France and the Republic Part 33

M. Floquet, imprisoned in 1871 for complicity with the Commune, was made Prefect of the Seine in 1882 by the men who have since made M. Carnot President of the Republic. As President of the Chamber, M. Floquet, under the existing regime in France, is now the superior of M. Carnot.

Can there be any mistake as to the meaning of this? In 1882, as Prefect of the Seine, M. Floquet maintained the closest relations with the Munic.i.p.al Council of Paris. M. Ferry's bill making primary education obligatory, and 'laicizing' that education, finally became law on July 26, 1881. The war against G.o.d in the schools began at once vigorously, and nowhere more vigorously than in Paris. M. Paul Bert had insisted, in his Report of 1879, upon the importance of protecting teachers who were scientific and philosophical Atheists against the pangs their consciences would suffer were they obliged to read or to hear recited pa.s.sages from 'what is called Sacred History, that is to say, a mixture of positive history, with legends which have no value except in the eyes of believers.' In this spirit of the peddler who tried to 'scrub out the blood-stains' at Holyrood the law of 1881 was conceived. How it was executed we learn from M. Zevort, a distinguished inspector of the Academy of Paris, and by no means a Catholic. In some places the authorities ordered the words 'Love G.o.d, respect your parents,' to be effaced from the school-house walls. In others, children were compelled to give up the Catechisms which they had brought with them to school, intending to go on after school hours to the parish church. In this same year M. Fournier stated in the Senate that persons appointed by the Minister of Public Instruction to distribute prizes in the schools had made speeches to the children in which they spoke of all religion as mere superst.i.tion. He cited one such orator as contrasting 'scientific education, the only true education, which gives man the certainty of his own value and urges him onward to progress and to the Light,' with 'religious education which fatally plunges him into a murky night, and an abyss of deadly superst.i.tions.' Another luminary of the State exclaimed in a burst of eloquence, 'Young citizenesses and young citizens! We have been accused of banishing G.o.d from the schools! It is an error! Nothing can be driven out which does not exist. Now G.o.d does not exist. What we have suppressed is only a set of emblems!'

These emblems were the religious inscriptions, and the crucifixes, taken out of the school-houses. Of these emblems the Prefect of the Seine, in 1882, carelessly observed in the course of an enquiry before the Senate, that the removal of them was 'only a question of school furniture!' And the Munic.i.p.al Council of Paris, with which M. Floquet in 1882 so cordially co-operated, formally adopted resolutions calling for the complete suppression in all the primary schools 'of all theological instruction whatsoever.' 'No one,' said one councillor, M. Cattiaux, with much solemnity, 'can prove the existence of G.o.d, and our teachers must not be compelled to affirm the existence of an imaginary being.'

With M. Floquet as President of the Chamber, M. Carnot and his Ministers are at the mercy not of the Radicals only, but of the Radical allies of the Commune. The French Monarchists to-day are fighting out the battle of religion and of civilization for every country in Christendom.

Though the Calvados was the chosen home of M. Guizot, it was not his birthplace. Like M. Thiers, whom he so little resembled in other particulars, M. Guizot was a son of the South. He was born at Nimes, in the Gard, a city rather Republican than Royalist by its traditions, even under the old Monarchy. His father was an advocate, and by the charter of Nimes, which organized in 1476 the 'consular' government of the city, it was provided that the first consul of Nimes should always be taken from among 'the advocates graduated and versed in the law,' the second consulate only being left open to 'citizens, merchants, and graduated physicians.'

As the fifteenth century is commonly admitted to have been a 'feudal'

century, this provision attests the power of the robe as against the sword in a very interesting way, and at an interesting point in French history. The local n.o.bility felt the slight put upon them very strongly, and made great efforts to have the system changed. These efforts were not successful till the end of the sixteenth century. In 1588 the Duc de Montmorency, Governor of Languedoc, issued a decree convoking the Council-General to consider the subject, and this a.s.sembly, after a stormy session, decided that 'the n.o.blemen and gentlemen of the province should hold the first consulate alternately with the advocates.' The first n.o.bleman of Languedoc who profited by this decision was Louis de Montcalm, an ancestor of the ill.u.s.trious defender of Quebec. He became first consul of Nimes in 1589, the year after the defeat of the great Spanish Armada against England. He was a Huguenot, and Nimes in the days of the great Religious Wars had become a Protestant stronghold after its capture by the Huguenots on November 15, 1569. The Huguenot de Calviere, Baron de St.-Cosme, who took a leading part in that military adventure, was made Governor of Nimes and a gentleman of the King's bedchamber by Henry of Navarre.

