France and the Republic Part 2

On April 20, 1878, M. Leon Say announced to the Chamber of Deputies that he expected the country to spend for 1879 a sum of 3,173,820,114 francs, and to meet this expenditure with an estimated income of 2,698,622,014 francs!

In 1876 the expenditure of France had reached 2,680,146,977 francs, and the income of France had reached 2,778,438,082 fr. 66 c. Two years had sufficed to reverse the situation, and to convert an excess of receipts over expenditure under the Government of the Marechal-Duc, amounting to more than 98,000,000 francs, into an excess of expenditure over receipts under his 'truly Republican' successor amounting to 475,148,100 francs!

From that moment to this the Third Republic has been steadily expending for France year after year at least five hundred millions of francs, or twenty millions of pounds sterling, more than it has been able to collect from the French people in the way of normal revenue. The exact amount of this monstrous deficiency it is not easy to state with precision. So distinguished an economist as M. Leroy-Beaulieu, a Republican of the moderate type, puts it at the sum I have stated, of five hundred millions a year for ten years. At the elections of last year the Carnot Government ordered, or encouraged, the Prefect of the Herault, M. Pointu-Nores, to oppose openly and energetically the election of M. Leroy-Beaulieu as a deputy for the district of Lodeve in that department. Why? M. Leroy-Beaulieu is one of the few really able and distinguished Frenchmen, known beyond the limits of France, who may be regarded as sincere believers in the possibility of founding a substantial and orderly French Republic. But M. Leroy-Beaulieu, when he sees a deficiency in the public accounts, calls it a deficiency, and lifts up his voice in warning against a policy which accepts an annual deficiency of five hundred millions of francs as natural, normal, and to be expected in the administration of a great Republic.

Therefore, the presence of M. Leroy-Beaulieu in the Chamber of Deputies is a thing to be prevented at any price. The 'Republicans' of the Herault this year tried to prevent it not only by treating 'informal'

ballots thrown for him as invalid, and accepting 'informal' ballots thrown against him as valid, but, as the report of a Committee of the Chamber admits, by 'irregularities' which in other countries would be described in harsher terms.

Yet the majority of the new Chamber has postponed action upon this report of its own Committee till after the recess, and M. Leroy-Beaulieu is not yet allowed to occupy the seat which the voters of Lodeve undoubtedly chose him to fill.

If we accept M. Leroy-Beaulieu's estimate of the average annual deficiency in the French budget as correct, it is clear that the 'true Republicans' have mulcted France since 1879 in the round sum of five milliards of francs--or, in other words, of a second German War Indemnity!

But a banker of eminence, thoroughly familiar with the French finances, tells me that M. Leroy-Beaulieu has underestimated the amount. He puts it himself at an annual average for the past decade of 700,000,000 francs. Thanks to the device adopted, I am sorry to say, by M. Leon Say, in 1879, of transferring to what is called the 'extraordinary budget' of each year numerous items which should properly find a place in the 'ordinary budget' of each year, it is not very easy to get at a precise and definite basis for estimating the real amount of these annual deficiencies.

M. Amagat, a Republican deputy for the Department of the Cantal, who has distinguished himself and earned the hostility of the Carnot Government by his cool and methodical treatment of these financial matters, denounces this device as 'deplorable,' and as keeping alive the most strange 'illusions' among well-meaning French Republicans about the real condition of the national finances.

Precisely! But the device was adopted expressly to keep alive these 'illusions,' in order that the 'illusions' might keep alive the politicians who adopted the device.

It served M. Leon Say, who knew better, in 1879. It serves M. Rouvier, who, perhaps, does not know better, in 1890. The new Chamber met on November 12, 1889. A fortnight had hardly pa.s.sed when M. Rouvier, as Minister of the Finances, the 'Minister of ill-omen' as M. Amagat calls him, rose in his place and, without a blush, affirmed that the budget for 1889 showed an excess of receipts over expenditure of 'forty millions of francs!' This bold statement was promptly telegraphed from Paris, by the correspondents of the foreign press in that city, to the four corners of the globe. What did it mean? It meant simply this: that, thanks to the financial success of the Government investment of the public money in a grand raree show at Paris, called a 'Universal Exposition,' such an excess of income over outlay appeared in what is called the 'ordinary budget.' As to the 'extraordinary' budget--oh! that is quite another matter.

