stop to the vandalism of his disciples here, and that we owe to him the
preservation of the magnificent groups which still exist of statues
representing scenes in the life of the Virgin Mary. The groups above the
head of the Virgin on the double lintel had already been dashed to
pieces when he was appealed to. The groups below, still unharmed, afford
unanswerable proof that the sculptors of this part of Europe in the
thirteenth century must have been familiar with the best traditions of
their art. If Robespierre preserved these, we may forgive him not only
for sending his dear Camille Desmoulins and his detested Danton to the
guillotine, but even for replacing the shattered groups of the Nativity,
the Presentation, and the Death of the Virgin with this inscription of
his own devising: 'The French people believe in the existence of God and
in the immortality of the soul!' Under the First Consul this inscription
gave place to the Latin dedication now visible.
Pillaging he did not prevent, perhaps could not. One wizened old
reprobate, Ruhl, got himself great Republican _kudos_ by persistently
putting about a legend that he had successfully stolen the sacred
ampulla, from which St.-Rémi had anointed Clovis King of France, and had
dashed it to pieces in public. That he did indeed dash in pieces
publicly a flask of glass is, I am assured, indubitable. But not less
indubitable is it that he did not dash in pieces the sacred ampulla.
Ruhl was a bit of a scholar, and his legend was obviously suggested to
him by the traditional story of the Frankish warrior who smashed a
sacred vase at Soissons, and whose own head the stalwart King Clovis
afterwards clove in twain with his battle-axe on the Champ de Mars in
requital of the deed. Curiously enough, it was written that the head of
Ruhl should likewise in the end be smashed, as it was by himself with a
pistol at Paris, May 20, 1795, to save it from the guillotine!
All the churches of Reims did not escape so well as the Cathedral.
St.-Nicaise, 'the jewel of Reims' and the masterpiece of a famous
architect of the thirteenth century, Hues Libergiers, whose name is
preserved in that of one of the chief streets of Reims, was pillaged and
then pulled down, the materials and the site being sold at a 'mock
auction' to Santerre, the enterprising brewer, who 'pulled the wires' of
all the patriotic emotions of the Faubourg St.-Antoine from the outset
of the Revolution, got himself thereby made a general, and in that
capacity conducted Louis XVI. to the scaffold, where, as all the world
knows, he ordered the drums to drown the last words of the King. He was
an incorrigible and indefatigable speculator, and while he drove a
roaring trade at Paris in beer, he was always on the look out for
demolished churches and convents in the provinces. Napoleon took his
measure promptly, subsidised and used him to good purpose. Hearing once
that there was a ferment brewing in St.-Antoine, the Emperor sent an
officer to Santerre. 'Go and tell that fellow,' he said, 'that if I hear
one word from the Faubourg St.-Antoine I will have him instantly shot.'
The 'Titanic' and 'transcendental' Faubourg remained as mute as a mouse!
In no French city are the memories of the Revolutionary orgie more
offensively out of key with the actual aspect and the great associations
of the place than in Reims. Whatever may have been the ways of the
working people here forty years ago, I have always been struck by their
quiet and orderly demeanour, as well as by the general air of prosperity
and animation which pervades the city. Its grand Cathedral, the most
consummate type which exists of the great ogival architecture of the
thirteenth century, stands, the archæologists tell us, on the spot where
the Romans planted their citadel sixteen centuries ago. Like a citadel,
it dominates the whole city to-day; a fortress no longer, like the Roman
citadel, of armed force, but of faith, charity, and hope. Seven
centuries have not shaken the solidity of its massive fabric. They who
built it 'dreamt not of a perishable home.' But only a year ago a
serious dislocation appeared in the framework of the stupendous
rose-window over the grand entrance, and this, with other unsatisfactory
symptoms observable here and there in the building, lend colour to the
theory that the great chalk bed upon which the Cathedral stands may have
been affected by the percolation of water from some deep trenches which,
it seems, were dug near the northern and southern towers at the entrance
of the Cathedral, during the year 1879, and unfortunately left open
during the very inclement winter which followed.
This is a rather alarming theory, particularly if it be true, as it is
said to be, that since 1880 the towers have perceptibly come out of
plumb.
Fortunately the see of Reims is now in the charge of a prelate who fully
appreciates the value to art and to civilisation, as well as to France
and to the Church, of this magnificent edifice. When he came here from
the bishopric of Tarbes, his first episcopate, in November 1874, one of
the earliest steps taken by the present Cardinal Langénieux was to get a
full report on the condition of the Cathedral from M. Millet, the
accomplished successor of M. Viollet-le-Duc in the great work of the
conservation and restoration of the historical monuments of France. M.
Millet, on August 25, 1875, reported that the flying buttresses needed
immediate attention, and that 'the gables and vaults of the western
façade were seriously damaged, so that the rain water was penetrating
the masonry and threatening the destruction of the numerous statues and
sculptured ornaments of the grand western portal.' This portal, as every
traveller knows, is simply matchless in the world. The Archhishop
thereupon invited four of his personal friends, all at that time members
of the Ministry--MM. Dufaure, Léon Say, Wallon, and Caillaux--to Reims,
to see for themselves the state of the Cathedral. They came and
inspected the building, and after their return to Paris prepared a bill,
which became a law in December 1875, appropriating a sum of 2,033,411
francs in ten yearly instalments to the restoration of the Cathedral.
The work began at once under the direction of M. Millet, who
unfortunately died in 1879.
It was prosecuted after his death by another able architect, M. Brugère,
and is now in the hands of M. Darcy, who has shown by his work at Evreux
and St.-Denis that he is no unworthy successor of Viollet-le-Duc. The
appropriation made in 1875 has been expended, but I am glad to find, on
looking into the Budget for 1890 of the Ministry of Public Worship, that
a sum of 301,508 fr. 26 c. is still available for the works at Reims.