As a Protestant and as an advocate, the father of M. Guizot naturally inclined to the Republican theory of Government in 1789. He very soon and as naturally opened his eyes to the abominations of the Republican practice, and in due course came to the guillotine under the Terror. To the day of her death his widow wore the deepest mourning for him, and his son, like the son of the murdered Victor Charles de Broglie, honoured his memory by an inflexible loyalty to the principles of justice and of liberty for which his father had died.

I was not surprised, therefore, to find M. Guillaume Guizot, the Protestant son of the great Protestant statesman, at his pleasant rural home near Uzes as earnest and active in the summer of 1889 in organizing the monarchical party for the Legislative elections, as the staunchest Catholics of the Morbihan or of Champagne. Uzes, which gives a ducal t.i.tle to the family of Crussol, is a picturesque and interesting town, and its electoral district made a gallant stand for liberty and order in the elections. It gave nearly 9,000 Monarchist against about 11,000 Republican votes, and the returns of the whole Department of the Gard, when compared with those of 1885, show a marked change to the disadvantage of the powers that be. In the first place the total of the votes polled fell off more than 10 per cent. in 1889 from the total in 1885. In 1885, 110,786 were polled. In 1889, 97,828. In the next place the Republican votes in the whole department fell off in 1889 nearly 20 per cent. from the Republican total in 1885, or from 58,328 to 46,323.

In the third place the Republican majority over the Monarchists fell off more than 60 per cent. from the majority in 1885, or from 5,910 to 2,062. In the fourth place the Monarchists in the first district of Nimes had a majority of more than 1,500 votes over the Government Republicans. And in the fifth place the Republicans, who in 1885 secured the whole delegation of six members from the Gard, in 1889 lost the seat for the second district of Alais, which the Monarchists carried by a majority of 1,305 votes over the combined strength of the Government Republicans and the Boulangist Revisionists. This district is a coal and iron-mining as well as a silk-growing district. It is fall of workmen, and it has been a point of attack for the Socialist and subversive leaders in France for many years past. All the traditions of Alais itself are strongly Protestant. The fortifications of the town were destroyed by Louis XIV. at the end of the seventeenth century, and at no great distance is the Tour du Bellot, the lonely spot which witnessed one of the most desperate conflicts between Cavalier and the royal troops. The slaughter of the Camisards, shut up in their burning tower, is a tale of horror still in the countryside. At Nimes the memories of the long and merciless strife between the Catholics and the Protestants of Southern France are fresher still and more intense. M. Guillaume Guizot well remembers the bitterness of the pa.s.sions roused at Nimes by the local struggles between the 'two Religions' which followed the Restoration. His father was one day reasoning on the subject with a Protestant citizen of Nimes, who suddenly pointed to a man pa.s.sing on the other side of the street, and said: 'That man had a hand in the killing of my father here in the streets of Nimes. How can you ask me to forget that?'

The Republicans of the Third Republic, bent on coercing France into a 'moral unity' of Atheism, are fast making both Catholics and Protestants forget such things in the imminence of a new and common peril to the liberties and the rights of both. The two daughters of M. Guizot, as is well known, married two brothers, the heirs and representatives of the great Protestant and Republican family of De Witt. One of these brothers, M. Conrad de Witt, just re-elected a deputy for the Calvados, was my host at Val Richer. The other, M. Cornelis de Witt, the namesake of the statesman for whom his ill.u.s.trious brother the Grand Pensionary of Holland sacrificed his own life in a vain effort to save him from the brutal fury of an ignorant and frantic mult.i.tude at the Hague, has just been taken, in the full force of his energies and his great ability, from the love of his friends and from the cause of liberty in France. As a deputy and a member of the Government he took an active part in the re-establishment of the finances and the public organisation of France after the disasters of 1870-71. As a director of the great mines at Auzin, and as Vice-President of the Paris, Lyons, and Mediterranean Railway Company, he was in close and constant touch with the working cla.s.ses of France and with the great material interests of a country which he loved as his ancestors loved Holland. This is not the place in which to speak of the personal gifts and graces which will keep the name of M. Cornelis de Witt green in the memory of all who knew him. But of his great qualities as a citizen, and of the judgment absolutely unwarped by pa.s.sion or by prejudice which gave weight to all his political convictions, it is the place to speak. After a fair and serious experiment, in which he took his part loyally, at founding in France the 'Conservative Republic' of M. Thiers, he thought that outlook for the future completely and hopelessly closed; and as it was neither in the traditions of Netherlandish liberty nor in his own virile and courageous temper to acquiesce in the domination of a political oligarchy ready, like Carrier and the Jacobins of 1792, to 'make France one vast cemetery rather than not regenerate it after their own minds!'

