CHAPTER XIV

IN THE CALVADOS

VAL RICHER.

Perhaps the most striking illustration that can be given of the true

nature of the contest now waging between the Third Republic and France,

is the share taken in it by the family and the representatives of the

great Protestant statesman, who, under Louis Philippe, laid down the

lines in France of a truly free and liberal system of public education.

In the matter of education France was undoubtedly thrown backward and

not forward by the First Republic. The number of illiterates--that is,

of persons unable to read and write--naturally increased between 1789

and 1799 as the educational foundations which existed all over the

kingdom shared the fate of the religious and charitable foundations.

There was an abundance of ordinances and decrees about public education.

But the chief practical work done was to confiscate the means by which

the ancient system had been carried on. Baudrillart mentions educational

foundations made by the great abbeys as early as in the seventh century.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Councils of the French Church

created in each cathedral chapter a special prebend, the holder of which

was to look after the education not only of clerical persons, but 'of

all poor scholars,' and this 'gratuitously.'

In the fourteenth century lay foundations for free public education are

found, one in particular of importance established by a rich citizen,

Jean Rose, for promoting the general education of the people at Meaux,

the diocese afterwards of Bossuet, who under Louis XIV. was so active in

promoting 'the moral unity' of France from his point of view.

The long English wars interrupted the development of education, and many

instances are found during that dismal period in which persons who had

bought legal positions had to employ professional scribes to do their

writing. In the sixteenth century schools increased and multiplied all

over France. Rich citizens founded them for 'the instruction of all the

children,' as at Provins in 1509, and at Roissy-en-Buè in 1521. In the

rural regions the schoolmaster often received his pay in grain; he was

sometimes attached to some public office. In many places he taught the

children only for six months in each year. In short, education was

carried on in France at that time very much as it was in the rural

regions of the United States down to the second quarter of the current

century. In many French parishes of the sixteenth century the

schoolmaster 'boarded around' in the different families of the parish,

just as he did in New England. The religious wars again disturbed the

development of education. At Nîmes, where the archives I found had been

carefully investigated by M. Puech, more than a third of the artisans

could read, write, and keep their accounts at the end of the fifteenth

century. After the close of the religious wars, it was no uncommon thing

to find fathers signing their names in a very clerkly fashion, while

their sons were forced to 'make their marks,' as being unable to write.

Like causes produced like effects at the end of the eighteenth century.

Not content with disestablishing the Church, the legislative tinkers of

1791, by a law passed on June 27 in that year, struck out of existence

at a blow all the great industrial associations and corporations of

France. These had provided for the education of the children of their

members for centuries; but all the educational foundations were swept

away with the hospitals and the charities. The men who grew to man's

estate between 1793 and 1813 in France grew up in greater ignorance than

their fathers.

The worst national effects of the Terror did not disappear with the

disappearance of the guillotine. Before the fall of Robespierre, the

guillotine had come to be a financial expedient. 'We are coining money

on the Place de la Révolution,' said the estimable Barére to his

colleagues, and he counted that a poor week's work which yielded less

'than three millions of francs' from the confiscation of the property of

the victims. When under the Directory _fusillades_ took the place of the

too conspicuous guillotine, the confiscation still went on. The

Directory did no more for education than the Terror had done. The five

directors had other matters on their minds.

Barras, of whom a not unfriendly historian gently observes that, 'while

he lacked no other vice ancient or modern, he was neither very vain nor

very cruel;' Mr. Carlyle's 'hungry Parisian pleasure-hunter,' Rewbell,

of whom his special friend and colleague, Laréveillère-Lepaux, amiably

records in his Memoirs that 'his legs were too small for his body,' and

that he had 'a habit of attributing to himself speeches uttered and

deeds done by other people;' Letourneur, a corpulent rustic, whose

excellent wife loudly exulted over her joy in finding herself 'eating

stewed beef out of Sèvres porcelain,' and who, being asked when he came

back from the Jardin des Plantes whether he had seen Lacépède,

innocently replied: 'No; but I saw La giraffe!'--Carnot, 'Papa Victory,'

of whom Laréveillère says that 'nobody could endure his vanity and

self-conceit;' and, lastly, Laréveillère himself, whom Carnot in his

Memoirs, published at London in 1799, compares to a 'viper,' and says,

'after he has made a speech he coils himself up again'--these were

hardly the men to give their nights and days to reconstructing the

educational system of France!

Merlin (of Douai), Minister of Justice under the quintette, really ruled

France for nearly five years. This was Merlin, author of the 'Law of the

Suspects,' which Mr. Carlyle, though obviously in the dark as to its

real genesis and objects, finds himself constrained to stigmatize as the

'frightfullest law that ever ruled in a nation of men.' Mr. Carlyle does

not seem to have observed that the author of this 'transcendental' law,

the aim of which was to convert the French people into a swarm of spies

and assassins, was not only one of the first of the Republican' Titans'

to fall down and kiss the feet of Napoleon, but one of the first also to

desert Napoleon, and embrace the knees of the returning King. On April

11, 1814, this creature, who had caused the Convention to reject a

petition for a pardon presented by a man condemned for a crime, the real

authors of which had confessed his innocence and their own guilt, on the

ground that 'every sentence pronounced by the law should be

irrevocable,' joined in a most fulsome address of welcome to the

legitimate sovereign of France! His namesake Merlin (of Thionville),

another 'Titan' whom Mr. Carlyle admires as riding out of captured

Mayence still 'threatening in defeat,' was nimbler even than Merlin of

Douai. On April 7, 1814, he wrote to King Louis begging to be allowed

'to serve the true, paternal government of France!'

Concerning Merlin (of Douai), Barras, who made him 'Minister of

Justice,' placidly says: 'Poltroons are always cruel. Merlin always hid

himself in the moment of danger, and came out again only to strike the

vanquished party.' Proscription and confiscation kept the Government

which this worthy Republican directed much too busy to leave it any time

for looking after the schools of France.

When at last Napoleon gathered up the reins, he postponed the interests

of public education to other, and from his point of view more pressing,

concerns.

The Concordat re-established the Church in France, but it did not

re-endow the Church on a scale which would have enabled it at once to

reconstruct its own educational system. In fact, the Concordat can

hardly be said to have re-endowed the Church at all. Under the

thirteenth article the Pope formally recognized the title of the

purchasers of 'national property' in France to vast domains, the

property through purchase, donations, or bequest of the Church, which

had been made 'national property' only by the simple processes of

exiling or murdering the owners and confiscating their estates. In

consideration of this recognition, the State bound itself by Article

XIV. of the Concordat to 'ensure to the bishops and the curates salaries

befitting their functions,' and by Article XV. to 'protect the right of

the Catholics of France to re-endow the churches.'

As to the 'rising generation' of the French people the government of

Napoleon concerned itself much more with the conscription than with the

reconstruction of the schools, and though the Churches, both Catholic

and Protestant, took this work in hand very early in the century, it was

necessarily with inadequate means.

Under the First Consulate a general law regulating public instruction

was enacted, on May 1, 1802. Another was enacted shortly afterwards,

and in 1808 appeared the famous decree of the Emperor founding the

University system of France. Heaven knows how many schemes for founding

this University system had been elaborated and submitted to him before,

only to be torn up as 'ideological.' Cuvier affirms that he drew up

twenty-three such schemes one after another.

This decree of March 17, 1808, forbade the establishment of private

schools without the authority of the Government, set up three degrees of

public instruction, primary, secondary and superior, organised a body of

Inspectors-General, and, in short, 'laicized' public education in France

effectually as a machine to be controlled by the Imperial Government.

Under the ancient Monarchy, France possessed twenty-four Universities.

The Convention suppressed them all at a blow on September 15, 1793. This

was little more than three months after the Convention itself had been

'suppressed' and forced to kiss the hand that smote it by Henriot and

his cannoniers on June 28, 1793. A law abolishing the freedom of

education was to have been expected from an assembly itself enslaved by

an oligarchy of rogues and assassins. And this law left nothing standing

in France to impede the execution of the Imperial decree of 1808, the

first article of which was:--'Public education in the whole Empire is

exclusively confided to the University.' Another article ordained that

all the schools in France should take as the basis of their instruction

'fidelity to the Emperor, to the Imperial monarchy, the trustee of the

happiness of the people, and to the Napoleonic dynasty, the conservator

of the unity of France and of all the liberal ideas proclaimed in the

constitutions of France.' The theology of all the French schools was to

be in conformity with the Royal edict of Louis XIV., issued in 1682.

Furthermore and expressly, 'the members of the University were required

to keep the Grand-master and his officers informed of anything that may

come to their knowledge contrary to the doctrine and the principles of

the educational body in the establishments of public education!'

Here we have the 'moral unity' of France organized by Napoleon in 1808

on the lines in which the Third Republic has been trying ever since 1874

to organize it! Put the word 'Republic' for the word 'Empire,' the

phrase 'scientific atheism' for the phrase 'propositions of the clergy

of France in 1682,' and you have in the Napoleonic organization of

public education the organization controlled by M. Jules Ferry. Of the

two despotisms, the despotism of 1808 seems to me the more compatible

with public order and public prosperity. With public liberty neither of

them is compatible. Under the ancient Monarchy and the clerical system

of education liberty existed. The Jesuits and the Jansenists, the

Dominicans and the Oratorians and the Benedictines, had their different

principles of education, their different traditions, their different

text-books. Under the Imperial University, and still more under the

University of the Third Republic, differences became disloyalties. Under

the University of France in 1808 every young French citizen was to

accept the Catholic faith as defined by the clergy of France in 1682,

and true allegiance bear to the Napoleonic dynasty. Under the University

of France in 1890, every young French citizen is to disbelieve in God

and a future life, and true allegiance bear to the Third French

Republic.

In 1808 as in 1890 the rights of freemen were first vindicated in this

connection by the Catholic Church. On April 9, 1809, the Emperor issued

a decree that no one should be admitted to a Catholic theological

academy without a bachelor's diploma of the University. The bishops came

at once into collision on this point with the Imperial prefects of 1809,

as the bishops now came into collision on the decree of 1880 with M.

Jules Ferry and the Republican prefects. The Imperial prefects of 1809

(not a few of them rabid Republicans in 1792) were merely the valets of

the Emperor, as the prefects of 1890 are the valets of a Parliamentary

oligarchy.

The Emperor carried his point. But when the Emperor fell, and the

constitutional monarchy was restored, the University of France ceased to

be an Imperialist training-school. M. de Fontanes, appointed

grand-master by the Emperor in 1809, kept his place under Louis XVIII.

To keep it he made the University 'clerical.' Under Napoleon the

scholars in the public schools of France had been divided into

'companies.' M. de Fontanes in 1815 ordered them to be divided into

'classes.' Under Napoleon the hours of study and of play were announced

by a drum. In 1815 M. de Fontanes ordered them to be announced by a

bell. Under Napoleon the boys all wore a uniform. M. de Fontanes in 1815

ordered the uniforms to be no longer of 'a military type.' Then the

French Liberals who had not dared to stir under the Emperor began to

attack both the clergy and the University. But when the Revolution of

1830 brought these 'Liberals' into power, they ceased at once to attack,

and began at once to engineer the Imperial machinery of the University.

M. Thiers even proclaimed this machinery to be 'the finest creation of

the reign of Napoleon!'

In 1833 the truest Liberal of them all, M. Guizot, struck a strenuous

blow at this machinery of despotism. He could not deal with the

University as a system, but he framed a law affecting 'primary

education,' the principle of winch was that no man should be forced to

send his child to school, but that schools should exist all over France

to which any man who pleased might send his children if he was too poor

to pay for their education.

This principle of M. Guizot in 1883 was certainly not an outcome of the

'principles of 1789;' for it had been at the foundation of all the free

schools of France during the middle ages, and under the absolute

monarchy of Louis XIV. Talleyrand recognised it in his plan of 1791,

which did not suit Condorcet and his 'ideologists.' It was not in the

mere revival of this principle that the true liberalism of M. Guizot

manifested itself. In the second article of his law this great statesman

provided, in express terms, that 'the wishes of families should always

be consulted and complied with in everything affecting the religious

instruction of their children.' This was indeed a step far forward in

the path of true liberalism. It was a distinct recognition of the rights

of the family as against the encroachments of the State. It was the

'liberalism' not of the 'ideologists' of 1790, nor of the Third Republic

according to M. Challemel-Lacour, but of the legislators who gave Lower

Canada her equitable system of common and of dissident schools. It was

the liberalism of those courageous men who, like Montgaillard, Bishop of

St.-Pons, had dared, under Louis XIV., and after the revocation of the

Edict of Nantes, to protest in 1688 against imposing the Catholic

communion by force upon the Huguenot ancestors of M. Guizot.

As Minister of Public Instruction under Louis Philippe in 1833, this

lover of true liberty simply got enacted into law the principles which

had led him as a brilliant and rising young man of letters in 1812 to

refuse to adulate the Emperor, and which he had plainly and fearlessly

set forth as the necessary conditions of the constitutional government

of France in his famous interview with Louis XVIII. three years

afterwards.

Under M. Guizot's law of 1833, the primary schools of France were much

more than doubled in number during the reign of Louis Philippe.

In the spirit of that law M. Guizot administered the affairs of France

during his long tenure of official authority, and to him, more than to

any other man, must be attributed the progress which France made under

Louis Philippe in the direction of liberty, as Englishmen and Americans

understand that much-abused word. That progress might never have been

interrupted had the counsels of M. Guizot prevailed over those of M.

Thiers with the aged monarch who trusted the one but yielded to the

other, in February 1848.

Now that a parliamentary oligarchy has deliberately undertaken, in the

name of the 'moral unity of France,' to undo all that was done between

1833 and 1848 for educational liberty in France and to protect the moral

independence of Frenchmen, it is in the highest degree interesting to

find the principles of M. Guizot energetically maintained by the heirs

of his blood and of his name, not only here in the Catholic Calvados

which gave the great Protestant statesman so staunch a support through

all his years of power, and surrounded him with affection and respect

down to the last days of his long and illustrious life, but in Southern

France also, and in the home of his Protestant ancestors.

Val Richer will be a place of pilgrimage for lovers of liberty in the

twentieth century, as La Brède is in the nineteenth.

But the genius of the spot is more purely personal in the home of

Guizot than in the birthplace of Montesquieu.

The stately rectangular library at La Brède with its thousands of

soberly-clad volumes, standing as he left them on its shelves, annotated

by his own hand; the manuscripts still unfinished of the 'Lettres

Persanes; the grave silent cabinet, with his chair beside his

study-table, as if he had quitted it a moment before you came--all these

are eloquent, indeed, of the great thinker whose 'Esprit des Lois,' too

rich in ripe wisdom to be heeded by the headlong and haphazard political

'plungers' of 1789 in his own country, illuminated for Washington the

problem of constituting a new nationality beyond the Atlantic.

