Produced by Julia Miller, Janet Blenkinship and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF/Gallica) at
http://gallica.bnf.fr)
FRANCE
AND THE REPUBLIC
A RECORD OF THINGS SEEN AND LEARNED
IN THE FRENCH PROVINCES DURING
THE 'CENTENNIAL' YEAR 1889
BY
WILLIAM HENRY HURLBERT
AUTHOR OF 'IRELAND UNDER COERCION'
_WITH A MAP_
LONDON
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
AND NEW YORK: 15 EAST 16th STREET
1890
_All rights reserved_
PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
LONDON
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1890
by William Henry Hurlbert
in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington
* * * * *
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
PAGE
I. Scope of the book--French Republicanism condemned by
Swiss and American experience--Its relations to the
French people xxiii
II. M. Gambetta's Parliamentary revolution--What Germany
owes to the French Republicans--Legislative usurpation
in France and the United States xxvi
III. The Executive in France, England, and America--Liberty
and the hereditary principle--General Grant on the
English Monarchy--Washington's place in American
history xxxvii
IV. The legend of the First Republic--A carnival of incapacity
ending in an orgie of crime--The French people never
Republican--Paris and the provinces--The Third Republic
surrendered to the Jacobins, and committed to
persecution and corruption--Estimated excess of expenditure
over income from 1879 to 1889, 7,000,000,000 francs
or 280,000,000_l._ li
V. Danton's maxim, 'To the victors belong the spoils'--Comparative
cost of the French and the British Executive
machinery--The Republican war against religion.--The
present situation as illustrated by past events lxviii
VI. Foreign misconceptions of the French people--An English
statesman's notion that there are 'five millions of
Atheists' in France--Mr. Bright and Mr. Gladstone the last
English public men who will 'cite the Christian Scriptures
as an authority'--Signor Crispi on modern constitutional
government and the French 'principles of 1789'--Napoleon
the only 'Titan of the Revolution'--The debt of
France for her modern liberty to America and to England lxxvi
VII. The Exposition of 1889 an electoral device--Panic of the
Government caused by Parisian support of General
Boulanger--Futile attempt of M. Jules Ferry to win back
Conservatives to the Republic--Narrow escape of the
Republic at the elections of 1889--Steady increase of
monarchical party since 1885---Weakness of the Republic
as compared with the Second Empire lxxxix
VIII. How the Republic maintains itself--A million of people
dependent on public employment--M. Constans 'opens
Paradise' to 13,000 Mayors--Public servants as political
agents--Open pressure on the voters--Growing strength
of the provinces.--The hereditary principle alone can now
restore the independence of the French Executive--Diplomatic
dangers of actual situation--Socialism or a
Constitutional Monarchy the only alternatives xcvi
CHAPTER I
IN THE PAS-DE-CALAIS
Calais--Natural and artificial France--The provinces and the
departments--The practical joke of the First Consulate--The
Counts of Charlemagne and the Prefects of Napoleon--President
Carnot at Calais--Politics and Socialism in Calais--Immense
outlay on the port, but works yet unfinished--Indifference
of the people--A president with a grandfather--The 'Great Carnot'
and Napoleon--The party of the 'Sick at heart'--The Louis XVI. of
the Republic--Léon Say and the 'White Mouse'--Gambetta's victory
in 1877--Political log-rolling, French and American--Republican
extravagance and the 'Woollen Stocking'--Boulanger and his
legend--Wanted a 'Great Frenchman'--The Duc d'Aumale
and the Comte de Paris--The Republican law of exile--The
French people not Republican--The Legitimists and the farmers--A
French journalist explains the Presidential progress--Why
decorations are given 1-22
CHAPTER II
IN THE PAS-DE-CALAIS--(_continued_)
Boulogne--Arthur Young and the Boulonnais--Boulogne and Quebec--The
English and French types of civilisation--A French ecclesiastic
on the religious question--The oppressive school law of
1886--The Church and the Concordat--Rural communes paying
double for free schools--Vexatious regulations to prevent establishment
of free schools--All ministers of religion excluded from
school councils--Government officers control the whole system--Permanent
magistrates also excluded--Revolt of the religious
sentiment throughout France against the new system--Anxiety
of Jules Ferry to make peace with the Church--Energy shown
by the Catholics in resistance--St.-Omer--The Spanish and
scholastic city of Guy Fawkes and Daniel O'Connell--M. De la
Gorce, the historian of 1848--High character of the
population--Improvement in tone of the French army--Morals of the
soldiers--Devotion of the officers to their profession--Derangement of
the Executive in France by the elective principle--The 'laicisation'
of the schools--Petty persecutions--Children forbidden to
attend the funeral of their priest--The Marist Brethren at Albert--Albert
and the Maréchal d'Ancre--A chapter of history in a
name--Little children stinting their own food, to send another
child to school--President Carnot and the nose of M. Ferry--French
irreligion in the United States--The case of Girard
College--Can Christianity be abolished in France?--The declared
object of the Republic--Morals of Artois--Dense population--Fanatics
of the family--Increase of juvenile crime--American
experience of the schools without religion--A New England report
on 'atrocious and flagrant crimes in Massachusetts'--Relative
increase of native white population and native crime in America--An
American Attorney-General calls the public school system
'a poisonous fountain of misery and moral death'--A local
heroine of St.-Omer--The statue of Jacqueline Robins--The
Duke of Marlborough and the Jesuits College--A curious sidelight
on English politics in 1710--How St.-Omer escaped a
siege 23-43
CHAPTER III
IN THE PAS-DE-CALAIS--(_continued_)
Aire-sur-la-Lys--Local objections to a national railway--A visit to a
councillor-general--Pentecost in Artois--The Artesians in 1789--Wealth
and power of the clergy--Recognition of the Third
Estate long before the Revolution--The English and the French
clergy in the last century--Lord Macaulay and Arthur Young--Sympathy
of the curés with the people--Turgot, Condorcet and
the rural clergy---The Revolution and public education--M. Guizot
the founder of the French primary schools--The liberal school
ordinance of 1698--The Bishop of Arras, in 1740, on the duty of
educating the people--The experience of Louisiana as to public
schools and criminality--The two Robespierres saved and educated
by priests--What came of it--A rural church and congregation
in Artois--The notary in rural France--A village procession--'Beating
the bounds' in France--An altar of verdure and roses--The
villagers singing as they march--Ancient customs in
Northern France 44-52
CHAPTER IV
IN THE PAS-DE-CALAIS--(_continued_)
Aire-sur-la-Lys--Local and general elections in France--A public meeting
in rural Artois--A councillor-general and his constituents--Artois
in the 18th and 19th centuries--Well-tilled fields, fine
roads, hedges, and orchards--Effect of long or short leases--A
meeting in a grange--French, English, and American audiences--Favouritism
under the conscription--Extravagant outlay on
scholastic palaces--Almost a scene--A political disturbance
promoted--Canvassing in England and France--Tenure of office in
the French Republic--'To the victors belong the spoils,' the
maxim not of Jackson but of Danton--'Epuration,' what it
means--If Republicans are not put into office 'they will have
civil war'--'No justice of the peace nor public school teacher to
be spared'--'Terror and anarchy carried into all branches of the
public service'--M. de Freycinet declares that 'servants of the
State have no liberty in politics'--The Tweed régime of New
York officially organised in France---Men of position reluctant
to take office--The expense of French elections--1,300,000_l._
sterling the estimated cost of an opposition campaign--A little
dinner in a French country house--The French cuisine national
and imported--An old Flemish city--Devastations of the Revolution--The
beautiful Church of St.-Pierre--A picturesque Corps
de Garde--The tournament of Bayard at Aire--Sixteenth-century
merry-makings at Aire--Gifts to Mary of England on her marriage
to Philip of Spain--The ancient city of Thérouanne--Public
schools in the 17th century--Small landholders in France before
1789. 53-72
CHAPTER V
IN THE SOMME
Amiens--Picardy Old and New--Arthur Young and Charles James
Fox in Amiens--'The look of a capital'--The floating gardens
of Amiens--A stronghold of Boulangism--Protest of Amiens
against the Terror of 1792--The French nation and the Commune
of Paris--Vergniaud denounces the Parisians as the 'slaves of the
vilest scoundrels alive'--Gambetta and his balloon--Amiens and
the Revolution of September 1870--The rise of M. Goblet--The
'great blank credit opened to the Republic in 1870'--What has
become of it--The Prussians in Amiens--Warlike spirit of the
Picards--A political portrait of M. Goblet by a fellow citizen--A
Roman son and his father's funeral--A typical Republican senator
and mayor--How M. Petit demolished the crosses in the cemetery--M.
Spuller as Prefect of the Somme--The Christian Brothers and
their schools--M. Jules Ferry withholds the salaries earned by
teachers--The Emperor Julian of Amiens--How the Sisters were
turned out of their schools--The mayor, the locksmith, and the
curate--Mdlle. de Colombel--A senatorial epistle--Ulysses
deserted by Calypso--Why Boulangism flourishes at Amiens--The
First Republic invoked to justify the destruction of crosses
on graves--The Cathedral of Amiens and Mr. Ruskin. 73-94
CHAPTER VI
IN THE SOMME--(_continued_)
Amiens--Party names taken from persons--The effect of Republican
misrule at Amiens--Why the Monarchists acted with the
Boulangists--The Picards incline towards the Empire--How the
Republic of 1848 captured France--Armand Marrast and the
French mail coaches--Mr. Sumner's story--The political value
of paint--Paris and the provinces--M. Mermeix offers with a
few million francs and a few thousand rowdies to change the
French Government--General Boulanger's campaign in Picardy--Capturing
the mammas by kissing the babies--The Monarchical
peasantry--The National Accounts of France not balanced for
years--Conservatives excluded from the Budget Committee--The
Boulanger programme--Expenses of the political machine in
France, England, and America--The Boulangist campaign conducted
by voluntary subscriptions--General Boulanger and the
army--The common sewer of the discontent of France--The
local finances of a French city--Municipal expenses of Amiens--Pressure
of the octroi--A local deficit of millions since the
Republicans got into power--The mayor and the prefect control
the accounts--Immense expenditure on scholastic palaces--Estimated
annual increase in France since 1880 of local indebtedness,
10,000,000_l._ sterling--M. Goblet on the growth of young men's
monarchical clubs--History of the _octroi_--General prosperity of
Picardy--Rural ideas of aristocracy--Land ownership in Ireland
and France--'Land-grabbing' in Picardy a hundred years ago--The
corvée abolished before the Revolution, but it still exists
under the Republic, as a _prestation en nature_--Public education
in Picardy two centuries ago--Small tenants as numerous under
Edward II. in Picardy as small proprietors now are--Home rule
needed in France--'The opinion of a man's legs' 95-124
CHAPTER VII
IN THE AISNE
St.-Gobain--Paris and the Ile-de-France--Reclamation of the
commons--Mischievous haste in the Revolutionary transfer of
lands--The evolution of property and order in France and
England--The flower gardens of France--The home counties
around London compared with the departments around Paris--Superiority
of the French fruit and vegetable markets--The
military city of La Fère--A local cabbage-leaf--French farmers
and the Treaties of Commerce--Arthur Young at St.-Gobain--The
largest mirror in the world--The great French glassworks--'An
industrial flower on a seignorial stalk, springing from a feudal
root'--Evolution without Revolution--Two centuries and a half of
industrial progress--Labour in the Middle Ages--The Irish apostle
of North-eastern France--The forests of France--A factory in a
château--A centenarian royal porter--The Duchesse de Berri and
the Empress Eugénie--A co-operative association of consumers--A
great manufacturing company working on lines laid down under
Louis XIV.--Glass-working, Venetian and French--A jointstock
company of the 18th century--The old and new school of factory
discipline--French industry and the Terror--'Two aristocrats'
called in to save a confiscated property--St.-Gobain and the Eiffel
Tower--Royal luxuries in 1673, popular necessaries of life in 1889--How
great mirrors are cast--Beauty of the processes--The
coming age of glass--Glass pavements and roofs--The hereditary
principle among the working classes--Practical co-operation of
capital and labour--Schools, asylums, workmen's houses and
gardens, social clubs, and savings-banks--Co-operative pension
funds--A great economic family--Of 2,650 workpeople more than
50 per cent. employed for more than ten years--A subterranean
lake--The crypts of St.-Gobain and the Cisterns of Constantinople--A
spectral gondolier--A Venetian promenade with coloured
lanterns underground 125-161
CHAPTER VIII
IN THE AISNE--(_continued_)
Laon, Chauny, and St.-Gobain--The French Revolution and Spanish
soda--The most extensive chemical works in France--A miniature
Rotterdam--A Cité Ouvrière--The religious war in Chauny--Local
and immigrant labour--M. Allain-Targé on Boulanger, the
High Court of Justice, common sense and common honesty---French
elections, matters of bargain and sale--'The blackguardocracy'--Sketches
by a Republican minister--French freemasonry
a persecuting sect--Their power in the Government--Utterly unlike
the freemasonry of England, Germany, or America--The war
against Christianity in France and Spanish America--1867 and
the industrial progress of France--Extent of the chemical works
of France--Retiring pensions for workmen--Chauny in the olden
time--How the honest burghers freed their city in 1432--A contrast
with the rioters of the Bastille in 1789--Henri IV. and La
Belle Gabrielle--Chauny and the Revolution--The murder of
d'Estaing--Chauny acclaims the Restoration, and gives a gold
medal to the Prussian commandant--Public charity and public
education in the 12th century--Benevolent foundations pillaged
in 1793--Law and order under the _ancien régime_--A canal in
the law courts--An enterprising American turns rubbish into
indiarubber at Chauny 162-185
CHAPTER IX
IN THE AISNE--(_continued_)
Laon--A feudal fortress home--Chauny and the green monkeys of
Rabelais--The festival of the jongleurs and the learned dogs--A
damsel of Chauny on English good sense and Queen Victoria--A
region of parks and châteaux--The cradle of the French Monarchy--How
the Revolution robbed France--The rural reign of pillage
and murder--Horrors committed in the provinces during 1789--Arthur
Young and Gouverneur Morris on the general depravation
and lawlessness--The National Assembly a mere noisy 'mob'--The
outbreak of crime which preceded the Terror--The truth
about Madame Roland--Her hatred of Marie Antoinette and her
thirst for blood--The legend of the Gironde--Brissot de Warville
on robbery as a virtuous action--The relations of the French
Revolution to property--France more free before 1789 than after
it--The laws against emigrants--Girls of fourteen condemned to
death--Emigration made a crime, that property might be pillaged--How
Irène de Tencin defended the family estate--The story of
the Saporta family--The Laonnais in the 18th century--Wide-spread
ruin of its churches, convents, and châteaux--Destruction
of accumulated capital--How syndicates of rogues stole bronzes,
brasswork, and monuments--The story of two châteaux--The
bishop's château at Anizy--The burghers and the seigneurs in
the 16th century--The local 'directory' in 1790--Wreck, ruin,
and robbery--The Château of Pinon--Once the property of a
granddaughter of Edward III. of England--A domain of the Duc
d'Orléans--A tragedy of love and murder--Death of the Marquis
d'Albret--How Pinon passed to the family of De Courvals--The
present owner an American lady--The finest château in the
Laonnais--What has the Laonnais gained from the ruin of the
Anizy? 186-225
CHAPTER X.
IN THE AISNE--(_continued_)
Laon--The ruins of Coucy-le-Château--A rural inn in France--The
sugar crisis--The birthplace of César de Vendóme--The bell
which tolls and is heard by the dying alone--The hanging of boys
for killing rabbits--Game laws, French and English--The true
story of Enguerrand de Coucy--A little feudal city--The finest
donjon in France--An official guardian--A dinner with four
councillors-general--'What France really wants is a man'--Agricultural
philosophers--How a councillor-general tested chemicals--Peasantry
on the highway--A land of gardens--A city set
on a hill--Simple good-natured people--A raging Boulangist at
Laon--What a barber saw in Tonkin--The diamond belt of King
Norodom--Castelin the friend of Boulanger--A revolutionary
shoemaker on government by committees--Evils of the
Exposition--Foreigners steal the ideas of France--The railways, the
new feudal system--They are the real 'enemy' of the people--Extravagance
of the ministers--Freemasonry at Laon--How it
controls the press--The rise of Deputy Doumer--How he lost
his seat in 1889--The author of 'Chez Paddy' at Château
Thierry--Over-zeal of the curés--The question of working men's unions--M.
Doumer's report on the Law of Associations--He proves that
the Republic has done absolutely nothing with this law--'Five
years' spent in drawing up a report--'The Republic never existed
until 1879'--And nothing done for working men until 1888--M.
de Freycinet and M. Carnot only 'studied measures which might
be taken;' but were not!--The first practical step taken by M.
Doumer by making an enormous report in 1888, recommending
things to be done hereafter--The true Republic eluding for ten
years questions which the Emperor grappled with in 1867--The
voters of Laon in September defeat M. Doumer--A curious little
chapter of French politics--M. Doumer's coquetry with General
Boulanger--After his defeat M. Doumer becomes secretary of
the President of the Chamber and lets the working men's question
alone--Politics as a profession in France and the United
States--Intense centralisation of power in France makes it easier
and more profitable than in America 226-258
CHAPTER XI
IN THE NORD
Valenciennes--The shabbiest historic town in North-eastern
France--Perfect cultivation of French Flanders--Cock-fighting and
flowers--Prosperity of the cabarets--One to every forty-four inhabitants
around Valenciennes--Growth of the mining and manufacturing
towns--Interesting buildings in Valenciennes--Carelessness of the
citizens about their city--A graceful edifice of the 15th century
falling into ruins--Valenciennes in the days of the Hanse of
London--Mediæval burghers and their sovereigns--A citizen of
Valenciennes, in 1357, the richest man in Europe--Festivals in
the olden times--Religious wars--Vauban at Valenciennes--How
the clothworkers fled from the Spanish persecution--Dumouriez
at Valenciennes--The Hôtel de Ville--Interesting local artists
from Simon Marmion down to Watteau and Pater--The triptych
of Rubens--Some historic portraits--The Musée Carpeaux--The
coal mines of Anzin--14,035 workmen there employed and
200,210,702 tons of coal extracted--Competition with Belgium,
the Pas-de-Calais, England, and Germany--The coal mines of
Anzin organised a century and a half ago--The discovery of coal
in North-eastern France--Energy shown by the local _noblesse_--Pierre
Mathieu, an engineer, strikes the vein in 1734--The lords
of the soil claim their rights over the coal--A long lawsuit ending
in a compromise--A business arrangement under the _ancien
régime_--The hereditary principle recognised in the organisation
and undisturbed by the Revolution--An orderly, quiet, and prosperous
town--A region of factories intermingled with farms--Charming
home of the director--The company encourages workmen's
homes, with gardens and allotments--An improvement on the
Cité Ouvrière--2,628 model homes now occupied by workmen--For
three francs a month a workman secures a well-built cottage,
with drainage and cellarage, six good rooms and closets, and a
plot of ground--2,500 families hold garden sites for cultivation--Fuel
allowed, and a general 'participation in profits' of a practical
sort--The right of the workmen to be consulted recognised at
Anzin a century and a half ago--Beneficial and educational
institutions--An industrial republic--How the National Assembly
meddled with the mines--Mining laws in France, ancient and
modern--Influence of politics on the output of the mines--Every
Republican development at Paris diminishes, and every check to
Republicanism at Paris develops, the great coal industry--The
great strike of 1884--During that year the company expended for
the benefit of the workmen a sum equivalent to the profits divided
amongst the shareholders--What caused the collision therefore
between capital and labour?--A syndicate of miners under a
former Anzin workman, Basly, puts a pressure from Paris upon
the workmen at Anzin to develop the strike--The pretext found in
contracts granted to good workmen--The object of the strike
to establish the equality of bad with good workmen--Boycotting
and intimidation--Dynamite and Radical deputies from
Paris--A Republican minister asks the company to accept Basly
and his syndicate as an umpire--Bitter opposition of the Basly
syndicate to the saving fund system--They demand a State
pension fund--And pending this a fund controlled by the syndicate--A
despotism of agitators--Upshot of the strike--The mines in
the Pas-de-Calais--Visits to workmen's houses--Fine appearance
and carriage of the miners--Their politics--Women and children--Good
ventilation and sanitation of the mines--'No man can be
a miner not bred to it as a boy'--Excellent housekeeping of the
women--Miners of Southern and Northern France--Influence of
high altitudes on character--The elective principle in the mines--Morals
and conduct of the mining people--Churches and
schools--A children's school at St. Waast--A digression into the
Artois--What the Tiers-Etat of Northern France wanted in 1789--The
_cahiers_ of the Tiers-Etat--Respect for vested interests--A
visit to St.-Amand--The conspiracy of Dumouriez--Ruin of a
magnificent abbey--A beautiful belfry--Interesting pictures by
Watteau--Co-operation at Anzin--What its advantages are to the
workmen--Eight per cent. dividends to the members in 1866, and
an average during 23 years to 1889 of 11-80/100 per cent.--How the
workmen and their families live--Table of articles purchased--Attendance
upon the schools--Influence of women and families--Increase
of juvenile crime under irreligious education in France
and the United States--Louis Napoleon's National Retiring Fund
for Old Age--Regulations of the Anzin Council affecting this
fund--Average expenditure of the Anzin company for the benefit of
workmen 'fifty centimes for every ton of coal extracted'--The
Decazeville strikes in 1888--They begin with the murder of one
of the best engineers and end with a workman's banquet to the
engineer-in-chief 259-331
CHAPTER XII
IN THE NORD--(_continued_)
Lille--The _Flamand flamingant_--Pertinacity of the Flemish tongue--A
historic city without monuments--Old customs and traditions--The
Musée Wicar--The unique wax bust--A 'pious foundation'
of art, and M. Carolus Duran--Excellent educational institutions
of Le Nord--A land flowing with beer--Increase of the factory
populations--Decrease of drunkenness in the cities--Increase in
the rural districts--Special cabarets for women--Should women
smoke?--Flemish cock-fighting and the example of England--A
model Republican prefect--Juvenile prostitution--The souls of
the people and their votes--Danton's system of uneducated judges--Dislike
of good people to politics--A pessimist rebuked--The
Monarchist majorities in Lille--Inaccurate representation of the
people in the Chamber--Hazebrouck and its Dutch gardens--The
Republic hated for its extravagance--Relative strength of
Republican and Monarchical majorities--Elections conducted
under secret instructions--Cutting down majorities--The case of
M. Leroy-Beaulieu in the Hérault--Keeping out dangerous
economists--Ballot 'stuffing' in France and the United States--The
methods of Robespierre readopted--Systematic 'invalidation'
of elections--The people must not choose the wrong men--Boulanger
and Joffrin--'Tactical necessities' in politics--The
delusion of universal suffrage--An Austrian view of the elective
and hereditary principles--Energy of the Catholics in North-eastern
France--Father Damien--Public charity--Hereditary mendicants
in French Flanders--Dogs and _douaniers_--The division of
communes--Foundling hospitals and the struggle for life--Mutual
Aid Societies--Is woman a 'Clubbable' animal?--M. Welche and
the agricultural syndicates--'Les Prévoyants de l'Avenir,' a phenomenal
success--It begins in 1882 with 757 members and 6,237
francs; in 1889 it numbers 59,932 members, with a capital of
1,541,868 francs--The Franco-German war and the religious
sentiment--The great Catholic University--Private contributions
of 11,000,000 francs--The scientific and medical schools--M.
