was further
confused by it.
The State trial of 1899.
An epilogue to the Dreyfus affair was the trial for treason before the
Senate, at the end of 1899, of a number of persons, mostly obscure
followers either of M. Déroulède the poet, who advocated a plebiscitary
republic, or of the duc d'Orléans, the pretender of the constitutional
monarchy. On the day of President Faure's funeral M. Déroulède had
vainly tried to entice General Roget, a zealous adversary of Dreyfus,
who was on duty with his troops, to march on the Elysée in order to
evict the newly-elected president of the Republic. Other demonstrations
against M. Loubet ensued, the most offensive being a concerted assault
upon him on the racecourse at Auteuil in June 1899. The subsequent
resistance to the police of a band of anti-Semites threatened with
arrest, who barricaded themselves in a house in the rue Chabrol, in the
centre of Paris, and, with the marked approval of the populace,
sustained a siege for several weeks, indicated that the capital was in a
condition not far removed from anarchy. M. Déroulède, indicted at the
assizes of the Seine for his misdemeanour on the day of President
Faure's funeral, had been triumphantly acquitted. It was evident that
no jury would convict citizens prosecuted for political offences and the
government therefore decided to make use of the article of the Law of
1875, which allowed the Senate to be constituted a high court for the
trial of offences endangering the state. A respectable minority of the
Senate, including M. Wallon, the venerable "Father of the Constitution"
of 1875, vainly protested that the framers of the law intended to invest
the upper legislative chamber with judicial power only for the trial of
grave crimes of high treason, and not of petty political disorders which
a well-organized government ought to be able to repress with the
ordinary machinery of police and justice. The outvoted protest was
justified by the proceedings before the High Court, which, undignified
and disorderly, displayed both the fatuity of the so-called conspirators
and the feebleness of the government which had to cope with them. The
trial proved that the plebiscitary faction was destitute of its
essential factor, a chief to put forward for the headship of the state,
and that it was resolved, if it overturned the parliamentary system, not
to accept under any conditions the duc d'Orléans, the only pretender
before the public. It was shown that royalists and plebiscitary
republicans alike had utilized as an organization of disorder the
anti-Semitic propaganda which had won favour among the masses as a
nationalist movement to protect the French from foreign competition. The
evidence adduced before the high court revealed, moreover, the curious
fact that certain Jewish royalists had given to the duc d'Orléans large
sums of money to found anti-Semitic journals as the surest means of
popularizing his cause.
French parties at the close of the 19th century.
The last year of the 19th century, though uneventful for France, was one
of political unrest. This, however, did not take the form of ministerial
crises, as, for the fourth time since responsible cabinets were
introduced in 1873, a whole year, from the 1st of January to the 31st of
December, elapsed without a change of ministry. The prime minister, M.
Waldeck-Rousseau, though his domestic policy exasperated a large section
of the political world, including one half of the Progressive group
which he had helped to found, displayed qualities of statesmanship
always respected in France, but rarely exhibited under the Third
Republic. He had proved himself to be what the French call _un homme de
gouvernement_--that is to say, an authoritative administrator of
unimpassioned temperament capable of governing with the arbitrary
machinery of Napoleonic centralization. His alliance with the extreme
Left and the admission into his cabinet of socialist deputies, showed
that he understood which wing of the Chamber it was best to conciliate
in order to keep the government in his hands for an abnormal term. The
advent to office of Socialists disquieted the respectable and prosperous
commercial classes, which in France take little part in politics, though
they had small sympathy with the nationalists, who were the most violent
opponents of the Waldeck-Rousseau ministry. The alarm caused by the
handing over of important departments of the state to socialist
politicians arose upon a danger which is not always understood beyond
the borders of France. Socialism in France is a movement appealing to
the revolutionary instincts of the French democracy, advocated in vague
terms by the members of rival groups or sects. Thus the increasing
number of socialist deputies in parliament had produced no legislative
results, and their presence in the cabinet was not feared on that
account. The fear which their office-holding inspired was due to the
immense administrative patronage which the centralized system confides
to each member of the government. French ministers are wont to bestow
the places at their disposal on their political friends, so the prospect
of administrative posts being filled all over the land by
revolutionaries caused some uneasiness. Otherwise the presence of
Socialists on the ministerial bench seemed to have no other effect than
that of partially muzzling the socialist groups in the Chamber. The
opposition to the government was heterogeneous. It included the few
Monarchists left in the Chamber, the Nationalists, who resembled the
Boulangists of twelve years before, and who had added anti-Semitism to
the articles of the revisionist creed, and a number of republicans,
chiefly of the old Opportunist group, which had renewed itself under the
name of Progressist at the time when M. Waldeck-Rousseau was its most
important member in the Senate.