But La Brède has also a positive physiognomy of its own which takes you

back to ages long before his birth. The frowning donjon of the

thirteenth century, the machicolated round tower, the moat with its

running water, the drawbridge, the vestibule with its columns of twisted

oak, even the grand salon with the stately courtiers and captains, the

gracious dames and damsels of the family of Sécondat gazing down from

the walls, all these distract the eye and the mind. The distraction is

agreeable, but still it is a distraction. It leads you from the

biographical into the social and historical mood. You are delighted as

at Meillant or Chenonceaux with a corner of ancient France, marvellously

rescued from the red ruin of the Revolution.

Val Richer, on the contrary, like Abbotsford, is the creation of the

master whose spirit haunts the place. Like Abbotsford, it has an earlier

history and older associations, but of these there are few or no

material signs. Here stood the great abbey of which Thomas à-Becket once

was abbot, and where he found a refuge during that exile from which, in

his own words, he went back to England 'to play a game in which the

stakes were heads!' From Bures, near Bayeux, in this department, where

Henry was then holding his court, the four knights followed the Primate

to Canterbury, sternly bent on showing their lord that they were neither

'sluggish nor half-hearted.' Of the abbatial buildings which stood here

then few traces are left. But the handsome modern mansion built here by

Guizot rests, I believe, on the massive foundations, and certainly

incorporates some of the solid masonry above ground of the ancient

abbot's house. The drive to Val Richer from the singularly picturesque

old Norman town of Lisieux, within whose cathedral walls Henry of

England was married to Eleanor of Guienne, is beautifully shaded all the

way with noble trees, and bordered on either hand with parks and

gardens. No English county can show a more strikingly English

landscape--for this is the mother-country of Norman England, though now

one of the main pillars of the nationality of France. The Lady Chapel of

the Cathedral at Lisieux, indeed, was founded in the fifteenth century

by Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, in express expiation of the 'false

judgment on an innocent woman,' by which, as he lamentably confessed in

his deed of gift, he had sent the deliverer of France to the stake at

Rouen.

The park, like the mansion of Val Richer, is the creation of M. Guizot.

The monks of old had prepared the ground--for here, as everywhere, they

kept alive the traditions of Roman landscape art. The parks which the

Norman nobles made on both sides of the Channel were mainly devoted to

the chase, like the 'paradises' of the Persians; but the monasteries

possessed pleasure-grounds and gardens of all sorts. The beautifully

broken and undulating surface of the park of Val Richer attests, I

think, the fashioning hand of human art at more than one point; and M.

Guizot, by whom most of the fine trees which now adorn the place were

planted, took advantage, with the skill of a professional landscapist,

of all the opportunities it offered him.

I can well believe, with the most accomplished and appreciative of his

English biographers, that the years which he passed here after his

return from the exile into which he was driven by the unhappy

interference of M. Thiers at the most critical moment of the

disturbances of February 1848, were the happiest of his long and

well-filled life.

The halls and corridors of the mansion are tapestried with books. The

green secluded alleys, the gentle knolls, the glades, the spacious

meadows of the park, recall at every step the younger Pliny's

incomparable picture of his Tuscan villa. '_Placida omnia et

quiescentia._' 'A spirit of pensive peace broods over the whole place,

making it not lovelier only, but more salubrious, making the sky more

pure, the atmosphere more clear.'

People who imagine convulsions and cataclysms to be a necessity of

political life in France, will find it hard to explain the relations

which existed throughout his whole career from the time when he took

part in forming the first government of Louis Philippe to the day of his

death between this great Protestant statesman and the Catholics of the

Calvados. These relations still exist between his representatives at Val

Richer and the Catholics of the Calvados.

When the great Chancellor de l'Hôpital was using all his influence with

Catherine de' Medici to prevent the outbreak of the religious wars of

the sixteenth century, the Parisian rabble were set on by the satellites

of the House of Guise to attack the house of the Sieur de Longjumeau in

the Pré aux Clercs, as being a place of meeting for the Huguenots. The

Sieur de Longjumeau had no respect for the 'sacred right of

insurrection,' and, getting some of his friends into his house, gave the

people risen in their majesty such a thrashing that they speedily

disbanded. Upon this the 'moral unity' men of that time induced the

Court to banish the Sieur de Longjumeau to his estates, on the ground

that 'the most incompatible thing in a State is the existence of two

forms of religion.' This is the doctrine of the Third Republic to-day.

France cannot live with a mixed population of believers and of

unbelievers. All Frenchmen must be Atheists. The political history of

the Calvados for the last half-century, and especially of this region

about Lisieux and Val Richer, meets this 'moral unity' theory with a

practical demonstration of its absurdity. The great Protestant statesman

and his Catholic constituents at Lisieux lived and worked together for

liberty and for law, not in 'moral unity,' but in moral harmony. In

moral harmony his Protestant son-in-law, M. Conrad de Witt, through a

quarter of a century past has lived and worked for liberty and for law

with his Catholic constituents of Pont-l'Evêque.

The Catholics of the Calvados are not such intense Catholics as the

Catholics of Brittany and Poitou. After the Norman rising of 1793

against the tyranny at Paris had collapsed so dismally in the ridiculous

'battle' of Pacy--a battle which began with the flight in a panic from

the field of the vanquished Normans, and ended with the flight in a

panic from the field of their victorious enemies the Parisians--the

indignant Bretons and the Poitevins marched away to wage that contest

for their homes and their altars which has immortalized the name of La

Vendée. The less impassioned Normans made terms and took things as they

were. To this day what is called the 'little Church' exists in Brittany,

made up of peasants who regard the Concordat as an unworthy compact made

with the persecutors and the plunderers of the Church of their fathers.

The feeling of the Norman Catholics after Pacy and the miserable failure

of the Girondist resistance to the Mountain took the form of silent

disgust with the Republic and all its works. The Norman heroine in whose

heart this silent disgust named up till it made her the avenger of

innocent blood upon the most noisome reptile of the Revolution, had

ceased to be a Catholic before the shame of her country moved her to her

glorious and dreadful deed. But if the Catholics of the Calvados are

less intense, they are not less sincere, than the Catholics of Brittany

or Poitou. It is no indifference in matters of religion which makes them

co-operate so cordially with their Protestant friends and

representatives. It is because they value their religion, and mean that

it shall be respected, that they honour the memory of the great minister

who held sacred and inviolable the right of the parent to be heard and

obeyed in the matter of the religious education of his children. The two

daughters of M. Guizot married two brothers, the heirs of one of the

most illustrious names in the annals of European liberty. One of these

brothers, M. Conrad de Witt, now lives at Val Richer, and administers

his large agricultural property lying there in the commune of

St.-Ouen-le-Pin. Many years ago he won the gold medal of the French

Society of Agriculture, and for twenty years past he has been President

of the Agricultural Society of Pont-l'Evêque. In 1861, under the Empire,

his fellow-citizens made him a Councillor-General for the Canton of

Cambremer, in the Department of the Calvados, and he has kept his seat

in that body ever since, until he last year declined a re-election, and

made way for the candidacy of his nephew, M. Pierre de Witt. It was my

good fortune to be at Val Richer when the election came off. The canvass

had been carefully pushed; for, although the Republicans ostentatiously

announced their intention not to make a contest in which they were sure

to be beaten, M. Conrad de Witt and his nephew are not men to take

anything for granted where serious interests are concerned. There were

symptoms, too, that the Prefect of the Calvados, the Comte de Brancion,

a newcomer (as all prefects now are in France, the average tenure of a

prefect's official life since 1879 rarely exceeding eighteen months

in one place), had been advised from Paris to show his zeal by

contriving in some way to thwart, or at least to dampen, the victory of

the nephew in July, as a preliminary to prevent the victory of the uncle

in September. For M. Conrad de Witt was not only a Councillor-General of

the Calvados, and Mayor of his own commune of St.-Ouen-le-Pin, he was

sent to the Chamber of Deputies in 1885 as a Monarchist by the voters of

the Calvados by a majority of 13,722 on a total poll of 89,064, and when

he declined a re-nomination for the Council-General, he accepted a

re-nomination for the Chamber.

It was delightful to see the zealous interest taken in these contests,

not only by the family at Val Richer, but by all the countryside. The

elections for the Councils-General were held on Sunday, July 28, 1889.

All through the preceding Saturday scouts kept coming in to Val Richer

with the latest reports as to the state of things in the various

communes of the canton.

The tenor of these was uniform: 'There would be no contest; the only

possible Republican candidate, a respectable physician who had some

local strength in the commune in which he lived, founded upon his habit

of gratuitously attending the poor of that commune, had positively

declined to enter the field.' 'All the same,' said one energetic

volunteer from this very commune, 'we don't mean to let a single honest

voter stay at home. We understand this game. They want to make out that

we are lukewarm about the battle that is to come off in September. That

won't go!'

'Furthermore,' said another stalwart, keen-eyed, fresh-faced young

farmer, who might have passed as a Yorkshire yeoman, 'furthermore, I

don't trust this Republican cock till he's dead! I believe he's

shamming, but he shan't catch us asleep. This Prefect at Caen is as busy

as the Evil One. He means to play us a trick.'

The shrewd young farmer was right. Early, very early, on Sunday morning,

long before daybreak, indeed, there came hastening over to Val Richer

from the commume of Bonnebosq, some miles away, a spirited young fellow,

heart and soul in the fight, with the news that a story was putting

about all over the canton that M. Pierre de Witt had decided, at the

last moment, not to stand, and that, on the strength of this invention,

the nomination of Dr. ---- would be urged.

The polling had been fixed by the Prefect to begin in all the communes

at 7 A.M., and to close at 6 P.M. No time was, therefore, to be lost in

getting out a formal contradiction of this invention of the enemy, and

the vigorous young volunteer from Bonnebosq had lost no time. He roused

the candidate, got his instructions, and, before the polls were opened,

his men were all over the canton at work. In the course of the day I

drove over with M. Pierre de Witt to Bonnebosq, where we found the

mother of this energetic young politician, a typical Norman mother, full

of sense and fire, quietly proud of the activity and intelligence of her

son, and quite as much in the day's work as he. 'Not a pretty trick,'

she said, 'to play with Dr.----. He ought to be ashamed of it--and I am

sure he is,' she added, with a droll twinkle in her eye, 'for it has

turned out very badly! He will just be beaten like plaster. It would

have been cleverer to behave like a decent man!' Bonnebosq had a very

lively, cheery aspect on that Sunday afternoon. It is a busy prosperous

little place, with about a thousand inhabitants. The village church, a

new and very handsome French ogival building, most creditable to the

architect, has just been built at an expense of several hundred thousand

francs by a Catholic lady of the canton, and the people are very proud

of it. It struck me that at Bonnebosq the outlook for a moral harmony

between Frenchmen of divers religious communions contending together for

equal rights and well-ordered liberty was decidedly better than the

outlook for a 'moral unity' of France to be promoted by the

authoritative suppression of all private initiative in the education of

the French people. The traditions of the Norman race do not tend kindly

towards a system under which the individual is to wither that the State

may be more and more!

As Mayor of the commune of St.-Ouen-le-Pin, M. Conrad de Witt had a busy

day of it on Sunday, July 28. The holding of elections on Sunday is a

tradition in France. Two elections were to be made--one of a

Councillor-General and the other of a District Councillor. Under the

laws of 1871 and 1874, these elections must be held in separate though

adjoining buildings wherever this is practicable. Where the commune is

too small to furnish these facilities, the two elections may be held in

one place; but the votes for the two officers must be deposited in two

different urns. These urns are placed upon a table, at which the Mayor

of the commune presides with four assessors and a secretary, chosen by

them from among the electors. As the electors have the day before them,

the Mayor and the assessors are kept close prisoners at their posts till

the polls are closed. Nor is their work over then. As soon as the clock

strikes 6 P.M. the doors of the bureau close. But the Mayor and

the assessors must then proceed 'immediately' to examine and establish

the results of the voting. They choose from among the electors present a

certain number of 'scrutineers' knowing how to read and write. These

scrutineers take their seats at tables prepared for the purpose. At each

table there must be at least four scrutineers. The Mayor and the

assessors then empty the urns and count the votes, the secretary drawing

up a _procès-verbal_ the while. If there are more or fewer votes than

there were voters registered during the day as voting, this fact is

stated and affirmed. Blank or illegible votes, votes which do not

accurately give the name of the candidate voted for, or on which the

voters have put their own names, are not counted as valid, but they are

annexed to the _procès-verbal_. Votes not written on white paper, or

which bear any external indication of their tenor, are included in the

account as votes affecting the majority necessary to a choice, but they

are not put to the credit of the candidate whose name they bear; so

that, as a matter of fact, they tell against him. Moreover, if there are

more votes found in the urns than voters registered as voting, the

excess may be deducted from the number of votes given to the candidate

who has a majority.

I asked a very bright ruddy farmer in a spotless blue blouse, who was

watching the elections with great interest in one of the communes, what

he thought of this provision. 'It is a very good reason for watching the

mayors,' he said; '_dame_! a clever mayor who knows his commune, and has

good loose sleeves to his coat, can slip in a good many votes in this

way against the candidate who he knows is likely to win!'

I told him that in my own country we guarded the palladium of our

liberties (a queer palladium that needs to be guarded) against this

peril by using glass globes instead of the 'urns' employed in France,

which are in fact wooden boxes. The idea delighted him. He rubbed his

hands together with a chuckle, and said 'That would be capital! That

would bother them! But for that reason we shall not have your glass

urns!'

When the votes have all been emptied out of the urns and verified and

counted by the Mayor and the assessors, the Mayor distributes them among

the scrutineers. At each table a scrutineer takes the votes up one by

one, reads out in a clear voice the name of the candidate inscribed on

each vote, and passes it to another scrutineer, who sees it duly

registered, the Mayor and assessors the while supervising all the

proceeding. In communes containing less than 300 inhabitants the Mayor

and assessors themselves may scrutinise and declare the results.

As St.-Ouen-le-Pin falls just two short of this number, M. Conrad de

Witt not only lost his luncheon but his dinner. He never got back to the

château till ten o'clock at night.

The polling place in this commune was a small house opposite the village

church. I walked over to it after breakfast through the fields and by

lovely green lanes as deep as the lanes of Devonshire, with M. Pierre de

Witt and one of his kinsmen. The mass was going on in the village

church, and the singing of the choir seemed to me at least as fitting an

accompaniment to the expression by the sovereign people of their

sovereign will through bits of white paper--Mr. Whittier's 'noiseless

snowflakes'--as the braying of a brass band, or the hoarse shouts of a

more or less tipsy multitude.