M. Cornelis de Witt looked about him calmly for a way of escape.

This way he found where the sagacious Netherlanders of the seventeenth century found it after the hard-won liberties of Holland had been prostrated by the mad revolt of a misled mult.i.tude against the Government of the Grand Pensionary, who had held his own against Cromwell and against Louis XIV., made Holland the first naval power of the world, and scared London with the thunder of the Dutch cannon in the Thames. Nothing but the restoration of the hereditary principle in the person of William of Orange saved Amsterdam and Rotterdam from falling at the end of the seventeenth century, as they fell at the end of the eighteenth, under the dominion of an invader. When the hereditary principle was again abandoned after the death of William of Orange, the domestic peace as well as the national prestige of Holland vanished with it, and though the Dutch people in the middle of the eighteenth century insisted upon seeing it for a time restored, the power of the Dutch Executive towards the end of the century was so much hampered and weakened by the local jealousies of the provinces, that in the Convention which framed the Const.i.tution of the United States, Mr.

Butler, who had travelled much in the Low Countries, successfully enforced the necessity of making the American Executive monarchical by a vivid description of the evils inflicted upon Holland by her departures from that principle. We took warning as to the perils of the Union from the example of the Low Countries, and as to the importance of the Executive from the example of Great Britain. There were many Americans indeed in 1788, men of worth and of weight both in private and in public affairs, who rather than accept Edmund Randolph's plan of confiding the Executive authority to a triumvirate, would have given their adhesion to the seriously mooted project of making the American Executive absolutely hereditary, and inviting the Prince-Bishop of Osnaburg to accept the office.

The convictions of M. Cornelis de Witt are represented now with equal energy and determination in Normandy by his brother, M. Conrad de Witt, and by his son, M. Pierre de Witt, just elected a Councillor-General of the Calvados, and in Languedoc by his brother-in-law, M. Guillaume Guizot, and by his son, M. Cornelis Henri de Witt.

The home of M. Cornelis Henri de Witt, near Tonneins, in the Lot-et-Garonne, stands in the heart of a land of fruits and vines. From the terrace of his chateau of Peyreguilhot, the eye ranges over a fine expanse of the valley of the Garonne, which at no great distance from Tonneins mingles with the Lot beneath the promontory of Nicole. The landscape is rich in colour. Great fields of tobacco alternate with extensive orchards. It is a land to be seen in the season of blossoms.

The world-famed prunes of Bordeaux come mainly from about Agen, and the pleasant little commune of Nicole probably draws a much larger tribute to-day from London, in exchange for its precocious apricots, than it ever paid to London when the Plantagenet eaglets were rending the eagle of Winchester. The old traditions of Guienne seem to be much less vivid than those of Normandy or Brittany. I have heard Bretons speak of the d.u.c.h.ess Anne as the Scotch Jacobites still speak of the Stuarts. But though Coeur de Lion is still a popular hero in the land of Bertrand de Born, there is nothing there like the Provencal feeling in Provence.

At St. Remy, the beautiful birthplace of Nostradamus, a lively waiter in the excellent hotel of the 'Cheval Blanc,' taking me for a Frenchman of the north, contrived very skilfully to let me know that the Provencals do not hold themselves responsible for the failure of Northern France to repulse the Germans. 'If the Comte de Paris had not got the better long ago of the Comte de Provence,' he informed me, 'France would have been Provencal and not Provence French, and then things would have gone differently altogether.' But all Languedoc is as proud of its language as Wales. A youth who took me at Agen to see the shop and house of the 'barber-bard' was clearly of the opinion that the poetry of Lamartine and Victor Hugo would have been as fine as the poetry of Jasmin had they been so fortunate as to use his mother-tongue. 'The French language was a kind of Gallic patois mixed with German, while the true langue d'Oc, as I must know, was the language of the Romans.' This same philologist took me also to the little valley of 'Verona,' where he showed me not only a small vineyard, the property of Jasmin, but the house, the fountain, and the huge stone chair of Scaliger, 'a great philosopher descended from Julius Caesar.' Joseph Scaliger, I believe, was really born in this house, which was given to his ill.u.s.trious father by the Bishop of Agen; and Joseph with his own eyes saw some three hundred Huguenots burnt alive in Agen on the great Place du Gravier, where now the annual fairs of Agen are held under the stately elms.