This budget, by the way, is an instructive document. It shows that the
whole outlay of the State in France upon all objects connected with
public worship and religion in France and Algiers, excepting the service
of the chaplains in the army and the navy, amounted in 1889 to a little
more than one franc per head of the population! The whole expense in
connection with the Catholic Church, the Calvinist and Lutheran
confessions, the Israelitish religion and the Mussulmans, was no more
than 45,337,145 francs, a sum less than the amount annually expended by
the Protestant Episcopal Church of the single State of New York upon
keeping up its churches, colleges, and clergy! What proportion this sum
bears to the present annual income of the Church property confiscated
under the first Republic it would be interesting to ascertain. A
Protestant friend of mine in the south of France, who has made some
investigations into this subject, tells me that it cannot possibly
represent above _ten per cent_. of the present actual product of the
former property of the Church. Of the whole sum, 228,000 francs were
spent on the civil servants of the ministry. There are seven sub-chiefs
of bureaux in this ministry, all of them now doubtless good atheists,
who receive salaries of from 3,400 to 5,400 francs a year. The highest
salary paid to a Protestant pastor even in Paris is 3,000 francs, or
120_l._ a year. The curé of Notre-Dame de Paris receives 2,400 francs,
or less than 100_l._ a year. There are 580 curés of the first class who
receive from 1,500 to 1,600 francs a year; 275 curés of the second class
receiving 1,500 francs a year, and 2,527 curés of the third class
receiving from 1,200 to 1,300 francs a year. The thirty-one clerks in
the Ministry receive from 1,800 to 4,500 francs a year. The
Vicar-General of Paris receives no more than 4,500 francs a year. The
Archbishop of Paris receives, like all the other archbishops, 15,000
francs, or 600_l._, a year, which is the salary paid to the Director of
the Ministry! The Grand Rabbi of the Central Consistory receives 12,000
and the Grand Rabbi of Paris 5,000 francs a year, and the salaries paid
to the Israelitish ministers of religion range from 2,500 down to 600
francs, the latter amount being less by 300 francs than the wages of the
servants in the Ministry. The Muftis and Imams in office receive from
300 to 1,200 francs a year. All these salaries, with the outlay on the
construction, rent, or maintenance of buildings of all kinds used for
religious purposes, pensions, and travelling expenses, are comprised in
the total appropriation of 45,337,145 francs, or a little more than
1,800,000_l._ for the year 1889. During the same year 12,760,745 francs
were appropriated for the Fine Arts service. I do not say that the sum
thus devoted to the Fine Arts out of the pockets of the taxpayers of
France was at all too large. But I do say that it is out of all
proportion large as compared with the sum voted out of the pockets of
the taxpayers to the maintenance of religious institutions, which an
overwhelming majority of the people of France regard, and rightly
regard, as essential to the stability of law and order. Furthermore,
this Budget of 1889 shows the spirit in which the fanatics of 'moral
unity' are prosecuting their war against all religions in France. In
1883 the Government's budget amounted to 53,528,206 francs. Here we have
a reduction within six years of more than 8,000,000 francs. In 1883 M.
Jules Roche, now a deputy for the first district of Chambéry and an ally
of M. Clémenceau, proposed to reduce the Budget of Public Worship to
4,588,800 francs! The Third Republic, it will be seen, is getting on
towards the proposition of M. Jules Roche--a proposition which clearly
combines everything that is most open to objection in a legal connection
between the State and religion with everything that is most odious and
dangerous in an open war of the State against religion.
During these six years the leaders of this war against religion have
never dared to draw up a statistical account of the strength of the
various religious bodies in France. In 1882 one of their followers, M.
Alfred Talandier, on February 13, rashly proposed that a table should be
officially prepared of the state of religious opinions in France; but
the managers of the cause of 'moral unity' were too wily to walk into
that trap; they quietly stifled the proposition. It really might be a
little awkward, even for a Parliamentary oligarchy with a
strongly-bitted Executive well in hand, to confront, let us say,
37,500,000 of Catholics, Protestants, Israelites, not to mention the
Mussulmans in Africa, with a proposition to abolish a Budget of Worship
amounting to a little over a franc a head, for the purpose of reducing
France to a complete 'moral unity' of absolute unbelief in God and in
the immortality of the human soul!
Cardinal Langénieux took possession, as I have said, of the
Archi-episcopal See of Reims in November 1874. Seldom has the right man
been put into the right place more exactly at the right moment. It was
in September 1874 that M. Challemel-Lacour unfolded the Republican
programme of war to the knife against all religion. In September 1874,
too, as I have mentioned, the burning of the factory at Val-des-Bois
called out a general demonstration of sympathy from the Catholic
working-men's clubs all over France, which attracted public attention to
the movement; and in October 1874 Pius IX. issued a brief recognising
its importance and earnestly commending it.
The new Archbishop of Reims was exceptionally fitted by his training and
his experience to promote such a movement.
He was a Benedictine of the school of Cluny, bred in the traditions of
that illustrious Order, to which, without exaggeration, it may be said
that we owe almost everything that is best worth having in our Western
civilisation. For upon what does human society rest in the last resort
if not upon the two great pillars of the rule of St. Benedict--Obedience
and Labour? As a priest, the new Archbishop had successively and
successfully administered two of the most important parishes in Paris,
one in the workmen's quarter of the Faubourg St.-Antoine, the other in
the quarter of the noblesse, in the Faubourg St.-Germain.
After a single year passed in the Episcopate at Tarbes, that pleasant
city on the Adour which all the winds of the Pyrenees have not yet quite
disinfected of the memory of Barère, he was translated to this great
historic see in the prime of his vigour. For fifteen years he has so
ruled it that the Christians of Reims and of the Marne now seize with
delight upon every opportunity of manifesting their incorrigible
indifference to the 'moral unity of France.' You meet workmen in the
streets going about their work with religious medals openly displayed.
The churches of Reims are filled with men on great Church festivals.
Taking all the districts of the Marne together, the Revisionists and
Monarchists at the elections of 1889 outnumbered considerably the
Government Republicans. These latter polled 35,046 votes in the Marne,
against 40,287 polled by the former. The Radicals, who are very strong
in the first district of Reims, polled 11,037 votes there against a
Revisionist vote of 9,230. Do not these figures show, what I believe to
be the truth, that the 'true Republican' policy of reducing France to
'moral unity' by trampling on the traditions and coercing the
consciences of the French people is steadily dividing the French people
into two great camps--the camp of the Social and Radical revolution and
the camp of the Monarchy? That there was no necessity for this is
illustrated by what I have said as to the relations between the Cardinal
Archbishop of Reims and the Republican Ministers of 1875 who came here
on his invitation, and then took steps to secure the preservation and
restoration of the Cathedral. One of these Republican Ministers, M.
Léon Say, who is largely responsible for clothing the present Government
with the power which it abuses, has just been signally humiliated by the
present Government and the dominant majority.
