Project Gutenberg's France and the Republic, by William Henry Hurlbert

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: France and the Republic
       A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces
       During the 'Centennial' Year 1889

Author: William Henry Hurlbert

Release Date: May 16, 2007 [EBook #21498]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRANCE AND THE REPUBLIC ***




Produced by Julia Miller, Janet Blenkinship and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF/Gallica) at
http://gallica.bnf.fr)









  FRANCE
  AND THE REPUBLIC

  A RECORD OF THINGS SEEN AND LEARNED
  IN THE FRENCH PROVINCES DURING
  THE 'CENTENNIAL' YEAR 1889

  BY
  WILLIAM HENRY HURLBERT
  AUTHOR OF 'IRELAND UNDER COERCION'

  _WITH A MAP_

  LONDON
  LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
  AND NEW YORK: 15 EAST 16th STREET

  1890

  _All rights reserved_



  PRINTED BY
  SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
  LONDON

  Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1890
  by William Henry Hurlbert
  in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington


       *       *       *       *       *


  CONTENTS


  INTRODUCTION
                                                                   PAGE

  I. Scope of the book--French Republicanism condemned by
  Swiss and American experience--Its relations to the
  French people                                                   xxiii

  II. M. Gambetta's Parliamentary revolution--What Germany
  owes to the French Republicans--Legislative usurpation
  in France and the United States                                  xxvi

  III. The Executive in France, England, and America--Liberty
  and the hereditary principle--General Grant on the
  English Monarchy--Washington's place in American
  history                                                        xxxvii

  IV. The legend of the First Republic--A carnival of incapacity
  ending in an orgie of crime--The French people never
  Republican--Paris and the provinces--The Third Republic
  surrendered to the Jacobins, and committed to
  persecution and corruption--Estimated excess of expenditure
  over income from 1879 to 1889, 7,000,000,000 francs
  or 280,000,000_l._                                                 li

  V. Danton's maxim, 'To the victors belong the spoils'--Comparative
  cost of the French and the British Executive
  machinery--The Republican war against religion.--The
  present situation as illustrated by past events                lxviii

  VI. Foreign misconceptions of the French people--An English
  statesman's notion that there are 'five millions of
  Atheists' in France--Mr. Bright and Mr. Gladstone the last
  English public men who will 'cite the Christian Scriptures
  as an authority'--Signor Crispi on modern constitutional
  government and the French 'principles of 1789'--Napoleon
  the only 'Titan of the Revolution'--The debt of
  France for her modern liberty to America and to England         lxxvi
  VII. The Exposition of 1889 an electoral device--Panic of the
  Government caused by Parisian support of General
  Boulanger--Futile attempt of M. Jules Ferry to win back
  Conservatives to the Republic--Narrow escape of the
  Republic at the elections of 1889--Steady increase of
  monarchical party since 1885---Weakness of the Republic
  as compared with the Second Empire                             lxxxix

  VIII. How the Republic maintains itself--A million of people
  dependent on public employment--M. Constans 'opens
  Paradise' to 13,000 Mayors--Public servants as political
  agents--Open pressure on the voters--Growing strength
  of the provinces.--The hereditary principle alone can now
  restore the independence of the French Executive--Diplomatic
  dangers of actual situation--Socialism or a
  Constitutional Monarchy the only alternatives                    xcvi


  CHAPTER I

  IN THE PAS-DE-CALAIS

  Calais--Natural and artificial France--The provinces and the
  departments--The practical joke of the First Consulate--The
  Counts of Charlemagne and the Prefects of Napoleon--President
  Carnot at Calais--Politics and Socialism in Calais--Immense
  outlay on the port, but works yet unfinished--Indifference
  of the people--A president with a grandfather--The 'Great Carnot'
  and Napoleon--The party of the 'Sick at heart'--The Louis XVI. of
  the Republic--Léon Say and the 'White Mouse'--Gambetta's victory
  in 1877--Political log-rolling, French and American--Republican
  extravagance and the 'Woollen Stocking'--Boulanger and his
  legend--Wanted a 'Great Frenchman'--The Duc d'Aumale
  and the Comte de Paris--The Republican law of exile--The
  French people not Republican--The Legitimists and the farmers--A
  French journalist explains the Presidential progress--Why
  decorations are given                                            1-22


  CHAPTER II

  IN THE PAS-DE-CALAIS--(_continued_)

  Boulogne--Arthur Young and the Boulonnais--Boulogne and Quebec--The
  English and French types of civilisation--A French ecclesiastic
  on the religious question--The oppressive school law of
  1886--The Church and the Concordat--Rural communes paying
  double for free schools--Vexatious regulations to prevent establishment
  of free schools--All ministers of religion excluded from
  school councils--Government officers control the whole system--Permanent
  magistrates also excluded--Revolt of the religious
  sentiment throughout France against the new system--Anxiety
  of Jules Ferry to make peace with the Church--Energy shown
  by the Catholics in resistance--St.-Omer--The Spanish and
  scholastic city of Guy Fawkes and Daniel O'Connell--M. De la
  Gorce, the historian of 1848--High character of the
  population--Improvement in tone of the French army--Morals of the
  soldiers--Devotion of the officers to their profession--Derangement of
  the Executive in France by the elective principle--The 'laicisation'
  of the schools--Petty persecutions--Children forbidden to
  attend the funeral of their priest--The Marist Brethren at Albert--Albert
  and the Maréchal d'Ancre--A chapter of history in a
  name--Little children stinting their own food, to send another
  child to school--President Carnot and the nose of M. Ferry--French
  irreligion in the United States--The case of Girard
  College--Can Christianity be abolished in France?--The declared
  object of the Republic--Morals of Artois--Dense population--Fanatics
  of the family--Increase of juvenile crime--American
  experience of the schools without religion--A New England report
  on 'atrocious and flagrant crimes in Massachusetts'--Relative
  increase of native white population and native crime in America--An
  American Attorney-General calls the public school system
  'a poisonous fountain of misery and moral death'--A local
  heroine of St.-Omer--The statue of Jacqueline Robins--The
  Duke of Marlborough and the Jesuits College--A curious sidelight
  on English politics in 1710--How St.-Omer escaped a
  siege                                                           23-43


  CHAPTER III

  IN THE PAS-DE-CALAIS--(_continued_)

  Aire-sur-la-Lys--Local objections to a national railway--A visit to a
  councillor-general--Pentecost in Artois--The Artesians in 1789--Wealth
  and power of the clergy--Recognition of the Third
  Estate long before the Revolution--The English and the French
  clergy in the last century--Lord Macaulay and Arthur Young--Sympathy
  of the curés with the people--Turgot, Condorcet and
  the rural clergy---The Revolution and public education--M. Guizot
  the founder of the French primary schools--The liberal school
  ordinance of 1698--The Bishop of Arras, in 1740, on the duty of
  educating the people--The experience of Louisiana as to public
  schools and criminality--The two Robespierres saved and educated
  by priests--What came of it--A rural church and congregation
  in Artois--The notary in rural France--A village procession--'Beating
  the bounds' in France--An altar of verdure and roses--The
  villagers singing as they march--Ancient customs in
  Northern France                                                 44-52


  CHAPTER IV

  IN THE PAS-DE-CALAIS--(_continued_)

  Aire-sur-la-Lys--Local and general elections in France--A public meeting
  in rural Artois--A councillor-general and his constituents--Artois
  in the 18th and 19th centuries--Well-tilled fields, fine
  roads, hedges, and orchards--Effect of long or short leases--A
  meeting in a grange--French, English, and American audiences--Favouritism
  under the conscription--Extravagant outlay on
  scholastic palaces--Almost a scene--A political disturbance
  promoted--Canvassing in England and France--Tenure of office in
  the French Republic--'To the victors belong the spoils,' the
  maxim not of Jackson but of Danton--'Epuration,' what it
  means--If Republicans are not put into office 'they will have
  civil war'--'No justice of the peace nor public school teacher to
  be spared'--'Terror and anarchy carried into all branches of the
  public service'--M. de Freycinet declares that 'servants of the
  State have no liberty in politics'--The Tweed régime of New
  York officially organised in France---Men of position reluctant
  to take office--The expense of French elections--1,300,000_l._
  sterling the estimated cost of an opposition campaign--A little
  dinner in a French country house--The French cuisine national
  and imported--An old Flemish city--Devastations of the Revolution--The
  beautiful Church of St.-Pierre--A picturesque Corps
  de Garde--The tournament of Bayard at Aire--Sixteenth-century
  merry-makings at Aire--Gifts to Mary of England on her marriage
  to Philip of Spain--The ancient city of Thérouanne--Public
  schools in the 17th century--Small landholders in France before
  1789.                                                           53-72


  CHAPTER V

  IN THE SOMME

  Amiens--Picardy Old and New--Arthur Young and Charles James
  Fox in Amiens--'The look of a capital'--The floating gardens
  of Amiens--A stronghold of Boulangism--Protest of Amiens
  against the Terror of 1792--The French nation and the Commune
  of Paris--Vergniaud denounces the Parisians as the 'slaves of the
  vilest scoundrels alive'--Gambetta and his balloon--Amiens and
  the Revolution of September 1870--The rise of M. Goblet--The
  'great blank credit opened to the Republic in 1870'--What has
  become of it--The Prussians in Amiens--Warlike spirit of the
  Picards--A political portrait of M. Goblet by a fellow citizen--A
  Roman son and his father's funeral--A typical Republican senator
  and mayor--How M. Petit demolished the crosses in the cemetery--M.
  Spuller as Prefect of the Somme--The Christian Brothers and
  their schools--M. Jules Ferry withholds the salaries earned by
  teachers--The Emperor Julian of Amiens--How the Sisters were
  turned out of their schools--The mayor, the locksmith, and the
  curate--Mdlle. de Colombel--A senatorial epistle--Ulysses
  deserted by Calypso--Why Boulangism flourishes at Amiens--The
  First Republic invoked to justify the destruction of crosses
  on graves--The Cathedral of Amiens and Mr. Ruskin.              73-94


  CHAPTER VI

  IN THE SOMME--(_continued_)

  Amiens--Party names taken from persons--The effect of Republican
  misrule at Amiens--Why the Monarchists acted with the
  Boulangists--The Picards incline towards the Empire--How the
  Republic of 1848 captured France--Armand Marrast and the
  French mail coaches--Mr. Sumner's story--The political value
  of paint--Paris and the provinces--M. Mermeix offers with a
  few million francs and a few thousand rowdies to change the
  French Government--General Boulanger's campaign in Picardy--Capturing
  the mammas by kissing the babies--The Monarchical
  peasantry--The National Accounts of France not balanced for
  years--Conservatives excluded from the Budget Committee--The
  Boulanger programme--Expenses of the political machine in
  France, England, and America--The Boulangist campaign conducted
  by voluntary subscriptions--General Boulanger and the
  army--The common sewer of the discontent of France--The
  local finances of a French city--Municipal expenses of Amiens--Pressure
  of the octroi--A local deficit of millions since the
  Republicans got into power--The mayor and the prefect control
  the accounts--Immense expenditure on scholastic palaces--Estimated
  annual increase in France since 1880 of local indebtedness,
  10,000,000_l._ sterling--M. Goblet on the growth of young men's
  monarchical clubs--History of the _octroi_--General prosperity of
  Picardy--Rural ideas of aristocracy--Land ownership in Ireland
  and France--'Land-grabbing' in Picardy a hundred years ago--The
  corvée abolished before the Revolution, but it still exists
  under the Republic, as a _prestation en nature_--Public education
  in Picardy two centuries ago--Small tenants as numerous under
  Edward II. in Picardy as small proprietors now are--Home rule
  needed in France--'The opinion of a man's legs'                 95-124


  CHAPTER VII

  IN THE AISNE

  St.-Gobain--Paris and the Ile-de-France--Reclamation of the
  commons--Mischievous haste in the Revolutionary transfer of
  lands--The evolution of property and order in France and
  England--The flower gardens of France--The home counties
  around London compared with the departments around Paris--Superiority
  of the French fruit and vegetable markets--The
  military city of La Fère--A local cabbage-leaf--French farmers
  and the Treaties of Commerce--Arthur Young at St.-Gobain--The
  largest mirror in the world--The great French glassworks--'An
  industrial flower on a seignorial stalk, springing from a feudal
  root'--Evolution without Revolution--Two centuries and a half of
  industrial progress--Labour in the Middle Ages--The Irish apostle
  of North-eastern France--The forests of France--A factory in a
  château--A centenarian royal porter--The Duchesse de Berri and
  the Empress Eugénie--A co-operative association of consumers--A
  great manufacturing company working on lines laid down under
  Louis XIV.--Glass-working, Venetian and French--A jointstock
  company of the 18th century--The old and new school of factory
  discipline--French industry and the Terror--'Two aristocrats'
  called in to save a confiscated property--St.-Gobain and the Eiffel
  Tower--Royal luxuries in 1673, popular necessaries of life in 1889--How
  great mirrors are cast--Beauty of the processes--The
  coming age of glass--Glass pavements and roofs--The hereditary
  principle among the working classes--Practical co-operation of
  capital and labour--Schools, asylums, workmen's houses and
  gardens, social clubs, and savings-banks--Co-operative pension
  funds--A great economic family--Of 2,650 workpeople more than
  50 per cent. employed for more than ten years--A subterranean
  lake--The crypts of St.-Gobain and the Cisterns of Constantinople--A
  spectral gondolier--A Venetian promenade with coloured
  lanterns underground                                           125-161


  CHAPTER VIII

  IN THE AISNE--(_continued_)

  Laon, Chauny, and St.-Gobain--The French Revolution and Spanish
  soda--The most extensive chemical works in France--A miniature
  Rotterdam--A Cité Ouvrière--The religious war in Chauny--Local
  and immigrant labour--M. Allain-Targé on Boulanger, the
  High Court of Justice, common sense and common honesty---French
  elections, matters of bargain and sale--'The blackguardocracy'--Sketches
  by a Republican minister--French freemasonry
  a persecuting sect--Their power in the Government--Utterly unlike
  the freemasonry of England, Germany, or America--The war
  against Christianity in France and Spanish America--1867 and
  the industrial progress of France--Extent of the chemical works
  of France--Retiring pensions for workmen--Chauny in the olden
  time--How the honest burghers freed their city in 1432--A contrast
  with the rioters of the Bastille in 1789--Henri IV. and La
  Belle Gabrielle--Chauny and the Revolution--The murder of
  d'Estaing--Chauny acclaims the Restoration, and gives a gold
  medal to the Prussian commandant--Public charity and public
  education in the 12th century--Benevolent foundations pillaged
  in 1793--Law and order under the _ancien régime_--A canal in
  the law courts--An enterprising American turns rubbish into
  indiarubber at Chauny                                          162-185


  CHAPTER IX

  IN THE AISNE--(_continued_)

  Laon--A feudal fortress home--Chauny and the green monkeys of
  Rabelais--The festival of the jongleurs and the learned dogs--A
  damsel of Chauny on English good sense and Queen Victoria--A
  region of parks and châteaux--The cradle of the French Monarchy--How
  the Revolution robbed France--The rural reign of pillage
  and murder--Horrors committed in the provinces during 1789--Arthur
  Young and Gouverneur Morris on the general depravation
  and lawlessness--The National Assembly a mere noisy 'mob'--The
  outbreak of crime which preceded the Terror--The truth
  about Madame Roland--Her hatred of Marie Antoinette and her
  thirst for blood--The legend of the Gironde--Brissot de Warville
  on robbery as a virtuous action--The relations of the French
  Revolution to property--France more free before 1789 than after
  it--The laws against emigrants--Girls of fourteen condemned to
  death--Emigration made a crime, that property might be pillaged--How
  Irène de Tencin defended the family estate--The story of
  the Saporta family--The Laonnais in the 18th century--Wide-spread
  ruin of its churches, convents, and châteaux--Destruction
  of accumulated capital--How syndicates of rogues stole bronzes,
  brasswork, and monuments--The story of two châteaux--The
  bishop's château at Anizy--The burghers and the seigneurs in
  the 16th century--The local 'directory' in 1790--Wreck, ruin,
  and robbery--The Château of Pinon--Once the property of a
  granddaughter of Edward III. of England--A domain of the Duc
  d'Orléans--A tragedy of love and murder--Death of the Marquis
  d'Albret--How Pinon passed to the family of De Courvals--The
  present owner an American lady--The finest château in the
  Laonnais--What has the Laonnais gained from the ruin of the
  Anizy?                                                         186-225


  CHAPTER X.

  IN THE AISNE--(_continued_)

  Laon--The ruins of Coucy-le-Château--A rural inn in France--The
  sugar crisis--The birthplace of César de Vendóme--The bell
  which tolls and is heard by the dying alone--The hanging of boys
  for killing rabbits--Game laws, French and English--The true
  story of Enguerrand de Coucy--A little feudal city--The finest
  donjon in France--An official guardian--A dinner with four
  councillors-general--'What France really wants is a man'--Agricultural
  philosophers--How a councillor-general tested chemicals--Peasantry
  on the highway--A land of gardens--A city set
  on a hill--Simple good-natured people--A raging Boulangist at
  Laon--What a barber saw in Tonkin--The diamond belt of King
  Norodom--Castelin the friend of Boulanger--A revolutionary
  shoemaker on government by committees--Evils of the
  Exposition--Foreigners steal the ideas of France--The railways, the
  new feudal system--They are the real 'enemy' of the people--Extravagance
  of the ministers--Freemasonry at Laon--How it
  controls the press--The rise of Deputy Doumer--How he lost
  his seat in 1889--The author of 'Chez Paddy' at Château
  Thierry--Over-zeal of the curés--The question of working men's unions--M.
  Doumer's report on the Law of Associations--He proves that
  the Republic has done absolutely nothing with this law--'Five
  years' spent in drawing up a report--'The Republic never existed
  until 1879'--And nothing done for working men until 1888--M.
  de Freycinet and M. Carnot only 'studied measures which might
  be taken;' but were not!--The first practical step taken by M.
  Doumer by making an enormous report in 1888, recommending
  things to be done hereafter--The true Republic eluding for ten
  years questions which the Emperor grappled with in 1867--The
  voters of Laon in September defeat M. Doumer--A curious little
  chapter of French politics--M. Doumer's coquetry with General
  Boulanger--After his defeat M. Doumer becomes secretary of
  the President of the Chamber and lets the working men's question
  alone--Politics as a profession in France and the United
  States--Intense centralisation of power in France makes it easier
  and more profitable than in America                            226-258


  CHAPTER XI

  IN THE NORD

  Valenciennes--The shabbiest historic town in North-eastern
  France--Perfect cultivation of French Flanders--Cock-fighting and
  flowers--Prosperity of the cabarets--One to every forty-four inhabitants
  around Valenciennes--Growth of the mining and manufacturing
  towns--Interesting buildings in Valenciennes--Carelessness of the
  citizens about their city--A graceful edifice of the 15th century
  falling into ruins--Valenciennes in the days of the Hanse of
  London--Mediæval burghers and their sovereigns--A citizen of
  Valenciennes, in 1357, the richest man in Europe--Festivals in
  the olden times--Religious wars--Vauban at Valenciennes--How
  the clothworkers fled from the Spanish persecution--Dumouriez
  at Valenciennes--The Hôtel de Ville--Interesting local artists
  from Simon Marmion down to Watteau and Pater--The triptych
  of Rubens--Some historic portraits--The Musée Carpeaux--The
  coal mines of Anzin--14,035 workmen there employed and
  200,210,702 tons of coal extracted--Competition with Belgium,
  the Pas-de-Calais, England, and Germany--The coal mines of
  Anzin organised a century and a half ago--The discovery of coal
  in North-eastern France--Energy shown by the local _noblesse_--Pierre
  Mathieu, an engineer, strikes the vein in 1734--The lords
  of the soil claim their rights over the coal--A long lawsuit ending
  in a compromise--A business arrangement under the _ancien
  régime_--The hereditary principle recognised in the organisation
  and undisturbed by the Revolution--An orderly, quiet, and prosperous
  town--A region of factories intermingled with farms--Charming
  home of the director--The company encourages workmen's
  homes, with gardens and allotments--An improvement on the
  Cité Ouvrière--2,628 model homes now occupied by workmen--For
  three francs a month a workman secures a well-built cottage,
  with drainage and cellarage, six good rooms and closets, and a
  plot of ground--2,500 families hold garden sites for cultivation--Fuel
  allowed, and a general 'participation in profits' of a practical
  sort--The right of the workmen to be consulted recognised at
  Anzin a century and a half ago--Beneficial and educational
  institutions--An industrial republic--How the National Assembly
  meddled with the mines--Mining laws in France, ancient and
  modern--Influence of politics on the output of the mines--Every
  Republican development at Paris diminishes, and every check to
  Republicanism at Paris develops, the great coal industry--The
  great strike of 1884--During that year the company expended for
  the benefit of the workmen a sum equivalent to the profits divided
  amongst the shareholders--What caused the collision therefore
  between capital and labour?--A syndicate of miners under a
  former Anzin workman, Basly, puts a pressure from Paris upon
  the workmen at Anzin to develop the strike--The pretext found in
  contracts granted to good workmen--The object of the strike
  to establish the equality of bad with good workmen--Boycotting
  and intimidation--Dynamite and Radical deputies from
  Paris--A Republican minister asks the company to accept Basly
  and his syndicate as an umpire--Bitter opposition of the Basly
  syndicate to the saving fund system--They demand a State
  pension fund--And pending this a fund controlled by the syndicate--A
  despotism of agitators--Upshot of the strike--The mines in
  the Pas-de-Calais--Visits to workmen's houses--Fine appearance
  and carriage of the miners--Their politics--Women and children--Good
  ventilation and sanitation of the mines--'No man can be
  a miner not bred to it as a boy'--Excellent housekeeping of the
  women--Miners of Southern and Northern France--Influence of
  high altitudes on character--The elective principle in the mines--Morals
  and conduct of the mining people--Churches and
  schools--A children's school at St. Waast--A digression into the
  Artois--What the Tiers-Etat of Northern France wanted in 1789--The
  _cahiers_ of the Tiers-Etat--Respect for vested interests--A
  visit to St.-Amand--The conspiracy of Dumouriez--Ruin of a
  magnificent abbey--A beautiful belfry--Interesting pictures by
  Watteau--Co-operation at Anzin--What its advantages are to the
  workmen--Eight per cent. dividends to the members in 1866, and
  an average during 23 years to 1889 of 11-80/100 per cent.--How the
  workmen and their families live--Table of articles purchased--Attendance
  upon the schools--Influence of women and families--Increase
  of juvenile crime under irreligious education in France
  and the United States--Louis Napoleon's National Retiring Fund
  for Old Age--Regulations of the Anzin Council affecting this
  fund--Average expenditure of the Anzin company for the benefit of
  workmen 'fifty centimes for every ton of coal extracted'--The
  Decazeville strikes in 1888--They begin with the murder of one
  of the best engineers and end with a workman's banquet to the
  engineer-in-chief                                              259-331


  CHAPTER XII

  IN THE NORD--(_continued_)

  Lille--The _Flamand flamingant_--Pertinacity of the Flemish tongue--A
  historic city without monuments--Old customs and traditions--The
  Musée Wicar--The unique wax bust--A 'pious foundation'
  of art, and M. Carolus Duran--Excellent educational institutions
  of Le Nord--A land flowing with beer--Increase of the factory
  populations--Decrease of drunkenness in the cities--Increase in
  the rural districts--Special cabarets for women--Should women
  smoke?--Flemish cock-fighting and the example of England--A
  model Republican prefect--Juvenile prostitution--The souls of
  the people and their votes--Danton's system of uneducated judges--Dislike
  of good people to politics--A pessimist rebuked--The
  Monarchist majorities in Lille--Inaccurate representation of the
  people in the Chamber--Hazebrouck and its Dutch gardens--The
  Republic hated for its extravagance--Relative strength of
  Republican and Monarchical majorities--Elections conducted
  under secret instructions--Cutting down majorities--The case of
  M. Leroy-Beaulieu in the Hérault--Keeping out dangerous
  economists--Ballot 'stuffing' in France and the United States--The
  methods of Robespierre readopted--Systematic 'invalidation'
  of elections--The people must not choose the wrong men--Boulanger
  and Joffrin--'Tactical necessities' in politics--The
  delusion of universal suffrage--An Austrian view of the elective
  and hereditary principles--Energy of the Catholics in North-eastern
  France--Father Damien--Public charity--Hereditary mendicants
  in French Flanders--Dogs and _douaniers_--The division of
  communes--Foundling hospitals and the struggle for life--Mutual
  Aid Societies--Is woman a 'Clubbable' animal?--M. Welche and
  the agricultural syndicates--'Les Prévoyants de l'Avenir,' a phenomenal
  success--It begins in 1882 with 757 members and 6,237
  francs; in 1889 it numbers 59,932 members, with a capital of
  1,541,868 francs--The Franco-German war and the religious
  sentiment--The great Catholic University--Private contributions
  of 11,000,000 francs--The scientific and medical schools--M.
  Ferry and the free universities--Catholic education in France
  and the United States--The case of Girard College--The dangers
  of the French system--The monopoly of the University of France--Liberal
  outlay of the Catholics of Paris--A mediæval Catholic
  merchant--'The work of God' in a business partnership--Mutual
  assistance in the Lille factories--Model houses at Roubaix--A
  true _Mont-de-Piété_--The Masurel fund of 1607--Loans without
  interest--A prosperous charity plundered by the Republic--A
  benevolent fund of 455,454 francs in 1789 reduced to 10,408
  francs in 1803--The fund restored under the Monarchy and
  Second Empire--The 'King William's Fund' of the Netherlanders
  in London--Count de Bylandt and Sir Polydore de
  Keyser                                                         332-368


  CHAPTER XIII

  IN THE MARNE

  Reims--The capital of the French kings--Clotilde and Clovis, Jeanne
  d'Arc and Urban II.--Vineyards and factories--The wines of
  Champagne known and unknown--The red wine of Bouzy--Mr.
  Canning and still Champagne--The syndication of famous brands--A
  visit to the cardinal archbishop--Employers and employed--The
  Catholic workmen's clubs and the Christian corporations--M.
  Léon Harmel--The religious education of a factory--How the
  workmen Christianised themselves--The conversion of a wife by
  a gown--The local authorities discouraging religion--'Planting
  Christians like vines'--'The Rights of Man' and capital and
  labour--Mediæval and modern methods compared--Capital and
  universal suffrage--Money in the first Revolution--Le Pelletier,
  the millionaire, and the mobs of the Palais Royal--The dramatic
  justice of a murder--Unwritten chapters of revolutionary history--The
  duty of employers--'The Masters' Catechism'--The invasion
  of 1870 and the Christian corporations--Modern syndications and
  the ancient _maîtrise_--Professional syndicates and professional
  strikes--Good out of evil--The working men and the upper classes--Count
  Albert de Mun--A popular vote against universal suffrage--The
  Holy See and the Catholic labour movement in France--The
  parochial clergy and the laymen--The Wesleyans and the
  Catholics--Privileged purveyors--The financial aspect of the
  Catholic corporations--A revival of the old guilds--The national
  system of the corporations--Provincial and general assemblies--The
  German _Cultur-Kampf_ and the French Catholic clubs--The
  Republican attack on religion--Religious freedom and freedom
  from religion--The State church of unbelief--The 'moral unity'
  men--Napoleon and Guizot--The Jacobins of 1792 and 1879--Moral
  unity under Louis XIV.--Alva and M. Jules Ferry--A
  chapter of the Revolution at Reims--Mr. Carlyle's little 'murder
  of about eight persons'--The political influence of massacres--The
  'days of September' and the elections to the Convention--How
  they chose Jacobin deputies at Reims--The documentary
  story of the eight murders--Mayors under the Republic--The
  defence of Lille--How the Republic voted a monument and Louis
  Philippe built it--Desecration of a great cathedral--The legend of
  Ruhl and the sacred ampulla--The demolition of St.-Nicaise and
  the bargain of Santerre--How Napoleon disciplined the Faubourg
  St.-Antoine--Is the Cathedral of Reims in danger?--Its restoration
  under the cardinal archbishop--The budget of public worship--Expenses
  of the administration--The salaries of the clergy, Protestant
  and Catholic--Jewish rabbis paid less than servants in the
  Ministère--Steady cutting down of the budget--No statistics of religious
  opinion in France--A Benedictine archbishop--Great increase of
  the religious sentiment in Reims--The Church driven by the
  Republic into opposition--Léon Say and the present Government--The
  home of Montaigne--A deputy of the Dordogne invalidated
  to snub Léon Say--Socrates and David Hume in modern France--Dogmatic
  irreligion--Jules Simon on the proscription of Christianity--Abolishing
  the history of France--A practical protest of
  the Catholic Marne--The great pope of the crusades--Catholic
  and Masonic processions--The Triduum of Urban II.--A great
  celebration at Châtillon--Hildebrand and his disciple--The
  Angelus and the 'Truce of God'--Mgr. Freppel on the anti-religious
  war--Jeanne d'Arc at Reims--A magnificent festival--Gounod's
  Mass of the Maid of Orléans--Catholic protest against
  the persecution of the Jews--The Republic threatens the grand
  rabbis with the archbishops--Deriding a death-bed in a
  hospital--The amnesty of the Communards--The rehabilitation of
  crime--Tyranny in the village schools--Religious freedom in
  France and Turkey--The home of Jeanne d'Arc--'Laicising'
  Domrémy-la-Pucelle--Piety and hypnotism--The chamber and garden of
  Jeanne--Louis XI. and the French yeomen--A shrine converted
  into a show--A scurvy job in a place of pilgrimage--The banner
  of Patay--Jeanne and her voices--A western worshipper of the
  Maid of Orléans--The Château de Bourlémont--The Princesse
  d'Hénin and Madame de Staël--The revolutionary traffic in passports--A
  generous act of Madame Du Barry--'Laicisation' in the
  Vosges--The defeat of Jules Ferry--The Monarchists going up,
  the Republicans going down                                     369-436


  CHAPTER XIV

  IN THE CALVADOS

  Val Richer--The home of Guizot--The French Protestants and the
  Third Republic--Free education in France the work of Guizot--Education
  in France checked by the Revolution--Mediæval provisions
  for public education--The effect of the English and the
  religious wars upon education in France--Indiscriminate destruction
  of educational foundations by the First Republic--Progress
  of illiteracy after 1793--The guillotine as a financial expedient--The
  Directory painted by themselves--The two Merlins--'Republican
  Titans' wearing royal livery--Barras on the cruelty of
  poltroons--Education under Napoleon--The Concordat and the
  Church--Napoleon's University of France--A machine for creating
  moral unity--The despotism of 1802 and 1882--The Liberals of
  1830--Primary education under M. Guizot--The rights of the
  family and the encroachments of the State--Catholic vindication
  of Protestant liberty under Louis XIV.--The heirs of M. Guizot
  in Normandy and Languedoc--M. de Witt at Val Richer--Three
  historic châteaux--The birthplace of Montesquieu at La Brède--The
  Abbey of Thomas à-Becket--The Château de Broglie--Lisieux--M.
  Guizot as a landscape gardener--A Protestant statesman
  among the Catholics of the Calvados--The Sieur de Longiumeau and the
  sacred right of insurrection--'Moral unity' and 'moral
  harmony'--Catholicism in the Calvados, Brittany, and Poitou--Charlotte
  Corday--The historic family of De Witt--An election in the Calvados--The
  people and the functionaries--Bonnebosq--The Normans and personal
  liberty--The procedure of a French election--Mayors with votes in their
  sleeves--Glass urns and wooden boxes--Gerrymandering in France and
  America--Catholic constituents congratulating their Protestant
  candidate--'Vive le roi!'--M. Bocher on two Republican
  presidents--Wilsonism and the Norman farmers--The domestic
  distilleries--The war against religion in Normandy--'The Church as the
  key of trade'--How the officials revise the elections--Prefects
  interfering in the elections--A solid Monarchist department--Politics
  and the apple crop--The weak point of the Monarchists--The
  traditions of Versailles and 'modern high life'--Louis XV. and
  Barras--Madame Du Barry and Madame Tallien--The 'noble'
  grooms of ignoble _cocottes_--The Legitimists under the Empire--The
  war of 1870-71, and the fusion of classes--Historic names
  in the French army--Officers and the châteaux--An American
  minister and the Comte de Paris--The Monarchist and the Republican
  representatives--The Duc de Broglie in the Eure--Architectural
  evidence as to the social life of the _ancien régime_--The
  war of classes a consequence, not a cause, of the Revolution--The
  Vicomte de Noailles and Artemus Ward--Feudal serfs and New
  York anti-renters--Jefferson and _lettres de cachet_--The Bastille
  and the Tower of London--Don Quixote and the wine skins--The
  Château d'Eu--Private rights in the 14th century--The 'Nonpareil'
  of the world--La Grande Mademoiselle and her lieges at
  Eu--Her hospitals and charities--A quick-witted mayor--A model
  Republican prefect--The Duc de Penthièvre--The Orléans family
  at Eu--Local popularity of the Comte and Comtesse de Paris--Norman
  grievances, old and new--A Protestant movement in
  Normandy--American associations with Broglie, La Brède, and
  Val Richer--Mr. Bancroft on the ministers of Louis Philippe--The
  'military council' of Royalist officers in the Revolution--Louis
  Philippe and Thiers--The rights of property under the
  Second Empire--The seizure of the Orléans property--The
  Jacobin levelling of incomes--The reformer Réal as an opulent
  count--The Orléans property restored in 1872, as a matter of
  'common honesty'--What the princes recovered, and what they
  presented to France--The 'wounded conscience' of a nation--The
  daughter of Madame de Staël--The present Duc de Broglie and the
  anti-religions war--The Conservative republic made impossible--The
  Radical Jacobins rule the roast--'The Republic commits
  suicide to save itself from slaughter'--Floquet the master of
  Carnot--The war against God--Two statesmen of the South--Nîmes
  and M. Guizot--The religious wars in Languedoc--The
  son of M. Guizot at Uzès--Politics in the Gard--Catholics and
  Protestants fighting side by side--The late M. Cornelis de Witt--The
  hereditary principle in Holland--What the United States
  learned from the Netherlands and from England--How the Duke
  of York missed an American throne--A Protestant monarchist
  in the Lot-et-Garonne--The plums of Agen and the apricots of
  Nicole--Coeur de Lion and Bertrand de Boru--The home of
  Nostradamus--Why the Germans beat the French--The barber
  bard of Languedoc--Scaliger and the Huguenots--Nérac and the
  Reine Margot--The 'Lovers' War'--The Revocation and the
  Revolution--The ruin of property in 1793--Decline of the wealth
  of France--The monarchists of the Aveyron--A banquet of
  monarchist mayors--The need of a man in France--'A bolt out
  of the blue'--How the Duc d'Orléans demoralised the government--The
  young conscript at Clairvaux--Carnot surrenders to
  the Commune--A Russian verdict on the republican blunder--The
  'Prince' of the people--How the Government has helped the
  Comte de Paris--Irregularities of republican taxation--Corsica
  and the Corrèze--France the most heavily taxed country in the
  world--Steady and enormous increase of taxation--Cost of collecting
  the revenue--Political dishonesty on the stump--The persecution
  of candidates--Invasion of private life--Bullying the
  magistrates--Public servants ordered to the polls--Curés fined
  for preaching religious duty--The Conférences du Sud-Ouest--M.
  Princeteau at Bordeaux--The fête of the Bastille at Bordeaux
  and Nîmes--A '_Fils de Dieu_' at Nîmes--Socialism at
  Alais--The suppression of inheritances--'Property a privilege to
  be abolished'--'Opulence an infamy'--The Socialists and the
  Government--Persecution of the Protestants--'Pray, what is
  God?'--Strength of Socialism in South-eastern France--Two
  typical departments--Socialism in the Bouches-du-Rhône--Historic
  France in the Calvados--Boulanger at Marseilles--A Socialist
  coachman at Arles--A great Catholic employer of labour at Marseilles--The
  largest glycerine works in the world--Church candles
  and dynamite--Taxing industries to death--Dutch competition
  with France--A Christian corporation in Marseilles--'An economical
  kitchen'--An uphill fight for law and order--The Christians
  of the 4th and of the 19th centuries--The Radicals hold the
  bridle--Shall France be Christian or Nihilist?--Ernest Renan on
  the situation in 1872--Jules Simon on the situation in 1882--The
  'civic duties' of man and the guillotine--What will the situation
  be in 1892?                                                    437-515


  MAP OF FRANCE _at end of book_


       *       *       *       *       *


_Errata_

P. 24, 11 lines from top, _for_ rival _read_ rural.

P. 64, line 1, _for_ de Royes _read_ de Royer.

P. 91, line 6 from top. M. Spuller, Prefect of the Somme in 1880, was
the brother of the present Minister of Foreign Affairs, not the Minister
himself.

P. 96, line 5 from top, _for Montauban _read_ Montaudon.

P. 105, line 4 from bottom, _for_ being _read_ long.

P. 395, 3 lines from top, _for_ Abbeys _read_ Abbaye.

Wherever found, _for_ de Fallières _read_ Fallières.




BIBLIOGRAPHY


As I have not wished to swell the bulk of this book by references, and
as many statements made in it concerning men and things of the first
Republic may seem to my readers to need verification, I subjoin a brief
list of authorities consulted by me in this connection. It is
incomplete, but will be found to cover every material point concerning
the epoch to which it refers.

  BIRÉ, E. La Légende des Girondins.

  CAMPARDON, EMILE. Le Tribunal Révolutionnaire à Paris d'après les
  Documents Originaux.

  DAUBAN, C. A. La Démagogie à Paris en 1793.

  DAUBAN, C. A. Les Prisons de Paris sous la Révolution.

  DAUBAN, C. A. Mémoires Inédits de Pétion, de Buzot et de Barbaroux.

  DAUBAN, C. A. Mémoires de Madame Roland. Etude sur Madame
  Roland. Lettres en partie inédites de Madame Roland.

  DE BARANTE. Histoire de la Convention Nationale.

  DE LAVERGNE, L. (de l'Institut). Economie rurale de la France depuis
  1789.

  DE MONTROL, F. Mémoires de Brissot, publiés par son fils.

  DE PRESSENSÉ, EDMOND. L'Eglise et la Révolution Française.

  DONIOL, H. Histoire des Classes Rurales en France.

  DU BLED. Les Causeurs de la Révolution.

  DURAND DE MAILLANE. Histoire de la Convention Nationale.

  FEUILLET DE CONCHES. Louis XVI., Marie Antoinette et Madame Elisabeth.

  FORNERON, H. Histoire Générale des Emigrés.

  GALLOIS, LÉONARD. Histoire des Journaux et des Journalistes de la
  Révolution Française.

  GONCOURT, EDMUND ET JULES. Histoire de la Société Française pendant
  la Révolution.

  GRANIER DE CASSAGNAC. Histoire des Girondins et des Massacres de
  Septembre.

  GUILLON, l'Abbé. Les Martyrs de la Foi pendant la Révolution Française.

  HAMEL, ERNEST. Histoire de Robespierre.

  JEFFERSON, THOMAS. Memoirs and Correspondence.

  LAFERRIÈRE (de l'Institut). Essai sur l'histoire du Droit Français.

  MALLET DU PAN. Mémoires et Correspondance.

  MASSON, FRÉDÉRIC. Le Département des Affaires Etrangères pendant la
  Révolution.

  MORRIS, GOUVERNEUR. Diary and Letters.

  MORTIMER-TERNAUX. Histoire de la Terreur, 1792-1794, d'après des
  documents authentiques et inédits.

  ROCQUAIN, F. L'Esprit Révolutionnaire avant la Révolution.

  TISSOT, P. F. Histoire complète de la Révolution Française.

  VATEL, CH. Charlotte Corday.

  YOUNG, ARTHUR. Voyages en France pendant les années 1787-89.
  Traduction de M. Le Sage; Introduction par L. de Lavergne.


       *       *       *       *       *


INTRODUCTION


I

This volume is neither a diary nor a narrative. To have given it either
of these forms, each of which has its obvious advantages, would have
extended it beyond all reasonable limits. It is simply a selection from
my very full memoranda of a series of visits paid to different parts of
France during the year 1889.

These visits would never have been made, had not my previous
acquaintance with France and with French affairs, going back now--such
as it is--to the early days of the Second Empire, given me reasonable
ground to hope that I might get some touch of the actual life and
opinions of the people in the places to which I went. My motive for
making these visits was the fact that what it has become the fashion to
call 'parliamentary government,' or, in other words, the unchecked
administration of the affairs of a great people by the directly elected
representatives of the people, is now formally on its trial in France.
We do not live under this form of government in the United States, but
as a thoughtless tendency towards this form of government has shown
itself of late years even in the United States and much more strongly in
Great Britain, I thought it worth while to see it at work and form some
notion of its results in France.

Republican Switzerland has carefully sought to protect herself against
this form of government. The Swiss Constitution of 1874 reposes
ultimately on the ancient autonomy of the Cantons. Each Canton has one
representative in the Federal Executive Council. The members of this
Council are elected for three years by the Federal Assembly, and from
among their own number they choose the President of the Confederation,
who serves for one year only--a provision probably borrowed from the
first American Constitution. The Cantonal autonomy was further
strengthened in 1880 by the establishment of the Federal Tribunal on
lines taken from those of the American Supreme Court. There is a
division of the Executive authority between the Federal Assembly and the
Federal Council, which is yet to be tested by the strain of a great
European war, but which has so far developed no serious domestic
dangers.

The outline map which accompanies this volume will show that my visits,
which began with Marseilles and the Bouches-du-Rhône, upon my return
from Rome to Paris in January 1889, on the eve of the memorable election
of General Boulanger as a deputy for the Seine in that month, were
extended to Nancy in the east of France, to the frontiers of Belgium and
the coasts of the English Channel in the north, to Rennes, Nantes, and
Bordeaux in the west, and to Toulouse, Nîmes, and Arles in the south. I
went nowhere without the certainty of meeting persons who could and
would put me in the way of seeing what I wanted to see, and learning
what I wanted to learn. I took with me everywhere the best books I could
find bearing on the true documentary history of the region I was about
to see, and I concerned myself in making my memoranda not only with the
more or less fugitive aspects of public action and emotion at the
present time, but with the past, which has so largely coloured and
determined these fugitive aspects. Naturally, therefore, when I sat down
to put this volume into shape, I very soon found it to be utterly out of
the question for me to try to do justice to all that had interested and
instructed me in every part of France which I had visited.

I have contented myself accordingly with formulating, in this
Introduction, my general convictions as to the present condition and
outlook of affairs in France and as to the relation which actually
exists between the Third Republic, now installed in power at Paris, and
the great historic France of the French people; and with submitting to
my readers, in support of these convictions, a certain number of digests
of my memoranda, setting forth what I saw, heard, and learned in some of
the departments which I visited with most pleasure and profit.

In doing this I have written out what I found in my note-books less
fully than the importance of the questions involved might warrant. But
what I have written, I have written out fairly and as exactly as I
could. I do not hold myself responsible for the often severe and
sometimes scornful judgments pronounced by my friends in the provinces
upon public men at Paris. But I had no right to modify or withhold
them. In the case of conversations held with friends, or with casual
acquaintances, I have used names only where I had reason to believe
that, adding weight to what was recorded, they might be used without
injury or inconvenience of any kind to my interlocutors.

The sum of my conclusions is suggested in the title of this book. I
speak of France as one thing, and of the Republic as another thing. I do
not speak of the French Republic, for the Republic as it now exists does
not seem to me to be French, and France, as I have found it, is
certainly not Republican.


II

The Third French Republic, as it exists to-day, is just ten years old.

It owes its being, not to any direct action of the French people, but to
the success of a Parliamentary revolution, chiefly organised by M.
Gambetta. The ostensible object of this revolution was to prevent the
restoration of the French Monarchy. The real object of it was to take
the life of the executive authority in France. M. Gambetta fell by the
way, but the evil he did lives after him.

He was one of the celebrities of an age in which celebrity has almost
ceased to be a distinction. But the measure of his political capacity is
given in the fact that he was an active promoter of the insurrection of
September 4, 1870, in Paris against the authority of the Empress
Eugénie. A more signal instance is not to be found in history of that
supreme form of public stupidity which President Lincoln stigmatised, in
a memorable phrase, as the operation of 'swapping horses while crossing
a stream.'

It was worse than an error or a crime, it was simply silly. The
inevitable effect of it was to complete the demoralisation of the French
armies, and to throw France prostrate before her conquerors. A very
well-known German said to me a few years ago at Lucerne, where we were
discussing the remarkable trial of Richter, the dynamiter of the
Niederwald: 'Ah! we owe much to Gambetta, and Jules Favre, and Thiers,
and the French Republic. They saved us from a social revolution by
paralysing France. We could never have exacted of the undeposed Emperor
at Wilhelmshöhe, with the Empress at Paris, the terms which those
blubbering jumping-jacks were glad to accept from us on their knees.'

The imbecility of September 4, 1870, was capped by the lunacy of the
Commune of Paris in 1871. This latter was more than France could bear,
and a wholesome breeze of national feeling stirs in the 'murders grim
and great,' by which the victorious Army of Versailles avenged the
cowardly massacre of the hostages, and the destruction of the Tuileries
and the Hôtel de Ville.

With what 'mandate,' and by whom conferred, M. Thiers went to Bordeaux
in 1871, is a thorny question, into which I need not here enter. What he
might have done for his country is, perhaps, uncertain. What he did we
know. He founded a republic of which, in one of his characteristic
phrases, he said that: 'it must be Conservative, or it could not be,'
and this he did with the aid of men without whose concurrence it would
have been impossible, and of whom he knew perfectly well that they were
fully determined the Republic should not be Conservative. He became
Chief of the State, and this for a time, no doubt, he imagined would
suffice to make the State Conservative.

He was supported by an Assembly in which the Monarchists of France
predominated. The triumphant invasion and the imminent peril of the
country had brought monarchical France into the field as one man. M.
Gambetta's absurd Government of the National Defence, even in that
supreme moment of danger when the Uhlans were hunting it from pillar to
post, actually compelled the Princes of the House of France to fight for
their country under assumed names, but it could not prevent the sons of
all the historic families of France from risking their lives against the
public enemy. All over France a general impulse of public confidence put
the French Conservatives forward as the men in whose hands the
reconstitution of the shattered nation would be safest. The popular
instinct was justified by the result.

From 1871 to 1877, France was governed, under the form of a republic, by
a majority of men who neither had, nor professed to have, any more
confidence in the stability of a republican form of government, than
Alexander Hamilton had in the working value of the American Constitution
which he so largely helped to frame, and which he accepted as being the
best it was possible in the circumstances to get. But they did their
duty to France, as he did his duty to America. To them--first under M.
Thiers, and then under the Maréchal-Duc de Magenta--France is indebted
for the reconstruction of her beaten and disorganised army, for the
successful liquidation of the tremendous war-indemnity imposed upon her
by victorious Germany, for the re-establishment of her public credit,
and for such an administration of her national finances as enabled her,
in 1876, to raise a revenue of nearly a thousand millions of francs, or
forty millions of pounds sterling, in excess of the revenue raised under
the Empire seven years before, without friction and without undue
pressure. In 1869, the Empire had raised a revenue of 1,621,390,248
francs. In 1876, the Conservative Republic raised a revenue of
2,570,505,513 francs. With this it covered all the cost of the public
service, carried the charges resulting from the war and its
consequences, set apart 204,000,000 francs for public works, and yet
left in the Treasury a balance of 98,000,000 francs.

It is told of one of the finance ministers of the Restoration, Baron
Louis, that when a deputy questioned him once about the finances, he
replied, 'Do you give us good politics and I will give you good
finances.' It seems to me that the budget of 1876 proves the politics of
the Conservative majority in the French Parliament of that time to have
been good. The Maréchal-Duc de Magenta was then president. M. Thiers had
resigned his office in 1873, in consequence of a dispute with the
Assembly, the true history of which may one day be edifying, and the
Assembly had elected the Maréchal-Duc to fill his place.

I have been told by one of the most distinguished public men in France
that, in his passionate desire to prevent the election of the Maréchal
Duc, M. Thiers was bent upon promoting a movement to bring against the
soldier of Magenta an accusation like that which led to the condemnation
of the Maréchal Bazaine, and that he was with difficulty restrained from
doing this.

