France and the Republic Part 4

Not less striking, in quite another sense, was the grim and stony silence with which the appeal of the Republican leader was received by the Right, representing, as the Third Republic has chosen to make the Right represent, the Religion, and with the Religion the Liberty, of France.

It reminded me, I am sorry to say, of the way in which a naturally amiable and considerate householder might be expected to listen to the arguments of an adroit and accomplished burglar showing cause why he should be locked into the plate-closet to protect him from the police.

M. Jules Ferry's offer was to suspend the application to certain religious bodies of the interdict fulminated against them by himself and the Republican Government. At last he paused, evidently oppressed by the steady, unresponsive gaze of his hearers.

Then the silence was broken!

'Do you speak for the Government?' called out a fiery deputy of the Right.

M. Jules Ferry hesitated a moment and then replied, 'No! I speak for myself; but there are many who think as I do!'

'You!' came back the hot response. 'You! bah!--you are nothing!'

The real response came later, on September 22, when, in his own town of St.-Die, the chief of the Opportunists, despite all the efforts of the prefect of the department and of the local authorities to carry him through, was beaten by a Monarchist. Obviously M. Ferry had heard how things looked from his committee at St.-Die when he made his fruitless appeal to the Eight in the Chamber!

Finding that nothing was to be expected from any cajolery of the Right, or any transactions with the outraged and awakened Christianity of France, the Government at last gave up the control of the impending elections unreservedly into the hands of M. Constans of Toulouse, of whom I have already spoken. To him, as Minister of the Interior, all the machinery of politics was abandoned. Every prefect in France became an electoral agent to do his bidding.

For the first time too, I believe, even in French administrative history, all the employees of the post-offices and the telegraph offices were transferred from the control of the Director of Posts and Telegraphs to the direct control of the Minister of the Interior.

Under his control they still remain, and it is now proposed to attach these services permanently to the Ministry which manages the elections.

Can anybody fail to see what this means?

At the suggestion of M. Constans, too, the Government resolved to attack the spectre. It determined to drive General Boulanger out of France. It is not easy to feel much sympathy with General Boulanger, who while Minister of War put into execution against the Comte de Paris and his family a most iniquitous decree, exiling them--for no other cause than the fact that they come of the family which made France a nation--from their country and their homes. But the proceedings which the Government of President Carnot took against General Boulanger were of such a character that the Procureur de la Republique, who was first directed to carry them out, withdrew from his post. Before they could be consummated by the arrest of General Boulanger, he suddenly left France. Into the subsequent action of the Senate, const.i.tuted as a 'High Court of Justice' to try him, I need not here enter.

Suffice it that after a canva.s.s organized in this fas.h.i.+on and in this spirit, and prosecuted by the Government with remorseless energy, the elections held on September 22 and October 6 have left the relative strength of the Government and of the Opposition in the new Chamber substantially what it was in the Chamber of 1885. This, in the circ.u.mstances, can only be described, in the language of one of the ablest Republican journalists in Paris, M. Jules Dietz of the _Journal des Debats_, as 'an escape from a disaster.'

The repulse of the a.s.sailants at the Redan did not save Sebastopol for the Russians. The margin of the proclaimed majorities by which many of the Government members of the new Chamber were returned, is so very small as to suggest of itself the pressure, in a very practical and concrete form, of the hand of authority on the returns at the polls. In twenty cases these majorities ranged from 6 to 200 votes.

In one case, in the Seine Inferieure, the details of which were given to me by persons of the highest character, with perfect liberty to use their names, the Government member was declared by the prefect, after two adjournments of the counting, to have been returned by a majority of 173 votes on a total poll, which proved upon examination to very considerably exceed the total number of voters registered in the district!

But, taking the general return of the votes cast at these elections as authentic, it is perfectly plain that the Monarchical party in France is stronger to-day than it was in 1885, and that the Republican party is weaker in France to-day than it was in 1885.

In 1885 the strength of the two parties stood as follows:--

Republicans of all shades 4,377,063 Conservatives and Monarchists 3,608,578 _________ Republican majority 768,485

In 1889 the strength of the two parties stands as follows:--

Conservative Monarchists 3,144,978 Boulangists 629,955 _________ 3,774,933

Opportunist Republicans 2,980,540 Radicals 981,809 Socialists 90,593 _________ 4,052,542

Republican majority 277,609

Here at once we see a falling off in the Republican majority, between 1885 and 1889, of no less than 490,876 votes. This is certainly significant enough when we remember that in 1885 the Monarchists did not everywhere and openly attack the Republic as a form of government, while in 1889 the issue was admitted on both sides to involve the existence of the Republic as a form of government.