In the Protestant corner of this Catholic churchyard, under some fine

trees, M. Guizot sleeps his last sleep in the simple tomb of his family.

Here, again, I thought, was a moral harmony better than any 'moral

unity'!

We had a merry and an animated dinner that night at Val Richer. Message

after message was brought in from the nearest communes, all of one

tenor. The Republican 'trick' had evidently exasperated the worthy

Norman voters, and brought them up to the polls most effectually! By ten

o'clock it was clear that M. Pierre de Witt was elected by a majority

too large to be 'whittled' away, and that the surreptitious appearance

of the Republicans in the field had served only to emphasize their

political weakness. In the canton, Cambremer itself, lying at a distance

of eight or ten kilomètres, and Beuvron only remained to be heard from.

It was possible harm might have been done there. For a law passed under

the Empire in 1852, and undisturbed for obvious reasons by the Third

Republic, allows the prefect of a department to determine into what

sections he will divide a large commune for the purpose, according to

the law, of 'bringing the electors nearer to the electoral urn.' This

opens the way, of course, to a good deal of what in America would be

known as official 'gerrymandering.' The thing may be of any country. The

name we owe to Mr. Elbridge Gerry, once Vice-President of the United

States; who, when his party controlled Massachusetts, devised a scheme

for so framing the electoral districts of that State as to get his

scattered party minorities together, and convert them thus into

majorities. An outline map of the State thus districted was declared by

one of his opponents to 'look like a salamander.' 'No! not like a

salamander,' said another; 'it is a gerrymander.'

Val Richer was full of little fairies in that bright summer weather. The

Pied Piper of Hamelin must have passed that way, losing some stragglers

of his army as he moved along. Wherever you strolled in the park you

came unexpectedly upon little blonde heads and laughing eyes peering

through the shrubbery, and saw small imps scampering madly off across

the meadows. On the Sunday night of the election, music and mirth chased

the hours away, till, just after midnight, a joyous clamour in the outer

hall announced some event of importance. From the far-off Cambremer and

Beuvron-sur-Auge a delegation of staunch electors had arrived to

announce the crowning victory. Thanks to the distance and the

'sections,' the votes had been long in counting, but they had been

counted, and not found wanting. One of these bringers of good tidings

might have sat or stood for a statue of William the Conqueror preparing

to make France pay dearly for the jest of the French King anent his

colossal bulk. He was a man in the prime of life, but he cannot possibly

have weighed less than 400 pounds. Yet he moved about alertly, and he

had driven over in a light wagon at full speed (the Norman horses are

very strong) to congratulate his candidate on the issue of a fray in

which he had borne his own part most manfully. M. Pierre de Witt had

received 1,042 votes as Councillor-General, against no more than 140

given to his medical competitor!

One bold voter had deposited a single vote for General Boulanger! 'Had

there been any disturbances anywhere?' No, none at all. 'We cheered when

we got the returns,' said the giant; 'we cheered for M. de Witt, and we

cried "Vive le Roi!" They didn't like it, but they were so badly beaten,

they kept quiet. I believe though,' he added, 'they would have arrested

us if we had cried "Vive Bocher!" That is more than they can bear!' and

therewith he laughed aloud, a not unkindly, but formidable laugh.

M. Bocher, who was made Prefect of the Calvados by M. Guizot, and who is

now a senator for that department, is, I am assured, the special _bête

noire_ of the Third Republic in Normandy. His long and honourable

connection with the public service has won for him the esteem of all the

people of the Calvados, while his thorough knowledge of the political

history of the country and of his time, his cool clear judgment, his

temperate but fearless assertion through good and evil report of his

political convictions, and his keen insight into character, must give

him long odds in any contest with the ill-trained and miserably-equipped

political camp-followers who have been coming of late years into the

front of the Republican battle.

They gave M. Bocher a banquet not long ago at Pont-l'Evêque, at which he

made a very telling speech, and brought down the house by inviting his

hearers to contemplate M. Grévy and M. Carnot as typical illustrations

of the great superiority of a republic over a monarchy, and of the

elective over the hereditary principle! The Republicans, he said, had

twice elected to the chief magistracy an austerely virtuous Republican

whom they had finally been compelled to throw out at the window of the

Elysée, as 'the complaisant and guilty witness, if not the interested

accomplice, of scandals which revolted the public conscience!' And whom

had the elective principle put into his place, under the pressure of

irreconcilable personal rivalries, and of a threatened popular outbreak?

A man whose recommendations were his own relative personal obscurity and

the traditional reputation of his grandfather!

With M. Grévy and M. Carnot the Norman farmers have a special quarrel

which gave zest to the caustic periods of M. Bocher. The all-powerful

son-in-law of M. Grévy, M. Wilson, proposed in the National Assembly in

1872, and with the influence of M. Thiers, then President, succeeded in

passing a law heavily taxing, and in an inquisitorial fashion, the

domestic fabrication of spirits. This is an old and prosperous industry

in Normandy. It is carried on, according to an official estimate made in

1888, by above five hundred thousand farmers in France; and in Normandy

particularly, a land of apples and pears, it is a great resource of the

farmers. They make here a liquor called Calvados, which when it attains

a certain age is much more drinkable and much less unwholesome than most

of the casual cognac of our times. After three years this very unpopular

law was repealed in 1875, mainly through the efforts of M. Bocher. It

had plagued the farmers more than it benefited the Treasury.

The _bouilleurs de cru_, as these domestic distillers are called, had

made during the three years 1869-72, 1,199,000 hectolitres of spirits

which paid excise duties. During the three years 1872-75 under the

Wilson law the production fell to about 165,000 hectolitres a year. In

the first year, 1875-76, after the repeal of the law it rose to 301,000

hectolitres.

The sale of crosses of the Legion, official contracts and other

operations not consistent with that virtue on which alone Montesquieu

tells us a republic can safely repose, made an end of M. Wilson and of

his father-in-law. But the enormous Republican deficit kept on

increasing, and in 1888, under the presidency of M. Carnot, the

Republicans revived a project formed by M. Carnot when Minister of

Finance, in 1886, for imposing upon the _bouilleurs de cru_ anew the

severe and inquisitorial taxation of 1872. Under the law introduced to

effect this, January 12, 1888, the whole of the buildings in which any

part of the processes of this production may be carried on must be open

to the tax-officers _at all hours of the day or night_. As many of the

_bouilleurs de cru_ are small farmers who use part of their houses for

some of these processes, it may be imagined how bitterly they oppose

such a law. They have no more love for tax-gatherers than the people of

other countries have; but the English maxim that every man's house is

his castle is a distinctly Norman maxim, and this menace offered to the

sanctity and privacy of the domicile has profoundly exasperated the

Norman populations. It is of a piece, they think, with the arbitrary

school system and with the elaborate contrivances devised to deprive the

communes of the right finally to certify and give effect to the returns

of their own elections. Above all, it is an interference with an ancient

and customary right. 'What business have these lawyers and doctors at

Paris,' said a farmer here to me, 'to be meddling with our usages and

ways here on our lands in Normandy? Let them fix general taxes, and

leave us to pay them in our own way!'

The war against the Church affects these Normans in the same way. It

does not seem to rouse them into a kind of fanatical fervour, such as

blazes up here and there in other parts of France, but it angers them as

a disturbance of their settled habits and convictions. 'The Church,'

said one of these Calvados farmers to M. de Witt; 'the Church is the key

of our trade. They must not touch it!'

What he meant was, that on Sunday at the village church the farmers,

after the mass, are in the habit of talking over all their affairs

together. It is a kind of social exchange for men whose calling in life

keeps them far apart during the week.

Is it to be supplanted for the benefit of the France of the future by

cockpits and cabarets, or courses of lectures delivered in 'scholastic

palaces,' by spectacled and decorated professors, on the 'struggle for

life,' and the 'survival of the fittest'?

The victory of M. Pierre de Witt in July was too complete to leave any

pretext for meddling with its results of which the authorities liked to

avail themselves. The law, however, gives abundant opportunities for

such meddling wherever a plausible pretext can be found. After the votes

of a commune have been verified and counted, two of the assessors start

off at once with all the votes and papers for the chief town of the

canton. The bureau of this chief town has power to 'verify and, if need

be, remake the calculations which show the majority. It may modify the

decisions of the communal bureaux as to the candidate to whom certain

votes properly belong, may decide what votes are to be treated as

entirely null, or to be counted in estimating the majority without being

held as given to either candidate. It may also decide what votes belong

to a candidate. It may also take away from the candidates elected, or

claiming to have been elected, all votes found in the urn or urns in

excess of the number of electors actually tallied as voting.'

The decisions reached by the bureau are next to be collated with the

_procès-verbaux_ of the communal bureaux--after which all the documents

connected with the election, including the tally-lists of the voters,

are to be sent to the prefect of the department.

When the legislative elections came on in September the authorities of

the Calvados made desperate efforts to break the solid front of the

Monarchist deputation from this department. In the arrondissement of

Pont-l'Evêque, where M. Conrad de Witt stood as the Monarchist

candidate, the official interference against him was so open that the

Prefect, M. de Brancion, did not hesitate to sign and circulate a letter

intended to affect the elections, though by Article 3 of the law of

November 30, 1875, regulating elections, all agents of the Government

are expressly forbidden to distribute ballots, professions of faith, or

circulars affecting the candidates. M. de Witt had cited to the electors

a remarkable declaration made in the Senate by M. Léon Say as to the

inevitable increase of local taxation which must be expected from the

development and enforcement of the Government policy in regard to

education.

M. Léon Say resigned his seat in the Senate last year that he might

enter the Chamber, his friends having convinced themselves, on no very

apparent grounds, that his appearance in the Chamber would rally around

him the support of Conservative men of all shades of opinion, and make

him master of the situation. He was a candidate in the Hautes Pyrénées.

The quotation made by M. de Witt from his sensible speech in the Senate

much disturbed the Republicans in the Calvados, and some official

application was evidently made to him on the subject; for, without

denying that he had said in the Senate what was imputed to him, he seems

to have assured the Republicans of the Calvados that it was absurd to

suppose he would so speak of the Government policy when he was standing

as a Government candidate for election to the Chamber. This obvious but

quite irrelevant statement was instantly circulated all over the

department by the Prefect himself. As it was very easily disposed of, it

did no great harm. But it is a curious illustration of the way in which

these election matters are managed now in France. M. de Witt was

triumphantly re-elected, receiving 6,972 votes against 5,189 in the

arrondissement of Pont-l'Evêque. The Monarchists also carried every

other seat for the Calvados, making seven in all.

In 1885, under the _scrutin de liste_, the votes given to M. de Witt

show a Conservative majority in the Calvados of 13,722 in a total poll

of 89,064. In 1889, taking all the districts together, the Calvados

showed a Monarchist majority of 19,868 in a total poll of 82,216. This

gives us a falling off in the total poll of 6,848, and an increase in

the Monarchist majority of 6,497 votes!

I called M. Conrad de Witt's attention, after the legislative elections

were over, to an article in an English periodical by a French Protestant

writer, M. Monod, in which the Monarchist majority of 1889 in the

Calvados was attributed to the bad harvest of pears and apples. The

veteran Protestant President of the Society of Agriculture in the

Calvados smiled in a quiet and significant way, and simply said, 'Ah! I

think we are more solid than that!'

So indeed it would seem!

The 'apple-blight' of the Calvados must obviously have extended into the

neighbouring department of the Eure, or at least into the great and busy

arrondissement of Bernay, which gave the Monarchist candidate in

September 1889 the tremendous majority of 5,550 votes in a total poll of

12,772. Possibly, too, there may be some occult relation between this

remarkable result and the presence in this arrondissement of one of the

most distinguished of living Frenchmen, and one of the most outspoken

champions of the Constitutional Monarchy. An able man with a mind of his

own, and the courage to speak it, is a force in any country at any time.

In France at this time such a man is a determining force. The obvious

weakness of the Monarchical party in France was touched by the

Committee of the Catholic Association in their report to which I have

alluded in another chapter. It is the association in the popular mind of

the monarchical idea with the traditions of Versailles and with the

'pomps and vanities' of what is ridiculously called '_le high-life_' of

modern Paris. As a matter of fact, all that was silliest and most

scandalous in the Court life of France in the eighteenth century was

reproduced and exaggerated under the Directory. What is there to choose

between Louis XV. doffing his hat beside the coach of Madame Du Barry,

and Barras ordering Ouvrard to keep Madame Tallien in diamonds,

opera-boxes, coaches and villas, out of the profits of public loans and

contracts for the service of the 'Republic one and indivisible'? Formula

for Formula (to speak after the manner of Mr. Carlyle), is not the

Republican Formula of the two the more demoralizing, dismal, degraded,

and altogether hopeless? What is called '_le high-life_' of Paris is

neither Royalist nor Republican. It is merely shallow and vulgar, like

the '_high-life_' of sundry other places ruled by governments of divers

forms. But when young men born to names which in the popular mind

represent the history of France show themselves as athletes in a

Parisian circus, or appear as grooms on the carriages of _cocottes_ in

the Bois de Boulogne, their folly naturally damages more or less in the

public estimation the principles with which the names they bear are

associated.

Under the Empire the Legitimists, as a body, really played the game of

the Emperor by holding themselves aloof from public life in all its

departments, in accordance with the policy adopted by the Comte de

Chambord. The inevitable effect of this policy was to widen the gulf

between them and the body of the French people. It tended to bring about

in France results like those aimed at by the National League in

Ireland, and to prevent a gradual and wholesome reconciliation between

the heirs of the class which was exiled and plundered during the

Revolution, and the heirs of the classes which eventually profited by

the proscriptions and confiscations of that unhappy time. The disastrous

war of 1870-71 did much to counteract the social mischief thus wrought.

The French Legitimists came forward in all parts of France to the

defence of their country. They were brought thus into contact with the

people and the people with them. They ceased to be a caste and began to

be citizens. The way was thus prepared, too, for that fusion of the two

great Royalist camps, the camp of the Legitimists and the camp of the

Orleanists, which has since taken place. A very intelligent young

officer of Engineers, himself the heir of an ancient name, told me at

Dijon that there are at this time more men of the old families of France

on the rolls of the army than ever before since 1789. Instead of

rejoicing in this as the wholesome sign of a growing moral harmony

between all classes of Frenchmen, the leaders of the Republican party

have been incensed by it. Doubtless they regard it as an obstacle to the

development of their idea of 'moral unity.' Under President Grévy, the

Minister of War actually drove one of the best soldiers in France,

General Schmidt, out of his command at Tours by insisting that he should

forbid his officers to accept invitations from their friends who lived

in the châteaux which are the glory of Touraine, the traditional garden

of France. Imagine a High Church secretary-at-war in England issuing an

order that no officer in a garrison corps should dine with a Catholic or

a Dissenter.