The lands of the Lot-et-Garonne are full of memories of the English wars, of the Albigensian crusade, of the long duel between the Church and the Calvinists. Tonneins, once a curious 'double city' of the middle ages, was destroyed in the seventeenth century by Louis XIII.

for its fidelity to the Huguenot cause. Nerac, where Jeanne d'Albret and the two Margots held their gay and gallant courts, and Henry of Navarre established his headquarters during 'the Lovers' War,' suffered as severely for the like cause under Louis XIV. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes sent its most industrious inhabitants into exile, not a few of them crossing the Atlantic to join the Huguenot colonies in New York and in the Carolinas. 'But the Revolution of 1789 did Nerac more harm,' said an intelligent tradesman of the picturesque little city to me, 'than the Revocation. The Revocation drove away many honest people from Nerac, but the Revolution brought here a great many rogues.' The country around Nerac is extremely fertile, and great prizes were to be picked up here during the decade of proscription and confiscation. The Garenne, one of the loveliest public parks in France, in which a beautiful fountain sparkles and murmurs beneath two lofty elms planted by Henry of Navarre and Marguerite de Valois, was actually bought during the First Consulate by the city for a little over five thousand francs, or two hundred pounds sterling. The war of 1791 against 'privileges' soon became in Nerac, as elsewhere in France, a war against property. The immediate effect of this was not, what we are constantly told it was, to increase the wealth of France by 'redistributing' it amongst the active and industrious cla.s.ses. It was, on the contrary, to diminish the wealth of France by lowering the real value of property. This is clearly shown by the extraordinary pains which Napoleon took to enforce respect for the rights of property as soon as he grasped the supreme power in the State.

But one comes everywhere upon striking local proofs of it. At Najac in the Department of the Aveyron, for example, the obliging hotel-keeper will give you the key of one of the most magnificent ruined castles in Southern France, which, with its grand donjon, and all the ma.s.sive circle of its walls and ramparts, was seized and sold, during the Terror, for _twelve francs_. The purchaser made a deal of money by converting the castle into a quarry, and when law and order were restored, he gladly parted with his very dubious t.i.tle for the highly respectable advance on his investment of 1,500 francs. As a piece of successful 'gerrymandering' the Republican treatment of this Department of the Aveyron, by the way, in the elections of 1889, is worth mentioning. In 1885, under the _scrutin de liste_, the Aveyron was ent.i.tled to six deputies. It elected a solid Conservative representation. In 1889, under the _scrutin d'arrondiss.e.m.e.nt_, the Government carved out seven seats for the Aveyron, and the electoral districts were so ingeniously framed as to secure two out of these seven seats for the Republicans--though the total of the votes cast in the department showed a clear majority for the Monarchists of 5,582!

We had a banquet of Mayors while I was at Peyreguilhot; not such a Belshazzar's feast as M. Constans gave at Paris to the thirteen thousand, but a simple and interesting gathering of about a dozen intelligent and active elective magistrates. Under a recent law all Mayors, except in Paris, are now chosen by the Councils, but the Government can revoke their commissions. Our guests at Peyreguilhot were all shrewd, quiet, active men of the country. 'We shall be beaten in September,' said one of them to me, 'because the Government employs men enough to beat us. Moreover, our farmers say, "Why vote at all, for the Mayors and the Prefect throw our votes out and cheat us?" Then, too, we must have a man to vote for before we can make them move. They will not vote for the Monarchy as a principle. But give them a man who touches their imaginations and they will make him a Monarch.' They voted for Louis Napoleon as soon as they saw him take the a.s.sembly resolutely by the throat. They would have voted, overwhelmingly, for Boulanger on September 22 had he suddenly reappeared in Paris, demanding a revision of the verdict of the High Court.

This is true, I think, not of the Lot-et-Garonne alone, but of all France. It has been signally ill.u.s.trated since the elections of 1889 by what Stendhal would have called the rapid 'crystallization' of public sympathy around the young Duc d'Orleans when he suddenly appeared in Paris. The Government was completely bewildered and demoralized by this 'bolt out of the blue.' Instead of quietly reconducting the prince to the frontier with a reprimand for his inconsiderate and unconventional patriotism, it stupidly locked him up in a prison haunted by legends disgraceful to the Republic, proceeded against him with clumsy vehemence, gave him time to show himself to the French people, in the words of the Duc d'Aumale, as a '_pur sang_,' a straightforward, dashing young French prince demanding the right of performing his military duty to the State, had him condemned, tardily resolved to pardon him, and wound up finally by sending him to Clairvaux to placate the criminal bullies of the Commune!

What has been the result? It cannot be more exactly stated than in the words of the official organ of the Russian Empire at Brussels, _Le Nord_, a journal certainly not predisposed in favour of the House of Orleans by the success of the Orleanist Prince Ferdinand in Bulgaria.