The ablest leaders of this Opposition were all malcontent Republicans;
and this fact seemed to show that if ever any form of monarchy were
restored in France, political office would probably remain in the hands
of men who were former ministers of the Third Republic. Thus the most
conspicuous opponents of the cabinet were three ex-prime ministers, MM.
Méline, Charles Dupuy and Ribot. Less distinguished republican
"ministrables" had their normal appetite for office whetted in 1900 by
the international exhibition at Paris. It brought the ministers of the
day into unusual prominence, and endowed them with large subsidies voted
by parliament for official entertainments. The exhibition was planned on
too ambitious a scale to be a financial success. It also called forth
the just regrets of those who deplored the tendency of Parisians under
the Third Republic to turn their once brilliant city into an
international casino. Its most satisfactory feature was the proof it
displayed of the industrial inventiveness and the artistic instinct of
the French. The political importance of the exhibition lay in the fact
that it determined the majority in the Chamber not to permit the
foreigners attracted by it to the capital to witness a ministerial
crisis. Few strangers of distinction, however, came to it, and not one
sovereign of the great powers visited Paris; but the ministry remained
in office, and M. Waldeck-Rousseau had uninterrupted opportunity of
showing his governmental ability. The only change in his cabinet took
place when General de Galliffet resigned the portfolio of war to General
André. The army, as represented by its officers, had shown symptoms of
hostility to the ministry in consequence of the pardon of Dreyfus. The
new minister of war repressed such demonstrations with proceedings of
the same arbitrary character as those which had called forth criticism
in England when used in the Dreyfus affair. In both cases the
high-handed policy was regarded either with approval or with
indifference by the great majority of the French nation, which ever
since the Revolution has shown that its instincts are in favour of
authoritative government. The emphatic support given by the radical
groups to the autocratic policy of M. Waldeck-Rousseau and his ministers
was not surprising to those who have studied the history of the French
democracy. It has always had a taste for despotism since it first became
a political power in the days of the Jacobins, to whose early protection
General Bonaparte owed his career. On the other hand liberalism has
always been repugnant to the masses, and the only period in which the
Liberals governed the country was under the régime of limited
suffrage--during the Restoration and the Monarchy of July.
Paris and the provinces.
The most important event in France during the last year of the century,
not from its political result, but from the lessons it taught, was
perhaps the Paris municipal election. The quadrennial renewal of all the
municipal councils of France took place in May 1900. The municipality of
the capital had been for many years in the hands of the extreme Radicals
and the revolutionary Socialists. The Parisian electors now sent to the
Hôtel de Ville a council in which the majority were Nationalists, in
general sympathy with the anti-Semitic and plebiscitary movements. The
nationalist councillors did not, however, form one solid party, but were
divided into five or six groups, representing every shade of political
discontent, from monarchism to revisionist-socialism. While the
electorate of Paris thus pronounced for the revision of the
Constitution, the provincial elections, as far as they had a political
bearing, were favourable to the ministry and to the Republic. M.