This was not a freak. It was a policy. It was in perfect keeping with an

amazing attack made by the Republican press of Paris not long

afterwards upon the then American Minister in France, Mr. Morton, now

Vice-President of the United States, for giving a dinner in honour of

the Comte de Paris. The Comte de Paris and his brother, the Duc de

Chartres, had served with distinction on the staff of the

Commander-in-Chief of the Union armies in America. They were the sons of

a French sovereign, with whose government the government of the United

States had long held close and friendly relations. The Comte de Paris is

the author of the most careful, thorough, and impartial history yet

written of the American Civil War of 1861-65. Yet, for showing his

personal and official respect for a French prince possessing such claims

upon the respect of Frenchmen as well as of Americans, the diplomatic

representative of the United States was assailed with coarse and vulgar

violence in the columns of journals assuming to represent the

civilization of the capital of France!

Some time after the incident to which I have referred at Tours occurred,

I drove from St.-Malo to La Basse Motte, the charming and picturesque

house of General de Charette, in the Ille-et-Vilaine, with the Marquis

de la Roche-Jaquelein. The autumn manoeuvres of the French army were

then going on. On the way he told me among other things that the

officers of a cavalry brigade encamped for two or three days in the

neighbourhood of his château had been forbidden by their brigade

commander to accept a dinner to which he had invited, not only them, but

their commander also! The general in command of the cavalry division

fortunately happened to arrive before the day fixed for the dinner, and,

having been informed of this state of affairs, quietly authorized the

officers to attend the dinner, and attended it himself.

Can anything be more absurd than to attempt to naturalize a Republic in

France by identifying Republican institutions with such tyrannical

interference as this in the private and social relations of French

officers and citizens?

The Third Republic has improved upon Cambon's piratical watchword,

_Guerre aux châteaux; paix aux chaumières_. It makes war socially upon

the _châteaux_, and it makes war religiously and financially upon the

_chaumières_.

All this must bring out into clearer relief before the French people the

unquestionable personal superiority of the Monarchist over the

Republican leaders and representatives. It is undeniable that an

overwhelming majority of the ablest and most influential men in France,

of all classes and conditions, are to-day in open opposition either to

the policy or to the constitution of the existing Republic, or to both.

Many--I think most of them--are agreed that the Monarchy must be

restored if France is to be saved from anarchy and dismemberment. The

rest of them are agreed that the Republic must be so remodelled as to

become in fact, if not in name, a monarchy. In this condition of the

country, the avowed Monarchists must inevitably draw to themselves the

support of all who differ from them, not as to the end, but as to the

means only. For the logic of events is steadily strengthening the

verdict uttered by the Duc de Broglie three years ago on the Republican

experiments, in a speech made by him before the Monarchist Union at

Paris on May 29, 1887. 'All these political ghosts must go flitting by,

but France will endure and remain, forced to pay the price of their

follies in the form of interest on their loans!'

There is no war now between the Château de Broglie and the cottages of

the Eure; certainly no war between the château and the town of Broglie.

The town is bright, pretty and prosperous. The park gates open into it

as the park gates of Arundel Castle open into Arundel, but without even

the semblance of a fortification.

The park is very extensive and nobly planned, with a certain stateliness

rather Italian than English. The ground undulates beautifully, and from

its great elevation above the river and the town commands in all

directions the most charming views. The roads and walks are admirably

laid out, the trees well grown and lofty. The château itself dates back,

as to its earlier portions, to the Hundred Years' War. It was more than

once besieged by the English, and some of the ivy-grown walls and towers

which overlook the town take you back to Edward III. and the Black

Prince. But the long façade and the main buildings are of the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, during which the De Broglies made

so much French history. Within, the spacious saloons, the grand

vestibule and hall, and the delightful library are in perfect keeping

with the traditions of a family which for generations has given soldiers

and statesmen to the service of a great people. Of course the château

has been much restored during the present century, but its general

disposition is what it was in 1789, and, like that of all the French

châteaux of the eighteenth century, it attests the friendly relations

which must have existed before the Revolution between the _château_ and

the _chaumière_. The English mansions even of the time of Queen Anne are

more defensible than these _châteaux_. The windows, of the sort which to

this day are called French windows in England and America, are long

windows opening like doors. On the ground floor they come down, indeed,

nearly to the level of the lawn. It is perfectly obvious that no thought

of a war of classes can have entered the minds of the architects who

planned these edifices or of the owners for whom they were planned. Yet

the problems of government which we imagine to be of our own times had

been hotly discussed and were hotly discussing when these edifices were

built. The ideas, not of Villegardelle only, but of Proudhon, were put

forth in germ by De la Jonchère in 1720, in his 'Plan of a New

Government.' The Château de Broglie resembles a feudal castle of the

fourteenth or even of the sixteenth century no more than it resembles a

Roman villa of the first century. The magnificent liberality with which

the Vicomte de Noailles, himself a younger son, gave away all the feudal

rights and privileges of the _noblesse_ on the night of August 4, 1789,

has always, I am sorry to say, reminded me irresistibly of the patriotic

ardour with which Mr. Artemus Ward devoted to the battle-field of

freedom the remotest cousins of his wife. The evidence is overwhelming

which goes to show that these feudal rights and privileges were

practically no more oppressive in the France of 1789 than they were in

the England of 1830. It is not even clear that the New York anti-renters

of our time had not as good a case for ridding themselves of 'feudal'

rights and privileges by storming the Capitol at Albany as the people of

France for ridding themselves of those rights and privileges by storming

the practically defenceless Bastille. The Bastille interfered no more

with the liberty of Paris in 1789 than the Tower with the liberty of

London. The only people in any particular peril of it were the 'black

sheep' of the _noblesse_, as to whom even Jefferson, in the sketch of a

charter of French Rights which he drew up in June 1789 and sent to

Lafayette and the bookseller St.-Etienne, proposed that their personal

liberty should be subject to a special kind of imprisonment at the

prayer of their relations, or in other words to a regular 'lettre de

cachet.'

It is a curious illustration, by the way, of the incapacity of this

National Assembly that in July 1789 its Committee for framing a

Constitution actually invited a foreign envoy, Jefferson, to take part

with them in their work. Jefferson had sense enough to decline the

invitation; but what gleam of sense, political or other, had the

blundering tinkers who gave it? The outcome of their gabble was that mob

violence destroyed for Paris in the Bastille what London possesses in

the Tower, an 'architectural document' of the highest authenticity and

importance. To talk of French feudalism as having been overthrown by

such men is absurd. If it had existed when they met, it would have very

soon sent them about their business. But it did not exist when they met.

The author of the curious _Précis d'une Histoire Générale de la Vie

Privée des Français_, published in 1779, treats the whole subject of the

private life, homes, manners, and fortunes of the French people

expressly from the point of view of the great change which had come over

them, 'since the abolition of feudalism.' The magnanimous achievement of

the Vicomte de Noailles ought to rank in history with the victory of Don

Quixote over the wine-skins, or with the revolutionary feat of that

drum-major of the National Guard who slashed with his sabre the corpse

of the unfortunate procureur-syndic Bayeux, lying battered to death in

the Place des Tribunaux at Caen, on September 6, 1792, and whom the

honest Normans of the Calvados afterwards kicked out of the city as 'fit

only for killing dead men.'

Even in the châteaux of the end of the sixteenth century and the

beginning of the seventeenth we get unanswerable architectural evidence

to show a steady improvement in the social relations of the people with

the noblesse. The Château d'Eu, for example, in the Seine-Inférieure, in

which Louis Philippe entertained Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, and

from which the Comte de Paris and his family were so lawlessly expelled

in 1886, was a true fortress in the days when the Norman princes and

their armies went and came between England and France, and Tréport saw

many an armada. But in the fourteenth century we find Raoul de Brienne,

Comte d'Eu, confirming to the people of Eu the immunity of their cattle,

binding himself not 'to make any man work save for good wages and of his

own good will,' not to requisitionise bread or wine but for money paid,

not to seize any man's horses, and not 'to compel any man to seize and

hale another man to prison except in cases of crime or of invasion.'

When the great Duke of Guise rebuilt the château of brick in the

sixteenth century, he put down most of the outer fortifications. Without

these the château is as much a part of the town of Eu as Buckingham

Palace is of St. James's Park. Catherine of Clèves, the widow of the

great Duke of Guise, lived at Eu through her long widowhood in the

friendliest relations with the good people of the town, while the

architects were erecting for herself and her murdered husband, 'the

nonpareil of the world,' as she called him (notwithstanding his

admiration of Mme. de Noirmoutiers), the beautiful monuments which still

adorn the collegiate church. Her daughter, the lovely and lively

Princesse de Conti, gathered a gay and gallant company of friends about

her, and lived an open-air life of hunting, promenades, and after-dinner

'games of wit,' upon the terraces, as unconcernedly at the end of the

sixteenth century, I was about to say, as such a life could be lived

here now. But I have to remember that at the end of the eighteenth

century, and under the illumination of the 'ideas of 1789,' the tomb of

this Princess in the chapel of Ste-Catherine was broken into, and her

bones flung about on the floor of the mortuary vault, while at the end

of this nineteenth century the legitimate owners of the château which

has replaced the home of Louise de Lorraine et de Conti have been driven

into exile for no other crime but that of their birth by a Government

which professes to be a Government of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.

In the middle of the seventeenth century the Château d'Eu, with the

whole domain, was sold on behalf of the Duc de Joyeuse et d'Angoulême,

the ruined heir of the Guises, to 'La Grande Mademoiselle,' the restless

and ambitious daughter of Gaston d'Orléans, brother of Louis XIV. Her

relations with the people of Eu were more than cordial. History concerns

itself with her as the Bellona of the Fronde, and Court chronicles as

the wife of that eminent scamp Lauzun. But at Eu she was the Providence

of the poor and the helpless. She founded hospitals and charities of all

sorts. The endowments of most of these were calmly confiscated during

the Revolution. One hospital, so well endowed that, in spite of the

_assignats_ and of dilapidation, it still had a revenue of 10,000

francs, was suppressed in 1810, and the building turned into a barrack,

despite the remonstrances of a worthy Mayor who still lives in the local

traditions of Eu. This functionary confronted Napoleon more creditably

than the Mayor of Folkestone confronted Queen Elizabeth. He received the

Emperor and began his harangue. Presently he stammered, hesitated, and

broke down. 'What!' said Napoleon, 'Mr. Mayor, a man like you!' 'Ah!

sire!' responded the quick-witted magistrate, 'in the presence of a man

like your Majesty, I cease to be a man like myself!' Another of the

foundations of the 'Grande Mademoiselle' still exists in the chief

hospital of Eu, now become the property of the town. The treasurer and

the physician of this hospital, both of them citizens of the highest

character, who have filled their respective posts for years, are

outspoken Royalists. At the elections of last year they voted as usual

with their own party. When the elections were over, the Prefect of the

Seine Inférieure requested the Municipal Council of Eu to remove both of

them. This the Councillors, though Republicans, declined to do.

Whereupon the Prefect removed them by a decree of his own!

The Château d'Eu came into the possession of Louis Philippe through his

mother, who was the daughter of the Duc de Penthièvre, and of whose

admirable character and exemplary patience with her impossible husband

Philippe Egalité, Gouverneur Morris paints so lively a picture. The Duke

was so much beloved at Eu, where he habitually lived, that no personal

harm came to him during the first years of the Revolution. He died at

Vernon, on the eve of the Terror, and so was spared the pain of

witnessing the excesses perpetrated at Eu as elsewhere, not only during

that period but under the Directory. An accomplished resident of Eu

showed me a decree of the Directory, issued in 1798, and ordering the

people to meet on January 21: 'the anniversary of the just punishment of

the last French King, and swear hatred to the Monarchy!' 'What has come

of all that fury and folly?' he said. 'For years since then the people

of Eu have not only "sworn," but shown, genuine affection and respect to

two French Kings, Louis XVIII. and Louis Philippe. They didn't care much

about Charles X., but they were contented under his reign. Eu owes the

restoration of our noble churches and monuments to these kings, and to

their representative the Comte de Paris. One of these kings brought the

sovereign of England and her husband to visit Eu, and made us feel in

our little Norman town that the great days of Normandy were not over. Of

that fine collection of pictures and of portraits you have been admiring

in the château, a great proportion belonged to the Duc de Penthièvre,

and these, with many other valuable things in the château, were quietly

taken out and saved when the robberies and blasphemies began here, by

the Mayor of Eu of that day, who risked his life by doing that good

deed. When the Comte and the Comtesse de Paris lived here, the park and

the gardens were the pride and pleasure of the people. Those fountains

are fed by water which the Comte de Paris had brought to Eu for the

service of the town, and the town is served by it now. Every year Eu was

filled with people who came and lived here because the Comte and the

Comtesse de Paris were here. What good has their exile done to Eu? Here

in Eu we know them. It is not they who are responsible for the local

debt of Eu, of which we who have to pay it can get no account at all

from our precious authorities, except in the form of a demand for more

taxes!

'As to the last century, you are quite right. Here, in this part of

Normandy, there were no such grievances then as we have now. There were

troubles with bad roads and bad agriculture. There were quarrels about

this right and that privilege. The curés didn't like the grand airs of

the Church dignitaries. The squires (_hobereaux_) were conceited very

often and ignorant and arrogant. We have not got rid of conceit and

ignorance and arrogance, though, by cutting off the heads of a few

squires a hundred years ago! No! as to Eu, at least, take my word for

it, the happiest day we can see will be the day when we can welcome back

here the Prince and the Princess who lived so pleasantly and so usefully

with us and among us, as King and Queen of the French! We are royalists

here because we know the Comte de Paris, and know that he would do his

duty as the king of a free people, and be something better than the tool

of a swarm of needy and self-seeking adventurers. There is a strong

feeling here, too, about the intolerant interference of those atheists

at Paris with the rights of parents and with freedom of conscience. Yet

we are not in the least a priest-ridden people. On the contrary! I can

show you a commune where the people, vexed with the charges of their

curé, have deliberately organized a Protestant chapel. They sent to the

Consistory at Paris, and got a minister, and they are doing very well!

What we want here is private liberty and public economy. The Republic

gives us neither. The Monarchy, we believe, will give us both!'

Broglie in the Eure, like La Brède in the Gironde, and Val Richer in the

Calvados, has associations of special interest to Americans. At La Brède

was born a gallant grandson of Montesquieu, De Sécondat, who earned high

promotion by his valour and his conduct in the American War of

Independence, side by side with Custine, who took Speier and Metz for

the Republic, and for his guerdon got the guillotine, and with Vioménil,

who died bravely defending his King and the law in the palace of the

Tuileries. Val Richer was the home of the great French statesman to whom

we owe the best delineation of Washington we possess, and of whom Mr.