In the second district of Bergerac in the Dordogne, the Monarchist
candidate for the Chamber, M. Thirion Montauban, received 6,708 votes,
against 6,439 given to his Republican competitor. I took a special
interest in this election, because M. Thirion-Montauban is the present
proprietor of the house of Michel de Montaigne, which came into his
possession through his marriage with the daughter of M. Magne, the
eminent Finance Minister of Napoleon III. I made a visit there late in
the summer, and found him busy with his canvass, on lines of respect for
personal liberty and the right of men to think their own thoughts as to
life and death, which would have commanded the cordial sympathy of the
great Gascon sceptic. The tower, the study, the bedroom of Montaigne are
preserved by him with religious care. The inscriptions on the walls
which John Sterling copied so lovingly half a century ago are there
still, and if indeed there be a life of faith as Tennyson says, 'in
honest doubt,' the Pyrrhonist seigneur who thought before Pascal that
the true philosophy was to laugh at philosophy, would not find himself a
stranger in his old haunt to-day because its lower hall has been
consecrated as a chapel.
The opponents of M. Thirion-Montauban behaved throughout the contest
with extraordinary violence, and on one occasion put him into serious
personal peril. However, he was elected. When the Chamber met in
November his election was contested. M. Léon Say took an active part in
maintaining the validity of the returns which gave the seat to M.
Thirion-Montauban, and the evidence in the case was overwhelmingly in
his favour. Nevertheless after the Report of the Committee was made, the
majority of the Chamber coolly invalidated the choice of the electors,
and seated the candidate who had not been elected. It was an open secret
that this was done quite as much to punish M. Léon Say as to exclude M.
Thirion-Montauban.
Intolerant as the 'true Republicans' are towards their political
opponents, they are still more intolerant towards those 'false
Republicans' who hesitate at framing the policy of a French Republic in
the nineteenth century upon the principles which led to the Revocation
of the Edict of Nantes. Were Socrates alive and a Frenchman, he would
stand no chance for a government chair of philosophy in a competition
with the little atheist Aristodemus, and were David Hume to reappear at
Reims, where he got his early schooling, he would certainly find himself
treated by the authorities as no better than a Catholic.
The irreligion of the Third Republic is a dogmatic irreligion. Bayle
would find no favour in its eyes, because protesting, as he said he did
'from his inmost soul protest, against everything that was ever said or
done,' he must of course protest against the Nihilism of M. Marcou and
M. Paul Bert.
Unfortunately for the 'true Republicans,' it is essential to their
success that with the religious faith they should also abolish the
patriotic traditions of France. M. Jules Simon, a Republican and a
Republican Minister of Public Instruction, has found himself compelled
to denounce in the clearest and strongest language the deliberate
attempt which these 'true Republicans' are making 'to teach the children
of France that the glory of France began with 1789, and that it was
never so great as under the Convention.'
Stuff like this is actually taught in the schools into which it is the
object of the present French Government to drive by statute all the
children of the country.
'These men,' says M. Jules Simon, 'who proscribe the name of Jesus
Christ and forbid it to be mentioned in the schools of France, on the
pretext that public education must be neutral in such matters, do not
hesitate to have children compelled to attend schools in which they are
taught that Louis XIV. was a tyrant without greatness or ability, and
that Louis XVI. was an enemy of his country justly condemned and
executed.'
Of the great historic France--the France which aided the American
colonies to establish their independence, after contesting with England
the dominion of North America and of India for more than a century--the
France of Montesquieu and of Rabelais, of Henri IV. and Sully, of
François I. and St.-Louis, of Chivalry and of the Crusades, the coming
generation of Frenchmen, if these fanatics can get their way, will know
no more than their Annamite fellow-citizens in Asia. It is not
surprising that a Government controlled by such men with such objects
should have amnestied the criminals of the Commune. The _pétroleurs_ who
destroyed the Tuileries and the Hôtel de Ville were only trying in their
practical way to abolish the history of France before 1789.
Here at Reims the history of France, I think, will die very hard. No one
could doubt this who visited the Department of the Marne in the month of
July 1887.
When the 'moral unity' men began their sinister work in 1880, the
Cardinal Archbishop of Reims was earnestly urging upon the Holy See the
beatification of the great French pontiff, Urban II., the disciple,
friend and successor of Hildebrand, and the canonisation of Jeanne
d'Arc, 'that whitest lily in the shield of France, with heart of virgin
gold.'
On July 14, 1881, Leo XIII. confirmed the beatification of Urban II. and
fixed of course the date of his death, July 29, as his place in the
calendar of Church festivals. In July 1882 a solemn Triduum appointed by
a Papal Rescript was celebrated with extraordinary pomp in the Cathedral
of Reims.
Two Cardinals, one the special Legate of the Pope, more than twenty
bishops, several abbots of the great Benedictine Order of which Urban
II. was a member, and hundreds of the clergy from all parts of France,
were present. The Cardinal Legate was attended by Monsignor Cataldi, so
long and so well known to all foreigners in Rome as the master of the
ceremonies to the Pope. The Cathedral was crowded. 'What I should like
to know,' said a quiet shrewd master workman who described to me the
effect produced by the scene in the Cathedral, 'what I should like to
know is why the Catholics of Reims have not the right upon such
occasions to escort the Legate of the Head of the Church from the
railway station to the Cathedral with a procession and with music and
with banners? Is that liberty I ask you?'
The question seems to me natural enough, particularly as I see that only
the other day the Freemasons at Grenoble were permitted to force
themselves, marching in a body with all their regalia and their emblems,
into the funeral procession of a Prefect who was not a member of their
order at all, and against the protest of the Bishop of Grenoble, who had
been asked by the family of the dead man to give him the burial rites of
the Church. That the Freemasons like other citizens should attend the
funeral as individuals the Bishop was ready to admit, but he not
unnaturally declined to acquiesce in the deliberate parade on such an
occasion of a body openly and undisguisedly hostile to Christianity in
all its forms.
Without a procession, however, the Triduum of the great Pope of the
Crusades was a great success in 1882. It led to the organisation of a
movement for erecting a magnificent monument to the memory of Urban II.
at his native place. Châtillon-sur-Marne, one of the loveliest little
towns in the valley of the Marne, situated about twenty miles from
Reims. Early in 1887 this monument was completed, and on July 21 in that
year it was unveiled with a solemn ceremonial in the presence of the
Cardinal Archbishop of Reims, of the Papal Nuncio at Paris, and of many
French bishops, among them the great orator of the Chamber of Deputies,
Monseigneur Freppel, Bishop of Angers. He delivered a most impressive
discourse on the significance of the Crusades, every sentence of which
was weighted with pregnant allusions to the actual condition of
religious liberty in France. These allusions were curiously emphasised
by the absence of the Bishop of Orléans, detained at his post in the
city of 'Jeanne d'Arc' by the sudden 'laicisation' of the schools in his
diocese!
The day was what a perfect day in the summer of Northern France can be.
