Development of Modern France 1870-1939

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THE DEVELOPMENT OF

MODERN FRANCE
(1870-1939)
THE DEVELOPMENT
OF MODERN FRANCE
(1870-1939)

HAMISH HAMILTON
90 GREAT RUSSELL STREET LONDON
DEDICATED
to

THE MAYOR AND COUNCILLORS


of
LA ROCHE BLANCHE (PUY DE DOME)
by
AN HONORARY CITIZEN OF THE COMMUNE

Ne placet Damnedeu ne ses angles

Queja pur mei perdet sa valur France.


PREFACE
object of this book
is to
provide an account of modern French
A history from the of the Second Empire to the outbreak of the
fall

present war. It is designed for the general public. As the history


of the Third Republic has only recently begun to be studied in a
scholarly fashion, many important questions are still unsettled and it has
been necessary to omit discussion of the evidence for the views taken
here and to drop any apparatus of notes or bibliography. As the
story approaches the present day, the traps in the way of the narrator
increase in number and in complexity. The writing of very recent
history must involve the use of materials which it is almost impossible
to control. I have tried to reduce to a minimum the amount of guess-
work at the cost of reducing to a mere narrative a very complex story.
The last year has, indeed, been sketched only in the baldest outline.
It should be said, however, that all of this book was planned and
:

nearly all of it written before the outbreak of the prese nt war. I have
not attempted to alter the judgments passed on individuals and events
in deference to any supposed need for reducing modern history in
war-time to the level of a royal biography. It should be said, too,
that the account of the origin of the last war, of the conduct of the
last war, and of the nature of the' peace settlement was largely written
and entirely planned some years ago. The views here expressed on
German diplomacy, military methods and geo-political position were
formed long before the last reputable friends of the Third Reich were
silenced by the event.
There is one feature of the plan of this book which, even apart
from the faults in execution, may be adversely criticized. For here
the 'development' of France is described only in its community aspects.
There is what will seem to many an old-fashioned emphasis on political
history. That theresult is a distorted and unjust picture of modern
France be at once admitted. At no time since the reign of Louis
will
XIV has the genius of individual Frenchmen and Frenchwomen been
more brilliantly displayed, or in a greater variety of fields, than in
this period. A history of modern France which finds space for the
Due de Broglie, historian and politician, but not for his grandson,
the great physicist; for Calmette the journalist and not for his brother,
the great pathologist; for Raymond Poincar6 and not for his cousin,
Henri Poincare*, the great mathematician: which has room for Zola
vii
PREFACE
but not for his school-fellow Cezanne, for Senator Antonin Proust and
not for his kinsman Marcel, obviously cannot pretend to give anything
like a complete picture of French activity in this period. Pasteur,
Debussy, Degas, Pierre Curie, Mallarme*, Bergson, the two Gharcots,
Alexis Carrel, Andr6 Citroen, Bteriot, Pere de Foucauld, Saint Theresa
of Lisieux, Madame de Noailles, Sarah Bernhardt, Gaston Paris,
Littre, Le Corbusier, a handful of names taken almost at random
reveals the variety of talents or of genius that modern France has bred
or provided a home for. But to assess the importance of these leaders
in so many fields is beyond my knowledge and abilities, and I have
chosen to ignore those brilliant but private careers, and concentrate
on the institutions and events affecting the political unit called France,
a unit much more easy to describe than the indefinable thing called
Trench civilization'.
Whatever merits this book may have it owes largely to the many
Frenchmen and Frenchwomen of all classes who have submitted to
questioning, who have helped to form the picture which has grown up
in my mind of the recent past of the nation to which our Western
civilization Of that Western civilization (of which with
owes most.
all its faults we
are unescapably the children) France has been, since
the time of the Chanson de Roland, the main sword and the main shield.
So it is to-day.

Note. I have not attempted to preserve French


capitalization in
proper names of persons or of institutions. In English the oddity out-
weighs the attractions of pedantic accuracy.

Vlll
CONTENTS
CHAP. PACK

BOOK THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLIC


I
I.

THE FALL OF AN EMPIRE ......


....... 3
II

III
IV
THE SIEGE OF PARIS
GAMBETTA'S
THE COMMUNE
WAR ........
........
35
47
55

BOOK II. THE REPUBLIC FILLS A GAP


I THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY . . . . .
-77
II THE CONSTITUTION OF 1875 . . . . . .106
HI RECOVERY . . . . . . . .
.114

BOOK THE REPUBLICANS TAKE OVER THE REPUBLIC


I

II
III.

THE SIXTEENTH OF MAY


GR&VY, GAMBETTA, FERRY
....... . . . . .
127
144
III THE PARLIAMENTARY REPUBLIC . . . .
.164

BOOK THE REPUBLIC DANGER


I

II
BOULANGER
D6ROULEDE
IV.

......... IN
183
1 88
III
IV
THE CRISIS
THE COLLAPSE OF BOULANGISM ..... 192
208

BOOK V. FRANCE OVERSEAS


I THE OLD EMPIRE 217
II TUNIS .
.224
III EGYPT 228
IV
V
VI
INDO-CHINA
MADAGASCAR
THE NEW EMPIRE
......... 232
243
247
ix
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
, BOOK VI. THE REPUBLIC SAVED
I

II
THE
PANAMA ....
'RALLIEMENT' *. . . . . . . .
257
268
III
IV
V
THE REVIVAL
CAPTAIN DREYFUS ........
OF SOCIALISM

THE RUSSIAN ALLIANCE AND FASHODA


.

. .
.

.
.

.
286
305
3 1 1

BOOK VII. THE AFFAIR


I A GHOST WALKS ..........
... 329
II
III
REVISION
THE DREYFUS REVOLUTION ...... .
349
357

BOOK VIII. THE SHADOW OF WAR


I

II
THE ENTENTE CORDIALE AND THE MOROCCAN
THE PLEASANT LAND OF FRANCE ..... CRISIS .
391
404
III
IV RUMOURS OF WAR ........
THUNDER ON THE LEFT . . . . . .
.419
432

BOOK THE WAR


I

II
THE FRONT
THE REAR
.........
. .
IX.

.
463
511

BOOK BETWEEN TWO WARS


I

II THE FRUITS OF VICTORY


......
X.

.....
THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES
.
543
558
III
IV RECONSTRUCTION ......
THE PRICE OF VICTORY

.....
. . . . . .
.581
.
599
V
VI
VII
THE EMPIRE
BACK TO POLITICS
AND KNAVISH TRICKS
........ ....
.
623
635
651
VIII THE RISE OF THE PEOPLE'S FRONT . . .
669
IX THE FATE OF THE PEOPLE'S FRONT . .
702

EPILOGUE 723
INDEX 731
BOOK I

THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLIC


Fluctuat nee mergitur.
Motto of Paris.
CHAPTER I

THE FALL OF AN EMPIRE


I

December 1848, ten months after the revolution that had expelled
INthe junior line of the House of Bourbon from the French throne,
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon I and grandson ol
Josephine, was elected President of the Second French Republic by an
overwhelming majority. Three years later by the coup d'etat of Decem-
ber 2nd, 1851, he dissolved Parliament by armed force and made
himself a dictator, a drastic solution of the problem of his relations with
the Assembly that the French people, in a plebiscite, overwhelmingly
ratified. A year later, another plebiscite ratified the assumption of the
imperial crown under the title of Napoleon III. The new Emperor
was detested by the adherents of the fallen legitimate monarchy of the
elder line of the Bourbons, by the adherents of the constitutional
monarchy of the younger line, by the devotees of the Republic. In
this band of opponents were some of the greatest names in contemporary
France: Victor Hugo, the greatest living poet, who remained in obsti-
nate exile; Adolphe Thiers, the most famous of French historians, who
was also one of the most famous of French politicians; Alexis de Tocque-
ville, theorist and practitioner of popular government, and a host of
others. But the French peasant and the French shopkeeper of the
small town, as well as many in all classes in the great cities, were
indifferent to the vitriolic poetry of Victor Hugo or the dignified

hostility of M. Thiers. The new Emperor (who had promised peace)


gave two great wars, neither very popular but both successfully
glorious; he made an ally of England and humiliated Russia and
Austria. He was the chief maker of united Italy and patron of re-
vived Rumania. Paris was modernized and made more splendid if
not more beautiful. It became the pleasure capital of the world; and
rapipl economic development made it one of the business capitals, too.
The Imperial Court, if sometimes vulgar, was magnificent in a fashion
unknown in London, Vienna, or St. Petersburg. The Empress, the
beautiful Spaniard, Eugenie de Montijo, set the fashions in ladies'
dress, as her husband did in politics. There was an heir, an attractive
boy, and, though opposition grew in France, "
it was deeply divided,
3
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
ranging as it did from the great Royalist lawyer, Berryer, to such
dangerous demagogues as the young Republican advocate, Gambetta,
whose manners, morals and political principles terrified the right-
minded.
By 1870, the Emperor was getting old and was already ill. He
had been compelled to withdraw the French troops who were trying
to set up the Archduke Maximilian on the throne of Mexico. His
brilliant protege", Herr von Bismarck of Prussia, had, under imperial

patronage, attacked Austria, and when the 'Six Weeks' War' was over,
the Prussian Prime Minister not only turned himself into Chancellor
of a North German Confederation without asking Napoleon's leave, he
refused to give any compensation for thus upsetting the balance of
power. When King of Holland was prepared to sell his
in 1867 the
Grand Duchy of Luxemburg to France, Bismarck vetoed the sale. It
was a great blow, and by the standards of that age had to be revenged,
but Napoleon III was weary, and when the Opposition won a great
many seats at the general election of 1869, he took the last steps in
a long-drawn-out process. He resigned himself to the position of a
constitutional monarch like Queen Victoria and accepted as Prime
Minister, fimile Ollivier.
The willingness of M. Ollivier to serve Napoleon III and the will-
ingness of Napoleon III to be served by him did them both credit, for not
only had M. Ollivier been a leader of the Opposition, but his father had
been arrested by the Emperor's police when Napoleon was seizing dicta-
torial power in 1851. The more violent members of the Opposition
denounced Ollivier as a traitor, but he was approved of by M. Thiers
and the sight of a former Republican in the uniform of a Minister of
the Empire was not without its lesson for practical politicians. Of
course, there was violent Socialism rampant among the Paris workers
and in the great steel works of the President of the Corps Legislatif at
Le Creusot. But an attempted revolution, provoked by the killing of
a journalist by a ne'er-do-well cousin of the Emperor, failed miserably,
despite the provocation to revolt of the nobleman who, dropping all his
titles, had become the most popular journalist of the Paris working-men.
It would take a great deal more than the eloquence of Maitre Gam-

betta, the pen of Henri Rochefort, or the conspiratorial gangs of


Auguste Blanqui to overthrow a power so strongly based on a strong
army, a resolute police force and popular acquiescence.
The Emperor had asked the people of France to express approval
or disapproval of the move towards liberal institutions. The plebiscite
was violently attacked and the Opposition did their best to show that
the country was not taken in by this trick. The result was more grati-
fying than the Emperor dared hope and far worse than the Opposition
had feared. Over seven million Frenchmen approved of the imperial
regime in its new dress, while the number of opponents was only a little

4
THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLIC
f
greater than in 1851 and 1852. The million,
cilables were helpless in face of this vote. The Emperor hacPa*
grant of authority. The Opposition clung to the crumb of comfort
e
that over 50,000 soldiers had voted no' and other Frenchmen were
puzzled that only 350,000 soldiers voted in all. Where were the
remaining 150,000 that were assumed to be in the most formidable
army in the world? But these critics and these wondering statisticians
could not hide from themselves that the Second Empire, eighteen
years after its violent birth, seemed to have undergone a new birth of
freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the
people, in a republican form at least, was far enough off in France, if
France was to have the last word in her own destiny. The plebiscite
was France's Sadowa, Ollivier had declared, and it was also an indi-
cation that the French Government realized that peace had her vic-
tories no less renowned than war, a belief whose sincerity had been
shown by the decision to reduce the annual contingent of conscripts
for the army by 10,000. It was a gesture towards that era of dis-
armament of which the Emperor dreamed.

II

On July 5th, Lord Granville, who was about to become British

Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, talked over the general situation
with Hammond, the veteran Under-Secretary. The report made to
the successor of Lord Clarendon was highly reassuring to him both as a
Foreign Secretary and as a member of the pacific Cabinet of Mr.
Gladstone. Never had the Under-Secretary known so great a lull in
foreign affairs. The new Minister would not, as far as could be seen,
have any important business to deal with. That evening Granville,
like the rest of the world, learned that a diplomatic mine had been
exploded; and although it was not quite certain who had laid it,
there was no doubt what country and Government was shaken by the
explosion. Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen had accepted
the offer of the vacant throne of Spain.
In 1868, Queen Isabella II had by the extravagance of her life,
the looseness of her morals and the absurdity of her politics, worn out
the patience of the ruling class in Spain, the generals, and she had
been deposed and had gone into exile with her son. 1 Marshal Serrano
and Marshal Prim, convinced that a Spanish Republic was impossible,
began to look around for a prince who could be induced to mount the
not very stable throne. The fall of Isabella was a blow to the policy
of Napoleon III, for he had taken a kindly interest in her fortunes:
and his Empress was even more involved in the politics of her
native land. But even had Napoleon been completely indifferent to
i
Later Alfonso XII, father of ex-King Alfonso XIII.
5
7 :
""
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
Isabella, the .question of who should rule Spain was traditionally of
-
tremendous importance to the ruler of France. The greatest danger
run by France in the past had come, it was believed, from the union in
one family of the thrones of Spain and of the old German Empire.
Since the establishment of the Bourbons at Madrid in 1700, that
danger of an enemy on the north-east and also on the south-west
frontiers of France had ceased to be a nightmare. Spain had only two
neighbours, Portugal and France. Of all the great powers, France

alone had a natural interest in Spain and, in 1870, no Frenchman


doubted these simple geographical truths. But it was learned on
July 3rd that the rulers of Spain were about to propose to the Spanish
Cortes (which would do as it was told) the candidacy of Prince Leo-
pold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a member of that family which,
above all others, it was to the interest of France to keep away from her
back door, since the recently victorious armies of this house lay so
uncomfortably close to her front door.
It is true that the young Prince was not a near kinsman of the King
of Prussia, being a cadet of the elder line which had stayed at home in
pleasant Swabia while the junior line sought greater fortune in the
dreary plains of Brandenburg. But the senior line had been willingly
absorbed by the junior, had ceded the little ancestral principality to
and had been recognized as part of the Royal House. The
Prussia
princes were all loyal Prussians, and this much more than set off the
indubitable but unimportant fact that they were more closely connected
by blood and marriage with the Emperor of the French than with the
King of Prussia.
1
The young Prince had some claim to being a suit-
able candidate for the Spanish throne. He was a Catholic, like the rest
of his branch, and he had married a Portuguese princess. But al-
though he was a cousin of the Emperor of the French and connected
with the dynasty of Spain's other neighbour, he was first and last a
Prussian prince. It was one thing to put his brother Charles, with the
2
approval of Napoleon III, on the throne of Rumania, or to offer
Leopold the throne of Greece, but no French Government could look
on calmly while a Prussian officer was made ruler in Madrid. This
fact was perfectly well known to the two chief actors, Marshal Prim and
Count von Bismarck, for though it may be doubtful when the Chancellor
of the North German Confederation first took a hand in the plot, b>
the spring of 1870 he was one of its moving spirits.
From Bismarck's point of view, the 'Hohenzollern candidacy', as
the world soon learned to call it, had everything in its favour. If al
went well, if the new King were elected and France was thus presented
with a. fait accompli, Napoleon III would have to submit or to in-

1
The Prince had a Murat grandmother on his father's side and a Beauharnais grand
mother on his mother's side.
Leopold was the grandfather of King Carol II of Rumania.
1

6
THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLFC^
furiate Spanish pride by denying the right off
_^
it chose. If he did submit, then there was a dut
Madrid to give the French cause to look to their southern frontier.
However little King Leopold could do, it would be better than nothing
when that inevitable day came, the day of reckoning between the great
power of the present and the great power of the future.
The unification of North Germany under Prussia had been carried
out with the benevolent assistance of Napoleon III. He believed in
national unity, in the policy of 'great agglomerations'. He also ex-
pected to be in a position to impose his own terms after a long and
exhausting struggle between Prussia and Austria. But in six weeks
Prussia had completely defeated Austria, and France was too late to
intervene. Peace was made with only the most formal participation
of Napoleon III. To a simple-minded imperialist soldier like Colonel
du ignoring of the Government of the 'great nation' was
Barail, this
impudent. And other servants of the Emperor felt the same: 'It is
France that has been beaten at Sadowa,' said Marshal Randan.
The enemies of the Empire were quick to rub in this truth. Many
of them, on the Left, rejoiced in the Prussian victory. Many of them
agreed with what that anti-clerical Bonapartist, Edmond About, had
written in 1860, that France would welcome the union of Germany
under Prussia. Only 'the princes and the junkers' would not help
Prussia to this high destiny. Protestant and enlightened Prussia was
admired by the enemies of the Church in France. What Sainte-Beuve
had called the 'vague and lyrical' view of Germany that Madame de
Stael had helped to spread in France was far from dead. Even after
Sadowa, George Sand had refused to believe the warning of the veteran
revolutionary Barbes who wrote to her that 'it is really barbarism which
is ready to throw itself on us'. Germany was the land whose scholars
had freed Renan from his faith and which had inflamed the heart of
young Edgar Quinet even before he knew much German. And, in
any case, not only were the Germans a philosophical and anti-clerical
people, they were also harmless. Parisians had seen what a small
German court was like in the famous comic opera 'The Grand Duchess'.
Who could be afraid of the army of Gerolstein and of General Bourn?
Too many people ^confused Gerolstein with Prussia and Count von
Bismarck (a great admirer of the comic opera) with General Bourn.
The sense in which Germany, like the Grand Duchess, loved military
men was not well understood in France.
Spain was not Gerolstein, and the sudden revelation that the elaborate
preparations for putting Prince Leopold on the Spanish throne had
almost been completed was too much for the temper of the French
ruling classes and for their political enemies of the same education.
So when on July 6th the Due de Gramont made a strong speech to the
Chamber announcing that France could not look on 'while a neighbour-
*THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
a foreign power, by placing one of its
ing people obliges us to permit
on the throne of Charles V, to disturb to our detriment the
princes
in Europe and to place the interests and honour
present equilibrium
of France in peril', there was general approval of his firm attitude. He
was indeed only representing the views of such organs of respectable
opinion as the Temps, and it was
an organ of the partisans of divine
right,the Gazette de France, which had first published the news. The
itself to be tricked once by
Imperial Government, which had allowed
Bismarck, could not afford to do so twice.
The speech of the Due de Gramont was the first of the French
mistakes in the crisis. Suspecting, rightly but without proofs that
could be made public, that the Hohenzollern candidacy was a move of
the Chancellor's against France, the French Government took up the
challenge, anxious to make public its views and to prevent the Oppo-
sition inFrance from accusing it of slackness. A prudent commenta-
tor, young Albert Sorel, pointed out that the proper move was to
the
approach Madrid, to point out to Serrano and Prim that the candidacy
was intolerable to France, and get them to withdraw the proposal.
Once Prussia was directly involved, France would have to deal with a
great power, not with disunited and corrupt Spain; with Bismarck,
and not with the current military saviours of the Spanish people.
Bismarck's policy was simple; he wanted, if possible, to get the
Prince made King of Spain. It was true the secret of the intrigue had
leaked out, but the Cortes had been summoned for July 2Oth and
whatever France was to do would have to be done quickly. If it was
too late to face her with an accomplished fact, then the war which
Bismarck wished for was at hand, a war in which, if all went well,
Spain would be an ally and at the worst France could be given the
appearance of attacking Prussia gratuitously before the military
reforms in France had produced any serious results, before France
had managed to secure any allies, and before any attempt to sow discord
between North and South Germany had any chance of success.
There were two obstacles to the success of this policy, the King and
the Queen of Prussia. King William was old and sincerely anxious to
avoid another war. His ingenious Minister had already involved him
in two aggressive and glorious conflicts, and the King had been fearful
when the acceptance of the Spanish crown had first been suggested.
H had swallowed the casuistical explanation that his consent to the
acceptance was purely the act of the head of the House of Hohenzollern
and in no way involved the Prussian state, but the morsel had been
hard to swallow and lay heavy on the royal stomach. The King's
conscience might be aroused, and the one person likely to arouse it was
Queen Augusta, who detested Bismarck, who was detested by him
and who was, alas!, on excellent terms with Count Benedetti, the French
Ambassador.
8
THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLIC
The sudden explosion of the mine found its chief engineer away at
his estate in Pomerania; the King was taking a cure at Ems; the Queen
\\ras close at hand at Coblence; and Count Benedetti near the Queen
at Wildbad. One other important actor was in his remote castle of
Sigmaringen, an hour from any railroad. Prince Karl Anton was
rejoicing in the great destiny of his son. 'Our house is at a turning-
1
point of history,' he wrote to his daughter, Princess Marie of Belgium.
'.. . Fate is knocking at our door, our children and our children's
children would not only be astonished but could also reproach us with
not having asked it to come in.' Full of these grandiloquent ideas, the
Prince was not likely to help King William in his dilemma, for although
the King had never liked the candidacy he felt himself bound by the
consent that he had given. He would be delighted if the acceptance
were withdrawn, but he would not order either Prince Leopold or his
father to withdraw it.
If the French Ministers had made a mistake in meeting Bismarck
half-way by demanding satisfaction from Prussia, not from Spain, by
making it evident that their aim was to persuade or coerce Berlin, not
Madrid or Sigmaringen, they showed some sense in their choice of
means. They attacked King William, first of all by impressing the
danger of the situation on the Prussian ambassador, Werther, who was
all the more susceptible since Bismarck had hidden the intrigue from
him. Werther was worried and innocent and he was about to visit
the King at Ems. And interrupting the cure of Benedetti at Wildbad,
they ordered that resourceful diplomat to visit the King, with whom he
was on excellent terms and on the way Benedetti visited the Queen,
with whom he was on even better terms.
The sudden storm that had sprung up alarmed all the Cabinets of
Europe. Their first view was that even if the French reaction had been
unnecessarily violent, the candidacy, and especially its secret negoti-
a stiff attitude. The Kings and Ministers were all
ation, justified
informed of the French view, and they in turn made known their
attitude to the Prussian Government, which did not care, and to the
Prussian King, who did. King William was anxious and the attitude
of his Queen, who saw in the crisis another example of Bismarck's
diabolic arts, added to his worries. It was Werther 's report of the
make the first dangerous
anger shown in Paris that induced the King to
move, from Bismarck's point of view. King William wrote to Prince
Karl Anton asking what he proposed to do in the emergency; thus
re-opening the whole question and running the risk of involving
Prussia, or rather Bismarck's scheme, in disaster, the disaster of a
withdrawal of the candidacy in face of French pressure. The time-
bomt^Jiad exploded, but it was not yet quite certain who was to be
injured by its splinters. *

1
Mother of King Albert I.

9
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
From Varzin, Bismarck kept an eye on the men whose folly or
.

wisdom, weakness or strength, could upset his admirable plans. His


representative in Berlin, Herr von Thile, kept on denying any knowr
ledge of the question. It was entirely a matter for the Hohenzollern

princes to settle with the representatives of the Spanish people; it was


not the business of Berlin or Paris. His agents in Ems watched the
King, who soon became conscious that his imperious servant was dis-
pleased with him and yet the King was not ready to be a mere tool in
his minister's hands. The German press, carefully worked by Bis-
marck's agents, began to show signs of irritation, but the real press
storm was in Paris.
In Paris, the editors and politicians were hysterical. Prussia must
not only be thwarted, she must appear to be thwarted. The impudent
comedy of pretending that Bismarck was outside the whole affair must
be shown up. The Government was under constant pressure to be
strong, firm, noisy. After its first blunder, it was not given time to
recover. It had before it the demand of Le Public that, as Prim had
behaved like a Spaniard and Bismarck like a Prussian, 'we must know
whether Messrs. Ollivier and de Gramont have behaved like French-
men'. That clever weathercock, Edmond About, was now convinced
that the honour of France was at stake, and it became clear that only
war would satisfy him. An even more representative journalist, fimile
de Girardin, in the next week did all in his power to make war certain.
The Emperor, it is true, wanted peace. He told the representative
of the King of Italy that if the candidacy was withdrawn, no matter
how, France would be satisfied. Ollivier was for peace, if not at any
price, at any price that gave France the substance of her demands.
The reports of the Prefects showed how far the provinces were from
sharing the hysteria of Paris, or of that part of Paris which was repre-
sented in newspaper offices and on the smart streets. War would be
accepted if necessary, but the necessity had to be proved to the peasants
and small traders, who had three times voted for the Emperor because
he promised peace at home arid abroad. M. Thiers, whose reputation
as a prophet had been made by his gloomy but accurate prophecies of
what the brilliant foreign policy of the Empire involved, had warned
the Chamber, over a year before, against any war with Prussia
except in circumstances in which intolerable aggression would force
France to fight and when she might have 'the world as witness, as
friend, and perhaps as auxiliary'.
But the Chamber was not very ready to listen to reason. The
Imperialist majority was discontented by the mildness and apparent
weakness of Ollivier. It looked, in order to discover the Emperor's
wishes, less to his Minister than to such bellicose orators as Clement
Duvernois. Under such pressure, Ollivier and Gramont weakened;
they had not only to thwart the Prussian plot, not only to defeat Prussia
10
THE BIRTH OF THE R E P
in the eyes of the world, but to give
would produce a parliamentary victory. If the Cortes had been sitting,
there might have been a fait accompli, in face of which Napoleon III
might possibly have taken the advice of his cousin, Prince Napoleon,
and, refusing to recognize King Leopold, let the Spanish people get rid
of him. If the French Chamber had not been sitting there might
have been no war, for the Cabinet and the Emperor would not have
been under constant pressure. Not all the pressure came from
Parliament. Napoleon was at Saint-Cloud, surrounded by courtiers,
by soldiers, by ladies, and most of* these were enemies of the Liberal
Empire, sure that anything short of a complete diplomatic victory
would weaken the Empire still further, and that a war with Prussia
(which, of course, would be victorious) would ensure a peaceful end of
the reign of Napoleon III and a glorious beginning for the reign of
Napoleon IV. The Empress was of this school, not content with
half-measures, ambitious for her son and, like a good Spanish Catholic,
detesting the very word Liberal and the party of Prim.
The third man in whose hands the destiny of France lay was the
Due de Gramont. 1
Superficially brilliant, cosmopolitan, he had been
a great social success as Ambassador in Vienna, and he took too
seriously the anti-Prussian talk of the Austrian court circles, and too
seriously his own popularity. Austria would have liked, that is to say
the military party would have liked, to avenge Sadowa, but they were
not ready for a risky war, and the hopes that had been based on the
recent visit of the Archduke Albrecht to Paris were baseless. Even
more baseless were hopes of Italian aid. France could only offer
Italy one thing, the free occupation of Rome, and a Catholic minis-
try like Ollivier's could not promise that. Whatever King Victor
Emmanuel might want lo do, the Italian politicians, less perhaps than
the politicians of any other nation, were disposed to let their policy
be affected by mere gratitude. Thanks to the distrust aroused by the
secret way in which the affair had been managed, the sympathies of

Europe were at the beginning with .France, and, had Gramont been
competent, they could have been kept with France. But France had
no allies. Even if Austrian policy had been bolder, Russia would have
vetoed active intervention, and the price of Italian aid was too great.
The belief that the small German states were anxious to throw off the
Prussian yoke, a view held by General Ducrot, the commander of the
Strasbourg garrison, was nonsense. There was some discontent in
South Germany; Wurtemberg especially gave Bismarck a little to
worry about; but in face of France, of an aggressive France, all Germany
would unite. This, indeed, was Bismarck's main calculation of benefit
from a war; fighting a common enemy, North and South Germany
would achieve a spiritual unity, which was still only embryonic.
1
He married a Miss MacKinnon.
II
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
.
, The French (Diplomatic roffensive, launched with the despatch of
Benedetti to Ems, was made on a wide front: Strat, Rumanian agent
in Paris, was told that the conduct of Prince Karl Anton was not going
to result in planting one son in Madrid, but might very well result in
the ejection of another son from Bucarest. M. Strat got to Sigmaringen
on the evening of July nth with this disconcerting message; but more
important, there arrived late that night a special messenger from Ems,
Colonel Strantz, sent by King William to induce Karl Anton to with-
draw his son's acceptance. The French had won. King William's
conscience had overborne his Minister's entreaties and, despite the

wrigglings of the disillusioned father, the renunciation was inevitable.


The news was sent in an unciphered telegram to Madrid and to the
Spanish Ambassador in Paris, so that the French Government might
learn their good fortune indirectly. For it was most important that
the fiction of the innocence of Prussia should be maintained. King
William rejoiced. 'A stone has been lifted from my heart,' he wrote to
the Queen, 'but be silent about this toward everyone, in order that the
news may not come first from us.' The news lifted stones from some
hearts in Paris, too. Napoleon III told General Bourbaki that peace
was secure. It was, he said, as if an island had suddenly arisen in the
Channel over whose ownership there had been a danger of war between
England and France. The island had sunk and the danger was over.
The impression outside France and among wise people inside
it was that a real diplomatic success had been won. This view was
represented in a Punch cartoon, and it was the
opinion of a good
authority, Bismarck himself. The Chancellor knew that he had lost
the first battle, but he was not ready to admit that the campaign
was over. For the moment he had to change tactics. In the news-
paper war, in the declarations in the Chamber, there had been foolish
things said. The German people was to be instructed by the Bis-
marckian press that its honour and security were endangered by this
French arrogance, all over a matter with which the Prussian Govern-
ment had nothing to do! It was not yet certain that Bismarck would
not have his war, but it would have to be an offensive war; a much less
attractive proposition than a defensive war, but not altogether worthless
all the same.
Bismarck was saved all need for further worry by the folly of Napo-
leon, Gramont and The withdrawal was not enough, so the
Ollivier.
Paris press now asserted. After all, it was not the Prince who had
withdrawn, but his father, and there was much Parisian wit expended
on Tapa Anthony's letter'. Who knew if the Prince might not sud-
denly turn up in Madrid as his brother had done in Bucarest? In any
case, Prussia should be made to admit her share in the conspiracy.
There must be an end once and for all to this project of encircling
France. The unfortunate Benedetti was instructed to get an approval
12
THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLfC
of the renunciation from the King which was going to be difficult
enough. He was then told to get a promise that the King would forbid
any renewal of the candidacy, and Werther was told to ask his master for
a personal letter to the Emperor expressive of good-will, but almost
necessarily involving a confession of ill-doing! The letter was the joint
folly of Gramont and Ollivier, the demand for a royal promise of
'never again* was the joint folly of Napoleon and Gramont. From
these two attempts to show that Prussia had seen the light came the
war. When the first news of the renunciation arrived, a Paris news-
paper had announced it as 'Prussia climbs down*. It was now

proposed to make Prussia admit it.


It was on the thirteenth day of July that Count Benedetti, already
alarmed at having been given room 13 in his hotel, obeyed his instruc-
tions and, accosting the King on the promenade, tried in vain to get
him to give an undertaking to prohibit a renewal of the candidacy.
William had gone as far as to authorize Benedetti to telegraph to
Paris that he approved of the renunciation. Further he would not
go and, as the exchanges grew warm, he broke off the conversation.
But Benedetti's instructions were formal; he was to try again, and he
asked for a fresh audience. But the King, tired, irritated and afraid
of his angry Minister, who was now at Berlin threatening resignation,
sent an aide-de-camp to say that he could not sec Count Benedetti.
The refusal was perfectly courteous and need have meant no more
than that the King preferred to have these negotiations transferred to
Berlin, where Count Benedetti could try his arts on Count Bismarck.
This message was repeated in a more severe form when the King
J
received the news of Werther s acceptance of the proposal that he
should write to Napoleon. There was definitely to be an end of this
kind of thing and Benedetti was told so. And this decision was com-
municated to Bismarck in Berlin in a fairly long telegram which the
Chancellor was authorized to publish if he thought fit.
That night Bismarck had as his dinner-guests, the Minister of War,
General von Roon, and the Chief of the General Staff, General von
Moltke. All the efforts of the soldiers for four years past had been
directed to preparing the army to fight France. The failure of Bis-
marck's diplomatic campaign had depressed them, and the first
impression made by the telegram from Ems depressed them even
further. Here was new French insolence unpunished! But Bismarck
was busy on the literary effort of which he was for the rest of his life
most proud. Cutting the telegram down to a brief message but inter-
polating nothing, he produced a message which suggested that the
King had brutally refused to receive the Ambassador, with the con-
sequent implication that the snub was deliberately intended to suspend,
if not to break off, diplomatic relations. What had been 'a drum beat
of a parley was now a flourish of trumpets', said Moltke. 'The old,
'3
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
God still lives andwill not let us perish in shame', said the pious Roon.
'ItwiH be a red rag to the Gallic bull', said Bismarck. The com-
munique* was at once sent to the press and to all Prussian embassies
and legations. The humiliation of the French Ambassador would be
published to all the world and what would the French do then? They
would, of course, fight.
Ollivier, Gramont and the Emperor were now mere flotsam in
the sea of anger that raged in Paris.In vain they thought of appealing
to a European congress. The power was out ef their hands. Thiers,
who had tried to warn Napoleon of his danger, might have been strong
enough to have resisted successfully, but the Emperor had snubbed
him. On the fifteenth of July the Chamber voted war credits, after a
debate in which the tough little man, speaking wisdom, was howled
down by an assembly whose temper was represented by Birotteau's,
'When one has been insulted there's no need of reflection'. It was an
appropriate confession of political bankruptcy, but no worse than the
declaration of Ollivier that he and his colleagues accepted their
responsibilities with a light heart. King William, when he had been
induced to agree to the candidacy, had done so, he declared sincerely,
with a heavy heart. But Ollivier, as he boasted in one of his numerous
apologias, was an optimist. In the furious debate, the text of the
famous despatch was never produced, and even supporters of the war,
like Gambetta, and of the regime, like Buffet, wanted more information.
Leboeuf talked of the military dangers of delay, and Gramont of the
diplomatic combinations with Austria and Italy that he hinted he was
negotiating, and the deputies followed him down the slope.
Bismarck had his war in an even better form than he had hoped
for. For France appeared not merely as the aggressor, but as a
frivolous aggressor, and when the foresighted Chancellor was able to

produce from his portfolio schemes for a joint Franco-Prussian partition


of Belgium obligingly written out by Benedetti, the picture of France
as the villain of the piece was complete. Soon Carlyle was able to
draw, for the benefit of the British public, a contrast between 'noble,
patient, deep, pious and solid Germany' and 'vapouring, vainglorious,
gesticulating, quarrelsome, restless and over-sensitive France'. In
America President Grant was ready to tell the French charge* d'affaires
that American sentiment was on Germany's side. And in Germany
itself, the unity Bismarck had counted on was at once manifest. For
all and their results there could only be one remedy,
these follies
victory. With the re-enforcement of a good many police agents,
mobs were parading central Paris shouting 'To Berlin' and singing the
long-forbidden Marseillaise. There was the answer to M. Thiers.
Aliens, enfants de la patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrive".

14
THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLIC

III

France and most of the world awaited the news of early and
brilliant victory with easy confidence. Even Germans who were
rightly confident in ultimate victory, feared some sudden stroke. The
German lands that lay in the way of a French invasion were full of
memories of the first Napoleon, and the Germans, who feared no Auster-
litz or Jena, were not altogether sure that there would not be an Ulm.

In London, the great editor of The Times, Delane, was strongly in


favour of the Germans but highly sceptical of their chances. 'I would
lay my last shilling on Gasquette against Pumpernickel.' Naturally,
in France herself, hopes ran high and most of the enemies of the
Empire believed, with varying emotions, that the Emperor's authority
would be strengthened by the imminent victory. Gambetta went off
on a holiday to Switzerland in full expectation of good news, for he
was too simple a patriot to wish for bad news that would weaken the
Empire. A cautious Orleanist, Guvillier-Fleury, relied on the genius
(and the strength) of France, seeing clearly that no other genius or
strength was available. Even the sceptical Taine preserved his modi-
fied optimism through the first weeks. That France should be beaten
by mere Germans, by the hastily-trained militia that they called an
army, was out of the question for all whose minds were not poisoned
by political rancour or enlightened by real knowledge of the formid-
able power which had risen across the Rhine.

Despite the lesson of Sadowa, there were still those who thought,
as Drouyn de Lhuys had thought in 1866, that gamekeepers were
all that was needed to sweep away the Prussian levies. Cham, the
most popular caricaturist of the time, showed a Zouave battering at
the King of Prussia's door with the butt-end of his rifle, and the legend
below ran: A new Ambassador whom he can't shut out.' The most
C

famous of French journalists, fimile de Girardin, constant to the policy


of bellicosity that had helped to make a peaceful settlement impossible,
was a noisy discounter of easy victory. When singers at the Ope*ra
admitted that they did not know the words of Alfred de Musset's
famous song 'We have had your German Rhine', Girardin shouted
from his box, 'It will take longer then to learn it than to take it.' *
Yet there have been few wars in which the odds were more decisively
on one side and that side not the French. The uncle of Napoleon III
is
reported to have said that God was on the side of the biggest bat-
talions, and the biggest battalions in this war were the German. Even
had other things been equal, the numerical superiority of the German
Army would have been decisive. Moltke had calculated on putting
330,000 men in the field if Bavaria and Wurtemberg did not join the
1
In French a pun, 'II faudra done plus de temps pour 1'apprendre que pour Ic prendre*.
15
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
North, 360,000 if they did; and he put the maximum* French strength
at the beginning of the campaign at 300,000. In fact, the French
strength when the campaign opened was under 270,000, and from
that inferiority flowed all the disasters, since so great a numerical
inferiority ensured that French mistakes would be fatal and German
mistakes reparable.
The numerical weakness of the French Army was caused by its

very nature. It was a professional force raised with as much regard


for the security of the regime and for the political advantages of popu-

larity as for military efficiency in a narrow sense. France had, it


was true, conscription, but conscription of a kind well described by
Marshal Gouvion Saint-Cyr as 'the blood tax'. All Frenchmen might
be called on to serve if France insisted on using all the healthy men
who. came of military age each year. But she did not, and so most
*

of the annual 'contingent* was exempted. By means of a lottery the


necessary number of recruits, nominally 100,000, was chosen from the
total of the annual 'class', and these who drew 'bad numbers' had to

serve, unless they found someone to take their place. This meant in
effect that poor men with bad numbers served; richer men bought
substitutes.
The consequences of this system were far-reaching. If all French-
men had had to serve, as all Prussians had, the period of service would
have had be comparatively short and the discipline and treatment
to
of the troops would have had to make allowances for the temporary
character of the military service of the rank and file. But with a
system that exempted all the middle- and upper-classes and only caught
a portion of the working-classes and small peasants, it was easy and
tempting to treat the recruit as a professional soldier with no civilian
future. It was possible to impose the comparatively long term of
seven years' service and to treat the private soldier as a very rough
diamond whom it would be* a pity to spoil by excessive polishing.
The recruit was sent away from his native district, to be enrolled in
units without any local attachments; he thus acquired, it was held,
true soldierly spirit; henceforward the regiment was his home. Once
in the Army the recruit was encouraged to stay in it, not by good
conditions or reasonable pay, but by a system of bonuses on re-enlist-
ment;* the more old soldiers who could be induced to rejoin, the more
efficient the army such was the theory. This theory had two valid
political arguments to make it palatable to the regime. The more
re-enlistments, the more 'good' numbers at the annual army lottery
and the 'blood tax* was very unpopular with the peasants who were
its chief victims, for the poor men of the towns very often failed to

pass the medical examination. The more re-enlistments, the more ,

isolated from the country the soldier was, and the Jess likely to be
tainted by politically dangerous thoughts,
16
THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLIC
Under this system, an army of professioilal long-service soldiers
was created which was used with a freedom that a short-service force,
more intimately connected with the country, might not have endured.
Between 1820 and 1869, an era of comparative peace, 300,006 French-
men died on military service in China, Africa, Spain, Italy, the Crimea,
Mexico. So lavish an expenditure of lives was possible only as long
as the victims were looked on as a mere part of the whole nation, set

apart for disease, death and glory.


The military drawback to this system was obvious. It limited the
numerical strength of the Army in war to what the country would
stand in peace. Moreover, the cost of this professional force was great,
since the bonuses paid on re-enlistment were a heavy item in the

budget. Once out of the Army or given long leave, the ex-soldier
bitterly resented being recalled to the colours, since he had reason to
feel that his country was dealing hardly with him. Hehad been
unlucky once; was he to be doubly unlucky, to be called back to the
colours when war broke out, while men who had escaped service
altogether were immune? In any case, the military standards set up
by a professional army were not easily met by the ex-soldier softened
by peaceful avocations. The officers did not think it possible to make
good fighting soldiers out of men who were not under the colours
when war broke out. All schemes for the inclusion in the active army
of reservists, or troops partly-trained in peace-time, broke down in
face of the scepticism of the War Office. Only after the great Prussian
victory over Austria in 1866 did the French military authorities begin
seriously to think of adding to the peace strength a proportion of
reservists.
This change had long been advocated by the most intelligent critic
of the French military system, Napoleon III. He knew Germany well;
he had served in the Swiss Army, and he had tried and failed to con-
vince the Army, of which he was the nominal chief, that there was
a great deal to be learned from the neighbours of France. It was
politically impossible to increase the regular annual contingent; so, if
the numerical military strength was to be increased, the prejudice
against reservists would have to be abandoned. A reform was insti-
tuted that had not had time to bear much fruit by 1870. The term
of service was cut down to five years followed by four in the reserve,
and when the war broke out there were 60,000 men in this regular
reserve.
This was very inadequate when compared with the vast reserves
built up by the Prussian system, and the Emperor and some of his
advisers were in favour of adopting the central feature of that system,
universal service. Even with the Prussian modification that allowed
the middle-class recruit to serve one year instead of three (and that
in special conditions'), the French bourgeoisie were bitterly hostile to
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
any such suggestion. Thiers had declared thirty years before (and
he had not changed his position) that conscription for the educated
classes was out of the question. The peasant or worker was no worse
off in the Army than on his farm or in his workshop, but to force the
sons of the middle-classes to serve would be tyranny in guise of a false
equality. The bourgeoisie did enough in providing most of the officers.
If the Republicans asked for universal service, they also asked at the
same time for the replacement of the regular army by a militia.
Whatever the military merits of this policy, it would weaken the
Imperial Government, which is why it was advocated by Jules Simon
and rejected by Napoleon III. But something had to be done, and
Marshal Niel, Napoleon's reforming War Minister, produced a scheme
for creating a 'mobile National Guard'. This scheme originally called
for a serious military training of the young unmarried men' enrolled
in the National Guard. Had
it been carried out it would have
pro-
vided a large reserve of locally organized and reasonably well-prepared
militiamen. But the period of training was cut down from months
to days, and after Niel's death even this amputated scheme was killed.
When the war broke out, the 'mobiles' existed only on paper. Except
in Paris, it was simply a list of young men who might, when war came
and if the struggle lasted long enough, be turned into soldiers.
The numerical superiority of the German armies could not be
countered by a Government depending as much on popularity with
the bourgeoisie and peasants as the Government of Napoleon III. If
the Germans were to be beaten it could only be by other means. One
advantage of a professional army, or so it was alleged, was superiority
in technical efficiency. There was apparent justification for this view.
The French Army, as even Moltke admitted when he visited France
in 1867, was smart. It was smart in uniform and smart in drill.

Cavalry and artillery in particular were proud of the speed and


accuracy with which they performed complicated evolutions. The
famous cavalry school at Saumur was above all a school for making
fine horsemen, riot for making efficient cavalry officers. The cavalry
officer'sduty was to lead his troopers in elaborate but highly unrealistic
drill formations in peace and in heroic and useless charges in battle.
The officers of the artillery had, of course, a more serious military
education at the ficole Polytechnique than was given at Saint-Cyr or
Saumur. But that education was narrowly technical and the French
artillery in 1870 had forgotten most of the teaching and practice of the
greatest of gunners. Apart from an excessive devotion to smartness
and to shining harness, the French artillery was noted for the speed
with which it unlimbered and opened fire, and this virtuosity was over-
prized. Instead of massing guns in the old Napoleonic fashion and
blasting a way for the infantry, the French artillery was anxious to make
it as difficult as possible for the enemy to find the
proper range.
18
THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLIC
Had the contest otherwise been equal, this might not have mattered,
but the equipment of the French artillery was terribly inferior to that
of the Germans. The latter had adopted a breech-loading steel gun
of the famous Krupp firm. This gun was both more accurate and of
far greater range than the French bronze muzzle-loader; and artillery
duels in the war of 1870 were farcical, since the Germans could fire
from a range far beyond French powers of reply. Again, Napoleon III,
himself a gunner, had seen the importance of the new artillery, and
there were in existence in 1870 two types of breech-loading gun made
under his orders. But they were only models; they were not ready for
issue to the Army and few people knew how they should be used. The
clumsy handling of the Prussian artillery in 1866 which, in any case,
was then only partially equipped with the new cannon, actually led
most French officers to accept the Austrian boast that their artillery
had been better than that of the victors, an illusion against which the
French attache in Berlin, Colonel Stoffel, vainly protested. Next to
numerical inferiority, the inability of the French artillery to fire as far
as the German guns was the main cause of French disaster.
One cause of the Prussian victories in 1866 had been given its due
weight by the French Army; the breech-loading 'needle' rifle had com-
pletely demonstrated its superiority over the muzzle-loader. It was
not only that the breech-loader could be fired faster and at greater
ranges than the older type of rifle, but it could be easily loaded by men
kneeling, standing, sitting, lying down, a change that would have had
great effect on infantry tactics if the makers of drill-books had been
ready to adjust their sacred rites to reality. But even the Prussians,
with their experience of 1864 and 1866, had hesitated to scrap their
infantry regulations of 1847, and the French were not ready to see
that the day of the massed column of Wagram was over especially as it
was no longer backed by the massed guns of Wagram. But the French
infantry was given a new rifle. The 'chassepot' was, in fact, much
better than the needle gun. The chassepot was not the only new
weapon of French might; the French Army and public were asked to
give their confidence to an entirely new instrument of war, the 'mitrail-
leuse', the ancestor of the modern queen of battles, the machine-gun.
The mitrailleuse was not a true machine-gun, that is to say, it was not
an automatic weapon. It consisted of twenty-five rifle-barrels bound
together, loaded and fired simultaneously. It was mounted on a gun-

carriage like a field-gun, and so was less mobile and much more easily
spotted and knocked-out by artillery fire than a modern machine-gun.
But, for all its faults, it was a formidable weapon; if it did not kill its
tens of thousands where the rifle killed its thousands, it inspired a
healthy fear that was almost as good. For fear of the discovery of the
secret of this new weapon, it was manufactured, under the direct

patronage of the Emperor, at Meudon, and it was not exhibited to the


19
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
Army until war broke out. Artillery officers were sent to Meudon to
learnhow to handle it, but when war came many of these officers were
in command of ordinary batteries, and many officers arid men who
had never seen this odd-looking weapon had to learn all about it on
the spot!
Outnumbered, hopelessly inferior in artillery and superior to its

probable enemy only in infantry equipment, the French Army did


not make up for its material weaknesses by moral or intellectual
strength. The professional troops had many admirable
qualities, but
they also had many grave faults. alarmed by the
Stoffel in Berlin,

inability of his countrymen to see the danger they were in, described
the contrast between Prussia, where every able-bodied man was called
on to serve, and France, whose army was 'an agglomeration of the
poorest and most ignorant Frenchmen, to whom the more fortunate
of fighting for them'. Largely illiterate and
classes entrust the task
often drunken, brave and enduring, full of confidence in their military
prowess, these much-abused soldiers deserved better leaders than they
got.
The French officers of this period, however, were admirable from
the point of view of courage, and took seriously the military duties
imposed on them by the current standards. Unfortunately these
standards, were not nearly high enough. The comfort and even the
decency of the rank-and-file were disregarded and, since the law of
1832 gave every officer a proprietary title to his rank, the favourite
reading of the regimental officer, according to General Thoumas, was
the Army List. Computations of future automatic promotion was the
only intellectual effort of most officers. Taine, who was an inspector of
the entrants to Saint-Cyr, the great military school, noted how few
young officers 'read or think for themselves. All their family and
social connections keep them from it.' In the two learned arms of the
artillery and engineers, the officers trained at the ficole Polytechnique
were often of high and the French Army had no
intellectual merit,
most modern weapons at least as
difficulty in finding designers of the
competent as any the Germans had. But even the gunners and sappers
-

were devoid of any training for the general problems of war; and the
officers of the General Staff, quite ignorant .of regimental life, were

incapable of such elementary work as organizing mobilization or


transport efficiently, much less of providing an intelligent guidance
and assistance for their chiefs.
chiefs had far more military experience than any Prussian
These
officers. But von Verdy du Vernois in 1866, and many other officers
iu 1870, were to show that theoretical training was superior to mere
experience on whose lessons no reflection had been expended. The
type of Frederick the Great's army mule, which had made twenty
campaigns and knew as much at the end as at the beginning, was
so
THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLIC
common in the higher ranks of the French Army. Indeed, their
experience did them harm in some cases. The motto of the Algerian
Army was 'd^brouillez-vous' 1 and no irretrievable disasters had come
from acting on it. A
neglect of outpost duty and of scouting was an
odd habit to contract from colonial wars, but it was contracted all the
same. The officers who distinguished themselves in Africa and then
in Mexico were commanders of small columns, and they rose to the
top without ever learning how to handle big units or developing a
higher sense of military duty than was involved in recklessly risking
themselves in the front line and inspiring courage in all the troops
within ear-shot. The Crimean and Italian wars did nothing to shake
this attitude, for it was believed that the victories had been won by

gallant attacks with the bayonet. MacMahon on the mined breach of


the Malakoff Redoubt announcing 'Here I am and here I stay', or
turning defeat into victory by mere phlegmatic courage at Magenta,
was a specimen of the French Army at its best. At less than its best,
there was still plenty of courage, but there was an unbridled appetite
for promotion and reward, and a consequent unwillingness to collabo-
rate that was very dangerous. The chief representative of this school
was Marshal Bazaine, an excellent regimental officer, but a selfish and
secretive general. His career in Mexico had been marked by glory
and graft, and whereas other officers gained promotion, it was said, by
service at the Imperial Court, acting in amateur plays with the ladies-
in-waiting or playing the piano to amuse the Empress, Bazaine, it was
believed, cultivated not only Napoleon III, but such enemies of the
Empire as Jules Favre.

Pursuing the mirage of an alliance with Austria, the French plan


9f campaign was a rapid advance from the Rhine across South Ger-
many, intimidating the South German states into neutrality, joining
an Austrian Army in Franconia, and, in the more golden of the dreams
of Saint-Cloud, being joined by an Italian force coming up from
Innsbruck. The Prussians, held up by a covering force in Lorraine,
would then be crushed by *he Allies. This scheme was based on the
card-castle of Gramont's diplomacy; but even had that castle been fit
to resist a puff of wind, the march to Nuremberg would have required
the genius of a Napoleon or a Marlborough. It got the equivalent of
the talents of Mack or Soubise.
It was realized that, if they were given time, the German Con-
federates could put a bigger army in the field than France could muster,
and it was decided not to give them time. The main advantage of the
French professional system ought to have been the presence with the
colours, when war came, of a larger number of men than those available
in a short-service army. Well organized, the French Army ought, in
the first two weeks of war, to have had an advantage in numbers; and
1
'Muddle-through/
21
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
Marshal Lebceuf, the War Minister, proposed to use this advantage
by sending troops to the front without waiting for the reservists. Such
a scheme required careful working out; it got none. No detailed plans
had been made in peace for the use of the railways in war and the
moving of troops to the frontier was a miracle of improvisation. In
fact, the French did gain a few days on the Germans, $nd had they

pushed forward rapidly the German concentration in the Palatinate


might have been seriously embarrassed. But the troops rushed to the
front were not ready to advance. In the German Army, all units
existed in peace-time, from the regiment to the army corps. In France,
the highest peace-time unit was the regiment; all bigger formations
only came into existence when war began, and generals and their staffs

might be perfect strangers to each other and to the troops they were
to command. Marshal Niel had drawn up a complete list of higher
commanders, but that had been scrapped by Lebceuf; and the troops
hustled to the front had to be hastily organized into brigades, divisions
and corps in those precious days at the end of July when the last chance
of victory and of allies was being lost, as an astounded world waited
in vain for the rapid stroke against the slower Germans which had
been universally anticipated. The expensive and brilliant Imperial
Army only manage(|by August ist to assemble 270,000 men in Lorraine
and in Alsace, and the disorder of the preceding days had been fantastic.
Leboeuf, who had boasted that the Army was ready down to its
gaiter buttons, found it was not even ready in such details. Therd
had to be hasty decisions as to what kind of caps the troops would wear,
and the brilliant shakos of the line and bearskins of the Guard were
replaced by kpis. The amount of cartridges carried by each man was
suddenly altered by the Minister of War, and troops arrived without
cooking utensils or, in some cases, without the minimum of engineering
equipment. The supply service broke down; there was a shortage of
bakers and bread; a great wagon camp at Chalons had only one exit
and it took days to get the wagons out, and without transport the Army
could not move. While troops were piHng up in frontier camps,
reservists were wandering over France looking for their regiments.
Instead of waiting until a regiment had. received and equipped its
reservists and was at full strength, the regiment was sent off to the front
at once, and the reservists, once the depot had equipped them, went
off to find their units. These depots were not necessarily located near
the areas from which the recruits came, and a reservist living in Alsace,
and whose regiment was in Alsace, might have to go to Bayonne or
Algiers to get his equipment and then return right across France to
find his regiment if he could. This was not easy for more important
people than reservists. The case of the general who wired to the War
Office 'Arrived at Belfort. Cannot find my brigade. Cannot "find my
divisional commander. Do not know where my regiments are. What
22
THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLIC
shall I do?' was exceptional; but precious days were wasted in solving
only slightly less absurd problems.
It true that the mobilization of 1870 was far more efficient than
is

that of 1859, whose slowness had so distressed Napoleon III; it is also


true that the ingenuity displayed in doing hurriedly in July what should
have been done at leisure years before was astonishing but the results
were fatal. The troops, eager for action, were wearied and discouraged
by the disorder in which they found themselves. Their despatch to
the front had been marked by disquieting scenes of drunkenness. A
veteran who remembered
the First Empire alarmed his neighbours by
5

announcing that 'we are beaten ,


on no more evidence than the drunken
disorder of the troops going to the front.
The last improvisation was that of the high command and the plan
of campaign. Instead of three armies, one in Alsace, one in Lorraine,
one in reserve, Napoleon III, at the last moment, assumed command
of one united army strung out over the whole 200 miles of frontier with
Leboeuf, the Minister of War, as his Chief of Staff. It was an unfortu-
nate decision. Napoleon was an intelligent critic of military organiza-
tion, but he was ill-prepared for high command. An important staff
officer 1 had noticed with apprehension that the Emperor could only
read a map with great difficulty and to this intellectual limitation he
added the physical disability of a severe bladder complaint that made
riding very difficult. A surgeon had to be in constant attendance to
operate if the illness took a sudden turn for the worse.
The Emperor and Leboeuf were incapable of effectual control over
the seven army corps in line 2 and these units were left isolated. Worse
still was the effect on the morbidly ambitious Bazaine, who saw himself

reduced from an army to a corps commander, and immediately lost all


sense of responsibility for the welfare of any unit except his own.
On August 2nd the French Army moved; the frontier town of
Saarbrucken was occupied after a trifling skirmish in which a com-
muniqu6 (that would readily have been forgiven had it been the first
of a series of victorious bulletins) dwelt with pride on the courage of the
young Prince Imperial. The advance of Frossard's corps was, in fact,
a meaningless move, but as happened frequently in this war, meaning-
less moves were just what the German General Staff was least
prepared
to counter. Moltke had the fault, so severely condemned by Napoleon
I, of 'making pictures'; his plans provided for rational but not for
irrational action by his opponents, and the news of Saarbriicken,
received late, resulted in a confusion of orders issued to the advancing
Germans. Had the French Army been ready, or had its leaders had
any resolution, the German hesitation might have been exploited; but
Napoleon Ill's brief will to action had already been killed by the news
of the defeat, on August 4th, of the small force under Abel Douay
1 *
Jarras. Canrobert's corps was assembling at Chalons.

23 G
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
stationed near the obsolete fortress of Wissembourg in Alsace and by
the death of its commander. If Wissembourg was only a minor
victory, it was, unlike Saarbriicken, a genuine minor victory; and it

was at once followed by German major victories.


Alarmed by the news of Wissembourg, the French Army in Lorraine
was thrown on to the defensive; and Frossard, abandoning Saarbrucken
(but not burning the bridges over the Saar), took up a strong position.
The advancing Prussians ran into the French 2nd Corps and the battle
of Spicheren began. It was typical of all the battles of the first and
decisive stage of the war. The Prussian troops were often very ill-

directed from above. Not only was Moltke slow to readjust his plans
to the eccentric movements of the French, but he was often given nd
information at all, for many hours at a time, by his subordinates in the
field. They fought battles and engaged the fortunes of the whole
Army without consulting the Great General Headquarters. The suc-
not to say anarchical, system blinded many foreigners
cess of this loose,
and most Germans to its faults with results dearly paid for, forty-four
years later.
Thesubordinate commanders were trained to attack at almost any
price; always to march to the sound of the guns, so that a' minor
encounter could rapidly develop into a great battle as all the German
units within reach rushed to the fray. The advantages of this system
were manifest. Confident of support, subordinates took responsibilities
on their shoulders very readily and the German troops never had the
depressing experience of realizing that not only did the rank-and-file
not know what was being done and why, but that their leaders knew
almost as little. On the other hand, the subordinate leaders could only
see through the fog of war what was under their noses and that was not

enough. So battle after battle was engaged in which the general


numerical inferiority of the French was, for many hours, turned into a
great local superiority. The Germans escaped the results of this state
of affairs because no intelligent attempt was made by the French to
exploit this temporary superiority, often more fully realized by the
fighting troops than by the French generals. The Moltke system not
only required for its success subordinates like Prince Frederick Charles
and the Alvenslebens, but opponents like Frossard an<J Bazaine.
At Spicheren, attack after attack was launched on the French holding
a strong position, and with strong reinforcements in easy reach. If
Frossard's neighbours had supported him, the German advance guard
would have been in Vandamme's position after Dresden and the war
in Lorraine would have begun with a great French local success. But
French corps commanders took a narrow view of their duties; the
security of their neighbours was not their business, but that of the
Commander-in-Chief, the Emperor. So Bazaine gave no help to Fros-
sard and may have made the notorious comment: The schoolmaster is
24
THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLIC
in the soup, let him stay there.'
l Whether he said this or not, Bazaine
acted in the spirit of the words. Frossard withdrew in good order and
the Germans, hardly believing in their good fortune, not merely let
him get away, but completely lost touch with the main French
Army.
On the same day, a much more important battle had been fought
and lost in Alsace. MacMahon had taken up a strong position at
Worth within easy reach of the 5th Corps; General de Failly was, in
a rather undetermined way, under the Marshal's orders- and also
directly under the Emperor's orders. At Worth, the battle took the
same course as at Spicheren except that MacMahon was outnumbered
far more seriously than Frossard had been. With his usual stubborn-
ness MacMahon held on to his position and the Germans learned
that a repetition of i86d was not good enough. Attacking French
infantry, armed with the chassepot and aided by the mitrailleuses ('the
damned coffee mills' as the Bavarian commander, von der Tann, called
them), was very different from attacking ill-armed and moderately
combative troops like the Austrians of 1 866. The future maker of the
Japanese Army, Meckel, coming on to the battlefield, was not only
startled by the rows of dead and dying that bore testimony to the

efficacy of French fire, but shocked by the sight of German troops


hiding in ditches and behind trees rather than return to the assault. But
the great numerical strength of the Germans told; MacMahon was out-
flanked and the attackers got to grips with their stubborn enemy. An
English spectator, Sir Charles Dilke, noted that the most desperate
fightingwas between two subject peoples, the Algerian Turcos of
MacMahon and the Poles of the Prussian 5th Corps. What might
have been a retreat in good order became a rout, and Failly's troops
came on the scene too late to do more than prudently retreat.
A heroic charge by the French cuirassiers at Reichshoffen did little
more than create a great legend, of troopers plunging to death in the
hop-fields with a futile courage worthy of the countrymen of the knights
of Crecy and Agincourt. Alsace was
lost; the shattered troops were
hurried off to the great campChalons where they arrived dirty,
at
hungry, demoralized. There were thousands of stragglers, and for days
the only thought of the survivors was to sleep and eat. The first news
of Worth, or rather of Reichshoffen, had been received in Paris as a
victory and the streets were gay with flags and full of cheering crowds.
But the truth was not long hidden. France learned with stupefaction
that her armies had been defeated three times in three The tact-
days.
less phrase of the Emperor's
message, 'all can yet be saved', revealed
how much had been lost.
The news of the defeats, of course, ended any hope of alliances.
1
*Lc pion est dans la marmelade, qu'il y reste.' Frossard, the c
pion', was not merely
a learned soldier, but had been Military Governor of the Prince Imperial.

25
THE* DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
France had to face her enemy alone. It was fitting, then, that the
Ollivier Ministry should bear the first brunt of popular wrath. The
Corps L^gislatif was summoned to meet on the ninth of August. In a
dream-world to the last, Ollivier had planned to arrest the leaders of
the Left, but such a coup d'ttat needed the presence of the Emperor in
Paris and he was at the front. But this fantastic reply to Worth and
Spicheren was given no chance of life. The Left-wing parties realized
that it meant that 'the armies of the Emperor had been beaten', and
so did the Chamber. Ollivier and Gramont were overthrown and a
new Ministry, headed by the Comte de Palikao, was formed. Palikao
was the soldier who, as General de Montauban, had commanded the
French c6rps in the Chinese war of 1860. He was energetic and reso-
lute and he and his colleagues represented, far better than had Ollivier,
the sentiments of the Imperialist majority. But that majority was
already stricken by fear. The Opposition could only be defeated by
victories in Lorraine.
The Republican deputies wanted a return to the great traditions of
their spiritual ancestors. All powers were to be given to the Chamber
and to a committee of that Chamber, while there was to be a universal
arming of the people; in short, a recourse to the great legend of the
Convention. Revolution was in the air, though not yet practicable.
A premature effort by the irrepressible Blanquists failed miserably, for
the Paris mob was fiercely patriotic and treated the Blanquists as
Prussian agents. The direct command of the Army by the Emperor
was discredited and the parties of the Left had their general at hand.
Marshal Bazaine must be given the chance to save France that had
been taken from him by Napoleon III and Lebceuf.
The Germans in Lorraine were still uncertain as to what the French
had done after Spicheren; and Moltke assumed that they were in rapid
retreat. It would have been the wisest course to fall back on a position
where the Army of Lorraine could join the remnants of MacMahon's
Army of Alsace, but the political pressure from Paris was too strong.
A stand must be made, and the job of holding the Germans was
entrusted to Bazaine, who was made Commander-in-Chief on August
1 2th. The new Commander-in-Chief, from the beginning, displayed
that astonishing indifference to the fate of his Army which led, in the
not very long run, to suspicions of treason. It is true that Bazaine's
position was difficult. The Emperor was still with him and he could
not be wholly disregarded. Military policy was more and more
coloured by political events at Paris; the best military decisions being
overruled because they might unchain the revolution. The Germans,
confident that the enemy was in full retreat, rushed ahead, and at
Borny ran into an army not in retreat but ready to resist. -The
battle reinforced the lesson of Worth. The chassepot again worked
wonders; the harassed French troops were full of fight and, at the end
26
THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLIC
of bloody assaults, held the battle-field with a gratifying feeling of
victory. Their tactical success was real, but Borny, though it seemed
to justify the appointment of Bazaine, was really a defeat. The French
Army should have been in full retreat, and the day lost in beating back
the Germans was never recovered. The Germans again assumed that
the French would do what they should have done and marched in hot
pursuit of the fleeing enemy. But Bazaine was not fleeing. He had
got his army under the walls of Metz and the job of getting them
beyond the city was too much for his staff. There was no direct rail-
way line with the other great fortress of Verdun and, though the
Emperor was at last safely shipped off, the streets of the fortress were
crowded with troops and the temptation to rest a little and straighten
things out was too much for the Marshal. Metz, it is true, was an
obsolete fortress; the conversion of it into a modern entrenched camp
had just been begun when war broke out, but it was the sort of city of
refuge likely to appeal to a general in a dilemma.
It was on August i6th that the Germans discovered where the
French Army was, by their usual method of running into it. Inferior
in numbers, the Germans again and again launched desperate and
futile attacks on French infantry in the comfortable position of having

only to shoot their enemy down. If French corps commanders


observed a cold neutrality towards one another, matters were not always
better in the German camp, and the Commander of the German ist
Army, Steinmetz, was on bad terms both with his superiors and
inferiors. His ardour involved another attack on a superior French
force which, though surprised, had plenty of time to react while still
much stronger than its opponent. But Bazaine had become obsessed
with the danger of being cut off from Metz, so obsessed that he
strengthened his left, which was in no danger, and left his right to
fend for itself. The great battle of Vionville-Mars-la-Tour was thus a
German defeat on the Vionville side which did not matter, and a French
defeat on the Mars-la-Tour side which did. To neither event did
Bazaine contribute more than his initial blunders and his refusal to do
anything to remedy them. He behaved in the next two days like a
brave regimental officer with no higher responsibilities. He was
bruised by a shell splinter while directing the fire of a battery; he was
nearly captured by German cavalry. He disappeared for hours: and
his immediate subordinates, who had realized with horror his
complete
nullity, entertained the hope that he had been killed or made a prisoner
and that the Army would now be commanded by Bourbaki or
Ganrobert.
The tactics of the battles were still the same. The German infantry
and the French (when the latter was given a chance to do so) showed
the most stubborn courage in fruitless assaults against the enemy lines.

Suffering frightful losses, both sides became demoralized, Bismarck


27
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
and the King were horrified to find themselves in a panic-stricken mass
of troops reduced to a mob by the chassepot and the mitrailleuse. On
both sides the cavalry had failed miserably as scouts, but the German
cavalry was slightly less carelessly led than the French. There was no
German equivalent of the surprise of Forton's division while the horses
were being watered. Under the critical eyes of General Philip Sheri-
dan, cavalry was used in masses of shock troops, in charges of troopers
against troopers, and of less brilliant attacks of armoured horsemen
against infantry and artillery. At Rezonville, the cuirassiers of the
French Guard were piled up in masses of horses and men in front of
the German troops they had not been able to reach. It was the last

great effort of the mounted swordsman or lancer; futile and heroic.


Only one of these efforts had any military results, the great 'death-ride*
of von Bredow's squadrons at Vionville. That held up the French
advance at a critical moment; it, unlike the other charges, was magni-
ficent and it was war.
The second battle, Gravelotte-Saint-Privat, completed the strategical
defeat of the French. Never using his troops in any articulated way,
refusing necessary artillery aid to the unfortunate Ganrobert whose
corps, rushed up from Chalons, had no entrenching tools, resisting all
the pleas of his own devoted staff officers to advance against a shattered
and smaller army, Marshal Bazaine in the two great battles showed
less sense ,of his duty and of the opportunities of the battle than did the

rank-and-file. The Germans, at least, knew their own minds; they


learned more quickly than their opponents the tactical lessons of the
war. They began to use their artillery superiority skilfully, blasting
the French infantry out of its positions before attempting to throw in
their own infantry. And the French guns, badly outclassed in any case,
were stupidly used or not used. The Germans had more guns and
better guns and used them all; the French had fewer guns and inferior
guns and let many of them stand idle. Even the asserted superiority
of long-service troops was not put to the test, for the crack French
corps, the Guard, for which the line regiments had been drained of
their best recruits, was kept idle and only used in driblets and too late.

By the evening of August i8th, the main French Army was penned
up under the walls of Metz. The results of the fortnight since the
German advance had begun were decisive and were summed up a
generation later by Colonel Foch in his lectures to the students of the
War School. 'The defeated French Army was thrown back into Metz;
Its final destruction was merely a question of time. Before the i8th
it had shown itself, whether by the feebleness of its leaders or of its
resources, incapable of any manoeuvre to defeat the enemy, make good
itsretreat to the interior of the country, or of rallying the still available
forces. How could it henceforward hope for better results in face of
a victorious enemy, in command of the lines of communication?'
28
THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLIC
French forces were, by this disaster, reduced to the garrisons of
various old and ill-equipped fortresses, Strasbourg, Belfort, Toul, to
the Army of Metz and to the Army of Chalons. The last was the only
available field force; and all the arguments that had made it wise for
the Army of Metz to fall back on MacMahon, told with redoubled
force in favour of keeping the Army of Chalons intact. Its morale
was badly shattered. The Emperor had come to Chalons where his
forlorn state was bad for discipline and where the elaborate Imperial
travelling household was the subject of mockery. The Paris 'mobiles*
had been sent to Chalons after a drunken and ill-disciplined departure
from the capital which made their procession to the station look more
like a carnival parade than a military move. At Chalons, they were
forced to do endless fatigues, partly because the camp was in a dirty
and chaotic condition and partly because there was nothing else for
them to do, no proper arms and equipment for the raw recruits, whose
discipline, slight at best, broke down. They filled the drinking dens
and brothels of the camp, and in despair were sent back to Paris. The
only sensible thing suggested had been the incorporation of the mobiles,
in groups of a hundred, in the regular regiments, where they would
have been fairly easily absorbed. As it was, MacMahon found his
Army reduced to regular troops collected from the wreck of the Army
of Alsace, reservists from the depots, troops from Africa and some
admirable battalions of marines. With these troops of mixed quality he
was ordered to advance to the relief of Metz.
It was an absurd project, only justifiable on narrow political

grounds. If the Army and the Emperor fell back on Paris, as all
military prudence commanded, the regime would collapse. The
Empress Regent and Palikao forbade this, and MacMahon marched
forward, hesitating and trying to turn back, but driven on by impera-
tive orders from Paris. The rashness of the march and the vacillations
of the Marshal bewildered the Germans, whose first news of Mac-
Mahon's movements came from the Temps. At once the German
armies began to close in on the doomed French. At Beaumont,
Failly's corps was badly surprised and showed, in sudden panics, the
effect of demoralization consequent on defeat. The Marshal had little
faith in his plan and gladly took refuge in the little fortified city of

Sedan, where his harassed troops could rest. MacMahon did not
realize that, already, the Germans had united their armies in front of
him, and he was more concerned to shelter his troops than to take up
a good position on the hills round the city.
On the morning of September 2nd the battle began. The Marshal
was badly wounded; the Emperor, rouged lest the troops should see
his deadly pallor, rode about under shell-fire in agony, but was not

lucky enough to be hit. Ducrot, who had succeeded MacMahon, was


all for an immediate retreat, but
Wimpffen, who had just arrived from
29
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
Africa and who had Palikao's authority to take command, still hoped
for a miracle. Some of the Army was ready for battle.
The marines, who had scandalized some of their comrades by their
straggling on the march, showed admirable courage and constancy.
Wimpffen hoped to force a way out, at any rate for the Emperor, and
had Napoleon taken the chance and died at the head of a desperate
sortie, his name might not have been dishonoured. But rightly con-
vinced that the battle was lost and anxious not to be the cause of use-
less slaughter, the Emperor retired into Sedan. The superiority of the
German artillery was felt far more at Sedan than
in any previous
battle. Moltke had his enemy securely held and he did not launch
his infantry to vain attacks, when he could destroy the French will to
resist by an artillery bombardment to which no real reply was possible.
Surrounded on all sides, the French were under a constant cross-fire.
The heroic combats of the marines at Bazeilles were worthy of the
repute of French arms. The cavalry charges of the Chasseurs d'Afrique
and cuirassiers covered the ground with gay uniforms, like a carpet, as
one narrator put it, and the King of Prussia, looking down on this
fruitless gallantry cried, 'Oh, the brave fellows'. But into Sedan the
fugitives poured, filling the narrow streets with men and horses and
baggage. An army paymaster had to crawl under the horses' bellies
to get Napoleon ordered the hoisting of the white flag.
past.
Wimpffen, mad
with rage, tried to resist, but the battle was over.
Napoleon offered his own sword in surrender, but Moltke reasonably
had to have the whole Army. Bismarck met at a wayside inn the
man whom he had last seen in his glory in Paris in 1867; and Moltke,
coldly inflexible, insisted on a complete surrender despite the vehement
pleading of Wimpffen. The French losses were over 20,000, the
German about 6,000, testimony to the superiority of the German
losses

guns. A
few thousand troops managed to get away, but 80,000
prisoners, among them the Emperor and a Marshal of France, testified
to the most complete and dramatic of German victories. Though not
as important as the battles round Metz, Sedan was the crowning glory
of Prussian arms and the end of the French Empire.
Although Paris and many other French towns have their street of
the 4th of September, that date is not one which all French Republicans
then or since have delighted to honour. The imminent collapse of the
Empire had been discounted since the middle of August, and Lord
Lyons, the British Ambassador, doubted if even a victory could save
the regime. Despite the attempt at secrecy the news of Sedan spread,
and by the evening of September 3rd the only question was what
would replace the fallen Empire.
The Republican leaders were by no means all anxious to replace the
Imperial Government at once. The burden laid on the successors of
Napoleon III would be heavy and, perhaps, unbearable; moreover, the
30
THE BIRTH OF THE R E f#&I0,C!Rafl2 Q J, \
deputies feared a revolution. Let the Corps
L^gislatif, the organ of
universal suffrage, however tainted and corrupted, provide France
with a temporary Government. Some of the Left were even ready to
contemplate a triumvirate of Palikao, Trochu, the Military Governor
of Paris, and Schneider, the President of the Chamber. But all these
combinations broke down on two obstacles. The Imperialist deputies
who were the overwhelming majority of the Chamber hesitated to
pronounce the fatal word 'deposition' and wasted time in seeking
plausible solutions that would not commit the future. And the Paris
mob was in no mood for these tricks, any more than it had been in
February, 1848. The Blanquists were active and, by September 4th,
the only remaining question was whether the change would be made
peacefully or not. The police might still resist. But there was no
fight left in the Imperialists. Had Napoleon III been killed at Sedan,
his heir might have had more friends, but the captivity of the Emperor
tied the tongues of the majority and their delay ended the possibility of
a pacific transition to a provisional regime. The impatient mob made
an end of the protracted intrigues and negotiations, invaded the
Chamber, and the Empire was over. Dr. Evans, an American court
dentist, smuggled the Empress out of Paris; and at the Palais Bourbon,
Jules Favre, accepting the popular acclamation of the Republic, cried,
'It is not here but at the Hotel de Ville that we must proclaim it*.
France had made another revolution, or rather Paris had. The
system that had resisted all attacks and which had, a few months before,
been acclaimed by the vast majority of the French people, was over-
thrown without a shadow of resistance as a result of a great French
defeat. Bismarck, more than any other man, founded the Third
Republic.
The collapse of schemes for a regular transference of power made
itnecessary to find a new Government at once. There was now no
thought of Palikao or Schneider. And since the revolution was the
work of Paris, it was fitting that the new Government should be
exclusively formed of deputies of Paris or of deputies who had been
elected for Paris but had chosen to sit for other constituencies.
5
The 'Government of National Defence ranged from such deeply
conservative members of the Left as Ernest Picard to the bugbear of
all respectable people, Rochefort, the scurrilous editor of the Lanterne,
idol of the Paris mob. One reassuring gesture was made, the appoint-
ment of General Trochu as head of the Government. The Governor
of Paris, as a critic of the old Army, inspired confidence in the new
rulers of Paris, and his great gifts as a talker made him more of a match
for his eloquent colleagues than, say, Moltke would have been. By
assuming the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Jules Favre took over what
was- at the moment the most important of the departments, for it was
bis place to determine the question of peace, or war. By his famous
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
circular of September 6th he decided for war, for he announced that
even to get peace France would not surrender an 'inch of her territory
or a stone of her fortresses'. Considered in cold blood, the circular to
French diplomats was absurd. It shut off negotiation at once; it
would have been wiser to have asked for Prussian terms and then to
have appealed to the conscience of Europe and the pride of France.
But such a course was impossible. In Paris all sections applauded the
eloquent declaration and there were critics on the Left who would have
liked to add 'not a dollar' to the list of things France would not give to
the victors. Thiers defended the circular in terms that the outside
world could understand: 'What would you have? The French Revo-
lution, our mother, was born speech-making: you mustn't take what
she says literally.'
There were plenty of people in France, and above all in Paris, who
took it all very literally. Prussia might have one French Army on the
way to Germany and the other shut up in Metz, but France had the
Republic. Prussia had announced, as is the way with belligerents
at the beginning of a war, that her quarrel was with the Emperor not
with France; now the Emperor was gone, so what was there left to fight
about? But even if Bismarck should prove perfidious, there was the
Republic confronting him. Had not a schoolboy under the Empire,
instead of writing Latin verses on the death of Prince Jerome in the
general examination, described the Republic coming:

Pale encore, et des plis de sa blanche tunique


Gachant son front voi!6?

She was no longer pale or veiled, but faced the invaders 'terrible as an
army with banners'. 'They won't dare to come now that we have
her,' said a workman. And spectators all over Paris noted that Sep-
tember 4th was like a holiday. It was a beautiful day and holiday
crowds watched the shopkeepers who had, a few days before, been so
proud of the signs that announced that they were purveyors to the
Imperial Court, climb up ladders and scrape off the incriminating
legends. Others cheered as busts of the Emperor were thrown into the
Seine, and far away, in Auvergne, young men climbed the mountain
of Gergovia, where Caesar had been repelled by the Gauls, and knocked
down the monument that recorded the visit of the Imperial archaeolo-
gist. was very different in the wake of the advancing German
It

armies, where the boy Maurice Barres never forgot the drunken French
troops going off to the front then returning a few days later, hungry
and shattered to be followed by the inexorable armies of the invaders.
But all that was remote enough from the Paris that celebrated the new-
born Republic and to which, in the next day or two, the great exiles,
Victor Hugo, Louis Blanc and the rest, hurried to give their moral
support. It was a brief delirium, but not all were victims of it. The
-
3*
THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLIC
youngest member of the Government knew that there was mor,e to be
done than make speeches and issue proclamations. While his col-
leagues were busy at the Hotel de Ville, Leon Gambetta had taken
possession of the Ministry
of the Interior and, announcing his action
to the provinces, made sure that the citadel of the political machine
would be own. The cautious Ernest Picard arrived
in safe hands, his
at the PlaceBeauvau just too late.
In conjunction with Arago, the famous scientist who had been
made Mayor of Paris, Gambetta nominated mayors for the twenty
arrondissements of the city and his colleagues learned of it for the
firsttime by reading the notice in the official paper! To secure the
machinery of local government was essential for the young Republic
and, from that point of view, it was unfortunate that the local
elections had taken place on the day of Worth and Spicheren, before
the result of these battleshad begun to weaken the Imperialist party.
Although Gambetta had nominated the new mayors, he wished to
strike while the iron was hot and have new municipal elections despite
the opposition of his colleagues. They were in favour of postponing
everything until peace was near, with or without further fighting, but
Gambetta was resolved both to beat the Prussians and to give the
Republic a chance to dig itself in: for he, like the rest of the Left, could
not realize how completely, for the moment, Bonapartism was dead.
Gambetta was not blindly partisan; he made the engineer, Charles
de Freycinet, a prefect, although he had been an Imperialist candidate;
but the Republican zealots of the Lot and Tarn would have none of
him. In general, however, Gambetta was mindful of his friends of
Belleville days, of men like the very red Arthur Ranc and of other old

associates, likely to be regarded by the prudent as specimens of the


class described by Jules Valles as 'refractaircs', 'fellows who have tried

everything and who have not become anything; fellows who have
studied in all the faculties: law, medicine, or history, and who have not
got rank, degree or diploma'.
As Minister of the Interior, Gambetta was in charge of the National
Guard and it was possible to arm the people against reaction as well
as against the Prussians. That is to say, if therewere any arms.
Ranc, whom Gambetta had made Mayor of the ninth arrondissement,
tells how
a zealous citizen came to him to enroll, and on being told
that hewould get a rifle in two days' time burst out, 'We've still got to
wait? So it's still just as it was under the Empire.' However, arms of
a kind were got and the National Guard of Paris rose in number to
360,000 men
one of the decisive political factors of the next six months.
any rate, the Republic was accepted and safe all over
Politically, at
France within a few days of its proclamation. There might be
differences of opinion about the kind of Republic. Prudence or
pedantry kept a veteran of the cause like Jules Gr^vy in ostentatious
33
THE' DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
aloofness from a Republic created by a revolution, and the most
famous French politician, Thiers, refused firmly to enter the Govern-
ment of National Defence, although he was willing to serve it as long as
it represented France, in however imperfect a form.

Only in one region was the change ignored. Inside Metz, Bazaine
had set up what was equivalent to a military dictatorship. He refused
to proclaim the Republic and was more and more preoccupied with
the problem of 'restoring order' after peace was made. He had made
a half-hearted sortie as MacMahon drew near, but he gave no sign that
he had any hope of success or any plan except to stay in Metz as long
as food held out and then save France from 'anarchy* in collaboration
with the Empress and with the consent of Bismarck. He indulged in
cryptic negotiations with the Germans and
sent off Bourbaki, under a
German safe-conduct, to negotiate at Hastings with Eugenie. But the
Empress soon realized that a restoration of her husband or her son by
the consent of Prussia was unworthy and impossible. As long as
France resisted, she would do nothing to hamper the work of the
Government of National Defence.
Inside Metz, discontent grew. Civilians threw the bust of the

Emperor out of the Hotel de Ville and a local paper compared the
conduct of the Marshal unfavourably with that of Beaurepaire, who
had committed suicide at Verdun in 1792 rather than surrender that
1
fortress to the Prussians. Eager and. angry officers talked of kid-
napping Bazaine, and some of his immediate subordinates were bitter

against him. But they were professional soldiers bound by hierarchical


respect. Their honour was satisfied by an occasional bloody and futile
sortie, and they settled down to the regular siege ritual of eating horses
and dying of typhus, until the approach of starvation would justify
surrender. For the cream of the Imperial Army of France could not,
for a moment, believe it possible that an amateur Army and an illegiti-
mate Government could succeed where the Emperor and his troops
had failed. As long as Bazaine held out, 200,000 German troops were
engaged, but he held out without hope of victory and merely from pro-
fessional decorum if not from dark and treasonable ambition. As
far as the Army of Metz was concerned, the war was over bar the
formalities.

1
It is probable that Bcaurepaire-was murdered by townspeople who wanted to sur-
render, but the importance of a legend has no relation to its truth.

34
CHAPTER II

THE SIEGE OF PARIS


igththe German Armies completed their investment of
ON September
For
Paris. a few days the cable in the bed of the Seine remained
undiscovered, but after September 25th the beleaguered city could com-
municate with the outside only by balloon and carrier pigeon. The
folly that kept the 'Government of National Defence' in Paris was soon
made evident. The Imperial Government, in its last days, had pre-
pared for the imminent siege by sending agents of the ministries to
Tours; the new Government accepted the decision of its predecessor
and despatched delegates to Tours to deal with the provinces. But
these delegates, Cremieux, Glais-Bizoin and Admiral Fourichon, were
only delegates without independent authority, and they were old and
worn-out men. Indeed, their age seems to have determined their
departure as much as anything else. Younger members of the Govern-
ment had to prove their courage by standing in the breach as their
great ancestors had done. The Republican myth, the belief that the
sacred name was the new sign in which France would conquer, com-
pelled the Government to stay in the sacred city where the Convention
in 1 792 had defied the embattled kings. Every member of the Govern-
ment had to act as if he were Danton. It was as deputies of Paris that
the members of the Government of National Defence had been thrown
into power; they could not desert their maker. And there was, too,
in the Government and in the population of the city, a good deal of
Parisian conceit. France was saved in 1793 because Paris was saved;
France was conquered in 1814 and 1815 because Paris was conquered.
It was the duty of the provinces to do all they could for the sovereign

city; but Paris would save herself by her exertions, and France by her
example.
Illusions were not confined to Paris. The Parisians thought that
itwould be impossible for the Germans to blockade effectively the vast
circuit of their city, for the wall was 20 miles round and the forts of the
entrenched camp would impose an even greater extension of their lines
on the besiegers than that. 1 But the Germans, and many non-
Germans, thought it would be materially and morally impossible for
the frivolous capital to stand a siege. Moltke, like a good professional
1 The German lines came to cover over 50 miles.

35
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
soldier, was convinced that the war was over. Most of the French
professional soldiers were prisoners, and he had now only to deal
with amateurs. He expected to be home and at peace by the end of
October.
There were good military reasons for this optimism. The fortifi-
cations of Paris were out of date; in the thirty years since they had been
built, the range of artillery had vastly increased and the reconstruction
of the defence work's had proceeded very slowly. In August, Thiers
had been infuriated by the pedantry and slackness of the engineers.
They in turn were held up by the legal difficulties of getting sites for
new defence works; they added to their difficulties by the snobbery that
made them prefer to begin elaborate permanent fortifications instead
of temporary but efficient earthworks of the type that had served the
Russians so well at Sebastopol.
The combat of September igth seemed to justify the gloomiest
French views. The important position of Ghatillon had to be aban-
doned after a skirmish in which the Zouaves fled in ignominious panic.
It is true that these Zouaves had nothing of the Zouave about them
but the name and the uniform; they were raw recruits, but to a popula-
tion brought up to regard the crack Zouave regiments with super-
stitious awe, the news was a cold douche. Of more permanent im-
portance was the imposition on the defence of a mere retention of the
permanent works; it was no longer possible to hold off the Germans and
force them to extend their-quarter of a million men over a vaster peri-
meter. Indeed, there were moments when it seemed doubtful if the
permanent works could be held. On the second day of the siege,
Parisian mobiles abandoned the key fort of Mont-Valerien, marching
back into the city to the tune of the Marseillaise. But despite momen-
tary panic and more permanent indiscipline, the Germans were not
tempted to assault a city that they assumed would soon fall without
any great activity on their side.
There was a moment when it seemed that it might fall at once,
for on September igth the Foreign Minister of the provisional
'

government, Jules Favre, left the city under a safe-conduct to interview


Bismarck in the great Rothschild chateau of Ferri&res. Gut off from
Europe, Favre had in Ghaudordy, his representative at Tours, an
excellent agent, but his own policy was imposed on him by his own
illusions and the still more formidable illusions and passions of the
Parisians. He wanted an armistice which would allow the election
of a Constituent Assembly and the regularizing of the position of the
Government, but 'if we must give up an inch of soil, no negotiations'.
It was a repetition of the old declaration; but, whatever Favre or his

colleagues in their hearts may have thought, an acceptance of Bis-


marck's terms was impossible. The American Minister, Elihu Wash-
burne, wrote in his diary of September 22nd, 'the Prussians demanded
36
THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLIC
r^s *t

territory, and no government could yield to sugh a demand and-iivc a


day in France'. If Prussia would not relent ana ram wofcflft TOraKasft
herself, the siege was inevitable.
In the last days of the Empire, preparations had been made for a
siege. The Minister of Commerce, Clement Duvernois, had displayed
great energy in collecting foodstuffs for Paris, and the sight of parks and
squares full of cattle, the Halles full of civilian, and the unfinished
Opera full of military, stores comforted the citizens. But the results of
these measures could not be fully estimated, for two reasons. No full
and accurate statement of the amount of food actually in Paris was ever
available. In the last month of the siege, Ernest Picard, the Minister
of Finance, noted with gratification that the Government was 'sur-
prised to find that there was still so much wheat and flour* in hand.
More indefensible than the neglect to make and draw up a strict
balance sheet of stores for the besieged Government, was the neglect,
until December, to make an accurate census of the number of inhabi-
tants. In September, Parisians had been advised to leave Paris if
no good reason kept them there, but there was no attempt to force
useless mouths to leave the city and, worse still, the inhabitants of the

neighbouring towns and villages were encouraged to enter Paris to be


safe from the invaders! It was, of course, impossible to determine
how long an unknown number of inhabitants could be fed on an un-
known quantity of wheat, meat and other foodstuffs. It was conse-
quently impossible to answer accurately the fundamental question,
how many days had the provinces got in which to rescue Paris? This
mattered little as long as Metz resisted, for it was obviously desirable,
at almost any risk, to deliver Paris before the troops besieging Metz were
freed to protect the troops besieging Paris. But after October 28th the
basic calculation of French strategy was the duration of the resistance
of Paris; and had the armies of the provinces known that they could
depend on the resistance of Paris into 1871, it would have been un-
necessary to try so many forlorn hopes.
The statistical deficiencies of the defenders of Paris had other minor
but not unimportant results. The food supply was controlled by the
mayors of the twenty arrondissements of the city and, apart from the
varying efficiency and honesty of the administrators, it was impossible
to insist on rigid justice when the exact population of each district was
unknown. So in the beleaguered city, there were startling discrep-
ancies in the amount of food available in the different arrondissements,
differences which did not add to the moral resources of the defence.
These moral resources were further weakened by the refusal of the
Government to ration everybody. The Blanquists demanded rationing
on the ground that JParis was like a becalmed ship and an equal division
of its limited resources was just and necessary. But such a drastic step
was opposed by a Government which shunned any revolutionary
37
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
measures and was strongly influenced by the doctrines of classical
economics. 'Rationing by dearness' was the slogan of Molinari, the
great economist. For all their Jacobin airs, the lawyers who domi-
nated the Government were timid souls. In the days before the siege
began, Ernest Picard had strongly opposed, raising the octroi, the muni-
cipal tax on 'foodstuffs entering Paris. Such a measure would en-
courage speculators to pour supplies into Paris which would be unfair
to the owners of the existing stocks and it would seriously affect the
revenue of the city which had to stand so much extra expense anyway!
A temporary suspension was voted, but as it was only to apply to goods
brought in by genuine refugees or citizens, it ensured that the octroi
officials would inspect all importations, collect no revenue but impose

enough delay to diminish seriously the amount of food that business


men on the make would otherwise have poured into Paris. A Govern-
ment like this was not likely to affront private property or the bellies of
the rich by insisting on a share-out. It fell back on that device dear to
all French Governments, the fixing of a legal price for certain foodstuffs
without doing anything serious to ensure control of the supply.
Butchers, forced to sell at this unprofitable price, simply shut up
shop, thus creating vast queues at such shops as remained open.
Food cards were reluctantly introduced and, even when the last
days of the siege were at hand, the Government issued a proclama-
tion denouncing rumours that bread was to be rationed. At last it
came to that; and the greatest of privileges for a Frenchman, the
right to ask for more bread, was taken away, too late to delay
the surrender of the city.
The clue to the resistance of Paris was the food supply, but the only
hope of the deliverance of Paris was in its garrison. That garrison was
formidable in numbers. There was Vinoy's corps, which had moved
too slowly to be caught at Sedan. There were some survivors of that
battle itself. There were two good regular regiments which had been
brought from Rome, there were 13,000 excellently disciplined sailors
and marines. There were in the city, in the police, the fire-brigade
and in other services many veteran soldiers of whom better use might
have been made had they been employed to stiffen the new units.
The new units were 100,000 mobiles from the provinces, 15,000
mobiles of the city and the vast amorphous mass of the National Guard.
Had the political position of the Government been stronger, a powerful
army could have been created. But neither Trochu nor his colleagues
were modern Carnots. Trochu was sceptical of the power of impro-
vised troops and, though he had moments of optimism, was as much
concerned with making an honourable as a successful resistance. His
deep religious faith at times led him to believe that Sainte-Genevteve
would deliver her city from the barbarians in the nineteenth century
as she had in the fifth. His colleagues did not share this faith, but
38
THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLIC
they had their own myths. Had not Ernest Picard declared that the
revival of the National Guard would
give France 500,000 trained
soldiers in a There were other reasons why a rational use of
week?
the man-power of Paris was difficult. The National Guard of the
working-class districts was deeply suspicious of its rulers and leaders.
This suspicion had led to the introduction of the election of their
officersby the mobiles. Were not the existing officers of that corps
nominees of the dethroned tyrant? Was it not an insult to Paris that
bearers of such hated names as Pi^tri and Baroche were high officers in
the Garde Mobile? So in the first days of the siege, indeed while some of
the Garde Mobile were actually fighting, its discipline was strained by an
electoral campaign, and it was not until December that the Government
took the political risk of abolishing election. In the 'sedentary National
Guard', election was of course a sacred right. So three battalions of
the Belleville Guard elected Flourens as their colonel and Belleville
thought of its soldiers as defenders of the Republic and of the revolu-
tion, as much as of the country. They suspected that if they were sub-
missive to the orders of the generals, they would be sacrificed by those
enemies of the Republic. And the National Gifard was the only
defence of the authority of the Government. 'We were,' wrote Jules
c

Ferry, a Government resting on moral force; we had nothing else at


our disposal; what had we to maintain order and defend it against the
party of anarchy? the National Guard and nothing else.' A Govern-
ment of this type could not impose on its only support an amalgamation
of the old and the new armies such as had accounted for the successes
of the First Republic. In addition, the National Guard was the only
obvious solution of the great unemployment problem. By paying the
amateur soldiers a franc and a half a day, 1 the Government saved from
destitution a mass of workers cut off from their normal employments
by the siege. That watchdog of the Treasury, Picard, protested against
such extravagance, adding that paying allowances straight to the wives
meant weakening the authority of the husbands. Gambetta wanted to
secure that, in return for these payments, real work was done. But
although the defence needed great masses of labourers, it did not find
it easy to get them. Until the last month of the siege, the National
Guard confined maintaining order, or creating disturbances
itself to

inside Paris, and to guarding the walls; the active defence was left to
the regulars, the sailors and the mobiles.
Even these units were not sufficiently amalgamated. The'defence
of the city was divided into nine sectors a and these did not always co-
operate willingly or in time. Moreover, the War Office, with its mind
on the really interesting problems of peace, for long refused to give the
1
The pay was thus is. $d. (thirty cents) a day for each man; a man with a wife and
two children got zs. tfd. (fifty-five cents) a day.
1 It
is significant of the dearth of higher officers, that
four of these sectors were com-
manded by admirals.

39 D
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
new regiments of the regular army a permanent organization lest vested
interests should be created, a future economy purchased at a serious
loss of efficiency. The provincial mobiles were in the main well-
disciplined, but they were affected (or tainted) by the more politically-
minded Parisian battalions l and by the survivors of Sedan who
naturally placed no blind confidence in the high command.
The defenders of Paris, however, with- few exceptions, contributed
an asset far more important than their defects of temper, discipline and
stolidity. They refiised to recognize what all the world but they
recognized, that the game was up. The great French talent for impro-
visation was drawn on. Gut off from normal supplies, Paris was
fully
provided with an army and a fairly well-equipped army. In some
ways, it was better equipped than the Imperial Army had been. The
breech-loading artillery which existed only in a model or two and in
some blue prints, became a reality in Paris, despite inexpert manufac-
turers and a desperate shortage of trained artillery officers. The
machinery for manufacturing mitrailleuses had been shifted to the
provinces, but new machinery was improvised and the attitude of the
Germans showed outside Paris, as it had outside Metz, that, for all its
defects, the new weapon had a formidably depressing effect even on
first-class troops. A flotilla of gunboats was put on the river* and
following up a bright idea of Napoleon III, armoured trains were
created to take advantage of the railway resources of the city.
All this technical ingenuity would have availed little had there not
been courage behind it. There were still panics, and the new regiments
were often only covered by the discipline of the few regulars, but the
fighting force of the Parisians surprised the Germans and the world.
Paris had men and courage, how were they to be used? Merely by
holding out, Paris immobilized 250,000 Germans and that was a great
deal, but it was not enough for the role in which the Parisians had cast
themselves. They were to break the German lines and liberate France,
and, when that proved impossible, they were to issue forth from the
beleaguered city when the new provincial armies got within reach.
The deliverance of Paris by Paris, always impossible, had not been
made easier by one of the few preparations for the siege that had been
really thorough. Obsessed by the need of preventing a Prussian
assault on the ramparts, all the roads round Paris had been elaborately
made impassable and all the gates had been blocked up or narrowed.
When it became evident that the invaders had no notion of assaulting
the fortifications, these defences became an obstacle to. the defenders,
who wished to attack. The Germans fortified themselves all round
Paris and the garrison repeatedly found that the temporary and local
superiority in strength which it gained from its position in the centre of
1 Paris affected the
bodies as well as -the minds of its defenders; there were 8,000 cases
of venereal disease in the garrison.

40
THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLIC
the vast perimeter, could not be made effective fast enough to break

through. Sortie after sortie failed, ending after initial success, with

desperate combats in the great walled parks of suburban chateaux,


Gros Bois and Malmaison, Ladoucette and Villiers.
These sorties, if useful in themselves in keeping the Germans on the
alert,would, if no more than that, have been but bigger versions of the
exploits of Sergeant Hoff. What he did by his nightly raids, Trochu
could do less well on a bigger scale in his monthly sortie. But,
as Trochu told his colleagues, he had a plan. It was not in origin
his plan, but Ducrot's. That general, taken prisoner at Sedan, had
escaped from his captors and was now Trochu's second-in-command.
His plan was bold. Its object was not to achieve the impossible, to
break up the besieging army by a sortie, but the more limited and
practicable one of getting out of Paris the pick of the garrison. This
army would be the nucleus of a provincial army of rescue. In his
choice of a direction for this break-through, Ducrot showed originality.
France had complete command of the sea, but apart from capturing
German merchantmen was making no use of it. It was Ducrot's plan
to use it; the escaping army was to march on Rouen by Pontoise; there
itsback would be to the river and its bases would be the Channel ports,
from which the Germans could not cut it off. It would be in touch
with the new armies of the north gathering round Amiens and the
frontier fortresses, while the new armies on the Loire would be trans-

ported by rail and sea to lower Normandy. In fortified lines based on


sea communications, it could resist all German attempts to repeat
Sedan until it was readyadvance to the relief of the sedentary
to
garrison of Paris. Once out of Paris, Ducrot proposed to play the part
of Wellington in 1810 and make for a new Torres Vedras. Ducrot
and Trochu were ready for the risky break-through when their plan
was made obsolete by the decision of Leon Gambetta.
Although there is no evidence that he foresaw the consequences of
letting the Government be shut up in Paris, Gambetta's temperament
was too active and combative to let him rest content with the r61e of
sending balloon messages to his nominal subordinates in the provinces.
There were disquieting symptoms of disunion in the south; there were
disquieting signs of independence at Tours. After many hesitations
and changes, the Paris Government had finally decided against
holding elections for a Constituent Assembly, but the delegates at Tours
had disregarded the wishes of the Government in Paris. It was high
time that someone more important than mere officials should represent
the authority of Paris in the provinces, and, on October gth, Gambetta
arrived at Tours, a day after he had left Paris by balloon.
Henceforward all the general political and strategic decisions were
imposed on France and on Paris by the will of the demagogue of thirty*
two. In his passion for secrecy, Trochu had not confided his plan to
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
the Government as a whole, and Gambetta was allowed to leave Paris
without any knowledge of it. His friend, Arthur Ranc, who joined
him a few days later, was told and he told Gambetta. But whether
Gambetta's later professions of ignorance were deliberate lying or
simply reflected the indifference with which he had heard Ranc's
story, he paid no attention to the Trochu plan and adopted
and forced
on Trochu an entirely different strategy. In this scheme, there was no
question of getting the best part of the
Paris garrison out. The new
armies were to advance as fast and as directly as possible to
provincial
the relief of Paris; when they got close enough, the Paris garrison, in a
vast mass movement, was to issue forth and the two French armies would
meet in the Forest of Fontainebleau. There was an historical parallel
for this scheme. The leader of the Gaulish resistance
to Caesar, Vercin-

getorix, had shut himself up in Alesia awaiting deliverance at the


hands of the new Gaulish armies which, in co-operation with his,
would break the Roman lines of circumvallation. But attack from
within and without had not shaken the grip of Caesar on the Gaulish
citadel, and Alesia had fallen. It was not an encouraging parallel, but
then the Italian Gambetta was really a countryman of Caesar and not
of Vercingetorix.
There was an immediate argument for doing what could be done
quickly. The greater part of German military resources was employed
in the two great sieges of Metz and Paris. It was essential to deliver
Paris before Metz fell, before the avalanche to use Gambetta's

metaphor descended on the new armies gathering on the Loire.


Although he later gave the impression that he had created armies
out of nothing, Gambetta found that a good deal had been done under
great difficulties. The nominal War Minister, Le Flo, was in Paris
and so was the greater part of the War Office staff. Le Fort, who was
organizing the troops at Tours, did so less in the hope of being able to
resist the Germans than to secure that, at an armistice, France should
have a respectable military force in the field. Tours was a Bedlam of
Catholic volunteers with the emblem of the Sacred Heart on their
tunics; adventurers of all nations looking for jobs,
rank or contracts; old
officers from retirement; newly-promoted officers of good
recalled
Republican antecedents; the officials of the remnants of departments
sent from Paris; the troops of the raw i5th Corps. The Ambassa-
dors and Ministers of the powers had mostly left Paris and were dealing
with M. de Chaudordy, the cool and competent diplomat who was
running his branch of the Foreign Office much more competently than
Favre was running the head office in Paris. And in the midst of them
ail, the aged delegates of the Government squabbled and procrasti-
nated. The head of the War Office, Admiral Fourichon, had just
resigned and Gambetta seized the office, as he had seized the Interior
on September 4th. Within forty-eight hours of his arrival he had
4*
THE BIRTH OF THE R
made himself Minister of War, presenting both Tours and
accomplished fact, and had begun. Two days before
his dictatorship
Gambetta arrived, the nascent army of the Loire under La Motte Rouge
had been defeated and Orleans abandoned to the Bavarians under von
der Tann. It was a bad beginning. Gambetta immediately removed
La Motte Rouge, but how was he to replace him? Nearly all the pro-
fessional French officers were now prisoners of war or besieged. Gam-
betta had to call on retired officers, men invalided out, men at the base
whose experience had been gained as adjutants or as quartermasters.
He had to appeal to the Navy: and soon Army Corps and smaller units
were commanded by naval officers given temporary military rank.
The names of these transplanted mariners were quickly famous,
Jaures and Jaureguiberry, Pallu de la Barriere, Penhoat, Pothuau, La
Ronciere, Saisset; in the provinces and in Paris sailors fought regiments,
forts, and corps as they would, had they been given a chance, have fought
their ships. But such resources were not enough. Gambetta and the
brilliant civil engineer, Charles de Freycinet, whom he had made his
executive agent, hoped for great things from the new Auxiliary Army
which was to produce the brilliant young generals that the Republic
needed. Gambetta thought of 1793, Freycinet of the more recent
example of the American Civil War. Gambetta forgot that it was the
Royal Army that provided most of the generals of the Republic, and
Freycinet that nearly all the successful generals in America were pro-
fessional soldiers.
The new Commander of the Army
j
of the Loire, General d Aurelle
de Paladines, was a competent officer, a good trainer of troops but no
thunderbolt of war. He was less pessimistic than Bourbaki, who had
refused to command the mob that called itself the 'Army of the Loire',
but the ignorant optimism of the young civilian under whose orders he
was, irritated him. He thought that Gambetta trusted too much to
mere numbers and did not realize how difficult it was to move ill--
trained troops,much less fight and win battles with them. 'It would
be dangerous to trust to the deceptive mirage of paper figures, and to
take them for a reality,' he told Gambetta on the eve of the great
advance which was designed to deliver Paris. And within three
weeks of Gambetta's arrival, the fall of Metz had profoundly altered
the situation for the worse. With the Army of Prince Frederick
Charles hurrying to the west, the race was to the swift and that race
was halted while M. Thiers sought for a decent diplomatic end for the
war in which enough honour had been saved to satisfy the survivor of
the reigrf of Louis Philippe.
Thiers had gone on a mission to the Courts of Europe using all his
prestige and power of argument to induce them to intervene on behalf
of prostrate France. The only two countries that could or would
do anything were Britain and Russia. Chaudordy had managed to
43
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
induce Britain to take the lead in making the peace terms a matter
of general European interest. Gladstone was deeply alarmed by the
dangerous future created by the projected German annexation of
Alsace-Lorraine; and Bismarck was equally alarmed at the prospect of
this, or any other part of the peace, being discussed in a general

assembly of the powers. But Thiers was irritated with England and,
being warmly received at St. Petersburg, misunderstood the situation.
'The very flattering reception he was given,' wrote the charg^ d'affaires,
Gabriac, 'led him to conceive hopes that could not be realized, for that
welcome was, unfortunately, almost entirely personal.' The Russian
plan, which Thiers accepted, was to bring about direct negotiations
between France and Germany and to secure a pass from Bismarck to
permit Thiers to enter Paris to confer with the Government. Thiers
insisted that Gambetta delay the offensive of the Army of the Loire
while he went to Paris. Gambetta was full of fight, believing as he
did that the war was far from lost and that peace and elections at this
moment meant ruin for the infant Republic.
The old statesman left Tours on the 28th October. After a brief
interview with Bismarck he entered Paris, bearing with him the dread
news which the Government had refused to believe, the news of the
fallof Metz and the judgment that the time had come to accept the
inevitable. October 3oth was a black day for Paris, since the fiirious
population, ever ready to suspect treason, learnt at one stroke of the fall
of Metz, of the unsuccessful fight at Le Bourget, and of the arrival of the
old enemy of the Paris workers, ready to betray them to the Prussians
with his perfidious proposals of an armistice.
On October 3ist the explosion came. Round the Hotel de Ville
the crowds became more and more ugly. Jules Ferry was there and
he sent for Jules Favre, who hastily left Thiers and went off to join his
colleagues; Trochu was added to the hostages that the rash confidence
of the Government put in the hands of what was now the insurgent
party. There must be municipal elections at once, the Government
must resign, any attempt to rescue its members would be the sign for
their death. Such were the insurgent terms. The day wore on with
the unfortunate Ministers more and more alarmed, but refusing to
resign. The news of their situation spread fast, but no one seemed
disposed to do anything to rescue them. Flourens, booted and spurred,
walked among the ink-pots on the table, incarnation of the embattled
National Guard of Belleville. The most Left-wing member of the
Government, Dorian, tried to reason with the leaders of the tmeute;
the most Right-wing, Ernest Picard, who did not share the cbnfidence
of his colleagues in the good will of the Parisians, was busy planning
a rescue that would not mean the death of the Ministers. There was
perpetual disorder among the noisy crowds that filled the Hotel de
Ville; the Courage of the Ministers baffled the mutineers, and time was
44
THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLIC
given to appeal to battalions thought to be loyal, like that of the
Folies Bergere club. A first raid rescued Trochu, Ferry, Arago and
Pelletan, but Jules Simon, Jules Favre, General Le Flo and Garnier-
Pages were still captive. It was obvious that the revolt had not suc-
ceeded, but that increased the danger for the Ministers who were now
hostages. The Hotel de Ville was surrounded by loyal troops, and
some mobiles, who had entered its kitchen by a tunnel that ran from
a neighbouring barracks, opened the doors to the besieging troops, and
Jules Ferry was in time to save his colleagues.
The leaders of this abortive revolution were not prosecuted. Told in
stern tones not to do it again, their thunder was stolen by the announce-
ment of a plebiscite asking the Parisians to express their approval
of the Government of National Defence. The election of November
3rd gave an overwhelming majority to the Government and, as a
gesture that may have concealed a half-surrender, it was announced
that mayors and aldermen would be elected. Peace, for the moment,
was made between Paris and its rulers, because all chance of peace
between Paris and its besiegers was over.
It was the opinion of Thiers that, had it not been for the disastrous
tmeute of October 3ist, he would have obtained an armistice from
Bismarck which would have permitted the holding of a general election
without the surrender of any French military advantages, such as they
were. Thiers hoped, that is to say, that Bismarck would allow Paris
to be supplied with food during the armistice. There seems little
reason to believe that Bismarck would or could have granted an
armistice without continuing to starve out Paris, or without the sur-
render of one of the forts; and the Paris workers, whatever the bour-
geoisie thought, were still vehemently opposed to compromise. It was
a little later that Trochu, replying to one of his colleagues who had
said that the man in the street wanted peace, said, *The people in some
drawing-rooms want peace; the man in the street wants war'. Thiers
was forced to admit his failure. 'The Empire ruined us; the Republic
keeps us from saving ourselves.'
All the wisdom was on the side of Thiers, but on November gth
the battle of Goulmiers seemed for a moment to show the folly of
wisdom, for what the professional soldiers of the Empire had failed to
do, the raw recruits of the Army of the Loire had done; they had
won an undisputed victory over the Germans. The French had a great
superiority in numbers, but even so, to win at all was miraculous and

the face of the war was transformed. Two days before the battle,
Hatzfeld, Bismarck's aide-de-camp, had expressed his scorn of the new
levies. Prince Frederick Charles at the head of the veteran troops
from before Metz could 'march over the whole of France from north
to south and from east to west, driving all these creatures before him
and pillaging the country as he chooses'. The complacency of the
45
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
Germans gave way to something like panic, and the wiser heads
realized how narrow an escape they had had. Prince Frederick
Charles declared that, had Metz held out a day longer, he could not
have got his troops up in time to save the army round Paris from
having to raise the siege. If Metz had held out a day longer or the
advance on Orleans had been made, as Gambetta had wanted, on
November ist. For the moment, the, prudence and pessimism of
Thiers and Favre were at a discount; Gambetta and his armies must
be given a chance to succeed where Thiers and his diplomacy had
failed.

46
CHAPTER III

GAMBETTA'S WAR
despair of the rulers of France and the sublime self-confidence
THE
of the German generals were both deeply affected by the news of
Goulmiers. For the Government in Paris, the victory meant the trans-
fer of the effective authority from them to Gambetta. The strategy of
the campaign was no longer controlled by Trochu and Ducrot; Paris
was to be rescued by the provincial armies and the movements of its
garrison must be co-ordinated with those of its potential rescuers. For
the Germans, the new development was both surprising and dangerous.
The German lines of communication stretched right across France,
menaced from the troops in the east round Dijon and in the Vosges,
from the troops in the north round the fortresses of French Flanders, and
from the armies to the west and south if they should choose to move east.
The very amateurishness of the new French armies worried the
Germans. Which of these hastily raised corps would turn out to be
formidable? The normal calculations of the General Staff were out
of place here. The greater part of France was still in French hands;
and the commanders of the German wedge thrust into its heart found
it impossible to decide where to strike, especially as every blow gave

breathing space to the forces in other regions where the indomitable


nation that did not know it was beaten could raise and train troops.
Yet Goulmiers and the battles that followed showed how limited
was the French power of action. Had the Army of the Loire been a
little better trained, the Bavarians would not merely have been defeated

but destroyed. But, in attack, the new French troops were capable
of only the simplest manoeuvres and quite incapable of exploiting a
victory. In going into action it was found necessary to deploy the
troops long before the attack could be delivered, as a quick change
from marching to battle order was too difficult for them. The country
over which the Army of the Loire was forced to fight was particularly
unsuitable for raw troops, as the great plain of the Beauce deprived
them of cover. Shortage of officers and lack of the esprit de corps of old
units made it seem advisable to keep the troops always together, which

meant that they were not quartered in houses or farms, but forced to
camp out in the fields or on the roads, a source of desperate hardship
and loss as winter came.
47
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
The equipment of the new armies represented an administrative
miracle, but the problem of arming the new armies was insoluble.
Fortunately most of the regular arsenals were far away from invasion
and they were utilized to their full capacity, but their output was
insufficient. Arms were bought from America, from England, from
Belgium, good weapons and bad. But even the good ones were not
standardized. The troops of the Army of the Loire had fifteen different
kinds of rifles and a constant source of ill-feeling was the difference
between regiments that had chassepots or Remingtons or other modern
types and the less lucky units that had to put up with muzzle-loaders.
At critical moments troops were liable to panic as the deficiencies of
their equipment were realized.
Like the garrison of Paris, the new corps were, in some ways, better
off than the old had be*en, since they got some breech-loading field-guns
and abandoned Leboeuf s bad fuses. The rapidity with which good
batteries were put into the field and good gunners improvised illustrates
the best side of the military administration. Freycinet, much more
than Gambetta, was the author of these prodigies of technical im-
provisation. Yet Freycinet hesitated to take what might seem very
obvious steps like imposing unified control on the railways, which might
have made it easier to increase German embarrassment by rapid troop
movements by rail. Both he and Gambetta had to allow for the
novelty of their authority; the Government of National Defence at Tours,
as at Paris, had to negotiate almost as much as it had to command.
Gambetta did not separate, in his own mind, defence of France
from defence of the Republic. As Minister of the Interior he had
turned over, as far as he could, the control of the local government to
loyal Republicans, but in so many regions of France, loyal Republicans
a few months ago had been scarce and not very well thought of by the
average man and woman. The old political machine had collapsed
and the new party in power was, as yet, short of prestige and of
administrative experience.
Gambetta's troubles were, if any thing,, greater where the Republican
party was strong. Lyons caused him serious difficulties, for in that
*

old centre of socialist and republican agitation the Republic had


been proclaimed a few hours before it had been proclaimed at Paris.
The party leaders in Lyons were by no means ready to recognize,
unconditionally, the authority of the Government of National Defence.
They treated with it as equal to equal. The philosopher, ChaUemel-
Lacour, whom Gambetta sent to Lyons as Prefect of the Rhone, was
not recognized under that title by the municipality; he was merely
the delegate of the Government of National Defence, and was often
forced to play the part of an ambassador rather than of a ruler. The
red flag floated over the Hotel de Ville; the defence of Lyons and of
the valley of the Rhone was treated as a private problem of the region;
48
THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLIC
regular officers were suspect
and the self-styled 'Committee of Public
Safety' offered the command to Garibaldi and to Cluseret. The latter
had served in the Union 'Army during the American Civil War, so
it was as a 'Republican general of the United States of America* that

he was asked to 'come and help us to found the United States of


Europe'.
A
city thinking of the United States of Europe was naturally
attractive to the most notorious practising revolutionary of the age, and
by September i5th Michael Bakunin was in Lyons, where he founded
a 'committee for the saving of France'. Already the ebullient Russian
had decided that the way to save France was by 'an elemental, mighty,

passionately energetic, anarchistic, destructive, unrestrained uprising


of the popular masses'. But no French rising was elemental enough
for Bakunin and his methods were 'too Kalmuck' for the French. By
September 28th Lyons had lost its chance of inaugurating the new
age and next day Bakunin was again on the road. But Lyons con-
tinued to give trouble, to fly the red flag, to hamper Gambetta. The
murder or 'execution by popular justice' of Commandant Arnaud two
months later showed that there was still revolutionary yeast at Lyons,
but the danger from Gambetta's point of view was over.
In Marseilles, Cluseret on October 3ist carried out a coup fetal
with more success than Flourens was doing at the same time in Paris.
Cluseret was aided by George Francis Train, the American Bakunin
of this experiment, but within three days Gambetta was able to impose
his authority through a new Prefect, Gent. There were risings and
demonstrations all over the south, notably at Toulouse and at Saint-
fitienne, and the notorious 'League of the South' bred fears for national
unity, while the separatist language of southern soldiers scandalized a
1
patriotic boy in Saint-Quentin in the invaded north.
As the war continued, weariness naturally grew. Thiers on his
journey to Paris at the end of October heard the ruined peasants ask
for peace; and the enemies of the Dictator in the bitter December days
commented bitterly on the telegram Gambetta had sent from Bourges
to one of his friends. 'Things are getting better here very fast and a
few days from now you will hear news of us. Fine cigars, keep cheer-
ful.' It was easy, it was said,' for the shabby lawyers whom accident
had thrust into power to be cheerful. It was harder for the freezing

troops on the Loire, or for the miserable recruits in the wretched


in the German
training camps, or for the peasants and townspeople
lines paying now for the anger the unexpected French resistance
aroused in the breasts of the much-tried German troops!
patriotic fervour that made these sufferings
The endurable was not
present in all Frenchmen. While Henri Regnault, whom his friends

thought the hope of French painting, was serving under the walls of
*
Gabriel Hanotaux.

49
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
Pariswhere he was to die, Paul Cezanne in German-free Provence was
hiding from the police who had tried to drag him into the army. In
Normandy, Gustave Flaubert, more pessimistic than ever since the
despicable revolution of September 4th, drilled his militia company
without much hope; and among people with a good deal to lose, the
Gambetta policy of war to the bitter end was less and less popular.
These sections of the country agreed with Thiers that the time had
come to make the best of a bad job, but the more energetic Frenchmen
agreed with the spirit of Ducrot's reply that political wisdom, as well
as military honour, made it necessary for the present generation to
suffer that the next generation might benefit by their heroism.
In besieged Paris, the grimmer Vlays of the siege were at hand.
Gallant efforts were made to keep up the spirits of the population.
Theatrical performances were warmly patriotic, but the violent attacks
on the regime that had gratified public opinion in the days
fallen

immediately September, 4th began to bore the public. For a few


after
weeks it seemed as if the opportunity to recite the bitter verses of
'Les Chatiments' * almost compensated for Sedan. The delight of
listening to these long-banned verses was not confined to old Republi-
cans. Men whom no one had suspected of disaffection to the ex-
Emperor were zealous in the good cause. An irritated officer
2

complained that whenever he went to the theatre to amuse himself he


was sure to see a gloomy gentleman get up and 'rolling his eyes fiercely'
recite,
8
L'enfant avait re$u deux balles dans la tdte,

yet 'whilst people grew sorrowful over the two stray bullets in the head
of thishypothetical child, German shells were disembowelling real
children a few hundred yards away'. Immediately after the fall of the
Empire, a member of the Gomedie Frangaise had refused to take part
in, one of these performances 'in a theatre which a few weeks ago was
so willing to be known as the home of the "Regular Actors of the

Emperor" ', but what delicacy did for Edmond Got, boredom did for
other people. The demand for new scandals about the Emperor and
Empress diminished; in a city more and more wretched, the easy
pleasures of abuse were not so comforting and medals of Napoleon III
wearing the spiked helmet of the Prussians were less popular, as it
seemed impossible to escape from the real spiked helmets of the
besiegers. Even a lecture by fimile Legouve on 'Moral nourishment
during the siege' was more comforting than the publication of love-
letters from Napoleon III to his mistress.
For a city whose physical as well as its spiritual lighting had been
its pride, cutting off the gas supply at the end of November was a great

blow, following as it did on the failure of the battles of the Marne on


1
Celebrated poems against Napoleon III written by Victor Hugo in exile.
1 '
Comte d'Herisson. 'The child had received two bullets in its head.'

5
THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLIC
the previous days and on the recapture of Orleans by the Germans.
The high hopes of Coulmiers were fading; Paris could not deliver her-
self, and the relieving army was
in retreat. Food was becoming a
serious worry; the supply of milk for children presented impossible

problems and, though the rich could buy the animals from the 200,
compare the taste and price of zebra and bear, of camel and elephant,
the poor were less happy. Prices soared so that at a charity bazaar,
pound, and eggs is. $d* each
* i * a
chickens were i each, butter
(the daily pay of a National Guardsman). Rats became edible and
vendible, and the city that had been the envy of the world settled
down to a bitter winter.
The strain of the siege was not only felt by the Parisians. The
Germans had not counted on this stubborn resistance; the besieging
troops, though better fed than the besieged, suffered from the very
severe winter and from the constant strain. Bismarck was eager to
end the siege and the war before the neutrals could interfere, and,
backed by the War Minister, Roon, he wanted to bombard the city.
He was full of scorn for the muddle-headed humanitarianism of the
Prussian court ladies who thought a bombardment inhuman: for, in
that age, the crushing of military resistance by the killing and maiming
of women and children was opposed with a warmth and sincerity that
we can hardly understand to-day.
The victor of Goulmiers, Aurelle de Paladines, was
less impressed

by his victory than almost anybody else. A veteran


of the old army,
he was conscious of the bad training and bad equipment of the new
levies. Many of his men had the old muzzle-loading rifles; they were
short of equipment; they carried cartridges in the haversacks along
with their food, and biscuits on string over their shoulders. Their
clothing and their shoes were very inadequate for the rain and hail
that soon became snow. There was much to be said for digging in
round Orleans and awaiting, in a prepared position, the German
assault. But Gambetta was obsessed with the belief that Paris could
not hold out beyond the fifteenth of December. 'Paris is hungry and
needs us.' 8 An advance was begun and, at Beaune-la-Rolande, the
Germans defeated a surprisingly vigorous attack. News had come of
4
a sortie planned by Trochu and all local considerations were sacrificed
to the need of aiding the victorious army of Paris, for, mistaking a
reference to the capture of Epinay-sur-Seine for Epinay-sur-Orge,
Gambetta saw the two armies triumphantly meeting. But the sortie
failed, and in any case the Army of the Loire not only did not
advance but had to retreat. Gambetta did not lose heart: Aurelle
was denounced almost as Bazaine had been, and peace moves were
repressed. Moltke was again convinced that the war was over and
1 *
$5. 30 cents.
*
This slogan had the appeal of a jingle in French, 'Paris a faim et nous reclame'.
4 The balloon was blown away to Norway, and Trochu's message came via Oslo.
51
Tttfe DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
could not understand why the French did not see this too, and in
Paris the combative Ducrot, defeated and discredited by his part in the
battle from which, despite his promise, he had returned alive though
not victorious, thought that Moltke was right.
Gambetta now begun to discount the fall of Paris, and to prepare
for a campaign against the Germans even when their field armies had
been reinforced by the arrival of the Paris siege troops. German
patience and morale were to be worn down by a war that would seem
endless. The removal of the temporary capital from Tours to Bor-
deaux was a sign of the times; Gambetta's headquarters was no longer
near Paris; indeed it was no longer in any fixed place, for only half of
the remaining days of the war were spent by him in Bordeaux. He
was now for ever on the move, encouraging, bullying, harassing luke-
warm patriots and enemies of the 'Republic*.
The Army of the Loire had been cut in two in its retreat and its
western half now had, in Chanzy, a general after Gambetta's own
heart, a man full of hope and energy, conscious of the defects of his
troops but willing to make the best of them. Chanzy knew how much
heartening the infantry needed. He deplored the habit of the artillery
of galloping off once the German guns had got their range. The very
speed and skill with which these tactical moves were carried out was
bad for the ill-armed, raw infantry who had to stand their ground.
The sight of the general with his picturesque escort of Algerian cavalry
in their flowing cloaks was comforting to the troops. In the north,
another able and resourceful general had been thrown up by the war.
Faidherbe had shown great initiative in the colonies and he showed
equal initiative in his campaigns in Artois and Flanders, Indeed,
almost to the end, he held his own against the Germans, showing
prudence in brief moments of success; and when he succumbed at last
at Saint-Quentin in January, he gave a very good account of himself.
The third general on whom Gambetta relied was Bourbaki. A
former commander of the Imperial Guard and a convinced Imperialist,
he was unlikely either to feel much optimism when faced with the
amateur regiments of Gambetta's army or to have much confidence
in the demagogue who had been so violent an enemy of the fallen

regime. He saw difficulties all the time and there were difficulties
everywhere, but Ghanzy and Faidherbe showed that they were not
insuperable. At a critical moment, when all depended on a last
desperate effort, Bourbaki wired Gambetta, 'You think there is a well-
organized army. I think I have often told you the contrary.' Forced
to campaign in an abnormally severe winter, Bourbaki provoked
Freycinet to ask why the snow and ice did not stop the Prussians too?
It was not altogether a fair question, but it was not wholly unfair.
The spirit of Chanzy was very different. He was now face to face
with one of the best of the German generals, Prince Frederick Charles.
52
THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLIC
Both the French and German troops suffered from the bitter cold.
The invaders had often to clothe themselves in French uniforms, and
were very far from being the well-equipped and overwhelmingly
confident troops of August. But the state of the French was far worse.
In retreat, the rickety fabric of discipline often broke down; there were
thousands of stragglers; there were demoralizing failures of supplies
and it was a tribute to the courage of the rank-and-file, and to the skill
and resolution of Chanzy, that so desperate a resistence was made in
the three days' battle of Le Mans (January loth, nth, isth). But for
all Ghanzy's optimism, his army, after the retreat on Laval, was in-

capable of causing serious alarm to the Germans.


That task fell upon Bourbaki. Between Gambetta, Freycinet and
the railway manager, Auguste de Serres, a plan was concocted which
Bourbaki undertook to carry out in a spirit of duty rather than of
hope. His army was to be transferred east as fast as possible by
railway to menace the German lines of communication. In Burgundy,
Garibaldi was still in the field, although suspect to many Frenchmen:
as a revolutionary charlatan, and Belfort, the only survivor of the

great frontier fortresses, was still holding out under its bold governor,
Denfert-Rochereau. A rapid raid on the German flank might have
given a respite to Chanzy or Faidherbe, it might have relieved Belfort,
it might even have made possible a successful sortie from Paris. But
speed was impossible. Bourbaki was suspect to the Government and
Serres accompanied him with an order of revocation in his pocket.
The task of transporting over 100,000 men across country was too
much for the railways and the miserable troops were frozen in the
stationary trains, suffering almost as much as if they had marched.
They got within the sound of the guns of Belfort, but all the attempts
to break through the German lines failed. Bourbaki tried to commit
suicide (and failed). His army now under Clinchant was cut off from
its basq and, excluded from the armistice, made the most disastrous

marches of the war in frightful weather. Eighty thousand men, frozen,


starving and in rags, crossed into Switzerland. At Saint-Quentin,
at Le Mans, at H&icourt, the three main French armies had been
defeated. Chanzy, Faidherbe, Bourbaki all had failed to deliver
Paris or seriously to endanger the German position. And Paris could
not help herself; she was bombarded from January 5th; food supplies
were at last coming to an end; sorties were now hopeless butchery.
On January a6th, the armistice terms agreed on by Bismarck and
Jules Favre Were accepted; the war was over except for the unfortunate
Army of the East which was being driven into Switzerland. Whether
the neglect to mention the Army was due to the folly of Jules Favre or
the duplicity of Bismarck matters little; its complete destruction had
only one important consequence, it made quite hopeless Gambetta's
resistance to peace.
53
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
5
For the Dictator was still bent on war. 'Thanks to Paris, he
c
declared on January 3ist, if we are resolute patriots, we have in hand
all the necessary means to avenge it and free ourselves.' Ghanzy was
still ready to fight and, in Paris, there were plenty of fanatics ready to

believe that in face of 'the flag of the democratic and social Republic,
Bismarck will recoil in terror and the German Army will pass the
Rhine in disorder'. But these of La Villette were recognized
illusions
for illusions in the rest of France. Bismarck had got what he wanted;
he had imposed unconditional surrender on the politicians who claimed
to represent France. These politicians had helped him by not sending
Favre to London to the Congress that met in January to discuss the
formulas needed to cover the repudiation by Russia of the treaty
imposed on her by the victors in the Crimean War. There was now
neither military nor diplomatic hope for France. In vain, Gambetta
tried to resist. Bismarck had insisted on an Assembly which should
have authority to make peace. Gambetta had attempted to exclude
from it all Imperialist officials and leaders, but Bismarck had insisted
on a free election and the older politicians were now in no mood to
submit to any dictatorship. On February 6th, Gambetta resigned.
Two days later, the elections overwhelmingly ratified the policy of
peace.
The formal ending of the war was delayed until the signing of the
Treaty of Frankfort (May loth, 1871), but all but details were settled
in the preliminary Treaty of Versailles. Thiers displayed his oratorical
talents in his interviews with Bismarck and he obtained two concessions,
the indemnity was reduced from 240,000,000 ($1,200,000,000) to
200,000,000 ($1,000,000,000) and, in exchange for the entry of the
Prussian troops into Paris, Belfort, the still untaken fortress, was to
remain French. France had lost over 150,000 lives and had suffered
great material losses. But more permanent was the humiliation of
the loss of the two frontier provinces, despite the protests of their
deputies in the new National Assembly at Bordeaux. When the Mayor
of Strasbourg died after making his protest, his end was suited to
the national mood. As important as the ratification by the Assembly
of these humiliating terms, was the recognition that an epoch was
over. It was over two centuries since France had arisen on the
ruins of Spain and of the Holy Roman Empire as the strongest
power in Europe, a match for any state singly and for most combina-
tions of states as well. Only six months before, that position was still
apparently unshaken, but on January i8th, 1871, the German Empire
had been proclaimed in that Palace of Versailles built by the great -

1c

king whose proud motto had been Nec pluribus impar'. That
France was dead beyond hope of resurrection. .

1
*Not unequal to several', themotto adopted by Louis XIV after his successful war
against Holland, Spain and the old German Empire.
54
CHAPTER IV

THE COMMUNE

1867, Victor Hugo wrote an introduction to a guide tg Paris,


INpublished for visitors to the Exhibition. It was a hymn of praise to
Paris. 'She goes her way alone, France follows, has to follow and is
irritated thereby; later she calms down and applauds; it is one of the
forms of our national life. . . Paris decrees an event.
. France sud-
denly summoned, obeys.' The great romantic poet was then in exile,
but he expressed, well enough, the spirit of Paris. Silenced and sub-
dued by the Empire which was backed by the millions of rural voters,
Paris bided her time and on the eve of the war was ready for a revolt
or, if all went well, a revolution.
A new generation of workers had grown up that knew nothing, at
first hand, of the bloody days of June, when the workers who had

made the revolution of February 1848, learned that they had not made
it for themselves. The revolution of September, like the revolutions
of July 1830, and February 1848, had been taken over by the bourgeois
politicians: and the brief reactions of the militant revolutionaries against
this Government of lawyers and talkers failed, without bloodshed on
October 3ist and with bloodshed on January 22nd, when the demon-
strating National Guards were shot down outside the Hotel de Ville
by the Breton mobiles inside it, mobiles who, it was believed, had
fired at the command of Jules Ferry's deputy, Gustave Chaudey. It
was in protest against the surrender of Paris that the National Guards
had assembled on January 22nd, and their failure had been followed
by the end of the siege. And, however necessary that submission to
the will of Bismarck was, there were orators and journalists in plenty
to declare (and simple souls in plenty to believe them) that there was
still Tood in store, that there was still a fighting chance, that the

Government of National Defence was not merely incompetent, but


treacherous.
The resignation of Gambetta, the Conservative triumph at the
elections, the sudden appearance of Thiers as the ruler of France, all
irritated the Parisians. They thought of their resistance as heroic and
reproached the provinces for not coming to the rescue of the city,
55 E
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
but they realized that the majority in the new National Assembly was
more inclined to blame the disasters of the war on Paris than to be
grateful for its courage. The provinces were full of stories of the
heroism of mobiles and sailors who had held the forts while the Parisian
National Guard was idling in clubs and in the streets. And if the
name of Thiers sounded gratefully in the ear of the provincial bour-
geoisie, it hacfa very different sound in the ears of the Parisian workers,
for whom Thiers was the man of the massacre of the Rue Transnonain,
the most savage episode of the social war of the reign of Louis Philippe. 1
By its refusal to move to Paris, the Assembly showed its distrust of the

capital, and this insult seemed to the Parisians fully to justify their
worst fears for the Republic and the Revolution. While the newly-
elected deputies were getting ready to sleep on camp-beds in the great
halls of the Palace of Versailles, the armed Paris workers were being
prepared for a new revolution or for resistance to an attempted counter-
revolution.
In his negotiations with Bismarck, Jules Favre had secured the right
of the National Guard to retain its arms and, though he later repented
of this, he could not in fact have guaranteed the disarming of the
workers. Indeed, it was in defence of their arms, not merely their
rifles but their artillery, that the workers first moved, collecting the

guns in great parks, to save them from the Prussians and the 'yokels'
of Versailles. What did the squires of the Assembly and their peasant
electors know or care for the honour of Paris? 'An assembly of country
bumpkins' was how Gaston Gremieux described the new Parliament.
The very claim of the Assembly to sovereignty was maddening. Felix
Pyat asserted that, by consenting to the mutilation of France, the
Assembly had committed suicide. When the Prussian troops entered
Paris, they were received by black flags, by silent streets, by a public
day of mourning. Women whose curiosity or business instincts
brought them out into the streets through which the conquerors passed,
were publicly whipped. Paris passed through her hours of deepest
humiliation and the blame was only in part imputed to the Prussians.

II

The bitterness roused by the rise and fall of the Commune of 1871
has never quite abated, and it is still a matter of violent controversy
whether a Parisian revolt. was inevitable or whether, if inevitable, its
(Jefeat was certain. Even had the Assembly been sympathetic and
tactful, the embittered and armed proletariat of Paris might not
have accepted its authority. Whatever orthodox Republicans might
say or think, the Paris worker (and the militant everywhere) was
inclined to 'set the Republic above universal suffrage', and this dogma
1 Now chiefly remembered because of Daumier's picture.
56
THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLIC
of the divine right of the Republic was reinforced by the anti-parlia-
mentary bias of the Blanquists, who were the most active revolutionaries
in Paris. In his newspaper, La Patrie en Danger, Blanqui had asked
the workers to look at 'the fifteen or twenty samples of parliaments
which have bored, perverted or laid waste the country for nearly a
century, it is a heap of nullities and egoisms'.
The quarrel between the Assembly and Paris was not merely due
to mutual suspicion and dislike based on abstract political and social
differences. The Assembly, moved by its natural desire to get back
to normality as soon as possible and blinded to the harshness and rash-
ness of what it was doing by its hatred of Paris, passed two laws which
not only showed how little the Assembly knew or cared for the dis-
organization of Paris after the ordeal of the siege, but were of immediate
and disastrous consequences to scores of thousands of anti-revolutionary
bourgeois. By a law published on March loth, to go into effect on
the 1 3th, commercial bills, whose maturity had been postponed by a
moratorium, were to be paid seven months after they were normally
due, which, since the first moratorium dated from August 1 3th, 1870,
meant, in very many cases, at once. This measure threatened many
honest and conservative shopkeepers and business men with ruin. 1
Another law repealed the moratorium on house rents. The Assembly,
that is to say, threatened a great part of the population of Paris with
bankruptcy or eviction or both. Having done this, it adjourned itself,
to meet at Versailles on March soth.
That Paris was in one of its combatant moods was obvious and,
as long as it remained a centre of armed discontent, conservative

people in general and business in particular would be uneasy. It was


necessary, so Thiers thought, to show that the new Government was
master before the Assembly met. The removal of the artillery from
control of the National Guard was as essential in the eyes of the party
of order as, in 1848, the suppression of the National Workshops had
been. So, on the night of March 1 7th, the walls were placarded with
a proclamation from Thiers, appealing to the patriotism and good
sense of the people of Paris. 'Evilly-disposed men, under the pretext
of resisting the Prussians have taken control of a part of the city . . .

forcing you to. mount guard under the orders of a secret committee
. . ,
Parisians, . . . you will approve our recourse to force, for it is
necessary, at all costs . . . that order, the very basis of your well-being,
should be reborn.'
The immediate act of force thus announced was the seizure of 'the
guns stolen from the State'. The most famous of the gun parks was
on the Butte de Montmartre, still a half-built area, separated from
Paris at its feet and only accessible by one decent road and a number

1
It should be remembered that bills were, and are, far more commonly used by small
business men in France than they are in England. 150,000 bills were at once protested*
57
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
of steep lanes. It was to Montmartre that General Lecomte climbed
at the head of his squad of police and his larger body of very raw
troops. The Butte was successfully surprised, the guns taken but
there were neither horses nor harness to haulthem away, which in any
case was a difficult enough job. The Montmartre
of 1871 was abed
in the early hours of the morning, but it had plenty of time to awake.
Soon the streets were full of men and women; the weary, puzzled and
hungry troops of the 88th regijnent were surrounded; an attempt by
Lecomte and his police to fire on the crowd and restore discipline
among the troops failed; the young soldiers turned the butts of their
riflesup and Lecomte was arrested. Later, another general, Clement
Thomas, hated since his suppression of the workers in June 1848, was
recognized, although in civilian clothes, crossing the Place Pigalle, and
he, too, was arrested. On the same day, the attempt to seize guns at
Belleville failed. M. Thiers had lost the first round in his war with
Paris or the revolutionary sections of Paris.
The 'Chief of the Executive Power' was not the only representative
of established order to suffer defeat that day. The Mayor of Mont-
martre, since the siege, had been a doctor just under forty, Georges
Clemenceau. He had hoped to negotiate the peaceful surrender of
the guns, so the arrival of Lecomte and his men had alarmed him and,
now that the attack had failed, he was still more alarmed at the possible
fate of the generals. But his authority was crumbling every minute.
His deputy, Ferre, was openly hostile, and all the east end of Paris was
now on the move; the ominous beat of the drums calling out the
National Guard was silencing prudence. The two generals were
doomed and were shot down by unknown National Guardsmen;
women danced obscenely round their bodies. The Mayor, shattered
by this revelation of his own impotence and popular savagery, burst
into tears. 1
In Paris, if was now in the hands of that
there was any authority, it

mysterious Committee denounced by Thiers. The Committee was not,


members were unknown
in fact, an obscure body, although most of its
except to their fellow- workers. During the siege two authorities had
grownup to rival the Government of National Defence: the mayors of
the twenty arrondissements and the officers of the National Guard.
After the siege, the delegates of the battalions of the National Guard
continued to meet, and after some preliminary discussion, there was
organized on March 3rd, the 'Republican Federation of the National
Guard' with a Central Executive Committee. 2 The Central Com-
mittee was organized by arrondissements but, in fact, only the working-
1
According to his biographer, M. Georges Suares, Glemenceau did not weep again
until the victory of 1918.
1 ?
The Federation comprised 215 battalions out of 270. From the Federation came the
name 'fecle'reV, usually translated into English as 'federals 1 , thus leading to over-emphasis on
the federalist ideas of some members of the National Guard.

58
THE BIRTH OF THE
class arrondissements really took part in the organization7'j3K ^
only the working-class and lower-middle-class battalions joined the
Federation.
The Central Committee, suddenly projected into the limelight, was
not an organized revolutionary party. Its members were, apart from
a few crooks and cranks, representatives of the Paris workers, and the
Paris workers were still mostly not factory hands but skilled craftsmen
working in small businesses like the bookbinder, Varlin, or lower
middle-class employees like Jourde, the clerk in the Bank of France.
Nor were they united by doctrine. The Government at Versailles and
the world were ready to believe that the revolt of Paris was the work
of that mysterious 'International' whose early congresses had alarmed
the bourgeois public of the i86o's, providing raw material for the
romantic imagination of Mr. Disraeli when he was writing Lotkair, but
which was, in fact, at death's door owing to the fight between Marx
and Bakunin. But neither formally nor really had the International
a leading role in the revolt, and although Marx came to its defence in
the manifesto of the International, 1 it was not Marxism that was the
animating creed of the Paris workers or their leaders. Only Vaillant
knew anything of German socialism, and the men who were now thrown
to the top disciples of Proudhon or of Blanqui, or belated Jacobins
were
like Delescluze, re-enacting '93 as they understood the history of the
heroic year.
Their immediate objects were simple: to escape the effects of the
Assembly's withdrawal of the moratorium; to save the Republic; and
to save the autonomy of Paris and of the National Guard. They
wished to overthrow the authority of the Commander-in-Chief
appointed by Thicrs, Aurelle de Paladines, and to secure that Paris
would not be deprived of her local autonomy by the Assembly. None
of these objects, it was held, was in itself revolutionary, and the Central
Committee was not prepared to recognize that a revolution had begun;
that it had to win or be destroyed. So the first day of triumph was
wasted; such regular troops as did not desert or disband were allowed
to withdraw from the city and so were Thiers and his Ministers.
M. Thiers recognized when he was beaten; he had lost the first
round, but he was not unduly depressed. He had, ever since 1848,
held that the way to deal with a serious Parisian revolt was the method
practised by Windischgratz against Vienna in 1848. Get outside,
assemble your forces and retake the capital. To this plan Thiers now
clung, believing in it so firmly that he even ordered the evacuation of
the key of the Paris fortifications, Mont-VaJ&ien.
March igth was a Sunday and, like September 4th, a fine day.
The enthusiastic Yves Guyot wrote to a provincial paper run by a
2
revolutionary friend of his an enthusiastic description: 'A crowd on
x
known *
"Now better as Tht Civil Wear in France. Jules Guesde.
59
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
'the on the boulevards, Women, children, men surprising them-
(jfiiays,
selvesby calm and order; and the Republicans breathing freely
their
and saying, "Ah! it's the first time we have really felt ourselves to be
'

living in a Republic". The Republic was, for the moment, in the


somewhat surprised hands of the Central Committee, which rejoiced
with the good people of Paris and summoned it to elect a municipality.
It still tried to avoid breaking with legality altogether.
The retreating Government had left its authority, for what it was
worth, to the mayors, and they were the link between Paris and
Versailles. Most of the twenty mayors were Left-wingers and deputies
like Clemenceau. Even the Right mayors were anxious to avoid a
a finish of the kind anticipated, \vithout enough repulsion, by
fight to
some of the more vehement members of the Assembly and, perhaps,
by M. Thiers. The attempted compromise failed, as all subsequent
compromises failed. The Blanquists were not ready to recognize the
authority of the Assembly and insisted that the Central Committee
must keep control of Paris, pending the election of the municipality;
while the Government and the Assembly, although willing to make
very inadequate adjustments of the laws on bills and rents, were angered
at the pretensions of Paris to make terms with the only legal and

sovereign body in France.


For a day or two there were hopes that the right-thinking elements
in Paris would deliver the city from its usurpers. Admiral Saisset, who
had earned popularity during the siege, was nominated Commander of
the Department of the Seine and he had hopes that the large number
of Parisians who had a good deal more to lose than their chains would
rally to him. But before and after the siege, a very large proportion
of the more prosperous inhabitants of Paris had left it for the country,
so that the National Guard battalions of the richer quarters were much
under strength. In any case, as Andrieux noted in Lyons, the members
of the National Guard were prudent fathers of families not anxious to
take too many of order; they were very unlike
risks in the restoration
modern storm troopers. A
demonstration of the 'better elements' of
Paris was dispersed in the Place Vendome with the loss of fifteen lives,
and there was more blood between the Assembly and Paris. Despite
all protests from alarmed or prudent deputies, the election of the

municipality went forward. On both sides compromise was more and


more suspect; the Central Committee occupied the bourgeois quarters
of Paris, while the Assembly disowned Saisset, who had made promises
of concessions that were intolerable to the irritated niajority. The
mayors agreed with the Committee that the election would have to
go on. In this atmosphere of quasi-Iegality, the people of Paris, on
March 26th, elected a municipal council which was overwhelmingly
revolutionary and which showed it by taking the august and terrifying
name of 'the Commune of Paris'; For if the word 'commune' recalled
fin
THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLIC
to some historically minded people the revolt of the commonalty in the
Middle Ages, it recalled to far more, the great Paris Commune of the
Revolution that had dethroned Louis XVI, overawed the Convention,
and whose fall had been the beginning of the end for the Jacobin
Republic. Against the Assembly which at any moment, it was feared,
might proclaim the King or give the executive power to the Due
d'Aumale, Paris evoked the memory of 1792.
Without prevision, the capital of France had fallen into the hands
of a revolutionary government, but it had not fallen into the hands of
a revolutionary party. It was this lack of an organized revolutionary
party that prevented the Central Committee from taking advantage of
the panic that fell upon Versailles. Although Vinoy forced Thiers to
authorize him to reoccupy Mont-Valerien, the position of the Govern-
ment was dangerous. It had few troops, and the desertions and
mutinies of March i8th had shown how unreliable those few were.
There were some loyal units; the Foreign Legion was especially trust-
1
worthy; there were also a few Turcos; but French soldiers, worn out
by the war, were in no combative mood; least of all were they in a
mood to fight their own countrymen.
Despite the appeal of the
Assembly, it had proved
harder in 1871 than in 1848 to rouse the
far

provinces against Paris. To get a force together, Thiers had to ask


Bismarck to accelerate the release from Germany of the prisoners of
war of the old Imperial Army; these professionals were used to obeying
orders and were not as war-weary as the remnants of Gambetta's levies.
While troops were being accumulated at Versailles, while the old
historian of Napoleon I was visiting their camps, looking after their
food, clothing, and drink, hurrying on the preparations for attack,
showing up the slowness of the regular soldiers by hiring contractors to
build a battery, the chances of victory for Paris were slipping away. As
Lissagaray bitterly pointed out, the Commune started with many more
advantages than most revolutions command; immunity from attack,
abundant arms and supplies; and a near-by
for a short time at least;

enemy who could hardly have resisted a march of the National Guard
on Versailles. But to attack was to admit a definitely revolutionary
purpose, to abandon the pretence that only Parisian municipal rights
were being fought for. The Blanquists had, it is true, no such prudery
and, by decreeing the disestablishment of the Church and the abolition
of conscription, Paris was in fact stepping outside the bounds of her
authority. But the fiction of a contest over municipal autonomy,
of Seine and
expressed in comic form by references to the 'Government
5
Oise 2 and, more seriously, by appeals to the great cities of the provinces
for aid, was observed until it was too late.
The refusal of the deputies of Paris, led by Louis Blanc, and the
mayors of Paris like Clemenceau, to collaborate with the Commune,
1 * Versailles the capita] of this department,
Algerian native troops. is

61
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
made a revolutionary policy even more necessary. But what kind of
a revolution? Lenin declared that for a successful revolution it is
necessary to have 'a high development of productive forces and the
preparedness of the proletariat*.
Paris had neither. There was no
Parisian equivalent of the great Putilov works in the Petersburg of
1917, and no equivalent of Lenin
and his party. War-weariness was
not confined to the partisans of Versailles. One of the Commanders-
in-Chief of the Commune, Gluseret, was later to say that he always
asked for twice as many men as were necessary for any operation as
the only way of getting the minimum. A
nominal strength of 200,000
men produced about 40,000 combatants. Then the sectionalism that
had made the defence of Paris difficult during the first siege, was even
more marked during the second. The National Guardsmen were ready
to defend their own quarters, but very reluctant to defend other
sections. And the sections of Paris which were in danger were those
nearest Versailles, the richest quarters, whose inhabitants were not
anxious to keep out the assailants, while the most strongly communard
areas in the north-east of the city were safe anyway, as that section of
the fortifications of Paris was inside the German lines and the German

troops were officially neutral. Lastly, there was never an uncontested


authority in Paris. Although it had the sanction of popular election,

the Commune had always to face the rival authority of the Central
Committee, as the Government of National Defence had had to bargain
with the National Guard. It is true that in its triumphant proclama-
tion of March igth, the Central Committee had boasted that it would
not conserve the power that had fallen into its hands, but although its
mandate had expired, the members of the Committee could not divest
themselves of their feeling of responsibility for the fate of the Revolution,
and the Committee was tempted to behave to the Commune as the
great Commune had behaved to the Convention.
Thus it came about that Thiers was given a few days to recover
from his expulsion of March i8th, days which he used profitably, while
Paris enjoyed its recovered liberty and its assumption of its historical
role. As Lissagaray put it, Tor the tenth time since 1 789 the workers
put France on the right track.' It remained to be seen whether France
would stay on that track. For a moment there seemed to be hope
that she would. All over the south there had been, during the war, a
good deal of revolutionary feeling, most obvious at Lyons, but visible
everywhere and taking form in federalist organizations like the 'League
of the South'. The claim of Paris to autonomy and the appeal to out-
raged patriotism evoked sympathy in a region where Royalism and
militant Catholicism were always at war with red Republicanism,
militant anti-clericalism and Protestantism.
The war had not directly touched the south, and it seemed, for a
moment, that that ebullient region would make up in civil conflict for
62
THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLIC
what it had been spared in national war. But except at Marseilles,
where Gaston Cr^mieux was the nominal leader of a local Commune
which proclaimed that 'the Republicans of Paris and Marseilles wish
that Paris and the Government that sits there should rule France
politically and, at Marseilles, the citizens of Marseilles claim to
administer themselves', there was no serious disturbance. Even "at
Marseilles, despite some bloodshed, the revolt was short-lived and
futile. At
Saint-fitienne, the Prefect was killed. At Toulouse, the
officers of the National Guard demanded 'the dissolution of the
Assembly cause of all the difficulties, fruit of fear and of clerical
. . .

corruption', but surrendered to legal authority without difficulty. At


Narbonne, Digeon, who had been one of the leaders of the League of
the South, found that his followers were not ready to resist two com-
panies of Turcos. In short, in the south, all that words could do to
save Paris and the Republic was done. In the rest of France, still
under German occupation or only recently delivered from the menace
of invasion, there were not even words, only a deep desire to get back
to peace and order.
Paris and M. Thiers were left to fight it out. On April 2nd, the
complacency of the Commune was shaken, for the Army of Versailles
attacked and seized Courbevoie and shot the prisoners it took. The
civil war had begun; Versailles was avenging Lecomte and Clement
Thomas and, from that day on. both sides were provided with good
emotional excuses for savagery. In Paris, the news of the attack was
received with fury. The Executive Committee of the Commune
announced that 'the Royalist conspirators have attacked. The . . .

Chouans of Charette, the Vendeans of Cathclineau, the Bretons of


Trochu, backed by policemen have begun civil war '. l
. . .

The proclamation revealed a great deal of the illusions of Paris.


The ignorant and brutal Catholic peasants, led by their squires, were
attacking the sacred city of enlightenment and progress. The romantic
Amazon of the Commune, Louise Michel, professed to have noticed
the eyes of the Breton mobiles who had fired on the crowd on January
22nd, 'blue, looking at us with glints of steel', and although she hoped
that, in time, these bandits would see the error of their ways, for the
moment these victims of priest-craft were deadly enemies of Paris.
The same point was made, with his usual vehement vulgarity, by
Vermesch in his Phe DuchSne.
It was outrageous that such yokels should dictate to Paris. Not
until Paris and the other great cities had completed 'the Parisfication
of the whole of France' would there be justification for the Voluntary
abdication of Paris in favour of her children come to their majority'.
So Blanqui had written and, to carry out Blanqui's programme, it was
1
Charette and Cathelineau were famous leaders of the Royalists during the great Revolu-
tion and their descendants had distinguished thcrosclveg & 1870.

63
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
necessary not merely to repel the attacks of the yokels but to drive
them off. So, on April 3rd, came the sortie. Three columns ,under
Duval, Flourens and Eudes issued forth to try what the National Guard
could do, now that it was no longer hampered and betrayed by people
like Ducrot and Clement Thomas. The sortie, hardly organized at
all, was a disastrous failure. Flourens was found in an inn and
immediately shot. Duval was captured along with other Federals who
surrendered on promise of their lives. The column of prisoners was
met by General Vinoy, who asked who was their leader. Duval
stepped forward and was executed on the spot. There was more blood
between Paris and Versailles.
The defeat of the sortie produced the same effect on the authority
of the Commune as was produced by defeats during the first siege on
the authority of the Government of National Defence. The contempt
for regular military authority was discredited and Cluseret was named
Commander-in-Chief.
Cluseret had had a varied career in America and France; 1 and,
despite his ostentatious cynicism, he brought a necessary minimum of
authority into the military affairs of the Commune. The collapse of the
was an even greater disaster than it appeared at first sight, for it
sortie
meant that Paris was cut off from the provinces; and this time there was
no Gambetta organizing relieving armies. There was still agitation
among the Left parties; there were further attempts at mediation
organized by the 'Republican League for the Liberties of Paris' and by
some Freemasons, but the resolution of Thiers was unshakable. He
had fought these disturbers for a generation; he was now going to
finish them off. How to do it, was not so easy to see, for Paris was
being fed from the outside; only the Germans could have blockaded the
city, and even had they been willing, Thiers dared not reduce Paris with
too openGerman aid. The French Army would have to do what the
Germans had not attempted, to force its way into Paris. This did not
seem easy, especially to Thiers, who regarded himself as the creator of
the fortifications and was torn between anger and pride as he con-
templated their resisting powers. So while Thiers and his new
Commander-in-Chief, MacMahon, were pondering on this problem,
the Commune was given time to take stock and organize resistance.
The execution of Flourens and Duval had infuriated the Federals,
and the Commune unanimously passed a decree setting up a system of
hostages. If the Versaillese murdered Federal prisoners, the Commune
would avenge them on the bodies of the prisoners most likely to be
prized at Versailles. So the Archbishop of Paris and many other
priests were arrested, a step which, it was believed, would cause second
thoughts among the Catholic majority of the Assembly and which
gratified the anti-clericalism of the Parisians. By arresting Bonjean,
Secjp. 49.
64
THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLIC
President of the Supreme Court, the Commune not only expressed its
hate of an ornament of the fallen Empire and the bourgeois legal
system, it brought pressure to bear on the conscience of a member of
the Versailles government whom it detested almost as much as it did
Thiers Dufaure, the Minister of Justice.
With the arrest of the hostages, there came to the front one of the
most remarkable figures of the Commune, Raoul Rigault. Rigault
was a formidable specimen of the middle-class revolutionary. What
he loved few knew, what he hated was no secret. He had used a short
period at the Prefecture of Police, after September 4th, to discover the
secrets of the spy system of the Empire. He
had pursued his researches
at what was now known as the 'Ex-Prefecture' of Police under the
Commune, and, in his last stage, as Procureur of the Commune, he
saw himself as the heir of his heroes, the atheistic leaders of the great
Commune, Chaumette and Hebert, the true revolutionaries who had
been betrayed by that religious windbag, Robespierre. In more than
his anxiety to represent the true revolutionary tradition, Rigault was

historically minded, for he seemed more concerned with punishing


treachery to the people in the past than with preventing it in the
present. This type of belated revolutionary justice was not a purely
private fad of Rigault's, but it was carried to pathological lengths by
him. 1 Above all, he wanted to pay out Gustave Chaudey for having,
it was asserted, ordered the mobiles to fire on January 22nd. So the
eminent Republican was arrested and treated as an even more valuable
1

prize than the Archbishop or the Judge.


Meantime, Paris was full of rumours of treason. Monks and nuns
were, of course, more suspect than any other class, and when they
could not be charged with dealings with Versailles, or even with
treasonable dealings in the late war with the Prussians, the floors of
their chapels were dug up and all the bones found were assumed to be
of recent and scandalous origin. The nuns of Picpus were charged
with torturing their rebellious sisters with horrible devices which the
nuns said were supports for cripples, a defence that was scornfully
laughed out of court by Rochefort and failed to take in the vigilant cor-
respondent of The (London) Times. Ranking next to the priests and
nuns as dangers, came the old police; their special art was entering
Paris through the sewers, ready to emerge like so many Greeks in Troy
from the man-holes. While a public too deeply impressed by Eugene
Sue swallowed these fables, there were even more traitors in Paris than
little bothered by
they suspected, traitors who pursued their trade very
Raoul Rigault. Thiers was in constant communication with Paris and
had and allies in the service of the Commune, as well as a potential
spies
fifth column in the residents of the richer quarters of the west end. The
1
The oddest example of this paying off of oldjcores was the arrest of a man denounced
for having betrayed the Four Sergeants of La Rochellc in 1822!
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
walls of Paris might be impregnable if honestly and vigilantly guarded,
but Thiers had reason to hope that they would not be both or either for
long.
As the fate of the Commune seemed more certain, it lost the support
of the lukewarm and of the elements merely disgruntled by the errors
of the Assembly. Supplementary elections to replace resigned mem-
bers increased the revolutionary temper of the Council of the Com-
mune, which was now a revolutionary committee more than a regular,
if ambitious, municipal government. The emblem of Paris was a
ship and this particular ship was sinking and was losing its complement
of rats. Inside Paris, life was still cheerful. There was no shortage
of food, there were plays and concerts, including, of course, readings
from Les Chdtiments. It is true that the new rulers of Paris were rather
puritanical. They raided the gambling games in the streets that had
become a feature of Paris during the first siege and they were given to
arresting all the customers found in certain cafes frequented by the
higher class of prostitutes, much to the indignation of British journalists
who found themselves, by accident, in one of the cafes during a raid.
Despite its revolutionary character, the Commune did little to interfere
with the normal economic life of the city. It granted, of course, long
extensions of the moratoriums on rent and bills that the Assembly had
foolishly stopped. decreed the occupation by the workers of the
It
abandoned workshops and it abolished night-work in bakeries, but

with all the will in the world, it is hard to show much on the credit side
in the way of positive socialist achievement. It is to one point' that
most Socialist criticism of the Commune has been directed. 'The
hardest thing to understand', wrote Engels, 'is the holy awe with which
they remained standing outside the gates of the Bank of France.' It is
true that the dealings of the Commune with the Bank make odd
reading if we think of the Commune as a socialist revolution. At the
beginning of the first siege, the employees of the Bank were organized in
three companies of the National Guard and, at the outbreak of the
Commune, the Bank companies totalled about 500 men, a garrison for
what might soon become a besieged fortress. That this fate was
avoided was due to the self-regarding tact of the Bank and to the
caution of Beslay, the elderly and well-meaning business man whom
the Commune appointed to negotiate with it. The officials of the Bank
were, of course, anxious to keep on good terms with the legal govern-
ment at Versailles, which was likely to win, and which, in any case,
controlled the branches of the Bank. On the other hand, the head
officeswere in Paris and the collapse of all hopes based on the resistance
of the loyal National Guard battalions put the main assets of the Bank
into great danger. So the Governor, within two days of the outbreak
of the revolt, was sending bundles of notes off to Versailles and also
sending off the plates from which the notes were printed. In Paris the
66
THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLIC
Bank had to meet the demands of the Con
Bank had a balance of 10,000,000 francs to
which at first the Central Committee and then the Commune drew.
But up to the end of March, the Versailles Government was still bor-
rowing from the Bank and, even after the Commune had forbidden
communication between the Bank officials and Versailles, the Court of
Directors secretly continued to make advances to M. Thiers' Finance
Minister, Pouyer-Quertier. This was odd enough, but at least the
Commune did not know of this deceit. But Pouyer-Quertier knew of
the loans to the Commune and, in cautious language, approved the
decision of the Bank buy immunity for the Bank, especially
officers to
for the sacred private accounts. Not only were these not touched but
they were kept secret.
This subsidizing of both sides in a civil war and the success of a
private financial corporation in making bargains with a desperate
revolutionary body have their comic side. Yet the arguments used by
Beslay to justify his anxious watch over the solvency of the Bank were
not without value. Any tampering with the formal immunity of the
Bank would destroy credit, and many supporters of the Commune, or
passive endurers of its rule, were small traders nervous about credit.
The terror of the return of the assignats l was powerful. Who would
sell food to the wives of the National Guards if there were
any doubts
of the soundness of the backing of the paper money in which they were
paid? And an alternative policy of requisition was as unthinkable in
the first as in the second siege. Beslay and Jourde were just as orthodox
financiers as Picard and, although the advancing Versailles troops
rushed to the rescue of the Bank as soon as they prudently could, it
was never in real danger. Within a few days of the end of the Com-
mune it was doing regular business with its branches. The dying
Commune, ever old-fashioned, had been too busy with priests to bother
with bankers.
With the complete collapse of the communal movement in the
provinces and the assembly of a disciplined and well-equipped army
at Versailles, the military prospects of the Commune grew dark. But
until the abandonment of the fort at Issy on April 27th, the Parisians
received no shock comparable to the failure of the sortie. Cluseret
was in time to reoccupy the abandoned fort before the Versailles
troops had summoned courage to seize it, but the news had spread and,
as on October 3ist, and January 22nd, the National Guard surrounded

Paper money of the great Revolution which became worthless. The Bank hoped that
1

its advances to the Commune would be acknowledged by the victors, but after a great deal
of haggling, the Chamber took the view in 1879 that the Bank had only been protecting
itself and, under the lead of M. Daniel Wilson, refused to be a party to any concessions to
the money power. So the Bank was forced to face a loss of 7,000,000 francs (280,000 or
$1,400,000). By 1891, the necessary internal book-keeping was completed and
the debt
of the defunct Commune was carried on the books at one franc 'as a reminder*.

67
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
thf H6tel de Ville demanding some kind of satisfaction. They got
two kinds: the arrest of Cluseret and the establishment of a 'Committee
of Public Safety' which was to supervise the work of the departmental
committees of the Commune and to be a kind of collective dictatorship.
The idea of establishing such a committee had naturally appealed to
the devotees of the old Jacobin tradition. On the other hand, it was
the old Committee which had betrayed the great Commune in 1 794;
and the spiritual heirs of Hebert had no liking for this imitation of
Robespierre. On May ist, the Committee was set up despite the
protests of men like Charles Longuet who talked scornfully
l of mascots.
The arrest of Cluseret, however soothing to the resentment of the
Parisians at their military ill-fortune, was not very helpful either, since
itwas necessary to find a successor. The new leader was Rossel.
Rosselhad been a regular officer so embittered by his experiences at
Metz and the treason, as he thought, of Bazaine, that he joined the
Commune merely as a protest against the surrender to the Prussians.
He had acquired, as Chief of Staff, an accurate knowledge of the
military weaknesses of his new rulers. Of Huguenot origin, rigid and
proud, Rossel had perhaps more ability than any of the other commu-
nard generals (he was an even more convincing talker than Trochu),
but he was not well fitted to command so individualistic an agglomera-
tion of soldiers as the garrison of Paris. He wished to insist on a high
standard of duty from his subordinates and he did not regard any
services or sufferings under the Empire as excusing neglect of duty in

1871. He wished to confine the Central Committee to the supply


side of the army and to organize a well-disciplined and mobile force.
Rossel soon found that he was almost as helpless as Cluseret had been,
and, after the final fall of the fort of Issy, he announced .the bad news
in a contemptuous proclamation and resigned, asking to be arrested
like his predecessor.
It was obvious that the Commune was soon going to be confined
within the walls of Paris, and the bastions and forts were being heavily
bombarded. Thiers was negotiating for the opening of a gate or
gates to the besiegers : and suspicion of treason spread fast, even attacking
the reputation of the new actual Commander-in-Chief, the Pole
Dombrowski, a suspicion that only his gallant death in the last days of
the Commune dissipated. The nominal Commander-in-Chief in the
last agony was Delescluze, the veteran Jacobin, and his simple faith
and courage were perhaps as useful as mere military knowledge could
have been. But the organization of the defence was breaking down.
The battalions guarding the walls were left unrelieved for long periods,
with the natural result that long stretches of the walls were soon left
unguarded. Desperation was reflected in gestures. Thiers' house
was destroyed; the Vend6me column was pulled down as a protest
1
Later son-in-law of Karl Marx and father of Jean Longuet.
68
THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLIC
l
against militarism; and the expiatory chapels erected to the memory
of Louis XVI
and of General Bre*a 2 were ordered to be razed.
On Sunday, May i6th, two popular performances took place in
Paris: a concert for the benefit of war orphans and the trial of Cluseret.
At the concert an officer, in asking the audience to come to next
week's performance, mocked the boastings of Thiers who had promised
to enter Paris the day before. Thiers was only twenty-tour hours late,
for at that moment the Versailles troops were entering through a gate
opened by Ducatel, hero or traitor according to taste. Thiers and
MacMahon watched with anxiety the entry of the troops, fearing that
all was going too smoothly to be safe but all was well. Through the
;

unguarded gates the regulars poured. Dombrowski received the news


with calm and sent off a despatch to the Committee of Public Safety.
Interrupting the trial, Billioray read the fateful despatch to the Council
of the Commune; Cluseret was hastily acquitted and, after an inde-
cisive discussion, the Commune adjourned. It never met, formally,

again.
It is possible that if the Versailles troops had rushed ahead that

Sunday evening, they would have occupied most of Paris without


difficulty. No serious preparations for a resistance within the city had
been made, and a silly communique attempting to deny the entrance
of the enemy was the only immediate contribution of the Committee
of Public Safety. But the generals were afraid of ambushes, of the
great artillery park at Montmaitre; they knew from 1848 that a Paris
workman behind a barricade was a formidable enemy and they were
impressed by the atrocity stories of mined streets and unknown chemical
methods of war. So the chance, if it was a chance, was lost and Paris
began the 'bloody week\
Once inside Paris, the Versailles troops found plenty of friends and,
advancing within the ramparts, extended two great arms round the
centre of Paris. Effective resistance was not possible west of a line
through the Rue Royale and on the other bank, the Boulevard Saint-
Michel. To
the east of this line lay the heart of the revolt. Round
the Pantheon on the left bank and in the smart shopping streets on the
right the barricades were bombarded and stormed. In the Place
5

Vendome, renamed by the Blanquists 'Place of Pikes and by the Com-


mune 'International Place', was the Ministry of Justice as well as the
fallen column. Only a few days before a hopeful citizen, after a good
deal of trouble, had got the job of concierge from the Delegate of
Justice, Protot. Now the Versailles artillery was firing there, and a
gunner needing a support for the wheels of his gun, called out, 'Roll
1
It had a statue of Napoleon I at the top. Gourbet, the artist, was in charge of the
destruction.
1
Bra had been assassinated in 1848 by a man called Nourri, who was still a prisoner
in New Caledonia. The Commune amnestied him and promised to free him 'as soon as
possible*. In the meantime they voted a pension for his mother.

69
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
over the old forty-eighter, he'll do '. Mounted on the body, the gun
battered down the barricades and the hopes of the aspiring job-holder.
The bombardment had set fire to many houses and what it did not
do, desperate communards did. From the terrace of Saint-Germain,
horrified deputies and their friends saw Paris go up in flames. Ad-
herents of the fallen cause rejoiced as the dome of the Tuileries fell in;
that den of kings was gone. The advancing troops were confronted by
a wall of smoke and fire and the countryside was covered with blackened

papers from the burning Ministry of Finance. After the troops came
the fire-brigades, in time to save the Louvre. On the left bank, Raoul
Rigault wanted to retire into the Cite and go down fighting in the
little island that had been the cradle of Paris, burning Notre Dame

and the Palace of Justice before all was over. But the Cathedral was
saved and the fire in the great Palais put out. Except for isolated
barricades, all serious resistance was now confined to the working-class
sections stretching east and north from the Louvre, on the right bank.
Formal military and political authority disappeared. In a procla-
mation, Delescluze had called on Paris to rise, rejoicing in the dis-
appearance of military order with 'its gold-braided officers'. The
Paris workers had nothing left to do but to die hard, as was their habit.
Each section now fought for itself or did not fight. The famous Butte
de Montmartre was captured, almost as easily as it had been on March
1 8th, and this time there was no While the troops advanced
recovery.
systematically and carefully, the communards fought desperately or
slackly as the energy of their local leaders varied. Old Delescluze at
least knew his part. He was dressed, as usual, as a sober bourgeois,
top-hat, frock-coat and cane.He wore his sash of office inconspicuously,
as he had always done, and seeking death with rather more persistence
than Napoleon III had shown at Sedan, he climbed on a barricade and
was shot down.
In the agony of the Commune, Raoul Rigault came into his own.
There would be no more of the tender-heartedness that had saved the
hostages up to now. Thiers had refused to make the bargain of ex-
changing the Archbishop and his colleagues against Blanqui, who had
been arrested in the provinces on the eve of the C6mmune. He pro-
fessed to believe that the old man was too formidable to be let loose in
Paris and he professed to be shocked by a phrase in a letter of the Arch-
bishop that referred to the shooting of prisoners by the Versailles troops.
This charge, Thiers asserted with histrionic indignation, showed that
the Archbishop was not a free agent. The priest sent to negotiate the
release of the hostages found reasons for not returning to Paris, and the
Committee of Fifteen of the Assembly approved the decision of Thiers.
Nodoubt he would have liked to save the Archbishop, but what was one
when society was endangered? He might have said to Darboy as
life
5

Ney did to the dying soldier, 'You are a victim of the fortune of war .

70
THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLIC
The Archbishop and his companions had little hope. The priests asked
their chief (who had been a learned theologian) whether they could
hope to be classed as martyrs and he replied that they could, since they
would be killed as representatives of the Church and not as individuals.
There was a missionary among them and it was remarked that the see
of Paris was as dangerous as the see of Corea. 1 President Bonjean,
who, as befitted an eminent Gallican lawyer, had been strongly opposed
to the Jesuits, made his peace with the Society in the face of death,
receiving the last sacraments from a Jesuit hostage.
The leaders of the Commune were now a handful, but they had still
some authority and they authorized Rigault to collect the hostages and
remove them to La Roquette away from the advancing army. They
were at Mazas, near the Gare de Lyon. The prisoners were put in rail-
way delivery vans, for the fall of Montmartre had exposed all the flank
of the Federal position. The time for vengeance was running short.
It was on May 23rd that Rigault arrived at Sainte-Pelagie and
demanded the delivery to him of Chaudey and three policemen.
They were executed on the spot, but one policeman got away and
Rigault called out, 'Don't kill him, bring him back*. He was shot in
due form. There was still fighting going on round the Pantheon and
Rigault did his best to keep the fight alive. But as resistance collapsed,
he took refuge in his lodgings in the Rue Gay-Lussac. His landlord
was arrested, but Rigault came downstairs, gave himself up and was
dragged out and shot, dying, so it is said, with the cry of 'Long live the
Commune'. His body lay in the gutter, partly stripped by the women
for whom the "end of the Commune, like its beginning, was a carnival.

Half-naked, the body of the Procureur of the Commune of Paris lay


unrecognized until his mistress came and threw a covering over it.
There were still optimistic souls who thought there was a chance
of an armistice, some even hoped for Prussian mediation, but the
Central Committee wasted no time in vain negotiations. In the Town
Hall of the eleventh arrondissement, Ferre took up the work of Rigault.
A curious noble adventurer, Charles de Beaufort, was shot for treason
or for rash words. The mob was clamouring for the blood of the
hostages and they were brought down to the courtyard of La Roquette
and shot. The Archbishop alone stood after the first volley, but he
was soon finished off. 'It was a magnificent sight', wrote an eye-
witness; 'these traitors stretched on the ground made one feel the
strength of the Revolution, one felt that we were already doomed, we
wanted to die in our turn, but to avenge ourselves first, we looked at
our dead enemies and felt relieved. When all was over, the
. . .

Federals went off, each on his own business, pleased at having shot the

1
Two of Darboy's immediate predecessors had met violent ends. Affrc was killed while
preaching peace on the barricades of 1848 and Sibour was murdered by a mad unfrocked
priest in church in 1856.

71 F
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
deadly enemies of civilization, auxiliaries of -all the monarchies and
propagators of ignorance in every generation.'
On the left bank, the retreating Federals had brought with them
the Dominicans of the College of Albert the Great, arrested in one of
the panics of the early days of the Commune. They were put into a
police station, then told to get out and get away. As they did, they
were shot down like rabbits. Then there came the killing of Jecker,
the shady Swiss banker, whose bogus claims had been the pretext for
the invasion of Mexico by the army of Napoleon III. 'Leave that
dung alone,' said Clavier to boys who had run up to the body. More
priests, policemen, miscellaneous prisoners were taken from La
Roquette and marched under the shouts of maddened crowds through
the streets. In the Rue Haxo, they were taken into an interior court-
yard and shot down by National Guards, completely out of hand. In
the intervals could be heard the waltz tunes played on their accordeons
by the German troops a few hundred yards away. One body, it was
later noted, had seventy-two bayonet wounds in it. It was Friday;
the Commune had less than two more days to live.
The last stage of the Commune was not a battle but a massacre. The
number of combatants on the losing side grew smaller as the victors occu-
pied district after district, but the slaughter did not stop. The victors
were embittered by the shame of having to fight a fresh war against their
own countrymen under the disdainful eyes of the Prussians. The sight of
the city in flames was not soothing; and the troops had been fed on atrocity
stories,of poisoning, of bayonets with fish-hook edges, of \ht pStroleuses^
horrible, drunken women who burned the city of malice aforethought-
Despite promises from Thiers that only the law should punish, and!
orders from MacMahon that the lives of prisoners should be spared, the
victors killed without mercy. As the army advanced, the conquered
areas were cleaned-up by careful searches, and any man wearing a%
National Guard uniform, or wearing Army boots, or with a discoloured
right shoulder that seemed to show the mark of a rifle stock, was arrested
and brought before court-martials which condemned casually, without
thought and without evidence. Woe betide a man who looked like at
leading communard, like Valles or like Billioray. These unfortunate'
doubles were shot without mercy and without proof. At least one*
luckless tourist, a Dutchman, was shot in this fashion. Leaders of the
Commune, or even men who were merely notorious instigators of that
'bad spirit' of Paris which the victors regarded as the curse of France,
were condemned after farcical trials, like the court-martial on Milliere
that ended with the death of that old enemy ofJules Favre on the steps
of the Panth&oi. From the rich- quarters that had not resisted the
Commune came volunteer hunters of the defeated and there were
over three hundred thousand written denunciations. Women and
children did not escape. That clever turncoat, Edmond About, wrote
7*
THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLIC
25th, that the troops 'had
on the to kill

petroleum into the cellars and then threw blazing tow on to it'.

Startled spectators saw, with increasing horror, the streams of blood that
ran without stopping from the barrack-gates and listened to the endless
rattle of rifle-fire. In a few days, the stink of imperfectly-buried
bodies roused protests even in the most bourgeois organs. The men
caught on the barricades expected and received no quarter. A young
student, Paul Bourget, who was to be a great Conservative man of
letters, saw, with horror, the regular troops beating out the brains of
wounded communards with the butts of their rifles.
Despite the killings with and without the formalities of trial, there
were prisoners. They were marched, men and women (and among
them many innocent bourgeois caught up in the great raids), to Ver-
sailles. *A band of rascals' was the verdict of a young author who was
to die the literary idol of the Left. 'They were repulsive, as you would
imagine', wrote Anatole France. The population of Versailles shared
this view. As the prisoners marched in, some bewildered* (as were
many of the women), some frightened, some proud (or insolent), smart
ladies lined the streets to jeer, to strike the vanquished with their
umbrellas, to behave as the gutter women had behaved in Paris with
the added ingenuity of
their better education. In the Orangerie, in
the of
camp Satory, the prisoners were huddled together, kept in order
under the muzzles of machine-c^uns, shown off to the fine ladies who
wished to inspect this new zoo.
Order reigned in Parisand M. Thiers had at last conquered the
rebellious city. It was a pity, as Jules Simon was later to admit, that
there were excesses, but 'men who see their blood flowing, who have
advanced over the bodies of their comrades, cannot be merciful'. All
in all, the regular army lost less than a thousand dead, while a reason-
able estimate of the dead on the defeated side cannot be less than 20,000.
But the victors were avenging not the few hundred dead of Paris, but
the much more numerous dead of Metz, Sedan, Le Mans. No defeat
at German hands was nearly as costly of French life as was the defeat
of the Commune; and few victories have been more blindly rejoiced in.
'The repression of the Commune 'was vile', as a Catholic and Royalist
writer, M. Georges Bernanos, has said. A simple and frightened priest
cried at the news of the deliverance of Paris, 'It is God's victory, the
army without wishing it has done His work; it has conquered Paris
for religion'. It had in fact founded, if not a new religion, a new

shrine, the 'wall of the Federals' in Pere Lachaise, where the defeated
remnants of the Commune had died fighting. It was a wiser judgment
that made the young Catholic officer, Albert de Mun, furious against
the murderers of priests and the shamers of the nation, later wonder
what it was in this bad cause that made so many simple men die so
bravely, on the barricades or before the firing-parties.
73
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
* **
That^feith had*few friends at the moment, at any rate few friends
in high places. The deputy who had been elected at the head of the
poll by the workers of Paris, Louis Blanc, attempted to disarm the
Assembly by reminding it that a further revolt was out of the question
because of the 'excess of evils that it [the Commune] had caused . . .

and the proof now acquired of its impotence'. George Sand rebuked
one of her correspondents who had seemed tainted with pity for the
conquered. 'The true friends of progress are known by the indignation
5

they vent against the infamous innovators of the Commune. Even


Tolain, the only member of the International who was a deputy,
denied his brethren, and, although he was expelled from the dying
society, that was no handicap to a politician in 1871.
A surprising number of the leaders of the Commune escaped death
on the barricades, or before the firing-parties of law and order. Exiles
were to be found as far apart as Glasgow and New York, but London
and Switzerland got most of them. Others like Rochefort and Louise
Michel were deported to New Caledonia, where Noumea became
what Lambessa had been under the Empire, the capital of the defeated
party. Among the leaders who did not escape, Rossel got the most
sympathy and his execution was a cause of sentimental grief to people
in many countries who thought of him as a misguided patriot. Fewer
were of the mind of John Richard Green, who kept his sympathy for
the men who, like Delescluze, had believed in the cause for which
they died.
When the full possibilities of destruction are realized, Paris got off
easily, but though the Louvre and Notre Dame were safe, the Tuileries,
the Hotel de Ville, the Cour des Comptes and many other great monu-
ments remained in ruin to remind the prosperous of the price of their
victory and the poor of the fruitless anger of their defeat. On the first
day of the Commune, the excited crowds had stood in reverent silence
at the sight of an old man following a coffin to Pere Lachaise. It was
Victor Hugo following his son to the grave. And in the Commune
died the old, confident, romantic Paris of which Hugo had been the
product and the poet. 'Since 1789', wrote Louis VeuUlot, Trance has
had only one King, Paris.* That monarch was now dethroned, with
far more bloodshed than had been necessary to secure the deposition
and execution of the heir of thirty kings. For the Reign of Terror was
far less bloody than the 'Bloody Week' and its blood thinly spread over
a year. In the conflict between France and her arrogant capital, Paris
was at last beaten. And
if universal suffrage was to have its way, it
was as necessary to dethrone Paris as to dethrone any Bonaparte or
Bourbon. Thanks to M. Thiers it had been done. 'They had seemed
MacMahon of the communards, 'that they were defending
to think', said
a sacred cause, the independence of Paris.' That sacred cause was
dead, leaving to the workers of the world a legend.
74
BOOK II

THE REPUBLIC FILLS A GAP


Non, Ton n'a point vu d'ame a manier si durc,
Ni d'accommodement plus pe*niblc a conclurc:
En vain de tous r6t6s on Pa voulu tourncr,
Hors dc son sentiment on n'a pu Pentrainer;
Et jamais diife'rend si bizarre, je pensc,
N'avoit dc ces Messieurs occupe la prudence.
Le Misanthrope.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
candidates had, in the main, not stood as partisans of any Pretender,
but, humanly enough, when the results became known, the victors were
very willing to accept the challenge which the defeated party now
gladly withdrew. The majority of the Assembly decided that it had
been commissioned to make peace and the Monarchy, whereas the
it had been commissioned only to make peace.
minority declared that
Both would have dismissed with scorn the idea that
sides, in 1871,
the Assembly had been elected to give permanent institutions to the
Republic.
would be unprofitable to try to guess all that the French people
It

thought they were voting for in February 1871. They undoubtedly


voted for peace and they undoubtedly voted for persons. The system
of 'scrutin de liste', that is to say, the election of all the deputies of one
department together, had been adopted, with a consequent confusion
of the issue which only a rigid party system could have clarified; but
there was, in 1871, hardly any party system at all. Names were
symbols. Thus Paris returned at the head of the poll Louis Blanc, in
exile until September 1870 since his brief period of power (or office)
in 1848 ;
he was a symbol of the 'Social Republic' and innocent of all
the recent disasters, treasons and crimes. Twenty-two departments
elected Thiers, who had been (it was believed) always right and who
had, in fact, been very often right. But Thiers was more than a man,
he was an emblem. In the usually left-wing department of the
Cote d'Or, the Burgundian electors had chosen the list headed by
Thiers against the list headed by Garibaldi. It was hard to decide
whether they voted for the great Frenchman against the famous Italian,
or merely for peace against war or for 'order' against the dangers of
radical Republicanism. In other areas there was even greater con-
fusion. In the normally conservative Deux-Sevres, a Republican
candidate, Ricard, who was to die a Republican minister, appeared on
allthe lists, Right, Left and Centre. Defeated with Antonin Proust, on
the Left, he scraped in at the bottom of the Right list whose most promi-
nent member was the violent legitimist, the Marquis de Larochejaque-
leinwhose devotion to 'Henri V
redeemed the apostasy of his father
to III.
Napoleon But not only was Ricard one of the notables of the
department, he had been counsel for Larochejaquelein in a contested
election case against the official Imperialist candidate in 1869. Indeed,
all over France, Republicans, Orleanists and Legitimists had been

thrown together in the past by their common hostility to Napoleon III.


The
general confusion combined with the 'scrutin de liste' to pro-
duce very odd electoral combinations. Thus the Bouches du Rhone,
home of extremes, chose Radicals like Pelletan and Gambetta, the
most famous of its native sons, Thiers, the Papal Zouave and hereditary
Royalist hero, General de Gharette, the moderate Republican, Gr6vy,
and that ghost of 1848, Ledru-Rollin!
.THE REPUBLIC FILLS A GAP
When the Assembly met at Bordeaux it was not only disorganized
but bewildered. Some members had been elected while they were in
war prisons, not only without making any campaign, but without their
knowledge. A majority were, to quote Arthur Meyer, mere political
conscripts, but they had at hand a political veteran in Thiers and, in
any case, his election by twenty-two departments imposed him on the
amorphous body which was nominally sovereign, bo on February
1
7th, he was elected 'Chief of the Executive Power of the French
Republic*. The vagueness of the title and its ambiguity were not
accidental, for the Assembly, under the hostile gaze of the Bordeaux
mob, had to make many immediate decisions which left it no time to
debate or decide the future of French institutions. It had to make
peace, to get the Germans away from Paris, to begin the reconstruction
of a country profoundly disorganized, if not vitally injured, by war,
revolution and invasion. For the moment it was necessary to postpone
party conflict. In this, Thiers and the majority of the Assembly were
of one mind; and it was in this spirit that they concluded the 'Compact
of Bordeaux'.
Thiers was to be the executive agent of an Assembly which was
sovereign and, whatever the Left might assert, constituent. A time
would come when the Assembly would give permanent institutions to
France: and in these early and hopeful days, it seemed possible that in
this, as in other matters, Thicrs and the Assembly would work together.
For Thiers had been the great apologist of constitutional monarchy;
he had been one of the great Orleanist 'Burgraves' under the Second
Empire, as he had been one of the most contemptuous critics of the
Second Republic. He had even allowed his admiration for the sacred
system of constitutional monarchy to lead him to toleration of the
Empire, once it seemed set on the path of parliamentary supremacy*
There seemed no reason why the Minister of Louis Philippe should
not become the Minister of another king. It is true that there were
suspicious signs. The important ministries in the cabinet formed by
Thiers were given to Republicans like Jules Simon, Jules Favre and
Ernest Picard, but his bland courtesy allowed all hopes to be plausibly
held. This art of agreeing with all parties was one of the political
trumps of the Chief of the Executive; in postponing all action on
fundamental political questions, he was careful not to antagonize his
old Orleanist friends or, indeed, his old Legitimist enemies. But for
other ears he had other words. He repeatedly told Jules Simon that
there could be no royal restoration; that if the Republic collapsed, the
beneficiary would be the Empire.
1
And the Commune, in part pro-
voked by the danger of a royal restoration, strengthened the hands of
Thiers. For until the revolt was crushed, no monarchist decisions
could be taken, and after it was crushed, why need they be? Thiers
1 This was also the opinion of that acute diplomat, the British Ambassador, Lord Lyons.
79
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
had shown (if the demonstration was needed) that a Republican
Government could crush a rebellion of the Left with all the rigour of
an absolute monarch if not with more. The collapse of the Com-
mune, by destroying the radical parties for the time being, made it
harder for the Right to find convenient scarecrows. The most violent
leaders of the Revolution were dead, in jail, or in exile.
What could a king do that M. Thiers could not do as well or better?
M. Thiers was by this time convinced that there was nothing. He had
exchanged confidences with Bismarck in which the Chancellor, not
perhaps with perfect candour, had made it plain what a nuisance a
monarch could be even to a great minister. Why bother to bring in a
Louis XIII or a Wilhelm I when the role of Richelieu or Bismarck
could be played without them? Thiers, in fact, enjoyed himself as the
sole executive authority in France. He
had been out of office, except
for a few humiliating hours in 1848, for thirty years; he had been
reduced to writing history instead of making it; his turn had now come,
and if he developed what the bitter Bonapartist pamphleteer, Paul de
Cassagnac, called *an itch for power', it was all very natural. When
he passed in review the troops who had conquered Paris, the satis-
faction of the little civilian sitting in a chair at Longchamps, where
Kings and Emperors had preceded him oil horseback, was obvious; and
he himself has told us that 'at that moment I found the burden I
carried not so heavy as usual'. Thiers had not forgotten the lesson of
1848, but there were Republics and Republics; Republics headed by
windbags like Lamartine or doctrinaires like Louis Blanc and Re-
publics headed by practical men like Thiers. Thiers did not quite see
himself as Napoleon, but there were some signs (it was suspected) that
the historian of the Consulate saw in himself a new First (and sole)
Consul. Crushing the Commune was his Marengo. There remained
before him a fruitful reconstruction of France, and if the new Consul
was inferior to the old in military capacity (as even Thiers would
probably have admitted), he was far superior to him on the battlefield
where the new war had to be fought. He was a great parliamentarian,
a great politician, and he hoped to win in the Assembly his Austerlitz,
hisJena.
It did not take the more acute Royalists long to realize that the
Chief of the Executive was giving to them only kind words and to the
Republicans the more substantial tokens of his esteem. Although
occasionally forcing a compromise, like that which sent the Assembly
to Versailles instead of to Paris (as Thiers wanted) or to Fontainebleau

(which was the first thought of the majority), the Assembly had to *

tolerate a good deal from its nominal servant. Decentralization had


been one of the themes of Royalist theory in opposition, but Thiers had
no sympathy with such sentimentalities; he did not desire to weaken
the central authority, above all when he was that authority. So when
8Q
THE REPUBLIC FILLS A GAP
the majority wished to give the right of electing their mayors to all
communes, Thiers was able to force them to limit this concession to
communes with than 20,000 population, in which rural and semi-
less

rural areas the Right was convinced in any case that its strength lay.
A more important conflict occurred over the definition and title of
the office held by Thiers. His friend, Rivet, wished to give him the title
of 'President of the Republic* and a term of office of three years, thus
defining the office and implicitly recognizing the existence of the
Republic, a step which it was inconceivable that the Assembly would
take while its hopes that the King would soon enjoy his own again
were still so high. For with the failure of the Commune, the Royalists
were now ready to restore the monarchy, as soon as they could decide
on the person of the monarch. At first the task of replacing the Third
Republic by the Third Restoration seemed even easier than that of
replacing the Second Republic by the Second Empire. Both rival
systems, Republic and Empire, were, it was believed, hopelessly dis-
credited; but an Assembly chosen by universal suffrage, and therefore
free from the defect of a too narrow base which had ruined the mon-
archies of Charles X and of Louis Philippe, was reacty to proclaim the
King. Or rather it was ready to proclaim a king.
There were two possible candidates, the Comte de Chambord and
the Comte de Paris, the grandsons of Charles X and of Louis Philippe.
Both these monarchs had died in exile, a fate due in part, it was
believed, to their rivalry. The House of Orleans in 1830 had capital-
ized its liberalism and had stepped into the place of the senior line of
the House of France. But the experience of the constitutional mon-
archy of Louis Philippe had not repeated the happy -history of the cor-
responding substitution in England. France, even after 1792, wanted
either a King who had more claims to the throne than those conferred
by an Act of Parliament, or it wanted no King at all. And even if
this lesson of the collapse of Louis Philippe in 1848 was not
accepted
by all the Orleanist party, the fact remained that a monarchist majority
in the Assembly was possible only if the partisans of the two Pretenders
united. The Orleanists were in a weak bargaining position, since they
could not plead any principle binding them to perpetual loyalty to
the heirs of Louis Philippe, while the Legitimists were bound, by the
very basis of their creed, to support the claims of the heir of Charles
X who was also the heir of Louis XVI, of Henry IV and of Saint Louis.
Happily a compromise seemed easy.
The posthumous birth of the son of the Due de Berri, after his
father's murder in 1820, had delighted the right-wing Royalists who
hailed the baby prince as 'the miracle child'. To more practically-
minded Royalists, the birth had not been so gratifying; for it had cut off
from the succession the popular Duke of Orleans and had thus forced
him, in 1830, to be a usurper instead of a legitimate heir. But Provi-
8l
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
dencc had redressed the balance, for the miracle child was childless;
the heir of the Comte de Ghambord was the Comte de Paris. 1 The
solution of the problem of 1871 was obvious. Let the Comte de Cham-
bord, now entering on his fifties, be King and then in due course let his
younger kinsman succeed. As a necessary preliminary, let the two
branches of the royal family make peace, publicly, to the delight of their
supporters and to the confusion of the enemies of public order and of
the Assembly. The 'fusion' of the two dynasties and claims in one
united family and theory would unite the fervour of the Legitimists, a
much more warm and combative political force than the prudent utili-

tarianism of the Orleanists, with what thosesame prudent Orleanists


had in plenty, money, presentable modern doctrines and leaders of
ability. La Vende'e would be allied with the Revue des Deux Mondes,
the Academy, the great banks and the great industrial companies.
What was potentially a great event encouraged the Royalists.
After forty years of exile, the Comte de Chambord had revisited the
country from which he had fled as a boy. He had passed hastily
through Paris and had gone on to the great chateau from which he
took his title.The opportunity of sounding out public opinion, of
2

getting to know the leaders of the majority, most of whom, inevitably,


had never seen the Pretender, was open and it was not taken. After
a few days, the future King left France; and almost all his supporters
were still in the dark as to his personality and projects. It is possible
that many weary and disillusioned Frenchmen might have rallied
round the person of 'Henri V* had he given them any chance to do so,
but by his voluntary exile he forced them to see in him less a man than
a name, a principle. What that principle involved was still little
understood. The Legitimists had been in opposition as long as their
King had been in exile, and faced with the usurping rule of Louis
Philippe and still more of Napoleon III, they had, naturally if incon-
sistently,taken up a parliamentary, even a Liberal, attitude. Mac-
aulay had noted the 'Jacobinical attacks' on the Government of Louis
Philippe that came from the Legitimist leaders, Larochejaquelein and
Berryer. Larochejaquelein had gone over to the Empire, but Berryer
had been the ally of Thiers and the Orleanists in their opposition to
1
To extremists of divine right, the Orlcanist princes were not the next in succession, for
they were only descended (in the male line) from the younger brother of Louis XIV, whereas
the Spanish Bourbons were descended from Louis XIV himself through his grandson,
Philip V of Spain. It is true that King Philip had renounced all claims to the French
throne when he became King of Spain, but what were renunciations and treaties in face
of the will of God? To these logical royalists, the heir of the Comte de Ghambord was the
father of that Don Carlos who was to wage a civil war in support of his claims
getting ready
to the Spanish throne, claims quite inconsistent with the doctrines advocated by his partisans
in France. But the party of the 'Blancs d'Espagne' had not much more importance than
the English Jacobites of to-day have.
*
His formal title had been 'Due de Bordeaux', but he was always known by the name
of the chateau that in his infancy had been bought for him by a public subscription which
had been collected by methods familiar to all readers of Paul-Louis Courier as typical of
restoration tyranny. The bourgeoisie was full of readers of Paul-Louis Courier.
82
THE REPUBLIC FILLS A GAP
Napoleon III and company had moved far from the
in that dangerous
doctrines of Charles was natural to assume that Berryer's
X. 1 It
master had moved with the times. Even in 1830, the Royal Family
and the Royalist party had not been united in support of the follies of
Charles X. It was difficult to believe that, in 1871, the grandson of
Charles X, exiled by the old King's folly, would have learned nothing
and forgotten nothing. But this fantastic possibility began to seem less
fantastic as the conduct of the Pretender was studied. His departure
from France was interpreted as a snub to the Comte de Paris, \\ ho li.ul
taken the first step towards reconciliation by proposing to vMt his
cousin. The visit was to be put off, the Comte de Charnbord an-
nounced, until after the issuing of a proclamation which would make
known to France 'all his thought'. And the nature of this proclama-
tion was known to the Royalist leaders and it filled them with despair.
For the most startling part of the imminent declaration was the refusal
of the Pretender to accept the tricolour which, save for an interval of
fifteen years, had been the flag of France since 1789.
It was an absurd affront to the vast majority of the French people.
The tricolour flag was theirs; it was the flag of Valmy and of Auster-
litz; more than that, it was the flag of the recent disasters, of the shame
of Sedan, of the glory of Belfort; to abandon it now, in its moment of
distress, would have been odious. All of which things were obvious to
almost everybody in France, even to those Royalists who detested the
emblem of Revolution and yet they meant nothing to the elderly,
lame, and obstinate man whose life in exile had cut him off from the
living forces in the land which he believed he was divinely designed
to rule. To ask him to give up 'the flag of Henri IV, of Francis I, of
Joan of Arc', was to attack his honour. With that flag he asserted
(with imperfect regard for history) 'the unification of the nation was
achieved, it is with it that your fathers, led by mine, conquered Alsace-
Lorraine, whose fidelity will be the consolation of our misfortunes . . .

I have received it as a sacred trust from the old King, my grandfather,


dying in exile. ... In the glorious folds of this stainless standard, I
shall bring you order and liberty! Frenchmen! Henri V cannot
abandon the flag of Henri IV!' In its own negative way, the mani-
festo was almost as much of a masterpiece as any proclamation
of Napoleon. Its naivete, in which the question of honour was
assumed to concern only the exile and not the nation, gave reasonable
grounds for doufcts as to the sense in which Henri V would interpret
'order and liberty'. Its reference to Charles reminded FrenchmenX
of the danger that the new King might follow in the footstepspf that
spoiled boy who had changed from a frivolous and dissipated young

Royalists of the school of the 'Action Francaise', unwilling to abandon their


1
Modern
claims on the fame of Berryer and still more unwilling to tolerate political Liberalism, have

had to display great casuistic ability in staking out their claim to the great man.

83
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN
man only to become a frivolous and bigoted old man. No one ex-
pected the Pretender to renounce his grandfather, but to have his
legacy publicly and proudly accepted was too much. And the last
straw was the reference to Henri IV, for there could be no doubt that
had he returned to earth in 1871, the first person to abandon the flag of
Henri IV would have been Henri IV. To the founder of the Bourbon
dynasty, Paris had been well worth a Mass; to its modern representa-
tive, all France was not worth gaining at the expense of sacrificing

private honour identified with a family flag.


The effects of the proclamation were all that the more prudent
Legitimists had foreseen. The Republicans rejoiced. Thiers told
Marcere that 'this event may definitely establish the Republic'.
Laurentie, who had tried in vain to save the Pretender from his folly,
lamented, 'We have just lost in twenty-four hours the fruits of twenty
years of prudence'. Even the Legitimist organ, the absurdly named
Union, hesitated for a day or two, but in deference to its principles
rallied round. The extreme Catholic organ, the Univers, agreed with
'Henri V. Louis Veuillot was off again on his endless and fruitless
quest for a true Christian prince to redeem France.
The readers of the Union and the Univers were a small section of
political France. To all other sections, the act of the Pretender was
decisive. The Royalists in the Assembly refused 'to separate them-
selves from the flag which (France) has given herself, a flag made
illustrious by the courage of her soldiers and which has become, in
opposition to the bloody standard of anarchy, the flag of social order'.
In private, many Royalists expressed themselves far more heatedly,
The famous Bishop of Orleans, Mgr. Dupanloup, was deeply distressed
by the manifesto. A
typical bourgeois Orleanist like Vitet, exclaimed,
'O blood of Charles X', and other Orleanists, who had been indignant
at the easy and unconditional submission of their leader to Legitimist

pretensions, were now ready to withdraw from the bargain, or to move


over to a conservative Republic. The one justification for rushing
into union with the Legitimists would have been success. 'You take
more trouble buying a horse', said M. de Lasteyrie. And the horse on
which the Royalist assets were now put was not only literally lame and
afflicted with a bad pedigree, but the odds against him had suddenly

lengthened. For on July 2nd, the first batch of by-elections to the


Chamber had been held.
There were nominally 768 seats in the Assembly, but there were
only 630 members. Some who had been elected had resigned, while the
numerous cases of members being elected for more than one depart,
ment had made other vacancies, so that there were 112 places to be filled*
And on July 2nd they were filled. Forty-six departments went to the
polls, representing every part of France and elected Republicans.
Only in Paris, bled white by the Commune, did the Conservatives
84
THE REPUBLIC FILLS A GAP
gain. Not only did France thus dramatically reverse her attitude of
February, but in some regions she went further, for the Bonapartists had
taken the field and, coyly hiding under various transparent guises, they
had won substantial support. If the attitude of Thiers had been in
doubt, it was so no longer. His old Royalist acquaintance and col-
league, Falloux, reasonably asked whether it could be expected that a
man who had hesitated to embark on the monarchist ship while it still
had a favouring breeze behind it, would do so out of pure dr\<>ti<nu
when a shipwreck was certain. And a shipwreck was certain imirs^
the Comte de Chambord could be brought to see reason.
From July 1871 until the final disaster, all turned on the charu ter
of the Pretender. In some ways that character was admirable.
'Henri V had many virtues that Henri IV lacked; he was deeply
religious and he was chaste. Although displaying an unusual loyalty
to his own partisans, he welcomed new converts with charity. He was
far above his grandfather in public and private virtues, and if he
resembled any of his immediate ancestry, it was his great-grandfather,
the son of Louis XV, who had never reigned. But he had in the
straitest sect of the Royalist religion been bred, if not a Pharisee, a

high priest. He saw France, which he had known only as a child,


as a sinner led astray from her true salvation by various wicked men.
Those men had murdered his great-uncle, his father and various other
members of his family. High in the roll of great malefactors ranked
two princes: the Duke of Orleans, who had voted for the judicial
murder of his sovereign and kinsman, Louis XVI, and his son, who had
fought for the rebel Republic and had usurped the throne of Charles
X. It was the will of God that the rightful King should have as his
heir, the heir of these two men. But if the sins of Philippe Egalite and
Louis Philippe were not to be visited on the Comte de Paris, it was his
duty to expiate them by loyal submission to the head of the House of
France. That submission had to be public and complete. For the
taint of the Orleans blood had not been removed in more recent

generations. The father of the Comte de Paris had, in his will,


pledged his infant heir to the cause of the Revolution. His uncle, the
Due d'Aumale, had consented to election to the Assembly and had
spoken tolerantly of the Republic.
Round the princes of Orleans clustered the great magnates who
had failed in loyalty to the throne. There was the Due de Broglie,
son of one of the chief traitors of 1830, grandson of that Broglie who
had contumaciously refused to emigrate with his fellow-nobles and had
paid for his sin with his head. There was the Due d'Audiffret-
Pasquier, descendant of those great lawyer-aristocrats who had been
among the makers of the Revolution and who was full of their spirit of
conditional loyalty. There was the Due Decazes, whose name was a
challenge to the heir of Charles X, for had not the first Duke been the
35
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
unworthy 'Liberal' minister of Louis XVIII, chief enemy of the
Pretender's grandfather in those days when the Gomte d'Artois, as
heir-apparent to the throne, was striving to save his brother from the
false gods of constitutional government? As has been said, the Pre-
tender was not malignant or revengeful; he was careful to assure the
politicians that he would not be King of a party; that he would not
reserve his favours for the faithful remnant. He
would imitate Louis
XII and Henri IV. But can we wonder that his heart went out to the
real Legitimists who had no thought of bargaining with their King?
The Royal agent in Paris was Dreux-Breze, bearer of a name that
reminded the average Frenchman of the most unpopular bishop of
recent times, or of that master of ceremonies of 1789 who was shaken
out of his courtier's complacency by the refusal of the rebellious Third
Estate to do as the King bade them. A chief figure in the exile's court
was a Blacas, ominous name to those who remembered how an earlier
Blacas had helped to alienate a France, weary of Napoleon, from the
restored King. The Pretender's dealings with Frenchmen during
his exile had naturally been with the extreme Legitimist party which,
in the nature of things, had been cut off from the development of
modern French life. To this isolation a modern Royalist leader x has
attributed much of the failure of the Pretender to see France as she
really was. 'Having no communication with the spirit of France,
this Prince, whose spirit was truly magnanimous but ill-fitted to
the circumstances, believed that opportunity had several locks to be
grasped. Now she has never more than one.'
To persuade the Pretender of this fact a series of envoys followed
him into exile. The most violent Royalist of the leading generals,
Ducrot, went to Antwerp. He told the Pretender that he was ready
to do anything except 'to make a single regiment
accept the white flag.
This is impossible, quite impossible, to-day, to-morrow, for ever. . . .

It might be forced on the Army, but it will never be accepted.' The


Pretender was unshaken. He could not but believe that for France,
as for him, there was something mystic in the white flag which had not
known the shame and crimes that befouled the tricolour. There were,
of course, many Frenchmen who agreed with him. In regions like
La Vendde and* Provence there were multitudes for whom the tricolour
was then as odious as the Orange flag is to Ulster Catholics, or as the
Stars and Stripes was for so long to unreconstructed rebels in the
South. 2 But even the most famous representative of La Vendee,
General de Charette, was ready to submit to the tricolour if the King
adopted it; even the Royalist deputy of Nimes, Numa Baragnon,
though many or most of his supporters hated the flag of rebellion and
1
M. Leon Daudet.
1
Canon Dimnet has told of the distress of the Superior of the Seminary of Cambrai when,
after the Ralliement, the tricolour was hoisted for the first time over the college.