It is as if an English householder should divide his yearly accounts into 'ordinary' and 'extraordinary' accounts, putting under the 'ordinary' accounts his cab and railway fares, his club expenses, his transactions on the turf, and his ventures at Monte Carlo, but remitting to the 'extraordinary' accounts such unconsidered trifles as house-rent, domestic expenses, the bills of tailors and milliners, and taxes, local and imperial. For 1879, for example, M. Leon Say, as Finance Minister, gave in his 'ordinary' budget at 2,714,672,014 francs, which showed a reduction of 78,705,790 francs from the 'ordinary' budget of 1878; but with this cheerful statement M. Leon Say gave in also his 'extraordinary' budget at 460,674,566 francs, the whole of which rather important sum was to be raised, not out of the revenue, but by a loan!

This system has been carried on ever since 1877, when the 'true Republicans' got possession of the legislature, two years before they put M. Grevy into the Elysee as President.

On July 22, 1882, M. Daynaud, an authority on questions of finance, summed up the results in a speech delivered in the Chamber of Deputies.

The Government in 1877 spent, in round numbers, 3,177,000,000 francs. In 1883 it spent 4,040,000,000 francs. All this without including what are called 'supplementary credits.' So that, putting these aside, it appears from the speech of M. Daynaud that, in seven years, between 1877 and 1883, the 'true Republicans' subjected the people of France to an increase of no less than 863,000,000 francs in their annual public expenditure.

Meanwhile these same 'true Republicans,' who were thus adding hundreds of millions yearly to the public debt, struck hundreds of thousands out of the lawful income of the clergy of France. They ordered the dispersion by Executive decrees, and 'if necessary by military force,'

of all religious orders and communities not 'authorised' by the Government. They drove nuns and Sisters of Charity, with violence and insult, out of their abodes. They expelled the religious nurses from the hospitals and the priests from the prisons and the almshouses. They 'laicised' the schools of France, throwing every symbol of religion--in many cases literally--into the street, forbidding, literally, the name of G.o.d to be mentioned within the walls of a school, and striking out every allusion to the Christian faith from the text-books supplied at the cost of the Christian parents of France to their children in the schools supported out of taxes paid by themselves.

It is simply impossible to overstate the virulence and the violence of this official Republican war against religion which began under the Waddington Ministry almost as soon as it took possession of the government in 1879. It was formally opened under the leaders.h.i.+p of M.

Ferry. M. Ferry is admitted to be the ideal statesman of the Opportunist Republicans now in power. To him M. Carnot owes his Presidency of the Republic. In March 1879 M. Jules Ferry asked the Republican majority of the House to pa.s.s a law concerning the 'higher education,' in the draft of which he had inserted a clause ever since famous as 'Article 7,'

depriving any Frenchman who might be a member of any religious corporation 'not recognised by the State' of the right to teach. This 'Article 7' was a revival of an amendment offered to but not carried by the Legislative a.s.sembly of the Second Republic in 1849. The principle of it is as old as the Emperor Julian, who forbade Christians to teach in the schools of the Empire.

M. Ferry's law was intended to repeal a previous law adopted in 1875, and which had not been then three years in operation. By the Law of July 12, 1875, the Republic of Thiers and Macmahon had modified, in the interest of liberty, the monopoly of higher education in France enjoyed by the State. It was an essentially wise, liberal, and 'progressive'

law. But the Republicans of Gambetta could not endure it, for it gave the Christians of France the right to provide for the higher education of their children in their own way; so it must be abolished.

It was abolished; and though the Senate, making a partial stand for law and for the equal rights of French citizens, struck out 'Article 7,' M.