Monstrous as this attempt would have been, it hardly seems more
monstrous than the abortive attempt which was actually made, under the
inspiration of M. Gambetta and his friends, to convict the Maréchal Duc
and his ministers, 'the men of the 16th of May,' of conspiring, while in
possession of the executive power, to bring about the overthrow of the
Republic and the restoration of the Monarchy.

M. Gambetta and his party having formed in 1877 what is known as 'the
alliance of the 363,' determined to drive the Maréchal-Duc from the
Presidency, to take the control of public affairs entirely into their
own hands, and to reduce the Executive to the position created for Louis
XVI. by the revolutionists of the First Republic, before the atrocious
plot of August 10, 1792, made an end of the monarchy and of public order
altogether, and prepared the way for the massacres of September. Whether
the Maréchal-Duc might not have resisted this revolutionary conspiracy
to the end it is not worth while now to inquire. Suffice it that he gave
way finally, and, refusing to submit to the degradation of the high post
he held, accepted M. Gambetta's alternative and relinquished it.

It appears to me that the true aim of the Republicans (who had carried
the elections of 1877 by persuading France that Germany would at once
invade the country if the Conservatives won the day) is sufficiently
attested by the fact that they chose, as the successor of the
Maréchal-Duc, a public man chiefly conspicuous for the efforts he had
made to secure the abolition of the Executive office!

M. Grévy had failed to get the Presidency of the Republic suppressed
when the organic law was passed in 1875. He was more successful when, on
January 30, 1879, he consented to accept the Presidency. When he entered
the Elysée, the executive authority went out of it. The Third French
Republic, such as it now exists, was constituted on that day--the
anniversary, by the way, oddly enough, of the decapitation of Charles I.
of England at Whitehall.

That is the date, not 'centennial,' but 'decennial,' which ought to have
been celebrated in 1889 by the Third French Republic. In his first
Message, February 7, 1879, M. Grévy formally said: 'I will never resist
the national will expressed by its constitutional organs.' From that
moment the parliamentary majority became the Government of France.

Something very like this French parliamentary revolution of 1879 to
which France is indebted for the Third Republic as it exists to-day, was
attempted in the United States about ten years before.

In both instances the intent of the parliamentary revolutionists was to
take the life of a Constitution without modifying its forms. The failure
of the American is not less instructive than the success of the French
parliamentary revolution, and as all my readers, perhaps, are not as
familiar with American political history as with some other topics, I
hope I may be pardoned for briefly pointing this out.

Upon the assassination of President Lincoln in April 1865 the
Vice-President, Andrew Johnson, became President. He was a Southern man,
and as one of the Senators from the Southern State of Tennessee he had
refused to go with his State in her secession from the Union. To this he
owed his association on the Presidential ticket with Mr. Lincoln at the
election in 1864. He was no more and no less opposed to slavery in the
abstract than President Lincoln, of whom it is well known that he
regarded his own now famous proclamation of 1863 freeing the slaves in
the seceded States, as an illegal concession to the Anti-Slavery feeling
of the North and of Europe, and that he spoke of it with undisguised
contempt, as a 'Pope's bull against the comet.' Like Mr. Lincoln, Andrew
Johnson was devoted to the Union, but he was a Constitutional Democrat
in his political opinions, and the Civil War having ended in the defeat
of the Confederacy, he gradually settled down to his constitutional
duty, as President of the United States, towards the States which had
formed the Confederacy. This earned for him the bitter hostility of the
then dominant majority in both Houses of Congress, led by a man of
unbridled passions and of extraordinary energy, Thaddeus Stevens, a
representative from Pennsylvania, a sort of American Couthon, infirm of
body but all compact of will. It was the purpose of this majority to
humiliate and chastise, not to conciliate, the defeated South. Already,
under President Lincoln, this purpose had brought the leaders of the
majority more than once into collision with the Executive. Under
President Johnson they forced a collision with the Veto power of the
President, by two unconstitutional bills, one attainting the whole
people of the South, and the other aimed at the authority of the
Executive over his officers. In the policy thus developed they had the
co-operation of the Secretary at War, Mr. Stanton, and during the recess
of Congress in August 1867 it became apparent that with his assistance
they meant to subjugate the Executive. President Johnson quickly brought
matters to an issue. He first, during the recess, suspended Mr. Stanton
from the War Office, putting General Grant in charge of it, and upon the
reassembling of Congress in December 1867 'removed' him, and directed
him to hand over his official portfolio to General Thomas, appointed to
fill the place _ad interim_. Thereupon the majority of the House carried
through that body a resolution of impeachment, prepared, by a committee,
the necessary articles, and brought the President to trial before the
Senate, constituted as a court for 'high crimes and misdemeanours.' Two
of the articles of impeachment were founded upon disrespect alleged to
have been publicly shown by the President to Congress. The President, by
his counsel, among whom were Mr. Evarts, since then Secretary of State,
and now a Senator for New York, and Mr. Stanberry, an Attorney-General
of the United States, appeared before the Senate on March 13, 1868. The
President asked for forty days, in which to prepare an answer. The
Senate, without a division, refused this, and ordered the answer to be
filed within ten days. The trial finally began on March 30, and, after
keeping the country at fever-heat for two months, ended on May 26, in
the failure of the impeachment. Only three out of the eleven articles
were voted upon. Upon each thirty-five Senators voted the President to
be 'Guilty,' and nineteen Senators voted him to be 'Not guilty.' As the
Constitution of the United States requires a two-thirds vote in such a
trial, the Chief Justice declared the President to be acquitted, and the
attempt of the Legislature to dominate the Executive was defeated. Seven
of the nineteen Senators voting 'Not guilty' were of the Republican
party which had impeached the President, and it will be seen that a
change of one vote in the minority would have carried the day for the
revolutionists. So narrow was our escape from a peril which the founders
of the Constitution had foreseen, and against which they had devised all
the safeguards possible in the circumstances of the United States. What,
in such a case, would become of a French President?

The American President is not elected by Congress except in certain not
very probable contingencies, and when the House votes for a President,
it votes not by members but by delegations, each state of the Union
casting one vote. The French President is elected by a convention of the
Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, in which every member has a vote,
and the result is determined by an actual majority. The Senate of the
United States is entirely independent of the House. A large proportion
of the members of the French Senate are elected by the Assembly, and the
Chamber outnumbers the Senate by nearly two to one. What the procedure
of the French Senate, sitting as a High Court on the impeachment of a
President by the majority of the Chamber, would probably be, may be
gathered from the recent trial by that body of General Boulanger.

With the resignation of the Maréchal-Duc and the election of M. Grévy
the Government of France, ten years ago, became what it now is--a
parliamentary oligarchy, with absolutely no practical check upon its
will except the recurrence every four years of the legislative
elections. And as these elections are carried out under the direct
control, through the prefects and the mayors, of the Minister of the
Interior, himself a member of the parliamentary oligarchy, the weakness
of this check might be easily inferred, had it not been demonstrated by
facts during the elections of September 22 and October 6, 1889.

How secure this parliamentary oligarchy feels itself to be, when once
the elections are over, appears from the absolutely cynical coolness
with which the majority goes about what is called the work of
'invalidating' the election of members of the minority. Something of the
sort went on in my own country during the 'Reconstruction' period which
followed the Civil War, but it never assumed the systematic form now
familiar in France. As practised under the Third Republic it revives the
spirit of the methods by which Robespierre and the sections 'corrected
the mistakes' made by the citizens of Paris in choosing representatives
not amenable to the discipline of the 'sea-green incorruptible'; and as
a matter of principle, leads straight on to that usurpation of all the
powers of the State by a conspiracy of demagogues which followed the
subsidized Parisian insurrection of August 10, 1792.

Such a _régime_ as this sufficiently explains the phenomenon of
'Boulangism,' by which Englishmen and Americans are so much perplexed.
Put any people into the machinery of a centralized administrative
despotism in which the Executive is merely the instrument of a majority
of the legislature, and what recourse is there left to the people but
'Boulangism'? 'Boulangism' is the instinctive, more or less deliberate
and articulate, outcry of a people living under constitutional forms,
but conscious that, by some hocus-pocus, the vitality has been taken out
of those forms. It is the expression of the general sense of insecurity.
In a country situated as France now is, it is natural that this
inarticulate outcry should merge itself at first into a clamour for the
revision of a Constitution which has been made a delusion and a snare;
and then into a clamour for a dynasty which shall afford the nation
assurance of an enduring Executive raised above the storm of party
passions, and sobering the triumph of party majorities with a wholesome
sense of responsibility to the nation.

There would have been no lack of 'Boulangism' in France forty years ago
had M. Thiers and his legislative cabal got the better of the Prince
President in the 'struggle for life' which then went on between the
Place St.-Georges and the Elysée!


III

There are two periods, one in the history of modern England, the other
in the history of the United States, which directly illuminate the
history of France since the overthrow of the ancient French Monarchy in
1792.

One of these is the period of the Long Parliament in England. The other
is the brief but most important interval which elapsed between the
recognition of the independence of the thirteen seceded British colonies
in America, at Versailles in 1783, and the first inauguration of
Washington as President of the United States at New York on April 30,
1789. No Englishman or American, who is reasonably familiar with the
history of either of these periods, will hastily attribute the phenomena
of modern French politics to something essentially volatile and unstable
in the character of the French people.

My own acquaintance, such as it is, with France--for I should be sorry
to pretend to a thorough knowledge of France, or of any country not my
own--goes back, as I have intimated, to the early days of the Second
Empire. It has been my good fortune, at various times, to see a good
deal of the social and political life of France, and I long ago learned
that to talk of the character of the French people is almost as slipshod
and careless as to talk of the character of the Italian people.

The French people are not the outgrowth of a common stock, like the
Dutch or the Germans.

The people of Provence are as different in all essential particulars
from the people of Brittany, the people of French Flanders from the
people of Gascony, the people of Savoy from the people of Normandy, as
are the people of Kent from the people of the Scottish Highlands, or the
people of Yorkshire from the people of Wales. The French nation was the
work, not of the French people, but of the kings of France, not less but
even more truly than the Italian nation, such as we see it gradually now
forming, is the work of the royal House of Savoy.

The sudden suppression of the National Executive by a parliamentary
conspiracy at Paris in 1792 violently interrupted the orderly and
natural making of France, just as the sudden suppression of the National
Executive in 1649 after the occupation of Edinburgh by Argyll and the
surrender of Colchester to Fairfax had put England at the mercy of
Cromwell's 'honest' troopers, and of knavish fanatics like Hugh Peters,
violently interrupted the making of Britain. It took England a century
to recover her equilibrium. Between Naseby Field in 1645 and Culloden
Moor in 1746 England had, except during the reign of Charles II., no
better assurance of continuous domestic peace than France enjoyed first
under Louis Philippe and then under the Second Empire. During those
hundred years Englishmen were thought by the rest of Europe to be as
excitable, as volatile, and as unstable as Frenchmen are not uncommonly
thought by the rest of mankind now to be. There is a curious old Dutch
print of these days in which England appears as a son of Adam in the
hereditary costume, standing at gaze amid a great disorder of garments
strewn upon the floor, while a scroll displayed above him bears this
legend:

  I am an Englishman, and naked I stand here,
  Musing in my mind what garment I shall wear.
  Now I will wear this, and now I will wear that,
  And now I will wear--I don't know what!

There was as much--and as little--reason thus to depict the England of
the seventeenth, as there is thus to depict the France of the nineteenth
century.

If there had ever been, a hundred years ago, such a thing as a French
Republic, founded, as the American Republic of 1787 was founded, by the
deliberate will of the people, and offering them a reasonable prospect
of maintaining liberty and law, that Republic would exist to-day. That
we are watching the desperate effort of a centralised parliamentary
despotism at Paris in the year 1890 to maintain a 'Third Republic' is
conclusive proof that this was not the case.

France--the French people, that is--- had no more to do with the
overthrow of the monarchy of Louis XVI., with the fall of the monarchy
of Charles X., with the collapse of the monarchy of July, or with the
abolition of the Second Empire, than with the abdication of Napoleon I.
at Fontainebleau.

Not one of these catastrophes was provoked by France or the French
people; not one of them was ever submitted by its authors to the French
people for approval.

Only two French governments during the past century can be accurately
said to have been definitely branded and condemned as failures by the
deliberate voice of the French people. One of these was the First
Republic, which after going through a series of convulsions equally
grotesque and ghastly, was swept into oblivion by an overwhelming vote
of the French people in response to the appeal of the first Napoleon.
The other was the Second Republic, which was put upon trial by the Third
Napoleon on December 10, 1851, and condemned to immediate extinction by
a vote of 7,439,219 to 640,737. I am at a loss to see how it is possible
to deduce from these simple facts of French history the conclusion that
the French people are, and for a century have been, madly bent upon
getting a Republic established in France, unless, indeed, I am to
suppose that the French Republicans proceed upon the principle said to
be justified by the experience of countries in which the standard of
mercantile morality is not absolutely puritanical--that three successive
bankruptcies will enable a really clever man to retire from business
with a handsome fortune!

If it were possible, as happily it is impossible, that the American
people could be afflicted with a single year of such a Republic as that
which now exists in France, we would rid ourselves of it, if necessary,
by seeking annexation to Canada under the crown of our common ancestors,
or by inviting the exiled Dom Pedro to recross the Atlantic and accept
the throne of a North American Empire, with substantial guarantees that
if we should ever change our minds and put him politely on board a ship
again for Europe, the cheque given to him on his departure would not be
dishonoured on presentation to the national bankers!

It is the penalty, I suppose, of our position in the United States, as
the first and, so far, the only successful great republic of modern
times, that we are expected to accept a sort of moral responsibility for
all the experiments in republicanism, no matter how absurd, odious, or
preposterous they may be, which it may come into the heads of people
anywhere else in the world to try. I do not see why Americans who are
not under some strenuous necessity of making stump speeches in or out of
Congress, with an eye to some impending election, should submit to this
without a protest. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery: it
does not follow that it is the most agreeable.

I do not know that Western drawing-rooms take more delight in the
Japanese, who most amiably present themselves everywhere in the
regulation dress-coat and white cravat of modern Christendom, than in
the Chinese, who calmly and haughtily persist in wearing the ample,
stately, and comfortable garments of their own people.

The framers of the French Republican Constitution of 1875 did the United
States the honour to copy incorrectly, and absolutely to misapply,
certain leading features of our organic law. In order to accomplish
purposes absolutely inconsistent with all American ideas of liberty and
of justice, the parliamentary revolutionists who got possession of power
in France in 1879 have so twisted to their own ends this French
Constitution of 1875, that their government of the Third French Republic
in 1890 really resembles the government of the Akhoond of Swat about as
nearly as it resembles the government of the American Republic under
Washington.

The parliamentary revolutionists of the Third French Republic are
Republicans first and then Frenchmen. The framers of the American
Republic were Americans first and then Republicans. The Republic which
they framed was an experiment imposed upon the American people, not by
philosophers and fanatics, but by the force of circumstances. The ablest
of the men who framed it were not Republicans by theory. On the
contrary, they had been born and bred under a monarchy. Under that
monarchy they had enjoyed a measure of civil and religious liberty which
the Third Republic certainly refuses to Frenchmen in France to-day. M.
Jules Ferry and M. Constans have no lessons to give in law or in liberty
to which George Washington, or John Adams, or even Thomas Jefferson,
would have listened with toleration while the Crown still adorned the
legislative halls of the British colonies in America. Our difficulties
with the mother country began, not with the prerogative of the
Crown--that gave our fathers so little trouble that one of the original
thirteen States lived and prospered under a royal charter from Charles
II. down to the middle of the nineteenth century--but with the
encroachments of the Parliament. The roots of the affection which binds
Americans to the American Republic strike deep down into the history of
American freedom under the British monarchy. The forms have changed, the
living substance is the same. Americans know at least as well as
Englishmen what the most intelligent of French Republicans apparently
have still to learn, that liberty is impossible without loyalty to
something higher than self-interest and self-will.

This sufficiently explains to me a remark often cited as made to Sir
Theodore Martin by General Grant during the ex-President's visit to
England, to the effect that Englishmen 'live under institutions which
Americans would give their ears to possess.'

General Grant neither was, nor did he pretend to be, a great statesman.
But he was an American of the Americans. Four years of Civil War and
eight years of Presidential power had not been thrown away upon him. He
came into the Presidency as the successor of Andrew Johnson, who was
made President by the bullet of an assassin, and who was impeached, as I
have said, before the Senate for doing his plain constitutional duty, by
an unscrupulous parliamentary cabal.

He left the Presidency, to be succeeded in it by a President who derived
the more than doubtful title under which he took his seat from a
Commission unknown to the Constitution, and accepted by the American
people only as the alternative of political chaos and of a fresh civil
war.

Through his position at the head of the American army, General Grant, as
I have already mentioned, had been drawn into the contest between
President Johnson and the parliamentary cabal bent on breaking down the
constitutional authority of the Executive.

Going into the Presidency fresh from this drama, in 1869, General Grant
went out of the Presidency in 1877, after a drama not less impressive
and instructive had been enacted under his eyes, which threatened for
many weeks to result in a complete failure of the machinery provided by
the American Constitution for the lawful and orderly transmission of the
executive authority. It did, in fact, result in the adoption by Congress
of an extra-constitutional expedient, by which the orderly transmission
of the executive authority was secured, but the lawful transmission of
it--as I believe, and as I think I have reason to know General Grant
believed--was defeated.

Whether the constitutional machinery would or would not have carried us
safely through if the final strain had been put upon it, is now an
academic question not here to be discussed. But the final strain was
evaded by the adoption of the extra-constitutional expedient to which I
refer. An Electoral Commission was created by Congress to decide by
which of two sets of Presidential electors claiming to have been chosen
for that purpose the Presidential vote of certain States should be cast;
and it is a curious circumstance that General Grant, who had seen his
executive predecessor saved from removal by a single vote in the Senate
in 1869, saw his executive successor established in the White House, in
1877, by a single vote in this Electoral Commission.

It would have been strange indeed had the experience of General Grant
failed to impress upon him, with at least equal force, the advantages to
liberty of a hereditary executive acting as the fountain of social
honour, and the disadvantages to liberty of an elective executive
tending to become a distributing reservoir of political patronage.

I once had a curious talk bearing on this subject with General Grant
after he had retired from the Presidency. He had dined with me to meet
and discuss a matter of some importance with a Mexican friend of mine,
Señor Romero, long Minister of Finance in Mexico, and now Mexican Envoy
at Washington. When I next met the ex-President he reverted with great
interest to something which had been incidentally said at this dinner
about the experiment of empire made in Mexico by Iturbide, the general
who finally broke the power of Spain in that viceroyalty, and secured
its independence. I showed him certain documents which I had obtained in
Mexico through the kindness of Maximilian's very able Foreign Minister,
Señor Ramirez, a most accomplished bibliophile, bearing upon Iturbide's
plan for making the American Mediterranean a Mexican lake. He expected
to break up the United States by asserting the right of the Mexican
Empire to the mouths of the Mississippi, and the whole Spanish dominion
as far as the Capes of Florida. 'It seems a mad thing now,' said the
ex-President, 'but it was not so mad perhaps then,' and we went on to
discuss the schemes of Burr and Wilkinson and the alleged treason of an
early Tennessean senator. 'Perhaps it was not a bad thing for us,' he
said, 'that the Mexicans shot their first Emperor--but was it a good
thing for them?' 'I have sometimes wondered,' he added, 'what would have
happened to us if Gates, or--what was at one time, as you know, quite on
the cards--Benedict Arnold, instead of George Washington, had commanded
the armies of the colonies successfully down to the end at Yorktown.'

What indeed! That is a pregnant query, not hastily to be dealt with by
genial after-dinner oratory about the self-governing capacity of the
Anglo-Norman race--still less by Fourth of July declamations over what
the leader of the Massachusetts Bar used to call the 'glittering
generalities' of the American Declaration of Independence!

The experience of the Latin states of the New World throws useful
side-lights upon it. Of all these states between the Rio Grande and Cape
Horn, only one began and has lived out its round half-century of
independence without serious civil convulsions. This is--or rather
was--the Empire of Brazil, of which Dom Pedro I., of the Portuguese
reigning house of Braganza, on March 25, 1824, swore to maintain the
integrity and indivisibility, and to observe, and cause to be observed,
the political Constitution. That oath the Emperor and his son and
successor, Dom Pedro II., who took it after him in due course, seem to
have conscientiously kept. It does not appear to have impressed itself
as deeply upon the consciences of the military and naval officers of the
present day in Brazil, all of whom, of course, must have taken it
substantially on receiving their commission from the chief of the State,
and it now remains to be seen what will become hereafter of the Empire.

The authors of the Brazilian Constitution fully recognised the
impossibility of maintaining a constitutional government without some
guarantee of the independence of the Executive. They found this
guarantee not by applying checks and balances to the elective
principle, but simply in the hereditary principle, just as they found
the guarantee of the independence of the judiciary in the life-tenure of
the magistrates, and they introduced into their Constitution what they
called a 'moderating power.' This power was lodged, by the 98th article
of the Brazilian Constitution, with the Emperor--and the article thus
runs: 'The moderating power is the key of the whole political
organisation, and it is delegated exclusively to the Emperor, as the
supreme chief of the nation and its first representative, that he may
incessantly watch over the maintenance of the independence, equilibrium,
and harmony of the other political powers.'

The key of the 'political organisation' of Brazil seems to have worked
very well for fifty years. Now that it has been thrown away, it will be
interesting to watch the results.

The question, with us in the United States, from the beginning has been
whether the carefully devised provisions of oar organic Constitution of
1787 would or would not be found in practice to protect the sentiment of
loyalty to a National Union as effectually against popular caprice and
political intrigues as the sentiment of loyalty to a National Crown has
been protected in England by the hereditary principle. The American
Revolution of 1776, and the foundation of the American Republic of 1787,
can never be understood without a thorough appreciation of the fact that
the issues involved in the English Revolution which placed the daughter
of James II. on the English throne, and in the establishment
subsequently of the House of Hanover, because it was an offshoot of the
dethroned House of Stuart, were quite as intelligently discussed, and
quite as thoroughly worked out, among the English in America as among
the English in England. Without a thorough appreciation of this fact it
is impossible to understand the conservative value to liberty in the
United States, of the personal position and the personal influence of
the first American President. Washington was, in truth, the uncrowned
king of the new nation--'first in war, first in peace, first in the
hearts of his countrymen.' What more and what less than this is there in
the history of Alfred the Great?

Washington founded no dynasty, but he made the American Presidency
possible, and the American President is a king with a veto, elected, not
by the people directly, but by special electors, for four years, and
re-eligible. We celebrate the birthday of Washington like the birthday
of a king. The same instinct gave his name to the capital of his nation,
and that name was found a name to conjure with when the great stress
came of the Civil War in 1861. The sentiment of loyalty, developed and
twined about that name and about the Union which Washington had founded,
was not only the glow at the core of the Northern resistance to
secession: it was the secret and the explanation of that sudden revival
of the spirit of national loyalty at the South after the war was over
and an end was put to the villanies of 'Reconstruction,' by which
European observers of American affairs have been and still are so much
puzzled. For it must be remembered that the Father of his Country was a
son of the South, and that his native state, Virginia, is the oldest of
the American Commonwealths, and is known as 'the Mother of Presidents.'
The historic Union is as much Southern as Northern. Its existence was
put in peril in 1812 by the States of the extreme North. Its integrity
was shattered for a time in 1861 by the States of the South. Before it
was founded, in 1787, there was no such thing as an American nation.
There were thirteen independent American States which for certain
purposes only had formed what was described as a 'perpetual union,'
under certain Articles of Confederation. These Articles were drawn up in
1778, at a time when the event of the war with the mother country was
still most uncertain, and they were never finally ratified by all the
States until 1781, two years before the Peace of Versailles. Under these
Articles the national affairs of the Confederacy were controlled by the
Congress of the States. No national Executive existed, not even such a
nominal Executive as now exists in France. National affairs were managed
during the recess of the Congress by a Committee, and this Committee
could only confide the Presidency to any one member of the Committee for
one year at a time out of three years. This was even worse than the
elective kingship without a veto of the English Republicans of 1649. But
how were the people of these thirteen independent States, each with a
history, with interests, with prejudices, with sympathies of its own, to
be brought together and induced to form, through a more perfect union, a
nation, in the only way in which a nation can be formed, by the
establishment of an independent national Executive?

This was the question which was met and answered only after long
debates, and with infinite difficulty, by the American Constitutional
Convention of 1787. It is more than probable that this convention could
never have been held without the influence and the presence of George
Washington, who presided over its deliberations; and it is as certain as
anything human can be, that the constitution which it framed would never
have been accepted by the people of the States if they had not known
that the executive office created by it would be filled by him.

The political safeguards put about the American Executive by the
constitution may or may not always resist such a strain as has already
more than once been put upon them. The seceding States, in their
constitution adopted at Montgomery in 1861, tried to strengthen these
safeguards by extending the presidential term to six years, and making
the President re-eligible only after an interval of six years more. But
all our national experience goes to show that the more difficult it is
for a mere majority of the people to make or unmake the authority which
sets a final sanction upon the execution of the laws, the greater will
be the safety of the public liberty and of private rights.

So true is this that every American who witnessed, at London in 1887,
the Jubilee of the Queen, felt, and was glad to feel, with a natural and
instinctive sympathy, the honest contagion of that magnificent outburst
of the loyalty of a great and free people to the hereditary
representative of their historic liberties and of their historic law. I
am sure that no intelligent Englishman can have witnessed the
tremendous outpouring of the American people into New York on April 30,
1889, to do honour there to the hundredth anniversary of the first
inauguration of George Washington, without a kindred emotion.

To compare with the significance of either of these scenes that of the
gigantic cosmopolitan fair dedicated at Paris in 1889 by President
Carnot to the 'principles of 1789' is to exhaust the resources of the
ridiculous.


IV

The antagonism which now exists between France and the Third Republic
certainly did not exist between France and the ancient monarchy. The
members of the États-Généraux of 1789, who were so soon permitted, by
the incapacity of Louis XVI., to resolve that body into the chaotic mob
which assumed the name of a National Assembly, were elected, not at all
to change the fabric of the French Government, but simply to reform, in
concert with the king, abuses, two-thirds of which were virtually
defunct when the king took off his hat to the Three Orders at Versailles
on the 5th of May, 1789, and the rest of which took a new lease of life,
often under new names, from the follies and the crimes of the First
Republic, after the 22nd of September, 1792. Two contemporary observers,
watching the drama from very different points of view, Arthur Young and
Gouverneur Morris, long ago discerned this. M. Henri Taine, and the
group of conscientious historical students who, during the last quarter
of a century, have been reconstructing the annals of the revolutionary
period, have put it beyond all doubt. The enormous majority of the
French people, and even of the people of Paris, were so little
infatuated with the 'principles of 1789' that they regarded the advent
to power of the first Napoleon with inexpressible relief, as making an
end of what Arthur Young calls, and not too sternly, a series of
constitutions 'formed by conventions of rabble and sanctioned by the
_sans-culottes_ of the kennel.' Without fully understanding this, it is
impossible to understand either the history of the Napoleons, or the
present antagonism between France and the Third Republic.

Of this I am so deeply convinced that I have thought it right to
interweave, when occasion offered, with my account of things as they are
in France, what I believe to be the historic truth as to things as they
were in France at and before the period of the Revolution. To judge the
France of 1890 fairly, and forecast its future intelligently, we must
thoroughly rid ourselves of the notion that the masses of the French
people had anything more to do with the dethronement and the murder of
Louis XVI. than the masses of the English people had to do with the
dethronement and the murder of Charles I. Neither crime was perpetrated
to enlarge the liberties or to protect the interests of the people. We
long ago got at the truth about the great English rebellion. 'Pride's
Purge,' the 'elective kingship without a veto of the 'New Model,' and
the merciless mystification of Bradshaw, tell their own story. Steering
to avoid the Scylla of Strafford, the luckless Parliamentarians ran the
ship of State full into the Charybdis of Cromwell.

It is only within very recent times that the daylight of facts has begun
to dissipate the mists of the French legend of 1789. Even Republican
writers of repute now disdain to concern themselves more seriously with
the so-called histories of Thiers, of Mignet, and of Lamartine than with
the _Chevalier de Maison-Rouge_ of Alexandre Dumas and the _Charlotte
Corday_ of M. Ponsard.

Of course the legend dies hard--all legends do. Even the whipping of
Titus Oates at the cart's tail through London did not kill the legend of
Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey and the Popish Plot. The Republicans of the
Third Republic have not scrupled to set up a statue to Danton. People
who might easily learn the truth still speak, and not in France only,
about Robespierre and Madame Roland in terms which really justify M.
Biré in anticipating a time when Raoul-Rigault maybe celebrated as a
patriot and Louise Michel as a heroine. No longer ago than in 1888
certain people, perhaps relying on the fact that M. Casimir Périer, the
actual owner of the château at Vizille in which the famous meeting of
the Estates of Dauphiny was held in 1788, is a Republican, actually
undertook to 'ring up the curtain' on the Centennial of 1789 by
representing Barnave and Mounier as clamouring in 1788 for a republic at
Vizille! Of all which let us say with Mr. Carlyle, 'What should
Falsehood do but decease, being ripe, decompose itself, and return to
the Father of it?' To whom, alas! I fear, under this inexorable law must
in due time revert too many of the fuliginous word-pictures of Mr.
Carlyle's own dithyrambic prose concerning the 'French Revolution'!

The giants who stalked through his inflamed imagination like spectres on
the Brocken, may be seen to-day in the Musée de la Révolution at Paris,
shrunken to their true proportions--a dreary procession, indeed, of
dreamers, madmen, quacks and felons! How can that be called a 'Great
Revolution,' of which it is recorded that before it had filled the brief
orbit of a decade, it had made an end of the life or of the reputation
of every single man conspicuous in initiating or promoting it? The men
who began the English Revolution of 1688 organised the new order to
which it led. The men who began the American Revolution of 1776
organised the new nation which it called into being. This must have been
as true of the French Revolution had it been really an outcome of the
'principles of 1789,' or of any principles at all. But it was nothing of
the kind. It was simply a carnival of incapacities, ending naturally in
an orgie of crime. It was in the order of Nature that it should deify
Mirabeau in the Pantheon, only to dig up his dishonoured remains and
trundle them under an unmarked stone at the meeting of four streets,
that it should set Bailly on a civic throne, only to drag him forth,
under a freezing sky, to his long and dismal martyrdom amid a howling
mob, that it should acclaim Lafayette as the Saviour of France, only to
hunt him across the frontier into an Austrian prison.

It was because France detested the Republic, and, detesting the
Republic, might at any moment recall the Bourbons, that Napoleon
executed the Duc d'Enghien. It was to make an end of claims older than
his own upon the allegiance of a people essentially and naturally
monarchical. It was a crime, but it was not a squalid and foolish crime
like the murder of Louis XVI. It belonged to the same category with the
execution of Conradin of Hohenstaufen by Charles of Anjou--not, indeed,
as to its mere atrocity, but as to its motives and its intent. It
announced to the French people the advent of a new dynasty, and left
them no choice but between the Republic and the Empire. An autograph
letter of Carnot, the grandfather of the actual President of the Third
Republic, sold the other day in Paris may be cited to illustrate this
point. Carnot, like many other regicides, would gladly have made his
peace with Louis XVIII. His peace with some sovereign he knew that he
must make. The letter I now refer to was written after the return of the
Emperor from Elba, and it could hardly have been written had Carnot not
believed that France might be rallied to the Empire and to its chief,
because France could not exist without a monarchy and a monarch.

The restoration of the monarchy was cordially accepted by the French
people. The American friends of France celebrated it with a banquet in
New York. France prospered under it. It laid the foundations of the
French dominion in Africa, and thereby gave to modern France the only
field of colonial expansion which can be said, down to the present time,
to have enured to any real good either for French commerce or the French
people. Certainly M. Ferry and the Republic have so far done nothing
with Tonquin to dim the lustre of the monarchical conquest of Algiers.

On the contrary, the Republic, through its occupation of Tunis, its
'pouting policy' towards England in Egypt, and its more recent
intimations of a great French Africa to be carried eastward to the
Atlantic, has prepared, and is preparing, for France in the perhaps not
distant future a new chapter of political accidents upon the possible
gravity and extent of which prudent Frenchmen meditate with dubious
satisfaction.

The sceptre passed as quietly from Louis XVIII. to Charles X. in France
as from George IV. to William IV. in England. So far, indeed, as public
disorder indicates public discontent, the English monarchy was in
greater peril during the period between 1815 and 1830 than the French
monarchy. When the Revolution of July came, no man thought seriously of
asking France to accept a second trial of the Republic, and the crown
was pressed upon the Duc d'Orléans, with the anxious assent of
Lafayette, the friend of Washington, Mirabeau's 'Grandison-Cromwell' of
the Revolution of 1789. Under the long reign of Louis Philippe France
again prospered exceedingly. French art and French literature more than
recovered their ancient prestige. Attempts were made to restore the
elder branch of the Bourbons and to restore the dynasty of the
Bonapartes. But no serious attempt was made to restore the Republic.

The Revolution of 1848 took even Paris by surprise. The Republic which
emerged from it filled France with consternation, and opened the way at
once for the restoration of the Empire. On December 10, 1851, the French
people made the Prince-President Dictator, by a vote the significance of
which will be only inadequately appreciated if we fail to remember that
the millions who cast it were by no means sure that, by putting the
sword of France again into the hands of a Napoleon, they would not
provoke the perils of a great European war. France did not court these
perils, but she preferred them to the risks of a republic.

I spent many months in France at that time, and to me, remembering what
I then saw and heard among all sorts and conditions of men, not in the
departments only but in Paris itself, the persistency with which the
leaders of the present Republican party have set themselves, ever since
they came definitely into power with M. Grévy in 1879, to reviving all
the most odious traditions of the earlier Republican experiments, and to
re-identifying the Republic with all that the respectable masses of the
French people most hate and dread, has seemed from the first, and now
seems, little short of judicial madness.

It did not surprise me, therefore, in 1885, to find the banner of the
monarchy frankly unfurled by M. Lambert de Ste.-Croix and scores of
other Conservatives, as they then called themselves, at the legislative
elections of that year. It did surprise me, however, to see the strength
of the support which they instantly received throughout the country. For
I believe the masses of the French people to be at heart monarchical,
less from any sentiment of loyalty at all either to the race of their
ancient kings or to the imperial dynasty, than because the experience of
the last century, to which, as I think very unwisely, the Republican
Government has appealed in what I cannot but call its rigmarole about
the 'Centennial of 1789,' has led them to associate with the idea of a
republic the ideas of instability and of anarchy, and with the idea of a
monarchy the ideas of stability and of order. Now the Government of the
Third Republic, first under M. Thiers and then under the Maréchal-Duc of
Magenta, was so conducted from 1871 to 1877 as to shake this
association.

Under it Frenchmen had seen that a Republic might actually exist in
France for seven years without disturbing social order, interfering with
freedom of conscience, attacking the religion of the country, or wasting
its substance.

There were 'wars and rumours of wars' in the air in 1876. It was very
loudly whispered that Germany, alarmed by the rapid advances of France
towards a complete recovery of her national strength, meant suddenly and
savagely to strike at her; and that, unless the essentially national and
military Government of the Maréchal-Duc was replaced by a Government
which would divert the resources of France largely into industrial,
commercial, and colonial adventures, a new invasion might at any moment
be feared. It ought to have been obvious that a Government which held in
its hand a balance of 98,000,000 francs was much less likely to be
wantonly attacked than a Government which meant to outrun its revenue.
With a declared balance of 98,000,000 francs to the good, France might
raise at the shortest notice 2,000,000,000 francs in a war loan. The
balance of the Maréchal-Duc's Government was in fact a war-treasure, and
a war-treasure of that magnitude was a tolerably effectual guarantee of
peace. This ought, I say, to have been obvious; but it is the triumph of
demagogic skill to prevent a great people from seeing as a mass what is
perfectly plain to every man of them taken alone. Under the stress of a
war-panic the French people, whose dread and dislike of republics in
general had been lulled, as I have shown, into repose by seven years of
a Conservative Republican rule, were led into granting the untested
Republic of Gambetta the credit fairly earned by the tested Republic of
Macmahon and of Thiers.

M. Grévy, thought the incarnation of thrift, of peace at any price, and
of commercial development, was elected President in 1879. M. Léon Say, a
man of wealth and of business, from whom more circumspection might have
been expected, lent himself, as Minister of the Finances, in combination
with the rather visionary M. de Freycinet, to a grand scheme devised by
M. Gambetta 'in a single night,' like Aladdin's Palace, for spending
indefinite millions of money upon docks, railways and ports all over
France, wherever there was a seat in the Chamber to be kept or won. The
'true Republicans,' as they call themselves, must be kept in power, the
Republicans who hold it to be their mission--no, not their mission, for
that word smacks of a Deity--but their proud prerogative, to rid France
and the world of the Christian religion, to abolish all forms of worship
and of monarchy from off the face of the earth, and generally to fashion
the felicity of mankind, in and out of France, after their own mind.
They went to work without delay. Having made the Executive, in the
person of M. Grévy, a puppet, they began at once, in 1879, to pour out
the money of the taxpayers like water, for what we know in the United
States as 'purposes of political irrigation'; to 'purge' the public
service, in all its branches, from the highest to the lowest, of all men
not ready to swear allegiance to their creed; to create new posts and to
fill them with the dependents and parasites of the Republican party
chiefs.

The balance of 98,291,105 fr. 28 c. (to be exact!) with which the
Republic of Thiers and Macmahon had closed the year 1876, rapidly
vanished.

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

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

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

Therefore, the presence of M. Leroy-Beaulieu in the Chamber of Deputies
is a thing to be prevented at any price. The 'Republicans' of the
Hérault this year tried to prevent it not only by treating 'informal'
ballots thrown for him as invalid, and accepting 'informal' ballots
thrown against him as valid, but, as the report of a Committee of the
Chamber admits, by 'irregularities' which in other countries would be
described in harsher terms.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On July 22, 1882, M. Daynaud, an authority on questions of finance,
summed up the results in a speech delivered in the Chamber of Deputies.
The Government in 1877 spent, in round numbers, 3,177,000,000 francs. In
1883 it spent 4,040,000,000 francs. All this without including what are
called 'supplementary credits.' So that, putting these aside, it appears
from the speech of M. Daynaud that, in seven years, between 1877 and
1883, the 'true Republicans' subjected the people of France to an
increase of no less than 863,000,000 francs in their annual public
expenditure.

Meanwhile these same 'true Republicans,' who were thus adding hundreds
of millions yearly to the public debt, struck hundreds of thousands out
of the lawful income of the clergy of France. They ordered the
dispersion by Executive decrees, and 'if necessary by military force,'
of all religious orders and communities not 'authorised' by the
Government. They drove nuns and Sisters of Charity, with violence and
insult, out of their abodes. They expelled the religious nurses from the
hospitals and the priests from the prisons and the almshouses. They
'laicised' the schools of France, throwing every symbol of religion--in
many cases literally--into the street, forbidding, literally, the name
of God to be mentioned within the walls of a school, and striking out
every allusion to the Christian faith from the text-books supplied at
the cost of the Christian parents of France to their children in the
schools supported out of taxes paid by themselves.

It is simply impossible to overstate the virulence and the violence of
this official Republican war against religion which began under the
Waddington Ministry almost as soon as it took possession of the
government in 1879. It was formally opened under the leadership of M.
Ferry. M. Ferry is admitted to be the ideal statesman of the Opportunist
Republicans now in power. To him M. Carnot owes his Presidency of the
Republic. In March 1879 M. Jules Ferry asked the Republican majority of
the House to pass a law concerning the 'higher education,' in the draft
of which he had inserted a clause ever since famous as 'Article 7,'
depriving any Frenchman who might be a member of any religious
corporation 'not recognised by the State' of the right to teach. This
'Article 7' was a revival of an amendment offered to but not carried by
the Legislative Assembly of the Second Republic in 1849. The principle
of it is as old as the Emperor Julian, who forbade Christians to teach
in the schools of the Empire.

M. Ferry's law was intended to repeal a previous law adopted in 1875,
and which had not been then three years in operation. By the Law of July
12, 1875, the Republic of Thiers and Macmahon had modified, in the
interest of liberty, the monopoly of higher education in France enjoyed
by the State. It was an essentially wise, liberal, and 'progressive'
law. But the Republicans of Gambetta could not endure it, for it gave
the Christians of France the right to provide for the higher education
of their children in their own way; so it must be abolished.

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

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

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

'A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush' is an essentially French
proverb. Seven years of peace, liberty, and financial prosperity under
the Conservative Republic should have gone far, I thought, to convince
the average French peasant that he might, after all, be safe under a
republic. Doubtless this impression of mine was not wholly unfounded.
Yet, in spite of this important check upon the headway of the reaction
against Republicanism provoked by the fanaticism and the financial
extravagance of the Government of President Grévy--and in spite, too, of
the open official pressure put upon the voters of France by the then
Minister of the Interior, M. Allain-Targé, who issued a circular
commanding all the prefects in France to stand 'neutral' between
Republican candidates of all shades, but to exert themselves for the
defeat of all 'reactionary' candidates; in spite of all this, the
elections of October and November 1885 sent up about two hundred
monarchical members, whose seats could by no trick or device be stolen
from them, to the Chamber of Deputies, and pitted a popular vote of
3,608,578 declared enemies of the existing Republic against a popular
vote of 4,377,063 citizens anxious to maintain or willing to submit to
it.

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

The Third French Republic, such as these men have made it, is condemned,
hopelessly and irretrievably condemned, by its creed to be a government
of persecution and by its machinery to be a government of corruption.
There is no escape for it.


V

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More than this, the 'Secret Service Fund' voted out of the pockets of
the taxpayers of France into the strong box of the Minister of the
Interior, considerably exceeds the cost of the British Treasury Office!
In 1888 the British budget gave the First Lord of the Treasury, to cover
the expenses of that great and important department of the British
monarchical government, 60,222_l._, or nearly 4,000_l._ less than the
Republicans of the Third French Republic have generously put at the
disposal of M. Constans to 'combat conspiracies' against the life of a
Republic of which in the same breath we are asked to believe that it has
just been acclaimed with enthusiasm by the masses of the French people,
as the fixed, final, and permanent government of their deliberate
choice!

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

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

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

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

  'Get damned in their commonplace way.'

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

The hostility between the Church and the Republic in France is
absolutely, in its origin, one-sided. The Church is no more necessarily
hostile to the Republic as a Republic in France, than it is to the
Republic as a Republic in the United States or in Chile, or in Catholic
Switzerland. The Church can be made hostile to a Republic by persecution
and attack just as it can he made hostile in the same way to a monarchy.
Neither Philippe le Bel nor Henry the Eighth was much of a Republican.

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

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

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

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


VI

But as the point I have now touched, of the religious condition of
France, is a specially grave and important point, I must ask my readers
to pause with me upon it for a moment here in this Introduction. I am
especially moved to do this because I have reason to think that very
serious and very extraordinary delusions on this point exist outside of
France, and especially in England. This is not unnatural when we
remember that nine foreigners in ten take their impressions of France as
a nation, not only from the current journalism and literature of Paris
alone, but from a very limited range of the current literature and
journalism even of Paris. Most Americans certainly, and I am inclined to
think most Englishmen, who visit Paris, and see and know a good deal of
Paris, are really in a condition of penumbral darkness as to the true
social, religious, and intellectual life of the vast majority of the
population even of Paris. We see the Paris of the boulevards, the
Champs-Elysées, the first nights at the theatres, the restaurants, and
the fashionable shops; the _Tout Paris_ of the gossips of the press,
representing, possibly, one per cent. of the population of the French
capital! Of the domestic, busy, permanent Paris, which keeps the French
capital alive from year to year and from generation to generation--the
Paris of industry and of commerce, of the churches, of the charities, of
the schools, of the convents--how much do we see? There are a number of
prosperous foreign colonies living in London now, most of whose leading
members maintain business or social relations, more or less active, with
one or another section of the English population of the great British
metropolis. Perhaps, if we could get a plain, unvarnished account from
some member of one of these colonies, of England and English life as
they appear to him and to his compatriots, Englishmen might be as much
confounded as I have known very intelligent and well-informed Frenchmen
to be, by the notions of French life and of the condition of the French
people, really and seriously entertained, not by casual foreign
tourists, but by highly educated foreigners who really wished to know
the truth.

Not long after the Legislative Elections of 1885, the results of which
astonished public men in England at the time as much almost as they did
the satellites of the Government in Paris, I met at the house of a
friend in London a very eminent English public man, whose name I do not
feel quite at liberty to mention, but who is certainly regarded by great
numbers of Englishmen as an authority without appeal, not only in regard
to questions of English domestic policy, but in regard to European
affairs in general. In the course of a general conversation--there were
ten or twelve well-known people in the company--this distinguished
public man expressed to me his great surprise at the importance which I
'seemed to attach to the religious sentiment in France.'

I assured him that I not only 'seemed' to attach, but did in fact attach
very serious importance to it, and I ventured to ask him why this should
'surprise' him.

To this he replied textually--for I noted down the remark afterwards
that evening--that he was 'under the impression that the religious
sentiment was dead in France!'

'May I ask,' I replied, 'what can possibly have given you such an
impression as this?'

'Oh, many things,' he answered with great emphasis, 'but particularly a
statement which I saw in a statistical work of much authority, not very
long ago, to the effect that there are in France _five millions of
professed atheists_!'

All who heard this amazing assertion were, I think, as completely taken
aback by it as I was. Courtesy required that I should beg the
distinguished man who made it to give me, if he could, the title of the
work in which he had found it. This he promptly replied that he was at
the moment unable to do. He, however, very nearly asphyxiated a very
quiet and well-bred young Frenchman attached to the French Embassy in
London, who was present, by appealing to him on the subject. 'No, no!'
exclaimed the alarmed _attaché_, 'I dare say there is such a book, no
doubt--no doubt--but I have never heard of it.'

I have never been able to find this valuable work. When I do find it I
shall institute a careful inquiry into the reasons which could have led
five millions of French persons, or about one-seventh of the whole
population of France, to take the pains to register themselves as
'atheists.' Presumably they must all have been adults, as the
declaration, on such a subject, of infants, would scarcely, I take it,
be collected, even by M. Jules Ferry, as evidence of the success of his
great scheme for 'laicising' religion out of France.

Meanwhile, I find it set down in the usual statistical authorities
accessible in 1884, that out of the 36,102,021 inhabitants of France,
35,387,703 registered themselves, or were registered, as Catholics,
580,707 as Protestants, 40,439 as Israelites, and 81,951 as 'not
professing any form of religion.'

Yet I suppose that, if the eminent public man who saw, as in a vision,
these five millions of registered atheists marching to the assault of
Christianity in France were to announce their existence as a fact to a
large public meeting in some great English provincial city to-morrow, we
should have leaders in some of the English journals a day or two
afterwards prognosticating the immediately impending downfall of all
religion in France. Our modern democracies on both sides of the Atlantic
have made such rapid and remarkable progress of late years in the art of
forming opinions, that if Isaac Taylor could come back to the earth he
left, not so very long ago, he would hardly, I think, recognise the
planet.

The fashion of taking it for granted that the whole world is fast going
over to the gospel of ganglia and bathybius, of _vox populi et præterea
nihil_, is not confined to the 'fanatics of impiety' in France. I have
heard it seriously stated in a London drawing-room by another public man
of repute within the last year, that he believed 'Mr. John Bright and
Mr. Gladstone were the last two men who would ever cite the Christian
Scriptures as an authority in the House of Commons.'

The uncommonly good English of the Christian Scriptures may perhaps
constitute an objection to their free use in addressing popular
political assemblies. But, admitting this, I hesitate to accept the
statement. That it should have been made however, and made by a man of
more than ordinary ability, is perhaps a thing to be noted.

But I revert to France.

As the time drew near for the Legislative elections of 1889, the
Republicans in power began to perceive that their methods had not been
crowned with absolute success. The awkward corner caused by the enforced
resignation of President Grévy had indeed been turned, because the
Constitution of the Third Republic provides for the election of the
President by the Assembly. But it is one thing to play a successful
comedy in the Assembly with the help of what in America is called 'the
cohesive power of the public plunder,' and quite another thing to get a
satisfactory Chamber of Deputies re-elected by the people of France
after four years of irritating and exasperating misrule. Much was
expected from the dazzling effect upon the popular mind of the Universal
Exposition at Paris--so much, indeed, that I have had the obvious
incongruity of selecting for the celebration of the French Revolution by
a French Republic the centennial of a year in which no French Republic
existed, accounted for to me by a French Republican on the express
ground that the legislative elections were fixed for 1889! There may
have been some truth in this. For nothing could be more preposterous
than the pretext alleged for the selection by the French Government.