86
THE REPUBLIC FILLS A GAP
heresy, knew that to most good Frenchmen the tricolour was as dear
as it was to the detested Protestants and atheists of Languedoc. There
were still many families outside the Royalist strongholds to whom the
white flag was as sacred as the memory of M. de Charette shooting the
revolutionary partridges was delightful, but they were everywhere a
minority and a dwindling minority. A well-known Paris bookseller,
who had been one of the Guards of Charles X, had preserved as a relic
a fragment of the white flag given to the loyal soldiers who had escorted
the King to Cherbourg But M. Thibault's young son, Ana-
in 1830.
tole, though staunchly Conservative at the moment, did not share
that reverence, and what was true of the future Anatole France was
true doubtless of other sons of Royalist families.
For the moment a restoration was out of the question; the royal family
was not united and the Pretender, if he could be so called, was im-
possible. The Head of the House of Orleans had withdrawn his claims;
the Head of the House of France had made his supporters seem
ridiculous; the memory of Sedan was too recent for any serious project
of restoration of Napoleon III and the Republic was in possession.
It was not merely in possession, but, since the elections of July, in

possession with a basis of popular support which it had lacked. And as


the monarchical solution was for the moment out of the question, it was
necessary to provide France with a form of government less ill-defined
than that hitherto exercised by Thiers and the Assembly in uneasy
partnership. The Rivet motion could no longer be merely stifled; if it
was to be rejected, it could be rejected only in favour of an alternative.
To accept the motion as it stood would have been dangerous if not
suicidal for the Monarchists. To create a presidency of the Republic
for three years was minimum lease of life which
to give the Republic a

might make The Rivet motion was re-


the restoration impossible.
placed by another which was defended before the Assembly by Vitet.
This motion gave the 'Chief of the Executive Power' the title of 'Presi-
dent of the French Republic', and confirmed his powers 'under the
authority of the National Assembly until it has completed its labours'.
It provided that he could address the Assembly whenever he liked,
afterinforming the President of the Assembly, and it gave him power to
name and remove Ministers. 'The Cabinet and the Ministers are
responsible to the Assembly. Every act of the President of the Republic
must be signed by a Minister.' And, lastly, the 'President of the
Republic is responsible to the Assembly'. The declaration, as Vitet
said, didnot establish the Republic; it merely recognized its existence
de facto. Defective as the scheme was, it had the merit of reserving
the constituent power of the Assembly. It was just this power that
the Republicans now vehemently denied. Since the elections of July
they were convinced that the country was with them; they feared that
any system set up by this Assembly would be fatal to their cause which
87 o
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
in a new general
they had reason to hope would triumph completely
election. Their denials of the constituent power were, of course,
of the previous autumn
opposed by the Right, which quoted manifestoes
that committed the Left parties to regarding the Assembly (whose
election was then thought to be imminent) as fully provided with con-
stituent authority. But these debates were essentially barren and
fruitless. Everybody knew that, if they could, the majority would
make a monarchical constitution for France. Against the sole legal
power in France, the only remedy of the Left would be revolt; and the
Assembly might not altogether regret the opportunity to crush those
radical Republican elements which had not been involved in the
Commune and thus show the country that the Republican cause and
civil war were one and indivisible.
There were two obstacles to the majority's plans, Thiers and the
Gomte de Chambord. The President had facetiously suggested that
history would regard the Pretender as the American Washington, the
true founder of the Republic. But if the Comte de Chambord was its
founder, the bulwark of the Republic was its President. The last hopes
of rallying him to the Royalist cause were vanishing. The average
Republican had no fondness for the old Orleanist, the merciless enemy
of the the incarnation of all the inflexible bourgeois ideas of
Commune,
the July monarchy. But they fully appreciated the service he was
doing their cause by persuading multitudes of timid Frenchmen who
might otherwise have taken refuge under a King or Emperor that, if
the 'Red Republic' was as much of a nightmare as ever, the 'Republic
of M. Thiers' was very different and quite tolerable. This was
Thiers' own opinion. As he said with some naivete, he would riot
'betray the Government of which 1 have become the head' at any
rate as long as he was the head. And to a nation faced with all kinds
of problems requiring at least as much the resolution to impose a
solution as the intelligence to find the best solution, Thiers was still
indispensable. At least so Europe and France thought: and the
Assembly, whatever its own growing doubts, had to bow to this general
belief. It was in vain that Falloux warned his old colleague that

experts 'assert that for flattery Trouville beats Saint-Cloud'. The old
President held his court at Trouville with at least as much authority as
Napoleon III at Saint-Cloud. He inspected new guns, manipulated
the press, incarnated in his neat little figure, the thrifty, industrious,
unimaginative bourgeoisie whose money was redeeming the sacred soil
of France from the invader. To exchange him for a mere politician
was impossible. Only a king, who could set off the friendship of the
sovereigns against the patronage extended by Bismarck to Thiers,
could replace him.
The Republican triumph of July 2nd had diminished the Right
it now was
majority very seriously; necessary to get all possible votes
88
THE REPUBLIC FILLS A GAP
together to carry any monarchical project; and that meant conciliating
extreme right-wing fire-eaters. The Legitimists were merely con-
cerned that the King should enjoy his own again on his own terms.
They included deeply religious fanatics like Belcastel and a more
numerous body of 'guardees', 1 equivalents of the October Club which
had harassed the Tory leaders in the last years of Queen Anne. Thesr
fire-eating squires were for the most part novices in politics \shuli
they treated as a new kind of blood-sport. 8
Nearly everything in

France since 1789 had gone wrong, they believed, and the more \oc .tl

members of the extreme Right could usually be goaded into saying as


much by the skilful picadors of the Left.
On one question, above
all others, the Left delighted to divide the

Right and startle the nation into a further move away from the prin-
ciples of the majority. With the empire of Napoleon 111 had fallen
the temporal power of the Pope. On September 2Olh, 1870, the
Italian Army had entered Rome and Pope Pius IX had constituted
himself a prisoner in the Vatican. To keep the 'Savoyards' out of
Rome had been the main principle of the French Conservatives since
the Italian war of 1859. Rome must not become the capital of what
they believed (misled by their own prejudices and by the fantastically
incompetent politicians of the Vatican) to be a necessarily short-lived
and absurd state. Whatever slight chance there had been of Italian
intervention on the side of France in 1870, had been lost because the
Italians had been refused permission to occupy Rome. And now the
evil day had come and the Pope was calling on all the faithful of the
world to aid him with prayers, with alms and with what secular arms
they controlled, to deliver him from captivity.
A French warship was stationed off Civita Vccchia to receive the
Pope should he choose to fly from the polluted city; a new French
Ambassador was accredited to the Holy See and he talked of the recent
events in a fashion that infuriated the Italians, but the extreme Right
wanted more. The restoration of Henri V and of Pius IX were linked
together in their minds and plans. Even a reasonably prudent bishop,
like Saivet of Mende, dreamed dreams. The restoration of Henri V
'would be the signal for the fall of revolutionary Italy, of the reconsti-
tution of the Papal States, of a breach between Prussia and Italy and
1
of the moral triumph of France, pending her military triumph There .

were prayers to 'save France and the Holy See' and a great deal of
loose languagewhich made it hard for the Frenchman in the street to
decide whether some of his 'natural leaders' did not think the over-
throw of the secular authority of the Pope a more dreadful disaster
than Sedan and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine.
1
'Chevau-legers.'
1
M.Louis Teste computed the number of nobles in the original Assembly at 234, of
whom 39 were Republicans. Many of these gentlemen, he adds, had ennobled themselves
or were sons of men who had assumed the particule.

89
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
The Left fully exploited the political assets of the Roman question.
Even under Napoleon III, the Government had discovered that the
temporal troubles of the Pope disturbed the Conservative peasant
elector much less than they did the clergy, or the upper bourgeoisie
and noblesse. It was not always easy to make clear to the ignorant
in what way the survival of the Pope as an Italian prince was necessary
to the spiritual welfare of the Church. Even so good a churchman as
the future Cardinal Meignan had wondered if the imposition of papal
authority on unwilling subjects by foreign arms was not a luxury for the
Church. But for the most part, even bishops like Dupanloup and lay-
-

men like Broglie, who were hostile to most temporal activities of Pius IX,
were sound on the temporal power. Yet whatever could be said for the
policy of maintaining the political power of the Pope by French arms
before 1870, France had other things to think about in 1871. If there
9
were 'Savoyard troops in Rome, there were Prussian troops in France.
Four hundred thousand Frenchmen had just returned from a captivity
somewhat more rigorous than that of the self-constituted prisoner of the
Vatican and a defeated and humiliated country, which had discovered
in 1870 that she had no friends in Europe, was now being asked (so
the Left maintained) to make herself an extra enemy.
It was the aim of the Left to exaggerate the degree to which the
Conservatives were active in their campaigns for the delivery of the
Pope, to stress every folly of indiscreet devotees, to ignore the plaintive
pleas of more responsible Catholics that all they were offering the Pope
was sympathy. For the lesson of the election of 187 1 had been learned.
Whatever may have been the case before 1870, a reputation for
belligerency was now fatal to parties and individuals all over France.
As the war party, the Republicans had been destroyed in February
1871; they proposed to recover that lost ground by becoming the peace
party and by pinning to their opponents the fatal label of war-mongers.
There was to be no French crusade for the delivery of the Pope; there
would have been none even had there been no Republican party at all,
but the moderate Catholics were put into the impossible position of
having to deny any warlike aims in Italy without seeming indifferent
to the wrongs of the Pope. Everything they said to reassure the pacific
majority of their supporters, and to disarm their opponents, gave fresh
ammunition to the Ultramontane party of which the Legitimists were
the core. Every concession made to Royalist and Catholic unity gave
the Left its
opportunity.
External events played into the hands of the Republicans. Bismarck
quarrelled with the Pope; and friends of the Pope were, it was asserted,
natural enemies of Bismarck. As the nightmare under which all
Frenchmen lived was the threat of another German invasion, it was
politically disastrous for the Right to seem to provoke Bismarck and
that not for any French aim. It was bad enough that the Chancellor

90
THE REPUBLIC FILLS A OA P
rm. O.
regarded with a frown the rapid recovery of France. That could not
be avoided; but that his irritation should be increased by Catholic and
monarchical agitation could be helped, and the agitators irritated their
countrymen as much as they did Bismarck. For he now saw Catholic
conspiracies against him everywhere. Inside the new Reich his
triumphant career was being halted by the German Catholics and the
German Catholics were encouraged in their resistance by Catholics
everywhere, notably in France. And he feared that in alliance \vitn
the Catholics were the court party in Germany, the Conservative nobles
and the women who had hampered him ever since 1866. If there was
a Catholic restoration in France, the reverence of his master, the
Emperor, for the sacred rights of all legitimate sovereigns whose terri-
tories were not immediately needed by Prussia, would become a French

diplomatic asset. M. Thiers could only deal with Prince Bismarck;


Henri V could go over his head to Wilhelm I. Already, the tactful,
aristocratic French Ambassador in Berlin, M. de Gontaut-Biron, was

persona grata at Court. Already, the German Ambassador in Paris,


Count Harry von Arnim, was dangerously zealous for the restoration.
As far as France was concerned, Bismarck was an anti-clerical Repub-
lican and, though it would be too much to say that the reputed ability
of politicians to please Bismarck was a great asset in France, a reputa-
tion for annoying him was a great handicap.
Nor was the religious division in the ranks of the Conservatives
purely tactical in origin. The feud between Liberal Catholics, sup-
pressed both by the Pope and the Emperor and the Ultramontane
party, always cherished by Pius IX and, for a time, supported by
Napoleon III, had not been ended. The great Orleanist leaders were,
for the most part, sound Catholics, but they were tainted with Galli-
canism and, living in the world, they had fewer illusions about the
religious state of France than had the country parsons who read the
Univers and the country squires who read the Union.
The politician who was soon to become the leader of the Right,
Due Albert de Broglie, had testified to his faith by leaving the Revue
des Deux Mondes when it patronized Renan. But as a scholar, as a man
of the world, as the friend and ally of Montalembert, of Lacordaire, of
Dupanloup, he realized that the days of enforced religious unity in
France were over. He knew how lively was the fear of clerical rule,
even among multitudes which had no hatred of the Church. He knew,
too, that the naturally Conservative forces in France included many
Protestants, Jews and still more Voltairians. To insist on all the
claims of the Church to be found in the text-books of seminaries was
to commit political suicide. In any case, the great Orleanist Liberals
were not enamoured of the results of the policy of forced conformity
which, in a century, had led from the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes
to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.
9*
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
, Whatever the Gomte dc Ghambord and his friends might think, the
fundamental principles of the Revolution were too deeply rooted in
France to be pulled up even by a strong hand. The Conservatives had
to rule and provide institutions for the France of the Encyclopaedists
as well as the France of St. Louis and Bossuet. And, much as they
deplored the fate of the Pope, his loss of temporal power had at least
saved them from the heavy task of defending or explaining away all
aspects of the exercise of that temporal power which had been a burden
before 1870. They must, then, avoid outraging the prejudices of the
bourgeoisie, many of whom thought with Thiers that religion was
indispensable for women and workers, but hardly compatible with the
dignity of a man of education and property. It was important not
to make the heathen rage unnecessarily and quite as important not to
make them laugh.
Popular Catholicism in France in the nineteenth century was as
hard to reduce to this sage self-control as popular Radicalism was
disobedient to the precepts of M. Thiers. In an age in which it was
asserted that miracles do not happen, most French Catholics asserted
that they were still happening on an impressive scale. The old pilgrim-
ages were revived and new ones started. If the circumstances sur-
rounding the apparition at La Salette enabled the authorities to chill
the early enthusiasm for the vision, 1 the same could not be said of
Lourdes. The heirs of M. Homais were not merely surprised that
such things could be in an age of enlightenment, they were
profoundly
irritated. And when pilgrims prayed for France and the Pope as well
as for the alleviation of their own
spiritual and physical ills, the
devotional aspect was inextricably mixed with the To the
political.
multitudes who were irritated by any kind of
pilgrimage, were added
other multitudes who were irritated by the
implication or assertion that
France was suffering for her sins.
The Ultramontane party was not without its answer to the
pru-
dential appeals of the centre politicians. Of what use in resisting the
rising tide of Radical fanaticism was the prudent, calculating policy of
these eminent persons? They talked of their zeal for the 'moral order .
5

What meaning could you attach to so vague a phrase? The most


famous of the right-wing bishops, Pie of Poitiers, 2 talked
scornfully of
these 'smart people who provide for
everything except God'; and his
low opinion of them was shared by the famous Abbot of
Solesmes,
Dom Gufranger. Was it wise to throw cold water on the zeal of the
undoubted partisans of Church and King just to win
wavering support
from the proud and self-satisfied 'Liberals'? A France which would
not acknowledge her God would not loyally serve her King.
i
Itihould be remembered that the routed disbelief of the most famous of French
priests,
the Gur6 of Ars, in the miracle of La Salette counted for a
good deal.
Pie himself had had to bow to facts and
discourage certain devotions which would
have given arms to the enemy.

9*
THE REPUBLIC FILLS A GAP
Both Orleanists and Legitimists had a common enemy, while
Thiers was still in office and
increasingly suspect to the majority,
increasingly hostile to their ideals. As long as the life of the country
was overshadowed by the immediate results of the war, Thiers was
indispensable, but with every fresh achievement, he made himself less
so. The chief remaining asset of the President of the Republic was his
claim to be the bulwark between the Conservative and the Red
Republics. 'The Republic will be Conservative or it will not survive'
was the theme of the President. But if the Left were very willing to
use, to flatter, and, if necessary, to support Thiers against the Right,
they had no intention of accepting his view of the Republic as a new
Government of July with Thiers as Louis Philippe. This cleavage
between the President and the Left was watched by the Right, which
tried to force Thiers to break openly with the Left. That Thiers would
not do, nor would he openly ally himself with the Left. The art of
tightrope walking was brilliantly displayed, but the act could not last
for ever. In his message of November i3th, 1872, Thiers had finally
declared without any ambiguity for the Republic: It exists. It is
the legal government of the country; to replace it would be a revolution
and the most dangerous kind of revolution.' With Thiers the majority
could not hope to restore the King.
That majority had now a leader. The Due de Broglic, whom
Thiers had sent as Ambassador to London, had taken his place in the
Assembly to unite the majority in a firm policy of Conservatism.
Broglic was the head of one of the most talented tamilies in French or
any other history. His ancestors and descendants have shone in
almost every kind of activity. They have been Marshals of France,
Prime Ministers, great physicists, eminent, historians; only poets arc
lacking in the fasti of this great house. Duke Albert's father, Duke
Victor, had been a friend and political ally oi Thiers as Prime Minister
under Louis Philippe. His mother was the daughter of Madame de
Stael and Benjamin Constant, a Protestant background which Duke
Albert's enemies on his own side remembered. Duke Albert had been
brought up to be a statesman. 'From my earliest childhood,' he tells
us in his Memoirs, 'I believed that I was destined for public life, and I
had never stopped preparing myself for it.' But that career was first
the
interrupted by the Revolution of 1848, then halted altogether by
Second Empire. It happened, then, that 'when that public life, for
which I thought myself made, was at last opened to me in the gloomiest
circumstances, it was too late; more than one weakening habit had

been acquired
5
Even without the long internal exile of the Second
.

Empire, Broglie would have been greatly handicapped.


He was not
popular and he only once managed to be elected by universal suffrage.
He had the stiffness, but not the impressiveness of the aristocrat, and
he had something of the pedant in him too. He had himself described
93
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
his ancestors as 'more upright than attractive, more convinced than
convincing, more austere than likeable*. He and they would, indeed,
have made very good Adamses had they lived in America; passable
Russells had they lived in England. He was handicapped by his voice;
an unfriendly critic 1 said that 'he spoke as other people gargled'.
But Broglie, with all his faults and limitations, Had great qualities as
a leader; his strength as a debater covered many of the weaknesses of
his manner, and the pride that made him a poor manager of men gave
him admirable courage. As Gambetta said, Broglie 'had guts'.
From the end of 1^72, the pretence of collaboration between the
President and the Assembly wore rapidly thin. Thiers did not, how-
ever, lose hope. His self-satisfaction was immense; and the suggestion
that the Assembly would force him out of office did not frighten him,
since, like the Duke of Guise before his murder, he was convinced that
4
they would not dare'. Where were they to find a successor?
For the moment, the second consideration did tie the hands of the
majority. Many of the Orleanists wished to make the Due d'Aumale,
President. The most brilliant of the sons of Louis Philippe, he was
distinguished as a soldier, as a man of letters, as a man of the world.
His were Liberal; indeed, he was suspected of being a
political views
Republican. But the Legitimists would have none of him. An
Orleanist prince of the blood in office might play the Monk for his
nephew, the Comte de Paris, rather than for his distant kinsman the
Comte de Ghambord. He might even forget, so the malicious thought,
to play the Monk at all. The Comte de Chambord agreed with his
partisans.
There remained Marshal MacMahon. He was a man generally
respected for his courage and his character, if not for his abilities. He
was a sound Catholic, a good Legitimist (and the husband of a fanatical
one), but he had served Napoleon III loyally, not as a courtier but as
a candid soldier and administrator. In the Senate, and as Governor-
General of Algeria, he had shown independence. He was no adven-
turer, but 'brave homme et homme brave'. MacMahon had, however,
no political ambitions; he was reluctant to accept the great responsi-
bility of the presidency, reluctant to set up as a rival to Thiers whom
he respected and, perhaps, feared. But the moment to appeal to the
Marshal had not yet come. The Assembly had first of all to elaborate
the still rather sketchy organization of the Executive, and some decisive
development was needed to rally the doubtful Centre that was dis-
contented with Thiers, but was not enamoured of his enemies.
The death of Napoleon III on January gth, 1873, as a result of
an operation which was designed to fit him for an attempt to regain
his lost throne by a military conspiracy, disorganized the renascent
Imperialist party which had now no effective head, the Prince Imperial
1
P. Boiq.

94
THE REPUBLIC FILLS i

still a minor and the


Empress and the heir-presumptive, Prince
^

Napoleon, being on their usual bad terms. The removal of the


Emperor should have helped the Royalist cause with the numerous
class of timid or worried citizens who only wanted a
'strong Govern-
ment'. But the Gomte de Chambord was again in the breach. The
.

Pretender again refused to surrender his flag. Thiers, for the moment,
was safe.
A parliamentary committee had been entrusted with drafting a law
regulating the relations of the President with the Assembly and defining
ministerial responsibility. Thiers saw in this project only a method
of gagging him. The proposal laid before the Assembly by Broglie,
indeed, allowed the President to address the Assembly, but only after a
day's notice had been given, and, once he had spoken, the sitting was
automatically suspended. This device reduced the most effective
parliamentarian in France to a position similar to that of Louis XVI
during the Revolution, except that the presidential veto was far less
effective than that of the King had been. For the President could
only ask for a new debate on urgent laws and impose a two months'
delay before this second debate took place in the case of ordinary laws.
All other fundamental questions of constitutional organization were
left in the air; there could be no general system as long as the ambiguous

relationship between Thiers and the majority subsisted.


The acceptance of the law of March I3th by Thiers continued the
truce, but not for long. Despite the fury of the extreme Right, the
majority was still making an effort to get along with the irritating little
man, who, if not now indispensable, was still, it was thought, extremely
useful. But the evacuation of French territory by the Germans was at
hand and a dramatic confutation of the legend of Thiers as the guar-
antee of the conservative Republic was soon to be given.
In April the last struggle began. The Assembly, angered by the
revolutionary attitude of the municipiality of Lyons, took from the
second city of France its right to have a mayor; as in Paris, the Prefect
was to be the head of the municipality. The deposed mayor, Barodet,
became overnight the martyr of the Left. The President of the
Assembly, Grevy, piqued by a minor incident in a debate, resigned,
and although given a chance to withdraw his resignation, he refused.
The orthodox and eminently respectable Republican^ Gr^vy, was
replaced by an orthodox and equally respectable Royalist, Buffet, but
Thiers had wanted Martel, so that the action of the Assembly was a
revolt, if not yet a revolution.
There was a parliamentary vacancy in Paris; and the whole of the
city, under the existing electoral system, would
be called on to vote at
the by-election. Thiers determined to give Paris a chance to show its
gratitude to himself by letting them elect his Foreign Minister, Charles
de Remusat. The Left determined to rebuke Thiers and show its

95
H*4*rf ?''
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
'
*

strength by running the ^ex-schoolmaster, Barodet, whose deposition


had made him a symbolic figure of municipal liberty. The candidacy
was, obviously, designed to remind the Parisian voters that if Thiers
and his Minister soil of France from German
had freed the sacred
occupation, the of the Republic had abandoned, had
President
besieged, had dishonoured Paris, had been the cause of the death of
thousands of her citizens and was still the gaoler of thousands more.
Barodet got 180,000 votes, R&nusat 135,000. Even if the 26,000 votes
1
given to the Bonapartist candidate, Stoffel, had been given to R^musat,
he would still have been beaten. Paris had recovered from her
momentary fit of Conservatism. Fear and dislike of the Parisian
tradition of violent revolution was the common denominator of all
the Conservatives of the Assembly, and Thiers had, by his own act,
shown how vain were his hopes of dominating the Republican parties
and modelling them on his lines. He could no longer claim to be an
effective barrier defending both the Republic and the social order.
Other by-elections showed that the Left was still gaming and, where
the Left did not triumplvit was the Bonapartists. On May i6th the
Ministry was reconstructed on a Republican basis, but the President
was doomed. Broglie launched the attack on May 23rd. The Con-
servatives of the Assembly, he said, should avoid imitating the Girondins.
They should not perish in 'uniting the misfortune of being victims with
the folly of being dupes'. Under the new law Thiers could not at once
reply in person and his chief Minister, Dufaure, an ex-Orleanist lawyer,
a Catholic, honest and resolute, tried to take the place of his chief. 2
He was quite unequal to his task, and Thiers had to step into the breach.
As the law provided, he could not speak until next day, although he
had been present at the debate in his private capacity as a member of
the Assembly.
He was at the height of his form when last was free to defend
he at
himself. He pointed out that there was only one throne and there
were three candidates for it, so there was only one solution, the
Republic, which should be given good institutions. And, attacking
Broglie, he turned against him the charge that Thiers was the protege
of the radicals. Broglie, he said, would be the protege of a protector
whom his father would have repulsed with horror. 'He will be the
5

proteg of the Empire.


The debate on the President's speech took place that afternoon in
his absence. His Minister of the Interior, Casimir-Perier, was a belated
convert to Republicanism, son of the famous Minister of Louis Philippe
who had saved the monarchy of July by his rigorous repression of
Republicanism, brother-in-law bf the Due d'Audiffret-Pasquier and
1
The former
military attach^ in Berlin.
*
Elihu Washburne, the American Minister, said of Dufaure that he looked like 'a.

supervisor from one of the back towns of Jo Daviess County, Illinois',

96
THE REPUBLIC FILLS A GAP
head of one of the greatest business interests in France, the great coal
and iron company of Anzin. His presence at the side of Thiers was
symbolical of the strength that the divided Monarchists had lost, but
he could not shake the resolution of the majority to end the comedy.
A small group of the Centre, led by Target, although declaring them-
selves reconciled to the Republic, voted against Thiers. He was beaten
by sixteen votes, the exact strength of the Target group.
Thiers resigned at once, and the victors had an awkward moment
to live through, for MacMahon hadnot realized that he would have
to decide so soon. The Assembly accepted
the resignation, the Left
drowning with cries of 'no hypocrisy' an attempt of the President,
Buffet, to pay a tribute to Thiers. The Left refusing to vote, Mac-
Mahon waselected with only one vote cast in favour of Grevy to break
the formal unanimity. It remained to persuade him to accept.

MacMahon, like a good soldier, wanted a lead from above. He had


gone to ask adviceof Thiers but the ex-President told him coldly
that he often given him orders but never advice.
had After vigorous
appeals from Buffet, the bewildered soldier consented; the anxious
Assembly received the good news; and Thiers learned that no man
is indispensable.
The overthrow of Thiers, it came, came so easily that the
when
victors were were delighted. There was no dis-
as surprised as they
turbance of the public peace; the whole parliamentary revolution was
so easy to carry out that the Monarchists began to wonder whether a
restoration would not have been just as easy if there had been a
possible Pretender at hand. But the Pretender was not at Versailles,
but in that castle of Frohsdorff in Upper Austria where, mutatis
mutandis, he lived like another sleeping beauty, with only the faint
murmur of the real world to disturb his dreams. The time for a last
attempt to awaken the Prince from his own illusions was at hand.
The election of MacMahon to the presidency cleared up many
points. The new President of the Republic was that, and, politically
speaking, nothing else. He was not a member of the Assembly, he
was no orator, no politician, and he eagerly announced his complete
submission to the Assembly that had elected him. The offices of
President and of Prime Minister were effectually separated, thanks to
the political naivete and timidity of the President and the talents and
character of Broglie. Broglie, like Dufaure before him, had only the
title of Vice-President of the Council, but he was Prime Minister in all

but name. He had overthrown his enemy, what was he going to do


with his new authority? If it were at all possible, he would restore the
monarchy. The more hopeful Royalist leaders had plausible reasons
wondering whether the Prime Minister had the necessary faith
for in

the possibility of a speedy and easy restoration of Henri V to his


He had of his
throne. republished, in 1872, the posthumous tract
97
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
father on the government of France, an excellent exposition of Whig
doctrine which noted that with three pretenders, 'unequal in their
claims, in the eyes of reason and of history, but nearly equal in their
chances of success', it might prove to be wise to prefer the 'government
which divides the least'. And it was because the Republic was the
government that divided Frenchmen the least that Thiers had been
converted to it or so he said. Even if there was only one effective
candidate, as was the case at the moment, the elder Broglie had pointed
out that he needed more than hereditary or historical claims. The
Pretender 'must be a man of the wood from which one makes kings'.
Would the Gomte de Ghambord be that man? The
at last turn out to
Prime Minister, in private, expressed his doubts. The Pretender must
'come half-way: will he? Will he take even one step? I have no
reason to think so'.
If the Pretender had taken no steps, other people had. The Comte
de Paris had at last been permitted to make his long-postponed visit
to the head of the House of France. His reception had been correct,
and had even been welcomed as an acceptance of the principle of
Legitimacy. But the grandson of Louis Philippe had only accepted
that principle while hoping that France would see her salvation in it.
For him Legitimacy became active only when ratified by the will of the
people; for the Gomte de Chambord, the principle needed no popular
ratification, since it was precedent to the existence of the French
people and was the divinely appointed condition of their well-being.
The agreement between the Princes was thus very far from complete,
but to the outside world the action of the Comte de Paris seemed a
submission, and this surrender without conditions was disapproved of
even by so stout a Royalist as Falloux. It remained to make some
bargain between the Assembly and the Pretender. It was no longer
possible to postpone indefinitely the question of a new constitution.
Thiers, by his own prestige, might be a substitute for institutions,
MacMahon was not.
It was at this moment that the religious question was reopened in
a form most damaging to the Royal and Conservative cause, because
of the material it provided for Republican and anti-clerical propaganda,
and most harmful, in the Assembly, because of the way that it under-
lined the difference of temper and belief between the Orleanists and
the Legitimists. It was the belief of many pious French Catholics that,
for 200 years, it had been the will of God that a church or chapel
should be erected in France wherein should be 'the image of the Sacred
Heart, there to receive the homage of the King and all the Court'. In
the agony of the war, the fulfilment of this divine command seemed
urgent to many pious souls, and it was decided to erect on the heights
of Montmartre a basilica of the Sacred Heart. The Archbishop of
Paris had been won over to the idea and, to secure legal powers to
98
THE REPUBLIC FILLS A GAP
build the church and acquire the site, he had
ment. The Government was still Thiers; the Minister, Jules Simon;
but by the time the bill could be presented to the Assembly, Thiers had
fallen. So instead of a concession made by free-thinking Ministers in
a simple and inoffensive form, there was a project of law in the hands
of Catholic Ministers who could be taxed with religious tepidity if their
zeal seemed insufficient to the more fanatical, or indiscreet, or un-
worldly members of the Right.
The administrative baldness which was complained of in the bill
drafted by Jules Simon was no longer enough. There should be some
reference, said the lay sponsors of the project, to the 'divine protection
and pity' which France had need of. The prudent Archbishop, Mgr.
Guibert, a proteg6 of Thiers, was alarmed. The religious character of
the building, he said, could be left to him. What he wanted was a
simple law from the Assembly voted by the greatest possible majority.
The Orleanists were decidedly of the Archbishop's opinion. They
would ask from Caesar the things that were Caesar's and no more. But
the prudence of Guibert and Broglie was not to the taste of the Legiti-
mists. The most fanatical and most respected orator of the extreme
Right, Belcastel, wished the Assembly to pay homage to the Sacred
Heart in the words of the law itself. The Left attacked the proposition
and the devotion while the Centre tried to put an end to this pro-
fane discussion of holy things. The moderates had their way; the
non-committal law was voted as it stood, but the Left asserted, and a
great part of the country believed, that the Assembly had vowed France
to the Sacred Heart and decreed the erection of a church in expiation
of national sin. M. de Chambord hastened to express his hearty
approval of the most extreme party in one of those devastating open
letters of which he had the secret. Another barrier was erected
between the Royalist parties and the hesitant bourgeoisie. The new
church had become a symbol, symbol of a faith and policy that alien-
ated more and more Frenchmen. 1
The law defining the powers of the President had entrusted to
the Government the duty of proposing a constitutional scheme, and
Dufaure had laid his plans before the Assembly. After the fall of
Thiers, the duty fell to Broglie, who, refusing to do anything in the first
weeks of his administration, agreed that the Assembly should begin to
month after the end of the summer
discuss the constitutional question a
recess. For the monarchists it was now or never; by November they
must have their restoration ready or abandon hope.
Thus began the siege of Frohsdorf. The Pretender was, or appeared
to be, full of goodwill on the constitutional question; liberty of con-
1
When the Republic was finally secure, there was set up in face of the Basilica, a statue
of that Chevalier de la Barre whose torture and execution in the eighteenth century for
alleged blasphemy was, to the Voltairian bourgeoisie,
one of the greatest crimes of that
dominant Church that they feared almost as much as they feared the Commune.
99
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
science, equality before the law, parliamentary government, all were
guaranteed. There would be no charter granted by royal favour as in
1814, but a constitution drawn up by the King and the Assembly in
collaboration. Except for the flag, he was on formally good terms
with all sections of the majority. On that point he reserved the right
to discuss the question directly with the army after he had been restored.
He was confident that he would 'find a solution compatible with his
honour' without any outside interference. It was in vain that the
agents of the Government pointed out the danger of making the tri-
colour the flag of rebellion. If the white flag was rejected, the King
would go back to Frohsdorf. It was stalemate, but the accident of
heredity had bound up with the prejudices of this honest and obstinate
man the fate of great interests and powerful parties. The Right did
not, could not, abandon hope. Emissary after emissary went off to
Austria with no result, and the fatal day when the Assembly would
have to do something was approaching.
The various sections of the Right met under the chairmanship of
die fiery General Ghangarnier; a committee of nine representing the
four Right groups was created to decide on a common front to be
presented to the Assembly and to the Pretender. The lively Due
d'Audiffret-Pasquier was all for insisting on a previous acceptance of
the tricolour by the Gomte de Chambord as a necessary condition of
restoration. He saw himself as the heir of those 'politiques' of the
religious wars 'rejecting the League and imposing on the King the
conditions which the voice of the nation has the right to have accepted'.
What had been good enough for Henri IV was quite good enough for
Henri V. But the Legitimists were shocked and startled by this atti-
tude. They refused to bandy conditions with their sovereign. They
might regret his obstinacy and rejoice if others could break it down,
but they could not take an active part in forcing the King to do what
he did not want to do. So, when it was decided to make a last great
effort and to send a deputation to Frohsdorf to inform the Pretender

jhat, if he wished, he could be King on conditions no Legitimist


would agree to be part of it. M. de Larcy refused to go at all. Lucien
Brun agreed to go, but merely as a witness; the whole burden of
negotiation had to be undertaken by someone less committed to passive
obedience, to Chesnelong.
Chesnelong was in many ways an excellent choice. He was
eloquent, honest and able. He was a Gascon with an almost Italian
taste and
talent for ingenious adaptations of the incompatible and the

impossible into something the same yet different. He was a master of


formulas and a believer in them. And in these skilful hands the fate of
the monarchy was placed in the fateful interview of October I4th at
Salzburg.
Chesnelong had never before seen the Pretender. He was attracted
100
THE REPUBLIC FILLS A GAP
by the simplicity and candour of 'Henri V, but even his loyal eye
could not find the Comtesse de Ghambord attractive. She was deaf
and dowdy; she might win the respect of the French people, but she
would never win their love or dazzle them. Ghesnelong, who had
known the Empress Euge'nie, could not think this plain, bigoted woman
an asset. 1 But his business was with her husband, and in three inter-
views he described the political situation to the Pretender. The
majority of the Assembly was ready to restore him and in a form thai
reconciled the principle of legitimacy with the authority of the
Assembly. The law would assert that France was a 'national, here-

ditary and constitutional monarchy' and that the head of the House
of France was King. The same law would declare that the public
liberties were guaranteed; all details would be worked out by the King
and the Assembly in collaboration.
Then came the flag. The Committee of Nine had had their hands
strengthened by a message from MacMahon declaring that neither he
nor the Army would consent to abandon the tricolour. This was true
and of the greatest importance, but it helped to preserve the Pretender
in his illusion that he had only the Army to deal with, that if he could
win over the Army, the problem was solved and he thought that he
could win over the Army. So he listened politely to the eloquent and
subtle Gascon, but his mind was made up. He took no interest in the
various compromises suggested, that there should be a private flag for
the King, that there should be a tricolour with the fleur de lys on it,
most fantastic of that there should be a flag, white on one side and
all,
tricolour on the He could not control himself, and burst out,
other!
'I shall never accept the tricolour flag.' 'Sir,' replied Ghesnelong,
'allow me not to have heard that remark.'
Finally an agreement was reached; the tricolour would remain the
legal flag until after the restoration; the King would not encourage the
display of the white flag on his return and he would submit the whole
question to the Assembly. It was a settlement that settled nothing.
Ghesnelong had failed, although he did not admit it to himself. For
all his talent, he was not perhaps a good ambassador. He could not
understand the fundamental obstinacy of the Pretender, petrified in his
prejudices by the double disadvantage of a royal education and a life
of exile. To Chesnelong the question was simple enough. His main
passions were the Church and the stability and prosperity of France.
He was a recent convert to the Legitimate monarchy; he had loyally
accepted the Empire; to serve France and the Church he had made
2

and was willing to make many sacrifices of amour propre. Henri V, like
Napoleon III, was only an agent. The parliamentary talent displayed
Like James II of England, the Gomte de Ghambord had married a princess of Modena.
1

defenders
Chesnelong's religious feelings were far deeper than those of many prominent
of the Church. As a boy at the lych of Pau under Louis Philippe, he had been the only
practising Catholic in the school!
101
THE DEVELOPMENT- OF MODERN FRANCE
in these monologues was irritating to the Pretender. He was not used
to subjects who disputed, no matter how politely, with their master.
Despite his formal acceptance of parliamentary government, it is very
doubtful if he either liked or understood it. The Government of
Napoleon III in the first quasi-dictatorial years of his reign, was more
to his liking than the parliamentary Government of Louis Philippe,
which was planned for him by Broglie, Audiffret-Pasquier and
Chesnelong. He was not far from the opinion of the Royalist philo-
sopher, Blanc de Saint-Bonnet, who told him that 'in abolishing public
assemblies you do not deprive the country of anything useful and at
one stroke you deprive the Revolution of its head'. A
little later he

was to express his disgust with 'sterile parliamentary conflicts from


which the sovereign emerges, in most cases, powerless and weakened*.
If he were restored, he would have to deal with these fluent, self-
opinionated orators like Ghesnelong. If he gave way to them now,
what hope had he of resisting in the future? His grandfather had once
said that he would rather be a day-labourer than a mere constitutional
king like the King of England, and 'Henri V
was one of the few people
alive whodid not think the political opinions of Charles X
worthless.
Ghesnelong returned to Paris and, keeping the fatal outburst to
himself, produced the agreement, satisfactory on the constitutional
question, highly ambiguous on the question of the flag. What would
the King do if (as was certain) the Assembly refused to abandon the
tricolour? He would not abdicate to make room for the Gomte de
Paris; he would leave the throne to which he had been restored and
return to Austria, reducing the whole restoration to farce. But as the
Pretender cherished the illusion that even hardened parliamentarians
could not resist the appeal of the King when once he was among them,
the parliamentarians could not believe that, once on the throne, Henri V
would be foolish enough to leave it.
Now that they were committed to a restoration, monarchist spirits
rose. A kind of religious hallucination clouded the minds of many
otherwise sensible people, and M. de Cumont saw nothing less than
Providence in the resignation of Grevy and the fall of Thiers. They
had behaved like Balaam's ass; they had promoted the good cause all
unwittingly. But Cumont's belief that God was at work did not make
him willing to give in to the Pretender over the flag. The parlia-
mentarians, with their taste for compromise and ingenious political
carpentry, were almost as illusion-ridden as Ghambord himself!
The country knew that some great event was preparing behind the
screen; despite the reassurances of the royal manifestoes, the peasants
feared that the restoration of the King meant the old regime of tithes
and Writing from a deeply Catholic part of France,
feudalism.
Berthelot told Renan
that 'the return of Henri V
is the greatest chimera

that could possibly have entered the heads of intriguing politicians.


102
THE REPUBLIC FILLS
Anything is possible in this country except that.*
note this well, in thirty or forty departments, because he
really fears (I
don't ask whether he is right or not) that the common lands which he
got in '93 will be taken away from him/ In the towns the hostility
to the restoration was even greater, but the
majority were ready to risk
all that. They believed that France would submit to a strong govern-
ment imposed from above. The Army was well in hand. Bourbaki,
who commanded at Lyons, was ready to put down any rebellion, arid
would then resign, being too good a Bonapartist to serve 'Henri V.
Magne, the Finance Minister, too, thought himself bound by his past
to the cause of 'Napoleon IV, but General du Barail, the Minister of
War, although he would have preferred the Prince Imperial, would
stand by his colleagues. A
minor general, who publicly protested
against the approaching restoration, was dismissed. Le*on Say, the
ex-Orleanist, gloomily told the American Minister that the restora-
tion was certain. On
October 1 8th, Audiffret-Pasquier in his vehement
fashion said that 'the campaign is begun, we shall carry it on until it
triumphs ... in three weeks, the national, hereditary, and constitutional
monarchy will be established'.
The one hope of the Republicans and the Bonapartists was the
Pretender. Ghesnelong still kept his secret; in his own mind he was
justified, since the outburst of the Pretender had not been meant for
the public. But with every day that passed, the majority was more and
more converted to the view that the flag question was all but settled.
In Austria, the Pretender was irritated and then alarmed. In Paris,
the politicians, so he thought, were manoeuvring him into a position in
which he could not defend himself. An indiscreet comjnunique of the
Right Centre, which suggested that there were no serious differences
between the views of 'Henri V
and the majority, was the last straw.
The Gomte de Ghambord wrote to Ghesnelong, absolving him of all
charges of duplicity, but making his position clear. He would
not
'become the Legitimate King of the revolution'. He insisted on his
flag. A Bonapartist journal, Liberti, got wind of the letter, and on
October ayth the secret was out. In vain the desperate Royalists
of the letter, in vain
attempted to evade admitting the authenticity
in Paris to hold it up.
they attempted to get the royal representative
The King's orders were final; his paper, the Union, published the letter
and the restoration was dead. At the most, only eighty members of
the Assembly would have voted for the restoration with the white flag.
'Henri V had made, not by cowardice but by pride and dignity, the
great refusal.
The majority were discredited and humiliated, but had they
brought 'Henri V
back he could hardly have lasted more than a few
weeks; he would have insisted on his flag, and when that was refused
would have gone off, in his own opinion like another Regulus, to
103 H
THE DEVELOPMENT OF kOfcERN FRANCE
Austria. Ridicule does not always kill, even in France, but the
Assembly might have died of that farcical conclusion!
It was still possible to save something from the wreck. The consti-
tutional question had to be decided, and the temporary solution of a
term of seven years for the Marshal-President was decided on. The
term was a compromise, for the original project had been for a term
of ten years. Even in the shorter term much might happen. The
Comte de Chambord might die, thought some; the Prince Imperial
would have come of age, thought others. In any case, the executive
citadel would be held by a staunch Conservative, no matter what
electoral disasters followed the dissolution of the Assembly.
The majority, got together with difficulty to make the Monarchy,
made the Septennate, minus the zealots of Legitimacy, but plus some
doubtful Republicans and Bonapartists. As Ernoul put it, 'After the
hopes which the country has conceived and the disappointment which
it isundergoing, we owe it something'. But the Septennate was a blow
which the Legitimists could not receive in silence. In their hearts
many of them must have blamed the King, but in public they could
not, so their anger was increasingly turned against those moderate
politicians who, they managed to persuade themselves, had magnified
the flag question by their clumsiness and, it was soon asserted and
perhaps believed, had done so deliberately. The Orleanists had played
in 1873 their role of 1830; they were worse than the Republicans or

Bonapartists; they were hypocrites as well as traitors. The standards


prepared for the procession, the harness with the royal arms for the
joyous entry of 'Henri Vinto his good city of Paris, the rumoured
inspection of the stables of the Louvre by one of the Frohsdorf court
which had persuaded Beule, the Minister of the Interior, that all was
well; all these petty details of the great event that had been discounted
were present in the memory of the disillusioned partisans to irritate
them further. One last episode came to give romance and a further
reason for anger to the defeated cause and to its devotees.
On November loth, a lame man arrived at a small private house
in Versailles, where the Assembly was debating the Septennate in the
palace from which his great ancestor, Louis XIV, had ruled France,
and, for a time, most of Europe by his simple will, 'De par le roi'.
What suddenly brought the Comte de Ghambord back to France when
all was lost may never be known. 1 He was, after all, as M. Daniel
HaleVy reminds us, a disciple of Chateaubriand and an admirer of the
elder Dumas. He would cut the Gordian knot of political intrigue, he
would appeal to the traditional loyalty of M. de MacMahon, to the
gratitude due from the descendant of the Irish refugee gentleman to
the descendant of Louis XIV. Together they would appear before
1
We
may compare it with the belated arrival in 1715 of the Old Pretender. It is not
the only point of resemblance between the two distant kinsmen.

104
THE REPUBLIC FILLS A GAP
the garrison which would surely welcome the King and his flag?
Although the parallel would not have pleased 'Henri V, he was to act
Napoleon I in 1815, and MacMahon was to act Ney. This was a
new return from Elba.
The fantastic scheme had not even the honour of a direct refusal
from MacMahon. The projected interview never took place. The
astounded President would not come to see the Pretender, and it was,
so the Pretender thought, out of the question for the King to visit the
President. A
suggested accidental meeting fell through, but it did not
matter. At the suggestion that the troops would give up the tricolour
the Marshal had exclaimed, so it was said, 'The chassepots will go off
of themselves'. But in any case, MacMahon felt himself bound in
honour to obey the authority of the Assembly. Had it restored the
King, he would willingly have put 'Henri V
in his rightful place, for
he agreed with his zealous wife that 'We have no right to be here'.
But he would not play the part of Monk. The Pretender was as
incapable of understanding the Marshal's sense of honour as the
Assembly was of understanding the King's. M. de Roux has suggested
that the Gomte de Ghambord would never have attempted to seduce
MacMahon from his loyalty to Napoleon III who, although a usurper,
was a monarch, and one who had made MacMahon a duke and a
marshal. But this loyalty to an Assembly was incomprehensible, and
no palliation for disloyalty. 'I thought to have found a Constable of
France; I found a chief of
police',
*
said 'Henri V.
The secret of the stay of the Pretender at Versailles was well kept

during the week that followed the refusal of MacMahon to aid the
romantic scheme, and the vote of the Septennate which marked the
final refusal of the politicians to give France her chance of salvation
in the hereditary and undimmished monarchy of the heir of forty

Kings. When it was all over,


the secret was revealed, and his partisans
flocked to see their chief. But although he had a legal right to stay in
France, next day he left for ever that country to which his blood bound
him, but which for him on the throne or as a private gentleman could
never have been anything but exile. Frohsdorf and his dreams were
home.
1
Constable was the highest military rank under the old monarchy.

105
CHAPTER II

THE CONSTITUTION OF 1875

importance of the failure of the restoration is almost entirely


-L negative. From the first the project of restoration diverted the
majority of the Assembly from its real work, alienated it from the
nation and encouraged it in more and more fantastic schemes. It
threw together in uneasy alliance Orleanists and Legitimists, separating
the former from their true allies, the right-wing Republican bour-
geoisie. The peasantry, seeing their natural leaders increasingly in-
volved in intrigues which meant nothing to the vast majority of
Frenchmen, lost faith in such errant guides. Thiers and his friends
were driven to the Left and even the meagre compensation of a united
right-wing party was denied. The increasingly embittered Legitimists
were ready for any means of revenge on their allies. In vain the
Orleanist historian, Thureau-Dangin, reminded them in 1874 of the
results of the follies of then* 'ultra' ancestors under the restored mon-

archy of 1815. The wise words of M. de Villele found no echo in the


hot hearts and heads of the 'Guardees', and the more moderate Royalists
could not be brought to realize that they had far more in common with
L6on Say and Gasimir-Perier than with Belcastel or La Rochette. To
avoid disturbance during the critical summer, silence had been im-
posed on France. Even the evacuation of France by the Germans had
not been celebrated, since that might have given a chance to the friends
of the Republic to celebrate its virtues in celebrating the great achieve-
ment of Thiers. No attempt had been made to win public opinion; all
had been made dependent on elaborate diplomatic negotiations in the
Assembly and at Frohsdorf. The doubtful Broglie, the hesitant
Journal des Dtbats, had followed the more confident politicians and news-
papers to a farcical conclusion. It was the devoted Legitimist, Lucien
Brun, who best summed up the adventure: 'So we have been dreaming
a dream then and it is over.' The dream was over, but in that dream,
the French Conservatives had expended much of their strength and
most of their prestige. It was a prodigality that was to cost them and
France dear.
It was Gambetta's paper, La Rtpublique Franfaise, that was best to
describe the constitutional activities of the Assembly after the collapse
of the restoration: *We are entering the Republic backwards/
1 06
THE REPUBLIC FILLS A GA*
Firmly pretending not to see where they were going, the Government
and the majority, bit by bit, created the institutions under which
France still lives.
In this ungrateful task they were helped by the Republicans.
Denying the constituent power of the Assembly, the Radicals helped to
strengthen the resolution of the majority to use it. The orthodox
Republican tradition made it clear what kind of Government (if
promises were kept) a Left National Assembly would adopt. There
would be no President; good Republicans now agreed with Grevy's
views of 1848. Not merely should there not be a President elected by
the people directly, there should be no permanent President at all.
The whole executive should be immediately under the control of the
Assembly. There would be only one Chamber. The Assembly of
the past, to whose glories all sections of the Radicals laid claim, the
Convention, had been a single Chamber. A. Second Chamber was an
freedom of universal suffrage since it was designed to limit
insult to the
the sovereignty of the people as expressed in their delegates in the
popularly elected House.
These doctrines were well known to the Right, who were thus in-
duced to give France a constitution with a President and an Upper
House. It would have to be a Republic (the word was still abhorrent),
but it would have as much of the monarchical spirit united to its
democratic body as possible.
There was a President in existence it is true, but he had been
elected as a person; he was not yet a mere incumbent of an office, but
he was there. An Upper House, however, had to be created. M. de
Broglie produced a scheme that revealed very clearly how oligarchical,
ingenious and wrong-headed were his ideas. It was marked by that
naive belief in the natural authority of the 'notables' of France which,
since 1848, had had less and less plausibility to commend it. Edgar
Quinet noted in the Broglie Ministry the persistence of the spirit of
coterie that was the great weakness of the Orleanist leaders. They
were a small, distinguished, unpopular circle, dukes and great business
magnates, academicians and directors of the sage, weighty and almost
impotent journals. Their preoccupation with institutions was a matter
for ridicule. What political institutions had achieved anything in
France since 1789? France had had nine or ten constitutions; none
of them had survived the man or men whose ideas or ambitions they
represented. Yet the men who had designed or influenced them,
.

Mirabeau, Condorcet, Sieves, Bonaparte, Benjamin Constant, Tocque-


ville, Lamartine, were men of talent or of genius, and some of them had
had (what the Broglie Government so conspicuously lacked) popu-
larity. A scheme coming from this source would probably have no
more life than the 'Additional Act' of 1815 had. The grandson of
Benjamin Constant was as misguided as his ancestor. The plan for a
107
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
'Grand Council', which the Prime Minister submitted to an indifferent
Assembly, was an ingenious piece of political carpentry, but in the
France of 1874 it had no foundations. It was to have three classes
of members, one of members sitting in their own right, Cardinals,
Marshals, Presidents of the Supreme Courts; a second class nominated
by the President; and a third elected by a special panel. It was in the
choice of this panel, even more than in the choice of members ex
ojficio, that the isolation of Broglie
from his country was revealed. He
recognized (as the old regime had done) the aristocratic claims of
the judges; members of that numerous body were electors of right.
But for the representatives of the barristers and solicitors, only the heads
of the local bars were electors. Those important and representative
institutions, the conseils de prud'hommes, the amateur courts of in-
dustrial arbitration which had been one of the happiest inventions of

Napoleon I, were not mentioned at all perhaps because they had been
invented by Napoleon I. The whole scheme would have been an able
project to submit to the States General of 1 789 as the joint work of an
earlier Broglie and an earlier Pasquier. It was the scheme of a 'due et

pair* who had forgotten that the Parliament of Paris was dead, but it
did not receive the honour of a discussion; the extreme Right joined
the Left to defeat the Duke on a It was May i6th;
point of procedure.
ended the rule of Thiers.
just a year since the beginning of the crisis that
Whatever the faults of the Broglie scheme it was, at any rate, a
serious plan for the Jfuture government of France, but, now hopelessly
divided, the Assembly was in no condition to accept or discuss elaborate
plans for a constitution. And, M. Daniel Halevy suggests, with much
plausibility, it was only fear that gave Left and Right the necessary
shock, fear of what both L^ft and Right hated more than they hated
each other, the Empire. In the Ni&vre, the peasants had triumphantly
.
elected a former equerry of Napoleon III, the Baron de Bourgoing.
The Right learned (what they ought to have learned long before) that
there was only one dynasty that still had a real hold on the imaginations
of the mass of the French people. If there was going to be a monarch
in France it would be the young and attractive Prince Imperial. And
the Left, hitherto confident in its inevitable triumph, was startled.
Universal suffrage, divine though it was, had been disastrously fickle
in the past. Fear and often hate of the rural population which sup-
ported the tyrant had been marked among the intellectuals, the rebels
of the Second Empire. Were the peasants, after betraying their
betters by electing a Monarchist Assembly in 1871, going to do even
worse and make possible the restoration of the Empire? Some of the
Left were panic-stricken; all were irritated and alarmed. The Republi-
cans knew well that the Empire was more formidable and had greater
sources of strength than had the Royal cause. 'Henri V
might have
been a mere transitory phantom had he come to the throne, but
108
THE REPUBLIC FILLS A GAP
'Napoleon IV, once in power, would be far harder to dislodge. Rouher
and the veterans of autocracy would see to that. After all, it was
all

only four years since France had been overwhelmingly Bonapartist.


One excuse of the majority for not bowing to realities and formally
establishing the Republic had been the assertion that to do so would
be to promote the re-establishment of the tmpire. But the refusal
to proclaim the Republic was apparently having the same result.
The Left had refused to recognize the constituent power of the Assembly,
confident that new elections would give them an overwhelming victory.
The Royalists were absurdly incompetent in electioneering tactics.
They lost touch with their electors almost as soon as elected; after that,
it was said, the electors saw
only the dust of their carriage-wheels.
But the official candidates of the Empire had been masters of tactics;
they knew whom to flatter, how to cajole, how to avoid the degradation
of bribery without offering to the electors only the repulsive austerity
of general principles. The Empire and more rural roads; the Empire
and a return to the days when phylloxera did not ruin the vines; these
were good election points. Napoleon III was dead, but all the good
that the peasants thought he had done was not interred with his
bones.
To give France permanent institutions was a way \o bar the road
to 'Napoleon IV. No one had much faith in the permanence of the
permanent institutions, but even if imperfect and short-lived, they
were better than nothing, for France had only the powers of the Marshal
President as a substitute for a constitution. And to ask France to post-
pone any final decision until the Marshal's term expired in 1880 was
absurd. The country wanted some political structure to live in. It
would not be content, to borrow an image from the Slide y
to go on
living in a tent.
On the Right the hostility of the 'chevau-legers' could be dis-
counted. Their day was over, except for mischief. On the Left there
were great names which were an emotional and doctrinal asset, but
which were also a great deal of a nuisance. The younger leaders of
the Republican party were tired of hearing, again, what Louis Blanc
had said in 1848 or Victor Hugo in 1851. These great men of the
dead past were formally alive but, as M. Krakowski puts it, they had
been sent to the Pantheon in their lifetime. Their active day was over.
The constitution would be the work of disillusioned Royalists, and of
Conservative Republicans allowed to do their necessary but unim-
if not the voices of the sections
pressive best with the aid of the votes,
on their flanks.
All interest was concentrated on the affirmation or rejection of the
word 'Republic ; France had th thing; should she still be denied the
5

name? On January 3Oth, a lawyer who knew his own mind and who
had been converted by realities carried the day. France, according to
109
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
M. Wallon, wished to know under what regime she was to live. She
must escape from the provisional. The occasion was the debate on the
law for the election of the President. Wallon's amendment ran
simply, 'The President of the Republic is elected by the plurality of
votes cast by the Senate and Chamber of Deputies united in a National
Assembly*. What could be more innocuous? There was a President.
Some method of providing for his successor must be found and the
junction of the future Senate to the future Chamber made the election
as conservative as was possible in the circumstances. And if the name
'Republic' was enacted into law, that was merely a recognition of the
facts. By providing for a regular succession to the Marshal, it ended
the personal and temporary character given to the executive. It did
not 'definitely* establish the Republic. What was definitive? But it
ended the rule of the provisional.
Seven hundred and five members voted and the Wallon amend-
ment was carried by one vote. The Target group, whose shift to the
Right had overthrown Thiers, had shifted to the Left. The monarchist
Assembly had established the Republic and M. de Cumont's allusion
to* Balaam's ass was justified at last, in a sense that its author would

have deplored.
From January 3Oth onwards, the Republican majority grew rapidly.
Only the first step had counted; the Assembly had taken the plunge
and the rest of the constitutional laws were voted easily by increasing
majorities. They were, indeed, voted too easily. Both sides in the
Assembly had been hypnotized by the question of the regime. That
decided, there was little energy left for discussing the details of the
powers of the Senate, the method of amending the Constitution, the
nature of the Executive. There had to be a Senate; the majority and
the Marshal insisted on that, and the young Republicans, who saw the
promised land in sight, had to disregard the solemn warnings of their
venerable elders. MacMahon made a great concession when he
abandoned his claim to nominate the first life Senators of the new Upper
House. The seventy-five life Senators were to be elected by the dying
Assembly. This, it was thought, would at least secure a handsome
representation of the majority in the future Upper House.
In any case, the Conservatives looked to the composition of the
Senate with some confidence, whatever doubts they may have had of
its utility. It was to be elected by electoral colleges in each department

consisting of the deputies, the councillors of the arrondissements and


cantons and an equal number of delegates from each commune, large
and small. The greatest city and the tiniest village in a department
were equal. This last provision, thought the Right, would be some
compensation for the disappearance of any extra voting strength
for the biggest taxpayers a detail of the dead Broglie scheme. For,
it was thought, the
gentry and the local notables could control their
no
THE REPUBLIC FILLS A GAP
peasants, and the Senate would thus be a barrier to the tide of universal
suffrage which would, it was realized, swamp the new Chamber of
Deputies with Republicans.
In the election of the deputies there were a few precautions that it
had been possible to take. There was to be a second ballot if no candi-
date got a majority in the first. It was hoped that this would com-
pensate the Right for their inferior discipline in face of the organized
Radicals. And the Assembly took comfort, too, in the decision
(powerfully influenced by a speech of Gambetta's on the opposite side)
to abolish scrutin de liste, the election of groups of deputies by the
whole department, in favour of single-member constituencies. The
passionate plea of the great demagogue for the existing system con-
vinced the majority that they were right to abolish it. party with a A
united doctrine, with great national leaders, could hope to sweep whole
departments, could hope to elect carpet-baggers. But the Right had
no doctrine, only a barren preaching of resistance. Its strength, it
was thought, was the sum of the individual influence and popularity of
the local notabilities. These could more easily be brought to bear
in a narrow field.
It would be taking the details of the constitutional laws more

seriously than the Assembly took them to devote time to discussing the
views of Cezanne on the Senate or of Laboulaye on the Presidency. *
As the pertinacious Bonapartist, Raoul Duval, pointed out, both sides
were swallowing their principles. The acceptance by the Republicans
not only of a Senate, but of the granting to that Chamber the power,
on the request of the President, to dissolve the Chamber, was almost a
greater defiance of sound Republican doctrine than was the creation
of a Second Chamber itself. Yet it was a provision that had its uses,
for previous Republican assemblies, not being legally dissoluble by
anybody, had had to be 'purged', as happened more than once during
the Revolution, or to be swept away by armed force as in 1851. The
right of dissolution might be monarchical, but it was a convenient
safety-valve in the event of a conflict between the directly-elected
Chamber and the two indirectly-elected authorities. It made possible
an appeal to their common master, the electorate, or, as it was more
mystically put, to 'universal suffrage'.
The Assembly, once it had put its hand to the plough, was in a
hurry. It only took a month to enact the main body cf the Constitution;
and the supplementary laws were enacted after a committee stage of
only twelve days. The text of the fundamental laws, brief, ambiguous
and clumsily drafted, shows both the haste and the indifference of the
makers of the only French constitution since the Revolution which has

1
Laboulaye, who was supposed to be an
expert
on American matters, absurdly argued
that the President in the French system was being givenmore power than the President of
the United States had.
Ill
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
outlived its makers. France was no longer living in a tent, but in a
ramshackle hut, hastily knocked together, devoid of such necessities
as declarations of rights or preambles of principles. And in that ram-
shackle hut, dilapidated by the wear and tear of over two generations
c
of use, France still lives. ln France,' said a wise man, 'nothing lasts
so long as what is only temporary.'
One last important political act remained to the moribund Assembly.
It had life Senators.
to elect the seventy-five Having a majority in the
Assembly, the Conservatives, if they had united, could have secured
that all the seats fell to them. It only needed tact and unity. But tact
was not displayed in dealing with the all-important Left Centre, and
this group prepared to deal with Gambetta rather than with Broglie
and Buffet. And Gambetta was preparing a stroke of malicious
genius. He was making a bargain with the leader of" the extreme
Right, M. de la Rochette, who had told Jules Simon that he was ready
for a deal. The secret of the conspiracy was well kept: and it was not
until the voting began that the flabbergasted Right saw how it had
been tricked. The most eminent leaders of the quondam majority
were beaten and obscure Legitimists elected, with those veterans and
casualties of political war that the triumphant Left thought ready for
the political Invalides. At the end, a few of the Legitimists lost their
nerve in face of the astonished and indignant Right. They broke
ranks and four moderates were elected, among them Bishop Dupan-
loup. But the result of the first choice of life Senators was farcical. It
was by the obscurity and unimportance of most of the new life
farcical
Senators: 1 was farcical because of its political results. An Assembly
it

with a normal Right majority elected fifty Left Senators out of seventy-
five. Nine of the extreme Right were chosen.
This result achieved, some of the Legitimists had the grace to be a
little ashamed of the bargain they had made with Jules Simon and

Gambetta. Unable to blame either Charles X or Henri V for the


disasters of their cause, the Legitimists had revenged themselves on
their tepid allies. And the Union revealed the kind of triumph that the
elections were for it. 'We have seventy-five immovable senators, of
whom the Due Decazes
not one, and this negative merit is not to be
is

despised.' It was the


consolation for the 'Guardees'.
last
The ordinary senatorial elections gave a substantial majority to the
Right, a majority which, but for the Simon-Gambetta-La Rochette
coup, would have been overwhelming. The Legitimists gained 2
elected seats out of 224; the Bonapartists gained 39!
Like the French officers at Waterloo, the Conservatives advanced to
the battle of the general election without fear and without hope. Their
official leader was Buffet, honest, able, politically incompetent, and
1
No one, no matter how distinguished, was elected who was not a member of the
Assembly.
112
THE REPUBLIC FILLS A GAP
with a talent for repelling popularity that surpassed Broglie's. Buffet,
like Broglie before him, clung to the faint hope of conciliating the
Right. He neglected to conciliate the Left Centre whose alliance with
the Right Centre had made possible the new Constitution. It is just
conceivable that a campaign based on the union of the sections sym-
bolized by the two brothers-in-law, Casimir-P^rier and Audiffret-
Pasquier, might have been successful or, at any rate, reduced what
was to be a debacle to a mere defeat. It was still possible to say that
France was 'Left Centre'; that in Dufaure, even in moderate mem-
bers of the Left like Jules Simon, were the natural allies of the defeated
Orleanists who had made the constitution. After all, one of their
own princes, Joinville, had voted for the Republican constitution;
another, Aumale, was deeply suspect to all good Royalists.
The results were a devastating commentary on the policy of 'no
enemies on the Right and no friends on the Left
5
On the first ballot,
.

the Republicans got a clear majority of the whole Chamber. On the


second, their numbers rose to 340 out of 533. The Right had less than
200 members, only 30 of them Legitimists and nearly half of them
Bonapartists. Gambetta had been a candidate in four districts and
was elected in all. Buffet was a candidate in four districts and was
5
defeated in all. He was offered a 'safe seat and replied, 'If I stand for
5

it, it will cease to be safe .

The new system was at last in operation. 'What can come of this
mixture of two kinds of fraud, each seeking to deceive the other? . . .

Everything depends on origins. What a poisoned seed! What can it


So the angry Edgar Quinet had written of the new consti-
5

produce?
tution, deceived again in a long lifetime of political day-dreaming.
But the young men of the triumphant party did not share the appre-
hensions of the boring veteran of 1848. They had the Republic.
CHAPTER III

RECOVERY

TT is possible that in his estimate of what France could pay and remain
A solvent, and pay in a reasonably quick time, Bismarck was misled by
the gloomy view of French finances, that was natural if one took seriously
the opposition criticisms of the budget system of the Imperial regime.
Extravagance, lack of proper accounting, improvident mortgaging of
the future w v,h had been the main sins attributed to the financiers of
Napoleon I i i had, indeed, existed; but not only were real reforms made
iritiie Jast period of the Empire, but the rapid growth in the national
wealth that marked this period would have made the criticisms of
Leon Say, Jules Favre, Joseph Magnin and the rest excessive, even had
they been quite devoid of party bias and party exaggeration.
France was not merely solvent in 1870; she was solvent in 1871, after
the great losses of the war and with the prospect of paying an indemnity
of an unprecedented amount weighing on her credit. It was the
fundamental solvency of French economy which made possible the
rapid recovery of French credit and more than anything else con-
vinced a doubting world that, despite the war and the Commune,
the days of French greatness were not over. As soon as it was obvious
that there was a securely established central Government, there poured
in from the traditional woollen-socks of the peasants and from the
notaries' strong-boxes of the bourgeoisie, abundant savings whose
owners were ready to serve their country at a reasonable rate of
interest. The first loan floated by Thiers was issued on what proved to
be over-generous terms, but it was most important that it should not
fail. With the collapse of the Empire, whose credit had remained good
up to the last, regular borrowing had become^ very difficult; and the
nightmare of the financial officials, the issue of unsecured banknotes,
the dreaded 'assignats' of the Revolution, was narrowly avoided,
largely thanks to the technical skill and resolution of O'Quin and of the
much respected old imperial Finance Minister, Magne.
By the time of the armistice, the position was desperate. The
holders of the main securities, the rentes and railroad shares, had suf-
fered very great losses. Apart from the multifarious expenses of
114
THE kf>tJfcLl6 FtLLS A GAP
Supplying the troops besieging Paris, the German army of occupation
was costing 50,600 ($250,000) a day, and France had undertaken to
pay the whole indemnity of 200,000,000 ($1,000,000,000) by March
2nd, 1874! It was very excusable, therefore, in Thiers to paint too
rosy a picture of the public finances and, at the same time, to offer most
generous terms (roughly 6-25 percent.) for the loan of June 1871. He
asked for two milliards (80,009,000; $400,000,000): he got five
milliards, but the demonstration of public confidence was well worth the
apparent extravagance of the terms and the lesson was learned, for
re-conquered Paris was able to borrow on a good deal better terms, and
it was evident that French public credit could stand the strain of
raising
the indemnity.
The National Assembly, in financial as in other matters, was ani-
mated with the best intentions and with, in this case, fairly intelligent
intentions. In some of its minor taxes, it is true, it displayed its extra-
ordinary lack of political sense. Largely composed of country-gentle-
men, itdoubled the price of licences for shooting game, a measure not
only profoundly unpopular, but one which did not even raise much
revenue, as the falling off of sales of gunpowder, a State monopoly,
wiped out the gain from the dearer licences. A bold attempt was made
to deal with one of the great sources of tax evasion, the permission given
to wine growers to distill spirits for their own use; the amount allowed
was now limited to twenty gallons. 1 But no fundamental reform in the
elaborate tax system was possible without an attempt being made to
increase the revenue from direct taxes, without, that is to say, intro-
ducing some form of income tax.
In this, as in many other fields of government activity, the Assembly
was greatly influenced by English precedent. But whatever chance this
revolutionary proposal might have had was killed by the violent oppo-
sition of Thiers. An opponent of the tax compared it to the hated
'taille' of the old regime and Thiers heartily agreed. Even worse than
the compulsory service of sons of the bourgeoisie in the army, was the
inspection of their private affairs which
an income tax involved.
Thiers admitted that there was much in the history of the Revolution
to strike horror, but there were things that aroused 'a feeling of satis-
faction and esteem'. There had been a Reign of Terror, but there
had been no prying into the most holy recesses of private life, that is
into the business secrets and the income of the citizen.
It was not only an income tax that Thiers opposed with this sacred

anger, but a turnover tax which some


manufacturers wanted in prefer-
ence to the favourite project of the President, import duties on raw
materials. Thiers had disliked the low-tariff policy of the Empire
almost as jmich as he had its sentimental foreign policy. In power at
1
On the eve of the elections, the courage of the Assembly failed and the 'bouilleurs
de
cru* were given a freer hand again. They have kept it.
"5
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
last, he proposed to cut through the Gordian knot of the commercial
treaties that had tied France's hands and, rashly bold, he proposed a
tariff system which had to be hurriedly withdrawn in the face of
1
opposition from the other parties to the treaties.
In his positive action, Thiers was baffled; in his negative action he
was successful. The prying fiscality of the English system was avoided;
and, with a few additional revenues like the match monopoly created
to avoid difficulties in collection of .duty, France had to face a severe
financial strain with the resources of the Napoleonic system, a system
which had the merit of age and habit, if not the merit of flexibility or
of abstract fiscal justice. But with all its faults, it provided the money
that made it possible to liquidate the war charges, to pay somewhat
meagre compensation to those who had suffered from the worst
disasters of the invasion and to pay the ransom demanded by the
invader still encamped on the sacred soil of France.
To this task, Thiers devoted all his diplomatic as well as his financial
talents. He was resolved on a policy of 'fulfilment', on an avoidance of
all vain repining; on the sacrifice of all the easy chances of ostentatiously
patriotic indignation and resentment which would give the Germans
an excuse for stayingon in France and certainly make harder his am-
bition of persuading them to leave before the appointed day if the

money to buy them off could be found before then. In his ambition,
Thiers had two very useful assistants. One was his representative at
the headquarters of the Army of Occupation, the Comte de Saint-
Vallier, a very resourceful diplomat. The other was the Gommander-
in-Chief of that army, General von Manteuffel. Manteuffel was almost
as great an admirer of Thiers as was Thiers himself. He once begged
Saint-Vallier to tell Thiers of his 'veneration, I might say adoration for
a word for this great man*.
this great citizen, patriot, character, in
Thiers naturally did everything he could to keep Manteuffel in this
frame of mind.
It was not always easy. Not only was the German Ambassador,
Count Harry von Arnim, hostile to Thiers, to the Republic and to
France, but there were other Germans who thought that the rapid
revival of the lately prostrate enemy was ominous for the future, and it
was necessary to persuade them that their fears were groundless, and
that once France was evacuated, a real period of peace and mutual
esteem could be looked for, that the preachers of revenge had no
serious following, that Veal patriots want peace, while leaving to a
distant future the decision of our destinies'. So Thiers and his agents
vigorously repressed the administrators who did not protect German
troops from popular anger; managed, as tactfully as possible, to com-
bine courtesy visits on the Kaiser's birthday with regard for the feelings
1 One item in the new tariffs that amused a depressed nation was a very high duty on
laxatives.

116
THE REPUBLIC FILLS A GAP
of the local population; accounted for the hostility of the wives of
of the German troops by their natural sense of
officers
inferiority in
feminine elegance to Frenchwomen; explained away rash
speeches
by Gambetta and Radical triumphs like the election of Barodet in
Paris. Thiers, Saint-Vallier and Gontaut-Biron in Berlin had the
reward of their tact and self-control. By the early summer of ihc 1873,
great task was completed and its chief architect overthrown.

II

Of all the reforms to make, all the reconstructions to be put in hand,


one united the most diverse sections of the Assembly and the Nation.
'Give us back our legions', Audiffret-Pasquier had cried from the
tribune of Bordeaux in his philippic against the fallen Emperor. One
French institution above all had a claim on all the energy, courage and
wealth of the defeated and humiliated nation: the Army.
The reconstruction of the French Army was less a work of innova-
tion than of imitation, as was freely admitted at the time. To create
on French soil as close an imitation of the Prussian Army as possible
was the aim of the Assembly and of most of the military chiefs. 1 The
first point of imitation was also the most important. All sections of the
Assembly were agreed that the 'blood tax' had to be paid by all classes.
Had the Asseiribly had its way, the comparatively simple system of
three years' service in the active army and a much longer period in the
various reserve organizations would have been followed.
There were two obstacles to this solution; there was the general
professional view, still held despite 1870, that although you could
train a competent soldier in two years or less, that was too short a time
to make regiments where officers and men were sewn to each other,
as the Due d'Aumale put it. This was not only the view of the soldiers
(and the Assembly tended to follow, in military matters, its numerous
military members), but, much more important, it was the view of M.
Thiers. That indomitable survivor of the age of Louis Philippe was,
indeed, far more rigorous in his standards than were the soldiers, for,
unlike them, he had no use at all for the new-fangled Prussian idea of
universal service. He had opposed this dangerous doctrine when it
was advocated in 1848, and he had not really changed his mind since
1848. 'I don't want', he wrote to Saint-Vallier, 'a compulsory service

that will inflame all heads and put a rifle on the shoulder of every
Socialist; I want a army, coherent, disciplined, capable of
professional
making us respected abroad and at home, very limited in number, but
superior in quality.'

1
The oddest example of imitation of German methods was furnished by the law laying
down scalesof compensation payments for damage done by troops on manceuvres. The
scales used by the German Army of Occupation were taken over by the French.

117
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
Thiers saw and allowed for the momentary madness of the nation
and the Assembly. 'Universal compulsory service was the only thing,
they said, to bring back to France the power she had lost.' This was
'the opinion of everybody, except some very few men of unusual good
sense'. The men of very good sense were few indeed; perhaps they
were only one man, but that man was full of energy, talked of himself
as a new Garnot and was indispensable, for the moment, to the
Assembly. So playing his trump card, his threat of resignation,
Thiers drove a bargain.
The President would accept universal service in return for making
the period of service of the backbone of the army a minimum of five
years. For Thiers, five years was not nearly enough, he wanted seven
or eight, but he knew when he was beaten. But if a high proportion
of the army was to serve five years, the rest of it must serve for a very
short period, six months in fact. Otherwise the financial burden of
keeping five classes under arms would be ruinous. But how were the
men of five years' service to be distinguished from those of six months?
It would have been possible to choose the long-service men by their

special aptitude for arms or, alternatively, restrict the short service
privilege to those whose quickness marked them out as natural soldiers
requiring little But such choices would have been too
training.
offensive to the new of equality; and the old system of lot was
spirit
revived. There were again good and bad numbers, although no
number was now as good as that which had brought complete
exemption under the Empire. This inequality had bad results.
Obsessed by the view that it took a long time to make a real soldier,
the Army authorities did not count the short-service men as real effec-
tives, either while they were in the Army or when they had passed
to the reserves. They were a kind of amateur reserve to be used
for less serious work.
The new French Army did not, in fact, draw on the whole male
population of military age to furnish the first-line; there were still large
numbers of citizens exempt from the heaviest burden of citizenship,
although now (and it was an important difference) this privilege was
not to be bought. But, as Trochu pointed out, the inequality of
service was sure to kill the new scheme. It was hardly instituted when
a movement for doing away with the privilege was started, a movement
that not only led to an alteration of the law in 1877, but, long before
that, had gained much of its object by administrative means, as War
Ministers increasingly cut down the nominal five years and raised the
nominal six months untfl the difference between the two classes was
1
slight.
This was the most substantial but not the only inequality of the new
1
A week before his death, Thiers told Jules Simon that he was resolved to speak against
any tampering with the sacred five years, if he was to die while doing so.
THE REPUBLIC FILLS A GAP
law. Imitating the Prussian system, men of education were allowed
to Volunteer', on paying for their own equipment (at a cost of 60:
$300), and on showing proof of exceptional education they served only
a year and were trained to be reserve officers. This breach of equality
with its flavour of privilege bought for cash did not seriously affect the
numbers of the army, but it made the new law suspect. A still more
unpopular feature of the law was the complete exemption given to
future priests, ministers, rabbis and schoolmasters, whether lay or
clerical. The Left at this stage did not propose to make combatants
of the clergy, but it insisted that they should at least serve as stretcher-
bearers. The majority was not to be shaken. Excluding the mass of
the clergy from the Army, it created on the other hand, a service of
peace-time chaplains, a change very little to the taste of the Minister of
1
War, but characteristic of the majority who were deeply concerned
with the role of theArmy as an educational force, hoping as they did,
that the bourgeois soldiers would win over their proletarian comrades
to sound ideas, and that the chaplains would make of the Army a

moralising force in a country that needed moral reinforcement very


badly.
One consequence of the horror of voluntary enlistments, of buying
recruits with cash or privileges, was the almost complete disappearance
of the old professional soldier so common under the Empire. General
du Barail regretted this; a handful of these veterans were good for the
spirit of a regiment. Not many were needed, 'just enough to serve as
models to the young soldiers, keep up the military spirit, the traditions,
to tellcheerful soldierly stories in the barrack-room, sing the old songs
on the roads'. A
more serious loss was the disappearance of the old type
of non-commissioned officer. No longer tempted to re-enlist by high
pay or a bonus, there was no reason why the sergeants should stay on
in the Army and, in six years, the number, of veteran non-commissioned
officers was halved. Only when the prudish refusal to make the
service financially attractive was abandoned was the lost ground slowly
and imperfectly recovered.
In other ways, the reform was not as thorough as it might have been.
The War Office had still a deep respect for the rights of seniority; and
one reason for the organization of fourth battalions in 1875 2 was to
the same
provide jobs for superfluous captains, and something of
spirit was behind the law limiting
the normal tenure of command of
an Army Corps to three years. The social position of officers was safe-
guarded by giving the War Minister a veto on their marriage,
and the
rank of officer was given to officials of semi-civilian auxiliary services,
in part because it increased their matrimonial status and thus compen-
sated for low pay. Despite a realistic doctrine of fire based on the
experience of 1870, many relics of the old days survived. The pro-
a
1
General du Barail. See p. 122.
I
119
THE DEVELOPMENT Of MOfcEktt
posal to issue entrenching tools to a third of each battalion was vetoed
as crippling to the offensive spirit which was deemed to be the great
asset of the French Army. So the old sappers with their white leather
aprons and ornamental hatchets were preserved, and two were allotted
to each company. In the cavalry, distinctions between heavy,
medium and light cavalry, meaningless since the disappearance of
shock tactics, were preserved. And 10,000 military bandsmen were
kept to encourage the martial spirit. After all, everybody had read
in Les Chdtiments how the Old Guard had advanced at Waterloo

. . . a pas lents, musique en tfite, sans fureur.

One part of the Prussian system which the French Army was not
yet ready to imitate was the territorial location of regiments. To
recruit each regiment from one area meant, it was boldly asserted,

endangering national unity, creating not a French Army, but an army


of Burgundians, Bretons, etc. The real reason was probably a desire
not to tie officers to one, possibly unpleasant, garrison-town. There
was even a proposal to give every regiment a turn in Paris, and the
proposal of Cezanne, to establish Alpine regiments to match those in
the Italian Army, was turned down on the ground that service in these
units would soon be looked on as a punishment! The history of the
Chasseurs Alpins, when these regiments were at last founded, showed
how baseless this fear was.
In some ways, the new army was remarkably like the old. The
and the Territorial Army were the equivalent of
short-service troops
the mobiles; only the full-time troops, either in the Army or in the
reserve,were taken into account. They were the 'true army', wrote
General du Barail. There remained a dangerous scepticism of the
value of reserve formations, a belief that all would be settled in the
first weeks of war (as in 1870). A
belief was expressed on the eve of
1914 by a competent military critic, that despite the millions of men
in reservewho had passed through the Army, only a few hundred
thousand men would be put into the field at the beginning.
The new Army was, in most ways, vastly superior to the old. Its
officers worked hard, read and thought hard; ,the spit-and-polish
tradition of the showy Imperial Army died, not all at once, but it
died. Yet the lesson of 1870 that numbers are, if not all, more than
half the battle was not learned. A War Minister of this period, General
Charreton, expressed the dominant view. 'With our national charac-
ter so impressionable, so ardent in exploiting a first success, so easily

discouraged at the first defeat, we ought to devote ourselves to winning


the first success.' In 1914, fortunately for France, General Charreton's
view of his countrymen was proved wrong. But the hold of that view
on the minds of the dominant school of French officers was expensive
if not disastrous, for it was vain to think that the lesson which was not

120
THE REPUBLIC FILLS A GAP
obvious to the men who had been beaten in Alsace and under Metz by
armies full of reservists, would be appreciated by their successors who
had no personal memories to set against the fashionable theory.

Ill DC
The labours of the Assembly, the retreat of the Hlfeifia1jves within
the lines of the Conservative Republic, took place under the suspicious
eye of Prince Bismarck. The rapid recovery of French credit, and the
internal calm of the conquered nation, were alarming to so perspica-
cious a statesman as the Chancellor, who knew, better than anyone else,
the great risk he had. taken in humiliating and mutilating France in
1871. He knew, too, that it was inevitable that Germany should re-
place France as the object of general European suspicion; a nation of
such military prowess, ruled by such a successful master of politics as
himself, placed in the centre of the Continent, was bound to be re-
garded with suspicion and, perhaps, with fear by the other states.
From France they had nothing to fear now; from Germany they
might have much.
The victorious Prussian soldiers began to talk of putting an end to
the danger of a French war of revenge by a preventive campaign.
France was rapidly recovering her strength, but she was still no match
for her conqueror. Determined, as France was believed to be, on a
war of revenge, it was surely only prudent to defeat her finally before
she could become really dangerous again? These calculations were
made, were heard and were adversely commented on in all the Euro-
pean capitals. Bismarck was not afraid of France alone; but he
was afraid of a France allied with Russia or Austria. All his art was
devoted to keeping on good terms with both his neighbours, linked in a
common fear of the Revolution of which France was supposed to be
the centre. But it was hard to persuade anyone that the France of the
National Assembly was the tool of that International over whose
dread designs so much sleep was needlessly lost. But if the France of
M. de Broglie was not a centre of Red Revolution, she might be con-
sidered a centre of Black Counter-Revolution. To represent France as
the champion of the Pope was, from Bismarck's point of view, a good
5

move. It effectually separated Italy from her 'Latin sister It made


.

more to win for the enemy of Giant Pope than


English sympathy easy
for his supposed champion. It drew the Tsar closer to Germany, for
the Catholic Poles were his chief internal worry. Even in Catholic
Austria, the claims and complaints of Pius IX were coldly
received.
The Roman menace was not real enough to cement so unnatural a
combination of all the great powers against a weak nation, especially on
behalf of a nation suspected to be too strong for her neighbour '$ peace
of mind. A recovery of France was essential to the balance of power
121
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
in Europe, and a permanent reduction of France to impotence involved
serious dangers for all the states which had reason to fear a dominant

Germany. For this reason, if for no other, the plan of a preventive


war was impossible. could only be talked about, not carried out.
It
The French Foreign Due Decazes, knew this and acted
Minister, the
on it tol&core a superficially brilliant victory over Bismarck. The talk
of war or of further coercion of France had alarmed the English Govern-
ment, so Queen Victoria wrote a friendly if unnecessary letter of warn-
ing to the far from bellicose old Emperor. Relations between France
and Italy improved; relations between Germany and Russia became
less good. The diplomatic situation was altering to Germany's dis-
advantage when the 'war scare' of 1875 startled Europe.
Its origins were simple enough. French army reforms x seemed to
nervous (and* possibly inspired) German journalists important enough
to justify a violent press campaign of which the highlight was an article
in the Berlin Post entitled 'Is War in Sight?'. There were rumours of
extensive French purchases of horses in Germany, and an embargo
was put on the export of horses from the Empire. But France had no
intention of making war and Bismarck had no intention of pushing
matters too far. Had the French Government been content with the
mutual explanations that followed, the scare might have been com-
pletely forgotten. But Decazes was partly afraid, partly anxious
to put Germany in the wrong. His attempts to persuade the other
great powers that Bismarck had sinister intentions against France and

Belgium were not at once successful. Even the Post article did not
frighten the other capitals as much as it was asserted to have frightened
Paris. But rash remarks by a German Foreign Office official to the
French Ambassador in Berlin provided new evidence of German designs.
The British Government at last began to move; the British public

began to share its rulers' anxiety after an alarmist article had appeared
in The Times; and the Russian Chancellor, Prince Gorchakov, was at
last ready to give some sign of his displeasure with his hated rival,
Bismarck. The Tsar and his Minister were due to visit Berlin and,
although the Tsar was not alarmed, the conjunction of Russian and
British efforts to keep the peace which Bismarck denied was threatened,
infuriated the German Chancellor. Decazes had the satisfaction of
representing France as a harmless victim saved from the wolf by her
great and good friends in London and St. Petersburg, and Bismarck had
'

strong personal reasons for wishing to revenge himself on Gorchakov.


The immediate results of the scare were not important, but in the
long run it had an important effect on French foreign policy. Thiers
had always hoped to find in Russia the counter-weight to Germany.
He had based his diplomatic campaign of 1870 on the erroneous belief
that Russia could be induced to help France. Whereas some people in
1
The creation of fourth battalions. See p. 119.
122
THE REPUBLIC FILLS A GAP
France, like Gambetta, hankered after an alliance with Austria, and
others on the Left wished to cultivate England, Thiers had clung to
his Russian dream. Decazes seemed to have proved Thiers right;
Russia had saved France. Henceforward an- alliance with Russia
appealed to the French imagination for two different reasons. For
some it was the only chance of undoing the crime of 1871; for others,
Russian support was the only safeguard of France against a sudden
attack by Germany. A new invasion was a nightmare for mill ions of
Frenchmen, ano! the mythical projected attack of 1875 revived all the
fearsbred by 1870-1. Whether to revenge the disasters of the war of
1870, or merely to prevent their repetition, Russian aid was hence-
forward deemed to be necessary.

123
*
te*
ATQ
ior;

BOOK III

THE REPUBLICANS TAKE OVER THE


REPUBLIC
Lc peuple souverain s'avancc.
Le Chant du Dfyait.
CHAPTER I

THE SIXTEENTH OF MAY

defeat of Buffet and the imminent


replacement of the old
THE
leaders of the National Assembly by the untried and formidable
Republican majority, were inevitably a source of distress for the soldier
whom the defeated party had made head of the State. MacMahon
took seriously the commission that he held from the National Assembly;
it was his duty to avert or, if no more was
possible, to postpone the
arrival in power of the dangerous Radicals and, above all of their
leader, Gambetta. The tribune had talked in a famous speech of the
'new levels' of society which were now becoming politically conscious
and powerful. He was their mouthpiece, but MacMahon was unwil-
ling to listen. The Marshal had, it is true, some regard for Gambetta;
while a prisoner of war in Germany, he had not permitted his officers
to sneer at the amateur armies raised by the Dictator, but since then
Gambetta had been erected into a scarecrow by the Right and, to
some extent, by himself. But the Marshal failed to realize that the
tribune of Belleville was, as he claimed, not by nature a leader of the
opposition, but a man of government. If the Empire had lasted,
Gambetta might have been a minister of 'Napoleon IV' and he might
well have been a minister of'MacMahon.
Despite all Gambetta's overtures, the Marshal was unshakable. He
refused to receive Gambetta, partly because of his general distrust,
partly, it is said, because he learned that Gambetta
was on close terms
of friendship with his own sister-in-law, the Comtesse de Beaumont, and
MacMahon shared the view of his wife that her sister's catholicity of
taste in social and political matters was highly unbecoming.
A defence of his action that MacMahon later made, revealed how
deep was his incomprehension of the situation. For the President
believed that he showed his impartiality by refusing to have anything
to do with either the Comte de Chambord or Gambetta, with the

elderly obstinate heir of the dead past and


the plastic representative of
the living future. As leader, Gambetta had only one possible rival,
Thiers, but as MacMahon said, he could not
make Thiers Prime
he could retire in his favour. So, failing Thiers,
he
Minister, only
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
called on Dufaure to form a ministry. Dufaure had been born in
1798, during the Directory; the Third Republic was the seventh form of
government he had lived under, but he had been indelibly marked by
the reign of Louis Philippe. He wore 'the frock-coat, the eloquence,
and the Gallicanism of 1830', says M. Hanotaux. His colleauges
were as little representative of the new levels as he, and it was charac-
teristic that the occupant of the Ministry of the Interior was Ricard,
one of the few Republicans who had been beaten at the elections. 1
But to MacMahon, Dufaure represented the limit of concession, that
position on the edge of the political fortress beyond which he would
not retreat.
On the mined rampart of the Malakoff, in 1856, General de
MacMahon had refused to be withdrawn. 'Here I am; here I stay.'
The Elyse"e was the new Malakoff from whose walls the garrison looked
out on the enemy. For, as M. de Marcere, one ofthe leading Catholic Re-
publicans, complained, the Elysee, as far as the Republic was concerned,
5
was 'an armed camp It was an armed camp which MacMahon
.

would not abandon, for that would mean 'legalizing the Convention*,
since he thought the Senate would fall with the Presidency. It was

unlikely that the alarmed Conservatives would find any Republican


leader less alarming than Dufaure, but they showed little disposition
to foster that union of the centre parties which had made the Constitu-
tion. They treated Dufaure and Marcere like prodigal sons who had
yet to make their peace with their father and, in the meantime, were

fittingly left to the husks and the swine of Republicanism.


It was in the Senate, with its narrow Conservative majority, that
the Right fought its campaign: in that Senate which represented in
personnel and in temper the dead National Assembly, so unlike the
unruly Chamber 300 yards away at the other end of the Palace of
Versailles. Broglie was there to display his pride and talents by warn-
ing the ministers of the danger of taking the first step. Where would
it all end? Where would the resistance of the Right end? asked
Dufaure. He remembered as, oddly enough, the Due de Broglie did
not the lessons of 1830 and 1848.
There were grounds enough for fear on both sides. The personnel
of the administration was still Conservative and, although Dufaure was
ready to replace such political officials as prefects by Republicans, he
was not willing to purge the whole administrative and still less the
whole judicial system. Yet that was what the victors wanted, and the
defeated feared. For the vanquished Conservative bourgeoisie, a purge
of the administration was a blow to pride and purse, and ominous of
the exclusion of their sons from the profits of politics. For the Republi-
cans, the sight of Royalists and, still worse, of Bonapartists, in office
was irritating; it was the reward of political sin as well as the exclusion
1
At Niort, by a Bonapartist.
128
THE REPUBLICANS TAKE OVER THE REPUBLIC
from power and profit of the heirs of the martyrs of 1851. It was not
enough that the future was bright; the present had to be illuminated
too, although it was still possible for Gambetta to announce, without
being laughed to shame, that the real difficulty x>f a Republican
Minister of the Interior was 'to find trustworthy Republicans who arc
willing to take jobs. They are so little affected by the love ofjobs that
even under a Government of their choice, of their wishes, it is the
hardest thing in the world to get them to accept them'. This iron
resolution was breaking down faster than Dufaure's purge went on.
If the days of the battle-cry of 1924, 'all the jobs arid quick about it',
had not yet come, they were coming.
Intensely interesting as the question of jobs was to present and
future job-holders, it was not so close to the heart of the average elector.
For him there was one burning question, the Church. It was the
Church that had been beaten in the elections. And that defeat had to
have results. The administrative favours and exceptions which had
been enjoyed under the 'moral order' were now to be cut off, but there
was a marked difference between what even sincere Catholics, like
Dufaure and Marcere, thought were favours and what even a liberal
bishop, like Dupanloup, thought were rights. Dufaure, for example,
took administrative steps against some fiscal methods of the clergy,
steps which irritated some zealots; and, like a good Gallican, he refused
to permit the registration of a papal bull which had referred to a possible
division of the vast diocese of Lyons. Pope Pius IX must be reminded
that the Concordat reserved all these questions to the French State.
It was no more than had been done under all previous French Govern-

ments, but it was ominous. It was no wonder that the uncompromising


Bishop of Poitiers was soon to appeal to MacMahon as a new Clovis,
l

or that Dupanloup compared him to the saviours of the people spoken


of in Holy Writ. But the legitimist Pie had little hope of any good
coming from a Republic, whereas Dupanloup, for all his fears, still
clung to the belief that much could be saved. So on May i6th, 1876,
there appeared the first number of his paper, La Defense Sociale et
Religieuse.
Aaron was to hold up the arms of Moses in his fight against the
forces of evil. It is difficult, as M. Daniel Halevy has reminded us, to
realize what a great figure Dupanloup was in his lifetime, a modern
Bossuet and Fenelon. He is now so forgotten that his name is more
likely to suggest an obscene song
than the great cleric who reconciled
Talleyrand to the Church, resisted what he thought the mistakes of
Pius IX, and now was active in forcing MacMahon to play the part
of a new Napoleon III, instead of being content to play the part of
Soult to the Guizot of Dufaure or even of Gambetta.
Two topics put the Government into difficulties at once. The
l
Pic.

129
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
policy of no enemies on the Left* was being born, and the Republicans
were forced by the pressure of their militant supporters to propose an
amnesty who were still in exile, or in prison, and to
for the communards
demand the cessation of prosecutions for offences committed during
the Commune or, at any rate, the transfer of the trials from military
to civil courts.It was difficult to commend such a policy to Dufaure,
who had been, next to Thiers, the chief enemy of the Commune.
But this was not the only cause of disunion between the Ministry and
the majority. The burning question of lay funerals was hotter than
ever. The Catholics were, for the most part, still resolved that the
State should stigmatize as deplorable the growing hait of omitting
religious ceremony at funerals. The majority were equally resolved
thatit was intolerable that citizens who, as members of the Legion of

Honour, were entitled to certain honours after death, should be denied


them. Marc&re's compromise, which proposed to abolish funeral
honours in the case of civilians and retain the regulations untouched
in the case of soldiers, pleased neither those who, like Monseigneur
Dupanloup, were determined that the French State should publicly
profess religious views, nor those who, like Jules Ferry, asserted that
the State must be lay, be neutral. The day when the State was to be
lay, but not neutral, had not yet come. The fate of the lights of
heaven was, so it was asserted, a private matter; the Republic was not
yet identified with a campaign for their extinction.
If the amnesty and the war for or against the Church were politically
the most exciting themes, they were not the only themes that under-
lined, or seemed to underline, the differences between the Right and
the Left. Gambetta had been elected chairman of the budget com-
mittee of the Chamber, and in that capacity he had declared for a
bold attack on the question of income tax. Such words alarmed not
only the Right, but many good Republicans, who were only moderately
reassured by the reply of the Minister of Finance, Leon Say, that any
'general recasting of the tax system was an alarming chimera'. It was

certainly a chimera but, had there been more political sagacity on the
Right, itneed not have been alarming. 1
Republican unity was, except on the surface and where the regime
was concerned, superficial. Gambetta had discovered this when, at
the beginning of the first session of the new Parliament, he had tried
to institute a 'full meeting of the Left' as a party caucus. Significantly
Republican Senators had declined to forget that they
for the future, the
were Senators or to remember that they were merely mandatories oi
the great Republican party. Even more significant for the future, the
Republicans in the Chamber had refused to regard themselves as one
big party, of which Gambetta was the leader. The deputies did not
1
Income tax took fifty years to arrive; the complete recasting of the tax syitcm is stil
a subject of pious resolution by party congresses.
13
THE REPUBLICANS TAKE OVER THE REPUBLIC
like the idea of one party and one leader, and their
objection was
given plausible general grounds by Jules Ferry. 'To remain united,
truly united, united without any humbug, the real way is to remain
distinct. That is not a way of dividing the party, it is a way ofstrength-
ening it by sorting it out. Discipline, without which the parliamentary
system is only chance and anarchy, is only learned and is only con-
solidated in separate and limited groups, in homogeneous
gatherings;
the compromises between the extremes being possible only throng li In- t

action of the middle sections.' Jules Ferry was to learn the limited
value of this flexible discipline, but he undoubtedly spoke for the
majority.. The Chamber of Deputies was not going to be an English
Parliament, and Gambetta was not going to be given the chance of
playing the part of a Gladstone or Disraeli.
But Ferry had given the clue to the policy which alone could have
saved Dufaure, the union of the Centres, excluding both extreme Right
and Left. For that union there was needed, on both sides, moderation
and prudence. There was not enough of it on the Left; there was even
less on the Right, which used its senatorial majority to defeat Dufaure.

Regarding it as the duty of the Cabinet to be a link between the two


Chambers, Dufaure had defended before the Senate an amnesty bill
which he had vainly opposed before the Chamber. The Conserva-
tives, intheir clever, frivolous way, were thus able to vote against
Dufaure with an air of saving him from his friends. But the old man
was not deceived and he resigned.
The first effort to govern with the consent of both Houses and of
the President had failed. The new Prime Minister was Jules Simon,
once famous for a cruel attack on MacMahon, but really distrusted by
the President as one of the authors of the revolution of the 4th of
September. MacMahon had not altogether pardoned Simon, but that
astute politician had allowed it to be understood that the Marshal's
control of the Army would not be interfered with. As for the Chamber,
Simon was a masterly walker on tight-ropes. His adroitness in con-
ciliating the Catholics had led Dupanloup to say that the non-Catholic
politician would be a Cardinal before he would. And in his first
his unshak-
speech to the Chamber, the Prime Minister, while affirming
able Republicanism, had equally insisted on his firm Conservatism.
The crisis came over the old bugbear, 'the Roman Question'.
Pius IX was as convinced as ever that the triumph of the revolution in
Rome was only temporary, and he still looked to the Catholic states to
aid him, in some undefined way, to free himself from the tyranny of
the usurper. He had been irritated by the raising of the French
the rank of minister to that of
representative at the Italian Court from
ambassador, and he was still further irritated by a holiday taken by
Simon in which the Prime Minister accepted the
Jules Italy, during
order of SS. Maurice and Lazarus from the Italian Government.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
These demonstrations that the French Government was less sympathetic
with the wrongs of the Holy See than was proper in the rulers of the
Eldest Daughter of the Church were annoying, but there was worse to
come. A bill was introduced into the Italian Parliament making it an
offence for ecclesiastics to publish writings threatening the security of
the State, a general ban which might well cover the not infrequent
protests of the Pope against the loss of the temporal power. Pius IX
protested, and he appealed to the Catholics of the world to bring
pressure to bear on their Governments to put a stop to the Mancini Bill.
As ustfal, the militant French Catholics rushed into battle. A depu-
tation called on the Foreign Minister, the Due Decazes, and demanded
assurance that the independence of the Holy See would not be further
invaded. A monster petition was organized in which the President
was asked to 'employ all the means in his power to ensure respect for
the independence of the Holy Father, protect his administration, and
assure to the Catholics of France the indispensable enjoyment of a
liberty dearer than any other, that of their conscience and faith'. This
was to play directly into the hands of the Left. The old grievance that
the chance of the Italian alliance in 1870 had been sacrificed to save
the temporal power was given renewed plausibility. The Empress
Eugenie and her son, the Prince Imperial (who was the godson of the
Pope), had visited Pius IX reminding France of the reputed Catholic
intransigence of 'the Spanish woman' which, it was believed, had cost
France so dear. 'All the means in his power' was a vague term which
the Left promptly translated into 'war'.
The Eastern crisis, which was soon to end in the Russo-Turkish war,
was alarming observers. Who could be certain that a great European
war would be avoided? Who, on the Left, could doubt that Pius IX
looked forward to a general convulsion in which the impious and
rickety Kingdom of Italy would collapse? As the Petit Parisien put it:
'at an hour when France has greater need than ever of peace and calm,
a party rises up and asks the Government to send our children to the
slaughter-house'. The vast majority of Catholics had no such inten-
tion, but the temporal power of the papacy had been for so long their
chief public preoccupation that it was difficult to disown the inter-
pretations of the Left without seeming to take less seriously than did
Pius IX, the crime of which the Kingdom of Italy was the fruit. Nor
did all Catholics do much to refute the charges made by the Left.
The Bishop of Nevers, worthy successor of Monseigneur de Dreux-
Br&e*, wrote an open letter to MacMahon informing him that he
should 'free -the France of Charlemagne and Saint Louis from all con-
nivance in that revolution in which they do not recognize their child*.
As if this was not enough, the bishop took on himself to circularize
the mayors of his diocese to the same effect, a breach of administrative
decorum that Jules Simon was, of course, forced to rebuke. The
132
tttfe kEtJ6LlCANS> tAKE OVEk tttfi REPUBLIC
indignation of the Left was doubtless
mixed with pleasure at the sight
of the old enemy choosing to fight on such bad ground, for the griev-
ances of Pope Pius IX were not of a kind to evoke much sympathy
among neutrals. He was not a prisoner as the man in the street under-
stood the word, and Jules Simon was able, indeed, forced to say as
much, to the indignation of the Catholic zealots. The Right politicians
knew how foolish it would be to fight on the question of the temporal

power, and a resolution was passed by the Chamber, and reluctantly


accepted by Jules Simon, condemning the 'ultramontane activities'.
The Marshal bided his time and the Left was suspicious of the Prime
Minister, who, they thought, had not been zealous enough in repelling
the assault of the clericals on the independence of French policy, and
they became still more suspicious when they read in Dupanloup's
paper, La Defense Religieme et Sociale, that Jules Simon had given guaran-
tees to the Catholics on taking office, and if he did not keep his word,
'we know wellby what means we can force him to come round*. It
was a most indiscreet boast, which had slipped into the paper, so the
editor later said, without his noticing it. But it represented what many
Catholics were saying, and though the Prime Minister tore the paper
to pieces in front of the Chamber, he now could not appear to weaken
in face of the clerical menace. In any case, the Marshal had decided
to strike, and on May i6th, taking advantage of two minor points of
difference over a new press law and a law making public the sessions
of municipal councils, he sent the Prime Minister a letter to which the
only possible answer was a resignation. The crisis of the Sixteenth of
May had begun.

II

The new Prime Minister was the Due do Broglie. He was the
obvious choice, for he was the leader of the Opposition, yet he was not
really fitted for the task he undertook. As in the crisis of the abortive
restoration, he lacked faith, and he was too clear-sighted not to recog-
nize the odds against which he was fighting. Watching the smart
crowds round the Arc de Triomphe, he remarked to a colleague that
these people were better fitted 'for a coup d'ttat than for the effort which
we are going to ask of them'. And that colleague, M. de Meaux, com-
plained that the French Conservatives were waiting for a saviour from
heaven to do their work for them. They were, indeed, waiting for
several saviours. The old feuds were only superficially healed. The
Legitimists were suspicious of the motives of MacMahon and Broglie
and demanded an assurance that the Marshal would not be a candidate
for re-election in 1880. The Orleanists, or some of them, were not
resigned to their failure to make the Due d'Aumale President, and they
knew that both the duke and his nephew, the Comte de Paris, dis-
133
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
approved of the undertaking. The Bonapartists had now the most
attractive chief in the
young Prince Imperial, although they had to put
up with the alleged Republicanism of the heir-presumptive, Prince
Napoleon, who was a deputy. The politicians and publicists who were
above all Catholics were angered by the unwillingness of the ministers
to fight openly on the religious ground. Louis Veuillot allowed one
of his contributors to declare that the battle-cry ought to be 'clericalism,
there is salvation'. What with the attacks of Paul de Gassagnac on the
Due Decazes, the open suspicion with which the Legitimists regarded
Broglie and the internal feud in the Bonaparte family, the forces of
order were not conspicuously orderly.
Very different were the tactics of the Left. Under Gambetta's
lead, all the opponents of the new Ministry and all the friends of the
old were united. After some resistance, M. de Marcere and his friends
of the Left Centre joined the Left bloc and the Committee which had
been appointed to decide on a united front policy. Thiers, Dufaure,
Bardoux, Marcere, Casimir-Perier, Leon Renault, Gambetta, Clemen-
ceau, Louis Blanc, every shade of opinion in the majority was repre-
sented, and it was resolved that no deputy who voted for the decisive
resolution against the Broglie Cabinet would be opposed at the
imminent election, even though this policy meant refusing to oppose
Prince Napoleon! That there would have to be an election was
obvious; otherwise the Broglie Ministry could not last. The only
doubtful point was whether the Senate would grant the President's
demand for a dissolution. If it was right to refuse such a demand at
all, there was much to be said for refusing it in 1877. The Chamber
had still half its life to run; it had not been unmanageable in deeds,
although violent enough in words. The fall of the Simon Ministry
was not due to a difference of opinion between the Ministry and the

Chamber, but to their agreement. The acceptance of a right of dis-


solution given to the President and Senate had been a grave breach of
Republican tradition. It was unfortunate that it was to be exercised
so soon and in circumstances so likely to confirm all Republican sus-
picions of that monarchical relic.
More important than these long-term constitutional considerations
were the very reasonable doubts of many Conservatives as to the success
of the dissolution, and it was 'with death in their hearts' that some
Centre senators voted for the dissolution. Some of them, despite all
appeals to party loyalty, refused, among them the President of the
Senate, the Due d'Audiffret-Pasquier. By a narrow majority the
dissolution was voted, and the President and the Senate appealed to
the country to disown a majority in the Chamber whose programme
had hardly beenoutlined, much less put into effect. The electors were
asked to change their minds because of future evils, not because of
present discontents.
134
THE REPUBLICANS TAKE OVER THE REPUBLIC
The folly of 'the Sixteenth of May' seems
so clear to-day that it is
hard to do justice to its Brunet might appeal to posterity for
authors.
admiration of the authors of this legal coup d'tiat, but the time has not
yet come when they are thought justified. As Pere Lecanuet suggests,
their chief fault was being beaten, but to engage a battle in which
defeat is likely is a fault. But it should be remembered that the Right
was both frightened and proud. It was frightened as it saw its assets
dwindling. In 1878 there would be the municipal elections, so
important for the senatorial elections of 1879: and, by bad luck, the
third of the Senate to be renewed in the first election was strongly
Conservative. Of seventy-five seats to be contested, two-thirds were
held by members of the Right. Thus the narrow Right majority could
not in all probability be increased and would in all likelihood be
destroyed. Then, in 1880, would come the election of a new Chamber
which, in conjunction with the republicanized Senate, would elect
MacMahon's successor.
It was very well to play for time, to wait until the Left had
all

frightened the country, but what if that did not happen until all the
machinery of government was in the hands of men who, it was sincerely
believed, were anxious to carry out the Belleville programme of 1869.
That many parts of this programme would still be pious aspirations
in 1939 was unforeseen by a defeated party without sufficient cynicism
to take French party manifestoes with the necessary quantity of salt:
a quantity that varies, but is always more than a pinch. Then the
difference in popular support between the two parties was not fairly
represented by the election figures. An overwhelming majority in the
Chamber represented only 51 per cent, of the votes cast. To Veuillot,
the Republic was a mere electoral accident; and it was surely not beyond
the power of a resolute government to turn the 49 per cent, of votes
won by the Right in 1876 into a majority in 1877?
The dangers of the future appalled the timid and corrupted the
judgment of the normally prudent, as had the dreadful thought of the

dangers of the election of 1852. Then the Conservatives agreed with


the Bishop of Chartres that by the coup d'etat 'we have avoided the
2nd of May, 1852, which opened a frightful abyss before France*.
Now, it was to be hoped, they would agree with Paul de Cassagnac that
itwas not a question of fighting 'for one kind of government or another,
it isa matter of life and death for society'. Were there not signs of
the times? A few weeks before the dismissal of Jules Simon, Rochefort
had founded La Lanterne, Rochefort the communardl And, in a manifesto,
the exiles like Brousse told the workers: 'You must prepare yourselves
to pass from words to deeds, from the ballot-box to the barricades,
from the vote to the insurrection.' Would not this be enough to
frighten the, timid middle-classes? Gambetta was resolved that it
should not be enough.
135
K
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
The campaign of the Left, like that of the Right, was designed to
frighten, and the Left had two scarecrows to the Right's one* There
was the menace to peace arising from the Roman question. A victory
for Broglie would be a slap in the face for Italy and for Germany.
France, isolated at the moment of a great European crisis, was in no
mood to run any risks to oblige the Pope. It was in vain that Mac-
Mahon asserted that he and his ministers sought only peace. There
were many alive who could remember Napoleon III making the same
promise. Next to the danger of war, there was the danger of clerical
rule. France did not want to be ruled by priests, asserted the Left,
and the Right showed how true this was by the anxiety they displayed
to impose discretion on the clergy. So the nation was treated to
the comic spectacle of the Minister of Cults in a Conservative and
Catholic Government forbidding public prayers for the success of that
Government!
France is a country where historical precedent plays a great part in
politics, and the precedent
for 1877 was obvious enough; it was 1830,
when the foolish King Charles X had dissolved the Chamber, had seen
his opponents triumph and had resorted to a policy of repression which
had led to his overthrow by such defenders of liberty as M. Thiers
and the father of the Due de Broglie. The Left maliciously pointed
out that MacMahon asked for trust in words almost identical with the
fatal proclamation of July 1830. Already, in the great debate ended
by the dissolution, Gambetta had stressed the parallel with the crisis
C
that led to the 'three glorious days of July'. I dare to assert that as

in 1830 they were 221 when they went off and came back 270, so, in
1877, we g ff 363, and we will return 400 strong.' To achieve this,
disciplineand industry were needed.
The Republican press was taken in hand. La Republique Frangaise
was the National of the new campaign, but fimile de Girardin, John
Lemoinne, Edmond About were powerful auxiliaries. There were
special sheets, like the Phe Gerard, designed to reach the peasants,
written in simple language. The occasional indiscreet left-winger who
talked in a way to frighten the timid was silenced or denounced as a.
Bonapartist agent, for it was the tactics of the Left to see in the Broglie
Ministry only a precursor of the Empire. Not even the Empire of
1870, but, as Girardin pointed out, the Empire of 1852. The violence 1

of such Bonapartists as Paul de Cassagnac and Cune*o d'Ornano was


some justificationfor this charge. The new prefects and other officials
hastily appointed by the Minister of the Interior, M, de Fortou, were
largely Bonapartists, aswas natural since his chief agent at the Ministry
was M. de Saint-Paul, who was devoted to the Imperial cause. This
was inevitable, for the notables, as Tocqueville had pointed out a
generation before, were unpopular; other things being equal, the
electors would rather vote against them than for them. Thus the only
THE REPUBLICANS TAKE OVER THE REPUBLIC
real political machine available was that of the fallen Empire, and many
of favourite dodges, like the special white posters reserved to the
its

'official candidates', were lavishly employed, but without the resolution

and contempt for criticism that had marked the great days of Rouher.

Even had the occasion for attempting a reaction been better chosen,
had the country been really frightened by the dangers of radicalism,
really convinced that there was
no difference between the Gambrtta
of 1877 and the Gambetta of 1869, the lack of a positive progrrmmu*
would in any case have condemned the Ministry, if not to defeat, to a
barren victory. The fiery Royalist Bishop of Poitiers, Monseigneur
Pie, was right when he commented pessimistically: 'We know enough
[of politics] to be able to say that a coup d'etat (and that is what the
1 6th of
May is) isn't directed against someone or something, but for
something incarnate in someone. Otherwise, the coup d'etat is only a
sword stroke in water.'
In vain that the Government attempted to make MacMahon a
symbol. The honest, but not very able or resourceful, soldier was
paraded about the country like a mascot. His reception was seldom
warm and he was lucky when he had not to undergo the ordeal of
organized hostility like that prepared at Tours by M. Daniel Wilson,
or the dreadful drive through Bordeaux with boys dropping into his
carriage from lamp-posts to insult him! Official visits and reviews,
manifestoes and Army orders, did little to exalt his prestige. The
emptiness and banality of the Government's programme was as irritat-
ing to observers as the bad political judgment displayed in the whole
affair. His rage at the Sixteenth of May made Flaubert forget his old
detestation of the Fourth of September. The whole business provided
more materials for his abundant repertory of human stupidity. Had
the Government had the courage of the convictions of Louis Veuillot,
had it fought for the supremacy of the Church by the aid of the secular
arm, had it disdained the prudential counsels of the Orleanists, it
would not have done much worse, and would have gone down with
dignity. But the old error of the 'moral order' was repeated. The
Government of the Due de Broglie appeared, in fact, as the Government
of M. Joseph Prudhomme.
II est grave: il est niaire et pere de famille.
Son faux col engloutit son oreille. Ses yeux
Dans un reve sans fin flottent, insoucieux,
Et le printcmps en fleur sur ses pantoufles brille.

Many voters, who had no more use for the unkempt makers of verses
thanv had M. Prudhomme, were yet as bored as Verlaine with the
identification of the safety of society with the narrowest interests of the
middle-classes and doubtful if they were, in any case, in real danger
from the triumph of a coalition where Louis Blanc was offset by M.
Thicks, Gambetta by M. de Marcfcre, demenceau by M. Lqn Say.
137
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
The Government did its best to make up for its weakness by displays
of vigour. The noisy southerner at the Ministry of the Interior was
anxious to show that he was a new Morny. Indeed, there were critics
who said that M. de Fortou was so busy trying to look like Morny that
he had no time to act like him. He had not, of course, the resources at
the command of his predecessor. The Government had not the courage
to put the country under martial law, and the regular law did not allow
the silencing of all hostile criticism such as had been practised in

December 1851. It was not possible in 1877 to clap all dangerous


critics in jail. It is true that the law was strained to the utmost to

hamper the opposition. The legal rights of newspaper sellers were,


for instance, attacked with a disregard for formal constitutional
doctrine that recalls an American city boss anxious to save his clients
from dangerous thoughts, more than a Government presided over by an
eminent academic Liberal like Broglie. One of the electoral moves of
the Government was to flood the country with pictures of the Marshal
on horseback, and several wits found it was dangerous to remark that
'He has an intelligent eye I mean the horse'. But it was not only minor
members of the Republican coalition who were arrested. Gambetta
was charged with insulting the President and condemned to fine and
imprisonment a vain gesture, for, of course, he appealed and was still
at liberty when the election day came, with all the advantages and none
of the disadvantages of martyrdom.
An event which was not in itself very surprising raised the hopes
of the Government/ The role of Thiers in making the opposition less
terrible to the timid had been very important. The old man was
determined to have his revenge for his overthrow in 1873: and fortune
gave him both his enemies at one time as prey. His revenge over
Broglie and MacMahon would be complete; he would help to defeat the
one and drive the other out of the Presidency, where he proposed to
replace the Marshal. Gambetta' s share was to be the offices of Prime
Minister and Foreign Minister. Thiers would 'present him to Europe'.
From Gambetta's point of view, this had obvious advantages; and those
advantages were not merely personal. Gambetta was afraid that Mac-
Mahon, after the defeat of Broglie, would attempt to create another
Centre Government, a move which, if it succeeded, would make the
victory less than complete. But, he wrote to Arthur Ranc, 'thanks to
the animosity of M. Thiers, to his influence over the section of the Left
which might weaken, there is really nothing to worry about, from which
you will see how much, apart from other and excellent reasons, it was
desirable to run Thiers for the Presidency'. On
September 3rd, Gam-
betta was thunderstruck and the Government delighted to hear that
Thiers had died suddenly. Fears and hopes were alike groundless.
In death Thiers still hurt Broglie and MacMahon, for his widow
would not agree to the terms on which the Government offered a State
138
THE REPUBLICANS TAKE OVER THE* REPUBLIC
funeraland the private funeral was a great demonstration of Republican
unity. The body of the man of the Rue Transnonain and the 'Bloody
Week' was carried through the working-class districts of Paris with the
for the hatred of the Paris workers for their old
greatest of honour,
oppressor was subdued this day in face of a common enemy. Gambetta
was delighted at the 'spectacle of a million men animated by the same
devotion to justice and the Republic, some forgetting their bitter
memories of civil war, others silencing their fears'. With glorv, Thiers
was buried in that cemetery of Pere Lachaise where the Commune
had died.
There was still a danger that the death of Thiers would hurt the

Republican cause: for, with Thiers, died the most obvious guarantee
against the complete triumph of Gambetta. Gambetta knew this as
did his colleagues and in default of Thiers, the most reassuring of the
Republican leaders, Jules Grevy, was nominated as candidate to succeed
Thiers in his Parisian constituency and, it was given to understand,
was destined to succeed MacMahon in the Elyse'e. M. de Broglie
might exercise his aristocratic wit at the expense of Grevy of whom
Europe knew nothing, but the French voters knew how far the Republic
of M. Grevy, like the Republic of M. Thiers, was from meaning red ruin
and the breaking-up of laws.
It is possible that had Broglie
dissolved at once, he would have done
better,but by October the unity of the Republicans was complete,
while the hastily assembled Right coalition was barely held together.
The campaign, too, took on more and more a Bonapartist appearance.
Fortou was, or professed to be, full of confidence. His illusions were
common to all those who regretted the Empire, to those who agreed
with what fimile Ollivier had written in 1874, 'if they knew at Paris
how easily they could bring all these windbags to heel'. But alas! the
good old days were over and, despite police prosecutions, the windbags
continued co talk of the danger to Republican institutions, to peace, to
freedom, of the clerical menace, of the dangers of what a candidate at
Parthenay brutally called 'a Government of priests and a new Sedan',
brutal for the dead Emperor and for the living Marshal! There were
replies. The red ghost was made to walk and there were local scare-
crows. On the eve of the election, the Republican Mayor and candi-
date at Aries was attacked in a pamphlet Citizen Tardieu and the finances
of the Town of Aries. But all was in vain. Gambetta, indeed, was
proved wrong; the Government gained about fifty seats, but in the
new Chamber, as in the old, there was an overwhelming Republican
majority and the Republicans had polled 52 per cent, of the votes.
What was now to be done? Fortou characteristically lost heart at
once and wanted to resign, but Broglie was made of sterner stuff than
the pseudo-Morny and the Government met the new Chamber. By
that time, Fortou had recovered his wind and reproached the Republi*
'39
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
cans with not realizing that they were beaten! Broglie was his arrogant,
decisive self. But he had, and could have, no reply to the reproaches
of L&m Renault, 'The grievance that all France has against him
[Broglie] is that he has put the country in a state in which there is
to-day no longer a Conservative interest, a Conservative idea which
does not feel itself threatened and compromised by him and on his
account*. And Gambetta, sincerely enough, made the same reproach
e
of wasting valuable French assets when he talked of that mounting
wave of democracy which it was your business to control, to enlighten,
and to direct'. 1 How completely Broglie had failed in that duty was
shown by the local elections, which took place between the first and
second ballots of the parliamentary elections, for not only did another
series of local government bodies go over to the Left, ensuring a
Republican majority in the Senate in 1879, Dut Broglie was himself
defeated for election to the council of the Department of the Eure, his
own bailiwick in Conservative Normandy.
There were still bold and foolish spirits who talked of further resist-
ance. The Bonapartist Cardinal de Bonnechose was all for martial
law and a plebiscite, but although the Left was alarmed by rumours of
military conspiracy, and found in Labordere an officer who denounced
the suspected coup d'etat, there was no danger. It is true that the

Marshal, in one of his manifestoes, had talked of pursuing his policy


'to the very end'; and the officials who had staked their careers on his
success were faintly hopeful that the end was not a' mere election defeat
But not only would another dissolution be likely to produce the same
results; it was improbable that the Senate, not enthusiastic for the
Marshal's policy when it had first been tried, would agree to a new
election. After vain attempts to get Pouyer-Quertier to take over
the job of liquidating the adventure, MacMahon fell back on a business
cabinet, headed by a soldier, General de Rochebouet, a Cabinet whose
political members were known chiefly as unsuccessful candidates.
These evasions only postponed the evil day. In one of his most famous
phrases, Gambetta had announced that the President would have 'to
give in or get out'; he gave in and sent for Dufaure; the adventure of
'the Sixteenth of May' was over.
It was a parody of the most inexcusable adventure in modern French

politics, the Hundred Days,


with Broglie as a more guilty Ney, punished
(and with him his whole party) more effectually than a firing-party
could have done it, but with a severity not excessive for the offence.
For not only had the administrative machinery been scandalously
abused in a vain attempt to win a doubtful victory, an important piece
of constitutional machinery had been utilized without real justification
1
Gambetta "began his reply to the ingenious defence by Broglie with 'Kindly spare us
these ingenuities', a dose parallel with Campbell-Bannerman's
Camp famous rebuke to that
an, Ba
other aristocratic and incompetent politician, Balfour, CampbelJ-Bannerman was a clos,Q
student of French politics.

140
THE REPUBLICANS TAKE OVER rXKE REPUBLIC:
and so had been destroyed. There has never since been a dis>umo$
of the Chamber: and the conviction of the newly-elected deputy, that
he has four years in which to indulge his personal views with no risk
of having to justify himself to his electors, has been of the greatest
importance in French political practice. That conviction of immunity
the deputy owes to M. le Due de Magenta and to M. le Due de Broglic.
Since 1877 dukes have played no important r61e in French politics.
M. Dufaure had been the Marshal's first Prime Minister after the
Republican triumph of 1876; he was again Prime Minister after the
Republican triumph of 1877. It was not merely because M. Dufaure
was now in his eightieth year that things were different, he was no longer
the Marshal's Minister, he was the Prime Minister accepted by the
President of the Republic at the hands of the triumphant majority, a
majority more confident and more bitter than it had been in 1876.
Then, it had been fearful of the unknown power of the Senate and the
President; it had suffered the worst and had survived the ordeal trium-
phantly. And there was in the Republican ranks a great gap; Thiers
was dead, Thiers who had said that 'the Republic would be Conserva-
tive or would disappear'. In his place was Gambetta, half the age of
Dufaure.
The first fruits of victory were taken from the defeated Right. The
Republicans were furious at the revival of the hated official candidacies
of the Empire, and there were some who wanted to invalidate the
elections of all the deputies who had accepted the white posters that
marked the official candidate under M. de Broglie as under Napoleon
III. The Chamber was complete master of the election returns, not
only legally but by custom; there was no tradition of fairness to bind
the hands of the victors, much less a judicial procedure like that which
had recently been adopted in Britain. The victors, if they did not
abuse their powers, used them to the uttermost; seventy-two deputies
were unseated, and although some of them got back, the tradition was
established or re-inforced, that pressure, clerical or official, on behalf
of a candidate of an unsuccessful party was corruption of the judgment
of 'universal suffrage'. No pressure, governmental or private, by pre-
fects or by schoolmasters, by masonic lodges or by other organs of
organized Republicanism and laicity' was anything but a legitimate
aid to the voter as long as it helped candidates approved of by the
majority of the new Chamber. For many years to come, France was
faced with the odd political phenomenon that corruption always came
from the Right. No 'Republican' deputy was ever unseated, however
warmly his election had been recommended by the officers of the

Central Government,
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE

III

Despite this purge of the Chamber, politics in 1878 were at slack-


5
water. For 1878 was the year of the great 'Exposition Internationale .

The Exhibition was to be a demonstration, as George Augustus Sala,


the famous London journalist put it, of 'Paris herself again'. In 1867
Paris had been glorified in the great exhibition of that year, despite
such clouds as the execution of the imperial protege of Napoleon III in
Mexico. Things had changed since 1867. There were no foreign
sovereigns visiting Paris in 1878, except the Shah. However, there was
the Prince of Wales, already familiar as a private visitor to the city,
and there were many thousands of tourists, who came not to gape at
the ruins of the Commune, but at a city largely restored to its old glory,
with the completed Opera in addition, if without the great Palace of the
Tuileries. It was a wonderful demonstration of French vitality; and
while the show was on, burning political questions were kept in the
background. The victorious Left even voted 20,000 ($100,000) to
the defeated Marshal to enable him to act as host to the distinguished
visitors, and MacMahon, with his amiable courtesy, showed that there
was something to be said for having a nobleman at the head of the State
on show occasions. There were, of course, indications of the collapse
of the old order. There was that 'festival of the people', which, care-
fully arranged for June 3Oth to avoid the dangerous memories of
July 1 4th, was yet celebrated by the playing of the long-forbidden
Marseillaise by the band of the Republican Guard. This dire innova-
tion was made only by special permission, but it was a sign of the times.
There were others; the by-elections to the Chamber showed a continued
move to the Left. As a commentator put it, 1 'Being in a Republic, the
electors thought that to control the business of a Republic, one ought
to choose Republicans'. There were votes for new school buildings,
votes on a scale that alarmed the timid Conservatives whose objections
to these 'palace schools' were perhaps reasonable, but whose fond hope
that those objections would be shared by the parents of the children
who were to be housed in this new luxury was only another example of
the political folly of the former ruling classes. It was already the dogma
of the majority of French voters that, as M. Bardoux put it, 'The man
who does not love the schools is not patriotic'. M. Naquet proposed
to re-establish divorce abolished since the fall of Napoleon I, and the
crowds admired the great statue of Liberty that was destined to be a
present from the great Republic of the old world to the great Republic
of the new. When 1878 was over, there would be stirring times!
In October there was another series of local elections and the Left
again triumphed. On January 5th, the Senatorial Elections came.
1
J.-J. Weiss.
THE REPUBLICANS TAKE OVER THE REPUBLIC
Of 82 the Left won 66.
seats, It had now a majority of 50 in the Upper

House and of the 16 new Conservatives, 13 were Legitimists from the


West! The Orleanists were destroyed as a party; on one side, there
was the handful of zealots for the King and the white flag; on the other
the mass of voters won over to the Republic, the tricolour and what?
There were soon to be indications.
The military law limited the tenure of office of Army Corps com-
manders to three years, but MacMahon had been able to secure their
reappointment and all the great commands were in the hands of the
old of the Empire or of Royalists, including in that class His
generals
Royal Highness the Due d'Aumale. Gambetta had attacked this
evasion of the law, this tenderness for soldiers whose services, as he
hinted very broadly, could well be spared. But command of the Army
was the last prerogative to which the Marshal clung, and he refused to
accept changes in the higher commands. He had again either to 'give
in or get out*. He got out. He resigned and was succeeded on
January agth by Jules Grevy; Dufaure had refused to be a candidate
and so had Gambetta. Grevy, after all, had been presented to the
country as the heir of Thiers; he was old, respectable, drab and reassur-
ing. He was also, and this was not disliked by many rising politicians,
a determined if not open enemy of M. Gambetta. So the Presidency
of the Republic lost a little more of its prestige. Thiers, a great man,
and MacMahon, a fine figurehead, had both been forced out of office
by Parliament. Their successor was merely politically eminent. He
would add very little to the intrinsic powers of his office, nor did he aim
to, for he announced in his first message that he would not set his

personal views against those of the representatives of the people. 'Sin-

cerely submissive to the great law of parliamentary government, I shall


never begin a contest with the national will expressed by its constitu-
tional organs.' The new President still knew his place.
CHAPTER II

GREW, GAMBETTA, FERRY

A TITH the accession of Grevy to the Presidency, the stage seemed set
V V for a more important change, the accession of Gambetta to the
office of Prime Minister. Gambetta had been the leader of the re-
sistance to MacMahon, the organizer of victory in 1877. Only Thiers
could have competed with him for public attention, either in France
or in Europe, where he was classed with Bismarck, Gladstone, Disraeli r
But Grevy was obstinate, cunning and, at this stage of his long life, was
not yet so much a victim of vanity as to be vulnerable. He was not
going to begin his Presidency overshadowed by Gambetta. Not only
had he this personal reason for disliking the over-mighty leader, he had
a genuine suspicion of the great demagogue. Grevy was a lawyer of a
very different kind from the flamboyant orator who had upset the
tribunals of Napoleon III. He was a cautious family lawyer, his client
was France and the Republic and he was not going to let them be
led off on adventures.
It was in vain that Gambetta had tried to live down his reputation
for wildness, for rashness. Grevy, like MacMahon, was unconvinced.
Ludovic Halevy, watching this attempted evolution, compared Gam-
foetta to a light lady who never forgets her first love and Gambetta's
first All the fiery rhetoric which had delighted the
love was Belleville.
revolutionary proletariat of Red Paris, ten years before, now arose to
plague its author. This Gambetta felt was very unjust. Even under
the Empire he had not been a preacher of opposition for its own sake.
He had never forgotten that a Government has its rights and duties
as well as its temptations and crimes. He saw no reason, now that the
Republic was in control, why Republicans should continue to regard
the Government, any Government, as a dangerous dog to be kept on as
He hoped to win over to the new regime
short a chain as possible.
make of the Republic the heir not only of
some of its old enemies, to
its own glories, but of all French glories. Perhaps his recent Italian
origin blinded him to the fierce partisanship of the French, to their
refusal to make friends when they could so easily make enemies. His
attempts to live in a more decorous fashion, to abandon the Bohemian
144
THE REPUBLICANS TAKE OVER THE REPUBLIC
habits of his youth, did not convert his old enemies and angered his old
friends. He might be presentable enough for the Prince of Wales, but
not for M. Buffet, and, on the other hand, the man whose trousers at
last met his waistcoat, who
delighted in society, whose dinner-parties
'were smart as well as important, could hardly be a sound Republican
in the eyes of Gamille Pelletan whose own general grubbiness and rude-
mess were to be, for a generation, proof that he, at least, was immune
from the seductions of the old order. His old friends began to look
askance at his new friends. Those able young men, of whom Joseph
Reinach was the spokesman, with their English doctrines exalting party
discipline, a predetermined programme and, above all, the authority
of the party leader, were they to be the marshals of the new Emperor?
Grevy, Glemenceau and scores of less famous but equally resolute
members of the new ruling class were determined that the new Republic
should be more like the old Polish Republic than like the contemporary
English constitutional monarchy. The Republic did not mean merely
the substitution of a non-hereditary ruler for an Emperor or King.
The Republican deputies and senators and the leaders of the local
political machines in the provinces were to be the new Schlachta of
this western Poland.
In the centre of the Republican mass, Gambetta's Union Republi-
caine became not the great united Republican party dreamed of, but
the personal following of Gambetta. On its right and left were vigi-
lant groups whose Republican orthodoxy could not be questioned and
which, especially the Left, were not above clandestine alliance with
the Right whose fighting force came from the extreme Bonapartists.
Thus Grevy, blandly protesting that he did not want to use up Gam-
betta too soon, w^s able to form a 'replastered' Ministry, that is a
Ministry whose chief, Waddington, had been in the previous Ministry,
a precedent that was to become part of parliamentary custom. That
Grevy could do this, could take this dignified, able, but unpopular
semi-Englishman as Prime Minister, showed that the Presidency,
even in his hands, was not a mere formal office and how, from the
beginning, the French parliamentary system in Republican hands was
not going to be the copy of the English system that had been intended.
What Victoria could not do in the next year, GreVy did with ease. 1
But even Grevy could not deprive Gambetta of authority; and
instead of the open power of the premiership, the tribune had the
hidden power that came from holding two offices, the presidency of the
Chamber and the chairmanship of its finance Committee, at that time
the only permanent committee of the Chamber and consequently even
more important than it is to-day. Gambetta could not be neglected,
1
The way in which Victoria had to take Gladstone in 1880, despite her intense dislike
of him, was noted by Gambetta's friends. To them, Waddington, Freycinet and the rest
were mere Granviljes and Harringtons,
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
but his power was dearly bought, for it was soon attacked as a 'hidden
but the repu-
power'; its reality was recognized, indeed exaggerated,
tation of being an occult dictator was increasingly harmful. Gam-
betta was blamed for what the new Republican Government did not
do, for Waddington' s refusal to give a general amnesty to the commu-
nards, for instance. He was not thanked for what was done; for the
symbolic triumph of the Republic revealed in the adoption of the Mar-
seillaise as the national anthem, in the return of Parliament to Paris,

in the choice of the Fourteenth of July as the national holiday and,


more practically, in such important measures as the re-organization of
the Council of State which insured that Republican administrations
would not find too many legal obstacles to their activities in the de-
cisions of the great administrative court. The enemies of Waddington
were not united, for the extreme Left hesitated to unite with Gam-
betta's men, but the administration was too feeble to stand even when
backed by fear of Gambetta. It fell and GreVy replaced Waddington
by Freycinet; it was a 'replastering of the replastering'.
The new Prime Minister was Gambetta's old ally of the National
Defence, the old Imperialist candidate. He was able, he was eloquent,
and he Was weak. The Chamber was in no danger of finding a master
in him and had no more eloquent exponent of the excellence of doing
nothing in particular. Had there been no more vigorous personality in
the Government than its chief, it might have collapsed ignominiously.
But there was such a personality and there was a policy which could
be followed with political profit by the Government. It could 'deliver
the University' from the grip of the Church.
The University was thename given by Napoleon I to his organiza-
tion of all levels of French public education from the highest to the
lowest. All were controlled by the Minister of Public Instruction and
his inspectors; local authorities had little financial or other authority
over any part of the system.
Although there were many lay private schools, the good ones
among them were usually boarding houses and cramming establish-
ments associated with the State schools, and the bad were simple
refuges for dull boys whom unsympathetic masters had driven from
public establishments (whose financial stability did not depend on
numbers) to private establishments (whose financial stability did) . The
real competition came from Church schools, from the secondary
schools primarily designed to train future priests, the 'petits s^minaires'
of which Dupanloup's Saint Nicholas du Chardonnet was the exemplar,
or colleges run by priests but largely staffed by lay masters like the
College Stanislas in Paris, or the schools of the great religious orders,
like the Jesuits. These clerical schools won patronage by their readi-
ness to adjust fees, by their willingness to adjust programmes, but
above all, because they gave efficiently the formal education demanded
THE fcEPUBllCAttS TAKE OVER THE REPUBLIC
by the State educational system and, in addition, gave far more
attention to the non-intellectual sides of education than a State system,
now officially neutral, which had, in the not too distant past, encouraged
religious hypocrisy and which left the education, as apart from the
instruction of the boys, to a depressed class of ushers. 1 Then the
secondary schools recruited their pupils mainly from bourgeois families,
and the professors of 'the University' had a reputation for radicalism
that did not prepossess the timid parent in their favour. The 'redness'
of the University was not very profound, but under the Empire most
professors had been Republicans, suspect to the authorities in Church
and State. Eminent churchmen who had themselves been members
of the University before taking orders (and there were more of these
than is always realized), usually took a kindly view of the activities
of their former colleagues, but the average priest and average bishop
regarded the University as dangerous.
For them the Falloux law of 1850, allowing anybody who had cer-
tain minimal qualifications to open a school, was a charter of liberty.
It allowed Catholic parents to send their boys to schools which would

prepare them for both success in this life and salvation in the next.
The result was an astonishing growth in schools run by priests, especially
by members of religious orders. Even after the fall of the Empire the
tide flowed the same way. In Lyons, for instance, while lay private
schools decayed, the religious schools grew faster than the State secondary
schools. In the first generation of the Republic, the number of pupils
in the Church secondary school more than doubled and was greater than
the number in the State lycie and this in a politically Republican city.
Such a development was both startling and infuriating to the
Republicans. It meant that the bourgeoisie was, in greater and
greater degree, given an education which denied some of the optimistic
views of human nature held by Republicans and emphasized super-
natural views which denied that heaven was about us here if we looked
for it in the properway. No Frenchman, Catholic or Agnostic,
thought that it did not matter what a people believed. What both
too often forgot is that people do not always believe what they
parties
are taught. Education at the College Stanislas did not prevent Anatole
France from being a bitter enemy of the Church; it may indeed have
helped to develop his anti-clericalism. Education at the State lycie of
Clermont-Ferrand did not either keep Paul Bourget in the Church or
prevent him from returning to it. In the next generation, when State
education was more openly agnostic, the grandsons of two notables of
the regime, Renan and Jules Favre, were to become leading apologists
of the old faith, although neither Psichari nor Maritain had been
influenced by an early Catholic bending of the twig.
1
The professors in a lycie had almost exclusively teaching duties; the supervision of the
boys, especially of the boarders, was left to ans inferior caste of 're'pe'titeurs'.

147
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
of promises and threats. 1 No sincere Catholic, not even so Republican
a Catholic as Eugene Lamy, could stomach this doctrine, but there
were Catholics, not all of them lay, who were no very warm friends
of the Jesuits, or who were anxious that the general interests of the
Church of France should not suffer by too close an association of
the other orders and the secular clergy with the threatened Society.
Ferry played up to this sentiment by the famous Article Seven of his
bill on the reform of higher education. 'No one', the Article ran, 'is
to be allowed to teach in State or private schools, nor to direct a teaching
establishment of any kind if he belongs to an unauthorized religious
order.' This Article hit, of course, at other orders too; the Domini-
cans and the Marists were teaching but unauthorized orders. But it
was the Jesuit teachers against whom the might of the French State
was to be directed; for, as the event showed, the Government was ready
to let the lesser fish escape through the net.
It was Article Seven that united this fissiparous Republican
majority. In the Chamber, the Government's victory was easy. In
the Senate, the Right and Centre were still strong and the burden of
the defence of the right of Frenchmen, even of Jesuits, to teach, was
assumed by Jules Simon, whose task of insisting on the inconsistency of
this proscriptionwith the Liberal doctrines preached by the Republi-
cans, was easy enough. Freycinet's reply was politically cogent; no
Government that abandoned Article Seven could live for a day in the
Chamber; if the Senate forced the Government's hands by rejection
of the clause, other means would have to be found. By a narrow
majority, the Senate took the risk. The answer was to act without a
special law; two decrees were issued, one giving the Society of Jesus
three months to dissolve itself, the other giving three months to the
2
remaining unauthorized orders to apply for authorization.
The decrees were duly executed; the Jesuits did not dissolve as
ordered but waited to be expelled. In Paris, the priests expelled by
the deputy-turned-policeman, the Prefect Andrieux, .left their houses
on the arms of distinguished pupils. The spectacle of venerable men
going into exile surrounded by the affectionate regret of a large number
of gentlemen in frock-coats and top-hats was less moving than the
simpler-minded Catholics imagined it would be, for the Paris crowds
disliked the gentlemen for being friends of the Jesuits and the Jesuits
for being friends of the gentlemen. Two hundred magistrates resigned
their posts rather than take part in the expulsions, 8 and their names
1
Paul Bert, the French equivalent of T. H. Huxley, gave a good sample of this doctrine
in replying to the theological faculties of Paris when he became Minister of Public Instruc-
tion in 1 88 1 . Her insisted that the Catholic faculty of Theology in its teaching should respect
'the fundamental laws which govern the relations of the Catholic Church and the State',
while the Protestant faculty was for having shown that 'religious science and
congratulated
sincere convictions are not incompatible with a broadminded liberalism*.
1 With
prudent regard for the feeling of parents, the Jesuit schools were somewhat
inconsistently given a little longer to dissolve than the other houses of the Society.
*
Among them M. Pierre de la Gorce, who thus found the leisure to turn historian.
150
THE REPUBLICANS TAKE O,VER THE REPUBLIC
were inscribed by the Catholics in a 'Golden Book', but more impor
tant was the welcome opportunity thus given to the Government tc
republicanize the legal system still further. Protests were not con-
fined to magistrates. As the war against the orders continued, it wa<
found necessary to defend the authority of the State by suspending
5
one of the most eminent Catholic members of 'the University OJle- ,

Laprune, the eminent philosopher of the ficole Normale Supcricurc,


but this attack on the famous mother house of 'the University' was
resented even by sound Republicans and by the student body whose
most brilliant member, Jean Jaures, headed the movement of protest.
Neither Catholic indignation nor ironical surprise at seeing the Repub-
lic imitating the administrative methods of the
Empire had any effect
on the main Ferry reforms. In his war to free education from clerical
control, indeed from religious influence, Ferry was representative of his
party and that party was preferred by the average Frenchman to any
alternative open to him.
In the eyes of the University one of the great crimes of the Second
Empire had been the abolition, in the early tyrannical years, of the
classof philosophy. Like the prohibition of wearing a beard and the
rules laying down the number of buttons on the waistcoat of a
lyc&e
master, it had been inspired by suspicion of the soundness of the
teaching body. Like all the other prohibitions, it had not survived
the early years of the alliance between Emperor and Pope, but under
the Third Republic formal philosophical teaching was necessary for
the inoculation of a common philosophy of life and thought in the new
ruling class. There were critics of this system; unwilling and not very
successful pupils like Maurice Barres, who regarded Kant as being as
much a Germanic conqueror as Moltke, and better-informed critics,
like Gaston Paris, who observed of philosophy as taught in the lydes, 'by
the very fact that it is above [the heads of the pupils] it has the serious
drawback of making them believe that they know everything without
their having learned anything'. It was remarkable enough, that at a
time when hatred of all things German made it dangerous for a musician
like Chabrier to be too enthusiastic a propagandist for German music,
it should have been possible for educational administrators like Lecha-

pelier to make of Kant the main intellectual food of boys of eighteen


and nineteen as far as they could digest it. That it was possible
showed how deeply resolved the new rulers of France were to remake
the national tradition in their own fashion. Both sides believed, too
It was this belief that made
firmly, that they could not exist together.
Dupanloup from the French Academy when Littre* was elected,
resign
for that noble man andgreat scholar was an enemy of supernatural
religion. Dupanloup knew that Littre* was no more an atheist than
thousands of the upper classes in France were, but the public admission
of such a man to the Academy shocked him as the election of Brad-
151 L
THE DEVELOPMENT OP MODERN PRANCE
laugh to Parliament, a few years later, shocked so many people in
Britain.
If the Littre affair was to many gloomy Catholics a sign of the times,
so, tomany apprehensive Republicans, was the alienation from the old
Republican anti-clerical faith of so many bourgeois families. The
grandson of an old Bordeaux anti-clerical and Republican was brought
up by nuns and religious, and what happened to Fran$ois Mauriac
happened to many others. French Catholicism, round whose death-
bed so many spectators had been clustered since 1789, was an un-
conscionable time dying. Among the young Republicans there was
a general belief that, until France escaped from the relics of her Catholic
past, she could not hope to equal the progressive nations of the world:
the English, the Americans, the Germans. These had had the inesti-
mable advantage of the Reformation which France had missed, but
while individuals like Taine and Renouvier might dally with the idea
of adopting a non-dogmatic Protestantism, it was not much easier for
Frenchmen to become real Protestants in the nineteenth century than
in the sixteenth.

II

It is not altogether the fault of Ferry's enemies that his educational

policy is remembered too exclusively as an incident in the war against


the Church. For his friends then and since in celebrating the
triumph of Tree, compulsory and lay education', have always laid
most stress on its laicity. This was natural enough. The relation
between the schoolmaster and the priest had never been easy. Under
the old regime he was the servant of the priest; and the clerical party
attempted, as long as it had the power, to make him if not the servant
at least the auxiliary of the parish priest. Under the Empire, at least
while the Government and the clergy were still on good terms, he was
often forced to hypocritical religious observances. More Frenchmen
than Bouvard and Pecuchet had been impressed and repelled by
this control of the teachers by the clergy. Yet the teacher's position,
even when he was docile, was not secure, for as far as they could the
clergy tried to induce communes to bring in members of the teaching
orders of brothers and sisters who could undercut the lay master who
might be married and who had not taken a vow of poverty. And, from
the clerical point of view, a brother was preferable to the most pious
lay master, for who knew how genuine or lasting the piety might be?
In general, the communes were not very enthusiastic about re-
placing the lay masters by brothers, but nuns were very generally
welcome. Thus when the Republicans came into powerin 1877, there
were four times as many lay masters as teaching brothers, but nearly
twice as many nuns as lay schoolmistresses in the State elementary
152
REPUBLICANS TAKE OVER THE REPUBLIC
schools. The Republicans were ready, from the beginning, to put an
end to the employment of members of religious orders in the schools,
whatever might be the wishes of the local authorities, but it was im-
possible, offhand, to replace nearly 10,000 brothers
and nearly 40,000
nuns. So it was not until 1886 that the entry of new brothers and nuns
into the State schools was forbidden, and, as late as 1914, there were
still schools staffed by religious orders.
The fundamental reform was on the possession oi a
the insistence
teacher's certificateby all and the
teachersprovision of a normal way
of securing it, not open to nuns or brothers. One of the most reason-
able grievances of the lay schoolmaster or schoolmistress had lain in
the fact that the members of religious orders could teach on the mere
production of a 'letter of obedience' issued by the local bishop. Freppel,
Bishop of Angers, might assert that a 'letter of obedience' was as good
or better than a State certificate, but it was an astonishing anomaly that
entrance to a profession paid by the State should have been by two
doors, one guarded by the State and one controlled by a different if not
rival institution. To ensure a uniform education and standards for the
elementary teachers of the nation it was now necessary to improve the
normal schools where they were trained. So there were founded at
Saint-Cloud and at Fontenay-les-Roses two primary higher normal
schools, from which went out men and women to the departmental
normal schools which, in their turn, produced the elementary school-
teachers.
The greatest innovation was the creation of a new type of woman
school-teacher. Her appearance was a far greater novelty than any
mere alteration in the type of male teacher who, after all, had normally
been a layman, not necessarily very devout, whereas the creation of an
educational system for women not deeply marked by Church control
was really revolutionary. Even Dupanloup, who took a far higher
view of the possibilities of female education than did most Catholic
leaders, had been most vigorously opposed to the attempts of Victor
Duruy, in the last years of the Empire, to bring the secondary education
of girls within the orbit of the State system. Not until 1880 were the
first girls' lycles opened; and it was as significant that the legislative

promoter of these lydes was a Jew (Camille Se*e) as that the director
of the Higher Normal School for Girls, Felix Pdcaut, had been a Protes-
tant minister. Men of Catholic background, even if otherwise com-
pletely alienated from the ChurchV'still tended to think that a religious
education was a good thing for their wives *and daughters, a belief
which helps to explain the scandalous success of one of the first literary
results of the new system, Claudine d rcole. It was a long time before
the bourgeoisie, which was neither Jewish, Protestant, nor bound by
official position to display lay sentiments, began to send its daughters
to the lyctes.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
instruction by teachers in the State
Theprohibition of all religious
schoolsmight have led to a great exodus from them, had it not been
accompanied by compulsory education, which forced the children to
go somewhere, and free elementary education, which penalized the
zealous father who refused to send his children to the Godless school
which cost nothing. Both reforms were opposed by the leaders of the
Church, and Jules Ferry stressed the difference between the optimism
of modern society and the pessimism of a Church which feared that
more evil than good might come from general literacy, while the Re-
public did not care if the beneficiaries of her education only used it to
read books of devotion. Conservative lamentations over the cost of
the new schools, pver the salaries of the schoolmasters (whose minimum
was between 36 and 48 a year), 1 and over the interference of the
State with the rights of parents, all only irritated still more the egali-
tarian feelings of the average voter and increased his conviction that the
Church was the bulwark behind which the old privileged classes still
resisted the work of the Revolution.
In those early days, the difficulties that later arose between the
schoolmasters and the State were far off. It was easy to replace the old
duty of teaching the child his duty towards God by a vague religion of
patriotism and, a little later, by a heart-warming if not a very clear
doctrine of 'solidarity'. It is true that the schoolmaster was completely
at the mercy of the administration, as he had always been, but he was
not now likely to suffer for unorthodox opinions. Indeed, his hetero-
doxy had become the new orthodoxy. The schoolmaster was usually
the secretary of the mayor in the village, the official representative of
Republican orthodoxy. The French State still supported an estab-
lished Church but, in reality, it was not the priest but the schoolmaster
who represented the real ecclesia docens 'the University'. The priest
was merely a leader of the opposition paid and so muzzled by the
Government. The schoolmaster had nothing to fear from him, what-
ever he might have to fear from a prefect who was in complete control
of the educational machine and who might be the instrument of the
vigilance or spite of local politicians. In other ways, politics was the
serpent in this Eden, for there were still exceptions to the rule that all
teachers must have passed through the normal schools. Men and
women were admitted to fill unforeseen gaps in the personnel and these
back-door entrants were usually, it was asserted, possessed of political
backers, just as, it was believed, promotion went too largely by political
favour.
The comparative ease with which Ferry carried through these
reforms was due to his care not to alienate the bourgeoisie. Fervent
Catholics were, of course, profoundly angered by his policy, but fervent
Catholics were -not the majority in the middle-classes, however much,
1
$180 and $240.
'

154
THE REPUBLICANS TAKE OVER THE REPUBLIC
decorum might impose formal respect for religion on that majority.
The class structure of French education was still intact. State second-
ary education was neither free nor compulsory, although it was now
lay. A smattering of Latin still marked the male members of the
bourgeoisie from the workers and from men who had risen from the
working-classes. Latin verse had been abolished in 1872 by Jules
Simon, Latin composition went in 1880 and Greek was nearly a lost
cause, but French middle-class education remained predominantly
literary, with French largely replacing Latin, and English and German
beginning to take the place hitherto given to Greek.
If in a legal sense the whole teaching
body, from the Sorbonne
down to the village schoolmaster, was 'the University', in reality only
the upper branches counted. The
inspectors who controlled ele-
mentary education in the departments, like the prefects and the
bureaucrats in Paris, like the minister himself, were products of
the secondary-school system. The elementary teachers, isolated in
special (and presumably inferior) training schools, trained by pro-
fessors who hadthemselves been produced by special (and
presumably
inferior) training colleges, were a proletariat, or at least were merely
privates and non-commissioned officers in the great educational army.
The officers were the professors, professors of lycees, of of colleges,
faculties. 1
The professors became, indeed, a new political class in France;
what the men of letters had been under the Restoration and the
July
monarchy, the professors were now. The higher strata of the older
bourgeoisie were excluded from power in this generation, as far as it
was Catholic or Royalist, and in mass it was both. The
gap they left
was filled in part by Protestants, to a less degree by
Jews, by aspiring
lawyers and by professors. 'Since 1870, Burdeau, Duvaux, Lenient,
Charles Dupuy, Jaures, Jules Legrand, Etienne
Gpmpayre, Dejean,
Lintilhac, Mirman and how many others have been Deputies, Senators,
Secretaries of State, Ministers, Presidents or Vice-Presidents of the
Chamber.' So wrote an eminent professor 2 in defence of the political
rights of members of the University, although he was candid enough to
admit that not all of the political activities of these scholars in
politics
did France or the University much credit. In this
generation only
Conservative members of the University suffered for political
activity.
They could hardly be too careful in art age in which so good a Republi-
can as Yves Goblot could be denounced by the zealous vigilance of
the Republicans of Angers because he played duets with a countess!
There grew up what an acute critic of the regime has called the
8
'Republic of Professors', and many, perhaps most of the great orators

1
Colleges axe local high schools mainly maintained by communes; lycfos are high school*
mainly maintained by the State.
* '
Gustavc Lanson. Albert Thibaudct.

155
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
and debaters of the regime, had begun as teachers. They preserved
a great deal of the ethos of their corporation and in the war with
the Church brought a professional bias to bear that was not always
admirable. A former professor like Lintilhac, advocating at a Radical
Congress the establishment of a State monopoly of education, revealed,
indeed, a curious family resemblance to Louis Veuillot, minus Veuillot's
brilliant literary gifts. More important, as economic questions in-
sisted in forcing their way into politics, was a curious defect in the
system of higher education which has not yet been effectively remedied.
Economics was taught and studied not in the faculties of letters or
science, but of law. The new governing class was recruited mainly
from professors of literature, of rhetoric, occasionally from professors
of the physical sciences. Such economic teaching and investigation as
was done in France, was done in a legal and formal atmosphere which
accounts for the limited contribution of the French genius to this field
of study in the last two generations: and it was done in a faculty which
recruited its pupils mainly from the Conservative upper classes. The
bright boy who rose by scholarships was far more likely to make his
way to the Ecole Polytechnique or to the ficole Normale, than to a
faculty of law; and that bright boy, when he became a minister, had to
fight a temptation to believe that the laws of economics, even of arith-
metic, were inventions of reaction, to be safely ignored by the man-
datories of universal suffrage, or to be refuted by eloquence.

Ill

Between them, the Revolution and Napoleon had given the system
of higher education in France a character unknown in any other
country. No institutions of the old regime in France were in more
deserved disrepute than the universities. They had failed to adjust
themselves to the new learning in the sixteenth century; and the general
education of the French upper classes was thenceforward deeply
marked by the literary bias of the Jesuits. The old faculties of arts
became mere schools where some Latin and very little Greek was
taught to boys who, if they pursued any further studies, did so in purely
professional schools of law, medicine or theology. Even so character-
istic a production of the French genius as Cartesianism was very slow

in forcing an entrance into the universities. France continued to be a


teacher of Europe, but it was not her universities which could claim
the glories of a Mabillon or a D'Alembert; great monasteries or the
academies were the centres of learning and research. Outside Paris,
the universities were poor and sometimes venal. In the eighteenth
century, apart from Strasbourg, only Montpellier preserved some of
its ancient renown and revenues, and Strasbourg was half a German

university. It is true that Oxford and Cambridge were at their lowest

156
THE REPUBLICANS TAKE OVER THE
In the golden age of Glasgpyr and
depths, but they were not poor.
Edinburgh and of the German univemtie^rife<r!^|^
were, even more than in the age
of Rabelais, condemned by public
of 'Sorbonnards and Sorbonnicoles'. Stras-
opinion as the homes
bourg, despite a justified plea that it was more like Halle or Gottingcn
than like the decadent Sorbonne, was condemned by the National
Assembly with the rest. France turned from the debris of the Middle
Ages to a brand-new system of special schools.
Until the end of the nineteenth century, higher studies in France
were centred in a number of specialized institutions, differentiated as
much by the future careers of their pupils as by the studies pursued
in them. The most famous of all was the ficole Polytechnique, which
trained gunners, military engineers and civil engineers entering the
State service. There was the Museum which dealt with natural
history (biology), the ficole Normale Superieure, which trained
teachers for secondary schools, the ficole des Ghartes, which trained
archivists, the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, which evoked the
admiration of the young Charles Eliot, the ficole Centrale des Arts et
Manufactures, which trained technicians for private business. Each
new need was met by the creation of a new special school; there
was thus a multiplication of overlapping institutions: and these great
schools were all in Paris', so that there was a further intensification of
that intellectual grip of Paris on the provinces which was so widely
deplored. Entrance to and exit from these schools was by competitive
examination, the examination for entrance to the ficole Polytechnique
being the most revered of these tests. The French schoolboy, from an
early age, was brought up not to be educated but to be examined.
Each great school had its famous 'promotions', the good years when all
the stars competed together and the schools and the public had an
insufficient appreciation of the difference between an Edmond About
and a Taine.
To Napoleon I had added the faculties. As
these special schools,
far as thesewere organizations of teachers of law or medicine, no serious
criticism could be made of them, but the faculties of letters and sciences
were very maimed versions of true university faculties. Outside Paris
and one or two of the greater provincial towns, these faculties re-
mained what they had been, examining bodies which, in addition,

gave public lectures of a popular type to the local seekers after culture.
A great man, even under this system, could do great things, and when
Strasbourg had Pasteur in its Faculty of Sciences and
Fustel de Coul-
in its Faculty of Letters, it could not be contemptible. But even
anges
in cities which had four or five faculties, there was no university;
neither morally nor legally were they united.
The chief critics of this system were the Germanophile scholars who
were so powerful a force in French intellectual life all through the
157
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
century. From the time of Madame de Stael and Charles de Villiers,
the merits of Qerman learning were fervently preached in France and
the fruits of theGerman renaissance eagerly culled. Among the
admirers of German learning and its organizational methods was
Napoleon III, who had been educated in Germany and one of whose
academic collaborators, Louis Renier, was a convinced admirer of
German scholarship although he had no first-hand knowledge of it.
The Emperor was anxious to see in France some equivalent of the
German Catholic faculties of theology, but his efforts to- create in Paris
a new Tubingen or Munich failed, mainly because of the opposition of
Pius IX. More success attended the efforts of the greatest French
Education Minister of the nineteenth century, Victor Duruy. He
created,, it is true, just another special school, the 'ficole des Hautes
5
Etudes (School for Higher Studies), but unlike the existing schools,
this did not train for a specified career or prepare for a State examina-

tion; it was a graduate school of advanced research.


The war of 1870, so shattering to French conceit, was followed by a
national stocktaking, and the defects of the French educational system
were blamed for the disasters. It is true that the criticism varied
with the critic. To many pious Catholics the fault was in the moral
looseness that came from un-Ghristian education. 1 To the pious
Pasteur, it was due to the neglect of advanced science; to Renan, to
French frivolity and Jesuit education. All were agreed that something
should be done and the restoration of the universities, the grouping
together of the separate faculties in local bodies each autonomous,
with its own revenues and common government and subject only
to general supervision, was the dream of the reformers, especially of
those who had studied in Germany. These questions did not excite
much interest outside professional circles and, inside them, there
were plenty of defenders of the old order, especially defenders of
the strongest parts of the old order, the examination-ridden 'great
schools' of Paris. The fight over secondary and primary education
was politically more interesting and profitable, and as 'pure polities'
became the main business of the Ministry of Public Instruction, 'the
main thought was the expulsion of the Jesuits and the friars', as Gaston
Paris put it.
A way of a serious university reform was the
further difficulty in the
ambitious character of French secondary teaching. It was the common
practice to consider the teachers in the lycies and the teachers in the
faculties as parts of the same body, 'the University'. The degree of
bachelor, won by examination at the end of the secondary-school stage,
was a passport to all special studies. 'In France,' said Ernest Bersot,
'you make your first communion to be done with religion, you pass the
bachelor's examination to be done with learning, you marry to be
*
Napoleon III attributed it to the effect of such poisonous books as Mademoistlb dt Maupin.
158
THE REPUBLICANS TAKE OVER THE REPUBLIC
done with Success at the competitive examinations for entrance
love.'
to the great schools was the main object of secondary education in the
eyes of the average parent, and it was the success in these competitions
-of some of the schools belonging to the religious orders that most irri-
tated the old-fashioned champions of the University. Even at a later
stage, the higher examinations
were still competitive and it paid far
s
better to do well in the 'agre*gation , the annual examination for a
limited number of privileged places in the secondary-school system,
than to have written a brilliant doctoral dissertation or have received
a first-class training in research at the cole des Hautes Etudes. But,
however slowly, the movement for the creation of regional universities
made headway. The faculties
themselves were given some autonomy
and then in 1896 were linked in sixteen local universities, 1 usually in
cities which had had universities in- the past, like Caen, Besangon,
Poitiers.
The new universities could receive gifts, receive subsidies from
communes and departments and, if still under central control to a
degree unknown in Britain, the United States, or Germany, they were
far freer than the faculties had been. They were not richly endowed,
either by the State, the communes or by individuals. Salaries were
low: even in Paris a full professor only received 380 a year
a
and
unless he could hold several jobs at the same time, he had to live on
the level of a minor bureaucrat, a disability of less consequence than
it would have been in other countries, but not negligible. As M.
Ferdinand Lot pointed out, it was rare for rich men in France to give
large gifts to any public object that was not religious, and, indeed, some
of the independent Catholic universities, like that at Lille, received more
giftsthan did their State rivals.
Understaffed, ill-equipped as far as libraries and laboratories went,
the French universities, like so many other French institutions, did
wonders on meagre resources. Nancy, which had, in French minds,
replaced Strasbourg as the University of the East, was housed, as
lost
M. Lot put it, in a stable, while the Germans had housed Strasbourg
in a palace. Thirty years later, a Marseilles journalist compared the
University of Glasgow to a castle and the faculties of Aix- Marseille to
rabbit-hutches. In Paris, the re-built Sorbonne was cramped for
space since piety had made it impossible even for the Republic to
move the University from the sacred 'montagne Sainte Genevi&ve* to
a more commodious site. But for all its weaknesses, the new university
system was a vast improvement on the old. Associated with it in
Paris were the Ecole des Chartes and the Institut Pasteur, to name
two widely different institutions, each deservedly a centre of world- wide
admiration. The resources for advanced learning might be used more
by foreigners than by Frenchmen, but it fell to the Third Republic to

Including the University of Algiers.


1
$1,900.

'59
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
restore the glories of the French university and to make the name of
the Sorbonne as splendid as it had been in the thirteenth century.

IV
The violence of the reaction against the Ferry decrees was no sur-
prise to the astute old man in the filyse*e and was a cause of great dis-
comfort to the Prime Minister. He, like his predecessor, was a Pro-
testant and itwas significant of the extent to which the upper classes in
France were hostile to the regime, that the first GreVy cabinet had five
Protestant Members out of eleven and Protestants were less than i
per cent, of the population. Freycinet did not desire to appear as the
instrument of a persecuting policy. It was all very well for his com-
bative minister to receive addresses from the Freemasons of Toulouse
congratulating him on his fight against 'the enemies of society', but
society had more and, from a bourgeois point of view, more dangerous
enemies than the Jesuits. The more violent anti-clericals were de-
lighted that the Government had been led to such drastic measures as
the decrees, but Grevy did not share their pleasure and he told his
Ministers so. The same objects might have been attained, he thought,
by less dramatic means.
Both Grevy and Freycinet wished to avoid further conflict and they
knew that at Rome, whatever sympathy was felt for the Jesuits, the
new Pope, Leo XIII, was much less disposed than his predecessor to let
the best be the enemy of the good. The other orders, it was hoped,
might be induced to apply for authorization, and thus along with the
secular clergy, be separated from the Jesuits. A
tactfully ambiguous
letterfrom the orders was drafted and the Prime Minister gave broad
hints that a compromise was under way. On the Right,. the Royalists,
whose one hope of survival was the continuance of the war between the
Republic and the Church, sabotaged the negotiations by calculated
indiscretions; while on the Left, Gambetta's representatives in the
Ministry resigned in protest against this pusillanimity. Freycinet gave
in and GreVy took up the presidential trowel; plastering was tried
again, and the new Prime Minister was Ferry. Other orders followed
the Jesuits into exile. Laicity was safe.
Neither GreVy nor Ferry could prevent Gambetta from being the
first man in France. At a great fleet review at Cherbourg, the Presi-
dent of the Republic was eclipsed by the President of the Chamber; on
a visit to his native town of Cahors, Gambetta was received much as
the Prince President had been on those tours which had been the
preface to the Empire. Not only did Gambetta give arms to those
who talked of caesarism; at Cherbourg he had spoken of 'an immanent
justice'which would undo the wrongs of 1871. The German papers
protested; and it was easy for Gambetta's enemies, from the President
160
THE REPUBLICANS TAKE OVER THE
downwards, to represent him as a warmong
political projects,
the abandonment of the single-member constituency,
the scrutin farrondissement which already was a powerful vested interest,
and a limited revision of the Constitution. The first project was an
offence to the deputies who saw in small constituencies their source
of independence in face of the executive and, while any reform of
the Constitution alarmed prudent Republicans, a limited reform was
beneath the contempt of the Left. Gambetta was howled down at an
election meeting in Bell&ville, and provoked into denouncing his tor-
mentors as 'drunken slaves whom I shall pursue into their dens'. How
different was this language from the political bargain struck with his
electors of Montmartre by the leader of the new Radical party, Clem-
enceau! No limited revision for him; the Senate (of which he was so
long to be a member) and the Presidency (for which he was to be an
unsuccessful candidate) were both to be abolished. Universal lay
education, the gradual replacement of the Army by a militia, separation
of Church and State, income tax, abolition of the death penalty; this
was the old Belleville programme of 1869 brought up to date. Gam-
betta's first love was still plaguing him!
The Republicans could afford, however, to indulge in violent dis-
putes and in competition for the votes of the extremists, for the Right
was demoralized and disorganized. The evil effects of the feud
between the Orlcanists and the Legitimists did not grow less. The
Comte de Chambord and his organization in France were far from
repenting past errors; they regretted, as far as they regretted anything,
that they had ever made any concessions to the liberal ideas of the
junior branch. Under the leadership of Dreux-Breze, committees were
established which, if .without any influence outside the narrow circles
of Legitimists, effectively discouraged Royalist zeal among the ex-
Bonapartists and the Republican Catholics angered by the militant
anti-clericalism of the Republic. Until the death of the Comte de
Chambord in 1884, the official claimant to the throne showed that he
had forgotten nothing and had unlearned what little he had learned.
Characteristically, he bequeathed his property away from his Orleans
heirs to the family of Bourbon-Parma and his death was followed by the
dissolution of the Legitimist organization. The Comte de Paris only
inherited the barren title of Pretender; the Orleanist leaders were
left without troops.
was natural that, in such circumstances, Bonapartism should
It
have revived. It was far more popular than either Legitimism or
Orleanism; it more adherents among the people; and the
had far

Army, was still largely manned by Bonapart-


like the administration,
ists. But the chances of a concentration of Catholic and Conservative
sentiment on the Imperial cause were destroyed by news from Africa.
In 1879, the Prince Imperial, heir of Napoleon III, fighting as a
161
THE DfevELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
^volunteer .wi& *h$ was killed by the Zulus in South
JWtfifli troops^
Africa. The young Prince had been the most promising of the Pre-
tenders, if only because he was young, contrasting with the elderly
Gomte de Chambord and the middle-aged Comte de Paris. He was,
too, a familiar figure; he had grown up in France and he had been re-
garded by millions as the heir to the throne. He had been too young
when the Empire fell to have incurred personal odium and he had been
too young, when the question of the regime was decided, to have failed
as a Pretender like the Gomte de Ghambord, or to have refused to
become a Pretender like the Comte de Paris.
It was not only the loss of the most marketable of the contending

princes that disorganized the Bonapartists. The legal heir of the dead
prince was Prince Napoleon. But he had been a nuisance to Napoleon
III, and his ideas were so opposed to those of his cousin that the young
Prince's will had vainly attempted to leave the political inheritance
of the dynasty to Prince Victor Napoleon, the son of Prince Napoleon.
Yet the new head of the Imperial house illustrated in his own person
the vagueness of Bonapartist doctrine. The Prince Imperial had been
a pious Catholic, determined to be a protector of the Church. The
new chief of the party was notoriously an unbeliever. He lived in
open adultery, separated from his wife, the daughter of the usurping
King of Italy, and he had made public both his anti-clerical and his
Republican views. The latter were taken no more seriously in 1879
than they had been by the Prince's uncle, King William of Wurtem-
berg, thirty years before. His anti-clerical views were more important,
for most of the leading Bonapartists were convinced that an alliance
with the Church was a necessity for the party.
The flirtations of Napoleon III with the anti-clerical elements in
France, his Italian and his educational policy in the last decade of his
reign were, to this section, the main causes of his downfall. They
hoped that the new Pretender would resign his claims in favour of his
son or that he would make a bargain with the leader of the Bonapartist
party among the higher clergy, Cardinal de Bonnechose of Rouen,
or that he would at least remain silent on the clerical question. Only
so could the party be held together and such vigorous polemists as
Paul de Cassagnac be saved from the temptations of Legitimism.
Prince Napoleon went his own way; he continued his scandalous (and
public) private life, and to the horror of many of his formal supporters,
he announced his support of the expulsion of the congregations. To
the Bonapartist leaders, who had hoped that the anger of the Catholics
at this persecution would drive them into the arms of the only rival to
the atheist Republic which offered any hope of deliverance, this policy
was personally offensive and politically disastrous. But they were
compelled to admit that the rank and file of the party in the provinces
were less scandalized than were the upper-class leaders; that there were
162
THE REPUBLICANS TAKE OVER THE REPUBLIC
many adherents of the fallen Empire who had no love for the Church,
that, as Napoleon III had discovered, in the alliance of Empire and
Church it was far from certain that the Church brought as much as it
took away. Popular Bonapartism (and its strength lay in its popularity
among the lower classes) was very different from the respectable
Bonapartism of the salons where the line between Legitimist and
Imperialist was sometimes hard to draw. Without some great popular
movement, the sulky opposition of the best people in Paris and the
provincial capitals would exhaust itself in social snubs to tlir agents of
the detested Republic.
The despair of the Conservatives was revealed by the feeble efforts
they made in the general election of 1881. The leaders of the Bona-
partists fought on the same side as the two Royalist factions, but the
rank-and-file were indifferent. The total anti-Republican vote was

only half what it had been in 1877. The Republic seemed to have
triumphed definitively over all its external enemies.

163
CHAPTER III

THE PARLIAMENTARY REPUBLIC

new Chamber was controlled either by Gambetta or by Ferry;


THE
neither was safe without the other, but Gambetta was still the
dominating figure, especially as the sudden difficulties of the Tunisian
expedition made Ferry's position impossible. Turning over the Presi-
*

dency of the Chamber to Brisson, Gambetta was ready for the suc-
cession. Entangled in a mass of parliamentary formulas, the Ferry
Government could not get the Chamber to support or disavow the
Treaty of the Bardo. Gambetta saved not the Ministry but the treaty,
and even Grevy realized that he must be given his chance.
For many months, public opinion had been dazzled by the thought
of the return of Gambetta to power. If it was his enemies who
launched the phrase 'the great Ministry' to describe the future Govern-
ment, France and the world, which made such a difference between
Gambetta and all other French politicians, did expect a great Ministry,
no mere fourth plastering over of parliamentary cracks. It was to be
a ministry of All the Talents. Ferry, Freycinet, Leon Say, were to
be the supporters of the great man. Ferry was not asked, as he would
have refused; Leon Say made impossible conditions, 'no loan, no con-
version of the debt, no nationalization of the Orleans railway line'
and the prudent Freycinet abandoned the ship before it was launched
instead of after it began to sink. The Ministry could only be great
by the merits of its chief, not as a coalition of the great Republican
leaders. What was to have been a Cabinet of All the Talents seemed,
when its composition became known, to be a one-man show. It is
true that the Minister of the Interior was Waldeck-Rousseau, who was
to be a great figure in the Third Republic, but in 1881 he was simply
a rising lawyer. Paul Bert went to the Ministry of Public Instruc-
tion and Public Worship where his combative anti-clericalism-cum-
gallicanism was in place in the circumstances, but the composition of
the Cabinet seemed to the suspicious to be evidence of the dictatorial
tendencies of the Prime Minister. He wanted, it was asserted, only
partisans and satellites round him.
1 See p. 225.

164
THE REPUBLICANS TAKE OVER THE REPUBLIC
From thefirst the Ministry was in difficulties. The question of
the Constitution gave the Radicals their chance. How,
amending
demanded Clemenceau, could Gambetta limit in advance the sovereign
authority of the National Assembly?
How could he prevent it from
abolishing the Senate whose mere existence was an affront to orthodox
Gambetta's reason for limiting the
Republican doctrine? Practically,
aqtion of the Assembly to a programme agreed on in advance between
the two Houses was conclusive. Unless the Senate agreed, there ouM c

be no meeting of the National Assembly at all. It is true that nmc


the Assembly met, deputies and senators lost their separate < h.n.u i< is,

but even a firmly Republican Senate which the Uppri House now
was, would not risk its own abolition. Glemenceau's point was only
a debating point, but it was none the less effective with the many
deputies who were
looking for good doctrinal reasons for deserting the
man who had been the great Republican leader.
Waldeck-Rousseau had infuriated practical politicians as much
as Gambetta had annoyed theorists by a bold circular in which he
announced his refusal to pay any attention to complaints or requests
from deputies that were not sent through the prefects. To Waldeck-
Rousseau this circular was merely asserting the obvious rules of ad-
ministrative discipline; to the deputies it meant a substantial loss of

effective power and, on a higher plane, meant that decisions affecting


electors might be made by non-Republican officials, instead of
by the
men whom universal suffrage had chosen to see that no ill befell the
Republic or Republicans. Gambetta, too, showed an indifference to
this truth by giving important posts to a general and a
journalist who
had been more or less involved in the Sixteenth of May.
The real battle was fought over the electoral system. It was, or
had been, standard Republican doctrine that the single-member con-
stituency was a danger to effective popular sovereignty, as it had been
a belief of the Right that their only chance of success was in the use
of local influence. Experience had now taught the Republicans that
they could do very well in single-member districts, and, while there
was a platonic sentiment in favour of electing all the deputies of a
department on one list (scrutin de liste), it was hard for deputies to be
deeply hostile to a system that had worked so well for them. So when
Gambetta tried to force the hands of the Chamber, by making electoral
reform part of the proposed constitutional reform, the partisans of the
scrutin d'arrondissement were angered. The view that in the scrutin
farrondissement lay the safety of the Republic was not yet dogma, but
the Republican cause was now a great vested interest in most districts.
If these districts were merged, the local machines might find difficulty
in functioning. It was all very well for the partisans of Gambetta to
assert that France saw herself in a 'broken mirror'. If Gambetta had
his way, it was feared, France would have no chance to see anything
165
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
but Gambetta and his teams of carpet-baggers sent down from Paris
with a specious programme drawn up by the great demagogue and
competing successfully with local men whose appeal was not very
potent outside their own small circle. The committee appointed to
consider Gambetta's proposal had only one partisan of the Prime
Minister on it. It reported against his measure and the Chamber
backed it up. Gambetta resigned: the great Ministry had lasted
seventy-seven days.
Gambetta had written to his mistress, Leonie Leon, a fortnight
before he fell, that he was playing 'double or quits. They will pass
under the Gaudine Forks or I shall leave them to their irremediable
impotence*. The Chamber did not want any person or institution to
be potent save itself; to the degree that a large assembly can govern
a country, the Chamber would govern it. What the Chamber could
not do would not be done and, in the Radical Republican tradition,
there was a strong element of anarchical suspicion of all government.
Above that tradition was suspicious of the government of one man.
all,
The vested interests of the deputies were now safe and so were
other vested interests, for Gambetta had dreamed dreams of drastic
reforms of the taxing system and in Allain-Targe he had found a
Minister of Finance who was not to be intimidated by the rulers of
the Bourse or by the great companies. He was a predecessor of the
numerous left-wing financiers who have assailed the Jericho of high
finance with noisy attacks which the capitalist Jericho has successfully
resisted of course, it has never had to fear much more than noise.
In the grand penitence that followed the war, the National As-
sembly had projected a rigorous reduction of public expenses, by the
abolition of such useless officials as sub-prefects, by the reduction of
the large incomes of the departmental-treasurers whose role as Govern-
ment bankers had very little obvious justification in a country now
unified by railways and telegraphs, by the abolition of the many minor
posts in the bureaucracy which had few duties if low pay. It proved
harder to abolish the sub-prefectures than the Empire, and, by the
time the Republicans were well in the saddle, their horror of jobbery
had lost its old fanatical character. The general prosperity which
helped to anchor the new regime in popular esteem, also deprived its
leaders of any temptation to pursue an ascetic financial policy. It
was possible to reduce unpopular taxes and yet produce impressive
budgets. It was also possible to resume the policy that had accounted
for so much of the splendour of the Second Empire, the policy of great

public works. It was not merely a matter of finishing the new Opera
or building the Trocadero. It was by building railways and roads
that Napoleon Ill's Government had made its beneficence visible in
many remote regions of France. The Third Republic was soon to

surpass the Second Empire.


1 66
THE REPUBLICANS TAKE OVER THE REPUBLIC
The programme of *grcat P ublic works' was launched very
appro-
after the submission of the Marshal, in the year of
priately in 1878,
the great Exhibition that advertised the triumph of the Republic.
It was backed by the advertising genius of Gambetta, the technical

competence of Charles de Freycinet, and the financial competence of


Le*on Say. It was Say who found the means of borrowing the
cost at 3 per cent, without swamping the market, and Freycinet \sho
was in charge of the investigations of what was needed and how it \\as
to be done. The Gambetta to make the Republic splendid,
desire of
as well as to win tothe allegiance of the great masses \\Iiiih still
it

hankered after the flesh-pots of the Empire, made him a uaim sup-
porter of the great enterprise. If the scheme did not do .ill that its
authors hoped for, it was not altogether their fault. The good years
of the late 'seventies were followed by the bad years of the early
'eighties, and the financing of the schemes became less easy as the
question of what to do with the budget surplus ceased to have any
urgency.
More serious were the extravagances and follies that resulted from
the weakening of executive authority. A strong Ministry, sure of a
long life, might have been in a position to defy the demands of deputies
and senators where those demands had only electoral justification.
One main object of the scheme, for instance, was to do for Le Havre
and Marseilles what Germany had done for Hamburg, to create great
modern ports fit for all the demands of trade. But there were many
little ports which were not willing to see a few gicat rivals get all the

money, and, in order to get the programme through, it was necessary


to burden it with port- works of no real utility, except to the con-
tractors and, of course, to the local politicians. The main object of
the great project was the completion of the railway system, the resump-
tion of one of the greatest enterprises of the Second Empire. Here,
too, the comparatively modest plans of the engineers were overloaded
with more optimistic projects for lines without any economic justifi-
cation, lines whose only freight would be votes or which, if baptized
by the magic name 'strategic', had no relation to any strategy but
that of electoral campaigns.
The amount of pure waste must not be exaggerated. Even the
numerous light railways laid down in rural districts, if impossible to
justify from an accountant's viewpoint, did break down
the isolation
of rural life and, in that way, spread Republican principles among a
Conservative population which was immediately gratified by the
money spent in its behalf and, in the long run, was shaken out of its
traditional way of life. The political lesson was easy .to learn; no
prudence in the plan, nq caution in its early execution could secure
any policy involving great public expenditure from the necessity of
having to pay a very heavy toll to politics. No Ministry could save
167 M .
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
the general interests except at great political risk. In vain, critics -

from the old defeated parties, Buffet or Rouher, attacked Republican


Finance Ministers like Magnin. The public was not moved if finan-
ciers were. This policy had an immediate consequence that made
what the public thought of only intermittent importance. Republican
finance soon came to involve constant borrowing, and politicians found,
with an indignation in rough proportion to their naivete", that it was
not enough to want to borrow, one must find someone willing to lend
or one must impose a system of really rigorous taxes which would be
politically disastrous. L6on Say noted that many politicians thought
itwas as easy to pass a law raising a loan as a law on game licences:
when they discovered that it was not, their righteous indignation at
the tyranny of the bankers knew no verbal bounds.
For some years after the accession to power of the Republicans,
the bankers got no chance to exercise their tyranny. In face of budget
surpluses and a constant rise in both Government securities and in such
private favourites of the investor as the obligations of the great
railways, it was difficult to make the economical but timid French
investor frightened by the very name of Republic and the first years
of Republican control were boom years on the Bourse. There was a
boom, too, above all in Paris, where the golden days of
real-estate
Haussmann seemed to have returned. It was easy for the Government
to borrow and to borrow cheaply, while the great rise in revenue that
,

accompanied the boom made it practicable both to reduce the severity


of the more unpopular taxes and yet to present budget surpluses. In
the summer of 1880, the Minister, Magnin, could still justify a bold
policy of reduction of taxes by admitting its boldness yet declaring
that 'face to face with this great democracy, so prudent, so industrious,
so thrifty, I have no fears'.

By Gambetta came into power these golden days were


the time
over. The 1880 budget was the last for a long time which had even an

apparent surplus to show. A slump was under way, and it revealed


itself in the limited success of the loan of 1881 which was
adequate
but no longer brilliant. The Government could no longer do without
loans if it
proposed to keep its
extraordinary budget going; revenue
just met the regular costs, all the extras would have to be paid for out
of loans.
There was an effective deficit of nearly 30,000,000 in 1881 and
no very obvious means of reducing it except by reducing expenditure.
That was politically impossible, for the Republic had already acquired
a reputation for generosity that put the Empire to shame. Generosity
in minor things like the 8,000,000 francs l that was voted to provide
pensions for the victims of the coup cTttat of 1851 and generosity in big
things, for the educational reforms were costly and the Chamber, which
1
320,000 a year ($1,600,000).
1 68
THE REPUBLICANS TAKE OVER THE REPUBIg|Q
had no desire to make them unpopular by puttin|soifie SWft^&titatted
on the local authorities or, indeed, to encourage the view that educa-
tional expenditure, any more than policy, was subject to local control,

put the whole burden on the National Treasury. From 1877 to 1882,
the costs of education more than doubled, and if the total figure was
still modest, a little over 4,000,000 on one calculation, a little over
1
5,000,000 on another, it was not negligible in an era of deficits,
when it would be necessary to borrow from classes in little sympathy
with the objects of this particular expenditure. The Army, the Navy,
the colonies, the Tunisian expedition, salaries, pensions, all cost more.
The Republican fiscal administiation was more 'popular' than
that of the Conservatives had been. The rigid and, in many ways,
deservedly unpopular tax system that had remained fundamentally
unchanged from the time of Napoleon I, was among the first depart-
ments of Government to feel the effects of the emollient character of Re-
publican administration. There were far fewer prosecutions for evasion
of taxes, delays were more easily secured, and if these benefits were in
some degree justified by the onerous nature of the cumbrous system
whose working these adjustments oiled, the methods
whereby they
were secured had a less defensible side. For it was soon realized that
to get a tax collector to see light it was advisable to call in the influence
of the local Republican deputy or senator, who would very often
successfully go to the tax-collector's chief, the Minister, or when the
systemhadgotreally working, avoid bothering thatbusyman with details
and go straight to the bureau chief. It was widely suspected that in
making these representations to authority, deputies and senators went
on the principle that the Republic owed justice to all, but favours only
to its friends, a belief that increased the number of friends but did not
make for general confidence in the impartiality of the fiscal system.
In the long fight over income tax in France, many silly things were
said and many disingenuous arguments used against the system, but
some of their emotional force came from the general belief that taxes
were collected with more rigour from the enemies of the regime than
from its friends and among the potential income-tax payers, there
were more enemies than friends.
In mass and in detail, the deputies, by 1881, had made it plain
that the rules of financial orthodoxy had little appeal for them. Lip
service might be paid to it when it was necessary to submit to the
admonitions of a purist like Leon Say, but as soon as it was possible
to do without such symbolic figures, the politicians fell back on their
old unexpressed principles; never raise by taxes what you can borrow,
never, in any case, raise taxes before an election, spend your surpluses,
ifany, and leave your deficits to be liquidated by your successors.
The Right might sneer and scold, but who cared what they said?
1
$20,000,000 or $25,000,000.
169
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
The average elector was content with a fiscal policy whose immediate
results were gratifying and whose dangers were stressed only by the
enemies of the Republic and the friends of the Jesuits. Such a system
put a great deal of power into the hands of the large body of Republican
deputies, powers which, in less enlightened ages, might have
been used
for discreditable ends, but in a republic what was to be feared?

'Probity,'
said Charles Floquet, 'that old, vulgar probity ought to . . .

remain the distinctive mark and the stainless flag of all the true Repub-
licans.' No one could say fairer than that.
However great the supply of probity (it was less than Floquet's
electors believed) it was no
substitute for credit, as Allam-Targe* dis-
covered. It was all very well for Gambetta's Minister of Finance to
announce, in those confident terms to which the French public has
had so much opportunity to get accustomed, that the budget had been
planned with the intention of 'securing an unshakable financial founda-
tion to the democratic policy' that was, of course, to be followed. The
pessimistic prognostications of Le*onSay that had made him refuse the
Finance Ministry except on his own terms and had found expression
in his subsequent writings, were all too well founded. There was a
very large and increasing floating debt; there was a real deficit in the
1
neighbourhood of ^24,ooo,ooo. If the floating debt increased there
would be a general expectation of a loan, and in the depressed state
of the market, borrowing would be expensive, conversion impossible,
while the buying up of even one railway would be but another ex-
tension of the range of Government financing, already stretched too
far by the Freycinet plan.
A
strong Government might have been able to put the railway
companies in their place. Were they not, as Gambetta's organ, La
Rlpublique Frangaise, had declared, 'a State within the State ... a power
left in the hands of directors whose chief claim is that they are the
most open enemies of our political institutions'? But the collapse
of the Gambetta Ministry saved the companies from attack and the
Orleans company from nationalization. If Republican institutions
could not produce a strong Government, they could not hope success-
fully to combat great economic combinations whose rulers were not
harassed by their shareholders as Ministers were by the Chamber.
Allain-Targe' was replaced by Le*on Say, who thought that a Govern-
ment which could not pay itsway had to humour the people from
whom it proposed to borrow the money to carry on. He proposed
to consolidate the floating debt, to cut down the 'extraordinary
expenses', that is, the deficit, by two-thirds, though that meant diminish-
ing the supply of manna and quails that was so helpful politically;
and, far from attacking the railway companies, he proposed to get
them to find the money to meet the new net deficit of 10,000,000 by
1
$120,000,000.
170
THE REPUBLICANS TAKE OVER THE REPUBLIC
a loan which would be set off against their obligations to the Treasury.
Gambetta was only too right; the era of perils was over and the era
of difficulties had come and the Republican political system was much
better fitted to deal with perils than with difficulties.
The immediate cause of the financial troubles that befell France
and its Government was the 'krach' of the Union Generate. From small
beginnings in Lyons, this bank had grown very rapidly. It was to
free {so its chief,
Bontoux, declared) the Catholics of France from their
dependence on the two great groups that dominated high fiiuuu r, me
Jewish and Protestant bankers. Its operations were followed uitii
blind faith by all classes of Catholics; its stock soared to fantastic
heights and its activities had a great deal to do with the boom of 1880
and 1 88 1. By November, 1881, ordinary shares of the Union Gfafrale,
whose nominal value was 500 francs, were selling round 3,000. Within
a year the decline had set in and it turned into a collapse, whose
consequences spread to every part of the French financial system.
Although* the Union Generale foundered, the other interests involved
were salvaged, and by the end of February, 1882, the worst was known.
The assault on the Jewish-Protestant hegemony had failed, failed as
thousands of ruined Catholics believed, because those allied powers
had seen, with pleasure, the ruin of a powerful rival.
This belief was naive. It is unlikely that religious fanaticism in-
duced bankers to run the risk of demoralizing the whole capital market,
but if the older banks did not kill, it is possible that 'they did not
strive officiously to keep alive' an institution with su<;h special facilities
for tapping savings as a great Catholic bank would have had in France.
If the failure weakened enemies of the Republic, it weakened the
Government too, for although the panic was kept from spreading, it
effectually killed the boom, ended the seven fat years, and helped
to breed the anger and scepticism which was to endanger the very

regime that had seemed so secure when universal suffrage had given
its dominant party in 1881.
blessing to the
The taken by the phylloxera, 1 the deficits in international trade
toll

balances caused by bad harvests, the general depression of world


economy that affected politics in all countries, all combined to make
the unreality of some sides of French politics apparent. It was all
very well for the eminent political chemist, Paul Bert, to drink at
Auxerre to the destruction of the phylloxera, 'both kinds of phylloxera',
that is both the disease that was ruining so many wine-growers, and the
Jesuits. If the Burgundian peasants were satisfied with these pleasan-
tries, town workers were not. They wanted more than priest to eat.
the
If Gambetta's fate proved that it was easy to fail by attempting
too much, Freycinet's second administration proved that it was possible
to fall, less gloriously, by attempting nothing at all. While L^on Say
1 that almost killed European wine-growing.
Phylloxera, the deadly disease
171
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
was retreating in good order from the advanced financial positions
occupied by AUain-Targe*, his chief was faced with a problem affecting
the position and prestige of France which divided the Chamber into
two strongly opposed groups. Should France do nothing in Egypt?
Should she do a great deal, therebyrisking a good deal? The Radicals
were for doing nothing, taking no risks, of loss of life, or of money,
and, of course, of moral strength, in repressing the revolt of a people
rightly struggling tobe free. Gambetta was indignant at the aban-
donment of a great French diplomatic asset. Freycinet did a little,
enough to anger Glemenceau, not enough to please Gambetta. What
did this policy of sending troops to the Suez Canal mean? 'Is it
peace?* asked Clemenceau. 'No, for troops are to be sent. Is it
war? No, for they won't fight.' The Chamber refused to support
this policy by an overwhelming majority.
Freycinet was out and, after refusals by himself and Ferry to attempt
to form Governments, the 'seaside' Ministry of Duclerc was formed.
The Chamber was anxious to go on holiday and this elderly contem-
porary of Gr6vy, with a Ministry largely composed of Gambettists,
would do tomanage the current business till the Chamber came back.
The office of Prime Minister had changed hands six times since Grevy
had taken office. It was no wonder that authority was contemned,
that there were riots, Socialist demonstrations, Legitimist demonstra-
tions, Imperialist demonstrations, or that the Chamber, when it returned,
should have demonstrated its irritation by attacks on the families of
the Pretenders who represented a principle of executive authority
very unlike that which the Republic was revealing as her own. The
Duclerc Government fell.
A few days before, on December 3ist, there occurred a greater
blow to the principle of a strong executive than the fall of the Duclerc
Ministry. Gambetta had died. He had long been in poor health; he
was more and more preoccupied with his mistress, 1 and an accident
that would not have mattered to a more robust man was fatal to him.
There' was, of course, a national funeral and formal sorrow. Victor
Hugo took his grandchildren to look at the coffin and said, 'There
lies a great citizen'. The active politicians did not want great citizens
in their trade; the safe great man of the regime was to be a symbolic

figure like Victor Hugo or like Anatole France or, once he had been
dead for some years, Jean Jaures. A living great man m politics was
just a nuisance: for, except in dire emergency, the Third Republic had
no more use for them than the First had for chemists. M. Clemenceau
was to learn that.
The holiday Ministry of Duclerc, absurd as it was, wasmore im-
pressive than the Falli&res Ministry that followed. Not merely was
1
L6onie Leon, who was to him what Kitty O'Shea was to Parncll, a serious distraction
from politics.

173
THE REPUBLICANS TAKE OVER THE 'REPUBLIC
this a further plastering, but it was a poor job at that; it lasted less
than a month and it was Ferry's turn. He was now in a strong
position; the Chamber was, if not ashamed of its frivolity, at least
conscious of the need for some stability,, and the death of Gambetta
cleared the way for the dour Lorrainer. His followers and those of
Gambetta had an overwhelming majority over any combination of
Right and extreme Left. If they supported him, Clemriudiu jnd
Gassagnac could speak and combine in vain. The umiitimi thus
formed was provided with an admirably descriptive name that was
adopted by all parties. The 'Opportunists' were the sagacious Re-
publican members whose hearts were with the Left, of course, but
who realized that fundamental reforms should not be put through until
the time was opportune, which, again of course, it seldom was. The
elections of 1882 gave this party an equally complete control of the
Senate. It was ready to make concessions to the sentiments of the

uncompromising Left by enacting a law of divorce, a law which still


further angered the Catholics. By giving trade unions full legal status
and rights it attempted to win the tolerance of the elements that shouted
Gambetta down, while professing, perhaps sincerely, to believe that
the organizations of the workers, thus recognized by law, would
stabilizethe 'militants' and make of them sound, careful, trade-
union leaders of the English type.
Two reforms of great political importance were closely connected.
By removing the limitations on the rights of large communes to elect
their own mayors, a real measure of decentralization was achieved,
but one whose importance was as much political as administrative.
The mayor, now chosen by the councillors, was still an officer of the
Central Government, obliged to do a great deal of work for it and
liable both to close control and to removal by the Minister of the
Interior and his agents, the prefects. But, partly because of the political
importance of local government elections from the point of view of
recruiting the Senate, and partly because of the general passion for
politics that marked the country, local elections
were seldom fought
on purely local issues. The personnel of local government bodies was
composed of active politicians of all ranks, and the mayor of the big
town and the chairman of the departmental council was almost always
a deputy or senator and often a very important deputy or senator.
Whatever the legal fiction might be, a prefect, or even a minister,
would think twice before exercising his legal authority against a mayor
who might be a maker or unmaker of ministries, especially if he were
head of a great local dynasty like the Chautemps family in Touraine.
In the next generation, Poincar6 in the Meuse, Augagneur and then
Herriot in Lyons, Clementel in the Puy-de-D6me, were only examples
of the intermingling of local and national politics which made it im-
how much independent power a French munici-
possible to say offhand
173
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
It depended on who was at the head of it, at least as
pality had.
much on the formal law. 1
as
With the freedom of election of all the communes, the question
of reform of the Senate was inevitably connected in consequences if
not in origin. The Radicals had not yet repented their dogmatic
opposition to any second chamber, and the tactical reasons that had
led Gambetta to try to make a deal with the Senate before asking it
to agree to the meeting of the National Assembly were as powerful
as ever. The Senate would not risk a revision unless the Chamber
tiedits hands in advance. No Radical Medea was going to get a
chance to reform the Senate out of existence by putting the whole
Constitution into the melting-pot. The Senate could afford to give
satisfaction to the Left by abolishing public prayers and by accepting
a declaration that no member of a former ruling family could be
elected President, and that the method of constitutional revision could
not be used to abolish the republican form of government, gestures
which were superfluous or meaningless.
More important were the amendments which affected the Senate
itself. The system of life senators was abolished, the existing life
senators would remain, but, as they died out, their seats would be
given to the more populous departments, although the representation
of the departments remained far from equal, for the least populous
department had three senators, while the most populous, even the
Seine with Paris and its suburbs, had only ten. The Senate was still
weighted against the industrial areas and it was still weighted against
the big towns. It is true that the arrangement of 1875, whereby the
tiniest village and the largest city in a department had each one vote
in the college that chose the senators was done away with. The
number of senatorial electors from a commune now ranged from one
to 'twenty-four, according to the size of their municipal councils and
so, rather remotely, according to their population. But the great
cities,which were far more than twenty-four times as populous as the
villages,were still greatly under-represented; the real beneficiaries of
the reform were the middling county towns, the homes of the lawyers,
doctors, lycee professors who were becoming the new governing class.
The Senate was no longer predominantly rural; it was now mainly a
body representing the fears, the prudence, the sentiments of the petty
bourgeoisie of the scores of little local capitals of around ten and

twenty thousand inhabitants.


The reform of the Senate was all to the political advantage of that
body. Whatever chance the idea of life senators of great personal
eminence had had was gone from the moment the Legitimists sold out
to the Left. The replacement of the beneficiaries of parliamentary
jobbery by elected representatives of the local political organizations
1
Paris has remained divided into arrondissements, each with its own mayor.
174
THE REPUBLICANS TAKE OVER THE REPUBLIC
could only strengthen the Senate. For the new members were bound
to be either really important people in their own districts, or the
representatives of really important people. Elected for nine years by
a body composed of all the effective politicians, great and small, of his
department, a senator was now the recipient of a mandate which if
less mystically impressive than that conferred on deputies by universal

suffrage, was yet a good deal more concrete.


As long as both houses remained of the same general political
complexion, both Opportunist and only differing a little in the kern-
ness of sight that enabled them to see how inopportune real (lunge
was, the strength of the Senate was not apparent. It was useful in
that it allowed the Lower House, especially when an election was in
the offing, to pass bold measures, directed against the Church or in
favour of the workers, confident that the Senate would smother them.
The tactics of the Senate in these matters was masterly and simple.
It simply ignored the inconveniently radical measure and left it to
moulder until the formal political demand became, over a period of

years, a real demand which it was convenient to meet half-way. By


that time, the demand had usually become more radical, so that the
Senate when, at last, it got around to acting on the proposal, had to
choose between a mild bill received some years before and a more
violent one which the Chamber had passed in real or simulated in-
dignation. Of course, it chose the mild bill which was resurrected
from the grave where the Senate had laid it. No more effective device
for avoiding the dangers of democratic rashness has been discovered.
Of course, acting in this way, the Senate had to choose its ground with
care, not to show the obstinate folly of an English House of Lords or
the occasional pig-headedness of the Senate of the United States. It
is a tribute to the sagacity of the French Senate that it has almost

always managed to fight its battles with the Chamber from safe de-
fensive positions. The shrewd politicians in the Upper House were
and are excellent judges of the way the cat is jumping and can trans-
late fiery words and lavish promises or threats into intelligible political

language. Consequently, it has been mainly on finance that the two


houses have differed, for the Senate knows full well that, as M. Andre*
Siegfried has put it, if the Frenchman's heart is on the
Left his purse
ison the Right.
It was not until 1896 that a Radical Ministry, and so one differing
in character from the majority of the Senate, first came into office and

proposed the desperate remedy of an income tax. The Senate took


the offensive and passed votes of no confidence in the Ministry, thus
claiming that the Cabinet was responsible to both houses,
not merely
1
together but separately.
1
As usual thenConstitution cast no light on the problem. It merely said that the Ministers
were 'responsibl%efore the Chambers'.
175
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
Such a claim was outrageous, so the Radicals thought, but the
Senate did not care what they thought. It went on strike, even going
as far as to refuse the necessary vote of credit for the Madagascar

expedition. The Radicals were angry; they were pathetic; they ap-
pealed to the sacred rights of universal suffrage and threatened with
its wrath the mere representatives of restricted suffrage. Leon Bour-
geois, the Prime Minister, was an eminent academic politician, but
even he knew when he was beaten. He resigned and, from his time
to the time of M. Leon Blum, Prime Ministers have learned that in a
battle over finance with the Senate, the odds are on the Senate. It
never fights the battle unless it is sure to win, that is unless it has strong
reason to suspect that the Frenchmen-in-the-street and, still more,
the politician in the local committee-room, is more worried about the
financial situation than about the mystical dogmas that are so useful
at elections but wear so badly when they have to be paid for.
The power of the Senate was not purely negative, for it became
a reservoir of ministers. Its membership included many veterans
past their best, but it also came to include more and more of the
real leaders of the Republic. To sit for nine years instead of four, to
be elected not by emotion-ridden electors but by sage and practised
politicians and to suffer no real political disabilities in consequence,
made the delights of being a senator appeal to more and more notables.
As ministers, they could speak in either house and senators were just
as likely to be ministers as were deputies. They were even more
likely to be effective ministers, for, from the turn of the last century
on, the Prime Ministers who have not been transient and embarrassed
phantoms, the Prime Ministers who have carried programmes and
carried Parliament with them, have all been senators. Waldeck-
Rousseau, Combes, Clemenceau, Poincare. That such careers were
possible was, in great part, due to the reform of the Senate carried out
by Jules Ferry, a reform which so greatly strengthened the body he
was soon to adorn.
For the moment, however, Ferry was in command of the Lower
House, at least as much in command as anybody could be. For it
was now evident that French parliamentary practice and the ideas on
which it was based gave little hope of providing a strong executive.
1

The failure of Gambetta's attempt to build up a united and disciplined


Republican party made the Prime Minister dependent on the allegiance
of several groups. The misuse of the right of dissolution in 1877 h a d
made it impossible for recourse to be had to that method of appealing
from the delegates of universal suffrage to their theoretical master, the
electors. The abolition of scrutin de liste had meant that the electors
were tempted to choose local men on local issues, contenting themselves
with formal adherence to vague doctrines of no immediate moment.
No effective charge of disloyalty could be made against (deputies who
THE REPUBLICANS TAKE OVER THE REPUBLIC
voted against their nominal leaders if they were given an excuse to
do so by an astute wrecker of ministries.
Procedure made it easy to provide the excuse: in the 'interpel-
lation', the deputy was provided with a weapon against the Ministry
that made theof the latter a long or short series of hairbreadth
life

escapes. Every deputy or senator was entitled to demand, in writing,


an explanation of a specific act or a declaration of policy from the
Government. The ministers were thus forced to make a declaration
that might alienate some of their unstable supporters. The advantage
was with the attack which could choose its ground ingeniously and
frame questions of the classical 'have you stopped beating your wife?'
type and, even if repulsed in that assault, could keep on coming back
until the Government was put in a position in which it must offend
one section or another of its indispensable nucleus of support. Then
it was doomed; a new Government was formed, composed, as a rule,

of some members of the old and of some of the more ingenious assailants.
Few systems could be more calculated to weaken the sense of com-
mon responsibility in the Cabinet or of honesty in opposition in the
Chamber. It was true that the absence of an effective formal opposition,
the belief that, whatever happened, the Conservatives were too weak
to replace the Republicans, made the game possible without endanger-

ing the regime for the moment. All that suffered was the indepen-
dence of the executive, the strength of the administrative system and
the long-term interests of France. Apart from any other drawbacks,
the system imposed an intolerable burden on the ministers who were
forced to be continually in the breach and whose time, when Parlia-
ment was sitting (as it was for more than half the year), was necessarily
devoted to securing a respite until the rising of Parliament freed them
for administration. 1
The Chamber, and to a less degree, the Senate, from the first years of
the constitutional system of 1875, made it plain that effective sovereignty
was in their hands, that the Cabinet only held its power by a temporary
delegation that might be, and very often was, quickly withdrawn. For
the effective exercise of this power, however, the Chamber was not well
organized, and the Senate was even less so. Whether from a repulsion
from the precedent of the governing committees of the Convention
which bred a resolution not to create a new Committee of Public
Safety, or from mere reluctance to delegate any part of its power, the
Chamber was very slow to organize an effective committee system.
Before 1902 the only permanent committee was on finance. All other

1
When it is remembered that it is possible to have a vote on each phrase of a resolution
of confidence or no-confidence, following on an interpellation, it is easy to see what oppor-
tunities for ingenious drafting fall to an opposition leader. If he can pick up enough support
on any part of the resolution, the Government is fatally weakened. Even if the Govern-
ment carries a vote of confidence, it is in order to try to add an amendment which in
effect reopens the whole question.

177
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
committees were set up to deal with one particular proposal or problem
and were recruited, not straight from the Chamber in proportion to
the size of each group, but from the bureaux. The bureaux were simply
groups of deputies to which members were assigned by lot and for
one month at a time. A bureau, then, did not need to be possessed of
any homogeneity and could not, owing to its short life, develop any
corporate spirit or tradition. As the committees were chosen on the
basis of so many members from each bureau, the accidental character
of the composition of the bureaux might result in committees being very
unrepresentative of the temper of the house. Thus the committee
which dealt with and reported against Gambetta's constitutional pro-
posals in January 1882 was far more hostile to his Government than
the Chamber as a whole was. If the majorities in the Chamber had
been more stable and party discipline could have been relied on, this
would have mattered less, but a committee reporting adversely on a
Government project or giving a hostile turn to an investigation was
not faced with a loyal Chamber rallying to its leaders, the ministers,
but with an amorphous body, often more anxious to spot the winners
of the next cabinet crisis than to support the winners of the last one.
.
It was a tribute to Ferry's courage and tenacity that he was able,
with such institutions, to carry out his ambitious colonial programme,
to secure the limited revision of the constitution and to enact such

important financial measures as a conversion of a large part of the


debt. He was strong enough, too, to make a settlement with the great
railway companies on terms favourable to the latter and very offensive
to the proclaimed principles of the Radicals. He had, by suspending
for a short time the law that made it impossible to remove judges,

'purified' the Bench, that is removed judges whose loyalty to the new
order was suspect. This was a very great blow to the Catholic bour-
geoisie who saw one of the most prized of their preserves taken from
them, and though there had been vague talk of using the occasion to
cut down the number of judges which was certainly too great, the
vacant jobs were of course not abolished but given to the deserving
members or friends of the new governing class. It was not this
measure, any more than the war on the Jesuits, or the secularization
of education that brought down Ferry and introduced a new period
of indiscipline, but the course of the war in Tonkin.
The dying Chamber had realized how detested the colonial policy
had become and the continued depression had diminished the popu-
larity, if not of the Republic, at least of the Republicans. It did not

appreciate these facts at their true importance or it would not have


run the risk of restoring the scrutin de liste. That system was excellently
designed to let great waves of public opinion sweep away local issues
and local men. Had the Republicans been united, had Gambetta
lived or Ferry not been overthrown, the damage might have been
178
THE REPUBLICANS TAKE OVER THE REPUBLIC
slight. But in 1885 the Conservative vote more than doubled; on the
first ballot, there were only 127 Republicans elected and 176 Con-
servatives. 1 Panic drew the Republican factions together. 'Repub-
lican discipline' was invoked, that is the Republican candidates who
had got the highest vote in the first ballot were given a clear run
against the Conservatives. The final result gave a handsome majority
in seats to the Republicans, but the popular vote showed a recovery
of the Conservatives or a loss of faith in the Republicans that w-s, on
the surface, as ominous as the opposition gains in 1869 nat lM rn ^ >r ^
'

the Empire. The regime, then, was not as stable as it looked and the
new Chamber had no such central dominant block as the alliance of
the followers of Ferry and Gambetta had provided in the old. There
were things that united the new majority; such as the unseating of
twenty-two Conservative Deputies for electoral offences, in accordance
with the traditional French principle that only members of the minority
are ever elected illegally, but there was no person and no group in
command. The Brisson Government had only held office to carry
through the elections. Its refusal to provide for the immediate evacua-
tion of Tonkin was the ostensible cause of its fall, though the continu-
ance of French rule in Tonkin to this day makes this cause seem rather
inadequate; but a new Ministry had to be found. So the 'white
mouse', the pliable Freycinet, obliged and, as a sop to the Radicals,
took as his War Minister, Boulanger.

1
French law and custom, like American, distinguish between a majority and a plurality*
In an election, if no candidate gets a clear majority over all the other candidates, a second
ballot is held at which a mere plurality, i.e. the receipt of more votes than any other can-
didate, suffices. Between the first and second ballot, the real party adjustments are made,
the winner in the first becoming the candidate of all the allied parties and groups. The
first ballot is thus like an American primary, a means of discovering which section or which
leader of an electoral alliance appeals most to the voters and so is the destined standard-
bearer.

79
BOOK IV

THE REPUBLIC IN DANGER


And every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every
one that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him; and he became a captain
over them.
i Samuel xxii. I .
CHAPTER I

BOULANGER
July and, 1886, the British Ambassador in Paris, Lord Lyons,
ON wrote to his chief that 'the Republic here has lasted sixteen years
and that is about the time which it takes to make the French tired of a
form of government'. No regime since the Revolution had lasted
twenty years. The Republic, in 1886, was giving signs to the world
and to France, that she, like her predecessors, might well prove
mortal when attacked by the diseases that had killed them, the
diseases of habit, of boredom, of being something that the new genera-
tions now coming to maturity had not made for themselves, but had
inherited from their fathers. Since 1 789, no form of government in
France had survived the ordeal of the younger generations knocking at
the door. 'How lovely the Republic was under the Empire/ the lapi-
dary phrase of the comic artist, Forain, summed up all the disillusion-
ment with which the political zealot, young or old, looked on a Govern-
ment without brilliance and without stability, but above all, without
glory. The hopes of a speedy revenge on the victors of 1 870 were now
dead in the breasts of most of the rulers of France. Grevy had been
right, it seemed.