But this is not all.

When we compare the total of the votes cast in 1885 and 1889, we find a diminution of no fewer than 788,821 votes. If this proves anything, it proves that the voters of France care very much less about the stability of the Republic in 1889 than they did in 1885. And this farther appears from the further fact that the falling off in the total of votes cast affected the Republican vote of 1889 much more seriously than it affected the Monarchical vote. Indeed it did not affect the Monarchical vote at all. On the contrary, while there was a positive falling off from the Republican vote of 324,521 between 1885 and 1889, there was a positive increase of the Monarchical vote, between 1885 and 1889, of 166,355.

How is it possible to weigh the meaning of these figures fairly without seeing that a form of government which exists in France only in virtue of a majority which a change of 140,000 votes in a total poll of 7,827,475 would have turned into a minority, can hardly be said to rest upon as firm a basis, for example, as that of the Third Empire, with its plebiscitary majority of seven millions in 1870 responding to its majority of seven millions in 1852?

Take away from the narrow Republican majority of 1889 the public functionaries, high and low, now counted in France by tens of thousands, with all who depend upon and are connected with them; give to the ballot in France the sanct.i.ty, freedom, and security which it has in England; compel the public authorities in France to abstain, as they are compelled in England to abstain, from direct interference with the exercise by the voters of the right of suffrage, and the evidence is overwhelming which goes to show that the Third Republic would be voted into limbo to-morrow!

VIII

To say this is to say that the Third Republic does not exist in France by the will of the French people; and this I believe to be absolutely true. The Third Republic exists by virtue of the control which its partisans have acquired of the administrative machinery of the Government, or, in other words, by virtue of political corruption and intimidation. So great has been the multiplication of functionaries great and small under the Third Republic, that it is not easy to get at an accurate estimate of their numbers. The best information I have been able to obtain leads me to believe that, exclusive of the military and naval forces, not less than two hundred thousand adult French citizens now draw their subsistence from the public treasury. This represents a population of at least a million of souls, so that we have nearly one in thirty of the inhabitants of France subjected to a direct or indirect pecuniary pressure from the central authorities at Paris. So openly is this pressure exerted under the Third Republic, that the Government of M. Carnot did not hesitate, during the Universal Exposition, and not long before the Legislative Elections began, to bring up no fewer than some thirteen thousand of the mayors of France to Paris at the public expense. There they were entertained--still at the public expense--with a sumptuous hospitality, which proves that, however orthodox the Republican Atheism may be of M. Constans, the Minister of the Interior, he has not yet struck the blessed St. Julian out of his calendar, at least when he is spending the money of the French taxpayers on his guests.

If I may believe what I afterwards heard in more than one provincial town, these worthy mayors (every one of whom, let me observe, exercises a direct personal and official authority over the elections) carried back to his astonished and envious fellow-citizens tales of Arabian, Tunisian, Algerian, and Annamite nights at the Exposition, and on the Champs-Elysees, to which no pen but that of Diderot or of the younger Crebillon could do adequate justice. 'I do not believe the Sultan,' said a clever and amusing lady to me at Toulouse, 'threw open the doors of Paradise so wide to the German Kaiser, at Constantinople, as did our more than liberal M. Constans to the married Mayors of France at Paris!'

On the other hand, at Honfleur, in the Calvados, it came to my knowledge that the local authorities, on the morning of the first Legislative Elections, brought over from another port on the Norman coast, a number of sailors, residents of Honfleur, and ent.i.tled to vote there, but absent in the pursuit of their calling. These honest Jack Tars came to Honfleur by the railway, in a kind of brigade, accompanied by a Government agent, who marched them up to the polls, and, having seen their votes safely deposited for the Government candidate, gave each man his return ticket for the next day, and set them all free to spend the interval in the bosom of their astonished and, I hope, delighted families.

From the point of view of the domestic peace of France, this proceeding was perhaps less reprehensible than the Belshazzar's Feast of M.