Ferry and his friends, who controlled the President, caused him to issue an Executive decree, to which I have already referred, breaking up the religious orders aimed at in 'Article 7.' This was in 1880. In 1882 the Chamber adopted a law proposed by M. Paul Bert, confirming to the State the monopoly of secondary education; and to-day we see M. Clemenceau, the avowed enemy of M. Jules Ferry and of the Opportunists, shaking hands with them in public, after the elections of 1889, on this one question of deadly hostility to all religion in the educational establishments of France. At a banquet given on December 3 by certain anti-Boulangist students in Paris to the Government deputies for the Seine, M. Clemenceau declared himself in favour of 'the union of all Republicans'--upon what lines and to what end?--'To prepare the Grand Social Revolution and make war upon the theocratic spirit which seeks to reduce the human mind to slavery!'

In other words, the Third Republic is to combine the Socialism of 1848 with the Atheism of 1793, the National workshops with the wors.h.i.+p of Reason, and to join hands, I suppose, with the extemporised 'Republic of Brazil' in a grand propaganda which shall secure the abolition, not only of all the thrones in Europe, but of all the altars in America. If language means anything and facts have any force, this is the inevitable programme of the French Republic of 1890, and this is the entertainment to which the Christian nations of the New World and the Old were invited at Paris in the great 'centennial' year 1889.

Believing this to be the inevitable programme of the Republic, as represented by the Government of President Grevy so long ago as 1880, I was yet surprised, as 1 have said, to see the strength of the protest recorded against it by the voters of France at the Legislative elections in 1885, because the Republic of Thiers and Macmahon had made, and deservedly, so much progress in the confidence of the French people, that I had hardly expected to see the essentially conservative heart of France startled, even by three or four years' experience of the Government of M. Grevy, into an adequate sense of the perils into which these successors of the Marechal-Duc were leading the country.

'A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush' is an essentially French proverb. Seven years of peace, liberty, and financial prosperity under the Conservative Republic should have gone far, I thought, to convince the average French peasant that he might, after all, be safe under a republic. Doubtless this impression of mine was not wholly unfounded.

Yet, in spite of this important check upon the headway of the reaction against Republicanism provoked by the fanaticism and the financial extravagance of the Government of President Grevy--and in spite, too, of the open official pressure put upon the voters of France by the then Minister of the Interior, M. Allain-Targe, who issued a circular commanding all the prefects in France to stand 'neutral' between Republican candidates of all shades, but to exert themselves for the defeat of all 'reactionary' candidates; in spite of all this, the elections of October and November 1885 sent up about two hundred monarchical members, whose seats could by no trick or device be stolen from them, to the Chamber of Deputies, and pitted a popular vote of 3,608,578 declared enemies of the existing Republic against a popular vote of 4,377,063 citizens anxious to maintain or willing to submit to it.

From that time to the present day the Government of the Third French Republic has been standing on the defensive. It has steadily lost ground, with every pa.s.sing year, in the confidence and respect of the French people. The financial scandals, amid which President Grevy and his son-in-law, M. Wilson, disappeared and President Carnot was 'invented,' simply revealed a condition of things inherent in the very nature of the political organisation of France under the parliamentary revolutionists who came into power in 1879.

The Third French Republic, such as these men have made it, is condemned, hopelessly and irretrievably condemned, by its creed to be a government of persecution and by its machinery to be a government of corruption.

There is no escape for it.

V

It has made the Government of France--not the Administration, but the form, the const.i.tution of the Government--a party question, and it has organised the party which insists that France shall be a Republic, openly and avowedly upon the maxim of Danton that 'to the victors belong the spoils.' What has come of this maxim in the United States, where the form and const.i.tution of the Republic are accepted by all political parties, and the administration of the Government alone is a party question, I need not say.

There are 'black points' even on the horizon of the American Republic, as all Americans know. But there is no point blacker than this, as to which, however, it is possible with us that good men of all political parties may act together in the future as they have acted together in the past for Civil Service Reform. But what is possible with us is not possible with the party of the Republic in France. For, by making the Republic a republic of religious persecution, the Republicans of the Republic of Gambetta, Jules Ferry, Carnot, and Clemenceau have made it necessarily a republic of political proscription, and political proscription inevitably means political corruption.

If any man needs to learn this, let him study the story of the establishment of the Protestant Succession in England by Walpole, and the story of the overthrow of the United States Bank by President Jackson, in America. He may think the Protestant Succession in England, and the overthrow of the United States Bank in America, worth the price paid for each. But he will learn at least what the price was.