This policy of renunciation (which could not be openly avowed) had


no popular appeal, and in the overthrow of Ferry, two forces had been
at work, a sceptical pacificism that doubted the value of the colonial
triumphs and strongly objected to their cost, and an indignant nation-
alist feeling that saw in Ferry a traitor, playing Bismarck's game, turn-

ing the eyes of Frenchmen from the Vosges and wasting, on the banks
of tropical rivers, blood and treasure that should be husbanded till the
day came when France would fight for her share of the Rhine. Which
of these two sentiments was the stronger in the country remained to be
seen. There was no doubt which was stronger in Paris. The con-
tinued isolation of France, the lack of glamour in the Government, the
reluctant appreciation of how solid the work of Bismarck was, and all
the personal and general passions these facts provoked or covered, would
have found some outlet had Georges Boulanger never been born, but
luck and a curious combination of assets made the general who, in
January 1886, became Minister of War in the Third Freycinet Cabinet,
183 ,
N
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
appear to be the predestined instrument of all the enemies of the
Republic of Ferry and of Bismarck.
1
Young as modern generals go, Boulanger was under fifty. In
Africa, in Italy, in Cochin-China, the young officer redeemed by great
bravery and several wounds a far from distinguished career at Saint-
( lyr. He later returned to the military school as instructor, a chance
that enabled him to gain the admiration of many future officers, to
escape the disasters that led most of his comrades to early captivity in
Germany, and to win very rapid promotion in the defence of Paris.
Luck did not desert Colonel Boulanger, for he was wounded again at
the beginning of the fighting in Paris, thus earning further promotion
and also escaping that responsibility for the massacres of the communards,
which was to weigh so heavily on the reputations and careers of
soldiers like Gallifet. Boulanger continued to climb. His war-time
promotions were finally confirmed and, so long as it paid, Boulanger
was a model of Catholic and Conservative sentiment and practice. He
was sent to America to represent France at the centenary of Yorktown
and then made chief inspector of infantry. By 1881, however,
Boulanger was a devoted Republican and on good terms with the
Radical leader, Clemenceau, like him an old boy of the lycee of Nantes.
Sent to Tunis to command the Army of Occupation, he showed that,
Republican as he might be, he would defend the rights or privileges
of the Army against mere civilians like the Resident, Paul Cambon.
Boulanger' s methods recalled ,a little too much the soldiers of the First
Empire, and the 'p&dns' finally manoeuvred him out of his position.
2

He was thus available for the political combinations of Clemenceau,


whose will it was that made of the youngest general in the Army, the
new Minister of War.
Boulanger had owed his rise to luck, bravery, and ardent ambition,
combined with the talents of a courtier. Now that he was a public
figure, he had other assets to put on the market. Blue-eyed, reddish-
haired, giving an impression of youth and energy, the new Minister
made one of his most important decisions when he let his blond beard
grow. France had before her, surrounded by drab civilians, this attrac-
tive figure,and in contrast with the grey whiskers of the President, the
blond beard of the Minister of War.
'

Boulanger had shown that he could cultivate the right friends in


the right places at the right time. He was now to show that he could
'

flatter mobs and regiments as well as individuals. As Minister of War


he was energetic and, what was more important, he was noisy. His
predecessors had only slowly realized that the change from a professional
Army of the old type to one based on universal service, involved new

1
He was born in 1837 of a Breton father and a Welsh mother.
1
Contemptuous slang term for 'civilian*.

184
THE REPUBLIC IN DANGER
standards of cleanliness and comfort, more intelligent and flexible
discipline. Some minor adjustments had been made; others were
planned. Boulanger quickly put into effect most of those which had
been planned and accepted credit for those carried out before him.
The food, the lodging, the clothing of the troops was improved and
special efforts were made to win the gratitude of the non-commissionr cl
officers. The morale of the Army was looked after. Regimental spii it
was encouraged; recruits were welcomed with military music smt\- ;

boxes painted in the national colours; all trifles, but important tiillrs.
It was the veteran Orleanist general, Ghangarnier, who suit! iliat

Boulanger had again taught the French Army to 'wear its


cap on the
side of its head'.
Boulanger was the Radical Minister as well as the protector of the
rank-and-file. The Radicals had put him in the War Office, what
would he do for them? What he did was symbolic but none the less
important. The success of the Conservatives at the elections of 1885
had alarmed and irritated the Left. The votes cast for the Conserva-
tives had not been much less than those given to the Republican parties
and the Pretenders were living in France! The Comte de Paris was
very rich; he lived in the capital and in his chateaux like a sovereign.
In Parisian society, he was the chief, and no social climber like Swann
would for a moment have thought of preferring an invitation from any
Republican dignitary, from the President downwards, to one from the
Comte de Paris. A Royal marriage, celebrated in Paris with a social
splendour far beyond the resources of the filysee, was the excuse for a
1
Republican counter-attack.
A law was speedily passed exiling from France the heads of former
reigning families; and members of these families could not enter either
the Army or Navy. The restriction, on the face of it, applied only to
those princes who might wish to become soldiers or sailors; it preserved
the rights of the princes who were already serving. But Boulanger,
passing beyond the text of the law, deprived of their commands all the
princes, chief of the victims being the brilliant Due d'Aumale, under
whom the Minister had served. This decision was an outrage to the
Royalists, a token of good faith to the Radicals who now felt like some
old Jacobins after the execution of the Due d'Enghien, that this implac-
able enemy of the Bourbons was indeed their man. An indignant letter
of protest by the Duke led to his exile and to a duel between Boulanger
and a Royalist partisan in which the pistol of the Minister of War failed
to go off. More important, if not quite as ominous, was a controversy
in which Boulanger, who had been taxed with ingratitude, denied
owing anything to the Due d'Aumale. When a letter of his was

According to one story, Clemenceau was held up for a long time by the traffic jam
1

caused by the reception given in honour of the marriage, and this was one of the causes of
his anger.

185
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
printed in which he thanked the Duke, in very warm words, for his
kindness, he denied the authenticity of the letter. When it was pub-
lished in facsimile, the Minister replied with.vague threats and protesta-
tions of Republican loyalty. The hero of the Radicals was revealed as
an energetic but incompetent liar, but those Frenchmen who wanted
a hero were not shocked; after all, Bonaparte himself had had no blind
devotion to veracity.
Boulanger gave new proof of his intention to republicanize the
Army. He removed from their usual garrisons regiments whose officers
were suspected of too overt devotion to former dynasties; he imposed
public rebukes or dismissal on officers far senior to himself who seemed
to question his authority: and he gave indisputable rhetorical proof of
his love for the people during the great strike at Decazeville. The
violence of the strikers had been answered by a military occupation, a
normal enough reply, butone dangerous to the reputation of a political
soldier like Boulanger. He
escaped from his dilemma by the most
famous of his speeches, in which he defended the Army against Socialist
charges. It was not attacking the miners, he declared. 'At this
moment, perhaps every soldier is sharing his rations with a miner.'
This kindly thought enabled Boulanger to escape both horns of the
dilemma. He was a friend of order and of the workers. Who else
was both?
It was the great review at Longchamps on July i4th, 1886, which
revealed to the astounded and irritated politicians that, for the first
time since Gambetta, perhaps for the first time since the rise of Napoleon
III, one man had captured the hearts of millions of Frenchmen.
Nothing like it had been seen since that day, used by old Parisians as the
standard of popular frenzy, the return of the Army of Italy in 1859.
Mounted on a black horse which became at once almost as famous and
1
popular as its rider, Boulanger, in full uniform, surrounded by his staff,
completely eclipsed the President. Boulanger rode back to Paris as
part of Gravy's escort: the ride was a new triumph and the night was
another. He had ceased to be a general on the make, or an Army
reformer; he had become an idol and the incarnation of a great national
movement.
He received his consecration from the popular songs. Fletcher of
Saltoun's wise friend might have regarded the music-hall singer
Paulus, as the real author of Boulangism. En revenant de la revue became
the first and most famous of the innumerable songs written in honour
of the national hero. 2 Millions repeated the lines:

1
was a poor specimen of its kind and Boulanger an indifferent
Critics said that 'Tunis'
rider,but from the point of view of the man in the street Boulanger and his horse were just
what they should be.
1
Some assert that Paulus had thought of celebrating other military heroes and merely
chose Boulanger because he was in the public eye at the moment.

186
THE REPUBLIC IN DANGER
Gais et contents
Nous marchions triomphants,
En allant a Longchamp,
Le coeur a Paise,
Sans h&iter, Brat
*WI " /
*
Car nous allions ffeter
Voir et complimenter
L'Armee franchise.

With the success of the song sung at the Alcazar, a new Be )iiL non-

appeared. It was not as the friend of miners or the eneim of prnres


that he had been acclaimed by the crowds which had poured cut of
Paris to 'pay its respects to the French Army'. It was as the emblem
of French military pride and hope, the man who would make the Army
of Sedan, the Army of Austerlitz. Soon he was to be 'General Victory*.

Regardez-le la-bas! II nous sourit et passe:


II vient de delivrer la Lorraine et P Alsace.

A year later Jules Ferry was to refer contemptuously to Boul anger as


a 'music-hall Saint-Arnaud' l but, as Jacques Bainville said, it is not
given to everybody to become a music-hall hero. The sneers of Ferry,
or of any other French politician, mattered little to the fanatics who
now rallied round the general, for Boulanger was, by German testimony,
above all by the testimony of Bismarck in his speech in the Reichstag
on January nth, 1887, the greatest danger to good relations between
France and Germany. Whatever doubts the man in the street had had
were swept away. Bismarck had named his enemy. There could be
only one reply, a rally to the hero by all true Frenchmen. They could
now see him in Jiis true light:

D'un eclair dc ton sabre, eveille Taubc blanche,


A nos jeunes drapeaux, viens montrer le chemin
Pour marcher vers le Rhin, pour marcher vers le Rhin:
Parais, nous t'attendons, 6 general Revanche.

1
Marshal de Saint-Arnaud was the Minister of War who carried out the coup d'Mat
of December and, 1851.

187
CHAPTER II

DEROULEDE
idea of revenge for 1870, of a war to recover the lost provinces,
THE
had in France its regular and open organization and its chief in the

League of Patriots and Paul Deroulede. Few Frenchmen in their


hearts had abandoned all hope of undoing the Treaty of Frankfort and
fewer would have dared to admit their final acceptance of the treaty in
public, but there were so many other internal and external questions.
The odds against a French triumph, single-handed, over Germany
lengthened. The nation was not willing to devote all national resources
and all national thought to this one question. Paul Deroulede was.
He had served in the war. He had been a prisoner in Germany but had
escaped; and had fought against the Commune. The disasters of 1870
had made him the man of one idea and he grouped round him the most
active members of the minority of Frenchmen for whom there was only
one question. Deroulede was a great orator; he had written immensely
popular patriotic poems, but he had never managed to create a great
mass movement. With the death of Gambetta, whom Deroulede had
trusted, it became obvious that there was nothing to be got from the
politicians. The League of Patriots, which Deroulede had attempted
to keep non-partisan as long as all parties were united in their resolve to
undo the crime of 1871, became more and more an organization for
revising and reforming the Constitution as a means to the war of revenge.
Only a strong executive could plan and carry out a policy so bold, calling
for such foresight and tenacity. And the inevitable fate of constitutional
reform under the present regime had been made manifest by the way
in which Jules Ferry had been able to make the revision of 1884 farcical.
Deroulede had been in touch with Boulanger since the general had
come to the War Office as Inspector of Infantry and he had sounded
him when he became Minister. As was his habit, Boulanger listened,
uttered polite formulas of agreement and committed himself to nothing.
Nor for the moment did Deroulede want more. His great scheme was
to win over Russia to a French alliance by affecting public opinion
country and the opinion of the Tsar himself through the influence
in- that

of Katkov, the famous Panslav editor. With Russia detached from


Germany and a strong Government in Paris, the good work could begin.
Deroulede did not realize that the Boulangist agitation, far from impres-
188
THE REPUBLIC IN DANGER
sing the Tsar, made him more suspicious than ever of a State in which
such disorder could be permitted and in which a man like Boulanger
could be so powerful.
The time for testing the strength of the Russian cobwebs spun by
D&roul&de and Katkov was not yet come. First of all, Deroutedc had
to convince the general that it was his duty and interest to
put himself
at the head of a great national movement. He promised Boulunoer the
support of his '300,000 leaguers', a vast exaggeration of their numheis,
but they were not negligible all the same. As long as Boulan^n was
a Minister, he was bound to some loyalty to his colleagues and
Boulanger liked being Minister. Boulanger, too, had reason to suspect
that the politicians who had welcomed him into the Government would
now gladly usher him out of it. His Army reforms, his demands for
money for the new magazine rifles he was determined to issue to the
troops, even his love of the limelight, could be tolerated or approved,
but though Boulanger remained at the War Office when Freycinet was
replaced by Goblet, his fundamental frivolity alarmed the more prudent
politicians. When Bismarck named him as a danger to peace, he
seemed prepared to do everything to justify the Chancellor's fears.
Only the timely confession of a subordinate revealed and prevented his
despatching a personal letter to the Tsar and, when the Foreign
Minister taxed him with this extraordinary usurpation, Boulanger fell
back on his standard defence, announced that the accusation was a lie
and left the Cabinet meeting.
German military preparations were now on a scale that was, for
those simple days, unprecedented in peace-time, and Boulanger was
active in counter-measures. It was, and is, hard to decide whether
Bismarck or Boulanger was really the aggressor, but Bismarck knew
what he was doing and Boulanger did not. The War Minister was all
for drastic measures: he was alarmed, he said, as to the results of letting

Germany begin war when she was ready send France was not. Grevy,
who was convinced that if there was a war France would be beaten,
coolly told Boulanger that the only difference was that he would
have
to fight his battle on the Marne and not on the Saar. Gre!vy and the
civilian Ministers, as Bismarck realized, were all for peace; the danger
was a seizure of power by Boulanger or an incident. The incident ,

came, the arrest of the French frontier agent, Schnaebele, by the Ger-
man police. The French asserted that he had been seized on French
the Germans denied this and declared that he was an organizer of
soil;

espionage in Alsace, which was true. There


was all the raw material
of a war of honour, but the fortunate discovery that Schnaebele had
been invited in writing to meet his German colleagues and so was
covered by what was equivalent to a safe-conduct, enabled Bismarck
Boulanger, who was the main organizer of
to release the prisoner. the

spy system of which Schnaebele was part,


had displayed all his usual
189
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
frivolity. The public did not know this. They knew only that Bis-
marck had appeared to retreat. His climb-down must have been
due to his fear of Boulanger. Deroulede, who had resigned the Presi-
dency of the League of Patriots just before the Schnaebele affair, in

despair at the timidity of theGovernment had lost heart too soon.


The Goblet Government fell in its turn and it was not easy to find
it a successor, for the Chamber was divided between the Radicals, who

still looked on Boulanger as one of their own, and the more cautious

elements who regarded him as an enemy of peace and perhaps of the


Republic. A campaign of Rochefort, the most violent of Paris editors
and darling of the left-wing mobs, got 39,000 votes for the general at
a by-election in Paris, although he was not a candidate. Such a success
frightened more moderates into the belief that no Government was big
enough to hold Boulanger. The Senate, too, let it be known that it
would vote against any Ministry of which he was a part and, at last,
with Catholic support, a Rouvier Ministry was formed without
Boulanger. For a moment, there had been fear of a coup d'etat by the
over-mighty Minister, but with outward good grace, he surrendered
office. To return to the War Office was now his main ambition, and as
the orthodox Republicans made it plain that he could never return with
their permission, Boulanger began to listen to the bold men who now
surrounded him and who saw in his popularity a way to power.
Boulangism as a sentimental mass movement was stronger than ever.
Boulangism as a party was being born.
The problem of the Government was what to do with Boulanger, for
he must be got out of Paris before the I4tti of July. An Elba was
found, the command of the I3th Army Corps at Clermont-Ferrand.
Buried in Auvergne, it was thought he would be able to do no harm
and might soon be forgotten, but he was not yet in Auvergne. He was
due to leave the Gare de Lyon on July 8th, but Paris was as upset at
this news as at the flight of Louis XVI. An immense mob filled the
station and the surrounding streets; there were shouts of 'To the filyseV;
there were fights with the police. If Boulanger had wished to put him-
self at the head of an imeute, there were all the materials present, but he
was not ready for such drastic action. The hysterical mob singing the
Marseillaise, the men who lay down on the rails to keep the train from
moving, the feverish atmosphere of one of the 'days' of which Paris had
the secret, all this intimidated rather than stimulated Boulanger. He
allowed himself to be put on another engine and smuggled out of the
station". He may have let an opportunity pass, but his party was not
yet firmly constituted and he was not the bearer of a great name like
Louis Napoleon, who could afford to risk failure.
The demonstration at the Gare de Lyon was only one sign, among
many, of the mounting popularity of the general. Business had seen
*

its opportunity and every kind of article was put under the invocation

190
THE REPUBLIC IN DANGER
of his name and picture, as is done with royalty in coronation years.
There were short and cheap lives of the general on sale; floods of verse;
scores of songs. There were children's toys, the most interesting being
a model which always bounced back on its feet 'with energy ... a
popular emblem of a France respected and the Republic saved'.
Once Boulanger was settled in Auvergne, the hopes of the Go\crn-
ment seemed likely to be fulfilled. The general quarrelled with Jules
Ferry and tried to force a duel on him. He inspected his troop,; he
tried on the phlegmatic Auvergnats the arts that had won the Pa; isi.ms;
but he seemed now a seven days' wonder whose power \\.is gone, and
the politicians, who had begun to fear him, recovered their equanimity.
CHAPTER III

THE CRISIS

association of purity of morals with the Republican form of


.L government, for which history furnishes no justification, is one of
the most striking results of the pseudo-classical basis of the French
Revolution.' Such was the comment of the most acute foreign observer
1
of French affairs on the Wilson scandal which interrupted and for-
warded the development of the Boulangist crisis.
It was a private quarrel between two women that opened the sluices
of scandal. One lady of indifferent morals had borrowed a dress from
a kindred spirit and had refused to return it. The lover of the infuri-
ated and defrauded woman denounced the borrower to the police as
an agent in the sale of decorations; and 'la Limouzin', this odd fish from
the Parisian underworld, was thrown up on the beach to public view,
accused of espionage as well as of traffic in decorations. La Limouzin
was trapped, and then came the turn of General Gaffarel, who broke
down, confessed and was dismissed from the Army. Gaffarel was no
shady nonentity; he was the soldier whom Boulanger had chosen as
deputy-chief of the General Staff. He had a brilliant military record
and, like so many more of his class, he had been ruined by the collapse
of the Union Generate. After Gaffarel came Senator and General Count
d'Andlau who prudently disappeared, as well as a long train of minor
agents in graft. Even M. d'Andlau was a small fish compared with the
great political whale into whose hide the Gaptain Ahabs of the Paris
press were now ready to hurl their harpoons. For the chief agent of
corruption, it was asserted, was no less a person than that veteran
Republican politician, Daniel Wilson, who, long important in his own
right, was still more important since his marriage in 1881 to a daughter
of President Grevy. The trail of scandal led straight from the dingy
offices and hotels of the Paris of confidence tricksters and ladies of the

town, to the filyse*e, where M. Wilson resided as the permanent guest of


his father-in-law and from which it was soon discovered (as the insiders
had long known) that he had plied his trade.
At first sight, this state of affairs, however deplorable, did not
ij. E. C.Bodlcy.
192
THE REPUBLIC IN DANGER
directly involve the President. Had Grevy quickly disowned Wilson,
he, and the presidency, might have escaped fatal discredit, but the
family feeling of the Gr^vys was excessive even by the high French
standard. One brother had been made a General, one a Senator and
Governor-General of Algeria, and it was a current jest that it was a pity
that no Grevy was a priest, for he would have been a cardinal. Grcvy
was ready as a good family man to protect his son-in-law and, in any
case, he had a high regard for Wilson himself. His foreign nam< made
iteasy to attribute Wilson's character to his ancestry. He \\ as sa id to be
English or, as Lupine put it, a 'Yankee', but in fact, though of partially
Scottish origin, he was descended on his mother's side from a member
of the Convention.
was perhaps this ancestry that suddenly turned one of the most
It

lively men-about-town of the Second Empire into a Republican deputy


and opponent of the regime and induced him to spend on politics the
fortune which had hitherto earned him the grateful admiration of so
many ladies. Even before his marriage, Wilson was a powerful political
figure. His private political machine was well oiled with money, with
private favours, with financial combinations, which if not strictly dis-
honest were far from exemplifying public purity. In a less brilliant
way, Wilson was a Republican Morny. He used his position to bring
pressure to bear on the Administration to make things easy for com-
mercial friends of his and, in one of these acts of good fellowship, he
was thwarted by the heir of a greater name than Grevy, Carnot, the
Minister of Finance. The main political expense for which Wilson
needed irregular revenues to augment his own was the building up of a
chain of newspapers. It became known that it was wise to patronize
the Wilson press. It was also believed that it was easier to have your
merits recognized by the grant of the Legion of Honour if M. Wilson
had reason to think kindly of you, and it had long been known that
Wilson conducted his private and political business from the filysee,
thus avoiding the expense of office rent and postage. 1
The popular song that immediately made its appearance, 'What bad
luck to have a son-in-law', did not convince the mob that all that Grevy
suffered from was bad luck. For the President had developed one
French quality to excess; he was reputed to be very mean and to be as
ready as Wilson to save his own pocket at the public expense, and,
unlike Wilson, he had no past of lavish generosity to earn pardon for
present parsimony. Yet the President of the Republic was handsomely
paid and lavishly provided for in other ways. He received 48,000 a
year, of which a very large proportion was saved.
2

It is true that economy in the lyse*e was no novelty. Madame


this abuse of franking that alone seems to have angered Wilson's loyal con-
1
It was
stituency in Touraine.
1
1240,000. GreVy left 280,000 (11,200,000), mostly saved from his presidential
alary. .

193
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
Thiers carried thrift to pathological extremes, but not only was there

something grandly Balzacian in her behaviour, Thiers was not GreVy.


France got her money's worth from Thiers, even if the presidential fruit
was rotten, but GreVy's chief r61e was to incarnate the formal, not the
real authority of the State, to imitate MacMahon not Thiers, and the
Marshal Duke, as befitted a grand seigneury had left office poorer than he
entered it. In the reaction against GreVy this contempt for his mean-
ness was mixed with the general dislike of his excessive self-satisfaction.
Grevy, who had been famous as the opponent of any presidency at
all, once in office took up his role with a profound conviction that all
was for the best in the best of all possible republics, with a Ciceronian
belief that France was indeed lucky to have such a President and with
an assumption, which his re-election fortified, that his right to be chief
of the State was, if not divine, at least indefeasible. It was this illusion
that made GreVy turn a deplorable but minor scandal into a great
political storm in which the Republic nearly foundered. For the 'sale*
of decorations to provide funds for political journalism was not, in
itself, to discredit the regime, and the application to English
enough
politicsof the severe standards defended by some of Wilson's critics
would, in modern times, have kept the House of Lords a good deal
smaller than it is.
Public opinion in Paris was in no mood to listen to the apologists, and
a series of new scandals inflamed it even further. Indiscreet letters
involved an ex- Minister of War. General Thibaudin was one of the
few sound 'Republican' generals, and he was military governor of
Paris. It was this bulwark of the regime who had written to La

Limouzin, on the night he had given up the War Ministry, a word of


farewell', begging her permission to put into that word 'all the thoughts
which dominate my heart, and can inspire a great spirit which loves
you'. Worse still, the rash General had denied anything but the most
formal relations with the lady. Why had he risked so dangerous a
denial of what he was soon to have to admit? Thibaudin followed
Gaffarel and Andlau, but the real prey of the assailants was still at
large.
From the beginning of the of the traffickers, the public waited
trial

for the introduction of the nameof Wilson. At the third sitting of the
court the explosion came. Two letters of Wilson's had been seized
among the other papers of La Limouzin. They were harmless enough;
one merely noting an application for the Legion of Honour, the other
expressing the interest of Wilson and of Grevy in the career of General
Thibaudin. Both dated from 1884. Marcel Habert, the defender of
La Limouzin, asked that the letters should be shown to an expert
witness, representative of the firm that made the note-paper for the
Chamber. The expert testified that the water-mark showed that the
paper had been manufactured over a year after the dates of the letters,
THE REPUBLIC IN DANGER
The originals had been stolen and replaced by new and, it was assumed,
much less damaging letters.
Now far more than Wilson was involved; the regime itself was sus-
pect and in Parliament the indignant (and exultant) Right demanded
light on the mystery. The Republican politicians, like any other
hierarchy anxious to avoid scandalizing the laity, tried to resist. The
Minister ofJustice made the farcical excuse for doing nothing, I!MI tin-
course of justice must not be interfered with, that couisr <>; n,ijcc (

whicji was being assisted by a forger lodged somewhere in the ,clmmis-


trative machine. Already' the politicians had evaded the issue by
appointing a parliamentary committee to inquire not into the 'dust-
1
bin', as the Wilson affair was called, but into any kind of abuse that
they thought fit, a successful method of boring the public. But such
tactics could not be repeated. It mattered little now who had directed
the tampering with the dossier 2 or whether the changes were important.
The Republic had been caught out defending its own and it could only
be saved by sacrificing somebody. Wilson would no longer be a big
enough sacrifice: Grevy must go.
Nothing was further from the mind of the aged if no longer venerable
President. The attack on his dear Daniel was mere political spite.
I shall be like a rock/ he said, and the man who had been elected to be
{

the obedient servant of Parliament now convinced himself that it was


his duty to save France from the disaster of his removal from office.
The rock was soon attacked by formidable miners. Clemencean dis-
played all his genius for inveetive, and Rochefort found in the Wilson
affair a chance to display his talent for scandal, for irony and all his
hatred and contempt for the politicians who had let him rot in New
Caledonia.
The Rouvier Government once overthrown, the obstacle that

Grevy could not overcome was a parliamentary strike. No politician


of any weight would form a Ministry without the promise of Grevy's
resignation. The old man, more and more a comic character, alter-
nated between indignant resistance and embittered acceptance of his
fate. Rochefort asserted that innocent citizens could not sleep at night
for fear of being awakened by orderlies from the filysee asking them to
form Ministries. He went on to suggest that the only remedy was to
put up a notice: 'Commit no nuisance. Ministerial portfolios not to
be deposited here.' The motives attributed to Grevy were not flatter-
ing: 'Every day I hang on, I get 3,333 francs.'
Even Grevy could not hold on indefinitely, and when he went, who
would replace him? There were tHree candidates and three only,
1
'boite a ordures'. The same tactics were used at the same time to extend the inquiry
into the authenticity of the letters attributed to Parnell by The (London) Times.
*
M. Dansette argues plausibly that Grevy had the letters destroyed, and Wilson, realizing
that they were not likely to do him any real harm, wrote new versions. But for the neglect
of the water-mark, all would have been well.
195
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
Freycinet, Floquet and Ferry, and the strength of Ferry suddenly con-
verted some of the bitterest enemies of GreVy into defenders if not
friends. To the Radicals and to the men of the extreme Left, GreVy
was at worst merely a pompous knave, Ferry was a traitor, or so they
had always asserted, and whether they really believed it or not, the
men who had brought down the 'Tonkinois' had obvious prudential
reasons for keeping him out of the filysee. The ex-communards like
Rochefort, Eudes and the rest, thought of Ferry as the accomplice of
Thiers, of Gallifet and the other murderers of the workers. Lastly, the
Catholics had never forgiven the author of Article Seven. They had
taken their revenge in 1885; they were not satisfied with that. Their
votes, added to those of the supporters of Ferry in the Chamber and .

the overwhelming 'Opportunist* majority in the Senate, would elect


5

Ferry, but he was not merely the patron of the 'Godless school , he had
affronted public hypocrisy by a purely civil marriage. He must repent,
go to Canossa and give definite assurances of friendliness to the Church
to get Catholic support. Ferry had too much pride to accept such
terms and, if his supporters stood firm, he could win anyway.
The enemies of Ferry had two courses open to them: they could
try to find a candidate to beat Ferry or they could avoid an election
altogether, swallow their words and try to save Grevy. The Radical
newspapers now began to throw mud at Ferry, recalling the financial
triumphs of his brother, Senator Charles Ferry, of which they gave
unpleasant explanations. 'There are brothers who are worth just as
much as sons-in-law.' One last effort was made to save Grevy. At
the headquarters of the Grand Orient, 1 Clemenceau, Laguerre (the
future Boulangist leader), Rochefort, Camille Dreyfus, Eugene Mayer,
the flower of Radical and anti-clerical talent assembled, but Clemen-
ceau hesitated. How was the agitation against the unpopular Grevy
to be calmed? It could only be done by using a popularity great

enough to cover the President.Boulanger must return to the War


Office. Meantime, Floquet and Freycinet must be induced to give up
their claims but the emissaries returned to report that Floquet and
Freycinet was each convinced that he was President-elect in all but
name and, under this illusion, naturally refused to give up not a hope,
but a certainty.
D6roulede and his League of Patriots were willing to swallow all
their words to save Grvy, or at any rate to keep him in office long

enough to block the way to Ferry. The longer the agitation against
Ferry lasted, the more frightened the more timid of his supporters
would become and all the world had had proof of how easily they
could be frightened. On November agth, 1887, the 'Equals' of Mont-
martre placarded their manifesto: 'People of Paris! The Republic is
in danger! The Congress of Versailles is about to name Gravy's suc-
1
Headquarters of the strongest section of French Freemasons.
196
THE REPUBLIC IN DANGER
cessor. And it is 1
Ferry-Famine, it is Ferry-Tonkin, Ferry the valet of
Bismarck, to whom a monstrous coalition wishes to deliver up the
'

Republic
The rumour that Ferry might get Catholic support increased the
anger of the Left; and the danger of mob action, whether real or not,
stirred the politicians to further efforts. That night, Georges ,agumv I

gave a dinner-party in his house in the Rue Saint-Honoiv, .u ross the


street from the Church of Saint-Roch, famous as the ,.cm o(
\ming
General Bonaparte's whiff of grapeshot. Clemenceiui \\;is tin-re, and
a more important figure than Clemenceau, Boulanger, the only man
who could keep Grevy in office long enough to build up a eoalition
against Ferry. The new Cabinet, it was suggested, would prorogue the
hostile Chamber and perhaps get the Senate to dissolve it. 'I see
clearly enough, but afterwards,' said
2
Augereau Clemenceau, 'what
will the garrison of Paris do?' 'It will stay in its barracks,' replied
Boulanger and Clemenceau saw that his Augereau was really
Bonaparte.
If the chief of the Radicals at last saw where his proteg6 was going
and withdrew, others were less cautious. The ex-Prefect of Police,
Andrieux, was to be Prime Minister, so the story runs, Rochefort,
Minister of Fine Arts, and Boulanger, Governor of Paris. The 'his-
toric night' of November 2gth passed without any final decision and
without any results except one carefully kept from the left-wing
allies of the General, for Boulanger had taken time out during the

meeting at Laguerre's to go to see the Royalist leader, the Baron de


Mackau.
Grevy was still wavering between patriotic submission to the out-
rageous demands of the Chamber and refusal to let France suffer the
disaster of losing his services. The Prime Minister, Rouvier, who had
only continued to serve on a promise of the immediate resignation of
the President, duly announced to the Chamber that since Grevy had
not resigned, the Government would.
Paris was in an uproar; a quasi-revolutionary committee was sitting
at the Hotel de Ville, threatening a renewal of the Commune; Drou-
tede's 'League of Patriots' was ready for action; the only trouble was to
unite the rioters who chiefly wanted to get rid of Grvy, with those who
mainly wanted to keep out Ferry. The Minister of War ordered
Boulanger back to Clermont-Ferrand and was obeyed. Buoyed up by
his conceit and his trust in the letter of the law, GreVy still struggled,
but at last he succumbed and Rouvier was able to read to the Chamber
on the Second of December (ominous date) 8 Gravy's letter of resigna-
tion. Coming from a monarch of ancient line, abandoning the throne
1
An allusion to Ferry's role as Mayor of Paris during the siege.
1 at the request of the Directory, to purge
Augereau was sent by Bonaparte, in 1797,

On December and, 1851, Louis Napoleon had overthrown the Second Republic.
197
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
after an active reign, the manifesto might have been touching. Coming
from the astute but unamiable lawyer who had been made President
to ensure that the office would be as innocuous as was possible, the

phrases of the abdication were richly comic. 'I appeal to France!


She will say that, for nine year$, my government has assured peace,
order and liberty; that it has made her respected throughout the world.'
The Chamber was too surprised to laugh.
Now came the real crisis, the election of a successor. The danger
of Ferry's election was greater than ever, and there seemed only, one
way to prevent it, to frighten the electors with the scarecrow of an
Imeute in Paris. All the parties which preached or tolerated violence
were in the streets against Ferry and Versailles, where the election
was to take place, was not far enough away for the deputies and
senators to recover their equanimity. The Socialist deputy, Basly, who
had defended the lynching of the engineer Antrin by the strikers at
Decazeville, went off to consult the revolutionary committee at the
Hotel de Ville. His political colleagues had no desire to be victims of
that 'popular justice* which Basly had defended! It did not matter

very much that the excitement in the streets was largely confined to
professional rioters, or that indignation over Wilson, GreVy and Ferry
was not very profound. There was enough to frighten timid men, and
the politicians who had deserted Ferry in the past had not become much
braver with the lapse of years.
Preliminary soundings showed that already Ferry's supporters were
deserting him, but it was not easy to find a substitute who would win
all the deserters without losing his own supporters. It was Clemenceau
who finally found the man. 'Vote for the stupidest', was the formula
put into his mouth to justify the choice of Sadi Carnot. Yet Carnot
was not in the ordinary sense stupid; he was a brilliant engineer, but
his political career was due not to his merits but to those of his ancestors,
to his grandfather, the great organizer of victory of the Revolution, and
to his father, Senator Hippolyte Carnot, one of the surviving patriarchs
of the Republican cause, still living and overshadowing his worthy
but dull son.
The election of Carnot marked another stage in the decline of the
presidency. The third President, like his predecessors, had been forced
out of office, but unlike them, not over any question of principle. He
had been succeeded by a nonentity. Thiers had been chosen as the
greatest living French statesman; MacMahon as the most honourable
French soldier; GreVy had been elected in 1879 because of what he
had said in 1848; Carnot was elected in 1887 because of what his
grandfather had done in 1793. Carnot's election had meant, too, that
no Frenchman of real eminence could be President if mob violence or
parliamentary jealousy could be roused against him. It was not hard
to rouse a Paris mob; it was still easier to rouse the egoism of the
198
THE REPUBLIC IN DANGER ~
politicians. The real victor of the crisis was^lifinfiwifeflbar
O ifar
1 J ""^
J 0rt*
1
him, in exile
i
m Auvergne.
*
1

II

As theRoyalists were the strongest section of the Conservatives in


the Chamber and as they had great Press and financial rcsoim -s, it
was natural enough for Boulanger, when he to look for .illic-s on
began
the Right, to turn to them. But apart from personal harriers between
Boulanger and the Royal house, there were other reasons why his
feelers to the Right were not limited to contacts with the
Royalists.
Boulanger, after all, had been an officer of the Imperial Army; his
ambitions were almost entirely military and the name of
Napoleon
had for him a prestige that no Bourbon could rival. Then, for all his
faults and Boulanger had an understanding of the masses and
follies,
he knew how much more lively and how much more widespread
potential Bonapartism was than the hereditary loyalty of a diminishing
number of families to the Bourbons.
Even if these thoughts did not spontaneously occur to Boulanger,
they were implanted in his mind by an energetic young journalist who
had experienced, in his own career, the narrowness and futility of
Orleanism, and who was convinced that only one dynasty could be of
any real help to the enemies of parliamentary domination in France.
It was Georges Thiebaud who now persuaded the commander of the
1
3th Army Corps to take the great risk for an officer on active service
of leaving his command and visiting a Pretender.
Prince Napoleon, nephew of Napoleon I, and head, in his own
estimation, of the House of Bonaparte, was at the time of the Grevy
Prangins on the Lake of Geneva, and although Thiebaud
crisis living at

had kept in touch with him, the Pretender's first thought on seeing
before him a man claiming to be Boulanger was that he had to deal
with an impostor, an agent-provocateur. The General had managed to
throw the detectives who were shadowing him off the trail and, face to
face with the nephew of the Emperor, he displayed a proper awe in the
presence of the custodian of so great a tradition. There was, indeed,
a
good deal of common ground between Prince Napoleon and Boulanger.
The Prince's programme, officially, was not the restoration of the
Empire, but the creation through a plebiscite of a strong executive.
Boulanger and he could work together for the plebiscite, each confident
1
After various vicissitudes in the courts, Wilson's lawyers were able to get him acquitted
on all charges; usually on technical points. Other less prominent members of the firm
were not so lucky. 'All saved but honour,' Wilson took his seat in the Chamber ignored
voted to suspend the
by all; in disgust at his impudence in taking his seat, the deputies
sitting. Wilson did not leave, and when, after an hour, business was resumed, Andricux
walked up and shook hands, saying 'I don't like baseness.' Georges Thiebaud, who had no
virtue of the deputies, the
high opinion of parliamentary honesty, said of the outraged
'It's

whores keeping clear of the woman taken in adultery.'


199
THK DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
that the choice of France would fall on him. The Prince put his finger
on the immediate weakness of the General's position, the want of
money, but apart from a vague offer to harbour him if his enter-
prise failed, he did nothing to help Boulanger to put money in his
purse. That tangible proof of confidence had to be sought elsewhere.
The expulsion of the Comte de Paris had restored him to the pro-
fession of Pretender. He had now nothing further to lose, and at
Twickenham, unlike Paris or Eu, he had nothing else to do. The great
Conservative assault of 1885 had been successful enough to anger, even
to frighten the Republicans, but it was not a purely Royalist triumph
and in any case it was not much of a real triumph at all. The Republi-
cans might not be an overwhelming majority of the country, but they
had a firm grip of the Government. There was no legal way of re-
storing the monarchy, and the assets of a party whose aims are illegal
and whose methods are both legal and futile are bound to be wasting.
The Gomte de Paris would not be called back by a great popular
movement expressing itself through the normal political channels.
Boulanger was a far greater threat to the regime than were the heirs of
Henri IV and Napoleon. He might be Cromwell or, as Lord Lyons
had early foreseen, he might be Monk.
There were very great difficulties in the way. Boulanger was not
merely a Republican General; he was an ostentatiously Republican
General. He had far more to expiate than had Monk on the other
hand, he had far less to expiate than had Fouche, who had yet been so
serviceable to Louis XVIII. A more serious objection to using
Boulanger was that the tradition of the House of Orleans was parlia-
mentary and liberal. The appeal of Boulanger was not merely mili-
tary, it was Bonapartist in method. It was an appeal to the masses,
to plebiscites, appeals fully in the tradition of the heir of Napoleon, but
in complete contradiction to all that either branch of the House of
France had stood for hitherto. The younger Royalists, discontented
with the drab and fruitless counsel of the 'Burgraves', were not im-
pressed by this objection. Popular discontent was less with the Repub-
lic than with parliamentary government, and France would hardly

turn out a parliamentary President to replace him with a parliamentary


King. In the Royalist party itself there were many old Imperialists,
like its parliamentary leader, the Baron de Mackau, who had
gone
over to the Bourbons when the death of the Prince Imperial had ended
the chances of 'Napoleon IV.
To the plebiscitary view, the middle-aged Pretender in September
1887 announced his conversion. The return of the Kiqg would be
ratified either by a Constituent Assembly or by a plebiscite. There
was to be only one plebiscite; it was not to be a regular instrument of
government like the Imperial plebiscites, and the contingency that the
plebiscite might turn against the King was not contemplated. It
200
THE REPUBLIC IN
would be a new contract between France and its hereditary ruer.
There was to be a strong government and the parliamentary responsi-
bility of Ministers was abandoned. A Bonapartist paper was not unj ust
when declared that 'the Orleanist monarchy
it
incapable of
. . .

understanding the doctrines of the Empire is trying to find :i


way of
exploiting them*.
These doctrinal recantations would normally have mattered little;
they would only have hastened the decomposition of the Royalist
party had there been no movement of opinion against the est iblished
order. There was such a movement: and it was JIK am.it e in one man.
If the Gomte de Paris was to see any results for his dibits, in some way
or other Boulanger must be made an ally or a tool. As long as Bou-
1
anger was still on the active list of the Army and as long as he could
hope to return to the War Office by some deal with the politicians who
had got him out of it, he was unlikely to do anything so rash as really
to commit himself to revolutionary negotiations with the Royalist
party. But the appearance of Boulanger as a candidate in several
elections (against his will, he asserted, untruthfully and implausibly)
and the launching of a new paper, La Cocarde, made the politicians
resolved to finish with him. They first suspended him for his military
offence of coming to Paris without leave, and when the martyr was
1
triumphant in the first ballot in a by-election in the Aisne, they dis-
missed him from the Army. He was both indignant and demoralized
by this ending of his military career, the only public activity for which
he thought himself fitted and for whose honours and powers he really
cared. It was too late to repine; he could only recover his lost rank

by force; force in Parliament or out of it.


Other elections followed. In the Aisne, Boulanger withdrew; in
the Dordogne he was again elected and, finally, in the most industrial

department in France, the Nord, Boulanger for the first time openly
stood as a candidate. He stood on a platform of patriotism, of consti-
tutional revision and for the necessary preliminary dissolution of the
Chamber. The result was an overwhelming triumph for Boulanger.
The Opportunist majority of 20,000 became a Boulangist majority of
100,000. Nothing like it had been known since the triumphs of Louis
Napoleon.
Boulanger had already been in touch with the Royalist leader,
Mackau, during the Grevy crisis and, but for the delay in receiving
instructions from the Pretender, the Boulangists and the Royalists

might have combined during the presidential election. Always ready


with promises, Boulanger had allowed Mackau to understand that
he was ready to play the Monk, but his failure to get back to the War
Office forced on him the role of a Bonaparte, a Bonaparte who, after
1
At the bottom of the poll was the young Radical candidate, Paul Doumer, later
murdered while Conservative President of the Republic.
2OI
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
making his coup d'Jtat, would gracefully call in his rightful sovereign as
the Comte de Provence had hoped to induce the First Consul to do.
The adoption of the plebiscitary policy by the Pretender had won the
hearty approval of the chief ex-Bonapartist journalist, Paul de Cassag-
and Eugene Veuillot, who had succeeded his brother as editor of
riac,
the Univers, after abusing the General, was converted by the results of the
election in the Nord. 'Boulangism is ceasing to be a farce and be-
coming a force.' The editor of the most uncompromising Catholic
newspaper forgave the Radical minister who had, to the delight of the
Left, promised to make the future priests serve in the Army. 'The
parson with the knapsack on his back* had been a boast of the General's
that rendered him even more odious to the Right than had his conduct
towards the Princes. As the worldly-wise Arthur Meyer, editor of the
fashionable Gaulois put it, 'the General is the best weapon forged against
the Government; let us take hold of it without inspecting the hilt'.
And it was the converted Jew, Meyer, who found the way to get a hold
on the Boulangist sword. The General needed money, or rather his
campaign manager did.
The manager called himself Comte Dillon, but the Franco-Irish
noble family of that name refused to recognize this company promoter
who had learned his trade in the United States and had now set about
selling Boulanger to France, as he had sold stock to America.
Dillon
saw that for the great campaign he had planned, a campaign whose
methods were either praised or blamed as American, great sums of
money were needed. Meyer found the money, that is to say, it was
through him that the very rich Duchesse d'Uzes, a passionate Royalist,
was induced to subsidize the war against the Republic. The Duchess
was not the only backer of the General, for the great Austrian Jewish
banker, Baron Hirsch, subscribed handsomely to a cause dear to the
leaders of Paris^society. Who knew? It might open doors hitherto
closed to him, even though he was a friend of the Prince of Wales!
Dillon's position was difficult; He was a Royalist himself, but the

original Boulangists had been Radicals and the most prominent mem-
bers of the party were such enemies of the bourgeoisie and the clergy as
Rochefort of the Intransigeant, Eugene Mayer of the Lanterne, most
scurrilous of priest-eaters, Naquet, the author of the divorce law, and
Paul D&oulede who, though a Catholic and a defender of the social
order, professed the most rigid Republican orthodoxy. To combine
extreme Right and extreme Left in order to promote the cause of a
man whose word was worthless and who did not always even bother
to give his word, required great tact.
The Comte de Paris was slowly giving way to the pressure that the
Boulangists brought to bear on him, despite the scornful contempt of
his uncle, the Due d'Aumale, for his old enemy. Too open an identifi-
cation of the Royal cause with that of the General was dangerous to
202
THE REPUBLIC IN DANGER
the latter; and it was in the dark that the diverse elements of the
attacking army advanced. Only one thing held them together, the
belief that in Boulanger was the only weapon able to break through the
defences of the regime. Naquet, who had long preached revision of
the Constitution; Deroulede, who saw in the system a barrier to the war
of revenge; the Catholics, maddened by the renewed anti-clerical
threats of the Government; the Royalists and Bonapartists despairing of

legal victory; all pretended not to notice who their allies were, or, if tlnit
5
was impossible, to forget and forgive until the 'slut was stnni^lrd. 1

The first
step was to demand
the revision of the Constitution, and,
if that was refused, the dissolution of the Chamber. On Jmu .jth, the
Deputy for the Nord, president of the 'National Republican Party',
read to the Chamber a vague programme of reforms from which it was
not clear whether he wanted a Senate or not, whether there was to be a
President or not. What was clear was that he wanted a change. By
what right, asked the Prime Minister, Tloquet, did Boulanger attack
French institutions and demand changes? Where were the victories
that could cover such impudence? 'At your age, General Boulanger,
Napoleon was dead.'
There was, of course, no chance that the majority would oblige
theirenemy and, until a revolutionary situation had been created, the
obvious method was to make Boulanger stand for every vacant seat,
resigning after each victory and thus prove his claim to represent
France against the machine politicians of the Chamber. But the
Radical Boulangists did not like to commit themselves to one man and
one man alone. The memory of Napoleon III was too much for them,
so in the next election in the strongly Bonapartist Charente, they ran
not Boulanger but Deroulede. The Imperialists were ready to sacri-
fice their own candidate to the General, but not to a Republican

carpet-bagger, and Deroulede ran a bad third. The Boulangist


leaders ordered their supporters to transfer their votes on the second
ballot to the Opportunist candidate! That is, in deference to 'Republi-
can discipline', they went over to their enemies and attacked their allies.
This manoeuvre was not only absurd, it failed. The Bonapartist won,
because more than half Deroulede's supporters continued to vote for
him and most of his remaining supporters went over to the victor.
The prudent Eugene Mayer saw the light and resigned in a great
show of indignation. On the Left, only the really revolutionary
leaders remained, men whose hate of the existing order or hopes of the
results of a general upheaval blinded them to the way the General was

going.
The new Royalist affiliations of the General were the harder to hide
since Boulanger had discovered the delights of Society. He had always
been a climber and he was now dizzy with the flattery and adulation
1
'La gueusc' was the Bonapartists' term of abuse for the Republic.
203
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
with which he was surrounded. The pink, which was his emblem,
was all the wear; great ladies were delighted to be his hostesses; and it
was rumoured that he was received with semi-royal honours. The
General was delighted. His erotic activities had long been notorious
and there were now stories that suggested that he seemed to think that
a droit du general had replaced the droit du seigneur, but the great world
was ready to overlook many things in the predestined deliverer. The
aristocracy, despite warning voices from the elders, was convinced that
the Republic was doomed and their optimism spread to the diplo-
matic corps. Only one ambassador, it is said, refused to believe the
good news, and his reason was simply that the members of his very
smart club were all convinced that nothing could save the regime
and from many years' experience, he had discovered that his fellow-
clubmen were never right. The Pope, it was said, at first shared the
scepticism of the ambassador, and the Comte de Paris showed that his
own faith was weak by refusing the pleas of Dillon for money. The
Duchesse d'Uzes, however, had no doubts, and she gave 120,000
($600,000) to the Comte de Paris, all 'to be staked on Boulanger'.
The bargain was concluded at Coblence, place of ill omen for the
1
Royalist cause. If the conspiracy succeeded, the King of France would

repay the gift of his loyal subject.


The campaign had its sinews of war and it was vigorously pursued.
Again Boulanger addressed the Chamber and demanded a dissolution,
a formal act of propaganda only important because the violent en-
counter between Boulanger and the Prime Minister led to a duel, a
duel which, by every ordinary political rule, ought to have ruined
Boulanger. For the elderly lawyer easily defeated the soldier, and for
two days Boulanger lay at death's door. It was not the only shock to
the party. Boulanger was badly beaten in the Ard&che and the poli-
ticians were sure that their enemy was down and out. They spoke too
soon. Boulanger was a candidate in three departments, and Dillon
poured out the money of the Duchess with a generosity and skill worthy
of Mark Hanna. He won all three elections and the figures showed
the ominous fact that his increasingly open alliance with the Right as
yet cost him little on the Left. It was a complete revenge for the duel
and Boulanger enjoyed it, not with the chiefs of his party, but with the
mistress with whom he had been madly in love for over a year. While
the Republic apparently bled to death, Boulanger was in Africa on his
irregular honeymoon. That it had to be irregular was due to the
obstinacy of Madame Boulanger, who refused to facilitate a divorce, and
to the Court of Rome, which refused to aid the hero of Catholic France
by granting an annulment. Irritated as the Boulangist leaders were
by the amorous distractions of their chief, it did not seem to matter
much in the autumn of 1888. The Republic seemed doomed.
*
At Coblence the emigres of 1792 had assembled to invade France and restore the King.
204
THE REPUBLIC IN DANGER
The tactics of the Republicans were not wholly defensive. A
'League of the Rights of Man' had just been founded to resist 'Boulang-
ism and it was ready with a programme of reforms. There were old
political stand-bys like income tax and the election ofjudges; there was
the separation of Church and State, that panacea which had never
failed in the past to rally the townspeople in defence of the Republic
and Republicans and there was the revision of the Constitution.
After all, that had been the Radical slogan before the General had
stolen the idea. The Opportunists were quick to criticize th^ pro-
posals of the Radicals. Floquet, at a time when the Republican
majority of the Senate might be the only barrier to <i Bouhmgist
Chamber, wished to make a legal revolution easy. At a time when
the strength of Boulangism was being daily increased from the Right,
an anti-clerical campaign was to be undertaken in order to drive those
Catholics whose prudence had kept them aloof from Boulanger into
his arms.
The disunion in the Republican camp was equalled by that on the
other side. The 'National Republican Committee* was alarmed by
the patronage of a Royalist candidate whom Boulanger could not dis-
own. The Royalists of the 'Committee of National Consultation* were
alarmed by the zeal of all sections of the Imperialists for the plebiscite
which was to ratify the power of Boulanger or another. Boulanger
could only fall back on his standard tactics lies. He distributed assur-
ances of complete fidelity to all his nervous supporters, but the most
warm assurances were given to the Royalists, for on them he was now
completely dependent for money. Neither the Republicans nor the
followers of Prince Napoleon could compete with the Duchesse d'Uzes,
and the attempt to get the Empress Eugenie to contribute failed.
Her Majesty had no faith in Boulanger and even less in Prince Napo-
leon, and, in any case, before the final collapse of the negotiations with
the Empress the great crisis was over.
The complacency that Floquet had displayed in his ill-timed pro-
jects of revision did not desert
him now. There was a parliamentary
vacancy in Paris. Boulanger *s previous victories had been in Bonapart-
ist or clerical strongholds, or so it was asserted with uncritical confi-

dence. In Paris, anti-Clerical and an ti- Imperialist and anti-Mon-


archist, the true heart of France beat. An inoffensive candidate, the
1
President of the Conseil-G^neral of the Seine, was chosen to carry the
banner of the united Republicans. M. Jacques would be the new
Barodet. The Government quickly fixed the date of the election:
tanuary 27th. It was to be a short and decisive campaign.
The
were as confident as the Government, and all the enemies
Boulangists
of the regime in Paris rallied to the support of the General. Rochefort
and Eugene Veuillot; Albert de Mun and Granger; Catholics and
1
Roughly equivalent to the Chairman of the London County Council.
205
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
commmards\ the League of Patriots of De*roulede, the nascent anti-
Semitism of Drumont and his allies; the ex-Radicals, Naquet and
Laguerre; all combined in the decisive campaign.
Against the resources of the Government and the municipal political
machine, the money of the Duchess was poured out. In the seventh
arrondissement the Boulangists put up 1,500,000 posters, enough to
have covered all the vacant spaces in the district several times over, but

the game was to hide the placards of the enemy. The rival armies of
bill-stickers not merely plastered over each others' posters as fast as they
went up thus delighting the printing trade they fought in the streets
until the campaign became more like an American newspaper circu-
lation war than a mere parliamentary election.
Not all the political leaders of Paris followed Boulanger or the
certified Republican candidate. The Guesdists, in their gloomy
orthodoxy, ran their own candidate, Boule, but the action of the Gues-
dists was reproved by most other Socialist leaders as much as was the
desertion to the Boulangists of some of the Blanquists. Neither set of
traitors to Republican unity, it was felt, would be able to take many

supporters with them. Had not Paulus gone over to the Government
and provided a song to rival the Boulangist anthem, a song that
appealed to anti-militarist feelings, asserting as it did that 'the people
had never had friends in barracks'?
What Boulanger did succeed despite Floquet and Paulus? That
if
was not merely what the Government wanted to know, but what the
Boulangist leaders wanted to know. If he won, would he take the
obvious course, cash in on the plebiscite by making a coup d'etat or, to use
the Boulangist euphemism, that 'sweeping-out' of the deputies and the
Government which the country expected? The General would not
commit himself. He had been brought up to detest the coup d'tiat of
December 2nd. What would history say of him if he laid a sacrilegious
hand on the Republic? Had he not read in the Chdtiments:
France! a Phcure oft tu te prosternes,
Le pied d'un tyran sur ton front,
La voix sortira des cavernes,
Les enchaines tressailJeront?

Revealing his inmost preoccupation, Boulanger asked how could


one be sure of success? To risk infamy and yet to fail!
On the night of January ayth, the Ministers met in the ]lysee, and,
a mile away, the Boulangists met with their chief at Durand's Restaur-
1
ant, beside the Madeleine. Floquet was still confident, but despite
military and police precautions, there were signs that the regime was
ill defended. It was by no means certain that the Army would act

vigorously or at all against its former chief, and the Police was full of

Boulangists. As the results began to come in, the only question wa$
1
Now the chief Paris office of Thomas Cook.
206
THE REPUBLIC IN DANGER
how great would be the Boulangist majority. The streets round the
Madeleine and in front of the Boulangist newspaper offices were packed
with enthusiasts. They sang the Marseillaise; they sang the
Boulangist
songs. Round the lyse*e there was darkness and within it gloom.
G'est Boulange, lange, lange,
G'est Boulanger qu'il nous faut,
Oh! Oh! Oh!

The extent of the electoral victory justified all Boulangist hopes. A 1

march on the filysee was, indeed, an amateurish way of b< ^innino tl


revolution for which no preparations had been made, but on th.it in-
toxicating night, the hopes of the victors, the fears of the defeated,
showed that the ordinary rules were suspended. It would 1m ve been a
new Fourth of September, not a new Second of December.
Boulanger was not convinced; legality had paid him well so far.
He was not the only Boulangist leader to oppose the night march.
Deroulede had another plan. Boulanger was to go to the Chamber,
next day, he would be followed by 20,000 regular supporters and
200,000 others would follow them. He was to ask for revision and
dissolution. It would be refused, then 'Come out and we will go in.'
The General had other thoughts in his mind. He left his triumph-
ant supporters for a time; left them to join, so they thought, his mistress.
No one knows to-day what she said, indeed, no one can prove that she
was at hand, but when Boulanger returned, Rochefort reminded him
that it was a quarter past eleven. Outside the mob was roaring, and
among the demonstrators stood the detective ordered by Floquet to
arrest Boulanger if he made any illegal move! Boulanger' s mind was
made up and Rochefort had to make the best of it. Finally, Georges
Thiebaud looked at his watch, 'Five past twelve, I'm a bear of
Boulangism.'
2
The General made his way out of Durand's and was
driven off amid frantic acclamations. With him went Deroul&de,
trying to shake his chief's determination. 'The Empire died of its
origins.' 'It lived on them for eighteen years,' retorted D^routede.

At the lyse*e the Ministers were bewildered and then frightened;


elsewhere the leaders of the coalition so ignominiously defeated met to
discuss their humiliation, Clemenceau asking the ex-prisoners of the
Commune what life in New Caledonia was like, while they all awaited
news. A message from the irrepressible Floquet assured them all was
well. All was not well but the Republic was saved. President Carnot
slept in the filyse'e; Boulanger, it is thought, in the arms of Madame de
Bonnemains.

of the Right was about 90,000, Boulanger must have polled nearly as many normally Left
votes as Jacques; and since Jacques presumably got most of the Opportunist votes, Boulanger
must have been supported by the majority of normally Radical and Socialist voters.
Lc RonlancHsme est en baisse.*

207
CHAPTER IV

THE COLLAPSE OF BOULANGISM

the next day Boulanger not only avoided all revolutionary


ON demonstrations, he did not even go to the Chamber to take his
seat. If the chief of the revolutionary movement was idle, his enemies
were not. It was through an ingenious use of the rules of the game
that Boulanger had put the Republic in danger. The rulers of the
Republic could and did change the rules. Scrutin de liste was abolished;
it still had enough loyal adherents on the Left to make the majority

small, but it was done. Paris would never again be allowed to conse-
crate a dictator by her united voice. By prohibiting multiple candi-
dacies, the law now made impossible for Boulanger to run in every
it

department at the approaching general elections and, thanks to scrutin


de to carry his partisans in with him.
liste y The General was far
stronger than any of his supporters; that strength would have to be
spent in one constituency only. The abolition of scrutin de liste was
the abandonment of a reform preached by great Republican leaders,
and the prohibition of multiple candidacies was a direct attack on the
free choice of universal suffrage, but the Republicans were, for the
moment, cured of their mystical deference to that political God. 'It
is a question of eating or being eaten,' wrote Jules Ferry, 'and the
Republican party will deserve all the scorn of history if it can oppose
the revolution that is being organized with nothing but a fatalistic
reliance on principles.' What was wanted was a realist policy devoid
of encumbering scruples and Floquet had not merely mismanaged the
election, but he still clung to the dangerous project of constitutional
revision.
To resist Boulanger a sort of inverted Morny was required, one
who could make a coup d'ttat against the plotters of a coup d'ttat. The
new Prime Minister was Tirard, but the real head of the Government
was the Minister of the Interior, Cons tans. No one had ever accused
Ernest Constans of pedantic and untimely adherence to awkward
principles, for he was a political condottiere on whose commercial past his
enemies rather than his friends liked to dwell.
Gonstans had a sense of humour and was indifferent to the most
208
THE REPUBLIC IN DANGER
scandalous charges, whether of collusion in corruption in Indo-China,
or of tampering with the official rate of exchange in China. His
political speciality was elections, and it was as an expert manipulator
of universal suffrage that he was now The frightened
called in.
deputies trusted this technician; he was their 'fetish', said Ferry a little
scornfully, but then Ferry had so little reason to admire his colleagues.
On the night ofJanuary syth, Constans had observed the revolutionary
opportunity and, like Georges Thie*baud, he had concluded that it
would probably not return. Boulangism was weakening, but it I,,,d
seemed to be weakening before. There were those who said that
before Constans decided to destroy Boulangism he was ready to con-
sider an alliance with it, but the Boulangist leaders would have no
compromise.
The first move was against the League of Patriots; taking
advantage of any text of the code which gave colour to the
Government's action, the League was prosecuted. How were the
Boulangist leaders to be convicted ? It was certain that a jury
trial would result in triumphant acquittal. Fortunately the con-
stitutional laws of 1875 had provided for the trialof offences against
the State by the Senate, transformed into a High Court. There
was no doubt that the Senate would find enough law and enough
facts to convict the Boulangists. It was, as Clemenceau was later
to boast, a truly Jacobin tribunal. Just as the Revolutionary Tri-
bunal had found convenient to prevent such appeals to the people as
it

had marked the trial of Danton, it was desirable that a great political
trial should not unite on the same defendant's bench, a popular idol
like Boulanger and such orators as Laguerre and Deroulede. They
must not be given the chance to repeat the success of Gambetta under
the Empire with a living Baudin at their side. The way out was to
frighten Boulanger into flight. He was already nervous, and he got
Naquet and Laisant to write him letters advising him to leave France;
thus covered, he took the train for Brussels. The Boulangists managed
to keep this first flight secret and the volatile General returned next

day. With his usual frivolity he now agreed to let Laguerre launch
a fresh attack on Constans and that attack ended any hope of a bargain
with the Minister.
Circumstances were forcing both Government and Boulanger to
appeal to the Right. The new Prime Minister, Tirard, had appealed
not merely to Republicans but 'to all Frenchmen' to rally to the
Government. So it was time, the Right thought, that Boulanger
gave them some public evidence of his loyalty. With
such old pillars
of 'laicitf as Ferry and Challemel-Lacour courting the Catholics
with kind words, Boulanger might safely do the same. The mani-
festation of the conversion of the anti-clerical General to religious peace
was at first planned for the Ardennes. Boulanger was to speak at the
209
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
unveiling of a memorial to a priest who had given himself up as a
hostage to the Prussians to save the lives of some married men of his
parish. This was Thiebaud's idea; Boulanger would be covered by the
patriotic memories evoked by the ceremony, and the Ardennes was a
Conservative part of the country where applause could be guaranteed.
The General finally decided to speak at Tours, in a region where the
clergy were not excessively popular. It was, in fact, the constituency
of Daniel Wilson. The Republicans were prepared, when March i7th
came, to prevent the General's visit being a success. The school-
teachers, at this moment perhaps the only completely faithful body of
functionaries in the country, had distributed whistles to the school-
children, and the procession through the city got a mixed recep-
tion. Boulanger only gave the Catholics the standard kind words; he
promised tolerance and an end of 'the Jacobin heritage of the present
Republic', but those kind words irritated and alienated the Left masses
who had elected Boulanger hi Paris. Their faith was shaken; it could
all the more easily be destroyed.
In the next few weeks, the role of the ex-anarchist Naquet was
more important than ever before. He, the author of the divorce law,
went further than Boulanger in his courting of the Catholics, and, what
was more important, he encouraged or did not resist the determination
of the General to flee if his arrest was imminent. Naquet tried to
persuade his colleagues that the flight would please the General's sup-
porters. The working-men, he asserted, would be glad to see him too
smart for the police, but it was rightly retorted that Frenchmen would
prefer the General to be less smart and more brave.
Boulanger was getting less brave every day; preparations for calling
the High Court were well advanced; a new procureur-general, Quesnay
de Beaurepaire, known for his vigour and lack of crippling pedantry,
was appointed to play Fouquier-Tinville before the High Court. The
ingenious Constans indeed allowed a friend of the General to see the
warrant of arrest accidentally. The constant pressure told Boulanger;

took the train for Belgium and the Government with an amply-
rewarded self-restraint, let him go.

II

The General had fled very appropriately on April ist, and on

April 2nd the Boulangist newspapers tried in vain to treat the rumours
flying round Paris as an All Fools' Day hoax. The last hope of the
leaders was to induce Boulanger to return to Paris quietly and confront
the sceptical newspaper men. Laguerre promised that the meeting
would take place at midnight at the office of La Presse. Midnight
came, but no General; instead there was a substitute, a letter to Arthur
Meyer of the Gaulois, announcing Boulanger's refusal 'to submit myself
210
THE REPUBLIC IN DANGER
to the jurisdiction of a Senate composed of
sonal passions, their foolish rancour and the
unpopularity'. No letter had wrought such a change in French
politics since the days of the Gomte de Ghambord.
The resemblance with the Pretender did not end there; the agony of
Boulangism, agony of the Restoration, was prolonged by futile
like the

deputations to Boulanger in Brussels, in London, in Jersey, beseeching


him to return, to lead his followers, at first to victory then to a def- it
which would at least be honourable. Boulanger had now no ambition
that could compete with his resolution not to be separated I'mm Mar-
guerite de Bonnemains. He had, moreover, developed a view of
himself as an incarnation of the popular will that was as disastrous as
the divine-right obsessions of 'Henri V. He believed that the electors
would rescue him from his exile and restore him to his rights. When
the elections of 1889 resulted in a crushing defeat for his leaderless
army, the exile ceased to be Ghambord at Frohsdorf and became
Napoleon at Saint-Helena. He turned again to the Left, he declared
himself a revolutionary Socialist and sponsored a little weekly paper,
The Voice of the People, which preached this new doctrine, much as
Napoleon had devoted his exile to the creation of the legend of the
revolutionary pacifier of Europe. Boulanger's mistress was now dying
of consumption, and they left Jersey for Brussels, where she died on
July 1 6th, 1891. The few faithful adherents of the General thought he
might still play a part in politics, but his last link with reality was gone.
On September 3Oth he shot himself on her grave. In a note written
the day before he killed himself, Boulanger asserted that 'history would
not be severe' towards him, and his dramatic end evoked some easy
sympathy. The romantic S6verine said that he had 'begun as Caesar,
continued as Catiline, and ended as Romeo*. A juster verdict than
the lady's was the brutal epitaph of Boulanger's quondam protector,
Glemenceau: 'Here lies General Boulanger who died as he had lived,
like a subaltern.'

Long before Boulanger killed himself he had killed his party. The
High Court, as was planned, condemned Boulanger, Dillon and Roche-
fort to imprisonment in a fortress, but all three were safe in exile. The
trial made it easy to vilify the absent General, to reveal his sexual
activities, which shocked the elderly senators, and to imply that
Boulanger had used, for private and immoral purposes, the funds given
him for his campaign. It was difficult to prove an actual conspiracy,
for there had been no organized plot; that the Senate was still there to
in all probability, to the refusal of their
try the Boulangists was due,
chief to conspire seriously. The trial did not begin until August, and
it was too much to expect that Paris could remain at the white heat of

January till then. There were too many distractions; the new Eiffel
Tower, the most striking and attacked feature of the Great Exhibition
211
TTIK DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
which was compjei^Qj^ting the centenary of the Revolution; there was
Buffalo BUrf theife were endless celebrations of the great events of 1789.
When the elections came in September, the Boulangists were
defeated in advance by the alterations of the electoral laws, by the
vigour of Governmental pressure and by the absence of the General.
The Ministry had no illusions about the risks of allowing elections free
from all pressure. Gonstans took the matter in hand with his usual
skill. The Minister of Public Instruction warned the schoolmasters
c
that they were not to take shelter behind a kind of false professional
impartiality'. On the other hand, the clergy were threatened with the
rigours of the law if they forgot that a rigorous impartiality' was their

duty.
The Boulangist campaign was based in the country on an alliance
with the Conservatives, and in Paris on an attempt to repeat the
winning of the Left that had produced the victory of January 27th.
Boulanger met the Comte de Paris in London and the electoral bargain
was struck. Already defections had begun. Georges Thiebaud, dis-
illusioned by the cowardice of his chief, opposed him in his Paris
constituency. Worse still was the anarchy of the organization; there
were rival Boulangist candidates and the necessity of accepting Royal-
ists among the faithful was bitter to the surviving Boulangists of the
Left.
It is true that the fault was riot wholly Boulanger's. He was only
an 'agent of the discontented' and the discontents were so many and
so varied that only a most skilful driver could have kept from upsetting
a coach drawn in so many directions by such fiery horses.
Popular favour had chosen Boulanger: so what could D^roulede or
Naquet or Mackau do in face of that consecration? As Jules Ferry
said, Boulanger was 'a Messiah, a Mahdi'. Once he had become the
incarnation of popular hopes, it was inevitable that all the enemies of
the regime should try to use him. For a revolution, Boulanger was
not ready. Although an ill-disciplined soldier, he was a soldier, and
needed orders, and no one of his associates acquired enough ascend-
ancy over him to counteract his own timidity and the influence of
Madame de Bonnemains. When invited to meet the General, the
boulevard wit, Aur&ien Scholl, had replied that he would be with
1
Boulanger right 'to the i7th Brumaire'. Boulanger himself was of
SchoU's mind and in that scruple or fear was the final cause of ruin
for Boulanger and his party.
That ruin affected far more than the narrow circle of original
Boulangists. did not merely reduce the ambitious and courageous
It

Georges Laguerre to a life of provincial obscurity and poverty, send


Rochefort again into exile and end the careers of many minor parti-
sans. It ruined the political strength of the Conservatives. The Due
1
On the 1 8th Brumaire, Bonaparte had overthrown the First Republic.
212
THE REPUBLIC IN DANGER
d'Aumale, Gazenove de Pradines and the other old Legitimist and
Orleanist leaders had proved right in their forebodings, and the Comte
de Paris accepted the responsibility of his choice. In the General
Election, less than twenty candidates dared to run as Monarchists.
From this disaster it was impossible to save hope or honour.
For the Republicans, the narrowness of their escape was a salut.uy
lesson. Another important political lesson had been learned. The
rural classes had, in the main, escaped the Boulangist fevrr. A^ <Vy
supported the established Government in 1870 when \\ as th< K
it-
ipire,
they supported it in 1889 when it was the Republic. The dixision
between Paris and the provinces was marked, for the revolutionary
Boulangism of the capital was very different from the Conservative
Boulangism of the country. Only by violence could Paris have
asserted its old predominance. No tempting policy of revenge could
shake the resolution of the peasant not to be led off on adventures.
An apologist for Boulanger's hesitations on January syth, attributed to
him as a reason for them the fear that Bismarck would make war on
a Boulangist France. It is doubtful if any such motive influenced
Boulanger, but rural France certainly preferred a pacific Republic with
all its faults to a policy that might mean war. To war, Boulanger
might well have been driven by forces more potent than those that led
Napoleon III to Sedan; and a war conducted by Boulanger would have
ruined France, to translate into proper language the vigorously ex-
pressed opinion of General de Gallifet. The men who defeated
Boulanger were not all of them admirable servants of the State and, in
defending the Republic, they were defending themselves. But the
purity of their motives matters little; in saving France from the dictator-
ship of this shoddy hero, they deserved well of their country.
And for
the defeated party, even honour was not saved, for a Boulangist
Deputy, Terrail, who called himself 'Mermeix', began the publication
of The Inside Story of Boulangism^ With a treacherous candour, he
revealed all the General's duplicity, his contradictory promises to
the quarrels of
Republicans and Monarchists, the secret of his finances,
the leaders. 'Mermeix' had provided the Republicans with more mud
to throw than Wilson had supplied to the enemies of the regime.
Consistent to the last, Boulanger lied with his usual effrontery and in-
competence and the great movement of national regeneration ended in
ignominy.
1
Les Coulisses du Boulangisrru.

213
BOOK V
FRANCE OVERSEAS
Et plus en heur ne peult le conquerant regner, soit roy, soit prime ou philosophe,
que faisant Justice a vertu succeder. Sa vertu est apparue rn la victoirc ct conqueste.
Sa iustice apparoistra en ce que, par la volunt et bonne affection du peuple, don-
nera loix, publiera edictz, establira religions, fera droict a ung thascun, comme de
Octauian Auguste diet le noble poete Maro:

II, qui estoit victeur, par le vouloir


Des gens vaincus, faisoyt ses loix valoir.
Pantagruel.
CHAPTER I

THE OLD EMPIRE


I

1815, the British Government returned to Frame those parts of


INthe French Colonial Empire which were not needed for British
strategical security. That did not leave France much. Her most
valuable colony, in 1789 the most valuable colony in the world, San
Domingo, was now independent. A
few West Indian islands like
Martinique, Reunion in the Indian Ocean, Saint-Pierre and Miquelon
in the St. Lawrence, Cayenne in South America, a few decaying trading

posts in India, a few more on the African coast these were the scattered
fragments of what had once been a great colonial system. In the
generation that followed, Algeria, Tahiti and a few Pacific archipela-
goes were added. A beginning of African expansion on the Senegal
and Asiatic expansion on the banks of the Mekong had been made,
but there was little reason to anticipate the outburst of energy that, in
the next generation, was to create the second greatest colonial empire
in the world.
There was a natural connection between the defeat of 1 870 and the
renewal of colonial activity. As the hopes of immediate revenge grew
less, the more energetic Army and Navy officers became bored with a
life of preparation for an ordeal and an achievement that never came.

It was this boredom, frankly admitted, that drove one of the two

greatest of French empire builders to seek service in Tonkin, and less


brilliant and less vocal officers than Lyautey must have felt the same

urge. In the colonies a young soldier like Marchand could rise from
the ranks and enter world history. Africa and Asia were, to the men
of the generation that followed 1870, what Algeria was to the men of
the generation that followed 1815. It is true that this search for glory
and promotion on non-European battlefields was looked at askance
for

by many soldiers. 'If you were to bring me all the empires of Asia and
Africa .
they wouldn't in my eyes be worth an acre of the earth
. .

where I fought in 1870 and where the cuirassiers of ReichshofFen and the
Zouaves of Froeschwiller lie.' So, it is reported, 1 General Gamier des
Garets told the young Mangin. It was public property that Bismarck
1
By M. Lucien Corpcchot.
217
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
encouraged the expansion of French energies overseas and that in
French colonial controversies with Britain the normal German attitude
was cordially pro-French, so the numerous party that thought
good patriotism and good sense meant doing what Bismarck did not
want, was strongly opposed to a policy which meant the spending of
French troops and resources abroad and the distraction of public atten-
tion from the blue line of the Vosges. Moreover, colonial wars were
very unpopular, once the principle of universal military service was
accepted. It was not to die of wounds or of fever in a colonial war that
the conscript and his family accepted the blood tax. As far as possible,
professional troops, the Marines, the Foreign Legion, or native troops
like the Senegalese were employed, but in emergencies these were not

enough and each death of an ordinary soldier or sailor made enemies


of colonial expansion.
It was not as a substitute for battles in Lorraine that colonial

expansion was preached by the politicians. In the reaction against the


free trade policies of the Second Empire, the traditional mercantilism
of the French people was given free play. France, a late starter in the
industrialization of her economic life, was reasonably apprehensive as
to her chances of competing in world markets, and to win for nascent
French industry a closed market was a natural ambition. Even so
hard-headed a statesman as Jules Ferry saw through very rosy spectacles
when the economic possibilities of the new empire were in question..
Thanks to an empire in which French goods would have a preferential
right of entry, the industries of the nation and the welfare of the working
classes would both be benefited, or so it was believed.
There was much less reality behind another ambition of the colonial
school. France had no surplus population to export and, in any case,
few parts of the old or new empire had any room for white settlers.
The possible 'colonies of settlement' were two only. New Caledonia,
though small, remote, and hampered in its economic life by a tariff
system that cut it off from its natural Australian market, did offer some
good land, in a tolerable climate. But New Caledonia was used, like
early Australia, as a dumping-ground for convicts, and though many
of these were, like early Australian convicts, victims of unjust law or
political mischance rather than of their sins, their presence did not
encourage free settlement. As for the attempt to build up a colonial
population out of liberated convicts in Guiana, it never had even a
plausible case for presentation. In that tropical region, a liberated
forger or burglar settled on the land was, if anything, worse off than
,

when he was in prison.


More serious were the possibilities of settlement in Algeria.
Although the weakening of French authority that followed the war of
1870 produced the great rebellion of 1871, in fact the natives were not
only materially, but spiritually, helpless. The French conquest had
218
FRANCE OVERSEAS
lasted for over twenty years; it had been terribly expensive in men and
wealth for both parties, but it was final. In that long war, the native
aristocracy and bourgeoisie of the coast, so far as there was any, had
been swept away. On the one hand there were the conquerors, on the
other a cowed and demoralized population, cut off from the conquerors
not only by recent bloody memories, but by the far more important
barrier of Islam. On the one hand were the millions of the Faithful,
on the other the scores of thousands of invading Infidels.
Napoleon III, in one of his generous dreams, had thought t<> liml a
solution of this problem in juxtaposition. Except where the Kumpean
settlement was already in progress, the Arabs were to be in aim, lined
on their lands; Algeria was to be an 'Arab Kingdom'. He was too Jate:
settlement had begun. Behind the armies fighting in the marshes of
the Tell, had come the sutlers and the women. From these enter-

prising groups had come the first settlers, for they had discovered that
if fever and the natives spared them, men and women who grew

vegetables and were at hand to deal with the Army could make
handsome profits
l
The Roman precedent was ever before the minds
of the conquerors. Had this region not been (it was believed) the
granary of the empire? Where the Arab had made a desert there
had been great cities, Hippo and Gonstantine, Timgad and Lambessa.
The symbolic story of the conquest was that of the General who having
fought his way through a difficult pass, sent pioneers ahead to clear the
face of a cliff on which the achievement was to be commemorated.
On the face of the cliff was to be seen the name of the Third Legion!
With the Roman precedent before them, could the French forget
Gracchus and Caesar and leave the vast neglected country to the Arabs?
In any case, by using Algeria as a dumping-ground for its political
enemies, a milder version of Siberia, the Empire both increased the
immigrant population and concentrated energetic and hostile elements
on the edge of the Arab kingdom. Official military colonists of the

type associated with the reign of Louis Philippe; political exiles of the
Second Empire; energetic men (and women) who had seen a chance
to gain economic independence in the new territories (many of the last
being not French but Italians, Spaniards, Maltese); these were the
classes whose opportunity came with the fall of the Empire. For not
did Sedan destroy the authority of the chief patron of the natives,
only
but it weakened the prestige of the soldiers who, if not converted to the
the political and economic claims of
Imperial ideal, were yet hostile to
the immigrants. Marshal MacMahon as Governor-General of Algeria
had a which, a few years later, the prisoner of Sedan could
prestige

1
The early settlers had to be tough to survive the ordeal of life in a region as dangerous
as Kentucky's dark and bloody ground. In the village of Boufarik, now one of the most
of Algiers, between 1835 and 1841 out of
prosperous settlements in the neighbourhood
400 to 500 inhabitants, 58 were killed and 38
carried off by the Arabs,

219
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
not claim. What the settlers wanted above all was the access to the

great areas of potentially fertile land in Arab hands.


Eugene fitienne, himself born in Algeria and, for a long life, spokes-
man of the settlers, put their view-point with admirable clarity and a
fair degree of candour. 'Algeria . . . has an area equal to France's
more than sixty million hectares . . . this land is reputed to be the
most fertile in the world.' Unfortunately nearly all this treasure house
was in native hands. As long as they were allowed to keep their lands,
as they were under the bad old system of Napoleon III, they were
insulated from European culture and incapable of rising in civilization.
How was this deplorable state of affairs to be ended? l By making of
the mere tribesman an individual with his own legal name and legal
property. Property rights of course v/ould be respected, that is in the
case of those 'who really occupied land with proper title to it'. As
happened to the English peasant when his betters enclosed the common
lands, many Arabs who thought they owned land found that they did
not. It wasmade very easy for individuals to demand the sharing out
of land held in common, Such a demand presented a simple native
group with economic problems which it was ill- trained to face. An
ingenious dealer could usually find some shiftless native who, for a few
francs, would insist on a partition of the family holdings; once the
partition was made it was usually easy to buy up many of the allotted
pieces cheaply; in a few years all but the most prudent and tenacious
natives in the group were being introduced to European civilization
as landless wage-labourers on soil that, a few years before, they had
owned.
Buying land in this fashion became a flourishing business which gave
openings to the commercial talents of the Jews of Algeria. The Algerian
Jew had many qualifications for the work; he spoke Arabic, he knew the
country and, by the Gremieux decree of 1870, he was a full French
citizen whereas the Arabs were only subjects, with many legal handicaps.
The project of naturalizing all the Algerian Jews had been favourably
considered under the Empire, but it was actually put into effect by the
venerable Minister of Justice in the Government of National Defence.
He was himself a Jew and he was rightly confident that his co-religion-
ists would rapidly assimilate French culture. For the moment, how-
ever, the naturalized Jew, not otherwise unlike the unnaturalized Arab,
was an unpopular if necessary instrument of the modernization of
Algeria.
The economic results were striking. Where there had been brush
and swamp were now great estates. Once the illusion that Algeria
was destined exclusively for wheat was got over, the prudent settlers
who had acquired land cheap made money, for the phylloxera killed
so many of the French vineyards that the new Algerian capitalist
1
The confiscations following the rebellion of 1871 had helped a little.

22O
FRANCE OVERSEAS
wine-growers had little difficulty in ruining
many sections of their
French competitors. The French population of Algeria grew, though
not nearly as fast as the Spanish and Italian population. The old
pirate
capital of Algiers has become a great modern port; on the rocky site of
Constantine, glass and steel buildings of the utmost modernity crown
cliffs at whose foot primitive people still live in caves.
Like other backward peoples, the natives of the coastal airas <>f
Algeria bought civilization unwillingly and at a high pri( r. They
provided labour for a new ruling class of great capitalist farmeis m the
country and a ruling race of European artisans, clerks, businesM mm and
officials in the towns. In North as in South Africa, a Europe an society
was transported into a populous native society. The edifice built in
Algeria in the first generation of the Republic was -pJendid, but it
was a house divided. A European soeicty had been superimposed on
the native society; it owned all the capital resources of the country; and
ifa native bourgeoisie began to grow up, it was in the frame-work of
the European system that these lawyers, doctors, officials lived. Only
in the South did the native aristocracy hold its own, partly because the

conquerors, by the time they reached the edge of the desert, were less
ruthlessthan the men of 1830, partly because it proved impossible to
do without the native shepherds in a region whose wealth is purely
pastoral,and it proved equally impossible to break the links that bound
the shepherds to their hereditary chiefs. Europeans might be sleep-
ing partners with the Kaidy in their enterprises, but the kinsmen of
Abraham or of Masinissa saved themselves from the ruin that
befell the rulers of the Tell; where the plough could not go, the French
heirs of Rome could not go either.
The settler population in Algeria had more reasons to dislike
authoritarian rule in the colony than those furnished by the Arab
policy of Napoleon III. The authority given to the military under
the Empire was necessary in the frontier districts on the edge of the
Sahara, but unnecessary, so it was asserted, in the settled regions which

were simply three departments of France.


1
This claim was denied by
the existence of military Governors-General like MacMahon before 1870
and Chanzy after it, and, from the settler's point of view, normality
did not begin until Albert Grevy, brother of the President, became
Governor-General and proceeded to carry out the policy of 'attach-
ment'. This meant the breaking up of the separate centralized admin-
istration of Algeria and the 'attachment' of the various departments to
the relevant Ministries in Paris, general administration to the Interior,
fiscal matters to the Ministry of Finance and so on. Such a policy
meant the reduction of the Governor-General to the role of a filing-
clerk or a post-box. The departments of Algeria were to be governed
from Paris, as far as possible, like any
other departments. Algeria's
1
Algiers, Oran, Constantine.
221
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
needs and special problems were to be represented by her elected repre-
sentatives who would make their views heard in Paris, not in Algiers.
In Algeria was displayed in all its oddities the system of colonial
representative government at the centre which is the French solution
for the fundamental Imperial problem. From the beginning of the
great Revolution, this solution had been applied to the old Empire, and
each revival of Republican ideas had restored it. So, under the Third
Republic, Algiers was given representation in both Houses of Parlia-
ment as were, with one minor exception, all the colonies in existence in
1870. This system had more justification in Algeria than it had in
decadent sugar islands, or than in the absurd French enclaves in the
mass of British India. In the islands, representation merely meant the
selling by the coloured electorate of then* votes to the highest bidder in
a good-humoured and frank fashion. In the Indian settlements, things
were done in a more decorous way, recalling less a Pennsylvania primary
election of the good old days, than the auctioning of safe seats to opulent
candidates by Conservative Associations in the south of England.
There was no Boss in the West Indies as masterful and competent as the
all-powerful Madou-Chanemouganelayoudamliar who delivered the
vote of Chandernagore, Pondiche'ry and the other Indian towns. In
Algeria, elections were no more violent or corrupt than they were in
Marseilles, and there was all the difference in the world between the
representative character of a Thomson or an fitienne and that of the
successful bidders for the votes of the Negroes of Martinique or the
Brahmins of Pondichery. But the Algerian deputies and senators (like
the deputies sent by Cochin-China), if they represented a real political
community, represented only one interest in the Algerian community,
the settlers. The only indigenous community which could vote was
the Jews, and that did not conciliate the Arabs. It is true that the
"Arabs could acquire, by naturalization, all the rights of French citizens;
all they had to do was to abandon their status in Moslem law, adopt

monogamy, accept the full principles of the civil code: in short, by their
standards, cease to be Moslems. Few were willing to pay this price,
so that the vast majority of the inhabitants of Algeria were reduced to
an with no political and only limited civil rights.
inferior caste
The attempt to treat Algeria as a part of France soon broke down.
The deputies and senators from the three departments had, in fact,
many economic interests in common with the rest of the inhabitants
of Algeria, and they could not ignore the fact that the financial relation
of the colony to the metropolis was not that of a department in France
to the central government. they were anxious. to explain
Indeed, -as

to sceptics like M. Doumer on Algeria


that the fiscal burdens imposed
were intolerable, they were not tempted to deny this obvious fact;
The absurdity of the attachment system, with its false premise of
an almost cpmplete identity of Algeria and France, became common
223
FRANCE OVERSEAS
knowledge, thanks largely to reports on the
Republican authorities as Jules Ferry and Burdeau.
In 1896, the system of 'attachment* was reversed, the authority of
the Governor-General restored, and two years later a more significant
step was taken, the establishment of the 'financial delegations', consul-
tative bodies entitled to express local opinion on fiscal matters. With a
Governor-General in effective command of the local administiation and
with an increasingly effective organ of local opinion (that is, in the
beginning, settler opinion) set up, the fiction that Al^eiia was innely
an 'extension of France' was slain. Yet the results of olonl/aiion and
i

attempted assimilation remained. In Algeria a fifth of the population


was now of European origin. Government, education, economic life
was organized on French lines; there were many exceptions to the rule,
but the rule was that they order these matters better in France. The
worst iniquities of the new land law were done away with the era of
;

wholesale expropriation was over and the most indurated Moslem con-
servatism could not escape the effects of railways, roads, schools, mili-
tary service (which did not become formally compulsory for the native
until the eve of the last war)
. The economic transformation of Algeria,
the coming of a wage economy, of capitalist farming, of modern mining,
the rapid increase in native population, all ate into the carapace of
Moslem society. Yet, as the new century dawned, Algeria was still a
country of two nations, one on top and one below. Members of the
presidential suite who accompanied Loubet on his official visit to the

great colony could still be horrified at the insolence of the rulers to the
ruled, but that was only one sign of the barrier between the two races.
The native Algerian had been conquered, but he had not yet been won.
CHAPTER II

TUNIS
HE fate of Tunis was really settled when the French had secured
JL military control of Algeria. The Regency itself was defenceless, its
natives un warlike, its sea and inland frontiers open. Its conquest
would be a very different thing from the long and bloody war against
the warlike mountaineers of Kabylia. The French disasters of the- war
of 1870 made it, for a moment, seem likely that the Italians would
take advantage of the military prowess of the Germans not merely to
take Rome but to take Tunis, for by 1 870 the question of the future of
Tunis had been simplified. She would be ruled by France or by Italy.
On the one hand France was far richer, stronger, and was an immediate
neighbour. On the other hand, the connection between Sicily and
Tunis was old and the conquest and development of the Regency were
probably within the powers of the new Italian State, now that the
French had made the western frontier safe. As for the Tunisians
themselves, few knew or cared what they thought.
Like Algiers, like Egypt, Tunis was vaguely connected with the
Turkish Empire. Now that the great days of piracy were over, the
Bey was a territorial prince ruling over the old domain of Carthage.
Under pressure from Europe, one Bey had granted a constitution
which meant special privileges for Christians and Jews; he had con-
tracted a large national debt; in short, as far as his means allowed, he
had imitated Ismail Pasha in Egypt. His splendour, however, had no
such monument as the Suez Canal. Palaces, one of which housed a
harem more numerous if not more splendid than Solomon's, more or
lessmodern and decidedly expensive weapons of war, new taxes that
Western ingenuity had thought up these were the chief fruits of the
modernization of Tunis. Another Bey came who had no use for his
predecessor's harem, but could be influenced through a handsome
young man.
In the capital, British, French, Italian bankers, lawyers, adventurers
exploited the decadent Government; the Tunisian peasant paid more
and more in taxes and the Bey made vain efforts to play one European
power off against another and even' attempted to make of his nominal
suzerain, the Sultan, an effective protection against his fate. At the
Congress of Berlin, both Britain and Germany allowed France to know
224
FRANCE OVERSEAS
that they had no objection to a French liquidation of the bankrupt
concern. The Italians might protest but they could not resist. There
was a lively war of concessions, law-suits and intrigues between the
French consul, Roustan and the Italian, Maccio. Native discontent
against France was fanned by Arabic journals printed in Sardinia, and
under cover of commercial competition both Governments subsidiml
political rivalry. It was an uneven contest; and as soon as Fram c r< mid
find an excuse for intervention, Italy would have to submit. She n.^ht
and did show her anger by joining the German- Austrian al'Lun r,
but that would not get the French out of Tunis, once they \\CK- in.
A temporary Italian success in the diplomatic war in Tunis made it
advisable to act quickly. A Tunisian tribe was making :i nuisance of
itself on the Algerian frontier, and the patience of the Fix iicli authorities

suddenly snapped. An army crossed the border and the threat of recog-
nition of a Pretender made the Bey see reason. Three weeks after the
troops had entered Tunisia, the Treaty of the Bardo was signed. Under
polite disguises, it gave complete external and preponderant internal
control to France and, in return, ensured the dynasty its survival.
The speed of the first campaign was essential for the political sur-
vival of its
author, Jules Ferry. The Prime Minister, in obtaining
credits for the expedition, had assured the Chamber that 'the Govern-
ment of the Republic does not seek conquests', but he had refused to
give the assurances demanded by suspicious deputies of the Opposition
parties that nothing more was intended than a punishment of the
marauding Kroumirs. Thanks to the speed of the Army and the
feebleness of Tunisian resistance, Ferry was able to present the Chamber
with a treaty which, however much critics on the Left like Clemenceau
and critics on the Right like Cuneo d'Ornano might object, was certain
to be gratefully received. But Tunisia was not yet conquered; a
revolt broke out, mainly in the south, whose suppression meant more
effortthan the first military promenade. The Holy City of Kairouan,
the Mecca of North Africa, was occupied; Sfax was attacked from the
sea; Gabes occupied. By the end of 1881, the authority of the Bey,
that is of France, was restored all over the Regency. The 'rebellion',
the heavy losses from sickness among the troops and the widespread
belief in Paris that the conquest of Tunis was proving highly profitable
to financial interests of which Roustan was the mouthpiece, all made
the position of the Ferry Government difficult. It was, indeed, over-

thrown, but Gambetta secured a vote accepting the Treaty of the


Bardo. Clemenceau might see in the triumph only a Stock Exchange
.
affair; Rochefort, prince of all the journalists who 'private dirt in public
accuse Roustan of corruption and be acquitted of
spirit throw', might
libel by a jury; Tunis was securely French.
The new acquisition was valuable. In general it was fertile and
both more easily conquered and more easily held than Algeria, but its
225
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
political problems were more complex. Those very elements which had
been shipped off to Constantinople in 1830, when Algiers was taken,
were preserved in their rank and perquisites, if not in their power, by
the treaty. Not only persons but institutions like the great religious
estates were preserved from simple expropriation on the Algerian model.
Tunis, too, was more populous in proportion to its area than was
Algeria and offered less chance for settlement. Lastly, what European
settlement there was in the years immediately before and after the

conquest, was not mainly French. Italy might be excluded politically


but not the Italians, and as France was only a protecting power she
had to make far more concessions to the other European Governments
than she had done in Algeria, which she had annexed outright. The
Italians were very numerous in the eastern department of Algeria

(Constantine), as Spaniards were in the western (Oran). But the


children of these settlers were French citizens. They had to serve in the
French Army and they normally went to French schools. Thus the
son of an Italian settler was, in the next generation, to be famous in
French politics, but in Tunis a Rene Viviani might easily have remained
legallyand spiritually an Italian. Italy at first refused to recognize
French action in Tunis and when she did, she did so on her own terms.
There were not two legal classes in Tunis, natives and Europeans;
there were three, Tunisians, French and Italians. The French lan-
guage had not only to fight against Arabic, but against Italian, and
French enterprise had to compete with Italian. There was, it is true,
a natural division of labour among the Europeans. From Sicily came
peasant hardy, industrious, sober, able to live as cheaply as
settlers,
the natives and work harder. They provided a necessary labour force
for the development of modern Tunis, while France provided the skill
and the capital for great works like the canal that turned Tunis into a
port or created European towns like Enfidaville or the great olive groves
of Sfax. France, too, provided the spiritual direction, for the Arch-
bishop of Algiers, Cardinal Lavigerie, moved to Tunisia, built a cathe-
dral on the site of the citadel of Carthage, and made it the headquarters
of his famous missionary order of the White Fathers, who warred against
barbarism and the slave trade in Central Africa and for the spread of
Christianity and French influence. The main sufferers were the Italian
bourgeoisie, who saw the administration in French hands, with its direct
power over the jobs and its indirect power over the contracts.
Under cover of the beylical authority, order, health, finance, roads
were improved. The Bey was deprived of the power to pledge State
property and his subjects given a chance to accept the blessings of
Western civilization. In Tunisia, Arabic civilization was more deeply
rooted than it was in Algeria. The sedentary, trading Tunisians were
more sophisticated and better able to look after themselves than the
Algerians had been. For the moment, the drawbacks of thfe protec-
226
FRANCE OVERSEAS
torate system from the French point of view were ignored. The ease
with which French authority had been established and maintained
was in gratifying contrast to the troubled history of Algeria, and the
merits of indirect rule, of using, not abolishing, the native authority
were preached with conviction by leaders of the colonial party. In
other parts of the growing Empire, the Tunisian precedent \\.ts to be
rather uncritically followed.
CHAPTER III

EGYPT
some French sentiment about Egypt was awakened by the memory
IFof the crusade of Saint Louis and the Egyptian captivity of the holy
king, farmore was evoked by the memory of Bonaparte's expedition.
The France of the Revolution had awakened Egypt from her slumbers;
the Rosetta stone which made possible the study of ancient Egypt and
the creation of a modern Egyptian State by the Albanian adventurer,
Mehemet Ali, were both fruits of the French invasion. All through the
early nineteenth century, French interest in Egypt was lively. In
defence of Mehemet Ali she almost went to war with Britain; the
disciples ofSaint-Simon saw in Egypt a field for the application of the
technocratic ideas of their founder: and, in 1869, one great work
inspired by them was completed, the Suez Canal. In face of British
scepticism and hostility, the dream of Alexander the Great and
Napoleon I had been made a reality: and it was the wife of Napoleon III,
cousin of the builder of the Canal, who officially opened it. In the next
year, the Second Empire fell and an exhausted and humiliated France
could not defend the special position she had acquired. Worse, the
success of the canal attracted British attention to the country and it was
inevitable that the British Government should try to undo the harm
done to her position by Palmerston's mistake. The Khedive Ismail
was one of the Oriental rulers who were anxious to modernize their
countries, but the European financiers who advanced money to the
Khedive for railways and opera-houses, telegraph lines and palaces,
exacted an extortionate price for their services and the reforming ruler
made Egypt responsible for a debt charge of nearly 20 per head of
population. In the course of his rake's progress Ismail had been
forced to realize his shares in the Suez Canal, and by buying them
(under .
Government), Disraeli got Britain that footing in
. .

Egypt which she now needed. The British Government did not
acquire a majority vote on the Canal Board, but she was by far the
biggest individual shareholder and 80 per cent, of the shipping passing
through the Canal was British. Nothing could make Ismail solvent;
and his European creditors, whose claims on Egypt's wealth were of
course paramount, insisted on getting protection from their Govern-
ments. In France, their complaints were most heartily supported, and
228
FRANCE OVERSEAS
to save the interests of the debt-holders
became the main object of the
French policy. The British Government, less frankly and less uncritic-
ally, backed France.
Egypt was taken under the joint financial tutelage of France and
Britain, her finances and administration were reformed, that is, were
reorganized so that four-fifths of the revenue of the country could go ()
t

the debt-holders. It was a kind of condominium, but it was a limited


condominium. The interests of the French and Bri*'sh u editors,
though parallel, were not identical, and Britain had r direa p-.miical
interest in the future of the country through whose tenitoiy uin the
route to India. No British Government would tie its hands by making
a hard-and-fast bargain with France. Gambctta discovered this when,
in his short Ministry, he induced the British Government to consent to
the sending of a joint note to the Egyptian Government promising the
Khedive vigorous support against the growing Egyptian Nationalist
party. This party, with its anti-foreign bias, had aims which were
incompatible with the prompt paying of interest, but while Gambetta
was ready for deeds to back up words, Lord Granville had no more in
mind than the delivery of a sermon.
Despite notes and pressure, the Egyptian Nationalist movement
grew. It was directed against foreigners of all types, against the great
foreign commercial colonies of Alexandria whose immunity from
Egyptian law and whose vigorous commercial methods evoked resent-
ment, against the Turkish and Circassian officers and officials who had
most of the good jobs that were not in European hands, against the
powers whose solicitude for the legal rights of their citizens was seen in
an unkindly light by Army officers whose pay \vas in arrears and whose
peasant soldiers resented the crushing taxation necessary to keep Egypt
solvent.

growth of Egyptian resentment, there had been a


Parallel with the
marked disposition on the part of the Eastern powers to keep the
Western powers from acting entirely off their own bat. Bismarck was
not now disposed to be cut out altogether and, although German
interests in Egypt were trifling, a too close collaboration of France and
England was not desirable in the eyes of the great diplomatic juggler.
The solution favoured by the British Government was the use of the
authority of the Sultan and, if necessary, of Turkish troops to restore
order, that is, support the Khedive in what had now become an open
quarrel with the Nationalists. France was strongly opposed
to calling
in Turkish aid. It was no long time since Tunis had tried to shelter
behind the nominal authority of the Sultan and, unwilling since the
fall of Gambetta to take strong measures itself, the French Government

was now disposed to make the Egyptian affair the business of the con-
cert of Europe and anxious not to be involved in any enterprise except
as the mandatory of all the powers. Freycinet, the new Prime Minister,
229
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
had never liked the complete identification of French policy with the
demands of the bondholders, and in Paris the wrongs of the Egyptians
and the greed of the bondholders, like the corresponding themes in the
Tunis affair, were meat and drink to the Left. When the Army and
popular feeling put the native leader of the officers, Arabi Pasha, in
power for the second time, and when the authority of the Khedive and
the security of the bondholders were both in danger, a French squadron
joined a British off Alexandria. When native indignation was
expressed in a pogrom directed against the foreigners in the city and
the question of action became urgent, the mere hint that France might
be seriously involved in military operations in Egypt was enough to
provoke an outburst in the Chamber which moved the ardent Gambetta
to patriotic rage. The 'gang of lackeys' had revealed the moral feeble-
ness of France. 'Finis Galliae,' he wrote to his mistress L6onie Lion,
'we are ripe for slavery.' However Gambetta might rage, no one was
less likely to take a bold decision, to run counter to the feeling of
the Chamber than the former Dictator's right-hand man. Freycinet
defended his policy by stressing the danger that France would find
herself isolated with only British support, which would be no great help
if the great continental military powers combined against her. This,
too, was Clemenceau's argument; and on the other side, the prudent
Grevy thought it was more important that the restless Moslem world
should be taught that it could not successfully defy any European power
than that France herself should teach that lesson. If the British Army
and Navy demonstrated this important truth in Egypt, France would
benefit by it in other regions.
There was no support for intervention in Egypt and the Chamber
even refused the timid Minister a small credit to enable France to share
in guarding the Suez Canal. Both the enemies and friends of a vigorous
Egyptian policy agreed that this was a worthless half-measure. Frey-
cinet resigned and, although it was long before France reconciled
herself to the fact, she was effectually excluded from the country in
whose modern history she had played so great a part. The British
Government repeatedly announced that it had no intention of staying
in Egypt. After the destruction of the Egyptian forts at Alexandria and
the defeat of the Army at Tel El Kebir, there was no danger of resistance
to the Khedive and the British civil and military advisers who ruled in
his name, but the great revolt in the Sudan meant a permanent danger
to the Lower Nile and, in any case, deprived the Egyptian State of a

great part of its territory. To end the Dervish menace and restore
'Egyptian* rule in the Sudan now became the object of British policy.
Such a policy required money which, if it was to be furnished by Egypt,
could come only from revenues which would otherwise go to the bond-
holders. Such a diversion of budget surpluses was impossible without
the consent of the international commission which administered the
230
FRANCE OVERSEAS
Egyptian debt, and it was by opposition to British policy on this body
that France could best express discontent at the British occupation of
Egypt. This opposition in turn forced Britain to look to Germany for
support in her Egyptian policy, so that the Egyptian question divided
the two Western powers and drove one of them to seek in Gcnn.m and
the other in Russian aid, weapons in their war. France could do no
more than hinder Britain; she could not permanently impede lu policy
i

by mere legal sabotage on the Debt Commission. If she was to recover


any part of the lost Egyptian assets it would have to be by more active
measures. There was another lesson to be drawn from the Egyptian
failure. The new Chamber had overthrown Gambetta and Ferry and
Freycinet; it was obvious that vigorous action abroad was impossible
if the Chamber had to be kept fully informed of what was planned.

Ferry, at least, learned this lesson and in his next colonial enterprise
was careful not to come into the open; careful to represent each step in
his scheme as the last and, by such methods, to secure for France a great

empire far further from Europe, far more of a diversion of resources, far
less connected with French interests and sentiments than Egypt was.

By such methods the Chamber which had refused to run not very serious
risks in a country where, as the event showed, war was a military

promenade, was persuaded to vote the men and money needed for the
long and exhausting war in Tonkin.

231
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
had never liked the complete identification of French policy with the
demands of the bondholders, and in Paris the wrongs of the Egyptians
and the greed of the bondholders, like the corresponding themes in the
Tunis affair, were meat and drink to the Left. When the Army and
popular feeling put the native leader of the officers, Arabi Pasha, in
power for the second time, and when the authority of the Khedive and
the security of the bondholders were both in danger, a French squadron
joined a British off Alexandria. When native indignation was
expressed in a pogrom directed against the foreigners in the city and
the question of action became urgent, the mere hint that France might
be seriously involved in military operations in Egypt was enough to
provoke an outburst in the Chamber which moved die ardent Gambetta
to patriotic rage. The 'gang of lackeys' had revealed the moral feeble-
ness of France. Tinis Galliae,' he wrote to his mistress L&>nie L&>n,
5
'we are ripe for slavery. However Gambetta might rage, no one was
less likely to take a bold decision, to run counter to the feeling of
the Chamber than the former Dictator's right-hand man. Freycinet
defended his policy by stressing the danger that France would find
herself isolated with only British support, which would be no great help
if the great continental military powers combined against her. This,
too, was Clemenceau's argument; and on the other side, the prudent
Grevy thought it was more important that the restless Moslem world
should be taught that it could not successfully defy any European power
than that France herself should teach that lesson. If the British Army
and Navy demonstrated this important truth in Egypt, France would
benefit by it in other regions.
There was no support for intervention in Egypt and the Chamber
even refused the timid Minister a small credit to enable France to share
in guarding the Suez Canal. Both the enemies and friends of a vigorous
Egyptian policy agreed that this was a worthless half-measure. Frey-
cinet resigned and, although it was long before France reconciled
herself to the fact, she was effectually excluded from the country in
whose modern history she had played so great a part. The British
Government repeatedly announced that it had no intention of staying
in Egypt. After the destruction of the Egyptian forts at Alexandria and
the defeat of the Army at Tel El Kebir, there was no danger of resistance
to the Khedive and the British civil and military advisers who ruled in
his name, but the great revolt in the Sudan meant a permanent danger
to the Lower Nile and, in any case, deprived the Egyptian State of a

great part of its territory. To end the Dervish menace and restore
'Egyptian* rule in the Sudan now became the object of British policy.
Such a policy required money which, if it was to be furnished by Egypt,
could come only from revenues which would otherwise go to the bond-
holders. Such a diversion of budget surpluses was impossible without
the consent of the international commission which administered the
230
FRANCE OVERSEAS
Egyptian debt, and was by opposition to British policy on this body
it

that France could best express discontent at the British occupation of


Egypt. This opposition in turn forced Britain to look to Germany for
support in her Egyptian policy, so that the Egyptian question divided
the two Western powers and drove one of them to seek in German and
the other in Russian aid, weapons in their war. France could do no
more than hinder Britain; she could not permanently impede hn policy
by mere legal sabotage on the Debt Commission. If she u\s to over
i ( <

any part of the lost Egyptian assets it would have 10 be 1>\ m<n active
measures. There was another lesson to be drawn from the Egyptian
failure. The new Chamber had overthrown Gambeti.i and Ferry and
Freycinet; it was obvious that vigorous action abroad was impossible
if the Chamber had to be kept fully informed of what was planned.

Ferry, at least, learned this lesson and in his next colonial enterprise
was careful not to come into the open; careful to represent each step in
his scheme as the last and, by such methods, to secure for France a great

empire far further from Europe, far more of a diversion of resources, far
less connected with French interests and sentiments than Egypt was.

By such methods the Chamber which had refused to run not very serious
risks in a country where, as the event showed, war was a military

promenade, was persuaded to vote the men and money needed for the
long and exhausting war in Tonkin.

231
CHAPTER IV

INDO-CHINA

about the time that the Romans were conquering and romanizing
ATthe Celts of Gaul, the Chinese were extending both their authority
and their civilization southwards into the most easterly of the great
peninsulas of South Asia. Although the political authority of the
Chinese Empire was overthrown at about the time of the establishment
of the Carolingian Monarchy in what was becoming France, the cul-
tural mark made by the Chinese conquest on the people of the eastern
half of the Indo-Chinese peninsula was as deep as that made by the
Romans on Gaul. It was, in some ways, deeper, for there was no
nostalgic memory of a pre-Chinese State, no antiquarian cult of an
Annamite Vercingetorix; and whereas the Roman Empire disappeared,
the Chinese Empire remained, superficially not very different from
what it had been in the first centuries of the Christian era.
Despite a brief resumption of direct Chinese authority, destroyed
after a few years by native resistance, the real hold of China on the

kingdoms to the south was cultural. Chinese literature was copied and
political -authority was in the hands of a class of classically-educated
mandarins through whom alone the local divine monarch could exer-
cise his authority. Chinese ideograms made the literati citizens of the
cultural empire which stretched from the borders of the tropic Malayan
seas to the frontier of Siberia. Chinese ways of life and thought, Chinese

philosophy and Chinese superstition deeply marked the way of life of all
classes of Annamites and Tonkinese.
French interest in this region was not new. The religious possi-
bilities of the whole region did not escape the vigilance of the greatest

missionary nation in the world. Siam and all the lands to the east were
kept in view from the reign of Louis XIV on and the flag followed the
cross since, on the eve of the revolution, the court of King Louis XVI
was receiving ambassadors from Annam and French adventurers were
improving the military methods of a backward people. The Revolu-
tion put an end to this connection, but the missionary interest never died
and it was stimulated in the early nineteenth century by a violent
persecution of the missionaries and of their converts, a persecution that
232
PRANCE OVERSEAS
made the region as famous and dear to zealous
had been in the sixteenth or Canada in the seventeenth century. As a
Catholic and expansionist power, the Second Empire was naturally
attracted to Indo-China and by 1870 a series of easy campaigns arid
increasingly ambitious treaties had secured for France control of the
rich and sparsely inhabited delta of the Mekong, in whidi \\\is treated
the colony of Cochin- China. The Spaniards, who from their Philippine
base had aided the campaign, had been got rid of, and the existing
feeble mandarin government had fled. France had ac (j uired a valuable
territory and the chance to extend it. Itwas a minor Mexican expedi-
tion differing from the other in scale and in 'being successful.
The Republic
thus found herself in possession of a territory difficult
to defend in its present form and tempting the man on the spot to
adventure. To the west lay the decaying Indie civilization of Cam-
bodia and Laos; a far feebler copy of Indian culture than Annam was
of Chinese. To the north lay the Kingdom (or Empire) of Annam, a
feudatory of the Chinese Empire like Korea, but separated from the
suzerain power's capital by vast distances and encouraged to assert her-
selfby the weakening of Imperial prestige and authority that had
followed the unsuccessful resistance to white aggression and by the
weakness revealed in the long course of the Taiping rebellion. On the
west of the new colony was an aggressive Siam and behind her, a
potentially aggressive Britain. Within Annam, was the great territory
of Tonkin, easy of access from the sea, not well provided with means of
communication with the capital of the kingdom, discontented with the
rule of the Annamite mandarins and influenced to some degree by
loyalty to a deposed dynasty. And the great mother empire of China
lay like a stranded whale unable to defend her capital, much less her
extremities, from the outrages of the Western barbarians. She seemed
to be a great prize, religious and economic, for whoever should seize
her: and if she was too big to be swallowed by one power, each could
slice-off a convenient morsel. She would die the death of a thousand
cuts. It was inevitable, then, that the occupation of Cochin-China
should be only a beginning. In the Red River lay an open waterway
to the edge of southern China, and the country of the Red River tempted
missionaries, merchants and adventurous officials like that young
Protestant naval officer, Francis Garnier, who explored the region under
Napoleon III and, in 1873, began the Tonkinese wars by seizing, with
a handful of sailors, Hanoi, capital of the vice-royalty of Tonkin, only
to fall into an ambush and be slain. At another time Garnier might
have been avenged by the annexation of Annam, but the France of the
Due de Broglie was not ready for distant adventures and the Annamite
authorities escaped with no more than a vague acknowledgment of the
special interests of France in Annam and Tonkin and what the French
took to be an acknowledgment of their right to control Annamite
233
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
foreign relations. The mandarins of Annam were wise enough to see
their danger. They, too, took steps to prepare for renewed French
aggression. They punished, most rigorously, the native Christians who
had helped Garnier and they renewed their relations with their nominal
suzerain. Old feudal rites were now hurriedly performed, old tributes
paid; the menace from the south and from the sea drove the rulers
of Annam to rely on Pekin.
It was inevitable that this policy should lead to a violent denoue-
ment. A France which was everywhere recovering from the numbness
of the years that followed the war and which was especially active in
colonial enterprise, was uhlikely to rest content with the meagre gains
of the Treaty of Saigon. China, still self-complacent but imitating
barbarian arts in military matters, had refused to recognize the treaty
and was adept in polite evasion. The second Tonkinese war was cer-
tain to come, but it came in a dramatic form, for the French naval
officer sent out to Tonkinese waters was a romantic man of letters,

Riviere, anxious to be both a hero and a member of the Academy.


Like Garnier before him, he insisted on reparations for alleged or real
injuries to French interests and regardless of the odds attacked and
captured the citadel of Hanoi. Although Western arms and Western
discipline could work miracles, they were not omnipotent. Riviere,
like Garnier, was defeated and killed. This time no easy compromise
was possible, for the honour of France was engaged and behind the
feeble Annamites was the power of China. There followed a diplo-
matic comedy of a type less familiar then than now. France and
China remained at peace. Their ministers in Pekin and Paris
negotiated and concluded agreements, evaded or amended by one side
or the other. No war was declared, but French troops fought well-
armed Chinese regular troops whose presence was officially denied.
The 'Black Flags' were to the French dangerous bandits; to the Chinese
they were Annamite troops or citizens. In fact they were agents of
Chinese arms and policy. The war was laborious. The French
behaved with the reckless daring of conquistadores in sixteenth-century
America. With the entry of Chinese troops on the scene, the French
were no better equipped than their foes, but they had a discipline and
a confidence in victory that their opponents lacked, so attacks that
should have been disastrously defeated were successful. Moreover, the
French had command of the sea and of the rivers. They could move
along the coast and send parties up the labyrinth of water-ways, bom-
bard old-fashioned Annamite fortresses (designed a century before by
French engineers) from their gunboats and seize the nodal points of
Tonkin's transport and commerce. They could not keep the Chinese
authorities from sending men and 'arms into the disputed territory and,
as long as that was done, no number of brilliant French feats of arms
were of any lasting value. On the other hand, it was difficult to bring
234
FRANCE OVERSEAS
pressure to bear on China without declaring war. The other European
powers were in the main anxious not to interfere with France. They
had all a great deal to lose if she lost face in Eastern eyes, but Britain,
at any rate, objected 'to the French attempt to have the best of both
worlds, to exercise the rights of a belligerent and still remain formally
at peace.
The war degenerated two campaigns. On land, there were
into
brilliant successes followedby reverses when the French tempted fortune
too much. Under the vigorous command on sea and hnd of Admiral
Gourbet fortune had favoured the bold, but when soHiers replaced the
sailor, fortune was less kind. At sea, Gourbet was only too anxious
to get at the Chinese fleet, but on the one occasion when a Chinese
squadron came in sight, the pugnacious admiral was thwarted in his
plans for what would doubtless have been a complete naval victory,
since the cruisers of Admiral Ting were a good deal faster than the
battleships of Admiral Courbct. The Chinese saved their modern
vessels by flight, although a brilliant and completely successful cutting-
out expedition, which destroyed some old Chinese vessels at Foochow,
was some consolation. To coerce the Imperial court, Courbet landed
parties on Formosa, but he was far too weak from a military point of
view to exploit local successes or to redeem the local failures of his
subordinates. An occupation of the Pescadores islands was both more
practicable and more likely to frighten Pekin, but the real threat to
Pekin, the interruption of its riec supply by the Gulf of Peehili, was
long postponed for fear of international complications.
While the war continued, the French naturally took the oppor-
tunity of regularizing their position in Annam. They imposed new
treaties on the Government, leaving no loopholes for evasion; and once
they had successfully defended the capital, Hanoi, deposed one Emperor
and enforced recognition of their authority by their new nominee, the
conquest of Annam and its dependencies was formally complete, limited
by the outbreak of a general rebellion and the continuance of the war
with China. Not content with this extension of authority, France
forced comparable conditions on the King of Cambodia. A new
empire had been founded.
The success in the field and in the palaces of the new client princes
did not put an end to the war in the peninsula or to the opposition to
it in France. As the campaigns continued, as it became necessary to
call on the Chamber for repeated credits and on France for more and
more men, the opposition to the war grew. Ferry, now Prime Minister
for the second time, was unshakable in his resolution to impose a
victorious peace on China and the Opportunists still supported him, but
on the Left and Right, the enemies of the Prime Minister were vigilant
and bitter. It is possible, of course, that had Ferry foreseen and had
he announced the true cost in men and money of the conquest of the
235
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
new empire, Tonkin would never have been conquered. By presenting
the Chamber with a series of demands whose refusal would have meant
French humiliation in the East, he had his way, but at the cost of
increasing parliamentary irritation and of a growing conviction that the
resolute Minister was aiming at more than he admitted. He was able
to repel the assaults of critics like Glemenceau by pleading that too
candid a reply to questions would leave him at the mercy of Chinese
diplomacy, but as a treaty made in 1884 was, so the French Govern-
ment averred, evaded by the Chinese, the war continued. The alleged
duplicity of the enemy was to be punished; the Treaty of Tientsin
was to be enforced; but French patience was wearing out. It was not
evident to everyone that a satisfactory settlement with China was
not possible and Ferry was in fact negotiating such a settlement
when the blow fell.
The besieged French garrison of Tuyen-Quan was relieved in March
1885, and the Ferry Government had reason to hope that it could
silence with the double news of a settlement with China and
its critics

a brilliant military finish to the war. That was not to be. The cam-
paign which was now being fought on the Chinese frontier took an
ugly turn. There was confusing and disheartening news and, with an
election in the offing, the deputies of the majority were easily frightened
by Clemenceau and were ready, if excuse were given, to abandon a
policy and a chief whose, unpopularity might cost them their seats.
They were given their excuse. On the 2gth of March the blow fell.
A panic-stricken despatch from General Briere de 1'Isle announced the
defeat and wounding of General de Negrier at Lang-Son. Like the
Empire at the news of Sedan, the Ferry system was doomed by the news
of military defeat.
Unlike Napoleon III, the chief of the system went down fighting.
He faced the Chamber knowing that his overthrow was certain, a
Chamber full of bitter enemies applauding Clemenceau when he refused
to have any relations with the Ministers who were no longer Ministers,
but men 'accused of high treason'. By a great majority of Radicals,
Monarchists and renegades, the vote of fresh credits for the war was re-
iected. x The Government was overthrown and the crowds in the streets
were of mischief; Paris seemed to be on the eve of one of its 'days'.
full

Ferry's spirit was unbroken. He had confronted the howling


Chamber knowing that the preliminaries of peace with China were
settled but that, if he announced the news, the Chinese might evade
their engagements and the Chamber might, in its violence and panic,
throw away the results of war. and policy. He left the parliament
2
building accompanied by a young official who was appalled at the
1
Freppel, the fiery Royalist Bishop of Angers, refused to vote against the bfte noire of the
Catholics Who was defending France and Catholicism in the East.
*
Gabriel Hanotaux.

236
FRANCE OVERSEAS
sight of the furious mob barring the way, but Ferry kept his head. He
sent Hanotaux off to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to secure it against
any explosion of violence and walked, unattended, towards the filysei
to tender his resignation to the President. The last that Hanoi aux saw
of him that day was his tall hat moving steadily westwards along the
quai above the heads of the mob that howled 'Into the water with him'.
Although Ferry was overthrown, his work was done. Had lie not
been too sharp a bargainer he might have made a peace \\ith China
sooner, for the terms on which he finally settled \\ith the Imperial
Government were those which he could have had earlier. By securing
the acceptance by China of French suzerainty over all the territories
of the Emperor of Annam, he had made it certain that if France did
not lose heart, her authority could be established without outside inter-
vention and left to themselves, the natives could not hope for successful
resistance. Of this Ferry was well aware and in his retirement he saw
in the conquest of Tonkin his greatest achievement. It was not merely
a revenge for the loss of Egypt (although it was that) ; it was, he thought,
the creation of a great market for French industry, a remedy for trade
depression, a new and French means of entry through Yunnan into the
immeasurably rich Chinese market. The reality fell a good deal short
of the dream, but the reality was striking enough and the chief credit
for the acquisition by France of her most populous and richest colony
is Ferry's. But for him merchants like Dupuis, sailors and soldiers
like Courbet, Gamier, Negrier might have laboured as fruitlessly as

Dupleix or Montcalm.

II

In forcing their way into Indo-China, the French undertook the


administration of a civilization, or rather of civilizations, more sophisti-
cated and more unintelligible to Europeans than those of any other
French colony. If they had had little success in breaking through the
barrier of Islam in North Africa, that had not prevented the creation
of a European society parallel with the native society. Indo-China
offered no opportunity of repeating the methods which had created the
French society of North Africa. It was too remote, too vast, too
populous and the dominant race was too ingenious, adaptable and
be made French or safely left in its ancestral stag-
self-satisfied to
nation. The Asiaticworld of which Indo-China was a part was
not stagnant; it was beginning its great revolutionary transformation.
The French were hardly settled there* when the Chino-Japanese war of
1894 further weakened the traditional order in what was the spiritual
mother country of the Annamites weakened it to the profit of
another Oriental people. The revolutionary movement that had long
been smouldering in South China was rapidly spreading, and revolu-
237
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
tionary ideas and victories in Canton were bound to have repercussions
in Hanoi. The expulsion of the Manchus, following on the defeat
of the Russians by the Japanese, inevitably encouraged hopes in the
breasts of the Annamite Nationalists; and French policy for long did
little to discourage the growth of Nationalism.

In the oldest colony, Cochin-China, the withdrawal of the Annamite


officials with their tax registers and other apparatus of government
had forced the conquerors to set up a rough-and-ready system which,
since it was established by the naval officers who had conquered the
territory, was known as the 'admirals' system'. Cochin-China was
rich; it had a docile and sparse population; and the admirals made

not a bad job of replacing the old system. They established a school
for training European officials in the language and customs of the

country and, however offensive their rule was to the separation of powers
and other constitutional principles, it was suitable to the situation.
The Republic could not and did not tolerate such anomalies. Civil
governors replaced the sailors; the school of apprentice administrators
was abolished and the new and ignorant officials sent out from Europe
made no attempt to learn the difficult local language and were forced
to rely on venal interpreters and on missionaries for communication
with their subjects. French law was imposed, with disastrous effects
in a country in which the moral unit was the family and in which the
idea of the individual as the sole bearer of rights and duties was a blas-
phemous novelty. Cochin-China was added to the list of full colonies,
given a system of local government which, in effect, gave power to the
tiny minority of colonists; and, in 1881, the formal honour of electing
a deputy was conferred on the colony, that is to say, on the same tiny
minority. If the rulers of the colony had all obviously belonged to the

conquering race, the inert if proud natives might have borne it, but a
principle of race equality which was not observed to the advantage
of the indigenous inhabitants of the colony, worked to the advantage of
Negroes and Indians. The patronage of the colony was largely in the
hands of the deputies for Reunion and Martinique, with some allowance
made for the claims of the little French settlements in India. In
consequence a foreign law was administered to a conquered people,
not merely by the conquerors themselves but largely by members of
other subject races. Even more irritating was the role of the Indian
moneylenders, all being or claiming to be French citizens, while the
natives were only subjects. It is a common drawback to the imposi-
tion of European order and respect for formal contracts on native
makes things easier for usurers. Here the grievance was
societies that it

peculiarly irritating, for the moneylenders were transients, taking their


profits out of the country, not linked by any real ties either to their
rulers or the ruled and able, by their privileged political
position, tp
malte fte best of both worlds.
233
FRANCE OVERSEAS
It would be unjust, however, to suggest that all the faults of
French administration were due to coloured officials. The French
employed far more white officials than was customary in either British
or Dutch practice. This excluded natives from jobs which they
could have perfectly well filled, increased the discontent of the native
intelligentsia as it grew in numbers and did not make for efficiency.
The French clerk who was willing to exile himself to further Asia for a
!

salary of less than 200 1 a year was seldom, either >y character or
attainments, an impressive representative of the ruli:.<; race.
For all its faults, however, French rule in Cochii.-China meant peace
and progress in the Western sense of the word. The problems of
society were simplified by the clean sweep made of native institutions
during the conquest which had its advantages, \\liilc the natural
fertility of the soil was given an opportunity to yield its fruits and was
even increased by bold and successful engineering works.
Far more complicated were the problems of the semi-independent
kingdoms which had come under French rule during the Tonkinese
war. In Cambodia and Laos, the native civilizations were in an
advanced stage of decay. If Annamite society and institutions were
rather crude copies of Chinese models, Cambodian and Laotian society
and institutions were parodies of Indian models. A faint survival of a
caste system, a sacred monarch, a docile population, neither anxious
nor willing to advance or resist advance, ensured that French rule should
have no very formidable opposition to face. Indeed, encroached on to
the west by the Siamese, to the eastand north by the Tonkinese, the
inhabitants of the Indian states of the peninsula had some reason to be
grateful for the protection thrust on them by the French. It delayed,
if it did not postpone for ever, their economic and political eclipse at the
hands of their more energetic neighbours. The inhabitants of Laos had
even more reason than the Cambodians to welcome the strong rule of
the invaders; and, for the moment, French authority saved this decaying
society as French science jevealed the forgotten glories of Angkor-
Vat.
Where French diplomacy was skilful, where French agents were

tactful, thereverence of the natives of Cambodia and Laos for their


hereditary sovereigns was used to win acquiescence in the rule of the
foreigners. It was difficult, indeed, for officials bred in the official
irreverent French masculine education to take seriously the sacred rites
of the comic court of King Norodom. When Governor Thomson of
Cochin-China forced his way into the royal bedchamber in 1884 to
force the King of Cambodia to accept effective French control, he
behaved naturally but foolishly and the price of his brusqueness was a
rebellion led by the King's brother, Prince Sivotha, a rebellion which

though not so serious from a military point of view as the activities of


1
$1,000.
239
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
the Black Flags in Tonkin, was an expensive nuisance all the same. It
was not sufficiently appreciated that it was impossible to display public
contempt for the King and to expect, at the same time, that his subjects
should preserve to the full their traditional reverence. Under super-
the Khmers went their own way and the native officials
ficial docility,

were able to disregard the well-meant reforms imposed on them from


above, the more that a system which gave the kingdom fourteen Resi-
dents in eighteen years, was incapable of rigorous control.
In Laos, the idle, cheerful, incapable people went their own way

protected from their dangerous neighbours the Siamese and the Anna-
mites, on good terms with the Chinese who provided the necessary
minimum of economic energy, and isolated from the rest of Indo-China
by a happy difficulty of communication. What their white rulers did
or thought they were doing was no concern of the subjects of the petty
kings of Luang Prabang and was even less the concern of the mountain
people over whom French and Laotian authority was for long hardly
even nominal.
In Annam and its dependencies, the problems were far more com-
plex. In his deliberately isolated capital of Hud, the Emperor lived his
semi-divine life, performed the sacred rituals and embodied the spirit
of tink, the same spirit that animates tigers and elephants. An elabor-
ate civil service on the Chinese model administered justice and collected
taxes from the thousands of village communities of the Empire. As
conceited as their Chinese prototypes, the Annamite mandarins were
angered rather than impressed by the military prowess of the Western
barbarians. In the Emperor they had a sacred symbol whose value
they refused to see depreciated. It was in this spirit that they forced
an Emperor, who had received French envoys in person, to commit
suicide, and the lack of tact with which successive French agents treated
the incarnation of the dragon race who sat on the throne of Hue was
bitterly resented. So far as Annam was concerned, the French had
some appreciation of the situation, but they regarded Tonkin as a
conquered appendage of Annam, still loyal to the deposed Le dynasty
and ready to be delivered from the Annamite yoke, which meant, in
fact, the rule of the literati, the ruling caste of scholars whose prestige
depended on their knowledge of the Chinese classics.
Whereas the formal authority of the Emperor was acknowledged in
Annam, in Tonkin a system much more like the direct rule of Cochin-
China was instituted. The French overestimated the degree to which
the Tonkinese disliked Annamite rule or overestimated the capacity of
the Tonkinese to see the difference between one alien rule and another,
and they certainly underestimated the solidifying force of the age-old
system of government. In the long run, the natives came to share the
contempt of their white rulers for the old learning, and the examinations
for the mandarinate were abolished in 1915 with no great opposition.
240
FRANCE OVERSEAS
But an unnecessary strain had long been put on the patience ofthe subje< is
of theEmperor, bothin Annam andin Tonkin. Emperor after Emperoi
had been deposed, until there was some resemblance between modem
Annam and the Japan of the age of Genji; and there were other vacilla-
tions in policy which were inevitable with rapid changes in personnel.

(Tonkin had thirty-one and Annam thirty-two Residents in the forty


years between 1886 and 1926.)
These were long-term problems; the immediate problem facing the
French authorities on the conclusion of peace uith China svas how
that formal peace should be made real. Whatever m:i\ have been the
character of the original armed bands who resisted the French, by the
formal end of the war banditry had become endemic. One of the
young French officers engaged in the pacification of the frontier,
Captain Lyautey, was convinced that banditry was deliberately en-
couraged by the Chinese mandarins of the frontiers who profited by it,
as eighteenth-century British governors in North America sometimes

profited by piracy. After years of wearying campaigns, the methods


of Colonel Gallieni told, mainly because they were not merely military.
By his system of the 'stain of oil' an area once pacified became a
spreading centre of attraction for the great majority which wished to
live peacefully. Peace helped markets; loyal villages were armed to
defend themselves; and, by the time that Gallieni went off to pacify
Madagascar, the back of the military problem was broken.
There remained a problem which is not yet solved. In the reaction
against the forward policy of Ferry, the Paris Government showed its
biasby a rigorous economy. The newly-conquered Empire had to try
to pay its way. As little as possible of the cash and credit of the
metropolis was to be at the disposal of Indo-China. Starved of funds,
the French administration was able to do little more than preserve
formal order: Indo-China, for the first fifteen years after the con-
quest, was very stagnant indeed. From this state it was rescued by an
energetic Governor-General, Paul Doumer. That determined poli-
tician came out to the peninsula resolved to make his title of Governor-
General a reality. The separate colonies and protectorates were to be
forced to work together; their economic resources were to be pooled and
a great programme of public works to be launched. He created a
budget for the federation separate from the local budgets: he insisted
that Cochin-Chin a should pay out of her abundance a due share of the
total cost of running the federal system: and he was authorized to
contract a great loan on the credit of the federation itself. He made
effective the three great monopolies of opium, alcohol and salt, all very
lucrative, all very unpopular, all in varying degrees harmful. With
the proceeds of the loans and the rising revenue, a great public works
programme was put in hand. Roads and railways were built; the
whole federation was united economically and, in France, the contempt
241
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
for the possibilities of Indo-China that had long prevailed gave place
to a modified version of Ferry's golden dreams.
Modern Indo-China owes a great deal to Doumer, but in one de-
partment he was quite incompetent. He increased the dislike felt by
the natives for their European rulers, which was natural since the im-
mediate cost of his great developmental schemes fell heavily on the
peasants. Thje natives had other than financial grievances. They
were excluded from effectual authority in their own country, and
subject to the rule of a race whose egalitarian principles seemed to
suffer a sea-change- between Marseilles and Saigon. It was noted
that even priests in their churches sometimes drew the colour-line and
that even members of the League of the Rights of Man wore their
principles with a difference in Indo-China. As in British India, the
European women were declared to be an obstacle to the free intercourse
between the races that had marked the earlier days. The very absence
of colour prejudice in France, made the student who came home to
an inferior position in his own country, after some agreeable years in
Paris, all the more bitter and dangerous.
Yet there were improvements. The law, if it still in practice
differentiated between colonist and native, did so in less striking
degree. The worse abuses of the monopolies were attacked and modi-
fied in response to criticism in the press and Parliament. A few
natives were added to the advisory 'Government Council', but dis-
content was rife among the intelligentsia and, perhaps more ominous,
there was a recrudescence of banditry in Tonkin. To Albert Sarraut
fell the task of supplementing the material development of Doumer's

regime with political development. He came out in 1911 resolved to


go back to the more sympathetic policy associated with the names of
Paul Bert and Lanessan. He greatly improved the tone of the Civil
Service, getting rid of the white official proletariat, throwing more jobs
open to natives, insisting on a real knowledge of the native languages.
He resisted the French passion for uniformity and the conviction that
what right in Paris must be right everywhere.
is More place was
given to native law and to native administration of the law. What
Doumer had done in the material, Sarraut did in the political sphere,
and, on the eve of the Great War of 1914, France's greatest colony was
far more prosperous and far less discontented than even an optimist
could have anticipated in 1900.

242
CHAPTER V
MADAGASCAR
in the origins of the conquest of In do- China., tradition played a
Aspart in determining French action in Madagascar. In the reign of
Louis XIVthere had been designs on the island and the proximity of
the great French colony of Mauiitus kept the interest alive, but
Mauritius was conquered by Britain during the Napoleonic wars. It
was not French influence, that was active at the court of King
British,
Radama I, who
set about creating a modern kingdom in Madagascar
at about the same time that another monarch of the same race was
attempting the same task in Hawaii. Kamehameha had a simpler
task than had Radama, for Madagascar is the third largest island in
the world, larger than France and not much smaller than Texas. Its
population, though containing a considerable Arab and Negro mixture,
is predominantly Polynesian and Melanesian, and the arms and policy

of King Radama established the predominance of the inhabitants of


the central plateau, Im&rina, a people usually known as Hovas. To
the outside world the ruler of I marina was ruler of Madagascar.
English arms were not the only allies of the Hovas. English missionary
activity benefited by and reinforced the authority of the Queens, for
with brief intervals, the rulers of Imfcrina all through the century were
women.
Had Hova authority been really coextensive with the island, France
might never have got a foothold there, but many of the outlying tribes
were as little contented with Hova rule as the outlying tribes of the
Ethiopian Empire were with Amharic rule. It was possible for the
French to find client tribesmen like the Sakalavas, and from this client
relationship came those opportunities of intervention and those quarrels
over minor matters which led to the usual sequels naval bombardment,
landing-parties, a treaty giving France control of foreign relations and
outright sovereignty over the magnificent harbour of Diego-Suarez.
By the treaty of 1885, France in Madagascar reached the position she
had attained by the treaty of 1873 in Annam, but thanks to missionary
effort,the main commercial and cultural ties of the island were with
Britain, and the Hovas were almost as much clients of the London
Missionary Society as unwilling protege's of France. France had recog-
nized that Queen Ranavalona III was ruler of the whole island, which
243
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
was not true, and in return France expected to rule the island through
her which was optimistic. Even so, as experienced an administrator
as Le Myre de Vilers, one of the founders of Indo-China, could make

nothing of the division of authority. No reforms were introduced; there


was no security for European property and so no development. It was
realized that a real protectorate on Tunisian lines must replace the
barren 'right of protection', and had the Queen been more sensible or
less spirited, she might have settled down to the role of a protected

sovereign with nominal powers.


The Queen and her noble kinsmen, the aristocratic masters of
Imerina, continued to resist French authority. The man who was to
conquer the island, Gallie*ni, attributed the recalcitrance of the Hova
ruling class to a reasonable calculation. Their wealth came from
plundering the lower castes and from the profits of alluvial gold-mining.
'It was evident that in the long run, with the coming of an honest

administrative system and an incorrupt system of justice, it would be


more difficult to squeeze without mercy the lower classes.' Gallieni
added, with perhaps unconscious cynicism, 'The coming of numerous
prospectors in search of gold would very soon dry up the other source
of income.' However natural these fears were, the Hova aristocracy
was ill-advised to provoke French hostility, so ill-advised that Gallie'ni
attributed their folly to the bad advice of the English missionaries who
had assured their clients that the French were a vacillating people
who could easily be diverted from their aims. This was an error. A
French force under General Duchesne easily occupied the capital, for
the Hovas were not formidable military antagonists like the Maori,
and, although the first conquest cost the French over 5,000 lives, only
20 of these were lost in battle. The rest were lost by disease, and the
mismanagement of this expedition was soon a stock argument of the
anti-militarist party in France. The Queen submitted; her anti-French
Prime Minister was exiled and a more pliable one supplied. As it was
the custom for the Prime Minister to marry the Queen, Her Majesty
rebelled at this substitution. General Duchesne was not a very great
soldier, but he was a Frenchman and he saw Her Majesty's point of
view. His own candidate, he admitted, was 'already old, fat and with
no physical attractions. So Her Majesty screwed up her face and
several times put the question whether she was bound to have personal
relations with him. I had to give her the assurance that she need not'.
This question settled, the Hovas and the French might have settled
down, the more that French action in recognizing Hova rule as ex-
tending by right all over the island, actually favoured the rulers of
Im&rina. Madagascar was just Tunis or Annam all over again.
But not only was Madagascar not Annam or Tunis, in that there
was no central generally recognized authority worth conciliating
and working through, a protectorate of this type could not avoid
244
FRANCE OVERSEAS
leaving great power, economic and social, in the nand?oRatejf?nen-
tors of the Hovas, the English missionaries. France would establish
law and order in the great island for the benefit of two hostile
groups, the Hovas and the missionaries. Because of defective com-
munications, Duchesne had not received the order to impose conditions
on the Queen in time and he had made a treaty with her. It is just
conceivable that the treaty might have worked, even idler the formal
annexation of 1896, but the Malagasys, Hovas and non-11 ova" alike,
thought that their protectors were weak and undecided. There was
a general uprising. The real conquest of Madagascar was still to be
achieved and for that a new man was needed Gallieni.
The new commander was the most famous of French colonial
soldiers, trained in the hard school of the Sudan and Tonkin. He
benefited from having no previous commitments in Madagascar and
he saw his task as fundamentally simple; the influence of the Hovas
and thdr English friends must be destroyed. The non-Hova tribes
must be encouraged and, instead of vague professions of Hova sove-
reignty over the whole island, each natural unit must be won over to
the French side, by tact and firmness. French authority would spread
like a 'stain of oil'.
This policy involved a breach with powerful interests. To attack
English influences meant attacking the missionaries, and that not merely
meant alienating English opinion, but meant that Gallieni was suspect
of clericalism. To that charge Gallieni replied that he ostentatiously
kept himself apart from any Catholic religious observances, both
because that was his personal habit and good policy. He disliked
the Jesuits, who were the chief Catholic missionaries on the island. He
wanted the Jesuit Bishop replaced by a secular Bishop and other orders
encouraged to come in. He wanted the French Protestants to take
over the mission field of their English brethren, but he could not conceal
from himself the fact, however distressing it might be to zealous
Republican politicians in Paris, that the Jesuits were a source of French
influence, cultural and political, while the London Missionary Society
was a centre of English influence, and, in the colonial sphere at that
time, 'England, there is the enemy' was as much a dogma of French
colonialists as 'clericalism, there is the enemy' was of Radical politi-
cians. The properties accumulated by the English missionaries
through royal benevolence were taken over. Financial compensation
was paid but the roots of English influence were cut.
Another aspect of Gallieni's policy which was soon under attack
was his assertion that Madagascar was not and could not be a white
man's country, that it could not be turned into a colony for settlement.
*
Whatever was to be done, would have to be done through the native
and his varied institutions. Through these institutions the Army was
to work. It was, of course, to defeat and disarm the rebels, but its

245
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
main was to win them to acceptance of French guidance. The
task
Hova agents were to be got rid of (except in their own territories), and
after a decent interval, the Queen was deposed. 1 The island was
resolved into its natural tribal units and each unit dealt with on the lines
suggested by its own character and possibilities. By 1902, the whole
island was peaceful, although peace had been secured by methods dis-
tressingly lacking in uniformity. Lawyers, anxious to introduce modern
conceptions of justice (and, Gallieni believed, not unmindful of the
possibilities of a complete legal system set up in the midst of a litigious
people) ; Treasury officials distressed by the irregular character of the
tax system; all the political and administrative Haussmanns of Paris
and Madagascar were highly critical of Gallieni's policy.
Gallie'ni was unshakable in his own convictions and he was able to
resist political pressure. He treated the sickness of Malagasy society,
a despair of the future revealed in a rapidly declining population, by
using native society to work out its own salvation, "by a system of taxa-
tion to force the idle to work and by the use of this taxation for
obvious benefits to the natives. The tax, in many regions, took the
form of forced labour as education was made utilitarian, and the
Malagasy was taught to cultivate his garden before he was taught to
read Candide.
The success of this policy had its limits. The natives were not to be
turned into industrious French peasants merely by the creation of
legal peasant proprietorship and by compulsory labour. The popula-
tion of the island was quite inadequate for rapid development. If the
main lines of Gallieni's policy were never altered, there were occasional
failures to imitate his Gallio-like indifference to the volatile religious
life of the island. Governor-General Augagneur, who had been
Mayor of Lyons, was an enemy of missionary activity, and in his own
way as sectarian and ill-advised as any Methodist or Jesuit. The
hopes based on the potentialities of the island as a large-scale producer
of tropical crops, like the hopes based on an increased population
brought about by assisted immigration, were groundless. Madagascar,
if it was to be developed, would have to be developed by the Malagasy

peoples despite their serious defects as members of a modern economic


system. Ex-slaves, unemployed warriors, Hovas put down from their
seat of power these were the raw materials of the new society growing

up under French guidance. Some tribes failed to adjust themselves


and continued to decline. Others took advantage of the peace im-
poged by France and of the new roads and new markets to move into
the empty plains of the west, as the Tonkinese had moved, in the same
circumstances, to the south. There a great cattlerraising industry grew
up, and away from the depressing jungles of the east coast a new people
slowly found its feet. As midwife and as nurse, France had succeeded.
1
At the same time, the United States was ending the kindred monarchy of Hawaii.
246
CHAPTER VI

THE NEW EMPIRE


French commercial interest in Senegal dated from the early
THE
seventeenth century, if not earlier, and Saint-Louis and Goree had
been prizes of war in the eighteenth, but there \\as and could be no
effective conquest of the interior until the river steamer helped to
solve the transport problem. Even that invention was of limited
utility to the masters of the lower Senegal, since the river was safely
navigable for only four months in the year and the good river highway
of the region, the Gambia, was in British hands. It was the energetic
Faidherbe who, under the Second Empire, set about turning the chain
of trading posts into a colony, and the interest of the metropolis in the
colony was mainly due to the importance of its geographical position
on the way to South America. These advantages could not be ex-
ploited by the existing trading stations and the first step to the develop-
;

ment of this asset was the creation of the new port of Dakar, which, at
first, was merely a port of call for steamers bound for Brazil. As the
limitations of the Senegal were realized, the remedy for the transport

problem was seen to be the railroad, and in the first decade of the Third
Republic, plans for joining the Senegal and the Niger were drafted, but
their execution was long postponed.
In the scramble for Africa, Senegal was an obvious jumping-off
ground. Its hinterland, of desert and scrub, was not at first sight
attractive. A great French colonial official 1 compared it to a 'lunar
landscape', but once its plague was remedied, the soil was less sterile
than it seemed. The plague was human: slave- trading and tribal
war. For nearly twenty years the history of the colony and of its
expansion was the history of war with the Moslem chiefs of the military
tribes. Chief of these was Samori, whose defeats and recoveries, flights
and returns, made of him the local Abd el Kader. Pushing up the
Senegal and across to the Niger, the French encountered the agents of
other powers, chiefly of Britain. These agents, in their turn, were
moving inland to the domination of the great emirates of what is now
Nigeria. There were claims and counter-claims, and not till 1898 was
the frontier question settled. By that time Samori was a prisoner;
Dahomey had been conquered; and, after an initial disaster, a capable
*
Van Vollenhoven.
247 R
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
engineer officer called Joffre had occupied Timbuctu. Existing French
trading posts on the Ivory Coast and in Guinea had been linked up
with the hinterland and a vast area had been added to French territory.
It is Lord Salisbury observed, that a great deal of that territory
true, as
was light There were dreams of compensating for superior
soil.

German man-power with the aid of black troops, but not all officers
shared the young Mangin's high opinion of African troops. Even
though the Senegalese had proved admirable instruments of empire,
there were not many of them, and the physically and morally inferior
Negroes of the more tropical colonies were poor material for soldiers.
In any case, poor or not, there were not many of them, for West
Africa, wasted by war, the slave trade, and disease, was under-populated.
In all this region France was running a race with Islam whose
progress, whatever effect it had in raising the cultural level of the
natives, threatened toimpose a barrier to their spiritual conquest by
France whose impenetrability was fully appreciated by those who knew
Algeria and Tunis. In other ways, West African society presented
problems not easily solved by mere legislation. The abolition of
slavery in 1901 was more or less nullified by the survival of domestic
slavery in a society based on it. Only the prohibition of the slave trade
was effective. The lesson of Algeria was learned in that there was no
attempt to apply the disruptive principles of French land law and, as
far as French rule impinged on native economic life, it was in the bias

given to certain types of production rather than in direct alterations of


the social structure. In Senegal, to produce ground-nuts; in the more
southerly colonies, timber, palm oil, cocoa; and, in the hinterland,
cotton; these were the general aims of French policy and in all except
the last, the aims were achieved. The whole vast region could only
be effectually developed by being free from its reliance on undependable
rivers, and that meant great railway construction. The handsome
profits of railway construction in Senegal encouraged a timid Chamber
to authorize loans, and by 1923 the main railway system was com-

pleted. Not only was the hinterland provided with an outlet, but the
isolation of the natives was broken down. With the growth of the
railways went the growth of the ports. Dakar, from being a mere
p<>rt of call, was given a magnificent artificial harbour and, growing
like the prophet's gourd, became the capital of the whole of French
West Africa. 1 In an area ten times the size of France, but with only a
third of the population, a new civilization was being created.
In the basin of the Congo, French expansion was the work mainly of
a remarkable explorer and man of action, Savorgnan de Brazza, an
Italian by origin, an indefatigable traveller and a man of great nobility
of character. It was largely thanks to Brazza that France secured a
*
1
In post-war years the establishment of a permanent air service to South America has
made it one of the key positions of French international commerce and communication.
248
FRANCE OVERSEAS
foothold in theCongo basin between the Germans in the Cameroons
and the agents of King Leopold of. Belgium and Stanley, who were
launching that ill-fated experiment in international administration,
the Congo Free State. Officially an explorer under the direction of
the Ministry of Public Instruction, Brazza was in effect an agent of
French expansion. In the years immediately before the peaceful
delimitation of tropical African colonies by the Berlin Ait <l iHtyj,
possession was highly important, and treaties with venal nati\r chiefs
like Makoko, who had little idea of what they weir doing, luid yet a
real diplomatic value. The little band of explorers, helped by and
helping the French missionaries who were active in the region, secured
for France what was thought to be a very valuable share of the spoil of
Central Africa.
Before the spoil could be enjoyed it had to be prepared for use, and
that took capital. A tropical jungle, with communication only easy
by river, inhabited by the most disease- and superstition-ridden of
Negroes, the debris of an African society plagued by the vices of the
climate and demoralized by the slave-trade, was riot immediately
valuable, however great its
potentialities. It was natural, then, that

politicians should listen to the siren voices of company promoters who


promised a rapid development if they were given great concessions of
land and authority. Was not the same system working well in the
Congo Free State? Was there not a growing demand for rubber from
bicycle manufacturers and even from the new motor-car industry?
After hesitations and amendments, concessions were given and economic
control (which involved a practical exclusion of direct governmental
control over great areas) was put into the hands of companies anxious
to make rapid profits in a rising market. The profits were to come
mainly from collecting wild rubber, for although there were conditions
in the leases intended to encourage the growth of plantation rubber,
no one took them seriously.
The example of the Congo Free State was followed. Natives were
encouraged by payment in kind to collect rubber. If this did not
stimulate them to industry, flogging, rape and murder were used. All
the scandals of the Congo Free State were repeated on a lesser scale
and the country which Brazza had sincerely hoped to civilize was
devastated. The tormented natives rose in revolt and were easily and
cruelly suppressed. News of what was going on reached the metro-
polis and evoked angry protest, especially from idealists like P^guy,
who had seen in French expansion 'the introduction of justice, intelli-
gence, humanity'. As the real source of evil was the exorbitant power
of the companies, only the grossest abuses could be remedied unless the
concessions to the companies were to be revoked. It was a fundamental
maxim of French law that the State had to behave 'like an honest
man'; and the concessions had many years to run. They could not
249
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
be cancelled without compensation, and the Council of State was
certain to rule that compensation would have to be very substantial.
In such circumstances the liquidation of the companies took time.
In return for their vast temporary concessions they were induced to
accept much smaller areas in absolute proprietorship. The attempt to
develop the colony rapidly was over. In any case, the wild rubber
industry was declining and continued to decline in face of competition
from plantation rubber in the far-eastern colonies of Britain, Holland
and France. The cession of a great part of the colony to Germany as
part of the post-Agadir settlement, showed how little was now thought
of the treasure-house won for France by Brazza and, although the
Peace of Versailles restored the territorial integrity of the colony, it
remained a poor relation.
Itsdepressed condition was in humiliating contrast to the rapid
development of the Belgian Congo, now directly ruled by Belgium
which, both economically and socially, was rapidly repairing the worst
damage done by the Free State. Most striking proof of the stagna-
tion of the French colony was the rapid fall in population: the spread of
a deadly form of sleeping sickness reinforced the results of the growth of
abortion. Without a native population, the colony could not be de-
veloped at all, but all schemes for introducing East Indian coolies or
Senegalese failed. Only in recent years have improved hygiene and a
more sympathetic handling of the natives begun to stop the rot. A
'back-to-Brazza' doctrine has been preached and, to some extent,
practised, and although under-financed, public works at last are doing
something to rescue this Cinderella.
If in North Africa and in Indo-China, in face of old, elaborate and
the assumption that French subjects could be
self-satisfied civilizations,

fairly quickly and easily turned into Frenchmen was absurd, it was not
so in tropical Africa. There, primitive institutions, illiteracy, a low
level of sophistication and a mass of varying traditions and languages,
none of them strong enough to play the role of Islam in North Africa or
of Chinese culture in Annam, seemed destined to give way before the
superior civilization of the conquerors.
The simple-minded rulers of the early revolutionary period of
1848 exemplified this belief by making the inhabitants of the old colony
of Senegal, French citizens, not mere subjects, and giving them repre-
sentation in the national parliament. The Second Empire, here as
elsewhere, abolished parliamentary representation, but the Third Re-
public restored it.
1
The result was to create a privileged class in the
'fourcommunes', the native citizens of which had the rank of French
without having to abandon their private family law. Their
citizens

deputy might be an important figure in colonial politics and their


municipal organizations were theoretically entitled to all the rights of a
1
In the Chamber only; Senegal has no Senatorial representation.
250
FRANCE OVERSEAS ,

metropolitan commune. As the colony of Senegal grew, this enclave


was more and more anomolous and, without openly withdrawing its
privileges,
claims to share them were more rigorously scrutinized, and
if communal autonomy was left intact, most of the important depart-
ments of local government were in practice removed from communal
control.
Outside this area, the early government was 'assimilationist' but
not egalitarian. Local native authority was ignored and, although
natives were widely employed, it was outside the existing hierarchy of
native society. 'Chiefs' were made and set over giuups with whom

they might have little or nothing in common and the power of native
institutions was neglected and weakened by that neglect. The waste
involved in such a policy was seen by such grrrU administrators as Van
Vollenhoven. 'Nine times out of ten,' he wiote of the necessary inter-
mediaries between the white officials and the native mass, 'the inter-
mediary is there: he is the chief with traditional authority.' Although
the native authorities (where they really existed and had not been,
as in the Congo, almost annihilated) were used, they were used to
French ends, not to preserve native society but to hasten its elevation
to French standards. All the time the objective was to supplant
native ideas, as much as native techniques, with better ones. Native
arts and were, indeed, encouraged, but native ways of life were
crafts

only temporarily tolerated if they stood in the way of the conquest of


this barbarian society by French ideas.
The chief instrument of this progress was, *nd is, the French
language. Of course, in addition to local native languages, there exist
widely-spread native lingua francas like Mangingo, but as far as possible
all literacy is literacy in French. Even in the schools for Moslem
notabilities which have been established in those regions where Islam
has a hold, the main language of instruction is French, with only the
necessary minimum of Arabic for Koranic studies. The whole school
system is designed to produce a French-speaking class useful to the
Administration and a vehicle for the transmission of French ideas. 'To
5
instruct the masses and discover and bring out an elite is the basis of
French educational policy according to a leading official. 1
The com-
plete absence of a colour line in education, which means that children
of the same class are educated together, without regard to race, makes
this a practicable policy as it would not be in a British colony. Yet
there are serious limitations on the degree to which a policy of assimila-
tion has as yet succeeded. As native authorities are far more the agents
of central governments than initiators of policy, and as all high posts are
in French hands, the millions of Africans are in fact governed by a
handful of officials. Nor is the representation of Senegal in Parliament
any real remedy. Not only are the four communes a tiny oligarchical
1 Governor-General Garde.
251
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
community, but comparatively little colonial legislation passes through
Parliament anyway, as the President of the Republic is, for most
purposes except finance, a law-maker for the colonies. It is, theoret-
ically, not very difficult for a native of education or official rank to
become a French citizen, but in fact only 2,000 or so have done so, and
the great enterprise of Europeanizing so many millions of Africans is
directed from the top.
still The school and the Army, these are the
main instruments of this policy, and in both of them the African himself
is at best seldom more than under-master or a non-commissioned officer.
But true to the Roman precedent that has haunted French colonial
policy, France is trying to make of barbarians, men of the modern
world if not complete Frenchmen.
The expansion from Senegal had, by the end of the nineteenth
century, extended French authority over all the West African hinterland
and to various sections of the coast. It was natural that this great
French domain should be given a common government, as it was
natural that Indo-China should be given one. A Governor-General
was set up at the head of eight (now seven) colonies in what was styled
a 'federation'. It was not a true federation, much less of a federation
than Indo-China was. There were no authorities like the white colon-
ists in Cochin-China or the Emperor in Annam to limit the authority

of the Governor-General, and it is more realistic to think of the Gov-


ernor-General delegating authority to the governors of the colonies and
permitting them some local financial autonomy, than to think of the
federal units delegatingany authority to the Centre. A corresponding
system was set up for equatorial Africa, but that poor and neglected
region was in no position to work a federal system, and its local units
were shifted about as changes of policy or financial stringency dictated.
It was not until 1894 that the growth of the empire forced the
creation of a permanent Ministry of the Colonies, and that department,
it should be remembered, has no authority, even to-day, over North

Africa. Needless to say, the Colonial Ministry, like every other, suffered
from the musical chairs of French politics. It was difficult for a
Minister with only a few months in office to think out and impossible
for him to apply a policy, especially as he might be Minister merely as

part of some elaborate political combination. He was under the


constant inspection of colonial deputies and senators and harassed
by many different interests. It was notorious that colonial posts were
often filled, from the highest to the lowest ranks, with men whose claims
were political in the narrow sense of the word. Even the office of
Governor was used in this fashion. As late as 1911, an energetic
Minister * found the cadres of this rank full of 'elderly gentlemen who*
had been planted there in the early days of the creation of our empire
in return for electoral services that they had rendered at B6ziers or

iMenimy.
25*
FRANCE OVERSEAS
Chatcauroux*. They were long absent from their posts and, as in the
eighteenth-century British Empire, it was customary to have the work
done on the spot by a deputy, while the nominal governor drew his
salary athome.
was fortunate that neither Ministers nor Governors were the only
It
or the main makers and executants of policy. A 'superior colonial
1
council', representing not merely official, but unofficial opinion in the
colonies (normally, of course, white unofficial opinion;, \\as and is a
check on mere ignorance and on bad faith. A moir intriestmo, indeed
a unique institution, is that of the inspectorate. These jnissi dominid
have no parallel in other colonial systems, although individual officials
sometimes fill that role by special commission. 2 These officials have
the largest powers of inspection and can corimancl any services needed
for the purpose of their investigations from the local civil and
military
authorities, but they can give no orders and cannot occupy any ad-
ministrative post. Every French colonial administration knows that
every three years or so it will undergo a rigorous investigation by ex-
perts, with no local axe to grind, but with very great and varied ex-
perience of all parts of the Empire. In Paris, a Minister or a great
the Ministry has always at hand a mass of critically sifted
official in
information which enables him to contrast like things with like and
makes possible that minimum of efficiency in services which the same
system produces in English local government.
In Africa, as elsewhere in the Empire, France has been far more
willing to devolve financial power than political power. Where identi-
fiable bodies can be found or created whose opinion on economic and
financial questions would be of value, chambers of commerce, notables,
or the like, they are usually given a chance to make their views heard.
If these bodies have no real powers except that of publicity and pressure,
these powers in a system whose central government is democratic are
not negligible.
In its sixty-odd years of existence, the new French Empire has
undergone many changes, nearly all for the better. After the first
heroic years, there was a let-down both in personnel and policy;
politics weakened the administration and too hasty
measures to exploit
the economic resources of the colonies led to great waste and, in some
cases, to great scandals. There has been in the last thirty years a very
marked improvement in the governing personnel and a corresponding
improvement in the intelligence of the policy carried out. The passion
for mere uniformity that provided Saigon with the handsome and

absurdly ill-designed barracks that young Lyautey saw, that rode


roughshod over native custom and governed ancient peoples in the
1
Now known as the 'Superior Council of Overseas France'.
1
In recent times the work of Sir Alan Pirn in various British colonies has been like that
of a French inspector.

253
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
spirit of M. Homais, is gone. Indeed, in sympathetic understanding
of the cultural achievement of their subjects, the French have set a
good example to other peoples. It may be true that French officials
learn in Paris more of the philology of the ancient Khmer tongue than
any command of current speech that will be of use to them in Cam-
bodia, but they are less likely to have a philistine contempt for their
adminisfrjs. The comparative immunity of the French from vulgar
colour prejudice is a great psychological asset, combined as it is with a
firm belief that any people, with time and trouble, can be trained to
appreciate the highest of civilizations, i.e. French civilization.
The rigorous protectionist policy imposed on all parts of the
Empire which are not covered by international treaties, on the whole
works to the disadvantage of the colonies, although, of course, special
colonial interests gain by their protected market in France. Yet, as
France has become more and more industrialized, her colonies have
suffered less than they did from their compulsory confinement to the
resources of French manufacturers. The trend of the world has been
towards those closed economic systems of which Ferry and the early
colonial school dreamed. The long period of investment is now
beginning to show results in Indo-Chinese rubber and in Sudanese cotton.
Great capital investments, like the Tonkinese and African railways,
have been indeed too systematically planned, with too much of an eye
on imperial communication and too little on immediate economic
needs. But they have been effective in breaking the cake of custom
and, like military service, in forcibly introducing backward peoples to
modern civilization, in its best and worst aspects, to schools and hospi-
tals, to alcoholism and tuberculosis. They have helped to create a
common culture on the Senegal and to make easy the migration of
hardy Tonkinese from their over-populated home to empty Cochin-
China or the rich lands of the lotus-eating peoples of Laos. The hope
of Frenchifying the sixty million Negroes, Arabs, Annamites and the
rest is a dream, but when the French Empire goes the way of all

empires, it may leave a spiritual and cultural mark on its former


subjects more like that left by Rome and less like that left by Carthage
than could be safely predicted of some rival colonizing powers.

254
BOOK VI

THE REPUBLIC SAVED


J'ai nourri sous FEmpire, dans 1'amour dr hi Kcpiibliquo. *Elle est la
et

justice', me mon pere, professeur de rhetoriqnr an lyccr do Saint-Omer. II


disait
ne la connaissait pas. Elle n'est pas la justice. Mais t lie rst la facilite.
l
;
k/vNcn, VOrme du Mail.
CHAPTER I

THE 'RALLIEMENT
I

a tribute to the power of Boulangism that, for a moment, it shook


Iris
the confidence of Pope Leo XITI in the permanence of the Third
Republic and halted, though not fur long, his design of freeing the
living body of the Church of France from the corpse of monarchy.
Ever since he succeeded to the throne and the meagre assets of the
policy of Pius IX, Leo XIII had contemplated, like a new Ezekiel, the
valley of dry bones of French Royalist politics and had decided that
(barring a political miracle) the cause of the Most Christian King was
as dead as that of the Most Serene Republic of Venice. The ignomin-
ious collapse of the conspiracy cleared the way for the long-matured
papal plans and, if that was possible, increased the papal contempt for
the tactics and judgment of the French Conservative politicians.
As Pope Leo saw the problem, France was a country which had
determined, however regrettably, to abandon its ancient and modern
dynasties. The Houses of Bonaparte and Bourbon were equally things
of the past, and the Papacy, which had existed long before either of the
rival families, should imitate, in the nineteenth century, the policy of
the eighth. As Pope Zacharias had sanctioned the transfer of the
crown of the Franks from the House of Clovis to the House of Pepin,
a later Pope could ratify the definitive exclusion from power of the
two families that had succeeded the House of Pepin. But although
there was still a good deal of popular Bonapartism, and although the
higher ranks of the Army and Navy had a large number of command-
ers who had served Napoleon III and would gladly have served

'Napoleon IV, 'Napoleon IV had died before reigning. It was, not


with the Bonapartes that the Pope was concerned, and they had, in
most of their leaders, like Mackau, Paul de Cassagnac and
fact, lost
Baron Tristan Lambert, to the Royalist cause. The claims of the
Bourbons were more serious. Most of the Conservative leaders in
France were aiming at the restoration of the Comte de Paris. In this
aim they had the sympathy of most active Catholics, priests and laymen
alike. The Republic had become identified in the minds of its friends
and enemies with hostility to the Church.
257
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
In consequence, the Church was on the wrong side of the fence in
France, constantly harassed in minor ways and unable to halt the
constant drift of governmental policy towards a position of definite
hostility. Pope Leo, who had to reconcile himself to the permanent
war between his own Government and the usurping Govern-
state of
ment of the King of Italy in Rome, was not so enamoured of the
situation as to reconcile himself to being equally alienated from the
Government of France.
Pope Leo, if given less to illusions than his predecessor, was, like

him, unwilling to recognize that the papal temporal power was lost
for ever. The Italian State was poor, threatened by revolution, a
parvenu treated with condescending patronage by its allies, Germany
and Austria. If there was a general European war, or even a pro-
longed the papal diplomats thought that the whole rickety
crisis,
structure would collapse and, from the ruins, the Pope might recover,
if not the old Papal State from sea to sea that had been partitioned in

1860, at least the territory lost in 1870. Such dreams necessarily in-
volved taking a kindly view of the policy of the French Republic which
was on exceedingly bad terms with Italy and undoubtedly ready, rf
the worst came to the worst, to use the
Pope against the Italian State.
Such an alliancewould be more natural and much easier if Pope and
Republic were on better terms. So, apart from his realistic contempt
for the political folly of the Royalists, the Pope had his own reasons for

wishing to make a deal with the infidel Republic. A successful ending


of the feud between Church and State, the penetration of the Repub-
lican governing class by French Catholics, would be good for the
Church of France and for the territorial policy of the Papacy.
The most important reason, from the point of view of the French
Church, for a change of policy, was the need for an ending of the
repeated sacrifices of Catholic interests to the lost cause of the Most
Christian King. This was certainly the view of the most prominent
member of the French episcopate, Cardinal Lavigerie, Archbishop of
Algiers and of Carthage, the only French bishop of international
renown. His foundation of the White Fathers had spread his fame all
over the Catholic world and, as a leader in the war on the African
slave-trade, he was known far outside the circles of the faithful. In
Algeria it was impossible for the State and the Church to remain on
the coldly formal terms of the mother country. The activities of the
Cardinal-Archbishop were necessarily of importance in an over-
whelmingly Moslem country, where the differences between one kind
of infidel and another were not clearly understood and, as far as
they were understood, not always appreciated as they were in en-
lightened circles in France. In Africa, Lavigerie was a power,
especially after the occupation of Tunis, for the ardent cardinal set
himself at once to restore the glories of the see of Carthage and to revive
258
THE REPUBLIC SAVED
the memories of Saint-Louis who had died on Tunisian soil on a
crusade. These were not unimportant to the French Govern-
activities

ment, faced not only with the problem of Moslem hostility but wiih
the more immediate problem of the Italian colony in Tunis. Inevit-
ably Lavigerie had become a powerful figure; very different from the
docile administrators or political nonconformists who filled the *ccs
of France.
Lavigerie had been first a Bonapartist and then a /calous ] ;itirnist, ,.

but he was always a man of government; and he \\as j, much an


admirer of Gambetta as he had been of Napoleon 111 or the Gomte de
Ghambord. It was natural, then, for him to regret the Royalist
affiliations of the majority of the bishops and clergy. Before the
elections of 1885, Lavigerie had been foiced to accept close collabora-
tion with the Royalists, but his politics were already suspect. The
result of the elections strengthened the Gai dinal in his judgment, for,
however great the moral victory, the Conservatives were, in fact,
beaten. The rally of the Republicans between the first and second
ballots which undid the effect of the early Right victories was by many
attributed to rash Royalist boasting. The Right had not won but
had lost, on this view, because it was tainted with Royalism. France,
the first ballot seemed to show, was ready to change her governors but
not the form of government. A year before, Monseigneur Mourey,
French auditor of the Rota, had prophesied as much. 'France', he
wrote in his memorandum designed for the Pope's eye, 'is steadily
moving towards the Republic. What is to be done? Two things:
. . .

first of all publish a doctrinal declaration on the adaptability of the

Ghurch to different kinds of political institutions and apply the


traditional principles to the present condition of France; then tell our
bishops to prefer a Republican candidate, if he gives adequate
guarantees on religious matters.'
Thus was set out, before it was acted on, the policy of the 'Rallie-
ment\ the acceptance by French Catholics of the fact that the Republic
existed and was going to continue to exist, and the drawing of the
conclusion that the Catholic elector should prefer a frank Republican
(if otherwise acceptable) to the most pious
and acceptable Royalist
whose usefulness to the Church would be gravely limited by his role
as a member of what was doomed to be a permanent opposition. The
Government of France was left in the hands of professed enemies of
the Church who were enabled to stay in office because the elector was
offered as an alternative, not merely a Government more friendly to
religion, which he might be expected
to want, but a royal restoration
which he most decidedly did not want. The most effective reply to
this line of argument was provided by Monseigneur d'Hulst, the able
and Rector of the Catholic Institute in Paris.
1
D'Hulst was
aggressive
1
The chief centre of higher studies for the French clergy and for some of the laity.

259
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
not merely a noble, Royalist by birth and breeding, he was a close
personal friend of the Gomte de Paris. He despised the Republic and
the Republicans, extending his contempt to some, at least, of the
bishops nominated by Republican Ministers. The policy suggested
by the Mourey memorandum, he argued, was based on a false premise.
It was a mistake to think that there existed a majority of French electors
devoted to the Church or at least friendly to it and only forced to vote
for anti-clericals by the monarchist tendencies of the official Con-
servatives. 'In forty or fifty departments of the Centre, the country

people have little faith. They are attached to the outward observance
of religion; they want to have a church, a parish priest, funeral services;
but hardly anybody but the women make their Easter duties. . . .

The town workers have higher feelings. When you can get hold of
them individually, it is easier to reawaken Christian feeling in them;
but taken in the mass they belong to the socialist sects.' It was useless
to waste time lamenting a situation which could not be changed. The
Republic was bound to get worse instead of better, but that had its
advantages: 'there is a double current which pulls all the Conservative
interests (including the Catholic interests) towards the monarchy [and]
all the elements of disorder, including the hatred of religion, towards the
other camp'. All good Catholics might be Conservatives, but not all
good Conservatives were Catholics; in face of the danger to property
and order presented by the radicalization of the Republic, all those
classes, faced with moral and material ruin, were forced to unite and
unite on the common ground "of the monarchy, the sole remedy for
the dire disease. Far from the Church suffering from her association
with the Royalist party, she gained, thereby, the support of important
sections of the population which had no real objection to the lay policy
of the Republic.
The Pope had littlereason to be tender of the feelings of the defeated
party. Their Comte de Paris, had not only committed the
chief, the
folly of supporting Boulanger, but had allowed his daughter to marry
a Protestant, Prince Waldemar of Denmark, without insisting on the
customary religious guarantees. Many French Catholics had lamented
too openly the good old days of Pius IX. There were some who even
deplored the recognition by Pope Leo of the legal government of Spain
under Alfonso XII. They had found a chief in Cardinal Pitra, whose
conduct brought on him a rebuke of a severity not to be equalled for
another generation but then to be excelled. Of course the drift in
papal policy had not escaped notice, and finally Pope Leo got support
from such purely orthodox journals as the Univers (though Eugene
Veuillot had long fought such an abandonment of the policy of Pius IX)
and from the Croix. The latter paper went so far in its attacks on
Royalism and on the Pretender that the Comte de Paris thought of

appealing to the Pope to silence the polemics. An enterprise that


260
THE REPUBLIC SAVJiD
failed helped to break the ground for a new politic
the interests of the Church of France. Albert de Mun, the most
eloquent Catholic orator, had attempted to found a Catholic party,
avoiding any doctrinal views on forms of government, but offering the
workers a programme of legislation, 'inspired by the Church's spirit',
which was to give the working-class 'the protection it needs against the
abuses of power [and], in moral customs governed by its dot time, the
example and patronage whith the upper classes of the nation <
-,vc it*.

The success of the German Centre Party was noted in l-Yancc, but the
political frivolity of so many Catholic leaders was manifested in this

programme, appropriately enough approved of by the 'League of the


5
Counter-Revolution The Monarchists disliked it
. as much as did those
few Catholics who understood anything of the spirit of modern France.
Dazzled by their comparative success in the elections of 1885, the
Royalists would have nothing to do with the new party. There was
a Catholic party in existence, the Monarchist party; let it pick up a
few hundred thousand votes more and the game was won. Assailed
on the new party died still-born.
all sides,
Some of the illusions that had gone to its begetting survived. As
the centenary of 1 789 approached, the Republic prepared to celebrate
the beginning of the Great Revolution with an exhibition in Paris.
Albert de Mun and his friends, inspired by a group of country gentle-
men in Dauphine, tried to counter these celebrations by a kind of

parody of the original States-General, an assembly in which 'earners'


1

were to be presented purporting to show that the Revolution had been


a complete failure and must be undone. When the time of the
exhibition and the centenary came round, the Republic had just escaped
from the Boulangist danger. The Revolution might be a failure but
the Counter-Revolution was an even greater one. Yet there were
plenty of stern and unbending Catholics to refuse to have anything to
do with the accursed thing, ready to find Albert de Mun too ready
to make terms with the Mammon of Unrighteousness, insisting, as Paul

Vrignault wrote to Maurice Magnien, that the Revolution which was


5

being celebrated 'is fundamentally impious But, alas! there was


.

abroad in the land 'a spirit of conciliation and compromise at any price
which is ruining the strongest characters*.
Paul Vrignault was soon to be given conclusive proof that this
detestable spirit was strong in very high places, for the Pope had finally
got tired of waiting for the natural leaders of the French Catholics to
read the signs of the times. Although less than twenty candidates at
the elections of 1889 had dared openly to call themselves Monarchists,
the greater part of the Conservative and Catholic candidates were
badly-disguised Royalists, making the worst of both worlds, losing
the

respect due to frankness and the chance of success offered by acceptance


1
In 1789 the members of the States-General brought up lists of grievances, the 'cahiers'.
None of these efforts had shaken the loyalty of the majority of active
Catholics to Royalism or, at Jeast, their inert acceptance of the old
links binding throne and altar together in a common impotent dislike
for the institutions of modern France. There must be a dramatic
assault on this inertia, and the Pope decided that
Lavigerie was the man
and force to the initiation of the new policy which
to give that publicity
it
required.Lavigerie was more than ever convinced of the necessity
of such a move, but he had some reasons for hesitation. His
missionary
and his armed caravans, his hospitals and his new
efforts, his schools
cathedral in Tunis, all took vast sums of money. He was the chief
beggar of the French Church. He had no illusions as to the effect on
many of his supporters of becoming the leader of a movement for
reconciliation with the Republic. Many a man and woman who had
contributed generously to his good works would cut off supplies if
he publicly advocated acceptance of the Republic. Lavigerie foresaw
such blows to causes he held dear as the resignation of Keller, a lead-
ing Catholic politician, from the Anti-Slavery committee in Paris which
was one of the chief sources of money and power for the Cardinal's
campaigns. But he was too much the good centurion to refuse: he
was to be the mouthpiece of the Pope as soon as he could find a suitable
opportunity.
He found it in the presence of the French Mediterranean fleet in
the harbour of Algiers and in the absence of the senior officials who
might have entertained the officers. The Cardinal stepped into the
breach. To his astonished guests, Lavigerie gave a 'toast' * which
included the assertion that 'when the will of a
people had clearly
declared itself, when the form of government has
nothing in itself (as
Leo XIII has recently declared) contrary to the sole
principles by which
Christian and civilized nations can
was the duty of good citizens
live', it
to accept the form of government at whatever cost to
personal feelings.
The officers listened in icy silence. The Admiral, Duperr6, who was
notoriously a Bonapartist, simply proposed the health of the Arch-
bishop and clergy. The first battle was a defeat for the Cardinal-
and the Pope.
From October 2?th, 1891, the leaders of the French clergy and
1
This 'toast' was not what the word means in English, but a longish speech.
262
THE REPUBLIC SAVED
laity displayed a marvellous tenacity in trying to persuade themselves
and the world that the flamboyant Archbishop of Algiers and
Carthage
.had spoken only for himself. Lavigerie, who had hoped for
speech-
results, was bitterly disappointed with his episcopal brethren and with
the chief who had sent him into battle but who showed no
signs of
openly supporting his champion. It is true that the ope Liter declared
that he had only given Lavigerie permission 'with
my u<>uiai>ement' i

to launch his appeal for the frank acceptance of ilie


Republic by the
Catholics of France. He had been impressed by tl -e \ i^ >m with which
the Cardinal had stressed the weakness of the Realists. 1

Lavigerie,
exposed to all the rebukes and reproaches of die angered Royalists
and unsupported by his episcopal breth^n, was <>f a temperament to
which discretion did not come naturally. Jhues in mitres', wa his
description of the French bishops. He had a i>ood deal to put up with.
The more dignified Royalist organs were merely pained and reproach-
ful, but the ebullient ex-Bonapartist, Paul de Cassagnac, let loose on
the Archbishop of Algiers a flood of abuse of the type usually reserved
for Ministers and officials of the 'slut'. 2 'There was in the past at
Carthage a faith that has remained famous: it was called Punic faith.
It would be regrettable if Cardinal Lavigerie were solely inspired by
5
this bogus theological virtue. The clergy could not be as frank as
M. de Cassagnac, but there were priests whose opinions did not differ
very much from his. The Bishop of Reunion and the Bishop of Annecy
were the only open adherents of the new policy. The reasons given by
the Bishop of Annecy in a letter to Monseigneur d'Hulst showed an
acute sense of realities not common in the clergy. Isoard had no
admiration for the Republic, but he knew that 'for the great majority of
Frenchmen, the priest loves the old regime and wants the old regime,
and this old regime frightens people. Now it died with Louis XVI. . . .

The monarchy is gone for ever. It suited a state of mind which only
memory of educated people [but] of which the great mass of electors
survives in the
has no conception 3 The conviction that the monarchy was dead was
9
.

far more widely spread than the conduct of the bishops would lead one
to believe. Cardinal Richard, the Archbishop of Paris, had been a
in La Vendee in 1832 and had
spectator of the abortive Royalist rising
been convinced that, even then and in the most devotedly Royalist
part of France, there was no real monarchical sentiment. Yet Richard
dared not act on his convictions. Spurred on by d'Hulst and tied by
his old relations with the Royalist leaders, he could only organize another
neutral Catholic organization which tried to unite Catholics by
ostentatiously avoiding discussion
of what divided them. At the
head of this organization, 'The* Union of Christian France', he put
Chesnelong, and the rest of its leaders
were as symbolical of the
*
1 had called the Orleanists 'capons'. The Republic.
Lavigerie, said the Pope, 8
Italics mine.
s
263
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
old alliance of throne and altar. 1 But the appearance of the old
gang at the head of the never-victorious Army irritated the younger
generation. It was a veteran politician, Dugue* de la Fauconnerie,
who expressed (as far as he was concerned with unconscious prophetic
force) their feelings. 'None of the men of the old parties! Not X!
Not Y! Not Dugue de la Fauconnerie.'
The siege of Rome was undertaken by the fiery Bishop of Angers,
Freppel, deputy for Brest. Freppel argued that Lavigerie's policy (it
was still possible to feign to believe it was not the Pope's) was based on
c
the erroneous belief that the Republic, in France, is simply a form of
government as in Switzerland or in the United States for instance, and
not a doctrine, a doctrine fundamentally and radically contrary to
Christian doctrine'. It is true that the American example had greatly

weighed with the younger generation of French Catholics. The names


of Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore and of Archbishop Ireland of St.
Paul represented, for them, a policy of liberalism, of a readiness to
accept the facts of the modern world that had not prevented the rapid
growth of the Church in America while the policy of Royalist in-
transigence had not produced any very attractive political or religious
fruits inFrance. Archbishop Ireland, indeed, did not shrink from
carrying the war into France and preached the religious advantages
of republicanism in face of shocked Catholics in Paris.
The reported readiness of the Pope to dismiss, as obsolete, the claims
of the House of France, claims based on so many centuries of history,
provoked bitter reflections. Freppel did not fear to hint that the same
principle of acceptance of the accomplished fact might force the Pope to
recognize the loss of his temporal power in Rome. For the Kingdom of
2
Italy seemed just as secure as the French Republic. But the time was
past when, in Paris, the Nuncio, di Rende, had been a willing listener
to the hopeful Royalists, as, in Rome, his house was a centre of credulous
zealots who not only believed in the restoration of the Pope's temporal

power, but in the restoration of the King of Naples and the Duke of
Parma! The Pope's mind was made up; it would be vain for Royalist
journals like the old Gazette de France to remind him of the Royalists
who had died for the Pope at Castelfidardo and Mentana. Leo, XIII
at last came into the open and in an interview with the Petit Parisien,
followed by an encyclical, he made the Lavigerie policy publicly his
own.
The encyclical 8 distinguished between constitution and legislation.
The Catholics were to accept the Constitution and alter the legis-
lation,by all constitutional means. It was a fatal blow to the
'Union of Christian France'. As Chesnelong put it, the new policy
1
TheVice-Presidents were MM. de Mun, de Mackau, d'Herbelpt and
Keller.
1
Monseigneur d'Hulst harboured a peculiarly irritating suspicion that one object of
papal policy was to win the support of French Ministers for diplomatic action against Italy.
8
inter multiplices solliiitudines.

264
THE REPUBLIC SAVED
needed new men. Even if he had thought the Pope right that would
have been true, but he thought the Pope wrong and the Pope insisted
on a formal acceptance of the policy of the Ralliement. Chesnclong
submitted and, after reading without comment the papal message to
the Catholic Congress that had met while still hoping to evade the
issue, he left the hall, saying tearfully, Twice disowned; In the King
and by the Pope'. Not everybody was as docile a> Chesnelono. The
Comte de Paris objected to the assumption that the political control
of Frenchmen who were Catholics was in the hands oi the Pope and
remarked, ironically, on the triumph of the priiuiples oi Gregory VII
involved in the papal confirmation of the Republic. His chief repre-
sentative, the Comte d'Haussonville, who had, as a child, refused to
wear a tricolour badge in 1830, was no mo.e willing to obey the Pope
blindly now than he had been to obey his mother then. Monseigneur
d'Hulst was elected to succeed Freppei in the Chamber and managed
to avoid committing himself (practising what the anti-clericals called
the policy of the 'flag in the pocket'), but he found, to his distress,
that the Breton priests to whom he owed his election were completely
convinced of the Tightness of the papal policy. They were 'Catholic-
Republicans' to a man. For, despite the bitterness of the Royalists,
bitterness made manifest in the attacks of his old friends on Albert de
Mun when his acceptance of the papal policy became known, the
action of Leo XIII had finished off a moribund party.
How was the papal policy to be received by the Republicans?
By the Radicals it was of course received as another clerical trick, a
new Trojan horse from whose belly would issue forth the enemies of
the Republic if the Republicans were foolish enough to allow it
"entrance into the city. But the Radicals were not in power and their
attacks did not do anything to make the prospects of a union of Con-
servative forces less attractive to many Republicans. Boulangism had
frightened many of the governing classes, who had reason to wonder
whether the violence of their anti-clericalism had not been in part
responsible for the coalition of Left and Right that had nearly destroyed
the regime. Old Gambettists like Challemel-Lacour expressed more
kindly views of the possibility of domestic peace between Church and
State than would have seemed decent a few years before. It was not

only the memory of Boulangism that won some Republican support


for the new policy. Behind the Radicals were the Socialists. On
May ist, 1890, had taken place the first of the annual labour demon-
strations, borrowed from America, but which in France were given a
far more definitely revolutionary character. May Day in Paris in the
alarmed bourgeoisie,
'nineties of last century was not, in the eyes of the
a mere proletarian version of July i4th; it was an annual rehearsal of
a revolution. The Radicals had now rivals on their Left to force them
into even more revolutionary ways. Can we wonder that Jules Ferry
265
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
was ready genuine converts to the Republic? 'The Con-
to accept
servatives who have Republic will bring over others.
rallied to the
This is natural and not at all disturbing.' The country had need, he
declared, of religious peace, there was no question of going to Canossa.
But there were real issues at stake; real interests which could be united
on a common Republican ground. There were Catholics who for
slight concessions, even for a mere cessation of further anti-clerical
activities, would be willing to join in the defence of private property
even with such former hammers of the Church as Ferry.
It was not only the Socialists who frightened the bourgeoisie. There
were the Anarchists, whose bombs were, some Catholics asserted, the
natural fruit of the tree of Godless education. Such views were not
confined to Catholics. It was Severine, the famous left-wing journalist,
who said in her usual dramatic style that the lay State had 'shut up
Heaven but had not opened the bakers'-shops'. 1 But while not all
the world agreed that the wave of outrage was the result of the Godless
schools and the collapse of traditional morality, the attitude of the
Anarchists helped to force the timid on to common ground. On his
way to the guillotine, Ravachol had sung the new Pere Duchesne.
Pour etre heureux, nom de Dieu!
Faut pendre les propri&aires!
Pour etre heureux, nom de Dieu!
Faut couper les cures en deux.

A good many landowners and priests thought that, if they resisted in


common, they were less likely to be hanged or cut to pieces separately.
The welcome given to the Ralliement was not all based on fear or
cupidity or political calculation. A generation had grown up since
the establishment of the lay Republic and it could not be expected to
share the bitter animosities of its elders. The psychological equivalents
of the compulsory religious observances of the ficole Normale under
the Second Empire that had embittered the young Aulard, or of the
stupid snobbery of the richer pupils of the Catholic College Stanislas
that had wounded Anatole France, were now as likely to be found in
the lay educational system. The reaction of the younger generation
against Republican orthodoxy in the schools was soon to find brilliant
2
expression in the first of the great political novels of Maurice Barres.
Now that Laicism and Republicanism were orthodox, youth, naturally
rebellious,was ready to react against them. So there was noted in
the generation coming of age around 1890, not merely a more lively
1
This attempt to link up anti-clericalism with anarchism did not escape the vigilance of
veteran guardians of the Republic. Ren6 Goblet wrote to Arthur Ranc to tell of an adven-
ture of his in the provinces, his encounter 'with a gendeman, very agreeable by the by,
[who] took trouble to meet me: he then tried, determinedly, to indoctrinate me with
anarchism. Now, I have since learned, beyond all doubt, that he is an agent of the Jesuits,
what is called a short-coated Jesuit, which does not prevent his publicly preaching radicalism,
even socialism; anarchism he keeps for private discourse*.
1
Les Dtrannts.
266
THE REPUBLIC SAVED
and intellectual faith among those who had remained Catholics, hut
a certain sympathy with Christian ideas among those who had lost
their faith or never had any.
The 'Neo-Christianism' of Henry Berenger and his school was not
very long-lived, but it was part of the climate that made the Rallicmcnt
possible. The prestige of German and English though t had its part in
weakening the older French Voltairian tradition of s< "plirism towards
all that was not crystal clear. One of the leaders o r ihr Cath. .lie youth
of this generation, Frederic Boudin, even invent d a On manic Ultra-
montanism, and looked to America, to the disc iplcs of Father Hecker,
is Germanic Frame, from Latin
to free real France, that formality and
lack of spirituality. The times seemed ripe for what Spuller, the
k

veteran ally of Gambetta, was to call the new spirit'. In the back-
ground, silenced if they were clerg\, tampered if they were laymen,
were many thousands of French Catholics only forced by papal authority
into formal compliance. On the other were unconverted Republicans
for whom the Republic was anti-clerical or nothing, who would far
rather have had, in some cases, an anti-clerical king than a clerical
republic. Both the uncompromising Catholics and their perpetual
enemies would have agreed with Renan in the condemnation he had
passed long before on 'clerical liberalism'. 'An old man is not
ridiculous if he wears the clothes of his age; he is ridiculous if he puts
on a red cap and assumes airs of youth which contrast with his baldness.'
The Catholics who objected to assuming the red cap were confirmed
in their aversion by the bursting of the great Republican abscess, the
Panama scandal. Hopes revived; the Catholics who had rallied
seemed ludicrous to the faithful remnant, since they seemed to have
entered the Republican house just as it, at last, was doomed to collapse
on their foolish heads.

267
CHAPTER II

PANAMA

1888, when the Republic was in danger, the Socialist Deputy of


INNimes had declared in what, it was hoped, was a moment of southern
extravagance, that the fuss made over the Wilson affair had been
hypocritical. 'Among the thirty-three members of the Budget Com-
mittee there are at least twenty Wilsons.' It was no time for such

charges, even when made in after-dinner speeches, and the rash Numa
Gilly was sentenced to a year in prison, but the great corpse of Panama
was beginning to stink.
The idea of a Panama Canal was as old as the day when white
men first gazed on the Pacific, but the wild surmise did not become
more than that until the success of the Suez Canal attracted attention
to the possibility of repeating the success in Central America. Both
Britain and the United States had a real interest in the region and in
the problem, but neither public nor private enterprise in those countries
was ready to take the risks. It was inevitable, too, that men's minds
should turn to the maker of the Suez Canal and inevitable that the
energetic and vain old man, whose dreams had once come true, should
see, in Panama, a fitting crown to his romantic career.
Ferdinand de Lesseps had been born in 1805, the year of Austerlitz.
He was sixty-four when the Suez Canal was finished and when he mar-
ried his second wife, aged twenty-one. 1 To undertake a new enterprise
on the scale of Panama when he was seventy-four was a heroic folly, as
his familypointed out. Chairman of a 'Congress of the Interoceanic
Canal' in Paris, he swept away the doubts of most of the experts, took
over from Napoleon Bonaparte Wyse his Colombian concession and
prepared to repeat in America his success in Egypt. That success had
been due, more than anything else, to his incurable optimism. In the
discourse of the Protonotary Apostolic at the opening of the Suez Canal,
the prelate praised 'that superhuman faith in the accomplishment of
this gigantic work'.Naturally, Ernest Renan, receiving Lesseps into
the French Academy, was rather more ecclesiastical in his manner and

1
He had twelve children by her, the last born when he was eighty.
268
THE REPUBLIC SAVED
quoted (in 'a positivist sense') the words of Holy Writ, 'If you have faith
as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this
mountain, Remove
hence to yonder place; and it shall remove'. It was a bad
prophecy,
but an accurate diagnosis of Lesseps' mind. By faith, he hnd made the
Suez Canal. By faith, he had kept the Company from liquidation in
the early difficult years of its operation.
Lesseps, it should be remembered, was not a proKsion;il engineer,
but, in the original sense of the word, an entrepreneu )n< <( iiis chief (

technical assistants at Panama, M. Bunau-Varir.i, li.is dcsuibed how


politely and incredulously Lesseps listened to technical objections. 'He
saw in them obviously only another of those engineer's ideas that had
hampered him so much at Suez, and which he h.ul got over by letting
Nature and common sense have their wa\ / 1 1 \\as ihis bold empiricist
who won over the Canal Congress to I,',-;
pel idea, that the Panama, like
the Suez Canal, was to be a sea-level canal, 'a new Bosphoms'. This
inspiring idea was so magnificent that technical arguments for a canal
with locks to get round the great difficulty that the canal had to be
pushed through rain-soaked hills, not through a flat desert, were swept
aside for what were largely aesthetic reasons. Faith would move
mountains. Fundamentally, the Panama enterprise failed because
faith was not enough; the back of the energy of the Company was
broken in the unfinished Culebra Cut.
Lesseps was, like so many of his generation, influenced by the social
ideas of the Saint-Simonites. Indeed, the Suez Canal was one of the
main works which were to exemplify the faith of the sect. He delighted
to think that the Suez Canal Company was not just another vast
financial enterprise in the hands of a few financiers. Its constitution

was (and is) designed to limit the power of the great shareholders l
and Lesseps rejoiced to think that so many small shopkeepers, cab-
drivers, peasants had had faith in him, had taken shares in the Suez
Canal and that their faith had been rewarded. So, when the Panama
Canal Company was finally launched, provision was made for holding
the general meeting of shareholders in the Cirque d'Hiver.
Lesseps appealed to the small investor partly because
he wanted to,
the small investor could he get the necessary
partly because only from
funds without putting himself into the hands of the great banks. But
to appeal to the small investor meant appealing to a credulous and
timid class. They were incapable of reading a balance sheet, but they
could be won over to trust the man whom Gambetta had christened
'the great Frenchman', the man who, with Victor Hugo as his only
incarnated what pride 1870 had left in French hearts. But they
rival,
were timid; this wastheir first adventure in high finance, or
their all,

possibly their second,


after they had tasted the sweets of Suez. Because
1 Government not able to control the Company as effec-
For this reason, the British is

tually as its large shareholding would suggest.


269
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
they were timid, because the first attempt to raise capital was a failure,
and because he was incurably optimistic, Lesseps repeated his Suez
mistake. He underestimated the cost of the canal and asked only for
300 million francs.
1
He was offered twice as much, but even twice
as much would not have been enough. From the start Panama was
hampered by shortage of funds; crippled by the constant threat that
money would run out before the canal was finished. The original
shareholders saw their share in the total future assets getting smaller
and smaller; the way to get good terms out of Panama was not to have
come in on the ground floor. To continue to raise funds, it was
necessary to use, more and more shamelessly, the main asset of the
Company, 'the Great Frenchman'; and that asset began to waste. To
keep it from wasting, it was necessary to buy off critics: and so an
increasingly great proportion of the money raised was spent on all
classes of blackmailers,from very great figures of the journalistic world
like mile de Girardin and Arthur Meyer, down to the owners of the
most obscure sheets, like the Bee-keepers' Journal and The Line Fisherman.
Finally it became necessary to pay, not for favourable publicity, but for
mere silence. The offices of the Panama Company became a kind of
out-door relief organization for Paris journalists. These methods of
exploitation were not unknown before Panama and are not unknown
now, but there had never been such a prey. Gulliver lay there helpless,
bound by the gossamer bonds of confidence which he dared not break
until the canal was finished.
The
canal seemed ever further from being finished. After the col-
*

lapse the whole story of Panama was told by its enemies, who had
usually their own reasons for showing that it died of its own sins in
Central America and was not bled to death in Paris. There was, of
course, mismanagement, in the allotment of contracts, in the design of
machinery, in the organization of work. The difficulties were pro-
digious. Until the science of tropical medicine had made Panama
habitable, yellow fever killed Europeans as fast, at times, as they could
be sent out. The chief engineer, Dingier, who boasted that Panama
was really healthy, was refuted by the loss of his own family. Ships
lost all theirpassengers and the records of the great school of civil
engineering, the 'Centrale', had soon a roll of honour that recalled the
Poly technique in war-time. In such an atmosphere, moral relaxation
was as inevitable as in war. Cargoes of newly-landed prostitutes were
announced by the slang-code, 'lobsters arrived'. The isthmus became
one vast gambling hell and the three most flourishing industries were
brothels, gaming houses and coffin manufacturing. As the news of
the daily plundering at home spread, it was difficult to keep a spirit
of extravagance from affecting the men who were risking their lives to
build the canal. So there came into being examples of conspicuous
1
12,000,000 or $60,000,000.
270
THE REPUBLIC SAVED
waste, like the chief engineer's villa, 'Dingler's Folly', and, back in
Paris, the blackmailers had another weapon to use.
The real weakness of the canal was due to the fundamental mis-
calculation of Lesseps, his refusal to recognize the necessity for Jocks;
as long as the dream of the sea-level canal continued, the main work of
the engineers was wasted. The rumours of a breakdown grew as the
appeals for fresh funds became more extravagant, and the Government
at last took action and sent out to Panama, M. Rousseau, a. distinguished
engineer who, though cautious and non-committal in iiis public report,
was pessimistic in private.
Distress was converting even the obstinate Lesseps, now over eighty.
It is true that he would not give up his idea oi the "new Bosphorus' and
the plans provided for the alteration of the Joe ks into a sea-level system
when revenue should justify it, but at lea t the canal was on the way to
i

completion. The engineers had learned a great deal and the great
initial error was being remedied. All that was wanted was money, but
that was harder and harder to get. Despite the secrecy with which the
report of M. Rousseau had been surrounded, there had been a leak,
although how there could be a leak when the Minister of Public Works,
the distinguished engineer, M. Baihaut, was in office, was hard to see.
For Baihaut was not only a Republican Minister and not a Morny, he
was a professional moralist, an officer of 'the Society for the Promotion
of Good' and an orator who never let a month pass without a public
testimonial to the advantages and attractions of virtue. He was his
own Madame Husson and, like the hero of Maupassant's story, he fell.
He fell twice; once by seducing the wife of an old friend who was not
of a forgiving temper and again by allowing himself to be tempted by
the opportunities open to a Minister of Public Works to get his share of
the spoils of Panama. By the time Baihaut saw his chance, all the
ordinary means of raising funds had been exhausted. There only
remained the issue of fresh securities sweetened by a lottery. corre- A
sponding lottery had helped to provide the funds to complete Suez, but
that had been authorized under the Second Empire. It would be

harder to get the Republic to consent, even for a good object, to such
methods, harder or, at any rate, more expensive. In 1886, the price
for Baihaut's support or silence was a million francs, but, as the bill did
not pass, he only got sySjOOO. 1
The raising of funds for Panama was so closely bound up with
that it needed
publicity (or blackmail) and politics (or corruption)
attention. The first financier of the company was a banker
expert
called L6vy-Cr6mieux, but he was soon replaced by a more brilliant
figure, the Baron Jacques de Reinach.
Reinach was a German Jew,
an Italian Baron and a naturalized Frenchman. His background made
him one of the representative figures of the new world of cosmopolitan
40,000 ($200,000) and
1
15,000 ($60,000).
271
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
and mobile finance and, through his nephew and son-in-law, Joseph
Reinach, he had close connections with the dominant French party, the
Opportunists. Joseph Reinach had been a close associate of Gam-
betta's, was one of the editors of La Rtpublique Frangaise ,and a rising
Opportunist deputy of Seine et Oise. Although the Baron refrained
'from open political activity, or, as he put it, 'from the list of candidates
but not from the combat', he was active in many affairs closely associ-
ated with politics, financial combinations like the conversion of the
rentes, various railway schemes and other activities that had done him-
1

self, if not the State, some service. He had friends like Albert Grevy
and Camille Dreyfus and he was on at least friendly terms with such
eminently respectable figures as Leon Say. His large income was
lavishly spent in splendid hospitality, in fostering the arts, especially
those arts which, like the opera and the ballet, brought him into contact
with young women. He was, as his relations with his son-in-law
showed, a man of strong family feeling but there was nothing narrow
about his affections.
It was Reinach, with the aid of another German Jew called Arton,
who looked after those aspects of the financing of Panama that would
look oddest on a balance sheet. Although the Opportunists were the
party in power, that, in the French system, did not mean that the
parties not in power could be neglected, for Ministries might come and
go, but the Chamber and Senate remained to be cajoled and coerced.
So the Radicals had to be won over too, and that side of the job (it is
believed) was left to Dr. Cornelius Herz. Herz, unlike Reinach and
Arton, was anative of France; hehad been born in Besangon of Bavarian
Jewish parents who had carried him off to America where he was
naturalized. He had returned to France, where on the strength of
jobs in a pharmacy, an insane asylum and a short period as an interne
in a hospital, he was commissioned as an Army doctor in 1870 and

given the Legion of Honour (as a foreigner). The new-made knight


next tried to make a fortune in America, picking up a doctor's
diploma in Chicago (then not hard to do), a wife and, somehow or
other, a connection with the nascent electric-light industry. He man-
aged to get accepted in Paris as one of the great pioneers of electricity,
to make a good deal of money and some valuable friends. Most
important of all, he made a friend or ally of Georges Clemenceau.
Clemenceau had his own medical and American experiences behind
him, but was moved by different ambitions from the adventurer whom
he allowed to buy a big share in his paper, Justice. He needed money
for his paper and he had less than none of his own. He had extravagant
tastes; he had run through all the money of his American wife and he
had taken a mistress whose previous lover had been the Due d'Aumale,
who was not merely a prince of the blood, but a multi-millionaire.
1
National debt.

272
THE REPUBLIC SAVED
Cornelius Herz had undoubtedly a talent for risky financial operations,
but he owed a great deal to the general belief that behind him
stood Clemenceau, who was not only the most formidable debater in
France, but one of the most formidable duellists.
In a few years, 'the Doctor' was a great Parisian figure, if not in
quite the same circles as those adorned by the Baron de Reinadi. He
was even given testimonies of esteem from General BoulanRor and from
the GreVys, Madame Grevy accepting from him two valuable hi ai elets
for her granddaughters with an alacrity that astonished Charles de

Lesseps. Herz, like Reinach, began his relations with Panama as a


political and
financial agent, but this simple sharing of the work became

complicated by the transformation of Herz from a highly remunerated


lobbyist for Panama into a blackmailer, on a c ,>lossal scale, of Reinach.
What was the hold of Herz on Reinach is not known; some common
crime, some unknown
of the Baron's pasi; perhaps, as suspicious
folly
Frenchmen have suggested, knowledge of some treason of Reinac.h's
that even his friends could not excuse or hide. Reinach was now, as
was said, 1 a parasite who, when full of blood, was sucked dry by Herz
and had to begin over again, and the final victim was the vast body of
the Panama Company. 2 As the victim grew more and more anaemic,
Herz grew more and more exigent and, as the directors of Panama
grew more and more desperate, it was necessary to bring pressure to
bear on them not to resist, for resistance meant that Cornelius Herz
might blow everything up. Everything meant the parliamentary
Republic, for it was 1888 and the final crisis of Boulangism was
approaching. So Freycinet, Clemenceau, Ranc all combined to induce
Panama to pacify the angry Doctor. But in this critical year, the

Government did more than defend itself; it allowed the company to


make a last effort, to float a lottery-loan for seven hundred and twenty
million francs. 3 Both Houses accepted the bill; the Minister of Finance
professing to be completely neutral. The loan was a disastrous failure;
4
It was the end.
only two hundred and fifty-four millions were raised.
Despite some convulsive struggles the Panama Company had to go into
liquidation; work was stopped on the canal and it began to be realized

that all the vast investment was lost.

II

The shareholders of Panama refused to believe their evil fortune


and then, when the truth was known, appealed to the Government to
aid them, by providing funds whereby work could be resumed before
the concession fell in. In a smaller number of cases, they asked for
1
By Barres.
8
A list found in Reinach's archives bore the simple legend *Herz Blackmail*. The sum
noted on the list was, nearly ten million francs (400,000 or $2,000,000).
*
28,800,000 ($144,000,000). 10,400,000 ($52,000,000).
273
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
investigation of the affairs of the company. It is possible that with a

comparatively small investment, the French Government could have


finished the canal on the new plan. This would not have done much
good to the shareholders, at any rate for a very long time, but it would
have salvaged something for French national wealth and prestige, but
the rulers of France had had enough of Panama.
Reluctantly, the Chamber asked the Government in 1891 to open
an inquiry. In January 1892, Fallieres, the Minister of Justice, 1
announced that no time had been lost, although his private attitude
displayed no earnest hope that all speed would be made. The collapse
of Panama was on so great a scale that, even had there not been special
reasons, a Government might have hesitated to increase, by investiga-
tion or prosecution, the misery and anger of the unfortunate investors.
They had lost nearly 60,000,000 ($300,000,000); it was the greatest
disaster since the collapse of the Empire, the greatest purely financial
disaster since the Mississippi scheme of nearly 200 years before. The
governing class suspected that if the story of how the Panama bill had
passed became known, it would be difficult to keep it from appearing
to reflect on the system, as the Teste affair had reflected on the

Monarchy of July, as Jecker's bonds had on the Second Empire. It


must be remembered, in defence of the various Ministers who did their
best to stifle the scandal even at the cost of an economy of truth, that
they had the fright of Boulangism just behind them, and that they
really believed that regimes died of scandals, especially Republican
regimes, bound to be virtuous by their very nature. They had man-
aged to hush up Panama long enough to kill Boulangism, perhaps they
might hush it up altogether.
These hopes of silence were destroyed by the appearance of a series
of articles entitled 'The Inside Story of Panama'. 2 The new 'Mermeix'
called himself 'Micros'. His real name was Ferdinand Martin and he
was an ex-employee of the company with his own grievances to put an
edge on his zeal. 'Micros' had not really been in the secrets of the
great company, but he kept the public interested and the Government
frightened, and he distracted attention from Baron Jacques de Reinach,
which was natural enough, as the Baron had supplied 'Micros' with
some of the information for that very purpose. What was not quite
so natural was that the Baron's chosen instrument of protection and

aggression should be a new journal founded expressly to combat that


international Jewish finance of which M. de Reinach was so striking a
specimen. With Panama, the Libre Parole 'and its editor suddenly
became important political figures.
La Libre Parole had been founded a few months before by the chief
mouthpiece of anti-Semitism in France, Edouard Drumont. Its sub-
1
President of the Republic, 1906-13.
3
'Les Dessous du Panama', which might also be translated 'The Dirty Linen of Panama*.

274
THE REPUBLIC SAVED
titlewas Trance for the French', a cry that has not yet lost all its
force. For Drumont the enemy from whom France was to be de-
livered was the Jew. He did, from time to time, assail Italian
m migrants, English monopolists of the sardine fisheries, as well as
American women, frivolous and ill-behaved, who got foolish Fmidi
noblemen to marry them by a pretence of wealth and, OIK r thr title
was safely acquired, admitted that they were poor an ib.u tin !
hus- ii

bands would have to keep them! He had, too, a poo, opinion of


French Protestants and one of his collaborators was tin a. mi >j\i book
\ 1 1 <

denouncing the political dominance of careerists d, m


the south of
France, but the real enemy was the Jew. In i8<%, ] )j nmont had pub-
lished the book that made him famous, La Fiance Juirc. This twelve-
hundred page tract at first fell flat, but a clm-l itli Arthur Meyer, the
'
.