This or that thing which occurred at a particular time in a particular
year may reasonably be made the occasion of a centennial or a
semi-centennial celebration. But how is anybody to fix and celebrate the
'centennial' of a set of notions called 'the principles of 1789'?

In the United States we have celebrated the 'Centennial' of the
Declaration of Independence, and the Centennial of the first
Inauguration of the first President.

Did the French Government intend to invite the monarchies of Europe to
celebrate the destruction by a mob of the Bastille on July 14, 1789?
Hardly, I suppose! Or the Convocation of the States-General at
Versailles on May 5, 1789? Certainly not--for the States-General were
convoked, not under the 'principles of 1789,' but in conformity with an
ancient usage and custom of the French monarchy.

What are the 'principles of 1789'?

And why should anybody in or out of France celebrate them?

If by 'the principles of 1789' we are to understand the principles of
modern constitutional government--and I know no other intelligible
interpretation of the phrase--there is certainly no reason why anybody
out of France should particularly concern himself with celebrating the
adoption of these principles in France any more than with celebrating
the adoption of them in England, or the United States, or Germany, or
Spain, or Italy. The principles of modern constitutional government were
certainly not intelligently adopted, and certainly not loyally carried
out in France, by any of the governments which tumbled over one another
in rapid succession in that distracted country between 1789 and 1815.
Have they been intelligently adopted and loyally carried out in that
distracted country to-day? That is a question, I think, not hastily to
be answered!

To ask the people of England, of the United States, of Germany, of
Spain, of Italy, to unite in celebrating the principles of modern
constitutional government, under the name of the 'principles of 1789,'
at Paris, as if the world were indebted to Paris or to France for the
discovery, and the promulgation, and the adoption of those principles,
was really a piece of presumption which might have been pardoned to the
fatuity of the Abbé Sieyès a hundred years ago, but was hardly to have
been expected from educated Frenchmen in the year 1889.

This was stated, with great good sense and commendable courtesy towards
the French Government responsible for the absurdity, by the Italian
Premier, Signor Crispi, in the Chamber of Deputies at Borne, on June 25,
1887.

In reply to an interpellation of Signor Cavalotti, addressed to the then
Foreign Minister of Italy, Signor Depretis, as to the intentions of the
Italian Government with regard to the Universal Exposition of 1889 at
Paris, Signor Crispi, then Minister of the Interior, made a striking
speech (Signor Depretis being then ill of the disease of which he
eventually died), in which he lucidly and forcibly gave the reasons of
the Italian Government for declining to take any official part in the
matter. He plainly intimated his conviction (which is the conviction, by
the way, of a great many sensible people not premiers of Italy) that the
business of Universal Expositions has been possibly overdone. But,
without dwelling upon that point, he went on to show that it would be
foolish for Italy to isolate herself from the other great powers by
taking an official part in this particular 'Universal Exposition.' To
the plea of Signor Cavalotti that liberated Italy ought to unite with
France to celebrate 'the principles of 1789,' Signor Crispi thus
replied; 'I agree with the honourable member that we are sons of 1789.
But I must remind him that 1789 was preceded by the glorious English
Revolution, and by the great American Revolution, in both of which had
been manifested and established the principles which have subsequently
prevailed throughout the world.'

Whether the treatment of the Sovereign Pontiff at Rome by the government
of United Italy, since 1871, has been entirely consistent with the
principles of the 'glorious English Revolution,' or of the 'great
American. Revolution,' I need not now consider. But that all the living
political doctrines of which intelligent Frenchmen mean to speak when
they talk about the 'principles of 1789' are the American political
doctrines of 1776, and the English political doctrines of 1688, admits
of no question. As to this, Signor Crispi was absolutely right, and it
is creditable to him, as an Italian statesman and an Italian patriot,
that he should have thus early and publicly declined to attach the
liberty and the independence of Italy as a bob to the tail of an
electioneering Exposition kite at Paris in 1889. To France and to the
French Republics--first, second, and third--Italy owes a good deal less
than nothing. To two rulers of France, both of them of Italian blood,
the first and third Napoleon, she owes a great deal. But her chief
political creditor, and her greatest statesman, Cavour, drew his
political doctrines, not from the muddy French pool of the 'principles
of 1789,' but from the original fountains of 1776 and 1688. Had Cavour
been living in 1887, to answer the interpellation of Signor Cavalotti,
he might, perhaps, have defined more sharply than it was given to Signor
Crispi to do, the real relations between the French Revolution of 1789
and the national developments of modern Italy. Had the French Revolution
of 1789 been left to exhaust itself within the limits of France, it
would probably have ended--as the friends of the misguided Duc d'Orléans
almost from the first expected to see it end--in the substitution of a
comparatively capable for a positively incapable French king upon a
constitutional French throne. In that event it would have interested
Europe and the world no less, and no more, than the Fronde or the
religious wars which came to a close with the coronation of Henry of
Navarre. It was the fear of this, unquestionably, which drove the
conspirators of the Gironde into forcing a foreign war upon their
unfortunate country. The legend of Republican France marching as one man
to the Rhine to liberate enslaved Europe has much less foundation in
fact than the legend of Itsatsou and the horn of Roland. It is a pity
to disturb historical fables which have flowered into immortal verse,
but really there was not the slightest occasion, so far as Europe was
concerned, for France in 1790 to 'stamp her strong foot and swear she
would be free.' M. de Bourgoing's admirable diplomatic history of those
days makes this quite clear. No power in Europe objected to her being as
free as she liked. On the contrary, England, even in 1792, was both
ready and anxious to recognise the insane French republic of that day,
and to see the French royal family sent away to Naples or to Madrid.

Pitt was too far-sighted a statesman not to be well aware that the
commerce and the colonies of such a French republic were the natural
prizes of English common sense and English enterprise. Nor was Austria
indisposed to see the House of Bourbon, which had successfully disputed
the supremacy of Europe with the Hapsburgs, humiliated and cast down.

The French Revolution became Titanic only when it ceased to be a
Revolution and ceased to be French. The magnificent stanzas of Barbier
tell the true story of the riderless steed re-bitted, re-bridled, and
mounted by the Italian master of mankind, the Cæsar for whom the
eagle-eyed Catherine of Russia had so quietly waited and looked when the
helpless and hopeless orgie of 1789 began. The Past from which he
emerged, the Future which he evoked, both loom larger than human in the
shadow of that colossal figure. What a silly tinkle, as of pastoral
bells in some Rousseau's _Devin du Village_, have the 'principles of
1789,' when the stage rings again with the stern accents of the
conqueror, hectoring the senators of the free and imperial city of
Augsburg, for example, on his way to Wagram and to victory twenty years
afterwards!

'Your bankers are the channel through which the gold of the eternal
enemy of the Continent finds its way to Austria. I have made up my mind
that I will give you to some king. To whom I have not yet settled. I
will attend to that when I come back from Vienna.'

And, as the faithful record of the _Drei Mohren_ tells us, 'Messieurs
the senators withdrew, much mortified, and not at all pleased.'

Nevertheless, when the conqueror kept his word, and having made a king
of Bavaria to give them to, gave them to the king of Bavaria, Messieurs
the senators, with a suppleness and a docility which would have done
credit to Debry (who after proposing, as a republican, to organise 1,200
'tyrannicides' and murder all the kings and emperors of the earth,
begged Napoleon to make him a baron), made haste to come and prostrate
themselves before the new Bavarian Majesty and to protest that until the
fortunate day of his arrival to reign over them they had never known
what real happiness was.

If there is one thing more certain than another in human history, it is
that but for the English Revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution
of 1776 the world in general would know and care to-day very little more
about the French 'principles of 1789,' and the French Revolution, and
the First French Republic, than the world in general knows or cares
to-day about the wars in the Cevennes or the long conflict between the
Armagnacs and the Bourguignons.

Napoleon crumpled up the 'principles of 1789' and the Revolution and the
Republic in his iron hand, and flung them all together into a corner. He
meant that France and the world should think of other things. In 1810
Paganel, who, having been a 'patriot' of the Convention, had naturally
become a liveried servant of the Emperor and King, thought he might
venture to compose a 'Historical Essay on the French Revolution.' He
dedicated it to the Imperial Chancellor of the Legion of Honour, and he
wound up his preface with these words: 'And thus at last we see without
astonishment, after this long series of errors, misfortunes, and crimes,
the Republic disappear, and France implore the Supreme Being to
vouchsafe to her the one great and potent genius who in these difficult
circumstances was able to lift her up, to defend her, and to govern
her!' The heart of Louis XVIII. would have been touched by the grateful
humility of this repentant wretch. But the Emperor simply kicked him
downstairs. He forbade the book to be published. The whole edition was
put under lock and key, and never saw the light till liberty came back
to France, with the white nag and the Bourbon lilies, in 1815. Surely
here is a fact worth noting!

Had this first history of the French Revolution, written as Paganel, a
member of the Revolutionary Convention, wrote it, been published under
the First Republic, the author would infallibly have been sent to the
guillotine. Writing it under the First Empire he was merely snubbed,
despite his fulsome adulation of the Emperor. His book was finally given
to the world under the restored historic monarchy in 1818!

In 1811, Chateaubriand, having been elected to succeed Marie-Joseph
Chéniér, the brother of the republican poet André, murdered by the First
Republic, as a member of the Institute, prepared a speech on the
Convention, to be read before that august body. Napoleon heard of it
and, without troubling himself to look at it, forbade it to be
delivered. 'It is well for M. de Chateaubriand,' he said, 'that it was
suppressed. If he had read it before the Institute, I would have flung
him into the bottom of a dungeon, and left him there the rest of his
natural life!'

Napoleon knew the First Republic thoroughly. He had measured all its
men, and all its records were in his hand. He could not get into or out
of his carriage without treading on some incorruptible 'patriot'
prostrate between its wheels with a petition for a préfecture, a title
or a pension. The crimes and follies of the First Republic had made
France and the world sick of its name. Its true story was a tale of
shame and humiliation, not fit to be dragged out into the blaze of the
glory of Imperial France.

The First Republic was the deadly enemy both of liberty and of law. The
conduct of its first envoy to the United States would have justified
Washington in locking him up. When a stop was put to his mischievous
impertinences, he preferred exile in America to the chance of the
guillotine at Paris, and his name died out, I believe, curiously enough,
with one of the chief instruments of the notorious Tweed Ring in New
York.

The first shots fired in anger under the American flag after the peace
of 1783 were fired against cruisers of the French Republic captured in
the West Indies by American men-of-war, to put an end to the ignorant
and insolent attempt of what called itself a government at Paris to
issue letters of marque on American soil against English commerce.

So grateful was France to the Emperor for restoring the reign of law,
that she never troubled herself about liberty, and but for the
indomitable defence of constitutional liberty and national independence
which England maintained, often single-handed, from the rupture of the
peace of Amiens to the victory of Waterloo, the very names of the chief
actors in the odious and ridiculous dramas of the Revolution would have
long since faded, as Napoleon intended they should fade, out of the
memory of the masses of mankind.


VII

How little confidence the Government of the Third Republic really felt
in the efficacy of the 'principles of 1789,' and of the 'Centennial
Exposition,' to save it at the polls in 1889 from the natural
consequences of its intolerance and its corruption, was instructively
shown by the absolute panic into which it was thrown by the election at
Paris of General Boulanger on January 27. Here, at the very threshold of
the great electoral year, rose the spectre of the 'man on horseback'!

Certainly General Boulanger was not Napoleon Bonaparte. The Government,
which had itself put General Boulanger on horseback, knew the strength
and the weakness of the man himself. But it was the legend, not the
man, they dreaded. If the French people, or even if Paris, really
believed in the legend of Boulanger--and this tremendous vote of January
27 looked very much like it--it mattered little what the real value of
the man might be, the legend would make him master of France. That would
mean for the Third Republic the fate of the First Republic and of the
Second, and for the men who had identified it with their own fanaticism
and folly, and greed, and incapacity, a long farewell to all their
greatness!

As for the eventual results, what mattered these to them?

The Universal Exposition might collapse, or it might be opened by
General Boulanger on his black horse, instead of President Carnot in his
landau. What did that signify? But it signified much that the men who
had invented President Carnot were not likely to make part of the
_cortège_ of General Boulanger.

It is no exaggeration to say that from January 27, 1889, the Government
of the Third French Republic was openly and visibly given up by night
and by day to one great purpose alone--and that purpose was, not to
glorify the 'principles of 1789,' not to celebrate the Republic--the
grand statue of the Triumph of the Republic, destined to be set up with
great pomp in the sight of the assembled human race, was actually left
to be cast in plaster of Paris, no functionary caring to waste a sou on
putting it into perennial bronze or enduring marble--no! the great
dominant, unconcealed purpose of all the leaders of the Republic was, in
some way--no matter how, by hook or by crook--to conjure that spectre
of the First Consulate, riding about, awful and imminent, on the black
horse of General Boulanger!

Perhaps the high-water mark of this quite unparalleled and most
instructive panic was the appearance, towards the end of the last
parliamentary session, of M. Jules Ferry, the author of the odious
'Article 7,' the man who after hesitating--to his credit be it
said--originally to propose that ministers of religion should be
absolutely forbidden to teach the children of France in her public
schools, at last succumbed to the vehemence of Paul Bert, the Condorcet
of this modern persecution, and became the acknowledged leader of the
war against Liberty and Religion--in the tribune of the Deputies, there
to urge, and indeed to implore, the Conservative members to make peace
with the persecutors, and save them from the peril of Boulanger!

The scene of that day in the Chamber of Deputies was not one to be
forgotten. The aspect and the accents of the Republican leader were at
times absolutely pathetic with the pathos of unaffected terror. It was
difficult to believe, whilst listening to him, that he could really have
'five millions of professed atheists' at his back, encouraging him to
extirpate Christianity, root and branch, out of the land of France!

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

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

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

Then the silence was broken!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Under his control they still remain, and it is now proposed to attach
these services permanently to the Ministry which manages the elections.
Can anybody fail to see what this means?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Republican majority                           277,609

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

But this is not all.

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

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

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


VIII

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

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

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

From the point of view of the domestic peace of France, this proceeding
was perhaps less reprehensible than the Belshazzar's Feast of M.
Constans and the thirteen thousand mayors. But from the point of view of
the relations between the Third Republic and the deliberate independent
electoral will of France, I think it must be admitted that they are, as
the people say in the Western States of America, 'very much of a
muchness!'

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

Americans who understand the institutions of their own country find the
true measure of the fitness of a people for self-government in their
respect for the authority of a lawful Executive. The fatal mistake has
been made by the Third as it was by the First French Republic of
confounding respect for a lawful Executive with submission to an
Executive controlled by a majority of the Legislature. The fact that the
power of the public purse, in a constitutional government, is
necessarily confided to the Legislature, makes this mistake fatal--fatal
at once to the liberty of the taxpayers who supply the public purse, and
of whom the members of the Legislature are simply the agents and
trustees, and to the efficiency and integrity of the Executive. I see
with much interest, while the sheets of this book are going through the
press in London, that this very grave point emerges from a brief
correspondence published in the English newspapers between the
Chancellor of the British Exchequer, Mr. Goschen, and Lord Lewisham.
Lord Lewisham, acting, it would appear, on behalf of a number of English
Civil Servants, wrote to the Chancellor of the Exchequer concerning
certain complaints of these servants, embodied in a memorial. In his
reply, the Chancellor of the Exchequer alludes to an intimation which
seems to have been made by the authors of this memorial of their
intention to put a kind of pressure upon the Minister of the Crown
through the House of Commons. Upon this Mr. Goschen observes: 'the
memorialists should be reminded that their reference to an appeal to
their representatives in Parliament, involving, as it would seem, a
personal parliamentary canvass to determine the relations between the
State and its employés, contemplates a course of action not only
injurious to the public interests, but opposed to the best traditions of
the Civil Service.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The traits and the tendencies of France, on the contrary, must be
studied in the provinces. There was always more wit than wisdom in the
famous saying of Heine--that to talk about the opinion of the provinces
in France was like talking about the opinion of a man's legs--the head
being the seat of thought, and Paris being the head. But the saying was
uttered during the reign of Louis Philippe, and long before the
establishment of universal suffrage by the Second Empire. With universal
suffrage and with the development during the past twenty years of the
railway and of the telegraphic system throughout France, the importance
of the provinces relatively to Paris has greatly and steadily increased.
While steam and electricity have, of course, increased the strength of
the pressure which an aggressive oligarchy controlling the centralised
administrative machinery of the Government at Paris can put upon the
opinions and the interests of France, they have also, it must be
remembered, increased the power of France to resist and to resent that
pressure. They have established return currents, the force of which
grows visibly greater every year. The great provincial towns and cities
of France, for example, are ceasing to be dependent, as they formerly
were, upon the press of Paris for their news and views of which passes
in the capital.

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

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

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

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

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

Sooner or later this tragi-comedy must end. It concerns Europe and the
world that it should end sooner rather than later, and that it should
end with a pacific restoration of France to her proper place in the
family of European States. Surely the most imperious necessity of the
immediate future in Europe is a general disarmament. No French Republic
can possibly propose or accept such a disarmament. No French Empire even
could easily propose or accept such a disarmament. For the Republic and
the Empire are jointly though not equally responsible for the
humiliations and the disasters of the great Franco-German War. The
historic French monarchy, restored through a revision of the existing
Constitution by the deliberate will of the French people, might propose
such a disarmament with a moral certainty that it would be accepted.
Would not England necessarily stand by France in such a proposal? And is
it not clear that the refusal of Central Europe to accept such a
disarmament so proposed and supported would make that alliance with the
Russian Empire, which is impossible to a French republic, both easy and
natural with a French monarchy?

I should have visited France to small purpose if I could suppose that
such considerations as this will much affect the masses of the French
people. Their present Minister of Public Instruction, M. Fallières, gave
his measure of their average enlightenment on such points when he
actually called upon the electors of the Lot-et-Garonne in September to
vote against M. Cornelis Henry de Witt because a monarchical restoration
would 'be followed by a revival of the _droits des Seigneurs_, and--by a
Cossack invasion!'

But there are many men in France alive to such considerations as this,
and these men have many ways of reaching and influencing the political
action of the masses of their countrymen.

Such men see the vital relations of the diplomatic position of France to
the grave domestic question of the public expenses. It is difficult to
ascertain the actual cost of the military establishment of France on its
present footing of an armed peace. But French officers of rank assure me
that France is now keeping under arms at least 550,000 men, or more than
one in seven of her adult male population available for national
defence. 'We have more men under arms than Germany,' said a French
general to me at Marseilles, 'which is absurd, because the German army
for fighting purposes, in case of any sudden trouble with us, includes
the armies of Austria, Hungary and Italy--so Germany saves money on her
peace footing which we idly expend on ours.' What this officer did not
say to me has been said by many other well-informed Frenchmen, that the
recent military legislation of the parliamentary majority is
demoralising this great military force and threatens its efficiency. The
prominent position taken in the new Chamber since it assembled by M.
Raynal, a Radical member for the Gironde who held the portfolio of
Public Works under M. Gambetta in 1880 and again under M. Jules Ferry,
is not of good omen for the army. It was M. Raynal who brought about the
fall of General Gresley as Minister of War by an 'interpellation,'
founded on the refusal of the War Minister to remove an officer of the
Territorial Army because he was a monarchist. And now M. Raynal appears
with a project for more effectually establishing the domination of the
parliamentary majority by giving it the right to adjourn once a week for
six successive weeks, all debates on any 'interpellation' to which the
Government may object on 'grounds of public policy!'

While the costly army of France is at the mercy of legislation under
such conditions, the navy of France is managed, as appears from a
drastic report presented some time ago by M. Gerville-Réache, an able
Republican deputy from Guadeloupe, with at least as much regard to
politics as to economy. M. Gerville-Réache showed that contracts were
given out so recklessly that a supply of canned provisions, for example,
had been laid in at Cherbourg sufficient for five years! At other
stations supplies of all kinds were bought at prices ranging far above
the market rates, and circulars were produced in which successive
Ministers of Marine had ordered the commandants at different naval
stations to 'expend every sou in their possession' on no matter what,
'before the expiration of the fiscal year, as any excess remaining in
their hands would not only be lost to the Ministry by being ordered back
into the Treasury, but would allow opportunities for impugning the
forecast and judgment of the ministers!' Under such a system it is not
surprising that Admiral Krantz, one of the best naval administrators
France possesses, should have been forced to withdraw from the Tirard
Government to satisfy a political Under-Secretary, M. Etienne.

Is it possible that in the actual condition of France and of Europe such
a system as this should last?

If France drifts or is driven into a great European war, one of two
things would seem to be inevitable. If the French armies are victorious,
the general who commands them and restores the military prestige of
France will be the master of the government and of the country. If the
French armies are defeated, the Government will disappear in a whirlwind
of national rage and despair. 'In that event,' said a Republican Senator
to me, 'in that event--which I will not contemplate--the princes of the
House of France would be recalled instantly and by acclamation; we
should have nothing left but that or anarchy.'

But putting aside the crisis of a great war, what other alternatives
present themselves as the possible issues in peace of the system now
dominant at Paris?

Of what weight or avail in the policy of the parliamentary oligarchy
which calls itself the Third Republic are the counsels of men like M.
Léon Renault, M. Jules Simon, M. Ribot, M. Léon Say, who have tried in
vain to constitute in France the Conservative Republic of M. Thiers? M.
Léon Say left his seat in the Senate before the recent elections and
presented himself in the Pyrenees as a candidate for the Chamber, with
the well-understood expectation of finding himself eventually put into
the presidency of that body. This was to be a guarantee of the
Conservative Republic!

Who actually fills that most important post?

M. Floquet, who first distinguished himself under the Empire by publicly
insulting the Emperor of Russia in the Palais de Justice during the
visit of that potentate to Paris, and who resigned his seat as a deputy
for the Seine in March 1871 to share 'the perils and sufferings,' as he
put it, of his constituents, the Communards of Paris! For this M.
Floquet was arrested at Biarritz and locked up at Paris till the end of
the year 1871.

How can France hope to find liberty within her own borders, or peace
with honour abroad, under the domination of such men?

On December 19, 1888, during a discussion of the budget of 1890 in the
French Senate, M. Challemel-Lacour, a Republican of the Republicans, who
actually allowed the red flag to be hoisted instead of the tricolour on
the Hôtel de Ville of Lyons while he was prefect of the Rhône, and who
represented the Republic for a time as Ambassador in London, made a
remarkable speech, in which he warned his colleagues of the fate which
they were preparing for the Republic. He is one of the three Senators of
the Bouches-du-Rhône, and one of the four Vice-Presidents of a body now
controlled by the Government, and therefore virtually by the majority of
the Chamber of Deputies. He is more than this. An elaborate speech of
his, delivered in the Assembly on September 4, 1874, in which he denied
the 'right to teach' as threatening the 'moral unity of France,' was
the signal of the deliberate war against all religion afterwards
proclaimed by M. Gambetta, and since prosecuted by M. Jules Ferry. Out
of that speech grew the policy of the Third Republic. Yet what did he
say in 1888? He plainly declared his belief that the policy of the
Government was driving the Republic headlong to its ruin. He spoke as a
Republican, passionately reaffirming his faith in the Republic, and his
desire to see it solidly founded in France. 'I conjure you, therefore,'
he said, 'to take order, that the Republic may once more become the
reign of law; that all may be protected in their persons, in their
property, in their faith, not only against disorder in the streets, but
against moral disorder, moral anarchy, defamation, calumny, against the
fury of an unbridled, uncontrolled, irresponsible press. It is time to
arrest the threatening ruin which must affect the humblest lives, if our
sad fate be to witness the catastrophe of liberty!'

M. Challemel-Lacour is an orator. The Senate was shaken and roused by
his earnest appeal. A motion was made that his speech be ordered to be
printed and posted on the walls of Paris. But the night came, and with
the night the pressure of the powers indicted by the speech, and so no
more was heard of it, and the budget of 1890 was voted by the outgoing
Chamber, and the incoming Chamber has re-established in it a Secret
Service Fund of 1,600,000 francs for the Minister of the Interior--and
the work of 'invalidating' the elections of troublesome deputies goes
merrily on, and in the remote valleys and hills of France poor village
curates are mulcted of half their humble stipends for the offence of
calling upon their parishioners to vote for the candidates who do not
attack their religion.

From this intolerable position there are two obvious ways of escape. One
is the familiar Parisian way of the barricades. That way is not likely
to be tried in the interest of liberty or of law. The other is the way
which France sought to adopt in the recent elections, of a deliberate
Revision of the Constitution, now hopelessly perverted into the
instrument of a parliamentary oligarchy. The actual Government has just
prevented a Revision in the interest of a Republican Dictator, which
after all must have been more or less a leap in the dark out of a
window.

As between the only available window and the only available doorway of a
dwelling in flames, it is intelligible that an emotional inmate, with
the smell of the fire on his garments, should make for the window. But,
the window being barred, what should restrain him from walking
rationally out of the doorway? Any one of a dozen possible emergencies
may compel a Revision of the Constitution--and any Revision of the
Constitution now must mean either a Radical revolution, or a restoration
of the hereditary Executive. Either of these would be a doorway; for
France would know whither either of these must lead. M. Thiers, it is
said by persons who ought to be well informed, might have led France
thus out of a doorway in 1871, and into a restoration of the Monarchy.
M. Thiers was an exceedingly able man, but it is hard to see how he
could then have gone about to achieve this result. France in 1871 was
still a conquered country occupied by the German armies. The Third
Napoleon and his son were both then living. The Comte de Chambord was
then in the strength of his years. The Comte de Paris had not then taken
the steps which he afterwards took with so much wisdom and moral
courage, to make an end of the rupture between Henri V. and the House of
Orléans.

The situation now is materially changed. The Imperialists are divided
between Jerome the father and Victor the son. The Royalists are united.
The France of Henri IV. and of Charles X. is represented to-day by the
grandson of Louis Philippe. The _vox Dei_ and the _vox Populi_ meet in
him as they met in the Prince of Orange when England, forty years after
the criminal catastrophe of 1649, was driven by the flight of James II.
into seating William and Mary, the grandson and the granddaughter of
Charles I., upon the abdicated throne.

How can an independent Executive ever be restored in France excepting in
the person of Philippe VII.? Had the Revolution of 1830 never occurred
he would now by the ancient law of succession be King of France and
Navarre. Had the Revolution of 1848 never occurred he would now be King
of the French under the Charter. If the era of revolutions is ever to be
closed in France, must it not be by an Executive who shall be at once
King of France and King of the French--King of France, as representing
the historic growth into greatness and unity of the French nation; King
of the French, as representing the personal liberties and the private
rights of every citizen of the French commonwealth?


       *       *       *       *       *


FRANCE AND THE REPUBLIC




CHAPTER I

IN THE PAS-DE-CALAIS


  CALAIS

The men who, in 1790, brought about the formal division of France into
departments, no doubt thereby facilitated the ephemeral transformation,
in September 1792, of the ancient French monarchy into a French
republic, 'one and indivisible.' But they also put their improvised
republic thereby at the mercy of the marvellous Italian who blew its
flimsy framework into shreds with his cannon in October 1795.

In working out what George Sand calls 'the great practical joke' of the
First Consulate, and the formidable reality of the Empire, Napoleon
found, ready-fashioned to his hand and undamaged by the republican
tinkers, a system of administration essentially despotic. This system
did for him what Charlemagne did for himself when he got rid of the
tribal dukes of the Merovingian epoch, and, as Gneist and Sir Robert
Morier have shown, gathered into his own control the four unities which
make up the unity of the State--the military, the police, the judiciary,
and the finances. The counts of Charlemagne, removable at his pleasure,
with no root in their _comitatus_ save his sovereign will, were the true
prototypes of the modern French prefect. If the old provinces of
France, which had a local life, organisation, and spirit of their own,
had been taken as the units of government in 1790, the monarchy perhaps
might hardly have been abolished in 1792 by a Convention so headlong and
tumultuous that for one day it actually forgot, after abolishing the
monarchy, to establish any government in its place.

But if a republic had been founded through the action of the provinces
of France, it would probably have been harder for Napoleon to make an
end of it, than it was for Charlemagne to dispense with the recognition
of local rights to which the Merovingian kings had submitted in the
appointment of their hereditary _subreguli_, from among the local
magnates of the shires. This, it seems to me, may be inferred from the
fact, admitted on all hands in France, that the departments remain
to-day what they were at first--mere administrative divisions which have
taken no hold on the feelings and sympathies of the people, while the
'local patriotism' of the provinces is still a vivid reality.

Frenchmen are still Gascons and Provençals, Bretons and Normans,
Burgundians and Picards, and no country in the world is richer than
France in local histories and chronicles. But so late as 1877 the local
history of the Department of the Pas-de-Calais, in which I am now
writing, could be described as 'unique in France,' and this local
history is really a history, not of the department at all, but of the
two important and interesting provinces of which it consists--Artois,
namely, and the Boulonnais--each of which still preserves, after nearly
a century, its own distinctive character in the physiognomy of the
people, in their habits, their turn of mind, and their traditions. The
attempt to fuse them into a new political entity has completely failed.
No more has, apparently, come of it, locally, than would have come of
an attempt to fuse Massachusetts and Rhode Island into a Department of
Martha's Vineyard, or Kent and Sussex into a Department of New Haven.
Possibly even less. For Artois and the Boulonnais never passed
definitely under the French crown until the middle of the seventeenth
century. Even Calais, after the Duke of Guise had wrested it from
England, was conquered for Spain by the Archduke Albert, and a smiling
little agricultural commune alone now commemorates, in its name of
Thérouanne, the once great and flourishing episcopal capital of Morinia
in which Clodion began the French monarchy, and which was mercilessly
razed to the ground and abolished from off the face of the earth, little
more than three hundred years ago, by the victorious emperor Charles the
Fifth.

Of this artificial department Calais is neither the chief town nor
capital. It has scarcely a third of the population of Boulogne, and not
much more than half the population of Arras, which is the seat of the
préfecture; and though it is by no means so dreary and uninteresting a
place as the casual traveller, seeing only the landing-pier, and the new
station, which bears the name of the heroic Eustache de St.-Pierre, is
apt to take it to be, it cannot compare, in point of beauty and
interest, either with Boulogne or with Arras. But as the French head of
the great historic ferry between England and the Continent, and as the
seat of sundry thriving factories, it is both a busy and prosperous
town. I found its streets swarming with people and its houses a flutter
of flags and banners, when I came to it on June 3, 1889, to see the
'inauguration,' by President Carnot, of the works on which the French
Government has been spending millions of francs during the past decade,
with an eye to deepening and enlarging the harbour. The weather was
magnificent. Several men-of-war of the Channel squadron lay off the
port. Excursion steamers came in from England, bringing members of
Parliament and miscellaneous British subjects, of the sort once
indignantly denounced to me by the little old verger of a Midland
cathedral as 'them terrible trippers.' The active and good-natured
railway porters at the station were worn out with throngs of travellers
pouring in from all the country round about. There was much animation
everywhere, but nowhere any enthusiasm, though Calais, I suppose, must
be a republican town, as at the election of a deputy, held here in 1886,
the Government candidate, M. Camescasse, received 5,196 votes against
2,233 given to his Conservative opponent, M. Labitte. I am told, too,
there is a good deal of Socialism among the factory workmen; and I can
see that the place is full of _cabarets_ and _débits_, flowing not only
with light beer and sour wine, but with spirits of a sort to make the
consumers more clamorous about the rights than solicitous about the
duties of man.

I heard, in the course of the day, that at some points in his progress,
the President was received with cries of 'Vive Boulanger!' but nothing
of this sort passed under my own observation. What most struck me was
that his presence appeared to be not an event at all, but merely an
incident of a general holiday. Nor did the people seem to care much
about the real event of the day, the 'inauguration' of the perfected
port. Perhaps they knew that the port is not yet perfected. Those of
them who went down to the pier at least knew, this--for a steamer of no
very great size, the St.-André, I believe, trying to come in, grounded
on the sand, and lay there thumping herself heavily for I know not how
long. I heard this mishap described with much glee by a group of
Boulonnais in the main street. 'Ah bah!' said one of them exultingly,
'they may spend what they like, Calais will never be Boulogne!'

I breakfasted with a friend who lives much on a property he has in
Picardy, and who came down to Calais to meet me. When I first knew him,
years ago, he was a republican of the type of Cavaignac and a bitter
enemy of the Empire, some of his kinsfolk in the Gironde having been
ill-treated during the persecution which raged against the republicans
and the royalists alike, in and around Bordeaux, after the _coup d'état_
of the Prince President. Of later years he has been growing indifferent
to public affairs, and is now, I think, simply a pessimist, whom nothing
but a foreign invasion of France is likely to rouse into activity again.

'What is the matter with the people here?' I asked him. 'Are they
Boulangists, or do they simply dislike Carnot?'

'No!' he replied, 'I don't think they care much about Boulanger, and why
should they dislike Carnot? There is nothing in him to like or to
dislike. He is not a personality. He is only a functionary, and
Frenchmen care nothing about functionaries. They know that this is an
electoral job, and they care nothing about it, one way or the other.'

'But I saw an inscription on a banner in one of the streets,' I said,
'to this effect: "Calais always faithful to the Carnots!" Does that mean
that the Carnots are of this country?'

'Not at all! The grandfather of Carnot was born in Burgundy somewhere.
He married a young lady of St.-Omer, and in that way came to be sent by
the Pas-de-Calais to the "Legislative" and the Convention. The
inscription is amusing though,' he added, 'for, like these other
inscriptions reciting the names of Lazare Carnot, and Hippolyte Carnot,
and Sadi Carnot, it shows how hard some people are trying to work the
President up into a personality. They want to make him out the heir of a
dynasty--Carnot III.!'

'That is not a very republican way of looking at a President,' I
observed.

'Possibly not, but it is a very French way of looking at one! We should
be the most monarchical people in Europe if we were not the most
anarchical. Give a public man a legend and a grandfather, and he can go
a long way with us. I don't know that the grandfather will do without
the legend, even when, as in this case, the grandfather has a legend of
his own.'

'Is that legend of grandfather Carnot very strong in this region?' I
asked.

'Neither in this region nor anywhere else,' he replied. 'I think it is
very foolish of the managers in Paris to provoke comparisons by sending
a political bagman to Germany to bring back the ashes of Papa Victory,
as the Prince de Joinville brought back the dead Emperor from St.
Helena. Carnot I., after all, was simply a good war minister, who loomed
into greatness only in comparison with the rogue Pache and the
phenomenal booby Bouchotte who preceded him. He was certainly no better
than his successor Pétiet, and it was Pétiet, not he, who finally
"organised victory" by sending Moreau to the Rhine, and Bonaparte to
Italy. Napoleon, who knew them both, made Pétiet governor of Lombardy,
and chose him, not Carnot, to organise the great camp at Boulogne. When
Pétiet died, not long after Austerlitz, Napoleon gave him a much grander
funeral in the Pantheon than can be got up now for the grandfather of
Carnot. Most people have forgotten Pétiet, and it is a blunder to remind
them of him. But this is a government of blunderers. See what trouble
the Ferrys and the Freycinets are taking to unmake the legend
Clémenceau made for Boulanger! Do what they may, that black horse is
worth more to Boulanger to-day than Carnot's grandfather ever will be to
Carnot III.'

'But has Carnot III. no value of his own? Has he not shown more firmness
than people expected of him when this Boulangist business began?'

'Carnot III. is simply the firm-name of Ferry and De Freycinet. I am not
fond of the scurrilities of Rochefort, as you know, but he sometimes
hits the nail on the head very hard, as he did when, on the day after
that comedy of the presidential election, he said "the fact that a man,
if you ask him to dinner, will not put your spoons into his pocket is
not a sufficient reason for making him president of a republic." Only,'
he added reflectively, 'that was not quite their reason for making him
president. It was that they thought he would let other people pocket the
spoons.'

This reminded me of what used to be said of Secretary Seward by his
enemies, that he was 'honest enough himself, but cared nothing about
honesty in other people.'

'I don't mean that exactly,' said my friend. 'What I mean is, that
Carnot III. is not clever enough to know whether the people around him
are or are not honest. His grandfather was. Carnot I. would have cut a
great figure in our present Senate, and in the party of the "sick at
heart"--the respectable gentlemen, I mean, who are always consenting,
under the stress of some "reason of State," to vote for one or another
piece of rascality, though it makes them "sick at heart" to do so.
Carnot I. voted in this way for the murder of Louis XVI., and he takes
pains to tell us that all his colleagues in the Convention who voted for
it did so in dread of the mob in the galleries. Just in the same way he
was sharp enough to join Napoleon during the Hundred Days, because he
saw that his best chance of saving his own head and staying in France
was to keep out the Bourbons. This Carnot III. is, I dare say, more
honest and less calculating--for he is certainly more dull--than his
grandfather. Perhaps he may turn out to be the Louis XVI. of the
Republic.'

How much has actually been spent on the works here to make Calais a
great seaport, it is not easy to ascertain; but the lowest estimates
stated to me seem to be quite out of proportion with the results
actually achieved.

My conversation on this point with my friend from Picardy is worth
recording.

'Ten years ago,' he said, 'the amount to be spent on Calais was set down
at eleven millions of francs. I feel quite sure that at least twice this
sum has been actually spent here since the work began in 1881.'

'Why do you feel sure of this?'

'Because twice the first estimate has been avowedly spent everywhere in
France on the whole scheme. Calais alone figures this year in the budget
for sixteen millions and a half! You were in France, were you not, in
1880, and you must surely remember the songs that used to be sung in the
streets:--

  "C'est Léon Say, c'est Freycinet,
  C'est Freycinet, c'est Léon Say."

'These two men, both of them men of business, both financiers (though
the "white mouse"[1] is a bit of a visionary) and both men of ability,
deliberately adopted, in 1879, after a single conversation with
Gambetta, a scheme improvised by him, who was neither a man of business
nor a financier, but a declamatory Bohemian, for keeping up the war
expenditure by committing France to the creation of a complete
"commercial outfit."

    [1] This is the popular nickname of M. de Freycinet.

'The Republicans won the elections in 1877 by frightening France into a
belief that a Conservative victory at the polls would be followed by a
new German invasion. I am not sure, mind you, that this was an idle
scare. For under the Conservative administration of our affairs we had
cleared off in six years' time the frightful burdens imposed upon us by
the war, by the senseless Parisian revolution of 1870, and by the
Communist insurrection of 1871; and it is likely enough that Bismarck
may have made up his mind to attack us if he saw us persist in a sane
and sensible public policy. Be that as it may, Gambetta, Léon Say, and
Freycinet, between them, did his work for him by plunging the country
back into the financial morass from which the Conservatives had rescued
it. They carried the new chamber with them into Gambetta's scheme for
doing systematically and successfully what had been clumsily attempted
in the Ateliers Nationaux of 1848. France was to be made a republic by
spending nearly the amount of the German War indemnity on the
construction of railways, canals, and ports all over the country. The
sum stated in the outset was four thousand five hundred millions of
francs--rather a pretty penny you must see!'

'I remember it,' I replied, 'and I remember thinking, when the scheme
was first developed, that the adoption of it was a wonderful evidence of
the financial vigour and vitality of France.'

'Thank you,' he replied rather bitterly. 'It was just such a proof of
vigour and vitality that Dr. Sangrado used to get from his patients with
his lancet. It was a great political manoeuvre, no doubt, and it
commended itself to all the hungry politicians in France so promptly
and so warmly, that within three years' time, in 1882, M. Tirard, who
was then Finance Minister, and who is now on the box of the Carnot
coach, had to admit that the expenditure then contemplated in carrying
out this great idea could not possibly fall short of nine thousand one
hundred and fifty millions of francs! This, observe, was seven years
ago. To-day it has swelled, at the least, into eleven and perhaps to
twelve thousand millions of francs. Why not? Gambetta, Léon Say, and
Freycinet proclaimed the millennium of civil engineers and local
candidates. What becomes of equality and fraternity if the smallest
hamlet in the recesses of the Jura is not as much entitled to a local
railway at the public expense as the largest port on the Bay of Biscay?
Once let it be understood that the Government means to spend ten
thousand millions on public works, and all the voters are ready to
believe the Government has found the philosopher's stone. Nobody but the
tax-gatherer will ever make them understand where the money comes from.
And between the tax-gatherer and the taxpayer, a truly clever finance
minister can always interpose successfully, for a certain length of
time, the anodyne banker with a new form of public loan! We are the
sharpest and thriftiest people alive in private affairs, and in public
matters the most absolute fly-gobblers in the whole world!'

I tried to console my friend by informing him that this particular kind
of political financiering is not unknown in my own country. The scheme
of Gambetta appears to me to be simply a development, on a grand scale,
of the 'log-rolling principle,' on which, year after year, a measure
known as the 'Rivers and Harbours Bill' is engineered, with more or less
friction, through the Congress of the United States. It is regularly
and diplomatically fought over between the two houses until an agreement
about it is come to between the opposing forces, described by a recent
American writer as 'the plutocracy at one end and the mobocracy at the
other end' of our national legislature. In short, it has now become an
'institution,' and like other institutions it has its legendary hero, in
a western legislator who is reputed to have re-elected himself for a
number of years by 'putting through' successive appropriations for the
'improvement' of a stream which rose in an inaccessible mountain and
emptied itself into an unfathomable swamp.

'That is very well,' said my friend gravely, 'very well indeed, but you
have to do this thing every year, while Gambetta and Léon Say and De
Freycinet committed France to it once for all and irremediably. And on
what scale do you do this sort of thing?'

I was forced to own that, upon this point, Washington so far lags
shamefully in the rear of Paris. Our grandest 'log-rolling' in finance
is, to the colossal operations of Gambetta, Léon Say, and De Freycinet,
as is the ordinary iron lamp-post of New York to the Eiffel Tower.

The 'Rivers and Harbours Bill,' in 1886, was only saved after a
desperate struggle at the very end of the session, by a compromise over
an 'ancient and fish-like' canal job in the North-West, the original
promoter of which, long since passed beyond the hope, if not beyond the
desire of hydraulic improvements, audaciously baptized it with the name
of Father Hennepin, one of the glories of France in the New World. And
yet the amount involved in the Bill did not exceed fourteen million
dollars, or a beggarly seventy million francs.

'At that rate,' said my friend, 'it would take your great country more
than a century to match what we have covered in ten years. And yet you
are thought an enterprising people, and, what is more to the point, your
treasury shows an annual surplus, while ours shows an annual deficit;
and you have nearly twice our population, have you not, and more than
ten times our area of territory?

'If I were to "improve" the roads and ponds on my property on the
principle on which France has been "improving" her railway systems and
her ports, I should bring up in bankruptcy. Where else can the country
bring up? Nothing, so far, has saved us but the woollen stocking of the
peasants. Come to my place in Picardy, and I will show you a dozen
old fellows who go about dressed in blouses--who work like
day-labourers--no! much better and harder than day-labourers now do.
They will never tell you what they are thinking about; they will never
tell me, though we are the best of friends; but you will see what they
are--close at a bargain, shrewd, devoted to their farms and families.
Well, they live on a third--yes, some of them on a quarter--of their
incomes; they know just where every penny they have spent on the ground
for twenty years has gone, and just what it has brought back to them,
and every man of them can put his hand, if need be, on ten, twenty,
thirty, forty thousand francs. That is the woollen stocking. But the
most beautiful woman in the world can only give what she has. The
woollen stocking holds no more than it holds. You can find the bottom of
it if you keep on long enough--and then? And mark you, if I tell the
shrewdest of these old fellows that the Government is spending ten
thousand millions of francs on building railways from nowhere to
nowhere, and digging ports in quicksands, what will he do? He will begin
to think it is very hard that he can't get a railway built or a port
dug. Do you wonder I am a pessimist?'

'But if this is the way in which they look at things, why do they
clamour for Boulanger?'

'They don't clamour for Boulanger. That is to say the peasants, the
rural people. It is in the towns--here in Calais, for example, at
Boulogne, at Amiens--that they clamour for Boulanger. In the towns they
read all manner of trash and listen to all manner of lies. You can get
up a legend in the French towns for anybody or anything as easily to-day
as in the middle ages--perhaps more easily. Look at this legend of
Boulanger. It is a real legend to-day. You may be sure of that, and that
is the real danger of it. The people who are fighting against it to-day
are the people who made it. They wanted, they could not get on without,
a great man. Ferry went to pieces, as you know, in 1885. Tonkin and the
dead Courbet killed him. So they invented Boulanger. They made him War
Minister. They put him on his black horse. They let him drive out the
princes. Look at those five men seated there in front of that café. They
are doubtless decent well-to-do shopkeepers, master mechanics--no matter
what--I will wager you that of these five men, three believe Boulanger
to be the first soldier of France, and that two of them believe the
Government has driven him into exile to prevent the Germans from
declaring war! That is enough to make them Boulangists.'

'Then they want war with Germany?'

'Yes, in this part of France I think they do. But the legend is just as
effective where they do not want war with Germany. Last year I was in
the country of Grévy, not far from Mont-sous-Vaudrey. There the peasants
dread nothing so much as another war. They want peace there at any
price. Well, then, a very shrewd old farmer told me he wanted to see
Boulanger made Chief of the State. Why? Why because, as he said,
Boulanger is the first general in Europe, and the Germans know it, and
they go in fear of him; so that if Boulanger is made Chief of the State,
they will think twice before they attack us! What do you say to that?'

'Is it not extraordinary,' I replied, 'that this legend, as you truly
call it, should have been created so easily about a general who has no
battle to show for it; not even a Montenotte, much less an Arcola or a
Lodi?'

'What legend had Bonaparte when Barras put him at the head of the home
army, and Pétiet sent him to Italy? He did not command at Toulon, and
his one victory had been to blow the marshalled blackguards and lunatics
of Paris into the Seine, as Mandat might and would have done on that
dismal August 10, but for that hypocritical scoundrel Pétion. And didn't
the authorities arrest Bonaparte after Toulon; and was he not struck
from the active roll of general officers in France for refusing a
command in La Vendée? So far as the army goes, there is better stuff for
a legend to-day in Boulanger than there was in Bonaparte when he went to
Italy.

'But observe that the Government made a legend of Boulanger, not for
military but for political purposes. They were shut down to him. If they
could have used M. de Lesseps, and if the Panama Canal had been a
success, Lesseps would have served their purpose better than Boulanger.
Without a "great Frenchman," I tell you the republic is impossible. Are
they not trying to make a "great Frenchman" now of Carnot? If this could
be done, if it were possible to make a "great Frenchman" of Carnot, I
should not object. But it is absurd. And so for me, whatever the
electors may do in September, the republic is hopeless. They made
Boulanger to save it; now they are trying to unmake Boulanger to save
it. It is childish, it is silly, it will not do! If they succeed in
unmaking their legend of Boulanger, where are they? Not even where they
were when they began to make it. On the contrary! They have made it
perfectly plain that the republic is a parachute which falls without a
balloon. Where are they to find the balloon? The Exposition has given
the parachute a lift. The visit of the Prince of Wales gave it a lift.
The Shah, if he comes, will give it a lift--not much--but a lift. But
all these are expedients of a moment. All these will not give the
republic a "great Frenchman."'

'All this,' I said, 'seems to bring us back to what you said this
morning, that if you were not the most anarchical you would be the most
monarchical people in Europe.'

'Precisely! and it is the plain truth. The republic was possible with
MacMahon, for after all he was a personality. It was possible with
Thiers, for though he was a little rascal and the greatest literary liar
of the century except Victor Hugo, he was a personality, and a very
positive personality. It might have been possible with Gambetta, for he
too was a personality, odious and flatulent if you like, but still a
personality. It was not possible with Grévy. It is not possible with
Carnot.

'Let the elections go as they may, you will see that I am right. I wash
my hands of it all. But when I think of it I see on the wall _Finis
Galliæ_! For while I despair of the republic, I have no hope of a
monarchy. Nothing but a personality can carry on the republic--and
nothing but a personality can restore the monarchy.

'The friends of the poor little Prince Imperial understood this when
they consented to let him go off to South Africa. If he had been in the
hands of an English general of common sense, or of an English captain of
common courage, he would no doubt have come back safe and sound. And in
that case the odds are that we should be living to-day under the Third
Empire instead of the Third Republic.