Bancroft, the historian of the American Constitution, bears witness

that, as premier of France, he unreservedly threw open to his researches

all the archives of France in any way bearing upon the history of the

United States. 'Nothing was refused me for examination,' he says, 'nor

was one line of which I desired a copy withheld.'

Broglie was the birthplace of another French soldier who learned in

America to venerate the character of Washington, and whose life paid the

forfeit under the first despotic French Republic of his loyalty to

liberty and the law. Victor Charles de Broglie was a son of the veteran

Marshal of France, 'cool and capable of anything,' whom Mr. Carlyle

perorates about as the 'war-god.' As the Chief of Staff of Biron, in the

army of the Rhine, he refused to recognise the usurpers of August 10,

1792, in a letter to his commander which is a model of common sense and

military honour. Upon this letter Carnot, then a legislative

Commissioner, or, in plain English, inspector and informer of the

Convention, on duty with the army, made a report far from creditable

either to his head or his heart. Victor Charles de Broglie was

eventually guillotined. Taking farewell of his son, a child nine years

old, he bade him 'never allow himself to believe that it was liberty

which had taken his father's life.' The child grew to manhood and to

fame, for ever mindful of this brave injunction. He was the Minister of

Louis Philippe when the claims arising out of the lawless depredations

of the First Republic and the Empire upon American commerce were finally

recognised and settled by France, and Mr. Bancroft pays him a high and

well-deserved tribute for the courage with which he insisted on keeping

faith with the United States 'at the risk of his popularity and of his

place.' Are we to think it a mere effect of chance, or only a

coincidence, that the flag of the Constitutional Monarchy, as the sole

alternative of anarchy in France, is supported by the descendants of

Montesquieu, by the heirs of Guizot, and by the son of this Duc de

Broglie to whose courage and integrity France and America were indebted

for the equitable settlement of an international dispute originally

provoked by the vulgar folly and impertinence of the first French

Republic and of the disreputable envoys, Genet and Fauchet, whom it sent

one after the other to the United States with orders to appeal from the

Government of President Washington to the American people?

It was by the 'Military Council' made up of officers trained in the

school of the great Maréchal de Broglie, and not by the vapouring and

venal demagogues of the Convention, that France was successfully

organised to resist the Austro-Prussian invasion of 1792; and it was by

the government of which the present Duc de Broglie was a leading member

under the Maréchal Duc de Magenta, not by M. Gambetta and M. Jules

Ferry, that the Third Republic was so administered when the fortunes of

France were at their lowest ebb as to re-establish the finances, restore

the credit, and renew the military strength of the French nation.

For now more than two centuries the name of De Broglie has been made

historical in France, not by the favour of princes--for neither in the

camp nor in the cabinet have the De Broglies ever been courtiers--nor

yet by the applause of the populace, but by the personal ability, the

personal character, and the public services of the men who have borne

it. If ever a man died for his loyalty to liberty and the law, it was

Victor Charles de Broglie in 1794. His son, the earliest and most

faithful ally in France of Clarkson and Wilberforce in their long

crusade against negro slavery, never sought, but accepted his place

among the peers of France after the Restoration. Such was his absolute

independence that his first act in the Upper Chamber under Louis XVIII.

was to record his solitary but emphatic protest against the

condemnation of Marshal Ney. His political career recalls Seneca's

theory of Ulysses--'nauseator' but fulfilling his Odyssey. He disliked

but never shirked the responsibilities which were pressed upon him. It

used to be said of M. Thiers that whenever Louis Philippe wished to get

an unpopular measure carried, he contrived to make M. Thiers oppose it

violently, upset the government upon it, come into power upon his

victory, and then take the measure up himself and carry it through. The

Duc de Broglie was not a politician of this adroit and acrobatic type.

His yea was yea and his nay, nay in politics as in private life. He kept

aloof from the Second Empire, as his grandfather, Mr. Carlyle's 'War-god

Broglie,' had kept aloof from the first. But he never fell into the

Republican folly of pretending to regard the Second Empire as a tyranny

imposed upon the people of France against their will. On the contrary,

he saw things not as he wished them to be, but as they were, and so he

said of the Second Empire, 'It is the government which the masses of the

people in France desire and which the upper classes of France deserve.'

The sting of this saying was given to it by the acquiescence of the

'upper classes' in the blow struck by the Second Empire at the rights of

property in France when it confiscated in 1852 the estates of the House

of Orléans. This blow was aimed, of course, by Napoleon III. at the

Monarchy of July; just as the blow struck by Napoleon at the Duc

d'Enghien was aimed at the ancient monarchy. But in the one case as in

the other, the iniquity of the blow affected the fundamental conditions

of social order and peace in France. In the one case as in the other, an

Imperial Government, assuming to be a government of law, committed

itself to the most outrageous and despotic practices of the 'Terror' of

1793. In the charter of 1814, Louis XVIII. had abolished confiscation.

In the Charter of 1830, Louis Philippe had re-affirmed this abolition.

By the decrees of 1852, seizing the property of the House of Orléans,

Napoleon III. re-established confiscation. In principle these decrees of

1852 were no better than the Jacobin decrees of September 1793, which

fixed the proportion of his own income to be enjoyed by every citizen in

France. Réal, the chairman, as we should call him, of the Finance

Committee of the Convention of 1793, who calmly divided the income of

every citizen into three categories: 'the necessary' not to exceed, in

the case of a bachelor, 1,000 francs a year; 'the abundant' not to

exceed 9,000 francs, of which one-half should go to the State; and the

'superfluous,' the whole of which must be paid into the public treasury,

was a good Jacobin when he made this classification. He lived to become

a good Imperialist, and to accept from the Emperor the title of Count,

with a very large 'superfluous' income, of which he made very good use

for his own private pleasure and satisfaction. The question as to these

decrees of 1852 was brought up before the National Assembly on September

15, 1871, by the Comte de Mérode, who, 'in the name of justice and of

common honesty,' insisted that the Treasury should cease to receive for

public uses the income of the private property of the Orléans family,

illegally confiscated by the decrees of January 22, 1852.

The Government of the Republic at once responded that 'the

responsibility of this act of spoliation belonged exclusively to its

author; and the subject was referred to a Committee. This Committee

reported in 1872 a law founded, in the plain language of the Committee

'upon that principle of common honesty which forbids' man to enrich

himself at the 'expense of his neighbour.' The Report states that of the

'fifty-one direct descendants then living of King Louis Philippe, not

one, to their honour be it said, had addressed any request on the

subject, either to the Government or to the Assembly.' It states also,

that having examined the subject carefully, the Committee were

unanimously of the opinion that it was the duty of France 'to restore to

the owners of this property what belonged to them; no longer to keep in

the hands of the State what had never belonged to the State.' The

Committee, considering the frightful disasters brought upon France by

the war of 1870-71, could not recommend, said the Report, 'that the

Treasury should now undertake absolutely to repair the consequences of

an act repudiated by France. What it recommended was, that the Orléans

family should be put into possession of all that was left of its own

property, not that it should receive back the equivalent of the sums

already consumed and dissipated.' At that time the Treasury had

alienated under the decrees of 1852 no less than 70,000,000 francs of

this lawful property of the Orléans family, unlawfully seized and

confiscated. The whole property, when seized in 1852, was estimated by

the Committee of 1872 at 80,000,000 francs. Between 1853 and 1870 the

Treasury had received and spent 35,892,849 francs from sales of this

property. It had also received and spent, from the sale of timber cut in

the forests belonging to the property, 18,601,019 francs. Putting this

large sum aside, it is obvious that in the shape of property actually

sold, to the amount in round numbers of 36,000,000 francs, between 1853

and 1870, and of the interest on this amount during the same time, the

Imperial Government had really converted to its own uses 70,000,000

francs which did not belong to it. Not one penny of these millions of

francs was restored to its owners by the decrees of 1872. What the

decrees of 1872 accomplished, with the approval of such extreme

Republicans as M. Henri Brisson, was to put a stop to this public

robbery of private owners. The Orléans estates not yet sold in 1872 were

then estimated to yield an income of 1,200,000 francs. Before final

action was taken by the Assembly, the Orléans princes voluntarily came

forward and announced that they would accept no 'restitution' at the

expense of the taxpayers of France of their property sold and alienated

under the spoliation of 1852; and the text of the law as finally passed

in 1872 expressly ordains that 'conformably to the renunciation offered

before the presentation of the bill by the heirs of King Louis Philippe,

and since renewed,' their unsold property, 'real and personal, seized by

the State and not alienated before this date, be immediately restored to

its owners.' As a matter of fact, therefore, under this law, the heirs

of King Louis Philippe actually made the French Government a present in

1872 of many millions of francs, which belonged to them and did not

belong to France or to the French Government. By doing this, they

co-operated most creditably with every man of common honesty in the

French Assembly in repairing the wrong done to every French citizen by

the decrees of January 22, 1852, decrees justly described by M. Pascal

Duprat in the Chamber, on November 22, 1872, as 'decrees of flat

spoliation which had violated the sacred right of property, disregarded

the fundamental rules of law, and profoundly wounded the public

conscience.' However profoundly wounded the public conscience may have

been by these decrees in 1852, the scornful words of the Duc de Broglie

attest that it suffered in silence and for twenty years made no

adequate outward sign!

This cool and caustic statesman was born and brought up in the Catholic

Church. He married a Protestant lady, one of the most charming and

brilliant women of her time, the daughter of Madame de Staël, and he was

the intimate friend and associate throughout his public life of M.

Guizot. His son, the present duke, grew up in an atmosphere of practical

religious liberality. It was the law of 1875 restricting the State

monopoly of the higher branches of public education in France which

concentrated against the present duke, under the Maréchal Duc de

Magenta, the whole strength of the anti-religious elements in France. It

was not to prevent the restoration of the monarchy by men like the Duc

de Magenta and the Duc de Broglie, whom he well knew to be incapable of

conspiring for any object whatever, that M. Gambetta uttered his

war-cry: '_Le cléricalisme c'est l'ennemi!_' It was to rally behind

himself and his own associates in the Republican party the great army of

the Socialistic Radicals in France. It was to make the Conservative

Republic of the Duc de Magenta and the Duc de Broglie impossible, that

the Parliamentary conspirators of 1877 conceived and carried out, under

cover of this war-cry, their scheme for suppressing the Executive in

France. They have, as I believe, succeeded. They have made the

Conservative Republic impossible. What is the result? The result is that

no alternative of anarchy is left to sensible and moderate men in France

but the Monarchy.

This has been growing more and more apparent ever since 1885. In that

year the Legislative elections were made under the _scrutin de liste_;

and when the Government rallied after the shock of the first

Conservative attack, almost all the seats left in peril by that attack

were 'saved' at the supplementary election by surrendering them to

Radical candidates. In 1889, under the fear of Boulanger, the _scrutin

de liste_ was suddenly abandoned for the _scrutin d'arrondissement_, and

the same thing happened again.

At the first election, on September 22, 384 candidates of all parties

were chosen in the 83 departments of France. Of these, 164 were

Government Republicans and 44 Radicals. At the second election, on

October 8, the remaining 177 seats were filled. Of these, 66 were

carried by the Government Republicans, and no fewer than 57 surrendered

to the Radicals. In other words, at the first election the Radicals

secured just about a quarter of the 208 seats carried by the

Republicans. At the second election they secured very nearly one half of

the 123 seats carried by the Republicans. So that the Radicals finally

muster 101 out of the 331 Republican home members of the present

Chamber, and are, therefore, practically masters of the situation so far

as the Republic is concerned. They made this perfectly clear as soon as

the Chamber met by insisting upon and securing the election of M.

Floquet, a Radical of the advanced left wing, as President of the

Chamber. Were the Radicals to withdraw their support from the Government

on any issue, it would be left with 254 members to face a combined

opposition vote of 229 members, which might at any moment be converted

into a hostile majority by the action of less than a third of the

Radicals. When we remember that these 101 Radicals are represented in

the Chair of the Chamber by a leader who was locked up for a year in

1871 for his participation in the revolt of the Commune, and who voted

in 1876 for the full pardon of the convicts of the Commune, it will be

obvious, I think, that the Republicans 'have committed suicide to save

themselves from slaughter.'

M. Floquet, imprisoned in 1871 for complicity with the Commune, was made

Prefect of the Seine in 1882 by the men who have since made M. Carnot

President of the Republic. As President of the Chamber, M. Floquet,

under the existing régime in France, is now the superior of M. Carnot.

Can there be any mistake as to the meaning of this? In 1882, as Prefect

of the Seine, M. Floquet maintained the closest relations with the

Municipal Council of Paris. M. Ferry's bill making primary education

obligatory, and 'laicizing' that education, finally became law on July

26, 1881. The war against God in the schools began at once vigorously,

and nowhere more vigorously than in Paris. M. Paul Bert had insisted, in

his Report of 1879, upon the importance of protecting teachers who were

scientific and philosophical Atheists against the pangs their

consciences would suffer were they obliged to read or to hear recited

passages from 'what is called Sacred History, that is to say, a mixture

of positive history, with legends which have no value except in the eyes

of believers.' In this spirit of the peddler who tried to 'scrub out the

blood-stains' at Holyrood the law of 1881 was conceived. How it was

executed we learn from M. Zévort, a distinguished inspector of the

Academy of Paris, and by no means a Catholic. In some places the

authorities ordered the words 'Love God, respect your parents,' to be

effaced from the school-house walls. In others, children were compelled

to give up the Catechisms which they had brought with them to school,

intending to go on after school hours to the parish church. In this same

year M. Fournier stated in the Senate that persons appointed by the

Minister of Public Instruction to distribute prizes in the schools had

made speeches to the children in which they spoke of all religion as

mere superstition. He cited one such orator as contrasting 'scientific

education, the only true education, which gives man the certainty of his

own value and urges him onward to progress and to the Light,' with

'religious education which fatally plunges him into a murky night, and

an abyss of deadly superstitions.' Another luminary of the State

exclaimed in a burst of eloquence, 'Young citizenesses and young

citizens! We have been accused of banishing God from the schools! It is

an error! Nothing can be driven out which does not exist. Now God does

not exist. What we have suppressed is only a set of emblems!'

These emblems were the religious inscriptions, and the crucifixes, taken

out of the school-houses. Of these emblems the Prefect of the Seine, in

1882, carelessly observed in the course of an enquiry before the Senate,

that the removal of them was 'only a question of school furniture!' And

the Municipal Council of Paris, with which M. Floquet in 1882 so

cordially co-operated, formally adopted resolutions calling for the

complete suppression in all the primary schools 'of all theological

instruction whatsoever.' 'No one,' said one councillor, M. Cattiaux,

with much solemnity, 'can prove the existence of God, and our teachers

must not be compelled to affirm the existence of an imaginary being.'