Jewish editor of the smart society paper. / (^inlms, a duel in which


<

Meyer committed the grave sin of seizin^ his opponent's sword in his
left hand while running Drumont through with his right, gave the
necessary publicity.
La France Juive sold by the tens of thousands and its author became
known and hated or admired, as the mouthpiece of the rising anti-
Semitism of many Frenchmen. The book was not wholly undeserving
of its fame. Drumont at his best was a resourceful pamphleteer, a
combination of an inferior Veuillot with an inferior Proudhon. He had
not taken part in the brutal press-war of French politics for nothing and
he might have adopted caritas non conturbat me as a motto. The theme
of his book was the conquest of France by the Jews. Beginning with
some of the standard race mysticism about Aryans and Semites and
complaints that official anthropology was in the hands of Jews so that
their permanent physical and psychological marks were not sufficiently
dwelt on, Drumont passed on to his real theme. A series of Jewish
immigrants, headed by the Rothschilds, had come into France since the
Revolution, penniless, and look at them now! They shot down honest
peasants who did a little bit of poaching on the ill-gotten preserves of
MM. Rothschild and Ephrussi, and under a pretence of Liberalism, they
were active in the most violent attacks on Christianity and specially
on Catholicism. These specific charges were eked out by a general
resume ofJewish crimes in the past and present, including a declaration
of belief in the ritual murder charges and a translation of Chaucer's
'Prioress's Tale'. But for all his talents and for all the French appetite
for verbal savagery, Drumont would not have become either a hero or
a villain if there had not been plenty of fuel for his fire.
La France Juive appeared during a period of acute economic depres-
sion and Drumont provided an explanation of the workings of the
or to small tradesmen
trade-cycle that appealed to harassed shopkeepers
feeling the first impact of large-scale industry. On Marxian principles,
these victims of finance capitalism ought to have become aware of the
275
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
general class-war. Drumont showed them the source of their evils in
the wealth of the Rothschilds. It was inevitable that an attack on

'high finance' would involve anti-Semitism for, while in France as in


most other countries, high finance had its share of eminent Christian
representatives, those^ bankers who were not Jews were often Protestants.
Under the old regime and since the Revolution, banking, in Paris at
least, had largely been Swiss, when it was not Jewish.
This state of affairs had been made more general and more deeply
felt as a result of the failure of the Union Generate. This attempt, either
to get a share of the loot or to free banking from its heretical servitude,
had failed, not only with a great loss of money and prestige, but in
circumstances that gave some plausibility to Drumont's charges that it
had been ruined by the Rothschilds and by such political representa-
tives of the existing banks as Lon Say and Leon Say was a Protestant.
The Protestants, it was asserted, like the Jews thought more of their
spiritual kin outside France than of the rights of the country they helped
to plunder. Like Monod they backed English missionaries against
French interests in Madagascar, just as the Jews worked up agitations
against such natural allies of France as Russia. Backed by English
hypocrisy they aroused superfluous sympathy for the victims of Russian
self-defence, while ignoring the far more serious wrongs suffered by the
poor Irish peasants of Falcarragh 'the most gloomy and desolate part
of Ireland' at the hands of British police egged on by London Jewry.
The grievances of the French Catholics against what were to be
called, a little later, the 'met&ques', were not confined to finance. The
practically complete breach between the Church and the Republic had
meant that, in certain departments of the administration, it was rare
to find a practising Catholic in a position of power. A Jewish prefect
could, with impunity, observe Passover, but a prefect who was as openly
zealous in the observation of Easter might find himself under violent
attack from a paper like the Lanterns, whose main stock in trade was anti-
clerical scurrility and whose editor was a Jew, the great 'priest-eater',

Eugene Mayer. The Republican purging of the administration ofjustice


had resulted in the prominence in the courts of Jews and Protestants,
and the anti-clerical policy of the Ferry Government had meant
that the decrees had often had to be enforced on Catholics by Jewish
and Protestant officials. Needless to say, many Jewish and Protestant
officials were conscious of the delicacy of their position, but not all were,
and even those who were most amiable in social relations with the
Church were sometimes guilty of the faults of taste that Anatole France
was to illustrate in the person of the Jewish prefect, Worms-Clavelin.
The Conservative party in France was still numerous, rich and even
hopeful. Unwilling to think too deeply about the cause of their defeats,
unable openly to blame either Pope or King, the Conservatives were
grateful to the writer who expressed, with great polemical talent, their
276
THE REPUBLIC SAVED
bitterness. Since the death of Louis Veuillot, there had been no
authentic voice of the dogmatic and sometimes
unfairly harassed
country-priest; there had been no authentic voice of the little squire
who, in his heart, hated having to accept an Orleans as King; there had
been no authentic voice for the small tradesman or workman in those
regions of the South where religion and politics had always IHTII
mingled and where to the old target of the rich Protest, mt, \\\is now
added the even more attractive target of the rich Jew.
Drumont was fitted by temperament if not by genius to replace
Veuillot. The victims of his pen who were most jiaishly treated were
not the Rothschilds, but the great nobles who coin ted them. Drumont
did not spare the RoyaJ Family, the Due d'Aumalo or the Due de
Ghartres, or the bishops or, for that inaitei, the Pope. For him the
Ralliementwas the rescuing of a decayed ietime by cunning Italians.
The refusal of the Church to admit th.i:, urne a Jew always a Jew, was
another cause of pain for an ostentatious Catholic like Drumont. One
of his chief lieutenants, Jean Guerin, has recounted the disgust he felt
when the famous Jesuit, Fere clu Lac, remonstrated with him for attack-
ing some converted Jews named Dreyfus. Another early ally of
Drumont, Jacques de Biez, went about asking priests if it were true that
Jesus Christ was a Jew? Drumont doesn't seem to mind, but I can't
swallow it.' A few years before, a leading Catholic, Anatole Leroy-
Beaulieu, had complained that the clergy, above all in its lowest ranks,
was hostile to liberalism, thanks in part to a defective education, in part
to 'sheets which, far from enlightening them about a society of which they
know nothing, persist in deceiving them with dangerous memories and
elusive hopes'. This naivete had been well illustrated by the welcome
given to the famous anti-clerical pornographer, Leo Taxil, when he had
and had invented in 'Diana Vaughan' a Catholic
'returned to the faith'
rival to Maria Monk. Drumont had not been taken in by Taxil, but
by the time that he founded the Libre Parole, he had won the support
of many priests, 'sons of the soil who have not the timidity of many
shamedfaced conservatives. They like strength and willingly pardon
even excesses due to a kind of generous indignation.'
Generous indignation was not enough to make La Libre Parole a
great success. Duels and libel actions were the chief handicaps of
Drumont' s campaign, and while the duels usually paid one way or the
other, libel actions were unprofitable. Within a few weeks Drumont
was condemned to 4,000 ($20,000) damages and three months in
prison for attacking the probity of a Republican politician
whose char-
acter ought to have been above suspicion, since he had begun life as a
preacher and teacher of the new Kantian ethics that was
to replace in the

schools of the Republic the older Christian moral theories. M. Burdeau,


like M. Baihaut, was vindicated by the Republican courts. But for the
Baron de Reinach, Drumont might have been silenced by the mere
277
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
shortage of material. He bad, it is true, the advantage of having been
cool to Panama in its great days. He had attacked the first financier
of Panama, LeVy-Cremieux, and, by accident or design, he had assailed,
while they were still powerful,* many of the leading figures of the
financialand political world, Clemenceau, Freycinet, Burdeau, Baihaut,
Antonin Proust, Cornelius Herz, Arene.
Drumont was in prison for his libel on Burdeau when he began to
receive from Reinach, through Andrieux, the ex-Prefect of Police who
had gone over to the Boulangists, the materials for a fresh campaign,
materials provided by the demoralized Baron on the condition that he
should be kept out of the columns of the Libre Parole. In supplying
Drumont with materials, Reinach had been too clever by half. La
Cocarde, the chief Boulangist journal, had joined in the campaign, seeing
in the scandal its way to revenge on the victors of 1889. Within the
Government, Loubet, the Prime Minister, and, after some hesita-
tion, the Procureur-Gen6ral, Quesnay de Beaurepaire, saviour of the
Republic in 1 889, had decided against prosecuting any of the directors
of Panama; the politician because he feared the political consequences;
the lawyer because he was doubtful if any legal fraud had been com-
mitted.- Ricard, the Minister of Justice, was less content, and the
Boulangists in the Chamber were already demanding replies to awk-
ward questions and, if Ricard did not get his way, his resignation would
be an even greater disaster than the prosecutions, for he could appear
as a martyr of probity, prevented from doing his duty by presumably
corrupt colleagues. No one wished to give the pompous lawyer who
was known as 'La Belle Fatma' a chance to become a hero.
On November igth, the parliamentary campaign began with a
broadside from Floquet, the President of the Chamber. The conqueror
of Boulanger had been charged with receiving 300,000 francs * for
electoral purposes in 1888. His reply was brief, complete, and should
have been conclusive. 'Not only did I demand nothing, but I asked
for nothing, I got nothing, and I distributed nothing.' Except for a
few cynics, the simple affirmation of the President was received with
roars of applause which had just ended when members began to look
at that day's copy of the Jour 2 which had spread on its front page an

inspired statement in which a 'close friend' of Floquet's admitted that


he had received the money butj fighting to save the Republic at death
grips with an enemy provided with ample funds from unknown sources,
he had asked some great companies, including the Panama Company,
for 'their financial aid in the battle just begun'. Floquet had prepared
two lines of defence, one true, one false. He had himself used the false
one at the very moment that a friendly paper used the true one! It
was a bad beginning for the notabilities of the Republic.
It was not the only breakdown in staff-work that day. In a
' *
12,000 or $60,000.
*
Not the Jour-Echo de Paris now published.
THE REPUBLIC SAVED
desperate attempt to save Reinach, Loubet and Burdeau had tricked
Quesnay de Beaurepaire into postponing the arrests, but the Procurcur
had seen through their game and insisted on obeying the orders of his
chief Ricard who had, in his turn, tried with little success to
quirt the
parliamentary storm by informing the Chamber that the machinery of
justicewas in motion and all was well.
While the parliamentary war was raging with doubtful fortune,
the Baron de Reinach was engaged in his last desperate He
anij ui^n. (

had seen the Cocarde, he knew that the silence of (lie Lilnc Paiole was no
longer enough. One man could save him, Cornelia ilerz, and he
implored Rouvier and Clemenceau to go with him to make this appeal.
The Minister of Finance, the most formidable politician in France, and
the great financier set out together to m t a ambassadors to the master
,

blackmailer. Herz was inflexible, ,1 ul Rrinach tried a last card.


Accompanied by Clemenceau, he visited Consians whose fine hand was
seen by connoisseurs in part of the press campaign. Constans, like
Herz could, or would, do nothing. There was a last unpleasant inter-
view for Reinach with his nephew and son-in-law, Joseph Reinach, whose
career would be compromised, perhaps fatally, by the conduct of his
uncle. The Baron's allies had failed him; his family was embittered.
He spent an hour or two with two young sisters whom he kept and, at
one o'clock in the morning, got home. At a quarter to seven he was
found dead in bed. One of the chief witnesses would never tell his side
of the story.
If anything was needed to make of Panama a first-rate scandal, the
death of the Baron supplied the want. It was impossible to avoid
suspicion of foul play. The official cause of death, 'cerebral congestion',
was believed by few; there was much talk of suicide and some of murder.
It was against this dramatic background that Jacques Delahaye, the
formidable and deeply unpopular Boulangist deputy, demanded of the
Government and the Chamber, the appointment of a committee to
inquire into the charges that the Panama Company had corrupted
members of Parliament.
It was to be the day of light, not like the day of darkness when
Reinach had died, like Polonius, a 'rat killed behind the arras'. The
of the
Shakesperian comparison is that of a young Boulangist deputy
left-wing of the party, Maurice Barres. Delahaye hated the system
which he had failed to overthrow. Barres did not altogether dislike a
as did French
system that provided such admirable literary subjects
parliamentarism, but he despised the victors, the more that among
them was his old philosophy teacher, Burdeau, who was to suffer the
disaster of immortality at the hands of a pupil who had revolted against
the man and the doctrine.
Delahaye was in a difficult position; he knew, through agents of
the incriminated directors, that there had been corruption, but he had
279 T
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
shortage of material. He had, it is true, the advantage of having been
cool to Panama in its great days. He had
attacked the first financier
of Panama, Le*vy-Cre*mieux, and, by accident or design, he had assailed,
while they were still powerful,* many of the leading figures of the
financialand political world, Clemenceau, Freycinet, Burdeau, Bai'haut,
Antonin Proust, Cornelius Herz, Arene.
Drumont was in prison for his libel on Burdeau when he began to
receive from Reinach, through Andrieux, the ex-Prefect of Police who
had gone over to the Boulangists, the materials for a fresh campaign,
materials provided by the demoralized Baron on the condition that he
should be kept out of the columns of the Libre Parole. In supplying
Drumont with materials, Reinach had been too clever by half. La
Cocarde, the chief Boulangist journal, had joined in the campaign, seeing
in the scandal its way to revenge on the victors of 1889. Within the
Government, Loubet, the Prime Minister, and, after some hesita-
tion, the Procureur-General, Quesnay de Beaurepaire, saviour of the
Republic in 1889, had decided against prosecuting any of the directors
of Panama; the politician because he feared the political consequences;
the lawyer because he was doubtful if any legal fraud had been com-
mitted. Ricard, the Minister of Justice, was less content, and the
Boulangists in the Chamber were already demanding replies to awk-
ward questions and, if Ricard did not get his way, his resignation would
be an even greater disaster than the prosecutions, for he could appear
as a martyr of probity, prevented from doing his duty by presumably

corrupt colleagues. No one wished to give the pompous lawyer who


was known as 'La Belle Fatma' a chance to become a hero.
On November igth, the parliamentary campaign began with a
broadside from Floquet, the President of the Chamber. The conqueror
of Boulanger had been charged with receiving 300,000 francs * for
electoral purposes in 1888. His reply was brief, complete, and should
have been conclusive. 'Not only did I demand nothing, but I asked
for nothing, I got nothing, and I distributed nothing.' Except for a
few cynics, the simple affirmation of the President was received with
roars of applause which had just ended when members began to look
at that day's copy of the Jour 2 which had spread on its front page an

inspired statement in which a 'close friend' of Floquet's admitted that


he had received the money butj fighting to save the Republic at death
grips with an enemy provided with ample funds from unknown sources,
he had asked some great companies, including the Panama Company,
for 'their financial aid in the battle just begun'. Floquet had prepared
two lines of defence, one true, one false. He
had himself used the false
one at the very moment that a friendly paper used the true one! It
was a bad beginning for the notabilities of the Republic.
It was not the only breakdown in staff-work that day. In a
1
12,000 or $60,000.
*
Not the Jour-Echo de Paris now published.
278
THE REPUBLIC SAVED
desperate attempt to save Reinach, Loubet and Burdeau had tricked
Quesnay de Beaurepaire into postponing the arrests, but the Procurcur
had seen through their game and insisted on obeying the orders of his
chief Ricard who had, in his turn, tried with little success to
quid the
parliamentary storm by informing the Chamber that the machinery of
justice was in motion and all was well.
While the parliamentary war was raging with doubtful fortune,
the Baron de Reinach was engaged in his last He
desperate campa '-n.
:

had seen the Cocarde, he knew that the silence of the Lilnc /V/W<- was no
longer enough. One man could save him, Cornelius Hei/, and he
implored Rouvier and Clemenceau to go with him to make this appeal.
The Minister of Finance, the most formidable politician in France, and
the great financier set out together to at us ambas ulors to the master
t

blackmailer. Herz was inflexible mi Rrina< h tried a last card.


Accompanied by Clemenceau, he veiled Constans whose fine hand was
seen by connoisseurs in part of the press campaign. Constans, like
Herz could, or would, do nothing. There was a last unpleasant inter-
view for Reinach with his nephew and son-in-law, Joseph Reinach, whose
career would be compromised, perhaps fatally, by the conduct of his
uncle. The Baron's allies had failed him; his family was embittered.
He spent an hour or two with two young sisters whom he kept and, at
one o'clock in the morning, got home. At a quarter to seven he was
found dead in bed. One of the chief witnesses would never tell his side
of the story.
If anything was needed to make of Panama a first-rate scandal, the
death of the Baron supplied the want. It was impossible to avoid
suspicion of foul play. The official cause of death, 'cerebral congestion',
was believed by few; there was much talk of suicide and some of murder.
It was against this dramatic background that Jacques Delahaye, the
formidable and deeply unpopular Boulangist deputy, demanded of the
Government and the Chamber, the appointment of a committee to
inquire into the charges that the Panama Company had corrupted
members of Parliament.
It was to be the day of light, not like the day of darkness when
Reinach had died, like Polonius, a 'rat killed behind the arras*. The
of the
Shakesperian comparison is that of a young Boulangist deputy
of the party, Maurice Barres. Delahaye hated the system
left-wing
which he had failed to overthrow. Barres did not altogether dislike a
as did French
system that provided such admirable literary subjects
parliamentarism, but he despised the victors, the more that among

philosophy teacher, Burdeau, who


them was his old was to suffer the
disaster of immortality at the hands of a pupil who had revolted against
the man and the doctrine.
in a difficult position; he knew, through agents of
Delahaye was
the incriminated directors, that there had been corruption, but he had
T
279
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
de Lesseps was a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour, he could only
be tried in an appeal court, that is to say without a jury, and his rank
forced the other accused to stand trial before that court too. From the
Government's point of view, that was an advantage, for who could tell
what sophistical arguments might affect juries? The accused were
Lesseps, his son Charles, Baron Cottu and Marius Fontane, all directors
of the company and M. Eiffel, the contractor whose tower had made
him famous in 1889 and who had been called in, in the last desperate
struggle, to lend his name and
talents to the company.
The prosecution was vigorous and resolute. Republican justice
would show its mettle. The lawyers for the defence were eloquent, but
its real heart was the shrewd and^ courageous Charles de Lesseps. His
father was now eighty-eight x and hardly conscious of what was going
on. Charles de Lesseps painted a picture of filial loyalty, of doing
everything for the salvation of the great enterprise and of being harassed
and bled by the blackmailing gangs which were conspicuously not being
tried. When he, Lesseps, told the story of how Baihaut had extorted
nearly 400,000 francs from the company, the President, with traditional
judicial naivete, asked solemnly, 'But in those circumstances, you go for
the police.' There was abundant laughter in court and a wit put into
the accused's mouth the retort, 'And when it is the police who are the
thieves?' Pleas of piety, of pressure, of good faith in the most optimistic
announcements of the company, did not shake the judges. The two
Lesseps were given five years each; the other three two years each.
The directors of the greatest companies could note; there were still
laws and judges in France. 2
Amonth later began the trials of the accused politicians, or rather
of a few of them, for the examining magistrates had declared that there
was not a sufficient case to go before the jury where Rouvier, Roche,
Arene, Renault, Grevy, Deves, were concerned. These were, it is true,
the most important politicians, the ex-Ministers, the leaders of parties
and the well-connected; but the Republic, if it had shown in dealing
with the Lesseps that it could be just, showed in dealing with Rouvier
and Company that it could be understanding.
The remaining accused were Charles de Lesseps and Fontane,
Baihaut and his go-between Blondin and five members of Parliament,
Sans-Leroy, Beral, Dugu6 de la Fauconnerie, Gobron and Antonin
Proust. Charles de Lesseps having been sentenced for one crime and
being now before a jury, made no attempt to get off by keeping his
mouth shut. He did his best to shake the faith of the French people
in their rulers, but all the political defendants except Baihaut took the
line of stout denial. Sans-Leroy, whose changed opinion had turned
the parliamentary committee from an unfavourable to a favourable
1
Charles de Lesseps died in 1923 at the age of 83, full of vigour.
* These sentences were duly quashed on a point of law by the Supreme Court.
2812
THE REPUBLIC SAVED
vote, got the biggest laugh of the trial when he declared that his attitude
'had been that of a member of a committee who wished to be
enlight-
ened'. The jury accepted this story. They accepted all the stories
that the politicians chose to tell. After all, they were no less
plausible
than the stories the examining magistrates had chosen to believe when
told by Albert Grevy and the rest. Even the Royalist nnd Catholic
leader, Dugue de Fauconnerie, was believed.
la ()nl\ Bailout was
convicted, but then he insisted on confessing, with a v ealth tt\le: -il and t

a display of emotional repentance that recalls twentieth-i entmy Russia


more than nineteenth-century France. Baihaut t^ot five years; Charles
de Lesseps and Blondin one year each. 1
These trials, however satisfactory to the new privileged class whose
Battle of Pavia had ended with all saved but honour, vvere not so
edify-
ing for the country, especially for tho^ who had noted the evidence of
Madame Cottu, who had testified that the he;:cl of Police, Soinoury, had
promised to look after her husband if she would enable the prosecution
to incriminate a member of the Right. Ii was not clear that Soinoury
had acted off his own bat, but the Minister of Justice,
the stern and
unbending Radical, Leon Bourgeois, denied any knowledge of the pro-
posed bargain. In all probability he was telling the truth, but so many
Ministers, on their word of honour or oath, had had to deny such
scandalous things.
During all the trials and acquittals and sessions of the Brisson Com-
mittee, two men who could have told all or a good deal more than could
otherwise be known, had prudently left the country. Cornelius Herz
had taken refuge in Bournemouth and Arton, who had his own private
difficulties with criminal justice over the Dynamite Company, was

travelling over the Continent, pursued, not very vigorously or success-


fully,by M. Soinoury's detectives.
The Doctor was as great a humorist in exile as he had been in
Paris. He was, he asserted (and eminent doctors backed him up),
very ill. He could not leave Bournemouth and could not be extra-
dited. However, he was willing to give evidence if the Committee
would come to see him. The comedy went on, with visits of doctors
and members of the Committee to the Doctor who promised or threat-
ened to tell all, but was able at every new demand to evade questioning
on any vital point. An Arton comedy went on too, for that minor
swindler was willing to sell information, or silence, in exchange for
immunity. The hunt for Arton was a godsend to the music-halls,
but in 1895 he was given away and arrested in London. In Paris he
was only tried for his frauds at the expense of the Dynamite Company
(the grounds of his extradition) and got eight years.
Meanwhile the

1
Arton was later convicted (in his absence) of bribing Sans-Leroy, who had been acquitted
of the charge of being bribed. It may be remarked that in America, in similar circumstances,
it was the
politician, Fall, who
went to jail and the businessman, Dohcny, who was acquitted,
283
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
Panama Committee had laboured; it produced a great deal of distress-
ing evidence, but except for the unfortunate Baihaut, no politician went
to jail for his sins; and it was noted, with interest, that while the heirs of
various dead political beneficiaries of Panama were successfully forced
toreimburse the ill-gotten gains by the administrators of the defunct
company, the living successfully defended their spoil.
The pool into which Drumont, Gilly and the rest had thrown their
stones at last returned to its old calm. The enemies and friends of the
Republic alike believed, for a moment, that the regime was again in
danger. Even the dim Prince Victor, head if not hope of the Bona-
partists, found a lively phrase. 'The Empire built Suez, the Republic
Panama.' But the Conservatives had more than ever to regret the
waste of their assets in the Boulangist adventure. If the men who had
defeated Boulanger had been shown up as knaves, their enemies had
been earlier shown up as fools: and a peasant elector prefers a knave to
a fool. As if to show how incorrigible they were, the Boulangists
allowed one of the most feather-headed of their members, Millevoye, to
charge Clemenceau in the Chamber with being a paid agent of England
on the strength of some highly incompetent forgeries sold to him by a
negro employee of the British Embassy. A party which could be taken
in by Norton was not fit to govern.
There was more to come, for in the trial rising out of the Norton
affair, the honour of the Marquis de Mores was impugned. Mores was
a Spanish-Italian-French nobleman who had married a rich Ameri-
can and had lost a lot of money in America, lost it, he asserted, in
fighting from his ranch in the Dakotas, the Jewish controlled beef-trust.
Back in France, he had become the chief lieutenant of Drumont and
had organized a gang among the butchers of the abattoirs of La Villette
which he called 'the Friends of Mores'. He saw himself as the link
joining the old nobility to the workers, a plan recalling the romantic
dreams of young Mr. Disraeli. A real swashbuckler, Mores was a
noted duellist and his killing of an inoffensive Jewish Army officer had
won him even more admirers. Alas! it was now revealed, by the reck-
less marquis himself, that having incurred in a smart gambling club a
debt of honour which he could not pay, he had applied to Andrieux for
advice. Andrieux, who had a finger in every pie, told him to apply
to Cornelius Herz. The Doctor had a sense of humour of a cruel kind
and he insisted that he would only lend the money if Drumont would
come and ask for it. Drumont did! Shakespearian comparisons were
fashionable at the time. Renan had compared democracy to Caliban;
Barres, as has been seen, could quote Hamlet to advantage and Corne-
lius Herz insisted in parodying the 'Merchant of Venice', which play
Drumont had publicly admired.
1

1
Critics bad already noted that the first business-manager of La Libre Parob was a
(converted) Jew.
284
THE REPUBLIC SAVED
In the elections of 1893, the French
indignation than had been hoped or feared. Several honest leaders
of the Ralliement, including Albert de Mun and Jacques Pioti, were
defeated, partly because of Royalist defection. The Gonsen alivcs lost
badly; no moral reaction stayed their decline, while few of the incrim-
inated politicians lost their seats. The most -notable c\ption was
"

Clemenceau and he was defeated in the Var, not Do ,msr he was too
close a friend of Cornelius Herz, but because he \\as, it \\as asserted
and believed, an English agent, indeed a person. il protege of Queen
Victoria. His speeches were interrupted by sin >uLs of 'Aoh yes' and he
retorted, unavailingly, with ferocious and indecorous humour. Some
politicians had managed, like Cavaignar, to acquire a reputation for
moral integrity and rigour that stood them in good stead later, but the
great lesson of political morality (whic Ribot had professed to hope
]
i

for) was not given.


If there was any lesson at all to be learned, the town worker thought
it was that all politics must be corrupt in a capitalist regime and the
Socialists rose from twelve to fifty. France was still predominantly a
peasant country and the lesson the peasants drew, if they drew any,
was based on the fate of Baihaut. It reminded them of the celebrated
anecdote of the condemned man who asked and was given permission to
speak a few last words of advice to the crowd around the scaffold. He
L
said only this: 'Never confess.'

1
Ageneral line of Republican defence that was very successful was the assertion
that
the whole scandal was the work of the clericals! A more ingenious version of this is that of
M. Debidour, who, distressed by the lack of moral indignation shown by the Republican
electors, attributes it to the demoralizing influence
of 'Jatholic doctrine on these (anti-
clerical) electors, especially the devotion to Saint Anton/ of Padua.

285
CHAPTER III

THE REVIVAL OF SOCIALISM

his famous speech to the National Assembly on March 2ist, 1871,


IN
Jules Favre had promised that Paris would be 'brought to heel and
9

punished She had been, but there remained in the minds of the
.

ruling classes a conviction that the last had not been heard of the dread
society that, they thought, was the main author of the crimes of Paris,
the International. Favre was hardly back in the Foreign Office before,
he was approaching the powers of Europe, trying to induce them to take
common measures against the International. His approaches were
received politely but nothing was done. Thile, one of Bismarck's
assistants, listened to the plea of the French charge d'affaires, the
Marquis de Gabriac, and solemnly told him of the million members
that the International had in England! And Gabriac foresaw a great
and dangerous future for the International in America, where Marx
had sent the headquarters in his desperate and unavailing fight
with Bakunin to' save the dying society, a flattering estimate that
would have surprised even the optimistic Engels. In the first few
months after the victory of order, Favre could be pardoned for asserting
that 'All the filth of Europe was invited to Paris. Paris became the
rendezvous of the perverted people of the whole world'. It is a little
more surprising to find an editor l of an important paper like the
Journal des Debate, asserting that the Commune had simply been a
congress of the International. 'It opened on March i8th, taking this

time the name of the Paris Commune.' It was natural, then, that the
Assembly, sharing these illusions, should have legislated against this
formidable organization, that believing that the workers of the world,
or a good many of them, had united to raise rebellion in Paris, it should
have struck with all the force of law against the society which claimed
to be the unifying force of these enemies of society, that it should have
shouted down Louis Blanc and Tolain and replied to the former's
analogy of the English Trade Unions with cries of 'They haven't
burned Paris'. That the workers and their leaders had been, as one

1
Villetard,

286
THE REPUBLIC SAVED
of them 1 put it, caught in a trap sprung by the war and its
consequences,
was too simple an explanation; and the law of March
1872 made it a
penal office even to belong to the dreaded association. The scveic
repression did not altogether stamp out the local sections of the Inter-
national, especially in the south, but they were henceforward impotent
to do more than act as scarecrows for the
bourgeoisie.
For the moment it was only among the exiles that the work of
reconstructing a worker's party and a worker's d<u trine \\as possible.
The two chief centres of the dispersed survivors of the Commune
were London and Switzerland; London meant, in eileet,
encountering
the influence of Karl Marx, and Switzerland that of
thcstrong anarchist
movement of the watch-makers of the Jura. Except for the com-
paratively small group of members of the International, Marx was
hardly known in France, or, if he ^ s known, it was as the assailant
of Proudhon. Louis Blanc, according to JVnoit Malon, was one of the
few French leaders in 1848 who appreciated the importance of Marx
and that, it may be suspected, was due in part to their common
hostility to Proudhon. But twenty years later when Sainte-Beuve was
writing his sympathetic life of Proudhon, the Dr. Marx who had
attacked Proudhon was still that and nothing more. But the Commune
changed that. The importance
erroneously attached to the Inter-
national by the French bourgeoisie was an advertisement for Marx,
whose role, if misunderstood, was not underestimated. For the
moment, indeed, Marx was taken more seriously in conservative circles
in France than among the communards. For the acrid tone in which
Marx criticized the way the Commune had been run was not pleasing
to men who had just escaped the firing post, or exile to New Caledonia
or death on the barricades. The intellectual power of the academic
revolutionary in London was not fairly appreciated by men who had
really taken the field against capital, with rifle if not with pen. And
the feud within the International played into the hands of the enemies
of Marx, for two of the most important future leaders of French
socialism, Jules Guesde and Benoit Malon, were at the moment deeply
influenced by anarchist views, although not formally anarchists.
When was discovered that the police spy who had betrayed the
it

members of the International in the south of France had been chosen


by the infallibletheorist of revolution, the anger of Guesde overflowed
in a bitter letter. Van Heddeghem had been authorized by the
International to suspend the organization or a member of his district,

until the General Council's decision was known. This was control of
local French revolutionary action from the outside and Van Hed-
deghem had turned out to be a weak fool who was the dupe of another
of Marx, Dentraygues, who was a police spy. 'Under the
agent
pretence of the workers of our south to the International and
affiliating
1
Albert Richard,
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
thanks to the full powers given by Marx, he acted as a beater driving
the Socialist game for .the police.'
Paul Brousse, who was later to play an important part in French
Socialist politics, was strongly ip favour of an alliance with the Spanish

anarchists, then active in the troubled politics of the first Spanish


Republic. Even in London, where Marx welcomed the exiles and
where Charles Longuet and Paul Lafargue were on the way to becom-
ing his sons-in-law, the Blanquists disapproved of Marx's activities in
the International which they denounced as 'timid, divided, parlia-
mentary'. Divided among themselves and without any effective means
of propaganda in France as long as the 'moral order' ruled, with
military courts still seeking out and punishing communards and with the
International completely disorganized and Marx largely discredited by
the Dentraygues betrayal, French Socialism seemed dead. As Engels
said in 1874, 'The absence of a theoretical foundation and of practical
common sense is very evident.'
Within France, however, the workers were slowly emerging from
the coma to which the failure of the Commune had reduced them.
Many thousands of the most militant among them were dead, in
prison, or in exile, and the Government was vigilant to repress any
organization that seemed to be another head of the hydra that had
not, it appeared, been killed in 1871. But the serious and sensible
workers, on whose existence the ruling classes congratulated them-
selves, were not content to remain quite passive. There were slight
reforms even in those dark days; the first effective Factory Act, for
instance, dates from 1874; and the workers who went as delegates to the
Vienna exhibition noted that they represented a working class which
was better off than its Austrian peer, as the workers sent to the London
exhibition of 1862 had been stimulated to agitation by the discovery
that the English worker was better off than they. There was room for
a reformist movement and it was supplied by Barberet with his groups
of craft unions. Barberet was a very unrevolutionary leader, but the
Parisian working-man, for the moment, was in a very unrevolutionary
mood. Barberet was against even legal strikes, they were treason to
democracy. Can we wonder that an optimistic bourgeois economist
believed that 'the earnest workers have learned to their cost that strikes
are a detestable way of gaining an increase of wages'? Barberet
believed in co-operation, co-operation for production that is and also
in 'social bazaars' where workers would exchange their products.
Tolain, the expelled Internationalist, who was a deputy, encouraged
this modest programme, although the nervous Government was
frightened even by this faint stirring.
It was the collapse of the reactionary Government which gave the
workers courage again. Their votes were valuable to the Left;
prosecution of communards was soon to be stopped as was the main-
288
THE REPUBLIC SAVED
tenance of martial law and the other repressive means
whereby the
National Assembly had controlled the
country. Not all of these
shackles were cast off at once, but their end was
obviously not fai
away. In 1876, a Workers' Congress was held in Paris. 'Workers'
delegates had been sent to the Philadelphia
Exposition of that
year and,
unlike those sent to Vienna, had had little reason to
congratulate
the French worker on his comparative good fortune. Some militants
had refused the subsidy offered by Parliament to pa\ their expenses and
there were signs that the days of meek submission \\m- over. Yet
the Congress was mild enough to reassure L> Li^uo and to win an
angry rebuke from the Blanquist exiles in London. But not all exiles
were so censorious. Brousse was pleased that there should be any
kind of Workers' Congress at all. And Jnus Guesde noted that the
members showed a clear class-sense 1 u > had excluded from member-
.
''

ship anyone who was not a workei 01 a delegate of a group of workers.


,

To free the proletarian from his dependence on and trust in bourgeois


leaders and policies had been the aim of Proudhon. The Blanquists in
1872 had declared that the proletariat had 'finally become conscious
of itself. It knows that it bears within it the elements of the new
society/ The workers were giving signs that they had learned this
truth. All they needed was a doctrine and leaders.
The leaders were numerous enough. As the Republicans got a
secure grip on the State, more and more communards were pardoned and
enabled to carry on their propaganda from within France. True to
their traditions, the London Blanquists had founded a secret society,
'The Revolutionary Commune', and as long as Blanqui was alive, especi-
ally as long as he was in prison, his immense prestige made him a
rallying-centre for many ardent if confused aspirations towards social
justice and against the effectsof the contagion of the world's slow stain
on the purity of the Republican party. These militants were able
to run Blanqui successfully against Gambetta's nominee, Lavertujon,
at Bordeaux in 1879, and force the release of the 'imprisoned one',
although he had been ineligible when elected. But with Blanqui's
death next year, the party lost its leader and without him its doctrine
was too thin to serve for a modern Socialist party. The 'Central
Revolutionary Committee' which replaced the 'Revolutionary
Com-
mune' as the controlling body of the sect was originally a 'closed' body,
that is to say its membership was limited to a small and select body of
real and competent revolutionaries in the true Blanquist tradition.
But fidouard Vaillant, who had been a very new member when the
Commune was set up, and whose German education made him open
to Marxian influences, was successful in his move to accept members
from other Socialist parties and societies. Thus diluted, the Committee
lost what unity it had had. 'General' Eudes was still a name to
in
frighten the bourgeoisiewith, and his supporters were still believers
289
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
the sudden stroke by the small, determined and disciplined band, but
in the squabblesbetween the new and old school Blanquism decayed.
Although provided Socialism with some striking figures like Vaillant,
it

it could not provide a doctrine.


That duty Marxism which found, in Jules Guesde, the repre-
fell to
sentative it Guesde seems to have adopted many Marxian
needed.
ideas before he had ever read any Marx. He was a Republican in
that he believed that the Republic was indispensable for the workers,
but otherwise he wanted the workers to form their own party and take
over the State. Only thus could they put an end to the robbery
inherent in the wage system, the source of all their evils. Guesde,
a bourgeois himself, could not accept the view that only workers could
represent their class. That doctrine meant, he later asserted, giving
up Delescluze and accepting traitors like Tolain. Le Radical and
Les Droits de VHomme were vehicles for Guesde's propaganda and he
found in a young German in Paris, Karl Hirsch, the necessary link
with the new school of scientific Socialism. In the Latin quarter the
Cafe Soufflet became the chapel where the new gospel was preached.
Marx no longer depended on the denunciations of the righteous for
his fame. To an increasing number of French workers, his doctrine
became their living faith, not always very well understood, but none
the less firmly believed in. The field was not yet clear of competitors,
it is true. There were still Proudhonians; there were still Gomtists;
there were the Golinists who believed in the nationalization of the land
as a solution of the social problem. But all these stars were paling
before Marx's. A
translation of the first volume of Capital was issued
in ten-centime parts and in 1880 appeared the first Revue Socialiste
in which Kautsky wrote and in which part of Engel's Anti-Duhring
appeared, while in the revived galite, Lafargue published a transla-
tion of EngePs Socialism, Utopian and Scientific. 'The effect in France
was enormous,' wrote Engels. The literary campaign for Marxism
was well under way. It was still an undisciplined campaign. Benoit
Malon, in his broad-minded eclectic way, wrote in 1881 that it was
foolish to talk of the madness of doctrines that 'have for propagators

people like Marx, Engels, De Paepe, and for theoretical adherents,


people like J. S. Mill, Spencer, Schaeffle, Letourneau and a score more
of universally respected men of learning'. Marx would not have liked
the company Malon and his sponsor, Jules Valles, made him keep, but
his name at least was known. And not only his name, for Gabriel
Deville produced an epitome of Capital which, as the naive M. Boilley
wrote in 1895, 'is fairly lucid and well enough suited to our literary
5
taste. Hardly anyone in France, he goes on, 'reads more than this.'
So eminent an academic as fimile de Laveleye thought Marx worth
and so adroit a journalist as 'Mermeix* printed the
respectful refutation
Communist Manifesto in full. And if we are to believe the story told
290
THE REPUBLIC SAVED
1
by Paul Adam, copies of Capital in tatters, stained with coffee and
were passed from hand to hand in the cafes of the
cigarette ash,
Latin quarter, while the students debated the theory.
Guesde knew that revolutions are not made by mere literary con-
versions. They are made by revolutionaries, above all by iw< uti( >nary >1

parties. In 1878, in his weekly galite, Guesde had piv.u lial that the
electoral struggle was the only possible one for the moment,
although
'the source of evil does not lie ... in a political organi/ation
which,
however defective it only the effect, the resultant of the
may be, is

social organization'. The last number of E^aliU' appeared on July


1
4th, killed by fines, but Guesde was soon to find a more effective
sounding-board, for he took advantage of the Exhibition of 1878 to
organize an international Workers' Con^re<=s in Paris. It was prohibited.
But its organizers went on, and the- ^m- arrested, on
September 4th,
a significant reminder of how little Rcpubl-can anniversaries meant to
the workers. His defence made Guesde far better known than he had
yet been. 'We believe in the inevitability of a workers' 1789,' he
declared, and when he was imprisoned he issued a manifesto from
2
Sainte-Pelagie, appealing not only to the wage-earners, but to the
petty bourgeoisie of shop-keepers and peasants, trying to persuade them
that they had nothing to lose by a revolution as the existing order of
things was making them mere wage-earners anyway.
In 1879, the Workers' Congress, held in the Foiies Bergere of
Marseilles, was open to delegates of clubs as well as of workers and
marked the defeat of the older and more cautious leaders like Finance,
the Gomtist who thought the workers were not yet prepared for the
overthrow of the existing order. But the tide was moving away from
such timidity. The exiles of the Commune sent a message defending
the Commune that is very reminiscent of Marx's defence of it in 1871.
There was a violent attack on that monument of revolutionary respecta-
bility, Louis Blanc, deputy of Marseilles, who was accused of having
betrayed the Commune in 1871. He was soon to declare that 'if ever
an insurrection was of a kind to justify and to demand a full amnesty,
it is certainly the insurrection of March i8th', but the real militants

were not satisfied with such belated conversion. There had been a
marked growth in collectivist belief even since the Congress of the

previous year at and an increased readiness to run the risks of


Lyons
workers' candidacies, despite the gloomy fears of Ballivet that the
workers' representatives would be forced into dangerous alliances with
bourgeois parties. The bright example
of the good work done in the

Reichstag by the German Social Democrats was held up to the French


workers, who were also treated to a lesson from the German party
1
To M. Lucicn Corpechot. According to a more reliable witness, M. Alexandra
Z6vaes, the students read Proudhon, Blanqui,
Bakunin and Stirner as well as Marx and
the pamphlets of Guesde.
"He called the prison 'Pelagic', omitting the 'Samte*.
291
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
whose fraternal message insisted on the need for a disciplined prole-
tarian party. Ernest Roche, who was the organizer of Blanqui's
successful election at Bordeaux, was there to show what political action
could achieve. The resolutions finally passed contained chilly com-
mendation of the co-operatives whose sickly life had been suddenly
prolonged by the legacy of Benjamin Raspail, who left 60,000
($300,000) to provide capital at low rates of interest, but the real heart
of the Congress was in the acceptance of public ownership of the means
of production and the organization of wage-earners in a class party
with working-class candidates. The proletariat must 'cut itself off
completely from the bourgeoisie and separate itself from them in every
and economic'.
field, intellectual, judicial, political
The new 'Workers' party' was organized on a regional basis.
Its main centres of strength were Paris, Bordeaux, Lyons, Saint-

Etienne, Lille and Roubaix. In the south, anarchism was still too
strong for the party to have more than nominal existence and, even so,
the local groups professed anarchist views quite out of keeping with
the spirit of the new movement. That spirit was summed up for the
moment in a minimum programme whose origin was of great signi-
ficance, for in order to launch this new organ of French revolutionary
activity, Guesde went over to London to consult Marx and Engels.
The result was a list of immediate reforms like legal regulation of hours
of work, a legal minimum wage and other desirable improvements
which, if they did not alter the fundamental character of capitalist
society, made fine talking-points in electoral campaigns. Marx was
not altogether pleased at having to make these concessions to French
illusions, but the desirability of getting a real Marxian party organized
was too great for him to stick to rigid orthodoxy, if that would alienate
the ignorant French. The tact displayed in drafting the platform did
not save it from attack from two different sides. Felix Pyat, as un-
bending an ass as he had been in the days of the Commune, attacked it
as pusillanimous. He wanted nothing to do with minimum pro-
grammes; only maximum programmes were good enough for him;
meantime he had his own proposals, such as that for the erection of a
statue to Danton on the site of the chapel erected to expiate the execu-
tion of Louis XVI. More serious was anarchist opposition, for fear of
State tyranny was still strong, and the leader of the Marxists was not
temperamentally fitted to dispel such fears. Jules Guesde, the Marxist
leader in France, like his master in London, had many weaknesses
as a

party leader. He was suspicious, dogmatic, convinced both of his

lightness and of his righteousness. Jean Grave, the anarchist, is a


hostile witness, but it is not hard to believe him when he asserts that
Guesde's intolerance of opposition, or even of questioning, made him
far less effective as a leader than otherwise he would have been.
'Mermeix', while not unwilling to recognize the merits of Guesde, had
292
THE REPUBLIC SAVED
to admit that 'he didn't inspire sympathy'. But the tall, meagre,
bearded figure had the strength of firm belief and courage. 'Blanqui,
young, minus his romantic side, more scientific and truly modern so
1

Paul Alexis described him to the inquiring Zola. In the n\h Creole,
Paul Lafargue, Guesde had a useful ally, bitter, unscrupulous, redeem-
ing the suspicions his wealth and luxurious habits might ha\e aroused
by his marriage to one of Marx's daughters. In J< an Donnoy was a
more typical representative of the French converts to the new faith.
That the intolerance of Guesde had a good deal to do with the
speedy disruption of the party is certain, but there \\ere other and more
general causes. A Socialist party that descended from the high ground
of abstention from all bourgeois politics, that, as Jean Grave
put it,
wasted money on elections that ought to have gone to buy explosives,
was tempted, from the first, to play <h game according
to the political
rules. Either it ran hopeless candidacies of Accollas in 1876
like that
as mere demonstrations, a method of propaganda of limited value, or it

really tried to make its weight felt, and that meant bargains with other
parties; open bargains or tacit bargains. The organizer of resistance
to Gambetta in his fief of Belleville was Reties, a member of the party,
but opposition to Gambetta was far from being confined to the new
party; there were the left-wing Radicals to profit by the campaign of
the militant Socialists.
It was difficult to have a common enemy and common victories
without being drawn into entangling alliances. The real Marxians
were weak in Paris where the Blanquist tradition was strong and where
the true factory proletariat was just beginning to appear. In the great
textile towns of the north, there were the economic conditions for

breeding a real class-conscious proletariat. Elsewhere, it was necessary


to predict that the small craftsmen, shopkeepers, peasants and the like
were going soon to be reduced to the condition of the loom-tenders of
Lille or Roubaix, but prophecy was not, electorally, very appealing.
After the victory of Blanqui at Bordeaux, the Radical Sigismond
Lacroix had warned the old politicians that the 'days of idle chatter
and of intrigues are over'. But Lacroix and Guesde were both unduly
optimistic. It was possible to unite all sections and factions in cam-
paigns like that for Blanqui, for the complete amnesty, for the election
to the Paris Municipal Council of Trinquet, the exiled communard who
was dear to the proletariat because, on trial, he had, unlike some others,
refused to disavow his adherence to the revolution of March i8th.
Beyond that, unity was hard to achieve. Men would willingly unite
on what became, from 1880, the annual pilgrimage to the 'Wall of the
Federals' in Pere La Chaise, but it was harder to get them to unite
on the programme Guesde had brought over from London. Even
watered down to suit French tastes it was rather Germanic. The
assumption that there was only one true Socialist doctrine was irritating
293
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
to people who agreed with the policy of Le Proletaire : 'Truth in social
5

economy is not the property of any one school. The admirably


disciplined German Socialists had hurriedly snubbed L'Egalitt when it
offered its physical aid when the time came 'to answer force by force'.
The haste with which Vorwdrts rejected the offer had not been lost on
the sceptics who thought that the French workers had no need of verbal
lessons in revolutionary tactics from Germans, whether in Berlin or
London. Soon Joffrin was objecting to a programme 'born in Thames
fogs'. It might be all right for the north, but it was far too inflexible
for the whole country; there must be local adjustments. Joffrin,
Brousse and Benoit Malon were for a programme of immediate and
practicable reforms, for getting what was possible. They were
immediately nicknamed 'Possibilists' and, with an obvious reference to
the corresponding split in the Republican party, Guesde said there was
no room for Opportunists in the Workers' Party. 'What did you want
to be?' asked Joffrin, 'impossibilists?' Was the party to confine itself
to 'declining at every moment the word Revolution only as a piece of

play-acting?' If that was so 'our activity is as worthless as the walk to


the victim in the workhouse treadmill; we hate results'. The split
came at the Havre Congress in 1883; two separate meetings were held
and the new Workers' Party was cut in two. Brousse, who had old
grievances against Marx, compared the policy of split to the separation
of Church and State. The French workers were the state to be
delivered from the tyranny of the new Ul tramontanes, the Marxists.
'The Ultramontanes cannot obey the law of their country because their
chief is in Rome. The Marxists cannot obey the decisions of the
Party because their chief is in London.'

The anti-Marxian section took the name of The Workers' Revolu-


tionary Socialist Party, but were generally known by their sub-title,
the 'Federation of Labour Socialists of France', and more commonly
still, as the Tossibilists' or 'Broussists'. For the Marxian programme,
Brousse and his party substituted the doctrine of 'public services', the
taking-over of the great monopolies by the State as soon as they were
ripe for nationalization. Municipalities were to run bakeries and
butchers' shops. The days of violent revolution were over. Guesde
attacked this gas-and-water socialism. Not only did it evade the
fundamental question, the ending of the appropriating of surplus value
by the capitalist, but its immediate reforms would make things worse.
Rationalizing the bakeries and butchers' shops would greatly increase
the number of unemployed, besides creating a discord within the work-
ing class between the consumers and the employees of the public
services. But in Paris and the, rural areas, the warnings of the

'Torquemada in glasses', as Clovis Hugues, the Socialist poet-deputy of


Marseilles, called Guesde, were neglected. Blanquism, Broussism,
Anarchism (the last reinforced intellectually by the prestige of Prince
294
THE REPUBLIC SAVED
Kropotkin) divided with Guesdism the allegiance of the French
all

workers. was a story that was to be repeated; the hostility of the


It
rank-and-file to an exotic doctrine that did not appeal
enough to their
own revolutionary tradition; the jealousy of leaders when one of them
was the known representative of a foreign personality or doctrine; the
sliding into mere politics of so many members, oiue safely elected to
Parliament or to local bodies; the substitution (as s on occurred with
the Possibilists) of mere political objectives like the abolition of the
Senate for basic economic changes. The numbers involved in this
party war were small; the vast majority of workers were as indifferent
to Brousse as to Guesde, to Jean Grave as to Joifrin. But on a far
greater scale, later leaders were to have to face the difficulties that were
too much for Jules Guesde.
The split soon produced the ual bitterness.
-,
Electorally, the
Possibilists naturally did better than the !'\s* practical Guesdists; indeed,
the vote controlled by Brousse so< a became a respectable asset in the
Paris political market. Guesde was a candidate who inspired hostility
in electors, but he was only defeated at Marseilles in
1885 by the
intervention of Protot, the ex-Delegate for Justice of the Commune, who
denounced Guesde as an agent of Germany, an ally of those German
Socialists who were merely scouts for the armies of the Triple Alliance.
The Conservatives, who had their own reasons for seeing clearly the
menace complacency of their Republican fellow-bourgeois, noted
to the
that Socialism grew if the parties claiming to represent it did not.
But the early hopes, shared by Guesde and Malon, of making the
French worker exclusively class-conscious had died by the time the
Boulangist crisis called all good Republicans to the aid of the party.

II

The Boulangist crisis had further embittered the relations between


the Socialist sections, for some militants were seduced by the revolu-
the Possibilist leader
tionary promises of the General, while others, like
Brousse, seemed more pleased that they had helped to save the Republic
than anxious to transform it. It was the increasing absorption of
Brousse and the other bourgeois leaders of the party in merely political
aims, personal or general, that produced the next schism.
The ex-communard compositor, Jean Allemane, had watched with
distaste and distrust the degeneration of the party into an electoral
machine. He attributed this decline to the bourgeois character of the
to being elected and
leaders, to the excessive importance they attached
to the excessively broad view they took of their duties to the party

which had nominated them. Once elected they were more anxious,
so Allemane thought, to get re-elected, to please the general body of
voters and the leaders of other groups than to serve the interests of the
295 u
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
proletariat whose delegates they were. The discontent within the
party cameto a head at the Congress of Chatellerault in 1890. The
militants, who were soon to be known as Allemanists, were defeated,
defeated, they asserted, by sharp practice. They claimed to be the
true heirs of the original party, although they left to Brousse the name
of the 'Federation of Socialist Workers of France', taking the sub-title
for themselves and becoming ''The Workers' Socialist Revolutionary
Party'.
The new party,the Allemanists, was based on a strict class doctrine.
the workers could liberate the workers. Its leaders must be men
Only
who knew the workers' lot at first hand, not bourgeois on the make, or
even bourgeois sentimentally affected by woes they had not experienced.
Any member of the party elected to a public body was to be closely
watched by a committee of vigilance, the deputy or municipal council-
lor was to give a resignation in blank to the committee that nominated

him; he had to turn over a proportion of his official salary to the party
and to recognize that his duty was to it and not to the unorganized
electors whom the Broussists were accused of 'basely flattering'.
The suspicion of bourgeois leaders, the insistence on the strict
dependence of the political representatives of the party on its ruling
committee, the belief in the general strike and in direct trade-union
action, the attempt to make municipal Socialism the means of imme-
diate benefit to the workers, marked off the Allemanists from the
bourgeois-ridden Possibilists and from the doctrinaire Guesdists and
Blanquists who diverted the workers from immediate gains to remote
possibilities of complete revolution. Fear of being compromised with
the bourgeois led to prohibitions of the electoral bargains with other
parties which had been the bane of the old Possibilist policy, although,
as candid members of the new party pointed out, it was in fact impos-
sible to carry out the programme of municipal Socialism without alli-
ances with other groups. Anti-militarism was another of the dogmas
of the new group; with none of the reservations of the customary
type, the Allemanists were opposed to any wai, even a war for Alsace-
Lorraine, and denounced the Army as a school of vice and idleness. In
many of its doctrines, the party was marked by the influence of Proud-
hon, in its federalism, its suspicion of the bourgeoisie, its contempt for
the patriotic gullibility of the masses. In other ways, in its belief in
strike action, in the role of the trade unions, in its aversion from system-
atic dogma, it was an ancestor of the later syndicalist movement.
The Allemanists had their strongholds, and their activity led to the
increase of Socialist activity in new regions, but ten years after the
foundation of a united French Socialist party, it had split into four
sections, each as anxious to fight the other groups as to combat the
common enemy. It was a sign of the times that, despite this faction

fighting and the discredit cast on all the leaders of all the Socialist
296
THE REPUBLIC SAVED
parties by the charges of tyranny, corruption, incompetence and
political thimble-rigging that were thrown about, it was Socialism, if
not the organized Socialist parties, that profited in the elections of 1893
by the disgust aroused by Panama.
One result of these elections was underlined by a rising young
lawyer who had moved from Radicalism to an undot trinaire Socialism.
The Panama case,' wrote Alexandre Millerand, 'has shown all the
social forces of this country at the service and uncVr the orders of high
finance. . .The nation must take from the L> uons of this new feudal
.

system the fortresses which they have torn from her in order to dominate
her: the Bank of France, the railways, the mines.' But, he went on, 'It
is not by the
waving of a wand, by a miracle or by violence, that social
transformation will be brought about '.The electors had shown their
disgust with the existing political ;, -onnel, not only by electing some
of the leading members of the <>. o.ipiz^d Socialist parties, but by
electing nearly thirty indepemlen NK i.ilists.
1

The doctinal feuds between Guesde, Brousse and Allemane had


not prevented the growth of a general, if vague, Socialist sentiment.
The poet deputy, Glovis Hugues, and the old communard Cam&inat had
represented this vague Socialism in the Chamber, and to it various
deputies of other parties had drifted, men like Millerand and the
who had returned to the Chamber
brilliant young professor, Jean Jaures,
ata by-election just before the general elections of 1893, this time free
from all his previous connections with the bourgeois parties.
The main bond of unity between these unorganized Socialists was
furnished by the Socialist press, by Benoit Malon's Revue Socialistey
hospitable to all schools, and by La Bataille, founded by the communard,
Lissagaray, a more polemical than expository journal, fighting its
founder's battles over again rather than expounding the economic and
social creeds of the younger generation. The Cri du Peuple of Jules
Valles also served as a common battleground to all the Socialist
schools, although its founder was too independent in temperament to
take kindly to any dogmatic system. After his death, the romantic
Severine edited the Cri du Peuple and her generosity and sentimentality
made her a nuisance to rigid teachers and leaders like Guesde.
The contributors to these journals, like the independent Socialist
deputies, were far from any general agreement on their programme.
To some, Socialism meant little more than a generous hatred of bour-
geois complacency and a vague dislike of the wage system; they owed
much more to Victor Hugo than to Marx. The successes of 1893
made some clarification necessary, and the establishment of the 'Re-
publican Socialist Federation of the Seine' and the taking over by
Millerand of the newspaper, La Petite Rtpublique, gave the Independents
the rudiments of an organization and an organ, as the electoral success
of Millerand, Viviani and Jaures gave them leaders.
297
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
Mill? rand was the hardest-headed and
politically the shrewdest of
the leaders of the new His self-control marked him off from his
party.
colleagues as was noted by a Belgian Socialist,
1
who was rather
scandalized by the violence of the feuds between Socialist factions in
France. In Viviani, the group had one of the very greatest of French
parliamentary orators, who, even when he had little to say, was a
master of the art of saying it. More important than either of the young
lawyers, was the young professor, Jean Jaures. A
brilliant schoolboy
in a family more productive of sailors than of scholars, 2 he had been
'fort en thme' to a prodigious degree, the glory of the ficole Normale

Sup&ieure, endowed with a prodigious memory and learned beyond


the run of professors. To the new generation of members of the
University, Jaur&s was a hero. It was to him that the critical and

enthusiastic youth of the lycles and faculties looked to


redeem the credit
of a corporation not highly honoured by the career of men like Burdeau
or by the narrow conformist Republican orthodoxy of so many others.
The conversion of Jaur&s to Socialism was not sudden. His Latin
thesis for the doctorate had, indeed, been on the Origins of German
Socialism, but inS6cialism was interpreted very widely indeed and, in
it

its emphasis on the autonomy of moral factors in social evolution, in the

importance attached to the liberation of the spirit achieved by Luther


at the Reformation, in the comparative neglect of the economic side
of the question, it was a profoundly un-Marxian work. As far as
Jaurfcs ever became a Marxian (and there were idealist elements in his
doctrine to the end), he owed it to the Alsatian librarian of the ficole
Normale, Lucien Herr, who was to indoctrinate a generation of mem-
bers of the University with Marxism or, at any rate, to infuse a generous
dose of Marxism into the general Socialism that was becoming part of
the mental atmosphere of the Rue d'Ulm. In Jaur&s, Herr made his
greatest convert. In a far higher sense than Viviani's, he was a great
orator; there was a force of argument and a generosity of temper in all
his speeches that were beyond a mere virtuoso. Not a first-rate judge
of men as individuals or as small groups, Jaures had an unequalled
power of winning the trust of great masses and of inspiring reverence
and affection in brilliant young men not wont to lavish either on their
seniors. Two such different types as the sophisticated and wealthy
young Parisian Jew, Lon
Blum, and the robust, independent child of
the workers of Orleans, Charles P6guy, testified to the power of the new
leader's personality, and a subtle observer like Barr&s spent years

pondering the problem of the power and charm of this man who was
the inspirer of so much that Barrfcs hated and feared. In Jaur&s, French
Socialism had at last found its predestined leader, and it was natural,
given the temper of the two men, that the growing ascendancy of
1
mile Vandervcldc.
*
His brother, like his father's cousin, rose to be an admiral.

298
THE REPUBLIC SAVED
Jean Jaures should be suspect to Jules Guesde, who had been the
preacher of the word while Jaures was still at school and who was
forced to see in this eleventh-hour labourer in the vineyard, the born
charmer of that multitude which Guesde sometimes impressed but so
seldom won.
It was not Jaures, however, but Millerand who, with his sense of the

practical, laid the foundations of a closer unity IK t \\een the old Socialist
parties and the new loose Socialist group. Acting with them in the
Chamber, it was natural that even Guesde and Vaillant should come
some use in the newcomers who made the Chamber the sounding-
to see
board for a propaganda much more successful than anything hitherto
achieved by the veteran zealots. It was Millerand who, in
1896,
managed to induce all sections of the Socialist deputies, except the
Allemanists on one side and a fr\v vigiu- semi-Socialists on the other,
to accept a minimum programm* Billed, from the name of the banquet

given to celebrate the mrnt \'n t,,nrs at the municipal elections, the
'Programme of Saint-IVKmdcV The guests included Guesde, Vaillant,
Jaures, Viviani, Clovis Hugues, nearly every shade of Socialism in the
Chamber and the victorious mayors like Jean Dormoy of Montlu^on.
Guesde characteristically preached union, but union on conditions;
there must be agreement on objects and it was in a sense a reply to this
demand that was given by Millerand. 'No one,' he said, 'is a Socialist
who does not accept the necessary and progressive substitution of social
for capitalist property.' But, he went on, this progress was to be
achieved by the use of the vote, not by violent revolution. The
Socialists only asked 'the right to persuade the voters'. The speech
was the affirmation of a minimum economic content in a joint Socialist
programme, combined with the exclusion on one hand of the vague
preachers of mere social reforms that left the property structure un-
touched and, on the other hand, the criticism, if not the exclusion, of the
believers in a sudden violent overthrow of the bourgeois state. The
great change would come peacefully and gradually and by political
means. Caution, the repression of Utopian dreams, the defence of the
politicalsystem that opened to the workers the prospect of a peaceful
conquest of power these were the notes of the programme of Saint-
Mande, and they came fittingly to close a period when the old tradition
of revolutionary action seemed to have been killed in the repression of
the last desperate campaign of the Anarchists.
In the French Socialist tradition there had long been a strong
anarchist element; it was not only that the influence of Proudhon was
strong, but that there were so many minor Proudhons among the
French militants. It was as natural for Frenchmen to be 'anti-

1
The banquet took place, not in the suburb of Saint-Mandl, but in the remote eastern
section of Paris on the edge of the Bois de Vincennes, then much more remote even than
to-day.
299
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
authoritarian* as for Germans to see in party discipline and in the
liberating authority of the State, the way to the new world. To
Proudhonians, the way to make sure that the bourgeois state did
wither away and did not merely change its title was to abolish it at
the first Against Lenin, Proudhon would have said that
opportunity.
the time to accustom the people to 'observing the elementary rules of
social life . without force, without compulsion, without subordina-
. .

tion* was from the beginning of the revolution. Unless the State appar-
atus were rooted up at the start, it would not wither away.
Theoretical anarchism of this type was too abstract to compete with
Marxism, and from the assumption of the Socialist leadership by
Guesde, Lafargue and the other Marxians, it seemed doomed to ex-
tinction.Anarchism, however, had one real asset: it was actively
revolutionary. It did not postpone the great day to some remote time

when, by political organization, the capitalist citadel would be taken


over by the leaders of the workers. The declaration by Caffiero and
Malatesta in 1876 that 'the insurrectionary deed, designed to assert
9
Socialist principles by acts, is the most effective method of propaganda ,
was welcomed. Malatesta was as good as his word and tried to raise a
rebellion in Southern Italy a hopeless effort which was severely con-
demned by the orthodox Marxists in France and Germany. There
were still men in France, such as Jean Grave, who dared to defy the
orthodox. 'Our propaganda among the people ought to show them
that in a revolution, instead of going stupidly to the Hotel de Ville to
proclaim a government, we ought to go there to shoot whoever tries to
setone up.'
Such language appealed to the romantic. The Anarchists, who if still
few in number were sure of widespread sympathy, were prone to give
arms to their enemies, the police. Spies were common in their ranks,
and the verbal violence of Grave, Gautier and the others enabled the
police to frighten the bourgeoisie with the threat of a new Commune,
and facilitated the work of agents provocateurs. The preaching of violence
was not without results; there were anti-religious riots in the Haute
Loire and a bomb explosion at Lyons. The trial of the alleged authors
or instigators of this outrage attracted much public attention, the more
so that one of the defendants was the romantic Russian, Prince Peter

Kropotkin. The accused asserted that 'all governments are like each
other and one is as good as the other'. The court of Republican France
showed that there was some truth in this by condemning Kropotkin
and his associates to long*erms in prison, and the man who had escaped
from the fortress of Peter and Paul in St. Petersburg, found French
prisons more efficient than Russian.
Fromthe Lyons trial of 1882, for a period of twelve years, the doc-
trines and the deeds of the Anarchists became increasingly terrifying
to the sober citizens of France and the subject of mutual reproach
300
THE REPUBLIC SAVED
between Radicals and Conservatives. The bad times of the 'eighties
gave Anarchist propaganda a chance, and an unemployed demon-
stration that ended in pillaging shops was credited to the movement.
More serious was the case of burglary whose author, Duval, boldly
proclaimed himself an Anarchist attacking directly the fortress of
private property, and, in defending himself from ain-sl, had legitimately
killed a policeman, agent of an iniquitous SOCK iy. \Vhcther to con-,
demn or applaud Duval became a case of consciem -e with the leaders of
the Left and, if most condemned, he found a warm defender in S6v&ine
who condemned 'Socialist Pharisees', which in turn led to the with-
drawal of Guesde and the rest from the chief Left paper, the Cri au
Peuple, which she edited. The celebration of May ist of 1890 led to
riots in the strongly Left city of Vienne mcl to the condemnation of
Anarchist leaders; next year it va*. in Paris that the Anarchists and the
police had their annual fight, and as;. mi there was a trial and condemna-
tion of the leaders, some of whom had suffered more at the hands of the

enraged police before ti ial than 'lay did after their conviction.
It was obvious to the most zealous that these demonstrations did
little or no harm
to the capitalist state and were followed by severe

repression of the militants. It was necessary, then, to take more


drastic steps, and in 1 892 the campaign began with bomb explosions at
the houses of legal officials who had taken part in the trial of the Paris
Anarchists in 1891. The author of these 'acts of propaganda* was
Ravachol, who had murdered an old man and robbed graves for the
good of the cause before attempting to avenge anarchy on MM. Benoit
and Bulot. Some Anarchists refused to acknowledge Ravachol as one
of theirs. Against the condemnation of Jean Grave was to be set the
admiration of the most eminent and respected of French philosophical
anarchists, Elisee Reclus,who, refusing to discuss the actual crimes of
Ravachol, expressed admiration for his motives and his courage. More
outrages followed, and the parliamentary Socialists had none of the
hesitations of Reclus: they denied any sympathy with such compro-

mising associates.
It was as well they did so, for parliamentary tolerance of extreme

preaching and practice was tested very high when, in December 1893,
an Anarchist called Vaillant 1 threw a bomb from the gallery of the
Chamber of Deputies, wounding the priest-politician, the Abbe
Lemire, and giving the presiding officer, Charles Dupuy, the chance to
achieve a brief fame as the author of the remark, 'the sitting will go on'.
No one died as the result of Vaillant's bomb, but the attack on the
representatives of universal suffrage was punished
with death, despite
the plea of Lemire. It was to revenge Vaillant that Henri threw his
bombs. To Henri, all bourgeois were criminals and the death of any
one of them a revenge for the death of Vaillant. On his trial he was
just
1
Not to be confused with the Blanquist leader.
301
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
ceremonial side of his office that delighted satirists. The election
marked another stage in the decline of the presidency, for the new
President had neither personal nor ancestral claims on popular rever-
ence; he owed all his prestige to his office, and the intrinsic prestige of
the office was now not great. On the other hand, Felix Faure was an
astute politician under his comic vanity, and what he wanted he was
ready to try to get, within the limits imposed by the rules of the game.
In Jhe great storm that was blowing up, the fact that he and not
Casimir-P^rier was at the filys& was important and unfortunate.

304
CHAPTER IV

CAPTAIN DREYFUS
October agth, 1894, the suspicious public of La Libre Parole read
ON this note: 'Is it true that, recently, the
military authoritieshave
made a very important arrest? The charge brought against the arrested
man is said to be espionage.' Drum out was well informed, for he had
received a letter the day before jjoin Commandant Henry of the
French Military Intelligence informing him that the arrested man was
Captain Dreyfus. Henry had v> itten 'the story is that he is travelling,
t :

but that is a lie spread about because they want to hush the business
up. All Israel is on the job.' Drumont was delighted to reply to these
alleged Jewish manoeuvres and, on November ist, he published the
name of the officer. The day before, Havas had issued an official
statement that an arrest had been made. France suddenly learned two
things: that there had been treachery in high military quarters and that
the suspected man was a Jew.
The counter-espionage department of the French General Staff,
disguised as 'the statistical section of the Second Bureau', had known,
for some time, that the German military attache* in Paris, Colonel von
Schwartzkoppen, was in touch with various French traitors. In reply,
the Statistical Section had got its own agents in the German Embassy;
had managed to put microphones in a room used by Schwartzkoppen;'
and had a careful watch kept on the movements of the German's
attache* and on his Italian colleague and friend, Colonel Panizzardi.
Official assertions by Count von Miinster, the German Ambassador,
that no member of the Embassy had anything to do with espionage
did not shake the convictions of Colonel Sandherr, the head of the
Statistical Service, and rightly so, for although Miinster did not know

it, Schwartzkoppen was, in fact, in touch with spies.


From the start, the French soldiers and French Ministers very
naturally received with ironical politeness all German official and un-
official statements. On September 24th, Commandant Henry had
shown to his colleagues a piece of paper which had been torn up and
which he had pieced together again. Here was conclusive proof that
the Marquis de Val Carlos, Spanish military attache* and French
military spy, had been right when he said,
'there is a wolf in your

sheepfold*. The document shown by Henry was the bordereau; it was,


3<>5
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
that is to say, a list enumerating various pieces of military information
which the unknown writer proposed to sell to Schwartzkoppen, who
was obviously an old customer.
It was decided, rather hastily, that the author of the bordereau
could only be an officer of the General Staff in the War Office at the
moment. The field of research was thus limited; the document was
photographed and circulated to the heads of the various bureaux but
no one recognized the handwriting. Major d'Aboville decided that
the mystery was being tackled in the wrong way. What must be done
was to deduce what kind of officer could have written it. He must be
a gunner; he must have been recently in touch with several sections of
the General Staff, and only the staff officers in training moved from one
section to another. So the traitor must be a 'stagiaire'. D'Aboville
and his chief, Fabre, then examined the list of possibles. One name
suited all the conditions, except for the remark at the end of the bor-
dereau: 'I am going off on manoeuvres'. The suspect had not gone
off on manoeuvres, but, they reflected, he had gone on a 'staff ride' in
the East. Alfred Dreyfus was their man. Then they compared the
writing of the bordereau with the writing of Captain Dreyfus and were
'stupefied' at the resemblance. They consulted their chiefs, who in-
structed them to go ahead, and the agreement of all, including Sandherr,
was notified to the Chief of the General Staff, General de Boisdeffre.
A talented officer, M. du Paty de Clam, who, among other artistic and
semi-artistic hobbies, was an amateur graphologist, agreed with his
colleagues. The Minister of War, General Mercier, was told, and he
immediately told the President of the Republic, Casimir-Perier. A
Cabinet Meeting was called and the course to be taken discussed. The
Minister of Foreign Affairs, Gabriel Hanotaux, was in favour of hushing
the matter up, which was also the advice of the Military Governor of
Paris, General Saussier, but Mercier objected that the fact that there
was a traitor was too widely known to be kept secret; the investigation
must go on. Handwriting experts were called in; one, the expert of the
Bank of France, gave a hesitant reply; the other, Alphonse Bertillon, the
famous inventor of criminal anthropometry who had recently set up as
a graphologist, was much more positive. The arrest of Dreyfus was
decided on.
Alfred Dreyfus was a native of Mulhouse in Alsace, where his
family were rich business men. He had chosen to serve in the French
Army and had had a distinguished career (he was the first Jew to enter
the General Staff of the Army) He was able, conscious of the fact, and
.

not popular. He was well off; indeed, by the standards of French


army officers, he was rich. He was married and had two children.
He had, in short, a great deal to lose and very little to gain by treason.
He had, of course, connections with Germany, as he was an Alsatian,
but that was common enough; Sandherr was an Alsatian, for instance,
THE REPUBLIC SAVED
and it was difficult, at first sight, to see why a man who had chosen to
go with France and had chosen to serve in the French Army should
suddenly turn traitor. There were many readers of La Libre Parole
who knew that Jews would do anything for money, but Dreyfus, by
entering the Army, had given up the chance of making money in
business as his brother did, and was it likely that he would run all the
risks of espionage for the sums likely to be
paid t<> a comparatively
1
junior officer by the Germans? Nevertheless, tin-re was a prima facie
case, and du Paty de Clam was ordered to \;\\ a trap for Dreyfus.
Fragments of the bordereau were dictated to him and his writing was
found to resemble the original closely enough to reassure his superiors.
He was immediately arrested and kept in the closest confinement in the
military prison of the Cherchc-Midi.
The arrest took place on O "
^th and the secret was well kept.
t< .1 i

Madame Dreyfus was told it \vuld be in the interests of her husband to


keep the fact that he had )> en j'lestcd secret, so that Dreyfus, pro-
testing his innocence, was ..inplctely cut off from the world, while
<

Mercier and his subordinates prepared the case which would justify
their neglect of the prudential advice of MM. Hanotaux and Saussier.

Dreyfus was subject to constant interrogations from du Paty dc Clam


and, according to the latter, once cried out, 'My race will take ven-
geance on yours'. It was just what a Jew would say, according" to the
doctrines of La Libre Parole, and Sandhcrr and others had already
asserted that there were other proofs of his guilt. Nevertheless, the
inquiry was not proving very fruitful. Three more experts had ex-
amined the photographs of the bordereau', one said it was by Dreyfus;
another that it was by Dreyfus 'or a handwriting twin'; the third re-
fused to say that it was by Dreyfus. It was difficult to go on with the

case, and as the arrest had not yet been made public it was possible to
drop it without too much loss of face.
was
It at this point that Commandant Henry warned the vigilant
Drumont. To give up the case now was far more serious, especially
for a War
Minister fond of politics, but not sure of his footing in that
treacherous field. Mercier was ambitious; and although the evidence
comes from a later time, when Mercier was becoming an active poli-
tician, it is worth noting that one of Drumont's collaborators, Raphael
Viau, described him as the 'most politically-minded and publicity-
hunting officer' he had ever known. Even a less politically-minded
War Minister might have been frightened to drop the case once
Drumont and his allies got hold of it, for there had been repeated
rumours of treachery, and Drumont had already declared that Dreyfus
would escape, though he had 'admitted everything a fortnight ago',
because he was a Jew. His very name was damaging; as bad as LeVy
1
We now know that Schwartzkoppen thought that 40 was a very big sum to pay.

Dreyfus had about 1,000(l5o) a yc*"* of ** own -

307
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
or Mayer. Had not Drumont in La France jfuive denounced Ferdinand
over France? It is true that
Dreyfus 'one of the tribe who crawl
Alfred was not a relation, but what did that matter? In the same way,
in an endeavour to find out what motives could have led Dreyfus to
treason, inquiries were made into his private life. He was found to
'have had a few with women before marriage and one after, but
affairs
none likely to provide a motive; but a police spy, confusing him with
another, declared that he was a regular frequenter of gambling houses.
The Prefect of Police, L6pine, sent in a report that Alfred Dreyfus was
unknown in the gambling world and had been mistaken for his name-
sakes. Commandant Henry did not allow this information to confuse
the minds of the judges.
On December igth the trial began before a court-martial, none of

whose members was an artillery man, a weakness in a court which


would be called on to decide various questions of probability which
involved familiarity with the professional vocabulary of gunners. The
counsel for the defence was Maitre Demange, an eminent Catholic
lawyer, who only accepted the case on the condition that, should he
find from examination of the records that Dreyfus was guilty, he would
throw up his brief with all the disastrous consequences for his client
that such an action would involve. 1 Mathieu Dreyfus and Alfred
accepted this condition.
Despite the protests of Demange, the trial was heard in camera.
There was testimony that only an officer could have got hold of some
of the information mentioned in the bordereau', there was contrary testi-
mony that it could have been known to clerks and non-commissioned
officers. There was evidence advanced that Dreyfus had talked a lot
about espionage and counter-espionage, that he had displayed an un-
healthy curiosity. There was counter-evidence of character. Du
Paty de Clam testified that Dreyfus had trembled when he wrote
2

'hydraulic brake'. When asked to show where the trembling had


affected the writing, he replied that an innocent man would have
trembled, and that if Dreyfus had not, it showed what a good actor
he was.
The case for the prosecution was not going well when Henry asked
to be heard and testified that an 'honourable person' had told the
Intelligence Department of the existence of a traitor and, later, that he
was an officer of the Second Bureau. Turning to Dreyfus
Henry
added, 'There he is'. He refused to name the 'honourable person
9
.

'There are secrets in an officer's head which his cap ought not to know. 9
It was the first of those appeals for complete trust in his own
reliability
that Henry was to make. The burly ranker officer was, in some
ways,
1
Demange had successfully defended Mores in the trial arising out of the duel in which
he had killed a Jewish officer.
* The trick dictation had been given on a very cold day.
308
THE REPUBLIC SAVED
an odd personage to find in the Intelligence Service. Physically lie
was of a type that would have seemed eminently at home in the uni-
formed police, and although the main business of his office was con-
cerned with Germany, he knew no German. 1
Despite Henry's affirmation, the judges were still reluctant to con-
vict on the evidence produced, and Demange haH reason to expect the
acquittal of his client. Henry's solemn affirmation impressed nearly
all who heard it. It even impressed Lepine, but it left cold Colonel

Picquart, who knew that the honourable person v as the Marquis de Val
Carlos whose claim to honour was open to suspicion since he
accepted
pay for spying on his brother attaches. The time had come to play
the trumps which the prosecution had up their sleeves, the sealed
packet
of documents which Mercier had authorized du Paty to give to the
judges in private.
These documents, if :\u l'at\ uas right, were final. There were
four documents, all involving Divylus more directly than did the bor-
dereau. One, above all, was decisive, ii du Paty was right, for it was
a letter signed 'Alexandrine' which had passed between Panizzardi and
Schwartzkoppcn, referring to 'that dirty dog D' who had sold plans of
Nice. 2 At the time that this document had been intercepted, 3 no one
had thought 'D' could be an officer, or his plans of any real value.
Nevertheless, du Paty now declared that 'D' was Dreyfus and he
was believed by the judges. The document was concealed from
the defence; none of the judges of the court-martial seeming to know
or care that they were breaking the regulations for the conduct of
courts-martial.
The Minister of War, however, did, and his motive (on his own
authority) was the safety of the nation. The traitor could only be
convicted on evidence which, unlike the bordereau, directly involved the
attaches of Germany and Italy. The bordereau, after all, had only been
sent to Schwartzkoppen; he had not in fact received it. But the letter
of 'Alexandrine' was from Schwartzkoppen (or Panizzardi); it directly
involved the military attache's of the two powers of the Triple Alliance
who had on France. Even though the trial was
frontiers bordering
in camera, Mercier could not rely on the discretion of the defence and
a leak might mean war. And, the most vehement defenders of Mercier
4
assert, war in disadvantageous conditions. 'Germany was ahead of
us in the re-equipment of the artillery, we were in the midst of changing
our mobilization plan, we were in the dark as to the intentions of the
new Russian Emperor [Alexander III had just died]; finally, the very
1
According a story that circulated in the Army, Henry owed his promotion to his
to
excellent management of General de Miribel's eating and sleeping arrangements
on man-
oeuvres. The only job open at the time when he was to be rewarded was in the Intelligence.
'ce canaille de D.* f , ,
. . . ,
. ,

8
The letter was not dated and no record had been kept of the date of its arrival in the

War Office!
* 'Henri Dutrait-Crozon.'
309
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
motive of the war would have put us in a bad light in Europe/ The
judges were convinced; they voted unanimously for conviction and sen-
tenced Dreyfus to imprisonment for life in a fortified place, to be de-
prived of his rank and to military degradation. Dreyfus was over-
whelmed and Demange said, 'Your condemnation is the greatest crime
of the century*.
Mercier had won; whether he had saved his country or not, he had
saved his own reputation. The secret documents were brought to him;
he destroyed the 'life' of Dreyfus written by du Paty de Clam and
ordered that the other documents should be scattered in the files.
Sandherr and Henry disobeyed; the documents were kept in one en-
velope, initialled by Henry and put in the safe kept for secret records.
All that was wanting, now, was a confession from Dreyfus, but although
later it was asserted that he had confessed, no record of this interesting

confirmation of the judgment was noted at the time. Dreyfus con-


tinued to protest his innocence to the governor of the military prison,
Forzinetti, who believed him. He talked of suicide, but Forzinetti per-
suaded him that it was his duty to live to clear his name for the sake
of his wife and children. The sentence was confirmed; the solemn
degradation took place in public but there was still no confession, only
a stoical submission and a cry of 'Vive la France! I am innocent*.
Except for the Dreyfus family, his lawyer and some persons with
their own private reasons for knowing the authorship of the bordereau,
there was a general rejoicing that a traitor had been exposed and that
the fears early expressed that the wealth of the accused would secure
his escape were groundless. Legal procedure seemed to so many
Frenchmen designed mainly to secure the escape of the obviously

guilty. The rules of the Bar and Bench, the limitations they imposed
on the members of the profession, seemed, as a popular comic song sug-
gested, to affect only details. Alawyer 'couldn't ride a bicycle', so the
refrain ran, but he could do anything else. Courts-martial seemed to
be free from the weaknesses of the ordinary courts. It is true that the
rising Socialist deputy, Jean Jaures, complained that while privates
were shot for disobedience, the court had let an officer off with his life,
but in fact, the court had imposed the heaviest sentence in its power. A
law was passed making Devil's Island, off the coast of Cayenne, the
place wherein Dreyfus was to expiate his great crime. In a nation dis-
trustful, with good reason, of its rulers, the conviction of Dreyfus was
consoling. When Bazaine was tried for treason in 1873 he had excused
his conduct by reminding the court that, after September 4th, there
was no regular government to pay allegiance to. But the President of
the Court, the Due d'Aumale, destroyed this sophism in a phrase.
'There was France.' In an age of corruption and weakness, one insti-
tution had shown its vigilance. There might be no government that
the man in the street could trust, but there was the Army.
310
CHAPTER V
THE RUSSIAN ALLIANCE AMI) I ASHODA
I

1870, the idea of calling in tlir j>o\\er of Russia to redress the


SINGE
balance in the west had haim, the minds of Frenchmen. It was
to Russian intervention that as 1 a/rs allowed the public to believe,
)<<

was due the deliverance u(" I'lv-ur from a new German invasion in
1875. There were French polu who
dallied with the thought of
u ians

using Austria as a check on Germany, not with the idea of avenging


if
Sadowa and Sedan in one joint effort; but it was evident to all but
the most blind that Austria had, by 1880, definitely resigned herself
to the position of brilliant second to Bismarck's Germany. Association
with England appealed to many more, but from a military point of
view British help (even rould France have counted on it) would have
been of slight importance, and, at sea, British naval support was un-
necessary, as the French fleet was vastly superior to Germany's. There
was, in fact, only one ally who could do what France wanted, could
reassure the timid Frenchmen (and there were millions of them) who
were concerned with avenging 1870 than with preventing the
less
recurrence of another invasion and could inspire the more ardent souls
who dreamed of recovering Alsace-Lorraine by a fortunate war fought
with the active support of the countless soldiers of the Tsar.
There were, it is true, some very cautious Frenchmen who did not
believe in a Russian alliance for any purpose, because they thought
the only safety of France lay in her reconciling herself to her de-
pendent position. That was Gravy's view. There were others who
did not think that the Russian alliance was as valuable as public
opinion imagined. Such soldiers as Appert and Boisdeffre, who knew
Russia at first-hand, knew how much would have to be done before the
Russian Army would be in a position to attack quickly and effectively,
and knew that there was a risk of France's being over-run before the
lumbering giant had got ready to strike. Economists, like Paul Leroy-
Beaulieu, knew how much was rotten in the state of Russia,
economically, politically, socially; the giant had not merely feet but
legs of clay. But the isolation of France was such a humiliation
to some and such a nightmare to others that scepticism was deemed
311 x
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
unpatriotic. An alliance with Russia was the ideal solution of the
problem of French foreign policy, whether it was considered as insurance
that there would not be another Peace of Frankfort or as giving high
hopes that the crime of 1871 would be expiated.
With these hopes in the air, it was natural that French public
opinion should be on the alert to notice and magnify all signs of strain
between Russia and Germany; that the importance of the anti-German
sentiments attributed to the new Tsar, Alexander III, should be
exaggerated; that Russian resentment at the role of Bismarck in the
Congress of Berlin in 1878 should have been dwelt on and that such
leaders of the anti-German party in Russia as General Skobelev and
the Panslav journalist, Katkov, should have been credited with more
influence over imperial policy than they had. Indeed, Conservative
writers on the origins of the alliance, like Ernest Daudet, or diplomatic
commentators, like M. Toutain, have given the impression that the
alliance might have come sooner had France not been a Republic, or
had she been one less ostentatiously. It is probable that France did
suffer a little in monarchical Europe from her political character. She
could not oblige the Tsarist police, at that time, by turning over
Nihilist conspirators like Hartmann, or refuse to imprisoned anarchists
like Prince Kropotkin, the benefits of a general amnesty. It is not

unlikely, too, that Republican suspicion of professional diplomats did


-some harm at St. Petersburg. Gambetta's choice, in 1881, of his chief
diplomatic agent of 1870, the Comte de Chaudordy, as ambassador,
a nomination which fell through with the collapse of the Great
Ministry, was a better selection than the sending of the politically
sound but very ill-equipped Admiral Jaures. 1 Nor did the chronic
instability of French Cabinets impress a ruler like the obstinate
Alexander III who, as he said, did not like 'new faces'.
French opinion exaggerated the importance of these obstacles to
an agreement with Russia. It was unfortunate that so prominent a
politician as Floquet was reputed to have insulted Alexander II on his
2
visit toParis in 1867 by shouting 'Long Live Poland!', but Alexander
III was not so blindly pious a son as to allow such memories to
influence his politics twenty years later.
The real obstacle to an alliance was Bismarck and the real maker
of it was William II. Germany, in Bismarck's time, was still a saturated
power; in the Chancellor's opinion no change in the territorial status
quo was worth the risks of a war. It was his basic policy to preserve
Austria as a great power; so if he were forced to choose between Russia
and Austria, he would have to choose Austria, but he hoped to avoid
having to choose. He kept the line open to St. Petersburg by the 'Rein-
1
Benjamin-Constant Jaures was the cousin of the father of Jean Jaures.
*
When the reputation for this display of Republican sentiment had become rather a
handicap, Floquet declared that it was not he, but Gambctta, who had shouted at the
Tsar, Unfortunately a declaration by Floquet cannot be taken as ending the matter.
312
THE REPUBLIC SAVED
surance' treaty, so that he was allied to two rival powers at the same
time. He used Italy's British connections to make Britain a silent
partner of the Triple Alliance in the Mediterranean, thus checkmating
any French plans of coercion of Italy by the use of her superior navy.
Perhaps only Bismarck could have kept so many balls in the air at the
same time, for Britain was as hostile to Russian designs on Constanti-
nople and the Straits as Austria was to Russian designs on Bulgaria;
and Bismarck had to keep on good terms with ;>11 three. He managed
to do it, and even, by backing up French colonial policy, to achieve

something more than formal good relations with France, although the
fall of Ferry and the rise of Boulanger showed how transient such a

detente was bound to be.


As long as the balls were krpt in the air, Bismarck could afford
to take lightly the effort of j-
)lc like Deroulede and Katkov to

unite France and Russia on i u nun ion basis of Germanophobia. Even


the Tsar's dislike of the Gnu, -i elements in the Russian Empire, his
measures against tin- German language and against German subjects
in the frontier provinces however irritating, were no proof of anything
but a policy of internal Slavification quite like Bismarck's own policy
of Germanization in Prussian Poland. As long as the old Emperor
William I was alive, with his memories of the aid and protection
afforded by the Tsar Alexander I to his father in the War of Liberation
from Napoleon I, the traditional connection of Hohenzollern and
Romanov would stand a good many strains. It would certainly stand
the strain of resisting naive propaganda from a State whose system of
government seemed to be at the mercy of an adventurer like Boulanger.
It was the refusal of the young German Emperor, William II, to

permit Bismarck to carry on with his policy of juggling, of which the


Reinsurance treaty was the main feat of legerdemain, that at last gave
reality to the dream of a Franco-Russian rapprochement. If Germany
was going to move decidedly into the Austrian camp, Russia's position
was highly dangerous, for there were powerful groups both in Berlin
and in Vienna in favour of liquidating the old Austro-Russian feud by
a preventive war. In Italy, Crispi, exhausting the credit and resources
of the country in an armaments race and a tariff war with France,
was almost eager for a conflict; at any rate, he was earnestly asserting
his belief in the imminence of a French attack on Italy. Russia and
Britain had many causes of conflict. Europe was more of a powder-
magazine than ever and it was no time for Russia to be left alone with-
out any secure friendship to rely on. France was no longer merely a
suitor: she had a good deal to give in exchange and, by financial

pressure, could make Russian political worries even more disturbing.


In clearing the way for a Franco-Russian agreement, Bismarck's
financial policy greatly helped. The attacks by the Russian Govern-
ment on the German interests in the Baltic provinces had been, of
313
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
course, resented in Prussian circles, and the Chancellor may have had
genuine doubts as^to Russian financial stability and may have thought,
in addition, that he could force Russia's hand by denying her the
resources of the Berlin money-market. For whatever reasons, he
refused, in 1887, to permit the perennially hard-up Russian Govern-
ment to borrow in Germany and thus forced it to apply to Paris. This
was an astonishing blunder, since for the use of financial power for
political ends, Paris was much better equipped than Berlin. Under
the Second Empire, Paris had rivalled London as a money-market and
although, for the first few years of the Republic, French savings were
almost exclusively devoted to paying for the war, there was then a
rapid revival in foreign investment which even the depression of the
'eighties, following on the great losses in Austrian securities, associated
with the rise and fall of the Union Ginirale, could not seriously check.
France was the most attractive country in the world for the foreign
borrower. The interest rate in Paris, right up to 1914, was almost
always lower than in any other great capital; the French people went
on saving faster than a stationary population and a slowly-growing
industry could absorb the surplus, and local and general government
borrowing was much less important in France than in most countries*
No country had as much ready money as cheaply available.
The French money-market was, even more than others, subject to
government control. It was not impossible, but it was difficult, to
borrow money if the French Treasury objected. This power had
already been used, along with tariff weapons, to make Italy repent her
adherence to the Triple Alliance. Russia was a borrower on a greater
scale than Italy and seemed likely to be more solvent in the long run.

Despite slight improvements in Franco-Italian relations, the ban on


Italian borrowing lasted until the end of the tariff war in 1897.
Germany had had, indeed, to support the credit of her ally, and it
may be said that in this financial war, Germany and France changed
partners. Russia was very soon given proof of the degree to which
her new friend was prepared to use financial power for political ends,
for in 1891 when Russian finances were even more desperate than
usual, the Paris Rothschilds refused to back a new Russian loan,
ostensibly on account of the anti-Semitic policy of the Russian Goverri-
ment, really, it was believed, because the French Foreign Office was
determined to tie Russia down to something more definite than vague
expressions of goodwill.
The renewal of the Triple Alliance, by making it clear that despite
the temporary ^exclusion of Grispi from power in Italy, that country
could not be coerced by France into abandoning her allies; the
disastrous repercussions on Franco-German relations of the failure of
the visit of the German Emperor's mother to Paris; the brief flirtation
of William II with Britain; all these moves left Russia and France
THE REPUBLIC SAVED
isolated. The two losers in this game of musical chairs were naturally
thrown together. 1
France could and did press Russia for some definite understanding
and, while the negotiations were going on, the French fleet visited
Kronstadt. The visit was a diplomatic gesture of the most open type;
it was not misunderstood anywhere, and when the Tsar stood bare-

headed as a Russian band played the Marseillaise (regarded in every


European country save France as the revolution;!; \ hymn par excellence),
it was known that the
Republic was at hist m,t of the dog-house.
The visit to Kronstadt was, it is true, folloucd by a French naval
visit to Portsmouth, and it was not yet possible to tie Russia down.

Nevertheless, the coming event rast its shadow over all Europe, The
Russian Ambassador, Mohmilirim, \v<ts a strong partisan of an
2
alliance, and he talked. A clcsp. ,v famine left Russia, in the winter
of 1891-92, weak from a military point of view and on the edge of
'

bankruptcy. Hitherto ,!! (hat Vance had to show for her political
t

and financial support was a U-n. from the Russian Foreign Minister,
Giers, to Mohrenhcim, ailirniing a desire for the maintenance of a
peace threatened, it was implied, by the Triple Alliance and Britain.
The Russian and French Governments undertook to 'consult together
on every question that endangers general peace. ... In the event of
this peace being seriously endangered, and especially if one of the two

parties should be threatened with aggression, the two parties undertake


to come to an agreement on the measures of which the realization of
this eventuality would necessitate the simultaneous and immediate

adoption'. This jargon was vague enough to satisfy the cautious Giers,
but it was too vague from the French viewpoint. Nor did personal
negotiations between Giers and Freycinet in Paris improve matters.
Russia, Freycinet learned, had no designs on Turkey and would give
only moral support to France in Egypt. A Russian loan had failed
on the Paris market; the new friends had reason to regard each other
in a chilly enough fashion.
It France to force Russia's hand and to demand some-
was for

thing concrete, specifically a military convention. This appealed to


Alexander, who was, for the moment, very anti-German, dreaming of
dismembering the parvenu empire. With the arrival of the Deputy-
Chief of the French General Staff, BoisdefFre, real work began. From
a military point of view, simultaneous mobilization was the crux.
Gould Russia assemble her armies quickly enough to save France from
1
Muchto the disgust of professional patriots, the Empress Frederick had visited Paris,
with plenty of publicity. Her visit was to have been the
officially incognita but, in reality,
herald of better relations, but she visited the ruins of the Chateau of Saint-Cloud, destroyed
in the war of 1870, and this exhibition of Anglo-Prussian tact enabled the patriots to gain
a great deal of support from less fiery sections of French public opinion. As a political
move the visit was worse than useless.
*
There was suspicion in Russia that the Ambassador's views were coloured by financial
advantages he drew from his advocacy of an alliance.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
being overrun? Should France be allowed to evade the obligations of
the Alliance unless Germany were involved, that is, be allowed to
ignore the Austrian threat to Russia's security? It was finally decided
that each power was to aid the other if its enemy (Italy or Austria)
was being aided by Germany or if either was attacked by Germany
alone. Each country was to put in the field against Germany an agreed
number of troops, 1,300,000 in the case of France, seven hundred to
eight hundred thousand in the case of Russia. Technical measures
would be studied and neither party would make a separate peace.
This was the gist of the Boisdeffre-Obruchev agreement, designed, so
its preamble asserted, to aid in the preservation of peace and having

'no other object than that of providing for the necessities of a defensive
war, provoked by the forces of the Triple Alliance against one or the
other (party)'. 1 This convention made plain how limited were the
objectives of the Alliance, how far from justifying the dreams of
Deroulfede. The Panama scandals came almost at once to make the
Tsar very suspicious of the new ally; Austro-Russian relations improved
and, more important still, there seemed reason to believe that
William II was going back to the old Bismarckian policy of being on
good terms with Russia. Russia, too, refused to support France in
Egypt where British control was being strengthened, and the arrival in
power of Gladstone meant that Germany could no longer rely on
Britain as a sleeping partner in the Triple Alliance. The political
situation that had forced Russia towards France had greatly changed
for the better, but a tariff war between Russia and Germany and the
survival of the regime in France limited the possibilities of manoeuvre.
In Germany, the Government felt itself bound to dwell on the danger
of a war on two fronts to justify its military programme and, by the
summer of 1893, the Franco-Russian Alliance had stood its worst
initial strains. It was merely a manage de convenance at the moment,
but it was at least that.
As
often happens in a marriage of that kind, the benefits were
decidedly limited from the point of view of one party. France had
escaped the dangerous isolation of the past, but she had been in less
danger of German attack than she thought, while by tying herself to
Russia, she actually incurred new risks. Should a conflict break out
over Russian aims, Germany, whether involved directly, or through
her Austrian ally, would be forced to face a war on two fronts, and
that fact, given the views of the German Staff on the military potenti-
alities of France and Russia, meant that Frante would have to bear the
burden of the first German attack. Whether the disasters of August
1914 should be put down to the debit side
of the Alliance is open to
question. The Germans were sure to think
that a speedy victory over
France was easier than a speedy victory over Russia; it was not the
1
1 8th August, 1892.

316
THE REPUBLIC SAVED
treaty that made them think that, and it is arguable that, from a military
point of view, it was not the German attack on France but the attempted
French attack on Germany that led to the great disasters. more A
serious criticism, borne out by the event, is that war, when it did come,
came from the east; that it was in support of a Russian client state that
France underwent the ordeal of 1914-18; that, both in peace and war,
France gained far less from the Alliance than had been fondly hoped
for in the optimistic early years.
The first power to suffer in the esteem of the world as a result of
the Franco-Russian rapprochement was not Germany but Britain.
France, in Egypt, in Africa, and in Asia, had many grounds of difference
with Britain. The dispute between France and Siam over the control
of the Mekong involved a clash with hrit.iin, which wished to preserve
Siam as state; but how" er far Rosebery might be willing to
a buffer
go, Gladstone was not willing to risk u ar for the rights of the Siamese.
.\

The French were able to send warships to anchor off Bangkok and
impose a treaty that senomix damaged the prestige of Siam's pre-
sumed backer. Worse .-till, it was for a moment believed that the
French commander had ordered British ships away from Bangkok, a
step Rosebery wished to treat as a casus belli. A war with France, at
that time, would have been no joke, as the Russian fleet might have
been thrown into the scale and the great reorganization of the British
Navy was not complete. Rosebery appealed to the Kaiser, who was
then in England, for help, but before any decision could be made, the
news came that the crisis was a false alarm. The crisis left the German
diplomats convinced that Britain had given way, that she needed
German help and would have to pay for it; while the French were
given a chance to develop illusions as to the ease with which Britain
could be forced to climb down.
Paradoxically, the Alliance that in the minds of the professional
patriots of Paris was to deliver Alsace and Lorraine, seemed to have
its use, if it had any, in the that was
game of bluff and claim-jumping
going on in Africa and Asia. was isolated, and Italy, the
Britain
common link between the Triple Alliance and Britain, was exhausted
by the tariff war with France and by economic misery that brought
about a rebellion of the wretched Sicilian peasants. It was a change
from the days when the Triple Alliance powers with their British
associate, had had it all their own way. But it was a change that
helped to defend the status quo in Europe; its other result was to increase
tension between Britain and France, a popular enough result at the
moment, when, as Clemenceau discovered, any English attachment was
fatal, but not quite what Deroulede had planned. Europe was settling
down into two camps; it was as yet uncertain which camp Britain would
join, but war for European causes was less, not more, likely than it had
been a few years before. As the critics of the Alliance put it, the new
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
System preserved all the existing arrangements in Europe including the
Treaty of Frankfort.
The Alliance did more than that. It tied France so closely to
Russia that when the policy of the latter power involved good relations
with Germany, it involved France in those relations. France was thus
made a not very willing member of the triumvirate of European powers
that forced Japan to relinquish most of her gains after her victory in
the war with China in 1894. She was debarred from too ostentatious
sympathy with the Armenians during the period of revolution and
massacre in 1896, for Russia as well as Turkey had her Armenian
problem. Far from making a vigorous anti-German policy possible, the
Alliance led to a renewal of the policy of more friendly relations with
Germany, accompanied by an intensification of the colonial rivalry
with Britain. France even sent a squadron to the celebration of the
opening of the Kiel Canal, a gesture which one of the most formidable
critics of Republican diplomacy was to make a symbol of the vacillations
and reversals which, he asserted, were inherent in the system. 1
As the offensive weapon of the revenge policy of Deroulede, the
Alliance was a complete failure. Whatever the French negotiators
may have thought, it was in Russian eyes purely defensive, in Europe
at least. Moreover, as critics pointed out, since the Alliance was a
reply to the Triple Alliance and would die with it, it would cease to
be effective just at the moment when the European diplomatic game
would offer possibilities for a forward policy: for example, if the death
of the Emperor Francis-Joseph broke up the Austrian Empire. Of
course these limitations were hidden from the crowds which mobbed
the Russian sailors of Admiral Avellan on their visit to Paris in 1893.
That visit was the occasion of the greatest exhibition of Parisian en-
thusiasm since the Boulanger review of 1886. The visit of the young
Nicholas II and his wife in 1896 was not such a popular success. No
coloured posters showing the dull and timid young autocrat caracoling
on a fiery charger in a semi-Cossack uniform, no lush poetic prose from
the hysterical pen of Franois Coppe*e, could make Nicholas II a great
popular idol, and no courtly blindness could conceal the lack of warmth
which the young Empress showed to her hosts. The return visit of
President Faure was more formally significant, for at a naval review off
Kronstadt, Nicholas II spoke of die 'two friendly and allied nations',
the first official statement of the existence of the Alliance. 2 Even after
that public proclamation of the bond between the Republic and the
Autocracy, the Alliance was not an effective anti-German instrument,
and if it had any effect on France's position, it was to bring her face to
face with the danger which had been the nightmare of the early years
of the Republic, the danger of war, but this time not war with Germany,
but war with Britain.
I Charlps Maurras in Kiel tt Tanger. a6th August, 1^97.
318
THE REPUBLIC SAVED

II

The success of Brazza's explorations and political activities in the


Congo, at the time they were made, bred more hopes than the
intrinsic value of the region seemed to justify. If, from bases on the

Niger and the Congo, French power could be extended eastwards, it


might be possible to undo what was (from the point of view of the
Colonial party) the greatest error of the Third Republic, the help un-
wittingly given to the British occupation of Egypt. If France could
extend her power right across Africa from the Congo basin to the
frontier of Abyssinia, she would be in a position to bring pressure to
bear on Britain. She would be in control of the waters of the Nile
'

by which Egypt lived; modern em' ecring technique could make this
I

control more than a metaphor and then France would undo the mischief
that the feebleness of Freyeinoi b.- 1 wrought. This plan, or these vague
ideas out of which a plan might come, were not merely incompatible
with the security of the British position in Egypt, but they would make
impossible the realization of the dream that then delighted the less
realistic British imperialists, the vision of an All-Red route from the
Cape
to Cairo.
This contradiction in aim between the two great expansionist
powers in Africa was itself bound up with the whole complex
European situation. The degree of freedom allowed to the agents of
the two rival Governments in Africa was largely determined by the
balance of power in Europe. How far Britain would go depended on
the degree of security she felt in face of France's ally Russia, which,
in turn, depended on such contingencies as the possible acquisition by
Russia of the right to send her Black Sea fleet into the Mediterranean
or the completion of the Trans-Siberian railway. Not only so, British
policy could count on a more or less free hand according to the state of
Anglo-German relations which, in turn, might depend on conflict over
rival claims in Samoa. So we see the British Government at one time
trying to induce theGerman Government to advance its own Cameroon
frontier toLake Chad and, when this fails, agreeing to let King Leopold's
Congo Free State acquire residuary rights in the Bahr el Ghazal,
nominally part of the Egyptian Sudan, and, at the same time, getting
from the King a right of way for the All-Red route. This move served
to bring together both France and Germany, who were easily able to
intimidate King Leopold, if not Lord Rosebery. That particular
method of keeping the French out of the Upper Nile failed, having had
no more beneficial results than that of throwing Germany and France
together.
In this game of African musical chairs even Russia was involved,
for both France and her took a great if selfish interest in the inde-
ally
319
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
pendcnce of Abyssinia. After the death of the Emperor John at the
hands of the Khalifa's army, the Italians who, like the French and
British, had established themselves on the seaboard of the Abyssinian
plateau, soon quarrelled with their quondam protg6, Menelik. He,
in turn, was supported morally and materially by France and Russia,
the French having a locus standi as owners of the port of Jibouti, the
Russians as patrons of all Eastern Christian peoples. The British, on
the other hand, supported the Italian designs on Abyssinian inde-
pendence. It was convenient to have another and innocuous European
power on the flank of the Khalifa and still more convenient to avoid
having the head-waters of the Blue Nile under the control of a client
state of France.
is against this background that the French designs for seizing a
It

post on the White Nile, not for its intrinsic value but for its possibilities
as a bargaining weapon in negotiations with Britain over Egypt, must
be seen. British and French policy in turn would succeed or fail, less
in terms of its intrinsic soundness than in terms of the general European
situation. Britain was in the stronger position since she was firmly
settled on the Lower Nile, while France was only moving towards the
Upper Nile, but she had not made it quite clear that her claims (on her
own behalf and on Egypt's) were geographically continuous, that is to
say that, from Uganda to the mouth of the Nile, all the river valley
was to be under British or 'Egyptian' control. Between the northern-
most limit of British claims and the southernmost limit of Egyptian
claims there was a possible gap into which France might insert herself,
a gap whose chief town was Fashoda and whose chief importance was
that it might be used to secure control of the Nile waters. As long as
Britain seemed open to argument, both about the evacuation of Egypt
and the settlement of African claims, France might hold her hand, but
there were rumours, and justified rumours, that France and King
Leopold were both preparing expeditions to stake-out claims in the vast
region which was controlled, as far as it was cpntrolled at all, by the
Khalifa in Khartoum, and which the British Government, as the
trustee for Egyptian claims, looked on as its own.
Not all agents of British policy in Egypt wanted
to extend control
over the Sudan south of Khartoum. When Egypt could afford
much
it, Gromer thought, the death of Gordon would be avenged and a more
secure frontier acquired, but it was not necessary to extend Egyptian
rule into the vast tropical swamps wherein it had died once before.
There had been a famous warning, given in 1895 by Sir Edward Grey, 1
that 'the advance of a French expedition under secret instructions
from the other side of Africa right into a territory over which our
claims have been known for so long, would be not merely an incon-
1
Then Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Foreign Affair? and mouthpiece of the depart*
roent in the House of Common*,

320
THE REPUBLIC SAVED
sistentand unexpected act, but it must be perfectly well known to the
French Government that it would be an unfriendly act, and would be
so viewed by England'. This was, on the surface, plain enough, and
it was approved and denounced by
Englishmen according to their
sympathies with a forward and exclusive policy in the Sudan. But
the French Government naturally refused to be frightened off
merely
by strong and vague words, for it was not wholly cVar what the British
claims were, and the British assertion of a right to have an option on
a vast territory, while reserving to herself the choice of a time to take
it up, was bold. Britain laid down the law and seemed to bar all
compromise, a diplomatic method whose drawbacks she herself fully
appreciated when, a few months latei, President Cleveland, in an even
more blunt fashion, 'issued what was almost an ultimatum over British
claims in Venezuela.
Nor was the British position merely made uncomfortable by the
Venezuela dispute; in South AT' A a, the Jameson raid was made and
failed, with a consequent loss prestige by a power some of whose
. .1

leading figures found thcmsclws associated with an absurd episode


which, since it failed ignominiously, was certainly criminal. This blow
was followed by the telegram of the German Emperor to President
Kruger congratulating him on his successful defeat of the filibusters,
a gesture which infuriated a proud people conscious of uot looking its
best in the eyes of a critical world. Lastly (and of even greater
moment in Central Africa), at the Battle of Adowa, the Italian invasion
of Abyssinia was not merely repelled; a European army was annihilated
and the friend of Britain was humiliated by the client of France and
Russia. From Adowa sprang the necessity or excuse for British action
to relieve pressure on the Italians. The first move towards the re-
occupation of the Sudan began; and from 1896 on, there was a race
between the British and French agents. Which would first reach the
Upper Nile and in what force?

Ill

From the moment that the British Government decided to push


forward with the reconquest of the Sudan, the French Government had
little excuse for believing that a mere formal occupation of a post in

the disputed territory would serve any good purpose. At the moment,
France, backed by Russia, was successfully preventing the International
Debt Commission from advancing money to the Egyptian Government
for the cost of the war, thus forcing Britain directly to underwrite the

financing of the campaign. There was no longer any real hope of


the settlement that a year or so before had been discussed between the
French Minister of Foreign Affairs l and the British Charge* in Paris,
1
Gabriel Hanotaux,

321
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
From the Mediterranean to the Congo, the continent was kers, save
all

for enclaves, some colony of the Gambia, some


tiny, like the British
large, like the British colony of Nigeria and the German Cameroons;
only one was not yet under European control Morocco.
Fashoda was a bitter humiliation for France, coming as it did at
the very height of the Dreyfus crisis. The inglorious denouement
provided plenty of ammunition for the embittered Nationalists, and in
many French circles hatred of England seemed destined to replace
hatred of Germany. There was a growth, too, of scepticism about the
value of the Russian Alliance, but resentment of English manners and
methods was too deep to allow room for much anti-Russian sentiment;
it even fostered a shallow growth of feeling in favour of real co-operation

with Germany, fitienne, one of the leaders of the Colonial party,


expressed the contemporary sentiment. He was tired, he declared, of
sacrificing French to English interests. 'There are other people in the
world, with whom France can friake a good bargain. All right, France
will remember all the good turns of the past and all the bad turns of
This was not the lesson learned by the new Foreign
9
the present.
Minister. For Delcasse*, the lesson was the need not to let the reach
exceed the grasp, to reach an agreement with the odious nation which
had just won so brilliant a triumph over France. For Delcasse was too
good a Gambettist to forget for a moment the wound of Strasbourg
under the influence of the irritation of the scratch of Fashoda.

320
BOOK VII

THE AFFAIR*
Gesta Dei per Francos

1
The French word 'affaire* is usually translated 'case', but TAffaire Dreyfus* was no
mere case and it has been called simply 'the Affair*.
Y
CHAPTER I

A GHOST WALKS
I

the point of view of the French Army and the French nation,
FROM
the Dreyfus case was better forgotten A
traitor had been un-
masked, but it was humiliating that im officer in a confidential position
had betrayed, although less humiliating when it was remembered that
the traitor was not a real Fren< hmaii but a Jew. 1
The desire to let the matter ro was not uncommon among French
Jews, especially among the richer i rench Jews; the very best that could
be hoped for was that the business would be forgotten. Mathieu
Dreyfus was not ready to follow this prudent line. He was convinced
that his brother was innocent, both because of his knowledge of his
brother and because of the meagreness of the evidence against him.
Like Maitre Demange, he could not understand how the court-
martial could have convicted Alfred on the very inconclusive testimony
known to the defence. Since Alfred was innocent, someone else must
be guilty; since the evidence was weak, there must be some mystery
behind the conviction. So the Dreyfus family set themselves to find
out who had really written the bordereau and what had really happened
at the trial. They were at first more successful in the second part of
their task, for the trail which they had followed to lead them to the
real traitor, petered out. The judges of the court-martial had not been
discreet and it soon became known that secret documents had been
shown to the judges which had been kept from the defence. Among
those who learned this was Demange, and this breach of the rules of
procedure gave the Dreyfus family its first hope of getting a re- trial on
legal grounds. Such a re- trial could not be had without the consent of
the Government and the military authorities, and they were not willing
to risk the political storm that a re-trial of a rich Jew would have
brought, as long as they believed that justice had been done in however
irregular a fashion. The sacred 'chose jugeV 8 could not be upset on
a mere point of law.
1
The world of the Affair is so remote, that it is hard to remember the sense of shame
and alarm felt at the news of the treason of a mere temporary staff captain. The high
standard in treachery, at the very top of an Army, set by Soviet Russia was then unthink-
able, as was the comforting reasoning that shows how much an army gains from the revelation
of such colossal conspiracies.
*
Legally over and done with.
329
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
Destiny, which had been unkind to Alfred Dreyfus, at last relented.
That disease of Colonel Sandherr which perhaps accounted for the
initial mistake now made it necessary for him to retire and soon killed
him. His successor was not the semi-illiterate Henry, but a highly
cultivated officer, Colonel Picquart, who was like Sandherr, Dreyfus, and
so many others in the case, an Alsatian. However disappointing to
Henry the nomination of Picquart may have been, it was from the
point of view of the General Staff not only suitable but safe. For
Picquart was a Catholic and an anti-Semite ; if there was any move
1

for the Dreyfus case being reopened, it would not come from him.

Picquart was that rare type, a man who really cares for justice, no
matter where his care for it may take him. He really did believe fiat
justitia mat calum, or it might be better to say he believed that righteous-
ness exalteth a nation. There were to appear in the course of the
Affair many men who boldly asserted that they, too, put justice before
all questions of party and doctrine, but their claims were not, in fact,

severely tested, for their party interest and their doctrinal interest ran
in harness with their sense of justice. Picquart's did not; justice for
him involved a breach with the loyalties and beliefs of his whole life. 2
Picquart did not doubt that Dreyfus was a traitor; what puzzled
him was the problem of why Dreyfus should have betrayed. While
that problem was still unsolved, a new one was perplexing Sandherr's
successor; the sale of secrets to the German attach^ was still going on.
There were many signs of this, but the decisive proof came with the
arrival at the Bureau (during a temporary absence of Henry) of an

intercepted letter from the German attache to a French officer who


was obviously in treasonable relations with Schwartzkoppen. The
officer was a Commandant Esterhazy. Picquart's first thoughts, on
the receipt of the 'petit bleu', were that there was another traitor at
work, not that Dreyfus had been innocently condemned, and when he
began to investigate Esterhazy, he had no notion of where the trail
would lead.
Esterhazy was a descendant of a great Hungarian family and well
but not creditably known about town for his lively private life. He
was in debt, distrusted in his own regiment, the 74th Infantry, abnor-
mally interested, for an infantryman, in artillery matters and an old
acquaintance of Henry's. It was unfortunate, then, that Picquart
thought it necessary or natural to entrust further investigation to
Henry, since that tenacious officer was very unsuccessful in his attempts
to discover much about Esterhazy. It was necessary to learn a good
deal about the Franco-Hungarian: for he was trying, by the use of his
1
Picquartis said to have been a Protestant.
* It is usually
to be hoped that it is unnecessary to-day to emphasize the fact that left-wing
doctrinaires can swallow just as preposterous defences of the indefensible, and produce ex
post^ facto explanations
of events whose possibility they had denied as hotly as any blind
believer in Drumont or Rochefort.

330
THE AFFAIR
political friends, to get appointed to the General Staff. This was a
bad move, for the letters written by Esterhazy in his campaign were
seen by Picquart and he had seen that handwriting before. It was the
writing of the author of the bordereau. The resemblance was striking,
so striking that du Paty de Clam, when he saw it, attributed the letter
to Mathieu Dreyfus, and Bertillon to a man who had been trained by
the Jews to imitate the hand of Alfred Dreyfus. Picquart thought that
a simpler explanation was adequate. The writing of the bordereau was
identical with that of Esterhazy, because EstcrL.izy had been a traitor
in 1894 as h e was * n 1896. What remained to be done was to see the
evidence that had resulted in the condemnation of Dreyfus. Had
Sandherr and Henry obeyed orders, the evidrnce would have been
destroyed, but it was still in the files, and Sandherr had called Picquart's
attention to it when turning o\rr I: L post to him.
A

When Picquart had read the- famous dossier, his mind was made
up; there was nothing in that Election of ambiguous papers to fix

guilt on anybody. With some s aplicity, Picquart now told Boisdeffre


of his discovery; and the Chief of Staff, apart from annoyance at
the discovery of Sandherr 's disobedience, seemed to take the matter
calmly. Picquart waited and continued to investigate Esterhazy,
but not only did waiting mean that Dreyfus was still on Devil's Island
but, hearing rumours of the activities of the Dreyfus family,
Picquart pointed out to his chiefs how much better it would be to
take the initiative while there was yet time. Further delay, he
wrote to Gonse, would mean a crisis, 'a harmful, useless crisis, which
could be avoided by doing justice in time'. It was the first of many
chances given to the rulers of the French Army to retreat in good
order.
The Dreyfus family had entrusted the task of writing up their case
for anew trial to a brilliant young Jew, Bernard Lazare, who was a
most courageous opponent of anti-Semitism, but they did not know
how to call attention to the pamphlet. When at last they were ready
to publish it, Mathieu Dreyfus had the ingenious idea of getting a
British journalist to publish in a Welsh paper a false story of the escape
of Alfred. The only result, at first, was to frighten the Minister of the
Colonies, Andre Lebon, into ordering Dreyfus to be put into double
irons and confined to his hut. Physical torture was now added to the
mental tortures of the prisoner, but a second result of the story was to
revive interest in the case and L? Eclair published an article asserting
that there were many proofs of the treason of Dreyfus, including a
reference to 'him' in a letter from the German to the Italian attache*.
The opponents of a new trial were making the first false move; they
were not content to stay within the fortress of the chose jugie\ they
thought to drive off the besiegers by sorties.
Picquart was still so much in the dark as to believe that the article
331
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
was the work of the Dreyfus family, trying to keep the question alive,
but an interview with Gonse began to shake his faith in his superiors.
For Gonse informed him that, guilty or innocent, the Jew would have
to stay where he was. Picquart, shocked out of official respect by this
candour, retorted that he would not let this secret go to the grave with
him. He was becoming a nuisance and at an awkward time, for
Madame Dreyfus was demanding the re-opening of the case on the
ground that the rules of procedure had been violated, and the press was
beginning to take a new interest in the Affair if only to print further
'proofs' of the guilt of Dreyfus, proofs which complicated the position
of the General Staff. So Picquart was sent off to inspect fortifications
and then to the frontier of Tunis, a move which had the advantage of
putting Henry in charge of the Bureau, but had the disadvantage of
destroying Picquart's faith in his superiors.
It was not only the press and the Dreyfus family that were active.
Nationalist deputies were beginning to use the case as a means of
demonstrating their vigilance; interpellations were threatened, for, as
was later said, the enemies of Dreyfus were not content to assert that
he was guilty, they could not bear that anyone should assert that he
was innocent. By the vehemence of their assertions these enemies
got momentary applause and, no doubt, a warm sense of having
deserved well of their country, but they were aiding the Dreyfus family
to keep the question before the public mind. It was in a reply to a
Nationalist interpellation that General Billot, the Minister of War,
was in his turn provoked into leaving the security of the chose jugfo, for
he asserted that Dreyfus had been regularly convicted. This was un-
true and was now known to be untrue to a large number of people,
among them to Demange and Mathieu Dreyfus. Alfred Dreyfus,
guilty or not, had not been regularly tried.
It was now very doubtful if even in the part of his trial that had
been regular, he had been rightly convicted, for the Matin had published
a facsimile of the bordereau and there were plenty of people in Paris
who saw that the handwriting closely resembled that of Esterhazy. 1
Henry, now in charge of the Bureau, was resolved that the activities
of Picquart should not be allowed to create doubts in the mind of any
other investigator. He began to tamper with the documents that had
aroused Picquart's suspicion (not knowing that Picquart had taken
the precaution of having the petit bleu photographed before placing it
in the files), and other 'proofs' of the guilt of Dreyfus were manu-
factured and added to the dossier. The campaign for the defence
of the chose jugte was weU under way. Picquart, who was determined
not to let his secret die with him, wrote a narrative which was to be

1
Long after it was claimed that the Matin, in publishing the bordereau^ had deliberately
tried to help Dreyfus ; the Matin's comment on the case at the time shows that the news-
paper, if that was its purpose, had very carefully concealed its aim from its readers.
332
THE AFFAIR
sent, should he die, to the President of the Republic. He went further;
as the hostility of Henry and, behind him, of Gonse and Boisdeffre
became more and more obvious, he consulted Louis Leblois, an
eminent Paris lawyer, like himself an Alsatian, and a schoolfellow at
the Lycee of Strasbourg. He told Leblois of his conviction of the
innocence of Dreyfus, bound him to secrecy and entrusted him with a
watching brief over his interests. Leblois thought himself entitled to
investigate the case, if he kept secret the role of Picquart in it and,
talking of his doubts with a friend, Charles Rislcr, was astonished to
learn that Risler's uncle was himself in doubt both about Dreyfus's
guilt and what was best to be done.
The uncle in question was a notability of tho regime, Scheurer-
Kestner, member of one of the greatest Republican clans, Vice-
1

President of the Senate, most cmin< iu of exiled Alsatians. He had


been approached by the Drey us family as fellow- Alsatians, and his
I

doubts of the guilt of Alfred Dre,>l <s had led him to make representa-
tions to his old friend General Billot, who had put him off by affirma-
tions of the certainty of Drcyfus's guilt. Leblois had given him some-
thing concrete to go on, the opinion of Picquart and the attitude of
Gonse. Leblois himself felt bound to remain in the background. He
did not trust Billot or the military officials. 'A whole world will
collapse when this business is cleared up. ... Those fellows will
defend themselves, and we know how unscrupulous they are.' So
Scheurer-Kestner was not to open fire until he had approached the
President of the Republic and the Ministers. Felix Faure was not
responsive and the Senator tackled Billot. It was in vain, Billot was
deaf to all warnings and encouraged the press to attack his old friend.
The Prime Minister (Meline) was also approached, but, as Scheurer-
Kestner had already discovered, Meline was not a Gambetta or a
Ferry. At last he came into the open and by a letter in the Temps,
addressed to another great figure of the Republic, Arthur Ranc, he
5
declared for the reopening of the case, for 'revision .

It was obvious even to the military mind that the attack was

becoming serious. It was necessary to make sure that Esterhazy, who


was no very reputable character, would not run away, or sell out to the
Jews who were, in the opinion of the General Staff, capable of any-
thing. So a comic-opera secret interview with Esterhazy was arranged
in which du Paty de Clam wore a false beard. 2 For reasons which
even now are not quite clear, the General Staff had resolved to protect
Esterhazy, although they must have known how unreliable he was and

1
He was Madame Jules Ferry's uncle.
*
Those Frenchmen who, like M. Jean Heritier, still assert the guilt of Dreyfus have to
represent Henry and du Paty de Clam as being the innocent victims of Hebraic guiles They
can only defend the two men by implicitly asserting that some of the most delicate and im-
portant work in the French Army was entrusted to men who would have bought a gold
brick or Brooklyn Bridge at the bidding of the first plausible confidence trickster.
333
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
how dangerous an ally or protege he might turn out to be.
1
The
honour and security of the French Army were, from now on, in the hands
of an incompetent forger, Henry, and a most disreputable adventurer,
Esterhazy. Boisdeffre was ready to repress smiles when Esterhazy
wrote that he had 'a heritage of glory to defend'.
In this laudable enterprise Esterhazy needed liaison officers to keep
him in touch with the General Staff and two women were thus em-
ployed, the Marquise du Paty de Clam and a less reputable female,
Esterhazy's mistress, commonly known as 'Tart Pays'. The plan of
campaign was that Esterhazy should appeal to Felix Faure, who thus
found himself approached on the one side by Scheurer-Kestner and
on the other by Esterhazy who, when other letters had been left
unanswered, uttered a threat of a kind soon to be familiar. He
possessed, he asserted, the facsimile of a document that not only proved
the guilt of Dreyfus but which, if published, would force France to go
to war or to humiliate herself. It was a form of blackmail that was to
be employed to excess.
Up to this moment the Revisionists 2 had been working in the dark.
Picquart knew nothing of the activities of the Dreyfus family or of
Scheurer-Kestner who knew nothing of the petit bleu, and Mathieu
Dreyfus, so far, knew nothing of Esterhazy. But the Matin facsimile
was reprinted by Bernard Lazare; the hand of Esterhazy was recognized
and the news passed on to Mathieu Dreyfus, while Henry, through the
Libre Parole, attacked Picquart without naming him and revealed yet
more secret documents, another of those rash sorties of the defence.
At last the Dreyfus family had found what they wanted, the author
of the bordereau. It was no longer on a point of law that they asked for
revision, but on the general question of guilt or innocence. In a letter
to F&ix Faure, Mathieu Dreyfus denounced Esterhazy by name.
Esterhazy, confident in his protectors, demanded an inquiry and casting
himself as a victim of the 'Jewish syndicate' whose misdeeds Rochefort
was making much of, he was on the way to becoming a hero. Both
the Italian and German ambassadors were increasingly irritated by the
violence of the French press and both insisted with Hanotaux that
Dreyfus was innocent. Outside France all well-informed people knew
that Dreyfus was not the author of the bordereau, which proved them in
the eyes of stout patriots, allies or dupes of the Syndicate. 8
The demand of Esterhazy for an inquiry was granted, and the task
I
One theory is that Esterhazy wrote the bordereau at the orders of Sandherr as part of
& campaign of counter-espionage.
I
1 shall use this word to cover all those who wished the case to be reopened.
8
It was one of the complications of the case that the
Empress Eugenie and some of the
Orleans princes knew, through their relations with Queen Victoria, that the Kaiser had
told his grandmother that Dreyfus was innocent. But the old dynastic parties were not to
be shaken by such weaknesses. It should be noted that the Bonapartist firebrand, Paul de
Caisagnac,and the Orleanist newspaper, the&M/^were for revision. But the Soltil had to
climb down and replace its editor in face of the blast from its infuriated readers.
334
THE AFFAIR
was entrusted to General de Pellieux, who was given a civilian legal
official, Bertulus, to aid him. Henry had prepared
for this emergency

by accumulating documents that would have been conclusive against


Dreyfus if they had referred to him or had been genuine. He was able
to persuade Pellieux that Picquart was engaged in a conspiracy, with
Leblois, to throw the guilt of Dreyfus on Esterhazy 's shoulders. When
at last Pellieux saw Picquart, who had been brought back from Tunis,
his mind was made up. It was just as well, for the Figaro had secured
from a cast-off mistress of Esterhazy some very revealing letters in
which this French soldier abused the Frencli Army and its generals, and
c
wrote of a red battle sun, in Paris taken by assault and given over
to be plundered by a hundred thousand drunk soldiers That's
. . .

the treat I dream of.' Esterhazy w?s henceforward known to the


5
Revisionists as the 'Uhlan but by denying the authenticity of some of
,

the letters and representing the others as provoked by honest indig-


nation, their author managed to keep his reputation as a patriot.
Pellieux declared that the charges against Esterhazy were baseless, but
that the conduct of Picquart should be investigated, and when, on
Esterhazy's demand for a court-martial, another investigator backed
up by three experts declared that the bordereau was not by Esterhazy,
the General Staff breathed freely again.
The court-martial when it came was more a trial of Picquart than
of Esterhazy. It took the judges three minutes to acquit him: he was
cheered by the Nationalist mob and lauded by the Nationalist press as
had been a new Napoleon or at least a new Boulanger. Picquart
if he
was arrested and the campaign seemed to have been won, but every
move that attracted attention to the Affair threatened the security of
the official thesis and the Esterhazy trial was no exception.
Among the newspapers which had taken up the revisionist cause was
the new journal founded by Vaughan Clemenceau, VAurore. The
for

political career of Clemenceau seemed have ended with his defeat


to
after Panama, but with heroic tenacity he had decided to make a new
career with his pen. It was he who, in a flash of genius, chose as the
title to put at the head of the open letter to Flix Faure written by

fimile Zola, J* accuse. Zola was no longer as popular as he had been,


and if the violence of the attack on La Terre had done its authors more
harm than it had done Zola, none of the bright young men of letters
took very seriously the literary or sociological theories of the novelist.
But outside France and among the common readers of France, Zola's
reputation was still immense. He had been converted to revisionism
by Leblois and had begun a campaign in the Figaro which that paper
had had to drop. In VAurore he had found a more sympathetic and
more formidable audience than in the fashionable readers of the
Figaro. He accused the Army leaders, Mercier, Billot, Boisdeffre, of
deliberately concealing the evidence that showed Dreyfus to be
335
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
innocent, and the judges of the Esterhazy court-martial of knowingly
acquitting the guilty. He added in a prophetic phrase, 'What I do
is only a revolutionary method of hastening on the explosion of truth
and justice'.
It was, indeed, a revolution that was now threatened, not, as the
stupid political soldiers thought, a mere revolt. For with Zola the
intelligentzia, or as they were called at that time, the intellectuals,
entered the campaign. Anatole France, Claude Monet, Carriere,
Charles Richet, Louis Havet, young Marcel Proust were among them.
The war of doctrines was beginning.
To deal with Zola it was ingeniously decided to try him only for
one part of his letter, that in which he had declared that the court-
martial had acquitted Esterhazy by order. Picquart was tried for
communicating documents to Leblois and ordered to be discharged
from the Army, but the sentence was not carried out until after the
Zola trial and, for the moment, Picquart was kept in Mont-Val&ien.
The trial was another Pyrrhic victory for the General Staff. Zola was
convicted, but the Revisionists had managed to bring before the court
the communication of the secret documents in the Dreyfus court-
martial; and the Army witnesses, while they had not admitted this, had
not dared to deny it. Henry was bolder; he alluded to a mysterious
document that could not be produced. His impressive discretion was
not imitated by Millevoye, who had already shown his credulity by his
attack on Clemenceau over the Norton forgeries.
Millevoye told a meeting at Suresnes that there was in existence a
bordereau proving the guilt of Dreyfus since it was annotated in that
sense by the hand of the Kaiser! It was not the dramatic nonsense of

Millevoye that influenced the jury, but the testimony of Pellieux, who
asked what would become of the Army if it had to fight under dis-
credited leaders? In another of those dangerous sorties, he hinted that
there was in existence a document proving that Dreyfus was guilty.
Boisdeffre and Gonse were not ready to let this document (which
Henry had providentially discovered in 1896) be produced. Zola
was convicted, but the conviction was quashed on a point, of law
and a new trial ordered. Professors and officers who had professed
revisionist sympathies were suspended; Picquart was compulsorily
retired from the Army; Zola deprived of the Legion of Honour;
Leblois of his rank as assistant mayor of the seventh arrondissement.
The Government, true to the principle of its chief, was determined to
prove that there was no Dreyfus case, merely a handful of troublesome
clerks.
The Prime M^Hne, was unfortunate in the time he
Minister, Jules
had come to power. In a quieter age he might have been a real suc-
cess. He based his politics, almost as candidly as had Guizot under
Louis Philippe, on economic interests. A high protectionist, he had
336
THE AFFAIR
saved the French peasantry from the worst effects of the great fall
in world prices. In policy he was all for conciliation on a basis of
interest; he would not repeal the lay laws and he did not enforce them
with any zeal. He was sympathetic to the policy of the Ralliement,
to a union of all forces of social conservation, with no doctrinal ques-
tions raised or answered. Unfortunately, he fell into the midst of a
violent doctrinal quarrel. His political subordinates, like the too
zealous Louis Barthou (who was all for rigorous measures against the
Revisionists) and the noisy generals, were nuisances. Generals and
politicians would insist on improving their position by new discoveries,
new theories; a whole mythology had grown up round the case in
which the astute Meline could not believe, but which hid the beauties
of his sound budgets and his high kinds from a people that, no more
than fifty years before, was content with a naked policy of interests.
The elections of 1898 were morally n defeat for the Ministry, and within
a few days the new Chamber hat overthrown Meline.
It was the continued refusal of the Army, or of the politicians who

thought they were serving the Army, to remain within the stronghold
of the legal decision that finally gave the Revisionists their chance.
The instrument of destiny was the Minister of War in the Cabinet
which Brisson had formed after the fall of Meline. Godefroy Gavaignac
was by birth, by education, by career, the model Republican. He was
the heir of his family tradition, of the general who had saved the Second
Republic from anarchy but who had not saved it from the Empire.
He had been, as a schoolboy under the Empire, a conspicuous Republi-
can; and under the Republic he was a kind of Cato. It was an anti-
Dreyfusard interpellation that gave him the opportunity to declare his
conviction of the guilt of Dreyfus and to give reasons. The reasons
were various documents which might refer to Dreyfus and, if they
did, proved him guilty, a confession which it was belatedly found
that Dreyfus had made and a document that did undoubtedly refer
to Dreyfus. The speech was brilliantly successful. Only a small
minority of Socialists refused to vote it the honour of publication on
every official notice-board in France, but with the abstaining Socialists
was the astute Meline, who had been told by the Italian Ambassador
that the document referring to Dreyfus and supposed to have been
written by the Italian attache* was not genuine. Meline knew, more-
over, that Dreyfus had not confessed.
The Dreyfusards were pleased, for Gavaignac had moved away
from discussing the bordereau, the only legal basis of conviction, and the
lawyers were given a chance to attack the procedure of the court-
martial which had had no other evidence before it in the eyes of the law
but the bordereau. It was Picquart who was chosen to launch .the
attack; he declared that the minor documents cited did not apply to
Dreyfus and that the document which did was a forgery. Gavaignac
337
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
determined to crush Picquart by charging him with a breach of the law
on official secrets. Esterhazy was also arrested and Zola, appealing
on a point of law and finding that his new trial would still go on,
refused to appear in court.He was condemned and fled to England.
<v
The climax was approaching. -

The arrest of Esterhazy was bound to alarm Henry, who was


deeply involved with the 'Uhlan', and, while Esterhazy was being
investigated by one judicial official, Picquart was being investigated by
another. The results were more damaging for Esterhazy, that is for
Henry and for du Paty de Clam, than for Picquart. Cavaignac was
becoming worried and was foolish enough to propose to arrest and
send for trial before the Senate a long list of Dreyfusards, including
Jaures, Clemenceau, Scheurer-Kestner and Mathieu Dreyfus. This
was too much for his colleagues, but for a Government convinced of
the strength of its cause the Brisson Cabinet was strangely jumpy.
They had reason, for the expert ordered by Cavaignac to verify the
letter in which Panizzardi was supposed to have talked of Dreyfus,
found that it was composed of fragments of two letters. 1 It was or
rather should have been a crushing blow for Cavaignac, the more that
Esterhazy had been retired from the Army by a court-martial which
found him guilty of habitual bad conduct.
Henry was not immediately taxed with the forgery and when he
was he tried at first to lie. But the evidence was too strong and he
confessed. The first person to appreciate that the turn of the tide had
come was BoisdefFre. 'Recognizing that his confidence in Henry . . .

was misplaced,' he resigned. Nor could all the arguments of the


Minister induce him to return. Henry was arrested and sent off to
the fortress of Mont-Val6rien, and the press was informed that Henry
had admitted forging the document which, had it been genuine, would
have set all doubts at rest. General de Pellieux took the line of
Boisdeffre. 'Dupe of dishonourable men', having lost confidence in
superiors who had
given him forgeries to work on, he too resigned.
The Governor of Paris, Zurlinden, persuaded him to withdraw his
resignation and the Prime Minister had no official knowledge of a
letter so devastating in its implications for the chose jugie. BoisdefFre,
Pellieux, all but the most blindly partisan could see the implications of
Henry's forgery. As the document had not been before the court-
martial of 1894, it could not have affected its judgment one way or the
other, but what had affected its judgment was the testimony of Henry
and the introduction of documents not known to the defence. As far
as the original conviction had depended on the account of his own
actions given by Henry, it was now morally as well as legally under-
mined. For the good of the French State as well as of the French
1
The weave of the fragments was different; it was the same error of the forger that
helped to damn Wilson.
338
THE AFFAIR
Army, it was a pity that the rulers of both did not know when they

were beaten. The news of Henry's confession was followed by the


news of his suicide. He had written a letter to his wife, asserting that
the letter was a true copy. 'You know in whose interest I have
1
acted.'
For the moment almost all the enemies of revision were silenced and

the reopening of the case seemed inevitable. But Cavaignac refused


to admit that anything had happened to affect his opinion, and, by
resigning, he forced Brisson to find a War Minister who would under-
take to reopen the case. His first choice was Zur linden, who was soon
convinced by his subordinates that Dreyfus was guilty and was more
anxious to bring Picquart before a court-martial than to reopen the
original case. Picquart announced that h? was not going to commit
suicide and ifhe were found dead like Henry, the public would know
what to think. Zurlinden had rcsi^u.d and Brisson had been weak
enough under the pressure 01 his sviccessor, General Chanoine, to
restore him to his old post of Gov nor of Paris. Picquart's fears may
have been needless, but they addec to the melodramatic atmosphere in
which the Affair was now bathed.
After their first moments of stupefaction, the enemies of Dreyfus,
c
of the Jews, and of the Syndicate' had found a theory to allow them to
defend Henry. His forgery had been, said Ernest Judet, like a bank-
note; it was of no value in itself but it represented a great deposit of
wealth. There were real but unpublishable proofs of the guilt of
Dreyfus; it was on this hidden store of gold that Henry had drawn his
note. It fell to another, and until that moment obscure, writer to
make of Henry not merely a witness of worth but a great national hero.
In the little read and venerable Legitimist newspaper, the Gazette de
France, Charles Maurras became famous overnight. Henry, he said,
until he manufactured the Panizzardi letter, had been a gallant soldier,
and as his forgery had injured only the enemies of France, his action
must be interpreted favourably. From that general principle it was
easy to deduce that the dead man was a hero and a martyr. Maurras
admitted that this deduction would not be accepted by everyone.
'Our bad half-Protestant education' had kept us 'from estimating justly
so much moral and intellectual nobility But your unlucky
. . .

be reckoned among your finest feats of war.' To educate


forgery will
the French public to this view of political morality was the task set
himself by the critic and journalist who had now provided the anti-
Dreyfusards with a doctrine fit to resist all criticism.
The prosecution of Zola was ominous for the critics of the General
Staff, or even for the cautious politicians who were not willing to give
1
This cryptic phrase has puzzled many commentators. M. Armand Charpentier has
furnished an ingenious explanation which suggests that the whole Affair began as the result
of a mistake by Sandherr, and it was as the heir of Sandherr, the trustee for his policy, that
Henry had acted and had killed himself rather than betray his dead chief.
339
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
blind credit to any assertion made by one or more generals. It was

during the Zola trial (February 1898) that one of the political chiefs
of Dreyfusism, Trarieux, launched the idea of founding a society for
the protection of the principles of '89 now threatened by the soldiers.
The new society took the name of 'The League of the Rights of Man*.
It was to rally 'all those who, without distinction of religious belief,
wish for a sincere union between all Frenchmen and are convinced
that every kind of arbitrary action or intolerance threatens civil
disturbance and is a menace to civilization and progress'. The new
League was to serve as a kind of general staff to the Revisionists. By
its formal neutrality and the publicity of its activities it distinguished

itself from Masonry and among its founders was one of the most eminent
Catholic defenders of Dreyfus, Paul Viollet of the ficole des Ghartes.
Viollet soon discovered that the new League was incapable of preserving
the delicate distinction between opposing the activities to which the
vocal majority of French Catholics had given adherence and opposing
the activities of French Catholics in general.
For the moment the League did bring together those who felt that
was involved more than the innocence of one man;
in the Affair there
that there were endangered by the arbitrary action of the generals,
the Government lawyers, the complaisant politicians, the major con-
quests of the Revolution. The memory of the traditional miscarriages
of justice of the past, of Galas, of Sirven, was awakened. It was this
powerful tradition running back to Voltaire that brought so many
dilettanti over to the new League.
It was this tradition that turned the
'

Epicurean ex-Boulangist, Anatole France, into the defender of Zola


and the symbolic figure at great demonstrations of the Paris workers.
The Catholic polemics of Ferdinand Brunetiere had already awakened
anger in the disciple of Voltaire and of Diderot, but what was now
threatened was something more serious than dogmatism from the
Sorbonne, or from the Revue des Deux Mondes. The sceptic found that
he cared about scepticism, and, having refused, with his father, to
believe in the infallibility of the Pope or the divine right of kings,
Anatole France was hardly likely to accept the infallibility of courts-
martial or the divine right of Ministers of War or of Justice, with
Rochefort or Drumont.

II

It is difficult to-day, perhaps impossible, for most persons to under-


stand the passions provoked by the Dreyfus case. It is hard to see why
the Army and the partisans of the Axmy ran such risks, took such
extreme courses, forced themselves to steer narrowly between equally
dangerous positions and, in the name of the security and dignity of
France, compromised themselves with fools or knaves. It is even more
340
THE AFPAIR
difficult to realize thatthe partisans of Dreyfus could assert, in all sin-
cerity, thatthey sought only justice, that a wrong done by the State to
one man must be undone, at no matter what risk. There were, of
course, old Boulangists seeking only revenge; there were old Panamists
seeking rehabilitation; but there were thousands of zealots on both sides
who believed that what they were fighting for was the greatest thing in
the world. M. Le*on Blum has given a convincing picture of his dis-
illusionment when his literary idol, Barres, whose support for reopening
the case he had confidently promised to secure, first evaded and then
refused. Barres had been for so many of that generation 'not only the
master but the guide'. 1In a short time, Blum was telling Jules Renard
that he was afraid to re-read Barres, that he could not be as good a
writer as they had thought him!
Among the educated classes in France, the case became a dividing
sword. It separated Lavisse from Rimbaud, the Due de Guermantes
from the Prince de Guermantes, it bred quarrels and feuds which it took
a generation to heal. It \v;is noi or it soon ceased to be, the question
of the guilt or innocence of Dreyius, a victim who was not much hated
by enemies and not much loved by his friends. The question at
his
issuewas much deeper; should the Army, which, for so many, was
France, be endangered, its prestige and self-confidence weakened merely
to remedy a hypothetical injustice? In addition to Dreyfus, there was,
so the opponents of revision asserted, a neglected victim, France. The
hostility of foreign opinion to the official French thesis irritated rather
than shook the conviction of the enemies of 'the Syndicate'. They
doubted, with some reason, the complete bona fides of English, German,
and American critics who implied that such things could happen only
in France. As far as it was true, it was deplorably true. Only in
France would fundamental questions of the safety of the State and the
established order of things be debated at all. On the other side, the
friends of revision saw, in the claims of the military authorities to impose
their view of the facts, a claim to set up a new ruling class, to exempt,
from due process of law and from the working of the critical spirit, a
body of men whose claims to public respect were never overwhelmingly
impressive and, since the confession and suicide of Henry, open to
serious question.
It is possible that if the Army leaders, the 'great chiefs' of the
Nationalist press had accepted the necessity of revision after the suicide
of Henry, the Affair would not have developed its revolutionary char-
acter. The honour, that is the pride, the record for consistency, the
not unjustifiable resentment, the hopes of long-delayed triumph, all
combined to betray the classes and sections most closely allied with the
'
l
A modern parallel to this shock is furnished by the refusal of M. Remain Holland to
pay attention to the testimony of Mr. Eugene Lyons. The writer who had once been 'above
the battle* had taken sides and did not, any more than Barres, propose to discuss evidence
against his faith.
341
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
Army chiefs, into indefensible
follies. It was not merely that after the
suicide of Henry their case was bad, but that they were in no position
to defend it successfully even had it been good.
The incorrigible folly of the old Conservatives had been abundantly
displayed at the elections of 1898. The Legitimists, reduced to a sulky
silenceby the papal policy, had. bitterly resented the choice of an old
Republican, fitienne Lamy, as the head of the Catholic organization.
At the elections they sabotaged the efforts of 'the Catholic leaders and
were in a great degree the authors of the check administered to Meline.
Well might Albert de Mun quote the Cardinal de Retz, 'it is easier to
fight one's enemies than to get on with one's friends'. In the approach-
ing crisis it was of importance that so many of the Conservative voters in
France had managed to persuade themselves that the experiment of the
Ralliement had failed; that no orthodox Republican Government, no
matter how lukewarm on the question of laicity, that no Republican
leader, not a Spuller or a Me*line, would ever make those concessions
which the zealous Catholics demanded as a minimum, the abandon-
ment of the policy of laicity in the schools and the compulsory military
service of the clergy.
The elections of 1898 exalted the spirits of the extremists, while they
depressed the timid moderates, and there were few Conservative
leaders who were not in either class. So comparatively sagacious and
so generous a man as Albert de Mun saw in the agitation for reopening
the Dreyfus case merely a conspiracy to make the French soldier dis-
doubts and suspicions on his leaders'. Even
trust his officers, to 'cast
the moderate Jacques Piou, writing long after the event, had only the
mildest words of condemnation for the follies of the zealots and the
excesses of zeal that led Henry to forgery and Christiani to a mean and
childish brutality. 1
The development of the case into a crisis brought the veteran leader
of lost causes into the field. D&xmlede turned from writing historical
dramas on Duguesclin and Hoche, to politics. He was elected in the old
Bqnapartist region of the Charente and he began to plan another mili-
tary coup fttat. His Duguesclin and bi^Hocke were improved Boulangers,
but it was time to turn from the pen to the sword. So the League of
Patriots was revived, ready to be the ally of whatever general could be
induced to save France and the Republic from the politicians. 'The
Army will be our ally. It must have, when the moment comes, all the
decent people on its side. And if it turns out not to be enough to follow
it, we ahead
will
go of it.'

D&oulede was not the only Boulangist to see in the case an attempt
by the corrupt profiteers of the Republic to recover the ground some of
them had lost after the Panama explosion and, in the increasing bitter-
ness of the agitation on both sides, a chance to renew the assault on the
1
Sec p. 349.

342
THE AFFAIR
parliamentary Republic and avenge the humiliations of 1889. Roche-
fort, Barres, the old Monarchist leaders were all tempted to follow the
popular course; and their contempt, not unmerited in many cases, for
the sudden moral fervour of their enemies, blinded them to the folly and
meanness of their own allies.
The Boulangist element in the anti-revisionist ranks was the source
of many illusions. The failure of Boulanger as a dictator had made
people forget how effective he had been as a mascot. It was in vain
that 'the great chiefs', Boisdeffre, Gonse, Mercicr and the rest, were
presented to the public as deserving a reverence that would have been
excessive if given to marshals of the First Empire. The prestige of these
soldiers was purely official; they owed it to their rank, not to personal

popularity or to personal achievement. Nor did the habit of talking of


5
'the Army show much more judgment, for the Army was not the
officer corps but the vast majority of conscript soldiers, many of whom
must have felt that a judirbl en<>r by a court-martial was not at all
beyond credence.
1
The group oi aristocratic generals, falling back on
blunt assertions of authority, were very far, from a political point of
view, from equalling Boulanger; and the hatred of the Jews was too
artificial and limited an emotion to replace the passion for the Revanche
that had carried Boulanger and his black horse to the very threshold of
dictatorship. In putting all their money on the generals, the defeated
notables were backing the last hierarchy that had survived the liquida-
tion by the Republic of the old order of society, the last group of men
whose authority and prestige were independent of the only two authori-
ties recognized by the Republic, the politicians and the rich. And as
had happened in the case of the other hierarchies, the generals put too
great a strain on the real authority that they still had. The Affair, once
it became a question of the right of the generals to implicit trust, was

a new Sixteenth of May. It was fitting that the Due de Broglie lived
long enough to support, with what prestige he had left, this disastrous
imitation of his own folly.

Ill

While the politicians were manoeuvring and the academicians sign-


ing manifestoes, the most vehement of the Nationalist orators and
leaders was again ready to try his old recipe for the evils that were eating
away the foundations of the French State. De*roulede was preparing
torenew Boulangism without Boulanger. It was a serious handicap,
had had a leader under whom Deroulede and
for the cause in 1889

Naquet and Mackau could have fought, if the leader had ever dared to
1
One
of the leading anti-Dreyfusard intellectuals, M. Louis Dimier, was many years
later to learnfrom the experience of his son that military discipline and military justice
were not exempt from very serious faults.
343 z
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
fight. Now there was only Deroulede. Age had not increased his
prestige or his stock of political wisdom. He was ostentatiously Repub-
lican and suspicious of the Royalist connections of some possible allies.
Anti-Semitism, whether plebeian like that of Drumont, or aristocratic
like that of Barres, was uneasily worn by Deroulede for, in the past, his

anxiety to accumulate any kind of assets for his foreign policy had led
him to praise Cornelius Herz. Drumont, indeed, had only with diffi-
culty concealed his scorn for Deroulede, who was foolish enough to
think that the German was the main or only enemy, whereas Drumont
had maintained that, in 1870, both 'Aryan' peoples had been victims
of Jewish high finance, which needed a war to allow Bleichroder to
combine with Rothschild to plunder France. Worse still, Drumont
had warned France against a new war prepared by a fake quarrel
between 'Mayer and Mayer' and only needing an imbecile to start it:
and he had added, the imbecile was there, Deroulede.
Faced with the problem of freeing the Republicans from the charge
of war-mongering and from the difficulties of preaching a formal policy
of revenge without any active measures to that end, Gambetta had
found the magic formula, 'clericalism, there is the enemy'. It was the
weakness of the Right that they could not find so powerful a lever with
which to turn popular feeling against their enemies. They could not
even agree which of the two or three weak tools they possessed, they
were to use. They suffered, too, from a weakness that was inevitable
in a party which had never known power; the leaders were nearly all

newspaper editors, appealing to a limited public that might, in its


unsteady enthusiasm, switch its support from UIntransigeant to La Libre
Parole and, a little later, from the Libre Parole to Action Frangaise. The
Republican parties had their own newspaper wars, but Jaures and
Briand, if not M. G^rault-Richard, had in Parliament and the platform
more sounding-boards than any newspaper afforded. The
effective
fate of La UHumaniti and later of Messidor mattered
Petite R^publique^
little compared with the survival of the party.

It was a tribute to the respect shown by or expected of the French

people towards the established intellectual Church, the 'University',


that the manifesto of the 'Intellectuals' in favour of revision should have
so profoundly irritated the other side. The signatories might be
denounced as useless mandarins attacking the indispensable institutions
of a State which protected and paid them; the manifesto, nevertheless,
had to be answered. If the question at issue was one of mere guilt or
innocence, one of the mere exercise of critical judgment, then the
opinion of men whom the nation had agreed to treat as intelligent,
professors, academicians and the like, was highly relevant. That an
eminent mathematician, chemist, historian or man of letters could be
just as credulous and prejudiced as any peasant was not generally
realized. That the motives that made one academician come out for
344
THE AFFAIR
Dreyfus and another against him were not in most cases purely intel-
lectual was a heretical view, not widely held on either side, except as
far as each doubted the good faith of its opponents. 1
It seemed, then, to some young professors of the 'Universite' that it
would be worth while to organize a counter-manifesto and from this
there sprang a permanent organization. Composed of citizens indig-
nant at 'seeing the most disastrous of agitations being prolonged', it was
given the name of the Ligue de la Patrie Frangaise.
The Ligue de la Patrie Frangaise was welcomed by many thousands of
sincere and honest people whose critical judgment was not very acute,
by people who had been taken in by Leo Taxi], old readers of Drumont,
old readers of Rochefort, used to belie v ng any absurdity of their
;

enemies, but not necessarily either fools or knaves for being only moder-
ately impressed by the moral beaut ,>f the
Dreyfusard crusade. The
it

transference of the case from the mystical to the political plane which
Charles Peguy deplored, th msjli realized that it was inevitable, was
1

now well under way. Hie sudde moral fervour of so many survivors
of Panama (although it was often genuine) naturally aroused the anger
and disbelief of men devoted to another tradition than that of 1793,
as it evoked the ironical scepticism of a man like Georges Sorel, who
was to welcome Lenin, but who was not reverential enough to be
swept off his by merely verbal and historical revolutionary 'action'.
feet
It is
any resistance to revision could in the long run
unlikely that
have succeeded, but the form which it took was peculiarly futile.
Begun as a reply to the manifesto of the 'intellectuals', the League might,
in a country used to reverencing constituted authority, have carried
some weight. But the news that a majority of the French Academy
was against revision was less important than the academicians thought;
itwas a repetition of the mistake of the 'moral order', the belief that the
'notables' were still intrinsically powerful. Under this illusion, the
fight against the united Republican bloc was begun under the leadership
of a distinguished if not profound literary critic, Jules Lemaitre. His
reputation was perhaps enough to offset that of Anatole France on the
other side, but as Maurice Barres noted after a speech of Lemaitre' s,
'a doctrine was missing'. The League, avoiding every theme which
could divide the mass of Nationalist and Conservative voters and sub-
scribers that it wanted to enrol, would not have known what to do with
a doctrine, even ifJules Lemaitre had been the man to invent one. The
time was to come when he would have a doctrine, but it would be a
doctrine evolved in a stronger head: and Charles Maurras was still a

1
It was of course a great to enemies of the intelligentzia to show it up. Anti-
delight
Dreyfusardswere never tired of telling how Salomon Reinach, brother of Joseph and a great
State archaeologist, bought a bogus 'tiara of Sataphernes* for the Louvre. Fortunately,
although Salomon Reinach, as an old man, was again a victim at Glozel, he had enough
fellow-victims to escape a solitary pillory. The very sections which made fun of Salomon
Reinach, or attacked the logic of Henri Poincare*, were proud of their own scientific partisans.
345
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
minor figure beside the elegant academician. Lemaitre had, of course,
one thing to bring to the League, large financial resources, for his
mistress, Madame de Loynes, played the role of the Duchesse d'Uzes in
the Boulangist campaign. * If the campaign was to be an affair of
matching academicians, the choice of Lemaitre was defensible. But
the other side was not led by Anatole France or Jules Claretie. They
were like the princes in the old German Army, ornaments given a
prominent place in the foreground, but the Ludendorffs of the Dreyfus-
ards were highly trained professional politicians like Glemenceau.
The new League inevitably invaded the field already occupied
by Droulede's Ligue des Patriotes. Deroulede having failed to find a
saviour for France in Boulanger, or in General X, or in any politician,
had cast himself for the role. He was very sceptical of the value of
mere electoral campaigns like that waged by the new League, but he
loyally collaborated, although some of his supporters, like George
Bonnamour, were resentful of the way in which local triumphs, which
they thought due to the militant tactics of the old League, were credited
to the oratory of the new.
The question whether Deroulede was to lead France to salvation
was soon settled. The Brisson Government had decided to take the
firstlegal measures for making a revision possible, but ten days after the
Court of Cassation had begun its work on the case, the new Minister
of War, General Chanoine, stabbed Brisson in the back by declaring
to an astounded Chamber that he shared the opinion of his predecessors
and resigned on the spot.
The Brisson Government fell and Dupuy was called on by Faure to
take over the inheritance. The two critical posts of Justice and War
were given to the mediocre Lebret and the evasive Freycinet. Quesnay
de Beaurepaire, with his usual vehemence, attacked the judges of the
criminal section of the Court of Cassation, 2 and although the Govern-
ment denied any intention of reflecting on the judges, they introduced
and passed a bill transferring the case to the whole court, a victory for
the anti-Dreyfusards. At the same time, the charges against Picquart
were pressed, and not only the Generals but the incorrigible Cavaignac
affirmed their faith in the rightness of the early decisions. Any hopes
which might have been formed that the Court of Cassation would be
allowed to do its work in peace proved baseless. The agitation on both
sides was more heated than ever, but fortune favoured Dreyfus, for
France was startled, if not shocked, to learn that the President had died
suddenly on February i6th.
The death of Fe*lix Faure was a blow for the opponents of revision,
for the President was determined to do all he could to postpone or

1 There were some anti-Dreyfusards who attributed a lack of combativeness in Lemaitre


to his reluctance to expose Madame de Loynes to the full blasts of French controversy.
*
The President of this section was unfortunately named Loew.
346
THE AFFAIR
defeat the project, and, although a President could do little if faced with
a united and determined majority, there was as yet no such majority; and
a President might prevent its being formed. The death, so
skilful
awkward for one side, so fortunate for the other, naturally further
inflamed a public opinion which was, in any case, far from calm.
There were rumours that the official cause of death, a stroke, was not
the real one and that there were strange circumstances surrounding
the last day of Felix Faure. In the Libre Parole, the charge of murder
was openly made, although in terms that were not incompatible with
the other less startling rumours that ran round Paris. 1
Whatever the cause of death, the politicians felt the need of having
a safe man in the filyse'e. The anti-Dreyfusard party, so far as it had
one candidate, was for Mclinc, but that cautious man refused to run,
and the Radicals, combining with tl< prudent, elected Loubet, famous
for his efforts to diminish the scPanama scandal. This elec-
>pe oft lie
tion was taken as an ;iHj<<nt extreme Nationalist groups, who
In ] r

were distressed by the loss (*!< ,\ Faure and, so far as they were
old Boulangists, were also infuriated by the election of the friend of the
'chequards'. \Vln-n the presidential cortege entered Paris from Ver-
sailles, it was assailt \\ by shouts of 'Panama' and other party cries which
showed that central Paris, at least, was in the mood of January 1889.
Some ardent spirits wanted Deroulede to lead his leaguers and the
,

mob to attack; but, with a characteristic romantic gesture, he replied


'There is a corpse in that house'.
Whatever chance there was of a coup d'etat on February 1 8th, was
lost, but Deroulede had his plan. He proposed to take advantage of
the funeral of Felix Faure on February 23rd to make a coup fttat with
the aid of the troops under arms for the funeral procession. Whether
he ever had any real hopes of aid from a general or generals is
uncertain. His enemies, anxious to show him up as a frivolous play-
actor, declared that he had not, that his only hope was to induce a
general, on the spur of the moment, to lead his men to the filysee.
But whether with or without military connivance, Deroulede made his
own plans. He prepared a proclamation declaring the Constitution of
1875 abolished and calling for a new constituent assembly. Although
he represented his attempt as a new and bloodless September 4th, his
proclamation had a decided ring of December 2nd, 1851, when with
the aid of the Army, President Louis Napoleon Bonaparte had
destroyed the Second Republic. Deroulede was not President and he
was not a Bonaparte, and his forces were disunited by their different
views as to what was to follow the ending of the parliamentary republic.
Deroulede was very sensitive about any suggestion of crypto-Royalism
and afraid that the Pretender, the young Duke of Orleans, was in

1
These rumours suggested that the President had simply died from over-exertions of a
type dangerous to one of his age and physique.
347
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
hiding in Paris and would suddenly appear to reap the fruits of
De*roulede's success. The chief of the League of Patriots was deter-
mined not to play the Monk, so he regarded with suspicion the collabor-
ation of Jean Gu&in and his 'Grand Occident', for Gu&in was already
suspect of taking money from the Royalists on behalf of the 'Predestined
One'. 1
Armed with his proclamation, his pockets full of notes and gold, and
with straps ready to secure his trousers when he led his army on horse-
back to the lys6e, D^roulede waited for the arrival of the troops in a
porter's lodge off the Place de la Nation in the company of Maurice
Barres. At last the troops appeared, led by General Roget. Whatever
hopes D6roulede may have founded on any general were not founded
on Roget. Deroulede later asserted that the Government had altered
the plans for dispersing the troops after the funeral, so that it was Roget
and not another who appeared in the place where Deroulede had
assembled his 500 Leaguers. There was no time to change the plan,
so D6roulede rushed forward, caught the bridle of the General's horse
and implored him to lead his men to the filysee. Roget, who may not
have heard what was being said, shook off Deroulede; and the troops
marched on, pursued by Leaguers singing the Marseillaise, in which
many spectators joined, and by Deroulede and Marcel Habert hoping
that Roget would yet change his mind. Where were the troops going?
Deroulede suddenly realized that they were approaching Reuilly bar-
racks; the troops were going home. He shouted to his Leaguers to
bar the way, while Habert, thinking the soldiers were on their way to
the Place de la Bastille, let them advance unopposed. They entered
the barrack gates carrying the two conspirators with them. Roget was
only anxious to get rid of Deroulede and Habert, who were equally
anxious, now that the coup had failed, not to be taken lightly. While
the General tried to get them to leave, Deroulede burned his papers in
a stove and tried to win over the young officers; until, at last, the police
arrived and arrested him. Whether Deroulede had planned a
December 2nd or a September 4th he had, in fact, managed to do what
had been thought impossible, to parody the attempts of young Louis
Napoleon at Strasbourg and Boulogne.
1
Gu&rin afterwards retorted by saying that he saw many notorious Bonapartists among
the patriots assembled under Droulede's orders.

348
CHAPTER II

REVISION

the of whether the case was to be re-opened


BY submitting
to
question
the dour de Cassation, 1
the (rovernment helped to educate the
public in the substance of the rose The special law that transferred
.

the decision from the Criminal -clion to the whole Court, made no
.'

real difference. Indeed, from tl Dreyfusard point of view, it was all


to the good that the judge who finally announced that the bordereau was
the work of Estci hazy, war> not M. Loew of the Criminal section, but
the 'Aryan', M. Ballot Beaupre. The new trial was ordered and, before
it could take place, the bold Commandant
Esterhazy had at last lost
his courage or his trust in his old protectors. He confessed that he had
written the bordereau', he could afford to admit it, for he was safe in
London. Du Paty was less fortunate; he was in his turn sent to the
Chcrche-Midi, and there was a movement to send Mercier before the
High Court.
On the other side,
Picquart was released from prison, Zola returned
to Paris and Alfred Dreyfus was ordered to be sent back from Devil's
Island to stand trial for a second time before a new court-martial at
Rennes. That, a day or two later, a jury had acquitted Deroulede for
the Reuilly affair, mattered little. If the Government stuck to its guns,
it had little to fear from a coup d'ttat or from regular political opposition.

But would it stick to its guns? It was made to seem doubtful when, at
Auteuil Races on June 4th, Loubet, the new President of the Republic,
was assaulted by the Baron de Christiani, who smashed the presidential
tall-hat with his stick. The assault was mean and childish; the day for
such muscadin tactics had passed or had not yet come. 2
Like the assault on Senator Sumner, the assault on Loubet revealed,
or seemed to reveal, to many hitherto lukewarm defenders of the
Republic a serious threat to the dignity, if not to the safety of the

sense a Court of Appeal.


highest French court; it is not in the English or American
The
1

It does not decide finally on the merits of a case but, if it 'breaks' the decision of a lower
court, the case is sent to be re-tried by another court, in this case
a new court-martial.
1
The muscadins were smart young men-about-town who beat up Jacobin sympathizers
after the fall of Robespierre.

349
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
regime. Generals and colonels were still talking mutinously. The
Dupuy Ministry would not promise to send Mercier before the High
Court and was bitterly attacked for its failure to guard Loubet. When
it was the President's duty to attend another race-meeting, this time at

Longchamps, he was accompanied and guarded by an immense out-


pouring of the Paris workers. The crowds which had lent strength to
the cause of Boulanger were now on the other side. This demonstration
reassured many frightened Revisionists, who had despaired of rousing
the people, and opened the eyes of many prudent politicians to the
justice of a cause whose support was no longer dangerous and was soon
to be highly advantageous. It no longer paid to steer skilfully between
c
the Scylla of yes' and the Chary bdis of 'no'. Dupuy was overthrown:
the task of ending the threat to the regime and to internal peace, the
task of dealing with the problems which were sure to become acute
after the new court-martial, were too much for a mere standard

parliamentarian .

Loubet had a young and able lawyer, Raymond Poincare*; but


tried

partly because Poincare wished to include his friend Louis Barthou,


who as a former member of the Meline Cabinet was suspect, and partly
because he wished to include Casimir-Perier, who was known to be a
Dreyfusard and whose prestige might have helped the new Government,
time was lost and the attempt had to be abandoned'. It was then that
Waldeck-Rousseau consented to take up the task of crushing the
enemies of the regime. The new Prime Minister was a Breton of
Catholic family; he had been one of Gambetta's bright young men, but
seemed to have long abandoned politics for the bar, where he was one
of the most respected lawyers, counsel for great interests. Waldeck-
Rousseau had been and still was an Opportunist. It was necessary for
him to express vague social sympathies, to wish mildly for the pro-
gressive replacement of the wage system by some kind of profit-sharing,
but this grave, severe lawyer was very far from the Left. But to carry
out the Government programme he had to seek support on all sides; and
only a man of great political courage would have found the solution.
As Minister of War, he chose General the Marquis de Gallifet and for
Minister of Commerce, the Citizen Alexandre Millerand. Gallifet was
a very distinguished soldier, but to the Left he was, above all, the
ruthless represser of the Commune, the smiling butcher of tiiefideresl
'His sword,' said one orator, 'is red to the hilt with Republican blood.'
That a Republican Ministry should contain this elegant courtier was
extraordinary enough, but that the same Cabinet should contain a
Socialist leader of the calibre of Millerand was incredible. It was like
an between Cromwell and O'Connell, between Jefferson Davis
alliance
and Sherman. It was no wonder that Deputies like Boutard and
Z6vaes protested furiously when the Cabinet met the Chamber or that
the sitting opened to cries of 'Vive la Commune!'
350
THE AFFAIR
Waldeck-Rousseau was not to be intimidated by the rage of the Left
or the irony of the Right. He had undertaken to save his client, the
Republic, from the dangers of expropriation at the hands of reaction
and to secure his client against future annoyance. In his choice of
tactics, as in his choice of men, he showed his mastery. He denounced
the religious order that had made itself most conspicuous and most
noisy during the Affair; and the attack on the monks who were business-
men, on the monks who were politicians, struck home. 'Les moines
ligueurs' recalled the bad days of the wars of religion when the Catholic
League had allied Paris with Spain against Henri IV, when the monkish
demagogues had betrayed the national cause.
Waldeck-Rousseau might regard himself as the heir of the great
lawyers, the politiques, who had helped the good king to bring peace to
5
France. Then his reference to the milliard at which he estimated the
wealth of the unauthori/x cl religious orders was a master-stroke. Not
1
only was a milliard a ni< e round sum, but it recalled the 'milliard des
emigres', the sum gi ven to the ancestors of the noble enemies of Dreyfus
under the Restoration as compensation for their losses during the
Revolution. It was not necessary to do more to hint that the seizure;
of the 'milliard des congregations' was simple justice, compensation for
the sums handed over to the nobles by Villele. In any event, the
prospect of getting hold of the milliard was in itself highly attractive.
From that spoil so many (lay) good works could be subsidized!
Before the attack on the religious orders could be launched, or
indeed, before the new Ministry could be secure in its authority, it was
necessary to convert or silence vociferous critics on the Left. These
critics detested Gallifet, but more serious, they saw in the entry of
Millerand into the Ministry, a betrayal of the self-denying ordinance
that the Socialist leaders had imposed on themselves, a breach of the
bases of the unity of the Socialist sections which had been accepted and
a return to a new 'possibilism' with far greater prizes and far greater
temptations offered to the leaders than Paul Brousse had ever had to
or succumb to.
resist
Itwas the first great triumph of Jaures as a party manager that he
managed to convince so many Socialists that the Republic was in
danger; that it was a matter of moment to the workers whether it was
saved or not; that the entry of Millerand into the Government was a
necessary move in its saving and that, in addition, a Socialist Minister
could help Socialism in his ministerial capacity, not merely profit by
Socialist professions to reach the highest offices in the bourgeois state.
For years to come, it was Jaur&s, not Millerand or his imitators and
successors, who held a large section of the French workers to an alliance
with the bourgeoisie which produced no very striking benefits for the
to deny the premises of the class-war. Only a
proletariat and seemed
1
40,000,000 or $2001000,000.
35*
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
man of the personal probity of Jaures could have done it, and even
Jaures could not shake the dogmatic adherents of Guesde who saw in
Jaures a sophist and in Millerand a traitor and a begetter of traitors.
The refusal of Guesde to collaborate with bourgeois, any bourgeois,
parties in the defence ofjustice
was not unnatural. It fitted in with his
rigorously doctrinaire temperament. What was Dreyfus, a rich bour-
geois, to the workers? What
were these quarrels between one section of
the oppressors and another to the workers' leaders? Nor was the
sectarian side of the struggle likely to escape his critical eye. He was
inevitably as agood Marxian, an anti-clerical, more deeply anti-clerical,
perhaps, than the romantic and sentimental Jaures, but he had regarded
the standard French anti-clericalism of the bourgeoisie as a dodge 'to
turn the anger and the efforts of the proletariat from the grabbers of the
earth to the exploiters of an imaginary heaven; to substitute for the
necessary and fruitful war against the employer, the useless and harm-
less war against the priest'.
In any case, the fact that his party was strongest in the north was
bound to affect Guesde's policy; in Lille, in Roubaix, the Church had a
far stronger hold on the workers than it had in the Midi. excess of No
anti-clerical zeal on Jaures's part could harm him in Garmaux. All his
supporters wanted that kind of thing, and those who did not like it would
not have voted for Jaures anyway. In French Flanders, however,
there were plenty of workers who might be induced to vote the Socialist
ticket, but who were yet sufficiently attached to the Church to resent
too obvious a mixture of anti-Catholic with Socialist propaganda. To
concentrate all the efforts of the party in an attack on the Church would
mean for Guesde, own
stronghold, a long, bitter, difficult and not
in his

very profitable battle. Guesde had other reasons for steering clear of
the dangerous connections which his Republican and humanitarian
zeal was commending to Jaures. These recruits to Socialism from the
University, from the ranks of the lawyers, these Millerands, Vivianis,
Jaures, all were suspect in the eyes of the grim zealot. Their popularity,
their ability to rouse great audiences to enthusiasm and faith were not

very agreeable to the unpopular pontiff of absolute Socialist truth. The


policy of Saint- Mande was not the policy of uncompromising believers
in the class war. It was necessary that the primary and genuine
workers' party should avoid contamination, 1 that it should not be a
1
M. Alexandra ZeVaes tells us that Guesde was careful not to repel the millionaire
recruit to Socialism, Alfred Edwards, but that he steered him away from Guesde's own
party, the French Workers' party, towards the Blanquists. Edwards, through his wealth
and his control of several important or at least widely-read papers, was useful to the cause,
but the sincerity of his conversion was open to
question.
He was, at the moment, Waldeck-
Rousseau's brother-in-law, and there were cynical souls who thought that the Socialism of
M. Edwards was put on to annoy Waldeck-Rousseau. It is worth noting, too, that this
Levantine adventurer, notorious or ridiculous since his controversy with Barres over the
nature of French nationality, was just the type of the 'me'teque' suspected by the Anti-
Dreyfusards of being conspirators leagued against the honour and security of France in the.
interests of international Jewry.

352
THE AFFAIR
ladder for ambitious exploiters of the resentments and the hopes of the
victims of the system of capitalist exploitation, victims as deserving of
aid as Captain Dreyfus but a great deal less likely to get it.

II

When the first public session of the court-martial opened at Rennes


on August yth, 1899, it was true, so far as it is ever true, that the eyes of
the civilized world were on the lycee of Rennes. One mistake of 1894
was not repeated. There were several distinguished artillery specialists
among the seven officers who made up the court and, with the removal
from high commands of most of the ivore ebullient Generals of the
earlier trials and the rigorous discipline enforced by Gallifet, there was
less danger of a repetition of the ^-andalous scenes of the Zola case.
The streets of the dull Bicton city were filled
by journalists from
'

over the world, including in


all cir ranks the brilliant star reporter of
Mr. Alfred Harms\\orth\s Dai ,
Mail, G. W. Steevens, who, with
Anglo-Saxon firmness and robust brilliance, was to pass severe moral
judgments on the conduct of the French. A more subtle observer
was Maurice Barres, combining the role of dogmatic and intolerant
Nationalist pamphleteer with that of the student of the individual and
the society of which he was a more or less integrated part. For
Barres professed to believe that Dreyfus was not a fellow-countryman,
scarcely a fellow-human being, since he was a member of a race with
different standards, different views of the good life. Less sophisticated
versions of the same doctrines were set out in anti-Semitic tracts
hawked in the streets. Jaures was there, too, to see in the demeanour
of the witnesses the confirmation of his theories.
The trial itself produced little that was new. The two actors who
could have cast most light on the early acts of the play were absent:
Henry was dead and Esterhazy was in London, from which city of
refuge he refused to return. The prosecutor was an elderly and in-
competent officer called Garriere; the chief defending counsel were
Labori and Demange. The first great sensation of the trial was the
shooting of Labori by an unknown young man; the fact that the wound
turned out to be slight did not ease the tension much, since it gave the
Anti-Revisionists a chance to say the attack was a fake. Labori was
soon well enough to take part in the trial, but his vehement manner, his
refusal to profess belief in the good faith of an obviously evasive, or

deliberately misleading witness, were thought dangerous,


and it was
Demange, therefore, the respectful Catholic and brilliant advocate,

who made the final speech for the defence.


The main novelties of the trial were the testimony of Casimir-P6rier
for the defenceand of Mercier for the prosecution, and the intervention
of an Austrian adventurer called Gernuski, whose story of an Austrian
353
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
official's story of a German officer's admission of German relations with
Dreyfus was a poor substitute for the Henry forgeries. The Anti-
Revisionists pinned their faith to Mercier. His evidence was going to be
final, for it was boldly asserted he would produce a photograph of the
decisive document, the annotated bordereau. According to the classical
versiori of this story, the original bordereau had been written by Dreyfus
on thick paper and traced by Esterhazy on thin paper. The damning
original could not be used, because it bore annotations in the hand of
the Emperor William II commenting bitterly on the greed of Dreyfus.
It was to prevent the publication of this proof of imperial partici-

pation in the work of subornation of treason, it was asserted, that


the German Ambassador had delivered an ultimatum to the French
Government in 1894. It was under the threat of war that Mercier had
discussed the situation on a 'historic night' with Casimir-Perier. If
the truth were now told, war was again a danger; it was to such perils
that the agitation, subsidized by the 'syndicate' with vast sums from
abroad, had brought France! Such was the dramatic story that stirred
the readers of the most popular organs of the Catholic and Nationalist
press. The editors of these journals stressed the danger of war. The
poet, Francois Coppee, was willing to pay that price to know all, so
he wrote in the Gaulois, but he counted on the prayers of Joan of Arc.
Others were willing to run the risk without the aid of the saints.
There was no risk. Mercier was too astute a man to assert his
He had to face, in any case, the
belief in this nonsensical story in court.
awkward testimony of Casimir-Perier who denied the story of the 'his-
toric night', and to explain away the fact that the demarche of the
Ambassador had taken place after the condemnation of Dreyfus, so that
itcould not in itself have prevented the prosecution from using the
annotated bordereau if it existed. Mercier had to evade this point.
The War Office, he said, did not know anything of this rumoured
document at that time. Mercier was adroit and he was prodigal of
hints, playing the game of sealed lips like an old House of Commons
master, but allbut the most zealous were a little tired of hints and
secrets too terrible to be revealed. Even a letter from Esterhazy, re-
peating the story of the danger of war if the whole truth were told, did
not add much to the value of Mercier's testimony.
The Anti-Revisionists were anxious; they were especially anxious
because of what they surmised of the attitude of Commandant de
Brepn. At first sight no member of the court should have been safer.
An aristocrat, a most pious Catholic, an Anti-Semite, he had sent
money to that subscription for the widow of Henry which had seemed
so like a posthumous testimonial to her husband. Commandant de
Ergon's religion was very deep and very personal. His brother was one
of the small group of Dreyfusard priests and it was known that his con-
fessor had advised him to follow his conscience. Attempts were made
354
THE AFFAIR
to counter the effects of this deplorable clerical influence. His cousin,
Colonel de Villebois-Mareuil, reasoned with him in vain. 1 The trial
dragged on for weeks, but when the time came to decide it took the
seven judges only an hour to make up their minds. By five to two they
found Dreyfus guilty, but with extenuating circumstances, and they
reduced the penalty from life to ten years. It was an absurd decision:
for, if Dreyfus were guilty, there were no extenuating circumstances,
an argument that two of the majority were consistent enough to accept.
In the eyes of many the minority of two was as important as the majority
of five. Colonel Jouast had joined Commandant dc Breon; the Presi-
dent of the Court, and the member of it whose character for probity
was highest, had refused to accept the official 'hcsis.
2

The verdict for the moment prostrated Dreyfus, whose health


was extremely bad, and it infuri.iud \Valdcck-Rousseau. The Prime
Minister was ready to have yet .mot her trial, but Gallifet pointed out
that a new court-martial mii;lit Jo the same as the others. It was re-
solved to pardon Dreyfus but ncre the obstacle was the Dreyfusards.
They had been startled and infuriated by the verdict to a degree which
the reaction of many Americans to the Lowell Committee report in the
Sacco-Vanzetti case furnishes a pale parallel. To accept a pardon, to
abandon the right to appeal for a new trial, was to accept a new
iniquity. Clcmenceau, Picquart, and many others were bitterly
opposed to this surrender, but the Dreyfus family had no stomach
for vicarious heroism. They accepted the pardon, even though it in-

volved, in effect, an amnesty for Mercier, du Paty de Clam, and the


rest. Gallifet justified the pardon on the grounds that Dreyfus was in

very bad health and had already served half of the sentence of the
Rennes court, but these formal reasons deceived nobody. In a pro-
clamation to the army on September 2ist, Gallifet declared that 'the
incident is closed. The military judges, surrounded by the respect of
all, have decided in entire freedom. We have accepted their decision
without any mental reservations. We shall do the same before the
decision which a feeling of profound pity has inspired the President of
the Republic to make. ... I ask you and if it was necessary, I should
order you, to forget this past in order to think only of the future.'
Tacitus had long ago remarked that it was easier to be silent under
orders than to forget, but the Flavian emperors had had resources to
induce silence in their subjects that were not available to the rulers of
the Third Republic. What had been possible, as late as the few weeks
that followed the suicide of Henry, was no longer possible. In what

1
Villcbois-Mareuil was soon famous in another rdle. He went off to fight for the Boers
in South Africa and was killed in defence of a cause which the whole civilized world (outside
Britain) thought just. The indignant Mr. Steevens died in the same war on the other side.
1
A distinguished French officer, at that time in the Far East, who had never doubted
the justice of the verdict of 1894, was converted on the spot when he learned the names
of the dissenting judges.

355
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
had become a kind of civil war, one side had been victorious; it was a

good deal that itconsented not to exercise the full rigours of vengeance
against Mercier and the other military leaders of the defeated party,
that it accepted an act of amnesty. It could not and did not accept an
act of oblivion and, even if it had, the other side would not let it. .The
guilt of Dreyfus, the existence of the annotated bordereau, the existence
of a conspiracy of the Jews and other foreign powers to ruin France,
these were still articles of political faith for hundreds of thousands. On
the other side the agitation for a complete legal rehabilitation of Drey-
fus, for a recompense for Picquart, never died down. As the victorious
party got firmer in the saddle, it found time to undo the crimes of 1894.
At last, in 1906, in a decision which the extreme Nationalists of the
Action Frangaise said was as gross a violation of the letter of the law as

anything charged against the court-martial of 1894, the conviction


of Dreyfus was quashed by the Gour de Cassation. The victim was
restored to the Army with pomp and ceremony. He was given the
Legion of Honour and Picquart was made a general and was soon
Minister of War, but save for a few zealots on both sides, the person of
Dreyfus had long been lost sight of in the great debate between the
parties. He had been a symbol more than a man, and men still
battled round his name but no longer round his person.

356
CHAPTER III

THE DREYFUS REVOLUTION


T

there was to be no personal vengeance carried out in the form of


IFlaw, the Prime Minister was r<\v ued that there should be an end to
a state of things in which insubordinate soldiers, in league with trouble-
some clerks, upset the ]x\u c of ihe nation and weakened the authority
of the State. He had told his brother of the horror which he experi-
enced when he came inio office and discovered the disorder and in-
discipline which infected the public service. That the Republic was
in any real danger in 1899 is doubtful, but certainly public order and
Governmental efficiency were.
The Reuilly plot had failed miserably, but it was not forgotten.

Nor could it be, for the incorrigible Deroule.de was still hoping for a
great revulsion of public opinion that would sweep away the agents of
the 'syndicate*. The signal that Roget had refused to give would be
given, he thought, by the shattering testimony of Mercier. But without
waiting for Mercier to testify, the Government arrested the conspirators
or those of them who, like Deroulede, had not got away in time. One
of these laggards was Guerin. He saw his opportunity to await de-
livery until popular wrath against the syndicate had risen high enough,
so his friends said, or to gain notoriety as his enemies suggested, and he
took refuge, with forty or fifty members of his 'Grand Occident', in
their headquarters, which from the name of the street was soon known
as Tort ChabroP. There they were 'besieged* by the Paris police.
If the Reuilly affair was comedy, 'the siege of Fort ChabroP was
farce. Indeed, as the siege continued into its fifth week, Parisians^and
tourists who had been accustomed to visit it as one of the sights of the
town, grew bored. The makers of the mineral water and other sup-
plies used by the garrison advertised the fact; there were bickerings as
to the terms on which the Fort would surrender; but finally, when the
Government had reaped all the advantages of ridicule, surrender it
did. The good fortune of the Republic continued, for if Gudrin
parodied D&roulede, Max Regis, the anti-Semitic Mayor of Algiers,
parodied Guerin. He had his own Fort Chabrol in Algeria, but it
only held out a little over a week. Even Boulanger at his weakest
357
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
had been a more impressive figure than these various comic-opera
conspirators.
D&oulede had been tried and acquitted by a sympathetic jury, but
however farcical his activities, theywere more than a joke. So, as
in Boulanger's case, the Senate was called in and it duly convicted
D&oul&le, Buffet, Gu&in. The conspirators, after varying but brief
periods in prison, were exiled and the days of active conspiracy were
over. If there was to be a revolution it would not come from romantic
patriots or the dwindling band of the partisans of exiled pretenders.
It was not Deroulede and his kind, however, who were worth

powder and shot. It was their most potent allies, the religious orders
through whose preachers and press the anti-Dreyfus agitation had been
kept at white heat, the noisy clerical auxiliaries of the Army whose
numbers and wealth had been tolerated as long as the Ralliement and
the 'new spirit' had ruled the attitude of the chiefs of Church and State.
But Meline was for ever fallen from power, while the voice of the
Church had seemed to be indistinguishable from the voice of Drumont,
Judet, and the defenders of Henry. That corporations of such doubtful
legality or certain illegality should not merely defy the law by existing,
but should throw themselves into the thick of a bitter political battle,
was foolish on their part and infuriating to the victorious side. This
was what came of letting the policy of Ferry slip into innocuous desue-
tude! It was time to think of that 'milliard' of which the Prime
Minister had spoken, time to deal with these organized enemies of the
spirit of the age, the authority of the State and the anti-clerical tradition
of French polity.
The chief sinners, politically and morally, were the noisy and foolish
priests of the order of the Assumptionists. A new order, lacking the
prestige and the traditions, as well as the wisdom of the Jesuits or
Dominicans, the Assumptionists had been among the most verbally
loyal servants of the policy of the Ralliement. Through their newspaper,
La Croix, they had a vast audience all over France; and among the
country clergy their paper rivalled Drumont's Libre Parole in popularity
and influence. As the struggle over the Affair grew more bitter, the
Assumptionists grew more violent. They no doubt believed what they
said, in the press and in the pulpit; but it is probable that the delights,
dear to so many clerics, of adventitious popularity, were not without
their heady effects. To be on the same side as a great popular move-
ment directed against the enemies of the Church who were also enemies
of that more popular institution, the Army, was delightful. Who knew?
Men who began by hating the Jews might end by loving God!
If French Catholics had been accustomed to take thought for the
morrow, they might have reflected how hostile French tradition was to
might have doubted whether it was wise to involve
political priests, they
the cause of religion in such an ambiguous crusade as that defended in
358
THE AFFAIR
deed by Henry, in writing by M. Maurras.But the intoxication of the
moment was too much. The
bishops were discreetly silent, as was
their wont, for they had not changed much since Lavigerie had ex-
pressed his candid opinion of them. Laymen and clerics alike com-
mitted themselves to the doubtful cause of the honour of Henry, the
honesty of Esterhazy, the most rabid illusions of Drumont, the most
preposterous fictions of Rochefort. There were Catholics who, for
higher reasons than mere prudence (although their action was the
highest prudence), did not see what the honour of the Army had to do
with lying and forgery, who thought that even Jews deserved justice,
who had no use for the bogus science of Drumont or the more sophisti-
cated version of it preached by the gloomy atheist, Jules Soury, to the
elegant agnostic, Maurice Banes. These men, priests and scholars,
formed a 'Catholic Committee for the Defence ofJustice', words which,
if some zealous defenders of the faith were to be believed, had no
place
in true, French, Catholic mouths.
In resisting the aggicssion of the religious orders in the political
field, Waldeck-Rousseau was, of course, very much in the tradition of
the French lawyer statesmen. The dependence of the orders on Rome
and their immunity from the authority of the bishops were an old
grievance. Many a statesman of the old regime could, with a few
verbal changes, have made his own Waldeck-Rousseau's distinction
between the ordinary clergy whose position was regulated by the Con-
cordat and which had its hierarchical chiefs 'between whom and the
State there exist defined and agreed-upon relations' and 'certain militant
organizations, constantly growing, constantly getting more aggressive'.
The most obvious example of these aggressive bodies was the
Assumptionists who were promptly dissolved; but it was necessary, if the
campaign against the orders was not again to end in practical toleration
of unauthorized property-holding, trading, and teaching bodies, to go
much further, to regulate the whole matter of the right of association.
It was no longer enough to fall back on the richly-stored arsenal of all
French Governments, Royal, Imperial and Republican, for decrees
against Jesuits and the like, for that arsenal was foil of weapons which
could equally be used against trade unions, Freemasons and almost all
kinds of collective activity. To 'draw on the boots of the Empire', as
a critic put it, was convenient but not dignified for a Republican
Minister.
If the immediate grievance against the orders was their activity in
the Affair, an older and more permanently resented one was the
success of their schools. It was infuriating to the good Republican

that, a century after the Revolution, more than


half of the pupils in

secondary schools should be the pupils of priests and brothers. In all


of the Government, the contrast between the anti-clerical
departments
if not anti-Catholic personnel of the elected bodies and the attitude of

359 AA
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
so many officials was striking. To some it was a danger to the safety
of the State (and the Affair did not make this view less plausible) ; to
others it was intolerable that the right to serve the Republic for pay and
prestige should be open to men whose education was
based on hostility
to the Republic as the embodiment of a philosophy of life, if not as a
form of government. To put an end to this state of affairs, or to pre-
tend to put an end to it, the Government introduced a bill which would,
in effect, have made impossible for anyone, no matter how well
it

qualified otherwise, to enter the State service who had not first passed
through the State* schools. Waldeck-Rousseau defended the project
with ingenuity. It was, he said, an elementary test of loyalty to
demand of those who wished to serve the State that they should not

'repudiate its [the State's] teaching, or turn their backs on its schools'.
But the applause this view evoked was more noisy than warm. It was
not only that was, or seemed, unjust to barforlife from the civil service
it

men who had had the ill-fortune to have zealous Catholic parents
the Chamber was full of good Republicans who had had that misfortune,
as indeed the Prime Minister himself had had. It was still more
serious to alienate so large a portion of the bourgeoisie in face of the
Socialist menace and, as was constantly found when the partisans of an
educational monopoly seemed near the attainment of their goal, there
were not enough Republicans with blind confidence in the Univer-
sity to establish a new educational church. The bill was buried in
committee.
It had been the profession and the desire of Waldeck-Rousseau to

impose on the congregations an effective control by dealing, once for


all, with the right of forming associations; the orders would not be
named as such but would be covered in the general law; the most
noxious would have their existence made impossible, the less dangerous
would be given a new legal status that would make them fiscally and
politically subject to the State.This statesmanlike proposal was altered
by the action of the who
controlled the committees in both
militants,
Houses, into a general law on the right of association with special pro-
visions to deal with the religious orders, which were now named and
whose rights were to be severely limited. No order could now be
legalized except by a The
prohibition of any teaching
definite law.
by any member of a religious order that had not been authorized
created a new class of Frenchmen with fewer rights than any other, a
departure from the common law that was justified on the ground that it
forbade teaching by orders which were propagandists for the 'Counter-
Revolution'. Even this justification presented difficulties. To con-
demn to silence the organized enemies of the Revolution of 1 789 was
one thing, but was the condemnation to extend to organized preachers
of a new revolution? The Socialists secured an amendment that saved
them from any such danger and they, like the Masons, had to be careftil
360
THE AFFAIR
that legislation directed against bodies with international affiliations
did not affect them. 1
The law established complete freedom of association in France as ifc,
was already established in America and Britain. There was only this
difference, that those Frenchmen or Frenchwomen who wished to exer-
cise this privilege to live in common for religious motives were
only to
be allowed to do so if a special law were passed. Waldeck-Rousseau's
decree, implying that a congregation was not to be dissolved until both
Houses had refused the request for autlioi i/ation, saved the orders from
immediate dissolution. It would suflice for the Senate not to act at all
to preserve the status quo. Some of tlu> orders like the Jesuits did not
ask for an authorization that (hey knew was sure to be refused, but most
determined to get out of the law aH i! at they could.
The parties of the Right hoped at the elections of 1902 to recover
the ground lost in the oursr of the Affair. The veteran leader of the
<

Ralliement, Jacques Piou, led the >don of groups which called itself the
i

Action Liberate which a xsor >ed most of the old Conservatives. The Ligue
I 1

de la Patrie Fran^iisc also hoped to lead the rescue of the nation from the

agents of the 'syndicate'. Both sections were bitterly disappointed.


The difference in the number of votes cast on each side was not great,
but the Left had an overwhelming majority in the Chamber and the
miserable showing of the League was its death-blow. The Revisionists
were now in power without the need of moderate support. They
marked their triumph by replacing Deschanel in the presidency of the
Chamber by Leon Bourgeois and electing Jau res to the vice-presidency.
More significant for the moment was the resignation of Waldeck-
Rousseau before the new Chamber met, and the resignation was made
more important than it might otherwise have been by the choice of a
successor suggested to President Loubet by the outgoing Prime Minister.
His choice was fimile Combes.

II

The new Prime Minister was very unlike his predecessor; he was no
Parisian lawyer but a provincial doctor of medicine of a common
enough type. M. Combes shared all the ideas, prejudices, hates,
principles of the small-town anti-clerical,
but before he had become a
doctor of medicine he had been a doctor of divinity. Destined for the
of
priesthood, he had not been ordained, but he preserved something
his clerical training, not in the form of the unction that Renan culti-

vated, but in a dogmatic combativeness. Had he stayed


in the Church
it is very unlikely that he would have been one of the modernist clerics

who dreamed of reconciling the modern world with the ancient faith.
1 The modern Communist party might have had to be condemned on the strict applica-
tion of the law of 1901.
361
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
He might well have been a somewhat credulous reader of Veuillot or
Drumont. It was his sturdy resistance to the opinion of Paris, his
jpdifference to the social pressure which the provincial Radicals saw
as the chief source of the seduction exercised on so many of their
9
leaders by 'Reaction that endeared 'the little Father' to the rank-and-
file and that, even to-day, makes some of the older generation see in this

narrow, obstinate and self-satisfied little man, the ideal Republican


statesman. No dreams of social success, of a seat in the Academy, of a
place at a directors' meeting shook the resolve of the new Prime
Minister. He would finish, once for all, with the enemies of the
Republic, in every department of the State. The old maxim that the
Republic owed justice to all, but favours only to its friends, would be
practised with all the rigour of the game, even if it involved treating as
favours what many persons thought of as justice.
Itwas this firmness in face of the temptations of society and the criti-
cism of persons whose sound Republicanism had been weakened by
sophistries about justice and liberty, that endeared Combes to the
scores of thousands of men who prided themselves on being abreast of
the spirit of the age in hundreds of little towns. It was his acceptance
of power as a delegation from a resolute majority, not as a general com-
mission from the whole Chamber, that won Combes the real as apart
from the formal confidence of the victors of the elections of 1902. He
was their man and they could forgive him minor faults and even major
ones like that untimely profession to a startled Chamber of 'spiritualist'
beliefs which shocked for a moment the heresy hunters of the Left. 1
Combes was ready to use the law when it was a convenient weapon
and to evade it when it was a handicap. As Minister of Cults in the
Bourgeois Cabinet, he had contested the right of the Pope to veto the
nominations of bishops made by the Government. According to the
Roman theory, the Republic merely presented names to the Pope and
he decided, for whatever reasons seemed good to him, whether the
candidates were suitable or not. It had consequently become the
.

custom to sound the Pope in advance, and episcopal nominations were


the result of previous negotiation between Paris and Rome. Combes
had objected, both on the ground of the absolute right of nomination
reserved to the State by the Concordat and on the ground that the
papal veto kept sound Republican clerics from the episcopal bench.
Now that he was Prime Minister he was more insistent than ever on the
rights of the State and, in Pius X, he had a Pope far less ready than
Leo XIII had been to meet the State half-way.
The quarrel was not a new one. Under the Second Empire
there had been something like a strike and lock-out; the Minister,
Baroche, refusing to fill vacancies until the Pope accepted previous
1
Spiritualism in its French sense, as opposed to materialism, not as involving a belief
in the possibility of communication with the dead.

362
THE AFFAIR
nominations and the Pope preferring to leave sees vacant rather
than give in. Combes was soon in the position of Baroche, and one
of the main advantages of the Concordat from the point of view of
the State was lost. If the State could not control the filling of the

higher ranks of its religious civil service, for what reason did it main-
tain it? This administrative point of view was further offended by
the action of the Pope in summoning to Rome two bishops of whose
conduct serious complaint had been made. To Combes, these bishops
were not only victims of their Republican principles, but important
officials whose obedience to the State that paid them came first. They
were forbidden to go to Rome, but short of taking part in a schism
they could not long resist papal pressure; they gave in and resigned.
From the Pope's point of view, two unworthy pastors had been re-
moved; from Combes's point of \ -i< -v, two important State officials had
been dismissed by a foreign authority.
In such conditions \\asthe Concordat worth maintaining? But
before the question of Jiuivh establishment was ripe for solution, the
orders had to be dealt with. To Waldeck-Rousseau, the question of
the orders was one of political prudence. They were numerous; their
accumulation of property presented those problems that become acute
in the most pious nations every three or four generations; some of the
orders were, in addition, a political nuisance; and all of the orders, as
far as they competed with the official educational system, were a danger
to the moral unity of the nation. Waldeck-Rousseau saw the question
from the point of view of a lawyer and an administrator; hostile to all
fanaticism, he did not like either the political monks or the political
anti-monks. Like Ferry before him, Waldeck-Rousseau was willing
to distinguish varying degrees of incompatibility with the modern State
and modern society. He asserted, and probably believed, that the
Church could flourish without any orders, as, he asserted, the acceptance
of the Concordat had shown was the view of Pius VII. But once the
State was made secure, he was willing to allow for the fact that a great
many Frenchmen and Frenchwomen did not agree with him. He had
no desire to alienate more honest and sincere people than he could help
and he did not estimate the soundness of his policy by the extent and
bitterness of the opposition it provoked among the 'enemies of the
Republic'.
Combes took a simple view of his duties; he was a delegate of the
majority for a special purpose, the extirpation of the clerical menace.
In internal policy, a unity was given to the policy of the Government
not merely by the personality, simple and obstinate, of the Prime Min-
ister, but by the new organization of the Chamber. The rules were at
provide a general system of permanent committees parallel
last re-cast to
with all main departments of the Government. The bureaux had
the
been only constituted for a month at a time by lot; they had assembled
363
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
members with nothing in common and reshuffled them before they had
time to acquire any common knowledge or attitudes. The Chamber
of 1902 finally broke away from this system. The bureaux still survived
and it was from them that the new standing committees were recruited, a
system that led to committees being, at times, quite unrepresentative
of the real sentiments of the Chamber: accident might have assembled
1
all the leaders of the majority in a few bureaux.
The new system had then, and has still, bitter critics. Poincare
denounced the committee system as one of the chief causes of ministerial
weakness and instability, but the instability had far more deeply-rooted
causes than the committee system and the weakness of the Ministries
flowed from their instability. It could, indeed, be ^argued that the
permanent committee, assembling in one long-lived group the deputies
interested in a special branch of government, provided a very neces-
sary substitute for the missing ministerial stability and authority. In
the committee on one branch of government, there were normally
to be found the specialists in that field or the deputies who were pre-
paring to become specialists. There were the ex- Ministers and the
future Ministers. No doubt both types of member were often exces-
sively anxious to return to or to enter the Cabinet, but that was an
inevitable part of the system. At any ambitious deputy got
rate, the
an opportunity, as 'reporter' of a bill or of a section of the budget, to
master the details of government that the English system does not offer.
Believing, as the French deputies did, in the necessity of an effective
and continuous inspection of the activities of the administration, the
system of specialized and permanent committees was a necessary reform.
The Combes Cabinet was supported by a coalition of Radical and
Socialist groups with a few Left Centre adherents. To hold this
majority together there was set up a steering committee called the
'Delegation des Gauchcs', representing all the sections of the majority.
It was to this committee that Combes felt himself responsible. He was
constantly in touch with it and when he had got its assurance of sup-
port, he was able to count on a majority of the Chamber and so was
freed from the nightmare ofsudden reversals of parliamentary fortune that
threaten most French Cabinets. The moving spirit of the 'Delegation
5

was Jean Jaures, now wholly committed to the policy of collaboration


with bourgeois parties in order to save the Republic and to secure reforms.
Saving the Republic meant, at the moment, crushing the orders.
Whatever Waldeck-Rousseau may have thought was the intent of his
law, Combes had no desire to give any legal status to any orders if he
could avoid it. He declared that he would apply the law 'in form and
spirit, without bothering too much with certain juridical interpretations
1
The Chamber of 1910 allotted members to committees in proportion to the strength
of their groups, ignoring the bureaux. This system was adopted by the Senate after the
last war.

364
THE AFFAIR
of it'. Schools were shut on a great scale; there were riots in Brittany;
there were furious debates in the Chamber; but Combes held firm.
The Council of State ruled that the refusal of one House to authorize
an order involved its immediate dissolution, and Combes proposed to
authorize only five orders; for the others, the simple system was adopted
of refusing authorizations en bloc. It was, the Catholics believed, a
kind of revocation of the Edict of Nantes at their expense this time.
The orders ofwomen followed, and even the authorized orders were
assailed, but the few remaining teaching orders among them were
allowed ten years* further life as it was impossible to replace them at
such short notice.
There were special difficulties in enforcing such Jaws which arose
from the liberal character of the French state. In a modern state it is
very easy to suppress orders or Um whole sections of the community
like the Jews, because die re is no general code of public
liberty to
hamper the executive. Km in ;i country that allowed free choice of
domicile, free disposal of property, the right to teach, the right to
religious freedom, it was hard to enforce the laws against the orders
without infringing these rights. It was necessary to attribute to the
member of an order a permanent status that the law had pointedly
refused to notice when the orders were still tolerated. Monks and
friarswho did not wear robes, who did not directly hold property in
common, who merely lived in small groups in private houses might
constitute disguised religious communities. How, except by inquisi-
torial means, could the truth be discovered? Soon the Catholic press
was full of stories of administrative action that could be made to seem,
and often was, petty tyranny. What was to be done with sisters,
members of the same convent, who came home and lived in their
father's house? If members of societies, dispersed by law, were allowed
to preach or teach near their old haunts the dispersal of the order might
be more nominal than real; but if they were to be given a special and
inferior status, what became of the liberty of the citizen?
The profound irritation caused by the criminal folly of many of the
orders made these questions seem mere forensic tricks even to that part
of the majority which was not, under cover of defending the Republic,
carrying out its own sectarian purposes. Moreover, the Catholics who
relied on the general respect for the nuns were handicapped by the
revelation of serious scandals affecting two convents. The stories of
dirt and cruelty that were revealed in the courts were not edifying.
Worse one of the chief grievances of the old-fashioned French
still,

politician against the orders was their direct connection with Rome,
their refusal to accept the authority of the relevant State officer, the

bishop. And in one of the cases, the efforts of


the local bishop to
reform the convent had been rendered nugatory by the slowness of the
Roman tribunals to which the accused nuns had appealed.
365
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
The bitterness bred by the Affair was increased by the policy of the
Combes Ministry. A form of religious activity that all Catholics
thought necessary to the well-being of the Church, if not to its mere
existence, was made practically impossible in France; and exile was
imposed on many thousands of men and women revered by millions.
Nor were the financial results as gratifying as had been hoped. The
'milliard' that was to have been secured for social reforms turned out
to be much less. The
liquidators appointed by the courts were slow
and sometimes worse than slow. Litigation was long and costly
though profitable to lawyers like Millerand. The Radical answer,
that these difficulties only arose because the liquidation had been turned
over to the courts and not to the administration, in order to please the
moderates, was a terrifying defence to many timid souls for whom the
project of a direct confiscation of property and the settlement of all
questions arising out of it by administrative action was a nightmare
precedent. But the majority of Frenchmen remained either indifferent
or approving spectators of what the Catholics and Conservatives thought
of as spoliation. It was no wonder that many of the most ardent
members of the defeated party despaired of the Republic.

Ill

On before the Senate, Paul Deroulede had defended himself


trial

warmly against the charge of Royalism, declaring that Parliamentary


Royalism was the most unpopular cause in France. He was not far
wrong; the old Orleanist tradition had always been the doctrine of an
elite and that elite was not recruiting itself. Fatally injured by the
collapse of Boulangism, it lingered on with ebbing life. The Dreyfus
case was the last blow. No anti-Semitism on the part of the Pre-
tender, no ill-timed adulation of Esterhazy by a prince of the blood,
could give any appearance of life to the cause. There were still many
thousands of Royalists, old Legitimists, old Borxapartists, enemies of the
Republic by family tradition or convinced of its incorrigible vice by the
way in which it responded to the manoeuvres of 'the Syndicate', but
they had no leaders, no doctrines, only impotent hates.
These elements in French society were now to be given a lead by
a man of genius whose power of argument, of sophistry, of tenacity,
served to give an appearance of life to the dead monarchy and who
provided a framework of political doctrine within which nearly all the
critics of the Republic on the Right were to work and which was not
without its on some critics of the Left.
influence
Even Charles Maurras had not been among the first to rally the
if

demoralized troops of the Right after Henry's suicide, even had he not
keen the Desaix of a Marengo that was lost after all, he could hardly
366
THE AFFAIR
have win support from the angered, defeated and bewildered
failed to

Right. For Maurras knew what was wrong and, since he was un-
compromising and since the people to whom he appealed wanted some
explanation of their defeat that was not too humiliating, his simple,
consistent, clearly-stated thesis won the assent of thousands. The basic
doctrine of the new school of politics was that politics came before
anything else. Politique d'abord. The economic, the social, the intel-
lectual of France could not be healthy and could not be cured until
life

the common cause of their ills was removed. The Republic was the
source of most evil, and what little could not be explained as flowing
from that fountain of poison was inherent in human nature. For
Maurras was no optimist; human life at best wis hard; the wise man
accepted this fact and adjusted himself to the world as it was and ever
would be, a world in which the rai e was to the swift and the battle to
the strong, in which mere sentimental pity was a weakness and an
intellectual crime. Like NirtzscK*, Maurras despised Christianity and
thought its politically dangerous sentiments of 'he hath
put down the
mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble' order highly
noxious. In his early writings he gave free expression to this hostility,
but as a realist, a positivist, he had to admit that France had been
profoundly marked by the teaching of the Church; and as a practical
politician, he had to face the fact that many of his potential supporters
were likely to be alienated by the frank expression of his distaste for
Christianity. So whatever regrets he had for the old gods, he had to
recognize that they were conquered, that the day of the 'laurel, the
palms and the paean* was over.
1
He accepted the fact that the French
tradition was Christian, but, fortunately, Christian with a Roman and
Hellenic superstructure. The dangerous, revolutionary. Hebraic doc-
trine had been humanized by the Church, which was one of the most

perfect instruments of order, of organization, of the classic virtues en-


dangered by the vague, romantic barbarism of the North. At the
Reformation the barbarians had broken away from the healthy disci-
pline of the Church and it was the Reformation, letting loose in Europe
the poison of Hebraic doctrine, that had ended the union of Europe.
Since that day it was futile to aim at a restoration of unity; the national
state was the highest good, the necessary framework within which the
individual could develop. It was the great crime of the Dreyfusards
that they exalted a vague and unrealistic ideal of 'Justice' above the
concrete conditions within which the human race alone could attain to
as much justice as was possible. It was folly to put justice before the

state; there had been states without justice but there was no justice
without the state. For a Frenchman the good life was possible only
within a strong France. That was the condition of justice for French-
1
According to a former disciple, M. Louis Dimier, M. Maurras in conversation did not
despise the other pagan assets listed by Swinburne and banned by Christianity.
367
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
men. Was weakened fatally because of some artifi-
that France to be
cially raiseddoubts about the guilt of one man?
That the question could be debated was a sign that France was in a
parlous way, for it showed that she was open to the intrusion of the
ideas and the interests of the 'four confederated states', the Protestants,
the Jews, the Masons, the mttiques. These four groups had in com-
mon their alienation from the true French tradition; two of the groups
were Frenchmen who had gone wrong, the Protestants by their ad-
herence to the anarchical doctrines of the Reformation, the Masons by
their adherence to the internationalist doctrines of the eighteenth cen-

tury, doctrines which were Protestant at one remove. The Jews and
the mttiques were not French at all. The true country of the Jews
was world- wide Israel. They thought as Jews not as Frenchmen; their
kinsmen, in England or Germany, were closer to them than were the
Gentile citizens of the State that had foolishly admitted them to full
political rights. The whole agitation over Dreyfus showed that. The
mttiques were the recently-naturalized foreigners, too quickly and
too easily admitted to high places, formally French, but connected with
other nations by family, by religion, by education. The Protestant
Franco-Swiss-Danish family of Monods were examples of the mjtfgues. 1
Thanks to the exploitation of anti-clerical sentiments, the four
groups had managed to get hold of the French State and, once in pos-
session, did everything to dig themselves in, attacking such strongholds
of the national tradition as the Church and the Army. It was futile to
attempt to defeat the conspirators by constitutional means, they had
the machinery in their hands and, ^is they had shown in Boulanger's
case, they did not mean to let the machinery of the Republic be used
against them. Nor was it any use appealing to a vague patriotic senti-
ment as Deroulede had done. It was necessary to strike at the funda-
mental cause of the ills of France, thq Republic, and to do it by the only
means possible, the 'coup de force', by some form of violence. A
Royalist revolution was the necessary condition of the deliverance of
France.
The King was a real thing not a vague ideal like the Republic.
Governments were always governments by men and not by abstrac-
tions, and not only governments by men, but by families. That was
the strength of Rome, of Carthage, of England, of the great oligarchies.
They could be far-sighted; they could take, thought for the morrow
because the good of the State would be the good of their children and
grandchildren. Better still was the identification of the State with one

1
Maurra* had used the term before the Affair in the Nationalist paper, La Cocarde,
which Barres had run. The metics in ancient Athens were the resident foreigners who had
to serve the Athenian State and who were given some privileges, but who were carefully
excluded from the full rights of citizenship. In France, alas, the mitiques were not kept in
their proper place, but given the full rights of the city. The term was quickly taken up by
all parties and used to describe any type of -foreigner in France which tfce critic did not like.