'As it is, the Empire, between the significance of Plon-Plon, and the
insignificance of Prince Victor, is like the Republic between Ferry, the
Tonkinese, and Carnot, who ought to spell his name _Carton_!'

'But how is it with the royalists?'

'Ah! their only "personality" known to the people--and that is the value
of a personality in France--is the Duc d'Aumale--and who knows whether
the Duc d'Aumale is a royalist? I have no doubt--absolutely no doubt,'
he said with some emphasis, 'that Say and De Freycinet to-morrow would
gladly join forces with the Conservatives to make the Duc d'Aumale
president if the Conservatives would agree to it, and if the Duc would
accept the place; for that would give the Republic a new lease of life
in the first place, and in the second place it would utterly
disintegrate the royalists, both white and blue. If the Duc is not a
"great Frenchman" in the electoral sense of the phrase, he is the most
creditably conspicuous of living Frenchmen, which is something.'

'More so than his nephew the Comte de Paris?'

'Yes, certainly, in the popular mind. Personally, I do not think he
would make either so good a president of a republic, or so good a king
as the Comte de Paris, whose manifesto I think shows him to be a man of
clear and sound constitutional ideas, but the French people do not know
him. It was a blunder, by the way, in my opinion,' he added after a
moment, 'of Boulanger to expel the Comte de Paris. His exile and his
action in exile have made him better known in France than he would have
been, had he been left to live quietly at Eu and in Paris. Furthermore,
what sort of a republic is it in which a family of princes cannot live
without tempting the whole population to make one of them king? The
expulsion of the princes belongs to the same category of political
idiocies with the _pacte de famine_. Either the Republic is a reality
accepted by the French people, or it is a sham imposed upon them by a
party. If it is a reality, the princes are simply French citizens, as
much entitled to live in France under the protection of the laws as if
they were peasants. From this there is no escape logically or morally,
and the men who voted for such an edict are neither good Republicans nor
good Frenchmen. From the moment it was enacted and executed, the
Republic ceased to be a national government. It was a _coup d'état_ and
not a legal act, and every legislator who voted for it committed perjury
at least as distinctly as the author of the _coup d'état_ of 1851. Could
such a law possibly have been passed in your republic?'

'Certainly not,' I said. 'In fact, the people of many American States
are free to treat with all possible public and private distinction a
personage who not only was elected to a position which may be called
princely, but who actually exercised for several years a greater
authority over millions of American citizens than has belonged to any
French king since Louis XVI., and, exercising it, waged war against the
United States. But was there no pretence of constitutional authority for
the passage of this law which you so strongly denounce?'

'Certainly not. There was no shadow of a legal pretext for passing it.
It is, I think, the worst and also the silliest instance in our recent
history of an appeal to that argument of rogues and tyrants called
_salus populi_, as to which I am of the opinion of Louis Blanc, that the
"safety" of no nation under heaven "is worth the sacrifice of a single
principle of common justice."

'It was a blow struck in broad daylight at the personal rights of every
French citizen; just as the removal of the princes from the army was a
blow struck in broad daylight at the property rights of every French
officer. That it was possible for a Government to strike these blows in
cold blood, with no popular excitement instigating them, and with no
public resentment following them, should show you, I think, how absurd
it is to talk of the French people as a republican people. Any
Government in power at Paris may be as arbitrary as it likes, but it
must not be stupid. The expulsion of the princes was a crime against
liberty; it was as arbitrary an act as the issue of a _lettre de
cachet_. But it was also very stupid. It was stupid of the Government
because it put them for a time under the thumb of Boulanger. It was
stupid of Boulanger, because it put the Comte de Paris at once on a
pedestal and forced him before France and Europe into the position of a
saviour of society, for whom all the conservative forces of French
society must henceforth inevitably work. Whatever becomes of Boulanger
in the next elections, he has condemned the Opportunists irretrievably
either to hew wood for the Socialists or to carry water for the
Monarchists. And with them he has condemned himself. Wait and see if I
am not right.

'Come and see me in Picardy. You will find more royalist farmers than I
could have believed possible six years ago. If the Comte de Chambord had
not kept the Legitimist country gentlemen so much apart as a caste from
the peasants, there would be nothing easier than to sweep the country
with a monarchist propaganda. It was the royalist peasantry who brought
about the great emigration in 1789, long before the Terror, by burning
and pillaging the châteaux all over France under orders from Paris,
which they believed to be orders from the king. What puzzles them now is
the notion lurking down in the bottom of their minds that the
restoration of the monarchy will somehow put the country gentlemen over
them, and this has much to do with making them, not republicans, but
imperialists. As to the republic the overthrow of Grévy had a very bad
effect upon the peasants and the farmers in my part of the country, and
I believe it had everywhere.'

'Was M. Grévy, then, popular with them?'

'No, it was not that at all. It was the feeling that the Republic meant
changes and uncertainty. A farmer--a fair specimen of this class in my
country--expressed this to me in his own fashion only the other day. I
asked him if he was coming to see the President here at Calais. "What is
the use of that?" he said, "it is money out of pocket, and for what? Who
knows how long he will be President? There was Grévy. Here is Boulanger.
All that can do no good. With these short leases what can be done for
the land?" There you have it. In Picardy and in Artois the people have
long memories about the land. All these countries, as you know, were
fought over again and again. There were so many wars that people got out
of the way of making long leases, and the land suffered accordingly. In
the last century these provinces, now so well and so richly cultivated,
were in a very bad way through this. With leases of three, six, nine
years, the farmers naturally took as few risks as possible in the way of
improving the land. They were always making up the waste caused by the
previous tenant, or shy of investing for the benefit of the next tenant.
Towards the end of the century, and before the Revolution, small
holdings began to increase, and the English fashion of long leases came
in, and the agriculture improved accordingly. So you see why our farmers
tend to monarchy from the point of view of long leases and land
ownership, just as these sailors and fishermen here in the Boulonnais
tend to it from the point of view of seamanship. You will make
republicans of them when you get them to let the forecastle elect the
cook captain. That will not be to-morrow nor, I think, next week.'

I left Calais late at night for Boulogne, my friend going into Picardy,
where I promised to join him later on. There was an immense crowd at the
station, and I could not help admiring the good nature and cheery
civility of the porters. The sub-officials in silver lace were not so
admirable, but then they were only strutting about and objecting to
things. The honest fellows who were getting twice as many passengers
into a train as the train could possibly take, and helping bewildered
provincials to find out where they really wanted to go, were, I thought,
miraculously amiable and intelligent.

At the last moment, just as we were moving off, a lively Parisian
journalist tumbled into our compartment with his despatch-box and his
portmanteau. He was in the full evening dress in which he had been
parading about all day with the Presidential party; his white cravat was
loose and awry, and the grey dust of the Calais streets and piers lay
thick upon his glossy bottines; but he was in the best of spirits, for
he had caught the train and would now reach Paris in the morning.

'But the President is going on to Boulogne, is he not?' I asked.

'Oh, yes! but what of that? It will be just what it was to-day, and I
know what he is going to say. He will leave Boulogne early in the
afternoon, and we shall have it all, an excellent account. It's not
worth while to waste the time on Boulogne.'

He had been with the President ever since the party left Paris, and
thought the progression the whole, a success. 'Not at Calais,' that he
admitted. There had certainly been no great enthusiasm at Calais. He did
not think there had been any cries for Boulanger, but there was no
emotion. This he explained by telling me that the people had not been
properly '_stylé_.' 'In these cases, you know,' he said with the air of
a connoisseur in enthusiasm, 'you must have a certain subtle _stylage_.'

The word was new to me, but not so the thing. For I presently found that
by a 'subtle _stylage_' of the people, my companion only meant what in
America is known as 'working up a boom,' when the welfare of the Union
requires that a President, or a presidential candidate, should
perambulate a certain number of 'doubtful' States, or, in the
picturesque language of the days of Andrew Johnson, go 'swinging round
the circle.' If I am not misinformed, an analogous operation is
occasionally performed in England, when some popular idol finds it worth
his while to make an unpremeditated political tour.

'The thing was better done at Lens,' said my fellow-traveller. 'Do you
know Lens? They are all miners there, you know--very curious people. I
suppose they were glad to come up from under the ground and look at us.
Some of the women, too, were pretty--really very pretty. It was all very
well arranged. There is a good manager there, M.----. He made way, you
know, in 1886, for Camescasse, to oblige the Government. The President
gave him the Cross. It had a very good effect. At Bapaume, too, the
President did a good thing. He decorated ---- there, who had so much
trouble with the Christian Brothers.'

'For having trouble with the Christian Brothers?' I could not help
asking.

'No! but the courts decided against him, and that was a misfortune. The
President put it right by decorating him, for it is evident that he
meant to do his duty, and a Government must stand by its friends. Do you
know Bapaume? It is a pretty place--all factories. It was there, you
know, that Faidherbe beat the Germans. A very pretty place.'




CHAPTER II

IN THE PAS-DE-CALAIS--_continued_


  BOULOGNE

Boulogne now, as in the days of Arthur Young, is surrounded with bright
and pleasant villas and country houses, though many of the châteaux
which Young was so much surprised to find inhabited by country gentlemen
attending to their duties and living on their estates have disappeared.

It is not only a larger and a more lively place than Calais; it is a
more picturesque and a more interesting place. The old walls and
ramparts of the upper town make such a striking contrast with the modern
streets and squares of the lower town as reminds one vaguely of Quebec,
the Channel coming into the landscape like the St. Lawrence. As at
Quebec, too, the two civilisations of France and of England meet without
mingling; and at Boulogne, as at Quebec, the French type, if not the
stronger of the two, certainly proves itself to be the subtler, and
decides the local physiognomy.

I spent an hour at Boulogne, with a friend who now fills an important
ecclesiastical position in one of the provinces of Central France, and
who was passing a few weeks on the Channel for his health. He is one of
the few French churchmen I personally know who heartily agree with
Cardinal Manning in thinking that the abolition of the Concordat would
greatly strengthen the Church in France, even if it involved a further
serious sacrifice of the proprietary rights of the clergy. 'The way in
which the people have come forward to the support of the congreganist
schools against, the oppressive measures adopted in the law of 1886,' he
said, 'confirms my old conviction, that a complete separation of the
Church from the State in France, whatever its effect might be upon the
State, would strengthen the Church.'

He cited a number of instances within his own knowledge in which rival
communes had established, and were carrying on, at the direct expense of
the local farmers and residents, free or congreganist schools, while, of
course, at the same time they were paying taxes for the lay public
schools to which they would not send their children. 'And this in
spite,' he said, 'of the ingenious devices with which the law of 1886
bristles for making the establishment of free and Christian schools
difficult and expensive. For example, to begin with, the legislature
actually tried to prevent us from calling our schools free schools,
though as schools supported by the free subscriptions of the people they
were distinctly "free" schools, as distinguished from the schools
established by the law at the expense of the taxpayers. We were gravely
informed that it was an act of war to call a free school free! In this
same petty and childish spirit the congregations are called
"associations" in the text of the law. When a free school is to be
opened, the teacher who is to have charge of it must run the gauntlet of
a series of public officers, all of them, if they are on good terms with
the Government, presumably hostile to him as a Christian. He begins with
the mayor of the Commune, who may object to his opening the school in
the place he has chosen, on grounds of "good morals or of hygiene."
Then he must go through with the Prefect of the Department, the Academic
Inspector, and the Procureur of the Republic.'

'That is to say,' I asked, 'the law officer of the department? Why
should he be brought into the business?'

'Why, indeed,' replied my friend. 'You must ask M. Ferry or M.
Clémenceau. He can stir up the Academic Inspector to make some objection
to the opening of the free school, if the Academic Inspector does not
find and make an objection himself. If no objections are made within a
month the school may be opened. If objections are made they must be made
before the Council of the Department within a month. If the Council
support the objections, the teacher must appeal from the decision to the
Academic Inspector within ten days, and the Inspector must submit this
appeal to the Superior Council of Public Instruction at the next ensuing
session of that body. Now the Superior Council only meets twice a year,
and as the appeal, according to the law, is only required to be heard
"with the least possible delay," you will see that nothing can be easier
than for the Academic Inspector and the Procureur between them to keep a
decision in the air for months, or for a year, or even longer, and
pending the appeal the school cannot be opened.

'As for the departmental councils, which are first to consider the
objections made to the opening of the school, they no longer include, as
they did under the Empire, representatives of the Catholic clergy, the
Protestant sects, and the Israelites. All of these are struck out of the
councils by this law of 1886, though fully ninety-nine hundredths of all
the taxes paid to support the machinery, not only of public education
but of the State, are paid by the Catholics, Protestants, and
Israelites. Nor are the councils any longer allowed to elect their own
vice-presidents. The prefect, a government _employé_, presides over the
councils. The Academic Inspector, another government _employé_, is
officially the president; four councillors-general, elected by the whole
body of the council-general of the department, sit on the Departments of
Primary Instruction Council, as do also the director or directors of the
Normal Schools of Public Teachers, and four teachers, two male and two
female, to be elected by the whole body of lay public school teachers of
both sexes in the department, all of them paid _employés_ of the
Government; and finally, two inspectors of public primary education
nominated by the Minister of Public Instruction. So, as you see, out of
a council consisting of fourteen members, ten are paid servants of the
Government, directly concerned to discourage the development of the
Christian schools. If questions and disputes between the lay public
schools and the free Christian schools came before this council, one lay
and one congreganist teacher may be admitted to join the council. But
the wise and just provision of the earlier law, that two or more
magistrates of the highest repute should be members of these councils,
has been deliberately struck out of this aggressive law of 1886.

'Is it possible,' he said, 'to mistake either the spirit or the object
of such a law?

'What gives me confidence and hope is the unquestionable effect which
the law has had upon the religious life of France. It has aroused and
stimulated it to more vigour and energy than I have seen it show for
years past. If only the Church in France were to-day as free from any
official connection with the State as it is in your country, I believe
we should see such a revival of Catholic faith as has not been known in
Europe for centuries.

'Do you remember,' he went on, 'how Ferry went to Rome after his
expulsion from power? Yes? And doubtless you know what efforts he made
there at that time to bring about a subterranean understanding between
himself and the Vatican?'

'He is the only one of these Opportunists who really has a head on his
shoulders, and you will find that he is under no illusions as to the
possibility of any working alliance between the Opportunists and the
Radicals which can save the former from going to the wall, like the
Girondins in 1793.

'Perhaps,' he said, laughingly, 'we may live to see M. Ferry doing
penance in a white sheet, with a candle in his hand, on the way to a
seat in a monarchical Cabinet! Though I am no politician, yet--mark my
words!--this republic has been so mismanaged that now it cannot live
without the Radicals--and it cannot live with them!

'As for the Church; if you want to see what life and energy it is
showing in its work, come and see me in the autumn. I will show you in
the Limousin one of the establishments of the Congregation of the Holy
Cross, or you can go into Mayenne and see twelve or fifteen of them. Or
you ought to go to Ruille-sur-la-Loire, to see the modest cradle of this
great congregation, which now, from its mother-house at Neuilly, is
sending out Catholic life and faith all over the world, and the pulse of
which is beating higher in France to-day than at any time since that
true and simple servant of God, Dujarié, took it upon himself, from his
obscure little parsonage, to begin the restoration of the Church from
the crash of the Terror and the calamities of the First Empire.'

'How many years ago was it,' I asked, 'when this Congregation began its
work in the United States?'

'Not quite fifty years ago,' he replied, 'and, as you know, its schools
are flourishing in all parts of your Union, from the University (in
Indiana) of Our Lady of the Lake, to New Orleans and New Jersey, and
from Wisconsin to Texas. It numbers its pupils, too, by thousands here
at home in France.

'I ask you to join me in the Limousin because I hope to be there in
October, and then I can show you at Limoges what I am sure you would
like to see--one of our best cathedrals, and some beautiful old glass in
St.-Michel and St.-Pierre, not to mention the enamels still hidden away
here and there in certain houses I wot of!'


  ST.-OMER

Two of the most interesting places in the Pas-de-Calais are St.-Omer,
once a name of terror to the worthy Englishmen who went in constant fear
of the Pope and wooden shoes, and Aire-sur-la-Lys, which now embraces
within its communal limits all that remains to-day of the once famous
and important city of Thérouanne, the ancient capital of Morinia, and
for thirty years the episcopal seat of the great Swiss bishop, St.-Omer,
who made North-Eastern Gaul Christian in the seventh century.

St.-Omer still preserves a certain grave and austere physiognomy,
half-Spanish and half-scholastic; and it is easy for the imagination to
people its quiet streets with the English and Irish students who
frequented its collegiate halls from the days of Guy Faux to the days of
Daniel O'Connell. But its importance is now military, not theological.
M. Pierre de la Gorce, the accomplished historian of the Revolution of
1848, who lived here seven years as a magistrate, and who still resides
here because he finds in the place 'a still air of delightful studies'
congenial to his tastes and favourable to his historical labours, told
me, in the course of a most interesting afternoon which I passed here
with him, that the town is full of families living here on their
incomes; and in going about the streets I was struck with the general
air of quiet and unobtrusive well-being which marks the people. In his
position as a magistrate, M. de la Gorce had the best possible
opportunities for gauging the moral character of the inhabitants, and he
assured me that during the whole period of his residence in St.-Omer,
extending now over twelve or thirteen years, he has never known more
than one serious domestic scandal to disturb the even tenour of its
social life. Of how many towns of twenty thousand inhabitants could the
same thing be truly said in England or the United States? During all
these years, too, M. de la Gorce tells me, only two cases of alleged
misconduct on the part of priests have occurred in St.-Omer, and in one
of these cases the allegation was proved malignant and unfounded.
Politically, St.-Omer seems to be strongly Republican. In 1886 it gave
the Government candidate a majority of 1,281 votes on a total of 6,623,
whereas in Boulogne at the same election the Republicans were beaten in
the southern division, and carried the whole city by only a majority of
1,331 votes out of a total of 8,233.

What I heard in St.-Omer of the officers stationed there was
particularly interesting. There is a large garrison, and the greatest
pains are taken by the officers not only with the military discipline,
but with the schooling and general conduct of the troops. My own
observation leads me to think this true, not of St.-Omer only, but of
all the considerable garrison towns which I have visited in France
during the past six or seven years. The old type of swashbuckling,
absinthe-tippling, rakehelly French officer of whom, during the last
years of the Empire, one saw and heard so much, seems to have passed
away into history and literature. However it may be with the
'gaiter-buttons' in the next great war, I do not believe the staff of
the next invading army will have much to teach the French officers of
to-day, either about the principles of scientific warfare or about the
topography of France.

I am inclined to think that there are more French officers in St.-Omer
alone to-day who can read and understand German than there were in all
France in 1870. The _morale_ and carriage of the soldiers, too, are
distinctly higher. The calling of men of all ranks and conditions under
the colours has necessarily raised the moral and social level of the
rank and file as well as of the officers; and it is quite certain that
the army holds a higher place in the estimation of the better classes in
France than it used to hold. M. de la Gorce cited to me several
instances, here at St.-Omer, of young ladies of excellent family, three
of them at least considerable heiresses, who have married young officers
of merit solely because they were officers of merit, and who have gladly
turned their backs on the flutter and glitter of fashionable Paris to
share the quiet, unpretending quarters, and take a sympathetic interest
in the serious military career of their husbands in this rather
out-of-the-way garrison town.

I do not find M. de la Gorce sanguine as to any early solution of the
political problems with which France is still wrestling after a hundred
years. He makes no secret of his conviction that nothing but a return to
the constitutional monarchy can give the country lasting peace at home,
or real influence abroad. But his impression seems to be that time alone
can bring this about. He would have the royalists unfurl their banner,
go into the elections with a plain declaration of their political creed,
and await the progress of events. He cited, as a proof of the wisdom of
this policy, the steady advance made by the Republicans after a mere
handful of them came into the imperial legislature. They grew from five
to thirty, simply because they stood firmly on their own principles,
while the majority were disturbed and uncertain. The principle of the
hereditary constitutional monarchy, he thought, should be plainly
affirmed and presented to the French people, as their only real
safeguard against the incessant disturbance and displacement of the
executive machinery which results from the election of an executive
chief.

'Let this be affirmed and presented,' said M. de la Gorce,' by a
number--no matter how small it may be at first--of sincere and resolute
men, and every successive shock and catastrophe will bring more and more
support to them from all classes in France.'

M. de la Gorce is of the opinion that the laicisation of the schools,
whatever may be said of the motives and intent of those who have
promoted it, has had a good effect on the congreganist schools, by
stimulating the teachers and directors to make greater efforts for the
improvement of their methods and their general machinery of instruction.
This is quite in accord with the views of my friend whom I met at
Boulogne--and indeed it is in the nature of things.

The way in which the laicisation is carried out by the subaltern
authorities seems to be admirably calculated also to inflame the
religious zeal of the people. A very intelligent and liberal
ecclesiastic, living here, tells me that, while M. Ferry is professing
in the Chamber his great anxiety to co-operate with the Conservatives in
modifying the decrees of 1791, in regard to religious associations, and
talking about a more liberal treatment of the clergy and the Christian
free schools, the local functionaries here, in Artois, lose no
opportunity of irritating and annoying the Christian population. In the
village of Moislains near Péronne, for example, he tells me the funeral
took place the other day of the Abbé Sallier, for many years the curé of
that parish; a man so much respected and beloved by the whole community
that, notwithstanding an express request made by him in his will, that
no discourse might be pronounced at his interment, and that it might be
made as simple as possible, the people insisted on escorting the remains
to the cemetery in a long procession headed by the mayor, the municipal
council, and all the notabilities of the country round about. Naturally
the people wished that their children, most of whom had been baptized by
the abbé, might join in this procession; to prevent which an express
order was issued by the school authorities, that the children should not
be allowed to leave the school for that purpose. It is difficult to see
how a petty persecution of this sort can be expected to promote the
'religious peace' about which M. Ferry perorates at Paris. The rural
Artesians, my friend tells me, resent these proceedings very bitterly,
and show their feelings in the most practical fashion, by subscribing
freely to carry on the religious primary schools, and refusing to let
their children attend the lay schools, which are kept up by the
Government out of the taxes paid by themselves. This, with a thrifty and
rather parsimonious population, like that which increases and multiplies
so steadily in Artois, is a most significant fact.

The Marist Brethren, who have their headquarter at the Ecole de Notre
Dame in Albert, a town of some 4,000 inhabitants, about half-way between
Arras and Amiens, are carrying on these religious schools most
successfully. Albert itself is a very curious and interesting place.
There are remains here of Roman fortifications which show that it was a
point of importance under the Empire, and subterranean excavations of a
most remarkable character, one of them extending for more than two
miles. Down to the time of Henry IV. Albert was known as Ancre. Concini,
the Florentine favourite of Mary de' Medici, bought the lordship of
Ancre with the title of marquis. With the help of his clever Florentine
wife, Leonora Galigai, he completely subjugated the queen and her weak
son, Louis XIII.; and, without so much as drawing his sword in battle,
made himself a marshal of France, How all this led him on to his ruin I
need not recite. He was stabbed to death in the precincts of the Louvre
by Vitry; his wife, arraigned as a sorceress, was strangled and burned;
and their unfortunate little son was degraded. The marquisate and
lordship of Ancre were bought, oddly enough, by another and very
different Florentine race, the Alberti, who had come into France and
established themselves in the Venaissin a hundred years before. So
intense was the general hatred of the Concinis, that, upon acquiring
Ancre, the Alberti unbaptized the place and gave it their own French
name of Albert, which is still most honourably borne by their
representatives, the ducal houses of Luynes and of Chaulnes. It is
common enough in France, as it is in England, to find the names of
families perpetuated in conjunction with those of places once their
property--Kingston-Lacy, Stanton-Harcourt, Bagot's Bromley, Melton
Mowbray are English cases in point. But this displacement of an old
territorial designation by a family name is unusual. Some thing like it
has taken place in our own times and in a remote south-western corner of
France, where the people of Arles-les-Bains changed the name of their
pleasant little town of orange groves and olives to Amélie, to
commemorate their respect and affection for the excellent queen of Louis
Philippe.

There are factories at Albert; and a modern church is building there,
not to the unmixed delight of architects and archæologists. But my
concern now is with the work of the Marist Brothers who have made Albert
their headquarters.

This work is carried on with the direct and active co-operation of the
people. At one little hamlet, for example, called, I think, Brébières,
nearly a hundred children now attend the Marist school, whose parents
pay for each child a subscription of three francs a month. There, not
long ago, it was found that in one poor family of peasants a family
council had been called to raise this modest sum in order that one of
the children now of an age to attend the school might be sent to it. The
two elder children settled the question by insisting that they would
give up their own daily ration of milk to meet the expense.

Will France be a nobler and stronger country when the priests who train
the children of her peasantry into this spirit are driven out of the
land?

This is the real question which must be met and answered by the
advocates of compulsory lay education in the public schools.

The next step to be taken in the 'laicisation' of the schools has been
already revealed in the famous 'Article 7' of M. Ferry. M. Ferry is the
true, though more or less occult, head of the present Administration in
France. 'M. Ferry,' said a caustic French Radical to me in Paris, 'ought
to be the mask of M. Carnot. Nature gave him a Carnival nose for that
purpose. Everything is topsy-turvy now in France, and so M. Carnot is
the mask of M. Ferry. But the nose will come through before long.'

Many years ago the public conscience of Philadelphia, then as now one of
the most Protestant of American Protestant cities, was scandalised by
the will of a French merchant, Stephen Girard; who, after acquiring a
large fortune in that city, left it to found a college, within the
precincts of which no minister of religion was, on any pretext whatever,
to be allowed to appear. The stupid bigotry of this ignorant millionaire
was the high-water mark of French Republican liberality during the
dismal orgie of the First Republic. It is still the high-water mark of
French Republican liberality under the Third Republic. The dream and
desire of M. Ferry and his friends are to prohibit ministers of religion
from taking any part whatever in the education of the French people.
Already the municipal council of Paris has undertaken to 'bowdlerise'
the literature of the world in order to prevent the minds of the young
from being perverted by coming into contact with the name of God. These
good butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers of the Seine really
believe, like certain more academical persons of higher social
pretensions in England and America, that the ineffable simpletons and
scoundrels who for three or four years during the last decade of the
last century made ducks and drakes at Paris of the public fortune and
the private rights of the French people, were inspired harbingers of a
new era. Outside of France it may be hard to suppose this possible, but
nothing can be more certain than that the educational legislation of
France since 1882 has been aimed steadily and directly at the abolition,
not of Christianity alone, but of all religion.

It is curious to see the common school system of New England, which in
the beginning was the device of a theocracy bent on usurping the
authority of parents over their children, taken up after more than two
hundred years, and readjusted to the purposes of a set of men whom the
Puritans would have unhesitatingly whipped to death at the cart's tail
as blasphemers.

Only the other day, in the Chamber, an ardent Republican member, M.
Pichon, made a speech in which he openly avowed the object of laicising
the schools to be the destruction of religion. 'Between you, the
Catholics,' he exclaimed, 'and us, who are Republicans, there is a great
abyss. The interests of the Church are incompatible with those of the
Republican Government.' That the Republicans in the Assembly should have
applauded this declaration is rather astonishing, since it was in
substance an admission that the interests of the 'Republican Government'
are inconsistent with those of an admittedly immense majority of the
French people. But they did applaud it, and not long before M. Pichon
made the speech a solid Republican vote of 232 members had been recorded
for the suppression of the French Embassy to the Vatican. Is it
surprising that the Catholics of France should be asking themselves all
over the country whether it is possible for them to accept the Republic
without abjuring their religion?

The 'abyss' of which M. Pichon speaks has been dug, not by the Church,
but by the theorists who have expelled the Sisters of Charity from the
hospitals and the chaplains from the prisons of France, who refuse to
the poor the right to pray in the almshouses, and who throw the
crucifix out of school-houses which are maintained by the money of
Catholic taxpayers. As between M. Pichon and M. Ferry and their
fellow-conspirators on one side of this abyss, and the Marist Brethren
and the little children of France on the other side of it, the history
of the world hardly encourages the belief that it is the Marist Brethren
and the little children who will finally be engulfed!

It is a notable proof of the hold which Catholic ideas have upon the
people in this part of France, that notwithstanding a marked tendency to
emigration among the peasantry of the Boulonnais and of Artois, the
population has steadily increased through the excess of births over
deaths. This is not true of France as a whole. On the contrary, while
the deaths in France in 1888 were 837,857, against an annual average of
847,968 from 1884 to 1887, the births diminished from an annual average
of 937,090 between 1881 and 1884 to 882,639 in 1888, leaving the small
excess of 44,772 over the deaths. Of these only 33,458 were of French
parentage! In Artois and the Boulonnais, the population is more dense
than in any other part of France, excepting the metropolitan regions.
While France, as a whole, in 1881, gave an average of seventy
inhabitants to the square kilomètre, which is the precise proportion in
Bavaria--the arrondissement of Béthune in the coal-mining country of
Artois (fed by an exceptional immigration from Belgium) gave 173 to the
square kilomètre, which exceeds the proportion in any division of the
German Empire except Saxony, Lübeck, Bremen, and Hamburg.

The Department of the Pas-de-Calais, as a whole, gave 117 inhabitants to
the square kilomètre, which is the precise proportion in Saxe-Altenburg,
and exceeds by five the proportion in the British Islands taken as a
whole. In the arrondissement of St.-Omer the rate of increase by natural
growth some years ago outran that of the older sea-board States of the
American Union.

This phenomenon cannot be explained by the improvidence of the
Artesians, for they are admittedly remarkable, even in France, for
their frugality and their forecasting habit of mind. A friend of mine,
who lives near St.-Omer, is probably right when he attributes it to
their strong domestic tastes and habits, and to the influence over them
of their religion. He says they are 'fanatics of the family.' Certainly
in the cottages the children seem to have things all their own way,
almost as much as in America. 'The Artesian parents,' my friend tells
me, 'make their children the objects of their lives.' In the rural
regions there is not much immorality. Concubinage, which is by no means
uncommon in the towns, is exceedingly uncommon in the country of Artois.

The agricultural Artesian wishes to be the recognised head of his house,
hates to have things at loose ends, and habitually makes his wife a
consulting partner in all his affairs. Even when he is not particularly
devout he likes to be on good terms with, his curate, and has very
positive ideas as to what is decent and becoming. 'In short,' said my
friend, 'he is an ideal husbandman in every sense of that English word,
for which we have no equivalent. The assize records show that offences
against public morality are almost wholly confined to the towns in
Artois, and it is a notable fact that these particular offences are much
more frequently committed by persons who can read and write than by the
illiterate.'

My friend seemed to be startled when I told him that this 'notable fact'
appeared to me to be quite in accordance with the nature of things, as
set forth in the sound old maxim cited by the Apostle, that 'evil
communications corrupt good manners.' So long as thirty years ago, the
American Census showed that in the six New England States, in which the
proportion of illiterate native Americans to the native white
population was 1 to 312, the proportion to the native white population
of native white criminals was 1 to 1,084; whereas, in the six southern
States of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, and the two Carolinas,
the proportion of native white illiterates being 1 to 12 of the native
white population, the proportion of native white criminals to the native
white population was only 1 to 6,670. Mr. Montgomery of California,
Assistant-Attorney-General of the United States in the Administration of
President Cleveland, working on the lines of inquiry suggested by such
facts as these, did not hesitate, two years ago, to assert that 'the
boasted New England public school system, as now by law established
throughout the length and breadth of the American Republic, is a
poisonous fountain fraught with the seeds of human misery and moral
death.' He cites the official statistics given by a New England
professor, Mr. Royce, to prove that 'there is hardly a state or country
in the civilised world, where atrocious and flagrant crimes are so
common as in educated Massachusetts,' and he shows that the alarming and
unquestionable increase of crime in the United States cannot be
attributed, as it too often is, to the 'foreign element in American
society, the criminal rate of which has remained the same or even
lessened, while the native criminals increased during 1860-1870, from
10,143 to 24,173.' During that decade the total population of the United
States increased from 31,443,321 to 38,567,617. Deducting 2,466,752 for
the increase by immigration, we have a general increase of 4,657,538 in
the native American population, or of less than 15 per cent, against an
increase of about 140 per cent. in the number of native white criminals!
It is no part of my present purpose to discuss Mr. Montgomery's
contention. But it seems to me to deserve grave consideration in
connection with the adventure to which the French Republican Government
has committed itself, of suddenly substituting for the religious and
parental system of education in France, a French modification, in the
interest of unbelief, of that American public school system which, as
Mr. Montgomery maintains, rests upon the principle 'that the whole
people must be educated to a certain degree at the public expense,
irrespectively of any social distinctions.'

I have already said that St.-Omer appears to be in its politics
decidedly Republican. An odd illustration of this I found in a hot local
controversy waging there over the setting up of a statue in one of the
public squares, to commemorate the courage and patriotism of a local
heroine, Jacqueline Robins. This statue, which, as a work of art is not
unworthy to be compared with the statue of Jeanne Hachette at Beauvais,
was set up, with much ceremony, in 1884 (I believe the State paid for
it), and stands upon a pedestal, with an inscription setting forth how
Jacqueline Robins, in the year 1710, saved the besieged city of St.-Omer
by going off herself with a train of boats down the Aa to Dunkirk, and
bringing back the provisions and munitions of war necessary for the
defence of the city.

As the city of St.-Omer was certainly not besieged in 1710, this
inscription naturally excited the critical indignation of the local
antiquaries, and on July 27, 1885, an exceedingly clear and conclusive
report on the subject was laid before the Society of Antiquaries of
Morinia, a body which has done good service to the cause of history in
Northern France. From this report it plainly appears that St.-Omer was
not besieged at all in 1710. Prince Eugene, who marched into Artois with
the Duke of Marlborough in that year in pursuit of Villars, wished to
attack St.-Omer after the fall of Douai and Béthune, but the
States-General of Holland would not hear of it; and the gallant defence
made of Aire-sur-la-Lys by the Marquis de Goesbriant kept the allies at
bay so late in the year that no attempt upon St.-Omer could be made. The
local chronicles rejoice over this escape, particularly, because they
say the Duke of Marlborough had vowed special vengeance against the
city, its authorities having refused to oblige him by getting out of the
English Jesuits' College and sending him certain papers which the
Duchess of Hamilton (the wife of the brilliant duke who was killed in
Hyde Park by Lord Mohun and General Macartney) desired him to procure
for her use in a law suit against 'Lord Bromley.'[2] St.-Omer, then, not
having been besieged in 1710, why should a statue be set up in honour of
an Audomaraise dame for delivering it? On this point the Report of the
Society of Antiquaries throws a sufficient and interesting light. It
seems that there really lived in St.-Omer in 1710 a certain dame
Jacqueline Isabelle Robins, obviously a woman of mark and force, since
she carried on a number of thriving industries, and among them the
management, under a contract, of the boats between St.-Omer, Calais, and
Dunkirk. Napoleon would have thought her much superior to Madame de
Staël, for before she was forty years old she had married three
husbands, and surrounded herself with six or seven flourishing olive
branches. She was constantly in the law courts fighting for her rights,
not against private persons only, but against the 'mayor and échevins of
the city of St.-Omer.' Though St.-Omer, as I have said, was not besieged
by the allies, it was constantly occupied by the troops of his Most
Christian Majesty, who gave the magistrates and the people almost as
much trouble as if they had been enemies, and the records show that not
long before the surrender of Aire-sur-la-Lys to the allies in November
1710, the Comte d'Estaing (an ancestor of the Admiral who did such good
service to the American cause), under orders from Versailles succeeded
in bringing to St.-Omer from Dunkirk a complete supply of powder and
other munitions of war. It seems to be likely enough that in this
operation the military authorities availed themselves of the services of
dame Jacqueline and of her boats. As she was a masterful dame, and,
burying her third husband, who was twelve years her junior, in 1720,
lived on to depart at the age of seventy-five in 1732, a local legend
evidently grew up about her personal share in the events of the great
war of 1710. The first official historian of St.-Omer, a worthy priest
Dom Devienne, writing in 1782, gave this legend form. As he transformed
Jacqueline from a rich and prosperous woman of affairs into a 'woman of
the dregs of the people,' calling her Jane, by the way, instead of
Jacqueline, she became, after the Revolution, a popular heroine; her
third husband, who appears to have been a young Squire de Boyaval and a
dashing grey mousquetaire of King Louis, was metamorphosed into a
brewer's apprentice (Jacqueline among her other possessions owned a
brewery); and now, in the year 1889 we have the thrifty dame who helped
the king's officers carry out the king's orders for the supplying of
St.-Omer, immortalised in bronze as an Audomaraise Jeanne Hachette or
Maid of Saragossa!

    [2] This is a curious sidelight on English political history. 'Lord
    Bromley' was obviously Sir William Bromley, M.P., the bitter enemy
    of Marlborough, who earned the undying hatred of the Duchess by
    comparing her to Alice Perrers, the mistress of Edward III. In 1705
    Harley prevented the election of Bromley as Speaker by re-publishing
    an account of the 'Grand Toure' written by him, and foisting into it
    notes intended to show that Bromley was a 'Papist.' Bromley was
    again a candidate for the same office in 1710, and Marlborough
    evidently hoped to get from St.-Omer documentary proof of the
    'papistry' of his foe. The second Duchess of Hamilton came, I think,
    of a Catholic family, and may have thought she had a clue to these
    documents. The intrigue, however, failed, and Bromley was elected
    Speaker without opposition in November, 1710.

Is not this worthy to stand on record with Sir Roger de Coverley's tale
of the old coachman who had a monument in Westminster Abbey because he
figured on the box of the coach in which Thomas Thynne of Longleat was
barbarously murdered by Count Konigsmark?

The Republican Mayor of St.-Omer took sides on the question of
Jacqueline Robins in 1885 with the Republican 'Professor of History in
the Lyceum,' both of them being 'officers of the Academy,' against the
Society of Antiquaries; and I dare say the matter may affect the
Parliamentary elections in September, 1889!




CHAPTER III

IN THE PAS-DE-CALAIS--_continued_


  AIRE-SUR-LA-LYS

It is a local tradition at Aire-sur-la-Lys that, about half a century
ago, the good people of this ancient and picturesque town (which, like
St.-Omer, remained a part of the Spanish dominions when all the rest of
the Artois became French by the treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659) turned
out with flags and music to welcome their mayor back from Paris,
bringing the good news that the projected Northern railway should not
pass through their territory, to disturb their settled trade.

This unique incident is often cited to show the tenacious conservatism
of the Artesians. I believe, however, it only proves that the people of
Aire, dwelling in a region which has been fought over from time
immemorial, had a well-grounded objection to the exclusively military
views with which Marshal Soult then desired that the Government of Louis
Philippe should take up and carry out the projected enterprise.

At all events, Aire-sur-la-Lys now rejoices in a comfortable little
railway station, which makes it an important point in the system of the
Northern Railway of France.

There, on a lovely evening in June, I found the carriage of M. Labitte,
one of the Councillors-General of the department, waiting to take me to
his charming and hospitable home in the richly-cultivated agricultural
commune of St.-Quentin.

It was on the eve of Pentecost when, as the German poet tells us, 'the
woods and fields put off all sadness,' and a lovelier summer evening it
would be hard to find even in England.

M. Labitte is a Conservative and a devout Catholic. As I have already
mentioned, he was a candidate in the Pas-de-Calais in 1886 for the seat
in the Chamber now held by M. Camescasse, and received 74,554 votes
against 86,356 for his opponent. In Aire he was beaten by only 22 votes
out of a total of 3,536. His influence in the country here is, in a
certain sense, hereditary, for he came of a family which in the last
century gave many excellent ecclesiastics to the service of the Church,
among a population then, as now, remarkable for its strong religious
feeling. When the States-General were convened by Louis XVI. a century
ago, the first date fixed for the elections in Artois had to be
postponed, at the request of the Duc de Guines, because it interfered
with Easter. The Artesians cared more for the Church than for the State.
Yet, in no part of France was the calling of the States-General more
popular, and nowhere were more efforts made before 1789 than in Artois
to improve the condition of the people and to secure a more just and
liberal fiscal administration. The clergy were extraordinarily powerful
in Artois, alike by reason of their property and of the religious
disposition of the people; and it is a curious and interesting fact that
under the constitution of the Estates of Artois it was established
(thanks to the union of the clergy with the Third Estate) that, while no
votes of the nobility and the clergy united should bind the Third
Estate, any joint vote of the Third Estate with either of the other two
orders should bind them all. Here, long before the much-bewritten date
of 1789, we have the Church in Artois arraying itself on the side of the
tax-paying people against the privileged classes. Modern inquiries show,
indeed, that this was the attitude of the great body of the French
clergy long before what is called the 'Revolution.' The majority of the
representatives of the clergy in the States-General of 1789 did not wait
for the theatrical demonstrations in the Tennis Court of Versailles,
about which so much nonsense has been talked and written, to join the
Third Estate in insisting upon a real reform of the public service. No
French historian has ventured to make such a picture of the Catholic
clergy of France under the Bourbons as Lord Macaulay thought himself
authorised to paint of the Protestant clergy of England under the
Stuarts. There were flagrant scandals among the higher orders of the
Church in France, no doubt, as there were in England. The names of
Dubois, of Loménie de Brienne, of De Rohan are not associated with the
cardinal virtues. De Jarente, Bishop of Orleans, driving Mdlle. Guimard
to the opera in his coronetted and mitred coach, is not an edifying
figure, nor is Louis de Grimaldi, Bishop of Mans, saying Mass in his red
hunting-coat and breeches. But the Protestant Dean of St. Patrick's
thought the execution for felony of another Protestant dean a capital
theme for a merry ballad; and at the end of the eighteenth century
Arthur Young painted the English rural clergy in very dark colours. The
curates, the rectors, the monks of France as a body, showed under the
old régime the same qualities of devout faith and Christian sympathy
with the people with which they met and baffled their persecutors after
the crash of the monarchy. The three representatives of the clergy who
first struck hands with the Third Estate on June 13, 1789, were curates
sent to Paris by a province more intensely Catholic than Artois. They
were Poitevin priests from the region which we now know as La Vendée,
and which only four years afterwards rose in arms to defend its altars
and its homes against the intolerable despotism of the 'patriots' of
Paris.

When Turgot was put in charge of that work of fiscal reform which might
have spared France the horrors and the disasters of the Revolution, had
Louis XVI. been capable of standing even by Turgot to the end, he
carried on an extensive correspondence with curates in Artois as well as
in the other provinces of France, as the best means of educating the
people to an intelligent appreciation of his purposes and of his plans.
Condorcet, who treated the brutal murderers of the Duc de la
Rochefoucauld with a complaisance which entitles him to the confidence
of the most advanced anti-clerical philosophers of our own day, bears
witness to the good intentions of Turgot's correspondents. He says, in
his memoir of Turgot, printed at Philadelphia seven years before the
Revolution of '89, that 'the curates, accustomed to preach sound morals,
to appease the quarrels of the people, and to encourage peace and
concord, were in a better position than any other men in France to
prepare the minds of the people for the good work it was the intents of
the ministers to do.'

What was true of the French curates a hundred years ago is true of them
to-day, the duties prescribed to them by the Church being still
precisely what they were when Condorcet bore this testimony to the good
dispositions of men much more conscientious than himself. Then, too, as
now, the curates were required to look carefully after the education of
the children in their parishes. France is indebted, not to the
Revolution, but to a great Protestant historian and statesman, Guizot,
and to King Louis Philippe for the foundation of her system of public
education. The revolutionists of 1789 left the country worse off in this
matter than they found it. The royal ordinance of Louis XIV. in 1698,
which required the establishment of schoolmasters and schoolmistresses
in every parish in which they were not then to be found, and fixed the
salaries to be paid these masters and mistresses out of a public tax in
every parish in which no foundations for their support existed, was
distinctly a public-school law. This ordinance made it incumbent upon
all parents and other persons who had charge of children to send them to
the schools until they were fourteen years of age, and it also enjoined
upon the curates the duty of 'watching with particular attention over
the education of the children in their respective parishes.' The spirit
in which the clergy of Artois, at least, discharged this duty appears in
an ordinance of the Bishop of Arras issued in 1740, half a century
before the Revolution of 1789, in which the bishop lays it down as a
maxim that 'the greatest charity which can be shown the poor is to
ensure them the means of obtaining an education.'

This, down to thirty years ago, was the principle of legislation in
Virginia upon the public school question, the State not attempting to
interfere with the authority of parents over their children in the
matter of education, but making an appropriation for the instruction of
the children of the poor. That mischievous wind-bag Lakanal lived in
Mississippi and Louisiana during his exile in America, and it is
possible that his influence may have had something to do with the early
adoption by another southern State, Louisiana, of the general public
school system. However that may be, Louisiana in 1850 spent upon her
public schools three times as much money annually as any of the New
England States, with the result that, out of a native white population
of 186,577, she had in her prisons 240 native white criminals, or 1 in
777 of the whole number, being 'the largest proportion of criminals to
population at that time to be found in America, if not in the world.'
Virginia, out of a native white population of 1,070,395 in 1860, had no
more than 163 native white criminals in her prisons, or 1 in 6,566 of
her native white population.

It is a curious fact, by the way, that but for the fidelity of the
French clergy before 1789, in carrying out the work imposed upon them by
the ordinance of Louis XIV., and commended in the ordinance of the
Bishop of Arras in 1740, two of the most conspicuous actors in the
grotesquely horrible drama of the French Revolution would have starved
to death in the streets of Arras, or grown up there in vagabondage. The
clergy of St.-Vaast in the diocese of Arras found, in 1768, two wretched
urchins thrown upon the world by an unnatural father. One of these,
Maximilian Isidore de Robespierre, was born in 1758; the other, Augustus
Bai Joseph de Robespierre, in 1764. The good priests picked them up,
cared for them, and put them in the way of getting a good education,
which they turned to such purpose that both of them eventually came to
the guillotine in the flower of their years, and amid the cordially
contemptuous execrations of decent people all over the world. One of the
most accomplished public men in Massachusetts told me years ago, that he
was stopped on his way to school one morning in 1794, by a friend of the
family, who bade him run back at once and tell his father the news had
come from Europe that 'the head of Robert Spear had been cut off.' 'Make
haste,' said this gentleman, 'and your papa will give you a silver
dollar, he will be so glad to hear it!'

It was rather instructive to think of the 'sea-green incorruptible' and
his idiotic 'Feast of the Supreme Being' on that beautiful clay of
Pentecost, in the charming rural commune of St.-Quentin, the peace and
happiness of which was for a time so cruelly broken up by his atrocities
and follies a hundred years ago. The fine old church, near by my host's
residence, has been restored with great taste and good sense. It was
crowded at early mass with the farmers and their families, many of the
men wearing their blouses, but all well-to-do, for this region is one of
the richest and best cultivated districts of Northern France. The
service was celebrated with much simplicity, but with no lack of due
ceremony; the singing was excellent; and the priest's homily, a brief
and very good discourse on the spirit of Christian charity, was listened
to with great attention.

The pretty custom prevails here, as in Normandy, of handing about in the
congregation, at a certain point in the service, a basket of bread. Two
gravely courteous old peasants presented the baskets in turn to all the
people. The service over, the farmers stood and chatted together in
groups in the churchyard and about the porch, and I heard much talk of
the outlook for the crops, of the price of cattle, and of certain
properties which had recently changed hands. Of politics next to
nothing.

My host was for many years a notary at Aire. He has transferred this
position now to the husband of his only daughter, and occupies himself
mainly with his agricultural interests. The notary, who is a personage
everywhere in France, is especially a personage in Artois. This has come
about in part through the great changes which have taken place in the
proprietorship of land in this province during the last three centuries.
Towards the end of the seventeenth century, after the province was
substantially united with France by Louis XIV., great numbers of small
proprietors, who had done well enough under the Spanish rule, found
themselves forced, by the pressure of taxation, to part with their
land, and there was a marked increase in the great estates, not only of
the clergy but of the laity. After the First Consul took the country in
hand, and began to reorganise it socially, on the principle laid down by
him so often and so energetically, in his dealings with his councillors,
that 'true civil liberty in a State depends upon the absolute safety of
property,' there began to grow up in Artois a great middle class of
landholders, corresponding in many conditions to the 'strong farmers' of
Ireland. With the increase of this class came a natural increase in the
importance and influence of the notaries, already and through the
Spanish traditions very considerable in this region. In many parts of
the province the notary is recognised as an unofficial, but
authoritative, social arbiter, to whom may be safely referred for
settlement all sorts of disputes, including very often questions of
property which would elsewhere be taken before the courts of law. It was
pleasant to see that the relation thus established between M. Labitte
and the people generally had not been affected by the political
agitation of the last ten years. When I drove about the country with
him, I observed that he was saluted everywhere in the friendliest
fashion, and that, as he more than once told me, by persons politically
quite hostile to his re-election as councillor-general.