With M. Floquet as President of the Chamber, M. Carnot and his Ministers

are at the mercy not of the Radicals only, but of the Radical allies of

the Commune. The French Monarchists to-day are fighting out the battle

of religion and of civilization for every country in Christendom.

Though the Calvados was the chosen home of M. Guizot, it was not his

birthplace. Like M. Thiers, whom he so little resembled in other

particulars, M. Guizot was a son of the South. He was born at Nîmes, in

the Gard, a city rather Republican than Royalist by its traditions, even

under the old Monarchy. His father was an advocate, and by the charter

of Nîmes, which organized in 1476 the 'consular' government of the city,

it was provided that the first consul of Nîmes should always be taken

from among 'the advocates graduated and versed in the law,' the second

consulate only being left open to 'citizens, merchants, and graduated

physicians.'

As the fifteenth century is commonly admitted to have been a 'feudal'

century, this provision attests the power of the robe as against the

sword in a very interesting way, and at an interesting point in French

history. The local nobility felt the slight put upon them very strongly,

and made great efforts to have the system changed. These efforts were

not successful till the end of the sixteenth century. In 1588 the Duc de

Montmorency, Governor of Languedoc, issued a decree convoking the

Council-General to consider the subject, and this assembly, after a

stormy session, decided that 'the noblemen and gentlemen of the province

should hold the first consulate alternately with the advocates.' The

first nobleman of Languedoc who profited by this decision was Louis de

Montcalm, an ancestor of the illustrious defender of Quebec. He became

first consul of Nîmes in 1589, the year after the defeat of the great

Spanish Armada against England. He was a Huguenot, and Nîmes in the days

of the great Religious Wars had become a Protestant stronghold after its

capture by the Huguenots on November 15, 1569. The Huguenot de Calvière,

Baron de St.-Cosme, who took a leading part in that military adventure,

was made Governor of Nîmes and a gentleman of the King's bedchamber by

Henry of Navarre.

As a Protestant and as an advocate, the father of M. Guizot naturally

inclined to the Republican theory of Government in 1789. He very soon

and as naturally opened his eyes to the abominations of the Republican

practice, and in due course came to the guillotine under the Terror. To

the day of her death his widow wore the deepest mourning for him, and

his son, like the son of the murdered Victor Charles de Broglie,

honoured his memory by an inflexible loyalty to the principles of

justice and of liberty for which his father had died.

I was not surprised, therefore, to find M. Guillaume Guizot, the

Protestant son of the great Protestant statesman, at his pleasant rural

home near Uzès as earnest and active in the summer of 1889 in organizing

the monarchical party for the Legislative elections, as the staunchest

Catholics of the Morbihan or of Champagne. Uzès, which gives a ducal

title to the family of Crussol, is a picturesque and interesting town,

and its electoral district made a gallant stand for liberty and order in

the elections. It gave nearly 9,000 Monarchist against about 11,000

Republican votes, and the returns of the whole Department of the Gard,

when compared with those of 1885, show a marked change to the

disadvantage of the powers that be. In the first place the total of the

votes polled fell off more than 10 per cent. in 1889 from the total in

1885. In 1885, 110,786 were polled. In 1889, 97,828. In the next place

the Republican votes in the whole department fell off in 1889 nearly 20

per cent. from the Republican total in 1885, or from 58,328 to 46,323.

In the third place the Republican majority over the Monarchists fell off

more than 60 per cent. from the majority in 1885, or from 5,910 to

2,062. In the fourth place the Monarchists in the first district of

Nîmes had a majority of more than 1,500 votes over the Government

Republicans. And in the fifth place the Republicans, who in 1885 secured

the whole delegation of six members from the Gard, in 1889 lost the seat

for the second district of Alais, which the Monarchists carried by a

majority of 1,305 votes over the combined strength of the Government

Republicans and the Boulangist Revisionists. This district is a coal and

iron-mining as well as a silk-growing district. It is fall of workmen,

and it has been a point of attack for the Socialist and subversive

leaders in France for many years past. All the traditions of Alais

itself are strongly Protestant. The fortifications of the town were

destroyed by Louis XIV. at the end of the seventeenth century, and at no

great distance is the Tour du Bellot, the lonely spot which witnessed

one of the most desperate conflicts between Cavalier and the royal

troops. The slaughter of the Camisards, shut up in their burning tower,

is a tale of horror still in the countryside. At Nîmes the memories of

the long and merciless strife between the Catholics and the Protestants

of Southern France are fresher still and more intense. M. Guillaume

Guizot well remembers the bitterness of the passions roused at Nîmes by

the local struggles between the 'two Religions' which followed the

Restoration. His father was one day reasoning on the subject with a

Protestant citizen of Nîmes, who suddenly pointed to a man passing on

the other side of the street, and said: 'That man had a hand in the

killing of my father here in the streets of Nîmes. How can you ask me to

forget that?'

The Republicans of the Third Republic, bent on coercing France into a

'moral unity' of Atheism, are fast making both Catholics and Protestants

forget such things in the imminence of a new and common peril to the

liberties and the rights of both. The two daughters of M. Guizot, as is

well known, married two brothers, the heirs and representatives of the

great Protestant and Republican family of De Witt. One of these

brothers, M. Conrad de Witt, just re-elected a deputy for the Calvados,

was my host at Val Richer. The other, M. Cornelis de Witt, the namesake

of the statesman for whom his illustrious brother the Grand Pensionary

of Holland sacrificed his own life in a vain effort to save him from the

brutal fury of an ignorant and frantic multitude at the Hague, has just

been taken, in the full force of his energies and his great ability,

from the love of his friends and from the cause of liberty in France. As

a deputy and a member of the Government he took an active part in the

re-establishment of the finances and the public organisation of France

after the disasters of 1870-71. As a director of the great mines at

Auzin, and as Vice-President of the Paris, Lyons, and Mediterranean

Railway Company, he was in close and constant touch with the working

classes of France and with the great material interests of a country

which he loved as his ancestors loved Holland. This is not the place in

which to speak of the personal gifts and graces which will keep the name

of M. Cornelis de Witt green in the memory of all who knew him. But of

his great qualities as a citizen, and of the judgment absolutely

unwarped by passion or by prejudice which gave weight to all his

political convictions, it is the place to speak. After a fair and

serious experiment, in which he took his part loyally, at founding in

France the 'Conservative Republic' of M. Thiers, he thought that outlook

for the future completely and hopelessly closed; and as it was neither

in the traditions of Netherlandish liberty nor in his own virile and

courageous temper to acquiesce in the domination of a political

oligarchy ready, like Carrier and the Jacobins of 1792, to 'make France

one vast cemetery rather than not regenerate it after their own minds!'

M. Cornelis de Witt looked about him calmly for a way of escape.

This way he found where the sagacious Netherlanders of the seventeenth

century found it after the hard-won liberties of Holland had been

prostrated by the mad revolt of a misled multitude against the

Government of the Grand Pensionary, who had held his own against

Cromwell and against Louis XIV., made Holland the first naval power of

the world, and scared London with the thunder of the Dutch cannon in the

Thames. Nothing but the restoration of the hereditary principle in the

person of William of Orange saved Amsterdam and Rotterdam from falling

at the end of the seventeenth century, as they fell at the end of the

eighteenth, under the dominion of an invader. When the hereditary

principle was again abandoned after the death of William of Orange, the

domestic peace as well as the national prestige of Holland vanished with

it, and though the Dutch people in the middle of the eighteenth century

insisted upon seeing it for a time restored, the power of the Dutch

Executive towards the end of the century was so much hampered and

weakened by the local jealousies of the provinces, that in the

Convention which framed the Constitution of the United States, Mr.

Butler, who had travelled much in the Low Countries, successfully

enforced the necessity of making the American Executive monarchical by a

vivid description of the evils inflicted upon Holland by her departures

from that principle. We took warning as to the perils of the Union from

the example of the Low Countries, and as to the importance of the

Executive from the example of Great Britain. There were many Americans

indeed in 1788, men of worth and of weight both in private and in public

affairs, who rather than accept Edmund Randolph's plan of confiding the

Executive authority to a triumvirate, would have given their adhesion to

the seriously mooted project of making the American Executive absolutely

hereditary, and inviting the Prince-Bishop of Osnaburg to accept the

office.

The convictions of M. Cornelis de Witt are represented now with equal

energy and determination in Normandy by his brother, M. Conrad de Witt,

and by his son, M. Pierre de Witt, just elected a Councillor-General of

the Calvados, and in Languedoc by his brother-in-law, M. Guillaume

Guizot, and by his son, M. Cornelis Henri de Witt.

The home of M. Cornelis Henri de Witt, near Tonneins, in the

Lot-et-Garonne, stands in the heart of a land of fruits and vines. From

the terrace of his château of Peyreguilhot, the eye ranges over a fine

expanse of the valley of the Garonne, which at no great distance from

Tonneins mingles with the Lot beneath the promontory of Nicole. The

landscape is rich in colour. Great fields of tobacco alternate with

extensive orchards. It is a land to be seen in the season of blossoms.

The world-famed prunes of Bordeaux come mainly from about Agen, and the

pleasant little commune of Nicole probably draws a much larger tribute

to-day from London, in exchange for its precocious apricots, than it

ever paid to London when the Plantagenet eaglets were rending the eagle

of Winchester. The old traditions of Guienne seem to be much less vivid

than those of Normandy or Brittany. I have heard Bretons speak of the

Duchess Anne as the Scotch Jacobites still speak of the Stuarts. But

though Coeur de Lion is still a popular hero in the land of Bertrand

de Born, there is nothing there like the Provençal feeling in Provence.

At St. Rémy, the beautiful birthplace of Nostradamus, a lively waiter in

the excellent hotel of the 'Cheval Blanc,' taking me for a Frenchman of

the north, contrived very skilfully to let me know that the Provençals

do not hold themselves responsible for the failure of Northern France to

repulse the Germans. 'If the Comte de Paris had not got the better long

ago of the Comte de Provence,' he informed me, 'France would have been

Provençal and not Provence French, and then things would have gone

differently altogether.' But all Languedoc is as proud of its language

as Wales. A youth who took me at Agen to see the shop and house of the

'barber-bard' was clearly of the opinion that the poetry of Lamartine

and Victor Hugo would have been as fine as the poetry of Jasmin had they

been so fortunate as to use his mother-tongue. 'The French language was

a kind of Gallic patois mixed with German, while the true langue d'Oc,

as I must know, was the language of the Romans.' This same philologist

took me also to the little valley of 'Verona,' where he showed me not

only a small vineyard, the property of Jasmin, but the house, the

fountain, and the huge stone chair of Scaliger, 'a great philosopher

descended from Julius Cæsar.' Joseph Scaliger, I believe, was really

born in this house, which was given to his illustrious father by the

Bishop of Agen; and Joseph with his own eyes saw some three hundred

Huguenots burnt alive in Agen on the great Place du Gravier, where now

the annual fairs of Agen are held under the stately elms.

The lands of the Lot-et-Garonne are full of memories of the English

wars, of the Albigensian crusade, of the long duel between the Church

and the Calvinists. Tonneins, once a curious 'double city' of the

middle ages, was destroyed in the seventeenth century by Louis XIII.

for its fidelity to the Huguenot cause. Nérac, where Jeanne d'Albret and

the two Margots held their gay and gallant courts, and Henry of Navarre

established his headquarters during 'the Lovers' War,' suffered as

severely for the like cause under Louis XIV. The revocation of the Edict

of Nantes sent its most industrious inhabitants into exile, not a few of

them crossing the Atlantic to join the Huguenot colonies in New York and

in the Carolinas. 'But the Revolution of 1789 did Nérac more harm,' said

an intelligent tradesman of the picturesque little city to me, 'than the

Revocation. The Revocation drove away many honest people from Nérac, but

the Revolution brought here a great many rogues.' The country around

Nérac is extremely fertile, and great prizes were to be picked up here

during the decade of proscription and confiscation. The Garenne, one of

the loveliest public parks in France, in which a beautiful fountain

sparkles and murmurs beneath two lofty elms planted by Henry of Navarre

and Marguerite de Valois, was actually bought during the First Consulate

by the city for a little over five thousand francs, or two hundred

pounds sterling. The war of 1791 against 'privileges' soon became in

Nérac, as elsewhere in France, a war against property. The immediate

effect of this was not, what we are constantly told it was, to increase

the wealth of France by 'redistributing' it amongst the active and

industrious classes. It was, on the contrary, to diminish the wealth of

France by lowering the real value of property. This is clearly shown by

the extraordinary pains which Napoleon took to enforce respect for the

rights of property as soon as he grasped the supreme power in the State.

But one comes everywhere upon striking local proofs of it. At Najac in

the Department of the Aveyron, for example, the obliging hotel-keeper

will give you the key of one of the most magnificent ruined castles in

Southern France, which, with its grand donjon, and all the massive

circle of its walls and ramparts, was seized and sold, during the

Terror, for _twelve francs_. The purchaser made a deal of money by

converting the castle into a quarry, and when law and order were

restored, he gladly parted with his very dubious title for the highly

respectable advance on his investment of 1,500 francs. As a piece of

successful 'gerrymandering' the Republican treatment of this Department

of the Aveyron, by the way, in the elections of 1889, is worth

mentioning. In 1885, under the _scrutin de liste_, the Aveyron was

entitled to six deputies. It elected a solid Conservative

representation. In 1889, under the _scrutin d'arrondissement_, the

Government carved out seven seats for the Aveyron, and the electoral

districts were so ingeniously framed as to secure two out of these seven

seats for the Republicans--though the total of the votes cast in the

department showed a clear majority for the Monarchists of 5,582!

We had a banquet of Mayors while I was at Peyreguilhot; not such a

Belshazzar's feast as M. Constans gave at Paris to the thirteen

thousand, but a simple and interesting gathering of about a dozen

intelligent and active elective magistrates. Under a recent law all

Mayors, except in Paris, are now chosen by the Councils, but the

Government can revoke their commissions. Our guests at Peyreguilhot were

all shrewd, quiet, active men of the country. 'We shall be beaten in

September,' said one of them to me, 'because the Government employs men

enough to beat us. Moreover, our farmers say, "Why vote at all, for the

Mayors and the Prefect throw our votes out and cheat us?" Then, too, we

must have a man to vote for before we can make them move. They will not

vote for the Monarchy as a principle. But give them a man who touches

their imaginations and they will make him a Monarch.' They voted for

Louis Napoleon as soon as they saw him take the Assembly resolutely by

the throat. They would have voted, overwhelmingly, for Boulanger on

September 22 had he suddenly reappeared in Paris, demanding a revision

of the verdict of the High Court.