368
THE AFFAIR
family, with theHouse of France. No one had such good reason for
taking a long view as the King; no one had less temptation to reap
quick profits than a man whose office had come to him from his fathers
and would descend to his children. This truth was illustrated even in
the Republic, for France was governed by families, by groups, but these
families and groups were those of the four confederated states which
had elsewhere their abiding city, in Jerusalem or Geneva.
This doctrine was stated in a series of political tracts of great ability.
The possibility of a monarchical restoration was demonstrated in The
Inquiry into the Monarchy^ the contradictions of the foreign policy in
Kiel and Tangier, the dangers of Protestantism and of crypto-Protestant-
ism among Catholics in The Religious Revolution. The doctrine was just
what was needed by the demoralized parties of the Right, or rather by
their most ardent members.
The collapse of the ////< <lc la Patrie Frangaise had left many home-
less militants and had aheiuly become discontented by the vague-
the)
ness andrespectability of the League. Henri Vaugeois, a courageous
member of the University, had founded a more combative organi-
zation, which was to be militant for French ideals and French interests,
not for a vague general humamtarianism. This Action Frangaise went
over to the monarchical ideas preached by Maurras, and the Re-
public as an organization was now subjected to a constant criticism
from some of the most talented polemical writers in modern French
history. Maurras himself was an indefatigable writer whose style, if
monotonous, was in daily doses very effective. With him were associ-
ated one or two brilliant young members of the University, the art
critic Louis Dimier and the writer on foreign policy, Jacques Bainville.
There were others, notably those indefatigable enemies of Dreyfus and
the Dreyfusards, Delebecque and Larpent, who wrote together under
the name of 'Henri Dutrait-Crozon'.
But the most formidable of Maurras's allies was Leon Daudet. As his
father's son, he had had the entree to the new ruling class; he had grown

up with the sons of Marcellin Berthelot and had married a grand-


daughter of Victor Hugo. Daudet had qualities Maurras lacked; he
had a sense of humour, a much less doctrinaire attitude to letters and
the arts and an astonishing gift for scandalous controversy. He was a
more coherent Rochefort, a less solemn Drumont; his nose for scandal
was superb and his taste for it could hardly be restrained even when an
ally was in question. The Republicans were now the ruling class with
the advantages of being the ruling class, but with the disadvantages too,
the high proportion of humbugs in the higher ranks, the fatty degenera-
tion of the controversial muscles that accompanies success.
To be an orthodox Radical, in the early years of this century, was as
discreditable for a young man, in the eyes of his contemporaries, as to
1
Utnqutte sur la monarchic.
369
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
be an Imperialist was in the last decade of the Empire. The student
population, profoundly aroused by the Affair, was now ready for riot-
ing; and for more serious reasons than the right of the Four Arts ball to
have semi-naked models on show. 1 There were constant street affrays,
and the young men who had joined the new league were organized in
bands of newspaper-sellers and their guards; these 'Camelots du roi* a
were tough, combative, athletic young men spoiling for a row. Whatever
danger there may have been that the brawlers of the Sebastian Faure,
Gharbonnel and other Left gangs would have it all their own way, was
past. It was not long before bourgeois and noble families were familiar
with the results of police methods applied to their own sons; and the
unfortunate guardians of order in Paris were in danger of attack
from Right as well as Left! The Camelots, like the Action Frangaise
8
itself, were small bodies, but they were noisy, talented and brave, and

they had far more sympathizers than members. The revolutionary


doctrine of a Conservative party backed by fighting squads of ardent
young men was a French invention, destined to achieve great things
outside the country of its birth.
The rise of the Action Frangaise didmore harm to the parliamen-
tary Conservatives than to the Republic. Its violence, its dogmatism
appealed to the sections of the Conservative forces which had never
accepted the Ralliement; to the Legitimists, to the contemners of com-
promise. The attitude of the new Pope, Pius X, had something to do
with this revulsion, for his attitude was more like that of Pius IX than
that of Leo XIII. Louis Dimier, on a mission to Rome, was able to
appeal to the new Pope's dislike of liberalism and perhaps to encourage
him in dangerous optimism by talk of a Government of order, whose
character, Royalist, Imperialist, Republican, was a matter of indiffer-
ence to the Holy See. The days when, as the zealous Abbe Barbier
put it, 'the conscience of the Catholics of France has been kept lethargic
by the calculations of a too human prudence', were over.
This was the lesson learned by Marc Sangnier, the ardent ex-officer
who had founded Le Sillon * which was to organize the Catholic demo-
crats, to impress Catholic social doctrines on society, to resume the
work of the Ralliement, not on the narrow grounds of political forms,
but in every aspect of public life. Le Sillon appealed to many young
priests as well as to laymen; it turned its weekly into a daily; but
it had many enemies, especially among the Catholics of the Action

1
A serious riot had broken out over this question; the ladies were clad in costumes that
would, to-day, cause censorious remarks at a conservative seaside resort, but the authority
of the Republic was thrown on the side of the prudish Senator Berenger. The brutality
of the police on this occasion helped to alienate a good many young men from Republican
orthodoxy.
"The King's Hawkers/
1
The name 'Action Francaise' is applied both to the movement and to the journal o
the movement which became a daily newspaper in 1908.
* 'The
Furrow.'

370
THE AFFAIR
Frangaise\ its Leader was, perhaps, unduly ambitions; he welcomed

non-Catholics to his ranks; he was rash in statements of doctrine and his


enemies succeeded in inducing the Pope to condemn the movement.
Perhaps to the disappointment of his enemies. Marc Sangnier sub-
mitted; but the lesson was learned; the days of the Ralliement were over
as long as Pius X
and his Secretary of State, Merry del Val, were
in authority. The Action Frangaise was open to as great objections
from the doctrinal point of view as Le Sillon, but although the theo-
logians condemned it, the Pope, who loved it for the enemies it had
made, suspended sentence. The most vociferous section of French
Catholics were now violent dogmatic enemies of democracy, of liberty
in the ordinary sense of the term, of 'Social Catholicism'. They were
not the authorized representatives of the Pope, but they were men whom
he delighted to honour and to whom much was forgiven. 1

IV

On the Left, the Affair and its aftermath bred new hopes of a re-
construction of French society. Socialism became more than ever the
fashionable doctrine among the young intellectuals. There seemed a
danger that the clever young men from whom, by custom, French poli-
were recruited, would all be won over by Jaur&s or by Maurras.
ticians
The Radicals were, in the circumstances, delighted to welcome to their
ranks an occasional brilliant intellectual like fidouard Herriot. Pru-
dent and realistically-minded young men like Anatole de Monzie might
wonder how the rigours of Marxian doctrine were going to be applied
to the French countryside, with its millions of tenacious peasant pro-
prietors, but the alliance of the workers and the more intelligent and
honest of the bourgeoisie which had defeated 'Reaction' in the Affair
was still solid, or so it was hoped. Certainly it was zealously cultivated,
and not merely in the field of politics.
The young intellectuals and some of the older generation had been
awakened to the danger in which their way of life and their ideals had
been placed by the Nationalist campaign. They realized that the
defeat of the Nationalists was more due to the cqpnbative strength of the
Paris workers than to the testimony of the Professors of the ficole des
Chartes on points of textual criticism or than to the testimony of emi-
nent mathematicians on the application of the theory of probability to
the arguments of Bertillon. Their gratitude took the form of estab-
lishing 'People's Universities', that is the organization in the working-
class districts of Paris and of some provincial cities of courses of lectures

1
worth noting as illustrative of the tenacity of Conservative memories that according
It is
to M. Dimier, when the Action Franfaise was believed to be on bad terms with the Pre-
tender, the Duke of Orleans, subscriptions began to come in from old Legitimist families
which had never become reconciled to the fact that the heir to the throne was a descendant
of the tatted usurpers.

371
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
which would, it was hoped, raise the intellectual level of the workers
and make them fit to take over the capitalist state.
The practicability of such teaching, the possibility of building a
common culture for the workers and the left-wing intellectuals were
exaggerated. The very name of 'Universities' showed a grandiloquent
refusal to face realities. It was easy
for intellectuals to over-estimate
the desire of tired workers to sacrifice their meagre leisure, their in-
terest in their gardens or in cycle-racing, to listen to lectures on art,

philosophy, science and the rest. To the intellectuals it was a great


novelty; as to the Russian revolutionaries of a generation before, this
'going out to the people' was a source of genuine spiritual fefreshment
was, as in Russia, often a source of bewilderment to the workers.
if it
It was
all very well a$ long as the 'Universities' were just enthusiastic

public meetings where the great ornaments of the Left, like Anatole
France, could indulge in generous generalities. Such visits from the
great were flattering to the workers' self-esteem. *The working class/
wrote Guieysse, 'honours them and asks them to appear at its festivities
to put before it strongly the few simple ideas of which it feels the need to
be soaked in in order to finish its job thoroughly.' That is, the 'Uni-
versities' were to be sources of Socialist propaganda of a simple kind,
without any irritating displays of that scepticism which was disliked
by militant workers as much as by embattled officers. In this activity,
as in all others of the same kind, the workers had to develop their own

organizations: and the only body, not itself under workers' control, that
was able to build up any organizations among the workers, or to be
with them in their daily lives, was still the Church. The attempt of
the intellectuals to be a priesthood for a body of working-class believers
broke down before that ironical distrust of his social superiors that
marks the French working-man.
The despair of the Right, doomed as it seemed to be to perpetual
defeat on
constitutional battle-grounds, was in contrast to the hopes of
the Left or to that part of it which followed Jean Jaures; and he had
managed to win to his side the majority of French Socialists. They
believed that constitutional action could do a great deal for them. By
preserving the Republic it saved them from the danger of that 'govern-
ment with a punch' of which the Right was always dreaming and, by
winning, if not the gratitude, at least the prudential collaboration of the

frightened Left bourgeoisie, it made possible the extortion of useful im-


mediate reforms. The time would come when the bourgeoisie would have
given all that it dared, but that time was not yet. Against this policy,
Vaillant for the Blanquists and Guesde for the orthodox Marxists
preached and manoeuvred. To them, Jaures was a dangerous
seducer of the workers. Jaures was too kindly and too tactful to
retort in the same bitter fashion, but he had no high opinion of the

political sense of the doctrinaires. Yet, despite these quarrels, bitterly


37*
THE AFFAIR
waged on one side at least, the movement towards the union of the
Socialists factions went on.
The authority of the central body set up to harmonize the actions of
the various sections was weak and, although Millerand improved the
conditions of work in Government establishments and in the factories
and workshops of Government contractors, made factory inspection
more efficient and carried a factory act limiting the hours of work to
eleven which was later to be reduced to ten, these reformist gains were
nothing in the eyes of the militants compared with the scandal of a
Socialist being a member of a Government that had, at Chalon-sur-
Saone, shot down strikers. Worse still, to keep the Government in
office, some of the Socialist Deputies voted for an order of the day con-

demning collectivism. A new- split was inevitable; the Blanquists and


Guesdists combined to fonn the 'Socialist Party of France'; the rest
forming the 'French Socialist P,irty\ On the one hand were Guesde
and Vaillant; on the oilier the >unger men, the lawyers, the brilliant
v

Normaliens, united under their most brilliant comrade, Jaures, in close


alliance with the Radicals and in unshakable support of the Ministry
that had saved the Republic and was about to crush the Church.
The policy ofJaures might have remained compatible with Socialist
orthodoxy in France had only French Socialists been concerned. But
ever since the re-establishment of the International in 1889, the schisms
in the French Socialist ranks had been a scandal to the better-disci-

plined parties of other countries, especially to the German Social-


Democrats, then at the height of their fame. There was, indeed, a
great contrast between the well-disciplined regiments led by Bebel, with
their powerful trade-union allies, their elaborate and wealthy party
organization, their rich press and the feud-ridden, poverty-stricken
French Socialists. The Second International resolved not to tolerate
such a scandal any longer and, by preaching union to the French, it
played into the hands of Guesde. He took over a resolution voted by
the German Socialists at Dresden which had condemned a policy of con-
cessions to the established order, a policy which would make of a party that

ought to be a party of class war, 'a party content to reform bourgeois


society*. It was easy for the German Socialists to condemn Jaures;

they were not tempted to collaborate with the Government, since no


German Government wanted their aid. But at Amsterdam, the dog-
matists had their way; the policy of collaboration with bourgeois parties
was condemned and the French Socialists were ordered to unite. In
1905, the schism was officially closed. The new united party took the
name of the 'French Section of the Workers' International', commonly
known as the S.F.I. O. It declared that it was 'not a reforming party
but a class and revolutionary party'. Guesde had triumphed and not
only formally, for Jaures, once defeated, accepted most loyally the
policy of the victors; the experiment of the Republican bloc was over.
373
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
But before that had happened, the bloc had achieved its greatest
triumph, it had made inevitable and imminent the separation of Church

and State, that deliverance which had been promised by the Radicals
since Gambetta's Belleville programme of 1869. After the suppression
of the orders, the relations between the Republic and the Pope could
hardly remain more than formally correct. Some bishops and some
priests may have thought that the disappearance of the orders was not
without its bright side for the secular clergy, but they were too loyal to
the general interests of the Church to rejoice in a freedom from rivalry
that had such a dubious source.
In any case, such credulous members of the ordinary clergy as
rejoiced in the disappearance of their regular rivals and took literally
the professions of esteem for the paid and disciplined clergy of the
Republic which had been lavished on them when the fight against the
congregations was beginning, were soon to be disillusioned. For, once
the orders had been dealt with, the turn of the Established Church was
at hand. The old Radical promised land of the separation of Church
and State was about to be entered, with Combes as Joshua, happily
delivered by death from the presence of a protesting Moses in the person
of Waldeck-Rousseau.

The announcement of the projected official visit of the President


of the Republic to the King of Italy in Rome was the occasion, not the
cause, of the final conflict, but it was an occasion which put most of
the blame for the breach on the side of Rome. It was the claim of the
Vatican that the head of a formally Catholic state should not visit
the usurping King in what was by rights the Pope's capital. The
Secretary of State, Cardinal Merry del Val, confronted with the
approaching visit of Loubet, sent a protest to all Catholic states as
well as to the French Government. The note was not published, even
by France, but Jaures, who now had in the newly-founded Humanitt his
own newspaper, 1 had his first 'scoop'. He published the text with an
addition not present in the version sent to France, that the Nuncio
was only waiting at Paris for Very serious reasons'. This was taken to
be a hint that the fall of Combes was expected. Nothing could have
better suited the enemies of the Concordat. Here was the Vatican
both attempting to dictate the foreign policy of the Republic and
discounting the fall of a Ministry which was supported by a strong
parliamentary majority! And the occasion of quarrel was the old
question of die temporal power to which so much French Catholic
strength had been sacrificed. If the Pope and his Secretary of State
1
His earlier organ, La Petite Rtpublique, had suffered in repute from the sales-methods
of its proprietor, G^rault-Richard.

374
THE AFFAIR
thought that the unity of Italy was going to be undone, the more fools
they; if they thought that so important an element in French foreign
policy as the coaxing of Italy away from the Triple Alliance was going
to be sacrificed to mere clerical amour propre, more fools still. Even the
old defenders of the Concordat like Ribot could not swallow this: and
many a French Catholic must, in silence, have wondered at the papal
sense of proportion.
The time for an ending of the connection of Church with State had
clearly come. There was no political or moral
justification for it any
longer. Under previous Governments, if the Concordat had been
looked on as a useful bridle to keep the Church in order, it had at
least been administered by men who, like Baroche under the Second

Empire, or Jules Simon or Dufaurc under the Third Republic, wished


the Church well as long as it did not intrude on the domain of the State.
Such politicians could not now attain office, and the Minister of Cults
was far more likely to l>c a Paul Bert or a Combes, awaiting with vary-
ing degrees of patience the death of superstition and using the Con-
cordat to keep the dying Church quiet and harmless. On the other
hand, the old Gallican illusions were dead in all but the most obstinate
breasts. It was not possible to dream of reviving Bossuet. The
Church as well as the French State had had its night of the Fourth of
August; the old immunities, the old traditions, like the old local rituals,
had been swept away by the Napoleonic centralization of the reign of
Pius IX. The French State was unwilling any longer effectually to
aid the Church in its attempts to make or keep France Christian; the
French Church was unwilling any longer to aid the State to keep the
bishops and clergy tame.
Separation was inevitable, but what kind of a separation? There
were simple souls who thought that all that was needed was a simple
denunciation of the Concordat. But the Concordat only bound the
Pope and the Republic; were it to be abolished overnight there would
still remain many and important questions to be settled between the

French clergy and the Government. How were the vested interests of
the clergy who had entered a State service in good faith to be pre-
served? Were they to be preserved? Who was to own the buildings
from Notre-Dame and the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice to the humblest
village church and village presbytery? To zealots all was simple.
The clergy had no rights or hardly any; the example of rough Repub-
lican justice meted out to the orders was worth following in the spirit
if not in the letter. But a Government which had had enough trouble
with the ordfcrs, did not intend to run the risk of expelling thousands of
country priests from their homes or of turning the churches into secular
establishments. There would be no repetition of the errors of the First
Republic, no persecuted clergy saying Mass in private houses and barns,
while the new Republican cults of the Masons or the Socialists were
375 BB
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
observed in the secularized churches. If only to be baptized, married,
and buried in, a church was a necessity of French life, as ail but the
blindest of fanatics knew.
The liquidation of the State Church, if it was to be carried through
with any regard for internal peace, could not be the work of men like
Allard. It was, in fact, the work of a man whose record, if superficially

examined, seemed to make him totally unfit for the job. It was Aristide
Briand, the preacher of the general strike, the mouthpiece of the
syndicalist militants, the defender in the capitalist courts of the leaders
of the class war, who, as 'reporter' of the committee which drafted the
Bill, undid the work of the First Consul.
Briand was not a doctrinaire. He was ironically humble in the
presence of the distinguished academic Socialists of Humanitt, and he
had none of the caste feeling of the University. He was a born
negotiator; he had clerical friends and he did not rejoice in making
personal or doctrinal enemies. If it had been possible to negotiate
a concordat of separation, to arrange an amicable divorce with Rome,
that would have been the best solution, but neither Combes nor Pius X
were the men to make such an arrangement. The new settlement
would have to be one-sided, but before it could be undertaken the
Ministry had fallen. It had long been in danger. The alliance
between the Socialists and the Radicals had become less close, and
Jaurs had not been re-elected Vice-President of the Chamber, while
his preoccupation with the anti-clerical policy of the Ministry made him
the butt of attacks, not only from Guesde and the other orthodox
Socialists, but from Millerand. On the other side, the discontent
of the more conservative supporters of Waldeck-Rousseau had been
growing. The Ministry had been on the point of dissolution when the
final breach with the Vatican gave it a new lease of life. When its
time came it was to die with less dignity than would have graced its
fall if had come earlier.
that
A
Combes ministry would not, perhaps, have attempted or allowed
an attempt to make the separation as easy as it was the wish of Briand
to make it. The fundamental question was that of the property rights
of the Establishment. On the extreme anti-clerical side there was a
desire to make Church as poor as possible. If the clergy continued
the
to live in the same houses and control the same buildings, of what good
was the separation? But Briand and the majority of the Chamber,
from motives of prudence as well as of justice, were anxious to avoid
any appearance of persecution. They wished to leave the clergy in
effectual control of the churches and other ecclesiastical property. But
what was meant by the clergy? Was every parish to be treated as a
unit? What was to happen if two persons claimed to be the priest
of a parish? If the bishop was to decide, he was in effective control of
the clergy and the assets and the Pope, henceforward, would name
376
THE AFFAIR
all bishops without any voice being left to the State. Toavoid this,
'religious associations' were to be set up which would be given the
effective property rights in the churches, presbyteries and the rest.
Priests would receive salaries for four years to come, but on a descending
scale, and existing pension rights were secured. From the point of view
of the majority it was a generous settlement and, from the point of
view of many Catholics, it was less rigorous than they had feared.
The hopes of an amicable arrangement were upset by one internal
and one external event. The law provided for inventories of Church
property, and it was not made clear enough that the most sacred
emblems of the Faith would be respectfully treated. There were riots
in which the new militant Royalist party won its spurs in street fighting,
and the Prime Minister, by this time Clemenceau, suspended the
inventories. A candelabrum was not worth a human life, he thought.
On the other side, Pius X condemned the Law of Separation on the
ground that the law 'attributes the public celebration of religion not
to the hierarchical organization divinely set up by Our Saviour, but
5
to a lay organization The defenders of the law pointed out that
.

control of the property and finances of the parishes was in lay hands in
Germany. The papal objection, however, was not groundless. The
German Governments recognized and enforced the authority of the
bishops; they were, in any case, not hostile to the Church as such, which
the French State was. Moreover a difficulty arose from the fact that,
in a great many French villages and in most French towns, the real
Catholics were a minority. It was possible to foresee cases where the
control of the local Church would be in the hands of very lukewarm
Catholics indeed, a danger that did not often arise in the Rhineland or
Bavaria. 1 Yet the papal condemnation, though loyally observed, was
not gladly accepted by French laymen or even by all French
all

bishops. Thestern, unbending attitude of the Roman authorities


imposed burdens not on them but on the French clergy, and the new
Minister of Cults, Briand, was able to taunt the defenders of the Pope's
policy in the Chamber with the notorious disagreement of the French
bishops on the question of the religious associations.
What was to be done? There was no danger that the celebration
of Mass would suddenly cease. Church services were treated as public
meetings, but that meant asking for authorization, which the Pope
forbade die clergy to do, and the simple remedy was found of abolishing
:

the last restrictions on the right of public meeting for everybody. The
use of the churches was permitted to the clergy, but they had no strict
legal rights and, worse still, while the Communes could receive gifts for

the upkeep of the churches of which they were now the owners, they
1
Exactly the same difficulty arose when it was attempted, after the last war, to give
autonomy to the Church of England. How was one to mytingufch between the nominal
Anglican and the real Anglican? The fipht
over lay control of Church property was, of
course, familiar to such American Catholics as knew their bwn history.

377
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
did not need to accept them and, if they chose, could let the churches
fall into ruins. The action of Pius X
thus deprived the Church in
France of a great deal of property and imposed great burdens on the
laity. Not until after the last world war was a settlement reached
which, perhaps fair to add, would not in all probability have been
it is

acceptable to either side in the bitter atmosphere of 1905-7. At long


last, the dream of a 'free Church in a free State' was achieved. It
was not freedom as Archbishop Ireland of St. Paul, whose teaching
was held up to admiration by some French Catholics, would have
understood it. Monastic life was prohibited; in cities and towns
as far apart as Clermont-Ferrand and Bayeux, religious processions,

many centuries old, were now stopped by local authorities; and


the clergy lost all official status in a country where that was not
unimportant.
The hopes of the Viviani school and the fears of the old Galileans
were both proved baseless. The Church suffered far less from the
separation than had been anticipated. In many districts it was
difficult to recruit the clergy, but that was already an old story; some

parishes had to be abandoned altogether, but this was merely the


public recognition of a state of affairs barely hidden by the legal
establishment. On the other hand, the effects of freedom were often
bracing; a new missionary spirit was awakened among the clergy and
the old bureaucratic attitude grew less common. In varied ways, the
Church tackled the problem of keeping a hold on the people. It
organized women's clubs in the country; it organized boy scouts; the
Christian trade unions gradually freed themselves of the crippling
association with the employers; and, in every department of life, the
one great organization that could compete with the French State
showed its renewed life. There were no schisms and few scandals.
The Catholic Church was now the Church of a minority of faithful
and zealous people, not the nominal and official religious organization
of nearly all Frenchmen. It did not lose by the change.
The dissolution of the orders, the separation of Church and State,
some social reforms, a more generous legal interpretation of the rights
of associations (if they were sufficiently lay) were the main, but not the
sole, achievements of the Waldeck-Rousseau and Combes ministries.
The classical character of French secondary .education was further
assailed in a fashion which shocked the devotees of tradition and the
numerous" recipients of a sound classical education who defended a
system that had made them what they were. It was no accident that
the defenders of the new system included such academic ornaments of
Humaniti as Gustave Lanson, and the assailants of the intellectual
treason of the new Sorbonne found their most vehement spokesmen in
the Action Frangaise. All traditions seemed to be assailed and defended
together. The censorship of plays was abolished as well as the Con-
378
THE AFFAIR
cordat; theatrical licence of spectacle or the liberty of theatrical art
was a victory of the spirit that freed Dreyfus.
More serious and more offensive to the embittered Nationalists
was one of the most popular acts of the government of the Bloc the
reduction of the term of military service to two years.
This reform was really egalitarian, for the three years' nominal
service had, in fact, been exacted from only a part of the
conscript
population. Reduction in the term of service for various reasons and
the privileges given to possessors of certain educational qualifications
had made the average period of service less than two years, to the great
and natural discontent of those who had to serve three. The new law
insisted on a full period of two years with the colours for
everybody,
and it was held, by some optimists, that one result was to reduce anti-
militarism among the educated tluv.es. As long as they could cut
short their stay with th^ coloui>, the time spent in the regiment was
regarded as an unplcasam mttThid; in their careers. Under the new
system the possess< >rs of educational qualifications could gain advantage
from their diplomas, not by a reduction in the term of service but by
qualifying as reserve officers, and that involved taking the profession
of arms seriously, and the acceptance of a reserve commission, while
not incompatible with pacifist or anti-militarist views, usually tempered
the zeal with which they were held and propagated.
Since the Affair began with a purely military question, it was fitting
that it should end, morally if not legally, with another purely military
question or scandal, a scandal which was educational in that it again
showed that the French people, if not its professional leaders, had a
lively sense of justice and public decency that even the strongest
political vested interests defied at their peril.

VI

When Gallifet retired from the War Office in the summer of 1900,
the choice of his successor was of the greatest importance for the
Republican character of the Ministry. If it was the religious orders
which aroused the most politically profitable resentment in the breasts
of the voter, it was the generals who had been the leaders in the
campaign against Dreyfus which had provoked the scare of 'the
Republic in danger'. In the alliance of 'the Sabre and the Holy- Water
Sprinkler', the Sabre was the senior partner. The folly and the
of the leaders of the Army was not merely, it was thought, a
arrogance
result of the demoralizing effects of a military life, although that view
was increasingly popular; it was, above all, the result of the clerical
education and affiliations of the higher officers. Although Mercier
had been, when appointed, regarded as slightly anti-clerical, most of
the officers involved in the conspiracy against Dreyfus, whether as
379
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
conspirators or as dupes, had been both aristocratic and Catholic.
The very names of MM. de Boisdefire,de Pellieux, du Paty de Clam
stank, in Republican nostrils, of the ancien regime, of the rule of the
Jesuits, of barely concealed disloyalty to the Republic.
How had it come about that so many high places in the Army were
filled by Catholic aristocrats? Because, it was asserted, the whole
machinery of promotion was in the hands of a Catholic and anti-
Republican clique. This clique filled all the promotion boards with
its nominees; all reports on candidates for promotion were made by

members of the clique. Agood Republican, above all a good


Republican who was also a Jew or a Protestant, had little chance of
rising in the Army. As the nation grew more Republican, the Army
grew less so, and the change was made dramatic for the man in the
street by the picture of the Jesuit, P&re du Lac, who kept, it was said,
the List on his table and who made and unmade military
Army
careers.That promotion in many cases went by favour was certain.
The French Army was a human institution. That well-connected
young men in the Army, like well-connected young men in other
services, did rather better than their obscure if talented contemporaries,
was probable. The main differencewas that the kind of connection
that helped in the administrative services was not as powerful in the
Army as in the Foreign Office or the Ministry of the Interior. Catholic
and Conservative origins, which were a crippling handicap in the case of
a would-be prefect, were, at worst, no handicap, and often a decided
asset in the career of a would-be general.
Thedifference in temper and origin between the Army and the
Civil Service was not due merely to favour. It represented an

important change in the position of the Army itself. The practical


exclusion of the Conservative and Catholic classes from most branches
of public life made the Army more than ever the natural career of the
sons of these classes, and the Liberal and non-Catholic bourgeoisie had
not merely many more opportunities for distinguishing themselves than
were afforded by an Army where only colonial wars offered even
meagre glory, they were now rather disposed to despise that kind of
glory. Anti-militarism was increasingly popular among the educated
classes which had freed themselves from many of the traditional values
of French life or thought they had. Although it was still not at all
uncommon for a good Republican family to send a son into the Army,
especially into the learned arms, it was becoming less common. The
future Admiral Jaur&s kept up the naval traditions of his family, but
his brother's teaching was hardly likely to encourage a hesitating boy
to choose the career of arms. For an able young man of Royalist origin
like Lyautey, the Army was often the only career open. It was

inevitable, therefore, that the higher ranks of the Army and Navy
should represent, to a disproportionate degree, the Catholic and
380
THE AFFAIR
Conservative bourgeoisie, and that the cavalry, above all, should repre-
sent toan even more disproportionate degree that declining class, the
aristocracy.
Nor did promotion from the ranks remedy this state of affairs.
As France remained at peace, there was far less chance of winning a
commission by brilliant service in the field. In the colonies, it is
true, as the career ofMarchand showed, there were still opportunities,
but the tradition that every French soldier carried a marshal's baton
in his knapsack was very implausible by 1900. It is true that the
facilities for such promotions were much more lavish than in most

armies, but it was a handicap to have been educated at the ranker's


school, Saint- Maixent, instead of at Saint-Cvr, and, of course, still
worse to have become a gunner by passing through Versailles instead
of receiving the most highly cst'-emed education in France at the
ficole Poly technique.
The new War Minister w.^ himself a distinguished artilleryman,
and although the (act thut h< had begun his career as an officer in
the Imperial Guard raised some doubts as to his right to be regarded
as an original Republican, there was no doubt that, by 1900, General
Andre was as sound an anti-clerical as could be found in the French
Army, and, as far as opinions went, admirably qualified to carry on
the work of republicanizing it, begun by General Boulanger. Andre
took very seriously his task of 'protecting Republican officers and men
against the arbitrariness of a reactionary staff', to borrow a description
of his activities from an eminent academic Republican. 1 His duty, as
he saw it, was double: to make sure that good Republicans did not
suffer for their opinions and that reactionary officers did not benefit
from theirs. He had drawn up for his own use a double list of sheep
and goats, the list of sheep being headed 'Corinth' and the list of goats
'Carthage'. It was his duty as War Minister, so he thought, to extend
these lists, to make certain that not everybody would be allowed to
attain 'Corinth' and that the names listed under 'Carthage' would, if
not deleted, be put back on the promotion lists. Justice would at last
be done but how? The official system of promotion-boards was useless
for this purpose; it had given France the higher command that had
been defeated and disgraced in the Dreyfus campaign. The boards
could be abolished, promotions taken directly into the hands of the
Minister, but on what information was he to act? Reports on candi-
dates from their superiors were worthless, since it was the superiors who
were suspected. Moreover, these reports would bear only on the real
or alleged military merits of the candidates, not on their political
soundness. Andre was forced, 2 he thought, to apply for information

1
Charles Andlcr.
8
It is asserted that Andre* had his own domestic reasons for disliking the intolerance
and snobbery of the Catholic wives who set the tone in most garrison towns.
381
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
outside the regular channels, to take account of parliamentary opinion,
to call on the prefects and other officials of soundly Republican branches
of the Administration. Official reports were not enough; other sources
of information were needed, and Andr6 turned to that soundly
Republican and ^vorldly-wise body, the Freemasons, or rather to the
dominantly political and anti-Catholic section of the Masons whose
headquarters were the Grand Orient of the Rue Cadet.
Andre* had as his personal staff officer a zealous Mason, Captain
Mollin, and it was Mollin who was instructed to get in touch with his
brethren. He set about this task with genuine zeal. He shared all
his chief's suspicions of the clerical conspiracy; indeed, he exaggerated

them, for although he was, at the moment, a son-in-law of Anatole


France, Mollin resembled M. Homais a good deal more than he did
M. Bergeret. _ He had no scruples and no fears. No wrong was done
to the non-Republican officer who was not promoted, since apart from
the operation of seniority, promotion went by favour and there were so
many capable Republican officers that the Army would not suffer from
the exclusion from the higher ranks of all politically suspect officers. 1
In any case, 'the brain which is able to adapt itself well to the republican
idea should, by that very fact, generally speaking, be superior, not only
in the domain of abstract thought, but also in those of concrete realities,
to the brain which evolves towards the monarchical idea, which is an
idea of stagnation and tradition and consequently of reaction'. With
these convictions, Mollin went ahead, convinced not only that he was
saving the Republic but improving the Army.
Mollin's usefulness came from his Masonic associations. The
Grand Orient was turned into a research centre, field workers sent in
reports on officers of every rank, reports sent first to the Secretary of the
Grand Orient, M. Vadecard, and made available by him to Mollin.
The 'fiches', that is the forms on which the reports were made, were
kept secret, as is always desirable in espionage. But it was not possible
to keep the system wholly a secret, and General Percin, shocked (or

scared) told Waldeck-Rousseau in 1902 that non-official sources were


being consulted. Waldeck-Rousseau took the matter up with Combes,
pointing out that such a system was wrong and dangerous, but the
'Little Father' paid no more attention to his predecessor in this than
he did in other matters. In any case he was accustomed to let his
colleagues run their departments as they liked. Andre*, like Delcasse*,
was given a free hand.
The information collected was sometimes favourable to the officer
1
It is worth noting that of the five French Generals who won the Marshal's baton in
the last great war, four were bad Republicans by Mollin's standards (Foch, Pe*tain,
Lyautey, Fayolle). The fifth, Joffre, was, if not a clerical, a friend of clericals. Two of
the high officers most closely associated with Mollin had unfortunate military careers in
the field. It may be, of course, that in addition to being unlucky, they were the victims
# their past,
388
THE AFFAIR
reported on. A lucky colonel was described as 'perfect in all respects;
excellent opinions.' Less lucky was the commandant who, although
he was a 'good officer, well reported on, takes no part in polities', let
his wife have her own way and send her six children to religious schools

and, sharing his wife's opinions, 'goes to Mass with his family*. Worse
stillwas the officer who, though a bachelor, went to Mass, and worst of
all, the officer who both went to Mass and manifested reactionary

opinions as well as philosophical errors. While it was easy for the


local Masons to see what went to Mass, sent their children to
officers

religious schools, or otherwise gave outward signs of unfitnessfor military


command, it was harder to catch the dangerous type whose inward
treason only manifested itself at the mess among comrades. For
information on this class, the only good source waa a brother officer.
It was not always possible to find officers whose sense of Republican

duty was so strong that they could overcome reactionary scruples about
reporting the after-din arr conversations of their brethren, but many
regiments did produce at least one good Republican willing to denounce
his equals and superiors for the good of the nation and, occasionally,
for the immediate good of the Service: for if two officers were candidates
forpromotion at the same time, and one successfully denounced the
other, theArmy not only benefited by the elimination of a reactionary
from high command, but gained by the promotion of a Republican
whose loyalty had stood this severe test.
If it had been noted before 1900 that it paid to have reactionary
and religious opinions, it was now noted that it paid to be a staunch
Republican; even a little anti-militarism did no harm. As Mollin
complacently wrote, 'It happened often enough that one saw an officer
who in 1901 had his sons at a Jesuit school and openly displayed
sentiments hostile to the Government, in 1902 sending his sons to the
lycfa> and in 1903 displaying his respect for our institutions'.
As a Corps
Commander put it in a letter to Vadecard, with the help of the Masons
one had good hopes of 'uncassocking the Army of the officers infiefed
to Sarto'. 1 With luck and ordinary fidelity, the Masons might have
given France an Army as wholesomely Republican as espionage,
delation and hypocrisy could make it.
There was a weak link in the chain that joined up the local grocer
denouncing or approving his military customer, the ambitious major
denouncing a reactionary colonel, to the zealous captain who had the
ear of the Minister of War. Vadecard's assistant at the Grand Orient
was a certain Jean Bidegain who, from his own account, had always
been a lukewarm Mason as well as an anti-Semite. 2 His conscience
pricked him, so he later affirmed, as he saw the work of secret reporting
1
Sarto was the family name of Pope Pius X.
1
He bad,
be asserted; started a. Maioaic lodge, along with DcsUofcrca, from which Jews
were acduded.
8
3 3
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
going on; only the thought that he made his living by carrying out the
orders of Vadecard kept -him from resignation, and when he finally
offered a large and varied collection of the 'fiches' to the secretary of
the Ligue de la Patrie Franfaise, he did so on the promise that he
would get 40,000 francs in compensation. The secretary, Gabriel
Syveton, rightly thought that the secret of the 'fiches' was cheap at
the price. There had been for months rumours of the working of
some such system, and various newspapers had talked indignantly, but
with insufficient proofs, of the iniquities of the War Office.
Bidegain's 'fiches' were admirable ammunition, for he had carefully
covered his tracks and there was hope that the mine could be sprung
under the Government without any preliminary counter-mining being
possible. The firing of the mine was entrusted not to Syveton, but
to a retired officer, Guyot de Villeneuve, who read out to a startled
Chamber specimens of the 'fiches', choosing naturally those in which
the zeal of the Masonic informers had run away with their manners,
'fiches' of the type which denounced a general as 'a Jesuit, a dirty

Jesuit, a threefold Jesuit who soils the Army'. He named, too, some
of the officerswho had helped to reveal the un-Republican character of
their colleagues. The mine exploded with all the force its authors had
hoped Andre, frightened by the press campaign, had told Mollin
for.
c
to take the fiches' away so that it might be said truthfully that there
were none in the War Office, but this precaution had been taken too
late. The War Minister was in an extraordinarily difficult position.
He might allege that Mollin had gone much further than he had been
authorized to go, but that would seem like an attempt to put the blame
on other shoulders and would be no credit to the efficiency of the
Minister himself. He might, as his Republican predecessor Boulanger
had done in like circumstances, deny the authenticity of the 'fiches',
but from the moment that Guyot de Villeneuve began reading, Andre
had the dreadful certainty that the Reactionaries had got hold of the
genuine article. Even had Andre had the moral standards of
Boulanger, stout denial would have been too risky. So the astounded
Chamber, waiting on the Left at least for an indignant refutation of
the slanderous charges of the Right, had to put up with a feeble
promise to look into the matter from Andr6 and a vigorous 'You're
another!' from Combes, which, however adequate for the devoted
supporters of the Prime Minister, was not quite enoiugh for the
deputies who had been telling the world and France, for six years
past, how unlike clerical methods was the true Republican art of
government.
There was a grave danger that the Ministry might fall. It was
saved by the only man who could have saved it, by the only man
whose reputation could have covered Andr and Combes, by Jean
Jaurs, glory of the intellectuals, the philosopher in politics, incarna*
384
THE AFFAIR
tion of the public conscience awakened by the Dreyfus case. Jaures l
brushed aside the minor moral question and, with all the resources of
his intoxicating rhetoric, implored the good Republicans of the
Chamber not to do the work of the reactionaries and bring about the
fall of the Ministry. The days of 'let justice be done though the
heavens fall' had passed. Even Jaures could only induce the Chamber
to pass, by a majority of four, an evasive order of the day. Outside
the Chamber, public opinion was less easily placated. Despite the
formal anti-militarism of the electoral majority, the Army was still
semi-sacred, and it was hard to persuade even left-wing voters who,
after all, were mostly ex-soldiers, that its discipline and efficiency were

improved by Mollin's methods. Those who were not affected by this


argument were, too often for the security of the Ministry, affected by
moral scruples. Within the ranks of the League of the Rights of Man
war raged. Charles Gide, Rist, Hauser, Bougie*, Eisenmann, asked
for a condemnation of espionage and secret delation, but Francis de
Pressense, who w;is the most prominent representative of the Protestant
conscience in the ranks of the Socialists as well as President of the
League, \v;is not to be moved. He pointed out that a condemnation
of Andre's methods might and would help reaction; he treated the
whole question as one of tactics, talked of the bad effects of obstruction
in the Chamber, reminded the troubled Dreyfusards of what Parnell
had done to the discipline of the House of Commons, and suggested that
the time for expressing an opinion on the moral question had not yet
come. In this M. de Pressense, like*M. Jaures, acted as a practical
politician. He was backed by one of the most eminent young academics
with political ambitions, the mathematician, Paul Painleve, 2 and when
Joseph Reinach, taking care of his reputation both as a patriotic
Gambettist and as a Dreyfusard, resigned from the committee of the
League, his place was taken by Anatole France.
The position of the Masons was more difficult. They were forced
to realize that for reasons they did not wholly understand, the public
was not grateful for the services they had rendered the Republic.
Laferre, President of the Grand Orient, was a deputy, but he had
preferred not to defend the action of the great organ of lay morality
when the storm first burst in the Chamber. His courage soon returned
and he and his colleagues issued a manifesto reproaching the Republican
majority of the Chamber with its cowardice, a majority which con-
tained so many Masons! The manifesto lamented that the chance of
declaring that Masonry 'had deserved well of the Republic' had been

Jaures showed his courage in defending a system that made the religious practices of
1

a wife proofof the bad Republicanism of a husband, for he had more than once been delated
to his own party for allowing his wife to bring up his daughter as a Catholic, to let her
make her first Communion and, as some asserted, to send her to a Church school.
*
Painlev6 was later to claim credit for promoting the Catholic generals, Foch and
Pltain, during the last war.
385
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
lost, but the weaklings were warned that the eyes of their brethren
were on them. M. Laferre's apologia was not well received, for the
public found it hard to understand why the Masons were both so proud
of what they had done and so angry with Brother Bidegain for revealing
it. They had done good by stealth and blushed to find it fame. As
M. de Pressense pointed out, it was a mistake to have left the contents of
a powder magazine in the keeping of a traitor and a badly paid one at
that.
Denials, defiance, evasion and honest anger with the disloyal
M. Bidegain all left the public cold. The 'fiches de delation' killed the
Combes Ministry as the Henry forgery killed the anti-Dreyfusard cause.
The death agony was shorter. The vigorous and brutal Nationalist
deputy, Syveton, had allowed Guyot de Villeneuve to reap the glory
of the first day, but after a debate in which Jaures, Combes, and
Andre had each shown his particular talent for evasion of the issue and
which resulted in a majority of two for the Government, Syveton,
before the counting of the vote was finished, walked over to Andre* and
slapped him repeatedly on the face. This assault by a young man on an
old one saved the Government for the moment and a vote of confidence
was passed by a large majority. The attack, as Syveton in an apologia
declared, was an act of civil war, and many on Syveton's side deplored
his brutality, but for many more he was a hero. Although the
immediate result of the assault was the passing, by a large majority, of a
vote of confidence in the Combes Government, the situation remained
dangerous. Andre was bitterly- humiliated and Syveton, if he were
put on trial, would have every chance of exposing the whole system
of delation, of demonstrating that Andre and Combes had been evasive
in their explanations to theChamber, perhaps of showing, through the
evidence of the indignant Captain Mollin who had been made the
scapegoat, that they had been more than evasive. The day before
Syveton was to face the jury and to make himself the accuser and
Andre and his system the accused, the hero of the Nationalists com-
mitted suicide, faced as he was with a sudden double charge of sexual
offences with his daughter-in-law and of embezzling the funds of the
1
Ligue de la Patrie Franfaise.
The death of Syveton did not save Combes for long. Andre*
resigned, but Combes was now his own Jonah. His candidate for the

Presidency of the Chamber, Brisson, was beaten by Paul Doumer, and


although the faithful Socialists and the more obscure Radicals gave
the Ministry a majority of six on a vote of confidence, Combes resigned.

1
Needless to say, many of Syveton's friends said he had been murdered. The real
mystery is why his daughter-in-law should suddenly have become indignant over the fairly

remote loss of her virtue and should suddenly have confessed all to her mother. Because
the sudden production of these charges was so convenient to the Government it would be
as rash, as in the similar case of the sudden moral indignation of Captain Q'Shea against
ParneU, to lay too much stress on cut bom.
386
THE AFPAtfc
The great ideological conflict that had renewed in France the passions
of theWars of Religion and of the Revolution, that had affected every
aspect of French public and intellectual life, ended in a stink of shabby
spying and lying and in the obscurity of a vulgar sexual scandal. It
ended, as it had begun, in darkness. Had France had an Andrew
Marvell, he too might have thought that the cause was too good to
have been fought for ; but it was fought for, and bloodless civil war
took its toll, on both sides, of honour and truth. Yet as Monsieur
Daniel HaleVy found it necessary to remind his countrymen a few years
after, an innocent man had been saved, bad men had been punished.
Such triumphs of justice over passion and interest are not common in
any land, even when justice is aided, as it was in France, by passion
and interest.

387
BOOK VIII

THE SHADOW OF WAR


Les tenbres s'evanouissent
Quand le solcil sc lve.

HGSIPPE SIMON.

Ancotr.tl voices prophesying war.


COLERIDGE.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
plans' now made possible, unless he could be sure that these plans
would be at least half-French. He was to learn, in a few years' time,
how little regard for the interests and even for the dignity of her ally
Russia could display.
More from a realistic point of view, was the
successful, if looked at
lessening of the tension between France and Italy. The ending of
the tariff war in 1898 was mainly the work of Delcasse's predecessor,
but it was Delcasse" who reassured a nervous Italian Government
that France had no designs on Tripoli. It took time for the
economic peace to be followed by political consequences but, by
1902, the time was ripe for written assurances to Italy that her
claims in Tripoli would be safeguarded and that Italy would remain
neutral should France be attacked by one or more powers. Even
if France, as a result of 'a direct provocation', should be forced to

declare war, Italy would still be neutral. What was a 'direct provo-
cation'? The
Italian Foreign Minister, Prinetti, reassured Delcasse by

examples which could hardly be comforting to Germany: the Ems


telegram, the Schnabele affair, and 'certain developments' of the
Fashoda crisis. It was all very well for the German Government to
minimize the secession of Italy, to talk of wives waltzing with men
other than their husbands and yet remaining faithful. No one knew
better than Chancellor von Billow that Italian flirtations were liable to
have quite serious consequences. 1
Delcasse had, in his own mind, cleared the way for a more difficult
achievement a settlement with England.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the existence of the
independent Moroccan Empire, bordering on Algeria by land and only
separated from Spain by the Straits of Gibraltar, was an anomaly. A
vast area, reputed to be rich, occupying a most important strategic
position on the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, was ruled, as far as
it was ruled at all, by a curious bureaucracy, the Makhzen, which had

some points of resemblance with the mandarinate of Annam and,


like it, formally obeyed but usually controlled the monarch whose

authority and prestige were increased by an alleged descent from the


Prophet. The Sultans and the Makhzen had been fully conscious, ever
since the conquest of Algiers, that their independence and authority
were threatened by the infidel. Taking advantage of the anarchy
produced by the French conquest of Algeria, the Moroccans had
advanced eastwards, but after their great defeat at the hands of Marshal
Bugeaud, in the Battle of Isly in 1844, they acquired a healthy respect
for their newneighbours.
France was not the only threat, for Spain, clinging to her garrison

1
The Chancellor's wife was an Italian lady of very high rank who had eloped with
Biilow when she was still the wife of the German Ambassador in Rome and Bttlow was on
her husband's staff.

39*
THE SHADOW OF WAR
towns like Ceuta, waged war on the Sultan, and under the vigorous
leadership of O'Donnel and Prim, forced concessions from him. Other
powers followed suit, and it was in vain that the Makhzen tried to
maintain a policy of economic and political isolation, rather like that
imposed on Japan by the Tokugawa Shoguns. A more practicable
policy was to assert the authority of the Sultan in the eastern frontier
regions where the French colonists of Oran were covetously eyeing the
rich lands of the neighbouring tribes. While the Makhzen was thus
trying to make its authority effective, it was also trying to play off one
power against another, especially Britain against France.
The vigorous Sultan Moulay el-Hassan was helped, of course, by
the eclipse of French prestige after 1870; but wLen he died in 1894, a
bold Minister, son of a negro slave, made a child the Sultan, and the
decline of the imperial authority set in. The child, Abd el-Aziz, might
haye delayed the fatal event by playing off British authority, as repre-
sented by the famous Raid MacLean and the more important Waltei
Harris, Tangier correspondent of The Times, against French, but dying
at the age of nineteen, he left a serious debt and a threatened succession.
From 1900 onwards, Morocco was plagued by wars started by pre-
tenders to the throne, by bankruptcy, by tribal revolt, by rival con-
cession hunters, by all the symptoms of the political and economic
maladies which, in Tunis and Egypt, had made possible the imposition
of European tutelage. The Moroccans were warlike; they detested the
foreigner; they would resent the imposition, even under cover of
imperial authority, of foreign rule; but if the European powers could
agree, the independence of the Sheriffian empire was over.
M. Delcasse saw, or thought he saw, a way of making sure that the
liquidation of that independence would be the task and the opportunity
of France. She would step into the breach, restore and extend the
authority of the Sultan and, in his name, open Morocco to develop-
ment. This policy was a natural one; it made possible the rounding-off
of France's North African empire, and it was certain that twentieth-
century Europe would not indefinitely tolerate anarchy, barbarism, and
the denial of opportunity for economic development in a large area at
her very door. To the Colonial party, especially to the Algerian
representatives of that party, the Moroccan apple was ripe, fitienne,
the powerful representative of the settlers hi Western Algeria in Parlia-
ment, advocated the forward movement among the politicians. No
more than Stephen Douglas, faced with the problem of opening Kansas
and Nebraska to settlement, was he worried by the moral side. It was
time to extend the benefits of modern civilization westwards to the
Atlantic and southwards to the desert.
When, in 1903, anarchy in Morocco and incidents on the Algerian
frontier made it evident that some method of pacification and
modernization of the Moroccan territory had become necessary, Jaures
393
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
attacked any policy of military action. But it was not, as yet, with a
*
full realizationof the dangers of the Moroccan wasp-nest'. If the
thought of a war in Morocco appalled Jaures, what he feared was a

great colonial war comparable in difficulty and expense to the South


African War. Jaures attacked, that is to say, a policy of supporting
and extending the authority of the Sultan under the belief that the
Sultan could be controlled by France. Let France deal directly with
the independent tribes and, by peaceful penetration and aid, win them
to her side. To do any more than this meant uniting all Morocco
against the invader and would lead to a long, bloody, and expensive
war. A fraction of the money spent on that war would enable France
to modernize Morocco on generous terms that would win Moroccan
hearts.
There was some force in Jaures' argument. The Moroccans were
warlike and their country geographically was as difficult to conquer
as Algeria had been. If that precedent was conclusive, a long and
bloody war was in preparation. It was true, also, that the Sultan's

rights over the whole vast area were a fiction. Yet there was force in
fitienne's argument. It was impossible to negotiate 'with nothing', and

apart from the imperial authority, there was no organized authority


in Morocco at all. At any rate, the policy of controlling the Sultan,
ruling in his name and extending French control over the whole Empire,
was adopted All that remained was to clear up the diplomatic situation
. .

That was the task of Delcasse. He had learned the lesson of


Fashoda and was prepared to make a deal on a great scale with the
main obstacle to French control of Morocco Britain. Franco-British
relations, embittered by Fashoda, had not been improved by the events
of the Great Boer War. Within a few months of France's humiliation,
British pride was being humbled in its turn by a series of ignominious
defeats at the hands of well-armed farmers in tall hats. The press of
the world took a cruel pleasure in rubbing it in, and the Paris press was,
of course, more competently cruel than that of any other country. The
sacred person of Queen Victoria was insuJted and the anti-foreign
passions bred by the Dreyfus case made matters worse. Nor did the
attempt of the Right to use the hero of Fashoda as a stick to beat the
Republican traitors with, conduce to good relations. Nothing could
have seemed more remote, in 1900, than an 'Entente Cordiale' between
France and Britain.
There were other aspects of the situation. The Boer War had not
merely irritated British pride, it had revealed her isolation, for German
public opinion and the press had been as hostile as the French, and the
clumsy overtures of Joseph Chamberlain to Berlin had been brutally
rebuffed. The coming of Lord Lansdowne to the Foreign Office in
succession to Lord Salisbury meant that was now in the
British policy
hands of a man who believed that the days of 'splendid isolation* were
394
THE SHADOW OF WAR
over. Britain had had to draw close to the Triple Alliance ten years

before; she now had to make friends somewhere. The official visit of
thenew King, Edward VII, to Paris was a bold stroke which turned
out to be completely successful. The new British sovereign knew
Paris well, and he was far better qualified to charm the Parisian
population than was his nephew, the Tsar. It would be absurd,
of course, to attribute too much or, indeed, very much, to the per-
sonal influence of the King, but a fondness for France and a dislike
of his nephew, William II, made Edward VII a good symbol, if no
more, of the willingness of both Governments to forget Fashoda
and Bangkok. A visit of President Loubet to London sealed the
social side of the Entente. It only remained to complete the busi-
ness deal. It was not cas\, for as that eminent Francophile poet,
Kipling, said, French and British adventurers and empire builders
had been on each other", tr.uks for a long time in the past. But
Britain was willing to p.y a prcuy high price to escape from the awk-
ward position of having enemies on every side, ready to take advantage
of her difficulties; and German rudeness, as well as the open German
determination to build a navy big enough to threaten British naval
supremacy, made it impossible to believe that much could be done in
Berlin. As for France, the withdrawal of Britain from the German
orbit was a great general diplomatic gain, and the settlement of all out-
standing controversies would make the task of getting control of
Morocco easy.
In 1904, the negotiations were completed by the signing of a general
agreement. Most of the articles of the Franco-British agreements of
1904 were not important in their actual content. Long and tedious
negotiations over the right of French fishermen to use Newfoundland
beaches during the season, over the frontiers of Gambia or of Nigeria,
over the condominium in the New Hebrides, or over the disputes between
France and Siam, had little relevance to the main agreements except
that they illustrated the willingness of both Governments to remove, as
far as possible, all causes of dispute, even minor causes. Far more
serious were the really important surrenders and exchanges, the
abandonment by France of her long opposition to the British occupation
of Egypt, her surrender of her powers of delay and wrecking, and the
British recognition, in return, of a special French interest in Morocco,
an interest which, if it was represented to the public as a bulwark of the
status quo, was, in the minds of the negotiators and in the secret articles
of the agreement, equivalent to the acceptance, in advance, by Britain
of whatever action in Morocco should be determined on by France. If
the condition of the rickety 'empire' of Morocco called for active inter-
vention by France (as it would), British rights were saved by the agree-
ment of France not to fortify the coast opposite Gibraltar; and Spanish
claims, by the reservation to Spain of a special zone of influence.
395
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
If Delcass^'s calculations proved correct, if he had really bought
off all opposition, he had made a good bargain, for he had exchanged
the barren right of being a nuisance to Britain in Egypt for exclusive
rights of political interference in the rich and weak Moroccan state.
The rest of Europe would be presented with an agreement which it
might not like,but would have to swallow. The Dual Alliance had
won the long struggle for the hand of Britain, a conquest not only
intrinsically important but making it more certain than ever that
Italy's loyalty to the Triple Alliance would be very lukewarm. But at
the very moment of triumph, Delcasse*'s plans were endangered by the
threat of war between Japan and Russia, a threat that became a reality
two months before the formal signing of the agreement with Britain. 1
The most prominent and most acute critic of the Franco-Russian
Alliance had been Jean Jaures. He had not been hostile to it in the
beginning and he continued to oppose those uncompromising Socialists
who expressed a doctrinaire intolerance of an alliance with the Tsardom.
But Jaures was rightly convinced that the hopes of Russian aid for a
policy of revenge on Germany were illusions natural to romantic and
unpractical agitators like De*roulde, but quite beyond credence by any
responsible statesman. Like many, probably like most Frenchmen,
Jaures saw in the Alliance an insurance policy against sudden German
invasion. But unlike most Frenchmen, Jaures did not believe that such
an invasion was seriously to be feared. He contrasted the prudence
and restraint that had marked Bismarck's policy after 1871 with the
megalomania of Louis XIV and of Napoleon I. While most French-
men, who thought of the matter at all, saw in the Triple Alliance only
a menace to French safety, Jaures saw in it, so he said, a stabilizing
force. The Dual Alliance and the Triple Alliance were forces of
equilibrium. He asserted that Europe had never known such peace
as between 1871 and 1900, and he indulged in some polemics, not

very candid on either side, as to the claims of the period that followed
the Congress of Vienna and the period that followed the Peace of
Frankfort for the pre-eminence in peace.
According to Jaures, the question of Alsace-Lorraine would be
solved when the workers of France and of Germany had freed themselves
from their bourgeois and aristocratic masters, but war to free Alsace-
Lorraine would be a crime. Who knew what would come of that war?
The true Jacobin tradition was one of peace, and, with historical
accuracy, he contrasted the pacific policy of Robespierre in 1792 with
the combative follies of the Gironde which brought on the war in which
the Revolution exhausted herself. By tying" herself to Russia which
had no interest in restoring the lost provinces to France and a serious
political interest in not aiding the anti-authoritarian forces in Germany,
1
Without declaring war, the Japanese attacked and sank the Russian squadron in Port
Arthur harbour on February 8th, 1904. The agreement was signed on April 8th, 1904.
396
THE SHADOW OF WAR
France had, in fact, renounced all hopes of a restoration of Alsace-
Lorraine by force. Why should she not admit this fact and orient her
policy accordingly, instead of alarming Europe by verbal provocations
which she had no intention of turning into deeds? Were France to
renounce the idea of military revenge, Europe, even capitalist Europe,
might look forward to peace. For with an optimism that ignorance
alone could justify, Jaures asserted that the great questions of nationality
that had convulsed Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century
were now settled. There were irritating problems still to be solved but
they were minor. In spite of them 'there is no longer a single people
in Europe which cannot know the pride and joy of national develop-
ment, and the great upheavals, either the passionate efforts of
nationalities which wished to establish themselves, or the attempts at

repression which crushed them, have ended. No nation has now


. . .

a vital interest in altering the map of Europe.'


Holding this brlicf, Janres was naturally opposed to any excessive
deference, in internal or external policy, to the presumed wishes of
Russia. Jau res wished to be on good terms with the Tsar, with the
King of Italy, with the Kaiser. He rebuked the Italian Socialists for
their opposition to a visit of the Tsar to Rome and hinted that he
looked forward to the day when there could be a mutual exchange of
visits between Paris and Berlin. But he felt free to criticize Russian
policy in the Far and Near East and to denounce such atrocities as the
Kishinev pogroms. Whatever could be said for the Alliance as long
as it was confined to Europe, there was nothing to be said for extending
it to Asia, where it could only result in renewing the old enmity with

England and producing a totally unnecessary alienation of Japan.


Jaures incurred the enmity of most of the Right and of a good many
Radicals by the energy with which he denounced the dangers of a
servile following of Russia. Only the clergy, anxious to save the monks
and nuns, could support such a policy, he declared, and whether he
believed this or not, it was a good debating-point. The attacks on the
Republican Ministers of War and Marine, whom Jaures himself had
1

recently denounced for jingoism, were represented as being part of the


reactionary-clerical conspiracy/
The anxieties felt by Jaures were not felt by him alone, and by no
one were they more deeply felt or resented than by Delcasse*, whose
bold and hitherto successful foreign policy was suddenly endangered
by the folly of the rulers of Russia. As an ally, Russia had never been
satisfactory, always exercising a pressure approaching blackmail on her
partner. In the conduct of her quarrel with Japan she displayed no
regard for her own or French interests. For not only did the diversion
of Russian strength to the Pacific mean that she was not an effective
counter-weight to German military predominance in Europe, but her
1
General Andr6 and Camille Pelletan.
397
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
rival in the Pacific was the ally of Britain. France was now in the
ridiculousand dangerous position of close association with the ally of
the enemy of her ally. When war finally came; when for, reasons that
scandalized the French diplomats by their venal frivolity, the rulers of
Russia refused all compromise, the situation grew worse. There were
a few optimists who trusted in the Russian Army, but as defeat followed

defeat, their numbers dwindled. The Paris bankers, whose clients had
swallowed so many of the Russian loans in the past ten years, were
alarmed at the need for financing the war. The press might be induced,
by means involving considerable expense, to keep from the investing
public the depressing truth that the Tsar's Government was faced with
certain defeat and probably with revolution; but that truth would out.
To persuade Russia to make peace while there was yet time was a
tempting policy. Russia could not fulfil her part of the bargain while
army was in Manchuria, and France's financial support
the flower of her
of her ally was coming to look like throwing good money after bad.
But to advocate peace was to endanger the tepid loyalty of the Tsar
to the Alliance. Nicholas was obstinate and was egged on by his
cousin, the Kaiser, who had hopes of detaching the Tsar from his
republican ally. The Tsar, it was decided, must be left to find out
for himself that he could not win.
The same calculations lay behind a very risky policy that Delcassc
felt himself bound to follow. The last Russian hope was the use of the
Baltic fleet to take commandof the sea. That involved a voyage half
round the world a squadron without any bases en route and whose
for

port of destination, Vladivostok, could only be reached after defeating


or evading the enemy fleet. It would have been a very serious under-
taking for an efficient squadron; and the Russian squadron was very
far from efficient. Unless French naval officers would help, the Baltic
fleet would never reach Japanese waters. But how could help be given
without discovery which would infuriate the Japanese and their
English allies? As far as Russian incompetence allowed, French aid
was given to the Baltic fleet whose commander had refused the not
disinterested advice that he should approach Japan from South
America, a route which would make it impossible for the French to
help.
There seemed for a moment to be no way to save both the Alliance
and the Entente, for in crossing the North Sea, the nervous (and

possibly drunken) Russians fired and sank some British fishing vessels
which they took for lurking Japanese torpedo boats. There was panic
in Paris. War between Britain and Russia would be the last straw,
but Russia climbed down and an international investigation was agreed
on. Meanwhile the doomed fleet moved on to Dakar, to Dtego-Suarez,
;

to Indo-China, everywhere producing a bad impression on the French


officers who had been chosen to help it to evade the rigours of neutrality.

39B
THE SHADOW OF WAR
The Japanese were not deceived by the elaborate comedy and the
ingenious French evasions of their obligations as neutrals. There was
some ground to fear that the Japanese might attack the fleet as it lay
in Indo-Chinese waters, but that danger passed and the Russians sailed
on to be annihilated at Tsushima.
The game was now up, and the best that could be hoped for was a
speedy peace which would enable the Tsardom to defeat the revolution
that was obviously on the way. Although the Peace of Portsmouth
came in time to do that, Russia was, as an ally, almost useless. If
there was to be a showdown with Germany, France, from a military
point of view, would have to depend almost entirely on herself.

II

The possibilities <>f the. situation were not missed in Berlin. The
Franco-British agreement showed up, as baseless, the great illusion of
German policy, the belief that Britain would have to accept German
terms for collaboration, as she could not successfully settle her disputes
with France. The war in the East offered two possibilities of action.
As the Russian defeats continued, the authority of the Tsardom was
increasingly weakened; Russia was entering on a time of troubles and
the Kaiser might hope to play on the fears of his cousin, the Tsar.
Britain, after all, was the ally ofJapan; Germany could make attractive
offers of support to Russia, and the Tsar in turn, to save himself, could

(itwas hoped) force France to choose between the new Entente with
Britain and the Alliance with Russia. On the other hand, if it was
possible to show France in some conspicuous way that British support
would be feeble, the French, in their disillusionment, might abandon
the Delcasse policy and leave Britain once more in unsplendid isolation.
Which of these policies would be tried depended on the general
situation. The French, by sending the Tallandier mission to Fez to
impose 'reforms' on the Sultan, and by making a bargain with Spain,
obviously intended to dig themselves in in Morocco before any opposi-
tion could be organized. Biilow, against the wishes of the Kaiser,
determined to strike a dramatic attitude. On March 3ist, 1905, the
Kaiser and the Chancellor landed at Tangier and in a speech that was
heard round the world, William II insisted both on the interest of
Germany in Morocco and on the full independence of the Sultan whom
the French were obviously trying to reduce to the position of a client
prince. It was an Ems telegram over again.
It was France was
Delcasse*'s obstinate refusal to face the fact that

running exactly the which had been the nightmare of the statesmen
risk
of the early years of the Republic, that alarmed his colleagues. How-
ever confident he might be that Germany was bluffing, he could not be
certain. However plausible might be his formal replies to the German
399
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
complaints that they had been kept in the dark over the Moroccan
He had stolen
settlement, they did not affect the realities of the situation.
a march on Germany; he had greatly extended French power in one of
the few important areas still open to colonial expansion. The greatest
military power on the Continent saw no reason for submitting to such
an exclusion.The British Navy and the tiny British Army could not
save Franceand the French Army under Andr6, like the Navy
under Pelletan, was not in the highest state of efficiency, while the
state of the public mind was made plain by the political necessity
of the reduction of the term of military service from three years
to two.
The shrewd financier who had succeeded Combes as Prime Minister
was fully aware of all these considerations. Rouvier, unlike the 'Little
Father', did not allow his Cabinet to disintegrate into a collection of
departmental Ministers each doing what was right in his own eyes.
The anarchy within the executive, which had arisen from the concen-
tration of all the energies of Combes on the war with the Church and
had allowed Delcass6 to carry on, without any supervision, his own
foreign policy, was now over.
The professional diplomats, who admired Delcass6's energy and
firmness of purpose, yet saw clearly enough that he had kept his
colleagues and his countrymen, as well as the Germans, too much in
the dark. The France of 1905 and 1906 was not prepared to fight
an almost hopeless war to exclude Germany from any share in the
Moroccan settlement. If Germany was willing to go to the edge of
war, France would withdraw. It was possible that Germany was
bluffing, but it was certain that France was not in a position even to
bluff.
Delcasse in vain tried to blind his colleagues to the realities of the
situation by lavish promises of British help, promises that do little
credit to his candour or, alternatively, to his judgment The daring
pilot was dropped, and Rouvier had to steer the ship away from the
rocks and, after wriggling a little, accept the German demand for an
international conference. It was a spectacular triumph for Germany

which, at the same time, had managed to induce the panic-struck and
isolated Tsar at Bjorko to sign an alliance treaty with Germany, a

treaty that Nicholas II had to renounce, but whose mere existence


showed how broken a reed the Russian Alliance was.
As long as Germany had any hopes that the Tsar would keep his
word and bring France over to the German side, she was willing to
make handsome concessions to France in Morocco. But when the
pressure of Russian and French Ministers had forced Nicholas II to
withdraw his signature, when American intervention under the
energetic direction of Theodore Roosevelt was securing the end of the
Japanese War, Genrtany, if she was to rap any benefit* from her
400
THE SHADOW OF WAR
activity, must do so in Morocco itself. In this last policy she was only
in a minor degree successful. Only Austria gave her any real support
at the Algeciras conference. Britain defended the French thesis with
great tenacity; the Entente had stood the first strain put on it and a
secret but decisive event, the threat of war, had been followed by staff

negotiations between Britain and France; begun by a Conservative


Prime Minister they were continued by a Liberal. If any country was
isolated it was Germany. In return, the actual situation in Morocco
was left more ambiguous than Delcasse had hoped for. The Sultan
was not yet reduced to the situation of a Bey of Tunis, and the French
and Spanish rights of intervention were not only limited, they were
regulated by an international agreement which meant that the develop-
ment of the Moroccan situation which was sure to produce further
opportunities for French action would, at the same time, make that
action of the greatest diplomatic interest to the signatories of the treaty,
especially to the country whiv'h had played for such high stakes and
had gained so little.

Ill

France had been lucky. The Japanese War, followed by the first
Russian revolution of 1905, the forcing on the Tsar of a parliament
and the struggles between the Duma and the Autocracy, had made
France's ally useless in the European balance of power. Germany
had, in fact, lost a chance of easy military victory over France, a chance
which grew less with every month that passed, for the Tsardom survived!
Russia began, very slowly at first, to recover from the war and, ex-
cluded from the Far East, to turn her attention to the Balkans where,
of course, she ran across the interests of Austria. The German
diplomatic difficulties which had plagued Bismarck plagued his
successors. Vienna and St. Petersburg had to be kept, if possible,
from irreparable hostility, but if a choice had to be made, it would
have to be Vienna. Worse still, the Anglo-Russian agreements of 1907
meant that the old wedge that might be driven between Britain and
France, the hostility of France's ally, Russia, to France's friend,
Britain, had lost its dividing power. The Entente of 1907 might be
a good deal less cordial than the Entente of 1904, but it marked un-
mistakably the decision of Britain, if she had to take sides, to take the
anti-German side. From the French point of view, the diplomatic
situation was rapidly improving. She had a powerful and, as
Algeciras has shown, a dependable friend in Britain, and she had a
convalescent and, as the aftermath of Bjorko had shown, a moderately
dependable ally in Russia. Italy, at Algeciras, had not even pretended
to support her nominal ally, Germany, and France did not need to
401
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
worry seriously any longer about the Italian front, even if the soldiers
were not as fully aware of this as were the diplomats. 1
In Franco-Russian relations, the great power of a debtor was now
fully revealed. France was committed to Russian financial stability;
about a quarter of French foreign investments were in Russia, mainly
in Government loans, and the number of French investors with Russian
holdings was over a million and a half. In such circumstances, it was
difficult to avoid throwing good money after bad. Despite the obvious
shakiness of the Autocracy and the opposition of the Socialists and of
others to the financial bolstering up of the tottering tyranny, Witte
was able to finance his 1906 loans and thus defy the Duma. Not only
did Russia blackmail her creditor, she was able to dictate or, at least,
strongly to influence the course of French investment in other countries.
It was due to a Russian protest that Hungarian loans were no longer
admitted to the Paris market; and, in loans to the Balkan states, Russian
views were allowed to influence the choice of clients, of Serbia over
Bulgaria, for instance. Of course, the forces at work were not ex-
clusively Russian. The fact that the armies of the Balkan League of
1912 were trained and armed by French officers and French firms was
largely due to the conditions attached to loans to these countries.
Lule Burgas and Kumanovo were victories for the French loan market
as well as for the Greusot guns and the French military missions. In
the same way, the better relations between France and Italy were
reflected in increased French holdings of Italian loans, while, in any
case, Italy, unlike Russia, was no longer at the mercy of foreign money
markets where Government financing was concerned. By 1914, the
fifty-two Russian securities listed on the Paris market and totalling over
2
12,000,000,000 francs held France firmly to her imperial ally. She
could make conditions, that loans should be spent on strategic railways
for instance, but that was all.
In her relations with Germany, France might have used her financial
power much more adroitly. The privilege of admission to the great
sburce of cheap money, the Paris market, was worth a great deal to a
rapidly expanding economy working on a rather narrow credit basis.
To make Germany pay for financial privileges in return for concessions
over Morocco was a plan attributed to M. Caillaux who, in any case,
was not very enthusiastic about Russian loans, and Germany was, at
times, ready to talk business. But sentiment and the widespread
conviction that financing Germany was merely financing a future
1
One consequence of the Entente was the withdrawal of British support from Siam.
That kingdom had been pursuing, through most of the later part of the nineteenth century,
an aggressive policy towards its feeble eastern neighbours in Cambodia and Laos. There
was constant friction, but, in 1907, the main aim of French policy was achieved, the two
Cambodian provinces occupied by Siam were retroceded and French control of the Mekong
was secured, as well as a greater share for France in the development of Siam itself. It
was a substantial if not conspicuous gain for the Colonial party.
1
About 500,000,000 or $2,000,000,000.
402
THE SHADOW OF WAR
enemy were too strong. German firms were, of course, in close con-
nection with French industry, especially in the stecJ industry, but the
savings of the French peasant and bourgeois went, not to foster German
war preparations, but to the diminution of the complete un preparedness
for war of Russia.

403
CHAPTER II

THE PLEASANT LAND OF FRANCE


I

Germans have a simile 'as well-off as God in France' which,


-L whatever exact origin, reveals the awe and envy with which less
its

fortunate lands regarded France before the revolutionary impact of


modern industrialism. There were other countries as fertile as France,
there was England for example, but no other country was as fertile and
as large. The King of France and Navarre, in 1 789, ruled as many
subjects as the Empress of All the Russias or the Holy Roman Emperor,
but how much better worth ruling were the increasingly rich subjects
of Louis XVI than the inhabitants of the poverty-stricken lands of the
Romanovs and Habsburgs! From the flax arid cereals of the north, to
the vines, the olives, the oranges of the south, the wealth and variety of
French production was incomparable. Bad political and social organ-
ization, the backwardness of many regions, the inferiority in technical
skill of the south (where the iron plough was still a rarity) to the north,
could not weaken the economic strength of a people so industrious, so
resourceful, so abundantly provided by nature with the sources of
natural wealth. More truly than Virgil's Italy, France was 'magna
parens frugum'.
That France did not preserve this superiority was due in some degree
to the wars that followed the Revolution; those wars gave England a
great start. But that was not the whole story, as the case of Germany
showed. The fundamental change that slowed up French relative pro-
gress was technical.What France lacked was what suddenly became
of overwhelming importance coal and iron. Coal was not merely
relatively scarce in France; it was poor in quality and deposited in small
and scattered pockets, hard to work and hard to reach. Only in the
north was there the basis for a great modern industrial area. France
was not so badly off for iron, but her abundant deposits in Lorraine,
because of their high sulphur content, were unusable for modern
industrial purposes. Moving from an industrial economy based on
wood and iron to one based on coal and steel, France suddenly found
herself handicapped, not helped, by nature. Nor was this all, for the
Revolution, by greatly accelerating the growth of a peasant proprietary,
404
THE SHADOW OF WAR
diminished the supply of helpless, poverty-stricken labourers so oppor-
tunely provided for the needs of the new manufacturing class in England
and Germany.
French heavy industry was slow to develop and backward in almost
every respect. It was thought necessary, not merely to protect it by
high tariffs, but by absolute prohibitions of imports. It was not until
the Gobden treaty of 1860 with England that competition was legally
permitted, and that treaty, sacrificing heavy industrial production of
the new
type to the needs of the basic French forms of production, wine
and silk, showed how strong was the bias in favour of the old forms of
economic activity, for, if the treaty had to be imposed by the will of
Napoleon III, it was welcomed by the more vocal elements of the class
which the Emperor cherished above all others, the owners of the soil of
France. Like a Chinese* Emperor, the Emperor of the French was the
protector of the plough, the hoe, the silkworm.
France was still \ y rich: \\:ir and defeat were to prove that, but she
< i

was not rich in thr new \\a\s. Her Manchesters, her Pittsburghs, her
EssensandElberfckK \\ ei e small; progress was turning only a few regions
of France into imitations of Lancashire, Westphalia or western Pennsyl-
vania. The growth of French wealth was, as far as export trade was
concerned, still based on the skill of highly-trained, highly-individualistic
workers, workers on the land or on special raw materials. What two
experts said of the price of Burgundies was true of far more than wine.
'Quality, that is the essential cause of the variations of the price of a
product which is a monopoly, sought after by the customer because of
its and its flavour.' 1 French external commerce was mainly in
fineness
luxuries and in unique luxuries at that. This, as much as the scarcity
of coal and iron, accounted for the relative decline of the French
merchant navy. The typical French export was valuable but not
bulky, whether it was a case of Romance Conti, a Worth or Paquin hat
or dress, the novels of Zola or the person of Sarah Bernhardt. With a
stable population which did not provide even the minimum crude
labour force for such new industries as grew up, there was no French
equivalent to the mass emigration of British and German and Italian
subjects that enriched the United States and the shipping lines. Many
emigrants took ship for America at Cherbourg, but few of them in
French ships and still fewer of them were French. France was not of
the first importance in the new world commerce that was growing so
rapidly. She did not want the mass crude imports of wheat, wool and
the like that were needed by Britain and Germany and she had no
surplus of mass-produced exports, alive or dead.
Even as late as 1906, when high tariffs had encouraged the concen-
tration of capital in the home market and when modern industry was
at last taking hold of France, the second most valuable French export
1 MM. Germain Martin and Paul Martenot.
405
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
was wine and the first was silk-goods; the latter largely, though to a
decreasing degree, still made from silk grown in France. Other French
industries working largely for external markets, cosmetics, early fruit,

flowers, luxury sweetmeats, in the aggregate not contemptible items in


the international balance of payments, were simple extensions of French
agriculture. If the great oak forests of the Centre, planted by Colbert
to provide, every hundred and sixty years, timber for the fleet, were now
merely relics of the past, the great plain of the Beauce, out of which
the Cathedral of Chartres rises, and many other regions of France were
still producing wheat on a scale not contemptible even by the standards

of Minnesota or Manitoba. Horses and cattle, the highly integrated


beet-sugar industry of the north, the sacred names of the great wine
regions, the Clos Vougeot, Hermitage, Haut Brion, Chateauneuf du
Pape, Cognac and Epernay, seemed to show that the land of France
was as fruitful as ever, as great a store of material and moral wealth as
it had ever been.

The decline in the French birth-rate had many consequences, but


one of the most striking was the effect on the countryside. From the
middle of the century on, rural depopulation began to trouble observers,
especially those who really believed, what nearly all Frenchmen pro-
fessed to believe, that the peasantry was the backbone of the nation.
The rural population that had been 75-6 per cent, of the total in 1846,
had per cent, in 1886 and was to fall to 57-9 per cent, in
fallen to 64-1

1906. And these figures were worse than they looked. For many
persons included in the rural population were not directly connected
with the land; they were officials, policemen, schoolmasters, rentiers,
little tradesmen. With the decay of the handy-man on the farm, there
was room for more specialized workers, carpenters, wheelwrights and
the like in the villages and little towns. If the true farm population was
1
computed, it was shrinking faster than even the census figures showed.
The class that diminished most rapidly was that of the day-labourer
who owned a little land of his own.
Sometimes, the decline of this
class represented a advance; the labourer had acquired enough
social
land to keep him and no longer needed to go out to work. But more
commonly he had sold his scrap of land and had migrated. In some
regions economic disaster accounted in great part for the decline in
population. In the mountainous parts of western Burgundy, bad
prices for wool and timber made life too hard. The ravages of phyl-
1
There were many difficulties in using the comparative figures; the standards of exact-
ness in the early censuses left a good deal to be desired. Thus an apparent rise in the
number of women engaged in agriculture merely reflected a more careful discrimination:
1
farmers wives were now counted as of the farming population, but the number of un-
part
married women working on the land was falling. There were, too, minor causes of error
in the formal figures. Thus in one region of Burgundy the figures of rural depopulation,
bad as they were, would have been worse had it not been for the numerous boarded-out
children from Paris sent there by the municipal ^ocial services. In some communes they
were 10 per cent, of the population.
4o6
THE SHADOW OF WAR
loxera ruined many little wine-growers all over central and southern
France. Improved communications weakened the economic position
of the wine-grower who produced a good local wine that had had its
own market, until the railway brought Burgundy and Bordeaux to
compete with his speciality. As for the growers of coarse and cheap
wines, the disease not only destroyed the vines, but as the purchase of
the immune American stocks cost money, made recovery impossible.
There was a proletarianization of a large class. 1 When it was dis-
covered that wine could be profitably produced on the sandy shores of
the Mediterranean, the new vineyards represented capitalist enterprise
on a big scale and, when the competition of the great Algerian bonanza
vineyards came in, the day of the small grower was almost over. He
sometimes abandoned the fight altogether and grew potatoes or other
ignoble crops where once the rows of vines had run; more often he
abandoned the land where s<> little profit was to be made and moved
into the towns.
Not not nearly all, the rural depopulation was due to economic
all,
disaster. Soinc of the richest and most fertile parts of France were the
worst sufferers, and some of the most famous and virile stocks seemed to
approach extinction without any very tangible material reason explain-
ing their decline. In lower Normandy and in Gascony, the race seemed
doomed to death. In Normandy, excessive drinking added a high
death-rate to a low birth-rate to hasten the decline of that 'bold
peasantry a country's pride' which 'once destroyed can never be sup-
plied'. If there were not many deserted villages, there were plenty of
deserted cottages. For want of workers the most fertile land lost value:
a loss which, in turn, weakened the*economic strength of the rural
bourgeoisie and petty gentry.
There was a sharp, in some places a disastrous fall in the price of
land in the bad years of the early 'eighties, a fall which was just being
recovered-from before the beginning of the war of 1914. The loss did
not fall on all types of land equally. Where valuable cash crops like
beet were possible, the values held up, but in general, arable land
suffered much more than pasture. But land was no longer an asset that
was sure to increase in value. The traditional French peasant, so land
hungry that he was ready for the most desperate labour and the most
rigorous thrift to buy an acre or two, was no longer to be found in some
regions of France. He did not even care to own his house. That pride
in becoming a 'proprietor' which had anchored previous generations to
the soil was now not always a strong enough motive to conquer dislike
of the dullness, the hardships, the poor monetary returns of work on the
land.
In the old days, the poorer regions had exported their surplus popu-
1
Not implausibly, M. Maurras attributes tKe decline of the Royalist party in Provence
to the ruin of the bourgeois by the phylloxera.
407 DD
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MCfDERN FRANCE
lation, not for good but for a season, to the more fertile regions.
Brittany, Auvergne, Flanders from their teeming populations had pro-
vided labour for other provinces. Sometimes the labour exported was
not farm labour but special crafts. The Greuse was famous for its
wandering masons. But now these regions were less ready to supply
seasonal labour. It was not that they could or did hold their popula-

tion. There was still a great Breton emigration, but it was not an
annual movement to the farms for the harvest, but to the new industrial
centres for life. A mountain region like the Aveyron had half its young
men living outside the department, most of them little likely to return.
France still needed seasonal labourers, but more and more she got
them from outside. If the nomadic workers of the Cambre*sis still
moved south to hoe the beet, then to reap the wheat in the great plains
round Paris, the 'Camberlots' were followed by Belgian Flemings,
organized in little squads with a French-speaking leader. In the east,
before the war of 1914, the first Polish labourers were beginning
to appear, while in the eastern half of the Midi, Italians and, in the
western half, Spaniards were coming in to replace the vanished French-
men. There were even attempts to bring in Kabyle labourers from
the mountains of Algeria. The immigrants, however indispensable,
forced down the wages of the surviving French labourers and still further
accelerated the flight from the land.
Yet the productivity of the land did not fall: it rose. The disappear-
ance of a cheap and abundant labour force compelled landowners to
turn to machinery. It was not surprising that between 1892 and 1908,
the number of reapers and binders in Gascon department (Haute
Garonne) rose from 60 to 1,200.* The bigger proprietors were forced to
experiment with new fertilizers, new crops, new seeds. It was easier
now to do away with the remnants of the strip system. The Revolution
had held up the French enclosure movement and there were still many
tiny properties scattered over a wide area and jealously watched by
their owners. To avoid manuring a neighbour's land, strips were left
to nature to fertilize. A high level of cultivation was impossible; even
in a department as near Paris as the Oise, on the Montagne de Lian-
court the strip system made the use of the plough impossible.
The tenant-farmers who, in the north, were the most enterprising
exploiters of the soil were now in a good bargaining position. Leases
became longer ; eighteen years was not uncommon, and as it was
customary to negotiate the renewal of the lease three years before it fell
in, it was possible for the outgoing tenant to deal on equal terms, not
only with his landlord but with the new tenant. In some regions a kind
of tenant-right sprang up. The peasant proprietor usually worked
much less land than the lease-holder did; he had less capital and less
interest in improvements, but the big capitalist farmer, whether owner
or tenant, was now an industrialist in temper. Gone were the days
408
THE SHADOW OF WAR
when an annotated edition of the Georgics was regarded as a suitable
method of inserting a few notions of scientific farming into a purely
classical and mathematical education. Each department had had,
since the secure establishment of the Republic, a departmental professor
of agriculture, and there were demonstration plots, model farms and
travelling demonstrations. But the obstinacy of the small farmer made
him less ready to learn than was desirable, as hi?
shortage of capital
debarred him from some improvements, while his ferocious independ-
ence made the organization of co-operatives very difficult. There were
regions where co-operation succeeded brilliantly: among the dairy
farmers of the west; the wine- and olive-growers of Provence and
Languedoc; and among the cheese-makers of tb>* Jura where it was an
old story. But compared with Denmark or Belgium, if not with Eng-
land or America, co-operation was backward in rural France. Yet the
worst years were over by 1914; there had been a rapid rise in the
standard of living; the worst losses from the crash in land values had
been recovered; the economically weakest members of the rural com-
munity had been swept off the land.
There were still black patches. The wine-growers of Languedoc
and of parts of Champagne had serious price grievances which they
brought to the public attention by 'strikes and riots. More ominous,
for those who thought of the rural population as necessarily politically
'healthy' and 'stable', were the first inroads of trade-unionism of an
extreme type among the farm labourers, especially in the Centre, and the
rising tide of revolt among the share-croppers, the mitayers> whose bar-
gain with the owner of the land was likely to be one-sided.
The wood-cutters of the Centre, badly underpaid and exploited by
middlemen, were often on strike in the last years of the nineteenth
century. There were local trade unions and they were generally suc-
cessful, but their success brought about an almost equally complete
organization of the employers; and the fact that so great a part of the
forests of France belong to the State complicated matters further. The
class war had entered Arcady.
The growth of capitalist wine-growing in the south had as a corol-
lary the growth of a rural labouring class without much hope of escap-
ing from the wage system and consequently with plenty of reason for
combative organization. There were strikes in such regions as that
round B&iers and a marked shift to the extreme Left in local elections.
*

Optimistic Socialists threatened and timid proprietors feared something


like a new Jacquerie. But the unions were, as a rule, not long-lived, and
the movement merged with that of the general protest against the low
price of wine and other general economic grievances led by Marcellin
Albert which culminated in the famous mutiny of the seventeenth
1
infantry.
''Seep. 424.
409
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
The share-cropping system in France was very old and, despite the
criticisms of many experts, showed no signs of disappearing in the pre-
war years. It could work well, for both parties, where the bargain was
concluded on really equal terms and where the proprietor was person-
ally interested in the land he owned. But in some regions, especially in
the Centre, between the working share-cropper and the owner there was
a middleman, who bore the odious name of 'Farmer-General'. 1 The
middleman dealt with the landowner on one hand and the would-be
tenant on the other. He was a speculator: and in his hands the owner-
ship of the land appeared in its ugliest aspect, as a naked property right
without any social obligations and without any very obvious social
utility. The mitayers> bidding against each other, were forced to accept
annual leases; they were forced to buy fertilizers and machinery from
the same middleman; there was nothing to set-off against this tyranny,
since the middlemen usually refused to make repairs. Some of the
worst abuses of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland were
repeated in twentieth-century France. Indeed, these abuses had been
one of the great rural grievances of 1 789. But the burden which was
thought most intolerable was the 'settler's tax'. The whole principle of
metayage seemed to be summed up in its etymology: it was a half-and-
half system; the owner of the land provided the land; the tenant pro-
vided the labour; the results of this partnership were equally divided.
That, in addition, a payment in cash should be enforced was considered
a breach of natural justice and was far more resented than were the
extra payments in kind enforced in the west. It was no wonder that
the region where the cash payment was most common and most burden-
some, the Bourbonnais, should have been for a century past notorious
for its Left politics.
In the region round Paris, the social problems of agriculture were
not those of the mttayers but of the labourers. This fertile region, so
near a great market, was in the hands of small proprietors working their
own land and of great capitalist farmers holding on long lease, in some
cases working the same farm for generations. The socially and politi-
cally disturbing body here was the farm labourer working for the capi-
talist farmer. He had many grievances; he was often so badly lodged
that he openly admitted he was better off in the Army; his food, when,
it was supplied, was monotonous, and he wanted and did not always get

what he thought his due, a ration of wine or cider with each meal. He
also wanted a rise in wages or, still more, a regular wage, for more and
more he was employed on piece-work, paid a good deal at the most busy
times and little or nothing in the slack season. He was assimilated in
many ways to the town worker and reacted in much the same way.
The great strikes that broke out in 1906 and in subsequent years were,
1
The Farmers-General of the old regime were the tax-farmers; their rapacity was part
of the historical tradition of all Frenchmen.

410
THE SHADOW OF WAR
i

in some regions, directed against piece-work which the rural labourer


was coming to regard with the same dislike as the factory worker. The
militant trade-unionists of the Paris region saw a chance to spread their
syndicalist doctrines, and there were riots, attacks on farmhouses, mass
intimidation of blacklegs, all the warlike apparatus of an industrial
strike. Taken by surprise, the farmers yielded, and there followed on
this success a sudden spread of trade-unionism among the farm workers.
But all agricultural unions were shallowly rooted; they never enrolled
more than a small minority of the farm workers and these chiefly among
specialists, the forest workers of the Centre, the market-gardeners of the
Paris district. By 1914, rural unionism was little more important than
it had been before 1906.
In the year of her great ordeal, from an agricultural point of view,
France was better off than her chief enemy or than her chief ally. She
was normally capable of feeding herself; she ranked next to the United
States and Russia, h' ui.uii at a distance, as a wheat producer, and against
(

the decline in the pioduction of flax, hemp, silk, wool, could be set great
increases in cattle, cereals, wine and fruit production. If her rural
population was declining, it was more important than was the case in
either Germany or England. It was from the land that there came
most of the infantrymen who lived, and fought, and died so hard. In
Macedonia, where the English infantryman was so often at a loss, the
tough French peasant from Auvergne or the Jura was soon as much at
home as the Serbians or Greeks. Despite the loss of so much of her
most fertile and best-farmed land, France, hi 1914-18, was not at the
mercy of blockade and counter-blockade. There were in 1914 many
urban critics who thought that the peasant was pampered, by protec-
tion, by subsidy, by praise; that he was too conservative, too individual-
istic, too little affected by the great currents of the age. In peace-time,
most of these charges could be justified, but in war-time the great fault
of the French peasant was that he was now not numerous enough; there
,were not enough men to fill the ranks, not enough women to feed the
nation in arms. Or rather, there were just enough, to hold out to the
end.

II

The speciality of French industry for centuries had been luxuries,


and French predominance in the agreeable arts of life was greater in
the nineteenth than in any previous century. In all the western lands
the growth of a great new middle class provided a market for all kinds
of luxuries that, in previous centuries, could be sold only to great nobles,
to financiers, to a few great merchants. In place of Lord Bristol making
the grand tour and leaving his name to fashionable hotels, there were
thousands of middle-class tourists, less lavish in the individual case, but
411
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
farmore important in the mass than a hundred English peers. Many
by the rise of the tourist traffic; the hitherto grim and
countries benefited
despised Switzerland more than most, but France was the greatest
*

gainer of all.
Paris had been a rendezvous of Europe since the thirteenth century,
but now she surpassed herself. As a centre of intellectual as well as of
other fashions, she was unrivalled. The modern Cagliostro, Candide,
or Casanova found in Paris what his predecessors had found in Venice,
diversion or victims. By the end of the Second Empire it was already
true that 'good Americans when they die go to Paris' and more and
more Americans were in a position to anticipate death. It was not only
Paris that benefited. New watering-places, Trouville, Biarritz, brought
visitors who would have been bored by Pau or Cannes. The unifica-
tion and moralization of Germany, with its adverse effect on such
gambling resorts as Baden-Baden, made a place for Monte Carlo in the
providentially independent principality of Monaco. The little Italian
town of Nizza became the greatest tourist city of the world and, as Nice,
became and remained one of the largest French cities, more populous
than Nantes or Bordeaux. Vichy, Aix-les-Bains, and the rest replaced
Homburg and the other German spas as the greatest of inland watering-
places; and to the world of feminine fashion, if not to the improvers of
horse-breeding, Auteuil and Longchamps became more important than
Ascot or Goodwood.
In addition to the temporary or permanent pleasure seekers, France,
and above all Paris, became the Mecca of artists. Thousands of young
men and women began to think of being artists as, in an earlier century,
they might have thought of being monks and nuns. There were some
genuine vocations among the many false ones, but real and bogus artists
had this in common they all regarded Paris as the one place to learn or
practise their craft. Gone were the days when a visit to Rome or
Florence or, odd as it may seem, to Dusseldorf, was essential to the
English or American aspirant to the status of artist. In the visual arts,
Paris was now as dominant as any Italian city had ever been. Not only
were most of the greatest as well as the most popular artists French, but
those who were not were profoundly influenced by France, and for
shorter or longer periods dwellers within the sacred precincts. Van Gogh,
Sisley, Picasso,Modigliani were almost as much the glory of France as
Monet, Manet, Cezanne or Degas. The immediate economic result of
the work of Sisley or Cezanne was not great; it was only the fact that
he was heir to a sizable fortune that saved Cezanne from the depressing
life and early death of Sisley. France had it both ways; she had the
artists who, in the long run, were to be the best lock-up investments, for
dealers like Vollard as well as for Moscow and Philadelphia million-
aires. But she had also the immediately popular artists, Dore*, Detaille,
Carolus Duran and Van Dongen. More wealthy foreigners than Mr..
412
THE SHADOW OF WAR
Thaddeus Sholto helped to enrich France by being 'partial to the
modern French school', meaning by that, those later Gorois and the
Bouguereaus of all epochs which are so poorly esteemed to-day.
Another source of French wealth and influence was the invention,
or the description of the life of the professional 'artist', in letters or life
as well as in paint,by Murger. The new sea-coast of Bohemia was in
Paris, and from George du Maurier to Rudyard Kipling, George Moore
and Ernest Hemingway, literary men encouraged the migration to Paris
of large numbers of persons, the expense of whose social and artistic
education was an important invisible export for France. 1
Even rnore profitable, economically, was the growth of the old Paris
industry of female dressmaking. Paris had long been the leader in
fashion, but fashion had been loss versatile and the concern of fewer
persons than it became in the nineteenth century. To dress his wife
in the latest Paris fashions was even more the duty of an American
millionaire than to French chateau on Fifth Avenue or Nob
fill his
Hill with bad French Not only the dressmakers, but the
pictures.
jewellers, the makers of cosmetics, the designers of furniture, made Paris
the Mecca of rich women with money to spend, and the heroine of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes showed sound economic sense when she concen-
trated her attention 011 Goty, Gartier and the other historic names.
Paquin and Worth were symbolic names in the total French economy,
worthy of a place beside Clicquot, Panhard and Hennessy.
The immense importance of these luxury trades helped to maintain
in France the tradition of the small workshop, of the semi-independent

producer, of the man who could do something better than anybody else
or something that nobody else could do. Even as late as 1870, Paris
was still overwhelmingly a city of small workshops, and the lists of
communards which give -their occupations show how far from being a
homogeneous, factory-organized, uniform proletariat was the working
population that fought, unknowingly, for the Marxian tradition of the
future revolution. Not only in Paris did the small shop survive; watch-
makers in the Jura, knife-makers in the Forez, silk- weavers in the Lyon-
nais gave to French industry and French life its stability, its resistance
to modernization, to trustification, to what most of the outer world

thought progress.
Yet even France could not resist the spirit of the age. Modern
capitalist industry on a great scale was beginning to affect French
society profoundly under the Empire and it advanced with giant strides
under the Republic. The application of power-driven machinery to
many industries hitherto employing only human labour came later in
France than in England or Germany. But the hand-looms that had
1
In an age when Hiram Power's nude 'Greek Slave* could only be shown in parts of its
sculptor's native land if wrapped in muslin, and when the schools of the Royal Academy
in London did not allow persons under twenty-one to draw from the nude unless they were,
married, it was easy for Paris to attract custom.
413
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
eked out the incomes of the labourers in the northern departments were
destroyed by the new power-looms. Even industries like lace-making,
that were still monopolized by home workers, suffered badly from the
competition of machine-made substitutes. The best lace of Bayeux or
other centres could not be successfully copied in a factory, but cheap
machine-made lace destroyed the market for the hand-made. All but the
most expensive pottery suffered in the same way. Old potteries might
continue to flourish, but machines largely replaced men. Yet these
changes not only came later in France than elsewhere, they came less
completely. Only in the heavy industries, in mining and metallurgy,
did the great capitalist unit completely replace the old workshop.
There was still room, if narrowing room, for the small master with a few
workers or the individual worker employing only himself. This section
of the petty bourgeoisie resisted, with more success than one would have
thought possible, the rivalry of the factory system.
Another section of the lower middle-class that suffered from new
methods was that of the shopkeepers. Paris was a pioneer in the
development of the department store; the great shops, Samaritaine,
Printemps and the rest were among the sights of the city, and the
American tourists of the Qyaker City type spent as much time in the
Grands Magasins du Louvre as in the Museum. Every sizable pro-
vincialtown had its imitation or branch of a great Paris shop, and there
followed the growth of the chain grocer's shops, sometimes faintly dis-
guised as co-operatives, chains with hundreds of branches whose
managers increased the numbers of the salariat if not of the proletariat.
The son or daughter of the lower middle-class family, forced to become
an employee in any case, naturally preferred, if possible, to be an
employee of the State. The great fortunes of the millionaire drapers
and grocers were accumulated at the social cost of weakening the
ambition and tenacity of the lower middle-class, while on the other
hand, they not only in general reduced the costs of distribution, but by
adopting fixed prices saved time and diminished interest in purchasing.
Forced by the quasi free-trade of the Gobden treaty to modernize
their equipment, French manufacturers in the 'sixties held their own,

though with difficulty. The return to protection assured them of a


home market and, in some branches of industry, above all in those
connected with shipping, the Government helped by actual subsidies.
There was a circular process at work. High tariffs on raw materials,
such as steel, made it impossible for French shipyards to compete with
English, so they were subsidized. High prices for French ships made
it
impossible for French shipowners to compete, so they were subsidized.
The subsidy for shipbuilding had one absurd effect, for since it was
more easily earned by building sailing ships than by building steamers,
France saw her sailing fleet doubled at a time when in all other countries
the sailing ship was obsolete. And however well adapted for some
414
THE SHADOW OF WAR
forms of traffic, like the transport of aluminium ore from New Caledonia,
the sailing ships were, they were in general a poor investment, as was
finally recognized in 1^03, when the subsidy law was amended. But
the main cause of the decline of France from her place as the second
maritime power has been given above; she did not export or import the
bulky cargoes which were the basis of profitable shipowning and, con-
sequently, French shipowners found it hard to compete in the open
market of international transport. For her size and wealth France had
a smaller overseas trade than her rivals and the proportion of that trade
carried in French ships was only 30 per cent, on the eve of the last
great war.
In certain industries France was hardly a competitor at all. She
was not, fofcinstance, in any way able to compete with the German dye
industry; her old vegetable dyeing industry, the madder dyes which were
used for the red trousers of the infantry, was killed by the competition of
the German syntlu tied yes. The woollen industry was not in such a bad
way; its output grcn onsiderably and thanks to high tariffs it was able
c

to monopolize the home market, but it was organized largely on an

export basis, as its carding and spinning sections were more important
than its weaving, and even the weaving section was more important
than the home market justified. But in the early years of the twentieth
century, the foreign market for French woollen goods was being cap-
tured by English and German firms and, at best, the industry was
stagnant except in the highest luxury branches.
The great French textile industry was silk and that was still flourish-
ing, though it was beginning to be threatened by artificial substitutes.
But a lowering of prices, a great increase in consumption and the inven-
tion of mixtures of wool and silk kept the trade prosperous as a whole, if
the lot of the hand-loom weaver, who was still strong in the industry,
was increasingly hard. In cotton, high tariffs secured a home and
imperial market that might have been hard to find on a strictly com-
petitive basis.
The location of industry was often determined not only by tradition,
which had put the woollen mills in Flanders, or by political changes
which had transferred so many Alsatian cotton mills across the new
frontier, but by mere accident. It was the chance that a kinsman of
the Mackintosh family settled in Auvergne that made Clermont-
Ferrand the centre of a French rubber industry which replaced the
declining macaroni factories of the region, and it was the return from
America to Foug&res of an emigrant to the United States, that resulted
in the establishment there of modern shoe-manufacture with hired
American machinery.
In the development of industry, modern machine-tools and other
forms of machinery were of increasing importance, and France, in many
sections of industry, was dependent on her competitors for machinery.
4*5
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
Her textile mills drew a great part of their equipment from Germany
and England, her agricultural machinery was mainly American. But
in one growing mechanical industry France was a pioneer. The motor-
car industry was one in which all countries started at scratch; the
general excellence of French roads (by the standards of. those days)
made the new invention more immediately useful than in some other
countries, and France became one of the great automobile producers of
the world. In 1913, 35,000 workers produced what was, for the time,
the enormous number of 45,000 cars a year.
Not all the developments of technique were either to the disad-
vantage of France or not to her advantage. The growth of electrically-
driven machinery provided for France a new source of power, the 'white
coal' of her abundant water resources. In the Alps, the Jura, the
Vosges, the Pyrenees, that is on all her frontiers but the north, France
had valuable reserves of power and, in the mountains of the Massif
Central, there was another. With the improvement of long-distance
transmission systems, these sources of power were made available in
some of the industrial areas, while new industries, like aluminium, went
to the scattered sources of power. But the full exploitation of water
power was postponed until after the 1914. Goal was still cheap
war of
enough and abundant enough to provide the main source of power,
although the proportion of that coal which was of French origin was
steadily falling.
More dramatic and important was the result of the application of
the Gilchrist-Thomas process to the iron deposits of Lorraine. In draw-
ing the frontier of 1871, the Germans had, as they thought, secured for
themselves all the valuable mineral resources of the divided province.
But bad geology misled them as to the location of the main deposits
and, when the new process made it possible to use the Lorraine sul-
phurous was discovered that in Lorraine, and mainly in French
ores, it
Lorraine, was a source of iron ore second only to the Minnesota ranges.
From 1886, France, hitherto so poor in the resources necessary for a
modern industrial society, became one of the key countries. Above all,
her position became decisive for the German steel industry. The mar-
riage of Lorraine iron and Saar and Westphalian coal was a necessity for
both parties, and close financial links were created between the French
mining companies of the Briey basin and the great German steel cartel.
The discovery transformed Lorraine. Iron mining on this scale implied
capitalist industry in its most developed form and the Lorraine iron-
masters were soon great powers in the land. But the development was
not confined to mining; a great steel industry grew up on the spot,
eclipsing the older centres as far as the production of metal was con-
cerned, if its manufacture was still mainly an affair of places like Saint-
Etienne and Le Creusot
Financially, the steel manufacturers dominated the new iron-field;
416
THE SHADOW OF WAR
they owned the ore and disposed of it as they thought fit, to their own
steel works or to their competitors in Germany. Steel making was an
old industry in Lorraine, the Comite des Forges that grouped together
the steel producers of the region had been founded in 1864. But the
scale was now quite different. Great vertical combines grew up cover-
ing every stage of the industry, and the old ironmaster family of Wendel
became leaders of the new order. The name first appears in the
industry in 1701, but it was now as much a symbol of the French iron
industry as Carnegie had been of the American, and the special char-
acter of the Lorraine industry was underlined by the fact that the
M. de Wendel in France had as partner Herr von Wendel in Germany.
Across the frontier that angered patriots so much, modern industry
stepped without much difficulty. There was a good deal of easy
indignation, but the relationship between the German and French
industry was not only imposed by the inability of the French coal-fields
to provide enough coke lor the steel mills, but by the fact that the
French steel induct i\ could not use all the available ore. Alone among
the great stcH-producing nations before 1914, France was a great
exporter of ore. Her reserves were estimated at nearly a fifth of the
available WOT id supply, so she could afford it.
In industry as in agriculture, a basic fact was the stabilization of the
population. In 1870 Germany and France had had approximately the
same population. In both, the birth-rate fell rapidly between 1 870 and
1914, but in 1870 the French birth-rate was already lower than that of
Germany in 1914. France had a long start in the limitation of births,
which meant that her population was older than that of other nations
as well as proportionately smaller. In 1914, the two nations which had
been equal in 1870 were now far apart; Germany's population was
approaching 65,000,000, France's was around 40,000,000. Great
Britain and Austria-Hungary, as well as Germany and Russia, were
now more populous than France, and Italy was rapidly overtaking her.
The reality was in fact worse than these figures suggested. There
were fewer French men and women than forty years before. The
balance of births and deaths was about equal; in some years there was a
positive loss. The number of children per marriage was only a little
over two. But for immigration, France would have been on the way
to depopulation. The main sources of immigration were Belgium and
Italy, and there were always around a million foreigners resident in
France, the children counting as Frenchmen and new immigrants keep-
ing the figure constant. The Lorraine iron-field, located in a province
whose population was falling, had to recruit its labour force from Ger-
many, Belgium, Luxembourg and Poland. It was a humiliating con-
trast with the neighbouring Saar where there was a native industrial

population.
The reasons for the fall in population were social and psychological
417
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
Those departments where the Church was strong were still populous;
where it was weak, no amount of preaching of patriotic duty had any
effect. The lay state had many good things to its credit, but it was
unable to prevent, even if it did not actually promote, a great and
distressing historical event the rapid decline of the proportion of
Frenchmen to other Europeans. In a rather timid way, attempts were
made to encourage large families by fiscal privileges, but the French
taxation system did not then easily lend itself to such measures. Indeed,
as it so largely depended on indirect taxation, it could only aggravate
the burdens of the father of a large family. Attempts to preach the
virtues of a higher birth-rate were often assailed as clerical or militarist

propaganda. Nor were the efforts of great industrialists to encourage


fertility much better received. As a rule the employers who, by family
bonuses and other subsidies, direct or indirect, or by housing schemes
and nurseries, attempted to make parenthood less burdensome, were
zealous Catholics, and their efforts were associated in the minds of the
suspicious and stubbornly independent French workman with attacks'
on his freedom of action. Too many employers were crude practitioners
of the doctrine of Le Play that made the employer a sort of feudal chief
of his workmen. A man of great ability, sanctity and sincerity like
Leon Harmel, might make this role tolerable, even welcome, to his
dependents, but there were not many Harmels. The French worker
wanted to be left alone, not to be coerced or bribed into having more
children, or going to Mass, or anything else. Yet the idea of family
allowances, destined to an important post-war role, was taking hold in
some highly organized industries where it was possible to spread the
cost over thewhole industry in a way that did not penalize the indi-
vidual employer or the father who, if his high wages had had to come
from one pocket, would soon have been unemployable.
With a stable or diminishing population, with resources for the new
machine industry inadequate except in the case of iron ore, with the very
merits of the population, its tenacious individualism and its high degree
of ingenious initiative handicaps in a world calling for more and more
robots (to use a word not then known), France seemed to fill a less
important place in the economic world than her past or than the
brilliance of her contemporary contribution to civilization made seem
natural. Her industries were, in general, organized on a smaller scale
than those of her neighbours; with few exceptions, they were less
modern in methods and equipment; and, momentous fact, they were
nearly all on the frontier. Fertile, self-sufficient in most of the neces-
sities of life, with greater resources than her population could fully use,

France in 1914 seemed stagnant, an easy victim of more dynamic, more


modern, more enterprising nations.
CHAPTER III

THUNDER ON THE LEFT


I

trade-union movement that


grew slowly in France after the
THE
Commune and not very rapidly even after the full legalization of
union activity in 1884, waf originally, as a national movement, little
more than a side-show of Guesdism. It was political in aim, and it
asserted that the political conquest of the State was the necessary pre-
liminary to any bettering of the lot of the workers. But Guesde was not
able, in the unions any more than in the more purely political organiza-
tions, to impose his arid and pessimistic doctrine on all the militants;
and the foundation, in 1895, of the Confederation Glnlrale du Travail*
the 'C.G.T.', marked the triumph of the preachers of industrial action
over the politically-minded Guesdists. The new body was weak in
numbers and resources, but it was destined to command the loyalties of
French working-class militants until 1914.
Parallel with and in rivalry to the national federations of trade
unions were the Bourses du Travail. As their name suggests, they were
supposed to be labour exchanges; on the analogy of the Stock Exchange
they were to collect information about the day-to-day price of labour.
But in addition, they were to be centres of workers' education, social
life,trade-union organization, and, according to their historian, Pel-
loutier, tobe the instrument of the workers' liberation. As labour
exchanges, they were often subsidized by municipalities, which was a
considerable advantage in a country where dues-paying was often re-
garded as servile. But this had disadvantages, for the municipality
might and sometimes did try to confine the Bourses to the narrow duties
of a labour exchange and, as far as the workers' movement in a town
had become dependent on the Bourse and the Bourse on the subsidies,
the movement was at the mercy of local politicians. They might dis-
play an unworthy suspicion of the book-keeping methods of the Bourse
as was done at Dijon; the Municipal Council might change colour as

happened in Paris; the Prefectmight insist on the observation of legal


rules that were hampering to a 'semi-revolutionary organization.
Almost all the Bourses, sooner or later, suffered from their connection
1 General Confederation of Labour.
419
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
with the local authorities, suffered by the reduction of grants or their
abolition, or by the actual suppression of the Bourse as happened in
Paris in 1906. But for all their difficulties, the Bourses performed a
useful function. In many small towns the national federations of the
trade unions had little authority or utility. In the Bourse all the leading
militants of the crafts could meet and get to know each other. If the
municipality was suspicious it was sometimes possible to run a parallel
organization to the Bourse; the Bourse obeyed all the rules and got the
money, but the real organization, run by the men who ran the Bourses,
was free to do as it pleased.
Within the trade-union movement, two types of unions were in con-
flict. According to the law of 1884, trade unions, like any other organi-
zation, had to keep accounts, lists of members, names of officers and in
other ways submit to Government inspection. The authors of the law
looked forward, so they said, to the growth in France of stable, wealthy,
highly organized unions on the English model. Some unions did
develop on those lines; they accumulated funds and acquired a fairly
effective control over theworking of the industry. A sample of this
type was the great printing union, the 'Federation du Livre '. But
such unions were not admired or desired by all militants. A union
that had large funds had thereby given hostages to fortune; its funds
could be impounded by the Government if it turned to revolutionary
action; and a strong, rich, national union could be run only by a
bureaucracy which was distasteful to the average highly individualist
militant. There was thus a conflict between the rich, centralized and
rather conservative unions and the small, poor and often short-lived
militant unions. The militants were, or said they were, sceptical of
the value of mechanical organization, large and regular subscriptions,
and attempts to get all the workers to join. The really militant workers
in any industry, it was said, were always a minority. If all the workers

joined the unions, the militants would be outvoted and compromises


would be forced on them. Strikes brought about by small active
minorities, subsidized by special funds collected while the battle was
on, were more likely to be successful than strikes fought, after hesita-
tionsand negotiations by amorphous bodies, led by union bureaucrats
and subsidized by accumulated funds. Rich unions would avoid strikes
to save their funds'.
What could small unions of workers do against their employers or
against organized capitalist society? They could use 'direct action*.
Although this phrase came to mean in the common usage of politics
and polemics, violent, extra-legal action, the theorists of trade-union
tactics originally meant by it merely any kind of union activity. It

was, according to mile Pouget, 'simply trade-union activity .


any . .

spontaneous or considered manifestation of working-class decision'. It


was easier to say what was not direct action; political action was indirect
420
THE SHADOW OF WAR
means to attain class ends was indirect action
action, the use of political
and it not always condemned, at least always highly suspect.
was, if

This disapproval of political action did not mean that the workers had
no concern with the State. If, by their militancy, they could intimidate
the State into making concessions that was all to the good, since the
concession was squeezed out of the State by direct action.
The phrase, however, came to be associated >vith a special type of
union It was associated with various forms of
activity. sabotage, from
'strikes on the job' (the careful and obstructive obedience of all
regu-
lations by railwaymen for instance) to deliberately bad work, of which
one famous example was that recommended to barbers, the infliction
of non-fatal cuts on the clients of the employe 7*"! But the final weapon
was the 'general strike', the paralysis of bourgeois society by the con-
certed action of the indispensab]' vvorkers of the basic industries.
In the campaign for tin adoption of the general strike as a substi-
tute for direct revolutionary a *iun of the old Blanquist type, as well as
for the dangerous and dec <-pti\ r method of political and parliamentary
action, the chief orator was a young Breton lawyer, Aristide Briancl,
who had been at school with Pelloutier and who was the mouthpiece of
the theorist of 1 ic Bourses.
1 His eloquence and his extraordinary powers
of personal charm made him a danger to the regular politicians in the
unions and in the Socialist parties. He was a Pied Piper whose piping
seemed, at times, almost as seductive as that of Jaures in the ears of the
French workers. The existence of two rival groupings of the not very
numerous body of organized workers was obviously absurd and, in 1902,
the Bourses were nominally absorbed by the C.G.T. But not only was
the new organization organized on a double system of local Bourses
grouping all the. unions of an area, as well as a national organization by
industries, the united organization was deeply marked by the doctrines
of Pelloutier. It was hostile to politicians and in favour of incessant
warfare with the employers, especially through the method of the
general strike.
The new spirit among the militant workers found its prophet (after
the event) in Georges Sorel. Of sound bourgeois origin, a graduate of
the ficole Polytechnique, a retired State engineer, Sorel was no more a
proletarian than Marx. But like many members of the bourgeoisie, he
was contemptuous of the ideals and practices of his own class. Al-
though he was a Marxian after his own fashion, Sorel, like so many
French revolutionary thinkers, was at least as much in the tradition of
Proudhon as of Marx. He, like Proudhon, was an unashamed moral-
ist, the pursuer of an ideal, the believer in the utility
of myths. He
was to call Marxism a kind of 'social poetry', and his own doctrine which
reached its classical form in the Reflections on Violence * was marked by
an epic character. He idealized the workers who, in their day-to-day
1
Published in 1906.

421
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
struggle with the capitalist class, above all in the semi-warlike action of
the strike, were revealing themselves as the new ruling class and training
themselves to be it. The workers were better than the bourgeoisie;
*

they were the makers of the new society; that was the basis of their
right, not any sentimental democratic doctrine. For the doctrine of
the sovereignty of the democratic state was just a new version of the
divine right of kings.
It was round the doctrine of the general strike that Sorel's teaching
centred. By the use of the general strike, the militant workers exer-
cised their maximum power of pressure against the bourgeois state. It
was not certain that the pressure would be enough, but the encourage-
ment of the 'myth' of the strike among the workers fostered in them the
proper fighting spirit and saved them from the seductions of parlia-
mentary manoeuvring. What would be the effect of the failure of a
general strike, of the discovery that the myth was merely a myth, was
a question that Sorel, who after all was a bourgeois seeking a heroic
element in modern life, hardly concerned himself with. 1 It is, indeed,
not for his influence on the active labour movement or as an interpreter
of the labour movement to the public that Sorel is significant. But his
cult of violence, ofthe heroic, his contempt for the timid rationalism of
the dominant Radicalism marked him as a contemporary of Barres
(with his cult of energy), of Bergson (with his depreciation ofihe mere
intellect), of Maurras (with his love of violence, his contempt for formal
democracy). As with the Action Fran$aise, it was not in France -that
the new doctrine found its most zealous adherents, but in Italy, where
it served as the philosophical basis of revolutionary socialist action
before becoming the basis of one side of the doctrines of fascism.
In the same year as saw the publication of the Reflections on Violence,
the G.G.T. adopted the programme known as 'the Charter of Amiens'.
It was deeply marked by the hostility of the old Bourses to parliamentary
action for immediate reforms, a policy which still had defenders from
the strongly Guesdist regions of the North. The general strike was to
be the weapon which would liberate the woikers, not any parliamen-
tary intrigues or alliances. The reckless launching of strikes, with their
natural sequel of violence, made the activities of the C.G.T. a nuisance
to the more sedate Socialist leaders, especially to the deputies among
them, and made Socialist relations with the Radicals very difficult.
This was especially the case after the Confederation made anti-mili-
tarism its main activity. Its Manuel du Soldat was highly subversive of
discipline, at any rate in intention,, for, seen from the point of view of
the C.G.T., the Army was simply the main bulwark of the exploiting
capitalist state.
The hostility of the programme of the Gonfidbration Ginlrale du
1
There is a curious parallel between the doctrine of the offensive at all costs as taught
by Grandmaison and the myth of the general strike. XUf. p. 469.
422
SHA06W dF WAR
Travail to opeii Collaboration With stny political party was
partly
caused by fear of estranging rton-political workers, but much more
by
a fear that active participation by the unions in politics meant the
flooding of the cadres by ambitiotts politicians on the make and the use
of the unions as part of the electoral machine which sent
climbing
bourgeois to the Chamber, but did nothing else that was very clearly
beneficial to the workers. This scepticism might have been lessened
had the result of political activity been more obvious. It had been the
calculation of Jaures that once the clerical menace had been success-
fully crushed, the Radicals, for want of an active programme of social
reform, would be forced to give way to the Socialists or, if they did not,
to accept the Socialist programme or a great part of it. But in
grati-
tude for the saving of the Republic, or in imtated contempt for the
purely negative attitude of the Right, the electors in 1906, in addition
to increasing the strength of the unified Socialists, greatly increased the
strength of the Radicals. Clemcnceau was able to ignore the attack of
Jaures as long us his own party stuck by him. He was even able to rub
in the fact that Radicals and Socialists differed on fundamental ques-
tions; they might unite to defend the Republic and laicity, but they
were separated by the deep gulf of property rights.
Outside the Chamber, the militants did not make things easier for
Jaures. There were repeated strikes and riots in which the Govern-
ment took a high line, enforcing the law, preventing attacks on non-
strikers and forcing Jaures to choose between frightening the Radical

bourgeoisie and alienating the workers. The parliamentary Socialists


could hardly defend the violence and they could certainly not appear
to condone the vigorous enforcement of the law which resulted in such
distressing episodes as the firing on the crowd at Draveil. Such an
event enabled Glemenceau to attack Jaures as an agitator leading
ignorant men to violence and, at the same time, lent plausibility to the
argument of the extremists who said that the bourgeois state was the
enemy of the workers and could be nothing else: that it was a Republic
mattered not at all. Despite the fine flourishes, the programme of
social reform, income tax, old age pensions remained a mere pro-

gramme; it did not become law. The legislative machine seemed to


be impotent where the workers were concerned but highly efficient
where the deputies were concerned, for the same Chamber that could
do nothing for the people hastily and secretly raised the salaries of its
members from 9,000 to 15,000 francs. 1 Such a salary seemed princely
to the average peasant or worker, and his jealousy of the wealth of the

deputies increased as his opinion of their probity


went down. The
Socialist party taxed the salaries of its deputies, but the tax was very
small; the chance of being elected a deputy
was still very attractive
even if it led to no more than that. And it often led to much more.
1
From 360 ($1,800) to 600 ($3><xx>).

433 EE
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
There was Millerand, who had built up a great practice at the Bar,
helped, it was universally believed, by his political prestige and power.
There was Viviani prospering the same way. Briand was not so obvi-
ously profiting as a lawyer, but he was a Minister and part of a Govern-
ment that repressed the workers who now acted as he had talked.
Nor was the alliance with the Radicals on political questions very
secure. One of the promises made by the victors in the Affair had been
the reform of courts-martial, and the Clemenceau Government intro-
duced a bill to that effect. But the wine-growers of Languedoc, suffer-
ing from a crisis of local overproduction and from the competition of
Algeria, had broken out in a series of riots. Troops sent to restore
order were drawn from the local regiment, the lyth Infantry, and they
had mutinied, refusing to fire on the mobs. The Government had not
taken severe measures; it had merely sent the regiment off to Tunis; but
the mutiny frightened many moderate Radicals "and the bill for reform-
ing courts-martial was abandoned. It seemed to be no time to be
tampering with military discipline. The affair of the i
*jth revealed a
spirit in the Army detestable to the Jacobin at the head of the Govern-
ment; he was willing to make concessions to the indignant wine-growers,
but the Army was as sacred to the old enemy of the Generals as it had
been to the most zealous anti-Dreyfusards. Did not Clemenceau make
a zealous Catholic, a man with a Jesuit brother, head of the Higher
War School, putting Colonel Foch in charge of the training of the future
chiefs of the Army in full knowledge that he was as clerical as any pro-

te*ge of Pere du Lac? Had not the Prime Minister gone back to his
native province of La Vendee and there celebrated the warrior virtues
both of his own party, the Bluest and of the misguided Chouans, the
Royalists? After all they were the same race, 'the last square of the
Celts, of the Gauls, facing both the armies of Rome and the hordes of
5

Germany; often beaten, but never surrendering Even had Jaures


.

been less sincere in his detestation of military glory, less convinced that
it was an enemy of the true Republic of the workers, he would have

been forced to resist such appeals to the combative patriotism of which


Frenchmen were only now being cured by the action of his party.
The clash between the Clemenceau Government and the militants
on the Left was not confined to mere doctrinal questions. The C.G.T.,
with its doctrine laid down in the Charter of Amiens and provided with
a very dogmatic leader in Victor Griffuelhes, was in a decidedly com-
bative mood. It fell foul of the Government by its attempts to organize
the lesser civil servants, who had very serious grievances to complain
of. Wage scales, promotion, terms of service were all chaotic; political
influence was rampant and it was difficult to enforce discipline in a
body of public servants whose normal rules of service were altered
whenever it was convenient for a Minister to oblige a powerful poli-
tician. These grievances were not confined to minor officials. Even
424
THE SHADOW OF WAR
so distinguished a body as the chartistes, the trained archivists who had
passed through the Ecole des Chartes, found the prizes of their pro-
fession given to the protege's of politicians. Each Minister, on talcing
office, formed a 'Cabinet', that is a staff peculiar to himself; these minis-
terial staffs grew in size and were usually recruited from aspiring young

politicians. When their patron went out of office they should have

gone too, but it was customary to plant out the most favoured protege's
in the higher ranks of the service. What was done at the top was done
at the bottom, and the arbitrary nature of official discipline was one of
5
the chief causes of the demand for a ,
that is for a legal definition
'statute
of the rights and duties of the civil service. The crisis came with a
postman's strike. The strike was technically a great success; it tied up
the mails and the telegraph and telephone services, and although
Clemenceau made the usual speeches about not submitting to coercion,
negotiations were begun. The strike leaders demanded the dismissal
of the unpopular Undcr-Secrctary, Simyan. The Prime Minister re-
fused to accept such dictation, but the strikers thought that this refusal
was purely formal, that Simyan would be got rid of. The strike was
called off and Simyan stayed on. A
second strike was far less effective;
the immediate grievances of the strikers had been met and there was
no general tie-up. The power of the unity of the Government servants
had been exaggerated.
The next great test of the power of the G.G.T. was met not by
Glemenceau, but by Briand. As the election of 1910 drew nearer, the
combative attitude of Glemenceau in face of the extreme Left distressed
the sentimental and practical politician alike. But the vehement
Minister dug his own grave. The French Navy suffered more than did
the Army from the various political storms of the Affair. During the
Combes Ministry the Navy had, under Gamille Pelletan, been watched
with a truly Republican vigilance. The workers of the dockyards
found in the Minister a vigilant defender; and in addition, M. Pelletan
had his own theories of naval construction. A series of disasters whose
number seemed to exclude mere bad luck shook public confidence in
the administration of the Navy, and when on March i2th, 1907,. the
battleship lena blew up in Toulon harbour, with the loss of over a
hundred lives, the patience of Parliament was exhausted. A com-
mittee of inquiry was set up under the chairmanship of Delcasse', which
had little difficulty in forcing the resignation of the Minister of Marine,
Thomson. But the campaign was not over. A new committee with
very wide powers was appointed and Delcass6 was again made chair-
man. His report was devastating and he insisted that the Glemenceau
Government was to blame. The Prime Minister lost his temper and
his judgment and instead of replying to the criticisms attacked Delcasse'

personally. 'I have not humiliated France, but I say that Delcasse*
has humiliated her.' The Chamber, already restive,did not tolerate
4*5
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
this reference to the Tangier crisis. The Cabinet was overthrown on
the spot.
The idea of Briand as Prime Minister had its comic side; but the
former preacher of the general strike was to prove the truth of the adage
that reformed poachers make the best game-keepers. Briand was an
excellent judge of men and he knew what was lath and what was iron
in the militant organization of the C.G.T. An internal row had led
the imperious GrifFuelhes to resign, but after a brief interval of moderate
triumph, a young militant disciple of Griffuelhes, Le*on Jouhaux, was
appointed to succeed his master. The militants were again in control;
the men who, like Merrheim of the Metallurgical Unions, wanted no
collaboration with the State, no subsidization of the Bourses du Travail
by the municipalities, no trust in even the most eminent Socialist
by the organized workers.
politicians,
The of strength came on the railways. The wages of railway
trial
workers had not risen for ten years; only by working overtime could the
railway men make ends meet; and confidence in their own power, com-
bined with anger at the inflexible attitude of the companies, especially
of the Nord Company, made the unions ready to try the effects of the
strike weapon whose potency had been so lyrically preached by the
Prime Minister. But when the strike broke out, Briand was ready for
it. He arrested the strike leaders, even when they took refuge in the
offices of HumanitL More deadly blow, he called up the strikers as
Army reservists. He talked vaguely of a great sabotage plot, the com-
panies made some financial concessions, but the strike was beaten.
The defeat was, of course, followed by recriminations and by complaints
by the rigorous GrifFuelhes that the strike leaders were highly incom-
petent. But more obvious to the rank-and-file was the impotence of
the Socialist deputies to do anything for the strikers in face of the power
of the Government. The bourgeois parties had rallied to Briand,
leaving Jaures and Guesde to utter academic protests. Even honest
and sincere Socialist politicians could do little or nothing for the
workers, while dishonest or insincere ex-Socialist politicians could do
them great harm.
That Briand should be the agent of crushing the general strike was
peculiarly maddening. Had he not risen by preaching it in company
with his old schoolfellow, Pelloutier? It was this man who had not
merely stretched the law to defeat the strike, but had boasted of it.
This was wctrse than Clemenceau's candid admission that he was now
on the other side of the barricade. Leader after leader of the workers
had risen to power by the violence of his language, by the verbal
audacity of his revolutionary energy. As the old Radicals talked of the
cause and of their militancy as if they were still treading the dangerous
road that led to Noumea and Lambessa, when they were in much
greater danger of dying as Senators or as Governors of great colonies,
4*6
THE SHADOW OF WAR
so a series of brilliant young men got their foothold on the ladder by

finding words to express the revolutionary passion of the workers and,


the ladder no longer needed, kicked it away.
The slanders of the Right failed to shake the justified faith of the
workers in the probity of Jaures, but he, too, was a politician, forced to
make bargains with other politicians, forced to shut his eyes to be-
trayals and abuses. In a political system where a genial tolerance was
the custom of the country, a savage virtue was out of place and, if dis-
played too boldly, did not evoke admiration but irritation among an
unpriggish body of men like the deputies. The average voter was not
very surprised, not very disillusioned, for he took with plenty of salt the
professions of faith and the promises of works 3f the candidates. He
no more thought of believing every word that they said than he thought
of believing every word the seller said when praising a horse or a cow
to a prospective pureluistr. But the zealots, who are as characteristic
of French politics as the iionically sceptical majority, were less tolerant:
and it was they who were tempted away to 'direct action' by their
indignant resentment of the rules of the parliamentary game. It was
they who treated as a description of treason the dictum of Robert de
Jouvencl, \\Iiich its author had stated as a mere law of parliamentary
There is more in common between two deputies, one of
c

psychology.
whom is a revolutionary, than between two revolutionaries one of whom
is a
deputy.'

II

It was evident by 1910 that collaboration between the Socialists and


the Radicals and other Left groups was producing very limited results,
from the point of view of the Socialists. Yet as long as the electoral
system remained the same, single-member constituencies with the
second ballot, at election times it was necessary to make a bargain with
the Radicals. Without such a bargain there were many safe Socialist
seats which would be endangered, including Jaures's own. The
Socialists, then, with all the other groups except the Radicals, became
converts to proportional representation, which would free the party
from Radical patronage as well as helping the little groups of indepen-
dent ex-Socialists like Briand, Millerand, Viviani and the rest who
were in danger of being crushed between the two masses of the S.F.I.O. 1
and the Radicals. Proportional Representation would also help the
Right, so that the question of electoral reform cut across the normal
division. The elections of 1910 did not give the Radicals an absolute
majority, and the disorganization of parties that followed was marked by
a series of short-lived Governments and the ending of the long Radical

1 of Jaures's party.
'French Section of the Workers' International', the official title

427
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
domination of the Chamber; the great party, indeed, was so deeply
divided that it could seldom provide a Prime Minister.
But if the electoral question brought together Jaur&s, Briand and
Albert de Mun, the question of peace and war, of foreign policy and
militarism linked Jaur&s and an important section of the Radicals.
They realized that Europe was entering on a dangerous epoch of
imperial rivalry and they were anxious that France should run as little
risk as possible of being involved in the struggle. This policy of pru-
dential pacificism made Jaur&s .overlook many faults in the Radical
party and in that section of it which followed M. Joseph Caillaux.
In the Socialist party, anti-militarism and something like dogmatic
pacificism were almost universally accepted, and what was true of the
S.F.I.O. was truer still of the C.G.T. There was, of course, a remnant
of the old Blanquist tradition incarnate in men like fidouard Vaillant,
but it was a dying creed. The doctrine that the 'worker has no coun-
try' was replacing the old Jacobin tradition of the 'country in danger'.
The Paris working men who, twenty years before, had sung the jingo
songs of the Boulangist music-hall artists, were now on the surface
violently anti-militarist. The song that now went the rounds was not
a new 'En revenant de la revue', but a naive ballad that praised the
brave lads of the 1 7th for not obeying the orders which, if obeyed,
'would have killed the Republic'.
The reaction against militarism and against political Nationalism
went very far. Although the Radical Governments had been patriotic,
anxious to explain that they wished the Army to have all due honour,
they could not help giving aid and comfort to simple hostility to any
army. They might and did commemorate such triumphs of Republi-
can arms as the defeat, followed by mass executions, of the 1795 royalist
expedition to Quiberon. Hoche had his statue where he had defended
the Republic and the inscription read a not very obscure lesson to the
heirs of the emigres who had suffered the heavy hand of the Republic
a century before. But such commemorations of civil war, though
gratifying to a taste common to all French parties, were not enough for
the zealots.
There was Urbain Gohier, a most vigorous critic of the French Army
and of all armies. There was a vigorous body of critics of the tradi-
tional patriotic history which they regarded as the source of strength of
their enemies and the betrayal of the true interest of modern France.
,For it must be remembered that France was profoundly divided over
her own history. Benedict Arnold is not a hero to any Americans;
Guy Fawkes only a comic hero to Englishmen. But Frenchmen, on
both sides, had heroes whom the other side regarded as traitors, vic-
tories which were, for other Frenchmen, defeats. La Rochelle was,
for one section, the heroic city that had defended Protestantism, and
Protestantism had many more partisans in France than the tiny body
428
THE SHADOW OF WAR
of formal Huguenots would suggest. For others, L:i Rochelle was the
traitorous city that had called in the English to resist Richelieu. Even
within the Left parties, there was soon to be <i feud over Danton, for
that one-time hero was soon to be condemned as a rogue and a traitor,
by eminent scholars who saw in him not only the enemy of the true
Jacobin tradition, but the exemplar of so many modern corrupt and
compromising Republican politicians. It was only ten years or so
since Clemenceau had declared that the Revolution was a 'bloc'; it was
a bloc that was splitting as the orthodox patriotic Republican tradition
felt the impact of the new Marxian criticism of all wars but the class

war. 1 The most noisy spokesman of the anti-patriotic school was a


teacher in the Yonne, Gustave Herve, who expiated a youth of De-
rouledism by an equally violent reaction against the common plati-
tudes about the country, the flag and the rest of the symbols of national
religion. His career was lively; as editor of the anti-militarist Piou
2
Piou de V Tonne hr
andaii/cd the bourgeoisie in the traditional fashion,
si

and spent a good deal of time in court, defending


lost his job in the Ijcce
himself against charges of inciting to mutiny by repetitions of his scan-
dalous doctrine. The rising left-wing lawyers who made a reputation
by their defence of political prisoners, men like Briand, usually managed
to save Herve from the punishment due to his violence, but Hcrve was
irrepressibleand he did not always get off. A Parisian jury proved less
touched by the eloquence of the defendants' counsel than a provincial
jury had been. Guyot and Herve were both convicted and sent to
prison, to be released in a general amnesty a few weeks later. Herve" s
conviction, like his trial, aroused a good deal of more or less genuine
indignation. Was the Army to be protected against criticism as in the
bad old days when Lucien Descaves had been prosecuted for publishing
5
Sous Offs? More important was the effect of 'Herveism on the newly
united French Socialist party. Anti-militarism and pacificism was one
of the most popular parts of the party programme among the militants.
They read Herve's speech to the jury with approval. 'We shall not
let ourselves be shot down like rabbits. We shall reply to the mobiliza-
tion order by revolt. Civil war is the only war that is not
. . .

stupid. . . .' This was the stuff that the ardent party worker wanted
to give the troops.
'Herveism' was profoundly distasteful to Jaures. He was more and
more convinced that the immediate menace of the capitalist system was
not the direct impoverishment of the worker, but his death and mutila-

1
There was even a violent controversy over Joan of Arc. Many Republicans tried to
resistthe attempt of the Right to make her a Nationalist asset by reminding Catholics that
she had been burned by the Church, and the Royalists that she had been abandoned by
the King. Some went further and, like M. Thalamas, spoke of her in terms that provoked
the just indignation, or the intolerant violence, of the Right, according to your opinion of
M. Thalamas's taste.
8
*The Tommy Atkins of the Yonne.'
429
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
tion in a fratricidal war with his fellow-workers, brought on by the
vulgar covetousness and stupidity of the bourgeoisie.
But the noisy anti-militarism of Herv6 hampered the work of warn-
ing the public against the intrigues and follies of the warmongers. By
his violent and ill-considered attacks on patriotism, Herve* exposed the
Socialist party to the deadly charge of being ready to betray France to
Germany. Jaures allowed for the deep-rooted patriotism of the aver-

age Frenchman, and he understood that to affront it was not to make


of the peasant or worker a nationless member of the international pro-
letariat, but to drive him into the arms of the Nationalists, perhaps to
renew that alliance of the workers and the Nationalists which had made
Boulangism so much more formidable than the anti-Dreyfus campaign
had been. On the other hand, he knew that to rebuke nerve* too
severely would be to expose himself to attack, for a kind of resigned
pacificism was spreading in the party, especially among the school-
teachers and in the ranks of certain of the more militant trade unions.
He had to avoid the dangers of appearing to be another of those
patriotic Socialists of whom
a young German Social-Democrat, Herr
Noske,'was soon to be abused as the representative. So he translated
'Herveism' (much to the disgust of Herve) into something much less
offensive. The famous 'flag on the dung-heap' speech was made a
defence of true as against false patriotism; and the right of national self-
defence was recognized. The workers of the world had a good deal to
lose besides their chains, as miners had a good deal to lose by the
destruction of a mine, even though that mine was, for the moment, the
property of a usurping bourgeois. Herve*'s noisy sympathy with the
Moroccans was turned against him, for if it was right for semi-barbarous
Moroccans to resist invasion, why was it wrong for Frenchmen? 1
It was not necessarily true, said Jaures, 'that an idea which shocked
5
the vast majority was thereby proved to be right But in French Left
.

politics, as in French extreme Right politics, outrageousness was very


often the test of truth. To imagine that war could be avoided in a
capitalist society, even by working-class pressure, was an illusion, so
the critics thought. Jaures, undaunted, saw in working-class action
the only serious hope of avoiding the blood-bath, and as the feebleness
of that action, as the inability of the working-class to develop a really
potent organization of resistance grew more evident, the great leader
shut his eyes more and more determinedly to the detestable truth. If,
on the one side, Jaures was attacked as compromising with the national-
ist and militarist danger, he was attacked on the other as an
agent of
German demoralization. There was, it is true, something childlike
in the admiration Jaures felt for the country of Luther and Marx. He
1
Twenty years later, another vehement denouncer of all compromise, Citizen Doriot,
vehement Communist leader, was zealous in the cause of Abd el Krim. Herv6 lived to
become a noisy Nationalist and Doriot a Fascist.
43<>
THE SHADOW OF WAR
was very proud of his German scholarship and envied the German
Socialists their unity, their discipline, their doctrinal thoroughness.
He noted, but did not attach enough importance to, their somewhat
mechanical spirit of discipline, and although he once rebelled against
the patronizing attitude of Bebel, reminding him that the German
Socialists owed their privileges to monarchs who might take away what
had been given not won, criticism of the greatest of Socialist parties
was not welcomed. It was, then, a blow in the house of a friend when
one of the most eminent of French authorities on modern Germany,
Charles Andler, attacked the genuineness of the anti-militarism of the
German Socialists, called attention to a change of tone if not of doctrine
in their references to war and militarism, and accused Jaures of mis-
leading French Socialists as to the true nature of their German com-
rades' views. Andler was a close friend of Lucien Herr, who was the
chief intellectual inspiration oi Jaures; so the scandal was all the greater.
It was naturally exploited by the parties of the Right, and the picture
ofJaures as the agent of German policy was imprinted in foolish minds.
It was not the fault of Andler any more than it was the fault of Jaures;
the dilemma of all Socialist parties as the crisis drew nearer was simply
more acute in France than in any other country. The party, there,
had more influence on the Government, was more vociferous and un-
compromising in its language and yet as powerless as the Socialist

parties of other countries to escape from the chain of fatality.

431
CHAPTER IV

RUMOURS OF WAR
I

easing of the European situation that should have followed


A Algeciras lasted, if it ever appeared, for only a few months. There
were in the European system conflicts which it was almost impossible
to solve peacefully in a world of sovereign states in which national

rights were replacing supernatural hopes as the popular religion.


Convinced that wars had mainly economic origins, the leaders of the
Left in France, above all the Socialist leader, Jaures, talked and acted
as if Morocco were all that mattered. But a far more serious problem
than the liquidation of the Moroccan empire was that of the liquida-
tion of the Austrian and Turkish empires, each threatened by forces as
fanatical as and more formidable than the Moroccan tribesmen. The
Slavs of the Balkans were profoundly interested in the fate of their
brethren under Turkish and Austrian control. The murder of King
Alexander of Serbia in 1903 was a triumph for the forward party in
Serbia; the discontent of the Bulgarians with their nominal feudal
dependence on Turkey was growing ; Greece was troubled by
military conspiracy and by nationalist fervour, directed to the formal
acquisition of Crete and the redemption of Hellenes from Turkish rule.
In Vienna, the dangers of the situation were understood. As long
as Bosnia-Herzegovina, the only acquisition of the Hapsburg empire
in a century of losses, was nominally Turkish territory merely
'administered' by Austria-Hungary, there was a danger of Serbian
attempts to unite the inhabitants with their brethren in the kingdom
and a danger that a renascent Turkey would try to upset the status quo.
These Austrian preoccupations chimed with Russian designs. Driven
back from the Pacific, the Russian Government needed, or thought
it needed, diplomatic success somewhere and naturally tried to get it

in the region in which the Russian peasant, if he had any interest in


imperial designs at all, had his, in the Balkans. The new Russian
Foreign Minister, Isvolski, had long been planning the acquisition by
Russia of the right to send her fleet through the Straits to the Mediter-
ranean. He had tried in vain to get British support for this scheme
when negotiating the settlement of 1907. He now turned to Vienna,
43*
THE SHADOW OF WAR
where he met a kindred spirit in the new Austrian Foreign Minister,
Aerenthal. In return for Russian consent to the annexation of Bosnia,
Austria would support Russian claims in the Straits question. Nothing
however was to be done until all could be done together at a conference
of the signatories of the Berlin treaty of 1878. Isvolski was happily
on tour, sounding out Germany and Italy, when he read in a Paris
newspaper that Aerenthal had jumped the claim, that Austria was to
annex the occupied territory and her protege, Ferdinand of Bulgaria,
was to proclaim his independence and take the title of Tsar.
Aerenthal's policy had some excuse, for in Turkey a military
conspiracy, run by a body calling itself the 'Committee of Union and
Progress', composed of young Army officers Vvho were usually Free-
masons,
1
had forced the Sultan Abdul Hamid to accept a constitution
and to call a Parliament towards the reorganization
as a first step
of the Ottoman Empire. There was a danger that Bosnian deputies
would be summoned to that Parliament; there was a danger that, in
face of the new situation, the Serbians would try to get their share of
the spoil, so Aerenthal acted at once and presented Europe with a
fait accompli. It was a complete defeat for Russian poliey.
Whether Isvolski was deceived by Aerenthal or not, he had
certainly, by the standards of power politics, got himself 'into a mess'
(the metaphor was his own) and no one was very ready to get him out
;

of it. There was no chance of undoing or modifying the Austrian


coup at a conference, since Germany would back her ally and France
was very unwilling to contemplate the risk of war for so remote and,
from her point of view, unimportant an issue. Russia, herself, was in
no condition to fight; there was nothing to do but give in and accept,
as Turkey did, the annexation. But that was not enough for Austria.
For her, the annexation was a precaution against Serbian designs.
Belgrade must be forced to accept it, to renounce its expansionist policy
and to promise to be in future a good neighbour. Germany made it
plain that she supported Austria, so Russia could do nothing and her
client state was, for the monfent, abandoned. The great Slav power,
forced back into Balkan politics by her eastern disasters, had suffered a
diplomatic defeat as severe as her recent defeat in war. The Tsardom,
many of its leading councillors thought, could not afford another
defeat. Russian foreign policy was discredited and the relations of
Russia with France and Britain were now very chilly. Only Vienna
and Berlin had shown real solidarity as Europe noted.
The triumph of the Austrian thesis in the Balkans was not merely a
great blow to Russia, it was a cause of great uneasiness to Austria's
nominal ally, Italy. So Italy was ready to deal with Russia and, at
Racconigi, Italy and Russia agreed to support the Balkan status quo, a
move which made Vienna ready, in turn, to placate Rome by promises
1
Among them the future Ataturk.

433
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
that there would be no further Balkan annexations unless Italy had
been told in advance and had been 'compensated'. Flirtation did not
end there, for Germany tried to separate Russia from Britain by
promising not to support Austrian forward policy in the Balkans if
Russia would cease to support Britain. In short, the fidelity of
Russia and Italy was rightly suspected by their official partners, and
Europe was still not certainly divided into two unbreakable blocs.
It was obvious that Europe was not settling down; and, at the
elections of 1910, the Socialists had put among the articles of their
election manifesto an attack on the forward policy in Morocco. But
the average elector never had any -definite opinion on foreign policy
and, in any case, the elections were particularly confused. Briand,
as Prime Minister, had attacked the single-member constituencies in a

phrase recalling Gambetta's image of the 'broken mirror'. For Briand


they were 'stagnant pools', but he proposed to let them stagnate for
one more election, fearing, as he candidly admitted, that the immediate
adoption of proportional representation would increase the strength
of the extremists with whom he was in conflict. The Radicals had
tried to improve their discipline by setting up a party committee in
an office in the Rue Valois, and the name of the street came to have
a Tammany Hall ring in the ears of the enemies of the dominant
party, enemies who were numerous, especially in the highly literate
classes.
The calculation ofJaures was that, with the separation of Church and
State, the Radicals would be deprived of their standard programme.
But the veteran campaigners of the Rue Valois were not at a loss. The
'defence of the lay school' was the latest version of their war against the
Church. It was not untimely. Briand, who had never been a zealot
of the true blue stamp, had aroused Radical suspicion by talk of 'appease-
ment', which was to the Radicals what abandoning 'the bloody shirt'
would have been to Republicans in America in the generation following
the Civil War. The bishops had launched a campaign accusing the
schoolmasters and the authors of school manuals of undermining the
official doctrine of 'neutrality'.It was, of course, very difficult to be
neutral. Itwas easy enough to expurgate the works of La Fontaine, to
c
remove the un-Republican word God' before putting his poems in
1
childish hands. But it was hard to teach without suggesting some
view of life to thechildren; and the view of life of the average elementary
schoolmaster was likely to be, in the eyes of a bishop, very dangerous.
The bishops denounced the teachers whom they thought to be breaking

crucial. Odder still, long after the ending of the war of 1914, a high official of the educa-
tional system lecturing on folklore made the heroine of one of his legends address herself
in difficult circumstances, 'to the divinities', thus avoiding the use of the un-laic names of
God or the Saints.
434
THE SHADOW OF WAR
the law; and the Radicals discovered, with pain if they were naive, that
the separation of Church and State worked both ways. The bishops
were no longer officials with salaries that could be stopped and dudes
to their employers. They were private citizens, expressing freely their
private opinions. Schoolmasters could, singly or in groups, sue them
for libel; and that was done, but that was all. However, the electoral
advantages of so useful a battle-cry as 'the schools in danger' more than
compensated for the practical drawbacks.
The results of the elections were not satisfactory to any party except
the Socialists, who had gained a good deal. It was they who launched
the attack against the Briand Government. But the Prime Minister
defended himself with skill and with boldness. A reconstruction of his
Cabinet strengthened his hand, and when Briand at last fell, it was not
over his repression of the railway strike or any other social question,
but over his real or alleged lack of energy in enforcing the lay laws.
Briand protested that the accusation was baseless. 'If you want to
kill your dog, you say that he is mad. . . When you want to over-
.

throw a Ministry, you accuse itof clericalism and of making a bargain


with the religious orders.' The ingenious parliamentary tactics of
an uncompromising young Radical, M. Malvy, were not completely
successful, but Briand's majority was too small for any hopes of
ministerial stability to be possible and he resigned. His formal
successor was the inoffensive and ineffective M. Monis, but the real
leader of the new Government was its Finance Minister, M. Joseph
Caillaux.

II

Few candid persons had believed that the Algeciras settlement could
in any case havelasted long. If Morocco was to be developed (or

exploited), more was needed than a control of the police of the ports.
The attempt to create a grand port and centre of European influence
at Casablanca awakened native fanaticism, and a massacre was followed
by punitive bombardment and landing. The Moroccans were quite
intelligent enough to know that their independence was in danger,
that the punitive raids from the Algerian frontier under Lyautey, like
the landing-parties of Drude and d'Amade, were preliminary to a
general occupation. A violent dispute over the harbouring by the
German consul at Casablanca of deserters from the Foreign Legion
was finally settled at The Hague Court and was followed by an agree-
ment between such great French firms as Schneider-Creusot and such
great German firms as Krupp to work together for the development of
Morocco, but the French would not extend this economic condominium
to the Congo; and the Germans were resentful of what they could not
unreasonably call bad faith.
435
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
Worse still was the situation provoked by the civil war between
the Sultan Abd el-Aziz and his brother, Moulay Hafid. The Sultan,
as the protege of the Christian powers, was very unpopular and he was
easily dethroned by his brother. The new Sultan was recognized by
the Powers but he could not, of course, be permitted to continue to
exploit the anti-foreign sentiments to which he owed his throne. He
was forced to recognize the existing debts, to pay compensation for the
Casablanca outrages, which meant high taxes and provoked a new
rebellion. He was besieged in Fez and appealed to France for help.
To save the Sultan and the European colony, a French column relieved
the city (May aist, 1911), and, at the same time, Spain increased her
area of occupation. The Algeciras settlement was dead. After the
experience of 1905, it was evident that Germany would not permit
a simple nullification, or evasion, of the settlement without exacting
a price. There could be no repetition of Delcasse*'s mistake. This
was decidedly the opinion of the most important member of the
French Cabinet, the Finance Minister, Caillaux. The Germans gave
no sign of what they wanted as compensation and, at Kissingen (a
watering-place very like Ems), the French Ambassador, Jules Cambon,
learned from the German Foreign Secretary, Kiderlin-Waechter, that
Germany would indeed expect compensation, but what and when was
leftopen. Germany had, in fact, decided to repeat the tactics of
Tangier, but before the game was begun the Monis Government
had fallen, its Minister of War having with undue candour announced
that, in war-time, the final responsibility for the conduct of the war
should be in the hands of the Government and not in those of a
Commander-in-Chief. The new Cabinet had as its chief the Minister
of Finance of the old, M. Caillaux.
In the new Prime Minister, the Radicals seemed to have found the
new leader they needed. Joseph Caillaux was, by origin, very unlike
the typical Radical. He was the son of a Minister of the 'Sixteenth of
May*, a member of a rich Catholic and Conservative family of the
upper bourgeoisie and, apart from any bias due to such an ancestry
and environment, he had served in the highest ranks of the bureaucracy,
in the Ministry of Finance. It was Waldeck-Rousseau who had first
made him head of the department which his father before him had
ruled and whose inner mechanism he knew so well; and, by 1911,
M. Caillaux was the hope of those stern and unbending Radicals who
hoped to see a progressive income-tax established before they, like so
many other Radical Simeons, died. The new Prime Minister was not
merely sound on this reform (so many had been that!) but he had the
reputation for knowing what he was talking about, for being a master
of all the arts of the bankers and capitalists and bureaucrats who had,
for over a generation, prevented the adoption by the democratic

Republic in France of a measure of financial justice familiar in imperial


436
THE SHADOW OF WAR
Germany and in aristocratic England. The very absence in the
Radical leader of the social affability so popular among the political
personnel of what a great pamphleteer was soon to call 'the Republic
of Pals' 1 inspired respect, if it bred dislike. His haughty manner hurt
him with the workers, as did his origin, which he neither concealed
nor apologized for. His extreme confidence in his own judgment did
not endear him to his touchy colleagues, who may have suspected that
he could have stood very well the ordeal that was too much for the
Satrap in %adig.* That he ought to be well pleased with himself was
no news to M. Gaillaux. He was not very well known to the rank-and-
file militants of his own
party, who had little opportunity to see through
the exterior graces of their leader to the zealot for peace and fiscal
justice who was hidden behind the smart clotues and aloof manner.
In ranks of politicians, hr was more admired than loved, more
all

feared than trusted. A devoted admirer 3 has admitted that his hero
was ill-fated to be understood 'in a milieu where an easy tolerance and a
rather vulgar friend liiir^ arc common'. Like Shelburne in his master\
of finance and in lii.s boldness of conception, he was, like him, per-
manently weakened by the failure to win the goodwill of the members
of his chosen profession of politics.
His associations in the world of business and his lack of moral
indignation, at the beginning had alienated Jaures, but on one point
the Radical and Socialist leaders were agreed, in their aversion to
war and in their conviction that it was not inevitable. What Jaures
hoped to achieve by mobilizing working-class opinion in France and
Germany, Caillaux hoped to achieve by a mixture of economic and
political negotiation. He proposed to make opportunities for economic
development in Morocco really open to German enterprise; he was
sceptical about the policy of supporting Russian finances and he hoped
to bring about a real lessening of Franco-German tension by the
fulfilment under happier circumstances of the economic agreement of
1909. He was not left much time to work out his plans, for his
Ministry was only three days old when, on July ist, 191 1, M. de Selves,
the new Foreign Minister, was informed by the German Ambassador
Government had decided to send the gunboat Panther to the
that his
Moroccan Atlantic port of Agadir to protect German interests there.
Germany, that is to say, by giving this public proof of the seriousness
of her intention to exact a price for her consent to a modification of

1
Robert de Jouvenel in La Rlpublique dcs Camaradts.
*
His ingenious Sovereign cured the Satrap of his conceit by having a choir frequently
sing to him,
'Que son merite est extreme,
Que de grace, que de grandeur,
Ah, combien monsiegneur
Doit 6tre content de lui-mdme.'

M. Charles Paix-Seailles.

437
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
the Moroccan settlement, was ready to take the risks inherent in a
policy that might easily be interpreted as one of intimidation; and the
form of the proof, a German warship in an Atlantic port, was one
peculiarly fitted to make the British Admiralty nervous. The new
Prime Minister of France might preserve his sang-froid, but in France,
in Germany, in Britain, the makers of public opinion had now plenty
of material to work up.
On the other hand, the German Government and German political
opinion saw no reason why they should surrender their power of
hampering France in Morocco except for a substantial consideration.
The French talk of evacuating Fez was unworthy of belief; the French
would stay in Morocco as the English had stayed in Egypt. France
would have to pay the price for the undisputed right to control Morocco,
as England had had to pay France for the same opportunities in Egypt.
It was complicated by the fact that the price England had paid was

Morocco, but France had to buy it again from Germany. Germany


had something to sell which the French public might easily be led to
think France had already bought and paid for. The German price, it
appeared, was a high one, the whole of the French Congo. This was
not in French hands a very valuable asset, but in German hands it
would link the Gameroons to the Congo, give a common frontier with
the great Belgian colony: and, should that colony come on the market,
Germany might secure it and thus possess a continuous belt of territory
right across Africa from the Indian Ocean to the mouth of the Congo.
If the German demands were great, French offers or even hints of
offers were vague. The Colonial party was strong and it had to be
considered. The Minister of the Colonies * was involved, as much
as the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and there were justified complaints
from Ambassador Cambon in Berlin that negotiations were not con-
ducted either swiftly enough or firmly enough.
There were complications in Paris. Russia was as cold to the idea
of fighting for Morocco as France had been to the idea of fighting over
the status of Bosnia, but a belligerent speech by Mr. Lloyd George
warned Germany that Britain would stand by France. By August ist,
France had made her first offer; it had become a matter of haggling, a
breakdown was not impossible but it was unlikely, since for all practical
purposes M. Caillaux had taken the affair out of the hands of M. de
Selves, and M. Caillaux was a realist. France wanted to end, once
for all, any right of any power except herself to political authority in
Morocco; if Germany accepted that, she could get, not the whole of
the French Congo but what was for her the most important thing,
access to the river and a promise by France not to exercise her right of

pre-emption of the Belgian Congo if it came on the market without


previous agreement with Germany. There had been nasty moments,
1
M. Lebrun, now (1940) serving his second term as President of the Republic.
438
THE SHADOW OF WAR
there had been a panic on the Berlin bourse which may have been
provoked by the French Government as a hint to the Germans, but on
November 4th, 191 1, the agreement was signed. Europe had escaped
her third war crisis in six years.
Caillaux, like Rouvier, was a financier, and like Rouvier in 1906 he
was anxious to make of this mere truce, but a founda-
settlement, not a
tion for real Franco-German co-operation; but not
only were there
still
important sentimental obstacles, exploited and increased by
non-sentimental people and interests, but the Moroccan crisis had led
to the invasion of Triploi by Italy and this attack on the territorial

integrity of the Turkish Empire was only the beginning of a new


menace tp general peace.
It was natural that Italy, once it was
fairly certain that the Franco-
German negotiations weir going to end in a settlement, should try
to take up the option <-u Tripoli that she had held since
1902. The
invasion of Tripoli did not result in a walk-over; outside the coast
oases, theTurks stimulated Arab resistance to good effect and a con-
siderable part of the Italian Army was tied up in a rather inglorious
campaign. It was a source of weakness for Italy, a drain on her
finances and temper, and she. attempted to shorten the resistance of the
Turks by use of her fleet. This brought her into conflict with France
over a couple of French ships, seized with doubtful legality, but more
serious was the occupation of Rhodes and the Dodecanese, the carrying
of the naval war into Turkish home waters, for that excited the appetites
of the Balkan states.
These little Christian states had seen, with alarm, the attempt of
the new rulers of Turkey to unify the state, to impose Ottoman
nationality on all Turkish subjects in a way unknown under Abdul
Hamid. If the Sick Man got well, his recovery would end the hopes
of the Balkan states. The Italian war weakened Turkey and it was
inevitable that the Balkan states should try to strike while the iron was
hot. Thus, as far as the Moroccan dispute and settlement encouraged
Italy to try to get something, it was a factor in creating the war danger
in the Balkans.
Russian diplomacy had not forgotten or forgiven Aerenthal's coup
and vain efforts were made in 1911 to reopen the Straits question.
Russia could not hope to get the Straits opened for her fleet alone,
unless the three Great Powers were willing to bring pressure to bear
on Turkey to that end and none of them had any real reason to desire
such a settlement and some had strong reasons for disliking it. What-
ever dreams Isvolski and the Ambassador in Constantinople, Charykov,
might have of a deal with Turkey, the Ministers in Belgrade and Sofia
were busy with the traditional Russian policy, busy organizing a
Balkan League which would take advantage of Turkey's embarrass-
ments, even if that meant war with Turkey. Sazonov, Isvolski's
439 FF
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
successor at the Russian Foreign Office, when he took over at the
beginning of 1912 found himself faced with the problem of maintaining
Russia's position in the Balkans without running the risk of a local war
which might well turn into a general war. There was, indeed, no
solution of the problem except abandoning the forward policy, which
Sazonov refused to do.
It was the news of this'Balkan League', formed under Russian
auspices, that startled Poincare' when he arrived in Russia in the
summer of 1912. France's ally was committed to a policy that might
well mean war with Austria as well as war with Turkey, and no more
than in the less-important Japanese affair had France been told any-
thing until it was too late. Sazonov's excuse, if it was an excuse, might
have been that France had been decidedly chilly to hints of an active
Balkan policy that had been dropped a few months earlier, and his
palliation of his action was a belated effort to" induce the Balkan states
to stop short of war. But, as Poincare* said, this attempt to put on the
brake came from the people who had started the engine. It failed;
the Balkan powers went ahead and no concerted attempt to stop them
was or could be made. For to stop them by the joint pressure of the
Powers would be again to make Russia the instrument of betraying the
hopes of the Balkan states, and by the time a formula of joint warning
by Russia and Austria was found, it was too late. War had begun.
One general illusion was that the war would either be quickly
concluded- by a Turkish victory or by a long-drawn-out contest.
But, like Napoleon III in 1866, the rulers of the Great Powers had been
wrong. The war was brief and marked by a series of brilliant and
easy victories for the Balkan states. By the end of the year, Turkey in
Europe was reduced to Constantinople and a few isolated fortresses
besieged by the victorious armies of Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece.
The solemn warnings that the Balkan states would not be allowed to
profit by warlike action which had seemed impressive in October,
seemed merely silly in December. It was too late to save Turkey in
Europe; it was necessary to save Austria-Hungary and the position of
the Triple Alliance.
The Balkan war suddenly tipped the balance of power against
Berlin. Her protege, Turkey, had been ignominiously defeated by
nations politically influenced by Russia and by armies that had been
armed and trained by French firms and French officers. Worse than
this blow German prestige, was the menace to Austria. Serbia was
to
now much stronger in economic resources and in prestige; having
settled her Balkan problem, she could now turn north and begin to

support her fellow 'South Slavs' in Bosnia, in Croatia, in Slovenia.


Serbian ambitions were, for the moment, concentrated on getting a
port in the Adriatic and thus escaping from the landlocked position
which had put her economically at the mercy of Austria. But this

440
THE SHADOW OF WAR
meant the occupation of Albania, and such a change in the status quo
was a danger both to Austria and to Italy, which collaborated with
unusual cordiality in creating an independent principality of Albania.
It was this settlement that brought about the second Balkan war. For
Serbia, baulked of her Albanian outlet, demanded a larger share of
Macedonia, and when Bulgaria refused, formed <i separate alliance with
Greece. The Tsar was called on to arbitrate the differences between
the quondam Allies as had been provided for in the original treaties,
but Bulgaria, over-confident, launched a surprise attack on the Serbians
and the Greeks and was defeated. This was another blow for Austria
since Serbia was more formidable than ever, and if Bulgaria was now
out of the Russian orbit, that mattered less since two powers closely
associated with Germany and Austria, Rumania and Turkey, had
joined in the attack on Bulgaria. By the time the wars were finally
ended by the treaty of Bncar^st (August 1913), Austria's position had
been definitely endangered. Czechs, Slovaks, Rumanians, Italians as
well as Croats, Bosnians and Slovenes began to wonder if the day of
liberation \veve not at hand. What was loosely called 'the Great War',
but what \vaild more justly be called the 'Second War of the Austrian
Succession', \\a^ imminent.
It was reali/cd in Vienna and Budapest that a critical period had
begun, and but for German restraint it is possible that Austria might
have backed Bulgaria openly at the beginning of the Second Balkan
war. But Germany was less alarmed than was Austria. She had
military preparations on a great scale to complete and she was, on
the other hand, on better terms with Britain than usual. A preventive
war fought over Balkan disputes was not, in 1913, inevitable and so
it was avoided.
Europe had had her fourth escape from catastrophe
in seven years.
To France, the events of 1912 and 1913 were both gratifying and
sobering. The victories of the Balkan peoples were, like the rapid
expansion of French air power, gratifying to French pride; like the Lebel
riflein Boulanger's time, they mad defeat in war less feared, although
war, for most Frenchmen, was still to be avoided, if not at all costs,
at all costs except security and honour. The failure of the Haldane
mission to Berlin in 1912 made it certain that the Germans would go
on building that navy whose power of menacing British security was
the best guarantee of British fidelity to the Entente. The transfer of
most of the French Channel Fleet to the Mediterranean, so that the
British Mediterranean Fleet could be despatched to the North Sea
to restore the balance of naval power there, involved, in fact, an
for this subordination
implicit bargain that France should not suffer
of her naval needs to those of Britain. The crisis of 1911 had been
followed by tighter military relations. Arrangements for the use of the
British Army on the continent were completed, and although Britain
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
refused any commitment on paper, the French Government naturally
assumed that two countries which had dovetailed their defence
arrangements so completely were, if not Allies, something more than
mere friends.
Even the independent course of Russia had something to commend
those persons in authority in France who suspected that a
itself to
show-down between the two groups of powers was inevitable. For
Russia, in disputes arising from French interests, had never inspired full
confidence. Who knew if the only way to avoid being' left in the
lurch by Russia was not to be sure that, when the crisis came, it was
concerned with what Russia would consider a vital interest? In what
turned out to be a minor matter, Russia and Austria had combined to
prevent Kavala going to Greece, and France and Germany had found
themselves together on the opposite side. The secretiveness of
Sazonov on this question had shown the French how limited was their

knowledge of the aims of Russian policy and had increased their


nervousness as to Russian loyalty. Germany might have felt the same
for, on a general promise of German support, the Austrian Foreign
Minister, without further consultation, sent an ultimatum to the
Serbians imposing on them the necessity of abandoning some Albanian
lands which they were defiantly holding. The Serbs gave way; it was
a minor victory for Austria, a minor defeat for Russia; but the main
Balkan situation remained the same. Rumania was drifting away
from the Triple Alliance; and although Italy had renewed the Triple
Alliance and was making military arrangements to fight on the German
side of the Rhine if war came, these arrangements did not inspire much

hope in Berlin or much fear in Paris, as Italy's loyalty to her Allies was
estimated at its true worth. 1
Austria had little reason to be satisfied with the success of October
1913. The nationalities question, whose solution (if, indeed, there was
one) had been made impossible by the intransigence of the Sudeten
Germans Bohemia and the Magyars in Croatia and Transylvania,
in
was a cancer eating away the flesh of the monarchy. An operation was
necessary; the buying-off of Rumania; the destruction of Serbia; the
conclusive proof to the disloyal Slavs of the Empire that the great
Slav state could do nothing for them; these were necessary steps if the
Dual Monarchy was to hold together.
If the practical conclusion of a colonial settlement between Germany
and Britain gave hopes that this particular cause of conflict was now
unimportant, the tension in the Balkans grew. There was danger of a
war between Greece and Turkey, and the relations of Germany and
Turkey were shown to be as close as ever by the appointment of a
German General, Liman von Sanders, to a high post in the Turkish
v

1
The belligerent head of the Austrian Army, Conrad von Hotzendorff, wanted a
preventive war against Italy as well as against Serbia.
442
THE SHADOW OF WAR
Army. The imminence of afifth crisis was expected by all
competent
observers. Austria and Turkey were both in danger of dissolution,
which, however deplorable, had to be provided for. Germany had to
shore up her ally and her client; Germany's rivals had to provide for
the crisis.

The Agadir crisis had shown that the pohcy of


diplomatic laisser-
aller had prevailed from the fall of Delcasse to the opening of the
that
Moroccan crisis" was no longer adequate. Radical intellectuals might
dream their dreams, but, although for a Foreign Minister not to be like
M. de Vergennes was easy, it was not enough. 1 France could abandon
her interest in the balance of power and trust that Germany would not
abuse the great increase in freedom of action that such a change
involved. Or she could go further and get a good price for her
benevolent neutrality. Or she could strengthen her links with the
states with which she \v;ts associated. But all these policies, even the
first, involved inherence and resolution in execution. For the first
involved a frank admission that the question of Alsace-Lorraine was
closed and that the Republic was not and could not be active in
European politics, as the democratic organization of the state was
incompatible with an effective military and diplomatic policy. The
Rcpublif would have to admit the truth of the charges brought against
her by the Nationalists and rejoice in her disability. This was to be the
thesis of a famous Socialist tract that had a succis de scandale. 2 But this
policy of deliberate withdrawal of France from power politics was not
one that could just be let happen; it had to be planned, or the retreat
in good order would be a rout; and no one was ready, officially, to

accept responsibility for that retreat, that is to give Germany the


necessary assurance that France would let her be judge of her own
interests east of the Vosges.
A policy of active collaboration with Germany could, perhaps, have
been carried out by a man of great courage, energy and personal
dignity. Jaures, had he been in power, might have done it: at any
rate if there had been any hope (as there was none) that somebody
like Jaures would be in power in Germany. M. Caillaux had all the
qualifications for the operation except the necessary one of personal
immunity. He was not immune, for he had numerous enemies and
these enemies were well armed against him. So great a change in the
formal French outlook on the world could only have been carried out
ione ideal, peace, anti-militarism, the creation of the 'true Republic',
could have fought against the other ideal of national greatness, national
honour, national pride. A leader fit to lay such potent ghosts as Joan
of Arc and Napoleon, to eradicate such deeply-rooted memories as Jena
Vergennes was the great diplomat who organized the coalition against Britain to
1

which the United States owed its independence. To the French professional diplomat he
ranked with or above Talleyrand as a model. 1
Marcel Serabat's 'Faites un roi sinon faites la paix' ('Let's have a King or have Peace ).
443
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
and Sedan, had to be a French Gladstone. Caillaux the realist*
Gaillaux the businessman, Caillaux the zealous and not too scrupulous
party manager, was, at. best, a Elaine or a Joseph Chamberlain. It
was distrust of the man as well as of his policy that had brought about
Caillaux's downfall and made it certain that his successor would not

be a mere imitator of the fallen Minister. The alarmed politicians of


the old school of power diplomacy saw in Caillaux a dangerous
diplomatic gambler, who was willing to throw away acquired French
assets, like the Russian Alliance and the Entente with Britain, for

problematic deals with Germany, deals which involved surrenders of


present French rights to Germany as well as- the abandonment of the
old protest against the mutilation of France. There were, too, critics
like Briand who denied that only Caillaux could deal with Germany
and insisted that the idea of economic co-operation with Germany, in
Morocco and elsewhere, went back to the Clemenceau and Briand
Ministries and thatCaillaux and his friends, by their defeat of the
proposals to admit German enterprise to the French Congo, had
irritated Germany into the policy that led to Agadir. The Congo
treaty with Germany would, of course, have to be accepted and
ratified, but it was idle to pretend that the complacent belief that

Europe was on the eve of a long peace was still a tenable opinion.

Ill

To find a successor to Caillaux was not easy; that is, to find a


successor whose prestige and character would make the new Govern-
ment resistant to foreign and internal pressure. M. Caillaux was not
a fofgiving man and his hold on the Radicals was growing every day;
and although he had not yet conquered Socialist distrust, he was on
the way to doing so. Briand hoped that he might be given a chance to
resist his enemy, but it was finally to Poincar6 that Failures turned.
The new Prime Minister had striking points of resemblance to Waldeck-
Rousseau. Like him he was a great lawyer, not a brilliant forensic
orator like Briand, but a master of detail. He was endowed with
an astonishing memory and a prodigious industry. He had entered
*
politics young; he was a deputy at 27 and a Minister at 33. Yet at
35 lie abandoned active politics, devoting himself to his work at the
Bar, and it was as an almost silent deputy that he saw France pass
through the crisis of the Dreyfus case and the war with the Church.
He was a Dreyfusard, but not too soon and not too vehemently; he was
a laic, but more in the spirit of Waldeck-Rousseau than of Combes*
He entered the Senate in 1903, which made it easier for him to keep
apart from the feuds and alliances of the Chamber. A period in
Samen's Cabinet as Minister of Finance did little more than show
1 He was
bom in 1860.
444
THE SHADOW OF WAR
that he was still in politics. That a man so withdrawn from the
ordinary p6litical life of Parliament, so unlike the dominant political
figures, of the Left, dry, reserved, eloquent from the head not the
heart, legal representative of great corporations, should become Prime
Minister was sufficient proof of the disorganization of the parties.
But it was proof of more than that the shock to the French nation
that had been administered by the Agadir crisis.
The new Cabinet was something of a 'Ministry of all the Talents'.
It contained two of the most eminent ex-Socialists, Briand and

Millerand; it contained that emblem of Radical intellectualism, Le*on


Bourgeois; it contained Delcasse*. By adopting and pressing a project
for electoral reform, a kind of proportional representation, the new
Government pleased all the parties except the Radicals, who regarded
any alteration of the present system as a blow at the majesty of 'universal
suffrage', as it certainly was a blow at their control of the electoral
machine. Debated rmd altered in the Chamber, the reform was to be
buried in the Senate. In any case, it was in foreign policy that the
Poincare Government was to be noteworthy, for it was in order to give
France 'a feeling of security' that it had been formed, according to its
own declaration of policy.
The diplomatic situation was indeed alarming. The bargain of the
Ran onigi agreement, 1 when it was revealed, was almost as disturbing
to the ally of Russia (for France had been ignored) as to the ally of

Italy (for Germany had been deceived). As the Balkan war followed
the Italo-Turkish war, the situation of France, if she was not to abdicate
her position as a great power, was in serious danger. This was very
evident to Poincare, who had learned, during his visit to Russia in the
summer of 1912, of the dangerous game that was being played. It was
the general sense of increasing risks and the resolution that France
should have some policy that, as the term of President Falli&res came
to an end, made the question of the succession more important than
usual. If the rules of the game were to be observed, a docile second- or
third-rate Left politician would be chosen: but should the rules apply
at such a moment? There was a genuine feeling that they should not,
as well as a natural jumping at the chance of dishing the Radicals on
the part of the dissenters of Left and Right. A safe, dignified, and
non-Radical candidate might have been Ribot, but his chances
vanished when, stimulated by Briand, Poincare allowed his own name
to be put forward. For a politician of such eminence and weight
to be elected would be a minor revolution. He was of the calibre at
least of Casimir-Perier or of Gr6vy, not of Loubet or Failures. His
candidacy was an affront to many Radicals, above all to Clemenceau*
who may have had designs on the lyse*e himself (after all, he was now
over seventy and his active career, presumably, at an end) . Clemenceau
1
Cf. p. 433.

445
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
the President-maker had, failing himself, a safe candidate. He had .

refused to accept Antonin Dubost, so the orthodox Left vote was cast
in the preliminary meetings for a M. Pams. But Poincare* refused to
retire in favour of a minor member of his own Cabinet and, as the votes
had been almost equally divided between him and Pams, he was sure
to be elected if his supporters stuck by him, as the Right far preferred
him to Pams. Such a decision infuriated Glemenceau it was, he
asserted, a breach of Republican discipline to run after being beaten
in the preliminary vote, no matter how narrow the margin. The
conventions apparently required that the candidate of a little more than
a third of the National Assembly should defeat the candidate of a good
deal more than half. But Poincare was not going to be argued or
intimidated into surrender, and he was elected.
It was an election that created a precedent, for the Left was never
able again, no matter how great its formal majority in the two Houses,
to elect the candidate it had agreed on in the preliminary meetings.

At the final election, enough members of the majority always went over
to the other side to elect a compromise candidate. The presidency
ceased, that is to say, to represent a particular majority at the moment
of election. It represented the fundamental political caution and
conservatism that He beneath the superficial extremism of the French
politician. The election meant more than that, for Poincare took it as
support for his belief that the nation wanted a reinforcement of the

presidency which was to take it too seriously, for the new President
was too legalistically minded to step outside the bounds of law and
precedent and, inside them, his power of independent action was small.
Lastly, the election was a defeat for Glemenceau; his authority had
been successfully defied and the new President was now added to the
long list of politicians with whom 'The Tiger* had a score to settle.
Briand succeeded Poincare as Prime Minister, but the ingenious
emasculation of the electoral reform bill by the Radical technicians
of the Senate (led by Clemenceau) caused him to resign, and it fell
to Louis Barthou, close friend and ally of Poincare*, to carry through
the measure which revealed to people and politicians the seriousness
of the diplomatic situation, for before Briand's fall the Ministry had
announced its intention of raising the period of military service from
two to three years.
'

No project could have been politically bolder. The reduction of


the term of service had been in line with the development of the whole
military policy of the Republic and it had been almost the only con-
Army in the Dreyfus case. The crisis
crete result of the victory over the
of 1911 had forced on the Government a reconsideration of military
policy and a stocktaking of military resources on the Government. The
Army had a new Commander-in-Chief designate in General Joffre, and
be wa insistent that there was a great deal to be done before the
446
THE SHADOW OF WAR
French Army could take the field with confidence in its ability to defeat
the Germans. What was to be done called for great financial effort, but
it also called, so the General Staff asserted, for great
personal effort.
The War Minister in the Poincare Government was Millerand, who
won the confidence and respect of the chiefs of the Army by his great
abilitiesand his firm belief in all they told him. lie had done a great
deal to restore to the Army the prestige it had enjoyed before the Affair.
The Army was no longer a dangerous wild animal on a chain, but
a faithful watchdog that required encouragement. Like Boulanger
before him, Millerand knew that the man in the street and the soldier
liked, inpeace-time at any rate, the exaltation of the 'pride, pomp and
circumstance of glorious war', and as far as it vvas possible in an Army
whose traditions laid no stress on 'smartness', Millerand advertised the
rebirth of mutual confidence between the Army and the Nation. 1 The
energetic Minister fell as the result of an astonishing lack of political
sense in a former member of th< Government of Republican Defence' 2 ;

but his policy was continued. Yet reforms in administration, pro-


jected reforms in the artillery, even the proposal to put the French
Army into a less murderous uniform than the blue coat and red
trousers of not very old tradition 8 did not solve the military problem.
The Turkish defeat in the Balkan War had made the military
position of Germany and Austria less good, and Germany reacted
by a great programme of rearmament and a great increase of her peace-
time strength. France could find the money for technical improve-
ments, but could she find the men? Her population was stationary,
that of Germany still growing. Already France had had to lower her
standard of physical fitness to keep her regiments full. What could
she do now? There was only one remedy: to increase the term of
service with the colours. As France had only two thirds of the popula-
tion of Germany she must remedy that by keeping her sons under the
colours for three years, as against the German two. Involved in this
argument was a military conception that was violently and ably
attacked by Jean Jaures. Jaures, who had never been much at home
in the economic side of Socialist argument, had been more and more

oppressed, since 1906, with the danger of war and with the problem
of the Army in a democracy. Not living in idyllic simplicity on an
island or on an isolated continent, not believing that it did not matter
whether, France was ruled by Frenchmen or Prussians, he could not
fallback on either sentimental or revolutionary unilateral disarmament
One of his devices was the encouragement of torchlight parades. This gave the
1

critics who had not forgiven him for his desertion of Socialism a chance to make a pun on
the double meaning of 'retraite' (parade and pension). He had 'promised the workers old
age pensions, he gave them torchlight parades'.-
He reinstated du Paty de Clam in his rank as a reserve officer.
They dated not from Napoleon but from Charles X. The proposal to dress the Army
9

in a drabber costume and make officers less of a target was violently attacked in a Right
paper as part of a conspiracy to lower the dignity ancj authority of the officers.
447
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
as a remedy. Solutions that were not fantastically irrelevant to the
problem in London or New York, were irrelevant in Paris. It was
with this in mind that Jaures, ably briefed by some critically-minded
soldiers, wrote his brilliant plea for 'the New Army'.
The fault of the existing French Army, so Jaures argued, was that its

leaders thought entirely in terms of soldiers with the colours. They


wanted a long period of service with the colours, because they thought
that the war would be decided
in the first few weeks by the first-line

troops. Reserves would only be useful to exploit a victory already won.


More than that, they wanted long service because their tactical ideas
were based on a mechanical psychology. They put their trust in
soldiers drilled to automatic action; and it took time to produce such
soldiers. To train a man in the use of arms and in the elements of
the military arts took months; what took years was the 'making a
soldier of him', that is, the production of the blind habit of obedience
which the generals believed and Jaures did not believe was neces-
sary to producing an efficient soldier. Because this obedience was
thought necessary, troops spent too much of their time on barrack
squares in endless repetitive drill, too little in real preparation for war
in country camps. It would be possible to give France a more efficient
defensive force at a greatly less cost in time and money if the Generals
could be cured of their beliefs that only the 'active Army' counted for
much and that it must, consist of men who had put away civilian habits
of thought and action. If the two-year law had failed, Jaures argued,
it was because the heads of the Army had never tried to make it work.

They had merely lamented the reduction of the term of service instead
of recasting all their ideas of what an Army should be. They had
clung to the ideal of a 'great army' but had not tried to realize the more
practicable and efficient ideal of a nation in arms.
It was this thesis that was the basis of the most impressive criticism
of the three-years law. It was idle to pretend, as was pretended then
and has been asserted since, that the reorganization of the German
Army could be a matter of indifference to France; it could only be a
matter of indifference if France, first of all, completely recast her
foreign policy and, indeed, her view of the nature of the national state.
If she had done so, she would have been unique among the great powers
of Europe, but there was no chance of her doing so. In all probability >
Jaures exaggerated the merits of the militia system he advocated, how-
ever just were his criticisms of the mentality of the rulers of the French
Army. The constructive side of his doctrine suffered from his associa-
tion, however involuntary, with the noisy enemies of patriotism and
preachers of revolutionary methods of ending the danger of war.
And some of the supporters of the new law, conscious that it was not
likely to be popular at the coming elections, may have resented the fact
that Jaures was choosing the electorally better part. But the arguments
448
THE SHADOW OF WAR
for the new law were often of very doubtful validity. The threatened
superiority of the German Army was not decisive. The vision of that
Army throwing itself on France in the first days of war without waiting
for its was rather a naive nightmare than an actual threat. 1
reservists
But there was a real disparity of forces between Germany and France,
and it was idle to ignore it. 2
It was significant that the law was passed under the
-leadership
of Barthou and that a Chamber in which the Radicals were so
strong
followed non-Radical ministers in this unpopular course. Of course
such prudence saved the face of the Radical leaders. The most
unpopular result of the changed military policy was the retention with
the colours of the men who would normall ; have been
discharged;
there were many demonstrations and some minor outbreaks
against
military authority. The Chamber found the solution; it provided
that the age of calling up should be twenty, not twenty-one, and that
two classes should !>< Billed the colours at the same time.
>
The
implied bargain with the sen nig soldiers was thus kept and, in 1914,
there was in existence an extra class of trained men.
So great a sacrifice ;is the increase of the blood tax imposed on the
workers, demanded some compensation. The Barthou Government,
therefore, piomiscd that the extra cost of the rearmament programme
would be. met out of the proceeds of the income tax which was at last
to be instituted. This promise was not a new one. As long ago as
1907 M. Caillaux, as Clemenceau's Finance Minister, had introduced
a bill for income tax that was to be progressive in its incidence, that is,
which would be flexible enough to make the rates heavier on high
incomes than on low. It was to replace some of the old direct taxes
dating from Napoleon I, taxes which were now not productive enough
and which were very unjust in their incidence, not only as between
individuals but as between areas. The burden was to be shifted from
landowners to security owners, a move which was just and which was
popular with the numerous class of landowners. But the proposal to
levy a tax on the income from rentes was condemned by the Senate as
a breach of public faith. Had the income from the national debt not
been guaranteed by the law of Vendemiaire in the year 1797? The
Third Republic must keep the promises of the First.
Even apart from this threat to the implied contractual rights of the
public creditor, where the Senate betrayed a sensitiveness worthy of
John Marshall, the spirit behind the Caillaux proposals was terrifying
to the bourgeoisie. For, as Jaures pointed out, the information got by
1
It should be remembered, however, that in the first days of the war two important

attacks were made by frontier corps, one, the German attack on Liege, was a partial success;
the other, the French attack in Alsace, a complete failure.
The argument, dear to some French critics of the law, that the increase in the German
Army was still merely a Government project is of no importance. Whatever might be the
case in France, no Reichstag ever successfully resisted a demand for more armaments coining
from the Imperial Government.
449
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
an income tax w6uld make it possible to estimate what the
effective
could be made to surrender for 'works of solidarity
1

possessing classes .

Not only would the privacy of family finance be violated, but it would
be violated to enable politicians to pay the money of the thrifty over to
the idle! The Chamber adopted a bill more radical than Caillaux' s
which, possibly to the surprise of its authors, the Senate referred to a
committee which took nearly five years to report. After the three-
years law, with its increase of the cash and social cost of the Army, the
time had come to take some steps to fulfil the promises made for so
many years. That generous leader of the Right, Albert de Mun,
^wished his political bedfellows to show that they meant what they said
when they talked of equal financial sacrifice, but he found that he had
taken them too literally; they did not intend that the needs of national
defence should be made the occasion for revolutionizing a tax system
from whose deficiencies they did not suffer very much. The debate
went on for over a year, with various projects being sent to the Senate
and being trimmed there of their dangerous features. But the great
deficits of these years educated even the Senate and, on July I5th,

1914, the principle of a progressive income tax was at last voted. Its
rates were low; its exemptions generous, and it avoided all unnecessary

prying into private affairs by providing that a taxpayer who volun-


teered a statement of income was to be believed unless the authorities
could prove him wrong, while if he made no statement he was to be
assessed and had to prove the assessment wrong. It was a very thin
end of the wedge, but the wedge was at last ready for the Treasury to
hammer in.

It was not the Barthou Government that carried this reform. It


had proposed to raise a large loan to cover the deficit and the loan was
to be tax free. This was to deny the Radical thesis in the matter of
taxation, and the Chamber revolted. Elections were drawing near; it
was absurd, if not dangerous, that the dominant party should not rule
the country till the elections were over, so the Radicals came back to
office. The nominal Prime Minister was Doumergue; the real power,
Caillaux, who was back at the Ministry of Finance. It was Caillaux
who had launched the Radical programme with his speech at Pau
income tax and the return to two years' service. On the other side, the
leaders who had been cut off from power by the resurgence of the
Radicals and who were responsible for the three-years law, formed,
under Briand's leadership, the 'Federation des Gaudies'; and the
approaching election seemed to reduce itself to a duel between Caillaux
and Briand with the military law as the theme. Jaures led the orthodox
Socialists in a real though not formal alliance with the Radicals, and
as the Senate refused to tamper with the scrutin anondissement, 'Re-
publican discipline' could be trusted to defeat both open and concealed
reaction, the feeble remnants of the Right, the waverers of the Centre
450
THE SHADOW OF WAR
and the more dangerous 'Federation des Gaudies' which united so
many of the ablest parliamentarians.
Before the electors were given a chance to deride, the
political
system received a new shock that seemed to the jaundii ccl critics on the
Right to justify all their contempt for the Republic and may have
persuaded foreign observers that France was h, almost as bad a way as
her neighbour Britain. If she had no gre a I >a \ c n mr *

aging rebellion
<
1 1 < (

and mutiny, she had a scandal of the traditional type that


predicts the
ruin of the State if old-fashioned moralists are to be believed. When
the news spread round Paris on the
evening of March i6th, 1914, that
the editor of one of the chief Conservative
newspapers had been killed
by the wife of the leading member of the Government, even
in his office
the most blase were startled. The campaign run by Calmette's paper,
the Figaro, against the. Jeadei of the Radicals had been bitter even
by
French standards. It had c-.usisted largely in the publication and
threatened public ai inn .i"tln>v letters which even wise politicians write
to women but \\ha h, \\l\t n blished, are so hard to get taken in the
,
r

proper spirit.
3
l iu \ uilcctcc seriously M. Caillaux' s reputation for
politicaleandoui and consistency, and it was believed that Calmette
was determined to go dirough to the end, to pursue his campaign
against the p\\erful Finance Minister, regardless of the latter's violent
tempei, piide, and power. Attempts to silence Calmette failed, until
Madame Caillaux tried the remedy of killing her husband's accuser or
slanderer.
1
It is characteristic of the odd atmosphere of the 'Republic of Pals
that the Prime Minister, M. Gaston Doumcrguc, although of sound
Calvinist stock, should have attempted to keep M. Caillaux in the
Government. M. Caillaux had more sense and realized that his
position, for the moment at least, was impossible. His place was by
his imprisoned wife, whom he hastened to visit in the company of the
young Radical Minister, M. Malvy. The Cabinet was reorganized;
Renoult succeeded Caillaux and, more important, Malvy succeeded
Renoult at the Interior. The Empire had found it harder to adjust
itself to the murder of Victor Noir by Prince Pierre Bonaparte than, at

first, the Doumergue Cabinet did to


the killing of Calmette. 2
There were violent scenes in Paris, crowds expressed their dis-
approval by the usual methods of cat-calls and hissing, but the
machine
of policeand politics worked, at first, smoothly. But the vacant chair

1 to the second Madame Gaillaux and had been stolen by the first,
The letters were written
ofJoan of
objections as a professor to the Nationalist exploitation
2
M. Thalamas, whose
Arc have been mentioned (cf. p. 429), contributed the oddest document to the odd dossier
of the case. He sent Madame Caillaux an open letter congratulating her on her achieve-
ment. He knew from experience the sufferings of those who had dared to combat wealth
and clericalism. 'Make what use you like of this letter. Find in it the voice of an honest
man who is shocked and of a journalist-deputy who is made heart-sore by the goings-on of

those dishonour the Press and Parliament.


who
1
Madame Thalamas, the world was in-
de
formed, was writing an approving article for the Dtpkhe
Versailles.

45'
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
of M. Caillaux was hardly filled when, on March 1 7th, the Chamber
was the scene of a St. Patrick's Day row worthy of a place beside the
attack on Andre*, perhaps even worthy of comparison with the attacks
on the Panama 'chequards'. It began in the traditional way with a
demand from Jacques Delahaye for information about a letter whose
existence had been asserted by Calmette, a letter proving, it was said,
that in 1911 MM. Monis and Caillaux had brought pressure to bear on
the Procureur-General, Fabre, to secure the postponement of the in-
vestigation into the business affairs of M. Rochette.
M. Rochette was a financier on the edge of respectability. He had
fallen foul of Clemenceau, who, as Prime Minister, had taken legal
steps against him, an act of distrust that earned for Rochette the patron-
age of Jaures. The best friends of the great tribune were the first
to admit that he was no very good judge of character, especially of the
character of sharks like Rochette. But it was not unimportant that
by 1914, when Rochette was not even a hero to those who thought him
a financial genius or a martyr to those who thought him the victim of
Clemenceau' s tyranny, he should once have been a stick used by the
extreme Left to beat the Government with. By 1911, Rochette had
been convicted, but had appealed. It was the postponement of the
hearing of his appeal that was the favour Rochette, according to
rumours^ had asked of Monis and Caillaux and which had been
granted after improper pressure had been brought to bear on the
judicial functionaries whose business it was to deal with the matter.
The rumours involved more people than M. Monis and M. Caillaux,
for the arrest of Rochette was declared to have been due to a conspiracy
to break the market, a conspiracy to which M. Clemenceau had lent
his aid, innocently or less innocently. When the affair was first in-
vestigated by a parliamentary Commission, Fabre, the Procureur-
Gnral, refused to discuss the question of whether the postponements
of the trial which allowed Rochette to continue his operations were due
to political pressure. He hinted that they were, but refused to expand
his hint. The Chairman of the Commission, M. Jaures, summoned
M. Monis to tell his story, but M. Monis was averse, he asserted, to
increasing the amount of scandal. 'I will be the victim if you like, of

your injustice, but be the


I will proud and silent victim.' M. Jaures
did not insist; the mystery was left unprobed and Rochette had his first
conviction quashed.
make ghosts walk, and M. Monis thought
Assassination is enough to
that being a proud and silent victim would not now impress the
Chamber as favourably as it had the Commission. M. Monis, like
M. Floquet, fell back on stout denial. He had not been concerned in
any attempt to postpone Rochette's trial. That
slander, he implied,
had bten scotched by the Commission whereby he passed the ball to
Jaures, who demanded that, if the document that proved these charges
452
THE SHADOW OF WAR
existed, should be produced. Doumergue followed. Delahaye had
it

admitted that he had only seen a copy: where was the original? The
Radicals were triumphant but not for long, for M. Barthou, rising in
his turn, declared that the original existed, that he had seen it, that in
fact he had it in his possession, there it was! The document was
decisive; it told how, under pressure from Monis and Caillaux, Rochette
had been given a respite; the motives of Caillaux rniy have been of the
highest, he may have been in all sincerity desirous of not upsetting the
market at a critical moment by a new scandal, but his enemies had
triumphed.
Behind the campaign of scandal there was a bitter personal feud.
Caillaux, by his arrogance, his pride, his energy, had made many
enemies, and his contempt for many of his collaborators was so great
that he did not remember that a politician who wishes to pose or act
as the defender of
\\\r poor
against the rich, of the Republic against
itsenemies, cannot allord some kinds of acquaintances. His friends,
for example, wen: at Live in launching a new left-wing journal, the
Bonnet Rouge which was not dangerous; but among the respectable
politicians -\\ id
journalists who backed the new paper, were men whose
characters were vulnerable, men like M. Almeyreda. Caillaux, the
enemy of embattled high finance, had too many friends or acquaint-
ances (.11 the edge of low finance. Moreover, he had made dangerous
political enemies, notably Aristide Briand, whose good nature was one
of his chief assets, who managed to be on good terms with the most
diverse men and women, but who never forgave Caillaux. It was to

Briand, as Minister of Justice, that Fabre confided the damning docu-


ment and Briand had handed it on to his successor, Barthou. It was
the publication of this report by Calmette. that was the sword hung over
Caillaux' s head. It was to silence Calmette that all resources of

pressure had been adopted, and they had been so far successful that
Calmette, pressed not to use the Fabre letter, had printed the private
letter which had infuriated Caillaux and driven the second Madame
Caillaux to murder.
Opposed to Caillaux were very astute persons indeed, among them
Louis Barthou. When he received from Briand the sealed Fabre
letter, Barthou decided, he told the Chamber, that it was
not an
officialdocument and that he was not justified in handing it on to his
successor, sohe kept it. 1 It was the knowledge of the existence of this
explosive document that accounted for the desperate efforts of Dou-

mergue and Monis to hush it all up; but why, knowing that it did
exist, they should have risked their reputations in such dangerous
denials of the truth is more hard to explain. There was a third Com-
Barthou was an enthusiastic collector of autographs and of rare books; his methods were
1

later the subject ofa violent attack by Maurras in the famous tract Le Bibliophile Barthou.
This particular example of the collector's point of view was rebuked by Jaures, whose sense
of humour was never his strong point and who was in an awkward position.

453
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
mission, which reproved the activities of Gaillaux and Monis, rebuked
Briand and Barthou and, of course, dealt severely with M. Fabre,
who was not a deputy. The laws of political responsibility were not
mocked. 1
If Briand, Barthou, and the other leaders of the Te'de'ration des
Gauches* were naive enough to think that the revelations of bad
memory and plastic morals in high quarters would help them in the
elections of 1914, they were undeceived. The real victors in 1914, as
in 1893 after Panama, were the Socialists; they returned 102 strong,
while Caillaux's Radicals were over 160 strong. So far as the country
had expressed an opinion, it was hostile to any policy of domestic
appeasement and against the three-years law. The authors of that law
might lament, as they did, that a great question of high policy had been
debated in circumstances in which the easy way was sure to win votes;
the new Chamber had a mandate to end three-years service. 2 Pom-
care*regarded himself as the trustee of national interests, interpreting
those interests in a simple nationalist fashion. He was determined to
guard the sacred three-years service law and was naive enough to do it
by trying to foist on the Chamber a Ministry publicly committed to its
defence. But the ignominious collapse of the Ribot Government made
itnecessary to bow to the verdict of the electors and of the new
Chamber; the task of forming a Ministry was entrusted to Rene* Viviani,
who took office on June i6th.
The choice of Viviani, as the least unpleasant way for the President
to retreat, was very natural. No one could be more eloquent in
defence of the immortal principles of the Left than the ex-Socialist
leader. But he was of Italian origin and, like Gambetta, fond of a
combinazione. Moreover, he was a leading member of the^Bar, and the
uncharitable hinted that his success there owed something to the kind-
ness of that even more successful leader of the Bar, Poincare*. For a
man of Viviani' s talents it was not impossible to find a way out of the
dilemma for himself and for Poincare'. It was necessary both to carry
out electoral promises and to keep the bargain with the President, and
the new Government was considering the problem of how to repeal the
three-years service law while keeping the troops with the colours for
thirty-six months, when events made this compromise impossible and
1
There were, of course, many other elements in the Caillaux-Calmette feud. The
relations of Gaillaux with his first wife and with his second wife (while she was still married to
someone else), the relations between Monsieur and Madame Calmcttc, the fight for the con-
trol of the Figaro, all were involved. It was not a triangle but a maze (with as many doors
as the set of a Palais Royal farce) which was brought to the attention of the French public
by Madame Caillaux's pistol shot. It may be worth while adding that Madame Caillaux
was acquitted. She had been defended by Labori.
*
Caillaux took his triumphant return by his faithful voters of Mamers as a rebuke to
the slanderers who had tried to defame him because he was for peace and fiscal justice.
That opposition to a settlement with Germany and to an income tax were among the
motives of Caillaux's detractors is undoubted; it does not follow that M. Gaillaux, by his
conduct, had not diminished his utility as a public servant defending the public interest
against private wealth. But electors did not expect too much.
454
THE SHADOW OF WAR
superfluous.
1
The news of the assassination of the heir to the Austro-
Hungarian throne in the capital of the annexed provinces of Bosnia-
Herzegovina on June 28th made less of a sensation in Paris than had
the killing of Galmette. Diplomats were more
impressed, for the
murder of the Archduke could not fail to make Austro-Serbian relations
even worse if possible. At the moment of *he murder, the Austrian
Foreign Office was busy with plans for a diplomatic isolation of Serbia;
and the murder gave it an opportunity to press forward with those
plans.
But the secret of the decision to end, once for all, the Serbian menace to
the existence of the Dual Monarchy was well kept. Poincare* and his
new Prime Minister, Viviani, were due in St. Petersburg on a visit
planned by the President to reaffirm the Alliance and to smooth over the
difficulties between Britain and Russia that were
making the working of
the Entente difficult. It was decided to
carry out the programme.
The position of Austria was simple. She suspected, although she
could not prove, that the assassination was the work of agents of Serbian
officials. She was convinced that the tide was running against the
Monarchy; that the Balkan situation had to be ended or mended.
She could not be content with a mere diplomatic victory like that of
1909 or 1913. An independent Serbia could not be on good terms
with Austria, for she was bound to try to play the role of a Balkan
Prussia or Piedmont, to attempt to unite the South Slavs under her
leadership. Austria wanted to create a situation in which a war
against Serbia would be made possible. After victory, Serbia would
be partitioned among her neighbours, Rumania, Bulgaria, Albania,
who would thus be bound to the Austrian side. A rump state might
survive under Austrian domination, but there would be no annexation
of Serbians to the Monarchy, which was already in danger of death from
too many Slav subjects. Austria hoped that the war would be localized
and, if she could get German
support, hoped to frighten off Russia.
On July 6th, rashness, undertook to back up
Germany, with great
her ally, and, with this trump-card in his pocket, Berchtold, the Austrian
Foreign Minister, drafted an ultimatum so constructed that Serbia
could not accept it and remain independent. Each year that passed
strengthened Russia, from a military and economic point of view. She
was rapidly improving her army and, in the years since the peace with
Japan, she had made great economic progress. No delay
could Jielp
Austria. Then, too, the military measures taken by Germany, the war
could not be repeated very
levy and the great increase in military force,
soon. France, on the other hand, had not had much time to reap the
benefits, such as they were, of the three-years law,
and the reform of her
artillery had only just begun.
Britain was preoccupied with the Irish

realized that the three-years law was safer in


Iivolski, who did not lack shrewdness,
1

the hands of a Left Ministry than in those of an openly reactionary and therefore
weak
in fact, capable of carrying out the policy of the Right.
Ministry. Only the Left was,
455 - GG
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
crisis. was true that a show-down with Serbia was necessary, the
If it
calculation that 1914 was the year and the Serajevo murder the
occasion was correct. That, in the long run, it ended in the collapse
of the Austrian political structure does not show that this policy was
ill-timed except in being too late. And if the Germans were right in
thinking that the survival of Austria was indispensable to then- security,
they were right in backing Austria, although wrong or imprudent in
letting Austria have a free hand in deciding the nature of the steps to
be taken.
The gravity of the crisis was fully understood in Belgrade, as was
natural, for several members of the Serbian Government had known of
the assassination plot and had done nothing effective to prevent its
execution, while important Serbian officers were actually behind the
conspiracy. In 1914 it was much harder than it would be now, when
Balkan habits have spread over so much of the world, to make Western
nations realize that there were countries in which high officials used
murder as a political weapon and who thought a world war a slight
price to pay for national unity. Nor did Austria's own record help her,
for she had unfortunately allowed her bona fides to become suspect in a
famous trial in which a zealous Pan-German historian had been the
victim of forgers anxious to damn some Groat patriots. Such mistakes
are made in all countries, as The Times in London should have remem-
bered, but the zeal of the Austro-Hungarian State to convict Groat
nationalists, like the zeal of Lord Salisbury, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain
and others to discredit Parnell, was more damaging to the repute of the
dupes of the forgers than they realized. The Friedjung trial made it
J

harder for the sound part of the Austrian case to be accepted by Europe.
The terms of the ultimatum when they were published made a^ bad
impression, especially since Serbia was only given forty-eight hours to
accept or refuse in toto.* The Serbians were quite astute enough to
take advantage of this situation. Like Gavour in 1859, they P ut the
Austrians in a bad light by accepting almost all the demands. To the
world in 1914, as to the world before Ems in 1870, one power had
gained a great diplomatic victory and was soon to appear as a war-
monger by not being content with it. This was not merely the reaction
of the Entente but of the German Emperor. Berchtold and his
colleagues could not openly avow what was, nevertheless, their con-
viction, that no diplomatic victory over Serbia was any good. Serbia
must be made impotent by war. It was the contention of both Ger-
many and Austria at this stage that the war could and should be
localized: but the decision an that point would be made in St. Petersburg,
During the visit ef Poincare" and Viviani, Russia had been assured
1
The too zealous defender of German culture who played the part of Gavaignac or
Lord Salisbury was a Jew.
*
This note was delivered in Belgrade on July 231x1, 1914.
456
THE SHADOW OF WA-R
by France that her ally would stand by her. As in 1912, Poincare',
although anxious to avoid war, was equally anxious not to give Russia an
excuse to abandon the Alliance or to let it fall into desuetude. Clemen-
ceau and Pichon had run that risk in 1909 in the Bosnian crisis.
Poincare' and Viviani would not run it in 1914; they would not take

any steps to bring pressure to bear on Russi' which might suggest to


the Tsar, or to Sazonov, that France was indiilercnt to Russia's Balkan
interests.
Those interests were, in fact, involved; the Serbian question was
not a matter of life and death for Russia, but the annihilation of Serbia
would put an end to Russian influence in the Balkans, bring Rumania
back to the Triple Alliance and end the use o f Panslav patriotism as a
cement for the Autocracy. The Russian Army and bourgeoisie if not
the peasantry or town workers, were convinced that the abandonment
of Serbia was to be avoided at all costs, even at the cost of a war
with Austria that could hardlv avoid becoming a war with Germany.
Sazonov's objru \\a, to convince Austria and Germany that Russia
was seriou^ tln.s time. He wanted assurances from France that she
would back up Russia. He got them; he wanted assurances from
Britain tlint >he would back up France; he did not get them. Poinsare'
and Viviani had sailed for home a few hours before the publication
of the AuMrian ultimatum, with its disclosure of an intention to reduce
Serbia to a satellite power, if not to destroy her altogether, but the
French Ambassador, Paleologue, who had been sent to Russia to
replace a less vigorous diplomat, was a good disciple of his former chief,
Delcasse. So far as Russian action was affected by the certainty of
French help, then Paleologue was responsible for stiffening Sazonov,
and Poincare for making those assurances of support, if the worst came
to the worst, seem reliable.
As a means of bringing pressure to bear on Austria, Sazonov wanted
to mobilize in those Russian military districts which were opposite the
Austrian frontiers. Here a point of military technique became of the
greatest importance. Germany hoped to get the Entente to let
Austria deal with Serbia alone, and Russia was anxious to avoid appear-
ing to intimidate Germany. But it was impossible to mobilize effec-
tively against Austria without mobilizing
in the Warsaw district, and
that was a menace to Germany. For it must be remembered that
Germany's chances of success in a war on two fronts were thought, in
the opinion of all experts, to depend on her ability to mobilize much
faster than Russia. Every day of peace and mobilization was a serious
loss for Germany. A Russian mobilization then must involve war or
the loss, for every day that it went on without war, of an increasingly
large part of the chief German military
asset time.
Sazonov was able to delay mobilization and even to force the with-,
drawal of such an order which the weak Tsar had been induced to give.
457
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
But Sazonov was determined, even at the cost of a war, to make it

impossible for Austria to destroy Serbia; and, by* declaring war on


Serbia (July 27th), Austria had made it plain how far she was willing
to go and how hard it would be for her to retreat. Her German
partner, repenting belatedly of her rashness, tried to get Austria to halt
her invasion of Serbia till some compromise could be worked out. The
British Foreign Secretary, pulling France along with him, was working
desperately for a settlement. But there remained the unescapable fact:
Austria thought the destruction of Serbia, and Russia thought her
rescue, worth a great war. Each hoped to get what she wanted without
a general war, but even the certainty of a European war would not have
deterred the rulers.
These rulers, by the end of July, were not the statesmen but the
soldiers. And the soldiers in turn were the prisoners of their machines.
From the moment Russia mobilized, war was certain; for if mobilization
did not mean war in France or Russia, it did mean war in Germany.
To mobilize without war was to the advantage of Russia; to allow that
situation to continue was impossible from the German viewpoint. It
was obvious, by July 3Oth, that in certain circumstances Russia would
figh| and that France would support her; it was known next day that
Russia had mobilized, as it was rightly suspected that she had been
taking military precautions which cut down the German margin of
security for some days before that. The attitude of Britain was a cause
of uncertainty and worry to both sides. Sir Edward Grey could not
promise aid to France and he could not threaten Germany with British
intervention, for although he thought British honour and interest were
involved, if a war came, in backing France, he was not sure that the
Cabinet would support him. It is possible that had Grey been able to
give a firm answer to German questionings, Germany would have
brought a stronger pressure to bear on Austria. Jt is also possible that
the result would have been to stiffen further the Russian resolve to
prevent Austria doing what the rulers of Austria had decided must be
done at any price.
In Paris there was great anxiety but no panic. London refused to
give the comforting assurances demanded of her, and it grew more and
more likely that war was coming. In such circumstances it was desir-
able not to repeat the mistake of 1870; desirable, that is, hot to declare
war. Germany in 1914 was less adroitly led thau Germany in 1870.
The news of the Russian mobilization made a German mobilization
inevitable; especially as the French Government (whose Ambassador
in Russia had failed to inform it of the Russian mobilization for a day
after it occurred) at last gave way to Joffre's insistance and ordered a

general mobilization an hour or two before Germany did. The two


decisions were not directly connected; but they showed that the military
necessities were regarded in the same light in Berlin and Paris.

458
THE SHADOW OF WAR
The German Ambassador was ordered to ask the intentions of the
French Government, and if they, by some miracle, said that they would
remain- neutral, he was to ask for the surrender of the great fortresses of
Toul and Verdun as a guarantee. But as Viviani answered with polite
evasions, the Ambassador did not need to present his demand. On
July 2 6th a sealed letter had been sent to the German Minister in
Belgium containing an ultimatum to be presented on further instruc-
tions. It demanded a free passage
through the country whose inde-
pendence and neutrality Prussia had twice guaranteed, a demand
backed up by the plea of military necessity and by some quite super-
fluous lies about French designs on Belgium. And the declaration of
war on France did not confine itself to sta^'ng, what was true, that
France was the pledged ally of Russia with whom Germany was at
war, it based the declaration on alleged and false French violations of
German territory, while as a gesture, which did not in fact involve much
military loss, if ,m\ the French covering troops had been drawn back
,

on an average 10 kilometres from the frontier to avoid any awkward


incidents a -id to make a good impression on the world.
Germany was by now careless of what impression she made. She
attemptr-1 to get Britain to promise an unconditional neutrality,
promising in return that France should not lose any territory in
Europe, but without extending the guarantee to the colonies. In
London, Paul Gambon was trying in vain to get a ck finite announce-
ment of his intentions from Grey. All he got was a promise that the
German Fleet would not be allowed to enter the Channel, a promise
which, of course, was a serious breach of British neutrality. The invasion
of Belgium ended all British hesitation and, by the night of August 4th,
both the great European combinations were at war, although it was a
week or two before Austria and the Western powers were formally at
war, and Italy, taking advantage of the good legal point that she had
not been consulted about the ultimatum to Serbia, was neutral, ready
to put herself on the market when the time came.
In France the whole crisis, as far as the people knew, had only
lasted a few days; there was no warlike feeling in the masses; there was
a powerful force of organized opposition to a war incarnate in Jean
Jaures. On July sist the tribune was murdered, the first and one of
the greatest of French losses. In all countries the nations believed that
their rulers were the victims of aggression or of plots. They were all
victims of a system. It was, by the ideas of the age, legitimate for
Serbia to try to unite the South Slavs and legitimate for Austria to
resist. Both Governments overstepped conventional limits in their
but wholly incompatible aims; that was all.
pursuit of their legitimate
At the last moment, the Tsar made a despairing reference to The Hague
tribunal, butno statesman, in Russia or out of it, thought for a moment
of submitting the dispute to any third party. How could the right of
459
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
the Habsburgs to rule the lands they had held for centuries be weighed
against the resolution of the Serbs to unite their 'race? It is possible
that the war would have come anyway; but it did come because of the
failure of Europe any way of settling peacefully the Austrian
to find

question. was
If there any one group that, more than another, bears
the responsibility for the war, it is the Magyar nobles and the Austrian
Germans, above all the Sudeten Germans, who made a racial settle-
ment within the old empire impossible.

460
BOOK IX

THE WAR
Aliens, enfants de la patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrive.
La Marseillaise.