Constans and the thirteen thousand mayors. But from the point of view of the relations between the Third Republic and the deliberate independent electoral will of France, I think it must be admitted that they are, as the people say in the Western States of America, 'very much of a muchness!'

I ought to add that in France the mayors of the chief towns (or _chefs-lieux_), the arrondiss.e.m.e.nts, and the cantons are nominated by the Government at Paris. The mayors of the communes which owe their corporate freedom to the monarchy are elected, but the Third Republic has taken from them the control of their local taxation for purposes of the highest local interest. I should say also that all the sailors in France are obliged to be inscribed upon lists kept and controlled by the maritime prefects for the Ministry of the Marine, so that their whereabouts may be known or ascertainable at all times.

Americans who understand the inst.i.tutions of their own country find the true measure of the fitness of a people for self-government in their respect for the authority of a lawful Executive. The fatal mistake has been made by the Third as it was by the First French Republic of confounding respect for a lawful Executive with submission to an Executive controlled by a majority of the Legislature. The fact that the power of the public purse, in a const.i.tutional government, is necessarily confided to the Legislature, makes this mistake fatal--fatal at once to the liberty of the taxpayers who supply the public purse, and of whom the members of the Legislature are simply the agents and trustees, and to the efficiency and integrity of the Executive. I see with much interest, while the sheets of this book are going through the press in London, that this very grave point emerges from a brief correspondence published in the English newspapers between the Chancellor of the British Exchequer, Mr. Goschen, and Lord Lewisham.

Lord Lewisham, acting, it would appear, on behalf of a number of English Civil Servants, wrote to the Chancellor of the Exchequer concerning certain complaints of these servants, embodied in a memorial. In his reply, the Chancellor of the Exchequer alludes to an intimation which seems to have been made by the authors of this memorial of their intention to put a kind of pressure upon the Minister of the Crown through the House of Commons. Upon this Mr. Goschen observes: 'the memorialists should be reminded that their reference to an appeal to their representatives in Parliament, involving, as it would seem, a personal parliamentary canva.s.s to determine the relations between the State and its employes, contemplates a course of action not only injurious to the public interests, but opposed to the best traditions of the Civil Service.'

What the English Chancellor of the Exchequer here most wisely and properly condemns as a mischief a-brewing, has become the _jus et norma_ of 'the relations between the State and its employes' in France under the Third Republic.

The persons charged to execute and enforce the laws in France have come, under the Third Republic, from the President downwards throughout the Civil Service, to regard themselves, and to be regarded by the people, as the mere servants and instruments of the persons deputed by the people to consider what the laws shall be, and to adjust the public taxation to the necessities of the public service. The result necessarily is that the majority of the French Chamber of Deputies under the Third Republic has visibly become an irresponsible oligarchy of a kind most dangerous to liberty and the public weal.

By calling themselves, as they do, the 'party of the appeal to the people,' the French Imperialists show their doubtless well-founded conviction that the ma.s.ses of the French people are essentially monarchical in their ideas as to the best tenure by which the Executive authority can be held. To believe this, is to believe that the ma.s.ses of the French people are essentially lovers of order, not of disorder; that they instinctively put the executive above the legislative function in their conceptions of a political hierarchy, and therefore that they are essentially fitted for self-government. In this I am sure the Imperialists are right. But, unfortunately for them, the centralised administrative machinery of government in France by which the French people are now and have for a century past been prevented from governing themselves, though not indeed of Imperial origin, was so developed and perfected by the genius of the first Napoleon as to become identified in a sense with the Napoleonic dynasty.

It is a great misfortune of the French people that all great changes in their political system, no matter how promoted or in what spirit, must be wrought out within the vicious circle of this centralized administrative machinery. The initiative in liberating France from this centralized administrative machinery can only come from within the vicious circle itself. An independent Executive of France made Chief of the State by the popular will, and protected, as the Executive of Great Britain is protected, in the interest of liberty and of the people, by the hereditary principle, might take this initiative and begin the great work of so distributing throughout France the administrative responsibilities and powers now concentrated at Paris as to make the French people for the first time really their own masters.