Ferry and the free universities--Catholic education in France
and the United States--The case of Girard College--The dangers
of the French system--The monopoly of the University of France--Liberal
outlay of the Catholics of Paris--A mediæval Catholic
merchant--'The work of God' in a business partnership--Mutual
assistance in the Lille factories--Model houses at Roubaix--A
true _Mont-de-Piété_--The Masurel fund of 1607--Loans without
interest--A prosperous charity plundered by the Republic--A
benevolent fund of 455,454 francs in 1789 reduced to 10,408
francs in 1803--The fund restored under the Monarchy and
Second Empire--The 'King William's Fund' of the Netherlanders
in London--Count de Bylandt and Sir Polydore de
Keyser 332-368
CHAPTER XIII
IN THE MARNE
Reims--The capital of the French kings--Clotilde and Clovis, Jeanne
d'Arc and Urban II.--Vineyards and factories--The wines of
Champagne known and unknown--The red wine of Bouzy--Mr.
Canning and still Champagne--The syndication of famous brands--A
visit to the cardinal archbishop--Employers and employed--The
Catholic workmen's clubs and the Christian corporations--M.
Léon Harmel--The religious education of a factory--How the
workmen Christianised themselves--The conversion of a wife by
a gown--The local authorities discouraging religion--'Planting
Christians like vines'--'The Rights of Man' and capital and
labour--Mediæval and modern methods compared--Capital and
universal suffrage--Money in the first Revolution--Le Pelletier,
the millionaire, and the mobs of the Palais Royal--The dramatic
justice of a murder--Unwritten chapters of revolutionary history--The
duty of employers--'The Masters' Catechism'--The invasion
of 1870 and the Christian corporations--Modern syndications and
the ancient _maîtrise_--Professional syndicates and professional
strikes--Good out of evil--The working men and the upper classes--Count
Albert de Mun--A popular vote against universal suffrage--The
Holy See and the Catholic labour movement in France--The
parochial clergy and the laymen--The Wesleyans and the
Catholics--Privileged purveyors--The financial aspect of the
Catholic corporations--A revival of the old guilds--The national
system of the corporations--Provincial and general assemblies--The
German _Cultur-Kampf_ and the French Catholic clubs--The
Republican attack on religion--Religious freedom and freedom
from religion--The State church of unbelief--The 'moral unity'
men--Napoleon and Guizot--The Jacobins of 1792 and 1879--Moral
unity under Louis XIV.--Alva and M. Jules Ferry--A
chapter of the Revolution at Reims--Mr. Carlyle's little 'murder
of about eight persons'--The political influence of massacres--The
'days of September' and the elections to the Convention--How
they chose Jacobin deputies at Reims--The documentary
story of the eight murders--Mayors under the Republic--The
defence of Lille--How the Republic voted a monument and Louis
Philippe built it--Desecration of a great cathedral--The legend of
Ruhl and the sacred ampulla--The demolition of St.-Nicaise and
the bargain of Santerre--How Napoleon disciplined the Faubourg
St.-Antoine--Is the Cathedral of Reims in danger?--Its restoration
under the cardinal archbishop--The budget of public worship--Expenses
of the administration--The salaries of the clergy, Protestant
and Catholic--Jewish rabbis paid less than servants in the
Ministère--Steady cutting down of the budget--No statistics of religious
opinion in France--A Benedictine archbishop--Great increase of
the religious sentiment in Reims--The Church driven by the
Republic into opposition--Léon Say and the present Government--The
home of Montaigne--A deputy of the Dordogne invalidated
to snub Léon Say--Socrates and David Hume in modern France--Dogmatic
irreligion--Jules Simon on the proscription of Christianity--Abolishing
the history of France--A practical protest of
the Catholic Marne--The great pope of the crusades--Catholic
and Masonic processions--The Triduum of Urban II.--A great
celebration at Châtillon--Hildebrand and his disciple--The
Angelus and the 'Truce of God'--Mgr. Freppel on the anti-religious
war--Jeanne d'Arc at Reims--A magnificent festival--Gounod's
Mass of the Maid of Orléans--Catholic protest against
the persecution of the Jews--The Republic threatens the grand
rabbis with the archbishops--Deriding a death-bed in a
hospital--The amnesty of the Communards--The rehabilitation of
crime--Tyranny in the village schools--Religious freedom in
France and Turkey--The home of Jeanne d'Arc--'Laicising'
Domrémy-la-Pucelle--Piety and hypnotism--The chamber and garden of
Jeanne--Louis XI. and the French yeomen--A shrine converted
into a show--A scurvy job in a place of pilgrimage--The banner
of Patay--Jeanne and her voices--A western worshipper of the
Maid of Orléans--The Château de Bourlémont--The Princesse
d'Hénin and Madame de Staël--The revolutionary traffic in passports--A
generous act of Madame Du Barry--'Laicisation' in the
Vosges--The defeat of Jules Ferry--The Monarchists going up,
the Republicans going down 369-436
CHAPTER XIV
IN THE CALVADOS
Val Richer--The home of Guizot--The French Protestants and the
Third Republic--Free education in France the work of Guizot--Education
in France checked by the Revolution--Mediæval provisions
for public education--The effect of the English and the
religious wars upon education in France--Indiscriminate destruction
of educational foundations by the First Republic--Progress
of illiteracy after 1793--The guillotine as a financial expedient--The
Directory painted by themselves--The two Merlins--'Republican
Titans' wearing royal livery--Barras on the cruelty of
poltroons--Education under Napoleon--The Concordat and the
Church--Napoleon's University of France--A machine for creating
moral unity--The despotism of 1802 and 1882--The Liberals of
1830--Primary education under M. Guizot--The rights of the
family and the encroachments of the State--Catholic vindication
of Protestant liberty under Louis XIV.--The heirs of M. Guizot
in Normandy and Languedoc--M. de Witt at Val Richer--Three
historic châteaux--The birthplace of Montesquieu at La Brède--The
Abbey of Thomas à-Becket--The Château de Broglie--Lisieux--M.
Guizot as a landscape gardener--A Protestant statesman
among the Catholics of the Calvados--The Sieur de Longiumeau and the
sacred right of insurrection--'Moral unity' and 'moral
harmony'--Catholicism in the Calvados, Brittany, and Poitou--Charlotte
Corday--The historic family of De Witt--An election in the Calvados--The
people and the functionaries--Bonnebosq--The Normans and personal
liberty--The procedure of a French election--Mayors with votes in their
sleeves--Glass urns and wooden boxes--Gerrymandering in France and
America--Catholic constituents congratulating their Protestant
candidate--'Vive le roi!'--M. Bocher on two Republican
presidents--Wilsonism and the Norman farmers--The domestic
distilleries--The war against religion in Normandy--'The Church as the
key of trade'--How the officials revise the elections--Prefects
interfering in the elections--A solid Monarchist department--Politics
and the apple crop--The weak point of the Monarchists--The
traditions of Versailles and 'modern high life'--Louis XV. and
Barras--Madame Du Barry and Madame Tallien--The 'noble'
grooms of ignoble _cocottes_--The Legitimists under the Empire--The
war of 1870-71, and the fusion of classes--Historic names
in the French army--Officers and the châteaux--An American
minister and the Comte de Paris--The Monarchist and the Republican
representatives--The Duc de Broglie in the Eure--Architectural
evidence as to the social life of the _ancien régime_--The
war of classes a consequence, not a cause, of the Revolution--The
Vicomte de Noailles and Artemus Ward--Feudal serfs and New
York anti-renters--Jefferson and _lettres de cachet_--The Bastille
and the Tower of London--Don Quixote and the wine skins--The
Château d'Eu--Private rights in the 14th century--The 'Nonpareil'
of the world--La Grande Mademoiselle and her lieges at
Eu--Her hospitals and charities--A quick-witted mayor--A model
Republican prefect--The Duc de Penthièvre--The Orléans family
at Eu--Local popularity of the Comte and Comtesse de Paris--Norman
grievances, old and new--A Protestant movement in
Normandy--American associations with Broglie, La Brède, and
Val Richer--Mr. Bancroft on the ministers of Louis Philippe--The
'military council' of Royalist officers in the Revolution--Louis
Philippe and Thiers--The rights of property under the
Second Empire--The seizure of the Orléans property--The
Jacobin levelling of incomes--The reformer Réal as an opulent
count--The Orléans property restored in 1872, as a matter of
'common honesty'--What the princes recovered, and what they
presented to France--The 'wounded conscience' of a nation--The
daughter of Madame de Staël--The present Duc de Broglie and the
anti-religions war--The Conservative republic made impossible--The
Radical Jacobins rule the roast--'The Republic commits
suicide to save itself from slaughter'--Floquet the master of
Carnot--The war against God--Two statesmen of the South--Nîmes
and M. Guizot--The religious wars in Languedoc--The
son of M. Guizot at Uzès--Politics in the Gard--Catholics and
Protestants fighting side by side--The late M. Cornelis de Witt--The
hereditary principle in Holland--What the United States
learned from the Netherlands and from England--How the Duke
of York missed an American throne--A Protestant monarchist
in the Lot-et-Garonne--The plums of Agen and the apricots of
Nicole--Coeur de Lion and Bertrand de Boru--The home of
Nostradamus--Why the Germans beat the French--The barber
bard of Languedoc--Scaliger and the Huguenots--Nérac and the
Reine Margot--The 'Lovers' War'--The Revocation and the
Revolution--The ruin of property in 1793--Decline of the wealth
of France--The monarchists of the Aveyron--A banquet of
monarchist mayors--The need of a man in France--'A bolt out
of the blue'--How the Duc d'Orléans demoralised the government--The
young conscript at Clairvaux--Carnot surrenders to
the Commune--A Russian verdict on the republican blunder--The
'Prince' of the people--How the Government has helped the
Comte de Paris--Irregularities of republican taxation--Corsica
and the Corrèze--France the most heavily taxed country in the
world--Steady and enormous increase of taxation--Cost of collecting
the revenue--Political dishonesty on the stump--The persecution
of candidates--Invasion of private life--Bullying the
magistrates--Public servants ordered to the polls--Curés fined
for preaching religious duty--The Conférences du Sud-Ouest--M.
Princeteau at Bordeaux--The fête of the Bastille at Bordeaux
and Nîmes--A '_Fils de Dieu_' at Nîmes--Socialism at
Alais--The suppression of inheritances--'Property a privilege to
be abolished'--'Opulence an infamy'--The Socialists and the
Government--Persecution of the Protestants--'Pray, what is
God?'--Strength of Socialism in South-eastern France--Two
typical departments--Socialism in the Bouches-du-Rhône--Historic
France in the Calvados--Boulanger at Marseilles--A Socialist
coachman at Arles--A great Catholic employer of labour at Marseilles--The
largest glycerine works in the world--Church candles
and dynamite--Taxing industries to death--Dutch competition
with France--A Christian corporation in Marseilles--'An economical
kitchen'--An uphill fight for law and order--The Christians
of the 4th and of the 19th centuries--The Radicals hold the
bridle--Shall France be Christian or Nihilist?--Ernest Renan on
the situation in 1872--Jules Simon on the situation in 1882--The
'civic duties' of man and the guillotine--What will the situation
be in 1892? 437-515
MAP OF FRANCE _at end of book_
* * * * *
_Errata_
P. 24, 11 lines from top, _for_ rival _read_ rural.
P. 64, line 1, _for_ de Royes _read_ de Royer.
P. 91, line 6 from top. M. Spuller, Prefect of the Somme in 1880, was
the brother of the present Minister of Foreign Affairs, not the Minister
himself.
P. 96, line 5 from top, _for Montauban _read_ Montaudon.
P. 105, line 4 from bottom, _for_ being _read_ long.
P. 395, 3 lines from top, _for_ Abbeys _read_ Abbaye.
Wherever found, _for_ de Fallières _read_ Fallières.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
As I have not wished to swell the bulk of this book by references, and
as many statements made in it concerning men and things of the first
Republic may seem to my readers to need verification, I subjoin a brief
list of authorities consulted by me in this connection. It is
incomplete, but will be found to cover every material point concerning
the epoch to which it refers.
BIRÉ, E. La Légende des Girondins.
CAMPARDON, EMILE. Le Tribunal Révolutionnaire à Paris d'après les
Documents Originaux.
DAUBAN, C. A. La Démagogie à Paris en 1793.
DAUBAN, C. A. Les Prisons de Paris sous la Révolution.
DAUBAN, C. A. Mémoires Inédits de Pétion, de Buzot et de Barbaroux.
DAUBAN, C. A. Mémoires de Madame Roland. Etude sur Madame
Roland. Lettres en partie inédites de Madame Roland.
DE BARANTE. Histoire de la Convention Nationale.
DE LAVERGNE, L. (de l'Institut). Economie rurale de la France depuis
1789.
DE MONTROL, F. Mémoires de Brissot, publiés par son fils.
DE PRESSENSÉ, EDMOND. L'Eglise et la Révolution Française.
DONIOL, H. Histoire des Classes Rurales en France.
DU BLED. Les Causeurs de la Révolution.
DURAND DE MAILLANE. Histoire de la Convention Nationale.
FEUILLET DE CONCHES. Louis XVI., Marie Antoinette et Madame Elisabeth.
FORNERON, H. Histoire Générale des Emigrés.
GALLOIS, LÉONARD. Histoire des Journaux et des Journalistes de la
Révolution Française.
GONCOURT, EDMUND ET JULES. Histoire de la Société Française pendant
la Révolution.
GRANIER DE CASSAGNAC. Histoire des Girondins et des Massacres de
Septembre.
GUILLON, l'Abbé. Les Martyrs de la Foi pendant la Révolution Française.
HAMEL, ERNEST. Histoire de Robespierre.
JEFFERSON, THOMAS. Memoirs and Correspondence.
LAFERRIÈRE (de l'Institut). Essai sur l'histoire du Droit Français.
MALLET DU PAN. Mémoires et Correspondance.
MASSON, FRÉDÉRIC. Le Département des Affaires Etrangères pendant la
Révolution.
MORRIS, GOUVERNEUR. Diary and Letters.
MORTIMER-TERNAUX. Histoire de la Terreur, 1792-1794, d'après des
documents authentiques et inédits.
ROCQUAIN, F. L'Esprit Révolutionnaire avant la Révolution.
TISSOT, P. F. Histoire complète de la Révolution Française.
VATEL, CH. Charlotte Corday.
YOUNG, ARTHUR. Voyages en France pendant les années 1787-89.
Traduction de M. Le Sage; Introduction par L. de Lavergne.
* * * * *
INTRODUCTION
I
This volume is neither a diary nor a narrative. To have given it either
of these forms, each of which has its obvious advantages, would have
extended it beyond all reasonable limits. It is simply a selection from
my very full memoranda of a series of visits paid to different parts of
France during the year 1889.
These visits would never have been made, had not my previous
acquaintance with France and with French affairs, going back now--such
as it is--to the early days of the Second Empire, given me reasonable
ground to hope that I might get some touch of the actual life and
opinions of the people in the places to which I went. My motive for
making these visits was the fact that what it has become the fashion to
call 'parliamentary government,' or, in other words, the unchecked
administration of the affairs of a great people by the directly elected
representatives of the people, is now formally on its trial in France.
We do not live under this form of government in the United States, but
as a thoughtless tendency towards this form of government has shown
itself of late years even in the United States and much more strongly in
Great Britain, I thought it worth while to see it at work and form some
notion of its results in France.
Republican Switzerland has carefully sought to protect herself against
this form of government. The Swiss Constitution of 1874 reposes
ultimately on the ancient autonomy of the Cantons. Each Canton has one
representative in the Federal Executive Council. The members of this
Council are elected for three years by the Federal Assembly, and from
among their own number they choose the President of the Confederation,
who serves for one year only--a provision probably borrowed from the
first American Constitution. The Cantonal autonomy was further
strengthened in 1880 by the establishment of the Federal Tribunal on
lines taken from those of the American Supreme Court. There is a
division of the Executive authority between the Federal Assembly and the
Federal Council, which is yet to be tested by the strain of a great
European war, but which has so far developed no serious domestic
dangers.
The outline map which accompanies this volume will show that my visits,
which began with Marseilles and the Bouches-du-Rhône, upon my return
from Rome to Paris in January 1889, on the eve of the memorable election
of General Boulanger as a deputy for the Seine in that month, were
extended to Nancy in the east of France, to the frontiers of Belgium and
the coasts of the English Channel in the north, to Rennes, Nantes, and
Bordeaux in the west, and to Toulouse, Nîmes, and Arles in the south. I
went nowhere without the certainty of meeting persons who could and
would put me in the way of seeing what I wanted to see, and learning
what I wanted to learn. I took with me everywhere the best books I could
find bearing on the true documentary history of the region I was about
to see, and I concerned myself in making my memoranda not only with the
more or less fugitive aspects of public action and emotion at the
present time, but with the past, which has so largely coloured and
determined these fugitive aspects. Naturally, therefore, when I sat down
to put this volume into shape, I very soon found it to be utterly out of
the question for me to try to do justice to all that had interested and
instructed me in every part of France which I had visited.
I have contented myself accordingly with formulating, in this
Introduction, my general convictions as to the present condition and
outlook of affairs in France and as to the relation which actually
exists between the Third Republic, now installed in power at Paris, and
the great historic France of the French people; and with submitting to
my readers, in support of these convictions, a certain number of digests
of my memoranda, setting forth what I saw, heard, and learned in some of
the departments which I visited with most pleasure and profit.
In doing this I have written out what I found in my note-books less
fully than the importance of the questions involved might warrant. But
what I have written, I have written out fairly and as exactly as I
could. I do not hold myself responsible for the often severe and
sometimes scornful judgments pronounced by my friends in the provinces
upon public men at Paris. But I had no right to modify or withhold
them. In the case of conversations held with friends, or with casual
acquaintances, I have used names only where I had reason to believe
that, adding weight to what was recorded, they might be used without
injury or inconvenience of any kind to my interlocutors.
The sum of my conclusions is suggested in the title of this book. I
speak of France as one thing, and of the Republic as another thing. I do
not speak of the French Republic, for the Republic as it now exists does
not seem to me to be French, and France, as I have found it, is
certainly not Republican.
II
The Third French Republic, as it exists to-day, is just ten years old.
It owes its being, not to any direct action of the French people, but to
the success of a Parliamentary revolution, chiefly organised by M.
Gambetta. The ostensible object of this revolution was to prevent the
restoration of the French Monarchy. The real object of it was to take
the life of the executive authority in France. M. Gambetta fell by the
way, but the evil he did lives after him.
He was one of the celebrities of an age in which celebrity has almost
ceased to be a distinction. But the measure of his political capacity is
given in the fact that he was an active promoter of the insurrection of
September 4, 1870, in Paris against the authority of the Empress
Eugénie. A more signal instance is not to be found in history of that
supreme form of public stupidity which President Lincoln stigmatised, in
a memorable phrase, as the operation of 'swapping horses while crossing
a stream.'
It was worse than an error or a crime, it was simply silly. The
inevitable effect of it was to complete the demoralisation of the French
armies, and to throw France prostrate before her conquerors. A very
well-known German said to me a few years ago at Lucerne, where we were
discussing the remarkable trial of Richter, the dynamiter of the
Niederwald: 'Ah! we owe much to Gambetta, and Jules Favre, and Thiers,
and the French Republic. They saved us from a social revolution by
paralysing France. We could never have exacted of the undeposed Emperor
at Wilhelmshöhe, with the Empress at Paris, the terms which those
blubbering jumping-jacks were glad to accept from us on their knees.'
The imbecility of September 4, 1870, was capped by the lunacy of the
Commune of Paris in 1871. This latter was more than France could bear,
and a wholesome breeze of national feeling stirs in the 'murders grim
and great,' by which the victorious Army of Versailles avenged the
cowardly massacre of the hostages, and the destruction of the Tuileries
and the Hôtel de Ville.
With what 'mandate,' and by whom conferred, M. Thiers went to Bordeaux
in 1871, is a thorny question, into which I need not here enter. What he
might have done for his country is, perhaps, uncertain. What he did we
know. He founded a republic of which, in one of his characteristic
phrases, he said that: 'it must be Conservative, or it could not be,'
and this he did with the aid of men without whose concurrence it would
have been impossible, and of whom he knew perfectly well that they were
fully determined the Republic should not be Conservative. He became
Chief of the State, and this for a time, no doubt, he imagined would
suffice to make the State Conservative.
He was supported by an Assembly in which the Monarchists of France
predominated. The triumphant invasion and the imminent peril of the
country had brought monarchical France into the field as one man. M.
Gambetta's absurd Government of the National Defence, even in that
supreme moment of danger when the Uhlans were hunting it from pillar to
post, actually compelled the Princes of the House of France to fight for
their country under assumed names, but it could not prevent the sons of
all the historic families of France from risking their lives against the
public enemy. All over France a general impulse of public confidence put
the French Conservatives forward as the men in whose hands the
reconstitution of the shattered nation would be safest. The popular
instinct was justified by the result.
From 1871 to 1877, France was governed, under the form of a republic, by
a majority of men who neither had, nor professed to have, any more
confidence in the stability of a republican form of government, than
Alexander Hamilton had in the working value of the American Constitution
which he so largely helped to frame, and which he accepted as being the
best it was possible in the circumstances to get. But they did their
duty to France, as he did his duty to America. To them--first under M.
Thiers, and then under the Maréchal-Duc de Magenta--France is indebted
for the reconstruction of her beaten and disorganised army, for the
successful liquidation of the tremendous war-indemnity imposed upon her
by victorious Germany, for the re-establishment of her public credit,
and for such an administration of her national finances as enabled her,
in 1876, to raise a revenue of nearly a thousand millions of francs, or
forty millions of pounds sterling, in excess of the revenue raised under
the Empire seven years before, without friction and without undue
pressure. In 1869, the Empire had raised a revenue of 1,621,390,248
francs. In 1876, the Conservative Republic raised a revenue of
2,570,505,513 francs. With this it covered all the cost of the public
service, carried the charges resulting from the war and its
consequences, set apart 204,000,000 francs for public works, and yet
left in the Treasury a balance of 98,000,000 francs.