CVst la luttr finale,


Groupoas tous et demain,
1/lntr-rnntK>'iale sera le genre humain.
L> Internationale.
CHAPTER I

THE FRONT

strength and weakness of the French Army in 1914 had curious


THE
resemblances to its
strength and weakness in 1870. There was the
same reliance on one or two veapoiis, without a sufficient study of their
tactical use, their possibilities and limitations; there was the same under-
estimation of the potential numerical strength and efficiency of the
enemy. In the years that immediately followed the disasters of 1870,
the military policy of France had been deeply marked by a sense of
inferioriu . 1 1
was, consequently, defensive in spirit; some critics might
have said timid. The Peace of Frankfort had imposed on France a
frontier deprived of one of its great barriers, Metz, but a frontier that
still offered serious possibilities of fortification. These opportunities
were fully exploited by an elaborate system of fortresses and forts,
named after its chief designer, the system of Sere de Riviere. From
north to south, the four major fortresses of Verdun, Toul, Epinal,
Belfort, supported by many minor works, blocked all the ways into
France, either across the Vosges from Alsace or from the twin fortresses
of Metz-Thionville which were now the advanced bases of German
military power in Lorraine. Twenty years after Sedan, a German ad-
vance into France was only possible if these fortresses (and the gaps
that they covered) could be taken, covered or outflanked. And the
temptation to outflank them grew, as German military opinion settled
down to the study of the problems of the war on both fronts made
probable by the Franco-Russian Alliance. For the French had not
continued their frontier defences behind the Belgian frontier, where
Maubeuge and some lesser works were a poor substitute for the ad-
mirably-planned system of the eastern zone.
If the frontier barrier imposed on the German General Staff the
for over
duty of finding a way through it or around it, it imposed
on the French Staff the duty of making the most of it.
twenty years
Even when the pessimism bred by 1870 and the real weakness that
followed it had both given way to a reasonable degree of confidence
and strength, the various French plans of campaign proposed to leave
to the Germans the task of opening the campaign, of committing
them-
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE *

selves to some solution of the very difficult problems set them by Se"r
de Riviere and of taking advantage of the difficulties inherent in any
solution. Let the Germans engage themselves in the desperate assault
on the frontier barrier and, when they were deeply involved, take such
aggressive measures as the situation demanded.
Such were the prudent councils followed by the French Staff. But
as the years passed, the prudence or timidity of these plans became dis-
tasteful to the men who were coming to the top in the French Army.
That Army had, by 1890, not only recovered confidence in itself, but
had impressed its high opinion of itself on outside observers. It was in
many ways a pioneer; it had adopted the first magazine rifle, the Lebel,
in 1889 *: and, in 1897, produced the 75-millimetre quick-firing field-

gun, weapon that was not only the first effective quick-firer, but which
a
in 1914 was still the best, superior both to the German 77-millimetre
gun and to the British i8-pounder. Nor was the prestige of the French
Army due solely to its armament; the theory of war, the study of mili-
tary history, the whole intellectual training of the officers who were to
exercise the higher commands were raised to a high level. In General
Bonnal, in Colonel Foch, in Commandant Colin, it had produced
military historians and theorists whose writings were studied with
respect in all the great armies. And the doctrine of war taught in the
French military schools, especially by Foch and then by his disciples,
became hostile to the whole policy of letting the enemy make the first
moves. The main lesson of 1870 was, it was asserted, the importance
of taking the initiative, of not submitting to the will of the enemy, for if
one did so, the chance of repairing one's own mistakes or of profiting
from those of the enemy was lost. The object of war was to impose
one's will on the enemy until he surrendered or was rendered incapable
of effective resistance; the means of imposing this surrender on the
enemy was battle, and no defensive battle could give the results of an
offensive one. At best, it prevented the enemy from carrying out, at
that time and by that means, his projects; it did not force him to submit
to yours and it did not in itself prevent him from trying again. The
object of the French plan of campaign and consequently of the peace-
time preparation of the Army should be to take the offensive from the
start, not to allow the Germans to dictate the nature of the campaign
by leaving them a free initiative. It was no longer enough to await the
German attack in the shelter of the fortresses; they were to be spring-
boards, not shelters. From those springboards the French Army was
c
to deliver the blow that cannot be parried* which it was the object of
the general to make easy.
1
The Lebel was not a real repeating rifle like the later Mauser (German) or Lee-Metford
and Lcc-Enfield (British). Its magazine held eight cartridges, but each was inserted separ-
ately so that, in combat, once the magazine was emptied the rifle was reduced to being
a single-shot weapon. This weakness was not remedied until some time after the outbreak
of the war of 1914.

464
THE WAR
The Fnmch plans of campaign thus began to change in
successive
character, but even in 1910, the sixteenth made since 1870 was marked
by a semi-defensive character. It was still dependent for its develop-
ment on the revelation of the character of the German attack that would
come with the outbreak of war, it involved an abandonment of portions
of French territory from the very beginning, ind it was a
plan that
suffered, in addition, the defect of ignoring the possibility that the Ger-
mans would turn the line of fortresses by invading Worse Belgium.
was a plan based on military resources grossly inadequate for
still, it
the tasks assigned them, for it opposed only forty-two French divisions
to sixty-five German. No system of fortification could supply such
deficiencies, especially since the fortifications cr-ild be turned.
Such were the views of the new chief of the General Staff, Joseph
C&ar Joffre, who would have to command in time of war and who
entered on his function* in July 1911 when the storm-clouds on the
horizon were more .nd nioiv ominous. The new General-in-Chief was
just under sixty.' lie was from the south, a native of Rousillon, but in

physique and temperament very unlike the typical meridional of fiction.


Burly, blue-e) ed, phlegmatic, he had risen fast, displaying great organ-
izing abiiit> in the colonies, and earning the commendations of his
great chief, Gallieni, in Madagascar. An engineer, he had taken part
in the fortification of the frontier, but as a colonial officer lie had com-
manded mixed units, and in his march to Timbuctu had displayed a
capacity for command and a readiness to take responsibility which
earned and deserved high commendation. Grave differences of opinion
between General Michel and his colleagues of the Committee of National
Defence 2 led to the resignation of Michel, and after the refusal, first of
Gallie'ni, then of Pau, the post was offered to Joffre, who had been for a
year past a member of the committee.
Joffre at once set about recasting the plan of campaign as fast as his
resources would permit him. He managed, by calling on reserve
divisions which the old plan had neglected, to raise the forces put into
the field immediately on mobilization to sixty-three divisions against
the sixty-five which the French Intelligence Service attributed to the
Germans. In this way the inferiority of French numbers was dimin-
ished and Joffre (who had, for a time, specialized in railway work) be-
lieved that it was possible by a better use of the railways to give to this
mass a sufficient flexibility and mobility. The next problem was that
This gap
presented by the Belgian gap in the French defensive system.
presented a and a military "aspect. It seemed increasingly
political
in peace-time that an
probable from the disposition of German forces
invasion of Belgium was part of their war plan. The Government was
asked whether it would be admissible, if there was danger of a German
1
Born January I2th, 1852.
a
I have thus translated the title 'Conscil superieur de la guerre .

465
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
attack on Belgium, to take the initiative and move into that country.
London was discreetly sounded to the same effect and the decision was
made that.only in the event of a German attack on Belgium would the
French Army cross the frontier.
This. decision was politically extremely prudent, but it had one
military defect: it made very difficult any preliminary agreement with
the Belgian military authorities as to a common plan of campaign. In
fact, the Belgian plan provided for a massing of the Belgian Army in
three groups, one to defend the country against Germany, the other
against France, the other against a possible British landing. This
vagueness as to the character of the danger and help that might come
from Belgium was one reason why no detailed plan of campaign was
drawn up. Apart from massing all possible forces on the frontier and
being resolved to take the offensive as soon as possible, the actual de-
cisions to be taken were left to the outbreak of the war. According to
the joint Franco-Russian military agreements of 1913, both countries
would take the offensive at once, and this necessity for joint action and
for reassuring the Russians was one reason why the policy of a defensive
recoil and a waiting attitude was abandoned.
To carry this plan into effect it was necessary, so thought Joffre, to
do more than utilize all the resources of the existing military system; it
was necessary to augment them.
The growing international tension, the great increases in the
numbers and resources of the German Army which were announced,
the success of the campaign of national revival, resulted in the con-
version of the Chamber and the voting of the law of three-years in
August 1913. This law provided a peace-time army of 700,000 men,
less by over a hundred and fifty thousand than that which the new
German law provided for, but, it was thought, sufficient (with the
promised Russian aid) to make an offensive feasible as soon as mobil-
ization was completed.
Joffre had hitherto merely modified Plan XVI; he now replaced it
by Plan XVII, under whose direction the campaign of 1914 was begun.
After a year's work, the immense task of drafting detailed instructions
was over and by May ist, 1914, the office preparations for putting the
plan into effect were completed. Two great masses of troops were
constituted; one on the south between the Moselle and the Vosges, one
on the north whose junction with the southern wing would be secured
by an army facing Metz-Thionville, and an army of reserve which
would either move to the left of the right wing or to the right of the left
wing. The armies would be numbered from right to left (south-east
to north-east); the ist and 2nd joined to the 5th by the 3rd and the
army of reserve; the 4th, inserting itself either between the 2nd and 3rd
or between the 3rd and 5th. Which alternative would be adopted
depended on the German plan. If Germany invaded Belgium, the
466
THE WAR
4th Army would move north-cast and help the left wing; if
Germany
respected Belgian neutrality, the 4th French Army would add its weight
to the offensive of the right wing of the French mass. Certain minor
units were earmarked as the special reserve of the General-in-Chief,
and the great fortresses were provided with garrisons of reserve troops.
Twelve territorial divisions ofmiddle-aged reservists, indifferently trained
and equipped, would undertake the less-important garrison duties.
When the mobilization was completed, the French Gommander-in-
Chief would have under his hand nearly two million men. 1
What was the military value of this great force? It was great, but
it was less great than it
might and should have been. Its main striking
force was infantry and field-artillery. The equipment of the infantry,
with its defective rifle, its insufficient equipment in machine-guns, its
conspicuous uniform of blue coat and red trousers, had made no real
progress at a time when the German Army had in its equipment and
training made a great deal.
The the seventy-five, was still the best weapon of its
field-gin i,
kind, but was not the only kind. Although the attacking French
it

Army would have to begin its attack in hilly and wooded country, its
artillery, admirable for rapid and accurate fire in open country, had a
flat trajectory. The new Commander-in- Chief was conscious of this
weakness and he was anxious to equip his armies with a mobile heavy
artillery. This the Germans had done, and the weaknesses of their
seventy-seven were largely compensated for by an adequate supply of
mobile heavy artillery capable of mastering the seventy-fives. But
Joffre failed to secure in time the funds necessary for a new artillery
(though the plans and models of such guns were in existence) and had
to content himself with the adoption of a device enabling the existing
field-guns to fire at a higher angle and so be of a little more use in hilly
2
country than they had been.
Even more serious than the defects of equipment were the defects of
tactical training. French military thought had been preoccupied for
forty years with the question of the lessons to be drawn from 1870, but
it had not continued to draw the same kind of lessons. Immediately
after the war, the tactical teaching of the French Army had laid great
stress on the effect of fire; it had recognized, as the Germans had been
forced to do, that the chassepot had worked wonders and that, supported
by a better artillery, it, or its successors, could still work wonders. And
the lessons taught by the chassepot at Gravelotte had been repeated by
the Remingtons of the Turks at Plevna. The improvement of modern

1
1.865.000 men of whom the garrison of Paris and
a spare reserve division in the en-
virons were under the authority of the War Office, not of the Commander-in-Chie
The history of this artillery question is curiously like that of 1870. The device that
in the fuse that were the
improved the seventy-five was the equivalent of the alterations
that the improvement of 1914 was real
reply of Lebcmaf to the new Krupp guns, except
if slight.

467
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
weapons had strengthened the defence. But in the decade before
1914, this obvious truth was neglected. Arguing that the purely
passive methods of 1870 made useless the temporary tactical successes
won by rifle fire, the advocates of the offensive, in greater or less degree,
added to their general doctrine of the strategical offensive, a doctrine
of a tactical offensive. This led them, even the greatest and most
cautious of them, Colonel Foch, to minimize the reinforcement brought
to the defensive by the improvements in equipment, the magazine rifle,
the effective machine-gun, the quickfiring field-gun and smokeless
powder. The teachings of 1870 were repeated in South Africa, in
Manchuria, but despite heretics like Colonel Petain, for a time pro-
1
fessor of infantry tactics at the Staff College, the dominant military

teaching in France either denied or minimized the truth that a man


standing still, or more likely lying down, fires more rapidly and more
accurately than a man advancing on his feet or even on his belly, and
that this was true of the other weapons as well. To arguments like
these, the reply was given that troops could be trained to stand any
losses in their advance, and that once the enemy line was reached, the
power of the offensive would more than compensate for the preliminary
losses; the bayonet would redress the balance of the rifle, and the enemy,
driven out of his position, would suffer more in his hasty retreat than
the victors had done in their brisk advance.
This gratifying result was to be obtained almost entirely by infantry
action. The role of cavalry was to explore and to pursue; a reasonable
enough doctrine, but the role of artillery was almost as limited. Until
the infantry attack had made the enemy disclose himself, the guns were,
in general, to remain silent, then they were to support the attack but they
were not to prepare it. It was a strange doctrine for the most famous

Europe; and a military doctrine which laid so much stress


artillery in
on developing a theory in accord with national capacities and traditions
might have reflected a little more on the tradition of Bureau and
2
Bonaparte.
The new doctrine's triumph was not complete when Joffre took
command; and when the professor of infantry tactics at the Staff
College was asked to prepare an infantry manual, he insisted on the
importance of machine-gun fire. But the higher powers would have
none of this timid, mechanical teaching, and in April 1914 the manual
of the new orthodox doctrine was issued. It was a doctrine of the
offensive at all costs, attributing a virtue to the physical movement of
masses of men animated by thefuriafrancese which might have been in
order before the Battle of Pavia (1525) but was highly unrealistic in
1
colc Sup&ieure de Guerre.
*
Though not yet issued, a heavy field-gun, the 'one hundred and five', was being manu-
factured, and each army had some heavy artillery allotted, to it. It should also be remem-
bered thatjhe first British forces in France had no heavy artillery at all, and their field-guns
had only shrapnel, no high-explosive shells.
468
THE WAR
1914. But the 'Young Turks', who were now in the ascendant, went
far beyond Foch, for as their chief representative, Colonel de Grand-
maison, asserted, their faith was that 'in the offensive, imprudence is the
best safeguard. If we push the offensive spirit even to excess it won't
perhaps be enough.'
And in 1913 and 1914 it was possible to neglect the lessons of the
Russo-Japanese war in favour of the apparently more comforting lessons
of the Balkan wars, where the armies trained and equipped by French
officers and French armament makers had defeated the Turks trained

by German officers and equipped by Krupps. It was possible to dwell


on movement and on the moral qualities of an offensively-minded
infantry and forget that the victorious Bulgarians, before the lines of
Ghatalja, had been as helpless as the most deicnsively-minded army
could have been.
In the few days before the outbreak of war, the main effort of
General Joffre was din -clod to limiting the damage done by the peace-
ful gestures of the < ivilLm M inisi- s, to limiting the withdrawal of troops
10 kilometres within tlic French frontiers to as short a period as possible,
to putting into effect the preliminary measures for mobilization and,

finally, to wringing from a reluctant Government the order for general


mobilizatioi i . On the placards announcing the mobilization
August ist
of the 'Armies of Land and
Sea' were on the walls of every town and
village and, despite the statement of the President of the Republic that
'mobilization is not war', few can have doubted that war had come.
The problems of the first days of war had long perplexed the Govern-
ment chiefs. The vociferous anti-militarism of so many French
leaders had bred a fear that the national ordeal would begin with an
attempted sabotage of mobilization. But in face of the danger from
the east, French national unity reappeared under the surface of faction
and hate. And this union was helped by the reassuring discovery that
the mobilization was proceeding with an ease and smoothness very
different from the improvizations of 1870; the French Army, in this

department, had learnt its lesson, and it absorbed its reserves and sent
them off to the front as fast and as easily as did the Germans. Given
the accuracy of the statistical information at the disposal of the French
General Staff, Joffre had every reason to suppose that he would be able
to assemble a mass equal to that of the Germans as soon as the Germans.

Joffre was right as far as the speed of concentration


of the two
armies was concerned, woefully wrong as far as numbers went. For in
1914, as in 1870, the French leaders refused to believe
that the Germans
could make good soldiers out of all reservists. Reconciled to the addi-
tion of more than an equal number of reservists to their own peace-time

strength, but recognizing that .the


French reserve divisions were not at
all on the level of their active divisions, the French chiefs had learned

without perturbation that their German opposite numbers had pre-


469
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
pared to put into the field complete army corps composed of reserve
troops, but, since they did not believe that such troops were of any value,
they refused to take their existence seriously. But the Germans had
gone further; they had created entirely new formations, the 'ersatz'
(substitute) units composed of the troops left over in regimental depots
when the ranks of the active and reserve units had been filled, and of
these extra formations the French Intelligence Service had no news of
any kind. This double mistake was to be dearly paid for. During
the first three weeks of war the repeated reports of great German
masses on the extreme right of the German line, some of the reports being
remarkably detailed and accurate, were completely disregarded since
they could not be true, all the active corps of the German Army being
accounted for. The Belgians, from whom most of this information
came and who had good reasons for believing in it, were not allowed to
disturb the peace of General Headquarters with stories of the invasion
of their country by the Germans in force. The French cavalry corps
sent into Belgian Luxembourg failed almost completely to penetrate
the German screen and failed to report to Joffre the few fragments of
truth it discovered. And that truth was very disconcerting, for the
main German effort was directed to turning the French left flank by

sweeping right across Belgium, not merely (as the French believed) con-
fined to seizing the Meuse bridges and extending their right a little
beyond their own frontier. The French attack, that is to say, was to be
delivered against an enemy strong enough to withstand it and, at the
same time, with enough extra strength to develop its own plan of cam-
paign almost undisturbed. It took a little over three weeks for this to
be made evident to Joffre, and during those three weeks the French
Army was led blindfold to a great disaster.

II

It willbe remembered that the main variation of Plan XVII de-


pended on whether the Germans kept to their own territory or not; on
August 2nd, as soon as the invasion of Luxembourg was known, Joffre
ordered the 4th Army to take its place between the 3rd and 5th. This
was a recognition that a great part of the German Army would act
north, not south of Metz, but it was a decision made before anyone
could know how far north and west the German right would march.
The French Army now presented a continuous front from the Swiss
frontier to the eastern frontier of Belgium. The 4th Army was no
longer available as a strategic reserve; and as it became evident that,
somehow or other, the Germans were massing troops in central and
western Belgium, the only reply possible was the extension westward
of the 5th Army. This was earnestly demanded by its commander,
Lanrezac, who was convinced that a more formidable German force
470
THE WAR
was on his left than was believed at Headquarters, but who was
allowed by Joffre to do as he wished.
The first French move was a raid by the covering troops into Alsace,
a raid that easily occupied Mulhouse, as the German plan left Alsace
unguarded for the moment, and so produced a mood of patriotic exul-
tation in Paris, but a mere raid that ended in a hasty retreat. It was
in fact rather like Saarbrucken over again. But jt was not until the I4th
of August that really serious operations began, with the advance of the
two right-wing armies (ist and 2nd) against the inferior forces that the
Germans had entrusted with the guard of their southern wing. A new
army of Alsace under Pau was got together and resumed the attack on
Mulhouse, while its neighbours advanced in Lorraine. By the time
the critical moment had come (August igth and
2Oth), the Army of
Alsace, thanks to the prudence of its commander, had been saved from
advancing in the air, but was still too far away to help its neighbours
whose attacks had been extremely costly, whose advance had been slow,
and who were n.\\ \ig:)ion>ly mnter-attacked by the Germans and
forced into irtieat. The right \\ing of the French Army had run into
superior ibices and its role was reduced to keeping those forces busy,
while Joflrr s* night for victory on his left. On the left, the advance was
necessarily debyed a little by the necessity of waiting until the British
Expeditionary Force took its place in the line on the extreme left, arid this
was impossible before August 2ist.
Joffre could not remain wholly indifferent to the news of the German
masses on his left; but, still under the erroneous belief that no reserve
corps were available, he could only account for the strength of the
German right by assuming that they had weakened their centre. He
decided, therefore, to leave the task of dealing with the German flank
to his 5th Army, to the British and to the Belgian Army, now that the

Belgians had been successfully withdrawn from the doomed fortresses of


the Meuse (Liege and Namur). His centre armies, the 3rd and 4th,
would strike at the enemy's centre and, unsuccessful, seize its means of
communication. But this scheme was based on an illusion; the German
centre was not weaker but stronger than the French centre, and the
3rd and 4th Armies advanced in hilly and wooded country to
be
an enemy stronger in numbers, in excellent defen-
bloodily repulsed by
sive positions, and much better equipped for theonly kind of warpossible
in the Ardennes and on the Meuse. The second French blow had
failed and failed more completely than the first. And the main
German blow was just being delivered, for against the 5th Army and
the British were marching not seven but fifteen corps! The battles of
Charleroi and Mons, the retreat of the last units of the Allied forces in
Allied
line, followed. By August 25th the truth was revealed; the
Armies were in rapid retreat from an enemy greatly superior in num-
once joined, could only
bers, anxious to force them to a new battle which,
471 HH
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
be disastrous, a battle which could be evaded only by abandoning the
north of France to the enemy. It was a shock that tested the resolution
of the country, of the Army and of its leaders, for the war of 1914 had
begun with every appearance of being 1870 over again, only worse.
The Army had not only failed strategically, but its tactical shortcomings
had been revealed at frightful cost; 300,000 killed and wounded had
refuted Grandmaison.
It isnot to be wondered at that the natural pessimism that now
struck so many Frenchmen should have had its counterpart in an
equally natural exaltation in the German ranks and especially among
the generals. For things had gone even better than had been planned;
the left wing of the German Armies had defeated the French with
almost as much ease as had the centre and right, whose business it had
been to do the main job. The original German plan had been merely
to turn the French left, but now there was the possibility of turning
both flanks, of rolling the broken fragments against their own fortified

line, of creating the possibility of a far greater Sedan. The organiza-


tion of the German Army fostered such illusions, for it was like a loose
federation rather than like the tightly-centralized army over which
Joffre ruled. Each army commander exercised and was supposed to
exercise a great deal of initiative. The far-away Commander-in-Chief
in Coblence and Luxembourg never saw his Army commanders and
was sometimes reduced to picking up their wireless messages to each
other to discover what they were doing. The German Commander-
in-Chief was Moltke, the nephew of the victor of 1870; his uncle had
commanded in this fashion and the recipe was to be tested again.
For a week the pursuit went on, with each German commander
anxious to emulate the exploits of the others and not very willing to
recognize that another army than his might be the best one to give the
coup de grdce to the fleeing foe. And this failure to co-operate in perfect
harmony was accentuated by the fact that, on various sections of the
advancing German front, there was evidence that, despite the initial
disasters and the speed of the French retreat, the enemy was not yet

incapable of resistance. On the east, the attacks of the armies in


Lorraine made but slow progress against the French, strongly posted on
fortified heights and, in some places, able to call on the fortress artillery
to aid them to repulse the repeated and expensive German attacks,
Even at the opposite extreme, the British and Corps at Le Gateau and
the French 5th Army at Guise showed that they could still fight to sonw
purpose; but as the headlong advance continued, as the magnet o:
Paris came nearer, it was harder to keep one!s head in the various head-
quarters of the German armies.
was even harder to do it in Joffre's headquarters, where so man?
It
illusionshad been shattered in less than a week and where the dreadfu
responsibility of being the organizer of defeat was always before th
472
THE WAR
General's mind. But Joffre had always had a talent for shouldering
responsibility and he was nowcalled on to exercise it to the full. From
the moment that the collapse of his plan of campaign bad been made
evident, he had cleared his mind of the old illusions and set about
reconstructing his front. He projected and had to discard successive
plans for standing on various lines as the full weight of the German
advance was felt, but each new disappointmen left Joffre calm. There
'

were none of the nervous fits of indecision which were weakening the
judgment of his opponent; the French Commander was a man who had
always kept early hours, and while the Government at his imperious
suggestion was getting ready to abandon Paris, while the Minister of
War, Messimy, a retired officer and Radical politician, was alternating
between despair and the more comforting men.ories of Carnot and '93,
Joffre slept soundly every night (though necessarily in different beds as
headquarters moved rapidly south).
The French Commander had led him to one
reflections of the
solution of his pioMom. The
final blow had been the concentration
of the Germans on the western wing; he, too, must concentrate on that
wing and try to turn the German flank as they had turned his. So
while the Armies were retreating, Joffre was stripping his eastern wing
of corps alter corps and sending them by rail to the west; the same high
degree of technical skill shown in the plans for mobilization was now
shown in shifting the centre of gravity of the retreating armies.
While this shift was going on, Joffre was menaced by a gap in his
line which could only be filled by tact. Sir John French, the Com-
mander of the British Expeditionary Force, was profoundly disillu-
sioned by his experience of fighting beside the French. His little army
had been exposed to an attack in overwhelming force, had been forced
to retreat and was now exhausted and in danger of being involved in the
complete collapse that seemed impending. Sir John believed that his
instructions forbade him to risk such a disaster and he announced his
intention of withdrawing south of the Marne to rest and refit, and he
had already begun to move his bases from the Channel to the Bay of
Biscay. In short, he proposed to do as other British generals had done
before him, to secure his own army and save it from annihilation as
Sir John Moore had saved his in 1808. The news struck Joffre not
with panic, but with consternation; not only was a gap to be created in
but the moral effect of a failure to induce the British to join in
his lines,
the decisive battle would be disastrous. The British Government was
warned and Lord Kitchener, the Secretary for War, came in person to
But Joffre needed more
impose on French the duty of staying in line.
than that; for he had begun to accumulate to the west of the British
a new the 7th Army under Manoury, whose advance
Army group,
the German flank was to be the signal for the general advance.
against
And for that flank blow to be effective it must have the co-operation of
473
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
the British. In an interview in which French began by sulking, Joffre,
who knew when to be dramatic, thumped the table and told his col-

league that the honour of the British Army was at stake; and the co-
operation of the British was secured. In Paris, the Governor, Galli&ii,
Joffre's former chief, was assembling all the troops he could, and with
the entrenched camp of the capital as the bastion on one side, and the
great eastern fortresses on the other, the preparations for turning the
flank of the German advance went forward. They were helped by the
Germans, for the Commander of the ist German Army, Von Kluck,
was turning away from Paris, following the retreating French to give
the coup de grdce. The Germans thus outflanked themselves, presenting
their right toany force in Paris. The time had come at last. On the
night of September 3rd-4th, Joffre and Gallieni learned from various
sources, but most accurately from British aviators, of the movements of
the Germans. The only remaining decision to be made was that of the
time when the blow was to fall. Should it be the 6th or yth of Sep-
tember? The new Commander of the 5th Army, Franchet d'Esperey,
1

persuaded his chief to attack on the 6th. At ten o'clock on the night
of September 4th the orders went out for the attack and, on the 6th,
Joffre issued his order of the day to the Army: 'At a moment when a
battle is beginning on whose issue depends the fate of the country,

everyone must remember that the time for looking back is over; every
effort ought to be directed to attacking and driving back the enemy.
A unit that cannot advance must, whatever it may cost, hold the ground
it has won and be annihilated on the spot rather than retreat. In the
present circumstances no failure can be tolerated.' The Battle of the
Marne had begun. 2
The change of fortunes that followed the beginning of the battle and
the long-run importance of that change were so great that it was natural
to talk of 'the miracle of the Marne'. But if there was a miracle, it was
a moral miracle. First of all there was the miracle of the self-control of
the French Commander-in-Chief and of his
staff. With every excuse
for panic they kept their heads. They managed to exploit the possi-
bilityof manoeuvre offered them by that movement of all the German
which ensured that any field force based on the en-
forces east of Paris
trenched camp of the capital would be on the German flank. The
German errors and the French exploitation of them were part of the
solution of the problem as seen by Joffre. And it is not to his discredit

Although Lanrezac had shown a far more acute sense of reality than had any other
1

army commander, he had become very difficult to work with, whether through his fault or
Joffre's it is impossible to say. Joffre removed him and gave the 5th Army to the Com-
mander of the ist Corps, the future Marshal Franchet d'Esperey.
1
The question of the relative merits of Joffre and of Gallieni in the genesis of the Marne
has been much debated; it is not a question of great importance as the outflanking manoeuvre
was simple enough in conception. The greatest of soldiers said the same of war in general,
'a simple art, all is in the execution of it'. In execution, JofTre and Gallieni collaborated;
each doing his part well; the part ofJoffre being that of the responsible Commander-ia-Chief.

474
THE WAR
that he only took advantage of the errors of an over-confident enemy.
For the errors of Kluck and his ist Army in 1914 were no greater than
those of Steinmetz and his ist Army in 1870. The difference was the
difference between Joffre and Bazaine. In the decision to precipitate
action, JofFre was well advised. The Germans had begun to realize
that the war was not over and that the bold methods of their right wing
were dangerous. And there were several minor weaknesses in the
German position that time would speedily remedy. The continued
existence and activity of the Belgian Army based on Antwerp involved a
diversion of strength. The fact that Maubeuge did not fall until the
7th of a
September kept complete army corps out of the first stages of
the battle. Maubeuge, it is now believed, might have held out longer
if the defence had been better conducted, but unlike Metz in 1870, it

did hold out long enough to be useful. And the Russian menace that
induced Moltke to divert troops to the east was at this very moment
being exposed as hollow in the great German victory of Tannenberg,
but too late to ailed the Marne.
Yet all these auxiliary causes of temporary German weakness would
have availed Jofliv little, if the second and greater miracle of the Marne
had not t.iV-n pLce, if the rank-and-file of the French Army, after a
series <i v;vat disasters and a rapid and exhausting retreat, had not
ros])"i/K (I i" the appeal of a leader whom they had, as yet, no reason
to1 1IIM .The strain of pursuit was no doubt physically as great in those
bi'oiling August and September days as that of retreat and the German
victoiics had been fairly costly in men, but the advancing Germans had
all the pride and confidence of victory. It was 1870 over again on a

greater scale and with victories less dearly bought. The cavalry had
already sighted the Tower; they had seized the racing stables at
EiiTcl

Ghantilly; after one last assaulton the defeated enemy, Paris would
again know a German Army of occupation. Many of the French rank-
and-file must have begun the battle as the more intelligent French
officers had begun the campaign of Waterloo, without fear and without

hope.
The battle was quite unlike the later battles of the war; the strug-
gling armies were often separated from each other by great gaps. The
initiative of individual officers and men, their courage or their panic,

might, in a few minutes, decide an important local struggle and, in the


mass, the whole struggle. A French regiment, sorely tried, broke in
panic and the artillery officer in support drove his guns through the
retreating fugitives and opened fire on the triumphant Germans with
such speed and efficiency that they, too, broke in turn. It was the first
feat of arms of Colonel Nivelle. The commander of the 2Oth Corps was
sent off by Joffre to take command of a scratch collection of units which
was, a few days later, to be called the 9th Army. En route he picked up,
at a railway station, a young cavalry officer with an attache-case who
475
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
was to be the chief of his hastily-scraped-together staff. Colonel Max
Weygand and General Ferdinand Foch thus began their famous part-
nership. Out of Paris, in a fleet of taxis, came a few thousand soldiers
to join Manoury in the flank attack that menaced all the German right
and rendered barren their continued and increasingly successful attacks
on the French centre. 1
From the beginning of the battle the Germans were outmanoeuvred;
the only question was, could they by tactical superiority overcome their
disability? If the French armies that they had pursued from the
frontiers broke, the technical outflanking of their right would matter as
little as the pressure of the Austro-Russians on Davout had mattered

at Austerlitz. But the French armies did not break and the German
retreat began. In the east, the Kaiser, who had come to follow the
victorious attack of his son's army by a triumphal entry into Nancy, had
to postpone that pleasure indefinitely. Hausen's Saxons of the 3rd
Army, called on by their neighbours on both sides (and not aided by
their commander's inopportune dysentery), made no real progress, while
on the western flank, Kluck and Billow were fighting for their existence.
Behind and beyond them was Manoury, and between them and their
neighbours was a great gap into which the Allies were moving, but very
cautiously. Too cautiously, for though from various sources, and
especially from the British Air Force, came news of the great gap, the
leaders of the left, Manoury and Franchet d'Esperey and French, re-
fused to take the risk of a great turning movement and a great forward
drive that would have had a chance of routing the enemy, not merely
of repulsing him.
Yet it was a field of battle that might have inspired boldness in
French soldiers, for the battle lines moved round Ghampaubert and
Montmirail and Chateau-Thierry where, a hundred years before, the
Emperor had given the most brilliant examples of his virtuosity. One
French general was, indeed, full of this spirit and it was Foch who best
responded in spirit to the plans of Joffre. But even he could not drive
forward the weary troops who had borne and survived the desperate
assaults of the Prussian Guard. The German right escaped; and it was
only slowly that the Allied Armies followed. It was in reading the
names of reoccupied towns, of La F&re and Senlis and Rheims and
Lun^ville, that the French people and the world realized that the tide
of invasion had turned. The Government, now at Bordeaux, just
esc'aped from disaster, could hardly realize its good fortune or the duty
of telling the world that the invincible German Army had been
defeated, if not routed. But whatever the rulers of Germany might
tell their people and neutrals, they passed their own verdict on the

campaign and on the battle. On September I4th, Moltke was


1
Hie legend of the taxis grew so fast that it was soon believed that all Manoury's Army
went to die front in cabf.

476
THE WAR
removed and replaced by the Minister of War, Falkenhayn, although
to conceal the implications of this decision the change was
kept secret.
It was six weeks since the war had
begun; in 1870 the same length of
time had brought Moltke's uncle to Sedan.

Ill

As the Allies cautiously followed up the enemy, the confidence of


the more enthusiastic spirits at Allied headqnarteis rose. The British
officer, Henry Wilson, who represented the main link between French
and Joffre, agreed with Berthelot that they would all be on die Rhine in
three weeks' time. But the Germans weie recovering their nerve and
accumulating reserves. Their right was broug? t back into line with
the rest of their Armies and, north of the Aisne, their infantry
began
rapidly to put into effect
its excellent peace-time
training in the making
of field-works. The 7th French Army (Manoury) was still beyond the
German right, but not much, and all attacks made on the new German
position failed. A new German offensive on the French position was
out of the question and both sides began to move troops west, looking
for that open front where the war of manoeuvre for which alone they
had prepared rould be resumed. So began the 'race to the sea*.
Castelnau nnd French were sent off to the west and, every \v line, they
found the Germans moving with them. Antwerp had fallen, but the
Belgian Field Army had got away and was now standing <it bay in the
last corner of its country, on the strip between the Yser and the sea.
The possibilities of action were limited on both sides by the practical
disappearance of artillery ammunition, for both the French and Ger-
man gunners had planned for a short war and had exhausted their
reserves. 1
It was Joffre's idea to turn the German flank in Artois and then in
Flanders since he could not do it in Champagne. But the Germans
had the same idea and greater resources. Their reconstituted divisions,
their new battalions of volunteers, were thrown against the hastily-con-
structed Allied lines. Whatever mutual suspicions of their ally's fight-
ing power had been entertained by French and British vanished
in the

great battle of Flanders. The British infantry before Ypres; the French
marines on the Yser; the French cavalry reduced to using its lances on
foot to repulse the German infantry; the Belgians who flooded the tiny

fragment of their country as their Dutch kin had flooded theirs against
the then invincible Spaniards; was to these that was mainly due the
it

German onslaught. But if the


credit of the defeat of the second great

campaign of Flanders was mainly a soldier's battle, it gave to one


French officer the chance to learn the difficult art of inducing Allies
to fight together in a desperate battle. Foch had been chosen by
1
These were about equal; fifteen hundred shells for each field-gun.

477
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
Joffre to represent him in the north. And it was by his coaxing,
ordering, rhetoric, bluff, that the Allied front was held together for six
weeks of constant crisis. On November i5th, the last German attack
was made and failed, and from the North Sea to the Swiss border there
stretched an unbroken line of trenches, a front without a flank, pre-
senting military problems that were new, or new to soldiers dazzled with
the memories of the great captains of the past. Germany had made
two great efforts to destroy the French Army. Both had failed, but
she had succeeded in building a great fortress in France in which her
armies were to resist all attacks successfully until, in the great sortie of
1918, she put all to the touch and lost.

IV

Technically the French Army was even less well prepared for the
type of warfare now imposed on it than it had been for the campaign of
1914. A vigorous policy of recruitment of first-line formations and the
slow growth of the British Army saved it, foi the moment, from the
danger of being overwhelmed by superior numbers, but it was hope-
lessly outdistanced both in training and equipment by the Germans.
In training, although the more naive illusions of 1914 had been lost,
there was still a reluctance in high places to realize that a war of siege
had begun and that the technique of that war had to be learned.
Dreams of brilliant manoeuvres like that of the Marne delayed, at
Headquarters, the objective study of the tactical problem presented by
the creation of a great German fortress in France and Flanders.
The Germans had, and knew that they had, their enemies at a dis-
advantage. Their own plan of war had not, indeed, foreseen the
development of a continuous entrenched line from the Vosges to the sea,
but their tactical methods had always given a large place to the
defensive and they had studied the problems of the defensive backed by
modern weapons with thoroughness and objectivity. Their apprecia-
tion of the role of heavy artillery stood them now in even better stead
than during the war of movement and their troops had been trained in
peacetime in the use of field-works. 'Sweat saves blood* was a maxim
of the Prussian Army, and the spade was never put to better use than
in the months when the German Army dug itself in. In addition to
its better equipment and training, the invading Army in the nature of
things had strategical advantages too. It could choose its line with
far less fear of political or psychological repercussions
than could the
French Army, which was expected, and knew that it was expected," to
drive the enemy out of France at all costs and soon. The German
Army, once it was free from the pursuit that followed the Marne, could
utilize, the tactical assets of the countryside it occupied.
In general it occupied all the ranges of
hilly country that ran across
478
THE WAR
northern France; from its heights it looked down on its enemies,

observing their movements and imposing on them very great difficulties,


both for the infantry attack and for the war of the guns which was now
beginning to dominate the infantry attack. For three years to come,
the Allies were to waste their
strength in desperate assaults on the
natural advantages of the German
position, striv .,ig to drive the enemy
from Vimy Ridge, from Notre Dame dc Loretu% irom the
Argonne,
from the Heights of the Meuse, from the crest of the
Vosges, everywhere
battering against the natural and artificial obstacles behind which lay
the open plains, the way to Germany and It was
victory. during these
years that the price of the initial defeat and of the limited exploitation
of the Marne was paid.
This grim future was hidden from Joffre as 1914 came to an end
with the knowledge that both the great German attacks had been held.
The time had surely come for an offensive action to end the war in
1915 and to rid France of the invader? Thus the diplomatic defeat of
the Turkish intervention on the German side, with its crippling effects
on Russia, would be redeemed; thus Italy and the other hesitant
neutrals would be encouraged to rush to the aid of the victor.
For such ;ui offensive the French Army was not, in fact, prepared at
all. It was able at most to hold its own. The brilliant strategical
objectives, thr cutting of the east and west lines of communication of
the invaders, \vere mirages; indeed, it proved impossible even to recover
main line from Nancy to
the Saint-Mihiel salient which cut across the
Paris and thus hampered that manoeuvre of reserves from wing to wing
which had won the Marne.
The tactical inferiority was mainly an artillery inferiority. The
importance of gunnery was now realized and the first crisis of munitions
shortage that had almost brought the campaign to an end, on both sides,
had been overcome. Gone, too, was the old dogma that 'you don't
make cannon in war time'. Not only was the task of replacing ammu-
nition taken seriously, 1 but strenuous efforts were made to increase the
number of guns, if only to equip the numerous new divisions and corps

created since August. The number of '75*5' was very rapidly increased
and, for their new task, they were provided with a far higher proportion
of high-explosive shells. This change meant a serious problem of
supply of fuses, and in the race for quantity, quality was neglected. So
all through 1915, artillery calculations were complicated by the fact
that many of the new guns and new shells had the bad habit of bursting
in the French instead of in the German lines. But compared with the
V
problem of heavy guns, that of the '75 -was simple. As soon as the
importance of heavy field-artillery was appreciated, the existing stores

1
In the peace-time plans, arrangements were made, though very inadequate ones, for
the continued manufacture of shells though not of guns: 50,000 men were allotted to the task
of providing for the needs of the Army. By the end of the war, 1,600*000 were so engaged.

479
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
were stripped of guns. Forts not in the firing line, the reserve stores of
the navy, artillery depots that had been kept filled in a spirit of conserv-
ative antiquarianism were, all forced to give up their cannon. The
result was a rapid increase in the number of heavy guns, an increase
that concealed the weakness in power. None of the artillery thus sent
to the front was, with one exception, worthy of comparison with that
on the German side of the line. The one exception was the '105', a
weapon with a respectable range and a capacity for rapid fire. But the
manufacture of the '105' had only been begun when the war broke out
and a year later the whole Army had only eighty in service. Nor was
the task of filling the deficiences taken in hand fast enough; the war
might end any day; the manufacturing resources of the country were
barely adequate to keep up the supply of the existing models. So it
happened that the new guns, like the '155', designed to reply on even
terms to the Germans, were only ordered slowly and in limited quan-
tities, and when a more adequate programme was decided on, it could
not be completed before the summer of 1918 and for some types was
not designed to be completed before the summer of 1919! In the
meantime, the French infantry paid in blood for the imperfections of a
heavy artillery, a considerable proportion of which dated from the
artillery reforms of Bange that followed the war of 1870.
In the desperate and futile attacks that marked the winter and
spring of 1 9 1 4- 1 5, the last straw was often the weather. An army com-
mander pointed out to Joffre the absurdity of expecting sjwift and irre-
sistible blows from infantry stationed in water-logged trenches from
which it was very difficult to climb out. The men who managed to
get over the parapet were too often killed and wounded at once, their
bodies fell back into the arms of their comrades, and when the remnants
did get out, they found their rifles clogged with mud; and that mud made
any manoeuvring by the attackers impossible. They could only
move forward slowly in face of numerous and admirably-placed
machine-guns, protected by a powerful artillery that could too often
afford to neglect the French batteries and concentrate on annihilating
the French infantry. Four months of futile assaults of this type cost
the 4th Army 100,000 men, and the same story could be and was told
all over the front. As early as December 1914, General de Maud'huy
had insisted that only a commanding superiority in artillery gave any
hopes of success for the infantry attack and added the pessimistic
estimate that, at most, such a superiority of numbers could be assured
on only 1,500 metres of front!
Such a doctrine was quite incompatible with the optimistic strate-
gical conceptions that Joffre entertained at headquarters. Maud'huy
might be written down as a pessimist, but Foch, who was now Joffre's
right-hand man, used for all difficult tasks and finally given command of
one of the three groups of armies that were constituted in 1915, was
480
THE WAR
optimistic to the point of fanaticism and had been the great theoretician
of the power of manoeuvre. But experience, if it did not shake the
faith of Foch in the importance of strategy, gave him a healthy respect
for tactical necessity. He recognized that mere infantry assaults, no
matter how gallant, were hopeless, that the tactical problem came first
and that, after the experiences of the winter and spring of 1914-15,
the Allied Armies did not dispose of the necessary means of imposing
their will on the enemy and breaking through his lines at one great
stroke. But Joffre refused to listen to the advic^ of his right-hand man;
and even after the experience of the summer, in the great September
offensive of 1915, he and Gastelnau still dreamed of a single brief battle,
breaking through the sides of the great fortress that the Germans had
built in France.
These hopes were, if not made more plausible, at least made more
natural by the desperate position first of Russia, then of Serbia, against
whom the main effort of the Central Powers was directed. France
must sacrifice her troops to relieve Russia in 1915 as Russia had sacri-
ficed hers to save France in 1914. The Germans must be made to pay
for the boldness with which they had concentrated their strength in the
east. And in each successive operation, gallantry combined with luck
produced local situations in which it seemed, for a moment, that the
break-through was imminent. But the defence was always able to
rally; the cilort of storming the front lines exhausted the attackers,
whose artillery and infantry reserves never arrived in time. In vain
great masses of cavalry were assembled ready to emulate Murat. The
German lines stood firm; for a moment, it is true, the attacks of Sep-
tember did alarm the local German commanders, but Falkenhayn had
firmer nerves than they and vetoed any idea of withdrawal to rear
positions. His courage was justified. The battle had to be broken off.
It had cost the French 230,000 killed and wounded; the British, whose
first great effort it was, lost 100,000. The Germans lost 141,000 killed
and wounded and 25,000 prisoners. In a famous phrase, Joffre had
talked of 'nibbling at the enemy', but this kind of attrition resembled
trying to bite through a steel door with badly-fitting false teeth.
It is easy to be wise and censorious; Joffre did make serious efforts
to study the reasons of the failure of each vain battle, even if he was too
willing to see those reasons anywhere but at Chantilly where he now
had his headquarters. It would have been difficult for any French
Commander-in-Chief to remain passive in face of the taunt hurled at
the Government by the new Cato, Georges Glemenceau, 'The Germans
at Noyon'. Like the Spartan fortress in Attica, the German fortress in
France distorted the strategy of the power to whose sacred soil the
presence of the enemy was a disgrace as well as a menace. But the
education of the higher command and of the country was expensive.
Since the war began France had suffered two million casualties, of
481
tHE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
whom 600,000 were dead. Whatever illusions the Germans may have
had French fortitude before 1914, they could have none now. If
as to
the French were to be defeated, it was not because they did not know
how to die; the question was rather 'is knowing how to die enough'?1
The question was asked with the more anxiety that the year 1915
had been marked with disasters everywhere; the rosy illusions of the
winter of 1914, of French and Russian Armies meeting together in cen-
tral Germany, were gone. The Russian Armies had been driven back
with immense losses and the great diversion of the Dardanelles expedi-
tion had failed. In that expedition, France had surrendered control,
both on sea and on land, to Britain, although the Mediterranean was
by agreement her special sphere. At sea, the joint attack on the Straits
failed with serious losses to both fleets and, despite the opposition of the
French Admiral, Gupratte, the attack by water was given up. On
land, the campaign was conducted with no deference to the military
plans of the French Commanders. In the first month, the French
corps, under British orders, lost more than half its effectives, a propor-
tion much higher than that of the British forces, and by the end of the
campaign the French losses were a third of all the troops engaged.
The intervention of Italy had far less effect on the strength of the
Central Powers than had been anticipated, and the defeat of Russia was
followed by the destruction of Serbia. Mainly through French insis-
tence, Allied troops were hurried to Salonika to aid the Serbs and to
persuade the Greeks to accept the interpretation of their treaty obliga-
tions which was advocated by Venizelos and was most convenient to
the Allies. But it was too late, and the Balkan Army had to dig itself
in; the result was a locking-up offerees in and around Salonika which
the Germans came to describe as their greatest concentration camp
of Allied prisoners. The one slight comfort that the situation had for
Joffre was, that among the Allied soldiers so locked-up, was General
Sarrail.
had been one not unsubstantial claim of Joffre to succeed Michel
It
that he was a 'good Republican' and, at the same time, was not on bad
terms with those numerous generals who were not 'good Republicans'
in the Radical sense of the term, for although he was not a Catholic,
he was closely associated with such eminently Catholic generals as Foch
and Castelnau. From the outbreak of the war, Joffre had shown him-
self to be a severe judge of men, and of the twenty-one corps commanders
of 1 9 14 he had removed seven, while of the five army commanders,
two, Lanrezac and Ruffey, had been speedily replaced by Franchet

1
the end of 1915 France had lost in dead almost as many men as Great Britain was
By
to lose in thewhole course of the war and two thirds of the total losses of the whole British
Empire. In a period a little less than that during which the United States was a belligerent,
France lost seven times as many men as the United States, out of a population a little over
a third as great; i.e. over an approximately equal period of belligerency, about twenty
Frenchmen were killed for one American.
482
THE WAR
d'Esperey and by Sarrail. The successive Ministers of War, Messimy
and Millerand, had supported these exercises of authority, but all the
prestige of the victor of the Marne was needed when it came to remov-
ing Sarrail himself. That general had two claims to respect; he had
stabilized the front of his army in September, refusing to take advan-

tage of Joffre's permission to abandon Verdun to stand a siege, and he


was the most favoured general of the Radical n- inYians.
At the very beginning of the War M. Caillaux (at the moment out
of office) had pulled all possible wires to be sent to Sarrail as paymaster.
As the left-wing anti-clerical deputies saw the rapid rise of Foch (who
had a Jesuit brother) and of Castelnau, a nobleman and a perfect
'monk in uniform', they clung to the comforting thought that there was
at least one general who would not desert the Republic. As long as
Sarrail had a great command, Combes and Andre had not lived in vain.

Unfortunately, luck had deserted Sarrail; while other armies merely


failed to gain ground, his lost it. A series of local German successes
bred discontent all through the 3rd Army and finally Joffre instructed
Dubail to make an inquiry, as a result of which Sarrail was 'put at the
disposition of the Minister'. It was a bold stroke for which many

politicians never forgave the Commander-in-Chicf; but Sarrail was not


a man whose friends would let him be left in idleness and it was he who
was sent to Salonika to prove that he was a victim of bad luck and of
clerk al malice. The Sarrail episode was only one of the signs that the
politicians were settling down to the fact that the war was going to last
for some time and that the early days of uncritical national union were
over. In August 1914, the dogmatic Marxian, Jules Guesde, might
justify his entry into the 'Government of Sacred Union' by the declara-
tion that 'when the house is on fire it is no time for controversy. The
only thing to do is to take a hand with the buckets.' A year later, it
was obvious that, although the house was still on fire, it was not going
to burn down at once, and political hands could be spared for politics.
It was not either unnatural or unwise that this should be so. In the
early months of the war Joffre had been all-powerful: before the Marne
because of the general fear, after it because of his achievement. The
civilian Minister of War, Millerand, made it his simple rule of conduct
to follow the lead given from general headquarters at Chantilly, and

deputies learned, with increasing misgiving, that whatever the Con-


stitution might say, the real authority over the armies of the Republic
was in the hands of Joffre, not of the Minister who acted as his mouth-
.

piece in Parliament.
The dislike of this situation was not based merely on constitutional
grounds. The French soldier, less than any other, was likely to over-
look faults of intelligence and good sense in his superiors. He might
and did obey the most fantastic orders, but he was under no illusions
about their absurdity. Like the soldiers of the Army of the Potomac
483
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
in 1864, theFrench soldiers of 1915 wrote letters, talked when on leave
and managed to spread the justifiable conviction that the methods of
war of the High Command were often unrealistic, to put it at its lowest.
And among these soldiers on leave were deputies who had chosen to
serve at the front instead of in Parliament. Among them, for instance,
was the ex- Minister of War, Messimy, who had been a regular captain
and was now a divisional general, but there were many more, like
Desire* Ferry, who had first-hand experience of the limitations of the
tactical resources and methods of Joffre's headquarters and who soon

began to voice complaints. In vain Joffre protested and demanded


assurances against the infractions of discipline involved in the political
action of soldier-deputies and of officers with political friends. The
assurances demanded (and given) would have been capable of fulfil-
ment only if the complaints had been purely political and factional,
without serious foundation. But what the deputies and their infor-
mants were saying was only what Joffre's combatant subordinates were
telling him. The group of staff officers at Ghantilly acquired more and
more the reputation of theoreticians, of embusquts}- spinning their fine
theories in safety and comfort and leaving their impossible execution to
the fighting troops. And the deputies who, leaving questions of tac-
tics and strategy to soldiers or to civilians who liked that kind of thing,

concentrated their attentions on the food, the clothing, the wine, the
leave of the men in the trenches were, no doubt, often playing politics
in the traditional fashion, but they were also fulfilling a very useful

public function. For only if the man in the trenches could be con-
vinced that his grievances, even if not remedied, were at any rate voiced,
was his morale likely to stand the prodigious strain put on it.
Although the politicians might grumble and although some were
doing more than grumble, the position of the Commander-in-Chief was
too strong both in the country and with the Allies. As far as there was
any united conduct of the war it was organized by Joffre through the
inter-Allied conferences. The politicians most feared in Paris were
seldom known in other countries and, when known, were not always
admired or trusted. So Joffre was strong enough, when he organized
a General Staff of the whole Army, apart from his own staff of the
5
'armies of the north and north-east , to give the chief post to Castelnau.
And when Millerand had been replaced by the sick Gallieni, the poli-
ticians who thought that, by making Joffre's old chief and rival for the

glory of the Marne, Minister of War, they would restore the authority
of the Rue Saint-Dominique 2 over Chantilly were mistaken. Gallie*ni
disliked many of Joffre's collaborators and expressed bitter criticisms
of the professors of the Staff College who had neglected everything that
had happened since 1870, but Joffre's position was unshaken. On
December 2nd, 1915, Joffre was given the title of Commander-in-Chief
1
Slacken. *
The French War Office.

484
THE WAR
of all French Armies and made responsible in form, as in fact, for the
conduct of operations in all theatres of war. Gallicni was dying and
was soon replaced by the ineffective Roques at the War Office. Joffre
had, in fact, full authority to plan the campaign of 1916.
His freedom of action was seriously limited by the removal of Sir
John French from the command of the British troops. Whatever diffi-
culties had originally arisen, Joffre had found h' w to manage French,
the more that French was deeply under the influence of Henry Wilson,
who was deeply under the influence of Foch. In place of the Anglo-
Irishman, came the silent and self-confident Scot, Haig, who might be
managed, but if so could only be managed by other means. And it
was most important that he should be brought to collaborate. At long
last, the British forces were on a scale commensu" ate with the resources
of the country; their collaboration with the French was no longer mainly
of psychological importance. The French Higher Command and the
French people would decidedly not understand it if the British troops
did not take a much bigger share of the western fighting than they had
done so far. And it was not certain that they would. French was a
thorough 'westerner'; as convinced as Joffre himself that the war could
only be won in France. It was by no means certain that Haig shared
this belief and, even if he did, his position as a new commander was
weak. As far back as December 1914, Joffre and Foch had dissuaded
Kitchener from replacing French by Ian Hamilton, and now that
Kitchener had had his way, it was he who had to be persuaded that the
main military effort of the British Empire should be made in France
and, if in France, should be made in accord with the general
made
strategy of the French Armies.
There was in Britain a powerful party which regarded this war, like
so many previous wars, as one in which the main British contribution
should be naval and economic. Command of the sea plus the most
lavish use of the 'cavalerie de Saint-Georges' l combined with a moder-
ate and independent use of the army had been the downfall of Napoleon
despite Austerlitz and Jena. They would be the downfall of William II
despite the possible temporary triumphs of his arms in France or Poland.
And was argued, with force, that Britain could not be expected to
it

provide the dominant navy and a first-class army as well. She had
just, slowly and reluctantly, adopted conscription, a breach
with
national tradition far more revolutionary than any continental country
could realize, and sfie was already finding the financing of herself and
of her weaker allies a severe strain. But though neither side realized
it, British and French fortunes were far more deeply intertwined
than
those of Britain and of any former ally had been. For the first time

i.c. money, so called by the French from the figure of Saint George on the gold guineas
1

and sovereigns, with which for two centuries British statesmen had paid their allies to fight
the French.

485
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
since the Armada, mere command of the sea did not guarantee the
island fromall the serious dangers of war. 'England is an island,'
Michelet had said, thus explaining all the peculiarities of British policy.
But England (or Britain as the new British Commander-in-Chief would
doubtless have put it) was no longer quite an island. She was like Holy
Isle or the Mont Saint- Michel, joined in an incomplete fashion at cer-
tain times to the Continent; the et penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos of

Virgil was, for the first time, only partly true.


Britain had now hostages to fortune on the Continent almost as
important to her as Paris was to France. The channel ports, the Bel-
gian ports, from them came or could come the aeroplanes, the sub-
marines that might starve out the island or bring war home to its
complacent inhabitants. Napoleon had talked of Antwerp as being a
pistol pointed at the heart of England, but English nerves had borne
the pointing very well, since the pistol was not loaded. Napoleon and
the Grande Armee at Boulogne had been an empty threat, but the
Germans at Boulogne or Calais, that was more serious, for the new
German guns could make the use of the Straits of Dover very difficult
and with submarines might make it impossible. The Narrow Seas
were now too narrow for safety. This truth, if it percolated slowly into
English minds, did percolate; it was no longer possible to write off a
complete French defeat as the defeats of Austrians, Prussians and Dutch
had been written off in the past. With the enemy in the Channel
ports, able, in case of complete military victory, to make France open
to German submarines, aeroplanes and destroyers, not merely Calais
but Cherbourg, not merely Dunkirk but Saint-Nazairc and Toulon,
the semi-island might have to make very poor terms.
If such thoughts guaranteed France from too cavalier treatment at
the hands of her ally, they introduced a strategical complication, for
they made it as much a British interest to get the Germans out of Flan-
ders as it was a French interest to get them out of France. And while
a complete victory would do both, short of a complete victory it was as
natural that the thought that the Germans were in Ostend and Zee-
brugge should distort British strategy as that the thought that they were
in Ndyon or outside Rheims should distort French. If the Germans
were be defeated in 1916, JofFre was convinced that it was indis-
to

pensable that the main effort should be joint, that the British should
not attempt an attack on the Flemish coast and that French offensives
in Lorraine and Champagne were out of the question. The great
assault must be made where the two armies joined, in Artois and on the
Somme. And with diplomacy and tact, as well as with good military
arguments, Joffre and Foch, who was to be the chief French executant
of the offensive, talked with their British colleagues.
They were successful; the British Army in France was to be steadily
reinforced and when it was ready, around July ist at latest, the great
486
THE WAR
drive would begin. To that drive Joffre would contribute his carefully
accumulated reserves of men and, more important, of guns and ammu-
nition. France would contribute the lion's share of resources, and the
young and inexperienced British Army would (with all necessary tact)
be induced to take its orders from the senior partner. But while Ghan-
tilly was planning, so was the German Headquarters, and on February
2ist, after a bombardment of unprecedented violence, the troops of the
Imperial Grown Prince moved forward to storm the outer defences of
Verdun.

Thedesign of Falkenhayn was not to deliver a great battle or, in


the military sense, gain a decisive victory over the French.
strict The
total forces engaged at first were limited; the proposal of the Crown
Prince to make a wide encircling attack was rejected. The calculation
of German Headquarters was that it would be possible to force the
French narrow area where the French reserves and
to give battle in a
French be destroyed under a storm of artillery fire.
will to light could
The attack on Verdun was not a surprise. The French intelligence
service had t;ot wind of the German plans and preparations in time to
make it possible to reinforce the normal complement of troops in what
had been a fairly quiet area and to plan how the fortress was to be
defended. But Joffre, thinking as a strategist, was unable to see what
great gains the Germans could count on. Even if they took the fortress,
there was no possibility of a great break through.
Verdun was, indeed, important psychologically. It was one of the
three great barrier fortresses that had stood firm in August and Sep-
tember of 1914. Verdun, Toul and Belfort were sacred names. 1 Was
it not at Verdun that the heroic Commander, Beaurepaire, in 1792 had

committed suicide rather than surrender the fortress to the Prussians?


As a fortress, Verdun had suffered the eclipse in public and professional
esteem that followed the triumphs of the great Austrian siege-guns over
the Belgian fortresses in 1914. Its forts had been dismantled and the
elaborate trench-works created in their stead took little account of the
possibilities of defence offered by the steel and concrete masterpieces of
French military engineering. In the steps which were hastily taken to
defend less the fortress than the position on the Meuse which the for-
tress covered, but which, it was thought, it had ceased to guard, reliance
was placed mainly on heavy artillery, working according to carefully
planned schemes of fire supporting the infantry divisions assembled to
stop the German attacks. These preparations were not complete when
the attack came and, even had they been, the German leaders were

1
Falkenhayn had for a time thought of making his attack on Belfort.

487 H
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
confident that the weight of their artillery would render such defences
useless. The weight and speed of German fire, it was thought, would
annihilate French resistance and, covered by their artillery, the Ger-
mans would advance in comparative ease on the fortress. And, indeed,
by ordinary standards, the Germans were right. All the legendary
tales of great sieges were to be eclipsed in the narrow battle-ground,
only a few miles square in all, on which more than half a million men
were to be killed or wounded.
From the start, the plans of attack and defence went wrong. The
German infantry, advancing over ground where all resistance had
theoretically been blotted out, found that in the ruined trenches and
in the great mud-holes made by the sixteen-inch shells there were little

groups of French infantry who fought to the last. In those first hours
took place the first of innumerable Thermopylaes under a sky darkened
by more formidable missiles than the Persian arrows. In snow, and
rain,and mud, the French, who were proud to think themselves the heirs
of Athens, showed all the Spartan virtues. The startled Germans who
were working the sixteen-inch guns were to see a Frenchman move
tranquilly with his hands in his pockets from one shattered trench to
another. Officers and men were to sacrifice themselves with as little
concern and less self-conscious virtue than any heroes of the ancient
world and, if the German attack failed, if crisis after crisis was survived
in the five-months battle, it was first of all due to the simple resolution
of the French soldier. If, in 1915, he had shown that the old elan in
attack was not lost in the most hopeless circumstances, irt the spring of
1916 he showed that he could die where he was put as well as any
soldiers the world has seen.
would have been in vain for him to die if his chiefs had not chosen
It
well where he should die. At first, the efforts of the local command
to be ready for the attack seemed futile; if the power of resistance of
the isolated units which had survived the bombardment was a shock
to the Germans, the breakdown of the elaborate plans of defence was a
shock to the French. In the hurricane of fire that burst on Verdun,
the ordinary organization of command collapsed in many sectors. The
most disastrous result was the abandonment of the Fort of Douaumont
by itssurrounding troops and its capture (empty) by a Prussian com-
pany. Lieutenant Brandis had scored the most brilliant feat of war on
the German side since Ludendorff had captured the citadel of Lige in
1914. The weight of the German blow, even before this disaster, had
impressed Chantilly, where Castelnau had taken the grave responsi-
bility of awakening Joffre to demand orders and to offer to go to Verdun
himself to report. He was sent off at once; he reiterated the orders
already given by Joffre that the right (east) bank of the Meuse must not
be evacuated, even at the risk of the loss of the great mass of artillery
accumulated there, and when the new defender of Verdun arrived at
488
THE WAR
his command on the 25th of February, the decision to stand fast had
been taken.
The first German blow mighty as it had been and dramatic as was
its Douaumont in German, in neutral and in French
success hi taking
eyes had been parried. The task of resisting the second, that all knew
was imminent, had been entrusted to General IVtain, Commander of
the 2nd Army, and the general who had best gained and earned the
trust of the rank-and-file. That trust was, from Uxe side of the French
Command, the greatest asset of Petain; because lie had not, in the past
asked men to die in vain, he could now hope to be heard when he asked
men to die in tens of thousands to save the bulwark of France.
From Petain's taking over of the command of the front round Ver-
dun, the battle on the French, as on the German, side was mainly a
battle of guns. This was fully understood by Joffre, who poured out
at Verdun the carefully husbanded reserves of guns and ammunition
that were to have been used in the great offensive. It was not in quan-

tity that the French Army suffered but in quality, for the heavy artillery
was still largely composed of semi-obsolete types that fired more slowly
than did the German guns. But with all their limitations the French
guns were the indispensable background of the defence. It was the
task of the infantry to stand or to advance under the cover of an artillery
fire of an intensity of which there was no previous example in history.

Both the French and German artillery experts showed admirable in-
genuity in devising methods of destroying the opposing infantry, but it
was discovered that the infantry (German and French alike) had an
unprecedented capacity for enduring agony and death.
It was discovered, too, that not only flesh and blood had been under-
estimated. The forts German guns
stood the batterings of the great
with comparative ease; the plunged a foot deep in the concrete;
shells
the turrets vibrated like bells; men choked from poison gas or went mad
from shock, but the forts were not destroyed and could be and were
fought like battleships. To recover Douaumont, the French poured out
theic most valiant efforts in attack; to defend Fort Vaux they were
equally lavish of then* lives. Heroic legends, no more improbable than
the facts warranted, sprang up and, within a few weeks of the beginning
of the batde, the merely military side of the contest was less important
than the political. To force the French to give up Verdun was, for the
Germans, a symbol of their ability to force a separate peace on their
chief land enemy. To hold Verdun, was to show the world and the
Germans that the French will to victory was unshaken. Into the lists
by the Meuse the flower of both Armies was drawn; division after
division was destroyed in the ceaseless fighting. The system of battle
adopted by Pe*tain involved, indeed, the use of many fresh units, for
troops were brought into the battle-line and after a few days withdrawn,
then, after a brief rest, sent back. Falkenhayn kept his divisions in line

489
*
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
.
until they were past fighting. The French system was very expensive
in reliefs; it involved great losses and there were tactical drawbacks to
the constantly changing composition of the front line; but it kept ready
for use many famous fighting units which the German system would
have destroyed for months.
One problem was much simpler for the Germans than for the
French. The had given the Germans command of the
fortunes of war
main railway line behind their front, while Verdun was only linked to
its rear by a narrow-gauge railway and a road, the road now known as

the 'Sacred Way', from Verdun to Bar-le-Duc. It was along this road
that every night the careful organization of Petain brought, in thou-
sands of trucks, the greater part of the supplies of the battle. It was as
indispensable a foundation of victory as the opening of a line into Chat-
tanooga by Grant in the autumn of 1863, but it was a line under fire
all day and night and menaced by an enemy far more dangerous than
Bragg. March passed and April and June, and the drain on the French
Army continued; the Germans extended the range of their attacks and,
if the Crown Prince had lost faith in the battle, Falkenhayn still pressed
it. The losses were about equal on either side, but the Germans could
afford them better. Before the Allied offensive on the Somme could
be launched, the fortress would fall and the definite superiority of the
German arms be made manifest. The 'sword of England', the French
Army, would be broken and, without that sword, the hastily im-
provised weapon that was the army of Haig was not to be feared. But
though position after position was taken, the sword did not break.
The Germans, having falsely announced the capture of Fort Vaux,
could not fully exploit their success when, after days of fighting in the
cellars of the fort, it fell at last. The observation-point aptly called
'the Dead Man* was taken; the position of the French on the right bank
of the Meuse was bad. But on July ist, the long-awaited Somme offen-
sive began. Petain had become commander of a group of armies
and left the immediate defence of Verdun to Nivelle who, Joffre
thought, would be more ready to take the offensive when the German
attacks ceased. But the Battle of Verdun was not over; in one last
effort, on July nth and I2th, a great assault was launched on the Fort
of Souville whose fall would open the way to the inner defences of the
city. But the garrison, manning the outer defences of the fort like
sailors repelling boarders, repulsed the attack. Verdun was saved; its
salvation had cost 300,000 casualties to the French, and failure had
cost as many to the Germans.

490
THE WAR

VI

All through the assault on Verdun, the French command had been
steeled inits resolution to hold out by the thought that it was thereby

making the more easy the combined Allied assault that was planned
for the summer of 1916. The Allies, whose plans were being thus for-
warded, did not always show great tact in their acknowledgment of this
service. At the beginning of the battle, Sir William Robertson, chief
of the Imperial General Staff in London, had been rather pleased to
think that the Germans were spending their resources in this wasteful
fashion. He took, indeed, rather the line of the Irish landlord who
wrote to his tenants (from London) that if ^iey thought they could
intimidate him by shooting his bailiff, they were very much mistaken.
Haig quickly took both a more sympathetic and more realistic view of
the situation: and no British reaction was as trying to Joffre's temper as
the anxious demands of Cadorna l that the Russians should attack
before they were ready in order to relieve Italy from the imminent
Austrian offensive. As Cadorna was in a great numerical superiority,
this demand seemed, at French Headquarters, to be an excessive

example of that sacred selfishness which the Italians had candidly


announced as their motto.
The great operation in France was to be a joint offensive on the
Somme, an offensive from which Joffre hoped greater things than did
most of his subordinates. The wastage of Verdun had made the
French share in the battle less than had been planned, and if the Ger-
man lines were to be broken, it would have to be largely by British
efforts. The task of leading the French attack was given to Foch; and
(whatever might be thought at GhantilJy) at Foch's headquarters and
still more in the headquarters of his army commanders, like Fayolle,

it was realized that the offensive could succeed only so far as the artillery

preparation succeeded. Indeed, Fayolle wrote as if the main use of the


infantry was to occupy and to hold German positions made untenable
by the guns. Foch was not quite so limited in his outlook, but even he
seemed to optimists to write off too easily all chances of a break-through
and of a speedy return to a war of manoeuvre. But the wastage of
Verdun forced Joffre to give way in great part to his subordinates, and
the main object of the battle was now to wear down the enemy. If the

infantry could not attack without an intense artillery preparation, and


if the fact that most of the French heavy artillery was of the old slow-
firing type involvedan artillery preparation lasting days, surprise and
somanoeuvre was almost impossible.
It was something that Foch approved of an attack at all, for P<5tain
was firmly of the opinion that the French Army had done its share for
1 Italian Commander-in-Chief.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
that year and the heavy fighting ought to be left to the fresher troops of
the British, Italians and Russians. But to take this line was to abandon
the carefully nursed understanding with London, even if it had not
been contrary to Joffre's own beliefs. So, on the first ofJuly, the Allied
attack began; with real though limited success on the French side, with
some success but with frightful loss on the British. For the new British
armies, whose first experience of battle this was, were sent forward in a

dense and rigid parade order which was perhaps necessary, but which
gave the Germans the best targets they had had since the mass attacks
of the red-trousered French infantry of 1914-15. On July ist, the
British attackers lost 60,000 men, a loss unprecedented in British mili-

tary history. And the ground gained was not enough to justify these
losses; at any rate, in the eyes of the London Cabinet. The crisis of
September 1914 was renewed. Haig, under pressure from home,
talked of abandoning the offensive and Joffre, as in 1914, was forced to
appeal to the honour of the British arms. A refusal of the British
Government to stand a fraction of the losses endured by France might
well have done what Verdun had failed to do, broken the will to fight
of the French nation. 'England/ had run the German propagandist
taunt, 'will fight to her last Frenchman.'
It was necessary to prove that this was not so. So the attacks were
resumed, with no striking success, but at any rate with the effect of
further exhausting the western German armies. When Ludendorff,
who (with Hindenburg in nominal command) had replaced Falken-
hayn at the head of the German war machine, came to France in Sep-
tember, he realized, for the first time, how much more serious war was
on the western than on the eastern front; and the problem of resisting
the constant battering began to perplex him. But all was not well
within the French lines. There was constant friction between Foch
and his subordinates and between Foch and Joffre. The methods of
attack in this siege warfare were constantly changing and the Germans
adapted themselves to the defence faster than the assailants did to the
attack. The French public, which had expected a great deal from the
Battle of the Somme, was discontented with the modest successes that
seemed, to those who had won them, so remarkable. In this type of
war, weather was of supreme importance. Fog or mist made artillery
preparation based on air scouting impossible, and rain during the battle
turned the battle-field, pitted with shell-holes, into marshes. By the
middle of November, the battle had to come to an end and the enemy
was still in France. He had lost some villages and a few square miles
of territory, that was all. And this limited success had cost the French
200,000 men and the British over twice as many, while the Germans
had held their ground at a cost of about half the total Allied losses. It
was a poor balance sheet: and, as if to underline this fact, in two limited
offensives, in October and in December, General Nivelle, in front of
THE WAR
Verdun, had recovered most of the ground lost in the i^eat battle at
comparatively little loss to himself and at a considerable loss in
prisoners
to the Germans.
It was natural that the French Go verm n< in. .uul the French

Commander-in-Chief, should regard this feat oi ;n ins u ith admiration,


should wonder whether Nivelle and his chief rxei utaut,
Mangin, had
not discovered the secret that (on their own .idniission) was hidden
from Foch and P&ain, the secret of how to break, quickly and cheaply,
the fortified line against which for the third campaign the French
Armies had been hurled in vain. And the general situation made
some change politically necessary. The joy roused by the great Rus-
sian successes of June had been destroyed by the quick destruction of
Rumania, on whose intervention such high hopes ha'd been based.
SarraiPs Balkan offensive had petered out after the capture of Monastir,
the Italian offensive after the capture of Gorizia. On all fronts, the
great Germanic fortress had resisted attack. It was not without a
certain sympathy that Joflre listened to the proposals of the new Prime
Minister, Briand, that he should give the immediate command of the
armies in France to Nivelle and take over a general direction of the war.
Joffrc set about creating a new central organization and it took him
some days to realize that he was being politely removed from all com-
mand. His new office was purely nominal, all authority would be
divided between Nivelle and the new War Minister, General Lyautey,
who had been brought from Morocco where he had worked wonders
and who was entirely new to the intrigues, as well as to the problems,
of Paris arid General Headquarters. After a few days Joffre resigned,
and was made, in an oddly casual fashion, a Marshal of France, the
first that had been made since 1870.
The of the Generalissimo was a great symbolic event. He had
fall

outlasted two German Gommanders-in- Chief and no Allied chief had


commanded as long. Abroad his reputation was still immense, and all
the plans for 1917 had been made under the assumption that Joffre
would be in power. Within France, his authority had long been con-
tested and it was not only he but his collaborators who were limoges.
1

Foch, whose maintenance in active service after he had passed the age
limit of his rank had annoved the purists, was removed from the com-
mand of the northern group of armies and set to studying problematic
German invasions of Switzerland. Gastelnau was sent off on a mission
to Russia and, symbolic act, the General Headquarters were removed
from Chantilly at great cost and trouble to Beauvais and many of the
members of the central organization sent to the front.

1
Limoges was the town to which generals relieved of their commands were traditionally
sent.

493
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE

VII

The appointment of Nivelle has a curious resemblance to the super-


session of McClellan by Lincoln in October 1862. As that was prob-
ably the greatest mistake made by the Federal Government in the
American CivilWar, so was the appointment of Nivelle the greatest
mistake made by the French Government in the World War. There
was, it is true, a great difference between Nivelle and Burnside.
Burnside's own opinion of himself was not much higher than the low
one held by his subordinates, while Nivelle was a clever man and knew
it. Of partly English origin, a Protestant, a new man who had been
only a colonel when the war broke out, he had the gift of impressing
civilians, for a time at least. The fall of JofFre in France had been
paralleled by the fall of the Asquith Government in England, and the
new Prime Minister, Mr. Lloyd George, was as disappointed by the
results of the Somme as was the French Chamber.
Nivelle promised a victory in forty-eight hours; if, by that time, the
German lines were not pierced and a campaign in open country made
possible, the attack would be stopped. But Nivelle was sure that the
lines would be pierced. By covering the German lines back to the
rearmost position with a blanket of artillery fire, by sending the infantry
forward in a great bound to the positions of the enemy's heavy artillery,
the long and bloody combats of the Somme would be avoided. And to
the sceptics, Nivelle pointed with no false modesty to what he had done
outside Verdun. Reluctantly the elaborate plans of Joffre were
scrapped. Sir Douglas Haig was induced to put himself under the
orders of the new French Commander-in-Chief, who did not waste any
'

time on the tactful diplomacy with which Joffre and Foch had nursed
Franco-British collaboration toits comparatively healthy state. And
the French Chamber and, soon, the French soldier, was given an assur-
ance that the war was going to be won quickly and cheaply by a new
method. The secret of their doom could not be kept from the Germans
whose new chief was making his own arrangements.
Ludendorff had, in fact, decided to abandon a great part of the
territory fought over the previous summer, to save troops by shortening
his front and, by occupying a carefully planned and fortified position,
to let the projected Allied offensive waste itself in the air. If the plans
of Joffre had been carried out, the Allies would have been attacking
about the time the Germans were retreating, but the change to Nivelle
made certain that there would be time for the quiet execution of the
retreat to the Hindenburg line. The German plans could not be kept
secret and the rumours of a great retreat soon reached the Allied front
lines, from which they were relayed to headquarters. There they
received little credence, either from Haig or Nivelle, both of whom
494
THE WAR
thought that such a retreat was an operation which no German general
dared carry out; involving, as it did, the abandonment of dearly-won
and dearly-held ground.
It is a surprising that such ideas should have blinded the chief
little

of an army that was familiar with the campaign of Austerlitz, and still
more surprising that they should have affected the judgment of the chief
of an army whose second greatest commander had been Wellington.
But thanks to this blindness, the German retreat was begun in peace and
all the Allied plans were delayed in their possibilities of execution. As
the Germans withdrew, the Allies cautiously ad\ anced, but the German
retreat was admirably planned and executed; the region over which
the withdrawal was carried out was laid waste with a completeness
which owed a great deal to modern science and ? great deal to national
thoroughness. Wells were poisoned, traps were set which, when
touched, exploded; all buildings that could help the advance or hinder
the retreat were destroyed and, when there was any doubt, the answer
was 'blow up'. Thus was the magnificent medieval castle of the lords
of Goucy at last deprived of all military value.
Tothe advancing French, the aspect of German military thorough-
ness which struck home most deeply was the careful sawing down of the
fruit trees. It was like the destruction of olive trees to the Greeks.

The careful devastation of enemy territory was no novelty in war, but


the English on the Scottish border under Henry VIII, in Minister under
Elizabeth, the French in the Palatinate, Sheridan in the Shenandoah
Valley, had never done so perfect a job. And it was unfortunate that
the troops of the country across whose face this dreadful scar had been
so efficiently drawn, were not, like the Scots or Irish or Confederates,
doomed to defeat, but destined to victory. In less than two years' time,
it was Germany's turn to be occupied by French troops whose tempers,

in some cases, may well have been rather frayed by what they had seen
in 1917.

The German retreat upset all the Allied plans for an offensive; or
rather would have upset them had the Allies been wiser, above all had
it

the new French Commander-in-Ghief been wiser. There could be no


surprise now and as weeks passed in slow advance over the devastated
area, the chances of German knowledge of the French plan increased.
Not only did the Germans learn of the attack in general; the details
became known through captures of officers with operations orders on
their persons. The political scene, too, had changed. Briand, Nivelle's

patron, had fallen because his War Minister, General Lyautey, had
'insulted the Chamber' by opposing the revelation of war secrets even
in secret session. The new War Minister, Painleve', was sceptical of the
value of the promises of easy and quick victory that Nivelle was still
prodigjtfly issuing from headquarters,
and the scepticism of the mathe-
495
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
matician turned politician, was shared by most of the leading officers of
the French Army. General Micheler, destined to be the chief execu-
tant of Nivelle's plans, was rebuked for issuing orders that showed
doubts of the ability of infantry to do much away from their artillery
support. A corps commander who, when pressed by the Commander-
in-Chief, avowed apprehensions was sent to another part of the front,
as Nivelle asserted that faith was essential for the new system. To the
sceptics he asserted that he would be victorious in two days or stop; the
new offensive would be a different thing from the slow Somme advances.
Had not the brilliant, speedy and economical triumphs of the Verdun
*

team* been contrasted with the slow, costly and ineffective methods of
the old gang? Painlev6 was still unconvinced; the generals were con-
sulted as to the prospects, a measure to which Nivelle took not unreason-
able exception. Acouncil of war was held on April 6th at Ghantilly.
The necessity of offensive to support the Russians, who were being
an
weakened by revolution, and to keep faith with the British was agreed
on, but the atmosphere of doubt and the interference with his authority
which the consultation of his subordinates involved irritated Nivelle to
a degree that made him play his most formidable card, his resignation.
In face of the enemy and still more of the Allies, a second change in the
French command inside six months would have been disastrous. As
Castelnau, back from Russia, put it, it was the duty of the Government
to give Nivelle a free hand or to remove him. In the circumstances
they could not remove him. His authority was confirmed.
Everything was against Nivelle; if faith was still possible in the
lower ranks, it was difficult in the higher. Parliament was for the
moment anxious to show its power; it had overthrown Joffre and
Lyautey; deputies saw themselves as modern versions of thtf Jacobin
'representatives on mission'. Many of them were at or near the front,
like the congressmen before Bull Run in 1861. Thus the political
situation made anything less than a complete triumph no triumph at all.
The weather was vile; snow made all the troops miserable and made
the black troops on whom Mangin put such reliance almost useless.
Postponement until better weather was urged on Nivelle, even by
Mangin, whose offensive spirit was beyond doubt. But Nivelle was
unshakable.
The offensive was to be begun on April i6th, a date too late to give
any chance of surprise. Postponements had meant a prolongation of
the artillery preparation with a consequent weakening in intensity.
The necessity of firing on the rear German positions, imposed by the
ambitious nature of Nivelle's plans, was a further cause of ineffective-
ness. And lastly, the command of the air was in German hands. The
attack, when it came, was vigorously delivered except by the unfortu-
nate and frozen Senegalese. The weather was still vile; transport was
fantastically difficult; in some places it took eighteen horses to move a
496
THE WAR.
single gun. Casualties in the next few days were heavy; some regiments
lost half their effectives; the tanks did than had been hoped for.
less
But the advance, the prisoners, the losses inflicted were by the standards
of the Somme not dearly bought for 120,000 casualties. But it was not
merely a better Somme that the French Army and people had been
promised; it was a new Austerlitz, a quick, complete, and final victory.
That was as far away as ever; the Germans, as they had been appre-
hensive, were correspondingly exultant. Despite his promises, Nivelle
had not broken through the German lines; despite his promises, he had
not broken off the battle.
The great blow had been delivered, it had not produced the results
expected, but Nivelle continued limited attacks, especially on the
Chemin des Dames, that 'Ladies Road' built fr the daughters of
Louis XV, whose possession had been so valuable to the Germans and
whose conquest by the French was a real gain. At another time, this
success might have saved the General's reputation and place, but not
now. Refusing to resign, Nivelle was removed after his most zealous
collaborator, Mangin, had been vainly sacrificed. At last Painleve had
his way; the new Commander-in-Chief was Pe*tain and he was appointed

barely in time, for what the German attack had failed to do in 1916,
seemed on the point of being done by the French attack of 1917; the
combatant spirit of the French Army seemed to be broken.
The mutinies of 1917 revealed a weariness not at all surprising when
the ojcleal of nearly three years' fighting is remembered. The French
soldier was too intelligent not to know that many people had blundered
and, if he had not been smart enough to find this out for himself, there
were plenty of people to inform him. The unanimity of the national
will to resistance in 1914 was, if not destroyed, weakened by 1917. The
news of the Russian Revolution of March, with its promises of peace,
came to reinforce political and social forces ready to think that a
negotiated 'peace without victory' was not evident treason, if only
because the chance of getting anything else seemed remote. But the
root of the troubles of the Army lay elsewhere. The 'soldier had been
too much tried' said a general and he had.
It was not only the dreadful losses, suffered, as the infantryman had
come to believe, in part at least because his commanders did not know
their business. There were other grievances. The soldier had to suffer
hardships for which there was no real excuse and that at a time when
he believed that all civilians were making and spending money in a way
unknown to a frugal country before 1914. His food, his drink, were
monotonous, at best. The accommodation provided for him when he
was resting behind the lines was often ^wretched. Leave was irregular
and, owing to the delays of the offensive, it was hopelessly in arrears, as
furloughs had been stopped since February. When the soldier did get
leave, he had to make a long comfortless journey home, often to find
497
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
that the family dependent on him was badly off, while the fortunate
dependants of munition-workers were opulent. At home, the soldier
was subjected to propaganda against which the Government took no
steps* Moreover, the dislike of the French for extra-governmental
activities in peace-tim^ had its fruits in war-time. The voluntary
organizations for looking after the troops, the Y.M.C.A. and the like,
common to the British and American armies, were non-existent or far
weaker and poorer in the French Army. The soldiers, thus sorely tried,
had been promised a speedy end to their suffering if they made one
great effort they had made the effort and the promise could not be kept.
;

The mutinies were in most places peaceable enough. Troops


refused to attack but were willing to go into the trenches, 1 other units
talked of marching on Paris for thq, front was full of wild rumours of
revolution, rumours without foundation, but not without plausibility in
the spring of 1917, when every day brought new and strange news from
Russia. 8
Apart from refusing to obey orders, there was little positive violence.
A general forced to descend from his car was about the most serious
outrage to discipline. But for a month, the fighting power of the
French Army was desperately weakened. And fortune which had
favoured the Germans by giving them the plans of the great offensive
now deserted them; they had no suspicion of the mutiny and Pe*tain,
like Duncan during the great mutinies of the British Fleet in 1797, was
able to bluff his enemy into leaving him alone while he set about
restoring the morale of the Army.
For the work of healing, the new Commander-in-Chief was admir-
ably qualified. Petain was a man of great dignity of manner and
nobility of person; no soldier was less of a demagogue, less afflicted by a
false heartiness. But he was known as a man of his word; he had always
been careful of the lives of his men, never calling on them for useless
sacrifices 8 although, as Verdun had shown, capable of the utmost reso-
lution. He made few promises, but those he made were kept. The
food, lodging, leave, allowances of the troops were improved; a great
gift of American money from private sources was spent on the most
needy dependants; punishment was comparatively little used, although
4
power was taken to execute without appeal to the civil authorities.
The Gommander-in-Chief toured the whole line, talking to all
ranks, appealing to honour and patriotism, promising redress of griev-
ances and, by his example, restoring confidence between officers and
1
The same causes produced the same weariness and passivity in the Army of the Potomac
in 1864.
*
There were some Russian troops in France; they were already in a state of disorganiza-
tion comparable to that of their brethren at home.
They had, however, voted to take part
in the April offensive and had done so with courage if without skill.
*
It was this claim of Longstreet on the loyalty of his men that made him more popular
than either Lee or Jackson in the Army of Northern Virginia. *
* Cf.
p. 535.

498
THE WAR
men. In one group of officers assembled to meet him, Petain noticed a
young lieutenant who stood silent, and asked him what he thought was
the main cause of trouble in the Army. 'The neglect of their men by
the officers,' the subaltern blurted out. 'Well, gentlemen, you heard
that?* Such neglect was now inexcusable, since it was a fault of which
no one could accuse Petain himself.
The Army rapidly convalesced, but it was not fu for violent activity.
To restore its undertook a number of small opera-
faith in itself, Petain

tions, carefully planned and admirably successful, which were excellent


for morale, if only for showing that an offensive need not be a bloody

futility. The re-equipment of the Army went steadily on; heavy


artillerywas more abundant and more modern; the equipment and
training of the infantry was improved and, by tne end of 1917, the
wounds of the spring had healed. It was time, for the healing of the
French Army had had, as a natural if not necessary corollary, the bleed-
ing of the British Army, if not to death, to a dangerous degree of
anaemia. The autumn of 1917 was the blackest season of the war for
the British. Deprived of French aid, anxious to divert German
strength from Russia, the leaders of the British troops subjected them to
an ordeal far worse than that endured by the French in April and,
indeed, only surpassed by Verdun in duration and severity. In the
mud of Passchcndaele the fighting edge of the British Army was
blunted. And to end the year came the complete collapse of Russia
and Rumania and the rout of the Italians at Gaporetto,
Both British and French generals and troops were sent to Italy;
Foch, who had become Chief of Staff, went there too, and did not, it
appears, think it necessary to waste any of his stock of tact, so useful in
dealing with British Headquarters, on the Italian generals. The
Italians stood on the Piave and, when the New Year dawned, if the
eastern front had at last collapsed, the western fronts were intact. The
lesson of the year had seemed to be that Allied campaigns must be more
closely articulated, and experiments in Allied councils had produced
committees for unified action which, it was hoped, would be able to
secure as much unity as Joffre had achieved by prestige and personality.
One soldier kept on insisting that this was not enough, but the com-
plaints of Foch were not yet listened to, and the Allies awaited the
expected German attack, relying on gentlemen's agreements for mutual
aid. They were to learn that war was no place for mere gentility.

VIII

Both Haig and Petain had been sceptical of the schemes of Foch for.
a central reserve and they relied on agreements for mutual assistance.
It was evident that a great German attack was on the way. The army
attacked was to call on its ally for help and, with their own offensive
499
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
achievements as a guide to possibilities, the two Commanders-in-Chief
can be pardoned for thinking that there would be time enough for
divisions to be moved up in support.
On March 2ist the attack fell on the British, as they had foreseen;
not on the French, as P&ain had obstinately insisted was probable. The
main German attack did not score any extraordinary success, but its
right, directed against the British 5th Army, was successful in a fashion
unprecedented since 1914; the British retreat was precipitate, and
Ludendorffwas presented with the opportunity (it was really a danger-
ous temptation) to neglect his main battle to exploit this great success,
and instead of hammering the British Army to pieces, to try to separate
it from the French and then destroy it. What Ludendorff saw as
possible was also evident to Petain and Haig; the German advance, if
once it broke the union between the Allied armies, would force them to
retreat in separate directions. The British could only fall back on the
Channel ports and, if they were lucky, escape across the water like
Moore's army at Corunna in 1808, or try to man a new defensive line
based on the water, like Wellington at Torres Vedras in 1810. The
French would have to fall back on Paris and fight for their lives without
hope of aid from the British. There would be a new Ligny and then a
new Waterloo, with no chance of a reunion of the Allies on the battle-
field and therefore a complete victory for Ludendorif-Napoleon.
In this great crisis all mere agreements for mutual aid were useless.
Petain, always pessimistic, was ready to write the British Army off as a
loss; help was sent, but slowly and in driblets. The French Gommander-
in-Chief shrank from the frightful risk of involving his own army in the
disasters of the British. He had even better reasons for his attitude than
Sir John French had had in 1914; his decision was even more pregnant
with disaster. It was to meet this crisis that Haig appealed to London,
that Lord Milner came over, and that Glemenceau, Milner, Poincare*,
Haig and P&ain met at Doullens on March 26th. Petain, according
to one story, nodded at Haig, 'He'll have to surrender his army in the

open field, then it will be our turn'. A local politician besieged


Glemenceau with entreaties for information; if the battle were lost,
would he make peace? All present showed stoicism or resignation, all
except one. Foch had come with Glemenceau, and the never-shaken
self-confidence that had marked him from his youth, was now welcome
instead of being irritating. He was neither stoical nor resigned. He
refused to think of defeat; They're no smarter than we are', he repeated,
reinforcing his dogmatism with his boxing gestures. One thing, he
asserted, was obvious. Amiens, the link between the two armies, must
be held at all costs. These calculations of lines of retreat must stop.
Haig, who had asserted that he could deal with a man but nojt with a
committee, now suggested giving Foch the task of co-ordination. The
hour had found the man, and when all criticisms are examined, they
500
THE WAR
boil down to assertions that, had the hour been different, Foch would
not have been the man.
Foch's immediate task was that of co-ordinating "the action of the
Allied armies on the western front'; he was to keep them together, and
in that he was aided not only by his bold, not to suy reckless spirit, that
made him ready to take all risks, but by the exhaustion of the Germans.
As French infantry moved up in their unimpressive and entirely adequate
way, smoking, marching in apparent disorder, to the support of the
British, as French aeroplanes attacked constantly, fatigue, heavy losses,
the difficulties of supplies slowed up the German advance. By March
3Oth, the first great offensives were over; the blow had been parried.
On April 3rd the powers given to Foch were extended; he was now
9
entrusted with the 'strategic direction of operations . The three
national Commanders-in-Chief were to be under his orders with a right
of appeal to their own Governments. And on April i4th the last step
was taken; Foch was given the title of Commander-in-Chief. Foch
was optimistic and he had reasons for his optimism. Each month
diminished German numerical superiority; their resources in men were
bound to dwindle while, thanks to the Americans, those of the Allies
were bound to increase. And if the new American troops were raw and
tactically inferior, their spirit, their physique, their equipment more
than ompensated for their defects, defects that would in any case lessen
i

as the battlefield educated the survivors. If the Allied line held


through the summer, the German chance of a complete victory in the
field was gone. But such a negative victory, a mere success in holding
out, was not enough for Foch. He began at once to plan for the
exploitation of the chances given him for counter-attack by the very
German successes, each of which created new bulges, new salients
which, when the time came, Foch intended to burst in.
The time was slow in coming; and there was a moment when it
seemed that the chance, if it came, might fall to another general. In a
series of battles the confidence of the Allies in their generals was strained
to breaking point. The second great German blow took the form of
an attack on Flanders in which the British Army, as its leader told his
troops in a famous order, had its back to the wall. Haig added that
French aid was on the way, but it was not coming in sufficient quantities,
for Foch had no intention of engaging his main force as the enemy
decided. He calculated that the British Army, with carefully doled out
French would hold its own, with heavy loss in men, territory and
aid,
prestige no doubt, but with no fatal damage.
The third great German blow was directed at the French. Luden-
dorff had not abandoned his plan of finishing off the British Army, but
the preparation of another great attack in the north took time. The
area selected for attack was the position of which the Ghemin des Dames
was the most famous section. So completely had the fears of German
501
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
attack in this region been forgotten, that exhausted British divisions
were, by Foch's orders, sent there for a rest! The positions were not
held in strength and the army commander, Duchene, not only failed to
notice or believe that an attack was being prepared but, when doubt
was no longer possible, he deliberately held up his counter-battery fire
until the attack was launched. His artillery, like his infantry, was
blotted out by 4,000 guns. Surprise had been made easier by the frogs
in the marshes which drowned the inevitable noise of preparation. It
was March over again; indeed, the Germans advanced farther and
faster; they took Soissons; they reached the Marne. By May 3Oth they
were thirty-seven miles from Paris and the military results of their
victory were less important than the potential political results.
Nerves in the capital were not good. Paris was now under steady
bombardment from a great gun firing at an unprecedented range. Its
effect was purely moral * but not the less important for that. The news
of the German victory was a shock for the strongest nerves and many
deputies had no claim to strong nerves. They demanded vengeance
on the generals; and Clemenceau had to exercise all his authority to
save them, but obviously Foch could not afford another disaster.
Ludendorff, as in March, could not resist the temptation to exploit
hisunexpected triumph. He still thought of the attack in the north as
hismajor effort; he did not intend to change his bid, but he wanted to
pick up some quick tricks. For, if Allied nerves were strained, German
nerves were breaking; many of the people and many of the soldiers
wanted peace; a victorious peace if possible, but peace.
Every day's delay was a serious loss, for every day meant increased
strength for the British Army which was recovering from its terrible

mauling; every day meant more Americans; every day meant the
increased strain on the physical and moral strength of the Central
Powers. Germany had to win quickly before her allies collapsed.
Yet Ludendprff had now to give respite to the French as he had had to
give it earlier to the British. And when the new attack was launched
in June, it was no surprise^ although there was an impressive early suc-

cess which promised much. But any hopeful illusions were short-lived,
for the French line did not merely bend without breaking; a counter-
attack launched by Mangin on June nth scored real if limited suc-
cesses. Far more important was the fact that the attack had been
broken and returned, although the Germans could reckon on a serious
tactical gain, for the great lateral railway line from Paris to Nancy was
cut: but that was not enough.
A month later Ludendorff tried again, but' Foch was completely
ready; he disregarded the protests of the British, before whom the
1
The most famous achievement of the gun was the killing and wounding of a great
part of the Good Friday congregation of the church of Saint-Gervais. On that day, at the
request of the Archbishop of Cologne, the Allied air forces had refrained from their regular
raids on the Rhineland.

503
THE WAR
reserves accumulated for the long-postponed battle in the north loomed
as a menace. His gamble was based on very accurate information, for
the time and place of the impending attack were exactly known, and
two hours before the German barrage was ready, the French counter-
barrage was loosed on them. It was the night of July i4th.
By the iyth it was obvious that the attack had failed; obvious to
Ludendorff, who decided to cut his losses and move his offensive
resources to the north. He had now no option but to play what trumps
he had. He was not given even this chance for, on the i8th, the great
counter-attack surprised the Germans. French, British, Americans,
Italians were launched from the cover of the forests on the German
flank. Only hasty retreat saved the mass of the troops, but they lost
30,000 prisoners and over 600 guns. It was not as great a disaster or
as complete a victory as either side might have feared or anticipated,
but it was enough. Although Ludendorff did not yet realize it, the
initiative had passed from his hands to that of his opponent. He might
still
hope and plan, but all future battles would be fought where and
when Foch decided. The Allied Generalissimo had, in his peace-time
writings, com pared the course of a battle to an inclined plane. The
Germans were now sliding down the board, clinging desperately, but
sliding. And the Allies, the whole world outside the beleaguered
fortress, knew it.
On the 5th of August, Glemenceau visited Foch at his headquarters
and drawing a paper from his pocket began to read it. 'At the moment
when the enemy by a formidable offensive on a front of 100 kilometres l
relied on being able to gain a decisive victory and to impose on us that
German peace which would mean the enslavement of the world, Gen-
eral Foch and his admirable soldiers have beaten him. The confi-
. . .

dence placed by the Republic and by all the Allies in the victor of the
Marshes of Saint Gond 2 and in the illustrious chief of the Yser and the
Somme has been fully justified.' For a moment Glemenceau stopped,
then went on reading the decree. 'Article One: the General of Division
Foch (Ferdinand) is created a Marshal of France.'

It was not only had turned. The great


in France that the tide
and Mesopotamia were destroying what was
British armies in Palestine
left of the Turkish Army; the Austrian offensive in Italy had been

broken in June, and Foch was now pressing the Italians to attack and
showing increasing impatience at the refusal of General Diaz to take
any risks. Foch had not done what he had done by refusing to bet on
anything but a sure thing, and he was, perhaps unduly, intolerant of
Italian prudence. But in his own immediate sphere he showed none
of this temper. Known as a man of dominating manner and almost
inordinate self-esteem, he now showed a tact and sympathy in his deal-
'
1
63 miles. 1914, at the Maine.
503 KK
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
ings with his subordinates that were his greatest service to the Allied
cause. He refused to order, to dictate; he suggested and received
suggestions; he compared his position to that of the leader of an
orchestra, but he insisted on far less unison than the metaphor
implies.
From the 8th of August the main task of assailing the Germans fell
to the British, now fully restored in strength and, although there had
been sharp differences of opinion between Haig and Foch when the
latter seemed to gamble with the safety of the British Army, the new
Marshal of France showed the same diplomatic skill that he had dis-
played in 1914, with due alteration of tactics, since he knew well that
Haig was not Sir John French. With Pershing the task was more
difficult. Foch did not believe that the American staff organization
was skilful enough to handle a great army; by the time it had learned
its lessons the campaign of 1918 might be over. As a mere problem
in mathematics the question was simple enough. To put American
divisions under French or British commanders was the most economical

way of using the fresh American troops. They had shown at Chateau-
Thierry and elsewhere that their combative spirit was magnificent, but
that was not enough. In any case, to aid the Allies in their desperate
straits in the spring and summer of 1918, Pershing had willingly put his

infantry at the disposal of Foch, saying 'we are here to be killed', and
in the choice of troops to be sent over, preference had been given to
the immediately useful infantry and machine-gunners.
The American troops in France were thus necessarily short of
*

experience in the other arms. But Pershing, backed up by President


Wilson and by the Secretary of War, Mr. Newton D. Baker, was
unshakable in his determination to create and command an American
Army in France, not to allow the American troops to be used as mere
feeders for the veteran and weary French and British Armies. To this
claim Foch was sympathetic; no doubt he would have liked to be able
to draw on the American reservoir, but he had not insisted on the

importance of moral questions in war for nothing. The Americans


would fight better as an independent army under their own officers;
tactical mistakes would be more than compensated for by better feeling.
But Clemenceau (although he had had better chances of knowing the
American spirit than had Foch) was indignant. Indignant with Per-
shing and still more indignant with Foch, who evaded hints and disobeyed
orders to put the Americans in their place. Foch knew that, whatever
his formal powers, he -could not in fact order Pershing about as if he
were a French subordinate; for that matter, he could not order Ptain
about. So all through the autumn the Generalissimo had to persuade
the political chief of his own country as well as the Allied generals; he
had to choose continually the lesser of two evils; he was not in the
position of his hero, Napoleon, or of his opponent, Ludendorff.
504
THE WAR
Thus the great British triumphs of August took the form they did
as a result of Foch's accepting the modifications suggested by Haig,
modifications fully justified by the result; and the decisions to let
Pershing attack the Saint- Mihiel salient, at the risk of delaying the
more important attack in the Argonne, was made under the pressure
of American firmness and Petain's plea for tact. Yet the clearing of
the Saint- Mihiel salient was a brilliant success, even if hypothetical
greater successes can still be won on paper, so much easier to manoeuvre
on than that deplorably unaccommodating soil.
The German resistance revealed that Ludendorff, in defence as in
attack, was unable to bring himself to cut his losses soon enough. The
day for offensives was over; but the German chief could not bring
himself to abandon the territorial proofs of his former triumphs. He
behaved like Napoleon in 1813, but perhaps with more reason, for it
was desperately important to bolster up the feeble faith of the allies
of Germany and of the German people. Despite the bluff reassurances
of the political agents of the General Staff who were the nominal
German Government, faith in victory was vanishing if not yet replaced
by a despairing acceptance of defeat. Indeed, that despair was to
strike at the head of the German Army before it began to paralyse its
members.
At the northern end of the Allied line the British advance, supported
by the French and soon to be joined in by the Belgian showed that 1

-;,

the orderly slow retreat of which LudendoriT had dreamed was im-
possible; there was to be no stopping on prepaird ibrtificd positions
against which the Allies would batter in vain. At the eastern end the
American Army, by a prodigious feat of energy, had been shifted from
Saint- Mihiel to the region of the Meuse- Argonne. The Germans were
completely surprised.
1
But the fears of the limitations of American
staff- work were in part justified by the event. If there was, at the

moment, a chance of ending the war by a great victory in the field, it


was lost in the delays and breakdowns of the Argonne battles.
All along the line the desperate Germans fought with superb
courage. There were weak and demoralized units; there were bad
breakdowns; yet the western front, rapidly moving east as it was, was
still a front. But the weaker sides of the great central fortress were now
being opened. In the Balkans, Sarrail had been as trying and trouble-
some as in France, and his political friends could not save him. He
was succeeded by Guillaumat and then by Franchet d'Esperey, but
although the war-weariness of the Bulgarians was notorious, and
although the deposition of King Gonstantine by the Allies had both
secured the Allied rear in Greece and added the royal army to the
1
There a parallel here to one of the most famous feats of the American Civil War,
is
the shining of Jackson's army from the Shenandoah to Richmond in 1862. The parallel
becomes closer when it is remembered how clumsily and slowly Jackson intervened. Here
die comparison is to the advantage of the American generals of 1918.

5<>5
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
Allied forces, the Balkan front was passive and the removal of the
Gommander-in-Chief was thought of.
Before that measure was taken, Franchet d'Esperey struck. Boldly
he assailed the strongest part of the Bulgarian position with the
French and Serbians; his boldness was rewarded; the British troops,
weakened by malaria and poorly equipped, failed, but the Greeks
succeeded. The whole .Bulgarian front collapsed. A cavalry brigade,
under a general who honoured the name of his uncle, Gambetta,
seized the nodal point of railway communications, Uskub. The
Germans hurried reinforcements south, but too late. Bulgaria sur-
rendered and Glemenceau telephoned the news at once to Poincare*;
a gesture that revealed his emotion. The British troops marched on
Constantinople and the Franco-Serbians moved north. There was
still caution in Paris, and Franchet
d'Esperey was warned against the
dangers of attempting to rush to the Danube, warnings that he
acknowledged from the banks of the great river. The way into the
centre of Germanic power was thus opened; and the army of the
Balkans began to plan its advance on Prague and Dresden. 1
Before this disaster was fully realized, the nerves of the man who had
concentrated all power in his hands in Germany snapped. On the
29th of September, LudendorfF insisted that an immediate peace offer
and demand for an armistice should be made to the Allies. The
horrified civilians and even the nominal chief of the army, Hindenburg,
2
protested. But Ludendorff was not to be denied; he feared a rout in
France; he feared, much more reasonably, the consequences of the
Bulgarian collapse. He insisted that the announcement of the German
request for an armistice should be made on the basis of the Fourteen
Points of President Wilson which, since he had not read them, he did
not realize involved not merely the abandonment of dreams of territorial
gains, but the loss of most of the spoils of Bismarck and of Frederick
the Great.
From army headquarters the panic spread to the rear, as was natural.
But weeks the agony was prolonged. Ludendorff's nerves
for six

recovered, but the damage was done; all hopes of victory were gone;
what remained was the hope of peace. Foch was preparing a great
Franco-American attack on the eastern end of the line; the Belgians
and British were advancing on the west; Lille and Bruges were
recovered; the Italians were preparing at last to destroy an Austrian
army whose political counterpart had already collapsed. Victory was
in sight.
That victory was not solely the work of the armies. The over-
whelming force that was now battering at the crumbling walls of the
1
The proposal to remove Franchet d'Esperey on the eve of victory recalls the threat to
Thomas on the eve of Nashville, as the battle recalls the battle of Chattanooga. There was
a danger in 1918 that Haig would be replaced by Sir Henry Wilson.
1
Hindenburg was still dreaming of annexations in France!
506
THE WAR
German fortress had been accumulated over a period of four years,
during which one of the greatest of the original belligerents had been
knocked out, to be replaced by a far more formidable power than
decaying Imperial Russia. It was at the head of a great military
Foch was triumphing: and the creation of that coalition
coalition that
was the work of Allied and German diplomacy.
Beginning the war with what they thought a preponderance of
power which, barring a quick German victory, made ultimate triumph
certain, the powers of the Triple Entente had the
satisfaction of seeing
the minor partners of the Triple Alliance find ingenious reasons for
separating their fate from that of their allies. Rejoicing in the
neutrality of Italy and Rumania, M. Doumergne, in the first weeks of
August, instructed the French Ambassador to thank the Italian and
Rumanian Governments and declare that France was not surprised at
this action on the part of nations so civilized as Italy and Rumania
faced with the odious aggression of Austria and Germany'. But the
refusal of Italy and Rumania to march with their quondam friends was
not based on moral scruples, but on an acute calculation of their own
self-interest. It was the object of Germany to keep them neutral; it
was the object of the Allies to win them over to active intervention by
promising tlu-ni a share of the spoil. As the fortunes of war favoured
one skle ;md then the other, the diplomacy of the Allies succeeded or
failed. As far as France was concerned, that diplomacy was, with the
formation of the Government of National Defence, in the hands of
Delcasse, who brought all his old tenacity and energy to bear. On
September 5th, the signature of a treaty in London binding Russia,
Britain and France not to make a separate peace, at the very darkest
moment of the war, on the morrow of Tannenberg and the eve of the
Marne, created that formal coalition against Germany which was
ultimately to embrace in its ranks the greater part of the nations of the
globe. The first accession had already taken place: Japan had declared
war on Germany and laid siege to Tsingtao, the German naval base
on the Chinese coast. It became an obsession of French diplomacy,
as soon as the early dreams of speedy victory were over, that the
fortunes of war would be decisively inclined to the Allies by the active
intervention ofJapanese troops; as a corps of volunteers on the western
front, or as a regular army on the eastern front. As the war dragged
on, France was willing to go to great lengths to secure active Japanese
support, pressing the irritated Tsar to cede the northern half of Sakhalin
to secure Japanese aid. But the rulers of Japan had secured all that
they wanted; they sent a few destroyers to the Mediterranean, but that
was all.
The first effective fresh military force added to the fighting armies
was added to the German side. Turkey, from the very beginning of
the war, had made her decision, although that decision was
507
E,,
DEVELOPMENT <4F MODERN FRANCE
from the*
veiypm$^<Jfc^^ira for some months. With the
not
accession of Turkey to the German iiflffiDalkan politics became of
overwhelming importance. To Russia it gave an opportunity of
seizing the most glittering of prizes Constantinople. The design was
not openly admitted at first; but when it was, the Western Powers could
not oppose the designs of their indispensable ally. In war, as in peace,
thq Russian Government was apt in the use of blackmail. The
Foreign Minister, Sazonov, was always ready with hints that he was the
main partisan of war to the end, and he might resign. It was soon
evident that, despite her treaty with France and Britain, Russia was
by no means to be blindly relied on. If she did not get her way she
sulked, and her sulkiness was a threat of worse things to come. In the
Balkans, Allied policy tended inevitably to be Russian policy, and it
suffered from the impetuous character of Sazonov, who was precipitate
and irresolute.
The Allies dallied with the idea of uniting all the Balkaji states

against Turkey. But Bulgaria, smarting under her recent defeat,


could only be won over by promises of territorial concessions from her
despoilers, and Serbia, Greece, and Rumania were asked to give up
territory they now held to Bulgaria, in return for future and uncertain
shares in the spoils of Turkey and Austria-Hungary. Bulgaria was not
won and the other Balkan states were alienated. Russian policy
insisted on placating Bulgaria right up to her joining Germany and,
some people thought, even after she had done so. Delcasse, whose
return to diplomatic life had been via the French Embassy at St. Peters-
burg, had been too uncritically loyal to Russia to be a really good
French Foreign Minister, and his career ended with the revelation of
the duplicity and adroitness of King Ferdinand of Bulgaria. 1 The
greatest and only triumph of Allied diplomacy in the first year of the
war was the accession of Italy. In bidding for her support, the Allies
had the great advantage of being able to offer as much Austrian
territory as they thought fit, while Germany could only offer as much
as Austria could be induced to surrender. Russia and Serbia were,
indeed, obstacles to a complete fulfilment of Italian wishes, and it .was
French diplomacy which found a way round the obstacle. But Italian
intervention came too late to save Russia from her great defeats, and
Serbia sulkily refused to aid the Italian offensive by an attack. The
failure of the Dardanelles campaign and the entry of the Bulgarians
into the war on the German side put an end to the hopes of Greek
support which had been entertained since the very beginning of the
war. France was an eager bidder for that support, pressing Britain
to give Cyprus to Greece, as she pressed Russia to give Northern
1
The Republic made use of the fallen dynasties in its Balkan diplomacy. The Due de
Guise was sent on a semi-official mission to Sofia to win his cousin, the Kong, over to the
French side, and Prince George of Greece was relied on, because of his Bonaparte wife! to
1
influence his brother, King Goftstantine, who had married the Kaiser 1 sister.
THE WAR
Sakhalin to Japan. The Salonika expedition was almost as much a
French diversion as the Dardanelles expedition had been a British, and
it involved the Allies in increasingly drastic interference with Greek
sovereignty, in fomenting a revolution and, after the Fall oF the Tsardom,
in the deposition of King Gonstantine. 1 That monarch became, in
French eyes, a villain as despicable as his brother-in-law the Kaiser; on
the other hand, his enemy, M. Veni/elos, was not so much a hero to
the French as he was to the British, a difference in the public opinion
of the two countries that was to be very important.
Russian Pan-Slav policy had insisted on the detaching of Bohemia
from the Austrian Empire, which not only made futile French dreams of
driving a wedge between Germany and her partner, but threatened the
break up of what was, from the traditional French point of view, an indis-
pensable part of the European equilibrium. That danger was increased
by the high price put by Rumania on her intervention, a price that not
merely included Tiansylvania, to the bitter anger of the Magyar
minority, but the Kanat, \\Iiich threatened the interests of the Serbians.
When Gree<r w ,is at last oaxed or forced into joining the AJh'es, her
(

price was Sin) which made making terms with Turkey even more
rna,
difficult. Bythe, time of the Russian Revolution, the skin of the

Central IWvi>, had been largely allotted to their assailants and, as the
Tieat\ <>F l)i< st-Litovsk showed, those powers in their turn had far-
KM< hiiiL', de-signs on the territories of their neighbours. Victory for
either side meant great territorial changes.
The second Russian revolutions relieved the Western
lirst arid
Allies (at great cost) of a most exigent partner, and it is possible that
had the German military rulers been more prudent, they could have
made a permanently victorious peace in the East at the price of a few
concessions in the West. But Ludendorff was resolved to play double
or quits, arid that forced the Allies, with whatever misgivings, to do the
same.
But the higher diplomatic direction of the war had now passed out
of European hands. It was not merely that Wilson was the head of
the freshest and most powerful state of all those arrayed against
Germany; war weariness and the Russian Revolution made some more
positive ideal than mere victory necessary to the combatant
nations.
So it was that their rulers had to accept the lead from Washington,
with mental reservations of course, but with fewer than is commonly
supposed, for Wilson's terms to Germany, however sincerely based on
general principles, were the terms of a victor. Only defeat could
make the rulers or the people of Germany think them tolerable. As
that defeat grew nearer, and more obvious, the direction of Allied policy
passed openly into Wilson's hands. He laid down political
terms

although not on
1 Government objected
The Russian Provisional to the deposition

dynastic grounds.
509
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
which were the price of German escape from disastrous military defeat
and invasion. The technical security for those terms was a matter to
be decided by that severe but sincerely Christian soldier, Foch.
In all the armistice negotiations the attitude of Foch was simple.
War was fought to impose the will of one power or group of powers
on the other; victory came when it was impossible for one side to
resist. The Armistice terms would be designed to make impossible
any armed resistance by the Germans. To continue fighting to make
this complete triumph obvious to all would be a criminal waste of
blood. There were differences to be settled, of course. The French,
who were not interested in the German Fleet, were willing to make
concessions over the naval terms that would induce the Germans to
sign. The British wished to insist on the most rigorous naval terms,
but were willing to go comparatively easy on military questions (their
country had not been invaded). But the Germans were beyond any
power or will to haggle. They signed in Foch's railway coach in the
forest, and at eleven o'clock on the morning of November nth,
fighting ended. It was a year to a day since Ludendorff had decided
on the great gamble.

510
CHAPTER II

THE REAR
I

TT had been a calculation of some enemies and a fear of some friends


A of France that the bitterness of her party quarrels, the apparent weak-
ness of her government, would make her as disunited and as unfit for
war in 1914 as in 1870. The comparison with 1870, whatever validity
it may have had on the technical side, had none on the psychological.
No sooner had the menace of war and invasion become obvious to
the country, than there was an immediate rallying to the formal legal
authority, a whole-hearted acceptance of the necessities of the case that
restored shaken faith in the national destiny. In 1914 was proved the
wisdom of Thiers, for it was shown that the Republic did, in fact,
divide Frenchmen the least. The country awaited the news from the
front with a calm and resignation that astonished the frivolous observer.
There were occasional popular outbursts. The great dairy company
J
of Paris, Maggi had some of its shops attacked by crowds anxious to
,

show their detestation of everything German, but in the main it was


a sober country that went about its business, or as much business as
was possible in face of a general mobilization that smoothly and
efficiently took away from factory, farm and office, most of the most
useful workers.
The Chamber met only to manifest its unity, a unity as well
exemplified by the exchange of greetings between Albert de Mun and
fidouard Vaillant, as by any other demonstration, for the old com-
munard had never before consented to speak to his colleague. In 1871
they had been on different sides of the barricade. Now they were on
the same and on the other was the enemy of France. Voting
side
all Government asked, Parliament was prorogued and deputies*
that the
like lesser people, waited for news. Indeed, it was not only the deputies
who waited for news, for the Government itself was, if not in darkness^
at least in a very dim light, the amount of light that the Gommander-in-
Chief allowed to be seen. From the moment mobilization began,
civilian authority began to ebb and the fate of France was left in the

hands of the soldiers.


So long as the military machine worked smoothly (as it did during
mobilization) or successfully as it appeared to d6 during the early days
51*
Gp ar THI^6EVELOPMENT
Jiaizr
OF MODERN FRANCE
Aecidy hfo
of the campaign in A$S&,?tiMl was no disposition in the minds of the
Ministers to interfere. But when it became evident, in the last week
of August, that France had suffered a great defeat, a defeat that had
the appearance of being worse than any suffered in the same time in
1870, the Government was stirred to action, to panic action, captious
critics have asserted, long after the event. The Minister of War,
Messimy, had been a regular soldier before becoming a Radical poli-
tician, and his early blind confidence in the talents and character of
Joffre was shaken by the bad news. That was natural enough,
but the attempts of the Minister to interfere in detail and in general
were dangerous, or would have been had he remained Minister much
longer. But the frontier defeats not only meant the end of M. Messimy
as War Minister, they meant the end of the Radical Government.
On August 28th the Cabinet was replaced by the Government of
'Sacred Union'. Viviani was still Prime Minister, but his Cabinet was
replaced by one representing all the forces of the nation. The Catholic
leader, Denys Cochin, sat beside Combes and the Socialists Guesde and
1
Sembat, as 'Ministers of State' without any departmental duties.
More important was the transfer of three most important departments
to leaders of the political groups so decisively defeated at the elections.
Ribot became Minister of Finance, Millerand of War, and Delcasse of
Foreign Affairs. The Radicals (and the Left in general) were repre-
sented by the Prime Minister and by a young politician, a prote*g6 of
M. Caillaux M. Malvy. He kept the Interior, a department whose
great political importance had been, if anything, enhanced by the war.
The reconstruction of the Ministry was followed by a measure which,
although fully justified, turned out to be unnecessary and therefore
unfortunate. On the evening of September 2nd, the Government left
Paris. was the forty-fourth anniversary of Sedan, and the public of
It
the capital, increasingly alarmed during the past week by the news that
France was invaded, was naturally embittered by what appeared to
be a flight. In less than a fortnight from the beginning of the great
frontier battles, the Germans were at the gates of the capital. Joffre
and the Governor of Paris, Gallie*ni, had no wish to have their hands
tied by the immuring of the Government in what might soon be a

besieged city. The precedents of 1870 all suggested the danger of


allowing the Government to be cut off from France. If there was a
Gambetta in the Government, he had better be saved any necessity
for imitating the dictator's escape by balloon. But Parisian anger,
despair, or resignation, did not dull Parisian wits. The Marseillaise was
parodied:
'Aux gares, citoyens!
Montcz dans les wagons!' '

*
Cf. p. 443.
*
'To the stations, citizens, get into the trains.' The fugitive! were also known a*
'francs-fileurs'.

512
THE WAR
With the Government to Bordeaux went most deputies (although
Parliament was still
prorogued) and officials and newspapermen, with

many hangers-on of all three classes. The victory of the Marne proved
the retreat to have been unnecessary and thereby justified Poincar^'s
extreme reluctance to take the advice of the soldiers and leave, but the
Government stayed at Bordeaux until December gth, long after it
seemed to the optimists that it might have returned to Paris. Round
this Bordeaux period of the war many legends grew up; all of them
hostile. Gallieni's proclamation which announced the withdrawal of
the Government had given as a reason their desire to 'give a new vigour
to the national defence', but according to rumour, Bordeaux was more
like Capua than like Sparta. Famous for its foo^ and wine, the capital
of Guyenne was, so the average Frenchman came to believe, a paradise
c
for shirkers.At the famous restaurant the Ghapon fin' these rascals
ate and drank and amused themselves while their betters, the soldiers
and the inhabitants of the invaded regions, above all the Parisians,
showed the rr;il heroism of France. Some of the discredit into which
politicians fell during the war dated from this episode and there was
a risk that the charge 'You were at Bordeaux' would be as dangerous
e
as the charge 'You were at Coblence'.or at Ghent' was under the
1
monarchy of July.
The politicians had enough to contend against without the shame
of Bordeaux being imputed to them. The outbreak of war inevitably
discredited (whether reasonably or not) many members of the majority
who, a few weeks before, had been publicly and profitably scornful of
the alarmists. The alarmists seemed to have been right, even such
violent and uncritical alarmists as the pugnacious editors of the extreme
Royalist daily, L? Action Frangaise. If Leon Daudet was thus justified
by the event, how much were the Radicals condemned? And the
Radicals were deprived of their usual weapons. Parliament did not
meet from August 5th until December 22nd and, during that time, it
was difficult to persuade the country that anything that any politician
had done mattered very much.
The press was effectively muzzled. There was, indeed, no formal
censorship, but profiting by the lesson of 1870, it was provided that
any newspaper publishing false news could be suppressed. This
weapon was quite enough. The only way to avoid the risk of publishing
false news was to publish only news approved of by the Government,
and an effective preliminary censorship was thus made possible. Of
course, the limitations of the freedom of the press designed to prevent
the dissemination of false news were not intended to apply to false news
that suited the policy of the Government. As the Government, rightly,

1
Goblence was the German centre of the emigre^ during the Revolution, who there
invasion of France by foreign armies. Louis XVIII took refuse at Ghent from
plotted the
Napoleon during the Hundred Dayi and his supporters assembled there during the campaign,
513
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
was deeply concerned to keep up the spirits of the people, to avoid
any panic, newspapers were allowed to publish any cheerful fables
that they thought fit. From this arose the great campaign of 'bourrage
de crane', of patriotic 'ballyhoo'. The French reader of the news-
papers was told not to worry about the German advance, the invader's
supply system had broken down so badly that the enemy surrendered
to any soldier who could offer them a buttered bun. In any case what
did it matter? The Cossacks were only five days' march from Berlin!
The first effect of these fictions was no doubt useful, but very soon
they bred a general scepticism that was very harmful. It was not that
the French were told more lies than the people of any other country,
but that their national temperament made them less willing to forgive
their deceivers than, for example, the English proved to be.
The censorship soon developed other sides of its activities. Despite
promises from Ministers and from officials, it was used to stifle political
criticism. The prestige of the Government was an asset of France,
to criticize that Government was to dissipate the asset, and it followed
that it was the duty of the censors to prevent such waste. It was on

questions like these that the most violent fights took place between
successive Governments and the formidable Clemenceau. He changed
the name of his paper from L'Homme Libre to L'Homme Enchaine (from the
Tree Man 5
Man') but the trumps were in the hands
to the 'Shackled
of the censors. 1 It followed that, since nothing could be printed of
which the Government did not approve, it was natural to assume that
the Government approved of all that it allowed to be printed, and many
of the difficulties in which M. Malvy, the Minister of the Interior, later
found himself, arose from an application of this principle by his critics. 3
Yet there was plenty of ground for legitimate criticism. The faults
in army organization and equipment so soon and so disastrously
revealed wfcre of course clearly seen by the soldiers and, being French
soldiers, they were ready to give up their lives but not their right to
criticize and grumble. When Parliament did at last reassemble, the
deputies had plenty to say, apart from the obligatory patriotic mani-
festations. It is true that at first their criticisms were held in check

by the belief that the war would soon be over and by a. hesitation
arising from the fact that a good many deputies were also soldiers.
These deputies were naturally those who had best reason to know what
was wrong with the Army; on the other hand, they could only criticize
the Army by staying away from the front. And despite brave words
about it being as noble and more useful to serve France on the benches
of the Palais Bourbon than in the trenches, there was a natural fear
that the country might not see it that way. When Parliament was
1
When Clemenceau at last became Prime Minister he remembered enough of his own
principles in opposition to permit attacks on himself. 'The right to slander the members
of the Government should be beyond -all restriction,* he declared.
.Seep. 535.
5*4
THE WAR
called together it was decided that it would be useful, as well as in the
tradition of the Convention, to sit permanently, and as deputies who
were soldiers were given leave as long as Parliament was sitting, it was
left entirely to member to decide how much or how
the individual
fighting he would do.
little Senators and deputies became the only
Frenchmen, in fact, exempt from military service ex officio.
It was easy to sneer at this odd example of Republican equality,

yet there was a good deal more to be said for the preservation of
parliamentary control (even if it meant preserving parliamentarians
from the risks of the average Frenchman) than the critics of the Right
allowed. It was easy to list the dead deputies and assert that far more
members from the Right were killed than from the Left, but even if
this were true, it did not affect the main question: was parliamentary
control worth having?
The professional soldiers, of course, opposed it for good and bad
reasons. The coming and going of soldier politicians from the front
lines to Paris and back again was inevitably bad for discipline. It was
difficult to know how to handle a subordinate who was also a deputy.
If it was unlikely that the deputy would avenge the soldier, it was not
impossible, foi there was always the example of General Sarrail to show
that it paid to have political friends, even such lowly political friends
as county councillors; and, of course, Sarrail had other and more

powerful friends as well. It was natural, and in some ways wise for
Joffrc to attempt to cut communications between the Army and the
Parliament. Whether mere self-seeking, or delusions that it was the
duty of deputies to recreate the glories of the 'representatives on mission'
of the Revolution was the greater nuisance, was hard to say, but both
were nuisances. On the other hand, there were plenty of legitimate
complaints that were made not only by deputies, but by most combatant
soldiers that did not seem as important at General Headquarters as

they did in Parliament or in the trenches. Yet Joffre, with Gascon


cunning and obstinacy, tried to stop all parliamentary inspection, one
might almost say knowledge of the Army. A general who accepted
an invitation to visit Glemenceau, at that time chairman of the Army
Committee of the Senate, learned after his visit, in which he, a Catholic
and Conservative, was treated with the greatest courtesy by the old
priest-eater, that he was no longer persona grata at Chantilly.
Yet, despite Joffre, the deputies found themselves able to exercise
their inspecting functions, their functions as voicers of grievances and

finally their function (usurped though this was) as the makers and un-
makers of Commanders-in-Chief. Joffre, in fact, could only have
continued to exercise his uncontrolled dictatorship by being far more
uniformly successful than he was. He was able to get rid of Sarrail, to
inflict him on the Allies in Salonika instead of on the French armies
at home ; but with the fall of the Viviani ministry at the end of 1915 he
515
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
.lost his and he had sooir to fight for his
chief protector, Millerand,
immunity from criticism against a public opinion which, in Parliament
-
at least, blamed him for the early disasters at Verdun. He was forced
to try to meet the politicians on their own ground and was beaten.
Had he been more reasonable, less self-satisfied at the end of 1915,
he might not have been dismissed at the end of 1916.

II

Economically, as well as militarily, all preparations in France, as


in Germany, had been based on a belief that the war would be short.
The financial and economic problems presented by a war lasting, not
a few months but four years, had not been foreseen, and the solutions
that were improvised had most of the faults of improvisation, though
it should be remembered that those faults are less marked in French

improvisation than in that of any other people.


To this widespread national talent for muddling through, to this
successful reliance on 'System D', there was one great exception. 1 A
commentator on French war finance 2 has sorrowfully quoted Le"on
""Say's judgment: 'public intelligence, in economic questions, has made
5
far less progress in France than anywhere else. The experience of the
war^ki the main justified this pessimistic view. Of all the major
European belligerents, France managed her finances with the. least
skill, foresight and resolution. For this there were two classes of reasons :
one accidental and temporary, another permanent. The first of the
accidental reasons was, of course, the invasion which occupied or
devastated one of the richest regions of France. 8 Not only was there
a corresponding loss of revenue, but the economic damage done in-
volved very serious further losses. Had the area occupied been mainly
devoted to producing wine, for example, its loss would not have had
the important secondary results that followed on the occupation of
Lorraine and Flanders by the Germans. For these regions were the
main French producers of the sinews of modern war, of steel and iron
and coal and textiles. The resources thus destroyed, or in the hands
of the enemy, were replaced by imports from Britain, from America,
from Japan, from the whole world, and these imports had to be paid
for, or borrowed for, with consequent loss of wealth or credit. The
completeness of the military mobilization at the beginning of the war
emptied French factories and so made further imports necessary and,
a minor but not unimportant result, it completely disorganized the
financial side of the bureaucracy. After the war began, it was soon

1
From the verb 'se debrouiller' ('to muddle through somehow*) the French have in-
vented a 'systeme D' to which, in all emergencies, recourse is had. The result is often
brilliant.
1
M. Jeze. Cf. p. 524.

5 l6
THE WAR
impossible to learn what had been spent, or how, or on what, or even
what had been borrowed, and the arrears of accounting were not over-
taken until long after the war, when the damage had been done. 1
A secondary cause of confusion arose from the arrival of the war
at a moment when French public finance was just beginning to be re-
formed. The first serious breach in the Napoleonic and revolutionary
system (which themselves owed more to the ancien regime than it was
politic to admit) had been made. The principle of income tax had
been accepted and the beginnings of a system of collecting set up. The
reform, long disputed and still in a very embryonic form, served ad-
mirably as an excuse for a short-sighted financial policy.
The parties of the Left, faced with reasonable demands for an
increase in the old direct taxes, replied, truthfully but largely irrele-
it was
vantly, that politically improper to increase taxes which were
on the *way The parties of the Right were full of scorn
to abolition.
for thisargument; they pointed out that Britain had vastly increased
her taxation. They failed to point out, or to realize, that if Britain
was able to manage her finances better, it was due to the long existence
and well-tried machinery of income tax in that country. The sections
of French opinion which had fought bitterly the not very vigorous
attempts of the Left to impose an income tax, showed no desire to
remedy their fault; nor, indeed, did the Left. Borrowing was largely
done through anonymous bonds which were sold over the counter "with
no questions asked, and a commentator was later forced to admit that
'the State did little more than legalize a de facto situation' when it
2
exempted the bonds from the general tax on income.
Farmers were legally as well as practically exempted from the
excess profits tax, and such of them as made large profits during the
war (and some wine growers, for instance, made very large profits)
escaped from the curiosity and rapacity of the Treasury in a way that
would have aroused envy in other lands. Not until the war had lasted
over two years did the Government and Parliament make any serious
attempt to raise new revenue, and on this side of public finance the
most striking comment is that, during the war, the Government of
France did not raise in taxes enough to pay for its normal peace-time
expenditure. All war costs were borrowed. Internal borrowing was
directed to tapping (and tapping successfully) the economies of the
nation, not merely by great war loans as in most other countries, but
by selling Treasury bonds, and not until November 1915 was the first
war-loan launched.
A feature of French war-loans was the attempt to stabilize the rate
of interest. The French investor, in such circumstances, expected to

1
One of the oddest accounting mistakes was discovered in 1922, when it was found
that the total of National Defence bonds had been overestimated by 7,000,000,000 francs.
1
M. Truchy.
51?
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
get 5 per cent, on his nominal investment. It was& <if course, only
possible to maintain this traditional rate of interest by selling rentes
under par, and, when interest was reduced to 4 per cent., as it was for
the last two loans, at far under par. (The last was issued at 70*80 per
cent.) This feature, combined with a long period of inconvertibility,
might have imposed an even more intolerable burden on the next
generation had not successive devaluations of the currency saved the
State from the consequences of its rashness.
For foreign borrowing, the French Government, like the British,
tried to mobilize the securities held by its citizens v But it was much
less successful than was its ally; it only managed to mobilize

2,000,000,000 francs.
1 This was much less than the nominal French
holdings abroad, but those holdings were largely in Russian, Rumanian
and other unmarketable securities, and, in addition, the French
Treasury had not the information which would have enabled it to
stimulate lagging patriots (if such there were) who were hesitating to
lay down their bonds for their country.
It followed, then, that a great deal of French foreign financing had
to be done through Great Britain, that country advancing money to

France, generally on condition that the sums thus lent should be spent
either in America or Britain. In addition, loans were floated on the
American market, though less successfully than is often believed, and
when* Federal Reserve regulations made it impossible for the French
Government to borrow more in its own name, cities like Bordeaux and
banks like the Credit Lyonnais lent their names to transactions that
2
formally at least met the rules. By the spring of 1917 the credit of
France, like that of Great Britain, was exhausted in the country that
was supplying most of the war materials imported. No system of
public finance could have altered this, although a more rigorous
system of internal taxation would have kept down luxury imports and
thus helped the French exchange. With the entry of the United
States into the war, these difficulties disappeared; for the moment, all
that America could give was financial aid, and that was lent lavishly,
until by the end of the war the external debt of France alone had
reached, in francs, almost double the total pre-war debt which was,
in 1914, the highest in the world. 8
One last form of borrowing was lavishly employed from the
beginning of the war, the use of the printing press. At the outbreak of
war, the note circulation was 5,900,000,000 francs, by the end of 1919
it was 37,000,000,000 and, most
devastating comment on this side of

1
At then par of exchange 80,000,000 or 400,000,000.
1
The law forbade any Federal Reserve Bank to discount loans made to any one borrower
that exceeded 10 per cent, of the unimpaired capital and surplus of the lending bank.
*
The national debt in i o 1 4 was about 2 7,000,000,000 francs. The foreign debt in 1 9 1 8
was 43,000,000,000. The debt owed to America was just short of $3,000,000,000 and the
debt owed to Britain was just short of 690,000,000.
518
THE WAR
governmental policy, it was in 1919 that the biggest increase in the note
issue took place. That year was the worst of all from the point of
view of the financial purist; extravagance and optimism unaccompanied
by any sense of the importance of getting in heavy taxes and lightening
the paper burdens made the responsibility for 'he linancial policy of
the year of peace more than any reputation could stand. But
first

the French parliamentary system is designed for emergencies like


these, since no financial responsibility is ever laid on one pair of
shoulders. During the war, indeed, the control of finance by the
Chambers largely lapsed. Presented with accounts that neither
Minister nor Committee could understand, the Chambers could only
complain and hope for better things, or sometimes show their teeth at
inopportune moments, as when the Finance Committees of both
Houses expressed their dismay at finding that nearly ten million francs
had been spent on protective caps and on trench helmets. 'The
helmet*, said the Snuir report severely, *is a new item of equipment
which, legally, M\ not be introduced without legislation.' But such
:

rvrn had \( been more frequent, would have been of little


vigilance,
avail in M< mnmi- the flood of expenditure. The real remedy of
increasing the >< -\rime side was, as has been suggested, too heroic to

appeal
to many members of either House or of any party.
must not be thought that parliamentary control, if inadequate,
It
even if
was useless. That some order was observed, that accounts,
were rendered, was largely due to the vigilance
incomplete accounts,
of the senators and deputies. What might
have happened had that
of advances
vigilance not been exercised,
is suggested by the history
makers. When it became evident that the regular
to munition
all sorts of
sources of munition supply were hopelessly inadequate,

at-

free , to
its own contractors
^%S* ^Liderable profit

szxfsf&i sx = vr
-
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
borrowing it. But such useful interventions of politicians against the
extravagance of officials and soldiers were not enough to repair the
damage of the general financial policy for which the politicians were
1
responsible. *^

All over the world, the economic life of nations was disturbed by the
war, but inevitably France suffered more changes than almost any other
land. Despite her growing industrialization, France, in general, was
in 1914 a country of small factories, of little businesses, and the regions
where great industrial agglomerations were common were almost all
occupied by the enemy. The character of the war, with its demand
for vast quantities of machine-made goods ensured (once it was realized
that the war was not going to end in a few months) that the indus-
trialization of France would be immensely accelerated. For the first
few weeks of the war this result was not foreseen. The disaster caused
a great economic crisis, especially in the luxury trades of Paris; wages
were reduced and many employees put out of work. So little was the
character of the war realized that the Renault motor works in Paris
were shut down, except for a small section that made stretchers and
other small articles! By the end of the war, the factory was making
tanks and aeroplanes, trucks and cars, and instead of its peace-time
5,000 workers, was employing 25,000. Bourges, which was the seat of
one of the great arsenals, saw its population jump in about a year from
45,000 to 1 10,000 and the average output of its munitions works multi-
plied twelve-fold. The replacement of individual artisans by machine-
tenders serving the needs of mass production was greatly accelerated.
So, too, was the admission of women into industries where they had
been unknown before the war. The invasion sent hordes of refugees
into the safer parts of France, many to be a burden on charity and the
Government; others, like the cotton and woollen manufacturers of
Belgium and the north to stimulate the stagnant textile industries of
Normandy; others, like the 200 prostitutes shipped from the fortress
city of Toul to Marseilles, to disorganize completely the local market
for a time.
The industry that suffered most from the war was the greatest of
all agriculture. In peace-time there were 5,200,000 male workers on
the land; by 1918, 3,700,000 of them were in the Army and, despite the
use of women, prisoners and immigrants, agricultural production fell
1
In France, as in all belligerent countries, there were many real and more rumoured
scandal* connected with war contracts. In France, however, the long life of national
traditions was well exemplified by various projects to make the profiteers a
disgorge by
'revision* of all big contracts. But although there was much talk and trouble taken and
given, the methods used by the Monarchy to make Fouquet and his like disgorge were found
'
to be impracticable under the Republic.

520
THE WAR
off very badly. Even the vineyards, few of which were in the war
zone, reduced their production by 20 per cent.
The two crops most seriously affected were wheat and sugar. A
fifth of the 1913 wheat crop came from the invaded area, and France,

which after consuming 700,000 tons of sugar, had an export surplus in


peace-time, saw her production fall to 136,000 tons. The national
stock of cattle suffered as much or more. In the first two months of
war, more than half the cattle in the department of Indre et Loire had
been sent to the Army and, as the stocks fell while the Army demand
continued, serious privations were suffered by a population which was
finally forced to eat frozen meat when it could get it. 1 By 1918, Paris
had three meatless days a week and the number of dishes which could
be eaten at one meal was severely regulated. As supplies grew shorter,
queues began to appear, and there were soon disturbances provoked by
the shortage of such necessities as tobacco.
Bit by bit a rationing system was introduced for bread, sugar,
tobacco, chocolate, and although the system was not as rigorous as that
used in England, and was only slowly applied over the whole country
and to most necessities, it was practically complete by 1918. The most
serious shortage of all was in coal. Despite rationing and limitation of
the use of coal, French imports of fuel rose from 17,000,000 tons a year
to ovci i>o,ooo,ooo tons, a reflection of the fact that the most important
coal-fields were in German hands. As the submarine \var got worse,
supplies were both limited and erratic. A port like Marseilles, which
could only be reached from England by a long and dangerous voyage,
could not compete with Le Havre or Rouen; it saw freight rates increase
ten-fold and then saw the practical cessation of supplies. This forced
the Midi on to that substitution of water power for coal power that had
begun before the war, but for the moment it meant very serious hard-
ship. The vast profits made by British coal interests and by shippers
were forgotten much sooner in Cardiff than they were in Marseilles.
Even Paris suffered from a shortage and on one occasion from a com-
plete cessation of supplies.
Inevitably connected with the shortage of supplies was the rise in
prices. Inevitably, but not obviously, to a nation which has preserved
from the old regime a conviction that prices are fixed or should be fixed
by law. Shortage of supplies and inflation, with its depressing effect
on the foreign exchanges of a country whose imports had increased
nearly four times (in francs) by 1918 and whose exports had fallen by a
third, had their consequences. Needless to say, prices rose faster than
wages, and for the large classes of the community for which wages did
not rise at all, life became extremely difficult. The rise was naturally

1
Parisian consumption of frozen meat rose from 15 tons to five to six thousand tons a
month. It must be admitted, however, that the aversion of the Parisians to this food was
at first stimulated by the refusal of butchers to sell it

521
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
attributed to all kinds of maleficent, agencies. In Rouen it was the
presence of thousands of lavish British soldiers that was responsible.
In Paris, one chronicler seriously l assures us, it was only when the even

more lavish Americans 'with their pockets stuffed with dollars arrived'
that prices really rose.
To meet this discontent, the Government took traditional measures.
Since the Second Empire, indeed since Louis XVI, the cost of bread in
Paris had been kept stable by various governmental devices. During
the war, bread alone of the staples hardly rose in price at all, thanks to
Government subsidies, with a consequent calming of the tempers of the
greatest bread-eating nation of the world and the practical exclusion of
the bakers from the fantastic profits that made the war so tolerable to
many other classes of shopkeepers. But all other prices soared.
The official solution was the fixation of prices by the prefects. This
system had two drawbacks: it was not uniform and it could not be
enforced. If a prefect in one part of the country raised his prices,
supplies flowed into his department from other regions; by the time the
other prefects had followed suit, new discrepancies appeared. This
could have been remedied by a uniform price-fixing for the whole
country, but what could not be remedied was the growth of 'black',
unofficial markets. The peasant who found the price of milk too low
made cheese; when cheese was regulated, he ceased bringing supplies
to the official markets and sold privately. The .urban population was
indignant and sometimes raided the markets and forced down the prices
by threats; but, of course, the victims of this rough justice did not return
to these markets and the universal shortage saved them from any risks.
It was a permanent seller's market and no amount of decrees could
.alter this fact.
More hopeful was the encouragement of co-operatives or the estab-
lishment of municipal butcher shops or the 'baraques Vilgrain' of Paris
where foodstuffs were sold at cost price. These shops helped to provide
an element of competition at the retail stage. But the co-operative
movement in general did not rise to its opportunity. It failed to offer
the facilities of the great chain shops like the 'Docks du Centre'. The
trading activities of the local authorities, taking place on a perpetually
rising market, were generally profitable, although Paris suffered vast
losses, written off as 'insurance against public disorder'. Legal restric-
tion was much more successfully applied to rents, although in the great
munition centres suddenly flooded with extra workers, in Le Creusot
for example, the owners of houses did as well as if they had owned
valuable farming land, perhaps better, since they had no labour
troubles.
In Paris, short of food and warmth, the war was more dramatically
1
M. Bertaux. Another consequence was amorous, 'du coup, les plus beaux Australicna
et les plus males Portugal furcnt eclipses par les guerriers d'outre-Atlantique'.

522
THE WAR
evident than in any town not in the actual war zone, and Paris after all
was partly in the zone. 1 When war was declared, all theatres were
shut, restaurants closed at half-past eight, the trams and underground
railways were put on limited schedules. The Comcdie Franc.aise did
not reopen until two days before the Government returned (December
6th, 1914) and the Opera remained closed until the beginning of 1916,
and even then, evening dress was forbidden. Air raids had forced the
darkening of the whole city, but although it was dark its social life re-
vived. Moralists deplored the rage for dancing and musical comedy
and the intrusion of foreign ideas and customs. By 1916 the Parisians
had settled down to the war; it was part of their normal lives, some-
times comparatively quiet, sometimes too active, as in the spring of 1918
when the bombardment by Big Bertha, combined with the German
advance, again sent floods of refugees away from the threatened city.
But at each end of the social scale, Paris was alive. She was the centre
of the Allied resistance, and if her position was onerous and dangerous,
it was, after all, a price almost worth paying for the glory of
being the
cynosure of the world.
The workers, when at the end of 1916 wages began to rise, were
flattered by the Government as indispensable and had a fictitious if not
real sense of well-being. In Paris, as all over France, it was the middle
classes that suffered, although until the imposition of uniform rates of

pay by the munitions department in 1916, there were remarkable varia-


tions in the wage-level of the working classes in different parts of the
country. But the weakening of the position of the professional classes
which began during the war was one of the most striking results of the
war in French society. The official, envied by his fellows in 1913,
was pitied by them, if noticed at all, by 1917. Almost the only gain of
the clerical classes was a shortening of the inordinately long hours of
office-work.
The recognition by the Government of the claims of regular mistresses
of soldiers on their country's generosity was an inevitable and just
acceptance of a social fact, but the old-fashioned French family struc-
ture was badly shaken by the inflation, loss of savings in Russian bonds
and by the new opportunities offered to women by the war. Nursing,
officework, even factory work became a duty and often a necessity for
many daughters of bourgeois families, a state of affairs that it was easier
2
to deplore than remedy.
To make up the shortage of labour, there was an importation of
Spaniards and Italians, then of Chinese, and many Frenchmen first got
1
Paris was officially classed as in the war zone in June 1918, after the German advance
of the previous month.
*
A historian of the life of Marseilles during the war reports with indignation cases of
women who misconducted themselves 'attirles par une curiositl malsaine vers les Britan-
niques, les Hindous, les Africains du Nord, les S6n6galais, les Annamites'. No indication
is given of whether this order is ascending or descending.

523
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
a& idea of the size and variety of their empire when they saw men from

Madagascar, Indo-China, Algeria and Morocco, and even some Kana-


kas from New Caledonia, replacing the men of the ruling nation who
were in the trenches. They may even have had some scepticism of the
merits of imperialism implanted in them by comparing the sober
Moroccans, but lately rescued from barbarism, with the Algerians who
had added drunkenness to their native vices.

IV

Curing the first years of the war, the slogan of Clemenceau, the fact
which he used to show up the failures of the Government, was the
simple statement, 'the Germans are at Noyon'. But nobody on the
French side of the trenches can have had a clear idea of the sufferings
of their compatriots who were in the occupied territories. The destruc-
life in the actual battle-line; the ruin extending over a much
tion of all
wider area on each side of the line these could be understood. But
the sufferings of the population of the areas which, from October 1914
to October 1918, were securely held by the invaders, were of a less
obvious but very bitter kind. The normal population of the perma-
nently occupied region was a little over two millions; by the end of the
war it had fallen to about sixteen hundred thousand; the differences
representing soldiers and refugees and, to a minor degree, movements
of population into Belgium or Germany, some nominally voluntary,
some openly forced. For four years this population was controlled
entirely in the interests of the invaders. The north of France,
said an
American who had every means of knowing, 1 was a 'great concentra-
tion camp*. It suffered from all the hardships that fell on Germany
and most of those that fell on France. Some of the most odious mea-
sures taken by the Germans; the stripping of the region of almost all
its economic resources and the deportation of many of its inhabitants,

were blamed by the invaders on the rigours of the British blockade.


When it was thought worth while to conciliate the inhabitants, the
propaganda organ, the Gazette des Ardennes, the only newspaper
official
written in French that the average inhabitant saw, blamed the obstinacy
of the Allies and, above all, of England for continuing a hopeless war.
-
But there was no determined attempt in France to build up a pro-
German party like the Flemish party in Belgium. There was no raw
material for such a party and, except in the region of Maubeuge which
was for a long time attached to the German administration of Belgium
and the iron fields of Lorraine which were earmarked for annexation,
there was little effort wasted on conciliating a population which, in the
mass, never modified its hostility.
Many of the sufferings of the inhabitants were simple incidents of
1
Mr. Hoover.
524
THE WAR
war. The Germans shotsoldiers who were found
hiding and women
who helped any of the anti-German activities thai seemed to endanger
German security, and, in general, imposed their authority by savage
reprisals; but it should be remembered that the Allies had, in fact, an
excellent intelligence service behind the lines, and many of the French-
men who were executed died as patriots but were no more martyrs than
Schlageter, Major Andre or Nathan Hale. It was in less serious
matters that the occupation showed the less admirable sides of the
German character. Coming from a country in which, even in peace
time, the officer was a privileged person not bound to waste politeness
on civilians, the German officials were bound to be harsh in dealing
with a people which had not been so thoroughly brought to heel. And
in a few years, rigorous and humiliating punishment had done a
good
deal to tame the inhabitants of northern France. French officials re-
turning in 1918 were astonished to find the inhabitants getting out of
their way with profound bows! Petty annoyances like naming streets
after the Kaiser and Hindenburg, enforcement of formal saluting, occa-

sionally a perverse delight in humiliating what was too easily assumed


to be a conquered people, kept the flame of hatred alight, if it was very
necessary to hide the flame.
Life could be made tolerable by a humane or indifferent officer;
intolerable by a brute or a fool. Appeals to high quarters, for example
to the Imperial Grown Prince, sometimes had good effects, and selfish-
ness v\as at timesan ally of the French. One town escaped billeting
for two years, thanks to the foresight of two German colonels who did
not want their lavish accommodation lessened. A good many local
despots had local mistresses, and these sometimes played the role of
Esther and got the lot of their countrymen alleviated, although there
were one or two cases of loose women revenging themselves on their
respectable sisters who had despised them.
In four years of strain and of uncontrolled authority there were
bound to be grave abuses. It seemed to the French that the German
passion for beating was sometimes given rein to. Women were, from
time to time, beaten with rubber truncheons, and men had to fear blows
from the riding- whips that were the favourite German symbol of autho-
rity. Rigorous regulations designed to prevent espionage and to secure
control of the economic resources of the country gave abundant oppor-
tunity for delation, and many a village feud was carried
on with the
more or less unconscious collaboration of the invaders.
The problem of feeding the population was never completely solved.
The American Relief Organization alone stood between the population
and starvation, but at the best the diet was short in meat and vegetables.
The occupied territory was the richest part of France, but in four years
of war it was thoroughly and skilfully skinned. At first it was a ques-
tion of temporary requisitions. A colonel, for instance, demanded a
525
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
down-quilt and a cook. But it soon became a systematic assessment,
and removal of all that could be useful to the invader, raw materials,
machines, cattle, manufactured goods. Cases of personal plundering,
though common enough, did far less harm to the economic life of the
country than the carefully organized exploitation of its capital re-
sources. There were great financial levies too. Roubaix, in four years
of occupation, paid 82,000,000 francs in levies, the pre-war annual
taxes being about 5,000,000. The needs of the constantly moving
troops could only be met at the expense of the inhabitants. One town
of 12,000 inhabitants had to house 20,000 soldiers.
Worse still were the levies on the inhabitants for service. Although
coercion was officially frowned on, in fact many thousands of the in-
habitants were forced into labour gangs, a practice disliked when it was
applied to men and detested when it was applied to women. Any
resistance was severely punished and in ways that seemed designed
to insult as well as to intimidate.
The extremecentralization of French Government made the diffi-
cultiesof the occupied area even greater. Only one prefect (of the
Nord) stayed behind and he was ultimately deported. Thus there fell
on the mayors and councillors a responsibility for local government
forwhich they were not prepared and from which they were not allowed
to escape. The moral health of a community often depended as much
on the courage of the mayor as on the humanity of the German com-
mandant. Some mayors were servile; some were too tactless to be of
any use to their fellows; some were heroes; most deserved well of their
communities.
As the war went on, something like despair fell on the occupied
region. In no country had war weariness more material to feed on.
Communication with France, where tens of thousands of their fellow-
citizens were fighting, was extremely dangerous. Spreading good news
of the Allied cause was punished and for long there was so little to
spread! There were gallant efforts made to keep up the morale of the
people* The drunkenness of German officers was taken as a sign of
the inferiority of the conquering nation; their occasional 'sexual eccen-
tricities' were regarded as typical of a debased people. But the con-
querors were the conquerors all the same; and, in the spring of 1918,
the hearts of many thousands in Lille and Roubaix must have sunk
near to despair at the news from the front. But as sumrner drew on
things changed. By the autumn, the front was cracking; troops were
heard to shout down their officers; there was an air of anxiety and then
of alarm visible. The requisitions went on, but by October the end
was in sight. The invaders were in retreat. On November 2nd, the
Gazette des Ardennes last time, and in the next two weeks
appeared for the
had crossed the frontier, and close on their heels
the last of the invaders
came the delivering armies on their way to occupy western Germany. . . .

526
THE WAR

Among the greatest worries of a French Government faced with a


greatwar was the possible attitude of the leaders and politically active
members of the working-classes. In the years immediately preceding
1914, Jaures, leader of the Socialist party and towering above all his
rivalsby prestige and personality, had concentrated riore and more on
military and diplomatic questions. H? had attacked the army ad-
ministration as being inefficient and wasteful as well as undemocratic;
he had attacked the foreign policy of the Republic as opening an era
of imperialism by its Moroccan policy and by its subservience to Russia.
An alliance binding France to the Tsardom against the Germany that
had given the world the Reformation was odious to him. Anti-mili-
tarism was not Jaures' preoccupation only. It was largely by its
campaign against the three-years service law that the Left had won the
elections of May 1914. In June, the party congress of the Seine had
heard a German Socialist leader remind it that Bebel had said that
mobilization might mean revolution. So moderate a leader as Albert
Thomas had party should declare itself in favour of
a.skcd that the
1
stopping a by a general strike.
\\ .11

At the National Congress which opened on July I4th, the question


was no longei remote; the cloud on the horizon was now bigger than
a maii\s hiind and Jaures had to defend the strike as a peace weapon
against Jules Guesde, who said it merely meant delivering over the more
advanced to the less advanced countries. Even the once uncontroll-
able anti-militarist, Gustave Herve, had recanted his former violence.
When he had talked that way he had believed there was a body of real
revolutionaries ready to follow him but now he knew there was not.
But Jaures consoled the audience by reminding them of the achieve-
ments of the strike in other countries: in Spain in the Moroccan affair;
in Russia during the Japanese war; in Italy at the time of the war in

Tripoli.
2
'We must prepare to be worthy of the destiny which awaits
us*. And on July 25th, in a campaign speech at a by-election to the
Chamber, Jaures again tried to induce his audience to keep calm, to
remember how guilty France was over Morocco and how untrustworthy
imperial Russia was. There was wrong on the other side too. Ger-
many's diplomatic manner was bad, and the troubles in Bosnia-Herze-
govina were due (it was an election speech)
to Austrian clericalism
which had tried to convert the inhabitants of the provinces to Catho-
licism by force. The one hope of peace was that the workers of all the
nations should react, that all these thousands should unite 'that the
1
One of the opponents of the general strike asked ironically how it could be supported
by Thomas, who was in favour of taking part in the Government and might be a Minister
of War.
The chief opponent of Italian imperialism and militarism at that time was, of course,
Comrade Bcnito Mussolini.
527
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
very beating of their hearts may avert the horrible nightmare*. It was
the last speech Jaur&s made in France. 1
The permanent committee of the International had its headquarters
in Brussels and, on the 28th,-Jaures, Guesde, Vaillant, Longuet went
there to meet the other delegates. Guesde was sceptical of the reality
of the crisis; he had said and believed that the day of great European
wars was over. And in the atmosphere of Brussels, hope revived. The
Austrian and Czech delegates, it is true, said that it was impossible to
hold the annual Congress of the International at Vienna on August
23rd, but the committee was not in despair. The Congress was sum-
moned to Paris for August gth and the committee voted that the 'Ger-
man and French proletariats would bring even more vigorous pressure
than ever to bear on their governments'.
Jaures returned to Paris to carry out his part of the bargain. He
believed that the crisis would pass, and, in any case, that there would
be no sudden breakdown; the diplomatic battle, like any modern battle,
was bound to be a long drawn out affair, so he told pessimists. And he
repeated that the German leader Haase had told him that the German
Emperor didn'twant war and he knew that the French Ministry did
not want war. He had come from interviewing the Government when
the news reached the Chamber of Deputies that Germany had declared
a state of 'Kriegsgefahrzustand'. Jaures, who was very proud of his
German scholarship, insisted that this did not mean war but was merely
a state of preparation for war. He sent for dictionaries and made his
point while his colleagues marvelled at his optimism. According to one
story he told a Minister who asked him what he was going to do, 'con-
tinue our campaign against the war'. 'You'll be shot down/ said the
Minister. He went off to a favourite restaurant of his, and, while look-
ing at the photograph of the little daughter of an editor of the Bonnet
Rouge, was shot from the street. His murderer was an unbalanced
Nationalist fanatic who thought that he was saving his country. He
might well have ruined her. At a moment when unity was the one
necessity, the most trusted leader of the workers had been murdered.
Even if the story that he had planned to write a leading article de-
nouncing all the governments, his own included, is true, the article
would have been less of a blow to France than the murder. All sections
of public opinion recognized this, even the Action Franfaise, which had
been the bitterest assailant of the orator. The Prime Minister issued
a proclamation of homage which was also an appeal for calm. He
promised that the assassin would be punished. The appeal was heeded.
2

War was now certain the unfortunate phrase of Poincar^, 'mobili-


;

1
When the war fever had reached its height, friends of Jaures. anxious to clear his name
of charges of treasonable views denied the authenticity of the report of the Vaise speech,
but there is abundant proof of its accuracy.
1
The murderer was kept in prison for so long that the shock of his crime was forgotten;
he was then tried and acquitted.
THE WAR
zation not war', deceived no one; but even before mobilization was
is

ordered, the trade-union leader, Jouhaux, speaking in memory of


c

Jaures, had declared that the French workers would punish the bloody
despots who had made the war'. The leaders of the Left and the
Government were faced with a common dilemma. How seriously were
they to take the hot and^bold words uttered at so many congresses?
Had the French workers been so won over to revolution that they
would not fight? Had they in fact nothing to lose but their chains?
Workers, leaders and Government all came to the same conclusion and
by the time the great meeting in the Salle Wagram which Jaures had
called for Sunday 2nd had met, mobilization had begun.
Leaders and led alike were all over France facing a very real prob-
lem. They had not, like English and American leaders, time to think
the matter over. To refuse to answer the mobilization order meant, if
the refusal was not general, suicide; if it was general, revolution and
this in face of a Germany which showed no signs of internal dissidence.
Hermann Miiller, had been on his way to Paris
a Reichstag Socialist,
when he heard of murder of Jaures, and when he arrived he pro-
the
mised (through his interpreter, the young Belgian Henry de Man) l
that the Social Democrats would never vote war credits. But such
vague (and unkept) promises were not enough. Each reservist had to
decide for himself what might mean life or death for him or for France.
And there was no hesitation. A left-wing leader was later to complain
that the anti-militarists had been deceived by their own noisy propa-
ganda. It was the same handful in a dozen different guises who
shouted 'down with the Army' and alarmed the Government of France
while misleading the Governments of other countries. Behind the
fagade of Marxism a deeper French revolutionary tradition was hidden,
and it was the spirit of 1793, of Blanqui and the Commune of 1871, that
now sprang to life. The mobilization not only took place with technical
but with spiritual smoothness; for a moment there were only Frenchmen.
To this end the Government contributed by a decision which fully
justified itself. There was in existence a police list of dangerous per-
sons, of radical agitators who were to be arrested the moment mobiliza-
tion was ordered lest they should, in their revolutionary fervour,
sabotage the military machine. This was the famous 'Garnet B\ It
contained 2,501 names, the names of the most dangerous revolutionaries
in France; the names of trade-union leaders who might organize the
general strike; and of revolutionary politicians, like Pierre Laval, who
might incite them to it.
2
The Government was terrified either to use
Garnet B or not to. They were advised by M. Glemenceau to use it

1
Since chief planner for Belgian Socialism and Cabinet Minister.
*
Later, when the pacifist section of the trade unions and of the Socialist party had
recovered from the shock, it was asserted that the leaders had betrayed the workers to escape
Garnet B. But there is no ground for this view. As a trade-union leader told the critics
who talked of what they would have done, 'I should have liked to see you try. The Paris
workers . . wouldn't have waited for the police, they would have shot us on the spot.'
.

59
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
and the Prefect of Police agreed. But the advice of the Chief of the
Sure*te* was taken. He laughed at the fears expressed about the atti-
tude of the workers. 'They will follow the regimental bands,' he said,
and they did.
This patriotic unanimity was not broken for months. It is true that
the veteran leader, Vaillant, representing the Blanqui tradition, was
furious when the Government went to Bordeaux. This was 1870 over
again. Paris, capital of the Revolution, was being betrayed, but the
Marne calmed the old communard, although his patriotic vehemence soon
became too much for the directors of UHumanitt. When the Viviani
Government was re-organized at the end of August, the Socialist party
sent two representatives into it, Jules Guesde, the inflexible opponent
of participation in bourgeois governments, and Marcel Sembat, who
had written a book to show that a republic could not wage a successful
war. It was Minister Guesde who appointed trade-union leaders
'delegates to the nation', a vague reminiscence of 1793 and 1848. The
main result of this move was that the leaders had to explain their
motives in accepting such appointments when opposition revived and,
above all, to refute (as they did) the charge that they had not only fled
to Bordeaux, but had gone first class in the train!
The first rift in the unanimity of the country came on May is t, 1915.
The metal workers' federation, whose leader, Merrheim, was Jouhaux's
only rival in prestige among the workers and which was very revolu-
tionary in temper, announced that 'this war is not our war'. Socialist
unity lasted a little longer and the national committee on July I4th
was able to resolve unanimously that the only hope of freedom from
fear of war was the defeat of German imperialism. It was the last
unanimous vote the party was to pass.
The war had lasted a year and already the first enthusiasm had
gone; the weariness, under which all European nations almost collapsed
before the end came, was beginning to appear. The war and its con-
sequences had greatly weakened at first both the political and industrial
side of the workers' movement. Mobilization tDok away thousands of
militants and made much of the peace-time propaganda out of place.
The unions recovered fastest; not only did they recover lost ground,
they made new conquests. There were new federations of unions
formed, like the federation of railwaymen; and the growth of the
munitions industry helped the militant metal-workers whose member-
ship was 7,500 in 1912, 18,000 in 1916 and 204,000 in 1918. Financial
resources rose, too, though characteristically not in proportion.
Regions that had not been seriously unionized at all were now won over.
After some resistance, women were welcomed to the unions if with a
hope that they would go back to the home when the war was over.
1

1
The law permitting a wife or a minor to join a union without the consent of husband
or guardian was not passed until 1920. Even then, these members in tutelary state could
not become officials of the unions.

530
THE WAR
Such a growth was inevitable. If the unions had not existed, they
would have had to be invented; indeed, in some regions and industries
they were practically invented. The small groups of militants found
themselves merged in a mass of newcomers with no real notion either
of union discipline or union aims. But the union leaders were neces-
sarily forced into close collaboration with the Government, which at once
increased their prestige with the mass and made them an object of sus-
picion with the militants. As the demand for munitions grew, it was
necessary to send many expert workmen back from the front and it
was necessary to call on the unions to help in the selection of these
soldiers, both to avoid the release of incompetents and to avoid the
demoralization of both the Army and the factories had the choice of
men been left wholly to the employers or to the War Office.
The unions had to fight to protect the rights of their members who
were working under military orders: to preserve their claim to com-
pensation for injuries, for instance. As the war dragged on and as the
need for labour and for soldiers grew greater than France could meet,
the unions had to protect the French worker against the competition of
Chinese labour. When it was proposed to bring 100,000 Italian
workers to France, the unions protested bitterly that it was a device to
get 100,000 Frenchmen from the factories to the trenches, while their
places were to be taken by Italians who should go to the front them-
selves, and however flattering to the military pride of Frenchmen such a
system was, it would not be endured. Even the elaborate preparations
which marked the first year of American activity in France were
not regarded with approval. There were, it was asserted, more
American workers than soldiers in France, and as usual, the fighting
would be done by Frenchmen while their Allies made shells, roads
and money.
But although there was an increasing number of strikes, they were,
until 1917, fought over wages and over conditions of labour, and com-

pulsory arbitration of strikes was imposed at the beginning of 191 7 with-


out meeting much more than formal protests from the unions. The
necessities of the times forced the Government to impose on factories a

system of workers' delegates (or shop stewards as they were called in


Britain). This innovation was strongly opposed by many employers
and was regarded with some suspicion by the unions. Many of the
shop stewards were, indeed, .good union members, so good that they
made reports to the unions (which had officially nothing to do with
them) as well as to their fellow-workers in the factories. But others,
placed in authority, developed more or less reasonable ambitions of
their own and became rivals rather than allies of the regular leaders.
But for all the friction and all the oratory, French labour gave its
Government very little to worry about for the first two and a half years
of war.
531
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
More concern was felt at the rising pacifist protest that began to
shake the Socialist party. In the autumn of 1915 took place the first
conference between the representatives of the Socialist parties of the
warring nations. At Zimmerwald in Switzerland a little group repre-
senting the left wing of the national parties met and, largely under the
influence of the exiled Russian leader, Lenin, a joint Franco-German
declaration was issued. 'This war is not our war.' The chief French
delegate was Merrheim of the left-wing and formally pacifist metal-
workers, but there were many militants in France who, although not at
the Zimmerwald conference, sympathized with its leaders. To the
pacifist cause symbolized by Zimmerwald and, next year by the Kien-
thal congress, rallied an increasing number of local Socialist parties, in
the Haute- Vienne, in the Is&re, in the Seine, where the revolutionary
tradition was most lively. By December 1916, the majority of the
party which supported the war was within sight of being a minority, and
Jules Guesde noted bitterly that 'it's for that I have given so many years
of my life', to which the minority might have answered, 'it is, indeed,
for we are where you were'. Illegal pacifist tracts began to appear,
including reprints of the speech of Jaures at Vaise.
The vast majority of French workers were still untouched by
doctrinal opposition to the war, but more and more the militants had
begun to regret their adherence to the sacred union. The circulation
of UHwnanite under the highly patriotic direction of Renaudel had
fallen to 9,000. A rival paper, Le Populaire, was founded and, although
only a weekly, it was more powerful with the Paris workers than the
daily.
1
There was plenty of fuel; only a match was wanted, and that
was provided when the news of the Russian Revolution came.
It was inevitable that the Russian Revolution should have an
immense effect in France. Hostility to the Tsardom had always been
a powerful force on the French Left (and for a time on the Right too) .

Victor Hugo and Montalembert were united in their detestation of


Imperial Russia, and even the diplomatic necessities that led to the
alliance did not destroy this tradition, which, indeed, the imbecile and

bloody reign of Nicholas II had done nothing to weaken. Now the


Tsar was gone and, more important still, the French workers who had
been told about revolutions ever since 1871, who had been fed with
violent words, taught to await the great day when the rifle and the
barricade would replace the ballot box and the Parliament, had now
before their dazzled eyes the spectacle of the great day coming. What
had been, for over a generation^ mere rhetoric in Paris had become
reality in Petrograd. The wind from the steppes, like the wind
from the sierra in Hugo's poem, took away the senses of most active
members of the French working classes. What had been done in the
1
It might be noted that UHumaniti subsequently became the Communist and Lt Populairt
the Socialist daily.

532
THE WAR
capital of the Tsars could and should be done in the capital of the
Revolution.
This inspiration from the east became far more powerful after the
October Revolution. Here was a real revolution; here was the way to
peace. There was now no easy way of harmonizing the views of the
two sections of the party. If the main interest of the French workers
was victory for France, then the Bolsheviks v\de villains and inter-
vention against them necessary and just. But if the workers of the
world had nothing to lose but their chains, the Bolsheviks were heroes.
How could the nation of the Marseillaise attack the Revolution?
The Painleve* Government of September 1917 was the first to have
no Socialist representative in it; and all French Socialists were now in
favour of a general Socialist Congress at Stockholm which, as it involved
meeting German delegates, was strongly opposed by the Army leaders.
In the general uneasiness that was provoked by the defeatist wave, by
the campaign against M. Malvy, by the gloomy news from Russia, soon
to be followed by the almost equally gloomy news from Italy, the nature
of the decision to be made by France was becoming clearer. She could
turn to the Socialists and liquidate the war on the best terms possible
or she cou'd decide to fight to a finish and that meant Clemenceau.
The idea of ,t Clemenceau Ministry was abhorrent to almost all
Sociali^s, but to many of them it was as preposterous as it was abhor-
imt. But the impossible came about and, although Clemenceau tried
to get Socialist collaboration after the disasters of the spring of 1918, it
was refused him. Merrheim might talk of saving France from a Peace
of Brest-Litovsk, but by 1918 the only way to save France was to win
the war and the resolution to win the war was incarnate in Clemenceau.
The Socialists and the trade unions were thrust into the background.
The arrest of M. Malvy evoked protests from the 'Confederation
G&ierale du Travail', for the Minister of the Interior was regarded by
the trade-union leaders as a barrier to reaction. The great strike in the
Paris munition works in March 1918 widened the gulf between the
Government and the organized labour movement. The motives for the
strikewere various; it was not organized or led by responsible leaders,
but asit was in part a protest against a calling of munition-workers to the

colours and as it came at the moment of the great German offensive, the
genuine grievances of the workers were, for the country, less important
than the risks the strike made the country run. As a trade-union
leader said, 'they have struck in good faith at a moment when they
1
should not have struck .

In the Socialist party, the revolutionary and pacifist wave continued


to mount. In July the party congress was controlled by the Zimmer-
waldian section. Renaudel had been ejected from the control of
U Humanity and more extreme leaders like Cachin and Frossard were
l

1
Since expelled from the party as a moderate in the company of Renaudel.

533
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
The attack on Malvy came from many sides. Some of his Cabinet
colleagues thought, kindly, that his health required him to rest, but he
held his ground protesting, no doubt sincerely, that all that he had done
^was 'in a general honest thought and common good to all'. But two
attackers especially got through the guard. Le"on Daudet, in the
Action Franfaise, with a great literary talent and a complete absence of

scruples, accused the Minister of treason, above all of being the instru-
ment of betrayal of the plans for the attack on the Chemin des Dames.
The reiteration of these charges (as far as the censor would allow) had
its effect. And naturally, for though the specific charges were false, the
general political charge was true. The continuance of Malvy in the
Government was quite incompatible with a war to the bitter end. The
Minister was now a symbol, and a symbol of slackness.
To the press polemics was added a most powerful parliamentary
assault. The most formidable of orators, Glemenceau, roused to all his
patriotic bitterness by the complacent toleration of 'defeatism', told the
Minister to his face, 'You have betrayed the interests of France'. * The
blow told. It was delivered on July 22nd; Malvy took his much-needed
holiday and on August 3ist he resigned. But that was only the begin-
ning of a political revolution. The Ribot Ministry fell; and the Pain-
leve" Government that followed failed to give the impression of energy
that was needed. There was only one man left if France was to con-
tinue fighting. But Clemenceau was feared and detested by the
majority of his colleagues. He was on the worst of terms with the
President; he was more than anyone else the enemy of the Socialists.
He had steadily refused to join any of the war Governments since in
them he would be a subordinate. All politicians knew that if Clemen-
ceau was called on, Parliament was accepting a dictator. There were
manoeuvres and rumours. Albert Thomas, the very capable Socialist
Minister of Munitions, had his ambitions and one of his friends had the
ear of Poincare. But the President and Clemenceau had one thing in
common: they both remembered 1870, and Poincare* detested luke-
warmness more than he detested Clemenceau. On November I3th the
Painleve* Government was defeated amid shouts of 'Down with Clemen-
ceau' from the Left. It was a German saying, that Clemenceau was
France's last card. It was now played and it was trumps.
A few days less than a year elapsed between the appointment of
Clemenceau and victory. And as far as France was concerned that
victory was the work of a man of seventy-six. From the beginning of
2

the war Clemenceau had raged at his impotence, since he was convinced
that peace should only be made by a man who 'had read the Treaty of
Frankfort'. 8 His policy was simple 'Home policy? I wage war!
whose jurisdiction is summary. Since the Dreyfus case, the insistence on the most strict
procedural rules in military trials had been the mark of a good Republican.
1
Altered in the official account to 'you have failed in all your duties'.
*
The next oldest war leader, Hindenburg, was six years younger. 8
Of 1871.
536
THE WAR
Foreign policy? wage war! All the time I wage war/ His method
I
of doing so was in the true Jacobin tradition, however painful such an
admission would be to the self-styled heirs of the Jacobins. He had
he had their ruthless vigour. He had never
their fanatical patriotism;
been an amiable man and
he had now so many enemies he cared little
how many more he made. The acceptance of him by the Chamber
was as much an abdication as the creation by tli Convention, in 1793,
of the Committee of Public Safety. 1 1 c was a one-man committee He .

had no colleagues, only useful subordinates like General Mordacq, M.


Tardieu, M. Mandel, less useful ones like M. Klotz. He took for his
own Ministry the War Office.
Even during the war, no Prime Minister
had dared to run the political risk of not having a department of his
own. A Prime Minister without a department jf his own would soon
have ceased to be a Prime Minister. But Clemenceau did not take the
War Office for that reason; he wanted to keep an eye on the Army, to
keep an eye on General Petain, whom he trusted as far as he trusted
anyone. That was not far, and the Minister sometimes interfered in
matters that should have been left to the Commander-in-Chief; for
example, he forced Petain to alter (for the worse) the kind of training
given the troops in the winter of 1917-18. But that was a trifle com-
pared with the effect of his spirit on the Army and the country. He
was an indefatigable visitor to the Army. His curious Mongolian face,
hi.s dcci -stalker cap, his short robust figure were soon familiar all over
the front. He seemed to soften, to be more hopeful of human nature
when talking to the private soldier than when dealing with a general or
a politician.
Behind the lines the campaign against defeatism was carried to its
logical conclusion. Painleve had begun the job by arresting the leaders
of the Bonnet Rouge and their kin. Bolo Pasha was shot and so was the
ambiguous female who called herself Mata Hari, the shots that killed
her having since echoed round the world. Almeyreda was found dead
in his cell, strangled with his own bootlace. He killed himself because
his drug supply was cut off, said the Government; he was murdered, said
Leon Daudet.
Far more dramatic was the trial of Malvy. That ex- Minister had
rashly asked to be tried and he was taken at his word. He was charged
before the Senate (sitting as a High Court) with treason. The Upper
House, with a disregard for law that shocked jurists, disregarded the
charge of treason, which could not be proved, and convicted Malvy of
malfeasance in office with which he had not been charged, but of which
he was, politically, if not morally, guilty. He was sentenced to five
1
years' banishment on August 5th, I9I8. But a bolder step was the
arrest of M. Caillaux. That politician had suffered, all during the war,
the agony of being excluded from power and the knowledge, which he
1
On the same day Foch was made a Marshal of France.
537
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
managed to convey to his friends, that no one in France was as fit as he
for that burden. Against the charges of lukewarm patriotism, M. Cail-
laux had a right to indignation, but a self-esteem bordering on the
morbid, the ill-luck of having, like so many parliamentarians, some very
odd and the misfortune of an indiscreet tongue and pen made
friends,
him vulnerable. His arrest was in the best Jacobin traditions; so was
the adroit mixing of political and moral charges against him, and his
arrest was, like so much done by the Jacobins, necessary for the safety
of France if France were really determined to win the war. Like
General McGlellan whom the Democrats nominated against Lincoln
in 1864, M. Gaillaux was an able and patriotic man whose defeat was a
national necessity. 1
In the great military crisis of 1918, the Chamber almost revolted
against its tyrant, but who was
him? By the middle of the
to replace
summer was out of the question, and by the autumn, the
a revolt
Prime Minister was in a position to ignore President, Parliament and
Commander-in-Chief. For most of France and for all of the world he
was the nation incarnate. On November 4th he read to an enthusiastic
assembly the terms of the Austrian armistice and reminded the Chamber
that he was the sole survivor of the deputies who, at Bordeaux in 1871,
had protested against the cession of Alsace-Lorraine.
On November i ith, all Paris waited for the great news. Foch had
come to the capital and was recognized by the delirious crowds. At
the War Office the two men, forgetting their rivalry, fell into each
other's arms. At half-past two, the Prime Minister appeared in the
Chamber and, raising his hand for silence, read the terms of the Armis-
tice, and then calling for gratitude to the soldiers of France, he spoke in
the terms of the revolutionaries of his childhood. 'Thanks to them,
France, yesterday the soldier of God, to-day soldier of humanity, will
be for ever the soldier of the ideal.' Then Parliament voted its order
of the day to be placarded all over the territories of the Republic,
'Citizen Clemenceau and Marshal Foch have deserved well of their
country'. That night, fbr the first time for years, the lamps of Paris
could be seen from the sky. Frenzied mobs dragged the German guns
from the Place de la Concorde and left them in ditches. An immense
crowd gathered outside the War Office where it knew that the Prime
Minister had gone. 'Clemenceau', they roared. He opened his
window and, for a moment, looked on the triumphant people. Then
he shouted 'Vive la France', and sat down in his room.
One of the Prime Minister's oldest friends was the great painter,
Claude Monet, and during the darkest days of the past year, Clemen-
ceau had often gone to repose his spirit in Monet's famous garden. He
went this time, so the story runs, to tell his friend of the end of the war
1
It is perhaps worth adding that these martyrs, whose rehabilitation was one of the first
tasks of the victorious Left in 1924, have since bitten the hands that applauded them.
538
THE WAR
and of the triumph of France. 'Yes,' said Monet, 'now we have time
to get on with the monument to Ctezanne.'
In a few days, the last retreating Germans had crossed the frontier
and behind them came the French and their Allies. At the head of his
army, Mangin rode into Metz, having distributed to the troops copies
of Verlaine's patriotic lamentation on the enslavement of his native
city. And after Metz came Strasbourg, the city \vhere the Marseillaise
had first been sung. The 'day of glory' had at last come. It had cost
France fifteen hundred thousand lives, a little less than the total popula-
tion of Alsace-Lorraine.

539
BOOK X
BETWEEN TWO WARS
O cease! must hah and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn
Of bitter prophecy!
The world is weary of the past
O might it die or rest at last!
SHELLEY.
CHAPTER I

THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES


I

was the habit of Madame Letizia Bonaparte (who had known what
ITit was to be the wife and widow of a shiftless minor Corsican noble-
man), when she was asked to contemplate the latest example of the

astonishing fortune of her son, Emperor of the French, King of Italy,


Protector of the Confederation of the Rhine, to remark, 'It's all right
as long as it lasts'. The scepticism of Madame Mere underlay what-
ever Napoleonic illusions covered the surface of the French mind in
the first intoxication of victory. The position of France was unique.
She was a victor, but she had in many ways the psychology of a defeated
nation. If her attitude had any parallel in past history, it was best

represented by the attitude of Metternich in 1815. The rulers of


France, like the rulers of Austria, knew that the conjunction of circum-
stances that had brought them safely through the ordeal was unlikely
to recur. What was not achieved in the way of security now, would
not be secured later. And security was what France wanted above
all else.
Theruler of France in 1919, in his years of bitter impotence
between 1914 and 1917, had made his battle-cry of one phrase, 'the
Germans are at Noyon'. For France, the primary fact underlying
victory was invasion; the first and greatest result of the victory was the
deliverance of the sacred soil of France from pollution. It was not
irrelevant that a line of the Marseillaise had talked of impure blood
soaking into French soil. When that song was written, France was on
the eve of the first of five invasions from the east which had marked
the history of the previous century and a half. Those invasions were
not always unprovoked or unreturned, but a patient suffering from a
dreadful disease is not to be simply comforted, or cured of his fear of
its recurrence, by his doctor's pointing out that the first infection was

due to his own fault. France, the victor, had suffered for four years of
war all the agonies that normally accompany defeat, whereas her chief
allies, even Italy, had not known them at all, or only for a brief
period.
Then, in France, the peasant mentality was dominant, France was
543
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
not a country like England, where the overwhelming majority of the
people, in all classes, regarded the land as something to be looked at,
or played on. Even a doctor like Clemenceau, and a lawyer like
Poincare*, had close relations with the soil, each inhis own province,
La Vendee, and Lorraine. The occupation and the destruction of the
soil of France was far more easily understood by them than was
damage to any highly artificial system of economic organization. The
peasant mentality had other results. The war had been a great
lawsuit of a kind familiar enough; one side had won, it was entitled
not merely to the verdict, but to the assets in dispute, and, for the
peasant, these assets were tangible. The international world of credit
and trade was a new thing; the old permanent world had not altered
much since Joan of Arc had ridden west from Lorraine, confident in
divine aid to drive the English out of France where they had no right
to be. The Germans were trespassers and bandits of a kind well
known to a country where history had toughened the minds as well as
the bodies of men. And history taught, or seemed to teach, that arms
and the fortunes of war were realities more permanent than paper
bargains or paper debts.
For the French, the primary fact of Europe in 1919 was that in
its centre lay a people more numerous than any of its neighbours,

more warlike than any save one, more aggressive than that older and
more chastened nation, France. Germany, by herself, was more than a
match, thanks to her position, her population, and her military and
technical talents, for any one of her neighbours, indeed than for several
of them combined. Her social and political organization was primarily
conditioned by her military needs. France and Prussia had taught
each other too many lessons in this department of life for the French
to be deluded into thinking that Hohenzollern Germany had been

simply a slightly belated parliamentary state whose political evolution


had been accelerated by a defeat in war which the German people
would soon come to regard as a blessing in disguise.
These were illusions proper to nations that had not known defeat.
France knew better. She had known what a great conscript army
involved in the way of political problems; what defeat meant in the
distortion of political life; what a real revolution was; what, on one side,
the consciousness of invasion and, on the other, the consciousness
of immunity from invasion meant. The way in which France and
Germany and all the European nations were integrated was perceived

by the who,
critic, more than any one man, made the opinion of the
English-speaking world on the Treaty of Versailles. 'England still
stands outside Europe/ wrote Mr. Keynes. 'Europe's voiceless tremors
do not reach her. Europe is apart and England is not of her flesh
and body.' Still less was America, for although the chief American
delegate had been born in the midst of a great civil war and had grown
544
BETWEEN TWO WARS
up in a defeated community and so could not share the optimistic

English illusion that 'war never America was even


settles anything',
farther from Europe than was England, even more inclined to regard
as of little importance the petty concerns of the Lilliputians seen through
the eyes of the King of Brobdingnag.
Another cause of discord between the victors was the location of
the Peace Conference in Paris. It was not merely that the French

capital was feverish or hysterical. So <>rcat an event as the peace


settlement, so pregnant with good and evil fortune for such mighty

nations, would have awakened Philadelphia. But in Paris, the easy


belief in the necessity of restoring a mechanical balance of power, easy
fears of French political domination of the new Europe were evoked

by the very splendour of the scene. It was, after all, at Versailles that
peace was signed; and if that was dramatic reparation for 1871, it made
it easy to think of Louis XIV as well as of Bismarck, to
forget which
nation it was in modern times which had shown itself 'nee pluribus
impar'.
1
It was no longer the Gei mans of La Fontaine who could say

truthfully,

Nuu^ rultivions en paix d'heureux champs, et nos mairs


fci,i in propres aux arts ainsi qu'au labourage.

Thc\ iiacl learned the lesson of cupidity and violence and their French
teacher had wearied of their lesson more than had the pupils.
One last French prepossession was human, natural and un-
fortunate. Because France had made more sacrifices for victory than
*

any of the Allied and Associated Powers' and had suffered more in her
2
soil and in her blood than had any other of the great powers, it was
natural that she should imagine that her wishes had a special claim to
recognition. Had her rulers been more familiar with the New Testa-
ment, they might have reflected on the parable of the labourers in the
vineyard and realized that the very greatness of the French effort
weakened her position in 1919. Bled white, stripped of so great a
part of her capital equipment, she was incapable of resisting the
demands of her less exhausted friends. And this was bitter news, for
the French, like all the other peoples of the victorious coalition, the
English, the Americans, even the Italians, considered that victory was
primarily their achievement. It was a sign of Clemenceau's sagacity
that he, at least, never forgot that a victory won by four nations could
not be used according to the simple wishes of one of them.
The lines of the territorial settlement had been laid down by Wilson
in the Fourteen Points and in the supplementary points. Faced with
defeat, the rulers of Germany, that is the Army leaders, had surrendered
on terms which were extremely onerous and whose character they did
not realize. That Ludendorff had not read the Fourteen Points was
*
See p. 54. a
Serbia probably lost more men proportionately to population,

545
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
bad enqugh, but neither had Clemenceau. Wilson had in his hands
some, though not all, of the trump cards, and the greatest of these was
the political and financial disinterestedness of the United States. She
had none but ideal axes to grind, which was not true of any other power,
no truer of England than of France, and her representative in Paris was
willing to take great political risks for ideal ends.
It was, perhaps, a pity that Wilson was in Paris. His position was
unique; he was the sole head of the State, his own Prime Minister and
practically his own Foreign Minister. But his political position at
home had been weakened by the results of the Congressional elections.
He had not got the Democratic Congress he had asked for, $md it
was not certain that what he promised in Paris he could deliver in
Washington. Yet his power was immense. It was, in effect, on his
terms that the Germans had surrendered. He had great negative
power over his associates; above all, economic power, which he was
prepared to use. And he was not much in sympathy with the realist,
sceptical French Prime Minister, or, indeed, with any of his European
colleagues.
The effective power at the Conference was taken into the hands of
the five great nations, but of these, Japan was only moderately con-
cerned, Italy was weak and was for a time unrepresented, after Wilson
had appealed over the head of Orlando to the Italian people. The
real decisions were made by Clemenceau (who presided), Lloyd George
and Wilson. Clemenceau had the advantage over the other two of
l
speaking English while they did not speak French.
The most important difference between French and 'Anglo-Saxon'
ideas of territorial settlement arose over the Rhineland. Not only was
the acquisition of the left bank of the Rhine an old traditional French
policy, at least as old as the Revolution, but from the Rhineland
bridge-heads and bases had come the invading armies of 1914. On
the eve of the Russian Revolution, France and the Tsar's Government
had agreed to the establishment of a separate Rhineland state, but
the British Government had not been a party to this negotiation and the
agreement was of merely historical importance. It remained so.
Clemenceau had to be content with securing a military occupation of
the Rhineland for fifteen years and the permanent demilitarization of
. both banks. To the security afforded by the fact that a new German
invasion would have to start behind the river barriers and that France
had fifteen years in which to prepare her defences, was added the
decisive consideration of a joint Anglo-American guarantee of the
French frontier.
This was the greatest triumph of French diplomacy; it relieved the

1 To the
indignation of tome French patriots, the Treaty of Versailles waa the first great
international agreement not exclusively written in French or Latin* English was put on
terms of equality with the great diplomatic language.
546
BETWEEN TWO WARS
mind of the average Frenchman of his nightmare of another invasion
by his over-strong neighbour. Foch protested that no agreement was
worth actual military security, such as a separation of the left bank
from the Reich or the setting up of a buffer state would give. But
Glemenceau put Foch in his place; these were matters for statesmen not
for soldiers, however eminent. France had got (on the word of her
Allies) the greatest positive gain she could hope for from a joint
victory and, in addition to security, she was to get reparation.
The idea of political reparation was plainly evident in the treatment
of Alsace-Lorraine. The period between the Peace of Frankfort and
the armistice was treated as a mere interregnum. Germany ceded the
territory, asfrom November nth, 1918, and all the State property
in the former Reichsland was transferred, without any payment, to
France. Included in the property were the railways, which had been
nationalized by the Germans. The shareholders of the French com-
pany in 1871 had been compensated by Germany, but it was argued
that this had been done out of the profits of the indemnity. It was a
belated recognition of justice to take over the profits of the victors of
1871 in favour of the victors of 1919. And, as Germany had not made
any allowance for the share of Alsace-Lorraine in the French* debt
in 1871, none was made now. In the last convulsions of the falling
German Umpire, Alsace-Lorraine had been granted the rank of a
Federal State, but the French Government refused to recognize the
claims of the leaders of this State to authority. The rale of the one and
indivisible Republic was alone legal in the recovered provinces.
TheSaar settlement, too, was a matter of reparation, but of economic
reparation. French negotiators at the Conference put forward a case
for outright annexation. The territory had been left to France in 1814.
It was only as punishment for the 'Hundred Days' that it had been
taken away in 1815. But only a small portion of it had been under
French rule for more than a generation; only one commune was French-
speaking and, whatever was the case in 1815, the Saar valley was
indubitably German in 1919. It is true that a good military case
could be made for annexation, for the Saar basin endangered the
security of Lorraine; but since France had
been made safe by the
demilitarization of the Rhineland and by the Anglo-American joint
the non-French jiegotiators
guarantee, this argument was dismissed by
as worthless.
There remained a last claim. The destruction of the coal-fields
of northern France by the Germans had been deliberate; it should be
expiated. The 17,000,000 tons a year of the Saar field would be both
immediate compensation and a lesson to wreckers. So France was
absolute property in the mines, subject to a right of repurchase
given
open toGermany after fifteen years, on terms to be settled by arbitra-
tion. The area of the coal-fields was carved out of Prussian and
547
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
Bavarian territory and erected into a new governmental unit ruled
by a commission appointed by the League of Nations. Geramn law,
German language, German local government were all preserved.
After fifteen years, the final fate of the territory was to be settled
by a plebiscite which could vote for annexation to France or return to
Germany or the status quo, which, as the Saarlanders were to be a
privileged people, exempt from French conscription and Germany's
reparations liabilities, might be expected, by people who underestimated
the force of nationalism, to appeal to the majority.
The whole Saar settlement, with its careful balancing of the right
of France to specific and exemplary reparation and the political right
of German people to be German, showed a tenderness for those claims
of the conquered people which the victors admitted to be based on the
general principles on which the new Europe was being created, which
had not many precedents in past peace-making. One last example
of this spirit was the leaving in its artificial neutrality of the little state
of Luxemburg, of immense strategic importance, as it was. The
French and the Luxemburgers wanted a customs union, but it was
Belgium that had its way and the Grand Duchy passed from the
German to the Belgian economic system. 1
There was one glaring exception to the application of the principle
of self-determination and the reconstruction of Europe on a basis
of the rights of nations. One consequence of the war was that the
political, economic, and military position of Germany if she were

to be left immune from special restrictions would be actually


strengthened. On her eastern and southern borders, sne no longer
had two great powers but a large number of small nations, of which
the largest and strongest, Poland and Czechoslovakia, were far weaker
than their great neighbour. The disappearance of the Russian and
Austrian Empires had created a political and military vacuum which
Germany would fill if she were left unshackled. France would have on
her frontiers a neighbour far stronger, relatively, than in 1914.
From the British point of view, anything that diverted German
attention the sea to eastern Europe was to be welcomed, but
away from
for France such a result would be paradoxical indeed. That fear
of Germany which had dominated French foreign policy since 1870
might well be increased, not diminished, by the war: and apart from
the important improvement in the military frontier that resulted from
the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine, the French position would be worse:
a state of affairs that might not matter if a new Europe pacific and law-
abiding was being born; but such a Europe was not yet conceived.
If the German parts of Austria were to be added to the Reich, as both
1
The restoration of the status quo of 1870 was not quite complete. The frontier of 1 8 71
cut across the old departmental boundaries in Lorraine and the territory of Bclfort remained
the only of Alsace in French hands. The Lorraine boundaries were left intact and
portion
the 'Territory of Belfort' preserved its status as a miniature department.

548
BETWEEN TWO WARS
Germans and Austrians wanted, the new German state would be as
superior to France in population as the old had been and far more
homogeneous. What Bismarck had not dared to do after Sadowa
would have been done for his defeated heirs by the victors. It was
resolved to defy the principle of nationality; and the minor but not
unimportant cases in which it had been allowed to work to Germany's
advantage were forgotten in the natural indignation aroused by this
flagrant breach of the spirit of the new European order. It is possible
that the situation might have been tolerable for a generation, or until
the passions of 1919 had calmed, had the new Austria been immediately
helped economically and given economic privileges to make up for her
political disfranchisement, had she been excused from all indemnities
like the other succession states of the old Dual Monarchy (except
Hungary). But the new Austria was not given enough interest in her
new status to make up for the absence of an adequate sentimental
basis. 1

Apart from the Austrian exception, the territorial terms of the


Treaty kept remarkably close to the Fourteen Points and to the new
political basis of Europe, the self-determination of nations. With the
exception of Ireland, all the traditionally oppressed nations of Europe,
including some whose national consciousness was even newer than that
of the Germans or Italians, were given an opportunity for national life.
The result was quickly damned as 'the Balkanization of Europe', an
odd term of condemnation for anyone who reflected on the state of the
Balkans before and after the Christian nations were freed from Turkish
rule. Yet the application of the principle of nationality could not but
hit Germany hard. The Prussian state had prospered and grown by
conquest, and the fruits of over a hundred years of power politics were
now lost. Danes, Alsatians, Poles, all escaped from an iron rule
imposed by force and maintained by force. The section of the Treaty
to which the Germans objected most, the Polish corridor, was not

only in the Fourteen Points but no one had doubted, until 1919, that
the inhabitants of the corridor were Poles. But the German objections
to the Treaty as set out at Versailles showed that the German conviction
of superiority in civilization and in political virtue over the neighbour-
ing Slavs had not been shaken by defeat. The German liberals who
had thought of the partition of Poland as a crime were apparently an
extinct race.
If Europe was not to be reconstituted on a pure power-basis, there
was nothing but the principle of nationality, the most powerful of all
living religious dogmas, to build upon, and that principle
meant that
Germany had to disgorge. Nor was it true that the principle was
According to one school of thought, it was the Anti-Catholic bias of Clemenceau which
1

kept Austria out of the Reich. Had this union been allowed, the new federation
would
have been dominated by the Catholic and civilized western and southern Germans. Hitler,
Himmler and Goebbels come from these Catholic regions.
549
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
always used to her disadvantage. It secured For her the right to have
the fate of Upper Silesia and the frontiers of East Prussia settled by a
plebiscite. It secured the unity of the Reich and the eschewing by the
victors of the annexation of indubitably German populations. What
could be said by the Germans was that the system was not allowed to
work against the victors. If France had no subject peoples in Europe,
that was not true of Britain, and even the United States had no intention
of allowing any general system of political morality to be applied in
the Western World to, say, Puerto Rico.
As a European territorial settlement, the Treaties of Versailles,
Trianon and the rest applied with moderation a principle that alone
had seemed to justify fighting the war at all. Nor was the principle
of self-determination left to work in a vacuum. The rights of national
minorities were provided for, at least in the case of the smaller countries.
The new League of Nations was to prevent the recurrence of the petty
meanness that had marked Prussian rule in Posen for instance, or
Magyar rule over more than half the Kingdom of Hungary. Mistakes
were made; but fewer than it soon became fashionable in the victorious
nations to pretend, and profitable in the defeated countries to assert.
Nor should itbe forgotten that the makers of the new world at
Versailles felt themselves bound to work with speed. The recon-
struction policy of the North, after the American Civil War, could be
spread over several years and change its character several times,
usually for the worse, without the power of the North to impose its will
ever being in doubt. But in the spring of 1919, it was not certain
that the Allies would long preserve their superiority in power, for
their troops were clamouring for demobilization and, by what were
really mutinies, were achieving their object. More serious still was the
revolutionary fever spreading over a great part of Europe. It was

present even in Paris where a Left fanatic shot Glemenceau without


killing the tough old man. It was epidemic in Munich, capital of the
Catholic and conservative Bavarians, and it took a virulent form with
the formal establishment of Bolshevism in Hungary.
The plan of quickly imposing military and territorial terms on
Germany and postponing all fundamental questions until a preliminary
Treaty of Peace had been concluded had had to be abandoned. Wilson
was determined to incorporate the League of Nations in the Treaty,
not merely formally but fundamentally; that is, decisions as to particular
points would be made in light of the fact that a new world-order was
being set up. In 1814-15, the conquerors of France had been able to
impose terms on France and then to take time to reconstruct Europe
because they did not
hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near

and also because the greater part of the peace settlement of 1815

550
BETWEEN TWO WARS
hardly concerned France-at all. But the central geographical position
of Germany made the fate of Hungary, Lithuania and the other old
and nascent nations which lay all around the central colossus, of the
greatest importance to Germany and to her late enemies. Then the
financial problem of reparation made it necessary to link
up all the
Germans rightly argued, their capacity
territorial settlements for, as the
to pay was limited by the resources of the territory left to Germany, a
Germany with Upper Silesian coal could pay more man a Germany
deprived of those resources. A quick "business' settlement was in fact
impossible; what was 'business' depended on the kind of Europe that
was emerging. The Treaty had to be made in a hurry in face of a
Europe that seemed to be collapsing, and it was necessary to trust to
the unborn League to remedy what mistakes thc A e were and there
were sure to be some.

II

The preamble of the Covenant of the League of Nations laid it down


that the High Contracting Parties accepted the Covenant 'in order
to promote international co-operation and to achieve international

peace and security'. The emphasis of the British policy at Versailles


and later was on the first aspect of the League. From the habit of
intei national co-operation would grow the habit of peace. Too
rigorous a definition of obligations, too ambitious an attempt to
stabilize the territorial structure of Europe was to be avoided; it ran
counter to British traditions and methods. French logic was the
enemy of true progress.
This attitude seemed to the French both less wise and less candid
than it seemed to the British. They saw no signs that Britain was
abandoning anything she really valued or needed. Whether accident-
ally or not, the British Empire had emerged from the war greatly
increased in territory and Britain herself had secured the destruction
of that German fleet whose existence, at the side of the strongest army
in Europe, had more than anything else forced her on the opposite
side to Germany in the pre-war balance of power. With the High
Seas Fleet at the bottom of Scapa Flow, Britain was not merely secure
the conduct of the Germans in
against German naval power, but
sinking their own fleet had solved the problem of dividing up that part
of the spoils of war.
The island kingdom was secure, or thought she was. France would
have liked to be equally secure. But her problem was harder. It was
or to seize command of the
impossible to create a fleet surreptitiously
sea by a surprise. But the collapse of the other great empires had left
Germany in a position where, if her military power was to be anything
551 NN
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
like proportionate to the strength she drew from her geographical
position, her population, and her industrial resources, she would be in
a position to dominate the Continent. The peace of Europe must be
secured by making it impossible for Germany to wage a successful war.
The second objective setout in the Covenant, 'international peace and
security',would not simply grow out of the first, that is out of inter-
national co-operation. International co-operation involved a common
interest; Germany had not a common interest with Poland in the
survival of the Polish state, She had an interest in its destruction or
mutilation. She had not a common with the new Danubian
interest
states in their effective independence. Britain might be indifferent to
the survival of either Poland or Czechoslovakia, but France was not an
island. Debarred by her Allies from taking the territorial securities
customary in such cases, forced to take a treaty of guarantee instead,
France had to have a substitute. Marshal Foch would rather have had
some Rhine fortresses than a limited German Army, but he was over-
ruled.
The German Army was to consist of 100,000 long-service troops;
there was to be no General Staff, or system of reserves, or tanks, or
military air force this system was a continuation of the terms of the
Armistice. Like those terms was designed to make it impossible for
it

Germany to resort to arms. would have been more candid and less
It

dangerous to have admitted as much, to have pointed out that a


limitation on their freedom of arming was the price the Germans were
paying for the ultimate withdrawal of Allied garrisons from Mainz and
Ehrenbreitstein. But as a tribute to the moral principles of the Allies,
this simple precaution (one from the German point of view infinitely

preferable to the probable alternative of territorial mutilation), was


introduced by a very ambiguous preamble, 'In order to render pos-
sible the initiation of a general limitation of the armaments of all
nations.' There was a sense in which this motive was genuine. There
was no hope at all of a limitation of armaments as long as there was a
possibility of a German war of revenge. To remove that danger was
to make possible, not equality of armaments between the victors and

vanquished (no one proposed that the British or American navies were
to be limited as the German had been), but a serious reduction of
armaments, at least in Europe. And as it is too often forgotten, one
important result was the general reduction of the term of service with
the colours of the conscript troops of all European powers, a gain that
would have been warmly welcomed before 1914. Nevertheless, the
preamble was a mistake, for it allowed German leaders to persuade
their own and other peoples, that there was a contractual relation
between German disarmament and the disarmament of France and
the other military powers of Europe. It was an argument that was to
prove especially potent in countries like England and America, which
552
BETWEEN TWO WARS
were absolved by their geographical position from taking seriously the
problems of land power.
The same mixture of practical and sentimental motives was apparent
in the one part of the Treaty of Versailles that deserves all, or almost
all, the criticism that has been heaped upon it. It is highly
probable
that, had either side won quickly, indemnities in the strict sense would
have been exacted by the victors. The precede! u of 1870 was there;
victory was then rewarded by an actual cash profit to the victorious
state, if not to the victorious nation's economy. But as the war
dragged on it became evident to all but the most credulous, that no
one power could pay its costs. The Fourteen Points did not talk of
indemnities' but of 'reparations', and there was justice in the distinc-
tion. The man in the street, even the German man in the street,
could see the case for the restoration of France and Belgium, perhaps
by a joint effort of all the powers. After a complete victory of one side,
it was natural that the on the reconstruction by
victors should insist
the vanquished of the battle-ground. was the fortune of war that
If it

France and Belgium had been invaded and not Germany, it was the
fortune of war that Germany, having lost, should pay for the damage
her troops had done. It was felt impossible to state these simple
truths and so the claim for reparation was based on the aggression of
German} it was associated in the public mind with the 'war guilt*
;

clause to which, from the beginning, the Germans reasonably attached


no moral significance and which, as the years went by, became a mill-
stone round the necks of the Allies.
It was not on a dubious, but on a certain point of history that the
claim to reparation was based. It was Germany which had done the
damage and it was Germany which had lost the war. But the reluctance
to admit that the decisive fact was not the justice of the Allied claims,
but the ability to impose them, prevented the Allies from putting
those claims on a permanently defensible basis. It had other effects,

for the victors soon forgot how decisive was the fact that they had
won and began to think that, in international affairs, justice was all.
The Germans, who had been defeated and who thought their cause as
just as that of the victors, knew better. The prudery of the victors was
really not the main cause of the linking up of the reparations clauses
with the question of the guilt of Germany in causing the war. If
Germany was not to be subject to a mere indemnity, there had to be
some moral basis for the Allies' financial claims, or, which was politic-

ally unthinkable, the peoples of the victorious nations would have to be


told the truth, that, guilty or not guilty, Germany could not pay for
the war.
It was of course obvious to any competent and honest economist,
that the astronomical figures of what Germany could pay and must
on the victors, were mere
pay if the burden of victory was not to fall
553
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
magic. Yet a Governor of the Bank of England was ready to lend
himself to this game of hocus pocus. Lord Cunliffe talked of
20,000,000,000; Loucheur of twice that amount, although at these
levels itmattered very little what figures were used. Germany could
have paid for the actual war damage^ to Northern France, Belgium,
Italy and Poland. She could have borne the seizure of her merchant
fleet and overseas investments. Even the most pessimistic estimate
of 1919, that of Mr. Keynes, was adequate for such war costs. But
although Mr. Keynes was backed up by a few economists, even in
France, by M. Gide for instance, the half-mad world of 1919 would not
listen. From the heights of Olympus the wisest course of action would
have been to have fixed at a possible figure the German liability and
to have given Germany an inducement, political or economic, to pay
it off as fast as possible.
Even then, the problems of transfer would have been very serious.
The economic clauses of the Treaty by imposing a five-year limitation
on German tariff autonomy without any reciprocal obligation on the
victors not to raise duties against Germany, was absurd in the case of
nations which were insisting on receiving large quantities of German
goods (for that was involved in making Germany pay for the war).
One of the French experts employed to see that she did pay for it, 1 was
moved to wonder if the authors of this provision had ever read the

reparations clauses of the Treaty. It is true that Britain, by admitting


German goods duty free, and France by receiving immigrants on a
great scale, did not go to the paradoxical length of the greatest creditor
power, the United States, which both returned to high tariffs and put
what was practically a complete ban on immigration. But not much
more can be said of their wisdom than that.
Nor was only their wisdom at fault. The device which, by counting
pensions (an evasion of the Fourteen Points which is to the discredit of
both France and Britain), allowed war costs other than damage to
civilian property to be charged to Germany, weakened the morally
educational effects of the Treaty on German opinion. Germany had
not known invasion, and it was not unwise or unjust to show her that
it isnot everything to win the first round. A belief in the invincibility
of the Prussian Army and in the inviolability of German soil was one
of the superstitions of modern Europe that needed extirpation. But
the extension of war claims to cover belligerents who had suffered no
more from invasion than had Germany herself, weakened the moral
basis of the Treaty. What was an act ofjustice came to seem a form of
robbery: and by making it possible for Portugal, Australia and the rest
to claim a share in the war indemnity, the reparation due to the
sufferers with good title was diminished. No country had more
reason than France to restrict the meaning of 'reparation', for Germany,
1
M. Jacquei Seydoux.
554
BETWEEN TWO WARS
at best, could onlypay the real war damages. But in 1919 such
wisdom would have been more than human.
The hands of the victors were tied. All of the rulers of the
victorious powers were wiser than their peoples who were exhausted,
mentally as well as physically, by the ordeal they had come through.
For four years victory had been talked of as old-fashioned novelists
had written of marriage; it was a blessed state in which, once attained,
all trouble ceased. The peoples of Europe in 1919 wanted and
expected to live happily ever after, and no one dared wake them from
their dreams.
In Wilson's mind, if not in that of his chief colleagues, the League
of Nations was to take over the task of waking the sleeper gently.
Every member was to regret the territorial integrity of the other and
each member was to guarantee and to be guaranteed by every other
member. If these guarantees were to prove effective, then the night-
mare of insecurity that had ended in the war of 1914 would give way
to a happier and more confident day. In that brave new world, risks
might be taken and the more dangerous forms of national pride and
ambition might die.
What chances the League had of developing as its founder dreamed
it
might, were lost by the refusal of the United States to enter it. That
left Tr.mce and Britain face to face with no mediator of equal power

in the Le.igue beside them. More immediately important was the


failure of ratification of the Treaty of Guarantee-. With the with-
drawal of the United States, Britain also withdrew and France was not
only suddenly deprived of a political advantage of the greatest impor-
tance, but she felt that she had been cheated. In using the American
withdrawal to escape an inconvenient obligation, Britain was very
short-sighted. For she thereby lost her chance of stilling the French
fear that the danger of an ordeal like 1914 was not for ever past.
Deprived of the support that she had been promised, France was
forced to turn to the lesser powers to Poland, to Czechoslovakia, to
Jugoslavia and to build up that system of loans and alliances which
made the British public suspect a country, which was revolted by the
very thought of war, of harbouring Napoleonic dreams.
Of course, the French attitude to the new states was not solely
based on resentment and fear caused by the British withdrawal of the
guarantee. French political doctrine was sympathetic to the principle
of self-determination on which the new nations were based. The
'principle of nationalities' was an extension
of the principles of 1789.
In any case, in the collapse of the old empires, there was nothing else
to build on in eastern and Europe except Communism. It
central
was idle to talk of breakingup the Austrian Empire; it had broken
itself up and it could have been restored only by force of arms. The
disorder in eastern Europe, in the years that immediately followed
555
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
the war, was winked at by France, because there was nothing else to be
done.
In any case France had less interest in the restoration of the
pre-war economic structure of Europe than had Britain. Once the
German fleet was out of the way, Britain could afford to think hope-

fully of the reconstruction of the old economic system out of which had
come such wealth. France had reason to fear the reconstruction of
the old political system out of which had come such disaster. Britain
had regarded the unification of Germany under Prussia (once it was
achieved) with approval; it spread Protestant civilization over a wider
area and was in tune with the spirit of the age. It was; but that
spirit was already different from what the optimistic Victorians thought.
As John Stuart Mill saw, the victory of Prussia was no matter for
rejoicing among Liberals. But the illusions of 1866 were still lively
in 1919. That even a rich, parliamentary Germany would still present
problems of power to her neighbours, was ignored by the British
public, as the desirability of making Germany a partner in some of the
benefits of the new European order was ignored by the French public.
Both ignored the fact that there could be no one-sided solution
of the European problem: and this meant both that Germany had
to be included in a new society and that her inclusion must not
mean the exclusion of other nations for whom her defeat had meant
life.