The scene might have been planned by a poet or a painter. There are
other Châtillons in France more famous in history, and held in higher
honour therefore by those useful men the makers of guide-books, than
Châtillon-sur-Marne; and it is in the nature of all castles to stand on
picturesque sites, as of great rivers to flow by large towns. But
neither the Châtillon which saw the birth of the Admiral de Coligny, nor
the Châtillon which saw Napoleon throw away his sceptre with his
scabbard, stands more beautifully than the quiet little town which
nestles on its green plateau beneath the still majestic ruins of the
château in which the great Pope of the Crusades was born. It overlooks,
in the verdant valley of the Marne, the ancient priory of Binson,
superbly renovated now, and restored in great measure through the zeal
and energy of the Benedictine Archbishop of Reims. Around it sweeps a
great circle of green and wooded hills, dotted over with fair mansions
and lordly parks. For this province of Champagne is a land of wealth as
well as of labour.
From a shattered tower of the old feudal fortress floated side by side
the flags of France and of the Holy See. Beside the ruins rose, sharply
defined and well detached against the summer sky, the colossal statue of
Urban II. upon its lofty pedestal of granite. About it were arrayed in a
pomp of colour and of flowing vestments, the host of ecclesiastics drawn
together to do homage and honour in the sight of all men to the
illustrious French pontiff, whom the Church found not unworthy in days
of great stress and sore trial to take up and carry forward the work of
his friend and teacher and predecessor, Hildebrand. One need not be a
Catholic to recognise the debt of mankind to Gregory VII., of whom,
dying in exile and in seeming defeat at Salerno, Sir James Stephen has
truly said that he has 'left the impress of his gigantic character upon
all succeeding ages.' One need only be a moderately civilised man of
common sense to recognise the debt of mankind to Odo de Châtillon, known
in the pontificate as Urban II. Wherever in the world the evensong of
the Angelus breathes peace on earth to men of good-will, it speaks of
the great pontiff and of the Truce of God which he founded, that the
races of Christian Europe, suspending their internecine strife, might
unite to roll back into Asia once for all the threatening invasion of
Islam.
But the thousands upon thousands of people of both sexes and of all
conditions in life who filled the vast plateau of Châtillon on that
summer day in July 1887, and hailed with tumultuous shouts the monument
of this great Frenchman and great Pope, visibly took a more than
historic interest in the occasion. They were moved not only by those
'mystic chords of memory' of which President Lincoln knew the social and
political value much better than the French fanatics of 'moral unity,'
but by a vivid consciousness of the present peril of their country,
their homes and their faith. Once more, as in the eleventh century and
in the eighteenth, France needs to-day 'an invincible champion of the
freedom of the Church, a defender of public peace, a reformer of morals,
a scourge of corruption.'
This was the true significance of this memorable scene in the Marne. It
was in the minds of that whole multitude, and it stirred them all with a
common impulse when the eloquent Bishop of Angers, after sketching in a
bold and striking outline the career of Urban II., thus drove its lesson
home:--'Urban II. and the Popes of the Middle Ages have made for
evermore impossible any return to the pagan theory of the omnipotence of
the State. Ah, no doubt, despite that signal defeat, despotism will
return to the charge. More than once in the course of the ages we shall
see fresh appeals to violence against a power which can defend itself
only by appealing to moral authority. We shall see, as we saw under
Henry of Germany, emperors, kings, and republics strive to forge chains
for the Church by their laws and their decrees. But the memory of the
heroic struggles of the eleventh century will not pass out of the minds
of the people. Canossa will remain for ever an inevitable stage in the
progress of every power which undertakes to suppress religion and the
Church.'
This festival of Urban II. fell in the week which includes the
anniversary of the coronation of Charles VII. at Reims in the presence
of Jeanne d'Arc, and the Cardinal Archbishop availed himself in July
1887 of this circumstance to crown the manifestation at Châtillon by a
solemn commemoration in the Cathedral at Reims of the triumph of the
peasant-girl of Domrémy. He was a schoolfellow at St.-Sulpice and has
been a lifelong friend of Gounod, and upon his suggestion the great
French composer produced for the commemoration his Mass of Jeanne d'Arc.
He came from Paris himself to superintend the execution of the music.
Simple, grand, choral, in the manner of Palestrina, music of the
cathedral, not of the concert, I must leave my readers to imagine what
its effect was beneath those vast and magnificent arches which had
looked down four centuries ago upon the Maid of Orléans kneeling with
her banner in her hand before the newly-anointed King who owed his crown
to Heaven and to her, and praying that, now her mission was fulfilled,
'the gentle prince would let her go back to her own people and to tend
her sheep.'
I do not think it would be easy to convince anyone who that day
witnessed the profound and silent emotion of those assembled thousands
in the Cathedral of Reims that the religious sentiment is either dead or
dying in France! In the evening of the same day the Cathedral was
thronged again, and thousands of men stood there for an hour, as I saw
men stand in Rome last year under the preaching of Padre Agostino, to
listen to a very remarkable sermon from one of the most eloquent
preachers in France, Canon Lemann of Lyons. In the course of this sermon
the preacher incidentally, but with an obvious and courageous purpose,
dwelt at some length upon the energy with which Urban II. had denounced
and repressed the 'false Crusaders' who, under cover of the uprising of
Christendom against the infidel, fell upon, persecuted, and massacred
the Jews in Europe. This quiet and earnest protest against the
'Jew-baiting' tendency which is showing itself in France, as well as in
Germany, was plainly understood, and as plainly commanded the sympathy
of his hearers. This was the case also with his admirable treatment of
the international aspects of the story of the Maid of Orléans. There was
not a trace of Chauvinism in his citation of the simple and downright
message sent by the Pucelle to the English before Orléans. 'I have been
sent by God to throw you out of France.' Out of France she did throw
them. 'In this,' said the preacher, 'Jeanne d'Arc did a great service to
England as well as to France. The fair-haired nation of the North had
fought side by side with France, Coeur de Lion with Philip Augustus,
in the Crusades. When, therefore, the destined queen of the seas sought
to establish herself as a Continental power in the heart of Europe, the
Lord put in her way that grain of star-dust from Domrémy, forced her
back to her vocation, and bade her content herself with being sovereign
on the ocean.'