After luncheon on Pentecost, a most interesting ceremony took place at
St.-Quentin. A long procession made up of the inhabitants of the
commune, the men wearing their best clothes, the young girls garlanded
and dressed in white, set forth from the porch of the church, after a
brief service there, and marched around the commune. It was the English
beating of the bounds without the beating, and with the old religious
rites. In the midst of the procession, which extended perhaps a quarter
of a mile, the parish priest walked alone under an embroidered canopy
borne up by young villagers. Acolytes, with lighted candles, moved on
either side of the canopy. Before it was borne a white silk banner of
the Virgin, and behind it a banner embroidered in gold. All the park and
grounds of M. Labitte lying within the commune, and being thrown open to
the people, a very beautiful altar of verdure and roses had been set up
under a bower in the great garden behind the house, by the daughter of
M. Labitte. Before this altar the procession paused, a brief service was
performed there, and then the long line resumed its march, a chorus of
some twenty male voices chanting, as it went, the Magnificat. Nothing
could exceed the unaffected simplicity and seriousness of the people of
both sexes and of all ages. The day was one of those perfect days,
which, as Mr. Lowell says, come to the world in June, if ever they come
at all; and as the long line wound its way around the fields, green with
the prospering crops, beneath the orchards and the groves, and between
the fragrant hedgerows, the silvery chiming of the bells in the old
church alternated with the far-off chanting of the choristers, and the
fitful breeze brought us, from time to time, the grave deep voice of the
priest reciting, as he moved, the ancient prayers of hope and of
thanksgiving.

It was interesting to remember that under the first French attempt at a
republic, this lovely rural spectacle would have been as impossible as
it would be to-day under the rule of the Mahdi in the Soudan; and also,
to reflect that France is governed to-day by men who dream of making it
thus impossible once more.




CHAPTER IV

IN THE PAS-DE-CALAIS--_continued_


  AIRE-SUR-LA-LYS.

My host at St.-Quentin being a councillor-general, his term of office
expires with the elections fixed to take place on July 28. There is no
reason in the nature of things why councillors-general should be elected
on the same lines with deputies and senators. On the contrary, it would
seem to be very desirable that local rather than national considerations
should govern the election of such functionaries. But it has been found
difficult, even in England and Wales, to keep national party politics
out of the election of the new county councillors, whose duties are
modelled in some important respects upon those assigned to the
councillors-general in France; and it is evident that the French local
elections in July will be largely determined by considerations affecting
the national elections which must take place in September and October.
M. Labitte, who was elected a councillor-general by the Conservatives in
this department six years ago, was defeated in 1886, as I have already
said, in a by-election, held to fill a vacancy in the Chamber of
Deputies. It is the wish of his party friends that he should offer
himself as a candidate for re-election as a councillor-general on July
28; but he does not seem disposed to do this, preferring, I think, to
keep himself quite free to do his very best to bring about a
Conservative victory in the national elections in September, with the
importance of which to the future of France he is deeply impressed.
Meanwhile, he is giving a personal account of his stewardship as a
councillor-general to his constituents in a series of 'conferences.' One
of these conferences he was good enough to invite me to attend.

It was held in a commune, distant some ten or twelve miles from
St.-Quentin-par-Aire, and, as the custom of France is, it was held on a
Sunday afternoon. M. Labitte's son-in-law drove out from Aire with his
wife to dine and spend the evening with us. And about three o'clock M.
Labitte, his son-in-law, and myself set out for the conference. Our road
lay through a level but richly cultivated and, in its way, very
beautiful region. In the last century, Artois seems to have been a kind
of Ireland. The climate was excessively damp, the lack of forests and
the undeveloped coal-mines left the peasantry dependent upon turf and
peat for fuel; the roads were few and bad. There were good crops of
grain; but the Intendant Bignon, drawing up a report on the province at
the close of the seventeenth century, for the Duke of Burgundy, tells us
the wars had made an end of all the manufactures, including the
long-famous tapestry-works of Arras. 'There were few fruit-trees, little
hay, and little manure.' Here and there some linen was made; but the
trade of the province was carried on almost exclusively in grain, hops,
flax, and wool. Iron and copper utensils, and coal and slates came to
Artois from Flanders, cod-fish and cheese from the Low Countries, butter
and all kinds of manufactured goods from England. Yet the population
steadily increased all through the eighteenth century, while it was
falling off in the neighbouring provinces of France. The worthy
intendant thought the people sadly wanting in 'intelligence, activity,
and practical sense,' and seems indeed, like a Malthusian before
Malthus, half-inclined to attribute the phenomena of increase and
multiplication in Artois to these defects. It would surprise him, I
fancy, to look on the people and the land of Artois to-day. The land has
become one of the most fertile and prosperous regions of France; the
people, unaffected to any appreciable extent by immigration, and
unchanged alike in race and in religion, increase and multiply as of
old. The well-tilled fields, the well-kept and beautiful roads, the
neat, green hedgerows, the orchards bear witness on every side to the
intelligence, the activity, the practical sense of the inhabitants.

M. Baudrillart in one of his invaluable treatises on the condition of
France before the Revolution of 1789, gives us the main key of this
great difference between the condition of agricultural Artois in the
eighteenth century and its condition to-day. He cites a most curious
appeal to the estates of Artois in behalf of the rural populations, from
which it appears that the citizens of the chief towns had combined with
the _noblesse_ and the higher clergy to keep the village curates and the
farmers out of the provincial assemblies, and to throw the whole burden
of taxation upon the agriculturists. 'The soil of Artois,' say the
authors of this appeal, 'is quite as good as the soil of England; and
yet the Artesian farmers can only get out of their labour on it one
quarter as much as the English do.' It was the fiscal maladministration,
they maintain, which checked the progress of agriculture and depressed
the condition of the farmers; and it is interesting to observe that
these rural reformers proposed to remedy the evils of which they
complained, not by abolishing all the privileges of the privileged
classes in a night, as did the headlong mob of the States-General at
Paris in 1789, but by securing a fairer representation of the rural
regions in the Provincial Estates, limiting the duration of the
Provincial Parliaments to three years, and deciding that one-third of
the seats should be vacated and refilled every year. This does not look
as if the Artesians of the last century were particularly deficient
either in intelligence or in practical sense.

On our way to the conference we saw several sugar factories, most of
them now abandoned, though the beet crops of Artois are still very
important; and my companions told me that the people here, with all
their traditional conservatism, are very quick to abandon any industry
which ceases to promise good returns, and to change their crops as the
conditions of the market change. We saw but few châteaux. One of the
most considerable, standing well in view from the road in the midst of
an extensive park, and approached by a long avenue of well-grown trees,
seemed to be shut up. The proprietor, the Count de----, I was told had
not visited it for two years past, one of his gamekeepers having been
murdered in a conflict with some poachers.

Under the existing laws in France, political conferences must be held
within four walls. Trafalgar Square meetings would be as impossible in
republican France as in monarchical Germany. As the commune in which M.
Labitte was to meet his constituents possesses no convenient hall, and
the local authorities were not particularly eager to facilitate the
conference, one of the local Conservatives, a well-to-do farmer, had
taken it upon himself to provide, at his own expense, a proper place of
meeting, by fitting up a fine large barn with seats, and putting up a
simple rustic platform in one corner of it for the speaker. It struck me
that this was a symptom of genuine interest in the politics of his
region not likely to be shown in similar circumstances by many English
or American farmers. He was a man of middle age, with the quiet,
self-possessed carriage, general among his class in all parts of France,
and received us, in the large and neatly-furnished best room of his
old-fashioned and very comfortable house, with frank and simple
courtesy. On the walls hung a number of engravings and two or three
small paintings. One of these represented the Duc d'Orléans, the father
of the Comte de Paris, in the uniform of the celebrated corps of
Chasseurs which he organised and to which he gave his name. 'That
picture,' said the farmer, 'was given to my father by the prince. He
used to stop here often while he was at the camp of the Chasseurs, and
take his breakfast. I remember him perfectly, for I was then a
well-grown lad, and he was always full of kindness and good spirits. Ah!
if he had lived! We should not be where we are to-day in France, with
all these debts and all these dangers!'

The constituents of my host, all of them specially invited by letter to
attend the conference, had already begun to assemble when we arrived,
but some of them had two or three miles to walk after service in their
respective churches, and it was nearly six o'clock when the conference
began. By that time the large farmyard and the rooms of the house were
filled with a company of perhaps a hundred and fifty men, almost all of
them farmers. Among them was only one landowner of the aristocratic
class, the Comte de----, who had walked over from his château about
three miles off. He was a type of the old-fashioned French country
gentleman, tall and sinewy, with finely cut features, simply, not to say
carelessly, dressed, but with an unmistakable air of distinction, and a
certain peremptory courtesy of manner which would infallibly have got
him into trouble in the days when, near Baume-les-Dames, Arthur Young
had to clear himself of the suspicion that he was a gentleman on pain of
being promptly hanged from a lantern hook.

The seats in the barn once filled, some fifty auditors grouped
themselves in the farmyard about the wide-open doors of the barn, and M.
Labitte mounted the extemporised platform. The proceedings had to be
suspended for a few moments as the attention of the audience was
suddenly drawn to the high road by the galloping past of two generals in
full uniform, with their staff officers, from St.-Omer. There was no
nomination of a chairman or a secretary, none of the inevitable
formalities of an English or American political gathering. M. Labitte
called the meeting to order by the simple process of beginning to
address it. Nothing could be more direct and business-like than his
speech. It was exactly what he told his hearers he meant it to be, an
account of his stewardship as their councillor-general. He said not a
word about the personal aspects of the party conflicts raging in France,
and very little about the national aspects of that conflict. Speaking in
a frank conversational way, and referring to his notes only for figures
and dates, he gave his constituents a succinct picture of the effect
upon their own local interests of the policy pursued by the Government
of the Republic. He told them how much of their money had been spent
under the action of the Council-General during the six years of his
term, and on what it had been spent, and with what results. If they
liked the picture, well and good; if not, the remedy was in their own
hands at the next election. He had forewarned me to expect nothing
demonstrative in the attitude of his audience. 'They listen most
attentively,' he said, 'but they give you no sign either of agreement
or disagreement, of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. At night, after the
meeting is over, they will break up into little knots and coteries, and
talk it all over among themselves. If they are pleased on the whole, one
of the group finally will say: "Well, Labitte told us the truth," and
that being admitted by the rest, the conference will be a success!'

On this occasion the auditors were much more outspoken during the
conference. Speaking of the unequal pressure upon the different communes
of the military service, M. Labitte told them a story of a youth who
came to him to get an exemption from service. 'I told him,' said M.
Labitte, 'that I should be very glad to get it for him, but that his
commune was not at that moment entitled to an exemption, and that I
could not be a party to putting an injustice upon another commune. He
was annoyed at this, and thought I ought to do him a favour, no matter
at whose cost. I declined, and he went away. Some time after I met him,
when he exultingly told me that he had seen one of my colleagues, a
Republican, and had got from him the exemption he wanted. After that I
heard stories put about to the effect that Labitte cared nothing about
the pressure of the military service on the labouring people! Was I not
right? Was it not my duty to see no favouritism shown to one commune at
the expense of another?'

To these queries there was a prompt and general response, 'Yes! yes! You
were quite right,' and several voices cried out, 'Bravo!--quite right,
Labitte.'

Again, in dealing with the question of education, M. Labitte told his
hearers of three instances in which small communes had been made to
expend sums inordinately disproportionate to their resources upon what
he called 'scholastic palaces,' although a great majority of the people
in each instance distinctly refused to send their children to the lay
schools established in these 'palaces.' One case was that of a commune
of some seven hundred souls compelled to expend more than sixty thousand
francs, or 2,400_l._ sterling, upon a 'scholastic palace'! 'I opposed
these expenditures,' he said, 'for I think it is part of the duty of a
councillor-general to look closely into the use made of your money.'

This, also, the hearers applauded, not noisily at all, but with a kind
of gratified murmur, not unlike the very loud purring of a very large
cat. By this time it was evident that the speaker had his audience well
in hand, and M. Labitte took up some points of attack made on himself.
One of these was that he was a 'clerical.' He said that he certainly was
a 'clerical,' if that meant a man who had a religion and respected it,
and wished to see the religion of other people respected; and gliding on
from this to the question of the religious education of children, he
asked the people whether they wished to see the curates forbidden to
teach their children the principles of their religion. He was instantly
answered by a man standing in the crowd just outside the door of the
barn, who, in a loud and rather husky voice, shouted out that 'the
priest had no business in the school.' Several of the audience met this
interruption with derisive laughter, and two or three of them sharply
invited the man to hold his tongue and go about his business. For a
moment it seemed as if we were about to have a scene. But M. Labitte
interposed. With perfect good temper he replied to the man that he was
quite of his opinion as to the proper place of a priest, and that he had
no wish to see the children at school interfered with in their school
hours by any instruction not a part of the school programme. He
suggested, however, that, instead of shouting and clamouring, the man
should wait till he, M. Labitte, had got through, and then come up
'amiably and prettily' on the platform and state his own views as fully
as he liked. This made the man in the doorway angrier than ever, and as
the audience good-naturedly laughed at him, he began to use rather
abusive language. Upon this several stalwart peasants rose and made
their way towards him with very plain intimations that if he did not
take to the highway he would be carried there. The uproar was all over
in five minutes. Some companions of the anti-clerical gentleman, not
liking the look of the audience, contrived to surround him and led him
off, and he disappeared uttering a threat or two of incoherent defiance
as he went out of the farmyard. A burly farmer seated near me explained
that 'the fellow was drunk. But,' he added, 'he was sent here to do all
this, and I know who sent him. Do you see that high chimney across the
road some way off among the trees? Well, he is a factory hand there.
There are a number of them--they don't belong to this country, and the
manufacturer is an intriguer. He wanted to be a councillor-general, and
we beat him off. He doesn't like it--and that's at the bottom of it
all.'

M. Labitte spoke for about an hour, the audience gradually increasing
and listening with close attention. At the end the farmer, who had
arranged the conference, got up and thanked the councillor-general for
the account he had given of his services, and then the meeting broke up
as quietly as it had assembled, and with as little ceremony.

Before the company began to leave the barn, a young man near the door
asked for some information as to the duties likely to be imposed to
protect the farmers, and getting a brief and clear reply, he said that
would be very satisfactory--if only 'some proprietors would not put such
high prices on their land.' The Count, who sat just in front of me and
who had kept his hawk eye fixed on the speaker, chuckled to himself and
said to me, 'That shot was meant for me!'

Altogether the proceedings gave me a very favourable notion of the
intelligence and the practical sense of the people. If all the
constituencies in France could be handled in this direct fashion at the
national elections in September, the result of those elections might be
at least the approximative expression of the sense of the nation.

But this is not to be expected. There is much more canvassing done, I
think, by legislative candidates in France, and much less public
speaking than in America or in England, and the pressure of the
Government upon the voters is very much greater here even than it is in
America. The proportion of office-holders to the population is much more
considerable, and the recent governments have made the tenure of office
in France even more dependent upon the political activity of the
officials than it has ever been in the United States. This is one of the
many evil legacies of the First Republic. The maxim that, 'to the
victors belong the spoils,' I am sorry to say has been pretty
extensively reduced to practice on my side of the Atlantic; but it was
first formulated, not by Jackson, but by Danton. Louis Blanc tells us
that this brutal Boanerges of the Jacobins startled even his allies one
day, by cynically declaring that 'the revolution was a battle, and, like
all battles, ought to end by the division of the spoils among the
victors.'

Gabriel Charmes, a republican of the republicans, reviewing the conduct
of the governments which have succeeded each other in France with such
kaleidoscope rapidity since the death of Thiers, deliberately declares
that 'epuration is the watchword, and the true aim of Republican
politics' in France. And 'epuration' is the euphemism invented to
describe the simple process of kicking out the office-holder who is in,
to make room for the office-seeker who is out. Gambetta began this
process in December 1870, when he wrote to the Government at Paris:
'Authorise me and all my colleagues to "purify" the _personnel_ of the
public administration, and it shall be done in very short order.' Within
a month, the Minister of the Interior telegraphed to the prefects, 'you
are authorised to make all the changes among the public school teachers,
which, from a republican and political point of view, you may think
desirable.' M. Crémieux, Minister of Justice, followed the work up so
energetically, that by the end of the year 1871 he declared that he had
'weeded out eighteen hundred justices of the peace, and two hundred and
eighty-nine magistrates of the courts and tribunals.' When the
republicans of the different Radical shades got into power in 1877, the
newly elected deputies, according to M. Floquet, held a meeting, and
insisted upon a further 'epuration.' They were of the mind of the
sub-prefect of Roanne, who telegraphed to his superior, 'If Republicans
alone are not put into office, the Republicans will rise and we shall
have civil war.' In January 1880, M. de Freycinet, then, as now, a
Minister, loudly called for a 'reform of the _personnel_ of the
Administration; and M. Gabriel Charmes, speaking of the then
situation in France, tells us that only one prefect of the previous
Republican Administration had escaped 'purification,' and not one
procureur-general. 'Has a single justice of the peace,' he added, 'or a
single public school teacher in the slightest degree open to suspicion,
escaped the avenging hands of MM. Le Royes and Jules Ferry? Certainly
not.'

This was nine years ago. So thorough was the weeding, M. Charmes tells
us, that, 'even the rural constables had not escaped, and the epuration
policy had carried terror and anarchy into all branches of the public
service.'

In 1885 more than three millions of voters recorded their protest
against these methods of government, and against the deputies who had
identified these methods with the Republican form of government. This
protest was met by M. de Freycinet, on January 16, 1886, with a speech,
in the course of which he calmly said, 'Let no one henceforth forget
that liberty to oppose the Government does not exist for the servants of
the State.'

That is to say, the Republican Government, which is itself the servant,
and the paid servant, of the State, will not permit any of its
fellow-servants and subordinates, who are also presumably French
citizens and taxpayers, to form and express at the polls any opinion on
public affairs differing from the opinions held by the ministers who
make up the Government.

It was upon this simple and beautiful principle that Mr. Tweed and his
colleagues consolidated the local administration of affairs of the city
of New York. Applied to the administration of the affairs of thirty-six
millions of people in France, it ought certainly to produce results far
transcending in splendour any achieved by the Tammany Ring. For M.
Gabriel Charmes is quite in the right when he says that 'under this word
of "epuration" lie concealed the most deplorable forms of personal
greed, and the least avowable personal spites and rancours.' Like other
clever devices, however, 'epuration' may possibly be carried too far. If
it comes to pass that no actual functionary thinks his head safe, while,
at the same time, every office the Government has to give represents a
dozen or twenty 'expurgated,' and therefore exasperated and disaffected,
previous holders of that office, the confidence of the garrison may be
shaken while the animosity of the assailants is intensified. This point
may possibly have been reached in France. If it has not been reached,
the influence of the Government upon the voters must be very formidable.
For the average French voter is hemmed in and hedged about by
innumerable small functionaries who have it in their power to oblige or
to disoblige him, to gratify or to vex him in all sorts of ways; and
though the ballot is supposed to be sacred and secret in France, it can
hardly be more sacred or more secret there than in other countries. And
whatever protection against annoyance the ballot may give to the voter,
nothing can protect the candidate.

What I have heard in other regions I hear in Artois, that nothing is so
difficult as to persuade men of position and character to take upon
themselves the troubles, and expose themselves to the inconveniences, of
an important political candidacy. There are a hundred ways in which a
triumphant Administration conducted on the principles of the 'epuration'
policy may harass and annoy an unsuccessful banner-bearer of the
Opposition. The question of expense is another obstacle in the way of a
thorough organisation of public opinion against such a Government.

An average outlay of 400,000 francs per department would be required, I
was told by an experienced friend in Paris, adequately to put into the
line of political battle all the departments of France, large and small
together. As there are eighty-three departments in France, this gives us
a total of 33,200,000 francs, or some 1,300,000_l._ sterling, as the
cost of a thorough political campaign against an established French
Government. If we suppose each deputy to make a personal contribution of
20,000 francs to this war-chest, that will give us only about one-third
of the necessary amount. The rest must be made up by the personal
contributions of public-spirited citizens, and my own observation of
public affairs, going back, now, over a good many lively and interesting
political conflicts in the United States, leads me to believe that
liberal contributions of this sort are, as a rule, more easily collected
by the beneficiaries of a more or less unscrupulous Government actually
in power, than by the disinterested advocates of a real political
reformation.

We wound up the day of the Conference with a delightful little dinner at
St.-Quentin. The traditions of the old French _cuisine_ are not yet
extinct in the provinces, nor, for that matter, in the private life of
the true Parisians of Paris. They all centre in the famous saying of
Brillat-Savarin, that a man may learn how to cook, but must be born to
roast--a saying worthy of the philosophic magistrate who, coming to
America, under the impression that he was to be fed upon roots and raw
meat, went back to France convinced that a New England roast turkey and
an Indian pudding were not to be matched in the old world. It is one of
the many curious things of this curious world of the nineteenth century,
that a _cuisine_ of made dishes of which Grimod de La Reynière long ago
gave us the origin, in the downfall of the kitchens of the
prince-bishops along the Rhine, should be gravely and generally accepted
by Frenchmen themselves, or at least by the Parisians of literature and
the boulevards, as the national _cuisine_ of France. The charming
daughter of my host at St.-Quentin knew better; and she received with a
graceful, housewifely satisfaction the neatly-turned compliments which
one of the guests was old-fashioned and sensible enough to pay her upon
the skill of her cook.

The city of Aire-sur-la-Lys itself, like St.-Omer, shows traces still of
its connection with Flanders and with Spain. I do not know if it is true
of Aire as M. Lauwereyns de Roosendaele, writing about Jacqueline
Robins, declares it to be of St.-Omer, that there are people there, even
now, who think of the days of the Spanish rule as the 'good old times.'
But there is a certain Castilian stateliness about the older buildings
of Aire; and the portals of the larger residences, leading from the
street into charming secluded courts, gay with trees and flowers, remind
one of the zaguans of the Andalusian houses. Very Spanish, too, is the
Jesuit Church, despite some extraordinary decorations due to the zeal of
its more recent possessors.

The Flemish past of the city is commemorated especially by a very
remarkable little building known as the Corps de Garde, and by certain
portions of the Church of St.-Pierre.

Aire formerly had a cathedral, but during the worst period of the Terror
that exemplary ruffian, Joseph Lebon of Arras, the unfrocked priest, who
organised pillage and massacre throughout the Pas-de-Calais, frightened
the good people of Aire into a frenzy of destruction and devilry. The
Church of St.-Pierre was then a collegiate church, but it was turned
over to the worship of the Supreme Being invented by Robespierre,
desecrated and defaced and left in a deplorable state. It had already
suffered, like so many other churches all over France and England, from
the ingenious 'restorers' of the eighteenth century, who have left their
sign-manual on the upper part of the edifice and on the mass of a huge
organ loft which crushes and disfigures the main entrance. The greater
part of the building is of the fifteenth century; and it has been
restored within our own times as tastefully and effectively as in the
circumstances was possible, under the supervision and in part, I
believe, at the cost of a devoted and conscientious curate, a member of
a Scotch family long fixed in Artois, the Abbé Scott, who took charge of
the church at the end of the reign of Charles X. and who now lies buried
in the building he did so much to preserve. It is a very considerable
church, measuring three hundred feet in length and a hundred-and-twenty
in width; with a height of seventy feet in the main nave. The ogival
windows are filled with rich, stained glass; all the ancient monuments
which escaped the fury of 1793 have been excellently restored, and the
church bears witness in its condition to the active piety of the
faithful of Aire.

The 'Corps de Garde' is a quadrilateral jewel of Flemish architecture of
the end of the sixteenth century. It was of old the central point of the
city, where the armed citizens met who patrolled the streets like the
burghers of Rembrandt's magnificent 'Ronde de Nuit.' A gallery runs
round it of arcades, and brickwork supported by monolithic columns.
Above these arcades runs a frieze of trophies of arms with the
attributes of St. James--the mayor of the city in whose time it was
built bore the name of this apostle--and the cross of Burgundy.

The principal façade fronts the 'Grande Place,' and is surmounted by a
picturesque pointed roof. An attic storey, running all around the
building, is richly decorated with sculptures of the Theological and
Cardinal Virtues, the Four Elements, and the patron saints of Aire--St.
Nicholas and St. Anthony. On another façade is the sculptured niche, now
vacant, wherein stood a statue of the Virgin, before which all the
great processions, civic and military, were used to halt and do
obeisance.

In 1482, after the death of Charles the Bold, Louis XI. of France
succeeded, 'by treachery and corruptions,' in annexing Aire for a time
to the French crown, and the local records give a picturesque account of
a French tournament held here in 1492, the year of the discovery of
America, under the auspices of no less a person than the Chevalier 'sans
peur et sans reproche.' Pierre du Terrail, dit le Bayard, came to Aire
on July 19 in that year, and at once sent a trumpeter to proclaim
through all the streets and squares that on the morrow, being July 20,
he would hold a tournay under the walls of Aire, for all comers, 'of
three charges with the lance, the steel points dulled; and twelve sword
strokes to be exchanged, with no lists drawn, and on horseback in
harness of battle.' The next day the combat to be renewed 'afoot with
the lance until the breaking of the lance, and after that with the
battle-axe so long as the judges might think fit.' The chroniclers
celebrate in superlatives the valour and skill shown by the hero in
these gentle and joyous assaults of arms, and the beauty of the Artesian
dames and damsels who thronged from all the country round into Aire to
witness the tournay, and take part in the dances and banquets which
followed it. But the hearts of the people were evidently Flemish and
Spanish, not French; for they hailed the restoration of the Austrian
authority by Charles the Fifth with all manner of rejoicings. Charles,
with his usual sagacity, confirmed all the ancient rights and privileges
of the city and its corporations, which had been a good deal disturbed
under the centralising rule of the French sovereigns, and a record of
the year 1538 tells us that on the proclamation in that year of the
truce of Borny, the Austrian authorities paid the treasurer of the city
'lxxviii. sols' for silver money 'thrown in joy to the people.' The
treasurer himself seems to have been so enthusiastic on this occasion
that he threw his own cap after the silver money, for the record adds a
further payment to him 'for a certain cap belonging to him, which was
likewise thrown to the people.' All the records of this age at Aire are
picturesque with lively accounts of all manner of junketings, carousals,
and festivities, and the good people seem to have passed no small part
of their lives in merry-making. There is a curious entry on the occasion
of the marriage of the Archduke Philip to Mary of England. This
auspicious event was celebrated at Aire by a grand procession, followed
by 'songs and ballads in honour of the married pair;' and the treasurer
paid to 'Johan Gallant, goldsmith, iiii. livres iiii. sols for the
silver presents, to wit, an eagle, a leopard, a lion, and a fool--all in
silver--which were given to those who made the songs, ballads, and games
in honour of the said good news!'

Like Calais, St.-Omer, and other cities of this region, Aire offered a
refuge in 1553 to the unfortunate inhabitants of the ancient historic
city of Thérouanne, which, after a heroic defence by d'Essé de
Montmorency, was taken in that year, five days after the death on the
ramparts of the gallant commander, by the troops of Charles the Fifth,
and by his orders razed to the ground. The details of this merciless
destruction recall the sack of Rome by the Imperialists; and it is the
blackest feature in the black record of the First French Revolution that
the men who then got control for a time of the government of France, in
the names of Liberty and Progress, deliberately and wantonly rivalled
the most unscrupulous of the kings and emperors whom they were
constantly denouncing, in their treatment, not of foreign fortresses
conquered in war, but of French cities, of the lives and the property of
French citizens, and of the most precious monuments of French history.
Charles the Bold at Dinant and Charles the Fifth at Thérouanne were
outdone, in the prostituted name of the French people, by the younger
Robespierre at Toulon and by the paralytic Couthon at Lyons.

The annals of these north-eastern cities of modern France are full of
most curious and valuable materials for a really instructive history of
the French people. The most cursory acquaintance with them suffices to
show how much worse than worthless are the huge political pamphlets
which during the last hundred years have passed current with the world
as histories of the French Revolution, and how important to the future,
not of France alone but of civilisation, is the work begun in our own
times by writers like Mortimer-Ternaux, Granier de Cassagnac,
Baudrillart, Biré, and Henri Taine. Here in Artois, under the
conflicting influences of Flemish, Spanish, and French laws and customs,
a genuine development of social and political life may be traced as
clearly as in Scotland or in England, down to the sudden and violent
strangulation of French progress by the incompetent States-General and
the not less incompetent king in 1789.

The archives of Aire show that the question of public education was a
practical question there, at least as far back as at the beginning of
the seventeenth century. In 1613, the magistrates asked and obtained the
permission of the Archduke Albert and the Archduchess Isabella to lay a
special tax on the city of Aire and two adjoining villages, for the
purpose of founding a college, private citizens having already given an
endowment of 750 florins a year for this object. The importance of this
contribution may be estimated from the fact that after the siege of Aire
by the French in 1641, a sum of I,000 florins left to the Collegiate
Church of Aire by a canon of Tournay was found sufficient to restore the
chapel of Our Lady, the whole right wing of the church, and many houses
belonging to the canons, which had all been destroyed by the French
artillery. No time was lost in opening the college to the youth of the
city and the suburbs, and only a few years afterwards the priests in
charge of it wrote to the Seigneur de Thiennes, asking for further
endowments in order to increase the number of the teachers to twenty, so
great was the affluence of scholars from all the country around, 'to the
number at that time of more than three hundred.' The collegiate chapter
of Aire appointed one of its canons superintendent of the school, under
the title of the 'Ecolâtre.' There really seems to be as little
foundation in fact for the common notion that there was no provision
made for the education of the people in France before 1789, as for the
notion, not less common, that there were no peasant proprietors in
France before 1789. It is hardly excusable even that Mr. Carlyle,
rhapsodising more than fifty years ago about the 'dumb despairing
millions,' should have fallen into this error. For though De Tocqueville
and Taine had not then exploded it in detail, Necker, in whose career
Carlyle took so much interest, not only declared officially that there
was 'an immense number' of such proprietors in France, but took the
trouble to explain how it had come about. The law of 1790 establishing
the land-tax required every parish to furnish a detailed account of the
then existing properties in land, and it is shown by these that there
then existed in France nearly two-thirds as many landholders as now
exist, although the population of the country is now about twenty-five
per cent. greater than it then was.




CHAPTER V.

IN THE SOMME.


  AMIENS

By turns English, French, and Burgundian, Upper Picardy, of which Amiens
was the capital, became definitely French under the astute policy of
Louis XI. The Calaisis and the Boulonnais, with Ponthieu and Vimieu,
eventually constituted what was called Lower Picardy, and the whole
province, divided under the Bourbons into the two 'generalities' of
Amiens and Soissons, formed before 1789 one of the twelve great
departments of the monarchy, and was brought under the domain of the
Parliament of Paris.

The city of Amiens, associated now, I fear, chiefly, in the English and
American mind, with 'twenty minutes' stop' on the way between Calais and
Paris, and with a buffet which perhaps entitles it to be called the
Mugby Junction of France, is really one of the most interesting of
French cities. No student of Ruskin can need to be told that its
glorious cathedral makes it one of the most interesting, not of French
only, but of European cities; and two or three excellent small hotels
make it a most comfortable as well as a most instructive midway station,
not for 'twenty minutes,' but for a couple of days, between the capitals
of England and France. Arthur Young found it so a hundred years ago,
when he encountered there the illustrious Charles James Fox returning to
London from a visit to the Anglomaniac Due d' Orléans, in the company
of a charming 'Madame Fox,' of whom Arthur Young and London had no
previous cognisance.

Like Dijon, and Nancy, and Toulouse, and Rennes, and Rouen, Amiens still
wears that 'look of a capital' which is as unmistakeable, if also as
undefinable, as Hazlitt found the 'look of a gentleman' to be. York and
Exeter, for example, in England, have this look, while Liverpool and
Hull have it not. There are traces of the Spaniards in Amiens, as there
are wherever that most Roman of all the Latin peoples has ever passed,
and the curious _hortillonages_ of Amiens, which may be roughly
described as a kind of floating kitchen gardens, remind one so strongly
of the much more picturesque Chinampas of Mexico as to suggest the
impression that the idea of establishing them may have come hither by
way of Spain.

At the present time, Amiens is a point of no small political interest.
It is the bailiwick of one of the few really notable men of the actual
Republican party in France--- M. Goblet--and yet it is one of the
strongholds of Boulangism. There is an old song, the refrain of which,
as I heard it sung, more years ago than I care to recall, always haunts
me when I visit this ancient city:--

  Vive un Picard, vive un Picard,
  Quand il s'agit de tete!

The Picards have always shown, not only sense, but a kind of stubborn
independence of character. In the days of anarchy which came upon France
with the brief but ill-omened triumph of the Girondins, Amiens was the
first of the French provincial cities to resist and denounce the too
successful attempt of Danton and the commune of Paris to terrorise
France by a skilful abuse of the imbecility of Roland. The authorities
of Amiens were the first to protest against the outrageous pretensions
of the 'commissioners,' who came there with Roland's commissions in one
hand, and the secret instructions of Roland's colleague and master,
Danton, in the other, to pillage the property of the inhabitants under
the pretence of gathering supplies for the national defence, and to
establish an irresponsible local despotism under the pretence of
suppressing 'treason.' To them, in the first instance, belongs the
credit of compelling Roland to get up before the Assembly on September
17, 1792, and confess that he had 'signed in the council commissions
without knowing anything about the commissioners who were to use them;'
and to them, therefore, in the first instance, history is indebted for
the formal record which shows that the actual fall of the French
monarchy was followed, and its formal abolition preceded, by the letting
loose upon France of a swarm of scoundrels, who filled 'the prisons with
prisoners as to whom no one knew by whom they were arrested; who gave
over to pillage the treasures accumulated in the Tuileries, and in the
houses of the emigrant aristocracy; who conveyed away everything which
could tempt the cupidity of a subaltern, without any record whatever;
and who were delivering over Paris and France to the most absurd folly
and the most insatiable greed.' It was not the fault of Amiens if the
efforts of Mazuyer and Kersaint demanding a law to show 'whether the
French nation was sovereign, or the Commune of Paris,' and the sonorous
eloquence of Vergniaud denouncing the 'citizens of Paris' as the 'slaves
of the vilest scoundrels alive,' only led in the end to making France
herself for a time the slave of these same 'vilest scoundrels alive.'

In more recent times, Amiens received and entertained Gambetta on his
way by balloon from Paris to Tours. I asked the veteran Count Léon de
Chassepot, who for years was regularly returned at every election at the
head of the municipal councillors of Amiens, how the people received
Gambetta on that memorable occasion. His answer was that there really
was no 'reception.' Gambetta came down in his balloon at a little place
some way off, between Amiens and Montdidier, and when he reached Amiens
he was too tired and hungry to think of 'receiving' people or making
speeches. Count Léon de Chassepot had nothing, I believe, to do with the
invention of the guns which bear his name. But he has a glance like a
rifle-shot, and at fourscore years 'Spring still makes spring in the
mind' of this vivacious veteran. I asked him how Amiens behaved when the
news came there of the capture of Paris by the revolutionists of
September 4, 1870. Was the new republic hailed with enthusiasm?
'Enthusiasm!' he said scornfully; 'why should it be? The people of
Amiens were thinking of fighting the Prussians, not of upsetting the
Government! They received the news with stupefaction, as a matter of
little consequence in comparison with the invasion. The disaster of
Sedan had afflicted them profoundly. The Empire was popular in Picardy.
At the municipal elections which took place in Amiens just after the
declaration of war--early in August 1870, that is--the Imperialist
candidates had all been elected by overwhelming majorities. M. Goblet,
now so prominent in the Republican counsels, made his appearance then as
an anti-governmental candidate, together with M. Petit, the present
Radical mayor of Amiens. M. Goblet got 530 votes, and M. Petit 423. They
were the leading persons on that side, and the leading persons on the
side of the Government received, respectively, 5,099 and 4,964 votes.
This being the temper of the good people of Amiens at that time, you
will understand that they were more astounded than pleased by the
so-called revolution of September in Paris. But they were more patriotic
than the people of Paris, and they acquiesced in the overthrow of the
Government to show a united front to the enemy. He was within striking
distance of Amiens, by the way, and the boulevardiers unfortunately
thought that Paris was out of his reach.'

The first act of the revolutionists of September, it appears, was to
disorganise as far as they could the public service by removing the
prefects, and putting their own people into place and power. They sent a
certain M. Lardière down post-haste to Amiens to take the place of the
then prefect of the Somme, M. de Guigné, and that was all they did to
defend Amiens!

In the course of a pleasant morning spent with M. Ansart, a gentleman of
high character and position in Amiens, and with several of his friends,
I heard much that was interesting as to this critical period. The
attitude of the leading men throughout Picardy seems to have been in
complete conformity with M. de Chassepot's account of the bearing of the
city of Amiens. The mayor of a commune not far from Amiens, a marquis
and a leading Imperialist, on getting the news of the political
somersault executed at Paris, read out the bulletin to the people from
the mairie, reminded them that the enemy were sure to come into Picardy,
and then exclaimed, 'Well, my friends, since it seems we are in a
republic, Long live the Republic!'

This was the general feeling of good men everywhere at that time in
France. Said one gentleman, a landed proprietor from Brittany, 'Nobody
out of Paris who had a head on his shoulders approved what had been
done in Paris. But by common consent a great blank credit was opened for
the Republic all over France. If the Republicans would do their duty to
France, not as party men but as patriots, France was ready to accept
them. It is their own fault, and their fault alone, that the men who
made this change at Paris went to pieces so fast in the public
estimation. It is the fault of the Republicans, and their fault alone,
that now, after nearly eighteen years, they are an offence to sensible
and liberal men from one end of France to the other.'

The new prefect sent down from Paris turned out to be a wind-bag. By the
middle of November it became clear that Amiens must fall into the power
of the enemy. The new prefect launched a ridiculous proclamation,
blazing with adjectives, at the advancing Teutons, and then one fine
night got out of the way as fast as possible, leaving the city and the
department of the Somme to face the wrath of the not very placable
conquerors.

On November 28, the Prussians occupied the city, one French officer,
Commandant Vogel, falling at his post, which he refused to surrender.
Count Lehndorff, appointed to be German Prefect of the Somme, came down
upon the people heavily for war contributions, which were raised under
the management of M. Dauphin, who had been the Imperialist mayor of the
city ever since 1868, and who has of late years been a conspicuous
Republican. As peace drew near, Amiens had to borrow five millions of
francs, for which M. Dauphin agreed the city should pay M. Oppenheim of
Brussels a commission of 10 per cent., and issued its obligations at
7-1/2 per cent. for fifty years.

Naturally the Germans are not much liked at Amiens. Count de Chassepot
thinks the Picards in general really want war with Germany. They turned
out very generally during the contest. He commanded a battalion of
National Guards who turned out in full force, not a man missing, though
they were armed with wretched old muskets, and perfectly understood what
that must lead to for them. On making his rounds very early in the
morning, he found, in an advanced post, at a point of great danger, a
picket, a _sentinelle perdue_, who proved to be one of the most
respectable men in Amiens, the first president of the Upper Court of the
city, nearly sixty years of age, doing his duty as a private soldier.
'In a hospital here,' said M. de Chassepot, 'I have six hundred
patients. Every man of them is eager for another turn with the Germans.'

I was anxious to learn when and how it was that M. Goblet, just now the
leading Republican personage of this part of France, began to appear
conspicuously on the horizon. 'Not till Gambetta's new social strata
began to appear,' I was told. This was in 1874. The finances of the
city, left in a sad condition by the war, had been put into order by the
municipal council which was elected during the German occupation in
1871; the public works had been restored, fine barracks built, and a
sufficient number of school-houses. In return for those services the
councillors who had rendered them were turned out in 1874, M. Dauphin
among them, by the newly-organised 'Union républicaine.' This put M.
Goblet at last into the council with his ally, M. Petit, the latter
being the editor of a Radical journal, the _Progrès de la Somme_, which
the military governor of Paris had ordered to be suppressed early in
1874, for its attacks on the then President, Marshal MacMahon. In 1876
M. Goblet became mayor of Amiens.

'The very next year, when the contest began between Gambetta as head of
the Union of the Left and the President of the Republic, M. Goblet threw
himself as ex-mayor of Amiens openly on the side of the ex-dictator,
and made such speeches that he was dismissed from his office by the
President in June 1877.'

'Did he like this?'

'No, he didn't like it at all. As Minister of the Interior, in more
recent times, M. Goblet has knocked off the heads of a great number of
mayors. But when his own head was knocked off in 1877, he loudly and
scornfully denounced all municipal officers who would stoop to accept
their positions from the national government.'

'In that you have the whole character of M. Goblet,' said another
gentleman. 'I have known him from childhood. He is not a bad man, and,
as you know, he is a man of ability, one of the very few able men to be
found acting with President Carnot. But he is very vain, very ambitious,
very excitable. As the associate of Petit, who is a rampant atheist, and
of the anti-clericals generally, he has to pose as an unbeliever; but he
is, in fact, nothing of the sort. His wife is a good woman, and he goes
in great awe of her, which I think to his credit. I think if he felt his
health suffering he would go to confession in a quiet way by night, just
as the Gambetta prefect ran away from the Prussians in 1871. When the
grand funeral of Admiral Courbet took place at Abbeville, and it was
announced that Monseigneur Freppel would come and deliver the funeral
service over that noble Christian sailor and patriot, the victim of
Ferry, M. Goblet was in a dreadful state of mind. He said to me, "I
think I shall not attend the funeral." "Pray why?" "Well, I wish to
attend it, but I am sure that Bishop Freppel will say things offensive
to me." "Pray accept my congratulations," I replied; "you really are in
great luck that the first orator in France should take the trouble to
come all the way to Picardy expressly to insult you on such an
occasion!" So he thought better of it and attended, and his sensible
wife afterwards thanked me for preventing her husband from behaving like
a donkey.'

'An excellent woman, Madame Goblet!'

'Her husband owes her much, and he has some good friends. Comte de
Chassepot prevented him from playing the stupid farce of a Roman son by
sacrificing his father's funeral to a discussion on the laicisation of
the schools; for, seeing what he had in his mind, Comte de Chassepot
simply moved an adjournment of the council. His evil genius is M. Petit,
now a senator, the present mayor of Amiens. I have caught M. Goblet
offering the holy water with his hand behind my back to his wife; but M.
Petit is an outspoken unbeliever, and a very type of the anti-christian
demagogue.'

Upon this he told me a story which, as it is certainly typical of the
proceedings taken against religion all over France by functionaries of
M. Petit's way of thinking, I shall set down here.

In 1869 all the crosses and stones in the cemetery of the Madeleine at
Amiens set up on graves held by temporary concessions had to be removed
by reason of the lapse of these concessions. The then mayor and
municipal council had them sold, and ordered the proceeds to be spent in
erecting a large and beautiful cross with an image of the Saviour, and
an inscription stating that this crucifix was erected in memory of all
the dead buried in the cemetery whose crosses and tombs had been
removed. This crucifix, called the 'Calvary of the Poor,' was thus a
touching monument of the family affection of the poor among the people
of Amiens. Outraged by this symbol, the Radical mayor of Amiens caused
this Calvary to be dismantled, in the night of November 10, 1880, and
the crosses to be sawn in pieces and thrown away beyond the limits of
the cemetery. Surely this is an advance beyond Robespierre, and even
beyond the senseless Vandalism which solemnly ordered the destruction of
the tombs of the kings and heroes of France. Even Robespierre, when
Cambon made his proposal that the Convention should violate the public
faith pledged by the Constituent Assembly to the support of the French
clergy by the State in exchange for the seizure by the State of the
property of the Church, had sense enough to say, in a letter to his
constituents opposing the project, that 'to attack religion directly was
to strike a blow at the morals of the people.' I am not surprised to be
told that, notwithstanding the support given him by the central
government of the Republic at Paris, this worthy mayor has speedily lost
popularity even with his own Radical party, and that in the most recent
elections he barely escaped defeat. 'He is ensconced, though,
comfortably as senator,' said my shrewd informant, 'and I dare say he
will see his friend, M. Goblet, turned out of the Chamber! So--what does
he care? His zeal against the Calvary in Amiens may hurt him with the
poor people upon whose faith and whose affections he tramples; but, like
his brutal expulsion of the Sisters from their schools and hospitals,
and his truculence towards the religious processions in which the
Picards delight, it recommends him to the clique who have got our poor
France into their clutches at Paris, and who pose before all the gaping
world at the Universal Exposition as friends of Liberty and Progress!'

The laicisation of the schools has been pushed forward at Amiens, as
elsewhere. It began under M. Spuller, now Minister of Foreign Affairs,
who was made Prefect of the Somme in 1879. M. Goblet, who had then been
mayor for a year, resigned, to become under-secretary in the Ministry of
Justice, and the prefect put M. Delpech in his place. Everything, it
will be seen, was moved from the centre at Paris.

'This M. Delpech and his associates,' said one of my informants, 'began
the laicisation of the boys' schools. They were men who would not think
of picking a man's pocket, but see how they behaved in this business!

'There were six primary schools at Amiens conducted by the Christian
Brothers. Five of these had always been so conducted, and the sixth for
twenty years. The Christian Brothers agreed to give up this sixth
school, M. Petit promising them that, if they did this, they should not
be disturbed in the others. Very soon this promise was broken, and they
were turned out of the school of Notre-Dame. Then a charge was brought
against one of the brethren of the school of St.-Leu. It was serious and
went before the Assize Court, where the accused was promptly acquitted.
But this took time, and while the proceedings were pending, our
admirable M. Petit sent in a report to the Council recommending that the
Brethren be dismissed from their four remaining schools. On August 26,
1879, the Council adopted this report, and within a week M. Spuller, the
prefect, issued an order of expulsion, "in obedience," as he wrote, "to
the resolution of the Municipal Council of Amiens, and to the wishes of
the population."'

M. Spuller appears to be a true disciple of Robespierre, who, in his
famous socialistic speech before the Convention, affirming that bread,
meat, and all provisions are not private, but common, property, laid
down the maxim that, 'even if the measures proposed as their desire by
the people are not necessary in the eyes of law-makers, they should be
adopted.' _Civium ardor prava jubentium_ is a moral law for legislators
of this admirable school.

I should note by the way that these Brethren, thus expelled summarily,
were refused payment of their already fixed salaries for the month of
September.

A debate ensuing, the question was finally remitted to M. Jules Ferry,
'Grand Master of the University of France,' who decided that the
salaries were indeed due and the property of the Brethren, but that, as
the work could not be done by reason of their expulsion, the salaries
need not be paid!

Furthermore, the municipality appraised the school furniture, which had
been bought and paid for by the Brethren, and having ascertained its
value, decided--that it belonged to the municipality!

Will my readers think the expression of M. Fleury, an accomplished
journalist of Amiens, to whom I am indebted for these details, at all
too vigorous, when he described these proceedings as 'exactly defined in
the French Dictionary, and in the 379th article of the Penal Code, under
the word "theft"'?

In August 1880, on the refusal of the Sisters in charge of the girls'
school to take their pupils to an 'obligatory festival' during the time
fixed on Sunday for divine service, M. Petit, the municipal Emperor
Julian of Amiens, moved for 'the immediate laicisation of all the girls'
schools in Amiens.' This was too much even for M. Goblet, who, to his
credit, not only protested but voted against the proposition. It was,
however, carried. M. Goblet and six other councillors withdrew,
including the mayor, M. Delpech; and M. Petit thus became, by seniority,
mayor of Amiens.

'When this happened,' said a citizen of Amiens to me, 'and M. Petit was
thus put in charge of the rights and the property of the Sisters, it had
been perfectly well known for ten years that, by the Parliamentary
Inquest of 1871 into the story of the Commune of Paris, M. Petit had
been proved to be the founder at Amiens of the secret society known as
the "International," and yet he was never prosecuted, and he is now a
senator of the Republic. How do you expect honest people, who respect
the ordinary laws of order and civilisation, to support a Republic which
accepts and promotes the members of such a society?