By the summer the Treaty was made. It had been presented to


the Germans, who had been reduced
to discussing it, not by word of

mouth, but in writing; and although some alterations were made in


response to German arguments, it was certainly, like many or most
treaties in the past, imposed on the conquered. But since the Treaty
claimed (and with some justice) to be based on a more idealistic basis
than victory, it suffered from this character of a decree handed down
from above.
Already the fruits of victory were turning sour. The fear of
Bolshevism was being added to the fear of the Germans and, in a
country with hundreds of thousands of holders of Russian securities,
the greatest crime of the Bolsheviks for many was defaulting on the
Tsarist loans. The mutiny of the Black Sea squadron, the revival of
revolutionary enthusiasm among the industrial workers, the troubles
of demobilization, the belief, common to friends and enemies of the
bourgeois order, that it was in grave danger, all spread alarm. M,
Millerand, in a speech at the Ba-Ta-Glan dance-hall in Paris, denounced
9
the Bolshevik danger and called for a 'Bloc National, the union of all
the parties which were free from the taint of internationalism. The
*

greatest of economic 'lobbies', the 'Union of Economic Interests',


launched the famous poster of the savage Bolshevik with the bloody
knife between his teeth. All this might not have succeeded but for

556
BETWEEN TWO WARS
the added help of a new electoral law, a parody of that proportional
representation which had been voted on the eve of the war.
According to this system, the single-mem her constituency was
c

abolished; each department returned a group of deputies in proportion


to the votes cast, but if any list of candidates tot a majority of the votes,
it got all the seats. Proportional representation worked only when
there was no clear majority. The result was to put a premium on
electoral discipline; and, for once, that uas not on the side of the Left.
The great Communist crisis which was soon to split the party made it
impossible for the Socialists to combine on joint lists with the Radicals,
and, in many cases, the Radicals did not want such compromising
company. The elections were a landslide for the 'Bloc National for
5

the parties which were terrified of Bolshevism and iur the parties which
thought the Treaty of Versailles too mild. It is true that real pro-
portional representation would have given the 'Bloc National' less than
half the seats in the Chamber, but to the superficial observer and to
the practical politician concerned only with the legal authority the
resultwas decisive. For the first time since 1871, the French Chamber
was openly to the Right. Who knew, the hopeful victors thought,
perhaps war has cured the nation of its follies? Alas, there was
evidence that among the workers at least the old ferments were at
work!

557
CHAPTER II

THE FRUITS OF VICTORY

Armistice had hardly been declared when the organ of the trade
JL unions of Bourges announced, 'The War is dead. Long live the
War.' The sacred union was over; the class war was resumed. It was
inevitable that the French working class in 1919 should have felt opti-

mistic about its


prospects. Its indispensable role in the war had
created the illusion that it would be equally indispensable in peace,
equally able to make terms. The difference between a buyer's and a
seller's market was no better appreciated by labour than by many
businessmen. The great growth of the trade union movement, too, had
bred extravagant hopes. The fears of the old militants before the war,
their scepticism of the value of mass enlistments in the unions were for-

gotten. In Tours, for instance, the number of trade-unionists rose


from 2,000 in 1914 to 10,000 in 1920. The total number of trade-
unionists had by 1920 risen to over 2,000,000. Demobilization brought
back to the union ranks many militants; and the rise in the cost of living,
as well as the general effervescence, was reflected in a series of strikes,

many of which were successful. There were other successes: the adop-
tion by the Glemenceau Government of an eight-hours law and the

spread of the 'English week' (the abolition of Sunday work and the
general adoption of the Saturday half-holiday) Many of the strikes
.

were run in defiance of the prudent leaders of the G.G.T., and the
opposition to the rule of prudent leaders like Jouhaux which had
grown during the war, could now come into the open.
It was the Russian Revolution, with its deceptive suggestion that the

bourgeois state was no very formidable obstacle to a class-conscious and


well-organized proletariat, that went to the worker's head. The illu-
sions of theFrench General Staff in 1914 were now the illusions of
many of the leaders of the French workers. Allied intervention in
Russia was especially offensive to the revolutionary tradition of France.
Was the country of the Marseillaise to aid the Russian equivalent of the
Army of Conde? Were French soldiers and sailors to be kept under
arms in the service of the counter-revolution? The mutiny in the
French Black Sea fleet led by Andrd Marty was direct action against
558
BETWEEN TWO WARS
such a plot. A riot on Mayist, 1919, in Paris resulted in the death of
several manifestants at the hands of the police and provided further
material for revolutionary propaganda. The new rulers of Russia were
busy organizing the Third International and the Communist Inter-
national Federation of Trade Unions. There was now a proletarian
Vatican with an infallible Pope, and a Congregation of the Propa-
ganda which tried hard to make of France the Idest daughter of the
new Church.
The dispute over the methods and the promise of the Bolshevik
Revolution was, if anything, more acute in the ranks of the Socialist
party than in the ranks of the unions. The C.G.T. had continued in
close collaboration with the Govern men t even after the Socialists ceased
to be represented in it. The union leaders could .*ot merely ignore and
condemn Clemem am as loni; as he was, in fact, the representative of
the chief employer of the French workers, the State. The policy of
collaboration on terms with the Government and with the bour-
geoisie as practised by Jouhaux h.id its attractions for the great mass of
new recruits to the unions who wanted adjustments of wages and hours
and for whom the legalization of the eight-hour day was a tangible
victory of the policy of bargaining. But the Socialist party was not in
that position. It had lost by the secession of the right-wing patriotic

deputies who had founded La France Libre


x
an important moder-
ating element. Its leaders, less involved in day-to-day business with
the workers, the employers and the State, were more likely to take the
optimistic view of syndicalist leaders like Mon^tte that the only obstacle
to a successful assault on the frightened and demoralized bourgeoisie
was the leaders' 'lack of faith in the destinies of the working class', than
the pessimistic view of Merrheim that the obstacle was the conjunction
of a revolutionary moment with a non-revolutionary proletariat.
The old illusions about the general strike had been revived. It was
boldly asserted that the Russian revolution of February had been the
achievement of a general strike which, it was added rather as an after-
thought, had been followed by the winning over of the garrison of
Petrograd. Even if the French workers were not as militant as they
ought to be, the revolution was spreading elsewhere: and when it was in
flame in Germany and Italy, as it soon would be, France in her turn
would catch fire. The whole continent would soon be swept by the
fire started in Russia, and the French Socialists and trade-unionists
must be ready to add fuel to the flame and burn the old bourgeois
fabric to the ground. These illusions were shared, it must be remem-
bered, by Lenin as well as Monatte and, until the defeat of Tukachevsky
in front of Warsaw in August 1920, they were not obviously silly, even
in Germany
though it was obvious that, if left unaided, the revolutions
and were to fail and that Marshal Foch who had said that
Italy going
* Sec p. 534.

559
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
Bolshevism was a disease of defeated nations was more right than
Lenin.
That the French Socialist party consented, even briefly, to rejoin
the discredited Second International which had collapsed in 1914 was
more surprising than that the decision was bitterly opposed. At the
Strasbourg conference of February 1920, the decision of 1919 was easily
reversed, thanks to the lead of the old Guesdist T&Ieration du Nord';
and a delegation was sent to Moscow to learn on what terms the French
party could hope for corporate reunion with the true Church. The
delegates were Marcel Gachin and L.-O. Frossard who were made to
undergo a rigorous cross-examination by four leading Bolsheviks then
of the purest orthodoxy Radek, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Kamenev. 1 The
delegates stood the ordeal well, giving satisfaction to the Russians and
to such visiting revolutionaries as John Reed, and returned to France
ready to recommend complete submission to the Third International.
The degree of submission demanded was a shock to many who were
ready to accept a great deal from the leaders of the only party that had,
in fact, made a Socialist Revolution. For many of the French Socialist
leaders, and even for rank-and-file militants, the desirable solution was
a treaty between equals. But the Moscow Vatican, like its Roman
prototype, did not wish to make terms with heretics. Indeed, it was
more rigorous than Rome, for it did not propose to admit Uniat
churches to communion. If France had been ripe for a revolution,
many of the Russian conditions imposed then and later would have
been superfluous. It was absurd for leaders of a revolutionary party,
determined to overthrow the whole of bourgeois society, to remain
members of such bodies as the Freemasons and the League of the Rights
of Man. On the other hand, if the revolution was not imminent, it
was absurd to expect the French Socialists to abandon their bourgeois
allies, to put the Deplche de Toulouse on the index along with the Action

Frarqaise or the Echo de Paris, to see no difference between M. Clemen-


ceau and M. Caillaux and to abandon the old tradition of Jaures which
insisted that the French worker had more to lose than his chains and
that there were important differences between one bourgeois state and
another. As a Communist leader was to put it, after the sheep had been
separated from the goats, the moderate French Socialists were ready for
a revolution when the time was ripe for it. But, Am&ie'e Dunois went
on, 'who will decide when the right moment has come? Lenin's right
moment is not Blum's.'
It was not indeed. The clash between the actively and the merely
theoretically revolutionary politician could hardly have been made
more dramatic than by the contrast between such new militant
1
Gachin had been one of the agents employed to convert that paladin of revolutionary
Socialism, Benito Mussolini, to the Allied cause. His experience of dealing with 'Social*
1
Traitors is thus almost unrivalled.

560
BETWEEN TWO WARS
workers' leaders as Jacques Doriot and the bourgeois intellectual who
had stepped into the place of Jean Jaur&s. A brilliant young man of
letters, a dramatic critic, an important official of the Council of State,
very soon to be a successful member of the Paris bar, Leon Blum was
very far from being the kind of man who overthrows states. He was no
daring Pilot in extremity

but a brilliant dialectician who brought to the writing of


leading
articles for the Socialist press the talents whichhad attracted the
attention of Maurice Barres over twenty years before and who brought
to the platform of Socialist meetings or the tribune of the Chamber that

debating skill which made him so successful in the courts. Blum,


indeed, was even less of a revolutionary than Jaurcs, for he lacked the
great tribune's warmth of language, his living relation with his audi-
ence. It was possible to conceive Jaurs, like a new Camille Des-

moulins, stirring up a rnob to storm the Bastille and, swept along by his
own eloquence, leading them to action. Blum was more of the type of
Ledru-Rollin; if he was to be found with his followers in some forlorn
hope it would be because, being their leader, he had to follow them.
If France in 1919 and 1920 was ripe for a revolution, if the 'great
day' of two generations of Socialist oratory had dawned, the case for
joining the Third International (then it must be remembered an active
and optimistic revolutionary body) was very strong. But the Strasbourg
Congress luid been muddled. It had tried to make the best of both
worlds, to water down the fierce and exclusive discipline of the Bol-
sheviks; but the party could not stay long in the via media.
Moscow did its best to clear the issue; it handed down a list of
twenty-one conditions denouncing 'Social-Patriots' and 'Social-Patriot-
ism' and insisting on the subordination of the local Communist parties
to the rulers of the Third International in Moscow. In addition to
the articles of the creed to be believed and the list of doctrines to be
held anathema, there was a vigorous homily attacking the Socialist
leaders and the Socialist press, both VHumaniti and Le Populaire. The
peasants had been neglected, it was asserted, and such propaganda as
was undertaken among them was merely reformist and was entrusted
Compare- Morel'.
to 'the Social-Traitor,
At Tours, in December 1920, came the Congress which, like a new
Synod of Whitby, separated the adherents of the oecumenical revolu-
tionary church from the local sectaries. The debate again contrasted
those of great with those of little faith. Sembat in 1920, like Sembat
in 1913, threw cold water with great skill. He
attacked the illusions
about the possibility of winning over the peasants to a programme of
immediate and violent revolution. 'I fear that the peasants are more
concerned to keep the great profits they make now selling pigs and
chickens and that you will find them to-morrow combating you at the
561
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
polling-booths with their votes and in the streets with their rifles.' To
encourage the workers to believe in an easy and immediate revolu-
tion was to deliver them over to a greater defeat and a more savage
repression than the Commune had produced.
It was at first sight odd that in the rural districts the party was far
more enthusiastic for the Third International than was the case in the
urban areas, except in those urban areas where Guesdism had been
strong. Even the objection of the peasant proprietor to the collectiv-
ization of the land was rather lightly explained away, which was just
as well, for many of the regions most vociferously Bolshevik were full of
Left militants who were, economically, kulaks.
Theprospects of a revolutionary party so ambiguously constituted
were not as bright as the zealots thought, but there was no restraining
the majority. It accepted the bitter Zinoviev letter in which the grand-
son of Karl Marx * was denounced as a traitor; the minority, including
in its ranks most of the old leaders, left the party; the union of French
Socialists was dead. Being the majority, the Communists got control
of the assets of the old united party, most important of them being the
daily paper, UHumanitL No greater or less candid tribute to the memory
of a great man was ever paid than that paid by the new owners of
L Humaniti,for the paper still bore the legend, 'Founded by Jean Jaures',
9

but the new party was completely un-Jaur&sian. Its violence in contro-
versy^ its complete contempt for the old bourgeois virtue of truth;
itsslavish following of whatever orders or counter-orders came from
Moscow; these set it poles apart from the generous, humanitarian,
vague Socialism ofJaures. If any past Socialist leader was the inspirer
of the new course, it was Jules Guesde.
Itwas natural that, in the euphoria of the post-war boom, the trade
unions should have been tempted to try their old weapon of the general
strike. So many particular strikes had succeeded that it was hard to
believe that a general strike could fail. The victimization of a union
member on the P.L.M. railway 2 was followed by a localized strike
that was settled on
fairly favourable terms, but during the course of the
strike some militants who had been trying to induce soldiers not to

obey orders were arrested.


What began as a movement to rescue these martyrs, spread into a
great strike whose ostensible object was the enforcement of the nationali-
zation of the railways, the reinstatement of discharged militants and the
recognition of full union rights. The date fixed was May ist 1920; and,
in addition to the railwaymen, miners, dockers and other transport
workers were called out. But the Prime Minister was Millerand, an
old Socialist, and an old colleague of Briand's. He was able to out-
manoeuvre the C.G.T. leaders in appeals to public opinion; the workers
on the Nord and Est lines did not come out; the bourgeoisie helped to
1
JearrLonguet.
* Ghemin de Fer de Paris & Lyon et la Mediterranle.

562
BETWEEN TWO WARS
break the strike. The reply of the G.G.T. was to call out more trades;
the reply of the Government was to seize the
headquarters of the C.G.T.
and dissolve it. The strike fizzled out; Governments were not to be
overthrown by merely negative action. The defeat of the G.G.T. was
complete; its new members rapidly left it; militants were victimized
everywhere; co-operative societies which had extended credit gener-
ously, lost both their advances and many of theii members. With its
numbers down from 2,000,000 to Guo,ooo, the G.G.I, had to face the
ordeal of schism.
The leaders of the Revolution in Moscow naturally determined to
add the control of the French trade unions to the control of the French
Socialist party. This ta^k was more difficult, since the G.G.T. was
officially faithful to the policy of the Charter of Amiens which forbade
any alliance with a political pat ty and was officially animated by the
deepest suspicion of political leaders who tried to use the unions for
any but union ends. But, in fact if not in theory, the G.G.T. had been
closely associated with the S.F.I.O. and it might equally well be united
with the nascent Communist party, the legal heir of the old S.F.I.O. of
Jaures. It was harder to have to swallow the description of the old
International Federation of Unions as being composed of blackleg, scab
unions; and the C.G.T. refused to accept, at the Congress of Orleans,
the trims laid down by Moscow. Merrheim argued against the dan-
gers of pr< <i< war and the subordination of trade
lung a doctrine of civil
union a< tivities to political leadership. Jouhaux was equally firm: and
the: old union leaders, unlike the old Socialist leaders, had their way.

They had not had to lament the loss of a Jan res, the loss which no
Renaudel or Blum could compensate for in the ranks of the S.F.I.O.
Moscow was not very nice in its methods of controversy, and a general
excommunication against the non-Communist unions, above all the
French unions, was issued by the then mouthpiece of Muscovite ortho-
doxy, Zinoviev. 'The hucksters of labour will not long be able to
deceive the masses. Howl, bay against the Communist International,
you dwarfs.' The attempt to take over the C.G.T. in bulk having
failed, the 'cells' were called on to do their part. In many unions the
Communists got control of the executive with resultant splits, notably
among the railwaymen.
AtLille, in July 1921, came the formal schism; the delegates were
almost equally divided and after less than twenty years, the French
trade-union movement lost that unity it had so painfully achieved. In
most trades there were now rival unions, more concerned to fight each
other than to fight the employers. Soon there was to be seen what
would have been, before 1914, the blasphemous paradox of Christian
and Communist unions in temporary alliances against both employers
and the old unions of the C.G.T., alliances which were not admitted by
either party, but which had the same results as if they had been open
563
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
and formal. In any case, the Christian unions, free at last from domi-
nation by the employers, could not help gaining some ground in face of
a divided secular trade-union movement which, were one to believe
half of what was said by the old union leaders, or a tenth of what was
said by the new union leaders, against their rivals, was unworthy of
any trust. Having successfully split the working-class organization,
the Communist unions proudly took the title of Unitary and denied
that they were subject to any political party, a claim which was truer
than its authors thought, for within the Communist unions, the old
independent leaven was at work and the first schism was not to be
the last.

II

Even had the internal and external political and economic situation
been less critical, more like the picture that the victors of the elections
of 1919 had made
for themselves, the 'Bloc National' would have been
doomed discomfiture.
to Like all parliamentary majorities in all
countries, the victors of 1919 greatly exaggerated the confidence that
the country had put in them. A
real system of proportional repre-
sentation would, in fact, have deprived them of a majority; the ordeal
of the war had not shaken the average French elector in his political
loyalties nearly as much as might have been expected. The bogus
system of proportional representation produced a Chamber not really
representative and naturally weak in cohesion. It was said, with

plausibility, that more than half the members of the new Chamber were
practising Catholics: this involved the consequence that a great part
of the new Chamber was composed of political amateurs with no real
backing in the permanent political organization of the country.
The result was not, indeed, a Chamber that had any reason to fear
comparison from the point of view of character or ability with the
British Parliament elected a year before, or with the Harding
Administration that the Republican triumph of 1920 was to give the
United States; but it was a Chamber full of illusions and prejudices
and short of leaders. The long exile of the 'notables', from political
authority in France was now to be paid for, for the 'Bloc National' was
forced to fall back on the political personnel provided by leaders of the
old parties who had left the Radicals or Socialists.
The gave the leaders of the 'Fe*de"ration des
elections of 1919
Gaudies' the chance they had been refused in 1914, but those leaders,
Millerand, Briand, even Poincare*, had not in the new Chamber the
intelligent body of supporters which could have made a new system
viable. In the 'Bloc National' were men of all parties still impressed by
the lessons or what they took to be the lessons of the war, men afraid of
the internationalism of the Socialists and of the sectarianism of the
564
BETWEEN TWO WARS
Radicals, men really scared out of their Left complacency by the
menace of Bolshevism. Allied with these were the old Conservatives,
saved just on the point of extinction, the younger Catholics pursuing
their design of a Catholic 'Centre party' on good terms with the Re-
public and some uncompromising enemies of the regime of whom Le*on
Daudet was the symbol. If the other candidates of the Action Fran-
gaise had humiliatingly failed, among the vie tors were to be found men
who were not removed by much more than a label from the extreme
Royalist position.
To vigour and rigour were all that was needed.
this last school,
With that drawing attractive conclusions from incredible
talent for

premises with which a dissenter from their orthodoxy has reproached


1
them, the extreme Right blamed it all on the kalliement: but for that
criminal error, the Chamber would have been 'perhaps a Chamber of
Conservative Union, as uas the imposing minority of 1885'. But tlu*
author of this daydream 2 did not note the real bearing of what he
said. For the minority of 1885 \vas a minority; and any electoral com-
bination like that alliance of Orleanists, Legitimists, and Bonapartists
was not only out of the question in 1919, but any purely Catholic, Con-
servative and Nationalist combination of 1919 could only have been a
minority too. Indeed, a strong minority of the Right would have been
better for everybody than a rootless majority. The job of liquidating
the legacy of the war would have been undertaken by the real governing

party, the Radicals; their policy would have been less likely to be re-
pudiated as soon as political normality was restored and their illusions
would have been less dangerous than those of the 'Bloc National'.
The financial illusions of the 'Bloc N;u'uiar are part of the subject
of French post-war finance. 8 They were genuine and natural; and,
unlike Lord Cunliffe and other British sayers of smooth things, the
most misguided talkers of nonsense in the Chamber were not saying
what they knew to be untrue.
Less defensible were the political illusions. The unity of Germany,
that is the resolution of the German people to remain united inside one
fairly centralized state and not to go
back to the pre-Bismarckian era,
was now 'given' by history. It may have been foolish of the Germans to
prefer the unified regime to the old loose confederation
of independent
stateswhich had been, for foreigners at least, the glory and the charm
of the Germany of Goethe. But the Germans were as detennined as
the French or the English to know the expensive pleasures of being
members of a great state, and even the heavy bill presented at Versailles
had not shaken this determination. It was hard for persons who could
remember how new the Bismarckian Reich was, who knew from
recent tradition how strong local patriotism, how powerful French
1
M. Geonres Bcrnanos.
*
M. Robert Havard de la Montagne.
Seep. 5 89.
565
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
influence had been in the Rhineland,
to accept the fact that those days
were gone for ever.
Germany did not envy, nor did any section of
Germany, any federal state or region envy, the happy life of Switzer-
land. As M. Albert Thibaudet reminded Frenchmen, a German
Switzerland created under French auspices would be a country whose
hero would be Gessler not William Tell. No genuine, dignified, worthy
resistance to Prussianism, no anti-Bismarckian movement in Germany,
could survive under French patronage. Its leaders could only be
blacklegs, scabs.
This evident truth was hidden from many of the French politicians
and publicists by memories of Napoleon and by day-dreaming about
the possibilities of a return to the system of the Peace of Westphalia, by
childish denials of the fact that German unity had been increased, not
diminished by the war. The intellectual emptiness of this school was
shown in their persistent refusal to realize that the days when the
department of the Mont-Tonnerre was part of the French Empire, like
the days when Louis XIV could patronize M. de Brandebourg, were
for ever past. Maurice Barres, in a course of lectures given at Stras-
5

bourg and called the 'Problem of the Rhine , revealed the poverty of
this theme even in the hands of a man of genius; and, if such illusions
were no sillier than those of Arthur Balfour on the subject of Ireland,
1
they were of greater importance to the world.
For there was a problem of the Rhine, a problem of the relation of
Europe to the great central people whose numbers, resources, talents,
docility, all made her a source of anxiety to her neighbours. It was the

psychological unity of this nation that made her formidable, and that
unity was not to be shattered by petty plots or undermined by the
bribery of sections or persons. The fact of German unity had to be
accepted and, if necessary, provided against. It could not be undone
except by a partition on a greater scale than the partition of Poland: and
that solution was impossible, since neither France nor her Allies were
ready for the perpetual resolution to maintain partition, at all costs,
which had marked the Prussian state. So great a violation of the
principle of nationalities as a partition of Germany would have been,
required far more determination in power policy than a democratic
state could muster.
It was natural that the French generals in command of the Army
of Occupation should have overestimated the possibilities of encouraging^
a Separatist movement in the Rhineland. The occupied territory was
full of memories for a French soldier. There was above all the memory
of the twenty years when this land had been part of France, an era
commemorated in the monument erected by Klber to Marceau beside
the citadel of Coblence. Mangin, not much better disciplined than
his old chief Marchand, began at once to encourage the growth of a
1
An English apologist for this school insisted for years on writing 'the Germanics'.
566
BETWEEN TWO WARS
Separatist movement, an activity which helped to sow distrust in the
minds of Wilson and Lloyd George. Clemenceau, who was not only
resolved to keep on good terms with Britain and America but who
detested political generals, called Mangin to order. Yet there was a
sense in which there was a genuine Separatist movement in the Rhine-
land: but it was a movement away from Prussia, not away from Ger-
many. The Weimar constitution provided for breaking up Prussia if its
inhabitants so desired, but that was very far from breaking up the Reich.
That the desire for an autonomous Rhincland was one for autonomy
'preferably in the Reich' has been admitted by one of the chief French
officials x
concerned with the occupied territories. The leaders of this
movement were compromised by the existence of a small band of com-
plete Separatists, led by a kind of Captain of Ktpenick, Dr. Dorten.
This party, whatever its motives, was important only so far as it was
protected by French authority, and the vacillations of local French
commanders did nothing to encourage any trust in the firmness of
French policy and were yet enough to alienate the British Government,
for whom the unity of Germany was -now not merely a fact to be taken
into consideration but a most desirable fact, since it was an offset to

alleged imperialistic French dreams.


Apart from any question of political interference, the role of an
occupying army is always ungrateful. The Rhineland was an integral
part of Germany; only troops were barred from it, but what were
troops? Was it a breach of the Treaty, for Nazi formations to organize
field days? On what occasions could 'Deutschiand iiber Alles' be sung
in public? was ruled, for a time, that the German national anthem
It
was only to be sung on special ceremonial occasions, a ban which
moved French soldiers, always delighted to score off their superiors, to
learn the song and sing it on all possible occasions. But once the Ruhr
affair was liquidated, the hardships and abuses of occupation were
reduced to a minimum and the German grievance reduced to a genuine
one of amour propre.
If the French unofficial support for Separatism was one cause of
distrust in British breasts, the conduct of the plebiscite in Upper Silesia
was another. In 1921 the vote showed a majority for Germany, but a
very large localized minority for Poland. On the Bohemian analogy,
the unity of the province might have been preserved and Germany left
in possession. But that would have meant handing over nearly half a
million Poles to German rule; and a violent outbreak of the Poles,
favoured the French
by showed what might follow such a
garrison,
decision. The
province was divided with elaborate provisions
for

minority protection on both sides; and in the circumstances any victory


for Poland was considered a victory for France in eastern Europe, as any
For
victory for Germany was considered as a triumph
for England.
1 M. Tirard.

567 oo
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
American and, what was more important, in British eyes as narrow
and selfish. The French, noticing the curious identity between justice
and humanity, and American and British interests,- took such criticism
ill. It was not that such identifications were confined to 'Anglo-
Saxon' countries, but the refusal to notice the identity was. It was all
right, according to Labouchere, for Mr. Gladstone to have the ace of
trumps up his sleeve. What was intolerable was his pretending that
God had put it there. Many Frenchmen felt much like Labouchere
when they were lectured (as they increasingly were) by Englishmen on
their duties as good Europeans. These duties seemed to be closely con-
nected with the restoration of a Europe as nearly as possible moulded
to English patterns and conforming to English interests. This belief
seemed to colour the whole attitude of the majority of the Chamber to
the reparations question, and colour it most unfortunately, for it did not
really follow that what was to Britain's interest was not to France's,
nor that there was no good sense in even the smuggest sermon.

IV

The question of reparations, like other parts of the settlement, suf-


fered from the confusion of more or less genuine ethical considerations
with the practicable possibilities of the case. It was obviously of the
greatest importance to settle three questions quickly. For what was
Germany liable? In what proportions were German payments to be
allocated among the victors? To what extent could Germany bear
the burdens imposed on her? It would have been more prudent to
take all three questions together, or to have postponed the first two
until the possibilities of German payments had been fixed, for it was
obvious to all competent persons that, whatever variation in the esti-
mate of German resources was permissible, the highest possible estimate
of Germany's capacity to pay would be far below the most moderate
estimate of her liability under the Treaty of Versailles. But what was
eminently desirable was not politically possible; to disillusion the vic-
torious peoples as to the 'limitations of victory', to use M. Fabre Luce's
term, was out of the question. Its only result would have been the
replacement of Mr. Lloyd George by some British politician more
representative of the British Parliament elected in 1918 and M. Clemen-
ceau by some French politician more representative of the views of
M. Poincare' and the French Parliament to be elected in 1919.
It was not, therefore, until April 1921 that the Reparations Com-
mittee set up by the Treaty finally settled the question of Germany's
legal liability. That was assessed at 132,000,000,000 gold marks, 1 and
that fantastic sum was only a little over half what had been claimed.
The distribution of "this total had been fixed at Spa, the year before.
1
6,600,000,000 or $33,000,000,000.
57<>
BETWEEN TWO WARS
France, as was right, got the largest share, 58 per cent, of the total,
the British Empire got 22 per cent., Italy got 10 per cent., and
Belgium
got 8 per cent, with a prior claim on the first 2,000,000,000 marks. 1
On paper all was
clear, what Germany owed and what each of the
victors was even down to the modest shares allotted to Portugal
to get,
and Japan. All that remained to be done was to collect it.
While the negotiations between the Allies were going on, the Ger-
mans and the Allies were engaged in a long debate as to the amount
Germany could pay and, as payments in kind began to be made, as to
how much she had paid. The costs of the Army of Occupation were
the first charge on German payments and one initial cause of friction
between the victorious powers was French resentment of the fact that
the cost of the Army of Oc '-upation was very unequally distributed. It
cost a great deal more to keep an American or British soldier in the
Rhineland than It did to keep a French one. When, in May 1921, the
Reparations Commission announced its decision that the payments

made by Gcnruny up which the Germans had asserted


to that date,
were equivalent to 21,000,000,000 marks, 2 were in fact a good deal
less than half that amount; indeed were just enough to pay for the

Army of Occupation; the conviction that was spreading among French-


men, that something was very far wrong and that not only the Germans
but France's quondam comrades in arms were to blame, grew rapidly.
The differences of opinion between Britain and France were now
visible to the world. Very naturally, the Germans made efforts to
exploit them, but whether from a lack of judgment or from the political
impossibility for German, as well as for Allied statesmen, of ignoring an
inflamed public opinion, the German offers were so much below what
even the most bold British negotiator thought possible and reasonable,
that France and Britain were forced together, not apart, by such tac-
tics. It was possible, as at Spa, to make adjustments on minor points
like coal deliveries as part of payment in kind, but that was all, although
this was not unimportant from the French point of view, where freedom
from dependence on what had been, hi war-time, the extremely onerous
British coal monopoly was warmly desired.
The open clash between Germany and the victors came after a
series of projects of which the January 1921 scheme put forward by the
Allies not only showed a willingness to scale down payments, but a

willingness to admit two classes of payments,


from which it was only a
step to making a distinction between the really recoverable and the very
problematically recoverable part of the German obligations. But the
German reply not only made a much smaller offer than even the
British Government (now well on the way to sanity) could accept, but
the retention by Ger-
attempted to attach political conditions, notably
many of the whole of Upper Silesia. The Allies retorted by an occupa-
*
1
100,000,000 or $500,000,000. 1,050,000,000 or $5,250,000,000.
571
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
tion of some German towns, and Germany submitted to a demand for an
immediate payment of 1,000,000,000, gold marks. 1 Force seemed to
have succeeded.
The success was only apparent. Germany had only provided the
milliard of gold marks by borrowing and that loan had to be repaid.
The postponements of a final determination of German effective liabili-
ties made all calculations extremely difficult and, as long as the total
sum be paid was in dispute, it was asking a great deal of human
to
nature to expect German budgetary methods to be rigorous. The
mark, which had naturally depreciated with the resumption of world
trade in which Germany, at the beginning, was bound to be a greater
importer than exporter, now began to suffer violent oscillations and to
settle down after each crisis at a lower level. The increasingly rapid
depreciation of the German currency improved the competitive power of
German trade, and that distressed Britain. It also ruined the financial
position of the German Government; and that was a new complication
added to the reparations question. But whereas both British and
French public opinion deplored the of the mark, the man in the
fall

street in each country gave a different explanation of it. In Britain, it


was soon believed by most right-thinking people that the collapse of
the mark was due entirely to the exorbitant reparations claims of the
French. In France, the same type of person believed that the fall in
the mark was deliberately planned by Germany to evade reparations
obligations. Both views were wrong, but each had quite enough truth
in it to justify a theory to a public opinion which wished to believe it.
The failure to settle the reparations question, the failure to reduce
German liabilities to practicable figures rendered the position of the
German currency shaky. And in Germany there were very powerful
interests with their own profit to be made by the fall of the mark (as well us
with ingenious if fallacious economic theories to support such a policy).
Their pressure on a weak Government was one of the chief causes,
perhaps the chief cause, of the rapid impoverishment of the German
middle-classes that now began. To the British man in the street, the
French did not care what economic ruin was wrought in Germany
(and indirectly in Germany's trade partner, Britain), so long as the
defeated nation could be kept helpless. To the French man in the
street, the British Government did not care what happened to the
French devastated regions, so long as British trade revived. Business
was to triumph over justice. 2 This view was strengthened by the fact
that France got none of the milliard marks paid over by Germany; there
were good technical reasons why she did not, but politically this fact
1
50,000,000 or $250,000,000.
1
To this, it was at that time replied that Britain had her devastated areas, too, the
regions ruined by the collapse of international trade. But this argument has lost its force
since the world has seen the resignation with which successive British Governments have
left those regions devastated.

572
BETWEEN TWO WARS
was unfortunate. The Chamber was increasingly anxious and
angry
as its illusions were increasingly subject to
pressure from reality. They
had so far withstood the strain, but something had to give. Briand
knew that his position was undermined. He had to produce some
success or go. He was not unwilling to go, to leave to others the
responsibility of finding a new policy that would gratify the Chamber.
'If anyone thinks that a Government
ought to be turned out, they
should turn it out at once/ 'Anyone' was the new leader of the
Nationalist majority, Poinr,ne, who had escaped from the
prison of
the filysee where, for seven ycais, h< had been condemned to silence
and docility and who, as head of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the
Senate, was now the acknowledged leader of the party that wished,
whatever England tin night, to force Germany to pay, to 'take her by the
collar' as Briand himself had once put it.
At Cannes, Briand made his last effort. In the matter of reparations
it was recognized that a limited moratorium was
necessary; on the
other hand, IJiitain was ready to renew the military guarantee. The
Chamber and the Senate had both watched the meeting at Cannes
with the utmost suspicion. Politicians from Ribot to Leon Daudet ex-
pressed their apprehension, which was not diminished when it became
rumoured that, under the tuition of Mr. Lloyd George, Briand had
played golf. What must be the domination of his mind by the British
Minister if he was willing to go as far as that! Briand returned to
Paris l and after attacking his enemies, who were firing on him from
the rear, he resigned. It was the turn of Poincare.
The fall of Briand meant the end of Franco-British collaboration.
In rejecting the Cannes compromise, the Chamber expressed its con-
viction that enough had now been sacrificed to secure British support.
The project of guarantee was not a sufficient make- weight, for it evaded
the fundamental question from the French point of view. It guaran-
teed the French frontier, but it did not recognize as a casus belli, a Ger-
man attack on any of the eastern allies or proteges of France. It did
not even recognize the violation of the demilitarized Rhineland zone by
Germany as bringing the treaty obligation into effect. Britain would
only come to the aid of France to fight a war, likely to be long and
costly, on French soil. What France wanted was the guarantee that, if
war came, it would be on German soil confident that if the Germans
had to fight in their own demilitarized zone, they would not fight at all.
The new Prime Minister, Poincare', had no doubts of the Tightness of
his policy. He was a lawyer and he saw the case in simple legal terms.
Germany was a defaulter on her obligations, a situation for which the
law provided. He did not propose to be talked out of doing his utmost
1
was later asserted that M. Millcrand recalled Briand from Cannes. This M.
It
Millerand has always denied, and Briand never openly affirmed it. Briand's position was
obviously undermined and it would have been
absurd to complete a settlement at
Cannes if it was to be
rejected at once by the Chamber. He did right to return.
573
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
for his client by personal contact with British statesmen. When the
next great conference met at Genoa, M. Poincare* stayed away and had
the satisfaction of seeing the conference destroyed by the revelation
of the German-Russian alliance made at Rapallo. The object of
German diplomacy, Poincare held, was revealed. It aimed at calling
in the Bolsheviks to destroy the balance of power so recently created in
eastern and central Europe. France could only rejoice in the revelation
of German policy in its true light.
In another field of post-war diplomacy, French policy had run coun-
ter to British and seemed to be fully justified by the event. The policy
pursued by Mr. Lloyd George in the Near East was ending in disaster.
A clash between British and French policy in the Near East was
natural, indeed inevitable. To Mr. Lloyd George and to the British
political and military representatives, Turkey was British spoil of war.
The French point of view was candidly and naively put nearly six
years later, after both the victorious powers of 1918 had learned that
victories do not keep. 'France, whose victory made possible these
things, who had lost 1,500,000 killed and had gained incomparable
glory, is particularly by England, of her age-old
... despoiled,
pre-eminence in the East.' The war, that is, had been a joint enter-
prise; its gains should be divided in proportion to the sacrifices made
to secure victory. It was a plausible point of view for a moralist but
nonsense for a politician.
Unfortunately, in the years of conflict, Britain had had to make
various promises to various interests. She had had to discuss the par-
tition of Turkey while Turkey was still very much alive, and so had had
to agree to share the spoil with her Allies.Russia had to get the lions'
share; and not only had France her own claims, but she was useful too,
for, by giving her Mosul, Russia and Britain could be kept from having
an awkward common frontier when one had acquired Armenia and the
other Mesopotamia. By the time peace came, the collapse of Russia
had rendered France's role as a buffer state superfluous and other Allies
had been promised shares in Turkish territory. The Arabs had been
promised (or thought they had) the freeing of all Arab territories of
Turkey from foreign rule, and the Jews had been promised a privileged
position in what the Arabs thought of as part of their Arabia Irredenta,
Palestine.
The special sphere of French interest in this region was traditionally
Syria. The tradition was old and genuine, but it was oddly argued
by an anti-clerical Government, for it was religious. To assert a claim
to Syria on the grounds that, since the Crusades, the Eldest Daughter of
the Church had special interests there, was slightly ludicrous in 1919.
Mr. Lloyd George's zeal for the Holy Places was less suspect than this!
The simplest solution would have been for Britain to recognize the
of the leader of the Arab army, Feisal, son of the Sherif of
574
BETWEEN TWO WARS
Mecca, over all Syria. But that cut across war-time promises to the
Jews and to the French and across British public opinion, which was
sentimentally interested in the Holy Land much more than anybody
in France was interested in Syria and across British
policy which
wanted to be quite sure that the flank of the Suez Canal was in safe,
that is in British hands.
It was convenient for British purposes to insist on the unity and
independence of Syria (omitting Palestine) and for France to insist on
its unity and ignore its independence. As it was impossible for Britain
to ignore French claims altogether, it was natural to limit them to the
smallest possible area, the narrow coastal plain and the Lebanon where
dwelt the Maronites, the traditional Christian proteges of France and
their traditional enemies, the Moslem heretics, the Druses. But the
great Arab towns, Aleppo and Damascus, should go to Feisal, to the new
Syrian kingdom. For France (and for Feisal) the best solution would
have been the acceptance of some form of French protection in return
for the unification of all Syria (save Palestine) under his rule. But
neither France nor Feisal saw this soon enough; and Feisal, relying too
mi uii on the support of Britain, was driven out of Damascus without
much difficulty by General Gouraud. There was to be no Syrian
kingdom; there was, instead, to be a French mandated territory rather
like Palestine and Iraq. 1
In making all these arrangements, Britain and France, however
much they resented each other's actions, had acted on the assumption
that when they could agree, Arabs and Turks would have 10 accept the
results of that agreement. The two great powers were not far wrong
in the case of the Arabs; they were profoundly wrong in the case of the
Turks, and the French were the first to see it. The disappearance of
Russia as an ally had been a great disaster, but it had some agreeable
aspects for British policy. She had no longer to reconcile herself to
a Russian occupation of Constantinople. A Turkey under British
control, kept in her place by an aggrandized Greece, was now the
policy of the British Prime Minister, if not of the British Government.
Greece, rapidly growing in power and wealth, would be an invaluable
and grateful ally to Britain. Who knew? 'One day the mouse may
gnaw the cords that bind the lion/
The Turks had no mind to let ^Esop prove true once more, and in
the interior of Asia Minor, far away from the British fleet that found
it so easy to comfnand Constantinople, a new Turkey was being created

by a soldier of genius, Mustafa Kemal. The resurgence of Turkish


strength was rapidly felt by the French who were occupying Cilicia,
and
France was forced to consider not merely what paper rights she had in
the former Turkish Empire, but how much in men and money she was
willing to pay to make them real. Exhausted by the war, with her
*
Iraq wai not strictly speaking a mandated territory, but that was
a fine legal point.

575
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
hands full in Europe and with a great discrepancy appearing between
her real and her formal ambitions in the Levant, it was .natural and
prudent of France to liquidate her position in Gilicia, although that-
meant dealing with the new Turkish leader whom Mr. Balfour, while
Kemal was still climbing, called a 'bandit'. Bandit or not, he could
give France peace on her Syrian frontier at a price. France was willing
to pay that price: which was tacit recognition of the 'rebel' Turkish
Government and an abandonment of even formal good relations in the
Near East with Great Britain.
Great Britain, in all but nAme, was allied with Greece in a war to
deliver the Greeks of Ionia from Turkish rule. France had no interest
in such a policy; but she had an interest in limiting her commitments in
the Near East. So M. Franklin-Bouillon, with no official status, went
off to the 'rebel' Turkish capital of Angora and laid the foundations of
a pro-Turkish policy that, to the simple minds of the Levantine peoples,
made France as much the backer of the Turks as Britain was of the
Greeks. When, in December 1920, the Greeks imitated the French
and overthrew their organizer of victory, Venizelos, such French con-
sciences as needed quieting were soothed, for the return of King Con-
stantine was particularly offensive to the French, who had managed to
remain remarkably indignant at the loss of French lives in Athens in
that fight between a French landing party and Greek troops which M.
Maurras had called 'the Athenian vespers'. Gonstantine was less
tolerable than Kemal.
When the Greek offensive of the summer of 1921 failed, a second
Franklin-Bouillon visit resulted in the signing of an agreement between
France and the resurgent Turkey that amounted to an open breach
between France and Britain in Asia Minor. On a matter of form, the
British grievance was genuine. It was idle sophistry for Fnmcc to

pretend that the agreement was not a treaty, or that it was compatible
with the joint settlement of the Eastern Question. It was sub-
stantially the right policy nevertheless, and Britain would have been
wise had she effected a retreat in good order that would have enabled
her to save something for her luckless Greek proteges. But Mr. Lloyd
George encouraged the Greeks in their obstinacy and irritated the
Turks into an offensive in which the Greek Army was destroyed and
the Greeks uprooted from the country of Homer.
The very completeness of the Greek disaster (followed as it was by
the overthrow of Mr. Lloyd George) made the British diplomatic
position much easier. It was not really surprising that, in
making
peace at Lausanne, Britain and not France should take the lead.
France had already given Turkey all that Turkey needed from France
and had obviously discarded from weakness. Britain, on the other
hand, could no longer waste time protecting the Greeks, even had the
new British Government wanted to do so, and she was ready and wil-
576
BETWEEN TWO WARS
own substantial interests. That France, out of all
ling to look after her
the kaleidoscopic changes of the years between 1916 and
1923, got no
more than Syria, was not surprising; what was surprising was that she
got so much, for at no time was she ready to spend the men or money
required to gain more. Indeed, as the event proved, the control of
Syria was almost more than she was fit for, not because of material
weakness, but because of lack of serious resolution to develop an imperial
policy in yet another region of the world.

The autumn of 1921* was marked by the fall of Mr. Lloyd George,
the last of the great war leaders to remain in power. His fall was in
part caused by a rc\olt of his Conservative supporters, very like that
which overthrew Briand. although the occasion was concessions to Ire-
land instead of oneesMons to Germany. The new Prime Minister,
(

Mr. Bonar Ihad been out of offi e, during the most embittered phase
,aw,
of Anglo-French relations and, faced with the French threat to take
individual action against Germany, he made a very serious effort to meet
the French demands and avoid what he thought would be a disastrous
blow to European stability. Reparations had been divided into three
classes, A, B and C. G represented the most remote payments, those
spread over the longest period of time and were obviously, by now, like
very ill-secured third mortgages. The British scheme proposed the
cancellation of these liabilities and a funding of A and B obligations.
In return it offered the complete cancellation of the French war debt to
Britain in return for surrender of French debt claims on Belgium and on
the French gold in the Bank of England. This last transaction would
have shown a paper profit of nearly 500,000,000 for France, but
Poincare took only a day to reject the scheme which had, from his
point of view, the fatal fault of giving Germany another extension in
time. The German will to pay must be encouraged by sanctions.
And it was obvious to him would get her rights only by
that France

taking 'productive pledges'. That meant the occupation of the


Ruhr.
The occupation of the Ruhr was not a novel idea. In addition to
the zone occupied by the Allied Armies, temporary occupations of
German territory outside that zone had already occurred. Nor was
the idea of extending an occupation to the exploitation of German
assets a new one. It had been threatened by the Allies before this. It

was on the surface a plausible idea. If the Germans would not pay
because, as they asserted, the problem of transfer was beyond them, the
French should go and get what was owing, as a creditor sends a bailiff
to take the defaulter's cattle or household goods. It was, from a legal-

istic point of view, a natural enough procedure. And France was a


577
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
country dominated by legalistic, and rural legalistic ideas at that, as
M. Francis Delaisi pointed out. To cany out the scheme, it was, for
a man like Poincar^, indispensable to have the law on his side. By a
majority, the Reparations Commission decided that Germany was in
default on some deliveries in kind; the occupation was decided on. 1
The British Government contented itself with announcing that its
lawyers denied the legal validity of the occupation and left France and
Germany to their struggle. Belgium supported the French, and Belgian
troops formed part of the expeditionary force that occupied the Ruhr
in January. Italy merely sent some engineers to look after her interests.
The new Fascist Government had been in power for only a few months
and was still feeling its way; but, of course, if the expedition succeeded,
Italy wanted her share of the profits.
The troops which accompanied the technicians were merely an
armed guard, and as the occupation was envisaged at the beginning,
it was to be
quite a simple affair. But the German Government
organized and subsidized passive resistance and almost every activity
in the Ruhr basin ceased. Mine- and factory-owners, as well as
workers, were compensated for the cost of passive resistance. The
hopes of 'productive pledges' were dead. All that remained was the
punitive aspect; an immense daily loss was being inflicted on Germany.
Its most productive industrial area was cut off from the rest of the

country, and the cost of subsidizing the strike of employers and workers
was the last blow to the German currency. As far as wiping out the
savings of the middle-classes was concerned, that had already been
done by the inflation of 1919-22 and that inflation was very largely the
work of the German Government. The inflation of 1923 did not des-
troy savings; it made any rational economic calculations impossible for
all classesof Germans, not merely over a long period of time but from
day to day. Of course, the astronomical inflation brought profits to
some speculators and to the great industrial magnates, but for most
Germans it was an unrelieved nightmare.
This first result of the occupation was not displeasing to some
sections of French opinion. They would rather have a weak Germany
unable to pay than a strong Germany able to pay. This was roughly
the position of the Action Frarqaise, still powerful with the extreme
Right in the Chamber. From the collapse of the German currency
might come the collapse of German unity, a great positive gain from the
war. If a coherent policy of bribing sections of Germany to escape
from the Reich and its troubles had been undertaken, it might just

1
It has been pointed out that the Reparations Commission as originally designed had
five members, one of them American. Thus there would never be a deadlock, it was hoped.
American withdrawal reduced the membership to four and the French Chairman assumed
a casting vote. He did not need to use it, as the Italian Government backed up the French
and Belgians; but, it is argued, Italian policy might have been different had the Com*
mission been at its full strength.

578
BETWEEN TWO WARS
possibly have succeeded. By the end of the summer, passive resistance
was collapsing, to the surprise of some British observers who had let
their wishes colour their judgment. The German Government was at
the end of its tether and the French had, to a remarkable degree, suc-
ceeded in restarting economic activity in the occupied area. German
despair revealed itself in sabotage; and in Schlageter the Germans were
provided with a martyr, though the occupation was not rigorous by
modern standards. There were attempted revolutions by Commun-
ists and by the
political party run by the Reichswehr, the National
Socialists, but both failed. There was a revival of Separatism, but it
was only supported in a half-hearted way by the French authorities, and
its chances, never good, were So far as the occupation was
destroyed.
a test of strength between France and Germany, the contest was over
by September 1923. The German Government abandoned passive
resistance. Francr had her 'productive pledges'.
From the beginning of the occupation, Poincare had been supported
by the Chamber. When all allowances are made for the pressure to
show national unanimity in face of the foe, it still seems probable that
the Chamber really believed that the occupation was necessary to put
an end to German tergiversation and to British toleration of it. In
every vote, the Government had an overwhelming majority. Only the
Communists and Socialists opposed the policy; the Radicals either sup-
ported it, or more commonly abstained from voting like the prudent
politicians they were. In the parliamentary debates over the occu-
pation, the new leader of the Socialists, M. Leon Blum, showed his
mettle. The intellectual, new to the Chamber, with a trying voice and
irritating mannerisms, imposed himself on his party and on Parliament
by the lucidity of his thought and the elegance of his language.
The Socialist opposition was sometimes based on improbable hypo-
theses;it was hard to believe that the real villains of the piece were the

magnates of the 'Gomite des Forges'. They presumably knew on


steel
what side their bread was buttered; and however tempting the idea of
an armed raid into the Ruhr to fetch coal was to the simple-minded
economists of the Action Frangaise, the steel millionaires knew better
than that, the more that passive resistance had for a short time revived
the hated British coal monopoly. But Socialist opposition greatly
increased the prestige of the party, especially as the effects of the ex-
hausting struggle began to be felt in France in a franc that depreciated,
not indeed like the mark, but with an alarming speed. What was
missing in that opposition was not brains or courage; it was Jaures.
There was now no one to rise to the heights of the great argument and
of the
appeal from the narrow, honest and largely irrelevant logic
lawyer to the spirit of the community of men, including Germans. It

was in the years that followed the Armistice that the loss of the great
tribune was most felt. Perhaps it would have needed a German Jaures,
579
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
too, to make true peace between the neighbouring nations. But a
French Jaures would have been a beginning.
Despite the collapse of German resistance, the enthusiasm of France
for Poincare*'s policy (if there ever was much outside the Chamber)

rapidly diminished. The defeat of the Baldwin Government, in the


elections of 1923, at least saved European economy from the blow of a
sudden adoption of protection by the great European creditor; and the
German Government was now ready to give any conceivable proof of
its willingness to submit to payment of any reparations that could be

demanded from a shattered economy. The new British Government


was not as passive as its predecessor, and the negotiations that led to the
Dawes Plan were begun. Long before the Ruhr was evacuated, France
was disillusioned about the worth of military action; the troops called
up resented having to serve in what was nominally peace-time; and
French politicians were made permanently reluctant to use that military
supremacy which they had gained at Versailles. Germany was still
open to French invasion, but the will to invade was dead.

580
CHAPTER III

THE PRICE OF VICTORY


1

before disillusionment with the results of the


occupation of the
EVEN
Ruhr weakened the authority of the Poincare Ministry and of the
majority which hud supported the Prime Minister's policy, the politieal
l

basis of the l)lor National* was being destroyed. It had no general

uniting idea 01 e\en uniting interest, apart from a rapidly obsolescent


stock of simple patriotic ideas and emotions. The Radicals, who had
prudently not committed themselves on any great matter of policy,
were rapidly recovering their old ascendancy. Everywhere they had
the old 'cadres', the local machines, the local government units, con-
trolled by the veteran politicians whom only the accident of war had
thrust temporarily into the background. The disorganized .amateurs
of the majority were no match for the political Old Guard.
That majority, too, had made many enemies. It had attacked as

parasites on the budget the great body of civil servants, who were injured
in their pride and pocket, treated as bloodsuckers and deprived of their

right to organize. The schoolmasters were even more alarmed than


other government employees. The renewed diplomatic relations with
the Vatican, the toleration of illegal religious orders, the parliamentary
pleas for grants to Church schools, none of them very serious in them-
selves, were to the suspicious teachers signs of ill-will towards the lay
laws. And ifthe Government could prevent open opposition from the
employees of the State who were still in its service, it could not control
those who had retired on pension and who were free to act as zealous
electoral agents of the opposition.
The collapse of passive resistance made both Germany more anxious
to negotiate a settlement, and Britain, and (discreetly) the United
States, more ready to collaborate in bringing the French and German
Governments together. In France, the claim, true as far as it went,
that the occupation now more than paid its way, did not conceal from
the public, or even from Poincare', that mere affirmations of France's
treaty rights were not enough. Germany must pay all that shfc could,
but how much was that? Two committees were set up, one under
Mr. Reginald McKenna to deal with the technical problem of the
581
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
return of capital exported from Germany, the second under the chair-
manship of an American, General Dawes, to deal with the wider
problem of enabling Germany to meet any obligations at all and to
determine what payments, once she was restored to something like
economic health, she could make.
The Dawes Plan, as it was called, deliberately ignored all political
questions. It laid it down that Germany must be provided with the
means of becoming solvent and so must recover economic control of all
her territory; and that meant, in effect, the withdrawal of the French
troops from the Ruhr. Germany must be given enough credits to
enable her to establish a stable currency and, to secure that stability,
some independent body or official must be given authority to determine
when payments of reparations were endangering it. It was thought
to be impossible to fix the total of reparations to be paid. No estimate
that could be made in 1924 could be anything but a reckless guess.
But it was possible quite soon to fix what annual payments Germany
could make; although, until a total reparations debt had been fixed, it
was impossible to decide how long they would go on. They might, in
theory, go on for ever, payments towards an unknown total. Despite,
or rather because of, these deliberate refusals to attempt to answer
fundamental and unanswerable questions, the Dawes Plan was admir-
ably suited to the moment. Leaving all the long-term questions still
to be settled, it promised some immediate gain to everybody; an end of
the Ruhr occupation and currency stabilization to the Germans; some
tangible cash results from the occupation to the French; an increase in
European stability and, so it was hoped, in British prosperity to Britain;
and an improved chance of collecting the war debts to the United
States.
The payments were to rise over a period of five years to a standard
annuity of 2,500,000,000 gold marks, of which, when the scheme was
1

fully working, France would get over half. Even leaving out all ques-
tion of war debts, the income from the Plan was far below the dreams
of 1919. It would just about have covered the debt charges for the
restoration of the devastated areas. But, even burdened as they were
with an unsettled liability to Britain and the United States, x the Dawes
Plan annuities were an improvement on any previous receipts from
Germany. They promised an end of the endless political complications
and, as far as it was believed in France that neither Germany nor
Britain would have acted as they had done but for the occupation, it
was held to justify the Ruhr and that in turn justified acceptance of the
Plan, though not its formal ratification, by the Poincar6 Government.
Not only were reparations removed from the political agenda, but
_the acceptance of the principle of the economic unity of Germany meant
an end of flirtations with Rhineland separatism. The unity of the
1
195,000,000 ($625,000,000).
582
BETWEEN TWO WARS
Reich was preserved and its economic
prospects greatly improved.
French officials and soldiers who had tolerated or
encouraged the
separatist movement were now forced to observe a real neutrality and
the whole bogus business collapsed. The German
population, once the
protecting hand of the French officers was withdrawn, ended the Rhine-
land republic in a series of bloody riots in which the Action
Frangaise
saw not merely the revival of Prussia, but the treachery of England.
But in France there was, less than ever, any real will to pursue a
policy
of dismembering Germany. Unobserved by the outside world, the
French people had wearied of the atmosphere of war; the elections were
at hand and the nation was about to be given a chance to
express its
opinion of the policy of the 'Bloc National'.
The elections of 1924 were not, of course, fought exclusively or
mainly on the question of foreign policy. Many motives revived and
strengthened the dominant political tradition of the French political
system, a tradition which had not really been repudiated even in the
hysterical election ot 1919. It was not only the superior tactics and

superior discipline of the Radicals that made them so formidable. The


elections of 1924 in France revealed the same desire to return to the
easy ways of life of the good old days before the war, that tl*e election
of Harding in 1920 and the return to power of Bonar Law in 1922 had
revealed in America and England. The doubtful success of the Ruhr
was made manifest by the necessity of raising taxes, a necessity which
the Poincare Government had to admit on the eve of the elections. 1
Mere political routine and irritation at seeing the promises to make the
Germans pay translated into higher taxes for Frenchmen, did not alone
account for the crushing nature of Poincare's defeat. The opposition
1
to the foreign policy of the 'Bloc National had spread from the small

groups like the 'League of the Rights of Man' arid the organized
Socialists to the masses. A genuine horror of war, a revival of the old
optimistic dreams of international understanding,
a natural revulsion
against the extravagant nationalism that had been preached and to
some extent practised of recent years, revived the enthusiasm of the
parties of the old Left.
As in the hopeful years at the beginning of the century, this enthu-
siasm had its newspaper, not the now dogmatically Communist Humanite
or the struggling Socialist Populaire, but the Qyotidien, which was the real
if not the formal heir of the Petite Republique and the Humaniti ofJaures.

The Qyotidien was designed to be the reply of the masses of the Left to
the dominance of the newspaper world by the great financial interests.
All the great Paris newspapers with national circulations were either
In the provinces, there were
openly or covertly papers of the Right.
Left chief of them all the keeper of the Radical
important papers,
conscience, the Dtptcfu de Toulouse, property, pride and source of the
1
df. p. 391-

583
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODE'RN FRANCE
power of the Sarraut family. But that was not enough, and the
Qyatidien was-started in 1923. Its founder, Henri Dumay, appealed to
the militants everywhere to provide the funds for a Left newspaper
which would display Vigorous probity and ferocious independence*.
Twenty million francs was raised from petty officials, local party leaders
and the like who wanted to help the good cause and who, though to a
less degree, were also moved by hope of a good investment. With this
was able to produce a paper fit to rival the great
capital, the Qpotidien
commercial papers on their own ground and the Left benefited greatly
in the election of I924- 1
5
The emotional appeal of the 'Bloc National had lost its power; the
emotional appeal of the parties fighting it, the 'Cartel des Gaudies', as
they came to be called, was increasing in power. Europe learned with
astonishment that on May nth the French electors had voted against
the policy of the formidable Prime Minister. Poincare at once took the
election as a condemnation, and the leader of the successful coalition,
M. Herriot, prepared to take office. Before the month was out he had
given an interview to the great German Socialist paper Vorwdrts. It
would be the greatest honour of his life, he said, to bring peace to all
peoples.
If the outside world had paid most attention to the defeat of Poin-
care', the victors of the Left had an even greater animus against the
President of the Republic. For one thing, M. Millerand was one of
theirown who had gone wrong. Then as President, M. Millerand had
stepped down from his high place, so it was asserted, and by his speeches
and attitude had taken sides in party battles. Whether he had done
more than Poincare had done in the early months of his presidency was
doubtful, but the precedent was, in any case, not one likely to placate
the Left. Their general attitude had been summed up by the militant
old Socialist, Pierre Renaudel, 'all the jobs and quick about it', and the
Left meant to begin at the top.
On June 307 deputies passed a resolution declaring that 'the
ist,
maintenance of M.
Millerand at the Elyse"e would wound the Repub-
lican conscience, would be the source of endless conflicts between the
Government and the Chief of the State and a constant danger for the
regime itself'. M. Millerand fell back on his legal rights and duties.
As he told M. Herriot, he had been elected for seven years and it was
his duty to carry out his mandate, but he was really helpless. The
noisier deputies enjoyed themselves. It was the duty of the Chamber
to sit all the time to watch a 'President de coup d'etat', or so M. Berthon
asserted. But the real weapon of the Left was a Ministerial strike
1
The later history of the paper was unfortunate. The original subscribers found their
interests inadequately protected, and after a series of bitter controversies, the great liberating
organ of the Left disappeared and its place was very inadequately filled by papers like the
Populavrt and the (Euvre, whose small circulation* limited the effect of their brilliant editorial
pages.
584
BETWEEN TWO WARS
M. Fran^ois-Marsal, the Prime Minister chosen to attempt the hopeless
task of defending the President, could not command a
majority and the
Chamber refused to have anything to do with him. On June nth,
M. Millerand abandoned the battle and resigned. Another President
of the Republic had been taught his place and the office was further
weakened, or, at any rate, prevented from being strengthened. Full
powers were again in the hands of the 'delegates of universal suffrage'.
It remained to see what that meant.
France was politically weary; she wished to return to the good old
pre-war days and she naturally turned on the political representatives
of the unpleasant new post-war world. If the Left had been in office,
and had thus acquired the political liabilities that destroyed Wilson and
Lloyd George, Vcni/elos ai.d William Morris Hughes, the swing of the
pendulum might u have been so violent: but a swing to the Left was
>t

bound to be violent, since the Left were the best organized and most
rapidly growing prlitual eoalition in France. The very name of the
Left was ymbolie of political victoi y; a movement in that dim tion had
the inevitability of a glacier. Indeed, so much was the name a mascot
that was taken by parties which the country refused to regard as
it

a vain endeavour to escape defeat.* That the


politically sound, in
'Carter should triumph was inevitable, so far as the elections were con-
cerned. Its troubles only began with victory.
The between Socialists and Radicals was the most natural
alliance

thing in the world at election times, but it was increasingly artificial


once the election was over. For the Radicals disbelieved in the Socialist
remedy for the main ills of the world. 'Socialist' in the title of their
party (Radical and Socialist Radical) was no more than a sentimental
intensification of the 'Radical'. It did not mean that the Radicals were

really in favour of the extension of the economic role of the State, or the
limitation of the rights of property. No doubt the party was opposed
to selling the State monopolies to private companies and righteously
indignant at such 'lobbies' as the Union of Economic Interests which
spent money on behalf of reactionary candidates and thus interfered
with the party's campaign. But there was a great deal in common
between many eminent Radicals and Senator Billiet, the head of the
Union, between Radical and Reactionary bourgeoisie. In most of the
small towns and rural regions of France, you voted for or against the
parish priest, for or against the local landlord, less
no doubt if the priest
was personally amiable or the landlord winked at poaching, but funda-
mentally to show that the Revolution had not been
in vain.
did not vote for much. The old Jacobin authoritarian tradi-
You
tion was weak in the modern Radical party. Clemenceau had been
one of its last representatives and his name was now anathema to most
1
One continual shift was that the parties which had
paradoxical result of this all still

the word 'Left* in their titles were classed with the 'Right*.

585
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
militants. Far more representative of the attitude of the party were
the writings of its chief, almost its only eminent intellectual defender,
Alain. 'The Citizen against the Powers that Be* that was political life
as Alain saw it. The unending audacities of elected persons in betray-
ing their electors moved him less to the indignation of Whitman than
to anironical resignation and to a resolve to reduce, as far as possible,
their power for evil, as it was impossible to increase their power for good.
But the deputies, bad as they were, easily seduced by flattery and by
the social poison of Paris, were not as bad as the bureaucrats, the 'Tite-
Barnacles* (for Alain had read Dickens).
The State was a dangerous machine, almost certain to get into the
wrong hands, and it should, therefore, be provided with brakes. Indeed
itseemed as if some Radicals wanted far more brakes than the feeble
engine power of the French State machine made at all necessary. The
Radical was the man who wished to keep to the ideas and practices of
1789; to defend the Rights of Man as interpreted in the pre-machine
age; and to ignore the fundamental difficulties of applying the methods
of the age of diligences in the age of motor-cars. Just as the capitals
of French departments were located by a calculation of a day's ride on
horseback, so with the organization of the central government. For
the Radical feared that, if the State were strengthened and modernized,
the beneficiaries would not be the little men whose interests it was the
business of the party to foster, but the powerful lords of business
and finance, already far too potent for the peace of mind of believers
in equality.
The Socialist leaders and militants, if not the Socialist voters, were
contemptuous of the simplicity and superficiality of the Radical analysis.
It was to them a cause of deep intellectual indignation that an intel-

ligent people like the French should still be talking in purely political
and uneconomic terms. How could the Socialists work profitably with
such representatives of an obsolete technology and ideology? It was
this contempt for the Radicals and this fear of their crippling alliance
that justified, if it did not wholly account for, the revival of Guesdism,
and for the hostility to any alliance with the Radicals, or to a compromis-
ing policy which, the Socialist party resolved, was condemned both by
theory and practice. But as the elections of 1924 approached, it had
proved harder to hold the party line: it was natural to think of returning
to the pre-war tacit alliance at least for electoral purposes with the
Radicals.
It was even more desirable to find allies than it had been in 1914, for
the system of bastard proportional representation under which the elec-
tion would be fought, made the lot of the isolated minority very hard.
The purists, Bracke and would have no compromise, but
his friends,
local Socialist Federations were allowed to make their own arrange-
ments and, in the non-industrial departments, they fought with the
386
BETWEEN TWO WARS
Radicals. In the industrial areas alone could they afford the
luxury
of independence. The result was a return to the golden
day of 1914.
The election of over a hundred Socialist Deputies justified these tactics.
The election won, it was impossible to attack the Radicals at
once, and it was, indeed, necessary to promise loyal support to M.
Herriot, the new Prime Minister. It was all very well for the
party to
resolve in its Congress that it was a party 'necessarily distinct from all
others' and, next year, to refuse to base new theories on the difficult

experiment of support for the Herriot Government, theories which


would be contrary to 'the doctrinal virtues of traditional Socialism*.
But, in fact, the policy of 1924 and 1925 was a return to the policy of
1899-1905, to the practice of Jaures, and away from the theories of
Guesde. A new Miilciand would not be given leave to enter a Min-
istry,but that \\vs the only difference and the party produced
Millerands who, without leave, followed in his footsteps.
The dilemnm in which the Socialists involved themselves, by sup-
porting a go\ eminent debarred by its own doctrine from providing the
necessary lemeclics for the sickness of French society, was not painfully
obvious as long as the Left Government was mainly concerned with
political questions. On external and internal politics the S jcialists and
the Radicals were pretty well agreed and both were anxious to liquidate
die Ruhr, whose failure the Socialists had prophesied and the Radicals
had profited by.
Radicals, it is true, were ready to get what profit they could
The
from Poincare's mistake. They wished to make French withdrawal a
bargaining matter, not with Germany but with Britain. But there was
nothing to bargain with. It was obvious that France was tired of the
occupation and unwilling to prolong it. It was certain that even if
Poincare had stayed in office, he would have accepted the Dawes Plan,
so the new British Prime Minister, Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, was safe
in refusing to give fresh guarantees, financial or political, to M. Herriot.
Negotiations could only be over details, and M. Herriot brought nothing
back from his visit to Chequers that* he could not have got by normal
diplomatic methods. The conjunction of Left Governments,
in France
as well as in Britain, was an opportunity not to be lost, but the fate of
the 'protocol', 1 though distressing, did not lead to a breach.
There was no disagreement over the attempt to fulfil some of the
anti-clerical promises of the Radical campaign. It is true that Social-
ists smiled a at the importance attached by their Radical friends to
little

the clerical question, but attempts to withdraw the French ambassador


from the Vatican and thus undo a crime of the 'Bloc National* and to
introduce the lay laws into Alsace were approved. The policy of
militants who had been victimized after the
restoring their jobs to the
great strikes of 1920 and of restoring their right of organization to the
1
Seep. 611.
587
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
officialswas equally popular with Socialist and Radical Deputies and
with their electors. After all, it was often a mere matter of accident of
electoral law whether the victorious candidate of the Left was a Radical
or a Socialist. However much the parties might differ in their organized
form, the inchoate mass of Left electors, from which the deputies drew
their ultimate authority, had a fairly unified outlook on current

problems and no outlook at all on non-current problems.


Of course, in the victorious alliance of 1924, just as on the Left there
were Socialists constantly tempted to go Communist, there were, on the

Right, Radicals and others tempted by the safety and respectability of


'an alliance of the Centres'. These lukewarm 'Cartellists' were (with
the overwhelmingly Radical Senate) responsible for the defeat of the
Left candidate for the presidency. Paul Painleve*, eminent mathe-
matician and mediocre politician, was defeated by the mediocre poli-
tician,Gaston Doumergue. Even in the Chamber, Paul-Boncour, who
regarded himself in appearance and doctrine as a new Robespierre,
was defeated in the election for the Chairmanship of the Army Com-
mittee by Poincare"'s former War Minister, Andre Maginot. But it was
the financial crisis that revealed the fundamental differences between
the Socialists and their allies and that proved too much for the policy
of support.
It was unfortunate that the Prime Minister, who had to deal with
the financial crisis, should have been temperamentally so little fitted for
the drab and unpleasant job of putting in order a very badly managed
household. Years later, when the educational experience of 1924-26
should have chastened him, M. Herriot was still taking financial
problems too lightly; France would 'muddle through'. But figures had
a way of resisting all eloquence, and within a few months of its forma-
tion the Herriot Government was too busy trying to salvage the
Treasury and the franc, to worry any more about ambassadors in Rome
or nuncios in Paris.
Yet the troubles that beset the Government of the 'Cartel' were not
really of its making. As it had had the good luck to escape the danger-
ous responsibility for the political liquidation, it had the bad luck to be
faced with the problem of the financial liquidation of the war, a problem
incapable of solution until the time was politically ripe. That ripeness
coincided with the disillusionment over the Ruhr which was one great
factor in the 'Carters' triumph. It was the main cause of its downfall.
For it presented the allies of 1924 with a problem that made it impos-
sible to evade the issues which divided them; on one side were the
Socialist leaders, committed to the doctrine that the only solution of the
financial problem was bound up with a complete economic reconstruc-
tion of French society, on the other were the Radicals, fundamentally
sceptical of the need or desirability of such a reconstruction and loath
to increase the authority of the State which alone could make the
BETWEEN TWO WARS
Socialist programme practicable. In an economic choice the Radicals
were certain to choose the old order, even if they accompanied that
choice with noisy protests.

II

The political difficulties facing any reformer of French finance in the


years immediately following the Armistice had been perfectly illustrated
during a speech by Clemeneean's Finance Minister, Klotz. 1 He spoke,
as was natural, of the heroism of France
during her ordeal and, as was
suggested that France had been as enduring in pocket as
less justifiable,
in person. Yet, despite this heroism, the finances of the victor nation
were not in a M >d state. A voice from the Left declared that 'the rich
<>*<

must be made to pay a voice from the Right replied 'Germany must
;

be made to pay"; and the Finance Minister satisfied both. 'It is not
the rieli \\ li<> sh.ill
pay first; the first to pay shall be the enemy/ (Loud
cheers.)
During four terrible years France had been steeled to her ordeal by
the thought that victory would compensate herfor her sacrifices. Firmly
convinced that she had been the victim of a planned aggression; fully
conscious (which was less disputable) that she had suffered far more
than had the defeated nation; not at all sure that her allies were not
ready to be extremely generous, at her expense, to the nation that had
ravaged her soil, that had been as intolerable in victory as self-pitying
in defeat, France could not bring herself to face the sad fact that, guilty
or not guilty, Germany could not pay for the war.
The lack of respect for economic principles which was partly a fault
of French higher education made the arguments of the few technicians
who understood the problem seem mere logic-chopping to an intelligent
but ill-informed nation. Those parties on the Left which were most
exempt from mere emotional hatred of all things German were, as the
past and the future alike showed, as incapable as the Right of accepting

unpleasant facts in a financial world in which rhetoric was impotent.


On the Right, the politicians and their electors thought, and rightly
thought, that the advice given them from London and
New York was
not entirely disinterested. So it was natural to reply to all councils of
which
prudence, to all policies based on that 'sense of possibilities'
Cavour thought the greatest of statesmanlike qualities, with slogans not
much less childish than the famous dictum of Calvin Goolidge. They
owe the money, don't they?' was how the average French elector might
have answered scepticism as to the possibility of making Germany pay

1
M. Glcmenccau is reported to have said of M. Klotz that 'it was his bad luck to have
as Finance Minister the only Jew who couldn't count*. The later career of M. Klotz cast
a good deal of doubt on his financial ability.
589
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
for the war. France, as legally-minded as the United States, took the
parchment of the Treaty of Versailles too seriously.
Nor was the illusion that Germany would pay all war costs the
5

only trouble. The majority of the 'Bloc National represented interests


and sentiments which had never accepted the principle of the income
tax. It is possible that some of them really thought it would be possible
to undo the evil deed of the traitor Gaillaux. So there was a reluctance
to apply rigorously the only system of taxation that could have met the
needs of the time. That the result was inflation was not at once per-
ceived, nor was the fall in the franc proof of anything but the lack of
1
co-operation of France's allies. It was easy, therefore, for complacent
Ministers to stress the great rise in revenue and great increase in taxa-
tion, while ignoring the debasement of the franc, so that it was not until
1921 that the tax revenue equalled that of the last pre-war year in gold
francs. Even so, that revenue was, of course, grossly inadequate for the
needs of a devastated country.
It was very natural to hide the unpleasant truth that the French
State was going to need far more money than it had needed before the
war behind the fiction of an 'ordinary* budget, an 'extraordinary'
budget and a 'German' budget. The first was what its name signified
and was solvent. The second was to receive special sources of revenue,
liquidation of war assets, etc., and loans for special expenditure. The
'German' budget was to pay the costs of reconstructing the devastated
areas and other charges which the Treaty had managed to classify as
reparations, such as war pensions, and to be recouped by the sums paid
by Germany when Germany paid. Meantime, as in the case of the
extraordinary budget, the deficit was to be met by loans, and in the case
of the 'German' budget there were hardly any other receipts. Until
the 'Boche' was made to pay up, the French investor was asked to trust
the French State. His faith in the State was still great, but it was not
indestructible. Even if it had been, the investor was not merely anxious
to be sure that his investment was safe but that it was good. So, in
boom times, the Treasury found it hard to borrow in competition with
business, while in times of depression, it was easy to borrow, but slack-
ness in business was reflected in the lower tax yield.
Klotz went out of office with Glemenceau, and his successor was
Frangois-Marsal. Both Ministers realized that something had to be
done and, after various alterations in detail consequent on a Cabinet
change and others arising from differences between the Chamber and
the Senate, the budget of 1920 was voted. Its main novelty was a
turnover tax which was to be the great standby of successive Ministers
of France. Yet even these reforms left the real deficit untouched and
1
Exactly the same reaction was perceptible among people in Britain in 1931, who
knowing that a National Government could not default, were convinced that the British
departure from gold was the fault of the French and Americans. In the same way it was
the wicked Europeans who prevented Mr. Hoover from turning the corner.

590
BETWEEN TWO WARS
it was out of the question, it was asserted, to try to raise more by taxes.
Next year it fell to Doumer to produce the budget and he was a severe
critic of his predecessors, but his
attempt to raise the turnover tax was
bitterly opposed in the Chamber and, despite a fall in expenditure and
the ending of the 'extraordinary' budget, it was
necessary to borrow
that year 17,400,000,000 francs.
In 1922 the Poincare Ministry was formed to make
Germany pay,
and it was perhaps fitting that in such an atmosphere of optimism the
Finance Minister should be even more optimistic than the rest of the
Cabinet. The new Minister was a nobleman and resembled in some
ways that eminent noble financier of the years before the Revolution,
M. de Calonne. The dictum of the Comte de Lasteyrie that the deficit
was due, not to excessive expenditure, but to insufficient revenue, was
pure Calonne. Some time or other the budget would have to be
balanced, say in three or four years' time. If it turned out then that the
tax yield had n^l risen enough to end the ordinary deficit, 'one should
not hesitate to ask for further sacrifices'. Apart from this hoping for
the best, the rest of M. de Lasteyrie's policy was summed up in "making
Germany pay'. Who knew if, in that happy day, the income tax could
not be abolished? For M. de Lasteyrie hankered after tiie good old
days of non-inquisitorial finance. It took him almost a year to come
out of his golden dreams; he did so on the eve of the occupation of
the Ruhr, proposing a 20 per cent, increase in the existing taxes. The
Chamber was not so open-minded as the Minister and there was no
increase in the tax-rate, although there were minor adjustments. But
the Chamber had now to listen to arguments more powerful than those
of M. de Lasteyrie.
At last the lenderswere going on strike. Loans were less and less
successful and, by January 1924, a loan yielding 6-29 per cent, failed.
The French State could no longer borrow in the long-term market and
the franc was beginning to slide rapidly. By vigorous action on the
exchanges, the Poincare Government was able to rout the mere specu-
lators who were selling the franc short, but the fundamental problem
remained. It was obvious that, no matter how successful the occupa-
tion of the Ruhr might be in helping the Germans to make up their
minds to pay, they could not pay all the costs of reconstructing the
devastated areas andtheother charges putto theaccount of the 'German'
budget. Lasteyrie fell back on his 20 per cent, increase,
combined
with cuts in salaries and with attempts to make tax evasion more diffi-
cult. It was a suicidal programme on the eve of a general election, and

among the more rash promises made by Left candidates were not only
the repeal of the 20 per cent, increase but the abolition of the turnover
tax. The 'rich will pay' replaced the 'Germans will pay'.
To make France solvent, drastic measures were necessary, and one
that appealed to the Socialists was a capital levy. But this taxation
of
591
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
property holders in general to pay off debt holders in particular was
bitterly opposed by the property holders, who were, in most cases, also
debt holders. A
forced conversion-was really a bankruptcy, and for the
State to announce a change in the formal value of its obligations was
almost as bad as not to meet them; to cut down the rente, or not to pay
it,was a far more serious blow at public confidence, in France at least,
than to debase the currency. In any case there was no chance that an
Auvergnat businessman like M. Cle'mentel would consent to be the
sponsor of a capital levy. The last straw had been a revelation by the
Finance Gommittee^of the Senate that the figures of the Bank of France
balances had been doctored or made, if you like, less depressing than
they might have been. To make matters worse, the new Finance
Minister, M. de Monzie, had tried something very like a forced loan.
The Herriot Government was out; the Senate Was not disposed to
tolerate much longer any serious attempt to meet the financial diffi-
cultiesof the day by 'Cartellist' methods. M. Painleve* was the new
Prime Minister and he summoned the one great Left financier from
Mamers, where M. Gaillaux was, like another Cincinnatus, if not at his
plough at least busy mending his fences. The appointment of the
recently disgraced politician was less daring than it seemed. To have
been a victim of Clemenceau was by now a passport to the trust of the
Left, and Messrs. Gaillaux, Malvy and Sarrail were martyrs whom the
victors of 1924 delighted to honour. But for all that, there was a wide
difference in outlook between M. Caillaux and his Socialist friends.
M. Caillaux had no use for the merely sentimental attitude to public
finance that marked so many deputies of the Left. The economic
theories of the new Minister were not those which had triumphed in
1924. To
create a real budget, that is one in which all the separate
accounts were fused, to avoid any such threat to the investor's confi-
dence as a capital levy and to raise fresh funds to enable the Treasury
to meet its were M. Caillaux's main and unrcvolutionary
obligations,
proposals. The most
ingenious of them was a loan whose interest
was payable in francs, but at a rate which varied with the foreign
exchanges; this should have tempted far-sighted investors who felt
like being bears of the national currency, but unless the franc fell,
the yield was only about 4 per cent. Not enough French investors
combined confidence in the Government with fears for the franc to
justify the experiment. But apart from this failure, M. Caillaux dif-
5
fered from the of the 'Cartel on the question of lowering the turn-
left

over tax. He could get support only from the Right, and that was
uncertain. No government so based could carry through profound
reforms and so France drifted nearer inflation. The pilot had to be
dropped, and the second Painleve* Cabinet entrusted its financial salva-
tion to the Prime Minister, aided by M. Georges Bonnet. 1 The remedy
1
As 'Minister of the Budget*.
59*
BETWEEN TWO WARS
chosen was another capital levy and a moratorium on certain
maturing
debts. This was intolerable to many good Radicals; the formal
solvency of the Republic was not to be jeopardized.
Briand at last managed to form a Ministry and his miracle-worker
was the most eminent and richest of businessmen-politicians in France,
M. Loucheur. His remedy was most drastic taxation and collection of
taxes; the seven months' delay in voting the budget was suddenly to be
made up for by intolerable pressure on the taxpayers, most of whom,
not through their fault, were in arrears. In turn Loucheur went down;
then came Doumer, who proposed to add a tax on payments to the turn-
over tax. It was no wonder that M. Bedouce, one of the finance experts
of the Socialists, protested against such a betrayal of the electoral pro-
gramme of 1924! Donmer went. He was succeeded by Raoul P^ret,
the main ingredient of whose panacea was an increase of the turnover
tax, a pill made a little more palatable to the Left by the imposition
of some irritating but not very useful formalities on income-tax payers.
So far the Chamber had had its way. The game had born played
according to the rules; an attempt had been made to avoid too open a
betrayal of the optimistic programme of 1924, although amiable masters
of the game like M. Raoul Peret had secured concessions to sound
finance which less skilled parliamentarians like M. Doumer had failed
to get. But power was passing out of the hands of the deputies; what
had been said in 1924 was of less and less interest. The franc was
beginning to fall, and fall with increasing rapidity: and that fall was no
longer mainly an affair of speculators, for the cost of living was begin-
ning to rise in an alarming fashion. From Gaillaux to Pe*ret, the cost
of living index rose from 512 to 697. Very many of the Left voters
were worried by the fall in the franc; all were worried by the rise in
prices. Briand, who, after all, was familiar with the device in foreign
affairs, fell back on a well-tried remedy or diversion, a 'Committee of

Experts'. It was a betrayal of a darling dogma of the Left, for the

experts were, of course, financially orthodox. The Chamber


was full
of left-wing experts, but 'expert' meant, in fact, someone the investor
or the anxious creditor would recognize as more concerned with his
interests than with those of 'fiscal justice' or loyalty to the elector's
mandate. Directors of banks, even eminent professors of Economics,
were much more likely to restore confidence than were M. Vincent
Auriol, M. Bedouce, M. Nogaro or any other political financier. But
it was politically necessary to make some concessions to the amour propre
of the Chamber and to the honest suspicion of many of its members.
So M. Raoul Pe*ret was replaced by M. Caillaux, who was still the one
politician of the Left who had areputation as a financier, a reputation
that made it
necessary for Briand to forget that Caillaux was his one

personal enemy in politics and to accept him as the mediator between


the experts and the deputies.
593
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
There were more reasons than one why Caillaux could not effectively
mediate between the politicians and the, lenders, great and small. His
name, for many of the potential lenders, was the symbol of predatory
taxation. Horror of the income-tax, or, at least, reluctance to permit
that intrusion into private finances which was needed to make it effec-
tive, was widespread. It was all very well for the Left to talk as if the

only opponents of income-tax were the great magnates. The small


lawyers and the country doctors who were too devoted to the ethical
code of their professions (which imposed secrecy) to permit inspection
of their books if they kept any were numerous in the ranks of the
Radicals and by no means unknown in the ranks of the Socialists.
These sections of the majority might reinforce the angry minority,
backed as they were by the odd view of the incidence of direct taxation
expressed by the experts. For they asserted that direct taxes 'will
eventually be incorporated in prices, and, in many cases, in a proportion
higher than their real amount'. This doctrine was considered at least
doubtful in other lands by economists of equal eminence. But truth
may differ on one side of the Pyrenees from truth on the other, and
millions of Frenchmen trusted the experts who told them what they
wanted to believe.
It is possible that M.
Caillaux might have succeeded had he adopted
the experts' scheme and without serious alteration.
at once The
report was detailed, thorough, and was designed to meet the views of
that important body of persons to whom the French State owed money.
By the summer of 1926, France either had to go bankrupt and alienate
the millions of public creditors among whom were hundreds of thou-
sands of Socialist and, it may be suspected, not a few Communist
voters, or it could pay them, which meant meeting the wishes of all the
persons who could supply the funds, from the Governors of the Bank of
France down to the village shopkeeper who had been hoarding bank-
notes but might soon be stricken with panic distrust even of the notes.
Against this fact the Left could declaim in vain; if it had been true that
the great majority of Frenchmen had nothing to lose but their chains,
the creditors might have been coerced or defied. It was not true; they

might have less to lose than they had to gain, but the loss was certain,
the gain problematic. There was the example of the German collapse
to frighten them and only academic doctrines of Left economics to
comfort them.
Some of CaiUaux's measures were timely; the settlement of the
British war debt; the preparations for settling the American war debt;
but the real problem of confidence was in Paris and in towns like
Mamers, not in London or New York. What was needed, according
to the new Minister, was a law giving him full powers, the very remedy
attacked as dangerous by the Left when asked for by Right Finatice
Ministers. M. Le*on Blum, now as always a brilliant dialectician,
594
BETWEEN TWO WARS
pointed out the dangers of such a step. More serious was theopposition
of Right leaders, for it was in the main their
supporters whose confidence
had to be won. The past of the Minister rose to plague him. It had,
as M. Louis Marin reminded the House, 'the inconvenience of
dividing
Frenchmen, and that is a serious consideration when one is trying to
1
restore confidence .M. Tardieu, heir of Clemenceau, read the famous
'Rubicon' document which revealed, it was alleged, the dictatorial
ambitions of the man who asked for full powers. But the
dagger stroke
came from M. Herriot who, abandoning his place as President of the
Chamber, attacked the Minister. The second Gaillaux Ministry was
dead; the franc fell to 235 to the pound, less than one-ninth of its
nominal value.
M. Herriot could get no support from the Socialists unless he tried
a capital levy, and M. de Monzie, the Finance Minister in the new
Herriot Government, was no improvement as a maker of confidence on
M. Caillaux. The franc still fell; and the Paris mob, or that section of

it which was ready for a row (whi< h was not a negligible section), was
beginning to turn ugly. There was only one remedy left. The
Chamber of 1924 would have to submit to the financial dictatorship of
a Government of 'National Union' presided over by Poincare The
return of Caillaux had been one startling reversal of recent history, but
it was not as startling as the return of 'Poincare la Guerre, Poincare*

la Ruhr'.
In a later financial crisis, the greatest of French political cartoonists,
Sennep, showed M. Le"on Blum trying to inspire confidence by dressing
in the costume of a bourgeois of the time of Louis Philippe under the
busts of the Citizen King and of the great banker, Lafitte. But it was
not necessary for M. Poincare' to dress the part; he was a bourgeois of
the time of Louis Philippe, or, atlatest, of the time and ideas of Leon

Say. He had no new economic ideas or financial specifics. None


would have succeeded unless they had been revolutionary, and France,
in 1926, was not revolutionary. What was needed was evidence that
the Government at last was serious. Poincare was and looked like an
upright, unimaginative, industrious and intelligent village notary. The
country was tired of professors and noblemen and semi-noblemen
and
orators and the rest. It needed the services of a good attorney. It

got them.
There was nothing that was novel in Poincare*'s programme. Most
of it was borrowed from the Committee of Experts. He increased
taxation of all kinds most rigorously, except on the higher income-tax
brackets; there he lowered the rates to restore confidence
and because
the very high rates were almost totally unproductive. He greatly
the of tax collection; his own undoubted probity and
improved system
his prodigious industry were well employed here; he made some serious
economies in administrative details; he completed the process, which
595
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
his immediate predecessors had begun, of producing a unified budget.
He was, however, fortunate in some ways, for the Germans under the
Dawes Plan were now paving substantial sums, enough to cover the cost
of what rebuilding was still to be done. But the real secret was the
impression made on the investor by the firmness of the Prime Minister
and the docility of the Chamber. Whatever was to be done had to be
done quickly and without any hesitation. It was. This explains the
success of such transparent devices as the creation of the independent
sinking fund and the transfer to it of the profits of the tobacco monopoly.
Put into the Constitution by a special session of the National Assembly,
thenew institution could obviously only preserve its autonomy while the
Chamber and the Senate permitted. But the solemn character of the
legislation impressed the man in the street or the man in the cottage
did not impress the deputies. The franc was saved; that is, it was
if it

possible to let it rise to a rate about a fifth of its nominal value. It may
be that the Prime Minister had dreams of revaluing it completely, but
they were put aside.
The triumph of Poincare was not altogether pleasing to the Left; he
had got Parliament out of a very ugly mess, but it had been done by
methods very unlike those preached in the hopeful days of 1924.
Another assault on the 'wall of money' had been repelled with heavy
loss. true that the leader of the Radicals, M. Herriot, was in the
It is

Government, but it was also true that the Radicals were represented on
the joint committee in Parliament which controlled the tactics of the
parties of the moribund Cartel. They had a foot in each camp. But
as long as the franc was not legally stabilized, it would be highly

dangerous to upset the Ministry, for the lender was still timid and a
return of any of the previous Finance Ministers, even of the great
technician, M. Caillaux, might cause a panic.
If it was to the advantage of the prudent Radical to wait until after
the formal stabilization of the franc before breaking with the Govern-
ment of National Union, it was to the advantage of the Government to
postpone the stabilization dejure if not de facto until after the elections.
For, as M. Seignobos noted, the Poincaf Government was a political
novelty of great interest and of great menace to serious politicians.
It was a Government based on that union of the Centre parties in the
Chamber which had been the dream of the more intelligent Conserva-
tives since the agony of the National Assembly. It was not, like the
Poincare* Government of 1922-4, dependent on the Right, and it was
not, like the various Governments of 1924-6, dependent on the Social-
ists. The success of such a Government was anomalous in a Chamber
with a strong Left majority, even though that majority was weakened
by the refusal of the Communists to make any distinction between class-
enemies, except to regard 'Social-Fascists' like M. Blum as worse,
because less obvious, enemies of the workers, than open reactionaries

596
BETWEEN
like M. Tardieu. Poincare* did make some concessions to his Left
allies. In Briand there were both a symbol and a
policy, and he was
maintained at the Foreign Office by the Man of the Ruhr. There was
no danger to laicity to be expected from the heir of
Waldeck-Rousseau;
and all but the professional priest-baiters had reconciled themselves to
the retention of the French Embassy at the Vatican and to the refusal
of the Alsatians to be liberated from the clerical yoke.
It was hard to find
campaign slogans or even hints. Of course the
Communists had theirs; they wei e a revolutionary party pouring con-
tempt (until further orders) on bourgeois democracy. The position pf
the Socialists was more diflicull; they were bound to proclaim them-
selves revolutionary, or be even better targets for Communist
gibes, but
to be in favour of it revolutionary change some time or other was not

incompatiblewith being cle< ted ;itNar bonne, whereas any serious threat
of a revolution now was. 1 The Communist proposal of a common
revolutionary front had lo be repulsed, for the Communists meant it. A
not very \\cll hidden alliance with the Radicals, believers in private
property and stiongly opposed to any 'holiday of legality', was atxepted.
'We know," said M. Blum, 'what reaction means. We trust our local
it whether it shows its face or a mask/ In short,
parties to recognize
Republican discipline would work. It was the more important to do
this since the Chamber had gone back to
single-member constituencies
with no nonsense about proportional representation. To fight for a
lone hand would be electorally disastrous. As for the Radicals they
would, in the country, fight on the side of the enemies of the Govern-
ment which they supported in the Chamber. And to the traditional
and rather shop-worn stock of slogans, they added the 'single school
2
system'.
The
result was an election strongly in favour of the Poincare policy
of peace, retrenchment, and not very much reform. The results, in*
evitably, exaggerated this tendency, for the Communist party, by refusing
any electoral compromise and running their candidates at both ballots,
cost the 'Left' 36 seats and saw its own deputies reduced from 28 to 14,

although had increased its total poll by 200,000. The Socialists made
it

little progress and suffered badly at the hands of the Communists in


the real proletarian regions. The S.F.I.O. was in danger of becoming
1
M. Leon Blum had found it easier to get elected on a revolutionary programme with
no immediate content in Narbonne, than in the industrial areas of Paris.
*
'Scole unique.' This meant that all places in the lyctts should be free, that the lycies
should give up their elementary school departments and that all French children, at any
rate all those who went to the State schools, should receive the same education. To avoid
swamping the lycJes, entrance would be by an examination which could not fail to be com-
petitive. However democratic this system, it had the disadvantage of alienating bourgeois
members of the party who feared that their sons might not get to a lycto at all if the ability
to pay the fees was to cease to be a claim to admission. One fatal consequence would
be, greatly to increase the numbers in Church schools, which
filled the old partisans of
the University with horror, and the only remedy for that, the suppression of all Church
at party congrcasci.
schools, was politically impossible, a daydream of schoolmasters
597
I O. RaflU&aJ| ifcltfiiMMI f* OF MODERN FRANCE
a workers' party with few workers among its members. The real
victorswere the Centre groups, for the Radicals, too, barely held their
ground. Ideologies weje at a discount: the Government could now
stabilize the franc and let the political system return to normal. On
June 25th, 1928, the franc was defined as containing '65*5 milligrams of
gold, nine- tenths fine'. It was a reduction from the pre-war parity of
four-fifths.
The witson the Left might add to their list of epithets, Toincare of
the four-sous franc'. But the people who in this matter really counted,
the small investors, the pensioners, the owners of woollen stockings now
filled with banknotes instead of gold, were grateful that even four sous
out of twenty had been saved. That the French middle-class "had been
rescued from complete ruin; that its faith in the workings of the system
had not been completely destroyed; was a far better safeguard against
fascism than the jokes of the bright young men of the Canard Enchaine.
It was, from the point of view of the little man, so great a thing that it
concealed from him the fact that France had at last paid for the war by
a capricious and unjust capital levy. M. Klotz' successor had avoided
both horns of his dilemma; neither the rich nor the Germans paid, but
the classes whose interests and sentiments the politicians of the Left were
for ever and sincerely promising to protect without having the will or
the political means to do so.

598
CHAPTER IV

RECONSTRUCTION
I

area over which the Allied Armies advanced in the late


THE
autumn of 1918 had been either stripped or devastated. In what
was to be called the 'red zone', covering 4 per cent, of the area of the
occupied territory, the soil had been so torn up by shell fire, poisoned
by chemicals, gashed by trenches, that it was thought that tin- cost of
restoring it to fertility would be greater than it was worth. This
estimate was pessimistic, for it overlooked the irrational
courage and
tenacity of the French peasant; but even to-day there rims all across
France a great scar, in the chalk country, visible to the naked eye, and
everywhere marked by memorials, cemeteries and little woods; there
on French soil, Germany was kept unscathed.
The ten northern departments, which had a population of 4,700,000
in 1914, had only 2,075,000 at the Armistice. Livestock in 1918 had
been reduced to 174,000, about a tenth of the normal. Over 800,000
houses or farm buildings had been destroyed or damaged. In the
richest of the occupied departments, the Nord, over 50,000 houses had
been completely destroyed; nearly 5,000 miles of roads were seriously
damaged; nearly 600 miles of main railway line had been completely
destroyed; nearly 600,000 acres of farmland damaged. So it was in
other departments and, by 1925, a sum of 80,000,000,000 francs had
been spent on reconstruction. 1
The reconstruction of the devastated areas was the greatest economic
achievement of post-war Europe. It involved far greater difficulties
than did better-advertised programmes in more fortunate lands like
It was carried out, too, in specially difficult
Italy and Germany.
conditions. It would have been more economical to use German
labour as a method of payment in kind, but the objection that it
was intolerable that the invaders should return to work beside their
recent victims had some emotional force, although it should be noted

1
As this sum was spent over a period of five to six years with the gold value of the franc
But taking the
varying a great deal, it is hard to estimate its value
in other currencies.
little under
deadweight debt it imposed at the value of the Poincar6 franc, represented a,
it

700,000,000.
599 ftft
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
that was an emotion much more warmly expressed by French con-
it

tractors than by French workmen. Then the stern individualism of


the French peasant stood in the way of a completely scientific re-
building of the ruined farms and villages. The owners of the heaps
of rubble and water-logged foundations often insisted on building
again on exactly the same site and in the same style. Some of the
dreariest villages of northern France had been reduced to ruins between
1914 and 1918, but when the time came to rebuild, they appeared
again in all their nineteenth-century hideousness. In the devastation
of war, boundaries were often removed, and it was made legally easier
to concentrate land holdings, to assemble scattered strips. But peasant
conservatism was still strong; in Picardy, the engineers whose business

it was to re-allot the land were sometimes driven off with stones,

although some progress was made.


Economic pressure did more than the law to change the character
of farming in the devastated areas. The compensation paid for damage
to the land and buildings could legally be spent within a circle of 50
kilometres around the original site of the property, and a good many
peasants took the opportunity of this windfall to settle in the little towns,
further emptying the countryside of the marginal producers. From
the point of view of agriculture the devastated areas, by 1925, had got
back to their pre-war position. They were again the richest producers
of crops in France; of the great cash crop of beetroot, of wheat and,
to a less extent, of flax.
Like the rest of rural France, they continued to lose their native
population. By 1926, the year in which reconstruction may be said
to have been virtually completed, the rural population of France had
declined to 50-9 per cent of the total. Over 3,700,000 agricultural
workers had been mobilized and of these over 600,000 had been killed.
Nor was itmerely the war losses that emptied the countryside; the old
drift to the towns continued. Above all, the number of farm labourers
fell off. The peasant holding, if it was not the divine thing it had been
to earlier generations, was still sacred enough to escape the full effect
of cash computation. The family holding, worked without any hired
labour, or with only seasonal hired labour, could survive where the
farmer who had to pay high wages went under. And, of course, the
great war losses among the peasant class, when coupled with the
limitation of the size of families, meant in many cases that the only
son for whom the holding had been destined had been killed. In the
poorer regions land went out of cultivation and, if it was very poor, it
was not always possible even to find the owner, but it was not only in
the poorer regions that the plough and the spade were less and less
common. Between 1913 and 1921, 7,500,000 acres went out of culti-
vation; nearly 6 per cent, of the total of arable land. In the south-west,
Tarn-et-Garonne, Lot-et-Garonne, Dordogne were still in the bad
600
BETWEEN TWO WARS
way they had been in before the war. In the Gers there were 2,500
abandoned farms.
One important social consequence was that the value of the land
did not benefit by the general rise in prices that followed inflation. A
*
pessimistic expert thought that, as late as 1924, the value of land had
risen by only one-half, while nearly all other values had risen to three
or four times their pre-war value in francs. Although farmland did
benefit by the boom years from 1926 to 1930, its value did not,
except
in the rarest cases, rise proportionately to general costs and, as was

already the case before 1914, arable land did not gain as much as
pasture. The social consequences in a country where landowning a
was so widespread were not unimportant and, when taken in conjunction
with the general results of inflation, the fall in me real value of rentes
and other sources of fixed incomes, and the loss of three-quarters of the
3
pre-war foreign investment, it greatly weakened the position of the
middle classes.
The generally high prices foi agricultural products during the war
and the great prosperity of the home market from 1920 to 1930 made
the lot of agreat part of the French agricultural population economically
more tolerable than it had been in the pre-war years. It is true that
in the rise of prices that followed the stabilization of the franc, the

products of the land got a smaller share of the nominal increase than
did the products of the factory. And the gains were most marked in
the case of cattle raisers, especially for th'- peasants who had taken
over stock from the proprietor of the land at a fixed valuation and,
when their leases fell in, were often able to pay off the whole indebted-
ness for the price of one cow.
The fortune of the cereal producer was less agreeable. Despite
prohibitive tariffs, the good years in which France produced all or
almost she needed were years of what the peasant regarded as
all

unjustly low prices. For him, to produce wheat was more than a
mere economic activity. To permit land that could produce crops
to produce only cattle was, in the eyes of many Frenchmen, to commit
a kind of treason, and M. Daniel Halevy has told us of the scorn with
which a friend of his saw his neighbours go over to the lazy life of cattle
raising. Even the old ferocious industry of the peasant seemed to be
4
shaken. One of the best-informed observers of French rural life saw,
with pain, the neglect of the soil in Pe*rigord and Gascony. Technically
backward, living coarsely, the peasants seemed to his critical eye un-
1
M. Caziot.
1 The magic of property had not lost all its power. It has been noted that in rural
regions where the Communist party is strong, many of its loyal
members would yet be
insulted if it were suggested that they should enter themselves on the census forms as farmers
(agriculteurs) instead of
as landowners (propnttaires). But there were cases where the son of
a man who proudly insisted on his status as a 'proprie^taire', was equally insistent that he
was not a peasant but a mechanic.
M. Cohan's estimate. * M. Emile Guillaumin.
601
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
worthy of their opportunities. 'Middling workers, the peasants were
above all too fond of shooting and going to fairs. And the heather
spread over the fertile slopes where once there grew vines, plum trees,
apple trees, fig trees.'
Some of this severe criticism \yas merited, but some of it represented
resentment at inevitable change. The peasant was no longer so
economical; he spent more on himself and on his family; he had more
and newer if not better clothes; his wife and daughter dressed like
'bourgeoises'; he had better and more varied food. Encouraged by
the Government, rural electrification made great progress, making the
life of the village or the farm less dull. The motor-bus completed what
the bicycle had begun; it up the life of the villages to the towns.
tied
The peasant was no longer strange animal, seen in a favourable light
a
by George Sand, in a gloomier light by Zola. He dressed, talked,
and lived largely as the townspeople did. He preserved a certain
degree of contempt mixed with envy for the townspeople; but improved
transport, general literacy, improved economic status, all diminished
the importance of local traditions and of peasant folk-ways. It also
diminished the influence of local culture; many valuable things were
lost in the spread of a uniform material and, largely, a uniform spiritual

equipment: but not all was loss.


The changes in the peasant's attitude affected his farming methods.
Shortage of labour, when it did not drive him to abandon arable
farming altogether, induced him to risk his capital on agricultural
machinery which, before the war,* had been used mainly by the rich
capitalist farmer. In its turn, the use of machinery imposed co-opera-
tion on the peasant, at any rate as far as purchasing was concerned.
More chemical manure, better seed, a greater willingness to try new
methods, enabled France, despite her falling rural population, to be
more nearly self-sufficient than any other great nation of western Europe.

II

It was in French industry, not in French agriculture, that the war


and its aftermath had the most striking results. The ruin of the invaded
areas was even more complete in industry than in agriculture. The
land, where it was not the scene of actual fighting, merely suffered from
neglect; but all industrial plant had suffered from pillage and the
mines from actual destruction by flooding. In the Nord there were
nearly 10,000 factories and workshops, employing ten men or more,
which had been damaged or destroyed.
To restore the most highly industrialized area of France to its old
activity was a task to frighten any nation, but by the end of 1925 it
had been done. Once it was done certain advantages appeared, for*
France had now an entirely new industrial equipment in her most
602
BETWEEN TWO WARS
industrialized areas. It was an old ground of
complaint that French
industrialistshad been too niggardly in their expenditure on new
capital equipment. Now they had to start from scratch, and every one
of the major French industries (except silk) was of
necessity provided
with the most modern plant. The woollen and cotton factories of the
Nord, the steel mills of Lorraine and the main coal-mines were now
on a technical level with any industries in the world
This development was not confined to the devastated areas, for the
war had greatly accelerated the growth of heavy industry and of mass
production in the uninvaded parts of France. The needs of the war
had created new substitute industries in the centre and south; the motor
and other engineering works had had thei** growth immensely
accelerated; and the great profits of the war years enabled the entre-
preneurs to expand in the post-war boom years.
The most striking Change in the French industrial situation was a
result of thr Tiejty of Versailles. By the return of the annexed half
of Lorr.iine to France, she got complete control of the secono greatest
iron-field in the world. The ore deposits of German Lorraine nearly
equalled those of French Lorraine. United, they made France one of
the greatest industrial powers in the world, although, in the years imme-
diately following the war, the natural marriage of Lorraine ore to West-
plialian coalwas interrupted by tariff and political disputes, and the
chief French market was Belgium-Luxemburg. The recovery of eastern
Lorraine not only increased French ore supplies, it greatly increased
French steel output. France, in fact, became a very considerable steel
exporter, in a position to make terms with the German industry. As
competition of the old type grew less and less popular in the great
integrated industries, the competition of French and German steel in
the same markets was ended by a joint-selling agreement to which
Belgium was made a partner.
The increase in French steel production was not solely due to the
recovery of German Lorraine. Contrary to a general belief, many
French steel were destroyed in the war and were re-
mills in Lorraine

equipment. But the basic difficulty of


built with all the latest technical
the French steel industry, the shortage of good coking coal, remained.
German Lorraine had an important coal-field, and until 1935 the mines
of the Saar were French property, but it was still necessary to import
of French coal
15,000,000 metric tons of coal a year and a great deal
was not suitable for coking. So France had to be a great exporter of
iron ore, not only from the metropolis but from Algeria, and a quarter
of the 50,000,000 metric tons of iron produced at the height of the post-
war boom of 1929 was exported.
In addition to a privileged position as the possessor of the greatest
European iron-field, France was the possessor of the greatest European
source of bauxite, and consequently in a position to develop a great
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
aluminium industry. This was not her only advantage, for she was
well provided with water-power and it was near her sources of hydro-
electric power that her aluminium works were established. This
industry was important before the war and its growth was one of the
causes of the attention paid to the development of water-power, a
development pushed ahead under the influence of high coal prices
during and after the war of 1 9 1 4- 1 8.
France and Italy ranked together
as the two European countries with the most highly-developed
largest
hydro-electric systems, but by 1926, the most easily developed sources of
water-power had all been tapped, while a fall in the price of coal and
a great increase in the efficiency of coal-driven electricity plants had
made much further exploitation of 'white coal' uneconomic.
Recovered Alsace was not so great an economic asset as recovered
Lorraine, but the addition of the Alsatian spindles to the French cotton
industry made it the third largest in the world, just ahead of Germany,
though a long way behind England and the United States. Another
Alsatian asset was the great potash field which enabled France to com-
pete with the German industry and to force her way into the selling
cartel. In Alsace, too, was France's only oil-field, but at best it only
produced 3 per cent, of her annual consumption. Like all the great
industrial countries, except the United States, France was dependent
on imports for the most important of the new sources of power.
Despite the growth of her heavy industry, her increased production
of steel and the rapid expansion of her motor industry, which, with
an annual production of 200,000 cars, was for some time the leader in
the cheap car market in Europe, and with the Panhard, Hispano-Suiza
and Bugatti factories a leader in the luxury market, France was still
mainly an exporter of luxuries and semi-luxuries. Her exports, as
their great increase in mere bulk showed, were less purely luxury goods
than they had been before 1914; but even in the boom years nearly
half of their value was represented by textiles, and the most valuable
textile export was still silk. It was characteristic, too, that although
the artificial silk industry, like the heavy industries, was in the hands
of a few firms, the textile industries were still dominated by family
concerns and, in the case of real silk, by very numerous family concerns.
French export industry still catered for the trades that put a premium on
taste; that were highly susceptible to changes in fashion; that could not
profitably be controlled by bankers and great international consortiums.
Beside the new names of Renault and Citroen, beside the growth
of the Schneider-Creusot interests in Poland, Czechoslovakia and else-
where, the names of the great French vineyards, the names of the great
dressmaking houses, old ones like Paquin, new ones like Molyneux,
Chanel and Mainbocher, reminded the world of the special role of
France.
In. her balance of payments, the profits drawn from her being an
604
BETWEEN TWO WARS
agreeable place to visit or to live in
were greater than ever. The rise
of the summer
season on the Riviera was an important economic
development. Despite short-lived periods of popularity for the Lido
or Brioni, France was more than ever the playground of
Europe. In
1925, nearly 500,000 British and nearly 200,000 American tourists
entered France, and the development of motor traffic was
accompanied
by a great growth in the capital invested in the hotel industry. If
there was a falling-off in the popularity of all but the smartest inland
spas, it was more than covered by an immense growth in the prosperity,
if a decline in the exelusiveness, of the sea-side resorts.

Yet it might be argued thcit France was less in command of the


situation than she had hem. was flooded b" Americans, she was
If she
also influenced by their,. The adopted
city of Offenbach saw her
light musical stage dominated by the unsophisticated lyrics and simple
plot of Rose Marie. Where, a hundred years before, Anglomania had
provided the Lnizlisli players with a glorious reception and Hector
Berlin/ \\ ill) a w ile. and, on the eve of 1914, the Russian ballet c,F Serge
Diaghilcv had L,iven French artistic life a new dose of exoticism, it was
now the turn of America or of Afro-America. Josephine Baker and
Duke Ellington with, in a few years' time, the learned study of 'swing',
\\erc t<>be the rage of the city that had refused to tolerate Wagner.
In the film industry the American influence was c\cn stronger, and it
might have been thought that France was not producing enough that
was new and French to keep the affections of the multitudes who poured
in each year to improve their minds, to enjoy themselves and to help
the French balance of trade.
The growth of the tourist industry helped the position of the French
ports. Now that the main source of the profits of the great liners was
no longer the hundreds of thousands of emigrants who poured into
North and South America each year, the competitive position of France
was improved. For the new tourist traffic she was admirably placed,
and the port of Cherbourg benefited by the change. But the French
she had overtaken her
port that grew fastest was Marseilles. At last
rival, Genoa, but her natural difficulties were considerable.
great
Some minor parts of her old commerce, like that in sesame, had deserted
her, but they had been more than compensated for by
the great in-
crease in the trade in ground-nuts for the manufacture of soap and
oils. Marseilles, however, is cut off from her hinterland by hills,
and
her harbour is now almost entirely artificial. Not content with building
new quays into the Mediterranean, the bold Massiliots planned to
develop the great salt-water lagoon, the Etang
de Berre, which lies
behind the hills. A new
ship-canal was made into the lagoon, and the

greatest navigation
tunnel in the world (nearly 5 miles long) rendered
it possible for barges up to 1,500 tons to go from Marseilles
to the oil

refineries and other port facilities on the Etang de Berre,


THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
If the Rove tunnel was the most original of French engineering
works in the great years of reconstruction, it was not the only one.
Communications between Alsace and France were greatly improved by
a tunnel that reduced the distance between Saint-Die* and Strasbourg
by nearly 50 miles. The Canal du Nord, unfinished in 1914, was
completed; the river port of Strasbourg was greatly improved and given
economic privileges not relished elsewhere in France. Dunkirk,
Cherbourg, Le Havre, La Pallice were all made better fitted to compete
with their rivals. But the fundamental limitations on French maritime
commerce remained. Only a little over a quarter of the shipping
entering and leaving French ports was French and the proportion did
not rise; it fell.
As happened in all belligerent countries, the railways suffered

severely in the war, from excessive traffic and from neglect of repairs.
In addition to these common evils, a great part of the lines of the most
prosperous French companies, the Nord and the Est, had been
destroyed. There was a great deal of reconstruction to be done and
there were serious financial problems to be faced. The solution
adopted was not an amalgamation of the companies, as was suggested,
but the creation of a common pool of earnings. The strong lines were
to help the weak. The separate lines were to manage their own affairs
as they thought fit, but were to be rewarded for efficiency by premiums,
while the State was to bear the losses, if any resulted from the pooling.
Such losses were to be recouped by an increase of rates. It was an
attempt to combine the social advantages of nationalization, the pro-
vision of adequate services for regions unable to pay for them, with
the initiative of private enterprise. But even had the scheme been
more carefully planned from an accountant's point of view, it could
hardly have come at a more unfortunate time. Rapidly rising costs
ate into revenue faster than freight or passenger rates could be raised,
and the growth of motor-bus services hit especially hard a railway
system which, for political reasons, had been saddled with so many
unprofitable local passenger lines. As a result there were hardly any
years when a profit was shown by which the State could recoup the cost
of years in which the losses of the system had to be underwritten. One
of the permanent troubles of the French budget came to be the railway
deficit, and it seemed that the settlement combined the worst features
of nationalization with the worst features of private ownership.
On the other hand, the technical administration of the railways
was greatly improved. The State lines no longer suffered in comparison
with the private lines; French locomotive engineers had long been
famous for their skill in design and they were still worthy of the fame
of Nancy. The main development was the electrification of the Paris
suburban lines and of many of the main lines, especially in the south-
westt There were still considerable differences in efficiency in the
606
BETWEEN TWO WARS
was easy to tell when one left the P.L.M. for the Midi, but on
lines; it
the main lines, at any rate, the French railways provided a
good
passenger service which was speedy not merely by American or German,
but by British standards.
One of capital expenditure during these years must be
last object
mentioned. Likeother countries, France suffered badly from a
all

housing shortage. It is true that her population had fallen by 2,000,000


in the war years, but there had been a
great destruction of property
as well as a complete cessation of building. In the devastated areas,
rebuilding was usually clone by private persons borrowing from special
credit institutions on the anticipated compensation for war
damage.
But the great industries, especially the railways an/, mining companies,
built a great many houses for their employees with a resultant
raising
of the general standard of working-class housing. Other industries
imitated them; rapidly growing towns like Clermont-Ferrand weie
surrounded by Yites ouvrieres' built by the great firms, Miclu-lin and
the like, as part of their policy of social works. Special privileges for
numerous families, or rather remedial measures directed to making a
numerous family less of a housing handicap than usual, w~re features
of these settlements, especially where the employers were zealous
Catholics.
In addition, there was an exodus from the cities to the country.
New suburbs sprang up round all the great cities. Paris was at last
freed from the constricting girdle of her obsohtc fortifications. The
underground railway was permitted to pass beyond the old wall and
the population of Paris actually began to fall, as her inhabitants moved
out to the recently rural communes of the neighbouring departments.
In Paris itself there was a building boom; modern apartments took the
place of the old severe blocks which, even in the fairly rich sections of
the city, had very defective sanitary arrangements, as one of the most
famous of British residents of Paris has pointed out. 1
The desertion of the crowded centre of the cities was only one sign
of important changes in French urban life. Although still socially
conservative to a remarkable degree, war, inflation, the spirit of the
age, allhad their effect on French life. The war had impoverished
many of the middle-class and had given young women an unprece-
dented opportunity to enter business. Clerical work was now open
to them on a far greater scale, especially in banks and Government
offices,* and it was a necessary recognition of a new social
order to open
all examinations to girls on the same terms as to boys.
In other ways the change in the actual, if not the legal, position
of women was For some years the most famous woman in
striking.
France was not an actress (though there were some actresses of talent),
or a writer (though there was one of genius), or a scientist (though
1
Mr. Robert Dell.
60 7
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
there was one of genius). Suzanne Lenglen was known to
also
millions never heard of Colette or of Madame Curie.
who had
Mademoiselle Lenglen was not the only gift of France to the world
of sport. She was unique, but there was Borotra and there was
Carpentier and there was Ladoumegue. Indeed, considering that it was
still the case that few Frenchmen and still fewer Frenchwomen took

part in sport, the proportion of French stars in most sports was abnor-
mally high. But sport was spreading. For the workers, it is true, the
real sporting event of the year was still the bicycle race round France,
but in the north Association football was increasingly popular, and
Rugby was firmly rooted in the Midi, if the furia francese with which
it was played proved too much for the Scottish Rugby Union and caused

the disappearance of France from the international list. There were


still some signs of the old prejudice against organized sport that had
been entertained on the Left. To the old-fashioned Radical intellectual,
sport might be brutal, its teaching might inculcate those false ideas of
physical prowess and unintelligent achievement which it was the
business of education to destroy. From that point of view, sport was
thought of as too often merely a means of clerical propaganda. Had
it not been fostered in the past by persons like Dr. Paul Michaux who

was not only a zealous Catholic but openly advocated physical training
as a means of making better soldiers? In a town where the local
'Reactionary' magnates subsidized sport, it might be desirable for a
Left municipality to provide public facilities for games to counter the
seductions of the Right, but the average French worker's idea of
spending his spare time was bicycle-racing when he was young and

fishing when he was older, unless, indeed, as was too often the case for
the peace of mind of zealous trade-unionists, he spent his spare time
1
working.
had more time to spend, for the eight-hour day had
If he did, he
been conceded by Clemenceau in 1919, It is true that the eight-hour
day, as the worker understood it, was soon eaten into by provision for
overtime, rush work and the like. But even so it meant a very con-
siderable reduction in the hours of work. With it went the general
adoption of the 'English week', that is a Saturday half holiday as well
as a Sunday holiday. 2 This important social change was soon general
in all the great shops, offices and factories.
If any one class in France gained by the war,it was the workers.

As long as the reconstruction boom lasted they were free from the
danger of unemployment. In France as in the United States there
were no accurate employment figures, but on the basis of the demands
1
That typical Left intellectual, M. Charles Seignobos, expressed in 1921 his indignation
at the interest taken by the students of the Sorbonnc in the approaching Dempsey-Garpentier
fight. However, M. Seignobos, unlike Mr. Bernard Shaw, had the prudence to refrain
from absurd prophecy.
*
Sometimes it was found more convenient to take the hatf-hpUday on Monday,
608
BETWEEN TWO WARS
on the poor-relief organizations of the towns,
unemployment at the
worst period after 1920 was less than 100,000, and on several occasions
it sank below a thousand!
Wages were, by French standards, good;
the worker was getting a larger share of the national income than ever
before; and, if prices rose fast, the economies of mass production meant
an increase in real wages. Between 1926 and 1930 the
workers, more
than any other section in France, had comparative reason to
rejoice.
But what was the worker? He was now to an
increasing extent a
foreigner. France had for long been hospitable to foreigners, but in
the years after the war she replaced the United States as the main
recipient of immigrants. American law, by debarring immigration,
made life more intolerable even than usual in
I*ily, Spain, Poland.
France was the one refuge and she was soon host to 3,000,000 foreigners,
most of them workers. Some went on the land, especially Spaniards
and Italians in the Midi, hut for the most part they were a source of
heavy industrial labour. Poles manned the coal-mines and to some
extent the iron works of Lorraine. Italians were to be found in all
trades. There was a more or less temporary migration of Belgians and
Germans over the northern and eastern frontiers. From North Africa
came Kabyles from the poverty-stricken mountain villages, to which
they returned with their hoarded wages and, too often, with a taste
for nkohol and the seeds of tuberculosis. Like the migration of Negro
labour from the southern states during and after the last war, this
emigration was not approved of by the ruling class in the regions
whence the emigrants came. The colonists in Algeria did all they
could to keep their labour force at home, content with lower wages
and worse conditions than they got in France; but the difficulties of
interposing a barrier between what were, in theory, parts of France,
were very great. Stiff regulations as to health and solvency did some-
thing to meet the wishes of the colonists, but Algeria came to be con-
sidered as part of the French labour market. In opening her gates to
immigration on this great scale, France was no doubt acting wisely, but
it is not customary for a country to-day to be wise; and France deserved

more gratitude than she got for providing a new safety valve for that
so vigorously screwed down by the United States.
The immigrants had, of course, many faults. The Poles drank too
much; the Kabyles were given to crimes of violence; the politics of
Marseilles were made even more confused than usual by an immense
half-digested population of miscellaneous foreigners.
But French con-
fidence in the attractive power of French civilization and French ideas
was not baseless. In face of the rising tide of racial mysticism, France
asserted that being French is a state of mind, not a mystical inheritance.
And she united faith and works.
It would have been excessively optimistic in 1919 to have foreseen

that, less than ten years later, France would have


recovered so com-
609
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
pletcly from her ordeal and have recovered almost entirely by her own
efforts. The fairy gold of the German reparations account had been
long in materializing and had not been a serious addition to French
resources. Nevertheless, the north was rebuilt. The arrears of capital
equipment of the war years were more than made up. The budgetary
situation was sound. The balance of trade was flourishing, despite the
great remittances sent abroad by the immigrants, remittances more
than compensated for by the fact that, thanks to that immigration, the
population of France was now greater than it had been in 1914, and
the great predominance of young males among the immigrants was
just what was needed to fill the dreadful gap made by the war.
Old-fashioned people might lament many things, from the short
skirts to cocktails. American songs, American technology, in general
5

'Anglo-Saxon ideas seemed to be conquering the world. The most


that a competent French observer 1 could offer in the way of choice was
Mr. Henry Ford or Mahatma Gandhi. France, if forced to make so
unpleasant a decision, would choose Mr. Ford. It was therefore with
mixed feelings that the news was received of the collapse of the great
American boom in 1929, followed as it was by the financial dis-
comfiture of the complacent English. France had earned her im-
munity, earned her security: for her surely had come at last the enjoy-
ment of
5
'le vierge, le vivace, et le bel aujourd'hui ?

Ill

The withdrawal of the United States from the League and the con-
sequent collapse of the guarantee treaty had made it imperative from
the French point of view to provide a substitute. What Britain and
the United States would not provide must be sought elsewhere, in
the new states of eastern and central Europe; in this way a balance of
2
power would be created in favour of peace. But these obligations
must be mutual; France obviously had to guarantee the Vistula if
Poland was to guarantee the Rhine. Moreover, it was obvious, after
the first year or two of peace, that the non-European members of the
League were, for all practical purposes, to be considered as contracting
out of any possible military obligation under the League Covenant.
The British Government could and did use the reluctance of the
Dominions to undertake any serious commitments as a reason or excuse
for its own withdrawal from any general pact of guarantee, whether
that guarantee was based on a strict interpretation of the Covenant or
on a new treaty or treaties within the framework of the League. It
1
M. Andr6 Siegfried.
1
In its old British sense of an overwhelming weight of power on one side.

610
fcfiTWEEN TWO WARS
was Dominion opposition that justified, in British
eyes, the rejection of
the pact of mutual assistance drafted hi In the meantime, the
1923.
situation caused by the occupation of the Ruhr had increased British
readiness to take some risks for peace, and the return of two Left
Governments, the first Labour Government in England and the first
Herriot Government in France, made for better It
understanding.
was, in fact, the only time that both countries moved in the same
political direction at the same moment.
The result was the adoption of the Geneva
'protocol' which made
an aggressor, made compulsory the accep-
easier the identification of
tance of arbitration and provided for the application of sanctions, as
indeed the Covenant did. War was no longer a permissible remedy for
League members, as it might be argued it had been while the Covenant
failed to provide for the compulsory arbitration of all But
disputes.
the first Labour Government was short-lived; and the new Conservative

Government, ag.iin stressing the unwillingness of the Dominions to


undertake s\u h serious obligations, efused its assent. Another attempt
i

at providing general security had failed.


The next move came from Germany; she wanted a mutual non-
aggression pact in which a third party, Britain, should be a guarantor.
1 his proposal, first made in 1922, had many attractions from a German
point of view. It would tie the hands of France as against Germany,

and, at the moment, that was an unmixed good, as Germany was too
weak to attack France. It was not until the drawn contest of the Ruhr
had convinced Germany that she needed security even more than she
5
had thought, and France that the 'right to invade Germany was a
two-edged weapon, that the proposal became viable. The Germans
made the first move but then drew back, and the initiative fell to Austen
Chamberlain and to Briand, who now took over the control of French
foreign policy.
Briand's qualifications for diplomacy were personal. He was not
learned, he was not, normally, industrious, but he was a born
negotiator. It was said of him that while Poincare knew everything
and understood nothing, Briand knew nothing and understood every-
thing. He had an unrivalled gift for making friends which his curious
political career had
allowed him to utilize. His oratory was un-
readable in print, barely correct, full of repetitions and unnecessary
was
verbiage. But listened to, it was quite another matter; something
heard that could not be transferred to the page. Briand's auditors
could say to those who criticized him from the bare record of the
page, as Pitt said of Fox, 'they had not
been under the wand
printed
of the magician'.
In appearance, 1925 was not a good year for a new departure in
French foreign policy. The sudden death of Ebert had been followed
by the election of Hindenburg as President of the Reich, an event
611
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
interpretedby many Frenchmen as a sign of the incorrigible militarism
of theGerman people. There was a reaction to the Right in Germany,
and that made the position of the German negotiator difficult, too. He
was bound to ask for substantial concessions, not merely entry to the
League and a seat on the Council, but evacuation of the first Rhineland
zone of occupation. At Locarno the difficulties were smoothed over
by the triumvirate, Austen Chamberlain, Briand and Stresemann.
The frontiers between France and Germany were mutually guaranteed
and so were the provisions for the demilitarization of the Rhineland.
The Germans were allowed to interpret the League Covenant in a
fashion that did not bind them to help Poland against Russia, and
although no guarantee was given for the eastern frontiers, Germany
signed arbitration treaties with Poland and Czechoslovakia and, to
make assurance doubly sure, France signed a treaty of mutual assistance
with Czechoslovakia. But for both France and Germany, the great
feature of the treaty was the British and Italian guarantee, at the
moment of greater value to Germany than to France, but bound to be of
increasing value to the latter. It was not an absurdity for the preamble
to justify the treaty with a reference to 'the desire for security and

protection which animates the peoples upon whom fell the scourge of
the war of 1914-18'.
For the moment the tension on France's eastern frontier was at
an end; and Briand, in 1925, attained what he had tried to attain in
1922, a British guarantee of French security. He turned his attention
to France's southern frontier, where the Italian Fascist Government
was embarking on its own vigorous foreign policy, building up its own
client states in the neighbourhood of France's allies and beginning to
make of the question of Italian claims in Tunis a source of pressure
on the elder 'Latin nation'. When an agreement was made, it bore
the true but unsatisfactory name of a modus vivendi\ the real questions of
power and interest were left unsettled. But relations with Italy were,
after all, of minor importance if the problem of relations with Germany
was on the way to solution.
After some Germany had been admitted to the League and
delays,
to the Council, and Briand and Stresemann seemed to the outside world
harmonious partners. They were that in many ways, but there were
reservations on both sides. Briand wanted an organization of Europe
on peaceful lines which would preserve the chief result of Versailles, the
impotence of Germany in a military sense to exert that power which was
hers by her position. It was his wish to give Germany everything that
could be given without enabling her to return to the position of 1914,
which would mean, in fact, attaining a position of predominance she had
not known in 1914. If the experience of war had cured Stresemann
of some of the illusions of his fervently nationalist days, he was still a
National Liberal, ready to 'finesse* while Germany was weak, but with
612
BETWEEN TWO WARS
a permanent reserve in his mind as tp the
acceptance of the territorial
He knew, better than most outsiders, how weak was the
status quo.

position of Liberalism in Germany, how rickety the democratic structure,


and he was ever insistent that the only way to avoid a violent reaction
against his policy of 'fulfilment' was to make generous concessions to
Germany while she was yet weak. Mere gains of prestige, like a seat
on the League Council, were not enough. She must have
tangible
benefits from her collaboration in the reconstruction of a
peaceful
Europe. What the ultimate aims of Stresemann's policy were, can
only be guessed at, but he scored some great successes for Germany,
and these concessions were made possible only because they were
recommended to France by Briand. Briand's enemies assured France
that each concession would be followed, not by an improvement in the
relations between Fiance and Germany, but by a deterioration. 'The
way to treat a Prussian is to stamp on his toes until he apologizes'
was their maxim of policy. But the French people trusted Briand in
foreign poli< y as they trusted Poincare in finance, and concessions were
made.
The Dawrs Plan had never pretended to be final, and it was time,
the Germans said, that something more permanent was put 111 its place.
Tin- result was the setting up of a new Committee presided over by
'

Mr. Owen D. Young, who had been second American expert on the
Dawcs Committee. On this new Committee Germany was now repre-
sented as an equal. Like Locarno, the Young Plan was not a 'Diktat*
but a freely accepted bargain. The Young Plan was naturally more
tender of German sovereignty than the Dawes Plan had been. Control
of German finance ceased and with it the responsibility of the transfer
problem passed from Allied to German shoulders. There was a con-
siderable reduction in the total amount due, and in the new Bank of
International Settlements, Europe was provided with yet another
example of the smooth working of international organizations. With
the financial settlement went a political concession, the area of
occupation of the Rhineland was to be cut down and the final evacu-
ation to be put forward to 1930.
In France, these adjustments were, inevitably, criticized. Any
reduction in reparations payments was attacked. The great building
boom in Germany, made possible mainly by American loans, was
irritating to many French people, especially as
so much of it was the
result of lavish municipal expenditure obnoxious to French ideas of
what local governments should do. The premature evacuation of the
Rhineland, too, was bitterly attacked. Once the French troops were
As long as
gone, it would be seen what German gratitude was
like!

the Allied garrisons were there the Germans would be on their best
behaviour, but once free from their supervision, the old military
arrogance would be revealed. Events did not,
on the surface, belie
613
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
this view. But the real contest H over the Young Plan was not with
Germany but with Britain. It was necessary to allot new percentages
of the reparations payments among the recipients, and at the Hague
conference, called to do this, Mr. Snowden, the Labour Chancellor
of the Exchequer, denounced the attitude of M. CheVon, his French
colleague, as 'grotesque and ridiculous'. The zeal with which British
interests in the share-out were defended by a Labour Government was
a gratifying surprise to the City of London, but Mr. Snowden's manners
did not endear him to the French Government, which was soon to be
in a position where it had to be coaxed, not bullied.
The last great financial question of the war period, the war debts,
was, if not settled, at least temporarily evaded by the Caillaux-Churchill
and Mellon-Berenger agreements with Britain and the United States.
Although the financial terms of these settlements were not rigorous,
they did not tie up the war-debt payments to the reparations settlement;
thus ignoring, in the opinion of many Frenchmen, the very elements
of justice. But the French Government, although it did not for the
moment dare to ask Parliament to ratify the agreements, acted on them
and began to pay. 1
One last promise of the peace settlement remained to be dealt with.
A general project of disarmament had been on the League agenda ever
since Locarno, But a general disarmament treaty without Soviet
Russia would have been absurd, and it was difficult to induce Russia to
co-operate and then hard to know how to handle her proposals when she
did. The French position was simple; security must precede disarma-
ment. Only if they were certain that they would not be overwhelmed
by a dangerous neighbour would states take the risk of trusting to a
general disarmament treaty and, even then, only if the provisions of
that treaty were enforced by inspection. To British statesmen this
insistence on security and inspection seemed to be too cynical, too
mechanical. To French politicians, British trust in the good faith of
her neighbours was due to the fact that they were not close neighbours.
Then in British opinion, conscription was an evil, if only because
it permitted the powers of eastern Europe excessively large armies

which they could not have afforded had they been on a voluntary basis.
In all negotiations Germany had every interest in making the standard
of armaments in Europe comparable to her own. When Soviet
Russia finally came to announce her programme, she startled the world
by asserting that the way to disarm was to disarm, a bold measure
that was in line with the interest of the most secure of continental states:
a state which had, in every country, its own troops: the local Com-
munist party. Britain and France, after the Zinoviev letter and the

1
They were finally ratified after a bitter 'Campaign in which the Opposition plastered
the walls of France with the reminder that the statesmen who were accepting this burden
for the next two generations of Frenchmen were nearly all childless.
BETWEEN TWO WARS
revolutionary activities of the Soviet ambassador in Paris, were alarmed
at this land of peace offer.
Indeed, the first practical steps to meet
the German case were not measures of disarmament but the removal
of the Allied Commission which had the
duty of keeping Germany to
her treaty limits in arms. It was easier to
begin to level up than level
down. But in France, apart from the Socialists, whose
leader, L6on
Blum, made a bold policy of disarmament as a means to, not a conse-
quence of, security, the main theme of his polemics, security before
disarmament was an axiom.
There were other differences between the continental and the
insular points of view. France argued that there were more elements
in military strength than open armaments; in modern industrial
society,
war potential had to be borne in mind. A second Labour Govern-
ment in Britain meant a new effort, and the League made the Labour
Foreign Secretary Chairman of the Disarmament Conference whose
work was just beginning when Europe was shaken by the economic
storm, one of\\ hose victims was the Labour Government itself. There
was, on one side, not enough confidence in the future peace ot Europe
to induce the threatened powers to give up their own armour unless

they could be sure that, on the other side, less immediate!) threatened
powers would contribute at once and effectually to replace it if
occ asion arose. And the less immediately endangeied powers for that
\
cry reason were unwilling to take on extra obligations. Who knew,
they might have to be fulfilled one day? Naval armaments were a
simpler matter. Germany and Russia were noc at the moment active
in this department of military diplomacy; and there was the precedent
of the Washington Treaty. But France and Italy refused to agree that
the problem could be solved in isolation from military problems in
general and they did not take part in the abortive naval conference of
1927. An attempt by Britain and France to secure the acceptance
of their own points of view led to an agreement by which France
accepted the British views of the proper method of limiting
naval

competition in the cruiser class (which annoyed the United States),


while Britain accepted the French view that trained reserves should
not be counted in computing military strength (which annoyed the
Germans). The agreement had to be abandoned. When the 1930
naval conference was held, the dispute was between France and Italy.
limitation which gave her parity
Italy was ready to accept any naval
with France, but France maintained that formal parity between a

country with a coast line on three seas as well as an immense Empire


and a country with naval responsibilities on only one sea was, in fact,
not parity but the imposition of intolerable and dangerous inferiority
on the former country.
Before it was obvious that disarmament on sea or land by general
that the world could not
agreement involved a degree of mutual trust
615
*R
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
yet supply, Briand had achieved his most spectacular, if not his greatest
triumph. On the tenth anniversary of the entry of America into the
war, he suggested to the United States a joint renunciation of war as
an instrument of policy, an idea he had got from Professor Shotwell.
Mr. Kellogg, the American Secretary of State, replied by suggesting
a general renunciation of war open to all the world. The idea was
bound to appeal to the spirit of the age. It was believed that the lesson
of 1914 had been learned and that the evil thing was condemned by the
conscience of the world, and that what that conscience condemned,
died. It was a great triumph of optimism, of that belief in the reason-
ableness and humanity of man of which Briand was the greatest
exponent. He had apparent reason for his faith. He had had checks.
A bold scheme drawn up with Stresemann at Thoiry, which not only
provided for the evacuation of the Rhine before the treaty date,
but for the settling of the Saar question, had had to be withdrawn.
Not all his (or Stresemann's) countrymen were so trusting. But the
ratification of the Kellogg Pact by that vigilant body, the Senate of
the United States, in January 1929, seemed to be one final proof that
all was at last right with the world.

IV

In some ways the greatest cause of French disillusionment with


victory was caused by Alsace. By 1914, the pain that France had
felt at being mutilated in 1871 had become much less acute. The
Vosges were on the way to being a spiritual as well as a political and
physical frontier. The generation whose feelings Droul&de had
expressed, if in an exaggerated form, was passing away. The wreaths
on the Strasbourg statue in the Place de la Concorde meant less and
less to the average Frenchman, and if the French protest against the
crime of 1871 was less purely artificial than the clerical protest over the
loss of the temporal power of the Pope, it was acquiring something of
the same character.
The rising generations of Frenchmen neither talked nor thought
of Alsace as their fathers had done. There was even an attempt
to reconcile France to her loss. Alsace was to serve as a link between
France and Germany, to become a bond of union instead of a cause of
hate. It was evident, too, to all but the most uncritically patriotic
Frenchmen that Alsace no longer reacted against its conqueror with the
old energy. As decade after decade passed and the hope of an armed
deliverance from German rule grew fainter, the Alsatians necessarily
adjusted themselves to their new situation; their political ambition
became not a return to France, but a better status within the Reich.
The federal character of the German State made it fairly easy for
Alsatian claims to "be met; and the constitution of 1911, if it did not
616
BETWEEN TWO WARS
make the Reichsland a Federal- State, did
give it a high degree of
internal autonomy.
Those sections of French opinion which
attempted to keep alive
the old interest in the lost
provinces watched this evolution with
distress. What in these circumstances was the duty of the Alsatians
still
loyal to France? The question was debated in two books; one by
Maurice Barr&j defended the Alsatian notables who
stayed on in
Alsace and tried to preserve their local influence, even
though that
meant accepting German rule; while the older, more sentimental
doctrine was represented by Rene Bazin, whose hero, faced with the
choice of becoming a German officer or
going into exile in France, goes
into exile; thus saving his honour, said one school; thus
abandoning the
position in which ho .'>uld have continued to fight for French ideals,
said the other.
The outbreak of war revived the old interest in Alsace. It was a
dramatic gesture to send the frontier posts uprooted in the first
disastrous imasion of Alsace t*> be laid on the grave of Dcroulcde, for
the. prophet of the 'revanche' had died a few months before the
opening
of th.it war of which he had dreamed. General Joffre issued a
proclamation to the Alsatians welcoming them back to France and
promising them that their local privileges would be respected. But the
failure of the campaign of August meant that only a small fragment of
Alsicc remained in French hands: and there was, for long, no occasion
to think of the problem of what should be done with Alsace when and
if it was recovered.
The Germancollapse made the question suddenly urgent. It was

easy enough to hold military parades in Metz and Strasbourg and to

expel, overnight, the German professors of the university which had


been made the instrument of Germanization in the province, a natural
if regrettable action that evoked an astonishing amount of moral

indignation in some circles outside France. But what was next to be


done was not so clear. In some ways the Germans had made the
French task easier. The loyalty of the Alsatians to their new masters
was naturally suspect and, during the war, German rule had been
rigorous and had undone much of the good that, from the
German
point of view, had been achieved before 1914. Then one great source
of attraction for Alsatians had been the prestige of German arms and
power and that power of attraction was, for the moment, destroyed.
The Alsatians, in 1919 as in 1871,had the material advantage of
for example, to
being taken over by the victors. They were able,
the losses that befell the other parts of the old Reich as a
escape great
result of the collapse of the mark, for the French changed Alsatian

holdings of marks into francs at a high


rate. The first few months
after the Armistice were a kind of honeymoon; it did not last long.
The was well put, years later, by the Senator (Canon) Muller of
problem
617'
THE DEVELOPMENT QF MODERN FRANCE
Strasbourg, priest and politician. He rebuked the folly of the simple
souls in France whose only thought was that the interregnum of
1870-1918 was over. To ignore these years and 'to bring back to
France Alsace just as she had been when she was lost, is this not to
suppress the very problem of Alsace and to escape any need or duty
to understand and solve it? ... Neither France nor Alsace has
found each other as they were at the moment of separation. It is not
merely two or three departments which have added themselves to other
administrative units, it is the living and vibrating soul of Alsace which
has returned to France, the soul of an Alsace which had become more
conscious of her personality, which she had learned to defend against
allattempts at oppression, strengthened in the struggle, jealous of the
had conquered, accustoming herself to take into her own
liberties she
hands the care of her own business.' This Alsace, modified by
German rule, accustomed to far greater local freedom than the French
system permitted, provided with far more elaborate social legislation,
with a far less prudent not to say stingy attitude to local expenditure,
could not, without great political tact, be assimilated to the French
system.
The French Government, to some extent, realized the existence
of the problem. Instead of an immediate imposition of the French
system, instead of the division of the Reichsland into the three quite
separate departments that had existed in 1870, a High Commissioner
was sent to Strasbourg to govern the two recovered provinces. The
delicate task of governing Alsace was given to M. Alexandre Millerand,
now a most staunch Nationalist, but not by that evolution deprived of
those political talents, of that practical good sense which, in his Socialist
past, had justified the choice of Waldeck-Rousseau. M. Millerand was
not a doctrinaire, but a practical lawyer and administrator. He set
up a consultative committee which, though it had no legal powers and
consequently was no effective substitute for the Diet of the Reichsland,
at least made it certain that Alsatian opinion was listened to and that

decisions would not be made on a false assumption of complete identity


between Alsace and the rest of France. But the work of adjusting
Alsatian and French points of view required patience on both sides and
in 1924 the French supply of patience was abruptly cut off.
One survival of German rule that was bound to attract the attention
of French politicians was the continuation of the Concordat. Whether
that agreement had any legal validity after the cession of Alsace to
Germany was doubtful, but it had continued to be observed both by
the Germans and by the French, after 1918. The Catholic, Protestant,
and Jewish clergy were paid by the State, and the lay laws affecting
education were not applied. To the Radicals, anxious to return to
the political normality of pre-war days, this anomaly was intolerable
and the attack on it politically attractive. So in preparation for the
618
BETWEEN TWO WARS
electoral campaign of 1924,
they denounced the clerical danger in
general and the survival of clerical privileges in Alsace in particular.
As all State schools in Alsace were 'confessional', this was
equivalent to
exclusion of the Republican teacher of the standard French and
type;
it was impossible to unify the educational systems, so
long as this state
of affairs lasted.
The new Prime Minister was M. Herriot, himself a member of 'the
University', who was sympathetic to the complaints of his former
colleagues and he profoundly offended the Catholics of Alsace by
preparing to denounce the Concordat and to laicize the schools. The
protest was not confined to the Catholics, for all the Alsatians who were
opposed to the assimilationist policy of the French Government,
evident enough even under the 'Bloc National', rallied round the
clergy. The abolition of the office of High Commissioner and the
transference of the central administration from Strasbourg to Pai is were
further proofs of the intention of the new Government to ignore the
realities of the Alsatian scene.
The Radical error was natural enough. Alsace, before 1870, had
been, ifanything, an anti-clerical province; and before 1914, Left
writers, like M. Maxime Leroy, saw in the Republican u adition of Alsace
the best guarantee that France had left a permanent mark on the lost
province. But under German rule, the clergy had been one of the
main forces of organized opposition; and the spirit that, in Alsace
before 1870, was Republican and anti-clerical, expressed itself after
1870 in opposition to German rule. The leaders in that opposition
were often priests: and the Alsatians, like all other minority parties in
the German Empire, were in something like a permanent alliance with
the great minority party, the Catholic Centre. Then Alsace had not
known the Sixteenth of May, or the failure of the Ralliement, or the
Dreyfus case. The Alsatian equivalent of these crises was a series of
*

contests with the German authorities in which the Catholic clergy had
been on the popular side.
In Alsace, the priest was more in the position of a Polish or Irish
than of a French priest; he was a natural leader of a predominantly
Alsatian
peasant population. It was easy for Left doctrinaires,
like the

Charles Andler, to put all the blame on the greed with which the
Alsatian clergy clung to their stipends. That did not explain why the
to the extension of the
people followed the clergy in their opposition
benefits of the lay laws to Alsace. The Governments of the 'Cartel des
Gauches* were too weak to conquer determined resistance, and as they
could not even withdraw the embassy from the Vatican, they could
not annul the Concordat in Alsace or laicize the schools. The dictum
attributed to Gambetta that 'anti-clericalism was not for export* had
to be applied to the recovered provinces.
Peace on the religious front was not all that was required to

619
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
restore good relations between the Government in Paris and the
independent citizens of Alsace. The linguistic problem remained.
Before 1870, the absence of compulsory education had meant that the
language problem did not become acute. Yet even under the Second
Empire there were signs in both Alsace and Lorraine of special diffi-
culties. The Education Ministry was insistent that all instruction
should be in French; the clergy who controlled the elementary
schools were insistent that part, at least, of the school instruction
should be in the mother tongue of the children: and that, in almost
all Alsace, and in a considerable part of Lorraine, was some kind of
German.
German rule had greatly complicated the situation. Before 1870,
French had been the language of administration; it was spoken by all

officials the bourgeoisie, and learned by all conscripts. The


and by all
commercial connections between Alsace and the rest of France fostered
its use.Under German rule, except in a few communes, all instruc-
tion wasin German and education was compulsory. All the prestige
of the administration was now on the side of High German, which was
closely linked with the AUemanic dialect of Alsace. Moreover, the
emigration of so many of the leading families of the bourgeoisie was a
loss to French speech and culture, the more seriously felt that there was
a corresponding immigration of Germans. Alsace, in 1870, was a
province in which all the upper- and middle-classes were bi-lingual,
but with a preference for French, and in which the peasantry spoke a
Germanic dialect. In 1918, it was a province in which everybody had
a fair knowledge of High German in addition to the local dialect and
in which French was, for most of the population, a foreign tongue.
There was more of a sentimental attachment to it than there was
actual knowledge of it.
At first sight, the policy adopted by France was not absurd.
There were other regions of France where the mother tongue was
not French; there were Breton and Flemish and Basque, all remote
from French, as well as kindred Romance languages like Provencal.
In school only French was taught, a policy that had justified itself
by results; France was more linguistically united than any other great
European power. But in Alsace the case was different, Across an
cpen frontier or across the Rhine, German was the mother tongue and
official tongue of the nearest neighbours of the Alsatians. It had been
fostered for over a generation, whereas the other minority languages in
France had never had patrons. More than that, German still had in
the Reich a patron which saw in the linguistic patriotism of Alsace a
9

way of keeping the 'Alsatian question open, while southern Alsace was
linked, historically and linguistically, to German Switzerland. It was
childish to pretend that in such circumstances German could be treated
like Basque or Breton.
620
BETWEEN TWO WARS
Yet the French educational administrators were
very reluctant to
admit this truth. They saw that the main instrument of German
penetration in Alsace was linguistic; by no means all Alsatians who
habitually spoke German were disloyal to France, but all who were
disloyal habitually spoke German. There were educational arguments
too. The Alsatian dialect was not a
highly developed literary language,
and Alsatian High German suffered from dialectal
impurities.
Whereas, in Lorraine, everybody spoke good German or good French
or both, in Alsace the beneficiary of the attack on French was not the
language of Goethe but the anguage of Hans Snockeloch. Yet, despite
1

these arguments, only an authoritarian government careless of its


popularity could have enforced the linguistic uniformity aimed at by
the school policy.
France in Alsace Juts not been
willing to adopt the methods of
Prussia in Poland. But neither has she been willing to abandon the
view that lias been the official doctrine since the time of the Conven-
tion, that in the Republic, one and indivisible, the language shall be an

expression of that unity. German is taught in all schools but only for
limited periods and it is not the language in which instruction in non-
linguistic studies is given. But although the language question has
been a source of irritation, its importance has been exaggerated.
Alsatians who habitually speak the local dialect are not always willing
to speak correct German even when they know it. Twenty years of
French education have produced a class litei jue in French and therefore
not disqualified from promotion in the French services. The ending
in 1925 of the free market in Germany, provided for at Versailles, has
shifted economic interests from the Reich to France, and communica-
tions between France and the recovered provinces have been greatly

improved.
The faults of tact, to put it kindly, that marked the policy of the
'Cartel des Gauches' were one, but not the only, cause of the growth of
the Autonomist movement in Alsace. With the recovery of Germany
after the adoption of the Dawes plan, the Reich presented a more
attractive spectacle than had done in the years following the collapse
it

of 1918. Curious political alliances between Alsatian Catholics and


Communists angered both the Left and the Right in France, and a
movement that tried to promote a federal solution of the Alsatian

question was in French eyes suspect of merely being a blind for German-
fostered sedition. The of the Autonomist leaders at Colmar in
trial
but the election of the martyrs
1928 resulted in a few convictions,
to the Chamber resulted in their speedy pardon.
1
The Poincan*
it undid some of the more offensive acts of the
Government, although
Herriot Government, was 'laic' and encouraged laicization of the
at the 1928 trials has been
Since the outbreak of the present war, one of the defendants
1

executed for espionage.


621
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
schools; moreover, so rigorous a Lorraine patriot as Poincar was not
likely to be sympathetic to the demands of the Autonomists.
*
The rise of the Nazis complicated matters. On the one hand it
encouraged the small party that wanted the re-annexation of Alsace to
Germany; .on the other, some sections which had been in violent or
noisy opposition to the French Government, the Communists for
instance, saw new merits in French rule. The 'Front Populaire'
dallied with the idea of further laicization; and as the danger of war
grew, Alsace suffered from its frontier character, since businessmen
were reluctant to invest in so dangerous an area and the province
pleaded, with good reason, for special economic help. The threat of
war resulted in an increase of anti-Semitism, since the numerous
Alsatian Jews were accused of wishing for a war against the oppressors
of their race across the Rhine. Uncontrolled Communist, agitation
against the implacable enemy of the workers, Herr Hitler, was con-
sidered by the French Government to be too dangerous a luxury for
a frontier, and, much to the indignation of the party, their freedom
of anti-Nazi propaganda was limited.
When war at last came, Alsace was largely evacuated. Five
hundred thousand of its people, scattered over France, especially in the
south-west, represented an opportunity for mutual understanding that
had not been known before. The exile of the children of the Rhine
to the banks of the Garonne was yet another proof of the special hard-

ships that befall a frontier folk. It was no new story for Alsace, in whose
capital Rouget de Lisle had first sung the Marseillaise. That was not
the only memory of Franco-German relations in Alsace. A few years
before 1792 Goethe had been a student there; in the next century, the
two greatest glories of the University of Strasbourg had been the
Frenchman, Pasteur, and the German (for Jews could then be Germans),
Ehrlich. To be a link between France and Germany was the true
destiny of Alsace: a destiny which she may again be allowed to fulfil.

622
CHAPTER V
THE EMPIRE

was natural that post-war France should be more conscious of her


ITEmpire than pre-war France had been. The Empire had provided
men and supplies on a great scale. The inferiority of French population
to German had been dramatically illustrated, and it was comforting to
talk of a Fnim e of 'one hundred million people', however far from

reality such language was. The ^train of the war had been b.idly felt,
but the drain of troops (pushed to extremes that alarmed colonial
officials like Van Vollenhoven) did mean that hundreds of thousands of
French subjects saw France, and the demand for raw materials fostered
a rapid, if not always a healthy growth. In the fervour of war, too,
were made of advance which it was difficult if not
promises political
if the French Empire did not
impossible to fulfil in peace-time, and
much from the British, did not
suffer as post-war nationalism a it

escape altogether.
As was natural, it was in Indo-China tbat the political authority of
France was most directly challenged. Closely connected economically
and psychologically with South China, the States of the Union, especially
of the Chinese.
Tonkin, were caught up in the revolutionary fervour
Not only were Chinese immigrants extremely powerful in the economic
life of the Union and treated by the Administration with
the circum-
their powerful and uncontrollable organizations made prudent,
spection
but it was easy for the young Tonkinese Nationalists to read very
of 1905, the Chinese
encouraging lessons in the Japanese victory
revolution of 1912 and the Russian revolution of 1917. Canton was
the centre of all these movements, so far as they affected Chinese
nationalism. It was in Canton that the alliance of the heirs of Sun

Yet Sen and Lenin had its headquarters, and from Canton to Hanoi
was not far in space or spirit.
Some concessions were made to the new age. In the Federal
Government and in the States, native representation in the consultative
of the councils
councils was increased; but not only were the powers
in all of them there were still French majorities. M. Albert
limited,
back to the great colony as Governor-
Sarraut, who had been sent
to satisfy native aspirations than it
General, found that it was harder
623
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
had been before the war. The new University of Hanoi was only
a limited success, as far as breeding a generation of natives, French in
spirit as well as in formal training, was
its object. The eager imitators
of Chiang Kai Shek and Borodin were not to be put off by mere
constitutional window-dressing.
One real grievance of the native intellectuals was to a large degree
met. The improvement in the quality of the civil service 'that had
been one of the most valuable reforms of the pre-war Sarraut regime,
was maintained; and a Socialist Governor-General, Alexandre Varenne,
greatly increased the range of posts open to native ambition. In
Annam, a young Emperor who had been largely educated in France,
was the formal and, to some extent, the real initiator of reforms in
his Empire. But there had been at least one great scandal in war-
time, which was not only disgraceful in itself but whose inadequate
punishment showed that the ideal of equal justice between the races
was still far from being realized. If there was no blood barrier
between rulers and ruled like that raised by the Amritsar massacre in
India, there was not enough kinship of spirit and mutual trust to
inoculate Indo-China against propaganda from across the frontier.
There were not merely literary and political demonstrations of
nationalist discontent, there were outbreaks of violence beginning in
1930 and attacking each of the three eastern States in turn. There was
even the very dangerous symptom of an army mutiny which was
rigorously suppressed. The envy which the Indo-Chinese Nationalists
experienced at the sight of the triumphs of their kinsmen in China was
diminished by the feud between the Communists and their allies of the
Kuomintang; and the inability of the Kuomintang to resist Japanese
aggression effectively made French
protection less intolerable to the
most ardent spirits. Peasant discontent was, of course, largely a matter
of good or bad crops and prices; and the world depression was a great
blow to the hitherto flourishing Union. With the decision of the
rulers of Russia to support an allied government, Communism
became less of a menace to French authority in Indo-China l than it
had been; it was external aggression from Japan, irritated at the
use of French roads and railways as a means of supplying the Chinese
armies, that the French Government had now most to fear.
In North Africa, the war and its aftermath brought new problems.
France had drawn more heavily on North Africa for troops than on
any other part of the Empire; there was a far more frequent movement
of population across the Mediterranean than was possible between
France and any other colony ; and if the transitory immigrants from
North Africa to France learned French in their exile and were, in many
ways, modernized, they also learned modern political ideas which
1
One of the leaders of the Fourth (Trotskyite) International is a municipal councillor
of Saigon.
BETWEEN TWO WARS
were inconvenient for the French Administration when the labourers
returned home.
It was in Tunis that the Nationalist movement took
deepest root,
and this was natural enough. Tunis was purely Arab
speaking; it was
influenced by the course of events in
Egypt, by the successful escape of
that country from direct British tutelage; and there was a marked and
depressing difference between the consultative assemblies, local and
central, set up by the new
Bey in1922 and the full-fledged Egyptian
Parliament controlled by the Wafd. French rule, from the
point of
view of the young educated Tunisians, petrified Tunisian
political
life. But for French support, the Bey could not have resisted the
political demands of his subjects. Tunis, from this point of view, was
worse off than if she had been in the position of Algeria. For the
direct representation of Algeria in the French Parliament meant that,
where the economic interests of both colonists and natives were alike
(as they often were), they were represented in the sovereign assembly.
The Tunisian 'Constitutional' parties, the old and the new IJcstour',
l

were simply milder and less mild examples of the Nationalist parties
that were active all over the colonial world in the post-war era. For a
brief time, the regime of the dying liberal governments or Italy made
Libya seem more attractive to politically minded Arabs than Tunisia;
but Fascism soon removed this temptation to disloyalty to France, and
the rigorous methods of Italian conquest and colonization made
Tunisians less anxious for a change of master which, it seemed likely
1
;

in an age more and more dominated by power politics, was the only
choice open to a naturally pacific people.
Italy had, however, her own reasons for encouraging Tunisian
discontent. Although the number of French citizens in Tunis first
equalled and then surpassed the number of Italians, the increase was
due more to the naturalization of Italians than to the increase of genuine
French settlement. In the Regency, the Italians still supplied most of
the labour force, the French most of the capital and technical skill.
If the French counted, with reason, on the dislike of the not very in-
dustrious Tunisians for the severe competition of the Italian immigrant
that
labourers, the Italians counted on the strong anti-Jewish feeling
it was easy to rouse. It was significant that the Jews provided more

pupils for the lycee of Tunis than


did the vastly greater native popula-
tion, and they were far more numerous in
the professions and official
classes than their numbers suggested as likely. That the fault was
that of the Tunisian Moslems, who would not abandon their ancestral
ways of life and was no effective political answer. But the
learning,
French rule in Tunis the native population
simple fact that under
doubled while under Italian rule in Libya it halved could be under-
stood, especiallyas the frontier between the two countries was easily
did not benefit,
crossed, even although the increasing population
625
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
proportionately, by the great growth in wealth in the Protectorate.
And to the old disease of typhus (which the French fought with great
skill, so far as native social habits allowed them), was added the new
vice of tea-drinking, more deadly than the religiously banned alcohol
would have been.
In Algeria, the war promises were peculiarly hard to fulfil. To
extend the franchise indiscriminately to all the male population, or
even to a considerable part of it, would be to swamp the colonists.
The continued insistence on the abandonment of their personal status
by the Moslems was a complete barrier, in fact, to political assimilation.
The old grievance of the automatic naturalization of the Jews still
rankled and the wider representation of the native population on
the local government bodies was no substitute for complete political
equality. Only a few thousand Arabs were naturalized after the war.
But in Algeria the thoroughness of French conquest had its advantages.
The new native bourgeoisie was the product of French rule and French
education. Real equality was open to the few who chose to pay the
price. French was the language even of Arab discontent; literacy in
French was rapidly increasing, as far as the male population was
concerned; and, with the coming of wireless, for the first time the
French Administration had an opportunity to penetrate to the hitherto
closed world of Moslem women. Within Islam in Algeria, modern
ideas were telling, if only because of the penetration of the natural
leaders of the people by French culture. The dream of a mere exten-
sion of France across the Mediterranean was an illusion, but in Algeria,
at least, France had made a new Arab society beside the colonial
society. Their fusion was still an aspiration, not an achievement.
French North Africa had been cut off from the rest of French
Africa by a more effective barrier than the sea, the Sahara, but the
formidable character of that barrier was rapidly reduced in the post-
war years by the development of motor and air transport. Journeys
that, by camel, took weeks, were done by car in days and by aeroplane
in hours. The remote and inaccessible mountains of the Hoggar in the
heart of the great desert were turned, overnight, into a mere post on
the trans-Saharan bus lines and the formidable Tuaregs, the veiled
warriors of the desert, were tamed and turned into valuable tourist
assets like the Sioux or Hopis, but what took a generation in the
American West took only a few years in the Sahara. It was dramatic-
ally fitting that the great master of the old Sahara, General Laperrine,
should have been killed making an aeroplane reconnaissance of the
desert that till then had only known the camel caravan. Soon after
his death, the special desert bus and the aeroplane made the long

projected trans-Saharan railway no longer necessary and Timbuctu


no longer mysterious.
If the desert was in one sense conquered, in another it went on
626
BETWEEN TWO WARS
conquering, for continued to encroach on the fertile lands of the
it

coastal hinterland, Lake Tchad continued to shrink and the


great
French West African domain every year lost on its inner
edge more
habitable land to the advancing sand. The
post-war settlement had
rounded off that great colony by the acquisition of Togoland and most
of the Gameroons, as well as by restoring to France the
Congo territories
ceded to Germany after the crisis of 1911. Of these
acquisitions, the
most valuable was the Gameroons. This colony was held under
mandate, but the vigilance of the League was not enough to prevent
the French (as in Syria) from evading the
prohibition of forced labour
and, at great immediate cost, the old German colony was transformed.
The, new roads and bridges, paid for in the sweat of one generation,
were of the greatest benefit to the next and in the Cameroons a tyran-
nical system of sanitary control wrought a miraculous improvement
in public health.
After as before the war of 1914, the French Congo was the weakest
of the African colonies and its stagnation and the survival of sonic of the
old abuses of the company system made it the least creditable part
of the French Empire. The contrast with the Belgian Congo was
humiliating, and a brilliant man of letters, Andre Gide, called the
attention of his countrymen to the seamy side of their ruie in Africa,
to the delight of the most severe critics of the regime, the Communists. 1
was in Negro Africa that the policy of making over native society
It
in a French fashion achieved most success. The comparative absence
of colour-prejudice continued to be politically profitable, and when the
agitation for the return of the colonies to the Third Reich became
serious, it was a stroke of genius to translate and circulate the relevant
passages of Mein Aam^Tamongsuch natives as might have thought
if any

did that a return to German rule was likely to be to their advantage.


The neglected parts of the Empire were still the old colonies.
The French West Indies, like the British, were stagnating; the attempt
to colonize Guiana by time-expired convicts was less hopeful than it
had ever been, since no one even pretended to retain any of the faith
in the beneficent social effects of the system that had been proclaimed
by Joseph Reinach and the young Gambettists. The Pacific
islands

suffered from the great loss of population that civilization had brought,
and attempts to use Indo-Chinese labour had merely provided the

politicians of the Union with further materials for inflammatory


oratory. The fishing islands of the St. Lawrence knew a brief period
of boom as long as American prohibition lasted, but like the Bahamas
after 1865 when blockade running ceased, the golden day of
Saint-

Pierre and came to an end with the experiment noble in


Miquelon
1
When M. Gide applied the same critical standards, thesame refusal to be token in
official facade, to Soviet Russia, the Communists had reason to deplore their thought-
by the
less praise of his honesty and intelligence.

627
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
purpose. It seemed, indeed, that what the Republic had not founded
itcould not develop. The real difficulties of the old colonies came
from their age; they were relics of an earlier economic system, survivals
of a time when the sugar islands were the great prize of war. In the
modern world they were the equivalent of the ghost towns of a mining
area, only these ghost towns had still a large, indeed an unduly large
population. What to do with that population was a question not
perhaps insoluble if thought and energy had been devoted to it; but
neither was.

II

In 1914, France had only secured the recognition by the great


powers of her right to endeavour to control Morocco; the control itself
was still to be achieved. Legally France, in Morocco as in Tunis, had
all the authority of the native ruler, but not only was the authority of

the Bey much more real than the authority of the Sultan, the problem
of making his nominal rule effective was far less complicated. Morocco
was much larger, its mountains much more difficult to control than
were the Tunisian plains, and its peoples were far more warlike than
the docile inhabitants of the Regency. By the outbreak of war in
1914, French authority was confined to the coast and a few easily
accessible regions, but the Resident, General Lyautey, was skilfully

supplementing the threat of the 60,000 men of his army with the tact
and political ingenuity he had learned in Indo-China and Madagascar.
The outbreak of war made it fortunate that he had not merely relied
on force, for he was deprived of the force. Most of his best troops,
French and native, were sent off to fight in France: and, for four years,
Lyautey had to rely on bluff and on persuading the Moroccans that the
newcomers were not so intolerable a menace to their life and traditions
as they had feared. When peace came the area of French authority
had not shrunk, it had grown.
The Moroccan problem, as Lyautey saw it, was three-fold. French
peace and order was to be established over all the regions where the
Sultan nominally ruled (except the Spanish enclave). Not merely in
form, but in fact, native rights and prejudices were to be respected;
only so could French authority spread peacefully over the land.
Lastly, Morocco was to be opened to European development only as
rapidly as was compatible with the first two objectives.
For this ^delicate task, Lyautey was admirably equipped. He had
lived most of his life in the colonies and if, as his brief and unfortunate
experience as Minister of War in 1916 showed, that had unfitted him
for life in France, the converse was that he was really sympathetic to
the ways and prejudices of backward peoples. His own aristocratic
manner, his aloofness from the standards of the day, his aesthetic
BETWEEN TWO WARS
appreciation of the life of his
subjects made him fit to cajole as well as
to coerce. He was a great European ruler, more than a little de-
Europeanized. In his palace at Rabat he was not merely in form a
Grand Vizier of the Sultan. There were none of those mistakes in tact
that had weakened what might have been the useful
authority of the
crown, in Annam and Cambodia. The authority of the Descendant
of the Prophet was made manifest in all outward show, to the
great
advantage of the real beneficiary of that authority. Lyautcy had been
brought up in Legitimist circles; he could use the divinity that hedged
a king because he had once believed in it. He had been
brought up,
too, in Catholic circles and he could understand the place religion
played in Moroccan life, in this last western outpost of Islam on the
Atlantic. Respect for the religion and traditions of the country came
easily to him and was imposed on his subordinates. There were no
profanations of sanctuaries such as had occurred, as lately as the con-
quest of Tunis, in the most holy city of Kairouan.
Lyante> knew Islam too well, however, to wish it to ha\e .ui un-
checked authority, and in Morocco it was possible to do something to
i ountcrbalam <: it. Morocco was the extreme edge of the Arab-speak-
ing world and Arabic grew thinner the farther west one went. It was
the universal tongue in Tunis, almost so in eastern Algeria, less and less
so as one moved south from the coast and west to the ocean. With
Arabic went the Koran and Islamic theology, the literary and linguistic
links that bound together all the peoples which looked to the university
of El Azhar in Cairo for sacred learning and political inspiration.
In Morocco there were many regions where Arabic, the Koran and,
except in a formal sense, Islam were unknown. There the Berbers,
without a written tongue of their own, should be taught French; there
France would get in first and surround the Arabic-speaking coastal
plain and nearer hills with a Berberia modernized by
French language
and civilization. That this should be done successfully meant that
war had to be avoided. French ways and speech were not to be taught
in Morocco, any more than in Madagascar, at the point of the bayonet.
The great Kaids of the Atlas in their mountain castles were to be won
rule and then,
over, by kindness and by fair dealing, to accept French
to French If they resisted they were to be crushed;
slowly, accept ways.
but it was hoped that few would resist, and if only one or two did,
or long business.
crushing them would not be an unduly difficult
priests, would
The Moors of the cities, the officials, the dislike all

this .and, in fact, like the Orthodox Hindus, they developed a novel
their neglected brethren in die
missionary spirit when their control of
faith was threatened, but the Moors of the towns were no great military
threat. And short of allowing them to interfere in the Berber country,
all their susceptibilitieswere carefully considered, even pandered to.
It was fortunate for Lyautey that, in addition to many other great
629
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
qualities, he was a good
advertiser. For his policy cost vast sums oi
money and a great deal of political patience. It involved a frank
admission that, over a great part of Morocco, France did not exercise
effective authority and a refusal to try to hasten the day when her writ
would run over all her nominal territory. The policy of conciliating
the Moors meant that in Morocco (unlike Algeria and unlike even
Tunisia) great areas of fertile land had to be left in native hands to be
badly farmed or not farmed at all when, if the natives could be induced
to sell or lease, modern methods would immensely increase the yield.
But Lyautey knew, if the eager colonists did not, that the lands they
held or claimed in the plains at the foot of then: hill fortresses were
hostages which the Raids had given to French rule. To rebel meant to
lose their chief source of income. A rapid exploitation of the plains
that involved a great war in the hills would be a very bad bargain.
It was only in certain areas then that, apart from modern roads and

good order, modern civilization in the usual sense of the term was
evident, as it was in Algeria or Tunisia. But if most of Morocco was
left to its old barbaric ways, there were enough miracles of modern

development to stifle criticism, as long as all went well. The mud-huts


of the miserable little town of Casablanca gave way in less than twenty
years to a magnificent modern city and port. All over the coastal
regions, new European towns grew up beside the old Arab towns. But
Lyautey was careful not to let the new cities crush the old or reduce
them to mere slums imbedded in the new European cities as had
happened in Algiers and Tunis. The old and new cities were kept
separate. The twelfth century lived complete and intact a mile or so
from the twentieth, and at Casablanca a new native city was built in
native style. It must be admitted that the new towns gave a false

impression of what had been achieved, for the tenderness for native
land rights had made large-scale colonization practically impossible,
to the indignation of some of the Algerian colonists who had an
American frontiersman's attitude to a policy that kept land untilled out
of exaggerated respect for legal, rights that the Moroccans hardly
understood. But Morocco had many sources of wealth: and even with
the immobilization of so much of the land, it was able to borrow
cheaply and pay for all but the purely military costs of its Government.
In ten years wonders had been done and it was with general consent
that the great ruler was known as 'Lyautey Africanus'.
Although a soldier by profession and one of the Marshals created
after the war, Lyautey was not a soldier in the narrow sense of the
term. He was not perhaps soldier enough, for he neglected the
military risks of his political policy. He was not altogether to blame,
for the risks were not of his making. They arose from the diplomatic
compromise by which Ddcasse* had bought off Spanish opposition to
his schemes. Spain was given a share in the booty; a strip of Morocco
630
BETWEEN TWO WARS
opposite Gibraltar behind her garrison town of Tetuan. Tetuan was a
name dear to the Spanish Army, for it commemorated one of the few
victories won by that army in the nineteenth
century in other than civiJ
war. With the expulsion of the Spaniards from Cuba, Morocco became
the only place where Spanish officers could be
kept busy and a series
of generally disastrous
campaigns served, though very expensively, to
justify promotions and titles. In 1921, however, came the disaster of
Anual; the greatest defeat suffered by a European army at native
hands since Adowa. The victor was a chieftain of the Riff, Abd el
Krim, whose fame naturally spread through all North Africa. The
Moslem world was triumphing in the west as well as in the east (if we
can count Kemal as a Moslem). The defeat of the Spaniards was
awkward for the peace of French Morocco, but the victor of Anual
had still a good deal to do in the way of expelling the Spaniards from
their garrisons. Among the repercussions of his victory was a military
pronundamenlo in Spain; and the new dictator, Primo de Rivera, had the
courage to cut the, losses and to withdraw, slowly and with difficulty, to
the roast.
Meantime., the French advance had impinged on what the Riffs
deemed to be their territory. Flushed with victory, Abd el Krim
launched an attack that nearly carried him to the gates of Fez.
Lyautey was not prepared for war on this scale, and the greatest compli-
ment that was paid the Kaid was the hurried despatch of no less a
person than Marshal Petain to redress the fortune of war. The Riffs
found that Petain and ihe French were very different opponents from
Primo de Rivera and the Spaniards. Worse still, they had given the
Spaniards an opportunity, and a joint campaign in 1926 ended the
career of the new Abd el Kader. As was right, it was to the French
that he surrendered, and they exiled him to Reunion in the Indian
Ocean.
The Riff war gave the enemies of Lyautey their chance. He was
blamed for its outbreak and for its early disasters; the junction in one
hand of military and political authority was attacked, and a civilian
Resident General, the eminent Left politician, M. Steeg, was sent to
1
replace him.
The Marshal had made mistakes as well as enemies. There was
native resentment in Morocco, despite all his tact, for the impact of
modern economic life on the Protectorate often found the Moroccans
ill-prepared for the shock.
The large Jewish population was a further
for it was regarded not as part of the ruling race, but
as an
problem,
inferior branch of the ruled; yet the Jews were far more easily European-
ized than were the Arabs, who, themselves refusing to abandon their
old ways, regarded with a jealous eye the progress of more adaptable
France has fallen back
1
As Morocco has continued to be an international storm centre,
on soldiers to rule for her in this very debatable land.
ss
631
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
Jews. Economically a new country, Morocco suffered from boom and
slump as speculative waves rose and fell and, as a primary producer,
she, like all primary producers, gained less in the fat years, and
suffered more in the lean than did industrialized countries. But by
the time of the official conclusion of 'pacification' in 1934, Morocco had
been transformed. And that transformation, on the whole so peaceful
and so successful, was mainly the work of one man who, with his
political and religious views, would have found it hard to be a deputy
and impossible (in peace-time) to be a Minister of the Republic.
Fortunately for France, in the Army there was a perpetual Ralliement
going on.
In Syria, France had to face a problem more complicated than
any facing her in North Africa. In North Africa, she had been the
dominant power for a century; modern civilization and modern ideas
had come to the Maghreb in French dress; no outside power, except
Egypt and the common feeling of Islam, exercised much attraction
upon native opinion. But in Syria, France was a new-comer and an
unwelcome new-comer, except in the Christian part of the Lebanon
where the delivery from the extremes of Turkish misrule by the troops
of Napoleon III was gratefully remembered. There was, of course,
an old and real intellectual relation between all Syria and France, but
in modern times the American missionaries had been potent rivals
of the Jesuits at Beyrouth, and nascent Arab nationalism preferred the
infidels with no political axe to grind to the infidels who were, and

thought themselves to be, in some degree the advance guard of French


influence. It was an American investigation that, in 1919, had pro-
duced the best evidence of Syrian hostility to French rule.
More important, however, was the contagion of Arab national-
ism from the surrounding lands. Jewish immigration into Palestine
irritated Arabs all over Syria, of which Palestine, in Arab eyes, was

only a wrongfully detached fragment. In Egypt and in Iraq, Arab


nationalism was in constant effervescence against British rule and it
was inevitable that France should have to face the same problem. It
was true that, as the French maintained, Syrian unity was not a
reality as yet and the division of the French territory into four auto-
;

nomous states by General Gouraud was defensible on paper. But


except in the Lebanon it worked badly, if only by artificially dividing
the most irreconcilable sections into the two states of Aleppo and
Damascus. General Weygand undid Gouraud's work, and although
the union of Aleppo and Damascus and the abolition of the top-heavy
federal system were probably necessary, they gave to the rule of the
protecting power an air of impermanence that it could not afford.
The Weygand system was not given a chance to prove its worth,
for after the triumph of the Left in 1924 it was considered out of the

question to leave a reactionary Catholic in charge of an area where the


63 8
BETWEEN TWO WARS
religious question was so important. But the exposed situation of
Syria seemed to demand a soldier ruler. And who more deserving than
the martyred Sarrail? So he was given a third chance to show what a
good Radical soldier could do.
It did not take Sarrail long to decide that
Weygand had unduly
favoured the Christians of the Lebanon, but despite their freedom from
Jesuit influence the other tribes did not display the proper spirit. In
Syria, as in the Cameroons, the French passion for public works had
been pushed to what were politically speaking, dangerous extremes.
Syria was to be provided with roads, bridges, tunnels, irrigation, all
of them things she needed, but she was given them in a hurry and
largely by forced labour. These Russian methods caused discontent
in the towns and plains; they caused more than discontent in the
mountains. Sarrail, having invited some Druse chiefs to consult
with him about their grievances, promptly arrested them on their
arrival at Damascus and found himself with a rebellion on his hands.
The rebellion spread and Sarrail was attacked in his o\\n stronghold
of Damascus, a threat to his authority which forced him, in Ins opinion,
to bombard the city. A government which has to destroy considerable
parts of cities it professes to rule is not likely to !>< loved or respected,
as the British authorities could have told Sarrail, after their experiences
in Cork. Even if the first fine fervour of electoral enthusiasm of 1924
had lasted until 1926, General Sarrail's friends might have felt that,
whatever his merits, he had one unpardonable fault, he was unlucky.
But the Radicals had, by 1926, more to worry about than the reputa-
tion of their General. Sarrail, like L)autey, was recalled and a more
tactful civilian, the aristocratic Left politician, Henri de Jouvenel, was
sent to replace him.
It was possible by force and tact to put down the rebellion; it was
harder to quiet the Syrian nationalists who clung to two simple beliefs;
that Syria was a unit (and included Palestine) and that neither France
nor Britain had any right to be there at all. The old ill-feeling between
the British and French officials had not wholly died down; each saw the
recurrent troubles of the other with a moderately distressed eye and
each believed that the other did less than he should in the way of
or Palestine as a base
preventing the use of Transjordania or Syria
for intrigue or open war against the authority of the other mandatory.
The Syrians had been promised a constitution, but between what
to grant there remained
they claimed and what the French were willing
a great difference. The Syrians looked to Iraq and Egypt with envy,
but they ought, thought the French, to be looking to Palestine with
that their fate was better than that of their brethren. In
gratitude
I 93> France granted a constitution much in the manner of Louis

XVIII the Syrians had to


granting a charter and, despite protests,
As in the Moslem terri-
accept the fact or risk another rebellion. all

633
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
tones of France, land tenure was an almost insoluble problem, for the
great absentee landlords' kept the peasantry so poor as to make it hard
for any Administration (not prepared for revolutionary measures) to
do much for them. And Syria in the twentieth century was a poor,
underpopulated land, a shadow of what it was reported to have been in
classical times. It had far fewer natural resources than had French
North Africa, and the mandatory power had not that sense of personal
interest and permanent authority which had made France willing to

ignore narrow bookkeeping considerations and make the great capital


investment which had transformed her North African territories.

634
CHAPTER VI

BACK TO POLITICS
I

disillusionment bred in Socialist ranks by the failure of the


THE
'Cartel cles Gaudies' to overcome the resistance of the
money power,
followed as it was, by the unsatisfactory character of the elections of
1928, miojit have revived the revolutionary fervour of the first po.^t-war
VUit the general
years. prosperib the absence of
.
unemployment, the
fact that a great part of the true proletariat, with little or nothing to
lose but their chains, was foreign, voteiess and resident in France only
on sufferance, made the prospects of that 'holiday from legality', of
which even Socialist leaders had found it necessary to talk, very far
from bright. If in the elections of 1928, the official revolutionary party,
the Communists, had gained 200,000 votes, they had won only four-
teen seats and not one of these, even in the reddest areas, had been
won on the first ballot. Nowhere, that is to say, was there a mass of
revolutionary-minded workers from which a great mass movement
could come. The Communist deputies, for all their verbal intransi-
gence, were elected in part by bourgeois voters who discounted the verbal
violence of their representatives as they had discounted, for two genera-
tions past, all Left oratory. The electors liked a good show of ideo-
logical purity, but they expected it to be translated into tangible favours
like better local roads, petty local patronage, minor adjustments of the
administrative machine.
In a rural department, Communism often had an odd appearance;
itsleaders might be leaders of a local faction rather than agents of a
world conspiracy. Peasants had always voted, in some departments,
for the reddest candidate and they still did. But they were riot voting
for the immediate expropriation of all private property since they were
nearly proprietors and, in many cases,
all kulaks at that. The rural
Communist leader learned to wear his red with a difference, except at
election meetings, just as the officials of the Ministry of Agriculture
learned to the pursuit of the Colorado beetle at election times
suspend
where an was concerned. In rural France, all political
influential voter
doctrines had to be translated and the sense of property was regrettably
strong. The Socialists recognized this; and their rural expert, M.
635
OF MODERN FRANCE
Compere-Morel, had asfatwQjfr&'q3egsafl| that only the lazy, non-
working landowner had anything to fear from Socialism. The peasant
proprietors would be left to cultivate their own land until, educated
by co-operatives and syndicates, in good time that land became 'by
5
their own will, the collective property of the whole world of labour .

But that good time was far off, as candidates very well knew. Until it
was nearer, Socialists could replace Radicals, especially in the tradition-
ally red departments of the Midi.
With the recognition of Soviet Russia by France (October 1924),
the relations of the two countries were formally put on the usual basis.
But they were in reality bound to remain highly unusual as long as
France had a powerful Communist party which, whatever its preten-
sions to autonomy, was known to be effectually under the control of the
Comintern whose own permanent harmony of views with those current
in the Kremlin was miraculous, if spontaneous. It had long been

customary to accuse various parties in France of taking a lead from


foreign powers; the Conservatives had been abused as the mere agents
of the Vatican, the Socialists as mere agents of Germany. But these
charges had been largely electoral and, although not ineffective propa-
ganda at elections, were not taken too seriously after the ballots had been
counted. The case of the Communists was very different. They were
directly influenced by a government whose policy was directed either
to the aggrandizement of Russia or to the spread of world revolution.
The French Communists could not and, at that time, did not pre-
tend to accept the doctrine that the security of the French State was a
first charge on any political policy. From the old slogan that the
workers had no country, they had moved to the position that they had
a country, the 'Workers' Fatherland', the Union of Socialist, Soviet
Republics. Much of what they said could have been paralleled from
past Socialist speeches and manifestoes, but the Communist leaders
meant it. They were not likely to follow the slippery path that had
led Guesde, for all his formal Marxism, to joining a government of
National Defence in 1914. They were not content to reproach the
governing parties in France with their imperialism; they took active
steps in Indo-China, in Morocco, wherever the French Empire was
assailed, to aid the assailants. How was it possible in these circum-
stances to admit the Communist deputies to all the rights of the other
parliamentarians, to admit them to the Committees of the Chamber,
to make available to them the confidential information that was given
the ordinary deputy?
To a degree unknown to the Guesdists, the Communists were an
immediately revolutionary party, not waiting for a parliamentary
majority or tainted with the patriotic sentimentalism of the Blanquists.
They dreamed of a speedy repetition of the great days of 191 7, More
than that, as the revolutionary tide moved at different levels in
BETWEEN TWO WARS
different countries, as the Comintern, having launched a disas-
trously ineffective campaign in one country, turned to another to try
out its well-tested recipes for defeat, the issues and
slogans had to vary.
French workers, alarmed at local wage-cuts or sore over unsuccessful
-were called on to debate theses of great immediate interest in
strikes,
Moscow but somewhat remote from Lille or Saint-Denis. Local cam-
paigns were started and stopped on distant orders from the Comintern,
conducting the revolutionary war with all the pedantic complacency of
an Austrian Aulic Council, combating General Bonaparte.
Apparently adopting as their principle that it was not in mortals to
command success and that it was quite enough to deserve it, the Com-
munist press had to chronicle a long series of gallant fights against
hope-
less odds whose failure was always due to some
subordinate, never to the
distant Com maud cr-in-Chief. Trusting in the shortness of memory of
the workers and still more of the sentimental
intellectuals, regretting the
existence of of Humanitc not safely under party control, hut ever
files

faithful (apail from the steady loss of traitors expelled oj disillusioned


leaders who resigned) to the mot (Tordrefrom Moscow, the French Com-
munisb. went on their way. Their chief enemy \\as not the openly
(
apitalist leaders, the Tardieus or Poincares, but he 'Socialist-Fascists',
I

the iSocialist-cops', the Blums, Faures, Salencrros. French political


i
ontroversy was never tender of private lives, hut a new record of abuse
was up: the finances, the love-affaiis, the war records of Socialist
set

leaders, all were attacked with the use of all the arts of scurrility, to the
delight of Right controversialists who now needed to go no further to
find ammunition against the leaders of the growing Socialist party, than
to the columns of the paper which bore the name of Jaures on its front

page.
was easy to be intransigent in the Chamber, or at great public
It

meetings; it was harder, when the party got control of a municipality,


to avoid all collaboration with the bourgeois order. For one thing, the
mayor of a French commune an
of the Central Government,
is officer

although elected by the local council. If a Communist mayor


refused
to out his duties to the Central Administration, that did not mean
cany
that the bourgeois state was seriously handicapped, it merely meant that
an official took the place of the mayor. Communal autonomy was too
valuable an asset for the party for it to be prudent to risk its loss merely
to annoy the Administration. There were, of course, frequent conflicts
between Communist municipalities and the Central Government. But
at any rate, over such mundane
they were usually, on the surface
matters as inadequate book-keeping at Ales or Villeurbanne or bonuses
for the capture of what, Paris
rashly paid in a Mediterranean village
asserted, were mythical sharks.
The Communist-controlled municipality was more likely to be dis-
tinguished by its reformist activities than by its doctrinal rigour. French
.63?
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
local government had one characteristic common to nearly every part
of France: thriftiness. Thelocal tax-payers did not tolerate in their
local
government the lavishness that was reproached to the Central
Government by Conservative critics. As long as the taxes were kept
low, very meagre social services contented a thrifty and independent
population. This thriftiness was, by some, attributed to the powers of
financial veto that the law gave to the prefect, but when it is remem-
bered that the mayor of every important town was an important
politician, it is difficult to believe that this veto could not have been got
round, or over, had the mayor wanted to do so. The obsolete taxing
system of the octroi* provided very inelastic revenue, but enterprising
mayors, like M. Herriot in Lyons, could abolish the octroi. The French
v
from his local government as much as he was willing to pay
citizen got
for. That was not much, andiie was as reluctant to' borrow as to tax.
No great country had a less debt-burdened system of local government
than France.
Even before the rise of the Communist party there were cities,
Lyons was one, where a bolder local policy was attempted. But Com-
munist municipalities did, as a matter of principle, spend as lavishly as
the law allowed. It was their only chance to control the distribution
of the national wealth and they took it. Sometimes the results were
comic, like the building of a lavish modern lavatory in a mountain
village; sometimes impressive, like the ultra-modern housing schemes
of Villeurbanne near Lyons. But it was around Paris that the party
was strongest and its municipal policy most profitable, politically and
socially. After the war, the rapid outpouring of the population of
central Paris into the semi-rural communes of the Seine and Seine- et-
Oise presented problems for which the old-fashioned communal council
was ill-prepared. The new-comers were often victims of ingenious real
estate dealers; they were still more often victims of the post-war housing

shortage and they soon found themselves in the majority in the sur-
rounding communes. They had plenty of grievances; there were no
decent roads or drains or street lights. The timid Radical politicians
of the old order shuddered at the thought of the cost of the necessary
improvements. The Communists, in any case strong in a population
largely recruited from Paris workers of the old revolutionary quarters,
took their chance. They would provide what the 'badly-housed' party
wanted. They did and, regardless of financial prudence, the electors
got roads, drains, lights; the swamps where' they were forced to dwell
were made more habitable, ajtid many a district was firmly welded to
the party by methods that recall Joseph Chamberlain in Birmingham
more than Lenin in Petrograd.
Nor was it only in local government that the Communists found
themselves forced to make concessions to the world they lived in. They
1
A t*K on consumption goods entering the commune,
638.
BETWEEN TWO WARS
were far more purely a proletarian party than were the
Socialists, and
that was revealed in the social origin of their candidates, but it was
revealed more in the candidates than in the
deputies, since for some
reason or other, the Communist candidate who got elected tended to be
much less proletarian than the run of the members of the party. After
all, every bourgeois Communist deputy owed something to
bourgeois
electors, even if it was only changing the cap of the workers for the
hat of the bourgeois once he had been elected! The difference be-
tween the social composition of the two workers' parties was reflected
in the trade-union movements that represented their industrial side.
The old Federation of Unions, the C.G.T., was in fact closely linked
with the Socialist party it represented the reformist tendencies that
;

had developed during the war. It was far more ready to trust the
capitalist state than was its Communist rival, the 'Unified' Federation,
and this was natural, as a far higher proportion of its members were
State employees who could benefit by political pressure aiul could
double political with industrial action. It even dallied with the idea
of compulsory arbitration, again not unnaturally, for. as the employers'
'Union of the Metallurgical and Mining Industries' pointed out, com-
pulsory arbitration would greatly strengthen the position of the unions.
'It would give them a role out of all proportion to their numerical

strength; this is far less than is thought.' The Communist unions were
bitterly opposed to such an organization in the capitalist state, though
even they had to swallow their principles when there was a chance of
making tangible gains for a body of strikers through state action. The
C.G.T. was ready to work within the framework of the capitalist state,
even to accept compulsory insurance, though it meant workers' contri-
butions. The Communists attempted to preserve an attitude of com-
plete non-cooperation with the bourgeois state,
but in trade union as
in municipal politics, they had to make concessions to the realism of the
rank and file. Neither party in the golden days of the boom was, or
looked like, a menace to the established order of things which had made
such a miraculous recovery from the ordeal of war.

II

'I never saw, heard, nor read that the clergy were beloved
in any

nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing


can render them popular but some degree of persecution.' This was
the opinion of Jonathan Swift; and that he was right seemed to be sug-
gested by the greater popular
favour enjoyed by the Church in France
since her disestablishment and since the way to power in the State
had
become more to her enemies than to her friends. Catholi-
easily open
cism was no longer 'the religion of the majority of Frenchmen,' although
its rites were still important in the life of the great majority.
Even in
639
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
the red zone round Paris, in the new Cpmmunist municipalities, most
people were married in church (although only the civil ceremony had
any legal effect); most children were baptized; and an overwhelming
majority had religious funerals.
1
As an eminent French Protestant reminded his non- Catholic
countrymen, itwas always risky for Protestants and Jews to mix too
openly in the quarrels between zealous Catholics and anti-clericals of
Catholic origin. There were few of the last class in whose family
archives was not preserved a photograph of a scourge of the priests
wearing the white arm-band of the first communicant. The priest was
5

'part of the furniture of traditional French life, and the anti-clerical


fight wa,s in some degree a family quarrel: Whatever chance M. Her-
riot had had, in 1924, of quietly and quickly breaking off diplomatic
relations with the Vatican and abrogating the Concordat in Alsace-
Lorraine had been diminished by his tactlessness in making his inten-
tions first public in a letter beginning 'My dear Blum'. It was not

only in Alsace (where anti-Semitism was always ready to be awakened),


but in most parts of France that the letter had been regarded as a

. . .

In any case was increasingly hard to whip up enthusiasm for


it

campaigns against the Church. Catholics attributed this change too


much to the realization that the clergy had produced good soldiers, that
the religion of Foch, Petain, Guynemer was not necessarily contempt-
ible. It was due even more to the practical acceptance by French
Catholics of their position as a religious minority. The Church was no
longer a menace to the State. Publicists like M. Maurice Gharny,
politicians like M. Maurice Allard might sound the alarm ai clerical
designs. The cynical, on both sides, might comment on the fact that
the family whose paper was the Bible of Radicalism married a daughter
in the Cathedral of Toulouse and not merely at the Capitol, which was
all the law demanded, but M. Sarraut was only doing what all good

bourgeois and most working-class families did. The anti-clericalism of


a Left comic paper like the Canard Enehatine was almost as much a
standard and stale joke as adultery was in La Vie Parisienne.
In most regions of France, the Church was not a centre of regular
interest for more than a minority of the population. In general, the
regions where the Church was strong were Conservative in politics,
although some politically Conservative regions, like Normandy, were
far from being deeply religious. But even in very Catholic districts the
old identification between the presbytery and the chateau was no longer
universally true. The younger clergy were often affected (their rich
parishioners thought tainted) by Left social doctrines. More than
social doctrine put a barrier between the gentry and the clergy, for
young priests were often hostile to traditional Nationalism and, in an
1
M. Andr6 Siegfried.

640
BETWEEN TWO WARS
age where the question of peace and war was more important to many
Frenchmen than the old staple topics of economics and politics, this
ranged some Catholics more definitely on the Left than any mere social
programme might have done.
The clergy, in general, recognized, as Canon Dimnet has pointed
out, that the old Virgilian country cure, busy with his garden and his
bees, was no longer adequate. The French priest had to be a missionary
in France as much, almost, as outside. In the red zone round Paris
he had to start almost at the beginning: he had to establish 'cells' of
Catholics, as the Communists themselves had established cells in
factories and regiments. The old rural Bobigny had gone, and the new
Bobigny had to be treated like a mission field What would have
astonished both friends and enemies of the Church at the time of the
separation, was the immense growth of church building all round Paris
and, while the State was still bound to the formal, official architecture,
some of the most brilliant examples of modernity were thr new Paris
churches. In other ways, the Church moved with the times. It was
now far more active in social work of the kind that, in France, was
* 5

thought of as Anglo- Saxon T^^scout movement was highly


.

developed (despite suspicious Cathd^ps of the old school who saw in


it a foreign idea, not improbably part of a conspiracy connected with
Theosophy or other kindred evils) . These at t ivities were what an anti-
clerical called 'thetrumps of the clergy", and it was not very easy to
over-trump them. The established c l^rgy of the Republic, the school-
teachers, were not as zealous as their dissenting rivals. It was easier,

as was done in one city, to invite (he Salvation Army in to compete,


than to compete oneself. Only the Communist party could show com-
parable vigour in winning and serving the young.
The old political shibboleths, too, were less profitable. It was easiei
to threaten a Radical mayor with masonic censure for permitting a
religious procession in his city, than to apply political
sanctions to him
in his capacity either as mayor or as deputy. M. Georges de La
Fouchardi&re, as much the official humourist of the Radical party as
Alain was the philosopher, laughed at the curate who cultivated his
hero's mother-in-law in a much more kindly spirit than would have
been safe a generation before, and even 'Alain' preferred the Church to
the Army as a corporation. One, like Saul, had slain its thousands, but
the other, like David, its tens of thousands.
A new generation of Catholic politicians who did not so much accept
the Rallicment as not conceive its not being accepted, appeared, and M.
Champetier de Ribes was not regarded with the permanent suspicion
that hampered the work of Eugene Lamy and Marc Sangnier. Within
the Church, the prelates of the school of Cardinal Li&iart of Lille and
of M. Verdier, head of Saint-Sulpice-and soon to be Cardinal-Arch-
of the old regime as Cardinal de
bishop of Paris, replaced such survivals
641
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
Cabri&res or the nominees of Pius X. It was suspected, too, that the
old Left tradition which the French Dominicans had inherited from
Lacordaire was reviving, and even the Jesuits were less authoritarian in
their politics than they had been a generation before.
These tendencies were suddenly brought to public and scandalous
notice by the breach between the most vehement defenders of the
political rights of the Church and the authorities of the Church. On
the eve of the war of 1914, the Roman authorities had put on the Index
of prohibited books several of the works of M. Maurras, books which
were certainly not edifying to the average Christian. But Pius was X
unwilling to condemn so warm an enemy of his enemies and the con-
demnation was kept secret. Nevertheless, the numerous enemies of the
'Action Franfaise* among the French clergy and laity were ready to
attack and, when the death of Pius X
ended the rule of the intransigent
Cardinal Merry del Val, their hopes were given some justification by the
choice of a Secretary of State made by Benedict XV. He chose the
former Nuncio of Leo XIII in Paris, the promoter of the Ralliement,
Cardinal Ferrata. Cardinal Ferrata only lived a few months, but the
attitude of the new Pope was noted; he was more a disciple of Leo XIII
than of Pius X. The war had brought about a detente in the relations
between France and the Vatican; the renewal of diplomatic relations
was an augury of better times; and, although the 'Cartel des Gauches'
made some anti-clerical gestures, it soon found, as has been shown, that
it had more serious dangers to worry over than the aggressions of the

clergy.
Among the younger clergy, the old dogmatic monarchist tradition
was very weak; there were more disciples of Marc Sangnier among the
young priests and seminarists, in some regions at least, than there were
disciples of M. Maurras. Indeed, in provinces like Brittany, it was a
complaint of the local gentry that their political power was weakened
by the action of demagogic priests bent on creating in France a Left
political party modelled on the German Centre.
The defeat of the Right, in 1924, led to recriminations, and the
attempt of M. Daudet to get back to Parliament by entering the Senate
from La Vendee failed; largely, it was believed, through the opposition
of the clergy, some of whom felt that the author ofL'Entremetteuse * was
hardly a fit representative for the traditional home of Conservatism in
morals as well as politics. In the west, the* powerful Catholic daily, the
Quest-Eclair, was hostile to the Action Fran$aise 9 and what the Ouest-
Eclairthought was highly important in the region where Catholicism
and Conservatism had their traditional stronghold. A series of feuds
within the movement had deprived it of two of its leading members,
Georges Valois and Louis Dimnet, both of whom wrote damaging
1
A remarkably 'frank* novel that M. Daxidet somewhat belatedly withdrew from circu-
lation at the request of the Archbishop of Paris,

642
BETWEEN TWO WARS
attacks on their old leaders, and the mysterious affair of the death of
M. Daudet's young son, Philippe, entailed for the readers of the
paper
almost daily doses of violent abuse of the police which, however
just and
however natural in a distressed father, grew monotonous.
The battle really opened with an attack on the doctrine of the move-
ment made by Cardinal Andrieu, Archbishop of Bordeaux, an attack
which was not very much more fair than the attacks made by the
Action Frarqaise itself. The leaders of the movement attacked Car-
dinal Andrieu and his supporters with such vehemence that
Pope
Pius XI was forced to come to the rescue. Although the Pope sup-
.
ported the bishops who were involved in a struggle with what was a
powerful and unscrupulous organization, his policy was implicitly
criticized by the attitude of many eminent ecclesiastics, chief of them
one of the most eminent theologians, the Jesuit Cardinal Billot. But
Pius XI, on one side, was as authoritarian as Pius X
or Pius IX on the
other. He demanded the resignation of Cardinal Billot and the world
was treated to the almost unprecedented spectacle of a prince of the
Church retiring to a house of his order as a simple priest, it was not
the only innovation, for the Pope had not only put the works of M.
Maun as on the Index, publishing the decree of 1914, but he put the
newspaper, both for the past and the future, on the Index too.
The result was a permanent weakening of the movement. Many
of its supporters defied ecclesiastical authority and supported it, but
most Catholic supporters submitted, although there were some death-
bed scenes that recalled the fight over the bull Unigenitus in the
early eighteenth century, with the disciples of M. Maurras in the place
of the Jansenist followers of Arnauld and Paris. Such a role won
approval for the victims of papa! authority in the most unexpected
places.
Yet no amount of sympathy from old enemies of Rome could com-
pensate for the loss of Catholic support. Nor was this all.
The move-
ment which had been new and daring twenty years before, was a little
out of date by 1926. It had argued in the good old days that a violent
overthrow of the odious system was possible; but it had not seriously
a Monk.
attempted to bring that overthrow about; it had not found
Still worse, the possibility of a revolution on the Right had been demon-
strated, not by an orthodox disciple of Maurras, but by a former
disciple of Georges Sorel. Fascism promised more than the improbable
restoration of the monarchy; and movements like the Jeunesses
Patriotiques' of M. Taittinger won many recruits who,
ten years before,
would have become 'Camelots du Roi'. Like the old orthodox Social-
ists faced with the Russian revolution, the Action Frarqaise
faced with
Fascism seemed academic and ineffective.
The newspaper was to know one later moment of
Action Fran$aise
of overthrowing the
importance, but whatever chances and hopes,
643
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
Republic its devotees may have had, were dead long before the papal
condemnation. 1

Ill

The degree to which the victory of the Centre parties in 1928 had
been due to the general feeling that the maintenance of the Poincare'
Government was necessary for the financial stability of the country, was
revealed in the revived militancy of the Radicals which followed the
stabilization of the franc. At the Angers Congress, the party insisted
on demonstrating recovered doctrinal vigour ; M. Herriot and his
its

Radical colleagues had to leave the Cabinet. Nor were the relations
between the Prime Minister and the great Republican party improved
when he defied their most profitable political doctrine and introduced a
bill authorizing the opening of establishments for recruiting religious
orders which were active in the mission field. So great an affront to the
lay tradition not only rallied all the Left against the Ministry, but
even the .Centre. The Government majority fell perilously low.
split
The leader of the opposition to Poincare* was the young Deputy,
fidouard Daladier, who was now the chief Radical rival of fidouard
Herriot (who had been his schoolmaster). M. Daladier was anxious to
wean the party away from its compromising association with the Centre
and from the excessive demonstrations of detestation of Communism
which were the political line of M. Albert Sarraut and which were quite
incompatible with the old safe rule of political war, as understood by the
5

Radicals, 'no enemies on the Left In the Socialist party itself, a dis-
.

pute of the same kind was going on between M. Blum and some younger
men like M. Marquet, M. De*at and M. Montagnon who were increas-

ingly irritated by what they deemed the barren intellectualism of M.


Blum, a defect in the leader which one of them, a little later, publicly
asserted was explicable in terms of M. Blum's racial origin. But M.
Blum, M. Vincent Auriol and M. Paul Faure were more than a match
for the dissidents and, apart from any other obstacles to a reunion of the
Left as dreamed of by M. Daladier, the terms asked by the leaders of
the Socialists were too high to be met.
The PrimeMinister's health, which was increasingly bad, forced his
resignation, since he refused to remain on as a figure-head; and a short-
lived Briand Ministry fell, appropriately a few weeks after the death of
Stresemann. It was the turn of M. Andre* Tardieu who, despite his old
connection with Clemenceau, now best represented the Poincare* spirit.
The new Prime Minister, in his internal policy, was resolved to recreate
something of the atmosphere of the good days of the 'Bloc National*.
1
In i937 the Pretender announced that neither the methods nor the teaching of the
movement represented the true royal tradition. The position of a Catholic and Royalist
party denounced both by Pope and King was ludicrous and, in 1939, after submission, the
papal ban was raised from the newspaper but maintained for the work* of M. Maurras.
644
BETWEEN TWO WARS
One method was to attack the Communists with all the rigour of the
law, forcing the timid Radicals and the Centre parties to proclaim too
much tenderness for the revolutionaries or, on the other hand, to alienate
potential allies on the Left. The budget surpluses which had accumu-
lated made a programme of great
public works apparently feasible.
France was to have a new 'national equipment'. It was a more
mag-
nificent version of the
Freycinet programme of the 'eighties and a
reward to the country for the stoicism which it had displayed in
accept-
ing the bitter medicine of orthodox finance. The devastated areas had
been restored ; now the rest of the country had a right to improve its
material equipment.
It was a policy of 'good humour', and that France was in such a

flourishing condition was all the more gratifying since her highly critical
friends inEngland and America were revealing that, as had been sus-
pected, these economic: physicians, so lavish with advice in the past
years, were finding it hard to cure themselves. A
minor budget defeat
brought about the resignation of the Ministry, but M. Gamille Chau-
temps found that even a moderate: Radical Government mld not live
in that Chamber. M. Tardieu came back to office with, at the
Ministry of Labour, the ex-Socialist, M. Pierre L;i\al. Fifteen years
before, M. Laval had been thought worthy of a plac e on Carnet B, but
despite many personal friends on the Left, lie was now definitely
leassuring to the admirers of sound finance. Like the majority of the
"Bloc National', the Tardieu Government vuis anxious to show that it
was not opposed to social reform and, ,it long last, it was this coali-
tion of the Centre and Right which passed into law a system of social
insurance.
It was notable, however, that despite the 'reactionary' general char-
acter of the Government, Briand stayed on at the Foreign Office. He
had now become a symbol. His declaration that so long as he was in
office there would be no war, made his continuance in office of the

greatest political value to any Cabinet.


The Left, fully conscious of
this fact, stressed the obvious difference in temperament and attitude
between the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister, but M. Tardieu
refused to admit that the policy of M. Briand was a thing apart from
the general policy of the Government. He took over the direct negotia-
tions with Britain on the reparations question, but few Frenchmen really

regretted that the pugnacious Mr. Snowden


had now to deal with the
combative M. Tardieu. The more idealistic side of foreign policy, the

proposals for a United States of Europe


above all, were the work of
Briand who found that his old political friends were voting against him
and his old enemies for him. The Right might make fun of the 'Pilgrim
of Peace', their great cartoonist, Sennep, make of the cigarette gummed
to the pendant lip an emblem of semi- treasonable weakness, but the vast
reconcile security with peace.
majority of Frenchmen trusted Briand to
645
TttE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
The of Hitler weakened Briand more than it did the Govern-
rise

ment, but was a financial scandal affecting a leading Minister that


it

brought it down. The collapse of the Oustric bank not only made it
1

necessary for M. Raoul Pret to stand trial before the Senate (he was
acquitted) and exposed the Government to the attacks of the indignant
Left; it was one of the first signs of the ending of that golden day when
the main duty of the Government was to decide what to do with its
surplus. M. Steeg found, as M. Chautemps had found, that a Radical
Ministry could survive in this Chamber only on conditions that would
fatally alienate either Left or Centre, and his brief Ministry, although
it lasted over the NewYear, was replaced on January 27th, 1931, by
the first Government of M. Pierre Laval.
With the rise of M. Laval came the decline of the man whose early
career, in many ways, so much resembled his own, the militant spokes-
man of the extreme Left who had become for a time a leader of the
Right. But Briand, in his old age, had recovered the esteem and
affection of his former associates. Despite the rise of Hitler, the death of
Stresemann, the threatening affair of the Austro-German customs
union, his prestige was still high ; and it was confidently expected, at
leastby everyone outside the close corporation of politicians, that he
would be rewarded by being elected to succeed M. Doumergue as
President of the Republic. The extreme Right was in a fury; not
merely was Briand a betrayer of the dead who had won the victory of
1918, but as the Action Frangaise took pains to make widely known, he
had been criminal enough in his youth to be caught in an amorous
adventure, a fact which moved M. Daudet to an unwonted display of
shocked moral indignation. When the election came, whether it was
as a punishment for his early indiscretion, or merely another example of
the political law that the candidate of the Left could not hope to win a
presidential election, Briand was narrowly beaten. The result was
such a surprise that one unfortunate newspaper appeared with a
doctored photograph of the President-elect's triumphal return from
Versailles. The victor was Paul Doumer, who had been a candidate
against Falli&res a quarter of a century before! Briand, like Clemen-
ceau and Ferry, had learned that it was possible to be too great a man
for the Elyse'e.
Briand had pride but he had no vanity, and he was induced to stay
on where his work was crumbling round him
at the Foreign Ministry
in the critical summer of 1931. The dream of a peacefully united
Europe was only a dream. It was a world of power politics that was
being revealed, and France, for the moment, had power, the power of
her great gold reserve. A
series of foreign statesmen came to Paris, to

negotiate or plead, Mr. Mellon, Mr. Stimson, Mr. Henderson, Dr.