It is told of one of the finance ministers of the Restoration, Baron
Louis, that when a deputy questioned him once about the finances, he
replied, 'Do you give us good politics and I will give you good
finances.' It seems to me that the budget of 1876 proves the politics of
the Conservative majority in the French Parliament of that time to have
been good. The Maréchal-Duc de Magenta was then president. M. Thiers had
resigned his office in 1873, in consequence of a dispute with the
Assembly, the true history of which may one day be edifying, and the
Assembly had elected the Maréchal-Duc to fill his place.
I have been told by one of the most distinguished public men in France
that, in his passionate desire to prevent the election of the Maréchal
Duc, M. Thiers was bent upon promoting a movement to bring against the
soldier of Magenta an accusation like that which led to the condemnation
of the Maréchal Bazaine, and that he was with difficulty restrained from
doing this.
Monstrous as this attempt would have been, it hardly seems more
monstrous than the abortive attempt which was actually made, under the
inspiration of M. Gambetta and his friends, to convict the Maréchal Duc
and his ministers, 'the men of the 16th of May,' of conspiring, while in
possession of the executive power, to bring about the overthrow of the
Republic and the restoration of the Monarchy.
M. Gambetta and his party having formed in 1877 what is known as 'the
alliance of the 363,' determined to drive the Maréchal-Duc from the
Presidency, to take the control of public affairs entirely into their
own hands, and to reduce the Executive to the position created for Louis
XVI. by the revolutionists of the First Republic, before the atrocious
plot of August 10, 1792, made an end of the monarchy and of public order
altogether, and prepared the way for the massacres of September. Whether
the Maréchal-Duc might not have resisted this revolutionary conspiracy
to the end it is not worth while now to inquire. Suffice it that he gave
way finally, and, refusing to submit to the degradation of the high post
he held, accepted M. Gambetta's alternative and relinquished it.
It appears to me that the true aim of the Republicans (who had carried
the elections of 1877 by persuading France that Germany would at once
invade the country if the Conservatives won the day) is sufficiently
attested by the fact that they chose, as the successor of the
Maréchal-Duc, a public man chiefly conspicuous for the efforts he had
made to secure the abolition of the Executive office!
M. Grévy had failed to get the Presidency of the Republic suppressed
when the organic law was passed in 1875. He was more successful when, on
January 30, 1879, he consented to accept the Presidency. When he entered
the Elysée, the executive authority went out of it. The Third French
Republic, such as it now exists, was constituted on that day--the
anniversary, by the way, oddly enough, of the decapitation of Charles I.
of England at Whitehall.
That is the date, not 'centennial,' but 'decennial,' which ought to have
been celebrated in 1889 by the Third French Republic. In his first
Message, February 7, 1879, M. Grévy formally said: 'I will never resist
the national will expressed by its constitutional organs.' From that
moment the parliamentary majority became the Government of France.
Something very like this French parliamentary revolution of 1879 to
which France is indebted for the Third Republic as it exists to-day, was
attempted in the United States about ten years before.
In both instances the intent of the parliamentary revolutionists was to
take the life of a Constitution without modifying its forms. The failure
of the American is not less instructive than the success of the French
parliamentary revolution, and as all my readers, perhaps, are not as
familiar with American political history as with some other topics, I
hope I may be pardoned for briefly pointing this out.
Upon the assassination of President Lincoln in April 1865 the
Vice-President, Andrew Johnson, became President. He was a Southern man,
and as one of the Senators from the Southern State of Tennessee he had
refused to go with his State in her secession from the Union. To this he
owed his association on the Presidential ticket with Mr. Lincoln at the
election in 1864. He was no more and no less opposed to slavery in the
abstract than President Lincoln, of whom it is well known that he
regarded his own now famous proclamation of 1863 freeing the slaves in
the seceded States, as an illegal concession to the Anti-Slavery feeling
of the North and of Europe, and that he spoke of it with undisguised
contempt, as a 'Pope's bull against the comet.' Like Mr. Lincoln, Andrew
Johnson was devoted to the Union, but he was a Constitutional Democrat
in his political opinions, and the Civil War having ended in the defeat
of the Confederacy, he gradually settled down to his constitutional
duty, as President of the United States, towards the States which had
formed the Confederacy. This earned for him the bitter hostility of the
then dominant majority in both Houses of Congress, led by a man of
unbridled passions and of extraordinary energy, Thaddeus Stevens, a
representative from Pennsylvania, a sort of American Couthon, infirm of
body but all compact of will. It was the purpose of this majority to
humiliate and chastise, not to conciliate, the defeated South. Already,
under President Lincoln, this purpose had brought the leaders of the
majority more than once into collision with the Executive. Under
President Johnson they forced a collision with the Veto power of the
President, by two unconstitutional bills, one attainting the whole
people of the South, and the other aimed at the authority of the
Executive over his officers. In the policy thus developed they had the
co-operation of the Secretary at War, Mr. Stanton, and during the recess
of Congress in August 1867 it became apparent that with his assistance
they meant to subjugate the Executive. President Johnson quickly brought
matters to an issue. He first, during the recess, suspended Mr. Stanton
from the War Office, putting General Grant in charge of it, and upon the
reassembling of Congress in December 1867 'removed' him, and directed
him to hand over his official portfolio to General Thomas, appointed to
fill the place _ad interim_. Thereupon the majority of the House carried
through that body a resolution of impeachment, prepared, by a committee,
the necessary articles, and brought the President to trial before the
Senate, constituted as a court for 'high crimes and misdemeanours.' Two
of the articles of impeachment were founded upon disrespect alleged to
have been publicly shown by the President to Congress. The President, by
his counsel, among whom were Mr. Evarts, since then Secretary of State,
and now a Senator for New York, and Mr. Stanberry, an Attorney-General
of the United States, appeared before the Senate on March 13, 1868. The
President asked for forty days, in which to prepare an answer. The
Senate, without a division, refused this, and ordered the answer to be
filed within ten days. The trial finally began on March 30, and, after
keeping the country at fever-heat for two months, ended on May 26, in
the failure of the impeachment. Only three out of the eleven articles
were voted upon. Upon each thirty-five Senators voted the President to
be 'Guilty,' and nineteen Senators voted him to be 'Not guilty.' As the
Constitution of the United States requires a two-thirds vote in such a
trial, the Chief Justice declared the President to be acquitted, and the
attempt of the Legislature to dominate the Executive was defeated. Seven
of the nineteen Senators voting 'Not guilty' were of the Republican
party which had impeached the President, and it will be seen that a
change of one vote in the minority would have carried the day for the
revolutionists. So narrow was our escape from a peril which the founders
of the Constitution had foreseen, and against which they had devised all
the safeguards possible in the circumstances of the United States. What,
in such a case, would become of a French President?
The American President is not elected by Congress except in certain not
very probable contingencies, and when the House votes for a President,
it votes not by members but by delegations, each state of the Union
casting one vote. The French President is elected by a convention of the
Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, in which every member has a vote,
and the result is determined by an actual majority. The Senate of the
United States is entirely independent of the House. A large proportion
of the members of the French Senate are elected by the Assembly, and the
Chamber outnumbers the Senate by nearly two to one. What the procedure
of the French Senate, sitting as a High Court on the impeachment of a
President by the majority of the Chamber, would probably be, may be
gathered from the recent trial by that body of General Boulanger.
With the resignation of the Maréchal-Duc and the election of M. Grévy
the Government of France, ten years ago, became what it now is--a
parliamentary oligarchy, with absolutely no practical check upon its
will except the recurrence every four years of the legislative
elections. And as these elections are carried out under the direct
control, through the prefects and the mayors, of the Minister of the
Interior, himself a member of the parliamentary oligarchy, the weakness
of this check might be easily inferred, had it not been demonstrated by
facts during the elections of September 22 and October 6, 1889.
How secure this parliamentary oligarchy feels itself to be, when once
the elections are over, appears from the absolutely cynical coolness
with which the majority goes about what is called the work of
'invalidating' the election of members of the minority. Something of the
sort went on in my own country during the 'Reconstruction' period which
followed the Civil War, but it never assumed the systematic form now
familiar in France. As practised under the Third Republic it revives the
spirit of the methods by which Robespierre and the sections 'corrected
the mistakes' made by the citizens of Paris in choosing representatives
not amenable to the discipline of the 'sea-green incorruptible'; and as
a matter of principle, leads straight on to that usurpation of all the
powers of the State by a conspiracy of demagogues which followed the
subsidized Parisian insurrection of August 10, 1792.
Such a _régime_ as this sufficiently explains the phenomenon of
'Boulangism,' by which Englishmen and Americans are so much perplexed.
Put any people into the machinery of a centralized administrative
despotism in which the Executive is merely the instrument of a majority
of the legislature, and what recourse is there left to the people but
'Boulangism'? 'Boulangism' is the instinctive, more or less deliberate
and articulate, outcry of a people living under constitutional forms,
but conscious that, by some hocus-pocus, the vitality has been taken out
of those forms. It is the expression of the general sense of insecurity.
In a country situated as France now is, it is natural that this
inarticulate outcry should merge itself at first into a clamour for the
revision of a Constitution which has been made a delusion and a snare;
and then into a clamour for a dynasty which shall afford the nation
assurance of an enduring Executive raised above the storm of party
passions, and sobering the triumph of party majorities with a wholesome
sense of responsibility to the nation.
There would have been no lack of 'Boulangism' in France forty years ago
had M. Thiers and his legislative cabal got the better of the Prince
President in the 'struggle for life' which then went on between the
Place St.-Georges and the Elysée!
III
There are two periods, one in the history of modern England, the other
in the history of the United States, which directly illuminate the
history of France since the overthrow of the ancient French Monarchy in
1792.
One of these is the period of the Long Parliament in England. The other
is the brief but most important interval which elapsed between the
recognition of the independence of the thirteen seceded British colonies
in America, at Versailles in 1783, and the first inauguration of
Washington as President of the United States at New York on April 30,
1789. No Englishman or American, who is reasonably familiar with the
history of either of these periods, will hastily attribute the phenomena
of modern French politics to something essentially volatile and unstable
in the character of the French people.
My own acquaintance, such as it is, with France--for I should be sorry
to pretend to a thorough knowledge of France, or of any country not my
own--goes back, as I have intimated, to the early days of the Second
Empire. It has been my good fortune, at various times, to see a good
deal of the social and political life of France, and I long ago learned
that to talk of the character of the French people is almost as slipshod
and careless as to talk of the character of the Italian people.
The French people are not the outgrowth of a common stock, like the
Dutch or the Germans.
The people of Provence are as different in all essential particulars
from the people of Brittany, the people of French Flanders from the
people of Gascony, the people of Savoy from the people of Normandy, as
are the people of Kent from the people of the Scottish Highlands, or the
people of Yorkshire from the people of Wales. The French nation was the
work, not of the French people, but of the kings of France, not less but
even more truly than the Italian nation, such as we see it gradually now
forming, is the work of the royal House of Savoy.
The sudden suppression of the National Executive by a parliamentary
conspiracy at Paris in 1792 violently interrupted the orderly and
natural making of France, just as the sudden suppression of the National
Executive in 1649 after the occupation of Edinburgh by Argyll and the
surrender of Colchester to Fairfax had put England at the mercy of
Cromwell's 'honest' troopers, and of knavish fanatics like Hugh Peters,
violently interrupted the making of Britain. It took England a century
to recover her equilibrium. Between Naseby Field in 1645 and Culloden
Moor in 1746 England had, except during the reign of Charles II., no
better assurance of continuous domestic peace than France enjoyed first
under Louis Philippe and then under the Second Empire. During those
hundred years Englishmen were thought by the rest of Europe to be as
excitable, as volatile, and as unstable as Frenchmen are not uncommonly
thought by the rest of mankind now to be. There is a curious old Dutch
print of these days in which England appears as a son of Adam in the
hereditary costume, standing at gaze amid a great disorder of garments
strewn upon the floor, while a scroll displayed above him bears this
legend:
I am an Englishman, and naked I stand here,
Musing in my mind what garment I shall wear.
Now I will wear this, and now I will wear that,
And now I will wear--I don't know what!
There was as much--and as little--reason thus to depict the England of
the seventeenth, as there is thus to depict the France of the nineteenth
century.
If there had ever been, a hundred years ago, such a thing as a French
Republic, founded, as the American Republic of 1787 was founded, by the
deliberate will of the people, and offering them a reasonable prospect
of maintaining liberty and law, that Republic would exist to-day. That
we are watching the desperate effort of a centralised parliamentary
despotism at Paris in the year 1890 to maintain a 'Third Republic' is
conclusive proof that this was not the case.
France--the French people, that is--- had no more to do with the
overthrow of the monarchy of Louis XVI., with the fall of the monarchy
of Charles X., with the collapse of the monarchy of July, or with the
abolition of the Second Empire, than with the abdication of Napoleon I.
at Fontainebleau.
Not one of these catastrophes was provoked by France or the French
people; not one of them was ever submitted by its authors to the French
people for approval.
Only two French governments during the past century can be accurately
said to have been definitely branded and condemned as failures by the
deliberate voice of the French people. One of these was the First
Republic, which after going through a series of convulsions equally
grotesque and ghastly, was swept into oblivion by an overwhelming vote
of the French people in response to the appeal of the first Napoleon.
The other was the Second Republic, which was put upon trial by the Third
Napoleon on December 10, 1851, and condemned to immediate extinction by
a vote of 7,439,219 to 640,737. I am at a loss to see how it is possible
to deduce from these simple facts of French history the conclusion that
the French people are, and for a century have been, madly bent upon
getting a Republic established in France, unless, indeed, I am to
suppose that the French Republicans proceed upon the principle said to
be justified by the experience of countries in which the standard of
mercantile morality is not absolutely puritanical--that three successive
bankruptcies will enable a really clever man to retire from business
with a handsome fortune!
If it were possible, as happily it is impossible, that the American
people could be afflicted with a single year of such a Republic as that
which now exists in France, we would rid ourselves of it, if necessary,
by seeking annexation to Canada under the crown of our common ancestors,
or by inviting the exiled Dom Pedro to recross the Atlantic and accept
the throne of a North American Empire, with substantial guarantees that
if we should ever change our minds and put him politely on board a ship
again for Europe, the cheque given to him on his departure would not be
dishonoured on presentation to the national bankers!
It is the penalty, I suppose, of our position in the United States, as
the first and, so far, the only successful great republic of modern
times, that we are expected to accept a sort of moral responsibility for
all the experiments in republicanism, no matter how absurd, odious, or
preposterous they may be, which it may come into the heads of people
anywhere else in the world to try. I do not see why Americans who are
not under some strenuous necessity of making stump speeches in or out of
Congress, with an eye to some impending election, should submit to this
without a protest. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery: it
does not follow that it is the most agreeable.
I do not know that Western drawing-rooms take more delight in the
Japanese, who most amiably present themselves everywhere in the
regulation dress-coat and white cravat of modern Christendom, than in
the Chinese, who calmly and haughtily persist in wearing the ample,
stately, and comfortable garments of their own people.
The framers of the French Republican Constitution of 1875 did the United
States the honour to copy incorrectly, and absolutely to misapply,
certain leading features of our organic law. In order to accomplish
purposes absolutely inconsistent with all American ideas of liberty and
of justice, the parliamentary revolutionists who got possession of power
in France in 1879 have so twisted to their own ends this French
Constitution of 1875, that their government of the Third French Republic
in 1890 really resembles the government of the Akhoond of Swat about as
nearly as it resembles the government of the American Republic under
Washington.
The parliamentary revolutionists of the Third French Republic are
Republicans first and then Frenchmen. The framers of the American
Republic were Americans first and then Republicans. The Republic which
they framed was an experiment imposed upon the American people, not by
philosophers and fanatics, but by the force of circumstances. The ablest
of the men who framed it were not Republicans by theory. On the
contrary, they had been born and bred under a monarchy. Under that
monarchy they had enjoyed a measure of civil and religious liberty which
the Third Republic certainly refuses to Frenchmen in France to-day. M.
Jules Ferry and M. Constans have no lessons to give in law or in liberty
to which George Washington, or John Adams, or even Thomas Jefferson,
would have listened with toleration while the Crown still adorned the
legislative halls of the British colonies in America. Our difficulties
with the mother country began, not with the prerogative of the
Crown--that gave our fathers so little trouble that one of the original
thirteen States lived and prospered under a royal charter from Charles
II. down to the middle of the nineteenth century--but with the
encroachments of the Parliament. The roots of the affection which binds
Americans to the American Republic strike deep down into the history of
American freedom under the British monarchy. The forms have changed, the
living substance is the same. Americans know at least as well as
Englishmen what the most intelligent of French Republicans apparently
have still to learn, that liberty is impossible without loyalty to
something higher than self-interest and self-will.
This sufficiently explains to me a remark often cited as made to Sir
Theodore Martin by General Grant during the ex-President's visit to
England, to the effect that Englishmen 'live under institutions which
Americans would give their ears to possess.'
General Grant neither was, nor did he pretend to be, a great statesman.
But he was an American of the Americans. Four years of Civil War and
eight years of Presidential power had not been thrown away upon him. He
came into the Presidency as the successor of Andrew Johnson, who was
made President by the bullet of an assassin, and who was impeached, as I
have said, before the Senate for doing his plain constitutional duty, by
an unscrupulous parliamentary cabal.
He left the Presidency, to be succeeded in it by a President who derived
the more than doubtful title under which he took his seat from a
Commission unknown to the Constitution, and accepted by the American
people only as the alternative of political chaos and of a fresh civil
war.
Through his position at the head of the American army, General Grant, as
I have already mentioned, had been drawn into the contest between
President Johnson and the parliamentary cabal bent on breaking down the
constitutional authority of the Executive.
Going into the Presidency fresh from this drama, in 1869, General Grant
went out of the Presidency in 1877, after a drama not less impressive
and instructive had been enacted under his eyes, which threatened for
many weeks to result in a complete failure of the machinery provided by
the American Constitution for the lawful and orderly transmission of the
executive authority. It did, in fact, result in the adoption by Congress
of an extra-constitutional expedient, by which the orderly transmission
of the executive authority was secured, but the lawful transmission of
it--as I believe, and as I think I have reason to know General Grant
believed--was defeated.
Whether the constitutional machinery would or would not have carried us
safely through if the final strain had been put upon it, is now an
academic question not here to be discussed. But the final strain was
evaded by the adoption of the extra-constitutional expedient to which I
refer. An Electoral Commission was created by Congress to decide by
which of two sets of Presidential electors claiming to have been chosen
for that purpose the Presidential vote of certain States should be cast;
and it is a curious circumstance that General Grant, who had seen his
executive predecessor saved from removal by a single vote in the Senate
in 1869, saw his executive successor established in the White House, in
1877, by a single vote in this Electoral Commission.
It would have been strange indeed had the experience of General Grant
failed to impress upon him, with at least equal force, the advantages to
liberty of a hereditary executive acting as the fountain of social
honour, and the disadvantages to liberty of an elective executive
tending to become a distributing reservoir of political patronage.
I once had a curious talk bearing on this subject with General Grant
after he had retired from the Presidency. He had dined with me to meet
and discuss a matter of some importance with a Mexican friend of mine,
Señor Romero, long Minister of Finance in Mexico, and now Mexican Envoy
at Washington. When I next met the ex-President he reverted with great
interest to something which had been incidentally said at this dinner
about the experiment of empire made in Mexico by Iturbide, the general
who finally broke the power of Spain in that viceroyalty, and secured
its independence. I showed him certain documents which I had obtained in
Mexico through the kindness of Maximilian's very able Foreign Minister,
Señor Ramirez, a most accomplished bibliophile, bearing upon Iturbide's
plan for making the American Mediterranean a Mexican lake. He expected
to break up the United States by asserting the right of the Mexican
Empire to the mouths of the Mississippi, and the whole Spanish dominion
as far as the Capes of Florida. 'It seems a mad thing now,' said the
ex-President, 'but it was not so mad perhaps then,' and we went on to
discuss the schemes of Burr and Wilkinson and the alleged treason of an
early Tennessean senator. 'Perhaps it was not a bad thing for us,' he
said, 'that the Mexicans shot their first Emperor--but was it a good
thing for them?' 'I have sometimes wondered,' he added, 'what would have
happened to us if Gates, or--what was at one time, as you know, quite on
the cards--Benedict Arnold, instead of George Washington, had commanded
the armies of the colonies successfully down to the end at Yorktown.'
What indeed! That is a pregnant query, not hastily to be dealt with by
genial after-dinner oratory about the self-governing capacity of the
Anglo-Norman race--still less by Fourth of July declamations over what
the leader of the Massachusetts Bar used to call the 'glittering
generalities' of the American Declaration of Independence!
The experience of the Latin states of the New World throws useful
side-lights upon it. Of all these states between the Rio Grande and Cape
Horn, only one began and has lived out its round half-century of
independence without serious civil convulsions. This is--or rather
was--the Empire of Brazil, of which Dom Pedro I., of the Portuguese
reigning house of Braganza, on March 25, 1824, swore to maintain the
integrity and indivisibility, and to observe, and cause to be observed,
the political Constitution. That oath the Emperor and his son and
successor, Dom Pedro II., who took it after him in due course, seem to
have conscientiously kept. It does not appear to have impressed itself
as deeply upon the consciences of the military and naval officers of the
present day in Brazil, all of whom, of course, must have taken it
substantially on receiving their commission from the chief of the State,
and it now remains to be seen what will become hereafter of the Empire.
The authors of the Brazilian Constitution fully recognised the
impossibility of maintaining a constitutional government without some
guarantee of the independence of the Executive. They found this
guarantee not by applying checks and balances to the elective
principle, but simply in the hereditary principle, just as they found
the guarantee of the independence of the judiciary in the life-tenure of
the magistrates, and they introduced into their Constitution what they
called a 'moderating power.' This power was lodged, by the 98th article
of the Brazilian Constitution, with the Emperor--and the article thus
runs: 'The moderating power is the key of the whole political
organisation, and it is delegated exclusively to the Emperor, as the
supreme chief of the nation and its first representative, that he may
incessantly watch over the maintenance of the independence, equilibrium,
and harmony of the other political powers.'
The key of the 'political organisation' of Brazil seems to have worked
very well for fifty years. Now that it has been thrown away, it will be
interesting to watch the results.