I spoke of this allusion to the Jews with a most accomplished
ecclesiastic who dined at the Archi-episcopal palace. He was very much
pleased with it. 'One of the most mischievous things done,' he said, 'by
the present Government is that it is certainly fomenting--I cannot say
whether ignorantly or wilfully--a great deal of popular hostility to the
Jews by giving important official positions to men who, though
Israelites by blood, are in most cases no better Israelites than they
are Christians. Very nearly half the préfectures in France are filled by
such persons. When, as is too often the case, they carry out offensive
and tyrannical measures against the Catholic schools and congregations
in an unnecessarily offensive and tyrannical manner, it is very easy, as
you must see, for hasty or malevolent persons to persuade the people
that they do this because they are Jews, and as Jews hate the
Christians. I know that the best Israelites in France regret this as
much as I do. The policy of this Government is aimed as clearly at the
extinction of the Jewish as of the Christian faith; at the Grand Rabbis
as mercilessly as at the Archbishops of France.'
This same ecclesiastic gave me some particulars of the virulence with
which the anti-religious war is waged. He told me of one case of recent
date in Paris in which the authorities of a hospital neglected for two
days to pay any heed to the entreaties of a poor patient that they would
send for a priest to attend him, the doctors having given him to
understand that for him the end was near. The chaplains, it will be
remembered, have been expelled from all the public hospitals. Finally
some person in charge of the place, more humane than his fellows, sent
out to a Lazarist house in the neighbourhood and asked the Lazarists to
send a priest. The priest came. He was received very rudely, kept
waiting a long time in an ante-room, and when he was finally conducted
through the wards to the dying man, all sorts of vulgar and foolish
jeers were uttered about his mission as he passed along; and it was with
the greatest trouble that he finally succeeded in imposing some sort of
decent respect for the death-bed of this poor sufferer upon the hospital
attendants.
'This is the spirit,' said the priest who told me the tale, 'of the
Commune, or rather of those Communards who murdered the hostages. These
murderers simply put this spirit into deeds instead of words. They made
the name of the Commune so odious that when Victor Hugo in 1876 proposed
a general amnesty of the condemned Communards, the Chamber rejected it
without taking a vote.
'In 1880 the same general amnesty was proposed, and the Chamber adopted
it by a very large majority. Do you wonder that thoughtful men look with
horror on the current which is carrying us in such a direction as that?
At this moment two men of high personal character, Admiral Krantz and M.
Casimir Périer, are lending their support to a Government which
represents this current, and yet Admiral Krantz and M. Casimir Périer
have recorded their deliberate conviction that the men who clamoured for
an unconditional, indiscriminate amnesty for the Communards were simply
abusing the name of clemency for the rehabilitation of crime.
'Look again,' he said, 'at the spirit in which the laicization of the
schools is conducted. There are a hundred families we will say in a
village. Ninety-nine of these families are Christian families, not
families of saints--I wish I knew such a village as that!--but Christian
families. Go into their homes, and you will see the crucifix hanging in
the chambers, religious prints upon the walls. One family is a family of
atheists. I suppose the case, for as a matter of fact I know no such
family. But I will suppose it. There is a school in the village, and in
that school there hangs a crucifix, the gift of some pious resident.
Ninety-nine fathers and mothers of the village desire that crucifix to
be respected. One father and one mother (a bold supposition this!)
desire it to be removed. The authorities send in a man who plucks it
down, before the children, and throws it out of the door. I simply state
what has happened over and over again! Is there any respect for equal
rights--for the rule of the majority, for freedom of conscience in such
proceedings? Take the case of the Virgin of Béziers. In that ancient
city stood two statues of the Virgin, one in bronze and one in marble.
The civil authorities called upon the Church to suppress them. The
Church authorities of course declined to do this. Thereupon the civil
authorities take the money of the taxpayers and expend it in depriving
the city of these two monuments. Suppose the Turkish authorities were to
do a thing like this in a town full of Christians under their dominion,
what would all the civilised world say about the Turks?
'And it is done in a French city by Frenchmen either to carry out their
own self-will or to exasperate and insult their fellow-citizens, or for
both reasons at once!
'Still another case you can see for yourself at Domrémy. There under a
pious and patriotic foundation to which Louis XVIII largely contributed
the home of Jeanne d'Arc, religiously preserved in its original state,
was confided to the keeping of some Sisters. They dwelt in a neat
edifice constructed on the grounds purchased to secure the house of the
Pucelle, and there the children of Domrémy and the neighbouring communes
came to school and were gratuitously taught. Only the other day the
local authorities were instigated, I know not by whom--perhaps by the
friends of M. Ferry at St.-Dié, which is not very far off--to "laicize"
instruction in Domrémy. To this end they turn the Sisters out, put the
home of Jeanne d'Arc under the charge of a lay guardian, who has to be
paid by the State, of course, tax the commune to pay a lay teacher, and
make the school a lay school at the very door of the home of the
village maiden to whose religious faith France owes her freedom and her
national existence!'
I made a visit to Nancy and the Department of the Meurthe et Moselle not
long after I had this conversation in Reims. The Mother Superior of the
great Sisterhood of Christian Doctrine at Nancy confirmed this amazing
story of the performances at Domrémy, and gave me many particulars of
the petty persecutions to which the Sisters who conduct schools all over
France are subjected. The schools are open at all hours to the invasion
of Inspectors, who magnify their office too often in the eyes of the
children by treating the teachers (lay as well as religious) with the
sort of amiable condescension which marks the demeanour of an agent of
the octroi overhauling the basket of a peasant-woman at a barrier. If a
Sister has a religious book, her own property, lying on her desk, it is
violently snatched up, and the children are invited to say whether it
has been used to poison their young minds with religious ideas. 'In
short,' said the Mother Superior very quietly, 'our Sisters are really
much better treated in Protestant countries than in Catholic France.'
Domrémy-la-Pucelle is a typical agricultural village of Eastern France.
It is in the Department of the Vosges and in the verdant valley of the
Meuse. I drove to it on a lovely summer's morning after visiting
Vaucouleurs, where the Pucelle came before the stout Captain Robert de
Beaudricourt and said to him, 'You must take me to the King. I must see
him before Mid Lent, and I will see him if I walk my legs off to the
knees!' This interview began her marvellous career.
From certain articles in newspapers about a drama of _Jeanne d'Arc_, now
performing at Paris, I gather that Jeanne's moral conquest of France
which preceded and led to her material victory over the English
invaders, has at last been satisfactorily explained by the scientific
believers in hypnotism! Of this I can only say, with President Lincoln
on a memorable occasion, 'for those who like this kind of explanation of
historical phenomena, I should suppose it would be just the kind of
explanation they would like.'