It will not be the fault of the Carnot Government--certainly not of the most energetic member of that Government, M. Constans, Minister of the Interior--if the French people fail to learn this.

A very much higher price will have to be paid for the extirpation of religion out of France, and the education of the French people into what M. Jules Ferry fantastically supposes to be 'Herbert Spencer's' gospel, identifying duty with self-indulgence!

The late Chamber, doubtless having the then impending elections in view, voted to abolish the Secret Service Fund of the Ministry of the Interior. It was a Platonic vote, referring only to the Budget of 1890, nor did it take effect. But on December 14, 1889, M. Constans, having made the re-establishment of this fund a cabinet question, got up in the Chamber and boldly declared that he wanted a Secret Service Fund of 1,600,000 fr., or about 64,000_l._ sterling; that he did not care what the Right thought about such a fund; that he meant to use it to 'combat conspiracies against the Republic,' and that he expected the majority to give it to him as a mark of their personal confidence.

That the War Office, in a country like France, should need a Secret Service Fund, is intelligible. It is intelligible that a Secret Service Fund should be legitimately required, perhaps, by the Foreign Office of a country like France. But why should a Secret Service Fund of more than 60,000_l._ sterling be required by the Home Secretary of a French Republic which is supposed to be 'a government of the people, by the people, for the people'?

I have an impression, which it will require evidence to remove, that no such Secret Service Fund as this is at the disposal of the Chancellor of the German Empire; and I find the whole expense of the Home Office of the monarchy of Great Britain set down at less than half the amount which, after a brief debate, the Republicans of the new Chamber in France, by a majority of a hundred votes, quietly put under the control of the French Home Secretary, to show their 'confidence' in the excellent man to whose unhesitating manipulation, through his prefects, of the votes cast in September and October last, so many of them are universally believed in France to be really indebted for their seats!

In the year 1889 the British budget shows an outlay on the Home Office of 29,963_l._

More than this, the 'Secret Service Fund' voted out of the pockets of the taxpayers of France into the strong box of the Minister of the Interior, considerably exceeds the cost of the British Treasury Office!

In 1888 the British budget gave the First Lord of the Treasury, to cover the expenses of that great and important department of the British monarchical government, 60,222_l._, or nearly 4,000_l._ less than the Republicans of the Third French Republic have generously put at the disposal of M. Constans to 'combat conspiracies' against the life of a Republic of which in the same breath we are asked to believe that it has just been acclaimed with enthusiasm by the ma.s.ses of the French people, as the fixed, final, and permanent government of their deliberate choice!

At this rate it will actually cost the taxpayers of Republican France more than two-thirds as much merely to keep the Republic from being suddenly done to death some fine day between breakfast and dinner, as it costs the taxpayers of Great Britain to keep up the state and dignity of the British sovereign from year to year! The total annual amount, I find, of the Civil List of Great Britain annually voted to the Queen, of the annual grants to other members of the Royal Family, and of the Viceroyalty of Ireland is 557,000_l._ Of this amount the Hereditary Revenues, surrendered to the nation, cover 464,000_l._ This leaves an annual charge upon the taxpayers of 93,000_l._ sterling, or only 29,000_l._ more than the sum deliberately voted by the Republican Chamber at Paris into the hands of M. Constans to be by him used in 'combating conspiracies' against the Republic!--or, in other words and in plain English, in making things comfortable for his political friends, and uncomfortable for his political enemies!