Waldeck-Rousseau accepted the challenge of the capital, and dealt with
its representatives with the arbitrary weapons of centralization which
the Republic had inherited from the Napoleonic settlement of the
Revolution. Municipal autonomy is unknown in France, and the town
council of Paris has to submit to special restrictions on its liberty of
action. The prefect of the Seine is always present at its meetings as
agent of the government and the minister of the interior can veto any
of its resolutions. The Socialists, when their party ruled the
municipality, clamoured in parliament for the removal of this
administrative control. But now being in a minority they supported the
government in its anti-autonomic rigours. The majority of the municipal
council authorized its president to invite to a banquet, in honour of
the international exhibition, the provincial mayors and a number of
foreign municipal magnates, including the lord mayor of London. The
ministers were not invited, and the prefect of the Seine thereupon
informed the president of the municipality that he had no right, without
consulting the agent of the government, to offer a banquet to the
provincial mayors; and they, with the deference which French officials
instinctively show to the central authority, almost all refused the
invitation to the Hôtel de Ville. The municipal banquet was therefore
abandoned, but the government gave one in the Tuileries gardens, at
which no fewer than 22,000 mayors paid their respects to the chief of
the state. These events showed that, as in the Terror, as at the _coup
d'état_ of 1851, and as in the insurrection of the Commune, the French
provinces were never disposed to follow the political lead of the
capital, whether the opinions prevailing there were Jacobin or
reactionary. These incidents displayed the tendency of the French
democracy, in Paris and in the country alike, to submit to and even to
encourage the arbitrary working of administrative centralization. The
elected mayors of the provincial communes, urban and rural, quitted
themselves like well-drilled functionaries of the state, respectful of
their hierarchical superiors, just as in the days when they were the
nominees of the government; while the population of Paris, in spite of
its perennial proneness to revolution, accepted the rebuff inflicted on
its chosen representatives without any hostile demonstration. The
municipal elections in Paris afforded fresh proof of the unchanging
political ineptitude of the reactionaries. The dissatisfaction of the
great capital with the government of the Republic might, in spite of the
reluctance of the provinces to follow the lead of Paris, have had grave
results if skilfully organized. But the anti-republican groups, instead
of putting forward men of high ability or reputation to take possession
of the Hôtel de Ville, chose their candidates among the same inferior
class of professional politicians as the Radicals and the Socialists
whom they replaced on the municipal council.
France at the opening of the 20th century.
The beginning of a century of the common era is a purely artificial
division of time. Yet it has often marked a turning-point in the history
of nations. This was notably the case in France in 1800. The violent and
anarchical phases of the Revolution of 1789 came to an end with the 18th
century; and the dawn of the 19th was coincident with the administrative
reconstruction of France by Napoleon, on lines which endured with little
modification till the end of that century, surviving seven revolutions
of the executive power. The opening years of the 20th century saw no
similar changes in the government of the country. The Third Republic,
which was about to attain an age double that reached by any other regime
since the Revolution, continued to live on the basis of the Constitution
enacted in 1875, before it was five years old. Yet it seems not unlikely
that historians of the future may take the date 1900 as a landmark
between two distinct periods in the evolution of the French nation.
Results of the Dreyfus affair.
With the close of the 19th century the Dreyfus affair came practically
to an end. Whatever the political and moral causes of the agitation
which attended it, its practical result was to strengthen the Radical
and Socialist parties in the Republic, and to reduce to unprecedented
impotence the forces of reaction. This was due more to the maladroitness
of the Reactionaries than to the virtues or the prescience of the
extreme Left, as the imprisonment of the Jewish captain, which agitated
and divided the nation, could not have been inflicted without the ardent
approval of Republicans of all shades of opinion. But when the majority
at last realized that a mistake had been committed, the Reactionaries,
in great measure through their own unwise policy, got the chief credit
for it. Consequently, as the clericals formed the militant section of
the anti-Republican parties, and as the Radical-Socialists were at that
time keener in their hostility to the Church than in their zeal for
social or economic reform, the issue of the Dreyfus affair brought about
an anti-clerical movement, which, though initiated and organized by a
small minority, met with nothing to resist it in the country, the
reactionary forces being effete and the vast majority of the population
indifferent. The main and absorbing feature therefore of political life
in France in the first years of the 20th century was a campaign against
the Roman Catholic Church, unparalleled in energy since the Revolution.
Its most striking result was the rupture of the Concordat between France
and the Vatican. This act was additionally important as being the first
considerable breach made in the administrative structure reared by
Napoleon, which had hitherto survived all the vicissitudes of the 19th
century. Concurrently with this the influence of the Socialist party in
French policy largely increased. A primary principle professed by the
Socialists throughout Europe is pacificism, and its dissemination in
France acted in two very different ways. It encouraged in the French
people a growth of anti-military spirit, which showed some sign of
infecting the national army, and it impelled the government of the
Republic to be zealous in cultivating friendly relations with other
powers. The result of the latter phase of pacificism was that France,
under the Radical-Socialist administrations of the early years of the
20th century, enjoyed a measure of international prestige of that
superficial kind which is expressed by the state visits of crowned heads
to the chief of the executive power, greater than at any period since
the Second Empire.