The question, with us in the United States, from the beginning has been
whether the carefully devised provisions of oar organic Constitution of
1787 would or would not be found in practice to protect the sentiment of
loyalty to a National Union as effectually against popular caprice and
political intrigues as the sentiment of loyalty to a National Crown has
been protected in England by the hereditary principle. The American
Revolution of 1776, and the foundation of the American Republic of 1787,
can never be understood without a thorough appreciation of the fact that
the issues involved in the English Revolution which placed the daughter
of James II. on the English throne, and in the establishment
subsequently of the House of Hanover, because it was an offshoot of the
dethroned House of Stuart, were quite as intelligently discussed, and
quite as thoroughly worked out, among the English in America as among
the English in England. Without a thorough appreciation of this fact it
is impossible to understand the conservative value to liberty in the
United States, of the personal position and the personal influence of
the first American President. Washington was, in truth, the uncrowned
king of the new nation--'first in war, first in peace, first in the
hearts of his countrymen.' What more and what less than this is there in
the history of Alfred the Great?
Washington founded no dynasty, but he made the American Presidency
possible, and the American President is a king with a veto, elected, not
by the people directly, but by special electors, for four years, and
re-eligible. We celebrate the birthday of Washington like the birthday
of a king. The same instinct gave his name to the capital of his nation,
and that name was found a name to conjure with when the great stress
came of the Civil War in 1861. The sentiment of loyalty, developed and
twined about that name and about the Union which Washington had founded,
was not only the glow at the core of the Northern resistance to
secession: it was the secret and the explanation of that sudden revival
of the spirit of national loyalty at the South after the war was over
and an end was put to the villanies of 'Reconstruction,' by which
European observers of American affairs have been and still are so much
puzzled. For it must be remembered that the Father of his Country was a
son of the South, and that his native state, Virginia, is the oldest of
the American Commonwealths, and is known as 'the Mother of Presidents.'
The historic Union is as much Southern as Northern. Its existence was
put in peril in 1812 by the States of the extreme North. Its integrity
was shattered for a time in 1861 by the States of the South. Before it
was founded, in 1787, there was no such thing as an American nation.
There were thirteen independent American States which for certain
purposes only had formed what was described as a 'perpetual union,'
under certain Articles of Confederation. These Articles were drawn up in
1778, at a time when the event of the war with the mother country was
still most uncertain, and they were never finally ratified by all the
States until 1781, two years before the Peace of Versailles. Under these
Articles the national affairs of the Confederacy were controlled by the
Congress of the States. No national Executive existed, not even such a
nominal Executive as now exists in France. National affairs were managed
during the recess of the Congress by a Committee, and this Committee
could only confide the Presidency to any one member of the Committee for
one year at a time out of three years. This was even worse than the
elective kingship without a veto of the English Republicans of 1649. But
how were the people of these thirteen independent States, each with a
history, with interests, with prejudices, with sympathies of its own, to
be brought together and induced to form, through a more perfect union, a
nation, in the only way in which a nation can be formed, by the
establishment of an independent national Executive?
This was the question which was met and answered only after long
debates, and with infinite difficulty, by the American Constitutional
Convention of 1787. It is more than probable that this convention could
never have been held without the influence and the presence of George
Washington, who presided over its deliberations; and it is as certain as
anything human can be, that the constitution which it framed would never
have been accepted by the people of the States if they had not known
that the executive office created by it would be filled by him.
The political safeguards put about the American Executive by the
constitution may or may not always resist such a strain as has already
more than once been put upon them. The seceding States, in their
constitution adopted at Montgomery in 1861, tried to strengthen these
safeguards by extending the presidential term to six years, and making
the President re-eligible only after an interval of six years more. But
all our national experience goes to show that the more difficult it is
for a mere majority of the people to make or unmake the authority which
sets a final sanction upon the execution of the laws, the greater will
be the safety of the public liberty and of private rights.
So true is this that every American who witnessed, at London in 1887,
the Jubilee of the Queen, felt, and was glad to feel, with a natural and
instinctive sympathy, the honest contagion of that magnificent outburst
of the loyalty of a great and free people to the hereditary
representative of their historic liberties and of their historic law. I
am sure that no intelligent Englishman can have witnessed the
tremendous outpouring of the American people into New York on April 30,
1889, to do honour there to the hundredth anniversary of the first
inauguration of George Washington, without a kindred emotion.
To compare with the significance of either of these scenes that of the
gigantic cosmopolitan fair dedicated at Paris in 1889 by President
Carnot to the 'principles of 1789' is to exhaust the resources of the
ridiculous.
IV
The antagonism which now exists between France and the Third Republic
certainly did not exist between France and the ancient monarchy. The
members of the États-Généraux of 1789, who were so soon permitted, by
the incapacity of Louis XVI., to resolve that body into the chaotic mob
which assumed the name of a National Assembly, were elected, not at all
to change the fabric of the French Government, but simply to reform, in
concert with the king, abuses, two-thirds of which were virtually
defunct when the king took off his hat to the Three Orders at Versailles
on the 5th of May, 1789, and the rest of which took a new lease of life,
often under new names, from the follies and the crimes of the First
Republic, after the 22nd of September, 1792. Two contemporary observers,
watching the drama from very different points of view, Arthur Young and
Gouverneur Morris, long ago discerned this. M. Henri Taine, and the
group of conscientious historical students who, during the last quarter
of a century, have been reconstructing the annals of the revolutionary
period, have put it beyond all doubt. The enormous majority of the
French people, and even of the people of Paris, were so little
infatuated with the 'principles of 1789' that they regarded the advent
to power of the first Napoleon with inexpressible relief, as making an
end of what Arthur Young calls, and not too sternly, a series of
constitutions 'formed by conventions of rabble and sanctioned by the
_sans-culottes_ of the kennel.' Without fully understanding this, it is
impossible to understand either the history of the Napoleons, or the
present antagonism between France and the Third Republic.
Of this I am so deeply convinced that I have thought it right to
interweave, when occasion offered, with my account of things as they are
in France, what I believe to be the historic truth as to things as they
were in France at and before the period of the Revolution. To judge the
France of 1890 fairly, and forecast its future intelligently, we must
thoroughly rid ourselves of the notion that the masses of the French
people had anything more to do with the dethronement and the murder of
Louis XVI. than the masses of the English people had to do with the
dethronement and the murder of Charles I. Neither crime was perpetrated
to enlarge the liberties or to protect the interests of the people. We
long ago got at the truth about the great English rebellion. 'Pride's
Purge,' the 'elective kingship without a veto of the 'New Model,' and
the merciless mystification of Bradshaw, tell their own story. Steering
to avoid the Scylla of Strafford, the luckless Parliamentarians ran the
ship of State full into the Charybdis of Cromwell.
It is only within very recent times that the daylight of facts has begun
to dissipate the mists of the French legend of 1789. Even Republican
writers of repute now disdain to concern themselves more seriously with
the so-called histories of Thiers, of Mignet, and of Lamartine than with
the _Chevalier de Maison-Rouge_ of Alexandre Dumas and the _Charlotte
Corday_ of M. Ponsard.
Of course the legend dies hard--all legends do. Even the whipping of
Titus Oates at the cart's tail through London did not kill the legend of
Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey and the Popish Plot. The Republicans of the
Third Republic have not scrupled to set up a statue to Danton. People
who might easily learn the truth still speak, and not in France only,
about Robespierre and Madame Roland in terms which really justify M.
Biré in anticipating a time when Raoul-Rigault maybe celebrated as a
patriot and Louise Michel as a heroine. No longer ago than in 1888
certain people, perhaps relying on the fact that M. Casimir Périer, the
actual owner of the château at Vizille in which the famous meeting of
the Estates of Dauphiny was held in 1788, is a Republican, actually
undertook to 'ring up the curtain' on the Centennial of 1789 by
representing Barnave and Mounier as clamouring in 1788 for a republic at
Vizille! Of all which let us say with Mr. Carlyle, 'What should
Falsehood do but decease, being ripe, decompose itself, and return to
the Father of it?' To whom, alas! I fear, under this inexorable law must
in due time revert too many of the fuliginous word-pictures of Mr.
Carlyle's own dithyrambic prose concerning the 'French Revolution'!
The giants who stalked through his inflamed imagination like spectres on
the Brocken, may be seen to-day in the Musée de la Révolution at Paris,
shrunken to their true proportions--a dreary procession, indeed, of
dreamers, madmen, quacks and felons! How can that be called a 'Great
Revolution,' of which it is recorded that before it had filled the brief
orbit of a decade, it had made an end of the life or of the reputation
of every single man conspicuous in initiating or promoting it? The men
who began the English Revolution of 1688 organised the new order to
which it led. The men who began the American Revolution of 1776
organised the new nation which it called into being. This must have been
as true of the French Revolution had it been really an outcome of the
'principles of 1789,' or of any principles at all. But it was nothing of
the kind. It was simply a carnival of incapacities, ending naturally in
an orgie of crime. It was in the order of Nature that it should deify
Mirabeau in the Pantheon, only to dig up his dishonoured remains and
trundle them under an unmarked stone at the meeting of four streets,
that it should set Bailly on a civic throne, only to drag him forth,
under a freezing sky, to his long and dismal martyrdom amid a howling
mob, that it should acclaim Lafayette as the Saviour of France, only to
hunt him across the frontier into an Austrian prison.
It was because France detested the Republic, and, detesting the
Republic, might at any moment recall the Bourbons, that Napoleon
executed the Duc d'Enghien. It was to make an end of claims older than
his own upon the allegiance of a people essentially and naturally
monarchical. It was a crime, but it was not a squalid and foolish crime
like the murder of Louis XVI. It belonged to the same category with the
execution of Conradin of Hohenstaufen by Charles of Anjou--not, indeed,
as to its mere atrocity, but as to its motives and its intent. It
announced to the French people the advent of a new dynasty, and left
them no choice but between the Republic and the Empire. An autograph
letter of Carnot, the grandfather of the actual President of the Third
Republic, sold the other day in Paris may be cited to illustrate this
point. Carnot, like many other regicides, would gladly have made his
peace with Louis XVIII. His peace with some sovereign he knew that he
must make. The letter I now refer to was written after the return of the
Emperor from Elba, and it could hardly have been written had Carnot not
believed that France might be rallied to the Empire and to its chief,
because France could not exist without a monarchy and a monarch.
The restoration of the monarchy was cordially accepted by the French
people. The American friends of France celebrated it with a banquet in
New York. France prospered under it. It laid the foundations of the
French dominion in Africa, and thereby gave to modern France the only
field of colonial expansion which can be said, down to the present time,
to have enured to any real good either for French commerce or the French
people. Certainly M. Ferry and the Republic have so far done nothing
with Tonquin to dim the lustre of the monarchical conquest of Algiers.
On the contrary, the Republic, through its occupation of Tunis, its
'pouting policy' towards England in Egypt, and its more recent
intimations of a great French Africa to be carried eastward to the
Atlantic, has prepared, and is preparing, for France in the perhaps not
distant future a new chapter of political accidents upon the possible
gravity and extent of which prudent Frenchmen meditate with dubious
satisfaction.
The sceptre passed as quietly from Louis XVIII. to Charles X. in France
as from George IV. to William IV. in England. So far, indeed, as public
disorder indicates public discontent, the English monarchy was in
greater peril during the period between 1815 and 1830 than the French
monarchy. When the Revolution of July came, no man thought seriously of
asking France to accept a second trial of the Republic, and the crown
was pressed upon the Duc d'Orléans, with the anxious assent of
Lafayette, the friend of Washington, Mirabeau's 'Grandison-Cromwell' of
the Revolution of 1789. Under the long reign of Louis Philippe France
again prospered exceedingly. French art and French literature more than
recovered their ancient prestige. Attempts were made to restore the
elder branch of the Bourbons and to restore the dynasty of the
Bonapartes. But no serious attempt was made to restore the Republic.
The Revolution of 1848 took even Paris by surprise. The Republic which
emerged from it filled France with consternation, and opened the way at
once for the restoration of the Empire. On December 10, 1851, the French
people made the Prince-President Dictator, by a vote the significance of
which will be only inadequately appreciated if we fail to remember that
the millions who cast it were by no means sure that, by putting the
sword of France again into the hands of a Napoleon, they would not
provoke the perils of a great European war. France did not court these
perils, but she preferred them to the risks of a republic.
I spent many months in France at that time, and to me, remembering what
I then saw and heard among all sorts and conditions of men, not in the
departments only but in Paris itself, the persistency with which the
leaders of the present Republican party have set themselves, ever since
they came definitely into power with M. Grévy in 1879, to reviving all
the most odious traditions of the earlier Republican experiments, and to
re-identifying the Republic with all that the respectable masses of the
French people most hate and dread, has seemed from the first, and now
seems, little short of judicial madness.
It did not surprise me, therefore, in 1885, to find the banner of the
monarchy frankly unfurled by M. Lambert de Ste.-Croix and scores of
other Conservatives, as they then called themselves, at the legislative
elections of that year. It did surprise me, however, to see the strength
of the support which they instantly received throughout the country. For
I believe the masses of the French people to be at heart monarchical,
less from any sentiment of loyalty at all either to the race of their
ancient kings or to the imperial dynasty, than because the experience of
the last century, to which, as I think very unwisely, the Republican
Government has appealed in what I cannot but call its rigmarole about
the 'Centennial of 1789,' has led them to associate with the idea of a
republic the ideas of instability and of anarchy, and with the idea of a
monarchy the ideas of stability and of order. Now the Government of the
Third Republic, first under M. Thiers and then under the Maréchal-Duc of
Magenta, was so conducted from 1871 to 1877 as to shake this
association.
Under it Frenchmen had seen that a Republic might actually exist in
France for seven years without disturbing social order, interfering with
freedom of conscience, attacking the religion of the country, or wasting
its substance.
There were 'wars and rumours of wars' in the air in 1876. It was very
loudly whispered that Germany, alarmed by the rapid advances of France
towards a complete recovery of her national strength, meant suddenly and
savagely to strike at her; and that, unless the essentially national and
military Government of the Maréchal-Duc was replaced by a Government
which would divert the resources of France largely into industrial,
commercial, and colonial adventures, a new invasion might at any moment
be feared. It ought to have been obvious that a Government which held in
its hand a balance of 98,000,000 francs was much less likely to be
wantonly attacked than a Government which meant to outrun its revenue.
With a declared balance of 98,000,000 francs to the good, France might
raise at the shortest notice 2,000,000,000 francs in a war loan. The
balance of the Maréchal-Duc's Government was in fact a war-treasure, and
a war-treasure of that magnitude was a tolerably effectual guarantee of
peace. This ought, I say, to have been obvious; but it is the triumph of
demagogic skill to prevent a great people from seeing as a mass what is
perfectly plain to every man of them taken alone. Under the stress of a
war-panic the French people, whose dread and dislike of republics in
general had been lulled, as I have shown, into repose by seven years of
a Conservative Republican rule, were led into granting the untested
Republic of Gambetta the credit fairly earned by the tested Republic of
Macmahon and of Thiers.
M. Grévy, thought the incarnation of thrift, of peace at any price, and
of commercial development, was elected President in 1879. M. Léon Say, a
man of wealth and of business, from whom more circumspection might have
been expected, lent himself, as Minister of the Finances, in combination
with the rather visionary M. de Freycinet, to a grand scheme devised by
M. Gambetta 'in a single night,' like Aladdin's Palace, for spending
indefinite millions of money upon docks, railways and ports all over
France, wherever there was a seat in the Chamber to be kept or won. The
'true Republicans,' as they call themselves, must be kept in power, the
Republicans who hold it to be their mission--no, not their mission, for
that word smacks of a Deity--but their proud prerogative, to rid France
and the world of the Christian religion, to abolish all forms of worship
and of monarchy from off the face of the earth, and generally to fashion
the felicity of mankind, in and out of France, after their own mind.
They went to work without delay. Having made the Executive, in the
person of M. Grévy, a puppet, they began at once, in 1879, to pour out
the money of the taxpayers like water, for what we know in the United
States as 'purposes of political irrigation'; to 'purge' the public
service, in all its branches, from the highest to the lowest, of all men
not ready to swear allegiance to their creed; to create new posts and to
fill them with the dependents and parasites of the Republican party
chiefs.
The balance of 98,291,105 fr. 28 c. (to be exact!) with which the
Republic of Thiers and Macmahon had closed the year 1876, rapidly
vanished.
On April 20, 1878, M. Léon Say announced to the Chamber of Deputies that
he expected the country to spend for 1879 a sum of 3,173,820,114 francs,
and to meet this expenditure with an estimated income of 2,698,622,014
francs!
In 1876 the expenditure of France had reached 2,680,146,977 francs, and
the income of France had reached 2,778,438,082 fr. 66 c. Two years had
sufficed to reverse the situation, and to convert an excess of receipts
over expenditure under the Government of the Maréchal-Duc, amounting to
more than 98,000,000 francs, into an excess of expenditure over receipts
under his 'truly Republican' successor amounting to 475,148,100 francs!
From that moment to this the Third Republic has been steadily expending
for France year after year at least five hundred millions of francs, or
twenty millions of pounds sterling, more than it has been able to
collect from the French people in the way of normal revenue. The exact
amount of this monstrous deficiency it is not easy to state with
precision. So distinguished an economist as M. Leroy-Beaulieu, a
Republican of the moderate type, puts it at the sum I have stated, of
five hundred millions a year for ten years. At the elections of last
year the Carnot Government ordered, or encouraged, the Prefect of the
Hérault, M. Pointu-Norès, to oppose openly and energetically the
election of M. Leroy-Beaulieu as a deputy for the district of Lodève in
that department. Why? M. Leroy-Beaulieu is one of the few really able
and distinguished Frenchmen, known beyond the limits of France, who may
be regarded as sincere believers in the possibility of founding a
substantial and orderly French Republic. But M. Leroy-Beaulieu, when he
sees a deficiency in the public accounts, calls it a deficiency, and
lifts up his voice in warning against a policy which accepts an annual
deficiency of five hundred millions of francs as natural, normal, and to
be expected in the administration of a great Republic.
Therefore, the presence of M. Leroy-Beaulieu in the Chamber of Deputies
is a thing to be prevented at any price. The 'Republicans' of the
Hérault this year tried to prevent it not only by treating 'informal'
ballots thrown for him as invalid, and accepting 'informal' ballots
thrown against him as valid, but, as the report of a Committee of the
Chamber admits, by 'irregularities' which in other countries would be
described in harsher terms.
Yet the majority of the new Chamber has postponed action upon this
report of its own Committee till after the recess, and M. Leroy-Beaulieu
is not yet allowed to occupy the seat which the voters of Lodève
undoubtedly chose him to fill.
If we accept M. Leroy-Beaulieu's estimate of the average annual
deficiency in the French budget as correct, it is clear that the 'true
Republicans' have mulcted France since 1879 in the round sum of five
milliards of francs--or, in other words, of a second German War
Indemnity!
But a banker of eminence, thoroughly familiar with the French finances,
tells me that M. Leroy-Beaulieu has underestimated the amount. He puts
it himself at an annual average for the past decade of 700,000,000
francs. Thanks to the device adopted, I am sorry to say, by M. Léon Say,
in 1879, of transferring to what is called the 'extraordinary budget' of
each year numerous items which should properly find a place in the
'ordinary budget' of each year, it is not very easy to get at a precise
and definite basis for estimating the real amount of these annual
deficiencies.
M. Amagat, a Republican deputy for the Department of the Cantal, who has
distinguished himself and earned the hostility of the Carnot Government
by his cool and methodical treatment of these financial matters,
denounces this device as 'deplorable,' and as keeping alive the most
strange 'illusions' among well-meaning French Republicans about the real
condition of the national finances.
Precisely! But the device was adopted expressly to keep alive these
'illusions,' in order that the 'illusions' might keep alive the
politicians who adopted the device.
It served M. Léon Say, who knew better, in 1879. It serves M. Rouvier,
who, perhaps, does not know better, in 1890. The new Chamber met on
November 12, 1889. A fortnight had hardly passed when M. Rouvier, as
Minister of the Finances, the 'Minister of ill-omen' as M. Amagat calls
him, rose in his place and, without a blush, affirmed that the budget
for 1889 showed an excess of receipts over expenditure of 'forty
millions of francs!' This bold statement was promptly telegraphed from
Paris, by the correspondents of the foreign press in that city, to the
four corners of the globe. What did it mean? It meant simply this: that,
thanks to the financial success of the Government investment of the
public money in a grand raree show at Paris, called a 'Universal
Exposition,' such an excess of income over outlay appeared in what is
called the 'ordinary budget.' As to the 'extraordinary' budget--oh! that
is quite another matter.
It is as if an English householder should divide his yearly accounts
into 'ordinary' and 'extraordinary' accounts, putting under the
'ordinary' accounts his cab and railway fares, his club expenses, his
transactions on the turf, and his ventures at Monte Carlo, but remitting
to the 'extraordinary' accounts such unconsidered trifles as house-rent,
domestic expenses, the bills of tailors and milliners, and taxes, local
and imperial. For 1879, for example, M. Léon Say, as Finance Minister,
gave in his 'ordinary' budget at 2,714,672,014 francs, which showed a
reduction of 78,705,790 francs from the 'ordinary' budget of 1878; but
with this cheerful statement M. Léon Say gave in also his
'extraordinary' budget at 460,674,566 francs, the whole of which rather
important sum was to be raised, not out of the revenue, but by a loan!
This system has been carried on ever since 1877, when the 'true
Republicans' got possession of the legislature, two years before they
put M. Grévy into the Elysée as President.
On July 22, 1882, M. Daynaud, an authority on questions of finance,
summed up the results in a speech delivered in the Chamber of Deputies.
The Government in 1877 spent, in round numbers, 3,177,000,000 francs. In
1883 it spent 4,040,000,000 francs. All this without including what are
called 'supplementary credits.' So that, putting these aside, it appears
from the speech of M. Daynaud that, in seven years, between 1877 and
1883, the 'true Republicans' subjected the people of France to an
increase of no less than 863,000,000 francs in their annual public
expenditure.
Meanwhile these same 'true Republicans,' who were thus adding hundreds
of millions yearly to the public debt, struck hundreds of thousands out
of the lawful income of the clergy of France. They ordered the
dispersion by Executive decrees, and 'if necessary by military force,'
of all religious orders and communities not 'authorised' by the
Government. They drove nuns and Sisters of Charity, with violence and
insult, out of their abodes. They expelled the religious nurses from the
hospitals and the priests from the prisons and the almshouses. They
'laicised' the schools of France, throwing every symbol of religion--in
many cases literally--into the street, forbidding, literally, the name
of God to be mentioned within the walls of a school, and striking out
every allusion to the Christian faith from the text-books supplied at
the cost of the Christian parents of France to their children in the
schools supported out of taxes paid by themselves.
It is simply impossible to overstate the virulence and the violence of
this official Republican war against religion which began under the
Waddington Ministry almost as soon as it took possession of the
government in 1879. It was formally opened under the leadership of M.