'On October 2, 1880, this remarkable mayor went in person with a
locksmith and some others to the communal girls' school of St.-Leu, then
managed by the Sisters. The Sisters had been already that day notified
to leave the school-buildings "the next day." M. Petit ordered them to
go out immediately. They showed the notification and declined to go till
the next day. The curate of St.-Leu, with his vicar and with a member of
the board of Churchwardens, came up and protested against this invasion
of the school. "Show me the documents proving this house to be the
property of the municipality," said the curate. M. Petit showed no
documents, but demanded the keys. The curate refused to give them up. M.
Petit ordered his locksmith to pick the locks, which was done, and then
turning to the curate shouted out, "As for you, if you are here when the
commissary comes, I will have you turned out by force." Upon this the
curate, a venerable old man, withdrew.

'From the school of St.-Leu our local Robespierrot drove to the girls'
school of St.-Jacques, sprang out of the municipal coach (paid for by
the public treasury), dashed into the house, and seated himself without
a word.

'One of the Sisters asked him civilly what he wished. "I wish you to get
out of this house," he replied, "We cannot possibly leave in this way,"
answered a Sister who has for years devoted herself to this work. "I
have nothing to say to you," he cried; "I want the Superior." The
Superior quietly came and informed the mayor that the church officers
had told her not to leave, excepting under force. "Very well, you shall
have force! If you are not all out of here by Tuesday, I will put you
all into the street!"

'Now observe the consequences to the taxpayer of Amiens! The Church of
St.-Leu, as it happens, owned the greater part of the school-buildings.
The church began proceedings against the city, and in August 1881, the
tribunal ordered the city to give up the buildings seized by this
adventurous mayor, and to withdraw its lay teachers. The upshot was that
the performances of M. Petit, in one way or another--although M. Goblet,
then in the ministry at Paris, came to the rescue of his demagogic
ally--cost the taxpayers, in round numbers, some fifty thousand francs.
Now you see why the laicising Republicans are so anxious to shake the
whole system of the French magistracy. There may be judges at Berlin. It
is not convenient there should be judges in Republican France!'

This recalled to me what I heard the other day at Calais about the
functionary decorated at Bapaume by President Carnot, because the
tribunal had given a decision against him in a case raised by certain
Christian Brothers whom he had unlawfully put out of property which,
under the law, belonged to them.

'You think that a remarkable case!' said the Picard friend to whom I
mentioned it. 'It is an everyday affair. Wait a minute! Let me show you
the documents in regard to a performance of our worthy mayor and
senator, which throws President Carnot into the shade. They are as
amusing, too, as they are instructive, and I will give you copies of
them which you may use as you like. You tell me people in England and
America have no idea of what is going on in France? I assure you that
people in France who know what is going on around them, have no idea of
what it all means, or of what it must lead to in the end.

'Sometimes I think we were so stunned as a nation by the invasion and
the Commune that we are still staggering about like a man knocked on the
head in a dark road.

'But let me tell you the tale of M. Petit and Mademoiselle Colombel.
Mademoiselle Colombel was a lay teacher at the head of one of our
schools, the school of the Petit St.-Jean. I don't quite see, by the
way,' he observed, 'why M. Petit and his squad have not changed the
names of these schools. In Paris, you know, they had the courage to
change the name of one of the great lyceums into the Lyceum Lakanal. To
be sure it didn't stay changed very long, for even Paris--which suffers
one of its boulevards to commemorate that wretched creature Victor
Noir--wouldn't stand Lakanal. But to infect the minds of children with
the names of little Saints--surely this is a monstrous thing! Well,
Mademoiselle Colombel lost her temper one day, and tried to find it
about the person of one of her little pupils, with slaps, and pinches,
and other caresses of the kind. She was brought up before the police for
it, and sentenced to pay a small fine with costs. She appealed, but the
court confirmed the sentence of the police magistrate, who had acted
strictly within the law. What followed? This was in May 1885. Mdlle.
Colombel declared herself to be a persecuted martyr of "laicisation,"
and in that capacity called upon the mayor, M. Petit, for aid and
comfort. I believe they were old allies in the sacred cause. Be this as
it may, the mayor made himself her champion against the magistrate, and
wrote her, for public use, this letter. Pray print it. It is a great
thing for Amiens to possess a mayor, and for France to possess a
senator, who can write such a letter. It ought to have been sent to the
Exposition.

     '"Amiens, May 1885.

     '"Madame,--On the strength of calumnious imputations fomented by an
     Ulysses who could not console himself for the departure of Calypso,
     and complacently listened to, you have been prosecuted for cruelty
     to your pupils.

     '"After an inquiry as long and as voluminous as if the matter at
     issue had been a case for the Assize Court, this intrigue came to a
     miserable end before a simple police tribunal. From the moment,
     when, through a singular sort of suspicion about your natural
     judges, you were removed from the disciplinary action of your
     superiors, without any preliminary inquiry made by them, and,
     indeed, without apprising them of the matter, you should have been
     taken before the Courts. Nobody seemed to understand this, so you
     were condemned by default to pay a fine, trifling indeed, but so
     imposed as to take from you the right of appeal. Be this as it may,
     since some of the law officers of the Republic are ready to revive
     against the lay instructors of our schools, the methods of the law
     officers of the Empire, it is well your colleagues should know
     that, whilst I am at the head of the municipal administration of
     Amiens, they shall not be given over defenceless to the rancour of
     the clerical world, its dupes, or its accomplices. I have therefore
     the honour to inform you that I not only relieve you from all the
     costs of your case, but that, in order to soothe the trouble it may
     have caused you, I grant you an indemnity of one hundred francs!

     '"Against the sentence which condemned you put this proof of esteem
     and sympathy. Honest people and Republicans will think this
     testimony at least as good as any other. Accept, Madame, the
     assurances of my most distinguished consideration.

      '"The Mayor of Amiens,

         '"FRÉDÉRIC PETIT."'

'Ulysses bewailing the departure of Calypso is charming, is it not?'
said my friend. 'M. Petit is a cotton-velvet manufacturer, and his
classics are cotton classics. But what do you say to the applause of
"honest people" acclaiming a mayor who puts his hand into the public
treasury and makes a present out of it to soothe the injured feelings of
a schoolmistress fined by a public tribunal for ill-treating her pupils?
Can you ask for a more flagrant illustration of the state to which this
Republic is bringing our public services? And the mayor who wrote this
letter, and took this money out of the public treasury, and offered this
open insult to the tribunals of the city of Amiens, has since then been
made a senator of the Republic, with the help and concurrence of M.
Dauphin, then First President of our Courts, whose plain official duty
it was to revoke his commission as mayor as soon as this letter was
published! With such men as this in the French Senate do you wonder the
country laughs at senatorial courts of justice? I have no great opinion
of General Boulanger, though I have as good an opinion of him as of M.
Clémenceau, who invented him. But really is it not grotesque to see such
cotton-velvet senators as this mayor of Amiens going about to decide
questions of fidelity to public duty? Take my word for it' he continued,
'it is the direct personal knowledge which the people have of just such
personages as the mayor of Amiens all over France, which makes
two-thirds of the popular strength of General Boulanger. If the Senate
and the Government succeed in putting about the impression that General
Boulanger is no better than they are, they will no doubt weaken him with
the people, but they will not strengthen themselves. This Third Republic
is dying, not of any passion for the monarchy, not even of the
Imperialist legend, which is very strong in the country--more because
France was so prosperous under the third Napoleon than because France
dominated Europe under the first Napoleon: it is dying of popular
contempt. It is dying of the Goblets, the Petits, the Dauphins. They are
to be found all over France--under different names--yes--but always the
same: shallow, vain, vulgar sycophants of universal suffrage while they
are out of place, bullies and traders when they are in power. And then!'
he exclaimed after a pause, 'what most exasperates me is that they are
such a pack of wordmongers, for ever ranting about things which may have
intoxicated our grandfathers in 1792--they don't seem to me to have
invented gunpowder, our grandfathers!--but which simply make sensible
men sick to-day.

'Wait a moment! Let me complete the picture of our model Picard
Republican senator for you. The Comte de Chassepot told you the story,
did he not, of the Calvary in the cemetery of the Madeleine? Yes. But he
did not show you the correspondence about it between the bishop and this
charlatan of twopenny Atheism? No? Well it is a tit-bit, and I give it
to you! Petit sent his order to the keeper of the cemetery of the
Madeleine in November 1880, to raze the cross, saw off the arms, and
detach from it the image of Christ. He was then, observe, not really
mayor of Amiens, but only mayor by reason of the refusal of his senior
to serve in the office.

'The work was done at night. The cross was destroyed. The image of the
Saviour was thrown into a shed.

'Two days afterwards, the Bishop of Amiens wrote this letter to the
Prefect of the Somme, Spuller, the same person who is now--heaven save
the mark!--Minister of Foreign Affairs of the French Republic!

     '"Amiens: Nov. 12, 1880.

     '"Mr. Prefect,--A most deplorable incident--indeed a grave
     scandal--has just taken place at the cemetery of the Madeleine, and
     is exciting, with too much reason, the strongest and most painful
     feelings among the people of Amiens.

     '"The figure of our Saviour Christ, set up there in very special
     circumstances, and with a solemn ceremony in which more than 30,000
     spectators took part, was clandestinely thrown down and taken away
     the night before last. It is impossible for me to imagine that the
     authorities can have ordered such a thing to be done.

     '"I must request you, Mr. Prefect, to order an inquiry to be made
     into this inexplicable affair, and to cause the authors of the act
     to be prosecuted according to law. Please accept the assurance of
     my respectful regard.

        '"[Illustration] AIME VICTOR-FRANCIS,
            '"Bishop of Amiens."

'To this letter, written by the highest ecclesiastical authority of the
chief city of his préfecture--will you believe it?--M. Spuller, who is
after all not a perfectly illiterate person like Petit, actually made no
reply!

'But the cotton-velvet bagman of blasphemy three days afterwards,
reading in the papers the letter of Bishop Guilbert, burst into print
with this incredible but most instructive effusion, addressed to his
friend the Prefect:

     '"Amiens: Nov. 15, 1880.

     '"Mr. Prefect,--I find this morning in the journals of the
     bishopric the text of a letter addressed to you by the Bishop of
     Amiens in regard to the suppression of the Catholic emblem placed
     at the entrance of the general cemetery of the Madeleine.

     '"It was by my order, and my written order, that the Christ of the
     Madeleine was removed. The only failure to comply with my orders
     was that the operation was performed in the evening after the
     cemetery was closed, instead of in the morning as I had directed.
     In acting thus, I have shown great tolerance; for, in virtue of
     Article 13 of the Law of the 7th Vendémiaire of the Year IV.,
     circumscribed in its application, but not abrogated by the Law of
     the 18th Germinal year X., as is shown by a ministerial decree of
     the 7th Fructidor following: 'No sign special to any religion can
     be raised, fixed, and attached in any place whatever, so as to
     strike the eyes of citizens, except in an enclosure intended for
     the exercises of this religion, or in the interior of private
     houses, in the studios or warehouses of artists or merchants, or in
     public edifices destined to contain monuments of the arts."'

'Then followed a dozen pages of similar twaddle, meant to show that the
mayor of Amiens was a most tolerant prince, in that he had not ordered
the destruction of every cross set up on a private grave!

'Of course all these laws of the First Republic were long ago shot into
space under the Consulate and the Empire, and of course, even if they
had not been shot into space, a consecrated cemetery is an "enclosure
intended for the exercises of religion." But what did that signify to M.
Petit, who, in a public speech the year after, boasted that he "had not
been married in church, and that his children had never been baptized."

'Did all this give the man any right to destroy and carry away a costly
piece of artistic work, the property of the city?'

Obviously, it is as absurd to expect peace and order in France under a
republic in which men like M. Petit, and M. Spuller, and M. Dauphin, and
M. Goblet are leading friends of the Government, as it would have been
to expect peace and order in the England of the seventeenth century,
when churchwardens--as at Banbury, for example--went about breaking at
night into the churches confided to their care, and smashing the statues
of the saints and defacing the glorious monuments of the past.

After considering all these humours and graces of the most recent French
Republic, as set forth by the senatorial mayor of Amiens, for the
edification of Picardy and France, it was interesting to walk with Mr.
Ruskin from the Place de Périgord up the 'Street of the Three Pebbles,'
past the theatre and the Palais de Justice, to the south transept of
that glorious cathedral which has not as yet been taken down by night,
under the senatorial mayor or his friends the ministers, M. Spuller and
M. Yves Guyot. Why should this 'Parthenon of Gothic architecture,' as M.
Viollet-le-Duc calls it, be left standing when the Calvary of the poor
at Amiens is cast down and sawn in pieces?

For surely Mr. Ruskin, who has written many true and eloquent things,
has written nothing truer than these words with which he brings to a
close his remarkable paper called the 'Bible of Amiens':--

     'The life and gospel and power of Christianity are all written in
     the mighty works of its true believers, in Normandy and Sicily, on
     river-islets of France and in the river glens of England, on the
     rocks of Orvieto and by the sands of Arno. But of all, the
     simplest, completest, and most authoritative in its lessons to the
     active mind of Northern Europe, is this on the foundation-stones of
     Amiens. Believe it or not as you will--only understand how
     thoroughly it was once believed--and that all beautiful things were
     made and all brave deeds done in the strength of it--until what we
     may call "this present time," in which it is gravely asked whether
     religion has any effect on morals, by persons (senatorial and
     other) who have essentially no idea whatever of the meaning of
     either religion or morality.'




CHAPTER VI.

IN THE SOMME--_continued_


  AMIENS

Where party names are taken from persons, there we may be sure that the
people are either losing, or have never had, the political instincts
which alone can make popular government a government of law and order.
The Englishmen who are readiest to proclaim themselves 'Gladstonians,'
whatever may be their other merits, are hardly perhaps the most devoted
champions either of the British constitution as it is, or of strictly
constitutional reform. In France to-day, the Republican party is made up
of clans, each taking the name of its chief. There are Ferryists and
Clementists, as there were Gambettists; and the Government of the day is
putting forth all its strength to check the drift over of what I suppose
I may without impropriety call the Republican residuum into Boulangism.
Here in Amiens the tide seems to be too strong for the authorities at
Paris, and for that matter throughout the department of the Somme. At
the election nearly a year ago, on August 19, 1888, of a deputy to fill
the vacancy caused by the death of a Royalist member, M. de Berly,
General Boulanger came forward as a candidate and was elected by an
overwhelming majority. There are 160,400 electors in the department. Of
these, 121,955 voted. General Boulanger received 76,094 votes, and his
Republican competitor, M. Barnot, only 41,371, General Boulanger having
been elected at the same time for the Nord and the Charente-Inférieure.
General Boulanger resigned his seat and his Republican followers cast
their votes for a Royalist, General de Montauban, who was elected. In
the arrondissement of Amiens, with 57,527 registered voters, General
Boulanger had a majority, in 1888, of 15,274 voters, the whole vote
thrown there being 42,609. Yet, in 1881, on a total registration of
47,923 voters, the Republican candidates for Amiens, M. Goblet and M.
Dieu, were elected by a combined majority of 7,094 votes. If the
Boulangists carry Amiens, therefore, at the legislative election this
year, it may be taken for granted, I think, that M. Goblet and his
friend the senatorial mayor have not educated their fellow-citizens into
very staunch and trustworthy supporters of the Republic.

M. Fleury, the editor-in-chief of the Conservative _Echo de la Somme_,
who made a pretty thorough canvass of the department before the election
of August 19, 1888, gives me some curious details as to that election.

The monarchists, both royalists and imperialists, gave a general and
tacit, and in many cases an overt and active, support to General
Boulanger, their object being the same as his--to bring about a repeal
of the existing law of 1884, which was passed to prevent any real
revision of the constitution in a sense hostile to the existing
republican form of government. Of course if the people of the Somme had
really cared anything about the Republic as a form of government, they
ought to have defeated General Boulanger. It is the opinion of M. Fleury
that the people of the Somme, and indeed of Picardy, not only care
little or nothing about the Republic as a form of government, but
actually and by a considerable majority prefer some monarchical
form--probably, on the whole, the Empire.

They are not in the least likely to express this preference at the
polls, because, in common with the vast majority of the electors
throughout France, they have been born and brought up to take their form
of government from Paris. So long as the government at Paris--be it
royal, imperial, or republican--controls the executive, the people of
the provinces are extremely unlikely to make an emphatic effort of their
own to be rid of that government. If Louis Philippe, in 1848, would have
allowed Marshal Bugeaud to use the force at his command in Paris, the
Republic improvised in February of that year would have been strangled
before birth, to the extreme satisfaction of an enormous majority of the
French people. This was afterwards overwhelmingly shown by the election
of Louis Napoleon, when General Cavaignac, with all the advantage of the
control of the machinery of government at Paris, could secure only a
relatively insignificant popular vote at the polls against the
representative of the imperial monarchy. I spent the winter in Paris two
years afterwards as a youth, during my first tour in Europe, and I there
heard an American resident of Paris, well known at that time in the
world of French politics, Mr. George Sumner, a brother of the senator
from Massachusetts, relate in the _salon_ of M. de Tocqueville a curious
story of the days of February, which strikingly illustrates the
disposition of the French provinces at that time to take whatever Paris
might send them in the way either of administration or of revolution.

The king refused to let the Maréchal Duc d'Isly restore order (as there
is no doubt he could easily and quickly have done), on the ground that
he had received the Crown from the National Guard in Paris, and that he
would not allow it to be defended by the line against them. The recently
published letters of his very popular son, the Duc d'Orléans, prove
that, had that prince been then living, he probably would never have
allowed this scruple to stand in the way of averting a social and
political catastrophe. But the duc was in his untimely grave, and the
control of events fell most unexpectedly into the hands of a few men who
had no concerted plan of action, and, indeed, hardly knew whether they
were awake or dreaming. 'They proclaimed a republic,' said Mr. Sumner,
'because they did not know what else to do;' but they were in a state of
utter bewilderment at first, as to how they should get the republic
accepted by the provinces. A happy thought struck M. Armand Marrast. In
those days the French railway system was little developed. Most of the
mails from Paris were carried through the country by malles-postes and
diligences, and every evening an immense number of these coaches left
the central bureau for all parts of France. M. Marrast sent into all the
quarters of Paris and impounded, in one way or another, the services and
the paintpots of every house and furniture painter upon whom his people
could lay hands. These were all set to work upon the mail coaches. The
royal arms, with the Charter and the Crown, were painted over, and the
vehicles which, from Paris, carried to all parts of France the news of
the proclamation of the Republic carried everywhere also an outward and
visible sign of the establishment of the new government in the words
'République Française' brightly blazoned upon their panels.

I recalled this story to Mr. Sumner years afterwards in New York, and he
assured me not only that it was literally correct, but that he had been
consulted himself about it by M. Marrast at the time. This particular
device could not now be used as effectively. But, with the telegraph
wires and the telephones in its control, any government which may get
itself installed to-morrow in Paris would certainly have tremendous odds
in its favour, from one end of France to the other. The immense increase
of the French public debt under the republican administration since 1877
has correspondingly increased, all over France, the number of people
known as _petits rentiers_, who, having invested their savings, in part
or wholly, in the public securities, will be as quick to acquiesce in
any revolution which they believe to have been successful at Paris, as
they are slow to promote any revolution, no matter how desirable
otherwise a change in the government may seem to them to be. So long as
it is not shaken out of the public offices at Paris, the government of
the Republic may probably count upon this vast body of quiet people, as
confidently as the Empire counted upon it twenty years ago, or as the
monarchy or the dictatorship might count upon it to-morrow, were the
king or the dictator acclaimed in the capital.

M. Fleury cites one of General Boulanger's most active supporters, M.
Mermieix, as saying to him during the election in 1888, 'with a few
millions of francs, the liberty of the press and of public billsticking,
and three thousand rowdies, I can change the government of this country
in less than a year.'

The remark is slightly cynical. But the extreme anxiety of the
government of the Republic to get General Boulanger either into a prison
or out of Paris certainly goes far to justify the boast of M. Mermeix.

'I told General Boulanger at Doullens,' said M. Fleury, after going
thither in company with him from Amiens, 'that he was sure of his
election. My reason was that while I saw little real enthusiasm for him
at Amiens, none at all indeed among the middle classes, and no open
display of any on the part of the workmen, I found the peasants for him
almost to a man. They crowded about his railway carriage. They insisted
on shaking hands with him, many of them kissed his hand (that ancient
form of homage lingering still in their traditions), they fired off
guns, and, above all, the women held up their children to be kissed by
him. This settled the question for me. When I saw him kissing the little
girls, I knew that he had captured the mammas, and the mammas govern the
rural regions of Picardy.

'At Doullens I said to him, "You may be sure of your results now. You
will win by twenty-five thousand majority." He was very modest about it;
but, though he certainly is not a great politician, he seemed to
understand the meaning of this unquestionable popular interest in him
and his progress. I could not help, however, calling his attention to
the evidence it gave of what I believe to be the profoundly monarchical
instincts of the peasantry in this part of France.'

'How did he take it?

'Oh! he said nothing, but smiled in a way which might mean anything. Of
course his idea of a republic of honest men means, and can mean, nothing
but a republic with a chief who is beyond the reach of deputies and
contractors.'

'That,' I said, 'seems to have been simply Lafayette's idea, in 1792, of
an American republic for France, with a hereditary executive; or, in
other words, a French edition of the English "republic with a crown."'

M. Fleury replied, that this is rather the aim of the monarchists than
of the Boulangists. One of General Boulanger's lieutenants, M. Mermeix,
already cited, told him frankly that the Boulangists want a sort of
consulate stopping short of the Empire--a strong republic with a
nationally nominated chief, freedom of conscience, freedom of education,
no more parliaments, a simpler public administration, and the cutting
out of the financial cancer which is destroying the resources of France.
The coalition now existing between the royalists, the imperialists, and
the Boulangists, in view of the elections of 1889, obviously rests upon
the conviction, common to all these parties, that the Republic, as at
present constituted, is so far committed to a policy of reckless public
expenditure and of deliberately irreligious propagandism that its
leaders cannot, if they would, either readjust the national finances or
let the religious question alone.

A man of much ability and of very high character, who has filled
important financial posts under the Empire in this part of France, tells
me that there has been no real balancing, now, of the public books for
several years, because the members of the Cour des Comptes whose duty it
is to get this done have found it impossible (and so reported) to get
all the necessary accounts from the Ministry of Finance. As no
Conservative members are permitted to sit on the Committee of the
Budget, even such a monstrous thing as this passes unchecked by the
Chamber. No wonder that he should tell me, M. Bethmont, one of the
members of the Cour des Comptes and a Republican, is of the opinion that
nothing can make matters straight again in France but an Emperor with a
Liberal constitution, or, in other words, a revival of the Ollivier
experiment of 1870.

I tried in vain to get from M. Fleury some definite notion of the
political programme of General Boulanger. As I have been constantly
assured that the General formed his programme from his observation of
the institutions of my own country during the short time which he spent
in America, as one of the chosen representatives of France during the
centennial celebration of the crowning victory of Yorktown, in 1881, I
have long been not unnaturally curious to ascertain precisely how he
proposes to 'Americanise' the actual government of France. But on this
point I can get no more light from M. Fleury in Picardy--though M.
Fleury spent some time with the General as a not unsympathetic
ally--than I have been able to get from any of the General's most
devoted partisans in Paris. In Picardy as in Paris, Boulangism seems to
represent a destructive--or, if the phrase be more polite, a
detergent--rather than a constructive force. It is not the less worthy
of consideration, perhaps, on this account. But on this account it
appears to me more likely to play a subordinate than a leading part in
the political movement of these times. It is rather a broom, if I may so
speak, than a sceptre which the 'brav' général' is expected to wield. In
conversation with M. Fleury, another of General Boulanger's intimate and
confidential lieutenants, M. Turquet, formerly an Under-Secretary of
State in the Ministry of Fine Arts, who ran for a seat as deputy in the
Aisne in 1885, summed up the programme of Boulangism as 'a programme of
liberty.' 'I mean,' he said, 'real liberty, such as exists in America,
not our Liberalism, which is spurious and archaic. Our actual
republicans of to-day are Jacobins, sectarians. Their only notion is to
persecute and proscribe, and they are infinitely further from liberty
than you royalists are, for you have at your head a prince who has a
thoroughly open mind. The form of government, after all, signifies
little. The real question is not whether we shall have a monarchy or an
empire, an autocracy or a democracy. It is whether we shall have
liberty.'[3]

    [3] M. Turquet ran in September in the first arrondissement of the
    Seine against M. Yves Guyot, and there was no election. At the
    election in October the Government proclaimed M. Yves Guyot elected
    by a small majority.

'I answered him,' said M. Fleury, 'that what he said was very fine, and
that the friend of Fourier, Victor Considérant, had said it before him.
What I wanted to know, however, was, what the Boulangists proposed to do
with the Catholics, the believers, in France should the General get into
power.'

'We shall begin,' said M. Turquet, 'by suppressing the budget of
worship. We shall do this to satisfy the blockheads who are a noun of
multitude.

'But we shall restore, in another shape, to the clergy the indemnity
which is certainly due to them. We shall give the bishoprics either a
fixed sum, or a revenue proportional to the population of each
bishopric, so that the people may receive gratuitously the offices of
religion. This is a public service, and it shall be remunerated as it
ought to be. As to the Religious Orders, they shall have full liberty to
constitute themselves, to educate children, to care for the sick and
infirm, so long as they keep within the limits of the common law. All
property in mortmain shall be suppressed. A community of teachers, for
instance, may own the college necessary for the students, but not a
forest adjoining that college.'

To M. Fleury's natural question how the college should be maintained, M.
Turquet replied, 'You know as well as I do, that wealth no longer
consists in real estate alone. You can now carry in your pocket a
fortune in bonds payable to the bearer. The Religious Orders may own
these, like other people. A dozen of us in the Chamber hold these views.
You seem to think us Utopianists. But General Boulanger will make it
possible for us to apply these ideas!'

If General Boulanger and M. Turquet really imagine these views to be
'American,' it would be instructive for them to look into the masterly
protests of the Catholic Archbishop of New York, against the doctrines
of Mr. Henry George as adopted and expounded by Father McGlynn. The
Catholic Church in the United States holds its own property, real and
personal, and manages it to suit itself. It would be interesting to see
an attempt made in the legislature of an American State, to carry
through a law like the decrees issued in France in 1881, forbidding
curates and vicars to receive legacies left to them for the benefit of
the poor in their parishes, or to distribute to the poor sums left to
the Bureau of Public Charity, with an express proviso that they should
be distributed by the clergy of the place.

On one very important question of French politics, M. Fleury, as a
practical politician in this great and active department, gives me a
good deal of useful light. This is the question of the expenses of the
electoral machine. In France, as in America, no limit is set by the law
to the possible expenditure of a political candidate. I have already
given the estimate made for me in Artois of the general cost of the
legislative elections, and I have been told by more than one
well-informed French politician in other parts of France, that the
average cost of a candidacy for a seat in the Chamber may be roughly
estimated at twenty-five thousand francs, or a thousand pounds sterling.
This would show, allowing two candidates only for each seat, an
expenditure of thirty millions of francs, or twelve hundred thousand
pounds, at each French parliamentary election, being very nearly the
figure given me in Artois. We send only 330 members to Washington, but
we elect a new House every two years. The British House of Commons,
though more numerous even than the French Chamber, probably spends a
good deal less upon getting itself elected than either the French or the
American House.[4]

    [4] At this time (October, 1889) there is a difficulty in New York
    about a good candidate for the seat vacated by the death of the late
    Mr. S. S. Cox, being a prominent democratic member of Congress,
    because the candidate must consent to an annual 'assessment' on his
    salary for political purposes. The French Government, I am told,
    collects these 'contributions' easily, the deputies 'recouping'
    themselves by patronage.

One of the 'working sub-prefects' of the Boulangist party in Picardy
gave M. Fleury a very frank estimate of the expense of electing the
General in 1888, in the Somme. He put it, in round numbers, at nearly or
quite one hundred and twenty-five thousand francs, or five thousand
pounds. This unusual outlay was made necessary by the great efforts of
the Government to defeat the General. Furthermore, it was swollen by the
disinterested devotion of many of the General's friends. Some of these
auxiliaries spent days at the best hotels in Picardy labouring for the
cause, with the result of a special hotel account, amounting to several
thousand francs. Nothing makes men so thirsty as political emotion.
Another partisan, at the head of a journal, sent in a bill for
forty-five thousand francs expended by him upon printing and stationery,
no charge being made for his personal services! The chief agents
received about two thousand francs apiece. One of them must have worked
very hard, for he earned no less than fifteen thousand francs. While all
this expense was incurring in Picardy, furthermore, two other elections
were pending, in each of which the General was a candidate, one in the
Charente and one in the Nord. It would seem to be probable enough,
therefore, that on these three elections In 1888 General Boulanger, or
the Boulangists, must have spent at least two hundred and fifty thousand
francs, or ten thousand pounds.

'Where did all this money come from?' is a not unnatural question. For
M. Fleury tells me the General's bills were paid much more promptly than
the bills of the Government candidates. It is an open secret apparently
that the Government candidates are very bad paymasters when they are
beaten. Some of the bills incurred by them in 1885, when the
Conservatives swept so large a part of Northern France, were still due,
it appears, in 1888. But the bills of General Boulanger were settled
very soon after the close of the campaign.

M. Mermeix insisted to M. Fleury that the General's war-chest was
supplied by voluntary subscriptions. 'Every day,' he said, the General
finds some ten thousand francs in his mails, and his followers 'are all
either beggars or millionaires.'

Another of the General's managers gave M. Fleury the names of two very
rich persons, one of them a cattle merchant at La Villette, who
subscribed between them a hundred and forty thousand francs to carry on
the campaign in Picardy. The enormous importance given to General
Boulanger by his terrified former associates in the Government seems to
me to be a very striking proof of the little confidence they really have
in their own hold upon the country, or in the permanency of 'republican
institutions' as they now exist in France, and this adequately explains
the readiness of speculators to 'invest' in what may be called the
'Boulangist bonds.' Such a report as that presented not very long ago to
the Chamber by M. Gerville-Réache on the state of the navy in France
suffices to show that the speculative maladministration of the French
finances has been so great as to make it quite certain that any 'honest
government' coming into power must reconstruct the system of the public
indebtedness. That is an operation which can hardly be carried out by
the most scrupulously honest government without very great profits to
the financiers concerned in it, and I only set down what is said to me
by respectable Frenchmen when I say that the Boulanger campaign funds
are openly described, by persons not at all hostile to 'Boulangism,' as
'bets on the General.' 'The difference between the managers of the
Boulangist campaign and the managers of the Government campaign,' said a
gentleman to me in Amiens, 'is simply this--that the Boulangist managers
are playing the game with private funds, and the others with public
funds. So the latter, I think, will win, for they have the longest purse
to draw on.' This gentleman is of the opinion, however, that but for
General Saussier, in command of the garrison of Paris, General
Boulanger, after the election of January 27, 1889, in which he took the
capital by storm, might have turned the Government neck and heels out of
doors. The weak point of Boulangism,' he said, 'is Boulanger.' 'He has
no strength with the officers of the army. They have no confidence
either in his character or in his ability; not that they think his
character bad or deny his ability, but only that they regard him as a
shallow, vacillating, and mediocre person who made himself valuable to
the Republican politicians by going into alliances with them to which
other officers of strong character and high ability would not stoop. As
for the quarrel between Boulanger and these politicians, it is a
beggars' quarrel, to be made up over the pot of broth. But it won't be
made up, because they can't agree as to the distribution of the broth.
Meanwhile all the chickens of France are going into the broth, and the
peasant's pot will see them no more, as in the good old days of Henry
IV.!'

As for the absurd story that the Boulangist funds come from America, the
only foundation I can find for that seems to be the intimacy, which, I
believe, is no longer as close as it was, between General Boulanger, M.
de Rochefort, and a French nobleman of an ancient historic family, who
has married a very wealthy American wife, and who has long been known to
entertain the most extreme, not to say revolutionary, notions in
politics. The honest Boulangists who really hope to see a good
government established by putting out M. Carnot and putting in General
Boulanger, swell the tide of his supporters, apparently, here as
elsewhere in France, because they blindly hope for everything from him
which their experience forbids them to hope for from the men actually in
power. As one of his most cynical supporters long ago said in Paris, he
is 'the grand common sewer of the disgust of France.'

His popularity with the common soldiers is another element to be counted
with in estimating the strength of this military French Mahdi.

I have struck up a friendship here at Amiens with an excellent woman who
presides over a shop--not one of the _pâtisseries_ so justly celebrated
by Mr. Ruskin--and who is a very good type of the shrewd, sensible
French '_petite bourgeoise_,' such a woman as, I dare say, Jacqueline
Robins of St.-Omer was in her own time. She has a son in the army, who
is likely soon to be a corporal. '_Dame_, Monsieur,' she said to me, 'if
M. Boulanger is not the best General in France, why did they make him
Minister of War? You do not know what he did for the soldiers! My son
when he gets his stripes is to marry--she is a very nice girl, an only
child, do you know? and her father, who is very solid, will put her in
her own furniture--and more than that! and they will have their own
establishment. They could not have that, you know, but for General
Boulanger, who made the new rule about the wives of the sub-officers.
And they used to shave the soldiers--imagine it!--just like prisoners,
and such beds as they gave them--it was a horror! Well, all that he
changed, and he made the soup fit to eat.'

'The other generals are not very fond of him, you say? _Parbleu!_ that
is likely enough! It is like the _conseillers_ here in the city--one of
them does well, the others always find something to say behind his back!
And that affair on the frontier! You know, Monsieur, he had all the army
in hand--ah, well in hand--a hundred thousand men ready to march; and
those rascals of Germans they knew it, and they gave up our man. I am
glad we had no war. No! I do not want a war, but, _dame_, one must have
teeth, you know, and be ready to show them!'

'You want to see your War Minister made president, then?' I asked.

'President? what does that signify? Chief of the State--Emperor; ah!
those were the good times here in Amiens, Monsieur, not as it is to-day
with the eternal debts that M. Dauphin made us a present of. Eh! an old
hypocrite that man is! and with these _centimes additionnels_ that never
end! And then these water-mètres! Eh! that is a pretty invention to make
water as dear as wine at Amiens, and yet, God knows, wine is not too
cheap, with the octroi of Amiens! It is worse than at Paris! Call him
what you like, Monsieur, _c'est Boulanger qu'il nous faut_--that is to
say, we must have a man at Paris. And you will see he is the man; all
the mothers of soldiers will tell you that!'

From the point of view of the municipal finances, the 'good old times'
of the Empire may well have a charm for the taxpayers of Amiens.

In 1870 Amiens, with 61,063 inhabitants, raised and spent a municipal
revenue of rather more than a million and a half of francs, or, in round
numbers, about 25 francs, or 20 shillings, _per capita_ of the
population. A public loan, made in 1854, had been almost wholly paid
off, and the city treasury still held 600,000 francs of a loan of
1,600,000 francs made in 1862 for certain public improvements. The
municipal government cost 372,000 francs, and 180,000 francs were spent
on the public schools. Of the municipal income, 987,802 francs were
derived from four forms of direct taxation, and 770,000 francs from the
_octroi_. This gave an average of a little less than 13 francs _per
capita_ as the burden of the _octroi_ upon the population.

In 1886 the population had increased to 74,000. The direct taxes brought
in 1,184,724 francs, and the _octroi_, 1,498,459, making the average
burden of the _octroi per capita_ 20 fr. 20 c., or an increase of about
50 per cent. in the pressure of that form of tax upon the population, as
compared with 1870. As the _octroi_ is imposed upon food and beverages
of all kinds--fuel, forage, and building materials--this tax is regarded
in France as a measure for estimating the general well-being of the
inhabitants. Thus measured, there would seem to be a falling off in the
general well-being of the people of Amiens since 1883. For, while the
pressure _per capita_ of the octroi is much greater than it was in 1870,
the actual receipts from the _octroi_ were less with a population of
74,000 in 1886, than they were in 1883. In 1883 the _octroi_ yielded
1,533,140 francs. In 1886 it yielded only 1,498,459 francs. The falling
off was in the receipts from beverages, from provisions, from forage,
and from building materials. The tariff of the _octroi_ meanwhile has
remained substantially without change from 1873 to the present time. It
is an expensive tax to collect, the costs of collection in 1886
amounting to 11.85 per cent. of the receipts.

Adding together now the receipts from the direct taxes and the _octroi_
of Amiens in 1886, we have a sum of 2,683,183 francs, or in round
numbers about 1,100,000 francs more than in 1870. But while, as I have
stated, in 1870 the receipts equalled and balanced the expenses of the
municipal government, this is no longer the case.

In 1886 Amiens, with an income of 2,683,183 francs, spent 4,162,294
francs, giving an average municipal outlay of 56 fr. 10 c. _per capita_
and an excess of expenditure over revenue of no less than 1,479,111
francs, or very nearly the total income and outlay of the city under the
Empire. No wonder that the public debt of the department of the Somme,
of which Amiens is the capital, seems in 1886 to have amounted to
18,303,496 francs! What inequalities of pressure upon the people of the
department this involves may be estimated from the fact that, while
there are in the Somme 836 communes, only 404, or less than half of
these communes, are authorised to raise money by loans, and one-eighth
of them to raise money by _octrois_. Yet we are constantly told that all
inequalities and privileges were abolished throughout France by a stroke
of the pen in the _annus mirabilis_ 1789![5] The taxation in 20 communes
is estimated at 15 centimes, or less; in 87, at from 15 to 30; in 268,
at from 31 to 50; in 428, at from 51 to 100; and in 33, at 100 centimes
and upwards. These are the communal taxes. To these must be added 51
centimes for the departmental taxes, ordinary and extraordinary; 2
centimes for the land-tax; 19 centimes for the personal tax and taxes
on personal property; 18.8 centimes for the doors and windows tax; and
39.6 centimes for licences. For Amiens these fractions taken together
mount up to 119-4/10 centimes.

    [5] 'Privileges' were, in fact, abolished only by Napoleon in 1804.

I have no wish to weary myself or my readers with figures. But these
figures tell the story of the difference between the government of
France under the much reviled Empire and under the present government,
which is represented to us as the natural and admirable 'evolution' of
republican institutions in this country. In 1870, as I have stated, the
receipts and expenditure of the city of Amiens balanced one another. The
city paid its way, and lived up to, not beyond, its means.

With the war came upon it, of course, heavy and unexpected burdens:
German local exactions, its share of the general German ransom of
France, local war expenses, and its share of the general war
expenditure. For three years the citizens left their affairs, thus
disturbed and encumbered, to be managed by a municipal council trained
in the methodical habits of the imperial administration, with the result
that in 1874 the expenses of Amiens amounted to 2,479,802 francs, and
its revenues to 2,016,130 francs, leaving thus a deficit of 463,672
francs, substantially accounted for by the necessary payments on a loan
of 5,000,000 francs negotiated in Brussels by M. Dauphin at the very
high rate of 7-1/2 per cent. The affairs of Amiens were arranged three
years afterwards by a municipal Commission, which turned them over, in
1878, to the 'Republicans of Gambetta,' with a budget involving an
expenditure of 2,686,660 francs, against a revenue from taxation of
2,249,245 fr. 52 c., showing a reduced deficit of no more than 437,405
francs.

By 1880 the expenditure had risen to 3,156,616 francs, while the revenue
stood at 2,531,762, showing a deficit of 624,854 francs, being an
increase of nearly fifty per cent, in two years! From that time the gulf
has gone on widening between the receipts and the expenditure of the
ancient capital of Picardy, until the figures laid before me, as taken
from the official reports, show during the seven years 1880-86, a total
of 18,530,477.01 francs of receipts against a total of 24,551,977 francs
of expenditure, leaving a deficit for these seven years of 5,021,500
francs, or more than the amount of the Dauphin loan incurred by Amiens
as a consequence of the German occupation, and of the exactions of Count
Lehndorff!

What has been done during the past three years can only as yet be
conjectured. The accounts are made up at the mayoralty office, and
thence sent to the préfecture, and they do not get within range of the
taxpayer for at least a twelvemonth afterwards.

But M. Fleury assures me that between the years 1884 and 1888 the city
expended in buildings, chiefly 'scholastic palaces' erected as batteries
of aggressive atheism from which to beat down the temples of religion,
no less than 1,700,000 francs; so that the total of deficit of the
budget of Amiens, from 1880 to the present time, in all probability
exceeds six millions of francs.

If we assume the local finances of the rest of France to have been
handled during the last decade on the same lines, there is nothing
extravagant in the estimate made by a friend of mine, who formerly held
a very high post in the Treasury, and who puts the accumulation of local
deficits and the local indebtedness in France, independently of the
national deficits and the national loans, since 1880, at two milliards
of francs, or eighty millions of pounds sterling. For, although
Amiens is an important city, it represents only about one
four-hundred-and-fiftieth part of the population of France.

While I was at Amiens in June M. Goblet came there and made a rather
remarkable speech. It was in the main aimed at a society called the
'Association of the Conservative Young Men of Amiens,' all of whom, I am
told, except the president, are young working men--mechanics, clerks, or
the sons of clerks, mechanics, and working men--in short, a kind of
French 'Tory democracy.' They are not Boulangists at all, but outspoken
royalists. They support Boulanger simply and avowedly in order to get at
a revision of the Constitution and make an end of the Republic. 'This
association,' said M. Goblet, 'is making a tremendous stir. I admit its
right to do this. It holds meetings and conferences; it listens to
speeches in the city and the suburbs; it attacks both democracy and the
Republic in no measured terms; it does not hesitate to denounce its
enemies personally and by name, and neglects no means of acting on
public opinion. These conservative young men speak and act
energetically. They believe in the re-establishment of the monarchy;
they desire it; they preach a reaction against all that we have done for
twenty years past!'

There could hardly be a more signal proof given of the reality and
vitality of the anti-Republican movement in this part of France than
these words of a Republican leader who began his political career, as I
have shown, twenty years ago in a hopeless minority of Republicans under
the Empire, who has since worked his way up the municipal ladder at
Amiens and up the legislative ladder in Paris; and who, after reaching
the top of the tree, now finds himself in imminent peril of slipping
down again to the point from which he started. The force of the
testimony is certainly not weakened by the fact that at the legislative
elections in September, M. Goblet, standing as a candidate for the
Chamber, was completely beaten.

I have shown what a large part the _octroi_ plays in the revenue of a
city like Amiens. Nothing resembling it, I believe, exists in England
since the abolition, two or three years ago, of the coal dues in London;
and, though I suppose it would be within the power of any American State
to establish a tax of this sort within its own boundaries, it would be
practically impossible to enforce it without coming into collision with
the commercial rights of other States under the Federal Constitution. I
once had to pay the _octroi_ tax on two brace of Maryland canvas-back
ducks, which I was taking over from London to a Christmas dinner in
Paris. But Maryland would not submit to an _octroi_ upon her birds
entering New York.

The importance of the _octroi_ at this time in the financial system of
France is one of the most conclusive and most amusing proofs of the
essentially superficial and ephemeral character of the alleged 'Great
Revolution' of 1789. The _octroi_ was a revival in mediæval France of
the Roman _portorium_ which survives in the Italian offices of the
_dazio consume_ and in the _garitas_ of Spain and Spanish America. It
was originally imposed as a local tax by a city, under the sanction of a
royal charter. To get such a charter from a sovereign strong enough to
enforce respect for it was essential to the citizens who bound
themselves to one another to maintain their local independence against
the barons in their neighbourhood; and when such a charter was granted
by a sovereign it was said to be _octroyée_ by him. The tax therefore is
rooted in a privilege. Amiens obtained the right to impose it in the
fourteenth century. Of course the 'Great Revolution of 1789' swept this
right away, one of the most obvious 'rights of man' being to pluck an
apple in an orchard, take it into a town in his pocket, and eat it
there. But equally, of course, the Republic in the year VII. on the 29th
Vendémiaire re-established it; and in the next year, VIII., provided
that the privilege should be exercised as under the sanction of the
National Government, the National Government reserving the right to
revise the tariffs fixed by the municipal councils, and thereby making
the restored privilege of the _octrois_ another string whereby to fetter
and control the local action of the people on their own affairs. The
_octroi_ of Amiens was re-established on the 3rd of Brumaire next
following. Under the Empire, the Restoration, and the Monarchy of July,
the Council of State granted the _octrois_. Under the Republic of 1848
this power naturally went to the National Assembly as a means of
legislative pressure and corruption. The Second Empire restored it to
the Council of State; and it has now, naturally, gone back to the
Chambers. Neither the people of the cities nor the rural populations
like the _octroi_, but, in the immortal words of the late Mr. Tweed of
New York, 'What can they do about it?' It is a ready-money tax, from
which the taxpayer receives no visible equivalent, as he does when he
pays a penny for a postage stamp. When he has paid it, he is simply
allowed to take his own property where he wishes to take it, and do with
it what he wishes to do. It is quite likely that this _octroi_ may have
something to do with the disinclination of the common people in France
to part with small change as readily as do the Americans, and even the
English. They must always have 'money in the pocket' if they want to
bring a sausage and a bottle of beer through a 'barrier,' whereas an
American is never called upon to pay cash down to his Government except
at a custom-house when he returns to his country from a foreign trip,
or in exchange for a licence or a document of some sort which represents
value received in one or another form.

The time wasted over this tax in a city like Amiens is an extraordinary
burden on the patience of the people, trained as the French people are
to submit to a torment of eternal red tape, a week of which would drive
an American or English town into open revolt. At Amiens, for example,
there is a central bureau of the _octroi_, where the tax is received
from the great breweries and warehouses after the amounts have been
fixed by the officers on duty at those establishments. Then there are
ten bureaux or 'barriers' at the railway stations, the slaughter-houses,
and the fish-markets; and then again eight secondary bureaux, where the
people must go and pay amounts of less than one franc. There are, and I
am told have long been, loud complaints as to the inconvenient location
of the bureaux; but nothing comes of these outcries as yet, and I
presume nothing ever will come of them until something like an
independent local administrative life exists in the provinces of France.

The elements of such a life ought surely to be found, if anywhere, in
this ancient province of Picardy. You cannot traverse it in any
direction without being struck by the evident prosperity of the people.
Arthur Young, a hundred years ago, travelling from Boulogne to Amiens,
found only 'misery and miserable harvests.' He would find now only
comfort and excellent crops. Possibly he would think of the country what
he then thought of the region about Clermont and Liancourt, where, under
the fostering care of the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, the farmers had
developed a highly-diversified cultivation; 'here a field of wheat;
there one of luzerne; clover in one direction, vetches in another;
vines, cherry and other fruit trees making up a charming picture, which
must, however, yield poor results.'

But he would be wrong. This diversified culture of modern Picardy has
been highly remunerative, and the extensive kitchen-gardening of the
province is so still. The 'agricultural crisis' has doubtless hit the
large farmers rather hard, but I am told they are standing up well under
it--thanks to their past savings, and to French protection--better,
indeed, than the large farmers in England; while the peasants proper are
actually profiting by it. They not only get as much for their labour as
when the large farmers were making money, but they are buying up land at
lower rates. This may very possibly help the Republicans in the coming
elections, for the peasants always give the credit of a state of things
which is satisfactory to them to the Government of the day--be that
Government what it may--so that while the larger farmers tend to
Conservatism, the peasants will probably lean the other way. It is next
to impossible to get a political opinion out of a Picard peasant, but I
have more than once heard a peasant speak of the farmers in his
neighbourhood as 'aristocrats,' which I took to be as precise a formula
of political opinion as one was likely to get from him. It seemed to me
to represent, among the peasants of to-day, the enlightened 'principles
of 1889,' very much as the same formula, applied to the _noblesse_ of a
century ago, represented, among the large farmers of that day, the
'principles of 1789.'

Both then and now the formula simply means 'the man who has what I want
to have is an aristocrat.' I think I have observed something like this
in other countries--as, for example, in Ireland--where the guilty
possessor of acres, however, is not only an 'aristocrat' but an 'alien,'
as appears from a song popular in Kerry:--

  The alien landlords have no right
    To the land God made for you;
  So we'll blow them up with dynamite,
    The thieving, hellish crew!