Church policy.
The voting of the law which separated the Church from the state will
probably mark a capital date in French history; so, as the
ecclesiastical policy of successive ministries filled almost entirely
the interior chronicles of France for the first five years of the new
century, it will be convenient to set forth in order the events which
during that period led up to the passing of the Separation Act.
The French legislature during the first session of the 20th century was
chiefly occupied with the passing of the Associations Law. That measure,
though it entirely changed the legal position of all associations in
France, was primarily directed against the religious associations of the
Roman Catholic Church. Their influence in the land, according to the
anti-clericals, had been proved by the Dreyfus affair to be excessive.
The Jesuits were alleged, on their own showing, to exercise considerable
power over the officers of the army, and in this way to have been
largely responsible for the blunders of the Dreyfus case. Another less
celebrated order, which took an active part against Dreyfus, the
Assumptionists, had achieved notoriety by its journalistic enterprise,
its cheap newspapers of wide circulation being remarkable for the
violence of their attacks on the institutions and men of the Republic.
The mutual antagonism between the French government and religious
congregations is a tradition which dates from the ancient monarchy and
was continued by Napoleon I. long before the Third Republic adopted it
in the legislation associated with the names of Jules Ferry and Paul
Bert. The prime minister, under whose administration the 20th century
succeeded the 19th, was M. Waldeck-Rousseau, who had been the colleague
of Paul Bert in Gambetta's _grand ministère_, and in 1883 had served
under Jules Ferry in his second ministry. He had retired from political
life, though he remained a member of the Senate, and was making a large
fortune at the bar, when in June 1899, at pecuniary sacrifice, he
consented to form a ministry for the purpose of "liquidating" the
Dreyfus affair. In 1900, the year after the second condemnation of
Dreyfus and his immediate pardon by the government, M. Waldeck-Rousseau
in a speech at Toulouse announced that legislation was about to be
undertaken on the subject of associations.
At that period the hostility of the Revolution to the principle of
associations of all kinds, civil as well as religious, was still
enforced by the law. With the exception of certain commercial societies
subject to special legislation, no association composed of more than
twenty persons could be formed without governmental authorization which
was always revocable, the restriction applying equally to political and
social clubs and to religious communities. The law was the same for all,
but was differently applied. Authorization was rarely refused to
political or social societies, though any club was liable to have its
authorization withdrawn and to be shut up or dissolved. But to religious
orders new authorization was practically never granted. Only four of
them, the orders of Saint Lazare, of the Saint Esprit, of the Missions
Étrangères and of Saint Sulpice, were authorized under the Third
Republic--their authorization dating from the First Empire and the
Restoration. The Frères de la Doctrine Chrétienne were also recognized,
not, however, as a religious congregation under the jurisdiction of the
minister of public worship, but as a teaching body under that of the
minister of education. All the great historical orders, preaching,
teaching or contemplative, were "unauthorized"; they led a precarious
life on sufferance, having as corporations no civil existence, and being
subject to dissolution at a moment's notice by the administrative
authority. In spite of this disability and of the decrees of 1880
directed against unauthorized monastic orders they had so increased
under the anti-clerical Republic, that the religious of both sexes were
more numerous in France at the beginning of the 20th century than at the
end of the ancient monarchy. Moreover, in the twenty years during which
unauthorized Orders had been supposed to be suppressed under the Ferry
Decrees, their numbers had become six times more numerous than before,
while it was the authorized Congregations which had diminished. The bare
catalogue of the religious houses in the land, with the value of their
properties (estimated by M. Waldeck-Rousseau at a milliard--£40,000,000)
filled two White Books of two thousand pages, presented to parliament on
the 4th of December 1900. The hostility to the Congregations was not
confined to the anti-clericals. The secular clergy were suffering
materially from the enterprising competition of their old rivals the
regulars. Had the legislation for defining the legal situation of the
religious orders been undertaken with the sole intention of limiting
their excessive growth, such a measure would have been welcome to the
parochial clergy. But they saw that the attack upon the congregations
was only preliminary to a general attack upon the Church, in spite of
the sincere assurances of the prime minister, a statesman of
conservative temperament, that no harm would accrue to the secular
clergy from the passing of the Associations Law.