Ferry. M. Ferry is admitted to be the ideal statesman of the Opportunist
Republicans now in power. To him M. Carnot owes his Presidency of the
Republic. In March 1879 M. Jules Ferry asked the Republican majority of
the House to pass a law concerning the 'higher education,' in the draft
of which he had inserted a clause ever since famous as 'Article 7,'
depriving any Frenchman who might be a member of any religious
corporation 'not recognised by the State' of the right to teach. This
'Article 7' was a revival of an amendment offered to but not carried by
the Legislative Assembly of the Second Republic in 1849. The principle
of it is as old as the Emperor Julian, who forbade Christians to teach
in the schools of the Empire.
M. Ferry's law was intended to repeal a previous law adopted in 1875,
and which had not been then three years in operation. By the Law of July
12, 1875, the Republic of Thiers and Macmahon had modified, in the
interest of liberty, the monopoly of higher education in France enjoyed
by the State. It was an essentially wise, liberal, and 'progressive'
law. But the Republicans of Gambetta could not endure it, for it gave
the Christians of France the right to provide for the higher education
of their children in their own way; so it must be abolished.
It was abolished; and though the Senate, making a partial stand for law
and for the equal rights of French citizens, struck out 'Article 7,' M.
Ferry and his friends, who controlled the President, caused him to issue
an Executive decree, to which I have already referred, breaking up the
religious orders aimed at in 'Article 7.' This was in 1880. In 1882 the
Chamber adopted a law proposed by M. Paul Bert, confirming to the State
the monopoly of secondary education; and to-day we see M. Clémenceau,
the avowed enemy of M. Jules Ferry and of the Opportunists, shaking
hands with them in public, after the elections of 1889, on this one
question of deadly hostility to all religion in the educational
establishments of France. At a banquet given on December 3 by certain
anti-Boulangist students in Paris to the Government deputies for the
Seine, M. Clémenceau declared himself in favour of 'the union of all
Republicans'--upon what lines and to what end?--'To prepare the Grand
Social Revolution and make war upon the theocratic spirit which seeks to
reduce the human mind to slavery!'
In other words, the Third Republic is to combine the Socialism of 1848
with the Atheism of 1793, the National workshops with the worship of
Reason, and to join hands, I suppose, with the extemporised 'Republic of
Brazil' in a grand propaganda which shall secure the abolition, not
only of all the thrones in Europe, but of all the altars in America. If
language means anything and facts have any force, this is the inevitable
programme of the French Republic of 1890, and this is the entertainment
to which the Christian nations of the New World and the Old were invited
at Paris in the great 'centennial' year 1889.
Believing this to be the inevitable programme of the Republic, as
represented by the Government of President Grévy so long ago as 1880, I
was yet surprised, as 1 have said, to see the strength of the protest
recorded against it by the voters of France at the Legislative elections
in 1885, because the Republic of Thiers and Macmahon had made, and
deservedly, so much progress in the confidence of the French people,
that I had hardly expected to see the essentially conservative heart of
France startled, even by three or four years' experience of the
Government of M. Grévy, into an adequate sense of the perils into which
these successors of the Maréchal-Duc were leading the country.
'A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush' is an essentially French
proverb. Seven years of peace, liberty, and financial prosperity under
the Conservative Republic should have gone far, I thought, to convince
the average French peasant that he might, after all, be safe under a
republic. Doubtless this impression of mine was not wholly unfounded.
Yet, in spite of this important check upon the headway of the reaction
against Republicanism provoked by the fanaticism and the financial
extravagance of the Government of President Grévy--and in spite, too, of
the open official pressure put upon the voters of France by the then
Minister of the Interior, M. Allain-Targé, who issued a circular
commanding all the prefects in France to stand 'neutral' between
Republican candidates of all shades, but to exert themselves for the
defeat of all 'reactionary' candidates; in spite of all this, the
elections of October and November 1885 sent up about two hundred
monarchical members, whose seats could by no trick or device be stolen
from them, to the Chamber of Deputies, and pitted a popular vote of
3,608,578 declared enemies of the existing Republic against a popular
vote of 4,377,063 citizens anxious to maintain or willing to submit to
it.
From that time to the present day the Government of the Third French
Republic has been standing on the defensive. It has steadily lost
ground, with every passing year, in the confidence and respect of the
French people. The financial scandals, amid which President Grévy and
his son-in-law, M. Wilson, disappeared and President Carnot was
'invented,' simply revealed a condition of things inherent in the very
nature of the political organisation of France under the parliamentary
revolutionists who came into power in 1879.
The Third French Republic, such as these men have made it, is condemned,
hopelessly and irretrievably condemned, by its creed to be a government
of persecution and by its machinery to be a government of corruption.
There is no escape for it.
V
It has made the Government of France--not the Administration, but the
form, the constitution of the Government--a party question, and it has
organised the party which insists that France shall be a Republic,
openly and avowedly upon the maxim of Danton that 'to the victors belong
the spoils.' What has come of this maxim in the United States, where the
form and constitution of the Republic are accepted by all political
parties, and the administration of the Government alone is a party
question, I need not say.
There are 'black points' even on the horizon of the American Republic,
as all Americans know. But there is no point blacker than this, as to
which, however, it is possible with us that good men of all political
parties may act together in the future as they have acted together in
the past for Civil Service Reform. But what is possible with us is not
possible with the party of the Republic in France. For, by making the
Republic a republic of religious persecution, the Republicans of the
Republic of Gambetta, Jules Ferry, Carnot, and Clémenceau have made it
necessarily a republic of political proscription, and political
proscription inevitably means political corruption.
If any man needs to learn this, let him study the story of the
establishment of the Protestant Succession in England by Walpole, and
the story of the overthrow of the United States Bank by President
Jackson, in America. He may think the Protestant Succession in England,
and the overthrow of the United States Bank in America, worth the price
paid for each. But he will learn at least what the price was.
It will not be the fault of the Carnot Government--certainly not of the
most energetic member of that Government, M. Constans, Minister of the
Interior--if the French people fail to learn this.
A very much higher price will have to be paid for the extirpation of
religion out of France, and the education of the French people into what
M. Jules Ferry fantastically supposes to be 'Herbert Spencer's' gospel,
identifying duty with self-indulgence!
The late Chamber, doubtless having the then impending elections in view,
voted to abolish the Secret Service Fund of the Ministry of the
Interior. It was a Platonic vote, referring only to the Budget of 1890,
nor did it take effect. But on December 14, 1889, M. Constans, having
made the re-establishment of this fund a cabinet question, got up in the
Chamber and boldly declared that he wanted a Secret Service Fund of
1,600,000 fr., or about 64,000_l._ sterling; that he did not care what
the Right thought about such a fund; that he meant to use it to 'combat
conspiracies against the Republic,' and that he expected the majority to
give it to him as a mark of their personal confidence.
That the War Office, in a country like France, should need a Secret
Service Fund, is intelligible. It is intelligible that a Secret Service
Fund should be legitimately required, perhaps, by the Foreign Office of
a country like France. But why should a Secret Service Fund of more than
60,000_l._ sterling be required by the Home Secretary of a French
Republic which is supposed to be 'a government of the people, by the
people, for the people'?
I have an impression, which it will require evidence to remove, that no
such Secret Service Fund as this is at the disposal of the Chancellor of
the German Empire; and I find the whole expense of the Home Office of
the monarchy of Great Britain set down at less than half the amount
which, after a brief debate, the Republicans of the new Chamber in
France, by a majority of a hundred votes, quietly put under the control
of the French Home Secretary, to show their 'confidence' in the
excellent man to whose unhesitating manipulation, through his prefects,
of the votes cast in September and October last, so many of them are
universally believed in France to be really indebted for their seats!
In the year 1889 the British budget shows an outlay on the Home Office
of 29,963_l._
More than this, the 'Secret Service Fund' voted out of the pockets of
the taxpayers of France into the strong box of the Minister of the
Interior, considerably exceeds the cost of the British Treasury Office!
In 1888 the British budget gave the First Lord of the Treasury, to cover
the expenses of that great and important department of the British
monarchical government, 60,222_l._, or nearly 4,000_l._ less than the
Republicans of the Third French Republic have generously put at the
disposal of M. Constans to 'combat conspiracies' against the life of a
Republic of which in the same breath we are asked to believe that it has
just been acclaimed with enthusiasm by the masses of the French people,
as the fixed, final, and permanent government of their deliberate
choice!
At this rate it will actually cost the taxpayers of Republican France
more than two-thirds as much merely to keep the Republic from being
suddenly done to death some fine day between breakfast and dinner, as
it costs the taxpayers of Great Britain to keep up the state and dignity
of the British sovereign from year to year! The total annual amount, I
find, of the Civil List of Great Britain annually voted to the Queen, of
the annual grants to other members of the Royal Family, and of the
Viceroyalty of Ireland is 557,000_l._ Of this amount the Hereditary
Revenues, surrendered to the nation, cover 464,000_l._ This leaves an
annual charge upon the taxpayers of 93,000_l._ sterling, or only
29,000_l._ more than the sum deliberately voted by the Republican
Chamber at Paris into the hands of M. Constans to be by him used in
'combating conspiracies' against the Republic!--or, in other words and
in plain English, in making things comfortable for his political
friends, and uncomfortable for his political enemies!
And this, observe, is a mere supplementary adjunct to the budget of this
energetic and admirable minister, that budget having been fixed by the
late Chamber for 1890 at 61,291,256 francs--or, in round numbers,
2,451,650_l._ sterling--of which handsome amount 13,059,570 francs, or
522,383_l._ sterling, being the outlay on the Central Administration and
the préfectures, must be added to the 1,200,000 francs, or 48,000_l._
sterling, of the Presidential salary and allowances, in order to give us
a basis for a fair approximate comparison of the cost to republican
France of her executive President and prefects with the cost to
monarchical Great Britain of her executive Sovereign, lords-lieutenant,
and Viceroy of Ireland. Stated in round numbers, the result appears to
be that for their republican President and their eighty-three republican
prefects, the taxpayers of France pay annually out of their own pockets
570,383_l._ against 93,000_l._ paid annually out of their own pockets by
the taxpayers of Great Britain for their monarchical sovereign,
eighty-six lords-lieutenant, a Viceroy of Ireland, and thirty-two
lieutenants of the Irish counties. From the point of view of the
taxpayers, this would seem to lend some colour to Lord Beaconsfield's
contention, that economy is to be found on the side of the system which
rewards certain kinds of public service by 'public distinction conferred
by the fountain of honour.'
The threadbare witticism about the Bourbons of 1815, who had learned
nothing and forgotten nothing, may well be furbished up for the benefit
of the Republicans who now control the Third French Republic. However
true it may, or may not, have been of the Comte de Provence and the
Comte d'Artois, Henri IV., who was certainly a Bourbon of the Bourbons,
had a quick wit at learning, and upon occasion also a neat knack of
forgetting. He thought Paris well worth a mass, heard the mass, and got
Paris.
It was not necessary for the Republicans of the Third Republic, after
the formidable lesson which France read them at the elections in 1885,
to hear mass themselves. They were perfectly free to persist and to
perish in their unbelief, and, like the hero of Sir Alfred Lyall's 'Land
of Regrets,'
'Get damned in their commonplace way.'
All that Christian France asked of them in 1885 was that they would
leave their fellow-citizens as free to hear mass as they themselves
were free not to hear it. They had only to let the religion of the
French people alone, to respect the consciences and the civil liberty of
their countrymen, and the tides that were rising against them, and the
Republic because of them, must inevitably have begun to subside.
The hostility between the Church and the Republic in France is
absolutely, in its origin, one-sided. The Church is no more necessarily
hostile to the Republic as a Republic in France, than it is to the
Republic as a Republic in the United States or in Chile, or in Catholic
Switzerland. The Church can be made hostile to a Republic by persecution
and attack just as it can he made hostile in the same way to a monarchy.
Neither Philippe le Bel nor Henry the Eighth was much of a Republican.
But the Republicans of the Third Republic, in 1885, would learn nothing
and forget nothing. They met the protest of millions of voters in France
with a renewed virulence of Anti-Catholic and of Anti-Christian
legislation, with an increased public expenditure, and with fresh
political proscriptions.
Their purpose and their programme were succinctly and clearly summed up
in the explicit declaration of M. Brisson, one of the most conspicuous
leaders of the Republican party, that 'the Republic should be
established in France, if necessary, by arms!'
What is the difference in principle between such a declaration as this
and the attempt of the third Napoleon to establish an empire in Mexico
by arms? In the one case we have a proselytising, atheistic Republic
bent on abolishing the religion of an unquestionable majority of the
French people; in the other, we have a proselytising emperor bent on
organizing empire in Mexico. In the light of the doctrine that
governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,
the one undertaking is as monstrous as the other. The undertaking of the
Emperor failed disastrously in Mexico; I do not believe, and for many
reasons, that the undertaking of the Republic will succeed in France.
One, and the chief of these reasons, is, that I believe the hold of the
Christian religion upon the body of the French people to be stronger,
and not weaker, than it was before the propaganda of atheism began. In
some of the chapters of this volume evidence, I think, will be found to
show this. Under the plan which I have adopted in constructing the book,
I have not attempted to marshal and co-ordinate the evidence. I have
simply presented it, where it presented itself, either in conversations
had by me at one or another place with persons qualified, as I thought,
to speak with some authority, or in observations made by me in passing
through one or another region. It was a part of my plan too, as I have
said, to register, under the general heading of one or another
department, not only what struck me most while visiting that department
in the way of things seen or heard there, but also such conversations
bearing on general subjects as I there had, and such notes as I there
made from the books bearing on French history, which I took with me
wherever I went. As this book is not a treatise but a record, as it is
not intended to maintain a preconceived thesis, but simply to indicate
the grounds on which I have myself come to certain conclusions and
convictions, I thought the method I have adopted the fairest, both to my
readers and to myself, that I could pursue.
VI
But as the point I have now touched, of the religious condition of
France, is a specially grave and important point, I must ask my readers
to pause with me upon it for a moment here in this Introduction. I am
especially moved to do this because I have reason to think that very
serious and very extraordinary delusions on this point exist outside of
France, and especially in England. This is not unnatural when we
remember that nine foreigners in ten take their impressions of France as
a nation, not only from the current journalism and literature of Paris
alone, but from a very limited range of the current literature and
journalism even of Paris. Most Americans certainly, and I am inclined to
think most Englishmen, who visit Paris, and see and know a good deal of
Paris, are really in a condition of penumbral darkness as to the true
social, religious, and intellectual life of the vast majority of the
population even of Paris. We see the Paris of the boulevards, the
Champs-Elysées, the first nights at the theatres, the restaurants, and
the fashionable shops; the _Tout Paris_ of the gossips of the press,
representing, possibly, one per cent. of the population of the French
capital! Of the domestic, busy, permanent Paris, which keeps the French
capital alive from year to year and from generation to generation--the
Paris of industry and of commerce, of the churches, of the charities, of
the schools, of the convents--how much do we see? There are a number of
prosperous foreign colonies living in London now, most of whose leading
members maintain business or social relations, more or less active, with
one or another section of the English population of the great British
metropolis. Perhaps, if we could get a plain, unvarnished account from
some member of one of these colonies, of England and English life as
they appear to him and to his compatriots, Englishmen might be as much
confounded as I have known very intelligent and well-informed Frenchmen
to be, by the notions of French life and of the condition of the French
people, really and seriously entertained, not by casual foreign
tourists, but by highly educated foreigners who really wished to know
the truth.
Not long after the Legislative Elections of 1885, the results of which
astonished public men in England at the time as much almost as they did
the satellites of the Government in Paris, I met at the house of a
friend in London a very eminent English public man, whose name I do not
feel quite at liberty to mention, but who is certainly regarded by great
numbers of Englishmen as an authority without appeal, not only in regard
to questions of English domestic policy, but in regard to European
affairs in general. In the course of a general conversation--there were
ten or twelve well-known people in the company--this distinguished
public man expressed to me his great surprise at the importance which I
'seemed to attach to the religious sentiment in France.'
I assured him that I not only 'seemed' to attach, but did in fact attach
very serious importance to it, and I ventured to ask him why this should
'surprise' him.
To this he replied textually--for I noted down the remark afterwards
that evening--that he was 'under the impression that the religious
sentiment was dead in France!'
'May I ask,' I replied, 'what can possibly have given you such an
impression as this?'
'Oh, many things,' he answered with great emphasis, 'but particularly a
statement which I saw in a statistical work of much authority, not very
long ago, to the effect that there are in France _five millions of
professed atheists_!'
All who heard this amazing assertion were, I think, as completely taken
aback by it as I was. Courtesy required that I should beg the
distinguished man who made it to give me, if he could, the title of the
work in which he had found it. This he promptly replied that he was at
the moment unable to do. He, however, very nearly asphyxiated a very
quiet and well-bred young Frenchman attached to the French Embassy in
London, who was present, by appealing to him on the subject. 'No, no!'
exclaimed the alarmed _attaché_, 'I dare say there is such a book, no
doubt--no doubt--but I have never heard of it.'
I have never been able to find this valuable work. When I do find it I
shall institute a careful inquiry into the reasons which could have led
five millions of French persons, or about one-seventh of the whole
population of France, to take the pains to register themselves as
'atheists.' Presumably they must all have been adults, as the
declaration, on such a subject, of infants, would scarcely, I take it,
be collected, even by M. Jules Ferry, as evidence of the success of his
great scheme for 'laicising' religion out of France.
Meanwhile, I find it set down in the usual statistical authorities
accessible in 1884, that out of the 36,102,021 inhabitants of France,
35,387,703 registered themselves, or were registered, as Catholics,
580,707 as Protestants, 40,439 as Israelites, and 81,951 as 'not
professing any form of religion.'
Yet I suppose that, if the eminent public man who saw, as in a vision,
these five millions of registered atheists marching to the assault of
Christianity in France were to announce their existence as a fact to a
large public meeting in some great English provincial city to-morrow, we
should have leaders in some of the English journals a day or two
afterwards prognosticating the immediately impending downfall of all
religion in France. Our modern democracies on both sides of the Atlantic
have made such rapid and remarkable progress of late years in the art of
forming opinions, that if Isaac Taylor could come back to the earth he
left, not so very long ago, he would hardly, I think, recognise the
planet.
The fashion of taking it for granted that the whole world is fast going
over to the gospel of ganglia and bathybius, of _vox populi et præterea
nihil_, is not confined to the 'fanatics of impiety' in France. I have
heard it seriously stated in a London drawing-room by another public man
of repute within the last year, that he believed 'Mr. John Bright and
Mr. Gladstone were the last two men who would ever cite the Christian
Scriptures as an authority in the House of Commons.'
The uncommonly good English of the Christian Scriptures may perhaps
constitute an objection to their free use in addressing popular
political assemblies. But, admitting this, I hesitate to accept the
statement. That it should have been made however, and made by a man of
more than ordinary ability, is perhaps a thing to be noted.
But I revert to France.
As the time drew near for the Legislative elections of 1889, the
Republicans in power began to perceive that their methods had not been
crowned with absolute success. The awkward corner caused by the enforced
resignation of President Grévy had indeed been turned, because the
Constitution of the Third Republic provides for the election of the
President by the Assembly. But it is one thing to play a successful
comedy in the Assembly with the help of what in America is called 'the
cohesive power of the public plunder,' and quite another thing to get a
satisfactory Chamber of Deputies re-elected by the people of France
after four years of irritating and exasperating misrule. Much was
expected from the dazzling effect upon the popular mind of the Universal
Exposition at Paris--so much, indeed, that I have had the obvious
incongruity of selecting for the celebration of the French Revolution by
a French Republic the centennial of a year in which no French Republic
existed, accounted for to me by a French Republican on the express
ground that the legislative elections were fixed for 1889! There may
have been some truth in this. For nothing could be more preposterous
than the pretext alleged for the selection by the French Government.
This or that thing which occurred at a particular time in a particular
year may reasonably be made the occasion of a centennial or a
semi-centennial celebration. But how is anybody to fix and celebrate the
'centennial' of a set of notions called 'the principles of 1789'?
In the United States we have celebrated the 'Centennial' of the
Declaration of Independence, and the Centennial of the first
Inauguration of the first President.
Did the French Government intend to invite the monarchies of Europe to
celebrate the destruction by a mob of the Bastille on July 14, 1789?
Hardly, I suppose! Or the Convocation of the States-General at
Versailles on May 5, 1789? Certainly not--for the States-General were
convoked, not under the 'principles of 1789,' but in conformity with an
ancient usage and custom of the French monarchy.
What are the 'principles of 1789'?
And why should anybody in or out of France celebrate them?
If by 'the principles of 1789' we are to understand the principles of
modern constitutional government--and I know no other intelligible
interpretation of the phrase--there is certainly no reason why anybody
out of France should particularly concern himself with celebrating the
adoption of these principles in France any more than with celebrating
the adoption of them in England, or the United States, or Germany, or
Spain, or Italy. The principles of modern constitutional government were
certainly not intelligently adopted, and certainly not loyally carried
out in France, by any of the governments which tumbled over one another
in rapid succession in that distracted country between 1789 and 1815.
Have they been intelligently adopted and loyally carried out in that
distracted country to-day? That is a question, I think, not hastily to
be answered!
To ask the people of England, of the United States, of Germany, of
Spain, of Italy, to unite in celebrating the principles of modern
constitutional government, under the name of the 'principles of 1789,'
at Paris, as if the world were indebted to Paris or to France for the
discovery, and the promulgation, and the adoption of those principles,
was really a piece of presumption which might have been pardoned to the
fatuity of the Abbé Sieyès a hundred years ago, but was hardly to have
been expected from educated Frenchmen in the year 1889.
This was stated, with great good sense and commendable courtesy towards
the French Government responsible for the absurdity, by the Italian
Premier, Signor Crispi, in the Chamber of Deputies at Borne, on June 25,
1887.
In reply to an interpellation of Signor Cavalotti, addressed to the then
Foreign Minister of Italy, Signor Depretis, as to the intentions of the
Italian Government with regard to the Universal Exposition of 1889 at
Paris, Signor Crispi, then Minister of the Interior, made a striking
speech (Signor Depretis being then ill of the disease of which he
eventually died), in which he lucidly and forcibly gave the reasons of
the Italian Government for declining to take any official part in the
matter. He plainly intimated his conviction (which is the conviction, by
the way, of a great many sensible people not premiers of Italy) that the
business of Universal Expositions has been possibly overdone. But,
without dwelling upon that point, he went on to show that it would be
foolish for Italy to isolate herself from the other great powers by
taking an official part in this particular 'Universal Exposition.' To
the plea of Signor Cavalotti that liberated Italy ought to unite with
France to celebrate 'the principles of 1789,' Signor Crispi thus
replied; 'I agree with the honourable member that we are sons of 1789.