And this, observe, is a mere supplementary adjunct to the budget of this energetic and admirable minister, that budget having been fixed by the late Chamber for 1890 at 61,291,256 francs--or, in round numbers, 2,451,650_l._ sterling--of which handsome amount 13,059,570 francs, or 522,383_l._ sterling, being the outlay on the Central Administration and the prefectures, must be added to the 1,200,000 francs, or 48,000_l._ sterling, of the Presidential salary and allowances, in order to give us a basis for a fair approximate comparison of the cost to republican France of her executive President and prefects with the cost to monarchical Great Britain of her executive Sovereign, lords-lieutenant, and Viceroy of Ireland. Stated in round numbers, the result appears to be that for their republican President and their eighty-three republican prefects, the taxpayers of France pay annually out of their own pockets 570,383_l._ against 93,000_l._ paid annually out of their own pockets by the taxpayers of Great Britain for their monarchical sovereign, eighty-six lords-lieutenant, a Viceroy of Ireland, and thirty-two lieutenants of the Irish counties. From the point of view of the taxpayers, this would seem to lend some colour to Lord Beaconsfield's contention, that economy is to be found on the side of the system which rewards certain kinds of public service by 'public distinction conferred by the fountain of honour.'

The threadbare witticism about the Bourbons of 1815, who had learned nothing and forgotten nothing, may well be furbished up for the benefit of the Republicans who now control the Third French Republic. However true it may, or may not, have been of the Comte de Provence and the Comte d'Artois, Henri IV., who was certainly a Bourbon of the Bourbons, had a quick wit at learning, and upon occasion also a neat knack of forgetting. He thought Paris well worth a ma.s.s, heard the ma.s.s, and got Paris.

It was not necessary for the Republicans of the Third Republic, after the formidable lesson which France read them at the elections in 1885, to hear ma.s.s themselves. They were perfectly free to persist and to perish in their unbelief, and, like the hero of Sir Alfred Lyall's 'Land of Regrets,'

'Get d.a.m.ned in their commonplace way.'

All that Christian France asked of them in 1885 was that they would leave their fellow-citizens as free to hear ma.s.s as they themselves were free not to hear it. They had only to let the religion of the French people alone, to respect the consciences and the civil liberty of their countrymen, and the tides that were rising against them, and the Republic because of them, must inevitably have begun to subside.

The hostility between the Church and the Republic in France is absolutely, in its origin, one-sided. The Church is no more necessarily hostile to the Republic as a Republic in France, than it is to the Republic as a Republic in the United States or in Chile, or in Catholic Switzerland. The Church can be made hostile to a Republic by persecution and attack just as it can he made hostile in the same way to a monarchy.

Neither Philippe le Bel nor Henry the Eighth was much of a Republican.

But the Republicans of the Third Republic, in 1885, would learn nothing and forget nothing. They met the protest of millions of voters in France with a renewed virulence of Anti-Catholic and of Anti-Christian legislation, with an increased public expenditure, and with fresh political proscriptions.

Their purpose and their programme were succinctly and clearly summed up in the explicit declaration of M. Brisson, one of the most conspicuous leaders of the Republican party, that 'the Republic should be established in France, if necessary, by arms!'

What is the difference in principle between such a declaration as this and the attempt of the third Napoleon to establish an empire in Mexico by arms? In the one case we have a proselytising, atheistic Republic bent on abolis.h.i.+ng the religion of an unquestionable majority of the French people; in the other, we have a proselytising emperor bent on organizing empire in Mexico. In the light of the doctrine that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, the one undertaking is as monstrous as the other. The undertaking of the Emperor failed disastrously in Mexico; I do not believe, and for many reasons, that the undertaking of the Republic will succeed in France.

One, and the chief of these reasons, is, that I believe the hold of the Christian religion upon the body of the French people to be stronger, and not weaker, than it was before the propaganda of atheism began. In some of the chapters of this volume evidence, I think, will be found to show this. Under the plan which I have adopted in constructing the book, I have not attempted to marshal and co-ordinate the evidence. I have simply presented it, where it presented itself, either in conversations had by me at one or another place with persons qualified, as I thought, to speak with some authority, or in observations made by me in pa.s.sing through one or another region. It was a part of my plan too, as I have said, to register, under the general heading of one or another department, not only what struck me most while visiting that department in the way of things seen or heard there, but also such conversations bearing on general subjects as I there had, and such notes as I there made from the books bearing on French history, which I took with me wherever I went. As this book is not a treatise but a record, as it is not intended to maintain a preconceived thesis, but simply to indicate the grounds on which I have myself come to certain conclusions and convictions, I thought the method I have adopted the fairest, both to my readers and to myself, that I could pursue.