Associations Bill.
In January 1901, on the eve of the first debate in the Chamber of
Deputies on the Associations bill, a discussion took place which showed
that the rupture of the Concordat might be nearing the range of
practical politics, though parliament was as yet unwilling to take it
into consideration. The archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Richard, had
published a letter addressed to him by Leo XIII. deploring the projected
legislation as being a breach of the Concordat under which the free
exercise of the Catholic religion in France was assured. The Socialists
argued that this letter was an intolerable intervention on the part of
the Vatican in the domestic politics of the Republic, and proposed that
parliament should after voting the Associations Law proceed to separate
Church and State. M. Waldeck-Rousseau, the prime minister, calm and
moderate, declined to take this view of the pope's letter, and the
resolution was defeated by a majority of more than two to one. But
another motion, proposed by a Nationalist, that the Chamber should
declare its resolve to maintain the Concordat, was rejected by a small
majority. The discussion of the Associations bill was then commenced by
the Chamber and went on until the Easter recess. Its main features when
finally voted were that the right to associate for purposes not illicit
should be henceforth free of all restrictions, though "juridical
capacity" would be accorded only to such associations as were formally
notified to the administrative authority. The law did not, however,
accord liberty of association to religious "Congregations," none of
which could be formed without a special statute, and any constituted
without such authorization would be deemed illicit. The policy of the
measure, as applying to religious orders, was attacked by the extreme
Right and the extreme Left from their several standpoints. The clericals
proposed that under the new law all associations, religious as well as
civil, should be free. The Socialists proposed that all religious
communities, authorized or unauthorized, should be suppressed. The prime
minister took a middle course. But he went farther than the moderate
Republicans, with whom he was generally classed. While he protected the
authorized religious orders against the attacks of the extreme
anti-clericals, he accepted from the latter a new clause which
disqualified any member of an unauthorized order from teaching in any
school. This was a blow at the principle of liberty of instruction,
which had always been supported by Liberals of the old school, who had
no sympathy with the pretensions of clericalism. Consequently this
provision, though voted by a large majority, was opposed by the Liberals
of the Republican party, notably by M. Ribot, who had been twice prime
minister, and M. Aynard, almost the sole survivor of the Left Centre. It
was remarked that in these, as in all subsequent debates on
ecclesiastical questions, the ablest defenders of the Church were not
found among the clericals, but among the Liberals, whose primary
doctrine was that of tolerance, which they believed ought to be applied
to the exercise of the religion nominally professed by a large majority
of the nation. Few of the ardent professors of that religion gave
effective aid to the Church during that period of crisis. M. de Mun
still used his eloquence in its defence, but the brilliant Catholic
orator had entered his sixtieth year with health impaired, and among the
young reactionary members there was not one who displayed any talent. At
the other end of the Chamber M. Viviani, a Socialist member for Paris,
made an eloquent speech. As was anticipated the bill received no serious
opposition in the Senate. Though not in sympathy with the attacks of the
Socialists in the Chamber on property, the Upper House had as a whole no
objection to their attacks on the Church, and had become a more
persistently anti-clerical body than the Chamber of Deputies. The bill
was therefore passed without any serious amendments, even those which
were moved for the purpose of affirming the principle of liberty of
education being supported by very few Republican senators. In the
debates some of the utterances of the prime minister were important. On
the proposal of M. Rambaud, a professor who was minister of education in
the Méline cabinet of 1896, that religious associations should be
authorized by decree and not by law, M. Waldeck-Rousseau said that
inasmuch as vows of poverty and celibacy were illegal, nothing but a law
would suffice to give legality to any association in which such vows
were imposed on the members. It was thus laid down by the responsible
author of the law that the third clause, providing that any association
founded for an illicit cause was null, applied to religious communities.
On the other hand the prime minister in another speech repudiated the
suggestion that the proposed law was aimed against any form of religion.