'The appearance of this young exile,' said _Le Nord_, 'on the soil of France, not as a pretender or with political ideas, but simply as a Frenchman coming to establish his moral rights as a citizen by claiming to be allowed to perform his civic duties, and this with a rare combination of youthful dash, irreproachable modesty, and skilful self-possession was admirably fitted to awaken, and it has awakened, the sympathy of all who are politically disinterested.'

This is strong language coming from the only great power in the world to which France can look as a possible ally in the present condition of Europe. It was emphasised by the ablest and most active of the French Imperialists, M. Paul de Ca.s.sagnac. 'To keep this young prince in prison is impossible. To do so would make him King of France within three years. To let him go, after keeping him for a week, is no longer a generous and magnanimous act. It is simply obeying the vigorous kick administered by the masters of the Government, the French people, who have been saying of the Orleans princes, "they won't move," and who now see a young Duc d'Orleans move forward with a gay virility which has a flavour of Henri IV.! If the young Duc d'Orleans is as intelligent as I am told, and believe that he is, he wouldn't change places with Carnot to-day!'

Every 'ministerial crisis' which weakens the Government will strengthen the prestige acquired for the Monarchy by the young duke. He has won the women by his pluck, the fathers of families by his deference to the Comte de Paris, the Catholics by asking for a chaplain at Clairvaux, and the _chauvins_ by his military ardour.

A friend of mine showed me in Paris ten days after the arrest of the prince a letter from Normandy, in which the writer said, 'Millions of francs would not have done what has been done by this simple act to revive and invigorate the monarchical party throughout this whole region.... _Le pet.i.t conscrit_ will be the prince of the people from this day forth. The gray-beards among the peasants shake their heads and say, "All the same, it is not such a nice thing, this conscription, and since he was out of it why run into it?" But the women reply, "Since our lads have to go in, it is plucky of the Comte de Paris to put his son in too!"'

To make a handsome young prince a martyr of patriotism in the eyes of the women and the conscripts of France, is a highly original way of blocking the progress of his father to the throne!

The Mayors at Peyreguilhot were all of one mind as to the fiscal conduct of the Republican Government. It was 'making life impossible for the agriculturists of all categories. The tax on the revenue of the land in the Lot-et-Garonne was levied still on a _cadastre_ drawn up in 1837; so that lands now lying idle were taxed as they were taxed fifty years ago when covered with vines. Thanks to this system, forty-two departments in France pay more than their due proportion of this tax, and the others less than their due proportion. The Aude, which is a very rich department, producing, if you take good and bad years together, more than 20,000,000 francs of wine alone every year, pays a million of francs less, and the Lot-et-Garonne nearly a quarter of a million more, than its due share of this tax.'

M. de Witt confirmed these statements. The inequalities in national taxation, he tells me, are one of the crying grievances of France under the existing regime. Corsica, for example, pays only ninety-five centimes _per cent._ of revenue tax, while the Correze pays seven francs ninety cents, and there is one commune in the Gironde which actually pays ninety francs per cent. Besides the people pay the door and window tax, the furniture tax, the _prestations en nature_, the permanent personal tax, and the octrois and the _centimes additionnels_ levied for educational and other purposes.

The taxes levied as _centimes additionnels_ for the Departments of France increased from 1878 to 1886 by 24,692,266 francs, and the taxes levied as _centimes additionnels_ for the Communes (exclusive of Paris) by 34,246,647 francs, while from 1878 to 1885 the total of the debts of the Communes increased at the rate of 55,000,000 francs a year! The departmental loans during the same period increased no less than 95 per cent., or from 128,417,499 francs in 1876 to 249,188,700 francs in 1886.

Since the new Chamber met the air has been full of rumours of new loans, and of modifications of taxation. These modifications may ease the pressure on one point, but only by increasing it upon another point. No financier in France pretends to put the annual burden borne by the French people at much less than double the annual taxation of Great Britain. M. Meline, a Republican of the Republicans, admitted before the Chamber of Deputies on February 10, 1885, that the people of France were more heavily taxed at that time 'than those of any other country in the world.' He put the taxation of England at 57 francs a head, of the United States at 59 francs a head, of Germany at 44 francs a head, and of France at 104 francs a head.

And to-day the French people are more heavily taxed than they were in 1885. The mere general expenses of collecting the revenue of France are set down in the Budget for 1890 at 107,343,926 francs, or, in round numbers, 4,293,745_l._; divided as follows. Direct and a.s.similated land taxes, 19,838,175 francs; registrations, domains, and stamps, 19,143,950; customs, 31,077,301; indirect taxes, 37,284,500 francs.