This is true, I think, not of the Lot-et-Garonne alone, but of all

France. It has been signally illustrated since the elections of 1889 by

what Stendhal would have called the rapid 'crystallization' of public

sympathy around the young Duc d'Orléans when he suddenly appeared in

Paris. The Government was completely bewildered and demoralized by this

'bolt out of the blue.' Instead of quietly reconducting the prince to

the frontier with a reprimand for his inconsiderate and unconventional

patriotism, it stupidly locked him up in a prison haunted by legends

disgraceful to the Republic, proceeded against him with clumsy

vehemence, gave him time to show himself to the French people, in the

words of the Duc d'Aumale, as a '_pur sang_,' a straightforward, dashing

young French prince demanding the right of performing his military duty

to the State, had him condemned, tardily resolved to pardon him, and

wound up finally by sending him to Clairvaux to placate the criminal

bullies of the Commune!

What has been the result? It cannot be more exactly stated than in the

words of the official organ of the Russian Empire at Brussels, _Le

Nord_, a journal certainly not predisposed in favour of the House of

Orléans by the success of the Orléanist Prince Ferdinand in Bulgaria.

'The appearance of this young exile,' said _Le Nord_, 'on the soil of

France, not as a pretender or with political ideas, but simply as a

Frenchman coming to establish his moral rights as a citizen by claiming

to be allowed to perform his civic duties, and this with a rare

combination of youthful dash, irreproachable modesty, and skilful

self-possession was admirably fitted to awaken, and it has awakened, the

sympathy of all who are politically disinterested.'

This is strong language coming from the only great power in the world to

which France can look as a possible ally in the present condition of

Europe. It was emphasised by the ablest and most active of the French

Imperialists, M. Paul de Cassagnac. 'To keep this young prince in prison

is impossible. To do so would make him King of France within three

years. To let him go, after keeping him for a week, is no longer a

generous and magnanimous act. It is simply obeying the vigorous kick

administered by the masters of the Government, the French people, who

have been saying of the Orléans princes, "they won't move," and who now

see a young Duc d'Orléans move forward with a gay virility which has a

flavour of Henri IV.! If the young Duc d'Orléans is as intelligent as I

am told, and believe that he is, he wouldn't change places with Carnot

to-day!'

Every 'ministerial crisis' which weakens the Government will strengthen

the prestige acquired for the Monarchy by the young duke. He has won the

women by his pluck, the fathers of families by his deference to the

Comte de Paris, the Catholics by asking for a chaplain at Clairvaux, and

the _chauvins_ by his military ardour.

A friend of mine showed me in Paris ten days after the arrest of the

prince a letter from Normandy, in which the writer said, 'Millions of

francs would not have done what has been done by this simple act to

revive and invigorate the monarchical party throughout this whole

region.... _Le petit conscrit_ will be the prince of the people from

this day forth. The gray-beards among the peasants shake their heads and

say, "All the same, it is not such a nice thing, this conscription, and

since he was out of it why run into it?" But the women reply, "Since our

lads have to go in, it is plucky of the Comte de Paris to put his son in

too!"'

To make a handsome young prince a martyr of patriotism in the eyes of

the women and the conscripts of France, is a highly original way of

blocking the progress of his father to the throne!

The Mayors at Peyreguilhot were all of one mind as to the fiscal conduct

of the Republican Government. It was 'making life impossible for the

agriculturists of all categories. The tax on the revenue of the land in

the Lot-et-Garonne was levied still on a _cadastre_ drawn up in 1837; so

that lands now lying idle were taxed as they were taxed fifty years ago

when covered with vines. Thanks to this system, forty-two departments in

France pay more than their due proportion of this tax, and the others

less than their due proportion. The Aude, which is a very rich

department, producing, if you take good and bad years together, more

than 20,000,000 francs of wine alone every year, pays a million of

francs less, and the Lot-et-Garonne nearly a quarter of a million more,

than its due share of this tax.'

M. de Witt confirmed these statements. The inequalities in national

taxation, he tells me, are one of the crying grievances of France under

the existing régime. Corsica, for example, pays only ninety-five

centimes _per cent._ of revenue tax, while the Corrèze pays seven francs

ninety cents, and there is one commune in the Gironde which actually

pays ninety francs per cent. Besides the people pay the door and window

tax, the furniture tax, the _prestations en nature_, the permanent

personal tax, and the octrois and the _centimes additionnels_ levied for

educational and other purposes.

The taxes levied as _centimes additionnels_ for the Departments of

France increased from 1878 to 1886 by 24,692,266 francs, and the taxes

levied as _centimes additionnels_ for the Communes (exclusive of Paris)

by 34,246,647 francs, while from 1878 to 1885 the total of the debts of

the Communes increased at the rate of 55,000,000 francs a year! The

departmental loans during the same period increased no less than 95 per

cent., or from 128,417,499 francs in 1876 to 249,188,700 francs in 1886.

Since the new Chamber met the air has been full of rumours of new loans,

and of modifications of taxation. These modifications may ease the

pressure on one point, but only by increasing it upon another point. No

financier in France pretends to put the annual burden borne by the

French people at much less than double the annual taxation of Great

Britain. M. Méline, a Republican of the Republicans, admitted before the

Chamber of Deputies on February 10, 1885, that the people of France were

more heavily taxed at that time 'than those of any other country in the

world.' He put the taxation of England at 57 francs a head, of the

United States at 59 francs a head, of Germany at 44 francs a head, and

of France at 104 francs a head.

And to-day the French people are more heavily taxed than they were in

1885. The mere general expenses of collecting the revenue of France are

set down in the Budget for 1890 at 107,343,926 francs, or, in round

numbers, 4,293,745_l._; divided as follows. Direct and assimilated land

taxes, 19,838,175 francs; registrations, domains, and stamps,

19,143,950; customs, 31,077,301; indirect taxes, 37,284,500 francs.

M. de Witt represents the Canton of Castêl Moron in the Council-General

of the Lot-et-Garonne, and he is Mayor of the Commune of Laparade. At

the Legislative elections of last year, he contested the representation

of the Nérac district with M. Fallières, the Minister of Public

Instruction, and was defeated, receiving 6,484 votes against 8,967 given

to the Minister. M. Fallières 'on the stump,' speaking with the

authority of a Minister of 'Public Instruction,' actually assured the

electors that to vote for M. de Witt was to vote to 're-establish

seignorial rights, and to bring on a German or _Cossack_ invasion!' One

result of this was, that M. de Witt was burned in effigy near Tonneins

after the election!

After the election of M. de Witt as Mayor of Laparade, he was accused

before the tribunal at Marmande of 'corrupting' the electors of the

commune. The accusation rested on 'conversations,' but the tribunal

sentenced M. de Witt to a fine of a thousand francs, and several of his

electors to smaller fines. They all appealed to the Court at Agen, where

the case was pleaded by M. Piou, deputy for the Haute Garonne and one of

the ablest barristers in Southern France.

It throws an interesting light on the present condition of political

life in France, that M. de Witt, though the sentence of the tribunal at

Marmande was not sustained, had eventually to pay a fine of 500 francs

on the ground that he had been guilty of 'excessive charity' to an old

man of 80, named Sauvean, who had long been a pensioner of his family!

The wonder is that his commission as Mayor by the choice of his

fellow-citizens was not revoked by the Ministry at Paris. Under the

Third Republic this is no uncommon thing.

Early in the year 1889, M. Duboscq, Mayor of the commune of Labrit in

the Landes, one of the many out-of-the way and charming places which in

that part of France are associated with the memory of Henri IV., gave a

dinner to M. Lambert de Ste.-Croix, the distinguished Monarchist leader,

who died not long ago. For this offence--M. Lambert de Ste.-Croix having

just then exasperated the Republicans beyond measure by a vigorous

speech made at Dax on the Adour--M. Duboscq was actually suspended from

his office by order of M. Floquet, now the President of the Chamber of

Deputies! In reply to a question on the subject put by a deputy, M.

Lamarzelle, M. Floquet calmly replied that lie had suspended M. Duboscq

because, 'being a functionary of the Government, he had departed from

the reserve proper in his position by inviting an opponent of the

Government to dinner!' The Mayors of these communes, be it observed, are

elected by the people, not appointed by the Government! So that under

the practice of the French Republic, as represented by the present

President of the Chamber, a Radical Mayor of Newcastle who should ask

Mr. Gladstone to dinner ought to be 'suspended' at once by Lord

Salisbury! This is municipal liberty in France under the Third Republic.

As the Legislative elections are conducted under the supervision of the

Mayors, the object of such performances as these is obvious enough. At

the same time with M. Duboscq, M. Davezac de Moran, Mayor of Siest near

Dax, was also suspended by M. Floquet for the offence of allowing the

meeting of the Monarchical Committees, at which M. Lambert de Ste.-Croix

made his speech, to be held in his own house at Dax! 'If you think,'

said M. Lamarzelle to the Minister, 'to frighten us with all this, you

are mistaken. At your age Robespierre had got himself guillotined!'

During the Legislative elections of 1889 'the school-teachers, the

postmen, the gendarmes, the highway supervisors and the labourers, were

ordered to vote against the Monarchist candidates.' M. Delafosse,

elected in the Calvados, publicly stated this in the _Matin_, and

without contradiction. During the same elections the curés were

officially forbidden to advise their people to vote for 'friends of

religion,' and those who did so advise were fined after the election to

the number of 300!

M. Cornelis Henri de Witt is one of the most active and indefatigable

promoters of what are known as the 'Conférences du Sud-Ouest.' These are

meetings of the Monarchists organised on a systematic plan, which take

place at brief intervals throughout the great Departments of

South-Western France under the superintendence of a society of which M.

Princeteau, a very influential and intelligent citizen of Bordeaux, is

the President. M. Princeteau, like M. de Witt, is not only an

indefatigable organiser, but an extremely popular and effective orator;

and it is a curious proof of the efficiency of the Conservative

machinery in South-Western France, that at the Legislative elections of

1889 the Radicals and the Socialists completely disappeared as parties

from the contest in the Gironde. Thanks to the _scrutin

d'arrondissement_, several seats from that department which ought to

have gone to the Monarchists were kept by the Government; but upon the

total poll the Monarchists and Revisionists show 84,376 votes against

83,108 given to the Government Republicans. Under the _scrutin de liste_

the eleven seats for the Gironde would pretty plainly have gone in 1889

to the Monarchists. In 1885 M. Cazauvielle, the leading Republican

deputy, received 89,153 votes, or 6,000 more than the Republican total

in 1889. As in 1889 the total poll amounted to 167,484 votes, and in

1885 to 162,286, it is clear that the Republican strength fell off, and

that the Monarchist strength increased in the Gironde between 1885 and

1889.

M. Princeteau told me that on July 14 he gave a fête in his grounds near

Bordeaux to more than five thousand working people. While the fête was

going on, a procession of Republicans with bands of music, bent on

celebrating the fête of the Bastille, passed the grounds more than once

with the obvious intent of drawing away some of his guests. This they

completely failed to do. If the 'fête of the Bastille' was celebrated at

Bordeaux as it was at Nîmes, this says as much for the good taste as for

the sound politics of the Bordeaux workmen. At Nîmes on July 22, more

than a week after the 'anniversary,' I found the city streets made

perilous during the day and life made intolerable at night by such a

clamour of chorus singers and such a clatter of fireworks as I had not

supposed it possible could be got up beyond the domain of our own

'glorious and immortal' American Fourth of July. Several accidents were

caused by 'serpents' and other fireworks, and when I asked a staid and

sober citizen of this old Protestant capital why the law permitted such

performances, he quietly answered: 'The law does not permit them. The

authorities have formally forbidden them, but the authorities are

elective, and they are more anxious to keep their places than to keep

the peace.' To my question whether the extreme Radicals were very strong

in Nîmes, he replied that nearly a fourth of the Republicans of Nîmes

are avowed Socialists, mostly of the Anti-Boulangist Anti-Possibilist

type. One of their candidates for a legislative seat announced his

intention, if elected, to give some person, to be designated by his

constituents, an order for one half of his legislative salary, to be

drawn regularly, and applied 'by his committee to political purposes.'

His political programme included the formal abolition of the Presidency,

annual legislative elections, the nationalisation of the soil of France,

the abolition of the regular army, the socialisation of all the means of

production, gratuitous and obligatory education on the same lines for

all the children of France, and through all the degrees of education,

and the suppression of the right to bequeath or to inherit property of

any kind,' On the latter point a rather intelligent Socialist with whom

I made acquaintance while I was visiting the fine Roman Amphitheatre at

Nîmes, and whom I took to be a skilled mechanic, was very explicit. He

thought property a 'privilege' and therefore inconsistent with equality.

He spoke in an oracular fashion, and he probably belonged to the class

known among French workmen, not as '_sublimes_,' but as _'les fils de

Dieu_.' 'Of what use,' he said, 'is it to abolish hereditary titles if

you allow a man of one generation to give his son in the next generation

the more serious advantage over his fellow of a property which he has

done nothing and could do nothing to create?' I asked him if he agreed

with St.-Just that 'opulence is an infamy.' He replied very seriously:

'Yes, I think if St.-Just said that he said the truth. Certainly I do

not say that every rich man is infamous. That is another matter. But it

is infamous that in a land of equality one man should have the means to

give himself pleasures and execute achievements beyond his

fellow-citizens.' He told me that he lived in Alais, where he said the

Socialists of his type were much stronger than in Nîmes. The Legislative

elections show that lie was right as to this. The Socialists carried the

first division of Alais, throwing 7,205 votes against 2,425 Radicals and

4,218 Government Republicans. For the Government Republicans my friend

of the Amphitheatre could find no words of contempt strong enough.

'They are all whitewashed Wilsons,' he said, and then he dilated with

much eloquence on the case of a certain M. Hude,'a great friend of

Rochefort' he scornfully exclaimed, 'who is a great friend of Boulanger.

_Ah! voilà du propre!_ he is a wine-merchant, of course he is fond of

the _pots-de-vin'_(the French phrase for bribes taken to promote jobs),

'and thus, when the chemical officers go to verify the quality of his

wines, he calls in the Prefect of Police to prevent it, because he is a

deputy!' He was particularly bitter, too, on the conversion by the

Republicans of more than a thousand millions of francs lying in the

savings banks into 3 per cent. funds. 'What right had they to do this?'

he said indignantly. 'It was a trick to enslave the depositors!'