He argued that the religious orders, far from being essential to the
existence of the Church, were a hindrance to the work of the parochial
clergy, and that inasmuch as the religious orders were organizations
independent of the State they were by their nature and influence a
danger to the State. Consequently their regulation had become necessary
in the interests both of Church and State. The general suppression of
religious congregations, the prime minister said, was not contemplated;
the case of each one would be decided on its merits, and he had no doubt
that parliament would favourably consider the authorization of those
whose aim was to alleviate misery at home or to extend French influence
abroad. The tenor of M. Waldeck-Rousseau's speech was eminently
Concordatory. One of his chief arguments against the religious orders
was that they were not mentioned in the Concordat, and that their
unregulated existence prejudiced the interests of the Concordatory
clergy. The speech was therefore an official declaration in favour of
the maintenance of the relations between Church and State. That being
so, it is important to notice that by a majority of nearly two to one
the Senate voted the placarding of the prime minister's speech in all
the communes of France, and that the mover of the resolution was M.
Combes, senator of the Charente-Inférieure, a politician of advanced
views who up to that date had held office only once, when he was
minister of education and public worship for about six months, in the
Bourgeois administration in 1895-1896.
Socialism.
The "Law relating to the contract of Association" was promulgated on the
2nd of July 1901, and its enactment was the only political event of high
importance that year. The Socialists, except in their anti-clerical
capacity, were more active outside parliament than within. Early in the
year some formidable strikes took place. At Montceau-les-Mines in
Burgundy, where labour demonstrations had often been violent, a new
feature of a strike was the formation of a trade-union by the
non-strikers, who called their organization "the yellow trade-union"
(_le syndicat jaune_) in opposition to the red trade-union of the
strikers, who adopted the revolutionary flag and were supported by the
Socialist press. At the same time the dock-labourers at Marseilles went
out on strike, by the orders of an international trade-union in that
port, as a protest against the dismissal of a certain number of
foreigners. The number of strikes in France had increased considerably
under the Waldeck-Rousseau government. Its opponents attributed this to
the presence in the cabinet of M. Millerand, who had been ranked as a
Socialist. On the other hand, the revolutionary Socialists
excommunicated the minister of commerce for having joined a "bourgeois
government" and retired from the general congress of the Socialist party
at Lyons, where MM. Briand and Viviani, themselves future ministers,
persuaded the majority not to go so far. The federal committee of miners
projected a general strike in all the French coal-fields, and to that
end organized a referendum. But of 125,000 miners inscribed on their
lists nearly 70,000 abstained from voting, and although the general
strike was voted in October by a majority of 34,000, it was not put into
effect. Another movement favoured by the Socialists was that of
anti-militarism. M. Hervé, a professor at the lycée of Sens, had
written, in a local journal, the _Pioupiou de l'Yonne_, on the occasion
of the departure of the conscripts for their regiments, some articles
outraging the French flag. He was prosecuted and acquitted at the
assizes at Auxerre in November, a number of his colleagues in the
teaching profession coming forward to testify that they shared his
views. The local educational authority, the academic council of Dijon,
however, dismissed M. Hervé from his official functions, and its
sentence was confirmed by the superior council of public education to
which he had appealed. Thereupon the Socialists in the Chamber, under
the lead of M. Viviani, violently attacked the Government--shortly
before the prorogation at the end of the year. M. Leygues, the minister
of education, defended the policy of his department with equal vigour,
declaring that if a professor in the "university" claimed the right of
publishing unpatriotic and anti-military opinions he could exercise it
only on the condition of giving up his employment under government--a
thesis which was supported by the entire Chamber with the exception of
the Socialists. This manifestation of anti-military spirit, though not
widespread, was the more striking as it followed close upon a second
visit of the emperor and empress of Russia to France, which took place
in September 1901 and was of a military rather than of a popular
character. The Russian sovereigns did not come to Paris. After a naval
display at Dunkirk, where they landed, they were the guests of President
Loubet at Compiègne, and concluded their visit by attending a review
near Reims of the troops which had taken part in the Eastern manoeuvres.
Compared with the welcome given by the French population to the emperor
and empress in 1896 their reception on this occasion was not
enthusiastic. By not visiting Paris they seemed to wish to avoid contact
with the people, who were persuaded by a section of the press that the
motive of the imperial journey to France was financial. The Socialists
openly repudiated the Russian alliance, and one of them, the mayor of
Lille, who refused to decorate his municipal buildings when the
sovereigns visited the department of the Nord, was neither revoked nor
suspended, although he publicly based his refusal on grounds insulting
to the tsar.