M. de Witt represents the Canton of Castel Moron in the Council-General of the Lot-et-Garonne, and he is Mayor of the Commune of Laparade. At the Legislative elections of last year, he contested the representation of the Nerac district with M. Fallieres, the Minister of Public Instruction, and was defeated, receiving 6,484 votes against 8,967 given to the Minister. M. Fallieres 'on the stump,' speaking with the authority of a Minister of 'Public Instruction,' actually a.s.sured the electors that to vote for M. de Witt was to vote to 're-establish seignorial rights, and to bring on a German or _Cossack_ invasion!' One result of this was, that M. de Witt was burned in effigy near Tonneins after the election!

After the election of M. de Witt as Mayor of Laparade, he was accused before the tribunal at Marmande of 'corrupting' the electors of the commune. The accusation rested on 'conversations,' but the tribunal sentenced M. de Witt to a fine of a thousand francs, and several of his electors to smaller fines. They all appealed to the Court at Agen, where the case was pleaded by M. Piou, deputy for the Haute Garonne and one of the ablest barristers in Southern France.

It throws an interesting light on the present condition of political life in France, that M. de Witt, though the sentence of the tribunal at Marmande was not sustained, had eventually to pay a fine of 500 francs on the ground that he had been guilty of 'excessive charity' to an old man of 80, named Sauvean, who had long been a pensioner of his family!

The wonder is that his commission as Mayor by the choice of his fellow-citizens was not revoked by the Ministry at Paris. Under the Third Republic this is no uncommon thing.

Early in the year 1889, M. Duboscq, Mayor of the commune of Labrit in the Landes, one of the many out-of-the way and charming places which in that part of France are a.s.sociated with the memory of Henri IV., gave a dinner to M. Lambert de Ste.-Croix, the distinguished Monarchist leader, who died not long ago. For this offence--M. Lambert de Ste.-Croix having just then exasperated the Republicans beyond measure by a vigorous speech made at Dax on the Adour--M. Duboscq was actually suspended from his office by order of M. Floquet, now the President of the Chamber of Deputies! In reply to a question on the subject put by a deputy, M.

Lamarzelle, M. Floquet calmly replied that lie had suspended M. Duboscq because, 'being a functionary of the Government, he had departed from the reserve proper in his position by inviting an opponent of the Government to dinner!' The Mayors of these communes, be it observed, are elected by the people, not appointed by the Government! So that under the practice of the French Republic, as represented by the present President of the Chamber, a Radical Mayor of Newcastle who should ask Mr. Gladstone to dinner ought to be 'suspended' at once by Lord Salisbury! This is munic.i.p.al liberty in France under the Third Republic.

As the Legislative elections are conducted under the supervision of the Mayors, the object of such performances as these is obvious enough. At the same time with M. Duboscq, M. Davezac de Moran, Mayor of Siest near Dax, was also suspended by M. Floquet for the offence of allowing the meeting of the Monarchical Committees, at which M. Lambert de Ste.-Croix made his speech, to be held in his own house at Dax! 'If you think,'

said M. Lamarzelle to the Minister, 'to frighten us with all this, you are mistaken. At your age Robespierre had got himself guillotined!'

During the Legislative elections of 1889 'the school-teachers, the postmen, the gendarmes, the highway supervisors and the labourers, were ordered to vote against the Monarchist candidates.' M. Delafosse, elected in the Calvados, publicly stated this in the _Matin_, and without contradiction. During the same elections the cures were officially forbidden to advise their people to vote for 'friends of religion,' and those who did so advise were fined after the election to the number of 300!

M. Cornelis Henri de Witt is one of the most active and indefatigable promoters of what are known as the 'Conferences du Sud-Ouest.' These are meetings of the Monarchists organised on a systematic plan, which take place at brief intervals throughout the great Departments of South-Western France under the superintendence of a society of which M.

Princeteau, a very influential and intelligent citizen of Bordeaux, is the President. M. Princeteau, like M. de Witt, is not only an indefatigable organiser, but an extremely popular and effective orator; and it is a curious proof of the efficiency of the Conservative machinery in South-Western France, that at the Legislative elections of 1889 the Radicals and the Socialists completely disappeared as parties from the contest in the Gironde. Thanks to the _scrutin d'arrondiss.e.m.e.nt_, several seats from that department which ought to have gone to the Monarchists were kept by the Government; but upon the total poll the Monarchists and Revisionists show 84,376 votes against 83,108 given to the Government Republicans. Under the _scrutin de liste_ the eleven seats for the Gironde would pretty plainly have gone in 1889 to the Monarchists. In 1885 M. Cazauvielle, the leading Republican deputy, received 89,153 votes, or 6,000 more than the Republican total in 1889. As in 1889 the total poll amounted to 167,484 votes, and in 1885 to 162,286, it is clear that the Republican strength fell off, and that the Monarchist strength increased in the Gironde between 1885 and 1889.