Dynamite was unknown in Picardy a century and a half ago. And the Picard
has very little, except his religion, in common with the Irish Celt. But
the sentiment of this simple and pleasing little ditty glowed deep in
the Picard heart long before the Revolution of 1789. The 'earth hunger,'
which has given the act of 'land-grabbing' the first place in the
category of human crimes, invented, long ago in Picardy, and especially
in that part of Picardy now known as the Department of the Somme, a
custom called the _coutume de mauvais gré_ or the _droit de marché_.
Under this custom a tenant-farmer in Picardy considered himself entitled
to sell the right to till his landlord's fields to anybody he liked, to
give it as a dowry to his daughter, or to leave it to be divided among
his heirs; and all this without reference to the expiration of his
lease. If the landlord objected and went so far as to lease his land to
another person, the previous tenant was regarded by his friends and by
other farmers as a _dépointé_, entitled to take summary vengeance upon
the 'land-grabber.' He might kill off his cattle, burn his crops and his
buildings, and, if occasion served, shoot or knock him in the head. As
the whole country was in a conspiracy, either of terror or of sympathy,
to protect the _dépointé_ against the vengeance of the law, this
cheerful 'custom' had a liberalising effect upon the Picard landholders.
Rents fell, and if the value of landed property rose the landed
proprietor got no advantage from that. The torch and the musket kept
down the demand, which was equivalent practically to increasing the
supply. The results of this 'custom' were such that in 1764, a quarter
of a century before the Revolution of 1789, the king intervened, but in
vain, to put a stop to it. The 'oppressed and downtrodden peasant' of
Picardy under the _ancien régime_ did what he liked with his neighbour's
property--that neighbour being a landlord--as cheerily as the manacled
Celt of Mayo or Tipperary in our own times. Two years before the
Revolution, in 1787, the assembly of the Generality of Amiens, by its
president the Duc d'Hâvré, vainly urged the royal government to take
resolute action in this matter. With the Revolution, of course, things
grew worse very rapidly. The _dépointés_ became ardent lovers of
liberty, equality, and fraternity; tore up all their leases, sent their
landlords and the land-grabbers to the guillotine, or into emigration as
traitors, and made themselves proprietors, in fee simple. There seems to
be no doubt that the traditions of this _coutume de mauvais gré_ (which
obviously had much more to do with the politics of Picardy a century ago
than either Voltaire or Rousseau) still survive in the Department of the
Somme, and every now and then break out in agrarian outrages,
rick-burnings, and general incendiarism, whenever leases fall in and
landlords try to raise their rents on the shallow pretext that land has
risen in value.

While these traditions show that there was no lack of energy and force
among the 'downtrodden' Picard peasantry before the Revolution of 1789,
the local history of the province also proves that the liberal ideas
which are commonly supposed to have been introduced into France by the
Revolution were at work in Picardy among the _noblesse_ and the clergy
long before. The _corvée_, for example, of which we hear so much in
many so-called histories of the French Revolution, was abolished under
Louis XVI. in Picardy, before the States-General of 1789 were convened.

That the _corvée_, in itself, cannot have been the absolutely
intolerable thing it is commonly supposed to have been may be inferred,
I think, from the fact that, under the name of _prestation en nature_,
it still exists in many parts of the French Republic. It figures in all
the schedules of departmental taxation which I have seen down to the
year 1889; and, for that matter, it existed in New England down to a
very recent date, if it does not now exist there. It was obviously
liable to abuse, and doubtless was abused, and the Intendant of Picardy,
M. d'Aguay, made a striking speech, on the benefits to be expected from
its abolition, to the Provincial Parliament in 1787. From this speech we
learn that the money value of the _corvée_ in hand had been computed at
900,000 livres, but that the Intendant working out the details of the
abolition of the system, with the help of a number of the local
landholders (commonly supposed to have been the tyrants who profited by
the abuse), had reduced this estimate to 300,000 livres, at which sum
the tax had been converted into a money payment for the maintenance of
the roads, the province being thus relieved of two-thirds of the burden
borne by it. It is instructive to learn that attempts to bring about
similar results elsewhere in France were resented and resisted, not by
the great landholders, but by the corvéable peasants themselves! What
they really wanted, it would seem, was not so much to be relieved of the
obligation of forced labour by a payment of money, as to have their
roads made for them at the expense of the State, under the impression,
ineradicable down to our own day, and elsewhere than in France, that
what everybody pays nobody pays, an impression which is the trusty
shield and weapon at once of the Socialists and of the Protectionists
all over the world.

Public education in Picardy, as well as elsewhere in France, long
antedates the Revolution of 1789. Three centuries ago Olivier de Serre
and Bernard Palissy lamented the foolish disposition of French peasants
in the Limousin and in Picardy to give their elder sons a better
education than they had themselves received. 'The poor man will spend a
great part of what he has earned in the sweat of his brow, to make his
son a gentleman; and at last this same gentleman will be ashamed to be
found in company with his father, and will be displeased to be called
the son of a labouring man. And if by chance the good man has other
children, this gentleman it will be who will devour the others and have
the best of everything; he never concerns himself to think how much he
cost at school while his brothers were working at home with their
father.' This reads like a complaint of the nineteenth century in
democratic America, but it is, in fact, a complaint of the sixteenth
century in feudal France. It must have been frequent enough in this part
of Picardy, now the Department of the Somme. For from a very early time
this region has been full of small farmers bent on bettering their own
condition or that of their sons. In the public library of Abbeville
there is a land register drawn up in 1312 for the service of the
officers of King Edward II. of England, who had married Isabel of
France, from which it appears that the small tenants in this part of
Picardy were then as numerous as the small proprietors now are. 'One is
led to believe,' says M. Baudrillart, 'that the only difference between
the condition of the country then and now in this respect is, that the
enfranchised labourer has in many cases simply taken the place of the
feudal tenant and become proprietor of the soil.' So great has long
been the number of small landholders in Picardy that in the province,
taken generally, a holding of sixty hectares may pass for a large
property, one of fifteen for a moderate estate, and one of ten for a
small holding. The action of the French code upon this state of things
since the Revolution and the Empire has, in the opinion of many
intelligent observers, been mischievous. It has made it difficult to
check the excessive subdivision of the land into holdings too small to
be profitably and intelligently cultivated. There is no provision in the
French law it seems, as there is in the German law, making it obligatory
upon the heirs of a small landed property so to arrange their respective
shares as not to impede the proper cultivation of the land. The great
prosperity of kitchen-gardening in modern Picardy modifies the evils
flowing from this state of things however, and those who know the
country best tell me that, taken as a body, the small landholders of
Picardy, thanks to their thrift in regard both of time and of money, are
substantially well off. They don't like the townspeople, for the old
traditions are not yet forgotten of the time in which Amiens and the
other large towns used to shift the main burden of the expenses of the
province upon the shoulders of the peasantry; and if anything like a
genuine provincial legislature could be established, with a working
system of 'Home Rule,' all the elements are here which might be
developed into a healthy political activity. The system of working on
France from the centre at Paris to the circumference has certainly been
tried long enough, and thoroughly enough, to show that nothing but evil,
and that continually, can be expected from it.

More than fifty years have passed since Heine said: 'When I speak of
France I speak of Paris--not of the provinces; just as when I speak of
a man, I speak of his head, not of his legs. To talk about the opinion
of the provinces is like talking about the opinion of a man's legs.'

In this spirit France is still judged abroad, for in this spirit France
is still governed at home. But if, on some fine morning, the legs should
suddenly wake up with a very positive opinion of their own, the results
may be awkward--not only for the government at Paris but for the rest of
Europe.




CHAPTER VII

IN THE AISNE


  ST.-GOBAIN

The short railway journey from Amiens on the Somme to La Fère on the
Oise takes you through a country which, on a fine summer's morning,
reminds one of the old Kentuckian description of an agricultural
paradise--'tickle it with a hoe, and it laughs with a harvest.' As, in
one direction, Picardy extends into the modern Department of the
Pas-de-Calais, so in other directions it includes no inconsiderable part
of the modern Departments of the Oise and of the Aisne. In this way it
touches the central province of the Ile-de-France, the main body of
which is now divided into the three Departments of the Seine, the
Seine-et-Oise, and the Seine-et-Marne. From Amiens to La Fère,
therefore, the pulse of the French capital may be said to throb visibly
about you in the rural beauty of a region which owes its value and its
fertility less to the natural qualities of the soil than to the
quickening influences of the great metropolis. For centuries Paris lived
mainly on the Ile-de-France, and the Ile-de-France on Paris. Since the
steam-engine and the railway have opened, both to the province and to
the capital, the markets of all France and of all Europe, both the
province and the capital are infinitely more prosperous than in the old
days when the lack of communications and the lawlessness of men made
them dependent one upon the other. The steppes of Russia and the
prairies of America now compete with the grain-fields of the
Ile-de-France; the timber of the Baltic with its timber; and I have no
doubt that, during his six years in the prison of Ham, Louis Napoleon
drank there better Chambertin than ever found its way to the table of
the Grand Monarque at Versailles, after a certain enterprising peasant
walked all the way from his native province to the capital, beside his
oxcart laden with casks, to prove to the king the merits of the true
Burgundian vintage.

Certainly it would never occur to anybody now in Soissons or Laon to
make the journey to Paris, as people did a hundred and fifty years ago,
to drink the water of the Seine, as being 'the best in the world, and a
specific against burning fevers and obstructive ailments.'

But the vast commons which lay waste throughout the Ile-de-France a
hundred years ago are now green with crops; meadows have replaced the
marshes; orchards and gardens on every side show what the Campagna of
Rome may become, at no distant day, if Italy can make her peace with the
Church, and the Italian capital remain, on terms of justice and reason,
the capital of the Catholic world.

Before the Revolution the Generality of Paris contained 150,000 arpents
of waste commons; the Generality of Soissons 120,000 arpents. In 1778 a
writer deplores the spectacle, 'within thirteen leagues of the capital,
of vast marshes left to be inundated because they are common lands,
producing not a single bundle of hay in a year, and affording scanty
pasture to a few miserable cattle.' In a single hamlet this writer found
35 poor families feeding 22 cows and 220 sheep on 1,100 arpents of
common land! I believe there are philanthropists in England and Scotland
who think the enclosure and cultivation of common lands a crime against
humanity; and it would be edifying to listen to a 'conference' between
them and the shrewd, prosperous small farmers and gardeners who are
tilling these great spaces to-day in the Ile-de-France. One of the few
plainly advantageous results of the headlong Revolution of 1789 was the
transfer into many private hands of the immense estates which were held
by the abbeys and the clergy in and around Paris; and this transfer
might perfectly well have been brought about by steady and systematic
means without shaking the foundations of property and of order. We might
then have seen throughout France what we see in England--the gradual and
pacific evolution of a great industrial and commercial society on lines
not contradicting, but conforming to, the traditions of the nation.

The influence of the capital, of course, has had much to do with the
extraordinary development in these regions of all kinds of horticulture.
Nurseries, kitchen-gardens, flower-gardens occupy an increasing area of
the Ile-de-France, and a constantly growing proportion of its
inhabitants. M. Baudrillart says that in the single Department of the
Seine-et-Oise this proportion has increased tenfold since 1860, and he
puts it down for that Department in 1880 at 50,000 persons out of a
total population of 577,798.

The proportions can hardly, I should think, be much smaller in the
Departments of the Aisne and of the Oise. How much this industry adds to
the beauty of the country I need not say. Its influence is shown in a
notable increase of the love of flowers among the population generally.
The English villages no longer have the monopoly which they certainly
once had of flower-plots before and around the cottages, and of plants
carefully tended and blooming in the cottage windows. Years ago Dickens
used to say that London was the only capital in the world in which you
could count upon seeing something green and growing somewhere, no matter
how gloomy otherwise might be the quarter into which you strolled. This
is beginning to be true of not a few French towns and cities, while the
conditions of successful horticulture, in its various branches, give the
aspect of a garden to the rural regions in which it flourishes. The
nursery gardens, which are the most extensive, seldom cover more than
eight hectares; seed gardens range in extent from half a hectare to a
hectare; the fruit gardens from half a hectare to two hectares; the
gardeners who send up 'cut flowers' to market usually concentrate their
activity upon half a hectare of soil. These cultivators are all
capitalists in a small way, the least important of them requiring a
capital of from four to five hundred pounds sterling. And land so
employed is very often let on leases of three, six, or nine years, at
thirty-five pounds a hectare.

It is a curious thing that what may be called the 'Home Departments' of
France around Paris should be so much richer in these highly-developed
and remunerative forms of cultivation than the home counties of England
around London. Why should flowers, fruits, and vegetables, as a rule, be
so much better, so much cheaper, and so much more plentiful in the
French than in the English capital? The superiority of the French
markets cannot arise wholly from a difference of climate. Great risks
are run in this respect by the horticulturists of Picardy and the
Ile-de-France. M. Baudrillart tells a story of a large flower-gardener
in the Seine-et-Oise who, during the severe winter of 1879-80, found his
gardens deep in snow one morning, and, upon examining them, carefully
made up his mind that he stood to lose nearly 2,500_l._ sterling worth
of his best plants. That same evening he left for England, brought back
eleven waggon-loads of plants to supply the place of those killed by the
cold, and, by the spring, not only covered his losses but made a profit.

With its 'polygon' and its promenades the little city of La Fère, set in
the midst of well-tilled and fertile fields, has a martial air which
harmonises with its history. During the religious wars which ended with
the coronation of Henry of Navarre, this small Catholic stronghold was
besieged, taken, and retaken no fewer than four times in twenty years;
and, if we may believe an old sixteenth-century local ballad, the
Huguenots behaved in a way which showed that the 'Reformation' had not
improved their morals. The 'Déploration des Dames de la ville de La Fère
tenues forcément par les ennemis de la religion catholique' draws a
doleful picture of life in a conquered city three centuries ago.

  Est-ce pas bien chose assez déplorable
  De voir (hélas) son haineux à sa table
  Rire, chanter et vivre opulément
  De ce qu'avions gardé soigneusement?
  En nostre lict quand il veut il se couche,
  Faict nos maris aller à l'escarmouche
  Ou à la brèche, enconstre notre foy,
  Pour résister à Jésus et au Roy.

There are soldiers enough in La Fère to-day, for it is an artillery
station, as it was when Napoleon got his training here, but the peace of
the picturesque little fortress-town is less troubled by them than by
the politicians. A little local newspaper published here, which I bought
of an urchin at the uninviting but thriving station of Tergnier, was
full of paragraphs deriding and denouncing the clergy, which might have
been inspired by that model patriot and philanthropist Curtius, who
proposed in the year one of the Republic that the Government should make
a bargain with the Deys of Tunis and Algiers to ransom the French held
as slaves in those countries, exchanging them for French priests 'at the
rate of three priests for one patriot'!

'What sort of a newspaper is this?' I asked a cheery, red-faced old man,
well and substantially dressed, and, as he afterwards informed me, a
cattle-breeder and dealer on his way from Amiens to Laon.

'That journal, Monsieur?' he replied with a kind of 'sniff': 'that leaf?
It is a cabbage-leaf, Monsieur!' 'C'est une feuille de choux!' As for
himself he was a Republican--no, not a Boulangist--but he had voted for
Boulanger, and he would vote for him again. There must be an end of all
those taxes. It was too strong. The land could not pay them. In his
country a farm worth 30,000 francs eight years ago, to-day would not
sell for 20,000 francs. The farms that were mortgaged would not pay the
amount of the mortgages. Look at the taxes on cattle! These free-traders
at Paris want to drive us out of our markets with meat on the hoof, and
killed meat, from all the ends of the world. Here they are trying to
patch up that treaty of commerce with Italy, and bring back all those
competing cattle from Sardinia. That's a pretty idea! and for those
Italians, who owe France everything and now lick the boots of M. de
Bismarck. And now the Paris Chamber of Commerce wants an International
Congress on treaties of commerce. The devil take the treaties of
commerce!'

At the station of La Fère I found waiting for me, one lovely morning in
July, the _coupé_ of M. Henrivaux, the director of the famous and
historical glassworks of St.-Gobain. When Arthur Young visited these
works in 1787, he found them turning out, in the midst of extensive
forests, 'the largest mirrors in the world.' The forests are less
extensive now, but St.-Gobain still turns out the largest mirrors in the
world. To this year's Exposition in Paris it has sent the most gigantic
mirror ever made, showing a surface of 31.28 mètres; and the glory of
St.-Gobain is nightly proclaimed to the world at Paris by the electric
light which, from the summit of the Eiffel Tower, flashes out over the
great city and the valley of the Seine an auroral splendour of
far-darting rays, thanks to St.-Gobain and to the largest lens ever made
by man.

St.-Gobain, however, has other claims upon attention than its
unquestioned rank as the most important seat of one of the most
characteristic and important manufactures of our modern civilisation. In
a most interesting paper upon the life and labours of M. Augustin
Cochin, one of the most useful as well as one of the most distinguished
of the many useful and distinguished Frenchmen whose names are
associated with this great industry, M. de Falloux describes the works
of St.-Gobain as 'an industrial flower upon a seignorial stalk springing
from a feudal root.'

The description is both terse and pregnant. The history of this great
and flourishing industry, stretching back now over two centuries and a
half, is a history of evolution without revolution.

There is nothing in France more thoroughly French than St.-Gobain,
nothing which has suffered less from the successive Parisian earthquakes
of the past century, nothing which has preserved through them all more
of what was good in its original constitution and objects. The
establishment is like a green old oak, and, to borrow a phrase from
Wordsworth, its days have been joined each to each 'by natural piety.'
The place which it first took through privilege and favour, and could
have taken in no other way, it has kept ever since for nearly two
centuries and a half, and now holds by virtue of skill, energy, and that
eternal vigilance which is both the price and the penalty of free
competition.

The 'Knights of Labour' in our America of to-day put the cart before the
horse when they undertake to make labourers knights. The Middle Ages
knew better, and went to work in a wiser fashion by making knights
labourers. As early as the thirteenth century the glassworkers of France
had great privileges granted them, and an old proverb explains this by
telling us that 'to make a gentleman glassworker--_un gentilhomme
verrier_--you must first get a gentleman.' As soon as it was established
that by going into such a costly and artistic industry as this, a
gentleman did not derogate from his rank, the first important step was
taken towards the emancipation of industry. The glassworkers were
exempted from _tailles, aydes et subsides_, from _ost, giste,
chevaulchier et subventions_, or, in other words, military taxes could
not be levied upon them, nor troops quartered upon them, nor
requisitions made upon them. The _gentilhomme verrier_ had the right to
carry a sword and to wear embroideries, to fish and to hunt, nor could
the lord of a domain refuse to him, in return for a small fee, the right
to cut whatever wood he needed for his furnaces, and to collect and burn
the undergrowth into ashes for his manufacture. It was the richly and
densely wooded country about St.-Gobain which led to the establishment
at this spot in 1665 of the glassworks since developed into the great
establishment of our day. Even now, though gas has long since taken the
place of wood in the manufacture, and towns and farms have grown up in
the neighbourhood, no less than 2,440 hectares of the 2,900 which make
up the territory of St.-Gobain proper are still in woodland; and the
forests extend far beyond the limits of the commune which bears the
name of the Irish Catholic prince St.-Gobain, who came here in the
seventh century, as St. Boniface went to the Rhine, to evangelise the
country, and built himself a cell on the side of the mountain which
overlooks the glassworks. Here he did his appointed work, and here, on
June 2, 670, he was put to death. The mountain was then known as Mount
Ereme or Mount Desert, and it is still heavily wooded throughout almost
its whole extent.

The French Government also owns a very large domain around and beyond
St.-Gobain, about two-thirds, I am told, of the 10,000 hectares
constituting thirteen per cent. of the whole area of the Department of
the Aisne, which are still covered with forests.[6] These ten thousand
hectares are the remnant of the immense _sylvacum_ of the Laonnois, the
Andradawald of Eastern Gaul, through which Agrippa opened a great Roman
road connecting the capital of the world by way of Milan, Narbonnese
Gaul, Reims, and Soissons with the British Channel. At a short distance
from St.-Gobain a part of this ancient road running from south to north
through the lower forests of Coucy, is still in use, and is known by the
name of Queen Brunehild's Causeway. The chronicle of St.-Bertin, cited
by Bergier, attributes to that extraordinary woman the restoration of
this whole road throughout Gaul, and she certainly built a magnificent
abbey in the immediate neighbourhood.

    [6] The total revenue derived from the woods and forests of the
    State in France is set down in the Budget for 1890 at 25,614,300
    francs, but the returns are 'lumped' and not given in detail. I am
    told that the forests around St.-Gobain yield about 400,000 francs
    of this revenue.

Encouraged by the wise administration of Colbert, an association of
glassworkers established itself at St.-Gobain in 1665 under the
direction of a 'gentleman glassworker,' M. du Noyer. Twenty years
afterwards, in 1688, a Norman 'gentleman glassworker,' M. Lucas de
Nehou, who had joined this association, invented the process known as
the _coulage_ of glass for mirrors, and this became the kernel of the
great industry of St.-Gobain. The association took the name, in 1688, of
the Thévart company, from De Nehou's most active colleague. It became
the Plastrier Company in 1702, and ten years afterwards, in 1712, M.
Geoffrin, the husband of the clever and enterprising friend of Voltaire
and the Empress Catherine, took charge as administrator of the
establishment. His wife really administered both the establishment and
M. Geoffrin. It was she who confided the direction of the works in 1739
to M. Deslandes, and she is fairly entitled to her share of credit for
the great progress made in the subsequent half-century down to 1789.
Under the First Consulate St.-Gobain had to give up the privileges it
had enjoyed and face the modern conditions of success. It has proved its
claim to its ancient privileges by its triumphs ever since it
surrendered them. The history of its relations with the crown and with
the courts under the _ancien régime_ is a most curious, interesting, and
instructive chapter of the political and social, as well as of the
industrial, annals of France, and it has been admirably told by M.
Augustin Cochin in his book on the manufactory of St.-Gobain from 1665
to 1866.

A drive of less than an hour through a highly cultivated rolling
country, made attractive by well-grown trees and luxuriant hedgerows,
brought me to the clear, bright, prosperous-looking town of St.-Gobain.
Its two thousand inhabitants owe their well-being, in one form or
another, to the great company, and among the most comfortable as well as
the most picturesque dwellings in the place are the houses built by the
company, and conceded on very favourable terms to the families of men
employed in the works. Piles of timber attested the activity of the
forest administration. The people I passed, singly or in groups, saluted
the director's carriage in a friendly, good-natured way, which seemed to
show that here, at least, the 'irrepressible conflict' between capital
and labour has not yet passed into the acute stage. A fine old church of
the thirteenth century, with a tower of the sixteenth, and the noble
trees which cover the slopes and shade the roadway of St.-Gobain, are no
more in keeping with the standard English and American type of a
manufacturing town than is the parklike domain in the midst of which
rise the main buildings of the great manufactory itself.

There M. Henrivaux gave me a cordial welcome. The château of St.-Gobain,
in which the offices of the company have long been established, is a
vast square edifice of the time and the style of Louis XIV. It occupies
the site, and, I believe, comprises one remaining wing of an earlier
château, which was stormed and partially destroyed by the English in the
fourteenth century. Henry IV. was seigneur of St.-Gobain, and when the
glassworks company, at the end of the seventeenth century, bought the
domain and the buildings from the Count de Longueval, then governor of
La Fère, the title of the crown to the property had to be extinguished
as well as his.

Nothing can be finer in its way than the wide panorama of forest-clad
hills and rolling vales, dotted here and there with towns, villages, and
châteaux, over which you gaze from the terrace in front of this unique
establishment. It has its pleasure-grounds and its park. Within the main
building, besides the extensive suite of apartments assigned to the
director, who resides there with his family, is another handsome suite
of apartments, reserved for the administrators, six in number, whenever
they may choose, collectively or severally, to visit St.-Gobain. These
apartments are furnished with stately simplicity, and the whole interior
preserves the grand air of the eighteenth century. The _fleurs de lis_
still adorn the lofty chimney-pieces, the waxed floors are sedulously
polished, and, as M. Henrivaux says, could the ghost of Lucas de Nehou
have returned to St.-Gohain only a year or two ago, he would have been
welcomed at the entrance gate by a Swiss wearing the royal liveries of
the House of Bourbon, and resting majestically on his halberd, like the
guards of the Scala Regia in the Vatican. This imposing warden has now
passed away, at the ripe age of a hundred and two, and M. Henrivaux
tells me that he was more alert and active to the last than his more
celebrated contemporary at Paris, the venerable Chevreuil.

When a new administrator first makes his appearance at St.-Gobain, I am
told, he is received with music by day and an illumination at night, a
grand mass is celebrated in the chapel dedicated to the royal Irish
martyr, and the whole place assumes for a moment the aspect of another
age.

In one of the _salons_ of the administration, two pictures commemorate
visits paid to the manufactory: one, under the Restoration, by the
Duchesse de Berri, the mother of the Count de Chambord; the other, under
the Second Empire, by the Empress Eugénie--pathetic pictures both,
making the room a place wherein to 'sit upon the floor and tell strange
stories of the deaths of kings.'

Beside the canvas in which the Empress appears--a graceful, gracious
woman in the prime of her life and her beauty--hangs a small mirror in a
gilded frame, silvered by her own imperial hand in the great workroom
of the manufactory. The work was well and deftly done, but so delicate
is the process that when the light strikes athwart this mirror at a
particular angle, you can clearly trace a faint hair line of shadow
traversing it, the ineffaceable record of a ripple of laughter which
broke from the Empress's lips at some gay remark made by one of the
personages grouped about her while her hand was completing its task.

I spent a delightful day with M. and Mme. Henrivaux, inspecting all
parts of the manufactory of mirrors, visiting the houses provided for a
considerable number of the workmen and their families, on terms most
advantageous to them by the company, and inquiring into the working of
the co-operative association founded by M. Cochin.

This association is an association of consumers only, not of producers.
Its original statutes were drawn up very carefully by M. Cochin, and as
they have been as carefully observed by the members and the managers, it
is the opinion of M. Henrivaux that the experiment has proved to be a
success. This may be inferred from the fact that the title of
'co-operative' has been assumed in the town of St.-Gobain by a bakery,
which seems to be managed on the principles of private competition under
the 'co-operative' flag. If the 'trademark' were not popular, it would
hardly have been assumed.

The company also encourages societies among its own workmen and in the
town for educational purposes, including a philharmonic and a choral
society, and is liberal in its expenditure upon the schools, both here
and at Chauny, the seat of its very important chemical works.

At St.-Gobain alone, I understand, it is now making an outlay of some
sixty thousand francs on new school-buildings, which is a larger sum
than the total of the taxes paid by the people of the place. The
'budget' of the commune amounts to 27,500 francs, or rather more than
ten francs _per capita_ of the population. Obviously the prosperity of
the glassworks makes the prosperity of St.-Gobain, which, but for them,
would doubtless soon relapse into the proportions of the little hamlet
gathered, twelve hundred years ago, by the Irish evangelist about the
miraculous fountain, which is said to have been evoked by him with a
blow of his staff, and which still flows beneath the shelter of his
church.

When Arthur Young visited St.-Gobain a hundred years ago he
congratulated himself on his 'good luck' in hitting upon a day when the
furnaces were in full blast and the _coulage_ going on. A traveller of
the present day who should reach St.-Gobain armed with the letters of
introduction necessary to secure his admission into the works, and find
the furnaces not in full blast and the _coulage_ not going on, would be
in very bad luck indeed.

For while in 1789 St.-Gobain was a privileged company, enjoying, for the
output of its works here and in Normandy, and in the Faubourg
St.-Antoine at Paris, a chartered monopoly, the output of its works
to-day, under the wholesome pressure of competition with a fair field
and no favour, is enormously greater than it was a century ago, both in
volume and in value; and the position of St.-Gobain among the glassworks
of the world is at least as high under the presidency of the Duc de
Broglie, in 1889, as it was under the presidency of the Duc de
Montmorency in 1789. Yet the company is still administered, not indeed
according to the letter of its original statutes of the time of the
Grand Monarque, but in the spirit of those statutes. It is an ancient
dynasty which has simply accepted the changed conditions of modern life
and modern activity, and conformed its operations to them without
abandoning its fundamental principles. The successful advance of this
great industry, through all the changes, convulsions, and developments
of the past century, is quite as instructive as are the successive
catastrophes of French politics during the same time. 'I think,' said M.
Henrivaux to me, 'that when you compare the St.-Gobain of 1702 with the
St.-Gobain of 1889, you will perhaps agree with me that there is some
force in our double motto, 'tradition dans le progrès et hérédité dans
l'honneur.'

It is a curious fact that Lucas de Nehou, the inventor of plate glass,
was originally induced by the founders of St.-Gobain to leave his own
establishment at Tour-la-ville in Normandy and come to their works in
Paris, because the Venetian glassworkers who had been invited by Colbert
into France, refused to instruct the French workmen in their 'art and
mystery.' They could not be blamed for this. Venice was then the
acknowledged headquarters of the glass manufacture, and it was the
unchangeable policy of the 'most serene Republic' to keep all her
secrets to herself. A fundamental statute ordained that if any artisan
or artist took his art into a foreign country he should be ordered to
return. If he did not obey, his nearest relatives were to be imprisoned,
in order that his affection for them might lead him to submit. If he
submitted, his emigration should be forgiven, and he should be
established in his industry at Venice. If he did not submit, a person
was sent after him to kill him, and after he was well and duly killed
his relatives were to be released. In the thirteenth century Venetian
artists suffered death under this statute in Bologna, Florence, Mantua,
and other Italian cities. Even in Venice the glassworks were rigidly
confined to the island of Murano, in order to keep the workmen from
coming into contact with strangers visiting the city. When the Republic,
in 1665, as a matter of policy allowed a certain number of glassworkers
to go to France, at the request of Colbert, and to take service there
under Du Noyer at Paris, in his manufactory of mirrors, these workmen
were forbidden to teach their trade to any Frenchman. The result, as I
have said, was that Du Noyer finally brought about a combination with M.
de Nehou, the owner of certain glassworks at Tour-la-ville in Normandy,
that De Nehou came to Paris, that out of their joint enterprise
eventually arose the company now known as the Company of St.-Gobain,
that the French workmen trained by De Nehou did excellent work, and that
De Nehou put himself in the way of making, towards the end of the
seventeenth century, his invention of plate glass, which finally drove
Venetian mirrors out of the markets of the world. The Venetian mirrors,
charming as they are from the æsthetic point of view of decorative art,
are simply blown glass rolled flat, cut, polished, and tinned. The art
of making them came, like other arts, to Venice from the East, and in
the sixteenth century the Venetian mirror was the true 'glass of
fashion' all over Europe. The famous 'Galerie des Glaces' at Versailles,
of which Louis XIV. was so proud, was filled up with mirrors of 'French
manufacture after the fashion of Venice,' as the royal expense-rolls
state, and it took De Nehou and his workmen five years--from 1678 to
1683--to do the work. Eight years afterwards, in 1691, he presented King
Louis with certain 'large mirrors of plate glass,' the firstfruits of
his invention, made in 1689. In 1693, he was made Director of the 'Royal
Manufactory of Grand Mirrors,' and the manufactory was established in
the ruined Château de St.-Gobain.

A hundred years afterwards, in 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte occupied Venice
with a French army and made an end of that 'most serene' republic, as he
did, not long afterwards, of the least serene republic at Paris. He put
Berthier in command, and a commission of French savants, of which
Berthollet was a member, proceeded to pick the locks and investigate the
mysteries of Venetian art. Their report upon the Venetian glassworks was
to the effect that France knew more about the matter than Venice. 'The
industries of Venice,' said these irreverent conquerors, 'as precocious
as the industries of China, have stood still like them.'

In this age of jointstock companies and limited liabilities, it may be
interesting to see on what terms the original founders of the Company of
St.-Gobain put their heads and their purses together, to establish a
great industrial enterprise. Their articles of association were signed
by twelve associates on February 1, 1703, some ten years after William
Paterson and Lord Halifax laid the foundations of the Bank of England
and of the British public debt. The capital of the company, estimated at
2,040,000 livres, was divided into twenty-four shares of 85,000 livres
each, called 'sols,' and these again into twelve parts each, called
'deniers,' making a total of 288 'deniers.' These curious designations,
taken from the currency of the time, were used down to the overthrow of
the restored Bourbon monarchy in 1830. The owners of these shares, or
'deniers,' bound themselves solemnly never to make a loan, but to meet
all the expenses of the enterprise by assessments in proportion to their
holdings, and always to keep in hand a fund for current expenses of at
least one million of livres. They were to receive ten per cent. on their
capital, a special honorarium of 1,000 livres a year apiece, and a fee
of two crowns for attendance at meetings. All misunderstandings were to
be settled by arbitration, and all the proceedings were to be secret.
Under these articles St.-Gobain grew up, prospered, withstood the shock
of successive political revolutions in France, and kept its place in the
front of the great industrial movement of the nineteenth century down to
the year 1830.

During this long life of over a century and a quarter, the payment of
dividends seems to have been suspended for three years only, and that
after the Terror, from 1794 to 1797. In 1792, when the Girondins and the
Jacobins were tearing France to pieces between them, and courting
foreign invasion as a stimulus to domestic anarchy, the works were
stopped for a time in Paris, at Tour-la-ville and at St.-Gobain, but
only for a time. The very able director of the company, M. Deslandes,
originally selected, as I have said, by Madame Geoffrin, and who had
vindicated her good judgment by managing the affairs of the company with
success for thirty years, resigned his post in 1789. He was a model
disciplinarian of the old school.

In 1775, finding that some of the workmen at Tour-la-ville had been
seduced from their duty by a glassmaker at La Fère-en-Tardenois, M.
Deslandes called upon the Intendant at Soissons to clap them into
prison. Turgot, the friend of Franklin, objected to this, but M.
Deslandes gave him plainly to understand that 'a government which should
tolerate such misconduct would be detestable.'

When a great mirror was to be cast at St.-Gobain, M. Deslandes always
took command of the works in full dress, his peruke well powdered and
his sword by his side. Clearly such a director as this was out of
keeping with a king who would not let his officers fire upon a howling
mob, and who put on a red cap to oblige a swarm of drunken ruffians.

M. Deslandes was followed into retirement by several of the
administrators of the company, who emigrated, and in 1793 the Republic
caused the cashier of the company, M. Guérin, to be guillotined on the
heinous charge of corresponding with his former employers and friends
beyond the frontier. Naturally this crime was committed, like so many
similar crimes of that day, with an eye to the main chance. The shares
of the administrators who had emigrated were confiscated, in the names
of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and the confiscators sent sundry
'patriots' to sit on the administrative council of the company. Their
incompetency was so ludicrous and mischievous that Robespierre,
representing the State which had thus stolen an interest in the
enterprise, could not stand it. He actually 'requisitioned' two
noblemen--two 'aristocrats'--among the as yet undisturbed owners of the
property, to come forward and direct it, just as the leader of a
successful mutiny of convicts on board of a transport might
'requisition' the deposed captain and mate of the vessel to carry her
safely through a storm!

With the return of law and order in the person of the Corsican conqueror
things resumed their normal course at St.-Gobain; and as I have already
said, the company flourished under its old organisation down to the
establishment of the Monarchy of July. Then the owners of the 'deniers'
put themselves and their property under the general Civil Code, in the
form of what is called in modern France a 'société anonyme,' and at the
first general meeting of the 'société' in April 1831 the accounts of 128
years, over which no question had ever arisen among the representatives
of the original holders, were presented and approved. Certainly this
must be admitted to be a most noteworthy case of 'l'hérédité dans
l'honneur.'

The new 'société' has greatly extended and strengthened its operations
since 1831. The works at Tour-la-ville have been abandoned, the site
sold, and the workmen transferred to St.-Gobain. The glassworks of
St.-Quirin, the proprietors of which, on the abolition in 1804 of
privileges in general, had taken to making plate glass, were taken over
in 1858 by the St.-Gobain company, together with certain other works at
Mannheim in Germany and the chemical works at Cirey, and the 'société'
assumed the name under which it is now known of 'The Company of Mirrors
and Chemical Products of St.-Gobain, Chauny, and Cirey.' In 1863 it
bought up the works at Stolberg near Aix-la-Chapelle in Rhenish Prussia,
in 1868 a minor manufactory at Montluçon in the Department of the
Allier, and finally during this current year 1889 it is establishing a
manufactory at Pisa in Italy.

The operations of the company, as it now exists, extend to six
manufactories of mirrors, six manufactories of chemicals, a mine of iron
pyrites, a salt mine, many thousand hectares of forests in this
department of the Aisne and in the province of Lorraine, and to a local
railway connecting St.-Gobain with Chauny, where the plate glass cast at
St.-Gobain is polished and the mirrors are silvered. At St.-Gobain,
besides the plate glass mirrors, glass is made for roofs, for floors,
for pavements, for optical instruments, including the finest lenses used
in the lighthouses of France. Here, as I have said, the lens was made
now used at the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, from which, night
after night, a gigantic auroral ray of electric light leaps into space
and shoots for miles athwart the sky, to the inexpressible delight of
the gaping crowds below, and I hope to the edification of the world of
science.

Since 1870 the output of the company from its various manufactories has
more than doubled. It now amounts, in round numbers, to 800,000 square
mètres a year of polished plate glass; to 500,000 square mètres a year
of rough glass; to a million kilogrammes a year of blocks and castings
for floors and roofings, and to eighty thousand kilogrammes a year of
optical glasses of all sorts.

In the time of Louis XIV. and before Lucas de Nehou had made his
invention of plate glass, there was absolutely no public demand for what
in those days were called 'large mirrors' made in the Venetian fashion,
mirrors which to-day would not find a market in the most remote frontier
towns of America or Australia. Colbert then wrote to the Comte d'Avaux
apropos of the works of Lucas de Nehou in Normandy, that 'there was
absolutely no market for large mirrors in the kingdom, the king being
the only person who could possibly need them!'

This was in 1673.

In 1702, ten years after the invention of the process by which plate
glass is made, a mirror with a surface area of one mètre cost 165
francs. In 1889 such a mirror costs 30 f. 25 c. A mirror with four
mètres of surface area cost, in 1702, 2,750 francs. In 1889 it costs 136
francs.

When we come down to modern times and to the much larger mirrors
produced of late years, the fall in prices is extraordinary. In 1873 a
mirror with ten square mètres of surface cost 1,200 francs. To-day such
a mirror can be bought at St.-Gobain for 467 francs, showing a fall of
nearly two-thirds in price within sixteen years!

To-day the total production of polished plate glass in the world is
estimated as follows:--

                                  square mètres
  England (4 companies)                 900,000
  Belgium (6 companies)                 600,000
  Germany (4 companies)                 150,000
  United States (7 companies)           500,000
  France (not including St.-Gobain)     130,000
  St.-Gobain                            800,000
                                      ---------
    Total                             3,080,000

From this it will be seen that nearly one quarter of the plate glass of
a world in which plate glass, like champagne, is rapidly ceasing to be a
luxury and becoming a necessity, is produced at this ancient
establishment. With a keen perception of the tendencies of this age
St.-Gobain, of late years, has been fitting its machinery to produce the
very largest plates of glass possible to be made. Go where you like,
from the Eden Theatre in Paris to the Casino of Monte Carlo, from the
new monster hotel at the Gare St.-Lazare to the enormous edifice which
an enterprising firm of tradesmen has planted in the centre of the Corso
at Rome, and the vast glittering sheets of silvered glass turned out
from the great forges everywhere confront you. At the French Exposition
of 1878 St.-Gobain enabled the 'fly gobblers' of two hemispheres to
admire themselves in the most gigantic mirror ever made down to that
date. It measured six mètres and a half in height, by four mètres and
eleven centimètres in width, which gave it a surface area of 26 mètres
12 centimètres. Naturally M. Henrivaux determined to surpass this
prodigy in 1889, and to match the Eiffel Tower with a mirror. The
Belgian rivals of St.-Gobain suspected this, it seems, and sent forth
subtle persons to spy out the plans of the great French manufactory.
These colossal plates of glass are cast upon immense 'tables' of metal,
and by ascertaining the dimensions of the tables ordered for St.-Gobain
the ingenious Belgians hoped to get the measure of the effort it would
be necessary for them to outdo. In anticipation of this subtlety the
director of St.-Gobain ordered two immense tables, and when these were
sent to the manufactory, had them skilfully thrown into one. Upon the
gigantic table thus prepared the grand mirror of the Exposition of 1889
was cast at the eleventh hour. This mirror was the special delight of
the Shah of Persia during his visit of this year to Paris; and as I
suppose the seven plate-glass manufactories which have grown up in my
own beloved country under the benediction of the Protective Tariff,
since a prohibitive duty was originally clapped on plate glass to
encourage the one solitary establishment of the sort then existing in
America, will give themselves up to producing something more stupendous
still for the New York Exposition of 1892, I here set down its
dimensions. It measures in height 7 mètres 63 centimètres, and in width
4 mètres 10 centimètres, giving it a superficial area of 34 mètres 24
centimètres. It is 12 millimètres thick, and weighs 940 kilogrammes.
This enormous glass was cast from a single crucible, containing 1,600
kilogrammes of vitreous matter. To have seen this operation would have
been worth a very much longer journey than that from New York to
St.-Gobain, for the colour and glow of such a mass of vitreous matter in
fusion can only be matched by the evanescent hues of a crimson aurora on
a fine night in the North, or by the intense lights which play over the
surface of a stream of molten lava.

At every stage in the operation the utmost skill and delicacy of
handling are required to convert what might easily pass for a heap of
rubbish swept together from a macadamised roadway into the smooth,
glittering, lustrous plate which the French so picturesquely call a
_glace_, and which indeed most nearly resembles the evenly frozen
surface of a crystal lakelet. These sands, silicates, chalks, and
carbonates--rough contributions from Oken's 'silent realm of the
minerals'--are first crushed and mingled together by machines--one of
the best of them, I was glad to hear, of American invention--then passed
on into the great rectangular hall, in which they are shot into the
crucibles of the melting furnaces and fused, mainly by gas, on a system
invented and perfected by the late Dr. Siemens, I believe, who made such
a stir a decade ago at Glasgow by his discourse on the storage of force
before the British Association. The furnaces which, according to their
varying capacity, now require from eight to ten tons of coal a day,
consumed, before the development of the Siemens system, from sixteen to
twenty tons. Twenty-four hours now suffice for the fusion and the
casting of the glass, and if the casting were now to be conducted as
ceremoniously as in the time of that fine old martinet M. Deslandes, M.
Henrivaux would pass his life in a cocked hat, knee-breeches, peruke,
embroidered coat, and sword, for the casting now takes place every day
and at a fixed hour. None the less, rather the more, it is a work still
of extreme nicety, one to be done by experts, who must be as cool as
soldiers under fire. In a certain way and measure it is like ladling out
the molten lava of Vesuvius and pressing it into slabs for a lady's
toilette-table. The plates, once cast, must be smoothed and made even.
This is a very pretty process, and used to be performed by machines
which bore the very pretty names of _valseuses_. That paviour's rammers
should be called _demoiselles_ has always seemed to me an outrage and an
impertinence, though I may suppose it finds its excuse in the
short-waisted costumes of our grandmothers. But the movement of the
glass-smoothing _valseuses_ was really a sort of waltz movement. The
plates of glass were fixed with plaster on a solid rectangular table.
Granite-dust was scattered upon the plates, and then a wooden plateau,
armed on the under side with bands of cast iron or steel, was set to
waltzing over it backwards and forwards with a semi-rotatory motion, the
granite-dust supplied becoming finer and finer as the waltzing went on.

Instead of these _valseuses_ two great plates of glass are now fixed
side by side with plaster on huge tables, and two large ashlars are set
turning by steam on their own axes while they describe a great orbit
over the plates of glass. A stream of water constantly plays upon the
plates, which are also constantly powdered with fine sand. The ashlars
turn on their axes thirty or forty times a minute, and the plates of
glass are usually smoothed and 'evened' on both faces now by these
machines in from eight to nine hours, including the time spent in taking
them out of the plaster after one face has been smoothed, and fixing
them anew in the plaster, that the other face may fare as well. Here
again a considerable economy of time has been made. And, after all, when
one looks into the practical production of any of these great marvels of
human industry, it is in this economy of time that the real advance of
modern science beyond the results of ancient invention seems to consist.
With all our nineteenth-century chorus of 'self-praising,
self-admiring,' where should we be if certain--for the most part,
uncertain and forgotten--men of genius had not invented the primordial
processes which made art and civilisation possible? The workshop came
first, and was the real marvel in the case of every great industry. To
talk of the 'invention' of the steam-engine, for example, is an
absurdity. The 'invention' was the engine, an invention as old as Egypt
or China. The discovery that steam could be made to work the engine is
the more modest modern achievement. In this industry of glass-making the
amazing thing is that it should have come into the mind of a man so to
apply the heat of burning wood to sands and silicates enclosed in an
earthen vessel as to convert them into an entirely new substance
possessing qualities not perceivable by any human sense in the sands,
the silicates, or the earth.

What our modern progress in chemistry and in mechanics has enabled the
makers of glass to do, is greatly to reduce the trouble and cost of
producing this entirely new substance, greatly to improve the quality of
the substance produced, and to extend the range of the uses to which it
can be applied.

What would the Egyptians, who paid their tribute in glass to Rome, have
thought of a serious order to pave the Via Sacra with blocks of purple
glass? Yet such an order could be executed now at St.-Gobain, and when
one sees the great flags weighing nine kilogrammes made here and used to
let light into the cellarage below the carriage-ways, for example, of
the huge Hôtel Continental, at Paris, it comes easily within the
probabilities that the whole underworld of our great cities in time may
thus come to be made available for divers uses, as so much of the
underworld of Broadway now is in New York.

The great 'pavement question' is an open question still, in spite of
asphalte and of wood, and there would seem to be nothing in the nature
of things to prevent its being eventually solved by the glassworkers.
The roofing question clearly belongs to them. The casting of glass for
roofs began, I believe, with England, in the time of Sir Joseph Paxton,
but it has been immensely developed at St.-Gobain. Over a hundred
thousand square mètres of glass roofing made here were required for the
building of the Exposition of this year at Paris. All the most important
railway stations in France, from Nantes to Strasburg (unless the Germans
have changed this), and from Calais to Marseilles, are thus roofed. In
great warehouses, markets, public museums, street galleries--like those
of Victor Emmanuel at Milan--factories, workshops all over France and
the Continent, this conversion of the roof into a colossal window has
revolutionised matters within the last twenty years. The light is making
its way even into Turkey, where the great bazaar at Salonica has been
roofed in glass by St.-Gobain, and as the Chinese, who, despite their
early invention of glass, never got beyond using it for beads and little
bottles, have condescended to admit great French mirrors into the
Imperial Palace at Pekin, the glass roof may, ere long, make its way
even into China.

In the form of tiles, such as are now made here, glass must inevitably,
sooner or later, displace slates and shingles and terra-cotta for the
roofs, even of private houses, it being quite certain that these glass
tiles can be so used as to give a much better light in the garrets of
private houses than can possibly be got through the windows. When that
comes to pass the burglar's occupation of clambering stealthily from
roof to roof will be seriously interfered with. What with glass roofs
and glass floors and electricity, indeed, the city of the future is
likely to be much more easily 'policed' and patrolled, as well as
incomparably more cheery and habitable, than the city of to-day.
Perhaps, too, when we all come to living in glass houses, the cause of
peace and good neighbourhood may gain, and even Mrs. Grundy may grow
more careful about looking into the affairs of her friends and
acquaintances.

If that much maligned potentate the Emperor Nero had any real notion of
the capabilities of glass when he established the first glassworks at
Rome, the lamentation with which he took farewell of the world, '_qualis
artifex pereo_,' may have been inspired by regret at his not being
allowed time enough to develop them. Certainly such gigantic mirrors as
those which St.-Gobain has this year sent to the Exposition would have
shown to better advantage in his colossal 'Golden House' than in any of
our petty modern palaces. In what palace in England or in France to-day
could a mirror measuring 7 mètres x 63 centimètres in height by 4 mètres
x 12 centimètres in width, and thus displaying a surface of more than 30
square mètres, be placed, without dwarfing everything about it? These
immense and magnificent mirrors must go hereafter to decorate palaces of
public resort--'palaces of the people,' not palaces of princes. What was
a royal luxury when Colbert wrote to D'Avaux in 1673 has become a
popular attraction. The smallest restaurant in Paris would think itself
discredited to-day were it decorated with one of the _grandes glaces_
for which Colbert in 1693 thought St.-Gobain would find no purchaser
save the king; but the Grand Café and the Hôtel Terminus of the Gare
St.-Lazare order mirrors in 1889 which no king of our times would very
well know what to do with.