It may be mentioned that the census returns of 1901 showed that the
total increase of the population of France since the previous census in
1896 amounted only to 412,364, of which 289,662 was accounted for by the
capital, while on the other hand the population of sixty out of
eighty-seven departments had diminished.
As the quadrennial election of the Chamber of Deputies was due to take
place in the spring of 1902, the first months of that year were chiefly
occupied by politicians in preparing for it, though none of them gave
any sign of being aware that the legislation to be effected by the new
Chamber would be the most important which any parliament had undertaken
under the constitution of 1875. At the end of the recess the prime
minister in a speech at Saint Etienne, the capital of the Loire, of
which department he was senator, passed in review the work of his
ministry. With regard to the future, on the eve of the election which
was to return the Chamber destined to disestablish the Church, he
assured the secular clergy that they must not consider the legislation
of the last session as menacing them: far from that, the recent law,
directed primarily against those monastic orders which were
anti-Republican associations, owning political journals and organizing
electioneering funds (whose members he described as "moines ligueurs et
moines d'affaires"), would be a guarantee of the Republic's protection
of the parochial clergy. The presence of his colleague, M. Millerand, on
this occasion showed that M. Waldeck-Rousseau did not intend to separate
himself from the Radical-Socialist group which had supported his
government; and the next day the Socialist minister of commerce, at
Firminy, a mining centre in the same department, made a speech
deprecating the pursuit of unpractical social ideals, which might have
been a version of Gambetta's famous discourse on opportunism edited by
an economist of the school of Léon Say. The Waldeck-Rousseau programme
for the elections seemed therefore to be an implied promise of a
moderate opportunist policy which would strengthen and unite the
Republic by conciliating all sections of its supporters. When parliament
met, M. Delcassé, minister for foreign affairs, on a proposal to
suppress the Embassy to the Vatican, declared that even if the Concordat
were ever revoked it would still be necessary for France to maintain
diplomatic relations with the Holy See. On the other hand, the ministry
voted, against the moderate Republicans, for an abstract resolution,
proposed by M. Brisson, in favour of the abrogation of the Loi Falloux
of 1850, which law, by abolishing the monopoly of the "university," had
established the principle of liberty of education. Another abstract
resolution, supported by the government, which subsequently become law,
was voted in favour of the reduction of the terms of compulsory military
service from three years to two.
Resignation of Waldeck-Rousseau.
The general elections took place on the 27th of April 1902; with the
second ballots on the 11th of May, and were favourable to the ministry,
321 of its avowed supporters being returned and 268 members of the
Opposition, including 140 "Progressist" Republicans, many of whom were
deputies whose opinions differed little from those of M.
Waldeck-Rousseau. In Paris the government lost a few seats which were
won by the Nationalist group of reactionaries. The chief surprise of the
elections was the announcement made by M. Waldeck-Rousseau on the 20th
of May, while the president of the Republic was in Russia on a visit to
the tsar, of his intention to resign office. No one but the prime
minister's intimates knew that his shattered health was the true cause
of his resignation, which was attributed to the unwillingness of an
essentially moderate man to be the leader of an advanced party and the
instrument of an immoderate policy. His retirement from public life at
this crisis was the most important event of its kind since the death of
his old master Gambetta. He had learned opportunist statesmanship in the
short-lived _grand ministère_ and in the long-lived Ferry administration
of 1883-1885, after which he had become an inactive politician in the
Senate, while making a large fortune at the bar. In spite of having
eschewed politics he had been ranked in the public mind with Gambetta
and Jules Ferry as one of the small number of politicians of the
Republic who had risen high above mediocrity. While he had none of the
magnetic exuberance which furthered the popularity of Gambetta, his cold
inexpansiveness had not made him unpopular as was his other chief, Jules
Ferry. Indeed, his unemotional coldness was one of the elements of the
power with which he dominated parliament; and being regarded by the
nation as the strong man whom France is always looking for, he was the
first prime minister of the Republic whose name was made a rallying cry
at a general election. Yet the country gave him a majority only for it
to be handed over to other politicians to use in a manner which he had
not contemplated. On the 3rd of June 1902 he formally resigned office,
his ministry having lasted for three years, all but a few days, a longer
duration than that of any other under the Third Republic.