But I must remind him that 1789 was preceded by the glorious English
Revolution, and by the great American Revolution, in both of which had
been manifested and established the principles which have subsequently
prevailed throughout the world.'
Whether the treatment of the Sovereign Pontiff at Rome by the government
of United Italy, since 1871, has been entirely consistent with the
principles of the 'glorious English Revolution,' or of the 'great
American. Revolution,' I need not now consider. But that all the living
political doctrines of which intelligent Frenchmen mean to speak when
they talk about the 'principles of 1789' are the American political
doctrines of 1776, and the English political doctrines of 1688, admits
of no question. As to this, Signor Crispi was absolutely right, and it
is creditable to him, as an Italian statesman and an Italian patriot,
that he should have thus early and publicly declined to attach the
liberty and the independence of Italy as a bob to the tail of an
electioneering Exposition kite at Paris in 1889. To France and to the
French Republics--first, second, and third--Italy owes a good deal less
than nothing. To two rulers of France, both of them of Italian blood,
the first and third Napoleon, she owes a great deal. But her chief
political creditor, and her greatest statesman, Cavour, drew his
political doctrines, not from the muddy French pool of the 'principles
of 1789,' but from the original fountains of 1776 and 1688. Had Cavour
been living in 1887, to answer the interpellation of Signor Cavalotti,
he might, perhaps, have defined more sharply than it was given to Signor
Crispi to do, the real relations between the French Revolution of 1789
and the national developments of modern Italy. Had the French Revolution
of 1789 been left to exhaust itself within the limits of France, it
would probably have ended--as the friends of the misguided Duc d'Orléans
almost from the first expected to see it end--in the substitution of a
comparatively capable for a positively incapable French king upon a
constitutional French throne. In that event it would have interested
Europe and the world no less, and no more, than the Fronde or the
religious wars which came to a close with the coronation of Henry of
Navarre. It was the fear of this, unquestionably, which drove the
conspirators of the Gironde into forcing a foreign war upon their
unfortunate country. The legend of Republican France marching as one man
to the Rhine to liberate enslaved Europe has much less foundation in
fact than the legend of Itsatsou and the horn of Roland. It is a pity
to disturb historical fables which have flowered into immortal verse,
but really there was not the slightest occasion, so far as Europe was
concerned, for France in 1790 to 'stamp her strong foot and swear she
would be free.' M. de Bourgoing's admirable diplomatic history of those
days makes this quite clear. No power in Europe objected to her being as
free as she liked. On the contrary, England, even in 1792, was both
ready and anxious to recognise the insane French republic of that day,
and to see the French royal family sent away to Naples or to Madrid.
Pitt was too far-sighted a statesman not to be well aware that the
commerce and the colonies of such a French republic were the natural
prizes of English common sense and English enterprise. Nor was Austria
indisposed to see the House of Bourbon, which had successfully disputed
the supremacy of Europe with the Hapsburgs, humiliated and cast down.
The French Revolution became Titanic only when it ceased to be a
Revolution and ceased to be French. The magnificent stanzas of Barbier
tell the true story of the riderless steed re-bitted, re-bridled, and
mounted by the Italian master of mankind, the Cæsar for whom the
eagle-eyed Catherine of Russia had so quietly waited and looked when the
helpless and hopeless orgie of 1789 began. The Past from which he
emerged, the Future which he evoked, both loom larger than human in the
shadow of that colossal figure. What a silly tinkle, as of pastoral
bells in some Rousseau's _Devin du Village_, have the 'principles of
1789,' when the stage rings again with the stern accents of the
conqueror, hectoring the senators of the free and imperial city of
Augsburg, for example, on his way to Wagram and to victory twenty years
afterwards!
'Your bankers are the channel through which the gold of the eternal
enemy of the Continent finds its way to Austria. I have made up my mind
that I will give you to some king. To whom I have not yet settled. I
will attend to that when I come back from Vienna.'
And, as the faithful record of the _Drei Mohren_ tells us, 'Messieurs
the senators withdrew, much mortified, and not at all pleased.'
Nevertheless, when the conqueror kept his word, and having made a king
of Bavaria to give them to, gave them to the king of Bavaria, Messieurs
the senators, with a suppleness and a docility which would have done
credit to Debry (who after proposing, as a republican, to organise 1,200
'tyrannicides' and murder all the kings and emperors of the earth,
begged Napoleon to make him a baron), made haste to come and prostrate
themselves before the new Bavarian Majesty and to protest that until the
fortunate day of his arrival to reign over them they had never known
what real happiness was.
If there is one thing more certain than another in human history, it is
that but for the English Revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution
of 1776 the world in general would know and care to-day very little more
about the French 'principles of 1789,' and the French Revolution, and
the First French Republic, than the world in general knows or cares
to-day about the wars in the Cevennes or the long conflict between the
Armagnacs and the Bourguignons.
Napoleon crumpled up the 'principles of 1789' and the Revolution and the
Republic in his iron hand, and flung them all together into a corner. He
meant that France and the world should think of other things. In 1810
Paganel, who, having been a 'patriot' of the Convention, had naturally
become a liveried servant of the Emperor and King, thought he might
venture to compose a 'Historical Essay on the French Revolution.' He
dedicated it to the Imperial Chancellor of the Legion of Honour, and he
wound up his preface with these words: 'And thus at last we see without
astonishment, after this long series of errors, misfortunes, and crimes,
the Republic disappear, and France implore the Supreme Being to
vouchsafe to her the one great and potent genius who in these difficult
circumstances was able to lift her up, to defend her, and to govern
her!' The heart of Louis XVIII. would have been touched by the grateful
humility of this repentant wretch. But the Emperor simply kicked him
downstairs. He forbade the book to be published. The whole edition was
put under lock and key, and never saw the light till liberty came back
to France, with the white nag and the Bourbon lilies, in 1815. Surely
here is a fact worth noting!
Had this first history of the French Revolution, written as Paganel, a
member of the Revolutionary Convention, wrote it, been published under
the First Republic, the author would infallibly have been sent to the
guillotine. Writing it under the First Empire he was merely snubbed,
despite his fulsome adulation of the Emperor. His book was finally given
to the world under the restored historic monarchy in 1818!
In 1811, Chateaubriand, having been elected to succeed Marie-Joseph
Chéniér, the brother of the republican poet André, murdered by the First
Republic, as a member of the Institute, prepared a speech on the
Convention, to be read before that august body. Napoleon heard of it
and, without troubling himself to look at it, forbade it to be
delivered. 'It is well for M. de Chateaubriand,' he said, 'that it was
suppressed. If he had read it before the Institute, I would have flung
him into the bottom of a dungeon, and left him there the rest of his
natural life!'
Napoleon knew the First Republic thoroughly. He had measured all its
men, and all its records were in his hand. He could not get into or out
of his carriage without treading on some incorruptible 'patriot'
prostrate between its wheels with a petition for a préfecture, a title
or a pension. The crimes and follies of the First Republic had made
France and the world sick of its name. Its true story was a tale of
shame and humiliation, not fit to be dragged out into the blaze of the
glory of Imperial France.
The First Republic was the deadly enemy both of liberty and of law. The
conduct of its first envoy to the United States would have justified
Washington in locking him up. When a stop was put to his mischievous
impertinences, he preferred exile in America to the chance of the
guillotine at Paris, and his name died out, I believe, curiously enough,
with one of the chief instruments of the notorious Tweed Ring in New
York.
The first shots fired in anger under the American flag after the peace
of 1783 were fired against cruisers of the French Republic captured in
the West Indies by American men-of-war, to put an end to the ignorant
and insolent attempt of what called itself a government at Paris to
issue letters of marque on American soil against English commerce.
So grateful was France to the Emperor for restoring the reign of law,
that she never troubled herself about liberty, and but for the
indomitable defence of constitutional liberty and national independence
which England maintained, often single-handed, from the rupture of the
peace of Amiens to the victory of Waterloo, the very names of the chief
actors in the odious and ridiculous dramas of the Revolution would have
long since faded, as Napoleon intended they should fade, out of the
memory of the masses of mankind.
VII
How little confidence the Government of the Third Republic really felt
in the efficacy of the 'principles of 1789,' and of the 'Centennial
Exposition,' to save it at the polls in 1889 from the natural
consequences of its intolerance and its corruption, was instructively
shown by the absolute panic into which it was thrown by the election at
Paris of General Boulanger on January 27. Here, at the very threshold of
the great electoral year, rose the spectre of the 'man on horseback'!
Certainly General Boulanger was not Napoleon Bonaparte. The Government,
which had itself put General Boulanger on horseback, knew the strength
and the weakness of the man himself. But it was the legend, not the
man, they dreaded. If the French people, or even if Paris, really
believed in the legend of Boulanger--and this tremendous vote of January
27 looked very much like it--it mattered little what the real value of
the man might be, the legend would make him master of France. That would
mean for the Third Republic the fate of the First Republic and of the
Second, and for the men who had identified it with their own fanaticism
and folly, and greed, and incapacity, a long farewell to all their
greatness!
As for the eventual results, what mattered these to them?
The Universal Exposition might collapse, or it might be opened by
General Boulanger on his black horse, instead of President Carnot in his
landau. What did that signify? But it signified much that the men who
had invented President Carnot were not likely to make part of the
_cortège_ of General Boulanger.
It is no exaggeration to say that from January 27, 1889, the Government
of the Third French Republic was openly and visibly given up by night
and by day to one great purpose alone--and that purpose was, not to
glorify the 'principles of 1789,' not to celebrate the Republic--the
grand statue of the Triumph of the Republic, destined to be set up with
great pomp in the sight of the assembled human race, was actually left
to be cast in plaster of Paris, no functionary caring to waste a sou on
putting it into perennial bronze or enduring marble--no! the great
dominant, unconcealed purpose of all the leaders of the Republic was, in
some way--no matter how, by hook or by crook--to conjure that spectre
of the First Consulate, riding about, awful and imminent, on the black
horse of General Boulanger!
Perhaps the high-water mark of this quite unparalleled and most
instructive panic was the appearance, towards the end of the last
parliamentary session, of M. Jules Ferry, the author of the odious
'Article 7,' the man who after hesitating--to his credit be it
said--originally to propose that ministers of religion should be
absolutely forbidden to teach the children of France in her public
schools, at last succumbed to the vehemence of Paul Bert, the Condorcet
of this modern persecution, and became the acknowledged leader of the
war against Liberty and Religion--in the tribune of the Deputies, there
to urge, and indeed to implore, the Conservative members to make peace
with the persecutors, and save them from the peril of Boulanger!
The scene of that day in the Chamber of Deputies was not one to be
forgotten. The aspect and the accents of the Republican leader were at
times absolutely pathetic with the pathos of unaffected terror. It was
difficult to believe, whilst listening to him, that he could really have
'five millions of professed atheists' at his back, encouraging him to
extirpate Christianity, root and branch, out of the land of France!
Not less striking, in quite another sense, was the grim and stony
silence with which the appeal of the Republican leader was received by
the Right, representing, as the Third Republic has chosen to make the
Right represent, the Religion, and with the Religion the Liberty, of
France.
It reminded me, I am sorry to say, of the way in which a naturally
amiable and considerate householder might be expected to listen to the
arguments of an adroit and accomplished burglar showing cause why he
should be locked into the plate-closet to protect him from the police.
M. Jules Ferry's offer was to suspend the application to certain
religious bodies of the interdict fulminated against them by himself and
the Republican Government. At last he paused, evidently oppressed by the
steady, unresponsive gaze of his hearers.
Then the silence was broken!
'Do you speak for the Government?' called out a fiery deputy of the
Right.
M. Jules Ferry hesitated a moment and then replied, 'No! I speak for
myself; but there are many who think as I do!'
'You!' came back the hot response. 'You! bah!--you are nothing!'
The real response came later, on September 22, when, in his own town of
St.-Dié, the chief of the Opportunists, despite all the efforts of the
prefect of the department and of the local authorities to carry him
through, was beaten by a Monarchist. Obviously M. Ferry had heard how
things looked from his committee at St.-Dié when he made his fruitless
appeal to the Eight in the Chamber!
Finding that nothing was to be expected from any cajolery of the Right,
or any transactions with the outraged and awakened Christianity of
France, the Government at last gave up the control of the impending
elections unreservedly into the hands of M. Constans of Toulouse, of
whom I have already spoken. To him, as Minister of the Interior, all
the machinery of politics was abandoned. Every prefect in France became
an electoral agent to do his bidding.
For the first time too, I believe, even in French administrative
history, all the employees of the post-offices and the telegraph offices
were transferred from the control of the Director of Posts and
Telegraphs to the direct control of the Minister of the Interior.
Under his control they still remain, and it is now proposed to attach
these services permanently to the Ministry which manages the elections.
Can anybody fail to see what this means?
At the suggestion of M. Constans, too, the Government resolved to attack
the spectre. It determined to drive General Boulanger out of France. It
is not easy to feel much sympathy with General Boulanger, who while
Minister of War put into execution against the Comte de Paris and his
family a most iniquitous decree, exiling them--for no other cause than
the fact that they come of the family which made France a nation--from
their country and their homes. But the proceedings which the Government
of President Carnot took against General Boulanger were of such a
character that the Procureur de la République, who was first directed to
carry them out, withdrew from his post. Before they could be consummated
by the arrest of General Boulanger, he suddenly left France. Into the
subsequent action of the Senate, constituted as a 'High Court of
Justice' to try him, I need not here enter.
Suffice it that after a canvass organized in this fashion and in this
spirit, and prosecuted by the Government with remorseless energy, the
elections held on September 22 and October 6 have left the relative
strength of the Government and of the Opposition in the new Chamber
substantially what it was in the Chamber of 1885. This, in the
circumstances, can only be described, in the language of one of the
ablest Republican journalists in Paris, M. Jules Dietz of the _Journal
des Débats_, as 'an escape from a disaster.'
The repulse of the assailants at the Redan did not save Sebastopol for
the Russians. The margin of the proclaimed majorities by which many of
the Government members of the new Chamber were returned, is so very
small as to suggest of itself the pressure, in a very practical and
concrete form, of the hand of authority on the returns at the polls. In
twenty cases these majorities ranged from 6 to 200 votes.
In one case, in the Seine Inférieure, the details of which were given to
me by persons of the highest character, with perfect liberty to use
their names, the Government member was declared by the prefect, after
two adjournments of the counting, to have been returned by a majority of
173 votes on a total poll, which proved upon examination to very
considerably exceed the total number of voters registered in the
district!
But, taking the general return of the votes cast at these elections as
authentic, it is perfectly plain that the Monarchical party in France is
stronger to-day than it was in 1885, and that the Republican party is
weaker in France to-day than it was in 1885.
In 1885 the strength of the two parties stood as follows:--
Republicans of all shades 4,377,063
Conservatives and Monarchists 3,608,578
_________
Republican majority 768,485
In 1889 the strength of the two parties stands as follows:--
Conservative Monarchists 3,144,978
Boulangists 629,955
_________
3,774,933
Opportunist Republicans 2,980,540
Radicals 981,809
Socialists 90,593
_________
4,052,542
Republican majority 277,609
Here at once we see a falling off in the Republican majority, between
1885 and 1889, of no less than 490,876 votes. This is certainly
significant enough when we remember that in 1885 the Monarchists did not
everywhere and openly attack the Republic as a form of government, while
in 1889 the issue was admitted on both sides to involve the existence of
the Republic as a form of government.
But this is not all.
When we compare the total of the votes cast in 1885 and 1889, we find a
diminution of no fewer than 788,821 votes. If this proves anything, it
proves that the voters of France care very much less about the stability
of the Republic in 1889 than they did in 1885. And this farther appears
from the further fact that the falling off in the total of votes cast
affected the Republican vote of 1889 much more seriously than it
affected the Monarchical vote. Indeed it did not affect the Monarchical
vote at all. On the contrary, while there was a positive falling off
from the Republican vote of 324,521 between 1885 and 1889, there was a
positive increase of the Monarchical vote, between 1885 and 1889, of
166,355.
How is it possible to weigh the meaning of these figures fairly without
seeing that a form of government which exists in France only in virtue
of a majority which a change of 140,000 votes in a total poll of
7,827,475 would have turned into a minority, can hardly be said to rest
upon as firm a basis, for example, as that of the Third Empire, with its
plebiscitary majority of seven millions in 1870 responding to its
majority of seven millions in 1852?
Take away from the narrow Republican majority of 1889 the public
functionaries, high and low, now counted in France by tens of thousands,
with all who depend upon and are connected with them; give to the ballot
in France the sanctity, freedom, and security which it has in England;
compel the public authorities in France to abstain, as they are
compelled in England to abstain, from direct interference with the
exercise by the voters of the right of suffrage, and the evidence is
overwhelming which goes to show that the Third Republic would be voted
into limbo to-morrow!
VIII
To say this is to say that the Third Republic does not exist in France
by the will of the French people; and this I believe to be absolutely
true. The Third Republic exists by virtue of the control which its
partisans have acquired of the administrative machinery of the
Government, or, in other words, by virtue of political corruption and
intimidation. So great has been the multiplication of functionaries
great and small under the Third Republic, that it is not easy to get at
an accurate estimate of their numbers. The best information I have been
able to obtain leads me to believe that, exclusive of the military and
naval forces, not less than two hundred thousand adult French citizens
now draw their subsistence from the public treasury. This represents a
population of at least a million of souls, so that we have nearly one in
thirty of the inhabitants of France subjected to a direct or indirect
pecuniary pressure from the central authorities at Paris. So openly is
this pressure exerted under the Third Republic, that the Government of
M. Carnot did not hesitate, during the Universal Exposition, and not
long before the Legislative Elections began, to bring up no fewer than
some thirteen thousand of the mayors of France to Paris at the public
expense. There they were entertained--still at the public expense--with
a sumptuous hospitality, which proves that, however orthodox the
Republican Atheism may be of M. Constans, the Minister of the Interior,
he has not yet struck the blessed St. Julian out of his calendar, at
least when he is spending the money of the French taxpayers on his
guests.
If I may believe what I afterwards heard in more than one provincial
town, these worthy mayors (every one of whom, let me observe, exercises
a direct personal and official authority over the elections) carried
back to his astonished and envious fellow-citizens tales of Arabian,
Tunisian, Algerian, and Annamite nights at the Exposition, and on the
Champs-Elysées, to which no pen but that of Diderot or of the younger
Crébillon could do adequate justice. 'I do not believe the Sultan,' said
a clever and amusing lady to me at Toulouse, 'threw open the doors of
Paradise so wide to the German Kaiser, at Constantinople, as did our
more than liberal M. Constans to the married Mayors of France at Paris!'
On the other hand, at Honfleur, in the Calvados, it came to my knowledge
that the local authorities, on the morning of the first Legislative
Elections, brought over from another port on the Norman coast, a number
of sailors, residents of Honfleur, and entitled to vote there, but
absent in the pursuit of their calling. These honest Jack Tars came to
Honfleur by the railway, in a kind of brigade, accompanied by a
Government agent, who marched them up to the polls, and, having seen
their votes safely deposited for the Government candidate, gave each man
his return ticket for the next day, and set them all free to spend the
interval in the bosom of their astonished and, I hope, delighted
families.
From the point of view of the domestic peace of France, this proceeding
was perhaps less reprehensible than the Belshazzar's Feast of M.
Constans and the thirteen thousand mayors. But from the point of view of
the relations between the Third Republic and the deliberate independent
electoral will of France, I think it must be admitted that they are, as
the people say in the Western States of America, 'very much of a
muchness!'
I ought to add that in France the mayors of the chief towns (or
_chefs-lieux_), the arrondissements, and the cantons are nominated by
the Government at Paris. The mayors of the communes which owe their
corporate freedom to the monarchy are elected, but the Third Republic
has taken from them the control of their local taxation for purposes of
the highest local interest. I should say also that all the sailors in
France are obliged to be inscribed upon lists kept and controlled by the
maritime prefects for the Ministry of the Marine, so that their
whereabouts may be known or ascertainable at all times.
Americans who understand the institutions of their own country find the
true measure of the fitness of a people for self-government in their
respect for the authority of a lawful Executive. The fatal mistake has
been made by the Third as it was by the First French Republic of
confounding respect for a lawful Executive with submission to an
Executive controlled by a majority of the Legislature. The fact that the
power of the public purse, in a constitutional government, is
necessarily confided to the Legislature, makes this mistake fatal--fatal
at once to the liberty of the taxpayers who supply the public purse, and
of whom the members of the Legislature are simply the agents and
trustees, and to the efficiency and integrity of the Executive. I see
with much interest, while the sheets of this book are going through the
press in London, that this very grave point emerges from a brief
correspondence published in the English newspapers between the
Chancellor of the British Exchequer, Mr. Goschen, and Lord Lewisham.
Lord Lewisham, acting, it would appear, on behalf of a number of English
Civil Servants, wrote to the Chancellor of the Exchequer concerning
certain complaints of these servants, embodied in a memorial. In his
reply, the Chancellor of the Exchequer alludes to an intimation which
seems to have been made by the authors of this memorial of their
intention to put a kind of pressure upon the Minister of the Crown
through the House of Commons. Upon this Mr. Goschen observes: 'the
memorialists should be reminded that their reference to an appeal to
their representatives in Parliament, involving, as it would seem, a
personal parliamentary canvass to determine the relations between the
State and its employés, contemplates a course of action not only
injurious to the public interests, but opposed to the best traditions of
the Civil Service.'
What the English Chancellor of the Exchequer here most wisely and
properly condemns as a mischief a-brewing, has become the _jus et norma_
of 'the relations between the State and its employés' in France under
the Third Republic.
The persons charged to execute and enforce the laws in France have come,
under the Third Republic, from the President downwards throughout the
Civil Service, to regard themselves, and to be regarded by the people,
as the mere servants and instruments of the persons deputed by the
people to consider what the laws shall be, and to adjust the public
taxation to the necessities of the public service. The result
necessarily is that the majority of the French Chamber of Deputies under
the Third Republic has visibly become an irresponsible oligarchy of a
kind most dangerous to liberty and the public weal.
By calling themselves, as they do, the 'party of the appeal to the
people,' the French Imperialists show their doubtless well-founded
conviction that the masses of the French people are essentially
monarchical in their ideas as to the best tenure by which the Executive
authority can be held. To believe this, is to believe that the masses of
the French people are essentially lovers of order, not of disorder; that
they instinctively put the executive above the legislative function in
their conceptions of a political hierarchy, and therefore that they are
essentially fitted for self-government. In this I am sure the
Imperialists are right. But, unfortunately for them, the centralised
administrative machinery of government in France by which the French
people are now and have for a century past been prevented from governing
themselves, though not indeed of Imperial origin, was so developed and
perfected by the genius of the first Napoleon as to become identified in
a sense with the Napoleonic dynasty.