M. Princeteau told me that on July 14 he gave a fete in his grounds near Bordeaux to more than five thousand working people. While the fete was going on, a procession of Republicans with bands of music, bent on celebrating the fete of the Bastille, pa.s.sed the grounds more than once with the obvious intent of drawing away some of his guests. This they completely failed to do. If the 'fete of the Bastille' was celebrated at Bordeaux as it was at Nimes, this says as much for the good taste as for the sound politics of the Bordeaux workmen. At Nimes on July 22, more than a week after the 'anniversary,' I found the city streets made perilous during the day and life made intolerable at night by such a clamour of chorus singers and such a clatter of fireworks as I had not supposed it possible could be got up beyond the domain of our own 'glorious and immortal' American Fourth of July. Several accidents were caused by 'serpents' and other fireworks, and when I asked a staid and sober citizen of this old Protestant capital why the law permitted such performances, he quietly answered: 'The law does not permit them. The authorities have formally forbidden them, but the authorities are elective, and they are more anxious to keep their places than to keep the peace.' To my question whether the extreme Radicals were very strong in Nimes, he replied that nearly a fourth of the Republicans of Nimes are avowed Socialists, mostly of the Anti-Boulangist Anti-Possibilist type. One of their candidates for a legislative seat announced his intention, if elected, to give some person, to be designated by his const.i.tuents, an order for one half of his legislative salary, to be drawn regularly, and applied 'by his committee to political purposes.'

His political programme included the formal abolition of the Presidency, annual legislative elections, the nationalisation of the soil of France, the abolition of the regular army, the socialisation of all the means of production, gratuitous and obligatory education on the same lines for all the children of France, and through all the degrees of education, and the suppression of the right to bequeath or to inherit property of any kind,' On the latter point a rather intelligent Socialist with whom I made acquaintance while I was visiting the fine Roman Amphitheatre at Nimes, and whom I took to be a skilled mechanic, was very explicit. He thought property a 'privilege' and therefore inconsistent with equality.

He spoke in an oracular fashion, and he probably belonged to the cla.s.s known among French workmen, not as '_sublimes_,' but as _'les fils de Dieu_.' 'Of what use,' he said, 'is it to abolish hereditary t.i.tles if you allow a man of one generation to give his son in the next generation the more serious advantage over his fellow of a property which he has done nothing and could do nothing to create?' I asked him if he agreed with St.-Just that 'opulence is an infamy.' He replied very seriously: 'Yes, I think if St.-Just said that he said the truth. Certainly I do not say that every rich man is infamous. That is another matter. But it is infamous that in a land of equality one man should have the means to give himself pleasures and execute achievements beyond his fellow-citizens.' He told me that he lived in Alais, where he said the Socialists of his type were much stronger than in Nimes. The Legislative elections show that lie was right as to this. The Socialists carried the first division of Alais, throwing 7,205 votes against 2,425 Radicals and 4,218 Government Republicans. For the Government Republicans my friend of the Amphitheatre could find no words of contempt strong enough.

'They are all whitewashed Wilsons,' he said, and then he dilated with much eloquence on the case of a certain M. Hude,'a great friend of Rochefort' he scornfully exclaimed, 'who is a great friend of Boulanger.

_Ah! voila du propre!_ he is a wine-merchant, of course he is fond of the _pots-de-vin'_(the French phrase for bribes taken to promote jobs), 'and thus, when the chemical officers go to verify the quality of his wines, he calls in the Prefect of Police to prevent it, because he is a deputy!' He was particularly bitter, too, on the conversion by the Republicans of more than a thousand millions of francs lying in the savings banks into 3 per cent. funds. 'What right had they to do this?'

he said indignantly. 'It was a trick to enslave the depositors!'

In the first division of Nimes the Socialists showed no great strength at the elections of 1889. The Monarchists far outnumbered them, but they threw votes enough to make the election very close, the Republicans numbering 6,598, the Socialists 1,519, and the Monarchists 8,174, so that the latter won the day by no more than fifty-seven votes. That they won it is due to the cordial co-operation of the Protestants with the Catholics on the question of Religious Liberty in support of a Catholic, M. de Bernis, who had twice been condemned to imprisonment for 'a.s.sisting' Catholic teachers thrown on the world by the 'laicization'

of the schools of Nimes! This co-operation began in 1885. The Protestants of the Gard have quite as much at stake in this conflict as the Catholics. The Protestant Seminaries are cut down like the Catholic.