In the first division of Nîmes the Socialists showed no great strength

at the elections of 1889. The Monarchists far outnumbered them, but they

threw votes enough to make the election very close, the Republicans

numbering 6,598, the Socialists 1,519, and the Monarchists 8,174, so

that the latter won the day by no more than fifty-seven votes. That they

won it is due to the cordial co-operation of the Protestants with the

Catholics on the question of Religious Liberty in support of a Catholic,

M. de Bernis, who had twice been condemned to imprisonment for

'assisting' Catholic teachers thrown on the world by the 'laicization'

of the schools of Nîmes! This co-operation began in 1885. The

Protestants of the Gard have quite as much at stake in this conflict as

the Catholics. The Protestant Seminaries are cut down like the Catholic.

The appropriations formerly made in aid of new Protestant parishes are

made no longer. No sums are allowed for Protestant missionary work in

outlying districts. The Protestant Consistories have been deprived of

their right to nominate candidates for examination as teachers. The

Consistories and the Councils of the Elders are no longer allowed to

receive and administer legacies for the relief of the poor, for

hospitals or asylums. Formerly, where no manse existed in a commune, the

Protestant minister was allowed a certain sum for lodgings. This has

been stopped. In short, the Protestants, like the Catholics of France,

find themselves treated by an oligarchy of irreligious fanatics as

pariahs in their own country. The Protestants, like the Catholics, are

driven into irreconcilable hostility against the Republic by a

Parliamentary majority which treats all religious questions in the

spirit of M. de Mortillet, Mayor of St.-Germain, and a Radical deputy

for the Seine-et-Oise. In 1886 some speaker in the Chamber appealed in

the course of his speech to the law of God. 'The law of God!' broke in

M. de Mortillet; 'pray, what is God?'

The more completely this spirit of the Mayor of St.-Germian gets the

control of the Republican party, the more obvious it becomes that the

Republic must gravitate into Socialism.

As it steadily alienates from itself the vast multitudes of Frenchmen

who are either religious men, or recognise the vital importance of

religious institutions to the existing social order, it is compelled to

court the alliance of the avowed enemies of the existing social order.

This is strikingly illustrated in the political condition of the great

Southern Department of the Bouches-du-Rhône. This department offers a

most instructive contrast with the Calvados.

In the Bouches-du-Rhône, the Government Republicans were as badly beaten

in 1889 as in the Calvados. But in the Calvados they were beaten by the

Monarchists, and in the Bouches-du-Rhône by the Radicals and the

Socialists.

In the Bouches-du-Rhône the Radicals and Socialists threw 52,989 votes,

the Government Republicans no more than 7,218. Marseilles, the greatest

commercial city in France, a city of 'Republicans before the Republic,'

with traditions which give dignity to its democratic tendencies,

repudiated the Republic of M. Jules Ferry and M. Carnot as emphatically

as the Monarchical Morbihan. Even the Boulangists were nearly twice as

strong, and the Monarchists were more than twice as strong in Marseilles

as the Opportunist Republicans. The Boulangists threw there 13,123, and

the Monarchists 14,445 votes. The strength of the Boulangists gives zest

to a terse verdict upon the '_brav' général_' which I heard delivered by

a _cocher_ in Marseilles on the eve of the famous January elections in

Paris. Passing through one of the squares of the Mediterranean city, I

observed two _cochers_ engaged in an animated debate. One of them from

his box exclaimed 'I tell you Boulanger is the only real man in France!'

To which the other replied as vehemently, 'And I tell you that he is

nothing but the dealer in a low political hell! _c'est un croupier de

mauvais aloi!_' He may have picked up the phrase from the _Petit

Marseillais_, which is one of the few really well-edited newspapers in

France. But it was a notable phrase, and it expresses, I think, the

opinion of the sincere Radicals and Socialists, not only as to General

Boulanger, but as to the politicians, now his bitterest enemies, who

were his original friends and 'promoters.' A very smart and outspoken

Provençal Socialist who drove me on a delightful morning from the once

royal and always delectable city of Arles to the majestic ruins of

Montmajeur, and the unique and wonderful deserted fortress-city of Les

Baux, set no bounds to his speech about the official Republicans. We met

near Montmajeur a neat private carriage. 'That is the carriage of

M----,' he said, as we passed on. 'He is an aristocrat--but I think he

will be Mayor of Axles. We have had an aristocratic major who gave to

the people, and a Republican mayor who took from the people. I prefer

the aristocrat, till we can make an end of all majors and all this

rubbish of governments.' At the Legislative elections the Monarchists of

Aries threw 8,540 votes, the Radicals 9,858, and the Government

Republicans none at all. Of course the Radical members support the

Government--but on their own terms. As these terms grow more exacting,

the strength of the Monarchist reaction increases, and as the

Monarchists grow stronger the Radical exactions become more imperious.

The most active and earnest Monarchist whom I met in Marseilles, M.

Fournier, assures me that the Marseilles Radicals are more intolerant of

the Opportunists than they are even of the Monarchists.

As one of the largest employers of labour in Marseilles, M. Fournier is

in constant touch with the working population of the Bouches-du-Rhône.

He is an earnest and devoted Catholic, and he has encouraged the

foundation of a Christian Corporation among the people employed in his

works. These works were founded half a century ago, in 1840, for the

purpose of turning to practical results the interesting discoveries then

made by M. Chevreuil, the famous centenarian dean of French science, as

to the nature and properties of fatty substances. At the outset these

works were taken up with the manufacture of stearine candles; but as in

the case of the glass works of St.-Gobain, the chemical processes

employed in creating one particular product were soon found to yield

other very different and not less valuable results. I shall not attempt

to enter into the mysteries of saponification and distillation, which

cease to be mysteries when they are followed up from point to point

through the extensive and orderly organisation of the Fournier Works;

suffice it that at these works 600 men and 400 women are busily employed

in turning every year 13,000 tons of African palm-oil, and of

Australian, Russian, French, and American tallow into stearine candles,

oleine, and glycerine. The output is enormous, amounting annually to

20,000,000 packets of candles of an average weight of 400 grammes a

packet, to 3,300,000 kilogrammes of oleine, and to 1,200,000 kilogrammes

of glycerine. How much of this latter product goes to the pharmacies and

how much to the powder magazines of the world it is not easy to say. But

it is easy to see that if the Bouches-du-Rhône get the better of the

Calvados in the politics of France, there will be a serious falling off

in the demand for altar lights and chamber candles, and a still more

serious increase in the demand for nitro-glycerine!

The output of the Fournier Works represents about one-fourth of the

whole stearine and glycerine production of France, and as paraffin has

of late years largely taken the place of stearine in the famous Price

Works in England, the Fournier Works are now doubtless the most

important of their kind in the world. Thirty years ago the candles

produced here were almost all exported; now the home consumption just

about equals the exportation, a fact as to which the truly paternal

Government of France takes pains to leave no doubt in the minds of the

producers by taxing candles heavily as an 'article of luxury.' They are

subjected to a régie like cigars, and to the octroi, and these imposts,

M. Fournier tells me, now amount to about fifty per cent, of their

value. A knowledge of this circumstance may, perhaps, divert the wrath

of travellers in France from the hotel-keeper, who claps a couple of

francs for bougies into your bill if you pass half a summer's day in his

house, to the Government which concerns itself much more actively with

squeezing percentages out of the industries than with balancing the

national budgets of France. Must not all taxes be paid by the ultimate

consumer? What with these taxes and with the higher wage of labour in

France, the stearine works of Marseilles find themselves taken at

advantage by the energetic manufacturers of Holland. In the Fournier

Works the average workman earns a daily wage of from 3 frs. 25 c. to 3

frs. 50 c.; the average workwomen, who do chiefly the clean and even

pretty work of moulding the candles, making them up into packets, in

large, very well ventilated and well ordered rooms, earn an average

daily wage of 2 frs. 50 c. Both men and women work about ten hours a

day. The 'eight-hours' doctrine of the political Socialists finds no

more favour here with the real working people apparently than elsewhere

in France. In Holland and Belgium and at Roubaix the average wage is

about one franc less for both sexes.

The Christian Corporation of the Fournier Works is organised upon the

principles, but not exactly upon the lines, of the Harmel system. It is

formed by a union of five religious associations among the workpeople,

made up of the men, the married women, the young men, the young girls,

and the children. Character and conduct are the conditions of

membership, and under the direction of a General Council in which the

employers take an active part, the Corporation has founded and

administers for the common benefit a Consumers' Society which maintains

an economical kitchen with refectories, a recreation hall with a bar,

(not limited to soda water, lemonade, and tea), and a circulating

library. The statutes of this Society leave the members a wide range of

liberty, and the managers are chosen by the members. Of the profits five

per cent first go to the reserve fund; dividends may then be declared of

not more than ten per cent, on the capital stock of 10,000 francs, and

the surplus, if any, forms a supplementary reserve. The economical

kitchen is so well managed that it gives a customer (who must be

employed in the works, but need not be a member of the Association) for

55 centimes, or a little more than fivepence, a bowl of soup, a large

helping of meat and vegetables, half a pound of bread, and a third of a

bottle of wine. A café-cognac (and the cognac good) may be had for 25

centimes more.

In August of last year, with the help of the owners of the works, a

Musical Society was established, and the workpeople are furnished

gratuitously with medical advice and medicines. To these, in the case of

invalid workmen who have been for two years employed in the works, is

added a weekly allowance of six francs during illness. The owners have

also founded a savings bank which pays six per cent. on sums below 3,000

francs, and four per cent. on sums above that amount. These are open to

all the workpeople employed in the works, whether members or not of the

Christian Corporation.

In this fashion M. Fournier, and other devout and practical Catholics of

the Bouches-du-Rhône are fighting the Republic by fighting the

Socialistic Radicalism of which their department is the true

headquarters, and to which the Republic has substantially surrendered.

It is visibly an uphill fight in the Bouches-du-Rhône, and in

South-Eastern France generally. But there is life in the convictions

which nerve men to fight an uphill fight, and there is something in the

fire and spirit of these militant Catholics of France which reminds one

of Prudentius, the Pindar of Christian Spain, celebrating fifteen

centuries ago the believers who upheld so manfully the rights of

conscience against prætors and prefects bent on converting them to the

beauty of 'moral unity'--_quod princeps colit ut colamus omnes_!

When two men ride on a horse the man who holds the bridle is the master,

and the Radicals hold the bridle of the French Government. The Radical

Department of the Bouches-du-Rhône represents the Republic. The

Monarchist Department of the Calvados represents France. If the Republic

wins, the history of France before 1789 will be wiped out as with a

sponge, and with it all the great qualities of the French people must

disappear. Without an Executive, without a Past, and without a Religion,

France would become the ideal nation of the Nihilists.

If France wins, if she recovers the Executive unity and stability

essential to her life as a nation, recovers the historic sense of her

national growth into greatness, recovers for every man, woman, and child

in France the simple human right to believe and to hope, then the

Republic must inevitably vanish, for with all these things the Republic

has made itself incompatible.

If these were only my own conclusions, drawn from all that I saw and

heard and learned in France during the year 1889, I might hesitate to

adopt them as adequate and final.

But how can I hesitate, when I find these conclusions of mine not

obscurely foreshadowed as impending in 1872 by Ernest Renan, and

re-affirmed as imminent in 1882 by Jules Simon?

'The edifice of our chimæras,' cried Ernest Renan in 1872,[9] 'has

melted away like fairy castles in a dream.

[9] _La Réforme intellectuelle et morale._ Ernest Renan. Paris,

1872.

Presumption, puerile vanity, insubordination, feather-headedness,

inability to grasp many different ideas at a glance, want of scientific

sense, simple and stupid ignorance, here is the summary of our history

for a year!... The Opposition, which pretended to have revolutionary

remedies for all possible ills, has found itself at the end of a few

days as unpopular as the fallen dynasty. The Republican Party, puffed up

with the fatal errors which for half a century have been current as to

the history of the Revolution, and which imagined itself able to play

over again a game won eighty years ago only through circumstances

utterly unlike those of to-day, has learned that it was a lunatic taking

visions for realities. The legend of the Empire has been slain by

Napoleon III. The legend of 1792 has been done to death by M. Gambetta.

The legend of the Terror (for even the Terror had its legend among us!)

has been hideously parodied by the Commune.'

So cried M. Renan in 1872.

'Our worst disasters,' said M. Jules Simon in 1882,[10] 'have so far

broken out only where great numbers of men are crowded together. Men

begin with scepticism, from scepticism they go on rapidly to Nihilism,

and from Nihilism to Social War. The labourer in the fields still has

his faith; he still has his hope of another life; he has not yet

unlearned the name of God. When he becomes a Nihilist we shall have the

Commune in our cities, and beyond them the Jacqueries! It is impossible

that the authorities should not see this. But the authorities obey the

deputy, the deputy obeys the elector, and the elector obeys the

agitator.'

[10] _Dieu, Patrie, Liberté._ Par Jules Simon. Paris, 1882.

'There will soon be only two parties left in France; the party of the

dynamiters, and the party of the do-nothings. Whatever moderate

Republicans are left must go over either to violence or to

indifference. Is it France alone which is thus threatened? It is the

world. The Communists and the Fenians were not produced in France. But

France attracts them.

'The liberty you pretend to be establishing is oppression. The neutral

education you propose is the suppression of the human heart, of the

human conscience.

'This "clericalism" which you declare to be the enemy, and which, when

you are pushed to the wall, turns out to be Christianity--this

"clericalism" which you attack and mean to exterminate, tell me, is this

the power which lays your Ministers prostrate before your Deputies, and

your Deputies prostrate before their electors? Is it "clericalism" which

is stirring up Labour against Capital? Is it "clericalism" which

preaches and supports "strikes"? Is it "clericalism" which manufactures

dynamite and blows up houses? Is it "clericalism" which is transforming

your literature into ribaldry and your theatres into brothels? Is it

"clericalism" which shuts up your schools? Is it "clericalism" which

transforms all the actions and relations of life into matters of

contract and of calculation? Do you imagine that Christianity, if it be

your enemy, is an enemy as terrible as Nihilism? And what other end but

Nihilism can there be of your "neutral" obligatory schools and your

atheistic laws? Already you go in fear of the very phrase which

recognises the duties of man to God! You think it dangerous, you think

it equivocal! You do not know that when you recoil before the name of

God you abandon the traditions of France!

'Nay, you will not even hear now of man's duties to his country! This is

another "dangerous," another "equivocal" phrase! You talk now in your

programmes about the "civic duties" of man, for when these are taught

there will be no danger of confounding the Monarchical France before

1789, which we must learn to hate, with the Republican France which we

must love and admire!'

Thus spoke Jules Simon in 1882.

The 'civic duties' of man brought France in 1792 to the 'Law of

Suspects,' to the headlong and brutal demolition of the whole social

edifice, to confiscation, and to the guillotine.

To what will the 'civic duties' of man bring France, and, with France,

the civilization of Christendom, in 1892?

[Illustration: France]

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