It is a great misfortune of the French people that all great changes in
their political system, no matter how promoted or in what spirit, must
be wrought out within the vicious circle of this centralized
administrative machinery. The initiative in liberating France from this
centralized administrative machinery can only come from within the
vicious circle itself. An independent Executive of France made Chief of
the State by the popular will, and protected, as the Executive of Great
Britain is protected, in the interest of liberty and of the people, by
the hereditary principle, might take this initiative and begin the great
work of so distributing throughout France the administrative
responsibilities and powers now concentrated at Paris as to make the
French people for the first time really their own masters.
Certainly no executive holding power by any tenure less independent and
secure can ever effect this. That a real basis exists upon which this
great work might be carried out in the local life, traditions, ideas and
sympathies by which the widely different populations of what used to be
known as the different provinces of the Kingdom of France are united
among themselves and discriminated from one another, many able and
well-informed Frenchmen believe. One of the most hasty and mischievous
things done by the infatuated political tinkers of 1790 was to cut and
carve up France into arbitrary political departments for the express
purpose of disintegrating and destroying those ancient social and
political organisms.
This purpose has not been effectually accomplished. What has been
accomplished is to superpose upon the ancient organic France another
arbitrary and administrative France. This latter arbitrary and
administrative France controlled by a legislative oligarchy, which first
makes and then uses the French Executive for its own purposes, it is
which now calls itself the Third French Republic.
The traits and the tendencies as well as the origin of the Third
Republic can be thoroughly studied at Paris. Without Paris the Third
Republic never could have existed. It exists now in virtue of the
political machinery of which Paris is the centre. That it could not
withstand for a day any severe shock given to that machinery was
confessed, as I have said, by its own government in the abject panic
which followed the victory of General Boulanger at the polls of the
capital on January 27, 1889.
The traits and the tendencies of France, on the contrary, must be
studied in the provinces. There was always more wit than wisdom in the
famous saying of Heine--that to talk about the opinion of the provinces
in France was like talking about the opinion of a man's legs--the head
being the seat of thought, and Paris being the head. But the saying was
uttered during the reign of Louis Philippe, and long before the
establishment of universal suffrage by the Second Empire. With universal
suffrage and with the development during the past twenty years of the
railway and of the telegraphic system throughout France, the importance
of the provinces relatively to Paris has greatly and steadily increased.
While steam and electricity have, of course, increased the strength of
the pressure which an aggressive oligarchy controlling the centralised
administrative machinery of the Government at Paris can put upon the
opinions and the interests of France, they have also, it must be
remembered, increased the power of France to resist and to resent that
pressure. They have established return currents, the force of which
grows visibly greater every year. The great provincial towns and cities
of France, for example, are ceasing to be dependent, as they formerly
were, upon the press of Paris for their news and views of which passes
in the capital.
There are no such journals yet in any of the French provinces as the
powerful newspapers which are to be found throughout the United Kingdom;
but there is a steady and very notable growth in the circulation of the
more important local journals, and the telegraph brings them the news of
the day from Paris long before the Parisian papers can reach their
readers. The development of these influences has been checked, and is
still checked, by the official control at Paris of the telegraphic
system, and it is worth noting here that, just before the legislative
elections, the Minister of the Interior, to whom the control of the post
office and of the telegraphs had been transferred, caused the telephone
offices throughout France to be taken possession of by the officials of
the Government, though the negotiations with the private companies
owning the telephones for the purchase of them were still incomplete,
and though the private owners formally protested against the act.
But though the Government may check and retard, it cannot prevent the
development of these influences. France, such as I have found it, full
of activity, full of energy, leavened with a genuine leaven of religious
faith, irritated by a persistent mockery of the forms of liberty into
prizing and demanding the realities of liberty, must grow steadily
stronger. The Republic condemned to a policy of persecution and of
financial profligacy must grow steadily weaker.
Instead of trying to develop France, or letting France develop herself
into a republic, the partisans of a Republic have invented successive
republics, each more grotesque and uncomfortable than its predecessor,
and insisted on cramming France into them. So far the republics have
gone to pieces and France has survived. So intense is her vitality, so
tough appears to me to be the old traditional fibre in many parts of the
French body politic, that before the great chapter of the _Gesta Dei per
Francos_ can be safely assumed to be finally closed, a good many more
milliards will have to be spent on that State Establishment of
Irreligion and Disestablishment of God which the 'true Republicans' of
the Third Republic call 'laicisation.' Long before those milliards can
be raised and spent, the Third Republic will come to the bottom I
believe, if not of the purse, certainly of the patience, of the French
people.
It is already admitted on all hands that so slight a thing as the
reappearance of General Boulanger at Paris on September 21, 1889, would
have completely reversed the general result of the elections of the next
day. The birthday of the First Republic would have been celebrated by
the funeral of the Third. The failure of General Boulanger then to
reappear may have made an end of General Boulanger, but it certainly did
not establish the Republic.
On the contrary, here as we see is the Minister of the Interior, who
knows the situation better than any of his colleagues, invalidating
election after election in the Chamber of Deputies, and beginning the
work of financial reform by demanding an enormous Secret Service Fund to
protect the Republic against conspirators!
Sooner or later this tragi-comedy must end. It concerns Europe and the
world that it should end sooner rather than later, and that it should
end with a pacific restoration of France to her proper place in the
family of European States. Surely the most imperious necessity of the
immediate future in Europe is a general disarmament. No French Republic
can possibly propose or accept such a disarmament. No French Empire even
could easily propose or accept such a disarmament. For the Republic and
the Empire are jointly though not equally responsible for the
humiliations and the disasters of the great Franco-German War. The
historic French monarchy, restored through a revision of the existing
Constitution by the deliberate will of the French people, might propose
such a disarmament with a moral certainty that it would be accepted.
Would not England necessarily stand by France in such a proposal? And is
it not clear that the refusal of Central Europe to accept such a
disarmament so proposed and supported would make that alliance with the
Russian Empire, which is impossible to a French republic, both easy and
natural with a French monarchy?
I should have visited France to small purpose if I could suppose that
such considerations as this will much affect the masses of the French
people. Their present Minister of Public Instruction, M. Fallières, gave
his measure of their average enlightenment on such points when he
actually called upon the electors of the Lot-et-Garonne in September to
vote against M. Cornelis Henry de Witt because a monarchical restoration
would 'be followed by a revival of the _droits des Seigneurs_, and--by a
Cossack invasion!'
But there are many men in France alive to such considerations as this,
and these men have many ways of reaching and influencing the political
action of the masses of their countrymen.
Such men see the vital relations of the diplomatic position of France to
the grave domestic question of the public expenses. It is difficult to
ascertain the actual cost of the military establishment of France on its
present footing of an armed peace. But French officers of rank assure me
that France is now keeping under arms at least 550,000 men, or more than
one in seven of her adult male population available for national
defence. 'We have more men under arms than Germany,' said a French
general to me at Marseilles, 'which is absurd, because the German army
for fighting purposes, in case of any sudden trouble with us, includes
the armies of Austria, Hungary and Italy--so Germany saves money on her
peace footing which we idly expend on ours.' What this officer did not
say to me has been said by many other well-informed Frenchmen, that the
recent military legislation of the parliamentary majority is
demoralising this great military force and threatens its efficiency. The
prominent position taken in the new Chamber since it assembled by M.
Raynal, a Radical member for the Gironde who held the portfolio of
Public Works under M. Gambetta in 1880 and again under M. Jules Ferry,
is not of good omen for the army. It was M. Raynal who brought about the
fall of General Gresley as Minister of War by an 'interpellation,'
founded on the refusal of the War Minister to remove an officer of the
Territorial Army because he was a monarchist. And now M. Raynal appears
with a project for more effectually establishing the domination of the
parliamentary majority by giving it the right to adjourn once a week for
six successive weeks, all debates on any 'interpellation' to which the
Government may object on 'grounds of public policy!'
While the costly army of France is at the mercy of legislation under
such conditions, the navy of France is managed, as appears from a
drastic report presented some time ago by M. Gerville-Réache, an able
Republican deputy from Guadeloupe, with at least as much regard to
politics as to economy. M. Gerville-Réache showed that contracts were
given out so recklessly that a supply of canned provisions, for example,
had been laid in at Cherbourg sufficient for five years! At other
stations supplies of all kinds were bought at prices ranging far above
the market rates, and circulars were produced in which successive
Ministers of Marine had ordered the commandants at different naval
stations to 'expend every sou in their possession' on no matter what,
'before the expiration of the fiscal year, as any excess remaining in
their hands would not only be lost to the Ministry by being ordered back
into the Treasury, but would allow opportunities for impugning the
forecast and judgment of the ministers!' Under such a system it is not
surprising that Admiral Krantz, one of the best naval administrators
France possesses, should have been forced to withdraw from the Tirard
Government to satisfy a political Under-Secretary, M. Etienne.
Is it possible that in the actual condition of France and of Europe such
a system as this should last?
If France drifts or is driven into a great European war, one of two
things would seem to be inevitable. If the French armies are victorious,
the general who commands them and restores the military prestige of
France will be the master of the government and of the country. If the
French armies are defeated, the Government will disappear in a whirlwind
of national rage and despair. 'In that event,' said a Republican Senator
to me, 'in that event--which I will not contemplate--the princes of the
House of France would be recalled instantly and by acclamation; we
should have nothing left but that or anarchy.'
But putting aside the crisis of a great war, what other alternatives
present themselves as the possible issues in peace of the system now
dominant at Paris?
Of what weight or avail in the policy of the parliamentary oligarchy
which calls itself the Third Republic are the counsels of men like M.
Léon Renault, M. Jules Simon, M. Ribot, M. Léon Say, who have tried in
vain to constitute in France the Conservative Republic of M. Thiers? M.
Léon Say left his seat in the Senate before the recent elections and
presented himself in the Pyrenees as a candidate for the Chamber, with
the well-understood expectation of finding himself eventually put into
the presidency of that body. This was to be a guarantee of the
Conservative Republic!
Who actually fills that most important post?
M. Floquet, who first distinguished himself under the Empire by publicly
insulting the Emperor of Russia in the Palais de Justice during the
visit of that potentate to Paris, and who resigned his seat as a deputy
for the Seine in March 1871 to share 'the perils and sufferings,' as he
put it, of his constituents, the Communards of Paris! For this M.
Floquet was arrested at Biarritz and locked up at Paris till the end of
the year 1871.
How can France hope to find liberty within her own borders, or peace
with honour abroad, under the domination of such men?
On December 19, 1888, during a discussion of the budget of 1890 in the
French Senate, M. Challemel-Lacour, a Republican of the Republicans, who
actually allowed the red flag to be hoisted instead of the tricolour on
the Hôtel de Ville of Lyons while he was prefect of the Rhône, and who
represented the Republic for a time as Ambassador in London, made a
remarkable speech, in which he warned his colleagues of the fate which
they were preparing for the Republic. He is one of the three Senators of
the Bouches-du-Rhône, and one of the four Vice-Presidents of a body now
controlled by the Government, and therefore virtually by the majority of
the Chamber of Deputies. He is more than this. An elaborate speech of
his, delivered in the Assembly on September 4, 1874, in which he denied
the 'right to teach' as threatening the 'moral unity of France,' was
the signal of the deliberate war against all religion afterwards
proclaimed by M. Gambetta, and since prosecuted by M. Jules Ferry. Out
of that speech grew the policy of the Third Republic. Yet what did he
say in 1888? He plainly declared his belief that the policy of the
Government was driving the Republic headlong to its ruin. He spoke as a
Republican, passionately reaffirming his faith in the Republic, and his
desire to see it solidly founded in France. 'I conjure you, therefore,'
he said, 'to take order, that the Republic may once more become the
reign of law; that all may be protected in their persons, in their
property, in their faith, not only against disorder in the streets, but
against moral disorder, moral anarchy, defamation, calumny, against the
fury of an unbridled, uncontrolled, irresponsible press. It is time to
arrest the threatening ruin which must affect the humblest lives, if our
sad fate be to witness the catastrophe of liberty!'
M. Challemel-Lacour is an orator. The Senate was shaken and roused by
his earnest appeal. A motion was made that his speech be ordered to be
printed and posted on the walls of Paris. But the night came, and with
the night the pressure of the powers indicted by the speech, and so no
more was heard of it, and the budget of 1890 was voted by the outgoing
Chamber, and the incoming Chamber has re-established in it a Secret
Service Fund of 1,600,000 francs for the Minister of the Interior--and
the work of 'invalidating' the elections of troublesome deputies goes
merrily on, and in the remote valleys and hills of France poor village
curates are mulcted of half their humble stipends for the offence of
calling upon their parishioners to vote for the candidates who do not
attack their religion.
From this intolerable position there are two obvious ways of escape. One
is the familiar Parisian way of the barricades. That way is not likely
to be tried in the interest of liberty or of law. The other is the way
which France sought to adopt in the recent elections, of a deliberate
Revision of the Constitution, now hopelessly perverted into the
instrument of a parliamentary oligarchy. The actual Government has just
prevented a Revision in the interest of a Republican Dictator, which
after all must have been more or less a leap in the dark out of a
window.
As between the only available window and the only available doorway of a
dwelling in flames, it is intelligible that an emotional inmate, with
the smell of the fire on his garments, should make for the window. But,
the window being barred, what should restrain him from walking
rationally out of the doorway? Any one of a dozen possible emergencies
may compel a Revision of the Constitution--and any Revision of the
Constitution now must mean either a Radical revolution, or a restoration
of the hereditary Executive. Either of these would be a doorway; for
France would know whither either of these must lead. M. Thiers, it is
said by persons who ought to be well informed, might have led France
thus out of a doorway in 1871, and into a restoration of the Monarchy.
M. Thiers was an exceedingly able man, but it is hard to see how he
could then have gone about to achieve this result. France in 1871 was
still a conquered country occupied by the German armies. The Third
Napoleon and his son were both then living. The Comte de Chambord was
then in the strength of his years. The Comte de Paris had not then taken
the steps which he afterwards took with so much wisdom and moral
courage, to make an end of the rupture between Henri V. and the House of
Orléans.
The situation now is materially changed. The Imperialists are divided
between Jerome the father and Victor the son. The Royalists are united.
The France of Henri IV. and of Charles X. is represented to-day by the
grandson of Louis Philippe. The _vox Dei_ and the _vox Populi_ meet in
him as they met in the Prince of Orange when England, forty years after
the criminal catastrophe of 1649, was driven by the flight of James II.
into seating William and Mary, the grandson and the granddaughter of
Charles I., upon the abdicated throne.
How can an independent Executive ever be restored in France excepting in
the person of Philippe VII.? Had the Revolution of 1830 never occurred
he would now by the ancient law of succession be King of France and
Navarre. Had the Revolution of 1848 never occurred he would now be King
of the French under the Charter. If the era of revolutions is ever to be
closed in France, must it not be by an Executive who shall be at once
King of France and King of the French--King of France, as representing
the historic growth into greatness and unity of the French nation; King
of the French, as representing the personal liberties and the private
rights of every citizen of the French commonwealth?
* * * * *
FRANCE AND THE REPUBLIC
CHAPTER I
IN THE PAS-DE-CALAIS
CALAIS
The men who, in 1790, brought about the formal division of France into
departments, no doubt thereby facilitated the ephemeral transformation,
in September 1792, of the ancient French monarchy into a French
republic, 'one and indivisible.' But they also put their improvised
republic thereby at the mercy of the marvellous Italian who blew its
flimsy framework into shreds with his cannon in October 1795.
In working out what George Sand calls 'the great practical joke' of the
First Consulate, and the formidable reality of the Empire, Napoleon
found, ready-fashioned to his hand and undamaged by the republican
tinkers, a system of administration essentially despotic. This system
did for him what Charlemagne did for himself when he got rid of the
tribal dukes of the Merovingian epoch, and, as Gneist and Sir Robert
Morier have shown, gathered into his own control the four unities which
make up the unity of the State--the military, the police, the judiciary,
and the finances. The counts of Charlemagne, removable at his pleasure,
with no root in their _comitatus_ save his sovereign will, were the true
prototypes of the modern French prefect. If the old provinces of
France, which had a local life, organisation, and spirit of their own,
had been taken as the units of government in 1790, the monarchy perhaps
might hardly have been abolished in 1792 by a Convention so headlong and
tumultuous that for one day it actually forgot, after abolishing the
monarchy, to establish any government in its place.
But if a republic had been founded through the action of the provinces
of France, it would probably have been harder for Napoleon to make an
end of it, than it was for Charlemagne to dispense with the recognition
of local rights to which the Merovingian kings had submitted in the
appointment of their hereditary _subreguli_, from among the local
magnates of the shires. This, it seems to me, may be inferred from the
fact, admitted on all hands in France, that the departments remain
to-day what they were at first--mere administrative divisions which have
taken no hold on the feelings and sympathies of the people, while the
'local patriotism' of the provinces is still a vivid reality.
Frenchmen are still Gascons and Provençals, Bretons and Normans,
Burgundians and Picards, and no country in the world is richer than
France in local histories and chronicles. But so late as 1877 the local
history of the Department of the Pas-de-Calais, in which I am now
writing, could be described as 'unique in France,' and this local
history is really a history, not of the department at all, but of the
two important and interesting provinces of which it consists--Artois,
namely, and the Boulonnais--each of which still preserves, after nearly
a century, its own distinctive character in the physiognomy of the
people, in their habits, their turn of mind, and their traditions. The
attempt to fuse them into a new political entity has completely failed.
No more has, apparently, come of it, locally, than would have come of
an attempt to fuse Massachusetts and Rhode Island into a Department of
Martha's Vineyard, or Kent and Sussex into a Department of New Haven.
Possibly even less. For Artois and the Boulonnais never passed
definitely under the French crown until the middle of the seventeenth
century. Even Calais, after the Duke of Guise had wrested it from
England, was conquered for Spain by the Archduke Albert, and a smiling
little agricultural commune alone now commemorates, in its name of
Thérouanne, the once great and flourishing episcopal capital of Morinia
in which Clodion began the French monarchy, and which was mercilessly
razed to the ground and abolished from off the face of the earth, little
more than three hundred years ago, by the victorious emperor Charles the
Fifth.
Of this artificial department Calais is neither the chief town nor
capital. It has scarcely a third of the population of Boulogne, and not
much more than half the population of Arras, which is the seat of the
préfecture; and though it is by no means so dreary and uninteresting a
place as the casual traveller, seeing only the landing-pier, and the new
station, which bears the name of the heroic Eustache de St.-Pierre, is
apt to take it to be, it cannot compare, in point of beauty and
interest, either with Boulogne or with Arras. But as the French head of
the great historic ferry between England and the Continent, and as the
seat of sundry thriving factories, it is both a busy and prosperous
town. I found its streets swarming with people and its houses a flutter
of flags and banners, when I came to it on June 3, 1889, to see the
'inauguration,' by President Carnot, of the works on which the French
Government has been spending millions of francs during the past decade,
with an eye to deepening and enlarging the harbour. The weather was
magnificent. Several men-of-war of the Channel squadron lay off the
port. Excursion steamers came in from England, bringing members of
Parliament and miscellaneous British subjects, of the sort once
indignantly denounced to me by the little old verger of a Midland
cathedral as 'them terrible trippers.' The active and good-natured
railway porters at the station were worn out with throngs of travellers
pouring in from all the country round about. There was much animation
everywhere, but nowhere any enthusiasm, though Calais, I suppose, must
be a republican town, as at the election of a deputy, held here in 1886,
the Government candidate, M. Camescasse, received 5,196 votes against
2,233 given to his Conservative opponent, M. Labitte. I am told, too,
there is a good deal of Socialism among the factory workmen; and I can
see that the place is full of _cabarets_ and _débits_, flowing not only
with light beer and sour wine, but with spirits of a sort to make the
consumers more clamorous about the rights than solicitous about the
duties of man.
I heard, in the course of the day, that at some points in his progress,
the President was received with cries of 'Vive Boulanger!' but nothing
of this sort passed under my own observation. What most struck me was
that his presence appeared to be not an event at all, but merely an
incident of a general holiday. Nor did the people seem to care much
about the real event of the day, the 'inauguration' of the perfected
port. Perhaps they knew that the port is not yet perfected. Those of
them who went down to the pier at least knew, this--for a steamer of no
very great size, the St.-André, I believe, trying to come in, grounded
on the sand, and lay there thumping herself heavily for I know not how
long. I heard this mishap described with much glee by a group of
Boulonnais in the main street. 'Ah bah!' said one of them exultingly,
'they may spend what they like, Calais will never be Boulogne!'
I breakfasted with a friend who lives much on a property he has in
Picardy, and who came down to Calais to meet me. When I first knew him,
years ago, he was a republican of the type of Cavaignac and a bitter
enemy of the Empire, some of his kinsfolk in the Gironde having been
ill-treated during the persecution which raged against the republicans
and the royalists alike, in and around Bordeaux, after the _coup d'état_
of the Prince President. Of later years he has been growing indifferent
to public affairs, and is now, I think, simply a pessimist, whom nothing
but a foreign invasion of France is likely to rouse into activity again.
'What is the matter with the people here?' I asked him. 'Are they
Boulangists, or do they simply dislike Carnot?'
'No!' he replied, 'I don't think they care much about Boulanger, and why
should they dislike Carnot? There is nothing in him to like or to
dislike. He is not a personality. He is only a functionary, and
Frenchmen care nothing about functionaries. They know that this is an
electoral job, and they care nothing about it, one way or the other.'
'But I saw an inscription on a banner in one of the streets,' I said,
'to this effect: "Calais always faithful to the Carnots!" Does that mean
that the Carnots are of this country?'
'Not at all! The grandfather of Carnot was born in Burgundy somewhere.
He married a young lady of St.-Omer, and in that way came to be sent by
the Pas-de-Calais to the "Legislative" and the Convention. The
inscription is amusing though,' he added, 'for, like these other
inscriptions reciting the names of Lazare Carnot, and Hippolyte Carnot,
and Sadi Carnot, it shows how hard some people are trying to work the
President up into a personality. They want to make him out the heir of a
dynasty--Carnot III.!'
'That is not a very republican way of looking at a President,' I
observed.
'Possibly not, but it is a very French way of looking at one! We should
be the most monarchical people in Europe if we were not the most
anarchical. Give a public man a legend and a grandfather, and he can go
a long way with us. I don't know that the grandfather will do without
the legend, even when, as in this case, the grandfather has a legend of
his own.'
'Is that legend of grandfather Carnot very strong in this region?' I
asked.
'Neither in this region nor anywhere else,' he replied. 'I think it is
very foolish of the managers in Paris to provoke comparisons by sending
a political bagman to Germany to bring back the ashes of Papa Victory,
as the Prince de Joinville brought back the dead Emperor from St.