The appropriations formerly made in aid of new Protestant parishes are made no longer. No sums are allowed for Protestant missionary work in outlying districts. The Protestant Consistories have been deprived of their right to nominate candidates for examination as teachers. The Consistories and the Councils of the Elders are no longer allowed to receive and administer legacies for the relief of the poor, for hospitals or asylums. Formerly, where no manse existed in a commune, the Protestant minister was allowed a certain sum for lodgings. This has been stopped. In short, the Protestants, like the Catholics of France, find themselves treated by an oligarchy of irreligious fanatics as pariahs in their own country. The Protestants, like the Catholics, are driven into irreconcilable hostility against the Republic by a Parliamentary majority which treats all religious questions in the spirit of M. de Mortillet, Mayor of St.-Germain, and a Radical deputy for the Seine-et-Oise. In 1886 some speaker in the Chamber appealed in the course of his speech to the law of G.o.d. 'The law of G.o.d!' broke in M. de Mortillet; 'pray, what is G.o.d?'

The more completely this spirit of the Mayor of St.-Germian gets the control of the Republican party, the more obvious it becomes that the Republic must gravitate into Socialism.

As it steadily alienates from itself the vast mult.i.tudes of Frenchmen who are either religious men, or recognise the vital importance of religious inst.i.tutions to the existing social order, it is compelled to court the alliance of the avowed enemies of the existing social order.

This is strikingly ill.u.s.trated in the political condition of the great Southern Department of the Bouches-du-Rhone. This department offers a most instructive contrast with the Calvados.

In the Bouches-du-Rhone, the Government Republicans were as badly beaten in 1889 as in the Calvados. But in the Calvados they were beaten by the Monarchists, and in the Bouches-du-Rhone by the Radicals and the Socialists.

In the Bouches-du-Rhone the Radicals and Socialists threw 52,989 votes, the Government Republicans no more than 7,218. Ma.r.s.eilles, the greatest commercial city in France, a city of 'Republicans before the Republic,'

with traditions which give dignity to its democratic tendencies, repudiated the Republic of M. Jules Ferry and M. Carnot as emphatically as the Monarchical Morbihan. Even the Boulangists were nearly twice as strong, and the Monarchists were more than twice as strong in Ma.r.s.eilles as the Opportunist Republicans. The Boulangists threw there 13,123, and the Monarchists 14,445 votes. The strength of the Boulangists gives zest to a terse verdict upon the '_brav' general_' which I heard delivered by a _cocher_ in Ma.r.s.eilles on the eve of the famous January elections in Paris. Pa.s.sing through one of the squares of the Mediterranean city, I observed two _cochers_ engaged in an animated debate. One of them from his box exclaimed 'I tell you Boulanger is the only real man in France!'

To which the other replied as vehemently, 'And I tell you that he is nothing but the dealer in a low political h.e.l.l! _c'est un croupier de mauvais aloi!_' He may have picked up the phrase from the _Pet.i.t Ma.r.s.eillais_, which is one of the few really well-edited newspapers in France. But it was a notable phrase, and it expresses, I think, the opinion of the sincere Radicals and Socialists, not only as to General Boulanger, but as to the politicians, now his bitterest enemies, who were his original friends and 'promoters.' A very smart and outspoken Provencal Socialist who drove me on a delightful morning from the once royal and always delectable city of Arles to the majestic ruins of Montmajeur, and the unique and wonderful deserted fortress-city of Les Baux, set no bounds to his speech about the official Republicans. We met near Montmajeur a neat private carriage. 'That is the carriage of M----,' he said, as we pa.s.sed on. 'He is an aristocrat--but I think he will be Mayor of Axles. We have had an aristocratic major who gave to the people, and a Republican mayor who took from the people. I prefer the aristocrat, till we can make an end of all majors and all this rubbish of governments.' At the Legislative elections the Monarchists of Aries threw 8,540 votes, the Radicals 9,858, and the Government Republicans none at all. Of course the Radical members support the Government--but on their own terms. As these terms grow more exacting, the strength of the Monarchist reaction increases, and as the Monarchists grow stronger the Radical exactions become more imperious.

The most active and earnest Monarchist whom I met in Ma.r.s.eilles, M.

Fournier, a.s.sures me that the Ma.r.s.eilles Radicals are more intolerant of the Opportunists than they are even of the Monarchists.

As one of the largest employers of labour in Ma.r.s.eilles, M. Fournier is in constant touch with the working population of the Bouches-du-Rhone.