Certainly no executive holding power by any tenure less independent and secure can ever effect this. That a real basis exists upon which this great work might be carried out in the local life, traditions, ideas and sympathies by which the widely different populations of what used to be known as the different provinces of the Kingdom of France are united among themselves and discriminated from one another, many able and well-informed Frenchmen believe. One of the most hasty and mischievous things done by the infatuated political tinkers of 1790 was to cut and carve up France into arbitrary political departments for the express purpose of disintegrating and destroying those ancient social and political organisms.

This purpose has not been effectually accomplished. What has been accomplished is to superpose upon the ancient organic France another arbitrary and administrative France. This latter arbitrary and administrative France controlled by a legislative oligarchy, which first makes and then uses the French Executive for its own purposes, it is which now calls itself the Third French Republic.

The traits and the tendencies as well as the origin of the Third Republic can be thoroughly studied at Paris. Without Paris the Third Republic never could have existed. It exists now in virtue of the political machinery of which Paris is the centre. That it could not withstand for a day any severe shock given to that machinery was confessed, as I have said, by its own government in the abject panic which followed the victory of General Boulanger at the polls of the capital on January 27, 1889.

The traits and the tendencies of France, on the contrary, must be studied in the provinces. There was always more wit than wisdom in the famous saying of Heine--that to talk about the opinion of the provinces in France was like talking about the opinion of a man's legs--the head being the seat of thought, and Paris being the head. But the saying was uttered during the reign of Louis Philippe, and long before the establishment of universal suffrage by the Second Empire. With universal suffrage and with the development during the past twenty years of the railway and of the telegraphic system throughout France, the importance of the provinces relatively to Paris has greatly and steadily increased.

While steam and electricity have, of course, increased the strength of the pressure which an aggressive oligarchy controlling the centralised administrative machinery of the Government at Paris can put upon the opinions and the interests of France, they have also, it must be remembered, increased the power of France to resist and to resent that pressure. They have established return currents, the force of which grows visibly greater every year. The great provincial towns and cities of France, for example, are ceasing to be dependent, as they formerly were, upon the press of Paris for their news and views of which pa.s.ses in the capital.

There are no such journals yet in any of the French provinces as the powerful newspapers which are to be found throughout the United Kingdom; but there is a steady and very notable growth in the circulation of the more important local journals, and the telegraph brings them the news of the day from Paris long before the Parisian papers can reach their readers. The development of these influences has been checked, and is still checked, by the official control at Paris of the telegraphic system, and it is worth noting here that, just before the legislative elections, the Minister of the Interior, to whom the control of the post office and of the telegraphs had been transferred, caused the telephone offices throughout France to be taken possession of by the officials of the Government, though the negotiations with the private companies owning the telephones for the purchase of them were still incomplete, and though the private owners formally protested against the act.

But though the Government may check and r.e.t.a.r.d, it cannot prevent the development of these influences. France, such as I have found it, full of activity, full of energy, leavened with a genuine leaven of religious faith, irritated by a persistent mockery of the forms of liberty into prizing and demanding the realities of liberty, must grow steadily stronger. The Republic condemned to a policy of persecution and of financial profligacy must grow steadily weaker.

Instead of trying to develop France, or letting France develop herself into a republic, the partisans of a Republic have invented successive republics, each more grotesque and uncomfortable than its predecessor, and insisted on cramming France into them. So far the republics have gone to pieces and France has survived. So intense is her vitality, so tough appears to me to be the old traditional fibre in many parts of the French body politic, that before the great chapter of the _Gesta Dei per Francos_ can be safely a.s.sumed to be finally closed, a good many more milliards will have to be spent on that State Establishment of Irreligion and Disestablishment of G.o.d which the 'true Republicans' of the Third Republic call 'laicisation.' Long before those milliards can be raised and spent, the Third Republic will come to the bottom I believe, if not of the purse, certainly of the patience, of the French people.

It is already admitted on all hands that so slight a thing as the reappearance of General Boulanger at Paris on September 21, 1889, would have completely reversed the general result of the elections of the next day. The birthday of the First Republic would have been celebrated by the funeral of the Third. The failure of General Boulanger then to reappear may have made an end of General Boulanger, but it certainly did not establish the Republic.

On the contrary, here as we see is the Minister of the Interior, who knows the situation better than any of his colleagues, invalidating election after election in the Chamber of Deputies, and beginning the work of financial reform by demanding an enormous Secret Service Fund to protect the Republic against conspirators!