The country between Vaucouleurs and Domrémy is agreeably diversified,
well wooded in parts, and rich in fair meadow-lands. At Montbras a
little old lady dwells and looks after her affairs in one of the most
picturesque château of the sixteenth century to be seen in this part of
France, machicolated, crenellated, and dominated by lofty towers. We
passed, too, through Greux, a small village on the Meuse, the dwellers
in which were astute enough to get themselves exempted by Charles VII
from all talliages and subsidies 'by fabricating documents' to prove
that Jeanne d'Arc was born there. The incident is curious as going to
show that the 'downtrodden serfs' and 'manacled villeins' of the middle
ages had their wits about them, and could take care of themselves when
an opportunity offered, as well as the 'oppressed tenantry' of modern
Ireland. Domrémy, which is no bigger than Greux, neither of them having
three hundred inhabitants, straggles along the highway. The houses are
well built--the church is a handsome, ogival building of the fifteenth
century, restored in our day, but quite in keeping with the place and
its associations. Within it, under a tomb built into the wall, lie the
two brothers Tiercelin, sons of the godmother of Jeanne, who bore their
testimony manfully to the character of the deliverer of France, when the
Church was at last compelled to intervene in the interest of truth and
justice between the French Catholics who had worshipped her as a
'creature of God,' and the English Catholics who had burned her as an
emissary of the Evil One.
Almost under the shadow of the church tower stands the house in which
Jeanne was born and bred. A charming, old-fashioned garden, very well
kept, surrounds it. If when you leave the church you pass around by the
main street of the village, you soon find yourself in front of a neat
iron railing which connects two modern buildings of no great size, but
neat and unpretending. Entering the gateway of this railing you see
before you, shaded by well-grown trees, one or two of which may possibly
be of the date of the house, the quaint fifteenth-century façade of the
house of Jacques d'Arc, and his wife Isabelle Vouthon, called Romée
because she had made a pilgrimage to the Eternal City. A curious
demi-gable gives the house the appearance of having been cut in two. But
there is no reason to suppose it was ever any larger than it is now.
Probably, indeed, this façade was erected long after the martyrdom of
Jeanne. Over the ogival doorway is an escutcheon showing three shields,
and the date, 1480, with an inscription, '_Vive Labeur, Vive le Roy
Louys!_' This goes to confirm a local tradition that the façade was
built at the cost of Louis XI., who understood much better than his
father the political value to the crown and to the country of France of
the marvellous career of the peasant girl of Domrémy. The date of this
inscription is particularly significant. In 1479 was fought the battle
of Guinegate, which was lost to France by the headlong flight of the
French chivalry from the field. Louis XI. turned this disaster to good
account. He made it the excuse for founding, in 1480, his regular army
of mercenaries, liberating the peasants from the burden of personal
military service to the lords, and drawing to himself the power of the
State through taxation. '_Vive Labeur, Vive le Roy Louys!_' was a
popular cry throughout France in 1480; for Labeur in those days meant
what it means now in the _Terra di Lavoro_--the tilling of the fields.
One of the three shields above this doorway has a similar significance.
It is a bearing of three ploughshares. With it are emblazoned on the
house of the Pucelle two other shields, one bearing the three royal
fleurs-de-lys of France, and the other the arms granted to the family of
the heroine--_azure_, a sword _argent_ pommelled and hilted _or_, and
above a crown supported by two fleurs-de-lys. With these arms, as
we know, the family took the name of De Lys. The name, the arms, and the
inscription over the doorway were a perpetual witness to the peasants of
Champagne and Lorraine of the unity of interests established by King
Louis between the spade and the sceptre. With the help of an inspired
daughter of the people, King Charles had driven the English into the
sea, and delivered the land. With the help of the people, King Louis had
broken the power of Burgundy, and put the barons under his foot. '_Vive
Labeur, Vive le Roy Louys!_' I do not wonder this skilful craftsman 'of
the empire and the rule' lamented on his death-bed in 1483, at
Plessis-les-Tours, that he could not live to crown the edifice he had so
well begun. We in England and America know him only in the magic mirror
of the Wizard of the North. But France owes him a great debt. He was
cruel, but in comparison with the cruelty of Lebon, of Barère, of
Billaud-Varennes, his cruelty was tender mercy, He was a hypocrite, but
his hypocrisy shows like candour beside the perfidy and the cant of
Pétion and of Robespierre, while in the great 'art and mystery' of
government he was a master where these modern apes of despotism were
clumsy apprentices.
The interior of the house of Jeanne is probably in the main what it was
when Jeanne dwelt here with her parents, her sister and her brothers.
The ground floor contains a general living-room, the large chimney-place
of which may perhaps be of the time of Jeanne, and three bedrooms, one
of which, a chamber measuring three mètres by four, and lighted only by
a small dormer window looking out upon the garden, tradition assigns to
Jeanne and to her sister. Here, the people of Domrémy believe, the
maiden sate almost within the shadow of the old church-tower, and heard
the voices of St. Catherine and St. Margaret, and Michael the Archangel,
patron and defender of France, mingling with the sound of the church
bells, and calling upon her to arise, and leave her village home and the
still forests of Domrémy and her silly sheep, and go out into a world of
war and confusion and violence, and rally the broken armies of her
people, and lead them, like another Deborah or Judith, to victory.
That Jeanne heard these voices or believed she heard them, the
documentary evidence unearthed by Quicherat abundantly proves. It
proves, too, that she was cool, clear-headed, self-possessed, thoroughly
honest, and absolutely trustworthy in every relation of life. This being
her character, what did she do? She made her way from her solitude in
Lorraine to the court of the King at Chinon, with nothing but her faith
in her voices and her mission to sustain her; put herself into the
forefront of the battle of France, threw the English back into England,
and saw the successor of St.-Rémi put the crown of Clovis upon the head
of a prince whom nobody but herself could have led or driven to Reims.
If anybody in Paris or elsewhere knowing all this feels quite sure that
Jeanne did not hear the voices which she believed herself to have
heard, he certainly is to be pitied. It may do him good to consider in
his closet what Lord Macaulay has said in a certain celebrated essay
concerning Sir Thomas More and the doctrine of Transubstantiation.
A man may intelligently believe or disbelieve in the reality of the
voices heard by Jeanne, but no man who intelligently disbelieves in them
can need to be told that his disbelief rests upon no better scientific
ground than the belief of the man who believes in them.
To take the home of Jeanne d'Arc out of the keeping of devout women who
share the faith of Jeanne, that faith which, well or ill founded,
unquestionably saved France, was simply a stupid indecency. In the
keeping of the Sisters the home of Jeanne was a shrine. In any other
keeping it becomes a show.