Helena. Carnot I., after all, was simply a good war minister, who loomed
into greatness only in comparison with the rogue Pache and the
phenomenal booby Bouchotte who preceded him. He was certainly no better
than his successor Pétiet, and it was Pétiet, not he, who finally
"organised victory" by sending Moreau to the Rhine, and Bonaparte to
Italy. Napoleon, who knew them both, made Pétiet governor of Lombardy,
and chose him, not Carnot, to organise the great camp at Boulogne. When
Pétiet died, not long after Austerlitz, Napoleon gave him a much grander
funeral in the Pantheon than can be got up now for the grandfather of
Carnot. Most people have forgotten Pétiet, and it is a blunder to remind
them of him. But this is a government of blunderers. See what trouble
the Ferrys and the Freycinets are taking to unmake the legend
Clémenceau made for Boulanger! Do what they may, that black horse is
worth more to Boulanger to-day than Carnot's grandfather ever will be to
Carnot III.'
'But has Carnot III. no value of his own? Has he not shown more firmness
than people expected of him when this Boulangist business began?'
'Carnot III. is simply the firm-name of Ferry and De Freycinet. I am not
fond of the scurrilities of Rochefort, as you know, but he sometimes
hits the nail on the head very hard, as he did when, on the day after
that comedy of the presidential election, he said "the fact that a man,
if you ask him to dinner, will not put your spoons into his pocket is
not a sufficient reason for making him president of a republic." Only,'
he added reflectively, 'that was not quite their reason for making him
president. It was that they thought he would let other people pocket the
spoons.'
This reminded me of what used to be said of Secretary Seward by his
enemies, that he was 'honest enough himself, but cared nothing about
honesty in other people.'
'I don't mean that exactly,' said my friend. 'What I mean is, that
Carnot III. is not clever enough to know whether the people around him
are or are not honest. His grandfather was. Carnot I. would have cut a
great figure in our present Senate, and in the party of the "sick at
heart"--the respectable gentlemen, I mean, who are always consenting,
under the stress of some "reason of State," to vote for one or another
piece of rascality, though it makes them "sick at heart" to do so.
Carnot I. voted in this way for the murder of Louis XVI., and he takes
pains to tell us that all his colleagues in the Convention who voted for
it did so in dread of the mob in the galleries. Just in the same way he
was sharp enough to join Napoleon during the Hundred Days, because he
saw that his best chance of saving his own head and staying in France
was to keep out the Bourbons. This Carnot III. is, I dare say, more
honest and less calculating--for he is certainly more dull--than his
grandfather. Perhaps he may turn out to be the Louis XVI. of the
Republic.'
How much has actually been spent on the works here to make Calais a
great seaport, it is not easy to ascertain; but the lowest estimates
stated to me seem to be quite out of proportion with the results
actually achieved.
My conversation on this point with my friend from Picardy is worth
recording.
'Ten years ago,' he said, 'the amount to be spent on Calais was set down
at eleven millions of francs. I feel quite sure that at least twice this
sum has been actually spent here since the work began in 1881.'
'Why do you feel sure of this?'
'Because twice the first estimate has been avowedly spent everywhere in
France on the whole scheme. Calais alone figures this year in the budget
for sixteen millions and a half! You were in France, were you not, in
1880, and you must surely remember the songs that used to be sung in the
streets:--
"C'est Léon Say, c'est Freycinet,
C'est Freycinet, c'est Léon Say."
'These two men, both of them men of business, both financiers (though
the "white mouse"[1] is a bit of a visionary) and both men of ability,
deliberately adopted, in 1879, after a single conversation with
Gambetta, a scheme improvised by him, who was neither a man of business
nor a financier, but a declamatory Bohemian, for keeping up the war
expenditure by committing France to the creation of a complete
"commercial outfit."
[1] This is the popular nickname of M. de Freycinet.
'The Republicans won the elections in 1877 by frightening France into a
belief that a Conservative victory at the polls would be followed by a
new German invasion. I am not sure, mind you, that this was an idle
scare. For under the Conservative administration of our affairs we had
cleared off in six years' time the frightful burdens imposed upon us by
the war, by the senseless Parisian revolution of 1870, and by the
Communist insurrection of 1871; and it is likely enough that Bismarck
may have made up his mind to attack us if he saw us persist in a sane
and sensible public policy. Be that as it may, Gambetta, Léon Say, and
Freycinet, between them, did his work for him by plunging the country
back into the financial morass from which the Conservatives had rescued
it. They carried the new chamber with them into Gambetta's scheme for
doing systematically and successfully what had been clumsily attempted
in the Ateliers Nationaux of 1848. France was to be made a republic by
spending nearly the amount of the German War indemnity on the
construction of railways, canals, and ports all over the country. The
sum stated in the outset was four thousand five hundred millions of
francs--rather a pretty penny you must see!'
'I remember it,' I replied, 'and I remember thinking, when the scheme
was first developed, that the adoption of it was a wonderful evidence of
the financial vigour and vitality of France.'
'Thank you,' he replied rather bitterly. 'It was just such a proof of
vigour and vitality that Dr. Sangrado used to get from his patients with
his lancet. It was a great political manoeuvre, no doubt, and it
commended itself to all the hungry politicians in France so promptly
and so warmly, that within three years' time, in 1882, M. Tirard, who
was then Finance Minister, and who is now on the box of the Carnot
coach, had to admit that the expenditure then contemplated in carrying
out this great idea could not possibly fall short of nine thousand one
hundred and fifty millions of francs! This, observe, was seven years
ago. To-day it has swelled, at the least, into eleven and perhaps to
twelve thousand millions of francs. Why not? Gambetta, Léon Say, and
Freycinet proclaimed the millennium of civil engineers and local
candidates. What becomes of equality and fraternity if the smallest
hamlet in the recesses of the Jura is not as much entitled to a local
railway at the public expense as the largest port on the Bay of Biscay?
Once let it be understood that the Government means to spend ten
thousand millions on public works, and all the voters are ready to
believe the Government has found the philosopher's stone. Nobody but the
tax-gatherer will ever make them understand where the money comes from.
And between the tax-gatherer and the taxpayer, a truly clever finance
minister can always interpose successfully, for a certain length of
time, the anodyne banker with a new form of public loan! We are the
sharpest and thriftiest people alive in private affairs, and in public
matters the most absolute fly-gobblers in the whole world!'
I tried to console my friend by informing him that this particular kind
of political financiering is not unknown in my own country. The scheme
of Gambetta appears to me to be simply a development, on a grand scale,
of the 'log-rolling principle,' on which, year after year, a measure
known as the 'Rivers and Harbours Bill' is engineered, with more or less
friction, through the Congress of the United States. It is regularly
and diplomatically fought over between the two houses until an agreement
about it is come to between the opposing forces, described by a recent
American writer as 'the plutocracy at one end and the mobocracy at the
other end' of our national legislature. In short, it has now become an
'institution,' and like other institutions it has its legendary hero, in
a western legislator who is reputed to have re-elected himself for a
number of years by 'putting through' successive appropriations for the
'improvement' of a stream which rose in an inaccessible mountain and
emptied itself into an unfathomable swamp.
'That is very well,' said my friend gravely, 'very well indeed, but you
have to do this thing every year, while Gambetta and Léon Say and De
Freycinet committed France to it once for all and irremediably. And on
what scale do you do this sort of thing?'
I was forced to own that, upon this point, Washington so far lags
shamefully in the rear of Paris. Our grandest 'log-rolling' in finance
is, to the colossal operations of Gambetta, Léon Say, and De Freycinet,
as is the ordinary iron lamp-post of New York to the Eiffel Tower.
The 'Rivers and Harbours Bill,' in 1886, was only saved after a
desperate struggle at the very end of the session, by a compromise over
an 'ancient and fish-like' canal job in the North-West, the original
promoter of which, long since passed beyond the hope, if not beyond the
desire of hydraulic improvements, audaciously baptized it with the name
of Father Hennepin, one of the glories of France in the New World. And
yet the amount involved in the Bill did not exceed fourteen million
dollars, or a beggarly seventy million francs.
'At that rate,' said my friend, 'it would take your great country more
than a century to match what we have covered in ten years. And yet you
are thought an enterprising people, and, what is more to the point, your
treasury shows an annual surplus, while ours shows an annual deficit;
and you have nearly twice our population, have you not, and more than
ten times our area of territory?
'If I were to "improve" the roads and ponds on my property on the
principle on which France has been "improving" her railway systems and
her ports, I should bring up in bankruptcy. Where else can the country
bring up? Nothing, so far, has saved us but the woollen stocking of the
peasants. Come to my place in Picardy, and I will show you a dozen
old fellows who go about dressed in blouses--who work like
day-labourers--no! much better and harder than day-labourers now do.
They will never tell you what they are thinking about; they will never
tell me, though we are the best of friends; but you will see what they
are--close at a bargain, shrewd, devoted to their farms and families.
Well, they live on a third--yes, some of them on a quarter--of their
incomes; they know just where every penny they have spent on the ground
for twenty years has gone, and just what it has brought back to them,
and every man of them can put his hand, if need be, on ten, twenty,
thirty, forty thousand francs. That is the woollen stocking. But the
most beautiful woman in the world can only give what she has. The
woollen stocking holds no more than it holds. You can find the bottom of
it if you keep on long enough--and then? And mark you, if I tell the
shrewdest of these old fellows that the Government is spending ten
thousand millions of francs on building railways from nowhere to
nowhere, and digging ports in quicksands, what will he do? He will begin
to think it is very hard that he can't get a railway built or a port
dug. Do you wonder I am a pessimist?'
'But if this is the way in which they look at things, why do they
clamour for Boulanger?'
'They don't clamour for Boulanger. That is to say the peasants, the
rural people. It is in the towns--here in Calais, for example, at
Boulogne, at Amiens--that they clamour for Boulanger. In the towns they
read all manner of trash and listen to all manner of lies. You can get
up a legend in the French towns for anybody or anything as easily to-day
as in the middle ages--perhaps more easily. Look at this legend of
Boulanger. It is a real legend to-day. You may be sure of that, and that
is the real danger of it. The people who are fighting against it to-day
are the people who made it. They wanted, they could not get on without,
a great man. Ferry went to pieces, as you know, in 1885. Tonkin and the
dead Courbet killed him. So they invented Boulanger. They made him War
Minister. They put him on his black horse. They let him drive out the
princes. Look at those five men seated there in front of that café. They
are doubtless decent well-to-do shopkeepers, master mechanics--no matter
what--I will wager you that of these five men, three believe Boulanger
to be the first soldier of France, and that two of them believe the
Government has driven him into exile to prevent the Germans from
declaring war! That is enough to make them Boulangists.'
'Then they want war with Germany?'
'Yes, in this part of France I think they do. But the legend is just as
effective where they do not want war with Germany. Last year I was in
the country of Grévy, not far from Mont-sous-Vaudrey. There the peasants
dread nothing so much as another war. They want peace there at any
price. Well, then, a very shrewd old farmer told me he wanted to see
Boulanger made Chief of the State. Why? Why because, as he said,
Boulanger is the first general in Europe, and the Germans know it, and
they go in fear of him; so that if Boulanger is made Chief of the State,
they will think twice before they attack us! What do you say to that?'
'Is it not extraordinary,' I replied, 'that this legend, as you truly
call it, should have been created so easily about a general who has no
battle to show for it; not even a Montenotte, much less an Arcola or a
Lodi?'
'What legend had Bonaparte when Barras put him at the head of the home
army, and Pétiet sent him to Italy? He did not command at Toulon, and
his one victory had been to blow the marshalled blackguards and lunatics
of Paris into the Seine, as Mandat might and would have done on that
dismal August 10, but for that hypocritical scoundrel Pétion. And didn't
the authorities arrest Bonaparte after Toulon; and was he not struck
from the active roll of general officers in France for refusing a
command in La Vendée? So far as the army goes, there is better stuff for
a legend to-day in Boulanger than there was in Bonaparte when he went to
Italy.
'But observe that the Government made a legend of Boulanger, not for
military but for political purposes. They were shut down to him. If they
could have used M. de Lesseps, and if the Panama Canal had been a
success, Lesseps would have served their purpose better than Boulanger.
Without a "great Frenchman," I tell you the republic is impossible. Are
they not trying to make a "great Frenchman" now of Carnot? If this could
be done, if it were possible to make a "great Frenchman" of Carnot, I
should not object. But it is absurd. And so for me, whatever the
electors may do in September, the republic is hopeless. They made
Boulanger to save it; now they are trying to unmake Boulanger to save
it. It is childish, it is silly, it will not do! If they succeed in
unmaking their legend of Boulanger, where are they? Not even where they
were when they began to make it. On the contrary! They have made it
perfectly plain that the republic is a parachute which falls without a
balloon. Where are they to find the balloon? The Exposition has given
the parachute a lift. The visit of the Prince of Wales gave it a lift.
The Shah, if he comes, will give it a lift--not much--but a lift. But
all these are expedients of a moment. All these will not give the
republic a "great Frenchman."'
'All this,' I said, 'seems to bring us back to what you said this
morning, that if you were not the most anarchical you would be the most
monarchical people in Europe.'
'Precisely! and it is the plain truth. The republic was possible with
MacMahon, for after all he was a personality. It was possible with
Thiers, for though he was a little rascal and the greatest literary liar
of the century except Victor Hugo, he was a personality, and a very
positive personality. It might have been possible with Gambetta, for he
too was a personality, odious and flatulent if you like, but still a
personality. It was not possible with Grévy. It is not possible with
Carnot.
'Let the elections go as they may, you will see that I am right. I wash
my hands of it all. But when I think of it I see on the wall _Finis
Galliæ_! For while I despair of the republic, I have no hope of a
monarchy. Nothing but a personality can carry on the republic--and
nothing but a personality can restore the monarchy.
'The friends of the poor little Prince Imperial understood this when
they consented to let him go off to South Africa. If he had been in the
hands of an English general of common sense, or of an English captain of
common courage, he would no doubt have come back safe and sound. And in
that case the odds are that we should be living to-day under the Third
Empire instead of the Third Republic.
'As it is, the Empire, between the significance of Plon-Plon, and the
insignificance of Prince Victor, is like the Republic between Ferry, the
Tonkinese, and Carnot, who ought to spell his name _Carton_!'
'But how is it with the royalists?'
'Ah! their only "personality" known to the people--and that is the value
of a personality in France--is the Duc d'Aumale--and who knows whether
the Duc d'Aumale is a royalist? I have no doubt--absolutely no doubt,'
he said with some emphasis, 'that Say and De Freycinet to-morrow would
gladly join forces with the Conservatives to make the Duc d'Aumale
president if the Conservatives would agree to it, and if the Duc would
accept the place; for that would give the Republic a new lease of life
in the first place, and in the second place it would utterly
disintegrate the royalists, both white and blue. If the Duc is not a
"great Frenchman" in the electoral sense of the phrase, he is the most
creditably conspicuous of living Frenchmen, which is something.'
'More so than his nephew the Comte de Paris?'
'Yes, certainly, in the popular mind. Personally, I do not think he
would make either so good a president of a republic, or so good a king
as the Comte de Paris, whose manifesto I think shows him to be a man of
clear and sound constitutional ideas, but the French people do not know
him. It was a blunder, by the way, in my opinion,' he added after a
moment, 'of Boulanger to expel the Comte de Paris. His exile and his
action in exile have made him better known in France than he would have
been, had he been left to live quietly at Eu and in Paris. Furthermore,
what sort of a republic is it in which a family of princes cannot live
without tempting the whole population to make one of them king? The
expulsion of the princes belongs to the same category of political
idiocies with the _pacte de famine_. Either the Republic is a reality
accepted by the French people, or it is a sham imposed upon them by a
party. If it is a reality, the princes are simply French citizens, as
much entitled to live in France under the protection of the laws as if
they were peasants. From this there is no escape logically or morally,
and the men who voted for such an edict are neither good Republicans nor
good Frenchmen. From the moment it was enacted and executed, the
Republic ceased to be a national government. It was a _coup d'état_ and
not a legal act, and every legislator who voted for it committed perjury
at least as distinctly as the author of the _coup d'état_ of 1851. Could
such a law possibly have been passed in your republic?'
'Certainly not,' I said. 'In fact, the people of many American States
are free to treat with all possible public and private distinction a
personage who not only was elected to a position which may be called
princely, but who actually exercised for several years a greater
authority over millions of American citizens than has belonged to any
French king since Louis XVI., and, exercising it, waged war against the
United States. But was there no pretence of constitutional authority for
the passage of this law which you so strongly denounce?'
'Certainly not. There was no shadow of a legal pretext for passing it.
It is, I think, the worst and also the silliest instance in our recent
history of an appeal to that argument of rogues and tyrants called
_salus populi_, as to which I am of the opinion of Louis Blanc, that the
"safety" of no nation under heaven "is worth the sacrifice of a single
principle of common justice."
'It was a blow struck in broad daylight at the personal rights of every
French citizen; just as the removal of the princes from the army was a
blow struck in broad daylight at the property rights of every French
officer. That it was possible for a Government to strike these blows in
cold blood, with no popular excitement instigating them, and with no
public resentment following them, should show you, I think, how absurd
it is to talk of the French people as a republican people. Any
Government in power at Paris may be as arbitrary as it likes, but it
must not be stupid. The expulsion of the princes was a crime against
liberty; it was as arbitrary an act as the issue of a _lettre de
cachet_. But it was also very stupid. It was stupid of the Government
because it put them for a time under the thumb of Boulanger. It was
stupid of Boulanger, because it put the Comte de Paris at once on a
pedestal and forced him before France and Europe into the position of a
saviour of society, for whom all the conservative forces of French
society must henceforth inevitably work. Whatever becomes of Boulanger
in the next elections, he has condemned the Opportunists irretrievably
either to hew wood for the Socialists or to carry water for the
Monarchists. And with them he has condemned himself. Wait and see if I
am not right.
'Come and see me in Picardy. You will find more royalist farmers than I
could have believed possible six years ago. If the Comte de Chambord had
not kept the Legitimist country gentlemen so much apart as a caste from
the peasants, there would be nothing easier than to sweep the country
with a monarchist propaganda. It was the royalist peasantry who brought
about the great emigration in 1789, long before the Terror, by burning
and pillaging the châteaux all over France under orders from Paris,
which they believed to be orders from the king. What puzzles them now is
the notion lurking down in the bottom of their minds that the
restoration of the monarchy will somehow put the country gentlemen over
them, and this has much to do with making them, not republicans, but
imperialists. As to the republic the overthrow of Grévy had a very bad
effect upon the peasants and the farmers in my part of the country, and
I believe it had everywhere.'
'Was M. Grévy, then, popular with them?'
'No, it was not that at all. It was the feeling that the Republic meant
changes and uncertainty. A farmer--a fair specimen of this class in my
country--expressed this to me in his own fashion only the other day. I
asked him if he was coming to see the President here at Calais. "What is
the use of that?" he said, "it is money out of pocket, and for what? Who
knows how long he will be President? There was Grévy. Here is Boulanger.
All that can do no good. With these short leases what can be done for
the land?" There you have it. In Picardy and in Artois the people have
long memories about the land. All these countries, as you know, were
fought over again and again. There were so many wars that people got out
of the way of making long leases, and the land suffered accordingly. In
the last century these provinces, now so well and so richly cultivated,
were in a very bad way through this. With leases of three, six, nine
years, the farmers naturally took as few risks as possible in the way of
improving the land. They were always making up the waste caused by the
previous tenant, or shy of investing for the benefit of the next tenant.
Towards the end of the century, and before the Revolution, small
holdings began to increase, and the English fashion of long leases came
in, and the agriculture improved accordingly. So you see why our farmers
tend to monarchy from the point of view of long leases and land
ownership, just as these sailors and fishermen here in the Boulonnais
tend to it from the point of view of seamanship. You will make
republicans of them when you get them to let the forecastle elect the
cook captain. That will not be to-morrow nor, I think, next week.'
I left Calais late at night for Boulogne, my friend going into Picardy,
where I promised to join him later on. There was an immense crowd at the
station, and I could not help admiring the good nature and cheery
civility of the porters. The sub-officials in silver lace were not so
admirable, but then they were only strutting about and objecting to
things. The honest fellows who were getting twice as many passengers
into a train as the train could possibly take, and helping bewildered
provincials to find out where they really wanted to go, were, I thought,
miraculously amiable and intelligent.
At the last moment, just as we were moving off, a lively Parisian
journalist tumbled into our compartment with his despatch-box and his
portmanteau. He was in the full evening dress in which he had been
parading about all day with the Presidential party; his white cravat was
loose and awry, and the grey dust of the Calais streets and piers lay
thick upon his glossy bottines; but he was in the best of spirits, for
he had caught the train and would now reach Paris in the morning.
'But the President is going on to Boulogne, is he not?' I asked.
'Oh, yes! but what of that? It will be just what it was to-day, and I
know what he is going to say. He will leave Boulogne early in the
afternoon, and we shall have it all, an excellent account. It's not
worth while to waste the time on Boulogne.'
He had been with the President ever since the party left Paris, and
thought the progression the whole, a success. 'Not at Calais,' that he
admitted. There had certainly been no great enthusiasm at Calais. He did
not think there had been any cries for Boulanger, but there was no
emotion. This he explained by telling me that the people had not been
properly '_stylé_.' 'In these cases, you know,' he said with the air of
a connoisseur in enthusiasm, 'you must have a certain subtle _stylage_.'
The word was new to me, but not so the thing. For I presently found that
by a 'subtle _stylage_' of the people, my companion only meant what in
America is known as 'working up a boom,' when the welfare of the Union
requires that a President, or a presidential candidate, should
perambulate a certain number of 'doubtful' States, or, in the
picturesque language of the days of Andrew Johnson, go 'swinging round
the circle.' If I am not misinformed, an analogous operation is
occasionally performed in England, when some popular idol finds it worth
his while to make an unpremeditated political tour.
'The thing was better done at Lens,' said my fellow-traveller. 'Do you
know Lens? They are all miners there, you know--very curious people. I
suppose they were glad to come up from under the ground and look at us.
Some of the women, too, were pretty--really very pretty. It was all very
well arranged. There is a good manager there, M.----. He made way, you
know, in 1886, for Camescasse, to oblige the Government. The President
gave him the Cross. It had a very good effect. At Bapaume, too, the
President did a good thing. He decorated ---- there, who had so much
trouble with the Christian Brothers.'
'For having trouble with the Christian Brothers?' I could not help
asking.
'No! but the courts decided against him, and that was a misfortune. The
President put it right by decorating him, for it is evident that he
meant to do his duty, and a Government must stand by its friends. Do you
know Bapaume? It is a pretty place--all factories. It was there, you
know, that Faidherbe beat the Germans. A very pretty place.'