Yet, once more, how the cost of these mirrors has fallen! In 1702 a
plate-glass mirror showing two square mètres only by surface, cost, at
St.-Gobain, 540 francs. In 1889 such a mirror, showing four square
mètres of surface, costs, at St.-Gobain, 136 francs. A mirror showing
ten square mètres of surface, which could not have been made in 1702 at
any price, can now be had for 467 francs!

In 1802, under Napoleon, a mirror showing four square mètres of surface
cost 3,644 francs, or very nearly three times the present cost of a
mirror, not tinned like the mirrors of 1802, but silvered, of twice and
a half that size. While new markets are constantly opening to this great
industry all over the world, the progress of chemical science and of
mechanics is as constantly suggesting new economies and new improvements
in the manufacture of glass, and St.-Gobain, though one of the most
thoroughly French of all French 'institutions,' shows no Chauvinism in
its incessant study and prompt appropriation of these economies and
these improvements. During the invasion of 1814 the workmen of
St.-Gobain marched off to Chauny to resist the advance of the Prussians,
and the manufactory had to pay a heavy fine for its patriotism. But it
avails itself as readily of German as of French science to-day, and I
found M. Henrivaux entirely and minutely familiar with the very latest
phenomena of the great change which is coming over the glassworks, as
well as all the other industries, of Pittsburg, through the use there of
natural gas instead of coal gas and coal. All the most recently invented
furnaces--English, German, American--have been tried and tested here as
soon as they were made; and the latest American 'crushers' and
'regulators' get to St.-Gobain as soon as they do to Pittsburg. The
materials which go to the making of a plate-glass mirror pass through
seven processes before the original heap of pebbles, dust, and ashes is
transformed into a sheet of splendour and light.

A hundred years ago more than ten days were required to complete these
seven processes, from the crushing and mixing and putting into the
furnace of the soda and the silicious sand and the charcoal and the lime
and the broken glass, called here _calcin_, through the fusion, and the
moulding, and the squaring, and the smoothing, and the washing, and the
polishing. Now this is all done in half the time--127 hours instead of
246.

With all this the condition of the workmen employed at St.-Gobain has
also steadily improved. It seems always to have been good, relatively to
the general conditions of workmen in other industries and other
establishments in France. Under the original statutes, and in the time
of the excellent M. Deslandes, the nominee of Madame Geoffrin, who ruled
St.-Gobain with great success from 1759 down to the Revolution, the
workmen of St.-Gobain, as I have shown, were looked after, as well as
kept to their duty, on strictly patriarchal principles, not likely to
find favour in modern eyes. That they did not themselves dislike the
system may be inferred from the fact that no such thing as a strike has
ever been known at St.-Gobain, and that a considerable proportion of the
workmen employed here now are the direct descendants of workmen employed
here in the last century. There are even workers by inheritance, as men
may be soldiers and sailors or magistrates by inheritance. Of course
with the great extension in our own time of the operation of the
company, great numbers of workmen other than glassworkers have come into
its employment. But in the glass manufactures alone there are now
employed: at St.-Gobain 375 workmen, at Chauny 583, at Cirey-sur-Vezouze
628, at Montluçon 473, at Stolberg, in Rhenish Prussia, 842, at Waldhof,
in Baden-Baden, 518; making, in all, 3,419.

The wages of the workmen are paid by the day, by the month, or by the
piece, according to the special work which they do, but in all cases
(and this, I believe, has been the rule here from the beginning) the
workman is interested in his work by one premium on the amount, and by
another on the quality of the work done. Furthermore (and this also
dates from the beginning) the company look after the primary education
of the children of the workmen. At St.-Gobain, at Chauny, at Cirey, at
Montluçon, and I believe, also, at Waldhof, it maintains schools for
both sexes at its own expense, together with asylums and training
schools for the children. In these there are now more than 1,400
children. When the company owns no such school it pays a subvention to
the nearest school for the benefit of the children of its workmen.

Here at St.-Gobain the company owns a number of houses, each house
having a garden and dependencies, which it lets to the workmen at an
average rental of eight francs a month. I saw not long ago, at one of
the stations on a line newly opened by the Great Eastern Railway Company
of England, very neat and even handsome cottages well built of brick and
thoroughly comfortable, which are leased to servants of the company at
2s. 6_d_. a week, or ten shillings a month. The houses I saw at
St.-Gobain let at less than seven shillings a month, were quite as large
as those of the Great Eastern Company, and the gardens were much larger.

I gathered from the remarks made to me at St.-Gobain by people who
seemed to be both well-informed and well-disposed, that of late years
the liberality of the company in regard to these houses has, in not a
few cases, worked mischief rather than good. They are not confined to
St.-Gobain, and the company owns and leases no fewer than 1,256 of
them. A good many allotments of land around the factories are also made
at nominal rates to the workmen, who cultivate them assiduously. The
glass-founders are particularly favoured in making these leases and
allotments. Besides these houses meant for families, the company
provides lodgings near the factories for unmarried workmen, or for
workmen whose homes are at a considerable distance from their work.

Within the buildings of the manufactory itself at St.-Gobain, M.
Henrivaux showed me some such lodgings, as well as several bath-rooms
which the workmen are allowed to use on the payment of a very slight
fee. It is his experience that the workmen prefer to consider the bath
as a luxury, and to pay for it.

All the relations between the company and its workmen, indeed, seem to
me to be governed by a sensible avoidance on the part of the company of
everything like fussy paternalism; and to this, in some measure, I have
no doubt, must be attributed the remarkably smooth and easy working of
these relations through so long a course of years. The workmen are
treated, not like children, but like reasonable beings, who may be
expected to avail themselves of advantages which are offered them with
an eye at once to their own interests and to the interests of the
company.

The co-operative societies at St.-Gobain and at Chauny, for example,
were founded in 1866, not by the company, but by the employees of the
company under statutes carefully drawn up by M. Cochin, and the company
simply undertook to assist them; in the first place by leasing them, at
a low rent, the buildings necessary for the business, and in the next
place by taking charge gratuitously of their financial operations. The
goods supplied are sold only to members of the societies, as in the
co-operative stores in England. The transactions amount to about
1,500,000 francs a year, the goods are sold at prices below those
charged in the local shops, and the members divide an average annual
profit of from eight to ten per cent. The management is entirely in the
hands of the members.

The company has founded at St.-Gobain a kind of savings-bank in which
the workman may make deposits of from one franc to 400 francs, drawing
interest at the rate of 4 per cent. per annum, until the maximum is
reached, when the money is either paid back to the depositor or, if he
prefers, invested for him, without charge by the company, in the public
funds or in railway securities. In this way many of the workmen are
coming to be small capitalists. If they wish also to become house-owners
the company advances, at the lowest possible rate of interest, the
necessary funds for the purchase, and workmen in good standing with the
company find no difficulty in getting gratuitous advances of money
repayable in small fixed amounts, upon showing good reasons for the
advance. And in all the establishments of the company, except at
Montluçon, where there is a special fund to give assistance in cases of
accident or disease, the workmen and their families are entitled to
medical advice and medicines at the expense of the company.

In addition to all these arrangements for promoting a real community of
interests between the company and its employees, there is a pension fund
out of which retiring pensions, varying from one-fifth to one-fourth of
the wages earned by the pensioner, are granted to employees who have
served the company for a certain number of years, or who find themselves
disabled from further service by age or by disease. A certain
proportion, determinable by the circumstances of each case, of these
pensions is settled upon the widows and young children of the
pensioners; and in order to encourage habits of thrift and forecast
among the workmen, the company undertakes to manage without charge the
investment of a certain proportion of his wages by any workman in the
'pension fund' of the national government.

The total outlay of the company upon these various methods of promoting
a community of interests between itself and its employees amounted in
1888 to 438,033 francs, thus divided:--

                                    francs
  Pensions                          241,657
  Medical Service                   100,055
  Schools and Religious Services     57,788
  Recreations                        17,667
  Gifts and Assistance               19,758

The outlay upon 'recreation' is made in the form of subventions and
prizes granted to associations of the workmen, such as shooting and
gymnastic clubs and musical societies. The manufactory, for example,
boasts a philharmonic society of its own, and there is a Choral Society
of St.-Gobain. Both of these have scored successes in various public
exhibitions. There is a rifle club, founded in 1861, and reconstituted
in 1874, with an eye to the possible military necessities of the
country.

The relations between the company and its employees under this system,
the germs of which were planted here two centuries ago, have assumed
such a character that the workmen habitually speak not of the
manufactory but of the 'maison.' They are and feel themselves to be
members of a great economic family. Of 2,650 persons now actively
employed in St.-Gobain, Chauny, and Cirey, 432, or 16.3 per cent., have
been employed for more than thirty years; 411, or 15.5 per cent., for
more than twenty and less than thirty years; 553, or 20.9 per cent., for
more than ten and less than twenty years; and only 1,254, or 47.3 per
cent., for less than ten years.

It would be instructive to compare this record with the records of the
most important industrial establishments in England and America during
the past thirty years, and I should be glad to see this done by some of
the people who talk so glibly in England and America of the inherent
fickleness and instability of the French character, as offering an
adequate explanation of the political catastrophes which have so often
recurred in France during the past century.

One of the most curious features of the establishment at St.-Gobain is a
subterranean lake. The fine forests around St.-Gobain and La
Fère--forests of oak, beech, elm, ash, birch, maple, yoke-elm, aspen,
wild cherry, linden, elder, and willow--flourish upon a tertiary
formation. The surface of clay keeps the soil marshy and damp, but this
checks the infiltration of the rainwater and therefore favours the
growth of the trees. In the calcareous rock the early inhabitants
hollowed out for themselves caverns, in which they took refuge from
their enemies and from the beasts of the forest; and these caverns,
called by the people _creuttes_--an obvious corruption of the name of
_crypts_, given them by the Roman conquerors of Gaul, just as the early
French trappers gave the name of 'caches' to the Indian hiding-places of
the Far West--are to be found all about Soissons and Laon. The more
modern lords of St.-Gobain, its monks and its barons, dug out of the
calcareous rock the stones which they used to build their châteaux and
their churches, and they created great _creuttes_ beneath St.-Gobain. It
seems to have occurred to M. Deslandes, during his long and skilful
supervision of the works here, that these caverns might be put to the
very practical use of securing an adequate water-supply. The idea has
been thoroughly carried out, and the subterranean reservoir of
St.-Gobain is much more impressive as a spectacle than the crypts of the
Cisterns at Constantinople. It is kept filled to an average depth of one
mètre by the infiltration of the surface waters and by the overflow of a
pond, La Marette, on the plateau of St.-Gobain, and it covers an area of
some 1,200 square mètres.

After two or three hours spent in visiting the various departments of
the glassworks overhead, M. Henrivaux led me through winding passages,
which reminded me of the dismal vomitories at Baiæ, down into this
strange underworld. Walls and pillars, partly of the natural rock, left
in the working of the quarries, partly of masonry built up to strengthen
the reservoir, give this weird water, when you reach it, the aspect
rather of a stream than of a lake. A workman, who had preceded and
guided us with a swinging lantern, put out a long boathook, and drew
slowly around to the landing-place a long, shallow boat, into which he
invited us to step. M. Henrivaux had kindly sent orders in the morning
to have the reservoir illuminated with Venetian and Chinese lanterns of
various colours. These had been hung from hooks in the rocks and pillars
with infinite good taste at long intervals, so as to illuminate not too
brilliantly the mystical darkness of the scene. Looking upon the vague,
indefinite vista, as it glimmered away into an indefinable distance, one
seemed really to stand

  Where Alp, the sacred river, ran
  Through caverns measureless by man,
    Down to a shoreless sea.

Seating ourselves carefully in the boat, our silent boatman, like a
spectral gondolier, rowed us silently along the labyrinthine canals of
this dim and ghostly Venice. Vathek Beckford would have made them
waterways to the Hall of Eblis.




CHAPTER VIII

IN THE AISNE--_continued_


  LAON

The lively little city of Chauny, standing in the heart of the rich and
lovely valley of the Oise, the 'golden vale' of this part of France, has
a history of its own of which I shall presently have something to say,
and which throws some interesting light upon the general history of
France.

But Chauny owes its actual prosperity mainly to its connection with the
Company of St.-Gobain. From a very early period in the annals of the
company, the plate-glass made at St.-Gobain was sent across the country
to Chauny, and thence by water to Paris, where it was polished and
'tinned' at the company's works in the Rue de Reuilly.

When the first machines were invented for saving much of the manual
labour spent upon these processes, it occurred to the managers of the
company that these machines might be advantageously worked with the
water-power of the Oise at Chauny. This was in the beginning of the
present century. About the same time, thanks to the foreign wars
provoked by the Girondists to promote the Revolution, it became very
difficult to obtain the supplies of natural soda necessary for the
manufacture of plate-glass, these supplies having been drawn, down to
that time, almost exclusively from Alicante in Spain; and the chemist
Leblanc hit upon a process for extracting soda on a great scale from
sea-salt. Of this invention the managers of St.-Gobain promptly availed
themselves; and, after a brief and unsatisfactory experiment at a place
called Charlesfontaine, they established at Chauny some soda-works,
which have since been developed into the most extensive chemical works
in France.

Taken in conjunction with the glassworks also now established here,
these works extend over an area of some thirty hectares, fourteen of
which are occupied by buildings. Numerous canals fed from the Oise
traverse this immense area, some of them supplying water-power, others
serving as waterways. The place, in short, is an industrial Amsterdam or
Rotterdam in miniature, lying between the river Oise, the Canal de
St.-Quentin, and the Canal de St.-Lazare. The Cité Ouvrière, built for
the workmen by the company, lies beyond the Canal de St.-Lazare and on
the road from Château Thierry in Champagne (the birthplace of La
Fontaine) to Béthune in Artois.

The streets and areas within the works are most appropriately baptized
by the names of the eminent men of science to whom the company is
indebted for great services either directly or indirectly: the Cour
Lavoisier, the Rue Pelouze, the Rue Guyton de Morvaux, the Rue Leblanc,
the Rue Gay-Lussac, the Cour Scheele, the Rue Hély d'Oisset.

Besides the dwellings put up for the benefit of the workmen at Chauny,
the company has built here a chapel, established a free dispensary, and
organised excellent schools for the children of both sexes, under the
supervision of the devoted Sisters, who have not yet been 'converted'
out of Chauny.

'What is the feeling of the people here on this question of clerical
teaching?' I asked an acquaintance of mine, who formerly filled an
important post in the local administration of this region, and who now
devotes himself to his flowers and his library in a charming old house
of the eighteenth century, the high-walled courtyard of which is
tapestried with luxuriant vines and creepers.

'All the sensible people in Chauny,' he said--'and there are many
sensible people in Chauny, though in the old times our neighbours used
to speak of us as "the monkies of Chauny"--are quite disgusted with all
this newfangled nonsense, and with these incessant attacks on the
clergy. The troublesome element here in Chauny is not to be found among
the workmen: it is to be found among the people who do not work. Of
course, everybody knows that it is the great chemical and glass works
here which make Chauny prosperous. But for St.-Gobain we should be where
we were a hundred years ago. And so there is a tendency all through the
Department to come to Chauny, in hopes of finding work under the
company. Of course, in nine cases out of ten, those who seek it thus do
not get it, for it is the rule of the company always to give the
preference to people from Chauny, or the immediate neighbourhood.

'Of course the unsuccessful "immigrants" linger about the place, and as
they don't find work they go lounging about the town, and take to drink
too often and, in short, soon become the raw material of which in these
days the freemasons are making what they call "Republicans." You have it
all,' he added, 'in the letter which M. Allain-Targé has just written,
refusing to be a candidate this year for the Chambers.'

I remembered very well the energy shown by M. Allain-Targé, as a
Republican Minister of the Interior, at the time of the elections of
October 18, 1885. He then issued an official circular instructing all
the public functionaries that, while they were to be absolutely
'neutral' as between Republican candidates of different colours, they
must exert themselves to the utmost as against all 'reactionary'
candidates. I was much interested, therefore, to learn the present
opinion of M. Allain-Targé as to the outlook of the Republic under his
successor, M. Constans, in 1889. It was very instructive to find that M.
Allain-Targé now declines to be a Republican candidate because, to use
his own words, though the High Court of Justice may 'deliver the
Republic from General Boulanger and his confederates, it is beyond the
power of the High Court of Justice to bring France back--let us not say
to the heroic age, but to the age of good faith, of disinterestedness,
of common sense, and of that prudent, sincere, and loyal policy, thanks
to which, during long years, France passed safely through so many
serious trials.'

'The new generations of electors,' says M. Allain-Targé in this
remarkable letter, 'exact of their representatives conditions to which I
will not submit. I will not undertake to make the promises which it is
now the fashion of candidates to lavish, and which I cannot regard as
serious.' These 'new generations of electors' are the 'new social
strata' about which Gambetta used to declaim so confidently only a few
years ago, and I quite agreed with my philosophic friend near Chauny in
thinking that no slight significance must attach to such a verdict upon
them, pronounced in 1889 by an 'advanced Republican' like M.
Allain-Targé, who only four years ago, in 1885, was the most active
minister of a Government called into existence to carry out the ideas of
Gambetta, and to found a stable republic upon these 'new social strata.'

Put into plain English, this letter of M. Allain-Targé, who had more
than any of his colleagues to do directly and in the way of business
both with the electors and with the elected of France four years ago,
and who now declines to have anything more to do with them all--simply
means that the electors sell their votes to the highest bidder, and that
the man who will make the most unscrupulous bid is likeliest to get the
votes. It is hard to see much difference between such a verdict and the
outspoken declaration of M. Paul de Cassagnac that law, order, property,
and liberty in France are threatened to-day, not by a 'democracy,' but
by a 'voyoucratie' or 'blackguardocracy.'

The 'anti-clerical' agitation here, as elsewhere in France, I am
assured, is plainly under the control of the 'freemasons.' Not that the
'freemasons' are avowedly very numerous here. But they are influential
because they act together, in silence, and on lines common to the
agitation all over France. 'Three or four energetic members of the
order,' said one very intelligent man to me here at Chauny, 'can easily
manage the whole official machinery of a large political district. To
understand their methods and their organisation you must go back to the
worship of Baphomet in the Middle Ages. In some of their lodges they
reproduce with a goat one at least of the abominations which Von Hammer
tells us were charged upon the Knights Templars as Baphometic. They are
a sect--a persecuting sect, and a sect bent on absolutely destroying the
Christian religion. To this end they parody the Christian symbols and
the Christian scheme of charity and of good works. They do not, most of
them, hold office, it being much more to the purpose for them to awe the
officials, and that is their favourite way of working. There are,
however, exceptions to this. If you go to Marmande in the South you will
find a sub-prefect there who is a most energetic and mischievous
"freemason." In the Aisne the Prefect is a freemason, and here all the
public functionaries go in fear of the order. They own the newspaper,
control profitable contracts of all sorts, and can make or mar the
career of public servants, through their occult relations with people at
headquarters in Paris.'

I suggested that in England and Germany and the United States the
'freemasons' are not only regarded as friends of order and of law, but
number among their dignitaries men of the highest official and personal
rank.

'That is quite true, no doubt,' he said. 'But this order in France has,
I believe, no official relations now with the order in either of these
countries. Its affiliations are with the "freemasons" of Italy, of
Belgium, and of Spain, so far as it has any affiliations. There have
been "freemasons," as you must know, among the Radical leaders in
Belgium who have not hesitated, while holding high public positions, to
denounce Christianity in open meetings as a "corpse blocking the way of
modern progress"; and what the freemasonry of Italy and of Spain is I am
sure you must know.'

I told him that in Spanish America and in Brazil I had met priests who
were members of the order; and I particularly cited the case of an
ecclesiastic of considerable importance, who in Costa Rica, some ten or
twelve years ago, was at the head of the Order of Freemasons in that
country.

'That may be,' he replied, 'but officers of our expedition into Mexico
under Maximilian have told me that the freemasons in Mexico were active
allies of the Liberals and of Juarez in their war against the Church.'

This I could not contradict, for while I never heard that President
Juarez was himself a 'freemason,' I know, from my conversations with him
after the fall of the Empire, in 1871, that, though educated by the
priests in Oajaca, as Robespierre was by the priests in Arras, he was an
unbeliever of the type of the advanced Encyclopædists of the last
century, and though not such a fanatic as Condorcet, strongly disposed,
not only to deprive the Mexican clergy of their 'fueros' under the old
Spanish system, but to make an end of Catholicism in Mexico if possible.
Nor was he much more friendly to the Protestants, who were then trying,
under Bishop Riley, to found a Protestant propaganda in Mexico.

'In France, at all events under the Third Republic,' he went on, 'the
"freemasons" are the implacable enemies of religion. It was in full
accord with them, and as a battle-cry in their interest, that Gambetta
uttered his famous declaration that "Clericalism is the enemy!" And if
the "freemasons" of any other country recognise and in any fashion
affiliate with the Grand Orient of France, they ought to understand what
they are doing, and to what objects they are lending themselves,
consciously or unconsciously. You tell me that General Washington was a
freemason. Yes, no doubt, but the freemasonry which he accepted was no
more like the modern "freemasonry" of France than this Third Republic of
ours is like the republic of which he was the founder!'

The processes carried on in the great chemical works at Chauny are in
their way as interesting as the processes carried on at St.-Gobain or in
the glassworks here. But I cannot say they are as pleasant, or even as
picturesque. Commercially speaking, the output of the chemical works of
this great company is at least as important now as the output of its
glassworks. The chemical works grew up out of the necessities of the
glassworks. When the company was led, at the beginning of this century,
by the pressure of the war epoch, to adopt in its glassworks the use of
the artificial soda made by Leblanc, the Director soon found it
advisable to have the artificial soda manufactured by the company
itself. This led to the establishment of the chemical works at Chauny,
and down to 1867 the company itself was the chief consumer of these
chemical products. The Exposition of that year widened the horizon, by
making France acquainted with the agricultural importance of the English
fabrication of 'superphosphates' as fertilisers. At the Exposition of
1878 the Company of St.-Gobain exhibited, and received a gold medal, for
superphosphates, which it was then turning out at the rate of 20,000
tons a year from three establishments--one at Chauny, one at L'Oseraie,
and one at Montluçon. As the company was then turning out a great
production of sulphuric acid, and owned the only important mine of
pyrites in France, it went on with increasing energy, and now, in 1889,
shows an output of 110,000 tons of superphosphates, from no fewer than
six establishments--Chauny, Aubervilliers, Marennes, Saint-Fons near
Lyon, L'Oseraie, and Montluçon. Besides these it possesses salt-works at
Art-sur-Meurthe, its iron pyrites works at Sain-Bel, and some important
deposits of phosphates at Beauval. These give employment to no fewer
than 3,300 workmen, independently of those employed by the company at
its various glassworks in the glass manufacture. At Chauny alone the
chemical works employ 1,350 of these workmen. For these, as for its
glassworkers, the company has established a system of savings
institutions and of pensions. Medical advice and medicines are given
gratuitously to the workmen and their families. The co-operative
association founded by M. Cochin at St.-Gobain has not, I believe, been
extended to the chemical works; but the company maintains
establishments which supply the chief wants of the workpeople at cost
price, and the dwellings provided for them, either gratuitously or at
very low rents, now number more than seven hundred, independently of the
dormitories for unmarried workmen. Retiring pensions, varying from
one-fifth to one-fourth of the wages of the workmen, are granted to all
after a certain number of years of service, and to workmen disabled by
disease or by accidents.

At the pyrites-mine of Sain-Bel, in the South, near Tarare, where more
than 400 workmen are employed--300 as miners and the rest in the works
above named, the former earning on an average 1,309 fr. 25 c., and the
latter on an average 1,114 fr. 90 c. a year--a system exists under which
any workman who chooses to put aside his savings in a _caisse de la
vieillesse_ receives from the company, when he has completed twenty-five
years of service, or has attained the age of fifty-five years, an annual
pension more than equal to the amount at that time of his savings in the
_caisse_.

As I have said, the manufacture of chemical products is not so pleasant
or so picturesque in itself as the manufacture of plate-glass and
mirrors. Within the last decade the output of sulphuric acid alone from
the company's works has more than doubled, and now amounts to more than
200,000 tons a year. The gases disengaged in the manufacture of chemical
fertilisers, such as carbonic acid, sulphuretted hydrogen, fluorine of
silicium, and so on, it was found at Chauny, destroyed entirely in a
very short time the polish of the glass in the window-panes of the
houses opposite to the works, and certainly did not improve either the
respiratory organs or the general health of the workmen. The company
therefore spent a good deal of time and of money in working out a system
for the complete condensation of these gases. I am told that it has
proved completely successful, and is now established in all the
chemical works of the company, to the great advantage not only of the
workmen, but of the company also.

Although Chauny is really a very ancient city--dating back at least to
the age of Charlemagne, when the monks of Cuissy and St.-Eloi-Fontaine,
with the keen eye of those early agriculturists for a good thing,
reclaimed its marshes and turned them into a fat land, yielding, as an
old local _dicton_ tells us, the

                  'septem commoda vitæ,
  Poma, nemus, segetes, linum, pecus, herba, racemus.'

--it has almost nothing to show to-day in the way of antique
architecture. Of the 'seven comforts of life,' the vine has vanished
also; but all the others flourish abundantly, and the people of Chauny
have little to complain of on the score of the natural resources of
their region. During the wars, though, of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, the place was so often taken and retaken that its buildings
were pretty well battered to pieces. The English of Harry the Fifth
stormed it in 1417, and England held it for a quarter of a century,
during which period an incident occurred much more creditable to the
burghers of Chauny than is the taking of the Bastille in 1789 to the
citizens of Paris. Monstrelet tells the story in a quaint and vigorous
fashion. Chauny at that time was part of the appanage of the Duc
d'Orléans, then a prisoner in England, and it was held for the
conquerors by a French, nobleman, 'Messire Collard de Mailly,' who had
accepted the office of Bailli of Vermandois from King Henry of England.
The burghers of Chauny, who had lived for two centuries in the enjoyment
of the rights and privileges granted them in a royal charter by Philip
Augustus, did not like this state of things at all. So they made up
their minds to demolish the castle, lest 'Messire Collard de Mailly'
should fill it with English soldiers and make himself quite unendurable.

It was a rather hardy enterprise, and the burghers went about it with
great coolness and good sense. Theirs was a real rising of the citizens
of a town to abate a nuisance which threatened their liberties, and not,
like the attack on the Bastille, a blow struck at law, order, and the
constituted authorities of a great kingdom by a subsidised mob; and
their leaders were the most respectable men of Chauny--not a crew of
thieves and murderers like the infamous Maillard, that 'hero of the
Bastille,' against whom his own employers and allies were eventually
forced to proceed as the chief of a gang of ruffians, and who, not
content with assassinating political prisoners and stealing their
property in Paris, roamed all over the Departments of the Seine and the
Seine-et-Oise, torturing farmers to make them give up their money, and
maddening the countryside with outrages not to be described.

Jean and Mathieu de Longueval, Pierre Piat,[7] and other 'notable
persons' of Chauny, bound themselves together by an oath, in 1432, to
'take the fortress of the city and demolish it.' They chose an occasion
when the bailli, Collard de Mailly, and his brother, Ferry de Mailly,
with some of their men, went riding out of the fortress 'to take their
pleasure in the town.'

    [7] That 'Pierre Piat' was a man of character as well as of
    substance appears from the fact that he was charged with seeing that
    his wife, the cousin of a rich and charitable lady of Chauny, Marie
    Martine de Feure, who died in 1400, should each year receive, under
    the will of this good dame, 'a large piece of linen cloth whereof to
    make shrouds for the poor who might die in the hospital of the
    Hôtel-Dieu at Chauny.' Obviously there was much better stuff for the
    making of a true republic among these good burghers of Chauny in the
    fifteenth century than was to be

found among the shouting mobs of the Palais-Royal in the eighteenth.

With a few courageous 'companion adventurers,' previously posted in
hiding near the castle, these determined burghers suddenly sallied
'forth from the place where they were watching the castle gates, and, no
one paying any heed to them, entered the castle courtyard, drew up the
bridge after them, and took possession.'

'News of this going after the two brothers, they were sore displeased,
but they could do nothing,' says the chronicler; 'for the citizens who
were in the plot straightway fell to sounding the tocsin, and gathering
about the castle in great numbers, with arms and with sticks, were soon
admitted into it.'

The castle being thus secured, 'sundry notables of the city went to meet
the two knights, and assured them that no harm should come to them or
theirs, for that what had been done was done only for the peace and
prosperity of the city.' Quite different this from the cowardly murder
of the Governor of the Bastille, struck down after his surrender by some
of Maillard's confederates, while that scoundrel himself still had his
hand upon the unfortunate De Launay's collar.

The 'Messires de Mailly' made the best of a bad business, and, with all
their friends and followers, withdrew into an hotel in the town. There
all their property was brought from the castle and delivered to them,
which, having been done, the good people of Chauny 'with one accord fell
to work to slight and demolish the said fortress, and this with such
good-will that in a few days' time it was wholly razed and destroyed
from top to bottom.'

The bailli and his brother soon departed out of the place, and 'Messires
Hector de Flavy and Waleran de Moreul,' who were sent to govern it by
the Comte de Luxembourg, 'found the citizens much more stiff and
disobedient than they had ever been before the desolation of the
aforesaid castle!'

After Joan of Arc had driven the English out of the realm, Charles VII.
had the good sense to pardon the citizens of Chauny for destroying the
castle, and it was never rebuilt. The Spanish occupied Chauny after
their victory of St.-Quentin in 1557. Five years afterwards Condé and
his Huguenots took the place, and did so much proselytising there that
in 1589 Chauny was one of the first towns in France to recognise Henry
of Navarre as King of France. It stood out for him when Laon and other
important towns in this region had joined the League, and during his
long struggle with the House of Guise it was a central point about which
the hostile forces constantly manoeuvred. Henry himself came here
often, and during the siege of La Fère 'La Belle Gabrielle' kept him
company at Chauny, Sinceny, and Folembray.

In the next century the French and the Imperialists fought all around
the place, to the great disgust of the poor peasants, who hid themselves
as eagerly in the woods from the troops of their own sovereign as from
those of his imperial enemy; and in 1652, Chauny, after a sharp but
short siege, surrendered to the Spaniards, who, however, agreed, by the
terms of the capitulation, to 'maintain the burgesses in all their
goods, rights, privileges, charges, and offices.' The Mayor of Chauny,
Claude le Coulteux, behaved so well in the siege, that Louis XIV.
ennobled him; and the curé of the church of St.-Martin, it is recorded,
fought at the ramparts, and 'pointed the cannon with his own hand.'

This was the last deed of arms in the annals of this little city, though
the fortune of war has twice put Chauny under foreign rule. In 1814 the
allies, and in 1870-71 the victorious Germans, occupied it, and laid it
under contribution.

That the Revolution of 1789 left the citizens of Chauny much less
determined to do battle for their rights than their ancestors were in
the days of the English invaders, may be fairly inferred, I think, from
the very curious circumstance that, in 1815, they actually made a public
subscription for the purpose of presenting a very handsome gold medal,
weighing two ounces, to the Prussian Commander of Chauny, Colonel Von
Beulwitz.

This medal bore the inscription, in French, 'The grateful city of Chauny
to M. Von Beulwitz, Commandant of Chauny.' The local authorities also
asked, and obtained, for their Prussian satrap and his secretary the
cross of the Legion of Honour!

All this was no doubt very creditable to the German authorities, and not
discreditable to the good people of Chauny. But it certainly seems to
show that at the end of the Napoleonic era, the French people in the
provinces were thoroughly weary of the Revolution and all its
consequences. They welcomed peace at any price from any quarter. The
testimony of all impartial contemporary observers accords with the
deliberate opinion given by Gouverneur Morris to Alexander Hamilton in
1796, that the French people in general were royalists at heart, and
utterly averse to the general overthrow of their institutions by the
legislative mob at Paris, or, as Mirabeau comprehensively called them,
'that Wild Ass of the National Assembly.'

At Chauny, in 1816, the inhabitants held a meeting under the presidency
of the mayor, at which they declared, with great unanimity, that 'the
people of Chauny had never, in fact and of their own free will, adopted
the impious and seditious principles introduced in France by a factious
minority, and that they regarded the death of the most Christian king,
Louis XVI., as the most execrable of crimes.'

Chauny was a city then of less than 4,000 inhabitants, but the
peripatetic 'patriots' of 1793 had contrived to do mischief enough, even
in this small and quiet corner of France, to earn the detestation of its
people. They desecrated its churches, turning Notre-Dame into a
saltpetre factory, stealing the church bells to sell them, pulling down
the steeples and towers, and defacing the monuments.

They arrested and imprisoned numbers of the best citizens, broke up the
ancient hospitals, driving away the Sisters of Charity, and brought
about the murder, by the revolutionary tribunals, of a celebrated French
admiral, who co-operated in America with Rochambeau to secure the
independence of the United States--the Comte d'Estaing, who was well
known and very popular in Chauny.

When the tribunal, after its fashion, called upon the fearless sailor
for his name, he replied, 'You know my name perfectly well,--it suits
you, perhaps, to pretend that you do not. But when you have cut off my
head, as you mean to do, send it to the English fleet, and they will
tell you my name!'

Here at Chauny, as elsewhere, the first concern of these revolutionary
'friends of the people,' when they got possession of the machinery of
the State, was to confiscate the funds devoted by the piety and the
benevolence of past ages to the service of the people. The more closely
one looks into the social annals of France, the more amazing it is that
the world should so long have swallowed the monstrous misrepresentations
current in our century, as to the condition of the French people before
1789, and especially as to the organisation, under the _ancien régime_,
of public charity and of public education in France.

Chauny possessed, as far back as the beginning of the twelfth century,
a public hospital or Hôtel-Dieu, and a hospital for lepers called the
'Maladrerie.' Who founded the Hôtel-Dieu is not known, for in those
'ages of faith,' so lovingly described by Kenelm Digby, it was not
thought so extraordinary a thing that a man or a woman should devote his
or her substance to benevolent purposes, as it is fast coming to be in
our own times.

The mayor and sworn magistrates of the city were the official governors
of the hospital, and the chaplain was taken from among the monks of
Saint-Eloi-Fontaine. A century and a half afterwards, in 1250, the Abbot
of Saint-Eloi-Fontaine received, under the wills of three burghers of
Chauny, a sum equal to about 40,000 francs of our time for the service
of the hospital of the Hôtel-Dieu. It is worth remembering that the
Third French Republic has passed a law forbidding ecclesiastics to
receive or execute such benevolent trusts as this.

I have already alluded in a note to a subsequent legacy made to this
institution in the fifteenth century by a pious dame of Chauny. A few
years later, in 1419, Colart Le Miroirier, a resident of Chauny, left to
the Hôtel-Dieu all his lands and goods at Chauny, Ognes, and Roy.

The 'religious wars' wrecked the Hôtel-Dieu in the sixteenth century;
but in 1620 a devout woman, Marie Dubuisson, took the work of
reconstruction in hand, and the citizens followed it up; so that, by the
end of the seventeenth century, it was well in order once more, and it
continued to be administered for the benefit of the poor of Chauny till
the 'patriots' confiscated it in 1793.

Under the Empire, in 1811, the re-established hospital was combined with
an orphan asylum, and both were put under the charge of the Sisters of
Charity, one of whom, Sister Renée Canet, had the good sense to found
here a little manufactory of hosiery and caps, which holds its own, I am
told, despite the not very benevolent combinations against it of the
local hosiers. The old buildings of the Hôtel-Dieu, however, no longer
exist, and the chief public hospital of Chauny is installed in a large
edifice put up under the Second Empire in 1865, and known as the
'Hospice-Sainte-Eugénie,' in honour of the Empress. It says something
for the common sense of the local authorities that they have not
insisted on changing the name of the institution.

During the orgies of 1793 the paintpot was busy with all the streets and
places of Chauny. The Rue de Prémontré, so called because some property
there belonging to the famous abbey of the Præmonstratensians, became
the _cul-de-sac_ or 'bag-bottom of Fraternity;' the Rue des Moinets took
the name of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; while the Rue Ganton, the licensed
abode of the social evil of Chauny, received, with exquisite tact and
propriety, the name of the Roman hero Scævola! The monastery of the Holy
Cross, founded by Mary of Clèves, Duchesse d'Orléans, about the end of
the fifteenth century, was confiscated, and made the headquarters of the
Republican Commission, the street on which it stood receiving the name
of the 'Bag-bottom of Vigilance,' from the banner which was borne upon
public occasions through the streets by this commission, on which was
depicted 'the Eye of Vigilance, a symbol of that exercised by it over
the enemies of the Republic and the people.'

Another street in Chauny, the Rue des Bons Enfans, preserves the memory
of the early foundation in the little city of public schools for the
children of the poor--'les bons enfans escholiers.'

Where now stands the communal school of Chauny stood, I am told, a
public college, founded here in the earliest years of the fourteenth
century. The buildings of this college were restored under the Regency
and Louis XV. They were confiscated, and the establishment swept away by
the worthy Revolutionists of 1793, at the same time that they gave a
public ball in the Church of Notre-Dame in honour of the Tree of
Liberty, which the young girls of the place were expected to attend 'in
dresses of white, symbolic of their innocence, and adorned only with
their virtues!'

Besides this public college, Chauny, before the beneficent epoch of the
Revolution, possessed a public school in each parish of the town. The
schoolmaster, besides his regular scholars, who paid for their
education, was expected to receive and educate eight poor children
nominated by the mayor and sworn magistrates. For this he received,
under Louis XIV., in 1706, forty setiers of wheat and fifty livres in
money. It is interesting, also, to learn that the principal of the
public college, when he happened to be a layman, received a salary,
under Louis XIV., of 400 livres in addition to his dwelling-house. When
he was a priest he received only 300 livres, but he might also receive
172 livres more as chaplain of the Hôtel-Dieu. The well-to-do citizens
who sent their children to the college paid for each child forty sols a
year.

When law and order had been re-established by Napoleon in France, two
citizens of Chauny, Carra and Dumoulin, in December 1802, got permission
to re-open the college, which the Revolution had closed. It has never
recovered its former importance however, and Chauny now possesses only a
communal school, I am told, and two religious or free schools, besides
the establishments maintained by the Company of St.-Gobain. One
educational foundation of the _ancien régime_, however, still survives,
in the bursaries of the Abbé Bouzier.

Antoine Bouzier d'Estouilly, priest, abbot of Notre-Dame-lès-Ardres,
doctor in science, doctor of the Sorbonne, canon and écolâtre of the
collégiale of St.-Quentin, was a noble as well as a priest. He founded,
on October 10, 1713, a fund for endowing two poor boys with the funds
necessary to enable them, in his own words, 'to serve the Church as
ecclesiastics, or the public in civil functions.' This phraseology is
worth noting by people who are tempted to believe the nonsense current
in our day to the effect that 'almost everything we know as modern
civilisation in connection with institutions of a philanthropic sort has
taken shape within the last hundred years, and is due to the influence
of the Revolution of 1789 in France.'

Nothing can be wider of the truth than this. On the contrary, the
progress of modern civilisation in connection with such institutions was
distinctly checked and thwarted for a time in France by the shock of
this Revolution, and in other countries by the horror and indignation
which the follies and crimes of the French Revolutionists excited.

The foundation of the Abbé Bouzier was expressly intended by him to
benefit 'the poorest' of those who should compete for its advantages,
regard being had to their natural ability and aptitudes for study. Each
beneficiary was to enjoy his scholarship for eight consecutive years,
dating from his entrance into the third class. If he had got beyond the
third class when he secured his nomination the difference was to run
against him. For example, a scholar ready to enter the class of rhetoric
who received a nomination was to hold his scholarship for six years
only; if he was ready to enter upon the study of theology, law or
medicine, for three years only; after the expiration of which another
must be appointed to enjoy it. Provisions were also made to secure the
good conduct of the beneficiaries. How this excellent foundation escaped
the cupidity of the Revolutionists is not clear.

From June, 1793, to March, 1795, the _Société Populaire_ of Chauny,
organised by emissaries from Paris, ruled the town absolutely. The
official authorities of the city and of the district went in abject
terror of them; for a denunciation sent to the headquarters in Paris by
this society was like a report sent thither from an army in the field by
one of the legislative spies who accompanied the generals of the
Republic, and swaggered about in the camps wearing the mountebank
costumes which may be studied with amusement and advantage in the museum
of the Revolution established this year in the Pavillon de Flore at
Paris. The members of this _Société Populaire_ openly pillaged the
churches and convents, made domiciliary visits, sold certificates of
'civism,' and dictated the most extraordinary measures of confiscation
and outrage. Their loudest leader was a certain Pierre Gogois, who used
to wind up their meeting by singing songs of his own composition,
addressed to the 'crowned brigands who were trying to re-establish the
abominable monarchy with the help of their anthropophagous hordes!'
These worthies abolished the school kept by the 'Daughters of the
Cross,' confiscated their property, and set up their own headquarters in
the convent.

In some way the Bouzier fund escaped their clutches, and it has been so
well managed that in 1871 the income was found large enough to warrant
the managers in establishing three scholarships instead of two.

The good example of the Abbé has been followed in our own times by a
Christian lady, Madame Lacroix of Sinceny. In memory of her son, a
Councillor-General of the Aisne, who was universally esteemed throughout
the department, and who died at the early age of thirty-five, this lady
founded, a few years ago in perpetuity, eight prizes, to be annually
competed for by the pupils of all the communal schools of the canton of
Chauny, and by the pupils of the schools established here by the Company
of St.-Gobain, as well as four full scholarships at the School of Arts
and Industries in Châlons-sur-Marne.

The prizes are to be competed for in applied geometry, in linear and
ornamental drawing, as well as in all the obligatory studies of the
schools concerned. The competitors for the four Châlons scholarships
must be the sons of workmen, domestic servants, labourers, or persons
employed in agriculture or in manufactures within the canton of Chauny,
whose incomes or earnings do not amount to 2,000 francs a year.

In 1874 the Municipal Council of Chauny founded six purses of 450 francs
a year, each to be competed for by candidates wishing to fit themselves
to compete for the Lacroix scholarships, the successful candidates being
left at liberty to enter any one of the free schools in Chauny. As
Madame Lacroix has made the curates of the churches of Notre-Dame and
St.-Martin _ex-officio_ members of the council of her fund, it is to be
presumed that the Government at Paris will find some way of striking
these clergymen out of the list, as it has already struck all ministers
of religion out of the local committees of supervision in educational
matters throughout France, for a French Republic is nothing if not
logical.

My likening of Chauny to a French Rotterdam or Amsterdam may be excused
when I say that in the middle of the last century the Mayor of Chauny
assured the Intendant of Soissons that the municipality had to keep up
no fewer than twenty-seven bridges. What with the Oise and its
affluents, and the many watercourses created about the place, either
to drain the marsh lands or to facilitate navigation, Chauny really is
an aquatic little capital like Annecy in Savoy. Naturally its citizens
set a certain value on their fishing rights, and it may edify those who
obstinately insist on regarding the feudal ages as ages of brute force,
to know that so early as in 1175 the citizens of Chauny, by the
lieutenant of the bailliage, Messire Regnault Doucet, asserted and
successfully maintained before the royal representatives their right to
fish in all the waters round about their town in all lawful ways against
the pretensions of no less a personage than the Duchesse d'Orléans. In
1540 this right was confirmed to them anew, and it was then shown that
at an inquest held in 1475 the witnesses had testified that from time
whereof the memory of man ran not to the contrary no citizen of Chauny
had ever been molested in the exercise of his right to fish in the
waters of Chauny either on behalf of the Duc d'Orléans or on behalf of
the King. The local archives, which are singularly rich and
well-preserved, are full of instances like this, which show that the
general current of life in this corner of France, long before the
Revolution, was determined neither by the caprices of the great, nor by
the passions of the mob, but by systematic considerations of law and of
tradition, until for the confusion of France, and more or less of the
civilised world, the natural evolution and development of law and order
were suddenly and insanely interrupted through the inconceivable
weakness of a most amiable and useless king, by the 'wild asses' of
Mirabeau, acting in 1789 under the pressure of what so friendly an
eyewitness of their conduct as Gouverneur Morris calls the 'abominable'
populace of Paris.

So complete was the civilisation of this region long before the
Revolution of 1789, that the mayor, the magistrates, and the citizens of
Chauny, early in the seventeenth century, succeeded in breaking down and
ruining an Italian gentleman, Cesare de Rusticis, who, thanks to
Concini, had secured a royal patent for canalising the Oise from La Fère
to Chauny. They got a notable advocate, M. Louis Vrevin, to draw up a
protest against the enterprise in the most florid and elaborate fashion
of the _Plaideurs_ of Racine, and by dint of bombarding the King's
Council with the names of Julius Cæsar, Pompey, Xerxes, Sesostris,
Cleopatra, Cicero, Tertullian, and others, got, in 1625, what we in
America now call an 'injunction,' putting a stop to the works begun by
this foreigner, who 'had come into France to fix the eye of curiosity
upon the river Oyse and to disturb it.' And a century later I find an
operation carried out here for converting a not very satisfactory
private investment into cash at the expense of the State which really
would not discredit the most ingenious American 'railway king' of our
own times. This also concerned a canal, the canal which unites the Oise
with the Somme. This waterway became the property in 1728 of a
celebrated millionaire of that time, Antoine de Crozat, and after his
death fell, in the division of his estates, to the share of his
granddaughter, the Duchesse de Choiseul. It was not very profitable, and
it represented a capital which ought to have yielded 2,200,000 livres a
year. So a certain M. Laurent, who had built for the Duc de Choiseul his
magnificent Château de Chanteloup, near Amboise (pulled down fifty years
ago by Chaptal, the first great producer of beetroot sugar in France),
undertook to get the canal turned into money. The plate-glass works of
St.-Gobain were then under the direction of M. Deslandes, the clever
nominee of Mme. Geoffrin. M. Laurent tried to persuade M. Deslandes to
employ Picard coal (which could be brought by the canal) instead of wood
in the furnaces at St.-Gobain. M. Deslandes made the experiment, but
soon gave it up, as the coal smoke injured the plate-glass. He
consented, however, to take four boatloads of the Picard coal and use it
in the forges connected with the works. This was enough for M. Laurent,
who went to Paris with an invoice of the four boatloads of coal, laid it
before the Council with an elaborate paper setting forth the value to
the canal of a traffic necessary to carry on the manufacture of the
famous plate glass at St.-Gobain, and got the Council finally to
purchase the Duchesse's canal on his own terms. I really do not see what
M. Laurent had to learn either from the 'Contrat Social' of Rousseau or
even from the American Declaration of Independence! If he had lived now
he would have been a sharp competitor with a countryman of mine, of whom
I am told in Chauny that he came here only a few years ago, inspected
the chemical works, looked into the composition of certain heaps of
rubbish thrown aside even by the sagacious managers of these works, and
setting up near one of the canals a genuine wooden American shed, so
applied to what he found in this rubbish certain processes for the
vulcanisation of indiarubber as to produce at very low cost certain
articles for which a great and increasing demand exists, and thus
founded a considerable industry here. He has since turned his
establishment over, I am told, to a company at a great profit to
himself, and gone back 'to the Rocky Mountains.' I am sorry for this,
for I should have been glad to 'interview' him!




CHAPTER IX

IN THE AISNE--_continued_


  LAON

It would be hard to find in France, or out of France, on a pleasant
summer's day, a more charming drive than the highway which leads from
Chauny, with its great modern industries and its lively, bustling
people, to the little feudal town of Coucy-le-Château, perched upon its
lofty hill and dominated by one of the grandest, if not, indeed, the
grandest, of feudal fortress-homes.

I do not know that Gargantua would now find the people of Chauny as
entertaining as Rabelais tells us they were in his time. Then he 'amused
himself much with the boatmen, and above all with those of Chauny in
Picardy--wonderful chatterboxes, and great at bandying chaff on the
subject of green monkeys.' There is no lack of boatmen now at Chauny,
though the railway has taken away much of their living; but the glory of
the green monkeys, I fear, has departed. In the days of Gargantua, the
Chaunois were as famous as the Savoyards now are, for wandering over
France with trained monkeys and trained dogs. On October 1 in each year,
on the feast of St. Rémy, every one of these peripatetic citizens was
expected to appear in his native town, there to join in a procession
which marched from what is now known as the Port Royal to the Bailliage,
bearing to the lieutenant-general of the king a traditional present in
the form of a huge pasty, decorated with eggs and chestnuts, and
surmounted by a pastry tower.

To the confection of this pasty the famous mills of Chauny, reputed the
best in France, were bound