The essential vulgarity of the performance is bad enough. But a
sharp-witted Domrémy man who took me on to Bourlémont in his 'trap'
assured me, in a matter-of-fact way, that in the village the chief mover
in the affair was commonly believed to have got a good _pot-de-vin_ for
securing the position of keeper of the house for a person of his
acquaintance. This may have been a bit of village scandal, but such
performances naturally breed village scandals. Whether it was or was not
a 'job' in this sense, it certainly marks as low a level of taste and
education as the pillage by Barère and his copper 'Syndicate' of the
historic tombs of France at St.-Denis in 1793.
Some years ago all France was incensed by a nocturnal desecration of the
statue of Duguesclin which stands at Dinan in the very lists in which
five hundred years ago the Breton hero met and vanquished 'Sir Thomas of
Canterbury.' The indignation of France was righteous, and if there was
any foundation for the popular impression that the outrage was
perpetrated by some English lads on a vacation tour, no language could
well be too strong to apply to it. But I did not observe that any
Parisian journalist alluded at that time to the way in which the ashes
of Duguesclin himself were treated in 1795 at St.-Denis, by Frenchmen
decked in tri-coloured scarves! It did not even occur to them to
remember how long ago and by what hands the column of the Grand Army was
pulled down in the very heart of Paris!
While the force of Philistine fatuity can no further go than it has gone
in the 'laicization' of the home of Jeanne d'Arc, I ought to say that
the actual keeper of the place seemed to me to be a decent sort of
fellow, not wholly destitute of respect for its traditions and its
significance. The house and the garden are neatly kept. In the centre of
the main room stands a fine model in bronze of the well-known statue of
Jeanne d'Arc, by the Princess Mary of Orléans, with an inscription
stating that it was given by the King, her father, to the Department of
the Vosges, to be placed in the house where Jeanne was born.
Commemorative tablets are set here and there in the walls; and in one of
the modern buildings in front of the house a collection is kept of
objects illustrating the life of the Pucelle.
The most interesting of these is a banner given by General de Charette,
to the valour of whose Zouaves the French are indebted for one of the
few gleams of victory which brighten up the dark record of 1870 It was
at Patay that in June 1429 the English, under Sir John Fastolf, for the
first time broke in a stricken field and fled under the onset of the
French, led by the Maid of Orléans, leaving the great Talbot to fall a
prisoner into the hands of his enemies. And at Patay, again in December
1870, the German advance was met and repulsed by the 'Volunteers of the
West,' that being the name under which the silly and intolerant
'Government of the National Defence' actually compelled the Catholic
Zouaves to fight for their country, just as they forced the Duc de
Chartres to draw his sword and risk his life for France as 'Robert
Lefort.' These puerilities really almost disarm contempt into
compassion. At Patay in 1870 the Zouaves saw three of their officers,
all of one family, struck down in succession, two of them to death, as
they advanced on the lines of the enemy, bearing a banner of the
Sacré-Coeur, which had been presented to General de Charette by some
nuns of Brittany only a few days before the battle. The banner, now at
Domrémy, is a votive offering of General de Charette and his Zouaves in
commemoration of the field on which they were permitted thus, after four
centuries, to link the piety and the patriotic valour of modern France
with the deathless traditions of Domrémy, of Orléans, and of Reims.
This little museum contains, too, a picture given by an Englishman, of
Jeanne binding up the wounds of an English soldier after the repulse of
one of the English attacks. The soil has risen about the house of
Jeanne, and this may have made the interior seem more gloomy than it
once was. But the house is well and solidly built, and if it may be
thought a fair specimen of the abodes of the well-to-do peasantry of
Lorraine in the fifteenth century, they were as well lodged relatively
to the general average of people at that time as those of the same class
in Eastern France now on the average appear to be. Charles de Lys in the
early seventeenth century seems to have been a man of note and
substance. But the parents of Jeanne were simply peasant proprietors. At
the entrance of the village church there is a statue of Jeanne, the work
of a native artist, in which she appears kneeling in her peasant's
dress, one hand pressed upon her heart and the other lifted towards
Heaven. And in a little clump of fir-trees near her house stands a sort
of monumental fountain, surmounted by a bust of the Pucelle. The house
itself remained in the possession of the last descendant of the family,
a soldier of the Empire named Gérardin, down to the time of the
Restoration. Some Englishman, it is said, then offered him a handsome
price for the cottage, with the object of moving it across the Channel,
as an enterprising countryman of mine once proposed to carry off the
house of Shakespeare to America. Gérardin, though a poor man, or perhaps
because he was a poor man, refused. The department thereupon bought the
house, the King gave Gérardin the cross of the Legion, and he was made a
_garde forestier_.
Upon the expulsion of the Sisters from the home of La Pucelle, some of
the most respectable people in the department at once organized a fund,
and built for them a very neat edifice in the village in which they are
now installed. Fully four-fifths of the children of the country round
about, I was told, still attend their free school. 'Ah! Sir,' said a
cheery solid farmer of Domrémy to me, while I stood waiting for my
'trap,' to continue my journey, 'it does not amuse us at all to pay for
the braying of all these donkeys! Do you know, it costs Domrémy, such as
you see it, twelve hundred francs a year, this nonsense about the
Sisters and the house of La Pucelle! And to what use? What harm did the
Sisters do there? It is not the Pucelle who would have put them out, do
you think? In the old time Domrémy paid no taxes because of the Pucelle.
Now because of the Pucelle we must pay twelve hundred francs a year for
what we don't want!'
Some of my readers may thank me--as the guide-book gives no very
accurate information on the subject--for telling them that
Domrémy-la-Pucelle may be very easily, and in fine weather very
pleasantly, visited from Neufchâteau on the railway line between Paris
and Mirécourt. Neufchâteau itself is an interesting and picturesque
town. It suffered severely from the religious wars, but two of its
churches, St. Christopher and St. Nicholas, are worth seeing. There are
two very good statues of Jeanne d'Arc, and the Hôtel de la Providence,
kept by a most attentive dame, is a very good specimen of a small French
provincial inn. There a carriage can be had for Domrémy, and with a
luncheon-basket a summer's day may be most agreeably spent between
Neufchâteau and the little station of Domrémy-Maxey-sur-Meuse, at which
point, about three miles beyond Domrémy-la-Pucelle, you may strike the
railway which leads to Nancy. The old capital of Lorraine, though not
nearly so trim and well kept as it used to be, is still one of the most
characteristic and interesting cities in France.
Very near Domrémy-la-Pucelle, a resident of the country, M. Sédille, has
built, on a fine hill overlooking the valley of the Meuse, a small
chapel adorned with a group representing the Maiden kneeling before her
Saints and the Archangel. This chapel stands on the place where, as
tradition tells us, Jeanne first heard the heavenly 'voices.' It was
then in the heart of a great forest, long since thinned away. It now
commands a wide and beautiful view of a finely varied country. There,
driving from Bourlémont on a lovely summer afternoon, I found a young
pilgrim from the Far West of the United States doing homage to the
memory of the Maid of Orléans. He had made his way here from Paris and
the Exposition. 'I got enough of that,' he said, 'in about three days,
with the help of a French conversation book.' His method was to look up
a phrase as nearly as possible expressing what he wanted to say, and
then to submit this phrase in the book to his interlocutor. 'How do you
find the plan work?' I asked him. 'Oh, very well,' he replied; 'the
French are so very obliging. I'm afraid it wouldn't work as well the
other way, on our side of the pond.' His worship, not of heroes, but of
heroines, was most simple and downright. 'I consider Joan of Arc,' he
said, 'the greatest woman that ever walked the earth, and next to her
Charlotte Corday. And these miserable Englishmen burnt one,' he added
scornfully, 'and these miserable Frenchmen guillotined the other. I
don't wonder this Old World is played out if they can't treat such women
better than that!'
He was charmed with the story of Adam Lux (caricatured by Mr. Carlyle),
who (like André Chénier) invited death by his defiant homage to
Charlotte Corday. 'Well now, I suppose,' he said, 'that if there had
been fifty more men in Paris then as brave as that Adam Lux, they could
have taken all those cowards and murderers and chucked them into the
Seine!' He rejoiced over the Bishop of Verdun's projected monument to
Jeanne, and I sent him to Châtillon by telling him that the statue of
Urban II. stands third in height among the religious monuments of Europe
after the Virgin of Le Puy and the St.-Charles of Arona.
Bourlémont before the Revolution must have been one of the finest
châteaux in France. It stands superbly on the plateau of a lofty hill.
The park which surrounds it is very extensive and full of noble trees.
The château was sacked and pillaged, and one great wing destroyed. This
the Prince d'Hénin is now rebuilding on the original scale, and in the
most perfect keeping with the stately and picturesque main body of the
edifice. The whole of the interior, with the great hall and the chapel,
has been restored and refurnished with admirable taste. Carved oak
wainscotings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, antique
armoires and cabinets and tables, mediæval tapestries--nothing is
wanting. But the thoroughness of the reconstruction emphasizes the
wanton folly and wickedness of the devastation which made it necessary.
The Princesse d'Hénin of the Revolutionary time narrowly escaped the
guillotine. She was one of many women of rank and worth who owed their
lives to the courage and ability and generosity of Madame de Staël.
After taking refuge in Switzerland, Madame de Staël organised a complete
system for bringing away her imperilled friends from Paris. She gathered
about her a small corps of clever and determined Swiss girls. These she
sent one by one as occasion served, or circumstances required, into
France, equipped with Swiss passports. On reaching Paris one of these
girls would find a lady waiting to escape, change wardrobes with her,
give her a Swiss passport properly viséd by the Swiss representative in
Paris, furnish her with money if necessary, and set her safely on her
way to the Cantons. When news came that she had arrived, the Swiss
damsel in her turn would get a new passport from her Minister and return
to Switzerland. Of course, such a system as this could not have been
carried out so successfully as it was without more or less co-operation
on the part of the 'incorruptible' Republican functionaries in France,
and there can be little doubt that, under the régime of the scoundrels
who made up the Committee of Public Security--Lebon, Panis, Drouet,
Ruhl, and the rest--a regular traffic in passports and protections went
on during the worst times of the Terror. It is remembered to the credit
of an unhappy woman, who was born in the town of Vaucouleurs, and for
whom nobody finds a good word, Madame Du Barry, that she deliberately
gave up the certainty of securing her own escape from Paris, in 1793, in
order to save Madame de Mortemart. The Duchesse de Mortemart was in
hiding on the Channel coast, when Madame Du Barry, for whom a
safe-conduct under an assumed name had been bought from one of the
Terrorist 'Titans,' insisted that this safe-conduct should be sent from
Paris to the Duchesse. The Duchesse used it and reached England in
safety. Madame Du Barry remained to perish on the scaffold, leaving her
goods and chattels to be stolen by the ruffians who sent her to the
guillotine, just as the goods and chattels, the money and equipments and
horses of the Duc de Biron were stolen by the Republican 'General'
Rossignol, his successor.
Domrémy is in the electoral district of Neufchâteau, and the elections
of 1889 do not show that the 'laicization' policy has given the
Republican cause a great impulse in this region. The Monarchist
candidate in the Neufchâteau district received in September 1889 6,571
votes, and the Republican 6,590. This is one of the microscopic
majorities which were so common in 1889, and which conclusively show
what a difference in the general result was made by the open pressure of
the Government on the electors. The Department of the Vosges sends up
six deputies to the Chamber. In 1885 it sent up a solid Republican
Deputation, including M. Méline, who was so conspicuous in 1889 in the
matter of General Boulanger and M. Jules Ferry, the standard-bearer of
'laicization' and irreligion. In 1885 the Deputies were chosen by the
_scrutin de liste_. The Republican majority shown by the vote for M.
Méline was 6,949 on a total poll of 87,635. M. Méline, who headed the
poll, received 47,292 votes. His Conservative opponent received 40,343.
In 1889 the elections were made by the _scrutin d'arrondissement_. Five
Republicans, not six, were chosen, and the defeated Republican candidate
was no less a person than M. Jules Ferry himself! The first district of
St.-Dié gave him 6,192 votes, and elected a Monarchist to replace him by
6,403 votes. It is not easy to overestimate the significance of this
change. Probably enough the majority will emphasize it by 'invalidating'
the election of the Monarchist!
A comparison of the total votes in the Vosges of the two parties in 1889
with those of 1885 is instructive. In 1885 the strength, of the two
parties respectively (the Conservatives not having then openly declared
for the Monarchy) was, as I have said, 47,292 and 40,343. In 1889 the
Republicans polled in all the districts of the department 47,116 votes,
and their opponents 42,124. Here we have a falling off of 176 votes in
the highest Republican strength against an increase of 1,781 in the
highest Opposition strength, or, in other words, a falling off of 1,957
votes in the aggregate Republican majority, together with the defeat in
his own district of the recognised leader of the Republican Government
party. And yet the total of the votes polled rose from 87,635 in 1885 to
89,240 in 1889. The inference is obvious: that the Monarchists are on
the upgrade, and the Republicans on the downgrade. If, with such results
in such a region and in the face of such a contest as that of 1889, the
Monarchists do not in the long run win, it will clearly be nobody's
fault but their own!