Luther, Dr. Curtius, Dr. Briining. M. Laval and Briand returned Dr.
1
See p. 678.
646
BETWEEN TWO WARS
Brttning's visit in Berlin, but no country was willing to make the sacri-
fices that were
necessary to restore mutual trust among the nations of
the world. From being a question of helping
Germany, it soon became
a question of helping England, and the Bank of France and the
Federal
Reserve Bank of New York strove in vain to save the most famous of
all
banks from the humiliating results of the
improvident optimism of the
great men of the City of London. England went off gold. The death
of Andre* Maginot, whose reply to the evacuation of the Rhineland
by
the French Army had been not pacts, but a great fortified line,
gave
M.. Laval a chance to rearrange his Cabinet and Briand
resigned.
In March 1932 Briand died, but before that release
came, the Laval
Cabinet had been overthrown by the vigilant lunate and a new
Tardieu Government formed. The combative Prime Minister
pre-
pared to fight the elections with a modernized version of the tactics of
1919; Communism was the enemy. The results of the first ballot
showed that 1919 had not come again, the tide was running to the Left;
but before the second ballot could be taken, the President of the
Republic was assassinated by a mad Russian exile and, in a hasty and
unopposed election, the President of the Senate, M. Lebrun, was
chosen. In an hour when the news from Germany was getting more
and more ominous, it was not irrelevant that the new President had been
born in Lorraine in 1871. The second ballot merely confirmed the
indications of the first. The parties of the Right were reduced to
around 250 in a house of 605. It was a decisive repudiation of the
policy of the heirs of Poincare, or of their bad luck, for the world
depression from which France had for so long thought herself secure
had struck her with full force by 1932.
The shock with which the French learned that they were not
immune from the economic troubles of the world was less profound than
the shock given to American complacency by the collapse of 1929.
There had never been wanting, even in the days of the most complete
devil or was
euphoria, critics to point out that France had gone to the
going and that many unpleasant features of the situation were being
neglected in the reign of good humour as typified, with different degrees
of success, by M. Cheron and M. Tardieu. The national habit of
denigration had never been wholly abandoned. But the suddenness of
the blow, in France as in other countries, was violent enough to make
almost any remedy seem palatable.
In 1930 there had begun a fall in the total trade of Fiance that was
significant of things to come. Her foreign customers were less and less
able to buy her exports, which were largely luxuries, and the tourist
traffic was beginning to fall off rapidly. Moreover, these customers
were in desperate need of markets and willing to sell at almost any price,
so
so that although the cost of imports fell, their bulk increased and,
French demoralized the
far as they were competitive with products, they
647 TT
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
internal market. With the in value of imports went a greater fall,
fall

in the value of exports: that the unfavourable balance of trade grew


is,

while total trade declined. Thus the balance of trade with Germany,
which had been favourable up to 1928, was now rapidly moving in
favour of Germany as that country fought desperately for foreign

exchange. With exchange control in some countries and with open


inflation following the British example after 1931, the international

price structure was hopelessly distorted.


At any remedy of a high tariff was no longer
rate the old simple
thought adequate. No duties,was asserted, could prevent a sudden
it

flooding of the few remaining markets. France ever since the war had
trusted to high protection, which meant repeated manipulations of the
tariff imposed by the fluctuations of the currency. All that protection
could do had been done.
The new remedy was the allocation of a quota for classes of imports.
In theory, the quota made available in the French market only what
could not be supplied from home sources, at any rate at the proper,
i.e. the current, price. It was an instrument of price stabilization; and
French economic policy in this period was directed to permitting French
prices to stay as they were in a world in which prices were falling
rapidly. If it was desirable to insulate the French price structure, the

quota system had something to be said for it. But, unless the allocation
of a quota to one country or class of imports was accompanied by a
system of licensing, it was hard to avoid breakdowns, for who was to
import and when? If, in addition to the general quota, specific licences
to import were given, favouritism was bound to be suspected, even ifit
did not occur. Then the rigidity of the quota system had absurd
results in the case of agricultural products. If the French production
of a certain crop was low (which was the fault of the weather), high
prices would, under a tariff system, provide the necessary imports. But
under the quota system France had simply to go short, and if, as was
often the case, France was an exporter of finished agricultural goods,
jams, or sweets, or candied fruits or vegetables, a valuable export
market was lost.
But the resolution to maintain the internal price structure of France
was unshaken, above all as it affected agricultural prices. 'Whatever
exporting industries might say (and some of them were themselves
agricultural in character), the right of the French peasant to get a
just price for his wheat and wine (which meant, in effect, the prices he
had been getting in the good years) was a political datum. All parties
must promise to maintain these just prices, and woe to those that failed
to keep the promise; that is to those in power as world prices cascaded
downwards. For there were limits to what could be done by tariffs,
quotas, internal restrictions on the planting of new vines or on the
marketing of wheat. It was possible to cut down foreign trade but not
648
BETWEEN TWO WARS
to Abolish it altogether (for France after all was a creditor country)
It was possible, by quotas, to divert more trade to and from the colonia
empire than had been possible under a mere tariff system. But so long
as the disparity between French and world
prices continued great, the
French balance of trade would get steadily worse on a much smaller
total. France would increasingly export less than she
imported, though
she both exported and imported less and less. Thut
is, a declining
trade structure would have to bear the weight of a
growing unfavourable
balance of payments, which meant diminished customs revenue and,
internally, less and less business activity, with consequently less and
less revenue from indirect and direct taxation.
That, in turn, meant an end of the days of budget surpluses, the
beginning of a scries of deficits and of danger to the franc. Nor was
the last scourge of depressions spared France. Unemployment began
to appear, though on a scale that was trifling compared with the
figures
of Germany, Britain and the United States in 1931-2. The chief
were the immigrants. No longer did France welcome
sufferers, indeed,
Poles and Czechs and Italians. Governmental pressure not merely put
an end to immigration but encouraged repatriation. There was a loss
of hundreds of thousands of the young, vigorous males who had filled
the gaps in the French post-war population. It was one of the most

serious losses of the depression for a country in France's deplorable

demographic position.
Herriot in 1932, like M. Herriot in 19^4, was the predestined
M.
Prime Minister; and he was again unlucky in that his main problem was
financial, while his main talent was political. Leader of what was a
veiled coalition of the Left, he was faced with a situation very like that
which had ruined the last successful Left coalition, a financial problem
whose solution was certain to bring to the surface the usually hidden
differencesbetween Radicals and Socialists. In many ways (apart,
even, from the threatening external situation) the situation was worse
than it had been in 1924, for there was now an economic problem
added problem was merely the
to the financial, or, rather, the financial
fiscalaspect of the economic problem. The Socialists stressed this

point in their speeches and their policy. No


mere fiscal soundness
would suffice. To increase taxes and diminish expenditure in a state
of declining production was folly; consumption must be increased,
not decreased. It was a prescription abhorrent to the prudent, old-
fashioned, bourgeois financier.
Even in the Chamber of 1932, old-fashioned views had a great
Centre
many defenders, though not all of them were vocal. For the
parties were still strong enough,
in alliance with a majority of the
free from dependence on
Radicals, to produce a majority of moderates,
the Right or the extreme Left. But it was out of the question for the
Radicals, so soon after the election, to think
of separating themselves
649
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
from the other indubitable Left parties. Not to speak of the Commu-
nists, who were a mere handful of 12, there were 129 members of the
Socialist party in the Chamber; their leaders were insisting on a very

high price for their support. Before the election, M. Blum had professed
his willingness to take office if his party were the largest in the new
Chamber and if a minimum programme, disarmament and national-
ization of railways and insurance companies, were accepted by the
Radicals. The Socialists had not become the biggest party, but their
terms for support were as high as ever and M. Herriot could not meet
them. One eminent Socialist had broken away from party discipline:
M. Paul-Boncour became Minister of War, a post where he could
plan those elaborate mobilizations of men, women, children and wealth
which made war seem a preliminary to Socialism and alarmed the older
Radicals who disliked both Socialism and war. But although the inter-
national situation deteriorated with a speed that made M. Paul-
Boncour's plans seem more terrifyingly relevant than could have been
dreamed of two or three years before, the financial situation perplexed
the Government more than did the political convulsions in Germany.
The deficit was growing with fantastic speed, all the economic troubles
that had helped to win the election for the Left remained to plague
the victors. The problem of keeping France was too much for
solvent
the Radical party and its leaders, if they had to remain on reasonably

good terms with their Socialist friends.


At Lausanne, reparations had been buried with all the necessary

face-saving formalities. The pessimists who thought that the Hoover


moratorium was the end of making Germany pay anything had been
right. Would they also prove right in their belief that the author of the
moratorium would fail to see the link between reparations and war
debts that was obvious to all Frenchmen? It did not matter very
much, for Mr. Hoover, obviously, was not going to be re-elected. But,
even defeated, he was still President and on December i5th, 1932,
France owed another instalment of $19,000,000 to the United States.
The President in office and the President-elect could do nothing to alter
the letter of the bond. The United States would neither abate nor
postpone, and M. Herriot appealed in vain to the Chamber to honour
France's word. He failed and he resigned, nor could he be induced to
withdraw his resignation. His successor was M. Paul-Boncour, who
strove to balance the budget by reducing official salaries; and M.
Charon simply stopped all entry into the civil service for a year as some
aid to a distressed treasury. The Ministry gave way to another, headed
by M. Daladier: who at least was younger, less oratorical, less tied to
the past than M. Paul-Boncour and, therefore, better fitted to deal with
the problem of the deficit which was now nearly 10,000,000,000 francs. 1
1
In gold pounds, about 80,000,000 ($400,000,000).

650
CHAPTER VII

AND KNAVISH TRICKS


I

it was in large part to the


impact of the world depression on
AsFrance that tin: had owed the apparently decisive character of
Left
their victory i" 1932, it was inevitable that, unless the crisis took a turn
for the better, they would suffer for it. The pressure on the treasury
did not lessen, for falling national income was reflected in
falling
revenue; and extra taxes and ordinary economies could not be made
effective fast enough to overtake the deficit. It was inevitable, then,
that the Government would be forced to take more drastic measures,
and, very reluctantly, M. Daladier had to decide to cut the salaries of
officials.
This step was not necessarily unpopular in the country. Small
shopkeepers, workers on short time or, in some cases, out of work,
clerical employees whose salaries had been drastically cut, all bore with

comparative equanimity the attack on the salaries of that privileged


class, the civil servants. But the proposed cut put the Socialist party in
a peculiarly difficult position. They were, above all, the party of the
fonctionnaire, as the Radicals were the party of the small business and
professional man, and the Communists the party of the proletarians.
To accept a cut in the salaries of their own supporters was to risk a great
deal. The militants were already angry. They had condemned at
the party Congress of 1933 the alliance between the parliamentary
party and the Radicals, an exhibition of doctrinal rigour that had been
enough to drive to the edge of secession some of the most vigorous
Socialist deputies, the able Mayor of Bordeaux, M. Marquet, the

Auvergnat apostle of 'planning', M. Deat, and the veteran friend of


Jaures, the living emblem of the heroic past, M. Renaudel.
M. Daladier tried to make things easier for the Socialists by putting
a good deal of jam on the pill; or rather, promising that jam would
follow the pill. There was to be control of private manufacture of
arms; there was a vague promise of the ultimate nationalization of
armament factories and of insurance companies; as well as of the intro-
duction of a forty-hour week. But the harsh reality of the moment was
the threatened 6 per cent, cut in official salaries. In private, the
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
Socialists pointed out how dangerous it would be for them as a party
to accept the cut; in public they pointed out, through the voice of M.
Blum, how unwise any such measure would be, for the remedy for the
crisis was not economy of this narrow type but the restoration of
economic health by Government action, by restoring demand. Secure
in this political and economic ivory tower, M. Blum condemned the
Government to death. In vain, M. Renaudel, a neglected Cassandra,
warned his party of the dangers they were making imminent, 'We
must defend parliamentary government and democracy.'
The danger invoked by M. Renaudel seemed imaginary to M. Blum.
Fascist threats in France were mere noise! The majority of the Social-
ists followed M. Blum and the party line; the minority was to form its
J
own party, the 'N&>s as they were to be known in a few weeks' time.
But for the moment the Chamber had to provide a new Government.
The choice of the President fell on M. Albert Sarraut, who lasted three
weeks and who was succeeded by M. Chautemps. It was not a good
method of impressing the nation with the seriousness of the deputies,
for the successive Ministries differed only in their heads; the Social-
ists, who had forced M. Daladier out of office rather than accept the
salary cuts, accepted them from M. Chautemps. It is true they did not
vote for them; when the vote came, they stalked out of the Chamber in

great indignation, thus avoiding the overthrow of the Government and


yet keeping their record clean. It was a childish evasion and hardly
even funny.
Faced with increasingly difficult financial problems and with the
impact of Hitler on French security, the Chamber seemed incapable of
following one line of policy or one man or group of men. It was

playing a kind of musical chairs of its own, and this at the best was an
innocent game for quiet times. The times were not quiet and there
was a violent campaign under way to convince the nation that the game
was not innocent.
The leader of the campaign was the vivacious expert of the person-
alities columns of the Action Franpaise, M. Le*on Daudet. The moral
turpitude of the rulers of the Republic was an old story to the readers
of his newspaper, but in addition to the old scandals and the old names,
M. Daudet was busy in these months calling the attention of all good
Frenchmen to the activities of a group of politicians and friends of
politicians. There was the prominent Radical Minister, M. Dalimier,
the well-known but not generally respected lobbyist-journalist, M.
Dubarry, and other prominent figures in the corridors of the Chamber,
men little known to the outside world, but conspicuous in the twilight
zone where politics, business, journalism, sport and the theatre met on
a common and low level of interest.
The campaign might have fizzled out but for the sudden collapse
of a financial scheme which was the last coup of a prominent member
652
BETWEEN TWO WARS
of the underworld, Serge Stavisky. His activities had been brought to
the attention of the police and, indeed, to the attention of the whole
investing world by the officials of the Ministry of Finance, who had
vetoed an ingenious scheme of M. Stavisky for marketing bonds issued to
compensate Hungarians resident in what was now Rumanian territory.
But the good friend of M. Dubarry who edited Volonti, a paper which
took a very kind view of Germany and especially of Herr Hitler, a kind
view that, it was suspected, was paid for and of M. Daiius of the Midi,
and of *so many politicians and lawyers, had many irons in the fire.
The one that finally burnt him was an issue of bonds based on the assets
of the Bayonne pawnshop, a scheme that might have collapsed, only
much later, but for the failure of the Hungarian issue. However
that may be, it was at Bayonne that the first effective police action
against him was taken and that the man
in the street for the first time

heard his name.


On December golh, 1933, the Echo de Paris mentioned the issue of a
warrant by the public prosecutor of Bayonne against 'Serge Alexandra
Within a week, the name was to be the best-known in
1

Stavisky .

the fairly large


France, but at the moment it conveyed little, outside
circle of people in Paris who lived on their wits and the other large
circle of lawyers, journalists and politicians who lived on
the people who

lived on their wits. To these classes, Stavisky was an ingenious and


hold vain crook, with a police record and with charges hanging over
if

him since 1927.That the charges were still merely hanging, showed
in his more elegant
that Stavisky (or Alexandre as he called himself
no doubt at a price. Son
moments) had secured powerful protn lion,
was a fine
of a Russian-Jewish dentist, the young Serge Stavisky
5

specimen of the 'meteques


who were, or so the Action Frangaise asserted,
the ruin of France. He had dabbled in most forms of petty graft, he
was well known to the police, but he was apparently
immune from any
as
He had lots money
of to spend, and although
police interference.
5
noted with in the Chamber,
the current Due d Audiffret-Pasquier pride
he had been kept off the turf by its vigilant
and aristocratic guardians,
of the rich and their
he had shone at Deauville and the other resorts

^^ ^ ^ _^ of many millions of bonds


amount of capital required
on behalf of

the Bayonne pawnshop; the extraordinary


for the working of the pawnshop
of a small country town attracted
were mainly insurance
attention in the long run. The victims
co^
fraud was postponed by the venerable
panics, and the discovery of the
device of two sets of books. The first

had been able to carry out his fraud? The

w
the Mayor of Bayonne, who was
not big game. The second
Stavisky

^ "^
mystery

also a Radical deputy.

question was
was how he

But
*
"^
M.Carat
how Stavisky had man-
the charges first brought against
to avoid defending himself from
653
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
him in 1927. How had he managed to get his trial postponed and his
bail renewed nineteen times? Who had protected him? Then, how
had the not very subtle fraud at Bayonne been so successful with the
insurance companies? The answer to this question was supplied by
the Action Frangaise, which published, on January 3rd, facsimiles of two
letters by the eminent Radical deputy, M. Dalimier, who was at the
moment a Minister in the Chautemps Government, letters recommend-
ing the Bayonne bonds. They had been written in 1932. For what
motives, in return for what services, had M. Dalimier helped to quiet
the suspicions of the insurance companies? For payments to the party
funds of the Radical party, suggested the Action Frangaise. Last and,
from the man in the street's point of view, most important question of
all,where was Stavisky?
While the readers of the Action Frangaise, a body very rapidly growing
more numerous, thought this over, the last question was answered.
Stavisky was at Chamonix, slain by his own hand as the police burst
into the house where he was hiding with his mistress. There was now
death added to thievery and corruption. The death of Stavisky was to
his case what the death of the Baron de Reinach was to Panama.

Alas, it was just this simple truth that the Prime Minister, M. Chau-
temps, failed to recognize. And that failure was especially disastrous
because the Prime Minister's brother-in-law, M. Pressard, was head of
body entrusted with the duty of prosecuting people
the Paris parquet, the
like M. Stavisky. The
situation was delicate; only great political skill
could prevent an ugly scandal, and M. Chautemps did not display that
skill. He was a brilliant debater, a capable administrator, a hereditary
politician, a member of the Republican aristocracy, well and agreeably
known in many circles, but none of these qualifications for high
office compensated for the absence of the Cavourian 'sense of the
possible'. What was not possible was to take the line of Meline in the
Dreyfus case, to pretend that there was no Stavisky case. M. Chau-
temps had won Socialist support and so he was sure of a parliamentary
majority in face of the traditional tactic of the Right, the attempt to
discredit the Republic by throwing mud at Republicans. M. Chau-
temps had his majority; not a very enthusiastic majority, yet a majority.
But that was no longer enough, for the decision was passing from the
hands of the deputies into the hands of the Paris mob or mobs.
As has been pointed out, the idea of a revolution from the Right,
of the organization of the counter-revolutionary forces for a coup dttat,
was, in its modern form, a French invention. But the Camelots du
Roi of the Royalist party were never very numerous and, if they were
militant enough to share with the police the task of keeping central
Paris freefrom Left violence, they were never a menace to the Republic.
M. Maurras had asked, in the optimistic years before the war of 1914,
if a violent overthrow of the hated and despised regime was
possible,
654
BETWEEN TWO WARS
and he had demonstrated that it was. But that
demonstration was
purely intellectual. The proof of the theorem on the
practical plane
was the work of the Fascisti in 1
The success of the armed
Italy.
bands of Signor Mussolini
naturally won admiration and imitation
in France. It was not,
however, the intellectual force of the Fascist
creed that won admiration, but its
success; and the 'Patriotic Youth' of
M. Taittinger 2 were recruited
largely from people who would earlier
have been Camelots du Roi. Then M.
Goty, when he turned from
perfumes to politics, had his own combatant organization, a semi-Bona-
part jst body calling itself the Solidarite Frangaise. This body was
lavishly
'subsidized but, like all the other political activities of M.
Coty,
was treated with an irreverence
astonishing to an English reader who
reflects that, for most
though not for all of this ('me, M. Coty was very
rich. His storm troopers were
suspected of being mainly mercen-
aries, and on the Left they were always known as the Sidilarite Fran-
faisc* Then there were the Francistes, who dressed in a uniform
rather like that of Hitler's storm
troopers and who took tli<>ii name from
the t\vo-headed axe of the ancient Franks, but
although Trench politics
arc highly historical, they were not historical
enough for a party of
ancient Franks to get very far.
In the agitation which was coming to a head in the first months of
1934, the various Fascist bands were reinforced, morally if not materi-
ally, by various ex-servicemen's associations which, like Bonaparte on
his return from Egypt in 1799, askccl the ulcrs of France what they had
i

done with the victorious nation of 9 1 1


9. The unions of old soldiers were
politically divided, though the National Union grouped most of them.
But a minor society of this kind was coming into the limelight, the
Croix de Feu. Originally the Croix de Feu was an organization of
war heroes who had been decorated for courage on active service.
Then it added a branch composed of what were, in Germany, called
and to these it added sympathizers, sons of heroes
'front-line soldiers'
and so on.Not all or nearly all front-line soldiers were members.
M. Daladier was not, for example. But the Croix de Feu did group a
body of Frenchmen who were, in popular esteem, entitled to special
respect. They were mainly a bourgeois body and their chief was a
nobleman, Colonel de la Rocque; proletarian members of the league
were rare, but then France was not a proletarian country.
It was these bodies which, each in its own way, made the parlia-

1 The
Italian Nationalists, who had their own blue-shirted bands, were allies of the
Fascisti in 1922 and were absorbed with the Black Shirts in the Fascist militia in 1923.
The Nationalists owed a good deal to M. Maurras in the matter of doctrine.
An exaggerated admiration for Youth marked all these movements. Even the Radicals
*

had their Jewesses. This worship of 'Giovinezza' was both natural and comic in France,
where, as the German gibe had it, the country was ruled by men of seventy-five 'because
the men of eighty are dead*.
The members were largely recruited from unemployed Algerians, known in Pans by
the genericname of 'Sidis'.
655
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
mentary dexterity of M. Chautemps irrelevant. The war cries came
from the Action Frangaise, the campaign of abuse was the main contri-
bution of M. Henri de ^Cerillis of the Echo de Paris, but all sections
contributed something. The peace of central Paris was disturbed by
nightly riots in which the Camelots du Roi showed their ingenuity.
It was they who discomfited the mounted police by strewing the streets
with marbles and were most ingenious in causing short-circuits in the
street transport system. But all the combatant bodies did their bit;
the police treated the rioters kindly, with suspicious kindness the 'Left
asserted; but behind every debate, behind every parliamentary move,
was the noise of the rioters, the shouts of 'Down with the Thieves' mixed
c
at times with the Up the Soviets' of the Communists.
The refusal of M. Chautemps, backed by the most eminent of
Radicals, M.
Herriot, to authorize a parliamentary inquiry might have
been pardoned in more normal times. After all, as Panama had
shown, a parliamentary inquiry was not necessarily a very good way
of getting at the truth. But these were not ordinary times. The
national sense of the fitness of things was outraged. The Stavisky case
was no worse than the Oustric case, than the Hanau case: granted; but
the general boom atmosphere that secured pardon for the allies of
5
Oustric or of Presidente was missing. 1
'la
M. Chautemps, not
content with refusing an inquiry, proposed to
strengthen the law of libel and remove such cases from the jurisdiction
of a jury! Not being able to prevent the vigilant press from showing
up he was guaranteeing immunity to future Staviskys, so his
Stavisky,
critics put Even the Socialists, who loyally backed him up, did no!
it.

do so with any enthusiasm. Despite his majority, he resigned.


Unless M. Lebrun ignored all the rules of the game, he was forced
to appeal to a Radical leader; and it was to M. Daladier that the task of

clearing up the mess fell. M. Daladier, at the start, showed far more
sense of realities than M. Chautemps had done; he tried to form a
Cabinet on a wide basis, to win over the leader of the Ne'e-Socialists, M.
Marque t, and to reassure the suspicious elements of the Right by in-

cluding M. Yberne'garay. But his negotiations fell through, and it was


a dull Radical Cabinet that was formed, with a few novelties like the
presence of the energetic and young M. Frot at the Interior. Putting
off meeting the Chamber for a week, M. Daladier got time to deal with
the increasingly complicated Stavisky business. It was necessary to do

something that would make a good impression, if only because, since


the split between Radicals and Socialists that had brought about the
fall of the first Daladier Government, the parties of the Right had been
anticipating a NationalGovernment which would ignore the electoral
bargains and promises of 1932. The former President of the Republic,
1
This attitude is not peculiarly French. It is certain that the genial tolerance, by the
American people, of the Teapot Dome scandals in 1924 was due to the general prosperity.

,656
BETWEEN TWO WARS
M. Doumergue, had been talked of as a saviour of the situation, but he
had told a reporter that he was too old.
When, at last, M. Daladier acted, the expectations of all Paris,
if not France, were ludicrously disappointed. M. Pressard, the
all
hitherto untouchable brother-in-law of M.
Chautemps, was moved
from the parquet to a high judicial office; this
kicking upstairs was not
well received. But the transfer of the head of the detective-service,
the S&rett, to the Comtdie Frangaise was too comic to be wise in such an
atmos*phere, and it was universally believed that it was done, not
merely to placate the dismissed detective, but to punish the head of the
national theatre whose great success of the past season had been a
pro-
duction of Shakespeare's Coriolanus. Coriolanus is a play that may fairly
be described as undemocratic: and the Thermidor a^air 1 had shown that
the Radicals were very sensitive to theatrical attacks on their creed.
But it was one thing to ban Sardou and another to ban Shakespeare;
and to put a detective at the head of the 'Maison de Moliere' was to
create a situation to which only Moli&re could have done justice.
The most serious step taken w.is the dismissal of M. Ghiappe from
the Prefecture of Police. The lively little Gorsican was a great Paris
figure. He knew 'everybody' in Paris (including the late M. Stavisky).
He had improved the traffic control. It was no longer dangerous to
life to cross the street. And he had exercised what was, for Paris, a
rigorous control of morals, so that it was no longer impossible to walk
through* certain quarters without being the object of improper pro-
posals. But M. Ghiappe had courted and earned the enmity of the
Communists, whom he had harried even more than he had harried
pimps and prostitutes, and his comparative kindness to rioters of the
Right made him highly suspect to the Left. But like Schober in
Vienna, Grzesinski in Berlin, Yagoda in Moscow, M. Ghiappe was
thought, by the credulous, to be an autonomous power, to
be too danger-
ous to touch. Even M. Daladier, when he decided to remove him and
replace him by the Prefect of Seine-et-Oise,
M. Bonnefoy-Sibour,
offered to make him Resident-General in Morocco. This was another
mistake, for if M. Ghiappe was not to be trusted in Paris, he
was not to
be trusted in Rabat. According to M. Daladier, the Prefect's reply
was to threaten a riot; according to M. Ghiappe, it was to point out that
after years of faithful service, the Prefect would leave office a poorer
man than he had entered it. 2
The riots had while M. Daladier was thinking out what was
stopped
to be done. The informal truce would last only so long as the genuinely
disgusted Parisian petty bourgeois was
convinced that he was not being

had forced the withdrawal of


Forty years before, the Radicals, led by Glemenceau,
1

Thermidor from the Comtdu Franfaise, as 'counter-Revolutionary'.


that he would
TSccording to M. DaladierT M. Ghiappe had said (over the telephone)
*
be dans la rue' to M.
rioting) ; accoixiing
he had said he would be A la rue ,
Chiappe,
(i.e.
that is, broke.
657
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
put off with yet another of those ingenious parliamentary dodges in
which M. Chautemps was so fertile. He wanted assurances that no
respect of persons would prevent justice at last taking her course; he was
presented with a game of administrative musical chairs in which offi-
cials were removed from the jobs they held, and for which they, pre-

sumably, had proved unfit, only to be transferred to equally good jobs


forwhich their only evident qualification was their failure in the posts
they had hitherto occupied. Better things had been expected pf M.
Daladier, who was not one of the Republican smart set, not a Free-
mason, not an orator. The system had been too much for him. It was
time to make an end of the system, to let some fresh air into the Cham-
ber where these preposterous tricks still found defenders.
The dismissal of M. Ghiappe was the match that fired the powder.
The ex-Prefect's letter to the Prime Minister revealed that, for an
official, M. Chiappe had curiously monarchical ideas of his function.
He would not, by accepting any other job, 'sacrifice to you my personal
reputation and the prestige which I had succeeded in giving to my post
and mytitle*. However, he added magnanimously, 'giving all my
collaborators a proof of good citizenship and of republican discipline
I ask of them, no matter how keenly they feel the injustice done to
The implication was that, had he
their chief, to stay at their posts'.
chosen, M. Chiappecould have induced the Paris police to follow
him and not the legal government. Whatever the faults and follies
of the Ministry, the country was well rid of a Prefect of Police with
such ideas.
With him into retirement went the Prefect of the Seine, 1 M.
fidouard Renard. The resignations provoked vigorous protests.
2
Thirty deputies of the Seine signed a joint manifesto charging the
Prime Minister with sacrificing Chiappe to his need of a majority, and
of being blackmailed by Humanitf and by the Populaire. 'The head of
the army of order has been sacrificed to the forces of disorder.'
It was the dismissal of Chiappe, it was generally believed, that was
the price of Socialist support for M. Daladier: and by it he secured a
parliamentary majority that was adequate for ordinary times. But
these were no more ordinary times than 1848 had been, and M. Daladier
was making the same mistake as Guizot had made then. The inde-
cisive character of the new Government's policy, the inconsistent not to

say farcical nature of its removals and promotions, all this seemed to the
man in the street to be a crowning example of the unteachableness of
the politicians. The Action Frangaise, the Ami du Peuple, Humaniti all
rubbed in the lesson and thousands who were neither Royalists, Fascists
1
The executive authority of the City of Paris and of the Department of the Seine is
divided between two prefects, the Prefect of Police and the Prefect of the Seine. Paris,
unlike other cities, has no elected mayor; the nearest equivalent is the President of the
Municipal Council.
1
Among them M. Paul Reynaud.
BETWEEN TWO WARS
nor Communists found themselves
echoing the 'Down with the Thieves'
slogans of the extremists.
On February 6th, 1934, the new Government was to make its first
parliamentary appearance; it was sure of a majority, so now was the
time or never to show the deputies that the was
game up. All the re-
actionary organizations summoned their members to demonstrations,
some of them to combat. The Communist ex-servicemen were also
called out to protest against the thieves and
against pension cuts. The
deputies 'were complacent; there had been so many demonstrations
and the police always had the best of it.
In the Chamber, veteran connoisseurs of
parliamentary disorder
admitted they had never known such a din as greeted the
unavailing
efforts of the new Prime Minister to make himseif heard. The Right
howled, the Communists sang the Internationale, the Ministerial declara-
tion had to be suspended in the middle to allow
something like order
to be restored .An attempt to limit the debate to a few selected speakers
was another of the blunders of the harassed Prime Minister, and, all the
while, a great crowd was pouring into the Place de la Concorde, across
the river from the Chamber.
Jacques Bainville, the Royalist historian, was accustomed to
illustrate the feebleness of the Government of Louis XVI by the fact
that the bridge of Suresnes, which had been wisely kept in wood so that
itmight be destroyed if a mob tried to advance on Versailles from Paris,
was not destroyed on the fatal 5th of October, 1789. The Republic
seemed to have surpassed the Monarchy, for the Pont de la Concorde
had been widened a year or two before and the hard-pressed police and
mobile guards were trying to keep the demonstrators on the right bank
of the river. The demonstration was soon a riot, and soon again an
emeute. There were a few revolvers on the side of the rioters, but they
were mostly equipped with weapons that recall the battles in the
Napoleon of dotting Hill', they had as pikes the iron railings plucked up
from around the trees, they had bottles and stones and, most formidable
of all, razor blades on the end of sticks, very effective in use against
horses. The police charged and charged again; a bus was set on fire
and the stink of burning rubber filled the air. The police were forced
to fire and all the time the debate went on, lifelessly, futilely; timid
shouted that men were
deputies slipped away; indignant deputies
a notice on
being killed outside; a wit among the newspapermen put
the press gallery addressed to the rioters. 'Gentlemen, there are no

deputies here.' At last the Government got its majority, a handsome


one, and the flight from the Chamber began.
Outside in the darkness, they were singing the Marseillaise. A
mob burst into the Ministry of Marine and tried to set it on fire, but a
naval officer in full uniform so impressed the incendiaries that they
left the building. There were attacks on the firemen as well as on the
659
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
police. A procession of ex-servicemen singing the Marseillaise was
joined by a procession of Communist ex-servicemen singing the
Internationale: if a deputy was spotted he was lucky to get away unhurt. 1

By midnight, the last attack on the bridge had been repulsed. The
Chamber had been saved; it was not 1848 or 1870 over again. But the
authority of the Government was too greatly shaken for it to survive.
M. Frot might thank the police and M. Blum preach the necessity of
resisting by force the attempt of Fascist bands to overthrow the
Republic, but the blood on the streets was too fresh a comment on
parliamentary manoeuvres for M. Daladier to ignore it. It was said
that another demonstration was planned for the next day; this time
it was to be led by the aged Marshal Lyautey. If he were shot down,
would a mere majority in the Chamber be enough to save the authority
of the State that had not managed to arrest Stavisky alive?
The reason for the collapse of the Government was well put by
M. Gaston Bergery. When he was a soldier, he had been told by his
sergeant never to touch a machine-gun if his hands were dirty. The
hands x>f the Daladier Government were not dirty in the ordinary
sense, but the whole parliamentary system seemed a little dingy. The
'Republic of Pals' meant that rigorously honest men were on good
terms with fairly honest men who were on good terms with shady men
who were on good terms with despicable crooks. Aymard, Dubarry,
Dalimier, Raynaldy, Chautemps, Daladier; the chain for the moment
was no stronger than its weakest link; Aymard and Dubarry were
weak links indeeo!.

Then, in addition to the moral weakness, there was a material


weakness: the police were worn out. They had been under strain for
a month now; there had been riots nearly every day culminating in
something like a great Paris day'. And if they were not bitterly
c

indignant at the loss of M. Chiappe, they were not very enthusiastic at


the thought that they were killing and wounding, being wounded and
being killed, for so confused an issue as the correct way of looking into
the scandalous affairs of a notorious crook and his political friends and
protectors. If the police failed, there was the Army, but even if it
could be relied on, a Government maintained by military force was a
novelty for the Republic. So despite all the bold or timid critics who
saw in such a surrender the end of parliamentary government, M.
Daladier resigned and M. Doumergue, the ex-President of the Republic,
was called on to form a National Government to liquidate the ugly
business.
It was time, for there was serious rioting on February 7th; this time
it was a demonstration by arid not against thieves. The scum of Paris

1
M. Hcrriot, Mayor of Lyons, was threatened with being thrown into the river. He
was naturally indignant that a mayor whose city boasted two such rivers as the Rhone and
the Sa6ne should have been in danger of being thrown into the Seine.
660
BETWEEN TWO WARS
turned out to take advantage of the disorder to
pillage shops and
individuals in the providential darkness. The police had another nasty
night of it and they were threatened with yet another.
True to their policy of showing up the crooked bourgeois
politicians,
the Communists had made common cause with the in the
Right press
campaign against the Chautemps and Daladier Governments. Some
Communists- had done more than that and had taken
part in the
demonstrations of the 6th, and the party leaders had refused all
collaboration with the Socialists in defence of the Republic
against
Fascism. On the morning of February yth, they denounced Daladier
and Frot and called for a demonstration in the Place de la Rpublique.
This forced the Socialists to postpone their demonstration and to
concentrate on a general strike for the next Monday. Even the most
party-ridden Communist militant could see that the real victors of the
6th of February had been the Fascist organizations and, with the
Gcmum example under their eyes, they decided to join in the general
strike. But the leaders still insisted on having their own demonstration,
despite the pleadings of the new Prefect of Police, M. Konnefoy-Sibour,
with the Communist leader, M. Doriot. So the 91 h saw rioting almost
us bloody as the 6th, but as it took place in the poor quarters of the
East End and as the victims were mostly workers, the press was less
worried about police brutality.
On February I2th came the strike. It was only a demonstration
but it was a successful demonstration. Like the demonstration that
followed the attack on Loubet, it showed that the Paris worker, if not
the Paris bourgeois, was determined to defend the Republic if not the
Republican politicians and it showed, too, that the Paris Communist
was no more willing to believe that the Republic didn't matter one way
or the other than his father had been.

II

If the Republic was to be saved, M. Doumergue seemed to be the


man to do it. If Poincare had not been so ill, he might have been
called in again, but he was unavailable. M. Doumergue would have
to repeat in 1934 the Poincare miracle of 1926. But the miracle was
much harder to repeat than to perform for the first time. Moreover,
the problem set Poincare in 1926 was comparatively simple: how to
ensure that the Government got its share of the abounding national
wealth. But the Government in 1934 was no poorer than the nation
be restored. Lastly and
was, and more than financial health had to
most important, M. Doumergue was not M. Poincare.
Not many people had liked the dour Lorrainer, but most people had
his integrity, his courage were all admired.
respected him; his industry,
M. Doumergue was no Lorrainer; he was a cheerful, expansive man,
661
- THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
despite a Galvinist education. It was not unimportant that the cheap
tailors had used him as a model for the fat jolly man on whom to put
their louder suits. It was the business of a President of the Republic
to smile, but M. Doumergue during his seven years of office smiled
with an ease and conviction that were half his battle. He was not
smiling now. He was called on to form a National Government and
he contrived to get representatives of all parties except the Socialists
and Communists to join. M. Herriot and M. Tardieu were both
brought in but without offices. M. Che*ron, whose fatness and good-
humour made him a Norman version of the Prime Minister, was made
Minister of Justice. M. Sarrautwas put at the great Radical Ministry
of the Interior and, greatest ornament of the Cabinet, Marshal Petain
became Minister of War. Not very much noticed was the most
important appointment of all: General Denain was made Minister of
Air. To him fell the job of seeing that France kept that lead in
military aviation she had had for so many years.
The duty of the Doumergue Government seemed simple. It had
to discover why Stavisky had been so long immune from due process
of law and why the demonstration of February 6th had ended, to take
one version, in a bloody massacre of innocent citizens by the police, or,
to take another, whyit had been possible to organize a conspiracy to

overthrow the Republic. The first committee was known as the


'Thieves' Committee', the second as the 'Murderers' Committee'.
The Committees worked hard and worked candidly, but in the
nature of things, their reports left a great deal in darkness. The
Committee on the riots was unable to prove or disprove either of the
rival theories, although the small body of Frenchmen who kept their
heads decided that there was no planned revolt and no planned
massacre either. The 'Thieves' Committee' had no difficulty in
showing that there was a great deal wrong, but less than the more
virulent critics had asserted. A number of deputies, Garat, Bonnaure,
Dalimier, Hesse were shown up in a displeasing light. To the content
of the historically minded, there was a Proust in this scandal (though
innocently) as there had been a Proust in Panama. Some of the worst
scandals of the Paris blackmailing press were made public; and the
dangers of the habit of subsidizing newspapers were again made
evident as they had been in the case of the Bonnet Rouge.
A great deal of the mud thrown by the expert hands of M. Le"on
Daudet was scraped off. M. Georges Bonnet, for example, had been
represented as an ally of Stavisky; had he not lunched with him at
Stresa? At Stresa the oddest things had happened and it was possible
that M. Bonnet and Stavisky had both been present at a great lunch,
together with scores of other persons. But, as was pointed out by an
acute critic of the system, 1 if the other departments had been half as
1
Mr. Alexander Werth.
662
BETWEEN TWO WARS
vigilant as M.
Bonnet's Ministry of Finance, there would have been no
Stavisky scandal or not one on anything like the same scale.
The real sinners were the detective police and the judiciary. The
police were divided into two rival organizations: the Surete, which*
covered all France, and the Paris detective force under the
Prefecture.
These organizations did not merely not collaborate, but
actively
opposed each other. This clash of jurisdictions accounted for some of
the impunity accorded to Stavisky and to others. But there was more
in it than that. Stavisky had actually been a police spy for the
Suretf and he was paid not in kind but in privileges. The nation was
treated to an inside view of the gambling world in which
Stavisky had
moved, from the internationally famed Zographos syndicate to the
petty bookmakers of the Paris region. In that w^rld, police toleration
was, if not indispensable, valuable. How was it got? By connections,
above all by political connections. Police officials learned to go easy
with certain gamblers and groups of gamblers because thcv had
political fnoiicls.
These connections were the explanation of the failure of the judicial
put a stop to the career of Stavisky and of other crooks of the
officials to
same type. True, the inefficiency of the system was partly due to
inadequate staffing. The parquet of Paris, whose du(\ it was to investi-
gate complaints and decide if there was ground for a prosecution, was
hopelessly overworked. With all the good will, integrity and inde-
pendence in the world, it could only decide by a crude rule-of-thumb.
And if its good will and integrity were not in doubt, its independence

was. For, by the side of Stavisky, there was always the deputy. That
it was a help to a practising lawyer to be a deputy was an old story.

But there was a difference between M. Leon Blum and M. Bonnaure,


the Radical deputy who was Stavisky's mouthpiece. Without his
parliamentary connections, Bonnaure would have been impotent.
With them, he was able to make legal officials see the advisability of
going slow. And no wonder, for if M. Bonnaure was not likely
to be a

Minister of Justice, his political allies included men who might well be.
And from the Minister ofJustice came those promotions which crowned
a legal career with honour. To defy a Minister who, for any reason,
wanted certain things done or undone, was risky.

Magistrates could remember Rochette,


whose political sponsor
was that eminent elder statesman, M. Gaillaux. They might even
remember the role of M. Doumergue in the matter. No doubt
these interventions were rare, but they were possible. How was an
to know that behind Bonnaure there was not
examining magistrate
some more formidable political figure? And the Stavisky case did
little to shake the belief of the Frenchman that there was a
average
administration at the disposal of those persons
superior type of judicial
who could pull political wires.
663
uu
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
It was a theory that it was impossible to refute completely. To
argue that political morality was better now than it had been under the
First Empire was merely silly. Napoleon I had Austerlitz and the
Code to cover his tolerance of Ouvrard. The Republic had the
Place de la Concorde and the holes in the Code. Nor was the statistical
argument much better. Even if one takes M. Tardieu's figure of
seventeen deputies as the maximum number of those involved in the
case, it does not follow, as has been ingeniously argued, that thisjshows
an improvement in parliamentary ethics since Panama. For if a
hundred or more deputies were involved in Panama, that was because
a law was needed to keep Leviathan afloat. Stavisky needed not a
law but dispensation from existing law. And Stavisky was no Reinach,
not even a Herz. That so shabby and petty a crook should have had
seventeen deputies in his train was more disconcerting than that so
great an effort should have been made to buy salvation for the greatest
enterprise of modern French industry. How much wiser was the
line taken by the 'Socialist Youth' before the tmeute. They were against
the thieves, of course. 'But we will not permit the exploitation of the
scandals against the regime.' They fell back, that is to say, on what
M. Ribot had said in 1892 and, politically speaking, they could not have
done better!
The real clue to the scandals was
be found in the lack of responsi-
to

bility. Ministries came and went; authorizations were given and


refused; in the perpetual flux, the Bonnaures had their little share of
authority. The horror of trusting to one man, or a group of men, any
real power of coercion or control over the State, meant that the

authority of the State was parcelled out among the mass of politicians
and their hangers-on. Most of these politicians were honest, but they
were not and could not be critical. A horror of State power was the
Radical philosophy; the sale of their share of this divided power was
the practice of such Radical Deputies as MM. Garat, Bonnaure and
Hesse.
It had long been a complaint against French administration that
it was burdened by too much paper, by too much paperasserie. An
event that almost wiped out the memory of February 6th, showed that
it sometimes suffered from too little. On the morning of February 2 ist,
there was found on the railway line near Dijon, the horribly mutilated
body of Albert Prince, a high legal official of the Paris parquet. He was
fastened to the line, he had been drugged; it was easy to conclude that
he had been murdered. And if he had been murdered, by whom?
That was easy to answer! By those who had reason to silence a man
who could really explain why Sjavisky had been let alone. And who
were they? Why, M. Camille Chautemps and his brother-in-law,
M. Pressard! It was assumed that M. Prince had inside knowledge of
the case, that he had documents proving that M. Pressard had pre-
664
BETWEEN TWO WARS
vented justice taking its course, and that these documents had been in
the possession of Prince when he had been murdered at Dijon. Prince,
himself, had dropped hints of this kind before his wife had received a
mysterious telephone call, instructing her husband to come at once to
Dijon where his mother was dangerously ill. He had gone off to
Dijon; he had arrived; he had next been seen cut into three pieces on
the line.
It was a story beating all but the most improbable inventions of
detective fiction. 1 Minister of the Interior, M. Sarraut, immedi-
The
*

ately caught the public attention with denunciations of a Mafia'


which had murdered Prince, but at whose orders? A
newspaper,
retired members of Scotland Yard
suspicious of the official police, hired
to make their own investigation, and various highly deplorable characters
were arrested, but they could not be connected with the mystery of
2
the Fairy Dell.
The criminal mystery was not solved then or since. Prince may
have been murdered, but it is equally likely that he committed yaicide,
as others implicated in the Stavisky case did. Nor, if he had decisive
evidence of the complicity of M. Pressard in the protection of Stavisky,
was it obvious he should take it oifto Dijon with him- or why all
why
a of the
should turn on one document in a country where so large part
was in writing reports.
Hut for the moment,
population employed
public credulity
was naturally impatient nf these refinements. M.
both eminent Masons, and their
Chautemps and M. Pressard were
Masonic ranks and titles were spread on the pages of all the hostile
were comic, to nhcrs they were sinister.
In the
journals; to some they
<

of the case, M. Chautemps had been disastrously incompetent.


origins
He was now subjected to
an ordeal which seemed, to those who think
that a democratic leader need only
mean well, an excessive punishment.
The storm died down. M. Chautemp. took refuge
the Senate m
the of those who knew him best, the
(or rewarded
was loyalty by
case re
political
leaders of his department); the Stavisky-Prince
to it. But there
attaching politically
with a fair share of mystery still

an Executive far stronger than


was no doubt what walits lesson. Only
system could protect
that provided by the French parliamentary
and the integrity of the administration of
!he authority of the State

wj*v ******
'
-*.-

was thought
,
to be most sinister

La. Combe aux Fees.


THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
which would increase the power of the Cabinet and decrease the power
of the Chamber. The deputies were to renounce their right to
propose specific expenditures. To the existence of this right, critics
attributed both the inordinately long time it took to vote the budget
and the unbalanced character of the budget when it was voted. The
deputies were organized in loose groups of interests as well as in formal
parties. There were groups formed to look after the interests of the
railwaymen, of the wine-growers, of farmers in general. It was a
feebly organized special interest which had not its accredited protectors
in Parliament and protection almost always took the form of ex-
penditure. By the time the Minister of Finance and the Finance
Committee had bought off these groups, the original shape of the
budget was lost. But, if no deputy could move a vote involving
expenditure, the first and last word on that side of the accounts would
be with the Minister. Such was the rule of the House of Commons,
and the excellence of British methods was as much a French Con-
servative commonplace in 1934 as their badness had been in 1931.
But it was realized that there was little point in reinforcing the

authority of the Minister, if the Minister was insecure in his position.


To cure the Chamber of its weakness for overthrowing, on frivolous
grounds, the Ministry of the day, M. Doumergue asked that the power
of dissolution should be given to the President of the Republic on the
recommendation of the Prime Minister, without the consent of the
Senate being necessary. This proposal was, in the eyes of most good
Republicans, outrageous. Senators pointed out that they had never
refused to grant a dissolution; since 1877 they had never been asked.
Deputies were infuriated at the thought that one of their number
should have the power to intimidate them by threatening to send them
before their master, universal suffrage, while the sacred mandate of
four years of power was still unexhausted. It was pointed out that
the position of a British Prime Minister, the choice of a semi-plebiscitary
election, was very different from that of a French Prime Minister chosen
by a President from a number of possible candidates of equal weight.
The President, by his choice, would be able to affect the powers of
Parliament very seriously; with the formidable weapon of dissolution
at his disposal, the real centre of power would shift, not from the
Chamber to the Prime Minister, but to the filysee. In the long run,
the right of dissolution might build up a tradition of party discipline
and party unity that would approximate to the British system, but in
the short run it would only cause confusion and the exaltation of the
presidential prerogatives.
The idea of dissolution was in the air.
f
After less than two years'
life, Chamber elected in 1932 had been coerced by rioters into
the
deserting its own principles and leaders. The mandatories of universal
suffrage, even apart from those of their number who were in jail, were
666
BETWEEN TWO WARS
neither respected nor self-confident in the
spring of 1934. It was a
reactionary joke toAvear in the buttonhole a little
plaque, 'I am not a
deputy', but it was a joke that appealed to many who were not
normally
reactionaries.
Faced with the collapse of the Radicals, to whose
support they had
belatedly rallied, the Socialists had themselves asked for a dissolution
of the Chamber. They did not get their
way, and the Right, which
had clamoured for it while the Chamber of 1932 was still
supporting
the Left, was content to leave well alone when it had been bullied
into
accepting the Doumergue Government. One took the obvious
deputy
which was open to the Socialists but which they had failed to notice.
step
M. Gaston Bergery resigned his seat and was vei/ narrowly beaten
after a bitterly fought election.
There was to be no electoral appeal to Caesar. But there was
another. As the Doumergue Government had been forced on the
Chamber by the street, its chief tool- upon himself to report not to the
Chamber but to the nation by wireless speeches. Onee, perhaps, was
tolerable, but when the Prime Minister made it evident that he intended
5
to repeat ins 'reports to the nation the politicians \\ere angered and
,

alarmed. As the panic subsided, the old party lines had begun to
first

re-fo,m. The Left tried to involve M. Tardicu in the Stavisky scandal


on the very inadequate evidence of a semi- legible cheque counterfoil.
M. Tardieu broke the party truec by at Lie king M. Chautcmps with
great virulence, arid the Government of which M. Tardieu was a
member nearly collapsed. There was more to do than to liquidate
the Stavisky affair, and the Prime Minister had more to report than
projects of Constitutional reform. He had to attempt to balance the
budget by cutting salaries and war pensions. The ex-servicemen's
organizations talked as if they were the American Legion and seemed
disposed to treat with the State on terms of equality.
As his task grew more disagreeable and as the first panic wore oil,
M. Doumergue showed signs of resenting criticism, fair or unfair ; and
a great deal of it was unfair. That he was a well-paid director of the
Suez Canal Company was made a subject of reproach to M. Doumergue,
and he was irritated into making an acid comparison between himself
and some of his critics. Although he was a lawyer, he had never
deputy, contenting himself with paying
while he was a his
practised
annual fee to keep nominal membership of the Paris Bar. Such self-
denial was not usual among lawyer-politicians, a palpable hit not
but at such
merely at the deputy-lawyers of the Bonnaure type,
eminent practitioners as M. Blum.
There was in these speeches over the air something of the manner of
a king addressing his good people; there was manifested an increasing
the Socialists and Com-
anger against the Left, especially against
a breach of the convention whereby,
munists, and there was, in any case,
667
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
except at election times, the sovereign rights of universal suffrage were
put in commission. The deputies who were, they believed, the only
authorized representativfes of the sovereign people, were recovering
courage, and they were increasingly tired of hearing M. Doumergue
call himself 'the Just'. The unwilling submission to the necessity of
constitutional reform which had been general in March soon evapor-
ated. The Radicals in the Ministry were now more disposed to
resistthe victors of February 6th than to make concessions to*them,
and, without Radical support or tolerance, the Ministry was doomed.
The Fascist peril, real or imaginary, was imposing new political combin-
ations on the parties: and Stavisky was forgotten in the threat of Colonel
de la Rocque. In November the end came; M. Doumergue returned
to Languedoc; his place was taken by M. Pierre-fitienne Flandin; and
the real interest of the nation shifted from the Government to the
Fascist leagues and the organs of resistance to them.

668
CHAPTER VIII

THE RISE OF THE PEOPLE'S FRONT


I

overthrow of a Left Ministry with a safe majority in the Chamber


THE
by riotous bands of the Right was a great shock to the political
complacency of the nominally dominant party. Even without the
lesson of Germany, the menace of a new
February 6th would have
angered the Radicals. They had, it is true, their represent. itivcs in the
Governments that were formed after the resignation of M. Daladier,
but the younger members of the party, M. Daladier himself, M. Cot,
j\f.
Chautemps and the others, resented the odium heaped on them by
the reactionary press and the attempt to veto the entrance of any of the
"murderers of February 6th' into the Government. These Radicals
were naturally thrown back on the support of other Left parties, and
in the 'Delegation des Gauches', the steering committee of the nominal

majority, they were active and critical. From the point of view of the
Radical party, there was a great deal lo be said for having M. Edouard
Herriot in the Cabinet and M. Edouard Daladier in the ranks of the
critics of the Cabinet.
The fear of a new February 6th was not confined to the Radicals.
The Communists had learned their lesson for the time being. The folly
that had led them to rejoice in the discomfiture of the 'assassins', that
is in the overthrow of M. Daladier and M. Frot, was, for the moment,
done with, though of course neither acknowledged nor repented of.
Then the lesson of the triumph of Fascism in Germany with the con-
sequent danger to the Soviet State was being mastered.
The real
leaders of the party in Moscow had, for the moment, an interest in
keeping France out of any close association with the Fascist powers;
and
as a beginning it was necessary to keep France from going Fascist
herself.
M. Gaston Bergery had been preaching the necessity of a 'common
front', and was
his ideataken up both by Radicals and Communists.
The rank-and-file of the Socialists were soon won over to the idea, but
the leaders remained sceptical. On the one hand, they distrusted the
Communist leaders and feared that an alliance with them could only
new of the Socialist
result in giving opportunities for that destruction
669
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
party which had for so long been the main aim of the Communists.
Then the sudden patriotic fervour of the Communists was too much
for many of the Socialists; less versatile than their proletarian rivals,

they could not suddenly appear as the champions of a re-armed and


militant, if unaggressive France, after a lifetime of denouncing mili-
tarism and the commoner forms of patriotism as bourgeois traps. The
appeal to the old Jacobin tradition (which was soon to include an appeal
to Joan of Arc) was easy enough for the rising young mouthpiece of
the new Communist policy, Maurice Thorez, but harder for the
Socialist leaders.
A common front with the Communists involved a common front
with the Radicals, and the Socialist party was divided between the
militant optimists, the Zyromskis and Piverts who wanted a revolu-
tionary overthrow of the capitalist order, and the more cautious school
led by Bracke, who wanted to transform society by legal means, after
acquiring an independent parliamentary majority. Neither method
was in the least likely to succeed for a long time to come, and, while
waiting for the miracle in whichever form it was to take, the party
could continue its old policy of highly critical if negative parliamentary
action. It could draw up programmes like the Huyghens programme
of 1932 and then content itself with austere criticism of the doctrinal
incoherence of the Radicals. In 1932, M. Pierre Cot had ironically
complimented the Socialists on the popularity they derived from the
fact that they had never been in power. He wished, but obviously did
not believe, that they would retain if in power 'the prestige they had
known how to acquire in the ante-room of power'. A good many
Socialists still preferred to stay in the ante-room.
An alliance with the Radicals had its special dangers, for the
Socialist party's position was constantly being undermined by the
Communists, and the left wing of the party was not anxious to com-
promise itself by a deal with such incorrigible bourgeois as the Radicals.
It is true that the Communists themselves were in favour of such a deal,
but did not follow, whatever formal logic might suggest, that the
it

Socialists would not suddenly appear as class-traitors for doing


reluctantly what the Communists were doing with enthusiasm.
The necessary stimulus to the common front was supplied by the
militant organizations of the Right. Although the real begetters of
the 6th of February were the Camelots du Roi, the glory of that day
was seized by the That organization was growing very
Croix de Feu.
fast. character as a veterans' society was now almost
Its original

destroyed by a flood ofyoung recruits. Its leader, Colonel de la Rocque,


was a power in the land. He was good looking, he was reputed
honest; his very lack of obvious political talents won support from many
disillusioned members of the bourgeoisie. Even the dotted meaning-
Jcssness of his literary style was not, at the moment, a great handicap, a
670
BETWEEN TWO WARS
remarkable fact in a country where muddleheadness and
literary
incompetence bordering on illiteracy are not merely not political
assets, but actual handicaps. 'Public service', as he called his doctrine,
was an odd mixture of noble sentiments and incoherent
proposals.
It was a sign of the confusion of the times that it was taken more or less
seriously by intelligent people.
The legend of the 6th of February was a useful psset. The belief
that %n innocent and harmless procession of ex-soldiers had been
massacred by the orders of a set of rascally politicians was
firmly
implanted in the minds of hundreds of thousands of well-meaning and
honest people, whose consciences had been very properly shocked
by
the solemn frivolity of M. Ghautemps and the vacillation of M.
Daladier. 1 Colonel de la Rocque talked of vigour and of action. As
long as he talked, all was more or less well, but a good many young men
in his organization really wanted action and expected to be shown
vigour. The great rallies in the grounds of chateaux, the mobiliza-
tion of the faithful by squads of cars, in one case by a squadron of

private planes, were pleasing demonstrations of organizing power, of


material icsources and of numbers, but what did thev lead to? When
some militants went so far as to raid a Socialist party office, they were
disowned by the Colonel, which was reassuring for the devotees of
legality but a sad disappointment for the potential storm troopers.
Whatever the irritation of fire-eaters like M. de Maud'huy at the
timidity of M. de la Rocque, the Colonel was active enough to provide
useful campaign material for the Left. The alleged threat to the
existence of the Republic was a timely bond of union between Radicals,
Socialists and Communists. The public was reminded that 'Casimir'
(as the Left press insisted on calling the Colonel) was an aristocrat.
Was not his brother a member of the household of that rather torpid
Pretender to the throne of France, the Due de Guise? In the columns
of the Populaire, the more credulous of the Socialist faithful were treated
to wonderful and hair-raising stories of Croix de Feu plots against the
him
Republic, plots that really flattered M. de la Rocque by treating
as

a Hitler or Mussolini when he was not even a Deroutede.


The Communists played up nobly. If they had a weakness, it was
a tendency to display a belligerent nationalism that distressed the
Socialists. Their pride in Valmy and in Joan of Arc, their insistence
on a 'free, happy, and strong France' was almost overdone. When the
term of service in the Army was raised from one to two years, against
the noisy opposition of the Socialists, it was disconcerting to find that
the Communists swallowed it when Moscow approved. But whatever
1
The growth of the legend was not accidental. At least one of the victims of Febru-
not a demonstrator, but an
ary 6th, luted as a war veteran, was not a war veteran and
innocent businessman going home from his office and Wiled by a stray bullet; Attempts
list of martyred
by his widow to rectify the error and to have the name removed from the
dewonitrntors were unavailing,
671
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
ironical suspicions may have been* entertained by Socialists who
remembered the old days of Communist slander and who could recall
the Stories of plots against the Workers' Fatherland, when leading
French statesmen carried on conspiracies against Russia in cafes- on
the boulevards, the movement for a common front was too strong to be
resisted. So long as the Fascist organizations lay low, the Socialists
hesitated to burn their boats, but in the late spring of 1935, the Croix
de Feu were more noisy and conspicuous than ever. It was time to

develop the common action of the Left parties, to concentrate on a


common minimum programme ranging from mobilization of the
'entire working-class population against the Fascist organizations' to a
'struggle against the Fascist terror in Germany and Austria'.
The failure to induce the Government to suppress the Fascist

organizations, the victory of the Left in a Paris by-election, the rising


tide of anti-Fascist feeling, all led to the formation of a common front

by the Communists, and Radicals, a front which was given


Socialists
its the
religious consecration
by demonstration of the I4th ofJuly, 1935.
It was an attempt to recapture the national holiday from the re-
actionaries. In the west-end of Paris, the Army review, the great rally
of the Croix de Feu, the arrival (late) of Colonel de la Rocque at
the Arc de Triomphe might recall the great days of the previous year.
But the real national festival was celebrated, as was fitting, much
further east.
July 1 4th, 1935, was a magnificent day. In the east-end of Paris
the very names of the streets were anti-Fascist demonstrations. From
the Faubourg Saint-Antoine the crowds poured east towards the
Place de la Bastille; they poured down from Belleville and in from the
new industrial suburbs. The historical associations that, in other
capitals, evoked memories of royal triumphs and national glories, here
recalled the days

When Death was on thy drums, Democracy,


And with one rush of slaves, the world was free.

If, a few miles away, the possessing classes were complacently celebrat-
ing their power, here they were reminded (as Morel reminded M. de
Charlus) that the ancestors of the workers had cut off the heads of the
ancestors of the nobles. This was not Berlin, or Vienna, or Rome, but
Paris.
The very disorganization of the procession was a sign of strength.
What did it matter that a richly over-dressed Negro found himself
leading the section whose banner bore the names of 'Alain-Langevin'
and was supposed to represent the embattled intellectuals? The
mothers of victims of the last war had, in their ranks, obvious mothers
of victims of the next war. There were officers in the procession, and
at least one duchess and writers and politicians. It is true that the
672
BETWEEN TWO WARS
hurried change of front of the Communist party had come too recently
to affect all the rank-and-file. The police, who were to have been
welcomed as defenders of the
Republic, were greeted with shouts of
'Assassins' as usual, and, despite
attempts to get the crowds to sing the
Carmagnole or the* Marseillaise, the only song that was really sung with
heart and knowledge was the Internationale. The 'damned ones of the
earth', 'the conscripts of hunger' looked both cheerfol and robust that
*
day. Red flags and tricolours waved over crowds shouting Up the
Soviets', 'De la Rocque to the gallows'. Few spectators noted that a
great and hastily stitched tricolour flag, floating over a group of Com-
munist, Socialist and Radical leaders, ripped in two, the blue and white
on one side, the red on the other. Only the mo^t cynical murmured
9
'absit When the night came and, with it, the dancing and the
omen .

fireworks, such fears seemed more out of place than ever. The
sovereign people, in its good city of Paris, had bidden defiance to the
heirs of the emigres :md the enemies of the one and indivisible Republic.
By the time of the great manifestation of July 141)1, 1935, the
parliamentary situation had become too paradoxical to be tolerable;
it would nave to be ended one way or the other, by a
sweeping victory
of the Left or of the Right. If M. Doumergue saw himself as Cincin-
natus-Poincare, M. Flandin saw himself as Waldc rk-Rousseau, saving
the Republic from the menaces of the armed leagues. M. Flandin was
not, however, Waldeck-Rousseau; he was simply a tall, vain, dull
politician of moderate ability,
if of great ambition. He was industrious,
less hide-bound by mere traditional phrases than was M. Doumergue,
more in touch with the needs and idea? of the age. But he was,
among other defects, unlucky. In his economic policy he discounted a
convalescence of world economy that was coming, but did not come
fast enough for M. Flandin's plans. He needed, too, external peace
and confidence, and he was confronted with the increasingly obvious
imperial demands of Sign or Mussolini
and the rapid increase in the
power and in the ambitions of Herr Hitler.
Within France, the main trouble of the Ministry was the fall of
prices and the stagnation of industry
and trade. The peasants were,
at last, bearing the full burden of the catastrophic fall of world prices.
stocks of wheat, wine
Fairly good harvests had produced heavy unsold
and other farm products. A law fixing a minimum price for wheat had
merely served to irritate the peasant. Since the Government did
not
offer to buy wheat at the minimum price, the legal prohibition
of sale

below the fixed price was a mere political gesture which served to
justify a high price
of bread, but did the producer of wheat no good.
He could sell his wheat at an illegal price or not at all. He chose to
break the law; and to blame the great grain merchants, the millers,
and the importers for the gap between the legal and the real price of
wheat. Believing as most Frenchmen did, that prices could be con-
673
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
trolled by merely making a law about it, he was convinced that he was
the victim of a conspiracy of commercial thieves and their Government
allies.
It was, for a moment, touch and go who should benefit by peasant
discontent. A 'Peasant Front' was formed by a vigorous Conserva-
tive demagogue, M. Dorgeres, who threatened a tax strike and frightened
the rural politicians of the Left as much as Colonel de la Rocque
frightened the urban. But the suspicion with which the French
peasant regards his betters was fatal to the rural Fascism of M.
Dorgeres. The fiction of a legal price for wheat was abandoned; the
Government bought up stocks to keep them off the market; the price of*
bread was reduced; the production of wine curtailed. By 1936, the
worst of the rural crisis was over, but the improvement came too late
to diminish peasant resentment against the rulers of the land, especially
the economic rulers of the land.
The discrepancy between world prices and French prices had
been greatly increased by the retention of the gold standard in France,
and the export industries saw in devaluation the only way out. After
the abandonment of the gold standard by the United States in 1933,
as the Economic Conference showed, the 'Gold Bloc', of which France
was the chief, was fighting a losing battle. In a town like Calais,
complete paralysis seemed to have settled over the local industries,
Lyons was hardly better off, and even Paris suffered severely from the
decline of tourist traffic and luxury buying. The tourist mark and the
tourist lira benefited German and Italian rivals of Paris and the Riviera.
It was not surprising that the most determined advocate of devaluation
of the franc should represent a Paris district terribly hard hit by the
high cost of a good time in the former capital of world extravagance.
But M. Paul Reynaud failed to convince M. Flandin, who asserted that
the gap between world prices and French prices was exaggerated and,
in any case, was decreasing every day.
To M. Flandin, devaluation was unnecessary and it was immoral;
it prepared the way for future difficulties and it threatened social

disorder. Terribly shaken by the war and by the first devaluation, of


1928', the middle classes had to be defended, for if they were not, the
result might be 'to expose France to the worst risks: for the middle
classes are the backbone of the republican regime'. Instead of
devaluation, there was to be a reduction of the interest rates and a
further lowering of French prices which would soon be overtaken by the
riseof the price level in Britain and the United States. In the mean-
time, confidence had to be preserved and republican institutions
defended. The individual deputies gave up their right to propose
expenditure, but there was no- more talk of dissolution or of con-
stitutional reform.The Dictator was back in the Midi, soured by the
ingratitude of republics and little consoled by the praise of Colonel
674
BETWEEN TWO WARS
de.la Rocque or M. Henri de Kerillis. He had
the lamentations of
come Chamber was afraid of new riots; it was not afraid
in because the
any longer, so M. Doumergue retired for good.
The problem of the power of finance in the Republic was no new
one. The great banks had been too much for
Gambetta, and the most
successful Finance Ministers, since his time, had been men
who, like
Rouvier, were themselves in the closest touch with the banking world.
Criticism of the great banks was often ill-informed and, when it was
well-informed, was often less the result of public spiiit than of a high
estimate of the potential value of silence. No great issue was floated
without a proportion of the overhead being earmarked for
publicity,
publicity often meaning the very opposite of what the word usually
suggests. Even when it was publicity in the ordii iry sense, what was
bought was not straight advertising but highly optimistic comment. 1
Apart from the degree to which the investor was well or ill-advised,
the concentration of power in the hands of a few banks was very much
disliked by the L<Tt. Even before the war, that concentration had
gone far; although there were stili a good many local banks, some of
which financed local industries. But the Credit Lyonnais^ the Societe
Generate, the Comptoir d'Escompte, with the two great bankers' banks,
the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas and the Union Parisienne, were over-
whelmingly powerful in the stock market. There were minor establish-
ments, but the big five either controlled the mass of French investment
or were closely linked with its controllers.
They were especially closely linked with the only possible rival
of the private banks, the Bank of France. The Bank of France was not
a state bank, as was often hastily assumed. It was a private corpora-
tion which, in return for certain privileges, the most important being
the right of note issue, stood in a special relation to the Government.
But it was the property of its shareholders; who elected the Regents, and,
although the State appointed the Governor, he had to possess a
minimum number of shares, a provision that limited the choice of the
Minister of Finance to such competent persons as had the shares or
could acquire temporary title to them, that is, to important financiers
or to friends of important financiers. The Regents survived Ministers
and Governors; they were drawn from the great banking and business
families, Rothschilds, Wendels and the rest, the same
small class that
insurance com-
provided the directors of the railway companies, of
panies, the rulers of the Comite des Forges
and of the other great industrial
trusts. A very strong Government might have kept this oligarchy in
its place,- but the French political system was not designed to produce

strong Governments.
Pessimistic political philosophers like Alain were more or less

1
One of the critics of the Paris money market ('Lysis') asserted that as soon as the
Russo-Japanese War broke out, the great banks doubled
their monthly publicity budgets.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE ,

reconciled to this state of affairs. He thought it less remarkable that


in a state dedicated to political equality there should be such economic
inequality, than that in a society marked by such economic inequality
thefe should be any political equality. Kind words and small favours
for theweak: harsh words and great favours for the strong: that was the
most one could expect. Such resignation was not common, and other
Radical doctrinaires saw in the power of the banks and of the financiers
one of the chief obstacles to the realization of the party programme.
To M. Jammy-Schmidt things had not greatly changed since the' days
of Gamier-Pages and Renouvier, if, indeed, since the days of Cambon.
The Third Republic was faced with the same hydra-headed monster
as the First and Second. To another Radical thinker, M. Albert
Bayet, the problem was one of post-war immorality in politics and
private life.
1
On the one hand, there was the sovereign people, or
that depositary of its sovereignty, the Chamber, and on the other a
mere handful of magnates. Yet in conflicts between the representatives
of universal suffrage and the bankers, how few and brief were the
victories of the politicians! Somehow this defiance of the laws of
politics and morals must be put an end to.
As an electoral cry, attacks on the bankers were highly profitable.
In 1924 they were described as the 'economic religious orders', thus
enabling those numerous Radicals who could recognize an enemy only
if he wore a cassock, to rally to the good cause. But however useful as
an electoral cry, the disguising of the banks and bankers as monasteries
and monks was a source of illusion. It suggested that it would be as
easy to uproot the SocieU Ginhale as the Society of Jesus, that the
Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas could be put in its place as easily as the
Sulpicians. This was an error. M. fimile Combes, the model
Radical statesman, had only to risk the hostility of his political enemies
when he made and enforced the law against the orders. Few of his
own supporters had a secret weakness for the Carthusians or the
Dominicans.
It was very different when it came to attacking the temples of the

money-changers. The Radicals might have read Erewhon with profit


and pondered the history of the musical banks. The religious orders
had, in their lay branches, in the 'third order' of St. Francis or of
St. Dominic, very zealous friends, but there were few religious tertiaries
in the ranks of the Left* Very different was the situation of the banks,
the issue houses, the great industrial companies. They had their
tertiaries, in hundreds of thousands, in all parties, including all parties
of the Left, including even the Communist party. That there was no
real identity of interest between M. de Wendel or M. Finaly and the
thrifty militant with 50,000 francs in mixed securities was easy to

Writing before the Stavisky explosion, M. Bayet was able to imply, without running
3

the risk of being laughed out of court, that all or almost all the sinners were on the Right.

676
BETWEEN TWO WARS
affirm, but harder to get believed. From
top to bottom, the investing
public had in common a
passionate desire not to lose its or capital
its interest by inflation or repudiation. A
thoroughly solvent State
could have defied the 'congregations
economiques' as a securely
established State had defied the
'congregations religieuses', but the
French State, since 1914, was seldom thoroughly solvent. It could not
command, it could only beg, and when it triai to command, the
threatened financiers were able to

. . .
put on the weeds of Dominic
Or in Franciscan think to pass disguised.

The disguise always worked; the alarmed faithful rallied to the cause
'
of financial safety and prudence, and, the mortifie deputy,
taking all
too seriously the applause which had greeted his rhetorical defiance of
the 'wall of money' at election times, found that the wall still stood and
that, on the other side of it, were enough of his own supporters to make
it impregnable.
It was the constantly recurring financial stress of the I'Yemh State
that made the chief difference between the political problem of the
money power before 1914 and after. It was not Pan.un.i, or Russia, or
Serbia, who now needed free access to the Freiah investor's savings
but the French Republic. The solvency of the Republic was what was
in question; and that solvency was repeatedly in danger as great masses
of short-term bonds became mature, or as an unbridgeable deficit put
the Government in the position of having to borrow, or print banknotes,
or default. It always chose to bonow, and that meant it was at the

mercy of the lenders. It was not only the. rich who organized, in
these circumstances, what M. Bayet picturesquely called a 'Vendee
of Money' or proved more nacly to sacrifice their sons than their
1
savings for France.
In these circumstances the position of the Bank of France \\as
decisive. For one thing it was playing a greater part in the geneial
banking life of the nation than it had done in the past. Before 1914,
the Government had had to force the Bank to set up piovincial
branches in order to make its discount facilities available in every
the Credit
department. Before 1914, the great French deposit banks,
with the great
Lyonnais, the Societe Generate, were comparable
in size

banks: that were among the largest banks in the


English joint-stock is,

world. But they did not grow at the same rate as their English sisters,
faced as they were by the competition of Government-favoured
institutions like the Banques Populaires. These, starting out to be
Banks' to make credit available to small shopkeepers
'People's cheap

out,
thing i

Horace. Carent quia vate sacro.

677
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
and small craftsmen, found it easier and more profitable to deal with
the more prosperous sections of the middle-class. Other special banks
were set up after the war to liquidate war damages, or to lend to
creditors of the State, or for other special purposes. But the chief
competitor of the great commercial banks was now the Bank of France.
The Bank of France had no longer to be coerced into financing the
needs of local business. It went after it, with what its rivals thought
indecent eagerness. Its branch managers were encouraged to approach
local business men and to undercut the local banks. More than that,
by re-discounting commercial paper up to nine months and then, after
a period in which the bill was in the hands of a commercial house long
enough to recover a legal virginity, re-discounting it, the Bank became
a source of long-term capital as well as of credit for current needs.
It was difficult for a small local bank to compete with this octopus,
and the Bank was accused, with some plausibility, of using its special
position to crush out opposition in cases where a local bank could have
competed successfully, given anything like equal conditions. The local
bank, often serving local industries, was, in any case, doomed to decline
in importance, but the decline was hastened by the action of the Bank
of France as well as by the growth of great holding companies which
financed whole industries from their own reserves and raised the capital
directly from the investing public.
The local bank did not always die peacefully, absorbed in the larger
communion of the great financial trusts. It was sometimes killed, and
in one of these murders, the Bank of France played a role that revealed
how difficult it was for it to do so many different kinds of banking
business at the same time.
Abold, speculative financier, M. Oustric, by a series of ingenious
coups got control of some important provincial banks which he used
in his complicated juggling in the stock market. When the crash came,
it was revealed that the funds used by Oustric for his campaign came
largely from the Bank of France, which had allowed this obscure
financier over a hundred million francs of credit. Worse still, the paper
discounted was only formally good, for it consisted of bills drawn by
one Oustric company on another Oustric company. The gullibility
of great banks in all countries was no great secret by 1930, but for the
great national controller of the French money market to be caught
out as a sleeping partner in a vulgar fraud which wrecked several
important local banks did not increase its prestige. The press, it may
be added, did not stress the r61e of the Bank of France in the matter -

unduly nor as some people thought, enough.


Criticism of the Bank was increasingly widespread. There were
markedly oligarchic characteristics about its organization. Although
there were 40,000 shareholders, only the 200 with the largest holdings
could vote at the annual meeting. The result was to create a banking
678
BETWEEN TWO WARS
aristocracy; scats on
the board of directors, that is the Council of
Regents, were in many cases hereditary. There had been a member
of the Mallet family among the
Regents ever since the Bank was founded;
there were several other dynasties
among the Regents, and it was pointed
that the great industries on the board were the sheltered
put represented
industries. It was the directors of
railways, shipping companies and
other subsidized industries, the directors of steel and armament works
whose chief customer was the State, the directors of insurance
companies
fearful of State competition, who ruled the Bank. That is, interests
wholly or in great part dependent for solvency on State action were in
a condition to dictate the monetary and
budgetary policy of the nation.
It was not to be wondered at that the
policy of the Bank often seemed
to be opposed to that of the Government and oi great branchc" of
industry not represented among the Regents.
The currency position added to the difficulties of the relationship.
The Bank thought that it had a duty to guard the franc against the
improvidence of the politicians. After the devaluation of the dollar
and the pound, the franc remained the one great currency attached to
gold; the Bank's action could make speculation against the franc
highly dangerous or comparatively safe. As the agitation foi devalua-
tion grew, became more and more important to secure harmony
it

between the Ministry of Finance and the Bank, and that harmony was
not always evident.
The money market was saturated with short-term Treasury bonds;
there was no chance of a successful flotation of long-term obligations;
there was a recurrent deficit. How was iliis situation to be dealt with?
By rigorous economy, by cutting salaries and expenses of all kinds, even
war pensions: so, the orthodox bankers insisted, and only so, could
devaluation with all its risks be avoided. M. Flandin was opposed to
devaluation, but he was also opposed to the policy of mere deflation
preached by the Bank to his very orthodox Finance Minister,
M.
Germain Martin. But the rumours of devaluation produced a run on
the franc and the Bank did not seem very anxious to defend the currency
by the usual means. It was discovered how vain it was merely to put
a new Governor in, for M. Flandin's nominee, like a good Republican
priest made a in the old days of the Concordat, soon absorbed
bishop
the point of view of his Regents. A
bad motor-accident crippled the
Prime Minister, and when he finally gave way and asked the Chamber
for full powers to carry out the economy programme insisted on by
orthodox finance, he failed to secure support.
To replace M. Flandin was not easy. The first aspirant was the
President of the Chamber, M. Bouisson. He was an excellent presiding
the limita-
officer, but he learned even more quickly than Addington had,
tions of an excellent presiding officer. His Minister of Finance was no
either a
less a person than M. Caillaux, but M. Caillaux was no longer
'

679 xx
THE fcfeVfcLOfMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
martyr or a miracle worker. The Bouisson-Caillaux Cabinet fell the
first daypresented itself to the Chamber. M. Bouisson tried to bully
it

the deputies, and they were no longer to be bullied. They could be


led but not driven, and the task of leading them fell to M. Flandin's
Foreign Minister, M. Pierre Laval. As M. Flandin noted, the Chamber
which had refused to trust him with full powers made no difficulty
about trusting them to M. Laval. The Bank had won; France was to
try another dose of deflation.
It was an expensive victory for the Bank. The politicians,
humiliated by the mobs of 1934, were bitterly resentful of further
humiliation at the hands of the Regents of the Bank of France. The
anger of the Left was no longer concentrated on M. de la Rocque,
but on the ruling oligarchy. It was the hold of the '200 families' over
the economic life of France that was the theme of indignant oratory
and of acute polemics from the pen of left-wing economists like M.
Francis Delaisi. With another of those historical parallels so stimu-
lating to oratory, so crippling to thought, the Bank was thought of as
another Bastille to be taken'. What France needed was the abolition
of the new feudalism; there was in the offing a new 4th of August
in which the new nobility would surrender its privileges whether
willingly or not did not matter.
For the moment, the Bank and its allies had their way. M. Laval,
empowered to issue decree-laws to redress the financial position, used
his powers most lavishly. Aspects of the national life, as remote from
budgetary importance as the control of carrier pigeons, were regulated
along with salaries, wages, the rents of houses and the terms of leases.
Purists were angered by the compulsory reduction of rents; and
economists pained by the assumption that prices could be controlled by
law. But deflation was applied all along the line: and if France was
to stayon gold, there was no other remedy. Nor was the attempt to
control prices by law (window-dressing as it largely was) entirely
fruitless. Already prices were very rigid over great areas of the national
economy; trusts, import quotas, price lists approved by cartels, had all
sheltered so much of the price structure from the free play of the
market, that administrative pressure had more chances of reducing
costs than at first sight seemed likely. The general upturn in world
production and price-levels helped M. Laval, as it might have helped
M. Flandin had his Government survived.
The reductions in salary, in pensions, in interest yields were more
obvious than the general improvement in the economic position of
France. The cleavage between the interests of the civil servants and
the other employees was greatly diminished now, since all suffered more
from the rapid fall in cash incomes than they were conscious of benefit-
ing by the maintenance of their real wages by a fall in prices. Many
persons who had thought of themselves as secure members of the
680
BETWEEN TWO WARS
bourgeoisie, among them the employees of the banks, were embittered
by a fall in their standard of
living that did not drive them (as it might
have done earlier) to the Right but to the Left. The demonstrations
against the 'decree-laws' were more noisy than violent, but
they helped
to swell the tide of popular resentment
against a system that seemed to
be descending an endless spiral of
increasing poverty. The Right
promised health at the end of an unpleasant treatment. The Left
promised health and the abolition of the treatment and Loth at
once/
The formation of the Laval Ministry seemed to revive the hopes of
the militants of the Right, and as the foreign crisis
grew more acute, 1
the Croix de Feu and the other Fascist or semi-Fascist
organizations
took the field, while the Peasant Front of Dorgeres launched its tax-
strike. The Left press was full of the most alarming stories of the
designs of La Rocque and of the guilty complicity of M. Laval. The
Radical leaders, even so conservative a Radical as M. Herriot, refused
to tolerate the patronage by M. L.tval of the Croix de Feu, and when
he denied, as he did, that he patronized the movement, they demanded
proof of that love for and loyalty to Republican liberties of which the
Prime Minister boasted. The
Radicals, indeed, were so angered or
frightened by the menace of the Fascist leagues that they at last em-
powered their leaders to enter into a close alliance with the Socialists
and Communists. Meantime they demanded guarantees from the
Government.
They got them. They had asked for dissolution of the Fascist
leagues. They got the word of honour of M. Ybarnegaray that his
friend,Colonel de la Rocque, was not a conspirator against the
Republic or liberty and in the Chamber, M. Ybarne*garay's word
counted for a great deal. M. Blum and M. Thorez wanted more;
they wanted an assurance that the military side of the Croix de Feu
would be done away with. M. Ybarnegaray agreed to this condition
and, as it was assumed that he was speaking in the name of the Colonel,
the Chamber was delighted to have the threat of conflict (however
unlikely it was) thus removed by a gentleman's agreement
that all
should be disbanded. But it was not certain
semi-military organizations
that M. Ybarnegaray had been speaking for the Croix de Feu, and it
was quite certain that he had not been speaking for the more militant
of the
organizations on the Right. Despite the angry protests
Solidarity Frangaise and the Jeunesses Patriotes, Parliament went ahead
with the
making para-military organizations illegal, entrusting
to dissolve them not to the courts but to the Government,
right
to murder or lesser
restraining the sale of arms and making incitement
crimes a misdemeanour. 8
the danger
By the end of 1935, any danger of a Fascist coup (and
1
Sec p. 687. * The first
application of the law was to M. Maurras, ice p. 683.

681
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
had always been greatly exaggerated by journalists and politicians who
took Paris too seriously) was over. The Croix de Feu had become
merely an electoral, organization of the Right, like the Ligue de la
Patrie Frarqaise. On the other side, the Left had at last got together
in SMI electoral alliance of all the important parties. On January i ith,
1936, the Rassemblement Populaire published its programme. It was
inevitably vague and compromising, since it had to cover the common
minimum demands of Radicals who were what in most countries
would have been regarded as really Conservatives, and of Communists
who, only a few years before, had been denouncing their present allies
as the worst enemies of the workers.
There were safe generalities. The oath of July I4th, 1935, was
repeated. Everybody was ready to defend 'democratic freedom, give
bread to the workers, work to the young and a great human peace to
the world.' To achieve this end without 'abandoning either their own
principles, doctrines or ultimate objectives' the parties to the pact made
some specific proposals.
They were mainly political laws against the Fascist leagues and
in favour of publicity about the ownership of the press; with a plea for
collective security and the strengthening of the League of Nations.
There was to be a national
But there were some economic proposals.
unemployment fund; a reduction of the working week without any
reduction of wages; a revaluation of agricultural prices (the last to be
accompanied by vigilance as to the cost of living). It was implied that
the middleman was the cause of low prices to the farmer and high
prices to the consumer, a generality that, in some cases, resulted in the
same candidate being able to promise, with a clear conscience, a high
price for wheat in the rural part of his constituency and a low price for
bread in the urban part of it. A
central Wheat Board was to put an
end to speculation and the stock be reformed. The
market was to
tax system was to be reformed, too, rich to be made
and evasion by the
difficult by the old panacea of a 'fiscal identity card'. It was a

programme that had great political appeal and it was launched on a


flowing tide.
The chances of the Left were greatly increased by an event which
made the Socialist leader more of a hero to his followers than he had
ever been before. The death of Jacques Bainville had removed one
of the members of the trinity of the Action Frangaise. Distressed
adherents of the movement, waiting for the funeral procession to start,
noticed M. Blum with a colleague and his wife in a car. The zealots of
the movement had been for months inflamed by the rhetoric of M.
Maurras; here was the chief mtteque, the enemy of Italy, the dispenser
of sophisms and saboteur of the true French policy. The Royalists post-
poned their mourning and attacked the Socialist leader. M. Blum was
badly beaten. The police were in time to save him from what might
682
BETWEEN TWO WARS
have been worse than a
beating, and the cold, distant intellectual
became a martyr.
The news of the attack did for the Left what the assault on Loubet
had done. It angered them and discredited their
enemies, for in
France, gang assaults on elderly and defenceless victims were not
regarded as signs of dynamism but of cowardly brutality. The
Royalists might defend the assault (as his constituents defended the
beating by Preston Brooks of Senator Sumner before the American Civil
War), but the danger of action in the street against the politicians, so
serious a year or so before, was now M. Maurras was sent
negligible.
to prison for incitement to violence l
and the cause of the Front Populaire
was even more certain of victory.
The Right entered the electoral battle of 1936 in more than its

customary disorder and depression. The refusal of the Croix de Feu


to run candidates meant that the
body which had diverted to itself so
much of the energy and money of the Conservative forces would neither
play the regular political game noi really play the alternative game of
revolution.
On the other side the enthusiasm with whieli the Communists
threw themselves into their new role of the patriotic party was funny
but clectorally profitable. Their picture of Hitler with a blood-stained
knife between his teeth was an ingenious turning of the Right's cannon

against it, for it recalled the Bolshevik with the bloody knife between
his teeth who had done such good servic e in 1919. That the knife was
marked 'Krupp-WendeP made the picture even more effective, for it
reminded the French workers that French capitalists were ready to
do business with the enemy of the German workers, the enemy of all
workers, the Nazi regime whose intolerable criminality was such that,
beside it, the French bourse* >is Republic was worth fighting for. After
the past years of ingenious devices, financial, diplomatic, political,
there was something new in the air.
The electors responded nobly. Of course (as was occasionally
forgotten), 1932 had been a great Left triumph, too, so there was not
room for a great shift of seats in the Chamber. The parties supporting
the People's Front gained about 30 seats, but the significant shift was
within the Left coalition.
The Radicals lost about as many seats as the Left gained as a whole.
The Socialists became the biggest party, though they polled only about
the same number of votes as in 1932; but the Communists doubled their
votes, and, thanks to the .working of their alliances, for
the first time

they got seats in the Chamber in rough proportion to their strength.

A million and a half Communist voters, 72 Communist Deputies


1
Defenders of the right of French political journalists to say what they please, dug up
from the files of the Communist press examples of attacks on M. Blum as
violent as any
%
made by the Action Fraitfaise.
683
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
instead of 10! That was the most striking aspect of the election and
the greatest political justification of the volte face in Communist policy.
There was almost as much attention paid to the young Communist
leader, Maurice Thorez, the vigorous and convincing preacher of the
new patriotic, not to say jingo, doctrine, as there was to L&m Blum.
The election was a victory over the friends of Mussolini and of Hitler,
as much as over the French capitalists. In the Paris region, where the
Communists polled more votes than the Radicals and Socialists put
together, and were by far the strongest party, the schism in the nation
seemed to be healed. The old Jacobin tradition was renewed; the
5
cries of 'Up the Soviets' and 'Up France were no longer contradictory.

II

In 1930, the neglected and electorally contemptible German


National Socialists suddenly became one of the greatest parties in the
Reichstag; the number of Nazi voters rose from 800,000 in 1928 to
6,500,000, and the world was brought face to face with a sudden
revival of extreme German nationalism. The impact of the de-
pression on Germany had given an opportunity to the party that had
denounced the 'system*, that had opposed both the Dawes Plan and
Young Plan, and whose main programme was the restoration of the
glory of Germany which had been lost by the crimes of the Socialists,
Liberals and other traitors of 1918. In no European country was the
rise of Hitler more deserving of calm study than in France, since it was

against France that his most violent diatribes had been directed, and
since it was the position of France in Europe and her security that were
most directly menaced.
France had two policies open to her, either of which might have
succeeded. One was the policy of using her present military and eco-
nomic strength to make a triumph of Hitler too expensive for Germany
to contemplate. She could have treated the Fiihrer, while he was still
an Austrian agitator, as Bismarck was prepared to treat Boulanger.
The ruling politicians in Germany might have been coerced or en-
couraged into really vigorous resistance or France could have
-

attempted to make the economic conditions which had helped to bring


about the startling growth of the Nazi party less intolerable. The
second policy was not incompatible with the first, but to adopt either,
or both, required vigilance and continuity.
In a sense there was plenty of vigilance. The incorrigible militarism
of the German people, their unending wish for revenge on France, were
asserted and stressed by the leaders of the extreme Right.
v
Had not
the premature evacuation of the Rhineland been followed, not by the
improvement of the relations between France and Germany, but by
the rise of Hitler? Would the Germans have rallied in such numbers
684
BETWEEN TWO WARS
to the cause of theman who had planned the annihilation of France
ifthe bridgeheads of the Rhine had still been
garrisoned by French
troops? Oderint dum metuant: the Germans
might have squirmed but
they could not have fought. On the other side there were to be found
optimists to whom the alarm over Hitler was
simply an invention of
the Right. 'What the Nationalists are unce again
trying to revive is
the state of mind, or rather, the
passions of 1912-13. . . Hitler to-day
.

is miles
away from power. He may be a little nearer it than, say,
Franklin-Bouillon, but he is infinitely farther away from it than General
Bouianger on the night of 2 yth January, 1889, or than Paul Derouledc
on the day of Felix Faure's funeral.' The author of this
optimistic
view was M. Leon Blum; and the main ground for His
optimism was the
traditional trust in the German Socialists which M. Blum had learned
from Jaures. What was to be feared from a country in which the
Prussian citadel of democracy was guarded by Herren Braun and
Severing?
These \\cic the illusions of the rarly spring of 1931 and they did not
long survive. In March, came the sudden and dramatic announce-
ment of the customs union between Germany and Austria. It was
sprung on the world in a fashion that made it very unlikely that the
powers immediately interested would believe that only a financial
arrangement was in question. France, Italy, Czechoslovakia pro-
tested, and if the partners to the union had any notion of defying the.
League, the great Austrian banking crisis which began with the failure
of the Credit-Anstalt made both Gcrrnjny arid Austria more docile.
A decision of the Permanent Court of International Justice that the
union was contrary to the obligations assumed by the Austrian Govern-
ment was highly political in its character. The judges voted along the
lines of the policies of their respective Governments which, it was
assumed rather easily in England, showed that the French and other
judges of the majority were influenced by non-judicial considerations;
the minority, of course, were not.
The rapid spread of the banking panic made the Austrian question
less important than it had been, for if the world had been recovering
from the Wall Street panic of 1929, that recovery was soon stopped.
From Vienna, the panic spread to Germany, and it was, from the point
of view of orthodox finance, a necessary and desperate last remedy
when President Hoover issued on June 20th an appeal for a general
moratorium on reparations and war debts. Mr. Hoover was in a
of the most important
hurry and he had neglected to secure the consent
financial power at that moment France. Nor could he do anything
to reassure the French, who believed that once reparations were stopped
they would never be resumed, and who
wondered if, in that event, the
the
American people would forgive their debtors with anything like
to display in forgiving theirs.
resignation that the French were expected
685
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
France was unwilling to take any serious financial risks to support the
tottering German banking structure and, within a few weeks, the crisis
had spread to England, whose bankers had been engaged in borrowing
French money and lending it, at a profit, to the now congealed banking
system of Central Europe.
In December, the first formal recognition of the end of reparations
was made, but the link to the war debt question, which all Europeans
could see, was invisible in Washington. It was invisible despite a* visit
to Washington made by M. Pierre Laval, since the French, for the
moment masters of the situation, were not accommodating, and since
no American politician, on the eve of a presidential election, could give
France the guarantee she wanted, that what she did not get from
Germany she should not be expected to pay America. By the time
the American presidential election was over, French public opinion
was resolved that the escape of Germany from paying what she had
undertaken to pay should not be made more intolerable still by France's
having to pay the country whose President had first launched the idea
of a suspension of payments.
In vain M. Herriot pleaded with the Chamber to honour its bond.
It was politically as impossible in France to pay anything to America,
as it was politically impossible in America to admit any connection
between the war-debt payments and reparations. But by the time that
the debt question ended M. Herriot's Ministry, France had much more
to worry about. The re-election of Hindenburg over the newly
naturalized Hitler reassured most of the timid, but the Marshal, once
safe in office, got rid of Brtining; and the Chancellor's fall was followed
by the expulsion from the stronghold of republicanism in Germany, the
Prussian Ministry, of those Social-Democratic leaders in whose energy
and vigilance M. Blum had put such excessive trust. There was, as
yet, less alarm than might have been expected. The Socialists were
still inclined to criticize M. Herriot for being too obsessed with security;

and those who thought of a German menace to peace, rather rejoiced.


Hitler was still out of office, and von Papen and the Barons were less of a
danger than Hitler would have been. When Schleicher followed
Papen, there was a revival of hope. Had not the Nazis lost a great
part of their support at the new elections? Had not the recognition
of the German right to arms equality, tempered by verbal reassurances
to France, shown the Germans that they could hope for justice and

friendship from the Western powers? But in January the last hope
of that kind had gone. Hitler came into office, and in a few weeks
the Reichstag fire, and the Nazi terror that followed it, destroyed the last
shreds of French belief in the
power of the greatest of Socialist parties.
Whatever hopes of peace and security France could still cherish could
not be based on the power and goodwill of the organized workers of
Germany.
686
BETWEEN TWO WARS
French opinion had its own
special difficulties in making up its
mind about the nature of the German Revolution. It was free from
some of the more foolish illusions of British known
opinion. Having
the pangs of defeat, itcould understand the emotion and motives of
the young Germans who wished to wipe out the disgrace of 1918, as
young Frenchmen had wished to wipe out the disgrace of 1 870, although
Andre Gide was no doubt more understanding than the
average
Frenchman when he noted that 'Hitlerism is a successful
Boulangism*.
That behind the Nazi movement were merely emotional resentments of
injustices, and that these once remedied, all the fever of the new order
would die down, was a view that not many Frenchmen could
sincerely
hold. But, on the other hand, the French intelligence was peculiarly
unfitted to sympathize with the limitless mysticism of the Nazi move-
ment; the passion for the absurd, the exaltation of unreason were
phenomena whose power the countrymen of Voltaire and Moliere were
prone to underestimate. 'What is not clear is not French', Rivarol
had written in the French revolutionary epoch, and that what was not
French was unimportant was a natural illusion of an insular people.
If the very nature of the Nazi Revolution, its mystical brutality, its
romantic and hysterical doctrines were calculated to perplex the
French spectator, his bewilderment was not entirely the result of his
own mental limitations. It was fostered by the new rulers of Germany
with a skill that was underestimated by people who failed to realize
that the Nazi leaders were capable of suiting their tunes to the audience,
providing the Wagnerian warlike motifs for the home market and
humane and reasonable Mozart for sale abroad.
Herr Hitler's great diplomatic problem, how to lull to sleep the
suspicions of his potential enemies while Germany was still militarily
impotent, was more difficult of solution in France than in Britain.
There was that too famous text in Mein Kampf laying down the
annihilation of France as one of the objectives of true German policy,
while the same sacred book made peace with England a necessary
preliminary to the destruction of France.
It was, difficult to explain away these things, but there were ways
and means. The journalistic favour that, in England, was secured by
mere was often on sale for more tangible gratification
social politeness,
in France. But no amount of venality would have greatly affected
French public opinion, if what Heir Hitler wanted the French people to
believe had not been something which they profoundly wanted to
believe, that, despite all that he and his associates
had said, he was
devoted to peace and that, with a few minor adjustments, especially after
the return of the Saar to Germany, Germany would settle down. What
if Pertinax doubted? Had not Mr. Ward Price expressed his con-
viction that France and Britain could count on the moderation of
the

Chancellor? It is true that the apologist who gave France this com-
687
THE DEVELOPMENT 6F MODERN FRANCE
1
fbrting assurance suffered, like so many of his Communist enemies,
from a lack of prophetic power, for he chose as a mouthpiece of the
pacific sentiments of the Third Reich, and worthy exponent of the ideas
of the Ftihrer, Herr Rohm, shortly before that leader paid with his life
for his political treason and sexual eccentricity.
Other apologists were less unlucky than M- de Brinon. M.
Alphonse de Ghateaubriant, as was natural in a romantic literary
nobleman, saw (and not altogether wrongly) in the energy and passion-
ate faith of the Hitler youth, something that was not abundant enough
in France, while others saw in Nazi Germany a bulwark .against
Bolshevism. So with each new advance, new claim, new threat, the
voices of the timid, the deceived, the morbidly anti-Bolshevik,
mingled with those of the bought, in a common
chorus of praise and
explanation. Stout Nationalists like M. Louis Bertrand moved from
defences of Louis XIV to defences of Herr Hitler, a historical pro-
gression not without its plausibility seen from another age or another
continent, but a little odd in a defender of the true French national
tradition. 2
In addition to the admirers of dynamism and to the Nationalists
with a natural admiration for the man who had succeeded in doing
in Germany what no one had succeeded in doing in France, making
national pride and national glory the main staple of politics, there were,
on the Left, convinced pacifists who were willing to close their eyes to
some of the more disagreeable methods of the new Germany in the hope
that they would be reserved for internal use. This selfish, or prudeul,
view of French duty must not be too severely condemned, for France,
on the other hand, was far more generous in the admission of refugees
than was Britain, and it was Park, not London, that received the mass
of fugitives from the Gestapo.
One last source of reassurance to the alarmed French was directly
fostered by Germany, by the old traditional method of buying praise
and suppressing criticism. In a country where being a dupe is as great
a sin as being a knave, the disinterested Nazi propagandist was harder
to find than was the case in Britain. But too much should not be made
of this. There was a genuine and honest willingness to end the Franco-
German feud. Believing that one-sided history was a menace, a group
of French and German scholars drew up a common statement on the
origins of the war of 1914, revealing a large measure of agreement
and a candid willingness to discuss points of disagreement. That the
1
M. Fernand de Brinon.
*
The high-water mark of this nonsense was reached by a gentleman calling himself by
the almost too Proustian name of Seramidal de Saint-Georges d'Ardenay. Having rather
hastily to interrupt a denunciation of the spreaders of false news of German aggression to
note the occupation of Vienna, he described that untoward event TU 'the reaction against
the shady plebiscite improvised by the "Patriotic Front" Chancellor, Schuschnigg, which
ended in a National-Socialist revolution*. Like M. Flandin, M. de Saint-Georges d%denay
came from the pacific Yonne.
688
BETWEEN TWO WARS
resulting memorandum was not (except in one
unimportant period-
ical) published in
Germany was of some significance.
Yet the triumph of Hitler in
Germany had immediately raised a
diplomatic problem of the first importance for France. Would she
stand .by her ally, Poland, whose
very existence was menaced by the
revival of a Nationalist in which the traditional
Germany Prussian
Poland would, in all probability, be dominant?
hostility to
Signor
Mussolini was willing to try to find out; and he
launched, in March
I933> the idea of a four-power pact between France, Britain, Italy and
Germany which would enable the great powers to 'revise' the Treaty,
in this case placate
Germany at the expense of Poland, while preserving
the Italian gains of 1919, the South
Tyrol and t'i e independence of
Austria.
The succession states were at once alarmed and, at that stage of
German military weakness, they could not be coerced, so the project
of revision was dropped. But the passivity of France in face of the
revival of a Germany which was obviously bent on escaping from the
shackles of Versailles was not lost on Poland, and In January
1934,
Hitler and Pilsudski signed a non-aggression pact and the intolerable
wrongs of the German people were put in cold storage, so far as Poland
was concerned. The Polish example was catching. If she could trust
Nazi Germany, why should not others?
1
The powers of the 'Little Entente which had an interest in pre-
serving the status quo in the Danubian busin, began to draw apart from
each other and from France. Only Czechoslovakia affirmed its
complete trust in France. The Foreign Minister of the Doumergue
Government was Louis Barthou, Poincare's closest political ally, and he
was determined not to be lulled into inertia by the most profuse German
promises. He would only go as far as offering a general system of non-
aggression pacts in eastern Europe, open to Germany as well as to
all the other powers. But Germany was no longer interested in general
pacts of the Locarno type. She did not expect to be attacked;
and what
she wanted was a system of bi-lateral treaties which would enable her,
when the time came, to isolate her enemies one by one. Poland, too,
was for the moment hostile to any system that diminished the value of
the immunity from German aggression that had been assured her.
In the Danubian basin, the problem was complicated by the dis-
by Jugoslavia; and France was still anxious to stay on
like for Italy felt

good terms with Italy. The royal dictator, King Alexander, came
to

France to clear up the matter, and he and Barthou were assassinated


in the streets of Marseillesby a Croatian terrorist. The Jugoslav
Government was convinced that the assassination was the work of bands
harboured by Hungary and Italy, and the situation of 1914 was almost
reversed. But the awkward question of what interests benefited by
the murder was glossed over. The death of King Alexander was for
689
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
France the loss of a trump card. The new rulers of Jugoslavia were
much less securely in the saddle than Alexander had been. The Prince
Regent, in particular, was believed to be violently opposed to any
rapprochement with Soviet Russia, and it had been Barthou's policy
to call in Russia to redress the balance upset by the defection of Poland.
In France, such a policy had been for some time advocated by such
respectable leaders of the Left as M. Herriot, and it was soon to be
advocated by such realist leaders of the Right as M. de Kerillis.
Russia, the argument ran, was a satisfied power. She had an interest
in the territorial status quo far greater than her theoretical interest in
world revolution. So France backed up Russia in her claim to a seat
on the Council of the League of Nations in 1934 and began negoti-
ations for that treaty of mutual assistance which was to bring Russian
weight down on the side of stability in Europe.
But while these questions were still unsettled, France had to make
up her mind how far she would think herself bound, in the face of the
new Germany, by the Treaty of Versailles. The time for the Saar
plebiscite was at hand.

Ill

Long before 1935, when the Saar plebiscite fell due, few people in
France still retained any illusionsabout the outcome. But for the
Hundred Days, the provisions of the first Treaty of Paris in 1814 might
have stood and the Saar have been made French in spirit. Over a
century of German rule had made the territory as German as Francoriia
or Brandenburg, and before the rise of Hitler the outcome of the plebis-
cite was never thought to be in doubt. The Saarlanders would, of
course, be making economic sacrifices by leaving the French customs
union which permitted the entry of their products, from coal to the
excellent Walsheim beer, without any tariff duties. But what were
such losses compared with the gain of return to the Fatherland?
The Nazi Revolution seemed to alter things. For one thing, it was
notorious that Germany was breaking the disarmament clauses of the
Treaty of Versailles. Should she be allowed to benefit by the terri-
torial clauses? The Prussian precedent of Bismarck's refusal to carry
out the Schleswig plebiscite might be turned against his heirs. Nobody
in France seriously proposed to take so bold a course, but there was
surely a possibility that a region so full of Socialists, Catholics and
Communists would refuse to vote to put itself under its class and creed
enemies? If the plebiscite was safeguarded, it was conceivable that the
Saarlanders would vote for the status quo, on the understanding that,
when Hitler fell, they would be allowed to join a liberated Germany.
The security of the plebiscite was, in fact, safeguarded by an inter-
national force mainly British, which was impartial, 'with French
690
BETWEEN TWO WARS
observers thought a kindly tolerance of the Nazi leaders
which might
mislead timid Saarlanders. The efforts of the
Socialists, the Com-
munists and a few Catholics to secure votes for the status
quo were not
looked on very sympathetically by
many Frenchmen; they were not
taken much more seriously than were the efforts of a handful of
French-
men to secure votes for France. If it was true, as the
hopeful believed,
that Hitler was sincere in his
promises of peace and amity after the
Saar question was settled, it was to the
advantage bi France that it
should be settled and settled quickly.
The result was
decisive enough. Less than 10 per cent, voted for
the status quo, less ithan
per cent, for annexation to France. In a pre-
dominantly proletarian region, an overwhelming majority had voted for
the nation, not for the class. When all allowance, had been made for
the influence of the Bishop of Trier on the Catholics and for intimidation
by the Nazis, the result was, or should have been, of the greatest signifi-
cance for the leaders of Left parties in France who were still doped with
illusions about the artificiality and transitoriness of national divisions.
Whatever might be the case in France, it was not true in other countries
that more ihan a handful of the workers were free of tin- national super-
stition and conscious only, or mainly, of their common interests as

proletarians. And if this was true, the degree to which France had
many truly class-conscious proletarians was of the utmost importance.
The question involved was of some urgent y for, in France, the effect
of the abnormally low birth rate of the war years was now being felt.
In face of a rearming Germany what was to be done? Raising the
period of army service from one to two years was the Government's
solution, a solution opposed with the greatest bitterness by M. Blum
and the Socialists. The alleged need for a stronger army, he argued,
was the invention of the generals who wanted an aggressive army. The
true policy was to agree with the other powers on disarmament and to
force the programme of disarmament on Germany. It was an argu-

ment directly in line with the Jaures tradition and it was likely to be
electorally profitable (which was not quite out
of line with the Jaures
tradition either). For a brief moment the Socialist protest was sup-
had a master who
ported by the Communists. But the Communists
was alive, not in the Pantheon; and on orders from Moscow they with-
drew their opposition to a measure which strengthened the military
to become an
power of a State which, however bourgeois, was about
allyof Russia.
Before the Communists had been given their orders, Herr Hitler
had taken the occasion to announce openly that he was disregarding the
arms limitations of Versailles. That Germany was rearming was no
France and
secret. Anagreement for mutual air assistance between
not directed Germany, was not unconnected
Britain, though against
the
with the success with which the Nazi Government was restoring
691
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
military might of the Reich. The official revelation that Germany had,
in fact, created an illegal air force was no news in March 1935, and the
further announcement that she was establishing an army whose peace
strength was about twice that of the French home strength was alarm-
ing, but not unexpected. These unilateral denunciations of treaty
obligations were, as the British Government solemnly pointed out,
likely to destroy the chances of a 'comprehensive agreement'. But the
German Government was wisely not taking British verbal denunciations
at more than their paper value.
The rapid rise of an armedGermany was of interest to more coun-
tries than France and Britain. In July 1934, after the blood purge of
his party, Herr Hitler's Austrian agents attempted a coup <Ttat which,

although successful in removing the obstacle of Chancellor Dollfuss, was


otherwise a failure and a failure largely because of the firm resolution
of the Duce to oppose, by arms if necessary, so great a menace to
Italian security as the establishment of a militant Germany on Italy's
northern frontier. The threat to Austria (despite lavish promises and
professions of good intentions from Herr Hitler) was driving Italy over
to the side of the status quo powers. The new director of French foreign
policy, M. Pierre Laval, was resolved to keep her there. With Italian
support, France could hope to impress on Germany the fact that a new
general war and a new defeat would follow a German attempt to undo
the territorial settlement of Versailles. If the rulers of Germany were
convinced that this was so, there would be no war.
The first steps to winning over Italy had been taken in January
when M. Laval had visited Rome. There he believed that he had
bought Italian support, or friendly neutrality, by some territorial
cessions of not very valuable desert soil, by the transfer of some shares in
the Addis- Ababa railway, and by extending until 1965 the right of the
Italians of Tunis to have their children regarded as Italian, not as
French subjects. It was a good bargain for France, if Italy had indeed
been won. But the price was in fact a good deal higher: and the form
the price would take was already evident.
In 1934 there had been a frontier fight between Italian and Abys-
sinian troops at a spot in the debatable land which was probably inside
the Abyssinian frontier. The rights and wrongs of the case had been
disputed, and Abyssinia which, under Italian patronage, had been
admitted to the League of Nations, appealed to Geneva. Various
forms of procedure were tried, but the Abyssinians paid less attention
to Italian words than to Italian deeds; they noted the increase in Italian

military strength on their borders and assumed, rightly, that Italy


meant war.
War between two League members was an outrage on all the pain-
fully accumulated post-war hopeful optimism. The French official
reaction was to regret that a semi-barbarous state was a member of the
BETWEEN TWO WARS
League, but even if she were, China had been a member too, and much
good had that done her when her fellow-member, Japan, attacked her.
The League was not really fit to keep peace all over the
world, but it
could keep peace where it was most menaced in
Europe. Even if it
came to war in Abyssinia, what was at issue? The
Abyssinian Empire's
independence was almost as much a fiction as the independence of
Morocco or Egypt. Alternatively it was by no means certain that its
independence was menaced, for the Italians had once before found that
it was easier to
plan the conquest of Abyssinia than to achieve it. The
Left, which of all sections in France had the greatest dislike of Musso-
lini, had also the greatest contempt for the military prowess of the
Duce's armies, and it was content to leave the punishment of his
temerity
to the people immediately concerned the M. Laval, at
Abyssir^ans.
any rate, was very reluctant to lose the fruits of his diplomacy, the
separation of Italy and Germany, for such trivial reasons. He asked no
awkward questions and it was unnecessary to tell him any lies; to deny,
for instance, tiiat war was decided >n.
When the British and French Ministers met Signor Mussolini at
Stresa, this tactful silence was not broken. The conference was agreed
on the necessity of maintaining the integrity of Austria (which meant, if
it meant
anything, military action by Italy and France) and collective
security was to be studied in order to 'maintain peace in Europe'.
There was no mention of peace in Africa; the alarm of the French at
the reported views of the British Chancellor of the Exchequer l was
quieted. All was very satisfactory on paper; preparations were made
for a mutual withdrawal of troops from the Franco-Italian border, and
M. Laval could regard himself as another Camille Barrere. Italy had
been won over. Nor was that all, for on May 2nd the Franco-Soviet
pact was signed, and its form having been adjusted to the League sys-
tem, London had approved. Germany, the treaty-breaker, the menace
to the peace of Europe, was indeed encircled. She would not now be
subjected to the temptation to use her new
armaments to which die
chance of a limited war would have exposed her. As Germany was not
to be coaxed and cajoled into good behaviour, she must be politely but

firmly intimidated.
The apparently sudden interest of the British Government in the

Abyssinian question was a shock to M. Laval. He believed that to risk


the loss of so important a stabilizing force in Europe as Italy, merely
because of formal obligations to Abyssinia, was absurd. Britain had
been right when she opposed the entry of Abyssinia into the League,
and right when, in 1925, she negotiated with Italy over spheres of
influence in Abyssinia in a fashion that showed little respect for the
formal sovereignty of the Negus. The sudden British regard for
legality, for the sacredness
of frontiers, for the sanctity of treaties (which
1
Mr. Neville Chamberlain.
693
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
France would have welcomed a few years before) was now suspect.
Had it not been imposed on the British Government by the informal

plebiscite of the 'peace ballot', by those sentimental 'clergymen* who, in


the eyes of so many Frenchmen, were a danger to the peace of Europe,
with their muddled and almost always ill-timed moralization of funda-
mentally non-ethical problems? M. Laval, too, was peculiarly ill-
fitted to understand the British, feeling for the small nation attacked by
the great, since he, unlike his predecessor M. Barthou, had no great
opinion of the smaller allies of France. Europe was ruled by the great
powers; that was a fact to be acted on and not a problem in moral
philosophy to be debated over.
These were the considerations that, it is assumed, were the basis of
the policy of M. Laval. That these considerations were not only those
of M. Laval was obviously true. To many, if not to all Frenchmen of
the Right, the sacrifice of the new-won friendship of Italy on what they
genuinely thought a frivolous or hypocritical pretext, was absurd. To
the numerous Fascist sympathizers it was a crime. And to the French-
men with a predisposition to admire Italian policy and to covet Italian
support, were suddenly added many Frenchmen whose suspicion of the
candour of British policy had been aroused by a series of minor pin-
pricks. Again and again, since Hitler had come into power, the policy
of the British Government had seemed to be one of verbal reproof
followed by condonation. The Berlin visit of Sir John Simon after the
announcement of German rearmament was not forgotten and it sud-
denly acquired a sinister appearance when it was announced that, with-
out consulting the other signatories of the Stresa agreements, Britain
had concluded a naval treaty with Germany, waiving the restrictions of
Versailles and limiting, instead, German surface tonnage to 35 per cent.
of the British. France felt more than wounded; she felt betrayed.
After all the ridicule of French preoccupation with security, Britain had
gone behind the back of her former ally and maxle what was, from her
point of view, an excellent bargain, giving her a far greater margin of
security than she had had in 1914. France remembered, too, that a
deal with Britain as a preliminary to the annihilation of France was a
part of the plan of campaign laid down in Mein Kampf. The last touch
was added by the signing of the treaty on June i8th, the anniversary of
Waterloo. Was this a new 'Belle Alliance' at the expense of France?
All through the summer of 1935, France, profoundly alarmed and
irritated, hoped that she would not have to choose between Britain and
Italy, that some face-saving device would be found, but the speech on
September nth of the new British Foreign Secretary, Sir Samuel
Hoare, made it plain that France would have to choose, that is, if
Britain were really going to throw all her strength in support of the
League. The British Minister's speech was, indeed, so definite, so
positive a commitment of Britain to the principle of collective security,

694
BETWEEN TWO WARS
that acute Observers in France could
hardly believe their cars. A
Britain so devoted to the
obligations of 'full of
acceptance League
membership' was worth the price of the alienation of Italy. A few
years before a French writer on disarmament l had
pointed out to his
countrymen the great merits, from a French point of view, of the obliga-
tions of the League system. The provisions of the Covenant ought to
be sacred to us Frenchmen: first of all we
reject the theory of "scraps of
paper" and thafr means the Treaty of Versailles then the Covenant
makes a comprehensive effort to put an end to the chaos of
present
international relations by a methodical
organization which is both
political and juridical. We
are attached to peace and the author of
the Discourse on Method is one of us.' But there vas little Cartesian
rationalism displayed in the last months of 1935.
The
cleavage over the Abyssinian question ran through all sections
of the country. Despite the outward enthusiasm of the Left for the
League and for sanctions, there were many enemies of the internal
policy of the Laval Government wru> privately wished him well in his
attempt to avoid estranging either Britain or Italy. The despatch of
the British Home Fleet into the Mediterranean encouraged those
Frenchmen who were willing to incur risks if Britain were really serious.
They told their countrymen that, when she really made up her mind,
Britain was unshakable and unbeatable: had she not 'had the hide of

Napoleon'? On the other hand, if Britain meant business, and that


meant war, the timid, the pacific, the piudeut and the pro-Italian
parties all found themselves united in a common hatred and fear of
drastic action. Among the students, the appearance of Professor Jeze
of the University of Paris, who had been the counsel for the Emperor
of Abyssinia at Geneva, was the occasion of a series of riots which
prevented one of the most eminent of French law teachers from lectur-
ing.
2
Among the French Catholics a violent dispute ranged on one
side the supporters of the Duce and on the other the critics of Italian
political morality ledby M. Paul Claudel, M. Francois Mauriac and
M. Jacques Maritain, a division that was to reappear a few months
later in a more profound form over Spain.
The fear of war was the chief argument, the chief emotion to be
utilized by Signer Mussolini and his French partisans and employees to
weaken the party in favour of the full League policy. The Italian
regime was dictatorial; it could not afford to retreat,
and its chief had
better go down fighting in face of the great powers than be quietly
squeezed out of existence by sanctions. Slow sanctions he could ignore
for the time being, counting on speedy victory to deliver him from the
mild boycott organized from Geneva. Real sanctions, the imposition
1
M. Andx* D. Toledano. <

1
Too much attention was paid to this student demonstration. Law students in France
case with the
contain a much higher proportion of idle and rich young men than is .the
student body of the other faculties.
695 YY
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
of impotence on his mechanized troops by holding up the oil supply,
that, he gave to understand, meant war. Was France willing to fight
a war of which the immediate burden would fall on her (she had a
frontier bordering Italy as well as one bordering Germany) for such
sentimental reasons as the British Government gave to cover their
realist political jealousy of the appearance of a great power on the
borders of Egypt?
The newspapers that defended the Italian case and spread the Italian
threats went to extremes of abuse that startled even old readers.
Gringoire, the weekly orgaa run by M. de Garbuccia (a Corsican clans-
man associate of M. Ghiappe) was perhaps the most virulent of all the
pro-Italian and anti-English journals, but it was a hot race and M.
Beraud, the chief mud-slinger of Gringoire, only won by a short head.
Mixed up with the question of foreign policy was a question of
internal policy. The semi-Fascist parties in France were on the down-
grade politically; the approaching elections would inevitably mean a
triumph for the Left, unless the Right could pin on its opponents the
deadly charge of war-mongering. And the philosophical Fascists could
not afford to see the regime in Italy collapse; its strength, efficiency,
and vigour had been the pride of the Action Frangaise for over a
decade. In Italy, the revolution which M. Maurras had preached was
practised.
The great victory of the Baldwin Government in a general election
inwhich the matter of dispute was which side would support the League
and the Negus more vigorously, further forced M. Laval's hand, for his
opponents, attacking him for many other reasons, could also attack him
for his failure to collaborate more warmly with a Government so repre-
sentative of British sentiment. Indeed, however reluctantly, M. Laval
was bound to follow a strong British lead, unless he could induce Britain
to adopt his policy of acompromise that would give the Duce enough to
justify slight retreat on his part.
a M. Laval thought that such an
arrangement was necessary unless Britain was ready to fight, and he
asserted that Sir Samuel Hoare from the first had assured him that
Britain would not push economic sanctions anywhere near the edge
of war.
M. Laval had his way. The world learned through the indiscretion
or indiscipline of Pertinax, who had consistently opposed the Laval
and hunt with the hounds, that the
policy of trying to run with the hare
brave words of September were being swallowed, that by war and the
threat of war, the Duce was getting a great deal of the territory of his
fellow-member of the League and of the Annunziata. If the Duce had
at once accepted the Hoare-Laval plan, the faces of the League and of
France and Britain might have been saved. But he waited and British
public opinion, less plastic than was necessary, killed the scheme.
All now depended on the prophetic talents of the military experts in
696
BETWEEN TWO WARS
France and Britain who calculated on a
long and exhausting war in
whose course the mild sanctions
adopted would, perhaps, be decisive.
As the experts were wrong, the defeat of the
League and of the two
chief powers in it, was made manifest to all the world in the
first months
of 1936. M. Laval's policy had failed.
Italy had been neither con-
ciliated nor intimidated. Britain had not been won over to collective
security (the willingness of the Baldwin Government to accept the
Hoare-Laval pact, like the failure to impose effective sanctions, showed
that); and the British people, whose heart and pride had more been
deeply involved than their Government's, were angered at what they
thought was a betrayal by France. Even if M. Laval had not failed,
elections were near at hand and it was time that .he Radicals were
back in power, so the Radical Ministers resigned from the Cabinet,
which meant that it fell and M. Pierre Laval gave way to a Government
headed by M. Albert Sarraut, whose business was to do nothing until
the elections in May.
M. Sarraut and his Foreign Minister, M. Flandin, hud, however,
some current business to do. They had to keep their <-yes open for a
chance to liquidate the Abyssinian question, which Italian victory was
making so desirable. They had also to ratify the treaty with Russia
which M. Laval had ostentatiously neglected to do. The ratification
was opposed mainly on the ground that it would irritate Germany and
give her an excuse, however bad, for new treaty violations. It was also

opposed (it was an election year) by many politicians who feared the
French Communist Party and who believed the ex-Communist, M.
Doriot, when he assured them that the only object of Russian foreign
policy was to get France into a war with Germany and leave her to
fight it alone. These predictions were warmly attacked both by friends
of the Soviet Union and by practical politicians, some of whom appealed
to the precedent of the alliance of Francis I and the Sultan against the
Emperor Charles V. A deputy of the Right, M. Vallat, denied the.
validity of this parallel. Soleiman the Magnificent, he said, did not
keep a Moslem party in France to overthrow his ally's Government and

replace the Bible the Koran! But the Chamber ratified the treaty
by
and sent it where it was still being debated when France
to the Senate
was suddenly faced with the greatest decision of her post-war history.
On March 7th, the people of Paris learned that Herr Hitler, who so
the Locarno Pact,
shortly before had accepted, freely, the obligations of
had sent his troops into the demilitarized area of the Rhineland.
With the occupation of the Rhineland, a question that most French-
men thought of subordinate importance suddenly became primary.
What was the strength of the French Army? So long as Germany
was
more or less limited in her military organization by the Treaty of
Versailles, the strength of the French Army could be
allowed to decline.
It is true that, apart from serious doubts as to the efficacy of the
697
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
disarmament clauses of the Treaty, the highly disciplined and trained
Reichswehr was a formidable force and, as it consisted entirely of long-
service troops, it provided an admirable nucleus that could grow very"

rapidly. Nevertheless, the disparity in force was too great for Germany
to be ready to risk the arbitrament of arms, unless backed up by another

country that could supply arms aftd men. That country was, for a long
time, Russia; or so French military opinion feared. But even after
the escape of Germany from the military strait-jacket of Versailles, the
military position of France was secured by the demilitarization of the
Rhineland, Guarded from sudden invasion by the great fortress line
called after the War Minister, Andre Maginot, France was in a position
to make sure that war, when and if it came, would be fought in Ger-

many, and the prestige of Prussian methods in Germany was largely


due to the justifiable boast that, since 1815, the Prussian Army had
saved the lands it served from invasion. With the Rhineland demili-
tarized it would be impossible to give such a guarantee and the French,
obsessed with their own memories of invasion, attached great import-
ance to the fact that in a new war it would be Cologne and Goblence,
not Rheims and Lille, that would suffer. 'To each one his turn', as a
candid deputy had put it at the time of the Ruhr invasion. It was this
belief that encouraged the Left to demand and the Right to concede a

great reduction in the term of military service. From three years it was
first reduced to eighteen months and then, in 1930, to one year. From
the point of view of many Frenchmen this was the most tangible fruit
of victory and a sufficient reply to the not always well-informed foreign
critics who talked of French militarism and the French refusal to reduce
armaments.
The reduction in the length of service did not, of course, reduce the
strength of the Army by two-thirds. It was in the first place an
inseparable part of the scheme to increase to around 100,000, that is to
about the legal strength of the Reichswehr, the long-service professional
troops who were to be the backbone of the*new army. But it was hard
to recruit so many in a country that had next to no unemployment,
especially as the terms offered recruits were not financially very tempt-
ing and as, in the general expectation of peace, there was not much
to attract the ambitious soldier. It was, indeed, hard enough to recruit
even The pay was bad; captains with around i i and com-
officers.
mandants with around 16 a month were in a desperate situation, if
they had no private means, and although these starvation rates were
raised, officers believed, with more or less justice, that since they had
no votes and were not allowed to organize, they suffered in comparison
with the electorally powerful bureaucracy.
A more effective method of making up for the fall in peace-strength
of the Army was the system of treating die conscripts who had served
one year, not as free from their military obligations except for their
698
BETWEEN TWO WARS
annual reserve training, but as being 'en disponibilite'. The men who
had had an intensive training for one year were, in legal theory, sent
off on long leave, but were still liable to recall at any moment. To
recall them was not to order general mobilization, it was merely to stop
their conditional leave. This system had been tried before, under the
Second Empire and in the early years of the Republic. It had been

found, however, that the conscripts on long leave regarded being called
back to the colours as a grievance; and it remained doubtful down
to 1936, how far the distinction between being on conditional leave and

being released from active service was sufficiently appreciated to make


the recall politically any more feasible than a mobilization would have
been.
The illusions about the possibilities of a great colonial army making
the war in a
up for the stagnation of French population had survived
few breasts. was
Mangin as enthusiastic as he had been in 1913, but

the colonial offuials disliked conscription, which Lyautey had kept from
it was applied, in Algeria,
being applied to Morocco; even \\nere
Tunis, Wrst Afi it was on a very limited scale and the mas? of native
ica,
were \ olunteers. Not only was conscription generally unpopular,
troops
but the military value of Malagasies and Congo Negroes was found
to

be Miiall. The French Native Army was, as in the past, drawn from
the lighting stocks, Senegalese, Moroccans, Algerians, and even these
small contingents. Indeed, the
regions contributed comparatively
French troops in the
necessity of stationing highly-paid professional
made it a matter of debate whether the metropolis gamed very
colonies
much in a military sense from its Empire, although, as the Foreign
establishment, the necessary
Legion recovered from its low post-war
work was entrusted to it. That recovery of the Legion
police largely
as the
had its awkward side, however, for the Legion's efficiency grew
and other flotsam and jetsam of the war were
post-war White Russian
as was the case before 1914, were
the main
replaced by Germans who, of
as before 1914, a large Proportion
element in the Legion. Again, con-
enlisted as Belgians, but the
the recruits were Frenchmen, usually
and of the Legion compared unfavourably with those m the
ditions pay and military urn
Frenchman
the of an adventurous
Colonial Aray:
more natural to enlist openly in the colonial troops than
of mind found it

d
"^So?:iJp-^-,econ yn ad.
?.F^
<,

stocks of equipment, with


a conse-
on
Army depend immense war its
was evident as

S
qut high and increasing degree
as the
of obsolescence
war with Abd el Krim. In the post-war years,
of cavalry that had fallen very
low by 1918
that

rose
too, the
again, until

do both.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
the spread of mechanization led to the transforming of horsemen into
tank drivers. 1
At a time, that is, when the militarism of France was a subject of
attack from politicians and and outside the country, the
theorists inside
French Army was actually a very cumbrous organization, powerful in
defence but not readily prepared for the aggressive design attributed to
it by critics like M. Blum. Hostility to the profession of arms, the
assertion that conscription was the greatest of evils beside which the
evilsof capitalism were negligible, was a theme of which Alain, the
Radical philosopher, never tired. But .despite all the unpleasant
memories of the last war, it was hard to arouse suspicion of a hard-
worked and ill-paid professional body like the French officers. They
were largely of lower middle-class origin, not the haughty aristocrats of
the Radical tradition and, although attempts were made to chill the
blood of electors with the dark designs of the Royalist and Catholic
Commander-in-Chief, General Weygand, it was hard to believe that
any army whose leaders, like Foch, had been so docile in the moment
of victory, were going to turn into so many Spanish or Spanish-
American generals many years later. The French Army was a faithful,
even a docile servant of the State.
When the Locarno treaties had been signed, some soldiers had criti-
cized them on the ground that they bound France to respect the
neutrality of the Rhineland; which meant that Germany could prepare
for war in peace, secure from a French invasion. But the advantages of
the treaty for a non-aggressive power were manifest; and France was
decidedly non-aggressive. So long as the Rhineland frontier was open,
the French Army could carry the war into Germany, thus protecting
France and effectively aiding her eastern Allies. In these circum-
stances it was confidently believed that Germany would not fight.
European peace was secured by the imposition of a limitation on Ger-
man sovereignty that was both a punishment for her destructive prowess
in the last war and a guarantee that she would not again enjoy the

pleasures of victories won on foreign soil. 'Qu'un sang impur abreuve


leurs sillons' was now the French motto.
It was this guarantee of peace, bought with nearly a million and a
half lives, that France saw slipping away from her in the second week
of March. What was to be done? M. Sarraut proclaimed that it was
intolerable that Strasbourg should lie under German guns: but either
Strasbourg or Stuttgart had to be endangered. It was a France pre-
pared for a defensive war which was faced with the crisis of March 7th.
The first and obvious retort to Hitler's breach of faith was for the French
to occupy the territory. She was still much stronger than Germany;

1
It it said that cavalry officers trained in the aesthetic tradition of the famous Cadre
JVfctr of the Saumur cavalry school, took this transformation ill. 'Oil is dirty, dung is not',
was how one critic summed up their attitude.

7OO
BETWEEN TWO WARS
Hitler probably did not dare to
fight; if he did he would be soon
and thoroughly defeated. But to move at all meant to call
up the
troops on 'long leave', and if there was a real fight, even a brief one, it
meant a general mobilization. It was a dreadful decision for a care-
taker government to have to take.
When the news came man in the street had asked
to Paris, the
c
What will the English do?' On
paper there was no d^ubt what they
woujpl do; they were bound as tightly as a country can be bound by the
Locarno treaty, but the reaction in London to the German advance was
not comforting to the French. There was a widespread measure of
agreement that the German claim for equality was quite reasonable,
that French worry over security was unnecessary, even
disgracefully
timid. The papers of the Left intelligentsia were particularly positive
on these points. To point to the flagrant breach of faith, to appeal to
the dangers of the future, was to be 'unconstructive' and often to be
unprinted. Then many in England were glad to pay back France for
her hick of energy in the Abyssinian risis, as many in France had been
glad to pay kick England for the naval treaty. Whether a French
Government of the Sarraut type would have dared lo do anything is
hard to say, but its indecision was made a decision by the British atti-
tude. Germany got away with the boldest and most essential of her
r.uly manoeuvres. She was now ready to mo\e on to conquest: and
Europe passed into the shade rw of war.
It is possible that the Government would have liked to have its
hand forced by the General Staff and to be compelled to order a
French counter-occupation that we now know would not have been
opposed; but the generals of the Republic had
been for long servants
not masters. There was nothing to be done but to prepare for a dark
future. 1 The immediate problems of the situation were left to the
incoming Prime Minister, that veteran critic of French militarism,
M. Blum.
1
One result of this crisis was the recasting of the French mobilization system. Instead
of calling up troops by classes consisting of year groups, the reservists were sub-divided
into various specialist categories and called up by these categories. This
made for more
flexibility and more secrecy.

701
CHAPTER IX

THE FATE OF THE PEOPLE'S FRONT

it became evident that the electoral victory of the 'Front


WHEN
Populaire* had surpassed the most optimistic previsions and that
the Socialist party had been the greatest beneficiary of the tidal wave,
M.Le\>n Blum addressed, on May iotb, 1936 the National Council of the
party. He reminded them of the meeting at the Salle Huyghens, four
and of the regrets he had then expressed that the Socialists
years before,
had not been the strongest of the Left parties. Had they been so, 'it
would have been a fine thing to see some men trying to serve the inter-
estsof their country while remaining faithful to the doctrine of their
party'. It was not without boldness that such memories could be

evoked, for in the exultation of the victors there was a risk that a very
high standard of fidelity to party doctrine would be demanded. It was
soon necessary to remind the Congress which had authorized the
Socialist leaders to form a Government that, not only had the Socialists
not won a majority at the last elections, 'but the proletarian parties
did not win one either. There is no Socialist majority, there is 110 pro-
letarian majority, there is a People's Front majority. ... It will be
the object of our experiment, and the real problem that this experiment
is going to set us, to discover whether it is possible to get out of this

social system, the amount of order, well-being, security, justice that it


can produce for the mass of workers and producers.' If the hopes now
held were falsified, 'I should be the first to come to tell you; it was a
chimera, it was an empty dream, there is nothing to be done with
society as at present constituted'.
In those early hopeful days, there was not much worrying about
such unpleasant eventualities. There was a great parliamentary
majority supported by a great wave of popular enthusiasm; there was
office at hand and the support of that band of practised politicians,
the Radicals. The Right was in ruins; there was only one cloud on
the political sky, the action of the Communists.
That party had benefited more than any other from the electoral
bargain; its organizations had been in the forefront of the fight and,
since the fusion of the two trade-union federations, many of its leaders
702
BETWEEN TWO WARS
were colleagues of the faithful allies of the Socialist
party. All seemed
to be well, but the refusal of the Communist
party to take office was
alarming. It meant that there was
always present a Left party, which
was not involved in the immediate
responsibilities of government. It
would be able to profit from any hitch, any weakness of the Govern-
ment; any of those adjustments of programmes to the hard necessities
of the times which were inevitable as seen from the Minister's
desk, but
which could be made to seem like treason in the
workshop or the
meeting. Only complete trust in the good faith of their recently-
acquired allies could have prevented the Socialists from being uneasy,
as they took office with the Communists outside.
'We should doubtless be more powerful,' said M. Blum, 'better
equipped to persuade the workers, if there was nothing to allow us to
envisage or to contemplate, even as a hypothesis, a difference of views
of any kind, between the different forms, the different
organs of the
1

working class, whether in its political or trade-union character. To


translate this cryptic language, the new Ministers would have felt safer
if they couJd have had their Communist friends more
closely under their
eye. As it was, they would have to keep one eye on the defeated Right
and one on the auxiliaries of the extreme Left, allies who might ruin all
by their exigencies and their tactics. It was not to the Right, which
had compared him to Kerensky, but to the Communists that M. Blum
C
next addressed his warning. I really hope that the Government
which the Socialist party is going to form, will not be the Kerensky
Government. But, if it were to be so, believe me, in the France of
to-day not Lenin who would replace it.'
it is

The warning was not superfluous, for it was necessary for the new
Government to reassure the possessors of capital that they were not to
be expropriated. It was also necessary to calm the fears of the fright-
ened bourgeois who were exchanging francs for dollars or sterling and
thus causing a strain on the currency, which might develop into a panic
and which was causing a serious export of gold. Such reassurances,
such negotiations were not what the militants expected. M. Blum was
This
parleying at the gate of the Wall of Money instead of storming
it.

feeling of betrayal was the price that had


to be paid for over-simplifica-
tion. As an English Communist writer pointed out, 1 'it is a simplifica-
tion of things to imagine that an attack on the privileges of the Bank of
France might bring such swift results as the storming of the Bastille by
the people of Paris in 1789'.
Although, as 'was their wont, the Communist
leaders afterwards
talked as if the stay-in strikes were their doing, they, like everybody else,
were surprised by the decision of the workers in some great Paris fac-
tories to exploit, industrially, the electoral victory and, by occupying
the factories, bring a special form of pressure to bear on their employers,
i
Ralph Fox,
703
THE DEVELOPMENT, OF MODERN FRANCE
a pressure that could only be countered if the power of the State were
used to expel them and they were rightly confident that the power of
the State would not be used against them in May 1936!
The first strikes took place on May 26th, but it was the second wave
of the first week in June that impressed the Government, the employers,
the workers, and simple spectators with the conviction that something
had changed in France, that this was more than a revolt, if not yet a
revolution. The demands of the strikers ranged from better lavatory
accommodation to paid holidays, but more significant than any specific
claim were the discipline and self-confidence of the workers. Although
itpleased the writers in the popular press and, no doubt, titillated their
readers to hint at a general let-down of all discipline, the turning of
factories into Abbeys of Thelema or Islands of Cythera, the holiday-

spirit of the strike never degenerated into riot. The popular song of the
moment, Tout va bien 9 Madame la Marquise ran the Internationale a good
second in popularity, and its temper fitted the mood of the strikers well
enough. They were willing to take a tolerant and optimistic view of
the situation, if they got their way in fundamentals.
It should be remembered that very few of the strikers were members
of any trade-union, or had any recognized leaders, although the Com-
munists at once set about filling the gap. A complication that added to
the danger of panic was the spreading of the strike to Hachette's, the dis-
tributors of newspapers, so that on the morning after the Blum Govern-
ment was formed there were only three papers on sale on the streets to
announce the news; the Populaire, Humanite and the Action Fran$aise.
There followed a race between the Government and the official
trade-union organizations on the one hand, and the spontaneous efforts
of the workers on the other. The workers were full of resentment at
the policy of deflation; they were full of hope as a result of the electoral
victory; they were not full of faith in the new Government. It meant

well, no doubt, but it needed pushing. Had there been no stay-in


strikes, would the Blum Government have been willing or able to
coerce the employers or the Senate? The workers thought it very
doubtful and they were right. On the other hand, the Government
was afraid of alienating a large part of its middle-class supporters by
toleration of illegal violence. Even the Communists were apprehen-
sive of a reaction. Had not the futile occupation of the Italian factories
in 1920 been the preliminary to Fascism? Who knew whether the most
unmanageable factory crowds were not the victims of Fascist agents
l
provocateurs or 'Trotzkyites'? At any rate, the Government thought it
prudent to drop hints of possible activities of saboteurs and thought it
safe to promise condign punishment, if any of these mysterious agitators
were caught.
/
1
Some may have remembered that Signer Mussolini, a,t tta time, approved of the,
seizure of the factories,

704
BETWEEN TWO WARS
The basic fact was, that the stay-in strikes could be ended
only by
violence, or by the acceptance of the main demands of the strikers. It
-was necessary to end, at
once, such dangerous strikes as that of the
butchers, and it was desirable to get the workers out of the factories as
quickly as possible and peacefully. That meant
winking at illegality;
but it was impossible, as M. Blum told the Chamber on
June yth, for
his Government to appear to disavow 'a part of the which
working-class
to-day is struggling to improve its conditions of life'. It was necessary,
indeed, for the Government to defend itself against charges of
having
talked and thought too much of 'order'. No one in the
Chamber,
except the discredited minority, could object to these sentiments, and
M. Blum scored a great success when he imposed 01* the employers the
1
Matignon agreements. Imposed, for the employers had very little
choice and even if those employers who were represented
by the 'Gen-
eral Confederation of French Production'
freely consented, their
consent did not bind, morally even if it did legally, the numerous small
employers who were not represented. The C.G.T. itself still did not
represent more than a minority of the strikers. For the moment, the
discontent of the smaller employers mattered little; what ,vas more (

serious was the ignoring of the authority of the C.G.T. by many


strikers. The agreements provided their own remedy for this last
danger; by making collective bargaining compulsory, they gave an
immense fillip to the C.G.T., which more than recovered the ground
that it had lost in 1920-1. Its membership rose to 5,000,000 and in it
the French working-class had again an clFective and accredited mouth-
piece.
The enforcing of collective bargaining was easier to lay down in
general terms than to enforce in law. There were soon to be plenty
of conflicts over the true meaning to be given to the law, but the great
employers could no longer ignore the unions or safely blacklist the
leaders; the united trade-union movement was no longer largely
a lobby of minor Civil Servants, an instrument of electoral rather than
of industrial pressure.
Of more immediate interest to the strikers was a rise in wages of
from 12 to 15 per cent., and the institution of paid holidays. Special
excursions were organized by road and rail: and in the sudden outpour-
ing of the workers and their families, brought about by
reduced rates in
hotels and for transport, optimists saw the French reply to the recrea-
tional facilities of Fascism.
Most dramatic of all the reforms was the adoption of a forty-hour
week in industry. This had been part of the Socialist programme and
had been vaguely promised in the platform of the People's Front, but,
in all probability, the Government looked forward to long and leisurely
negotiations with other countries before doing
much or anything about
1
From the name of the new office of the Prune Minister, the Hdtel Mntignon.
7<>5
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
it. The put an end to the hopes of postponement, and the
strikes

forty-hour law had


to be passed. It may be surmised that the Blum
Cabinet had its own doubts about the advisability of this reform. In
addition to increasing the leisure of the workers, it was supposed to
reduce unemployment; and the leaders of the Government, then and
later, were forced to make astonishingly naive pronouncements on this
topic which it would be insulting their intelligence to profess to think
that they really believed. So long as there was any unemployment in
France, it was argued, reduction of hours was a good thing; until the
unemployed were all absorbed, there could be no reason for altering
the Jaw. This was not true and, in any case, the main trouble of the
French working-class in the past few years had been not unemployment
but very low wages. The main burden of unemployment, which was
Jess in France than in any other country, had fallen on the foreign

immigrants. It was the main economic thesis of the new Ministry, as


set out by M. Blum to a criticaJ Senate, that the basic cause of trouble
was insufficient demand. An increase of purchasing power was to
stimulate production, and, by increasing the amount of business done,
make it easy for the entrepreneur to bear the burden of increased wages.

This theory was to be repeated again and again by apologists for the
new policy and backed-up by citations, more or less relevant, from
economists ranging from Quesnay to Mr. Durbin. But the application
of the forty-hour week did not increase the purchasing power of the
masses and it could hardly fail to diminish production and so raise com-
parative costs. This, in turn, made it harder for France to compete in
world markets, increased the unfavourable balance of trade and so
made for further pressure on the franc which M. Blum and his Finance
Minister, M. Vincent Auriol, were promising to defend.
The real argument for the forty-hour week was political. As M.
Blum told the Senate, it was a free body but it was a political body. He
asked it to remember 'the state of the country a fortnight ago. I ask
you to think of the fact that the voting of these laws which we have put
before you is most certainly one of the parts of the task of conciliation
and of concord that we have attempted.' The Senate in 1936, like the
Chamber in 1934, could take a hint. It accepted the Government's
programme without enthusiasm, but it accepted it.
The new Government had to do something for the peasants, since
it had done so much for the workers. Above all, it had to do something
for the producers of the noble crop, wheat. The remedy was drastic
enough. A Wheat Board, an 'Office du Ble', was set up which was to
fixannually a price that would both be remunerative to the pro-
ducer and avoid the recent fantastic ups-and-downs. To this end,
free dealing in wheat was to stop. The millers who were, in the eyes
of peasants, the villains of the piece, were
many no longer to have
anything to say about the price of wheat. That was to be fixed by
BETWEEN TWO WARS
the Office, a board on which producers, consumers and the State were
all represented. All wheat, in the original plan, was to be sold
by the
producers at the fixed price and exclusively to co-operatives who would
store it, and after paying the producer, sell it as required to the millers.

There would be no possibility of evasion, I^ike Joseph in Egypt, the


Office would have a complete corner in the wheat supply. To enable
the Office to fix the price, the producers had to make rather elaborate
returns, of acreage sown, of the crop harvested, of the amount of earlier
years' crops in store. The critics of the scheme expressed doubts as
to the ability of the Office to protect the consumer against the tempta-
tion to price wheat too high, and there were complaints of the amount
of bookkeeping imposed on the peasants. Then the Senate struck at the
elimination of the grain-merchant. He was alk wed to remain, al-
though his utility in a system of fixed prices was not obvious. Some
co-operators objected to the flooding of their societies with new mem-
bers and the turning over of their organization to extraneous
purposes.
In some regions it became a political paradox that the wheat policy of
the 'Front Populaire' had greatly increased the resources and
import-
ance of co-operatives almost exclusively run by 'Reactionaries'. The
new legislation was very complicated and it had to be altered and
amended by innumerable new rules, but, helped by a rather poor
harvest in 1936, the Office was able to give the peasant a better price
than he had had for some years. Needless to say, some perennial
grumblers asserted that without the Office, prices would have been
higher! But the Government received ,is mucii gratitude as it is wise
to expect from farmers.
The Blum Government had survived its first ordeals and survived
them well. The new Prime Minister had, in an anonymous tract,
written just before his entry into active politics in 1919, preached a
reform of governmental method, a reinforcement and rationalization of
the executive machinery. He now carried out some of his own ideas,
grouping ministries in a more coherent fashion and, startling novelty,
taking three women into his Government as Under-Secretaries, so pre-
of members of the Gov-
senting Parliament with the paradoxical sight
ernment who, by reason of sexual disqualification, could neither vote
nor be elected to the meanest office. Madame Juliot-Gurie and her
that the new Government, full of
colleagues were only one of the signs
who, like the Prime Minister, were taking office for the first
people
time, was not to be as hidebound as the Cabinets of the past. France
more from the peaceful revolution of 1936 than a mere
expected
ministerial reshuffling.
The Blum Government, like other French Governments, found its

hands tied by financial shackles. A


loan was issued that appealed
to the small investor and that was intended to show that the
directly
Government was not wholly dependent on the banks, on the money
707
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
power. It had some success as a demonstration, but to secure that
success, M. Vincent Auriol had to promise not to devalue the franc. It
was a serious commitment of the moral authority of the Government
and it did not prevent a constant ebbing of the gold stock of the Bank;
20,000,000,000 francs of gold were exported between May and Sep-
tember, more than a quarter of the total reserve. The men-in-the-
1

know had less confidence than had M. Vincent Auriol in the ability of
the new Government to evade the consequences of its own policy..
Abruptly reversing the deflationary policy of M. Laval, the new
Ministry had launched forth on a programme that was sure to cost a
great deal of money and it had, willy-nilly, accepted a programme of
limited hours of work that could not help the adverse balance of trade
and, indeed, was certain to make it worse. In its electoral campaign it
had denounced as slanderous any suggestion that France under a
People's Front Government would go off gold. Those clear-sighted
deputies, of whom Paul Reynaud was the chief, who had preached that
France would have to go off gold and that the only questions were when
and whether the departure would be made with the maximum of
advantages and the minimum of disadvantages, were treated as ill-
informed pessimists or as agents of reaction.
The conviction in financial circles, both abroad and at home, that
the day of the gold standard was over was so widespread that there grew
up rumours, when it became obvious that the People's Front was sure
to win, that what had been really hoped for was that the outgoing
Cabinet should take the decisive step. M. Sarraut would take the
discredit and leave the cash to M. Blum. Whether this was so or not
is still unknown. What was undeniable was that the flow of gold
outwards steadily diminished the assets of the Bank of France and so
diminished the profits to be made by the State if (or when) it bowed
to the inevitable.
Itwas hard to bow. The reputation of the Left as a 'killer of cur-
rencies'was thought to be dangerous, and the old jokes against the
Poincare franc would be repeated against the Blum franc. To give
way to the pressure of the speculators was very irritating, and some
members of the Ministry dallied with the idea of exchange control.
But with exchange control so many other things were bound up: and
exchange control would frighten more supporters in all parties than
\vcm\d a devaluation of the franc in terms of gold. Worse still, ex-
change control \vould put France into the company of the dictatorial
nations and cut her off from the monetary communion of the great
democracies. The decision was reached, and after an agreement had
been made with Britain and the United States not to enter into com-
petitive devaluation, the
franc was 'revalued' on September 25th at
113 to the pound. An
exchange equalization fund was set up; some
250,000,000 ($1,950,000,000) at the current rate of exchange.
1
About
708
BETWEEN TWO WARS
debts owing to the Bank of France were
paid off; and the remaining
profits of the revaluation of the gold stock of the Bank were taken by a
needy Treasury. It was not quite a defeat for the financial policy of
the Government, but it was very far from being a victory; and the
captious pointed to Belgium as a country where these retreats were made
in better order, and compared the technical skill of M. Van Zeeland to
that of M. Vincent Auriol, to the disadvantage of the latter.
Connected with the devaluation of the franc and the general in-
flationary effects of the social policy of the Government, was a rise in
the cost of living which was combated in the traditional fashion by the
appointment of committees of vigilance and threats of punishment for
unwarranted increases. Prices were not much affected by these
measures, and the critics of the Government were abie to point out that
real wages were lower under M. Blum than they had been under M.
Laval. This was not the only disconcerting revelation of the difficulties
of translating the wishes of 'our judge and master', as the Prime Min-
ister had called universal suffrage, into tangible economic improve-

ments. The Treasury was still in deficit and it was necessary to tempt
lenders with some special sauces on the old dishes of loans. Worse
still from the
point of view of the rigorous enemy of the 'wall of money',
attempts to force the holders of gold to sell to the State at a price which
would give it the profits of devaluation, failed. There had to be a
fiscal amnesty; and the prudent, if unpatriotic Frenchman who had
kept
his gold to himself, was allowed to sell it at the market At the
price.
end of the first year of the People's Front, the real strength, if not of the
two hundred families, at least of the two million families who had
money to lend and who would only lend it on their own terms, was
realized. And, as it had been advisable to call in the clergy to aid in
the great loan campaign (to the
disgust of the true-blue Radicals), it
was npw necessary to soothe the alarmed or irritated investor whose
political stronghold was the Senate.
In the days of Tardieu and Laval, the Senate had been rather
popular with the Left, but those days were gone, for the French Senate
was unique among the Upper Houses of the world: it did really redress
the balance, leaning to the Left when the Chamber was to the Right
and to the Right when the Chamber was to the Left. Now the Senate
was decidedly to the Right. Its action merely made evident a political
truth that was ignored by enthusiasts in the heady days of May.
The
was a it was against something
People's Front negative conception;
rather than for anything, at any rate for anything
more concrete
of At election times it was inevitable,
than the 'defence democracy'.
given the political history of
France since 1870, perhaps since 1789, that
there should be alliances of parties
which had a common enemy but
of people who opposed the
not a common policy. The Left consisted
Communists to the Radicals.
therefore from the
Right. It ranged
709
TH%>pEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
purely political questions had been
replaced by economic questions, it was the most natural thing in the
world that the Radicals who believed in the right of private property,
in old-fashioned patriotism, and in many other bourgeois ideals or
superstitions, especially in the desirability of the continued existence of
the bourgeoisie9 should find themselves involved in more or less open
alliance with other bourgeois who, perhaps, were not sound on the
Church, but who had far more in dommon in other matters with* their
Radical enemies, than the latter had with their Communist or with
their Socialist friends. Even in the landslide of 1936, the electors had
not wholly forgotten these truths; and some Radical Deputies owed their
election to Right voters who had preferred them to more dangerous
candidates.
In the Senate the chief critic of the Government was M. Caillaux.
The mishandling of the devaluation problem gave him plenty of excuse
for the display of his confidence in his own unequalled financial virtu-

osity, but he objected to all the economic theories of the Blum Ministry.
He especially objected to the assertion that France was in the position
of the United States in 1933 and that what it needed was a New Deal in
the manner of Mr. Roosevelt. Whatever the merits or demerits of Mr.
Roosevelt's methods, they were not, he believed, applicable to France.
France had no vast borrowing power France had no immense con-
tinental resources; the Blum policy was Rooseveltism for Lillipu-
tians. M. Blum did not agree. He even contrived to discover that
France was better prepared for economic experiment than the United
States had been, since her main trouble was currency hoarding, the very
opposite of the troubles that beset America during the bank holiday.
Abstract discussions on points of economic theory were unimportant.
What mattered was the obvious determination of the Senate to keep a
firm grip on the Government's collar. Within a few months of its
coming into office, the Senate taught it a lesson. The old arguments
against devaluation were revived by the Communists and, to placate
its supporters, the Government proposed to adopt a sliding scale of

wages to indemnify the workers against a rise in prices following on the


value of the franc. But the Senate would have none of this; was
fall in
not one of the objects of devaluation to get round the exaggerated rises
in wages and so in costs that had marked the summer of 1936? The
Senate stood firm and M. Blum had to retreat.
The Radical party was, by itself, in command of a majority in the
Senate, but it was a majority of Radicals who had succeeded in politics,
who had been Senators before the People's Front was formed and might
well be Senators after it had gone the way of the 'Cartel des Gauches'.
Nor was this all; over four million Frenchmen had voted,, even in 1936,
for the parties opposed to the People's Front, as against over five
millions for the candidates of the People's Front. In the ranks of the
710
BETWEEN TWO WARS
majority were hundreds of thousands of electors who, if confronted with
another series of financial disasters like those of 1925 and 1926, or with
continued disorders, might say, like the Bonapartist peasants in 1871,
'we did not vote for this'. It was the duty of the Senate, so the Senators
thought, to oppose the resistance of the elder statesmen to the pressure
exerted on the Government by strikers, by party meetings and by irre-
sponsibleand dangerous allies, that is the Communists.
If the months of the Blum Government saw the achievement of
first

some positive improvements of the condition of the workers, they also


saw the punishment, or at least the restriction of the power, of some of
the enemies of the victors. In the first rank of the enemies of the
people the Bank of France, or the Regents of the Bank, had been
classed. The day when they could dictate to Parliament was over;
no financial oligarchy would, in the future, be able to thwart the will of
the delegates of the sovereign people. The old Board of Regents was
abolished and a new one representing the Government, the trade
unions, the co-operatives, business, the employees of the bank and the
shareholders was set up. The shareholders were left with their private
commercial rights and they were all, the whole 40,000 of them, free to
attend the annual meeting if they chose. But the real control was in
the hands of the Board and of the Governor. The latter was no longer
required to own shares; his income was no longer voted by Regents and,
if he ceased to be Governor, he still drew his salary for three years,

during which time he was forbidden to take a post in any business.


As far as the financial troubles of the Government had been due to
the Bank, there was no reason to fear that they would recur.
Another unpopular section of the economic masters of France was
the armament manufacturers. They were profiteers; they were un-
patriotic; they were as bad as Krupps. Indeed, the greatest of them
were worse than Krupps, for the founder of Krupps was a real workman
while the first Schneider to come to Le Greusot was a mere financier!
So with due caution, the Government proposed to nationalize the
armament industry, separating the military from the civil side of mixed
firms like Renault works. For the aeroplane manufacturers, a more
ingenious system of buying control of the companies and thus preserving
the flexibility of private enterprise was preferred. M. Pierre Got
was convinced that the results, from every point of view, would be
excellent. French military aviation would soon recover its pristine
glory.
Within a few weeks of the election, the Blum Government had dis-
solved the Croix de Feu and the other Right leagues, forcing Colonel de
la Rocque to reconstitute his troops as a mere political party, the Trench
Social Party'. 1 For a time it seemed that the interest of the Right
had moved from the luckless Colonel, who had not run candidates in
1
Parti Social Fran^ait.
H .
,
7.7.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
1936 (and, better prophet than his critics, refused to take any interest
in the elections of 1940), to the combative Mayor of Saint-Denis, M.
Doriot, late leader of the Communist party in the Chamber..
M. Doriot had been one of the first preachers of the necessity for a
People's Front, but he had preached it too early ; by the time he saw
his policy adopted, he was outside the party. He still held his own in
his bailiwick of Saint-Denis and, plentifully provided with ammunition
from his knowledge of the inner history of the party he had left and
briefed by such enemies of Stalin as M. Boris Souvarine, he was able
to infuriate his late comrades. He was an especially vehement critic
of their foreign policy, sneering at their new-found patriotism and
asserting that its sole object was to embroil France and Germany in a
war for the benefit of Soviet Russia. He, too, founded a new party, the
'French People's Party' l it might have obtained more success had its
;

leader been more discreet.


Itwas not only that M. Doriot had shady supporters from Mar-
seilles (all partieshad shady supporters from Marseilles), but that he
was too openly allied with reactionary elements. There was, perhaps,
a place for a native Left party assailing the official Communists on their
weak side, which was their docility to Russian leadership. But there
was no place for such a party if its leader was obviously on good terms
with people like M. Philippe Henriot. Then M. Doriot, harassed in
mayor by the Blum Government, resigned his seat in Parlia-
his r61e as
ment and was not re-elected. He had been before his time in advo-
cating reconciliation with Germany and an end of trust in Soviet
Russia. Neither of the new parties made any serious progress and;

from the Right and its auxiliaries, the new Government had nothing
moment to fear.
for the
M. Blum, however, had his troubles and they were serious enough.
The apprehension he had politely expressed when he learned that his
Communist allies preferred to support the Government from outside
was not without justification. In every crisis, the Communists were
able tomake the best of both worlds, to get credit for whatever gains
were made by the workers and to put on die shoulders ol the Socialists
and Radicals the blame for any disappointments. They made political
and it was notorious that the
capital out of the devaluation of the franc,
most important Socialist leader after M. Blum, M. Paul Faure, trusted
the Communists as far as he could see them and no farther. Old trade-
union leaders, especially among the miners, were loud in their lamen-
tations at the undermining of their position by the Communists. The
unification of the unions had in many cases not put an end to the old
conflict. It had merely brought the Communists, like the garrison of a
new Trojan horse, inside the old unions. Nor was that all; for the
Communists got into street rows with the disbanded Croix de Feu which
1
Parti Populairc Fran$au.

712
BETWEEN TWO WARS
did not always end to their advantage and helped to perpetuate an
atmosphere of effervescence that the Government deplored.

II

The really serious problem of the Government was in foreign affairs.


It had come into office prepared with slogans that were not very rele-
vant fo the situation. Sanctions had failed and it was a question of
how best to get out of the undignified mess. It was obvious that Italy,
victorious in Abyssinia, was not likely to surrender to the pressure that
had been so inadequate when the new empire was still being con-
quered. Would it not be best to recognize facts, to abandon sanctions
and win back Italy to the Stresa front? Despite Communist disap-
proval this was attempted, but the Duce was now hard to woo. He
showed no signs of any willingness to rebuild the Stresa front and all
:

such dreams were made impossible by the outbreak of civil war in


Spain,
As soon as it was evident that the pronunciamento had neither com-
pletely succeeded nor completely failed, the war south of the Pyrenees
became of the greatest importance to France. She alone of the great
powers had a common frontier with Spain; the problems of neutrality
were more acute for her than for any other country. She had more to
lose by a mistake than had more remote countries which should, had
limes been what was, less and less plausibly, called normal, have had
no concern in the matter at all. No country had better reason than
the victim of the trap of 1870 to know that the internal politics of
Spain could be of the greatest importance to Spain's northern neigh-
bour.
For the 'Front Populaire', the Spanish war was the Spanish ulcer.
It was not only because of the new international complications it in-
volved, not merely that to the menaced frontiers of the Rhine and the
Alps, it threatened to add the Pyrenees. But the military revolt in
Spain shocked the political mysticism of the victors of May. The
Spanish Government, against whom the pronunciamento had been
directed, was itself the product of a People's Front. The military
rebels were rebels against the delegates of popular sovereignty. It was

not for being rebels, as such, that they were to be condemned. M.


Blum had to guard himself against any doctrine that equated right with
legality. That would have absolved the Second Empire, the Restora-
tion, all those Governments which French Republican tradition re-
garded as legal but not legitimate, as criminal usurpers or, at best,
as caretakers for the sovereign people, for the Gomte de Ghambord
himself did not hold the doctrine of his legitimate authority more
strongly than the French parliamentarians held the doctrine of theirs.
They received the news of the Spanish crime as Nicholas I had received
713
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
society that had become obvious with the Abyssinian War. When the
civil war, which was largely if not entirely an affair between Spaniards,
developed its natural savagery, it provided ample raw materials for
each side in France to accuse the other of being a friend of barbarism.
Members of the victorious Left parties saw, or professed to see in their
opponents, so many French Francos and Molas. Members of the
defeated side saw in their opponents mere dupes of Moscow. Had not
the Communists in Spain, in unholy alliance with the Liberals and
Socialists, made the elections of 1936 an ingenious device for introduc-
ing their hellish poison? Had not too candid friends seen in Spain
the next Soviet State, just before the military saviours had taken the
field? To pious Catholics, even if they did not believe a tithe of the
atrocity stories, there startling and horrifying fact about the
was one
non-Basque of
territories the Spanish Republic. Everywhere it was
impossible to say Mass. They were not to be put off by the vague
promises that, some time or other, permission would be given again for
Mass to be said publicly in the country of St. Theresa, of St. Dominic,
of St. Ignatius. It was a sign to them that a main, perhaps the main
aim of the Spanish revolutionaries, was to uproot the Catholic faith.
It was not surprising that many Catholics saw in Franco and his allies,

crusaders, or at least (in the case of the Moors) unconscious allies of


the Faith.
Especially was it natural in the Royalists to see the Spanish War
as another round in the campaign against the errors of the Revolution.
Not only did the Action Frangaise exalt the defenders of the Alcazar of
Toledo and, excommunicate as its own leaders were, exalt in the
victories of the Catholic armies, 1 but many conservative Catholics, like
Cardinal Baudrillart, were uncritical supporters of the cause of the
Nationalists.
It was not surprising that so many eminent Catholics took the sidr
of Franco. What was surprising was that so many did not. M.
Francois Mauriac was horrified at the savagery of the bourgeois
society towhich he belonged, and expressed his horror. The young
Catholic reformers of 'L'Aube* refused to see in General Franco a new
Godefroy de Bouillon; and M. Jacques Maritain analysed the idea of a
holy war with a care and critical power that was much disliked by the
friends of the new Spanish renaissance. All these Catholics felt, in
some degree, the reflection on the life of the Spanish Church that was
made by the savage hate it had managed to inspire in the workers
and peasants of a country that, a century before, had been so devoted
to its ancient faith. And though more prudence was naturally
observed by them, it was suspected that some of the most eminent of
the French clergy, beginning with the Cardinal Archbishop of
Paris^
1
It might be noted that the most successful Catholic expos* of the Catholic crusade was
the work of a former member of the Action Franfaise, M. Georges Bernanos.

716
BETWEEN TWO WARS
were reluctant to see the cause of the Church identified too closely with
the cause of General Franco.
The doubts and hesitation were not all on one side. On the Left,
if, was nothing but admiration for the defenders of
in public, there

parliamentary legality in Spain, there was plenty of criticism in private.


The torpor of the Catalans in the early part of the war was adversely
commented on. The French belief that there were only two serious
race$ of soldiers in Europe themselves and the Germans was rein-
forced by the apparently amateurish character of the war in Spain.
A Socialist deputy who was asked in private whether the local army
corps of his home town could end the whole business in a month and
replied indignantly, 'in a fortnight', was not, perhaps, representative
of his party but he was representative of a large body of public opinion
on the Left.
Among the Radicals there was a good deal of irritation at both sides.
They were nuisances, with their savage feuds and their common
inheritance of incompetence. They menaced the peace of France and
the solidity of the governing coalition. The stubborn Spanish valour
evoked too little admiration, and the political friends of M. Delbos did
him an injustice by behaving, at times, as if the whole Spanish business
was just one of those nuisances that had been interfering with the
smooth running of politics ever since 1914. Was one of their leaders
not being shouted down by Communist mobs? Did not the Communist
parly refuse to vote for the Government on questions of foreign policy?
Were they, perhaps, bent on forcing France into war?
Although it was not convenient to dwell on it, was it not the
Communists who had begun the campaign against the Socialist
Minister of the Interior, Roger Salengro, which had ended with his
suicide? M. Blum, M. Herriot, eminent politicians, eminent journal-
ists native and foreign, might attack (as they had every reason to do)

the infamous scurrilities of the Ghiappe press. But was there really
much to choose between the tactics of Gringoire and the tactics of
Humanitfi Was Henri Beraud any more dishonest, really, than the
Communist leaders who swallowed every new order from Moscow,
denounced their old leaders as traitors and rallied to the defence of men
whom, in February 1934, they had treated as thieves and murderers?
The 'Front Populaire' was formed to save the Republic. Well, the
Republic was now safe, safe at any rate from its Fascist enemies. Was
it safe from its new-found friends? Many Radicals and some Socialists
had begun to wonder.

Ill

It was a sign of the increased tempo of the age that the retreat that

every Left majority in the Chamber made about two years after its
717
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
election was made by the Blum Government in less than a year. On
February 24th at Saint-Nazaire, the Prime Minister announced a
'pause'; it was not, of course, a retreat, it was merely 'in order to con-
solidate the ground we have conquered'. The Right, which could
interpret political and military communiques as well as anybody else,
decided that the 'Front Populaire' would soon be on the run. M.
Vincent Auriol might hanker after exchange control, there might be
talk of strong government, but strong government and Left govern-
ment were almost philosophically contradictory terms. M. Blum
decided to placate the owners of capital. There was to be retrench-
ment on the ordinary budget (and that meant an end of the public
works programme which was dear to the trade unions). There was to
be a loan guaranteed against loss caused by a fall in the franc exchange
a device that had been tried before and just as in the last great
financial crisis, there were to be experts in charge, MM. Rist and
Baudoin.
was not only the exultant Right which could see that it was a
It

retreat, the disillusioned Left could do so too, and the 'pause' was
followed in a few days by the 'Clichy massacre'. A Left mob, stirred
up by two rival demagogues, one Communist, one Socialist, attacked
a cinema where a Croix de Feu show was being held. The police
defending the cinema, like the police defending the Chamber, had to
fire; there were six deaths, and the Government which had surrendered
to the banks had now 'the blood of the workers' on its hands. There
was a new wave of strikes, and these were especially important since
1937 was to be the year of the Great Exhibition. Traditionally,
exhibitions always open unfinished, but the Paris Exhibition of 1937
set a new The French saying 'when the building
record for lateness.
trade is flourishing, all's well' was shown to be true when inverted.
The builders, terrified of ending the only big job in Paris, went slow to
an unprecedented degree.
When the formal opening day -came, only three of the great powers
had their pavilions ready: they were the three dictatorial powers,
Germany, Italy, Russia. Across the avenue from the hammer and
sickle flag of the Soviets rose the swastika-adorned pavilion of the
Third Reich. The French sections were still almost all flags, hiding
foundations and frames. The delays in the completion of the Exhibi-
tion increased the anger felt by many of the petty bourgeoisie against
the Socialists and Communists, an anger noted and acted on by the
observant Radicals. Paris, central Paris anyway, lived by the tourist
trade. The Exhibition, in its unfinished state, was a bad advertisement.
It was not the only one. The application of the forty-hour law to
hotels and restaurants caused especial difficulties, and in a year in
which the tourist trade (as much because of the devaluation of the
franc as because of the Exhibition) was expected to be highly profitable,
718
BETWEEN TWO WARS
itwas maddening to have tourists irritated by bad service and, worse
to have them frightened by strikes and violence.
still r Armed police
guarding some of the most famous cafes at the very height of the season
was a sight that destroyed the mystical Republican faith of many who
5
had voted for the 'Front Populaire fourteen months before. Justly
or unjustly, disorder, strikes in the conspicuous industries, transport,
food supplies, amusements, are always certain causes of unpopularity
to the section blamed for causing. them. This time the blame fell on
the workers.
In any case, the rigid application of the 'five eights', that is a work-
ing week of five days of eight hours, was crippling to many industries.
That it hurt the great chain stores was all to the good in the eyes of the
little shopkeepers whom the law largely spared. But it was not so good
for the employees of the stores who lost their jobs, or found their earn-

ings inadequate. Then there were superior critics like M. Jules


Romains who complained that, instead of using their now abundant
leisure insome great cultural improvement, the French workers spent
their spare time fishing. More serious was the case of the workmen
who spent their spare time working. The unions had to organize a
campaign against 'black work', against the men who held two jobs or
did odd jobs in odd moments. And whatever may have been the case
in the great industrial agglomerations, in provincial France the idea
that exceptional industry was a crime was a novelty an unpopular
novelty.
It probable that the Government felt these qualms about the
is

forty-hour week as much as did its critics. But as prices rose faster
than wages, the forty-hours became the chief tangible victory of the
great year of 1936. The eight-hour day, the great victory of 1919,
had in practice been whittled away. Labour was resolved that the
same trick should not be played on the forty-hour week. It is possible
that a Government in which the organized workers had complete
confidence might have persuaded them to accept 'the pause' and to
permit what had become really necessary adjustments of the hours
question. But the Blum Government, with Spain and Glichy on its
record, could not successfully make the appeal. And it was compelled
to return a firm 'no' to the demand of M. Jouhaux that it should find
money for a great public works programme as well as for armaments.
France could not, in fact, afford both unless she adopted totalitarian
methods. She could not do that ; or if she did, M. Blum was not likely
to be the dictator.
In June came a new financial strain which was made a crisis by
the resignation of the two experts. They had been put in to reassure
the timid investor, so their departure could not but frighten him.
The pause would have to become an open retreat or M. Blum would
have to become a semi-dictator. He appealed to Parliament for
719
*THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
'plenary powers', for that abdication of parliamentary control over
finance which was the remedy that all French statesmen tried in office
afterdenouncing its dangers in opposition. The" Chamber gave him the
powers, but the Senate's time had come. It refused to trust a govern-
ment, which M. Caillaux, quoting a poem of Jean Richepin, compared
to a drunk woman. There were the visual attacks on the Senate in the
name of universal suffrage, but as usual the Senate had shown great
tactical sagacity. M. Blum resigned. ,

The head of the new Government was M. Chautemps, but the


real novelty was the Finance Minister. M. Georges Bonnet Was called
back from the Washington embassy to save the finances of France.
He was to be the new Caillaux. Like M. Caillaux he had been a high
official; like M. Caillaux he had ancestral connections with politics,

though his came not through a reactionary father, but through having
married the niece of Camille Pelletan, the modern Cato, the Radical
who, morally if not physically, had incarnated the unstained orthodoxy
of Republicanism. M. Bonnet's appointment was a sign that the
comedy was over. Socialist finance, it was said, had had its day,
which was not quite true, for Socialist finance had not been tried.
What had been tried was capitalist finance worked by hands made
incompetent by little knowledge and less faith.
M. Blum had persuaded the Socialist party to allow him to serve
under M. Chautemps. It was a People's Front Government, Number 2.
That the Front was cracked was denied by everybody, but cracked it
was. The Communists had only rallied to the parliamentary support
of the Blum Government at the last moment. Their old enemy and
now very lukewarm friend, M. Paul Faure, facetiously attributed their
change of front to the execution, between two telephone calls to Moscow,
of their Conimtern mentor. For the Russian trials, culminating in the
Army purge, had enabled the Socialists and Radicals to get their own
back. The rubric in the Populaire which, day after day, listed new
executions under the 'The Russian Crisis', was in itself enough to
title,
infuriate the directors of V Humanity which regarded the same events as

eighteenth-century doctors did gout, as a most reassuring sign of


physical and mental vigour. The execution of Marshal Tukachevsky
especially startled a country with a conscript army which, it was
realized, might have found itself taking the field in alliance with a
power whose high command was conspiring with the common enemy.
It was suggested that the failure to implement the Franco-Soviet pact
with a military convention was not an unmixed disaster, and visitors
to the Exhibition made a new game of counting how many of the
originals of the portraits of Soviet leaders clustered round Stalin had
turned out to be traitors!
If there were traitors in Russia (and there were some, somewhere
in Russia), there
'

were conspirators in France. A leading Italian


720
BETWEEN TWO WARS
refugee, Carlo Roselli, was found murdered in circumstances that
suggested that the Matteotti technique was not obsolete.. There were
explosions at the headquarters of the French industrialists which, first of
all, suggested an outrage by the Left and then suggested a crime by
the Right. For the country was alarmed at the discovery of a grotesque
but startling Fascist society, the Cagoulards, the 'Hooded Men', that
was something of a joke but enough of a reality to frighten the voters
anc} the deputies back to the 'Front Populaire'; and, in turn, the move
to the Left was halted by further strikes which the Government had to

help to break.
The year had seen a steady decline in French confidence and moral
energy. M. Bonnet, for all his technical skill, had had to devalue the
franc again, and this time there could be no pretence that it was a
question of a voluntary 'alignment'. The franc was allowed to
'float' around 130 to the pound, that is below the Poincare* parity.
This was the reward of orthodoxy! It was no wonder that, on the I4th
of July, the marching crowds consigned M. Bonnet as well as M. de la
Rocque, to the gallows. It was not the only change in the celebration
of the national holiday. The atmosphere of the great popular festival
was grim and gloomy. The union and optimism of 1935 and 1936 were
missing. Instead, a predominantly Communist procession marched
through back streets, past indifferent crowds, shouting for Spain. For
Spain was still being torn to pieces by war; German non-intervention
was now second only to Italian non-intervention. If an end had been
put to what was euphemistically called 'piracy', that is a blockade of
Government Spain by Italian submarines, by the Franco-British
declaration at Nyon, the comedy of non-intervention was otherwise
played as before.
Tempers in the ranks of the were naturally frayed, and
allied parties
M. Chautemps, it seemed many, deliberately took the chance of
to

driving the Socialists out of his government at the beginning of 1938.


He then formed a new and purely Radical Government. This was con-
sidered particularly shabby of M. Chautemps, since the Socialists had
defended him so warmly in 1934; but the Socialists ought to have been
warned by the conduct of MM. Caillaux and Malvy. In any case
there are enough proverbs in all languages about the danger of doing a
good turn to make Socialist indignation seem a little naive. Once
he had got them out, M. Chautemps did nothing in particular until,
at the beginning of March, he found an excuse to resign, so that when
Heir Hitler marched into Austria to deliver the Germans of that
country from the tyranny of being allowed to vote on their destiny,
France had no government at all.
The shock of the invasion of Austria was profoundly felt, for in this
case Germany was not breaking treaties and agreements affecting her
own territory, but crossing an international frontier. Moreover, the
721
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
resignation of Mr. Eden and the speeches of Mr. Chamberlain had
seemed to threaten a British policy that would, from the French point
of view, be highly dangerous. So much had been sacrificed to the
British alliance: was it to prove worthless after all?
It was true that, in the long run, if it came to a show-down, Britain
could not desert France; but if the British Government did not
realize this, it might come to its senses too late. The dangers of the
situation were keenly felt by M. Blum, who was called on to follow
M. Chautemps. He had
already tried to rally support for a true
national government, 'from Thorez to Reynaud'. He now tried a
bolder scheme, 'from Thorez to Marin', but the Right parties would
not agree to let their So M. Blum had to form a govern-
leaders serve.
ment of Radicals and Socialists to carry on in face of a new series
and
of strikes, including one that tied up the aeroplane industry. When he
asked the Senate for plenary powers, he was defeated; and even more
clearly than a year before the Senate proved to have gauged public
opinion rightly. There was no wave of indignation at the impudence
of the delegates of restricted suffrage.
M. Blum fell and with him fell the new Foreign Minister, M. Paul-
Boncour, who in his few weeks of office had dared one novelty. He
had refused to follow the lead of London and he had called a halt to
the non-intervention joke by opening the frontier and letting the
Spanish Government buy arms. Now that Mr. Eden was gone, the
common policy of France and Britain had gone too. But this rebellion
of France was short lived. Only a united country and a stable
government could have resisted British pressure; the third Blum
Government did not last a month, and the country was profoundly
divided. The 'Front Populaire', except as a piece of electoral window-
dressing, was dead. To its original reforms of 1936 it had added an
amalgamation of the railway companies into a semi-nationalized
system. It was all and it was not much. There were many faults,
faults in all the partners to it, as well as in its enemies, to account for
its comparative failure. But the real shackles on its freedom had been
riveted when the Rhineland was occupied. France was no longer free
,
to decide her own destiny.

722
EPILOGUE
'Tis true there's better booze than brine, but he that drowns must drink it
:

And oh my lass, the newsis news that men have heard before.

A. E. HOUSMAN.

T A THEN M. Daladier presented himself before the Chamber on


VV April 1 name he gave his Governn.jnt not only
3th, 1938, the very
made evident the death of the old 'Front Populaire', but made the
fundamental cause of that death evident. 'A great free country can
be saved only by herself. The Government of National Defence which
presents itself before you has decided to be the expression of this will
to be saved.' It was an appeal to the Jacobin tradition, for whatever
the optimists might say, the country was in danger. But that danger,
which admitted and which had led M. Blum to plead (with some
all

response from the extreme Right) for a truly national government, was
to be faced by a Ministry based mainly on the real governing party, the
Radicals, which, with all its many weaknesses, is the best judge of what
the average Frenchman will stand for if necessary in the trenches.
The foreign policy of the Daladier Government was a Radical
policy; therewas no place for bold initiative, or for long-term planning.
Radicalism meant prudence and tenacity when pushed to the wall
and not before. That meant, in turn, that French foreign policy was
bound to be passive, that it would be a series of reactions to German
and Italian policy, or that it would be simply a following of British
policy.
When the British Government made its treaty with Signor Mussolini
which involved, among other things, the open abandonment of the
Spanish Republic to Italian arms, the removal of the last fig-leaf from
the implausible lay figure called non-intervention, the French Govern-
ment, despite the anger of Communists and of Socialists and of some
alarmed patriots of the Right, had to follow suit.
When it became evident (as it became evident very soon) that
having solved the 'Austrian question' had only whetted the appetite of
the ruler of Germany, France, although bound by the most sacred
tiesof treaties to Czechoslovakia, allowed her policy to be controlled
from London. From the sending of the Runciman mission it was
evident to all but the most blind optimists that the existence of the
Czechoslovak state was in question, that the fortress on which so
much of French security was based was in the gravest danger. Legal
723
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
M. Joseph Barthelemy might explain that the treaties no
sophists like
longer bound France, but the French Government made no such
pretences. Nor were the French really duped by the words of persons
like Herr Henlein, who assured credulous Englishmen and English-
women that he was not an agent of Hitler.
The Czechoslovak 'problem*, the Spanish 'problem', were either
of these worth the risk of a war in which Italy and Germany would
be on one side, in which the chance of saving the Czechs would depftnd
on the efficiency of a Russian Army just purged of most of its com-
manders and in which the burden of the war would fall on the French
Army while Britain, prepared to move from the passive
as before, slowly
and comparatively bloodless war of blockade to the ordeal of war on
land? On this question, M. Bonnet, the Foreign Minister, had few
doubts. Following the footsteps of the British Prime Minister, he tried
to win over Italy. How could he do otherwise? The success of the
British royal visit to Paris showed how much importance the French

people attached to the alliance with Britain. Of course, if the Germans


actually invaded Czechoslovakia, France would march, and if France
marched, Britain would have to follow. But could France march for
the remote and debatable question of the exact military frontier of
Bohemia, when she had not marched in 1936 for the safety of her own
frontier? Could the British Government wage a war in such a cause,
after having by a most determined refusal to notice anything odd about
Nazi Germany, made it impossible to raise the war to a higher plane
than that of mere security? What the Treeing of Germans' meant, the
infamies of the occupation of Vienna had shown, but the new English
and French converts to the ideal of self-determination, ignoring any
awkward consequences of the blind acceptance of the principle for
great imperial powers, went far beyond the wildest Wilsonian dreams.
The most vigorous critics of these doctrines were the Communists,
but M. Daladier did not regret this opposition of the Communists, for
he believed and asserted and the country did not wholly disbelieve
c
him that that jDarty was only too ready to waste the blood of French-
men for interests which are not those of France'. What if M. Thorez
had accused the rulers of France of ignoring the fact that Herr Hitler
was resuming against France 'the old designs of Charles V? It was no
business of a Radical Minister to play the part of a Francis I or
Richelieu or of Ollivier and Gramont.
During the critical months, only the extreme Right and the
Communists were prepared to take any risk of war to put an end to
the German menace. The immense lassitude bred by the last war,
the sincere horror of another massacre, the human hope that things
could not be as bad as they seemed, irritation that remote and un-
intelligible quarrels of distant peoples should involve the destiny of
France, all combined to prepare France for Munich.
724
BETWEEN TWO WARS
Communists did the Govern-
Internally, too, the opposition of the
ment no harm. The had again been devalued to around 175 to
franc
the pound; the Government had been given 'full powers' and it used
them to attack the rigid forty-hour week. France could not (with
Mexico) be 'the only country with two Sundays'. M. Paul Reynaud
was only Minister of Justice as yet, but he was in the offing, the new
Poincare who would restore the economic balance when the time came.
M. Daladier had no doubts that, at least, he could and should attack the
Communists who were at the bottom of the endless agitation which
resulted in the dreadful fact that alone among the countries of Europe,
French production had fallen, not risen; France must work more or
accept a lower standard of living.
The feeling that France, technically and economically could not
risk a war was very widespread. In the golden days of the 'Front
Populaire', M. Leon Jouhaux had affirmed his belief that the technicians
of the bourgeoisie would rally to the unions since they promised a way
out of the system which was stifling production. It was not, perhaps,
the fault of the C.G.T., but that 'indispensable common feeling and
contact between the proletariat and the urban middle classes' had not
lasted, if it ever existed. Repeated strikes irritated the bourgeois
population, which did not blame the Government for the third change
in thr value of the franc in two years and which was not won over
to d belief in the merits of a controlled exchange.
If the nationalization of armaments had been one of the most

popular reforms of the 'Front Populaire' in 1 936, its results, or what


could be interpreted as its results, were highly unpopular in 1938.
For in the air, France was completely outclassed. The Denain
programme of 1934* had resulted in a great increase in the French air
force just at the wrong time, for the planes were obsolete as soon as they
were finished. The great technical advances came too late to be
incorporated in the French designs. But not only were French planes
too slow, there were far too few of them. While Germany was pro-
ducing 500 or 1,000 a month, France hardly produced 50. And in the
spring and summer of 1 938, it was being made evident, as the German and
Italian aviators blasted the way for Franco's troops to cut the territories
of the Spanish Republic in half, how important air power was.
By the time September came, it was obvious that whatever the
convenient pretences of earlier months, what was afoot was a con-
troversy between Germany and Czechoslovakia. Czech concessions
to the Sudetens were useless unless they were accepted in Berlin. And
if they were not accepted? If the Germans invaded a country
guaranteed by France? Despite the sophists, despite the pro-Fascists
whose patriotism was so curiously blinded when it came in conflict
with their party interests, France could not retreat.
1
See p. 662.
725
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
There came the three visits to Hitler: Berchtesgaden, Godesberg,
Munich. Only in the last conference had France a say. In none of
them had the Czechs a say. In none of them had the French Parlia-
ment a say, until all was over. Then the Chamber, with some absten-
tions, ratified theMunich agreements against the vote of the Com-
munists and of M. Henri de Kerillis. He and M. Gabriel P6ri of
Humanitt were the main, almost the only critics of Munich. Even the
view hinted at by Communist intellectuals like M. Paul Nizan, that
the whole war danger was worked up to frighten the people into
swallowing the mutilation of Czechoslovakia was not distasteful to some
French defenders of Munich who thought that such stage-management,
had occurred, was a credit to the ingenuity of its authors.
if it

Before the May crisis of 1938, M. Daladier had complained that


France was too often represented abroad as a 'drab country, frightened
about her future, concerned only with material interests'. In the
months that followed Munich, it did not seem a bad description. The
days when Jules GreVy was rebuking those foolish persons who thought
France would ever emerge from the second rank of powers, seemed to
have returned. It is true there were signs that French resignation
had limits. M. Flandin found that out when some enemy published
the telegram of approval that had been sent him, after Munich, by the
Ftihrer. It was going too far to talk of 'Gauleiter' Flandin, but most
Frenchmen felt that however innocent M. Flandin had been, his public
utilitywas seriously diminished.
Whatever chances existed of a true dttente in the relations of Germany
and the Western powers were seriously diminished when the murder
of an attache in the German embassy in Paris by a Jew was followed
by an outburst of disciplined savagery in Germany which only the
strongest stomachs could support. This was the Nazi State whose
accessions of territory and power had been so complacently accepted by
the rulers of France and Britain!
Among the aspects of Munich that had worried even the most
pacific of the French had been the private peace treaty between Herr
Hitler and Mr. Chamberlain, a treaty that M. Daiadier had not been
given a chance to sign. M. Bonnet remedied that, but by the time
Heir von Ribbentrop came to Paris to sign the Franco-German treaty
of peace, Munich was too clearly, at best, the lesser of two great evils,
and it was more and more doubtful if it was more than the purchase of a
postponement of war by what was certainly, for France, if not so
certainly for Britain an evasion of an obligation of honour. Herr von
Ribbentrop was received with only formal cordiality and in an atmo-
sphere of pessimistic distrust that he had not been used to in London
or Rome or was to know in Moscow. Mr. Chamberlain's document
had its few days of popularity; what Herr von Ribbentrop and M.
Georges Bonnet signed seemed to concern only themselves.
726
BETWEEN TWO WARS
The financial position of France was made still more difficult by
the expenses of the September mobilization; M. Daladier turned at
last to M. Paul Reynaud, whose orthpdox methods of restoring the
situation were a denial of all the economic doctrines of 1936. M.
Jouhaux rashly threatened a general strike and, when he tried to
escape from using the supreme weapon (whose dangers he had good
reason to remember), his Communist associates would not let him.
The Government was prepared;took over the railways and the strike
it

was a complete failure. main consequence was to strengthen


If its

the authority* of M. Daladier and of the State, a secondary one was


further to embitter the relations between Socialists and Communists;
for, according to the former, the Communists had insisted on striking

although it was obvious the Government was ready and ai xious to


break the strike and when the great day came, it was the unions
which, like the miners, were dominated by Socialists that had struck,
while the Communist-controlled unions had docilely gone to work.
As M. Jouhaux had feared, 1920 was repeated; over a million members
leftthe C.G.T. and, for the first time since May 1936, the employers
feltstrong enough to take the offensive. They had no longer to face
the danger of a sit-down strike, for the Daladier Government had
expelled the strikers from the Renault works with a vigour that made a
repetition of the expulsion unnecessary.
France at last had a Government with the resources of a govern-
ment. It was time, for if Germany was officially pacific, Italy, the
other end of the axis, staged a demonstration that revealed how low
France had sunk in the eyes of her neighbour. That Italian deputies
should dare to shout 'Nice, Savoy, Tunis', that Italy should dare to
claim portions of French territory, even in so indirect a fashion, was
intolerable. French self-esteem was profoundly shocked.
The attempts of M. Bonnet to minimize Italian insolence did not
in the long run help matters, and it was M. Daladier who provided the
answer by visiting Corsica, Tunisia and Algeria and affirming that not
an inch of these lands would be given up. The Spanish Republic was
dying; Signor Mussolini had had his way there; but whatever might
happen in other lands, the soil of France (and of her territories) was
sacred. That was an argument that the peasants, for whom M.
Daladier claimed more and more to speak, could understand. Despite
some absurd examples of journalistic optimism almost reaching the
British level of folly, the occupation of Prague was less of a shock to
French public opinion than to British. But again the nature of the
reaction was left to Britain to determine. She led the way in guarantee-
ing Poland and in the effective if not the formal recognition of Franco's
(and Mussolini's) triumph in Spain.
France was no longer worried at an Italian military menace to
Tunisia. The Mareth line made the narrow band joining the French
727 3 A
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
North African 'island* to Libya impassable. In Tunisia itself, the
threat of Italian conquest rallied most natives to the protecting power
and the Duce had obligingly decapitated the local Italian colony,
since nearly all its economically and socially prominent leaders were

Leghorn Jews. The economic position of France and, with it, her
powers of aerial defence improved; and even the professional patriots of
the Right were no longer such uncritical lovers of Italy as to forget their
duty to France. There were changes for the worse, too. The Germans
had got immense stores of the instruments of war in Bohemia; every
day that passed meant that the Siegfried line cement was hardening, the
forts getting nearer completion.
France was neither elated nor terrified at the ordeal which all but
the most optimistic saw was coming. Politicians might squabble over
the beauties or dangers of proportional representation and the Socialists
make a silly pretence of constitutional indignation, when M. Lebrun
was persuaded to remain at the filysee for another presidential term.
There were not, of course, wanting genuine pacifists or men whose
hatred of Bolshevism blinded them to more immediate dangers. It
was, as Jacques Maritain was to point out, one of the tragic difficulties
of the times that men seemed to be forced to choose between greater or
lesser evils, the support of the tyranny of Hitler or the tyranny of Stalin.
But the slow negotiations in Moscow, conducted by the various British
agents, seemed to promise a united front against territorial aggression.
In France the patriotism of the Communists was, in 1939, as it had been
for years, almost too vehement, too unconditional, but patriots like
Henri de Kerillis rejoiced that the chosen leaders of so great a part
of the French workers were now so reliable a barrier against another
Munich.
The crisis at last came. From the moment that the Russo-German
treaty was announced, it was obvious that war was at hand. Taken
unawares, the French Communists could only issue desperate last-
minute apologies. But the Government suppressed Humanite and the
formally non-Communist evening paper, Ce Soir. The Communist
leaders protested that they were misunderstood, and when at last France
declared watt on Germany, they, like all the Chamber, rallied in defence
1

of their country, the more easily that that country was fighting the man
and the system they had denounced so vehemently ever since the
Nazi revolution. 'II faut en finir , said the average man wearied by
5

repeated mobilizations, by repeated calls to arms, followed by truces of


a few months that lasted until the ruler of Germany decided what
engagement it would be most easy and profitable to break next.
France in September 1939 (as in September 1938) answered the call to
arms with stoical calm and resolution. It was time.
In the days after Munich when, with varying degrees of candour,
the escape from the ordeal was being celebrated, Georges Duhamel
728
BETWEEN TWO WARS
had noted that France, in withdrawing behind the Maginot
bitterly
line, had lost the
Descartes line, that intellectual tradition of being the
European home and friend of liberty of the body and liberty of the
mind. It had now been discovered that such a retreat was impossible
for France: that the Descartes line and the Maginot line were one.
An unknown soldier in September 1938 had known that. Across the
Rhine the Germans had hoisted a placard, 'Em Reich, Ein Volk, Ein
Fuhger'. He, in reply, put up his board. On it was written 'Libert^,
figalit6, Fraternite'. The battle between these two ideals has begun.

729
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF MAIN EVENTS
IN FRENCH HISTORY FROM THE
REVOLUTION TO 1870
1789 July i4th. Fall of the Bastille.
August 4th. Abolition of feudal rights.
1791 June 20th. Flight of Louis XVI to Varennes.
1792 August loth. Fall of the Monarchy.
September 22nd. Establishment of the First Republic.
1794 July 7th (9th Thermidor). Overthrow of Robespierre and the
Jacobins.
1
799 November 9th (
1 8th Brumaire) .
Bonaparte makes himself First
Consul.
1804 May 1 8th. Establishment of the First Empire.
1814 April 6th. First abdication of Napoleon I. Restoration of
Louis XVIII.
1815 June 1 8th. Waterloo second abdication of Napoleon I
: the ;

second Restoration.
1830 'Revolution of July' abdication of Charles
: accession of X :

the Duke of Orleans as 'King of the French'.


1848 February 24th. Overthrow of the 'July Monarchy'. The
Second Republic.
June 24th-26th. Defeat of the Paris workers.
December loth. Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte elected
President.
1851 December 2nd. 'The coup d'etat': Louis Napoleon makes him-
self Dictator.

1852 December 2nd. Establishment of the Second Empire under


'Napoleon III'. 1

1870 September 4th. Establishment of the Third Republic.


1
'Napoleon II* was the King of Rome who was deemed to have succeeded on the
abdication of Napoleon I.

730
INDEX
Abd el Aziz, 393, 436 Andrieu, Cardinal, 643
AbdelKader, 631 Andrieux, 60, 150, 197, 278, 284
Abd el Krim, 631, 699 Angers, 155, 644
Abdul Hamid, 433, 439 Angkor-Vat, 239
About, Edmond, 7, 10, 72, 136, 157 Anglas, Boissy d', 280
Aboville, Major, 306 Angora, 576
Action Franfaise, 106, 136, 344, 378, 513, Annam, 232-5, 240 f., 243 .., 249, 392
528, 536, 560, 565, 583, 643, 646, 624
654> 656, 658, 704, 716 Antrin, 198
Adam, Paul, 291 Antwerp, 86, 475, 477
Adowa, 321, 631 Anual, 631
Aerenthal, 433, 439 Anzin, 97
Agadir, 444 f. Appert, 311
Aisnc, 20 1 Arabi Pasha, 230
Aix-les-Bains, 412 Arago, 33, 45
Aix-Marseille, 159 Archduke Albrecht, 1 1

Alain, 586, 641, 675, 700 Ardeche, 204


Albert, Marcellin, 409 Ardennes, 209 f.
Aleppo, 631, 575 Arene, Emmanuel, 278, 281 f.

Ales, 637 Argonne, 479, 505


Alexander I, 313 Aries, 139
Alexander II, 312 Arnaud, 49
Alexander III, 312 Arnim, Harry von, 91, 116
Alexander, King of Jugoslavia, 689 Artois, 52, 86, 477, 486
Alexander, King of Serbia, 432 Arton, L'72, 281, 283
Alexandria, 229 f. Arvauld, 643
Alexis, Paul, 293 Aube, Admiral, 325
Alfonso XII, 260 Audiffret-Pasquier, Due d', 85, 96, 100,
Algeciras, 401 102,103,113,117,134,653
Algeria, 357, 392, 394, 424, 524, 603, Augagneur, 173, 246
609, 625 f., 629 f., 699, 727 Augusta of Prussia, 8
Algiers, 22, 262 Aulard, 266
Allain-Targ6, 166, 170, 172 Aumale, Due d', 61, 85, 94, 113, 117,
Allard, 376, 640 i33> H3> l8 5> 202, 213, 272, 277,
Allemane, Jean, 295, 297 310
Almcyreda, 453 Auriol, Vincent, 644, 706, 708 f., 718
Alsace, 22 ff., 189, 317, 587, 604, 606, Attrore, V, 335
616-22 Amterlitz, 15, 83, 476, 485, 495
Alsace-Lorraine, 44, 89, 121, 296, 311, Auteuil, 412
396 f., 471 f., 538 f., 547f->640 Auvergne, 32, 190 f., 199, 408, 411, 415,
Alvenslcben, 24 Auxerre, 171
Amade, 435 Avellan, 318
Ami du PcupU, 658 Aveyron, 408
Amiens, 536 Aymard, 660
Amsterdam, 373
Andlau, General Count d', 192, 194 Bahr-el-Ghazal, 319, 323 f.
Andler, Charles, 431 Balhaut, 271, 277 f., 282-5
Andre^ General, 381 f., 384 ff., 400, 452, Bainville, Jacques, 187, 369, 659, 682
483> 55 Baker, Josephine, 605
731
INDEX
Baker, Newton D., 504 Bert, Paul, 184, 171, 242, 375
Bakunin, Michael, 49, 59, 286 Berthelot, M., 102, 322 '
Balfour, Arthur, 566, 569, 576 Berthelot, P., 369, 477
Ballivet, 291 Berthon, 584
Bange, 480 Bertillon, Alphonsc, 306, 331, 371
Bangkok, 317, 395 Bertrand, 688
Baragnon, Numa, 86 Bertulus, 335
Barail, du, 7, 103, ngf. Besanon, 159, 272
Baraticr, 323 Beslay, 66 f.
Barberet, 288 Beute, 104 *
Beyrouth, 632
Barbici, 370 Bziers, 252
Bardoux, A., 134, 142 Biarritz, 412
Bar-le-Duc, 490 Bidegoin, 383, 386
Baroche, 362 f., 375 Biez, Jacques, 277
Barodet, 95 f., 117 Billioray, 69, 72
Barres, Maurice, 32, 151, 266, 279 f., Billot, 332 f., 335, 643
284, 298, 341 f., 344 f., 348, 353, Birotteau, 14
359 56i, 566, 617 Bismarck, Bk. I passim, 80, 88, 90 114,
f.,

Barriere, Pallu de la, 43 121 f., 144, 183 f., 187, 189 f.,213,
Barth&emy, 724 217 f., 229, 286, 312 f., 315, 396,
Barthou, Louis, 337 4i> 506, 545, 549. 684* 69
Basly, 198 Bjorko, 400 f.
Bataille, La, 297 Blacas, 86
Baudoin, 718 Blanc, Louis, 32, 61, 74, 78, 80, 109, 134,
Baudrillart, 716 137, 286 f., 291
Bayet, Albert, 676 f. Blanqui, 57, 59, 63, 70, 289, 293, 529
Bayeux, 378, 414 Bleichroder, 344
Bayonne, 22, 653 f. BloncUn, 282 f.
Bazaine, 21-8, 34, 51, 68, 310, 475 Blum, 176, 298, 341, 560 f., 563, 579,
Bazeilles, 30 594 ff., 615, 644, 650, 652, 660, 663,
Bazin, Ren, 617 68if., 684 ff., 691, 700-3, 705 f.,
Beauce, 47 708-1 i, 713 ff., 718 ff., 722 ff., 726 f.
Beaufort, Charles de, 71 Bohemia, 442, 724, 728
Beaumont, 29 Boillcy, 290
Beaumont, Gomtesse de, 127 Boisdeffre, General de, 306, 311, 315,
Beaune-la-Rolande, 51 333-6, 338, 343, 380*
Beaupr6, 349 Bonjean, 64, 71
Beaurepaire, Quesnay de, 34, 210, 278 f., Bonnal, 464
346, 487 Bonnamour, 346
Beauvais, 493 Bonnaure, 662 ff.
Bebel, 373, 527 Bonncchose, 140, 162
Bedouce, 593 Bonnefby-Sibour, 66 1
Belcastel, 89, 99, 106 Bonnemain, Madame de, 207, 2 1 2
Belfort, 29, 53 f., 83, 463, 487 Bonnet, Georges, 592, 66^ f., 720, 72 1 ,

Belgrade, 433, 439, 456 726


Belleville, 33, 127, 161, 293, 672 Bonnet Rouge, 453, 528, 662
Benedetti, 8 f., iaff. Bordeaux, 79, 117, 137, 289, 292 f., 407
Benedict XV, 642 412, 476, 513, 518, 530
Bral, 282 Borny, 26 f.
Beraud, 696, 717 Borodin, 624
Berchtesgaden, 726 Borotra, 608
Berchtold, 455 f. Bosnia, 433, 438, 440
Berenger, Henry, 267 Bosnia-Herzegovina, 445, 527
Bergeret, 382 Bougie^ 385
Bcrgery, 660, 667, 669 Bouisson, 679 f.
Bernanos, 73 Boulanger, 179, Book IV passim, 260, 273,
Bern, Due de, 81 284, 318, 343, 350, 357 f., 381, 384,
Berryer, 4, 82, 83 447,684
Bcrsot, Ernest, 158 Boule, 206

732
INDEX
Boulogne, 486 Cambodia, 239, 254, 629
Bourbaki, 12, 27, 34, 43, 52 103
f., Cambon, Jules, 184, 436, 438
Bourgeois, L&m, 176, 283, 322, 361, 445 Caxnbon, Paul, 185, 459
Bourges, 49, 520, 558 Cambresis, 408
Bourget, 72, 147 Canord Enchoind, 640
Bourgoing, 108 Cannes, 412, 573
Boutard, 350 Canrobert, 27, 28
Boutoux, 171 Canton, 238, 623
Bracke, 586 Caporetto, 499
Brandis, 488 Carbuccia, 696
Braun, 685 Carmagnole, 302
Brazza, Savorgnan de, 248, 250, 323 Carmaux, 352
Brazzaville, 323 Carnegie, 417
Brea,69 Carnot, Hippolyte, 198, 207
Bredow, 28 Garnot, Sadi, 198, 302 f.
Brtan, Commandant de, 354 f. Carpentier, 608
Brest-Litovsk, 509 Carriere, 336, 353
Briand, 344, 376 f., 421, 424-8, 434, Carthage, 224, 226, 254, 2^3
444 ff., 450, 453 f., 493, 495, 534 f., Cartier, 413
564* 569, 573 593 59 6 611 ff., 616, Casablanca, 435 f., 630
645 ff- Caserip, 302
Briere de 1'Isle, 236 Casimir-Perier, 96, 113, 134, 166, 302 ff.,
Brinon, 688 . 306, 35> 353 f- 445
Brisson, 164, 280, 337, 339, 346, 386 Cassaguac, Paul de, 80, 134 ff., 162, 173,
Brittany, 408 202, 236
Broglie, 85, 90 f., 93-9, 102, 106 ff., 1 10, Castelfidardo, 264
112 f., 128, 133 f., 136-40, 343 Castelnau, 477, 481-4, 488, 493, 496
Brooks, Preston, 683 Cathelineau, 63
Broussc, 135, 228 f., 294-7, 351 Cavaignac, 285, 337 ff., 346
Bruges, 506 Cayenne, 217, 310
Brun, Lucien, 100, 106 Cernuski, 353
Brunet, 135 Ce Soir, 728
Brunetiere, Ferdinand, 340 Geuta, 393
Bruning, Dr., 646, 686 C6zanne, in, 120
Buffet, 14, 95, 97, H2f., 127, 145, 168, Cezanne, Paul, 50, 412
358 Chabrier, 151
Bugeaud, Marshal, 392 Challemel-Lacour, 48, 209, 265
Bukharin, 560 Chalon-sur-Sa6ne, 273
Bulow, 392, 399, 476 Cham, 15
Bunau-Varilla, 269 Chamonix, 654
Burdeau, 153, 223, 277 ff., 298 Chamberlain, Austin, 61 1 f.
Bureau, 468 Chamberlain, Joseph, 325, 394, 456, 638
Burgundy, 53, 406 Chamberlain, Neville, 693, 722, 726
Burnside, 494 Chambord, Comte de, 81, Book II passim,
211, 259, 713
Cabrieres, 642 Chambord, Comtessede, 101
Cachin, 533, 560 Champagne, 409, 477, 4^6
Cadorna, 491 Champaubert, 476
Caen, 159 Chandernagore, 222
Caffarel, 192, 194 Changarnier, 100, 185
Caffiero, 300 Chanoine, 339, 346
Cahors, 160 Chantuly, 475, 481, 483 f., 487 f., 491,
Caillaux, 402, 428, 435~9 443 *"> 449~54 493, 496, 5i5
48 3> 535 537 *" 5&>> 59 Chanzy, 52 ff., 221
663, 679 f., 710, 720 f. Charbonnel, 370
Caillaux, Madame, 451, 453 Charette, 63, 78, 86 f.
Cairo, 319 323, 619 Charles X., 8x, 83, 102, H2, 136
Calais, 486, 534, 674 Charny, 640
Calmette, Gaston, 280, 451 ff., 455 Charreton, 120
Calonne, 591 Chartres, Due de, 277

733
INDEX
Charykov, 39 Grouse, 408
Chatalja, 469 Cri du PeupU, 297, 301
Chateaubriand, 104, 688 Crfrpi, 313
Chateauroux, 253 Croatia, 440, 442
Chatillon, 36 Croix, 260, 358
Chaudcy, 55, 65, 71 Cromer, 320
Chaudordy, 36, 42 .,3x2 Cuba, 631
Chaumette, 65 Cumpnt, 1 02, no
Ghautcmps, 322 CunUffe, Lord, 554, 565
Chautemps, Camille, 645, 648, 652, 654, Curie, Madame, 608
656, 658, 660, 664 f., 667, 669, 671, Curtis, 646.
720 ff. Cuvillier-Fleury, 15
Cherbourg, 87, 160, 405, 486, 605, 607
Cheron, 614, 647, 662 Dahomey, 247
Chcsnelong, 100-3, 263 ff. Dakar, 247 f., 398
Chiang Kai Chck, 624 Daladier, 644, 651 ff., 655-^, 660 f., 669
Christian!, Baron dc, 349 671, 723-7
Cilicia, 575 f. Dalimier, 652, 654, 660, 662
Civita Vecchia, 89 Damascus, 575, 631, 633
Clam, du Paty dc, 306 ff., 310, 330, 334, Danton, 35, 209, 292, 429
_/j 349> 355, 3Bo Darboy, 70
Clarendon, Lord, 5 Dardanelles, 482, 508 f.

Claretie, Jules, 346 Darius, 653


Claudel, Paul, 695 Daudet, Ernest, 312
Clavier, 72 Daudet, Leon, 369, 513, 536 f., 565,
Clemenceau, 58, 60 f., 134, 137, 145, 642 f., 646, 662
1721% 176, 184, 195-8, 207, 209, Daudet, Philippe, 643
211, 225, 236, 272 f., 278 f., 281, Dauphine*, 261
284 f., 317, 335 f., 338, 355, 377, Davout, 476
423 ff., 429, 444 ff., 449, 452, 457, Dawes, General, 582
481, 486, 500, 502, 504, 506, 514 f., Deat, 644, 651
524, 529, 533 f., 536 f., 544, 546 f., Deauville, 653
550. 555 56o 568, 579, 585* 590, Decazes, Due, 85, 112, 122 f., 132, 134,
592, 608, 644, 646 3"
Cltaentel, 173 Decazeville, 186, 198
Clinchant, 53 Defense Sociale et RtKgieuse, 1
29
Gluseret, 49, 62, 64, 67 ff.
Degas, 412
Cocarde, 201, 279 Dejean, 155
Cochin, 512 Delahaye, Jacques, 279 f., 452 f.

Colbert, 406 Delaisi, Francis, 578, 680


Colette, 608 Delane, 15
Colin, 464 Delbos, 715, 717
Combes, 176, 361-5, 374, 376, 378, 382, Delcass, 324 ff., 382, 391-4, 396 ff.,
384, 386, 400, 444, 483, 512, 676 400 f., 425, 445, 457, 507 f., 512, 630
Compayre, 155 Delescluze, 59, 68, 70, 74, 200
Condorcet, 107 Denain, 662
Constans, 208 ff., 212, 279, 281 Denfert-Rochereau, 53
Constant, Benjamin, 93, 107 Dentraygues, 287 f.
Constantino, 219, 22 x, 226, 505, 509, 576 De Pafcpe, 290
Coolidge, 589 DSptehe de Toulouse, 560, 583
Coppee, Francois, 318, 354 Deroulede, i88ff., 196, 202 f., 206 f.,
Corsica, 727 209, 212, 281, 313, 316 ff., 342 ff.,
Gottu, 282 346 ff, 357 3^6 396, 429* 6x6
Cottu, Madame, 283 Descaves, 429
Coty, 413,655 Deschanel, 361, 568
Coulanges, Fustel de, 157 Desmoulins,
Coulmiers, 45, 47, 51 DetaiUe, 412
Courbet, Admiral, 235, 237 Deux-Sevres, 78
Courbet, G., 69 Devs,282
Crfcnieux, 35, 56, 63, 220 Deville, 290
734
INDEX
Diaghilcv, Serge, 605 Duran, 412
Djaz, 503 Duruy, 153, 158
Diderot, 340 Duval, 64, in, 262, 301, 535
Diego-Suarez, 243, 398 Duvaux, 155
Duvernois, 10, 37
47, 419, 664 f.

Ebert, 61 1

Dillon, 202, 204, 211 Echo de Paris, 560, 653, 656


Dimier, 369, 370 Eclair, 331
:, 641 f.
Eden, Anthony, 722
,270 Edward VII, 395
JSgaKM, 290 f., 294
Dollfuss, 692 Egypt, 172, 393, 395 f.
Dombrowski, 68 f. Ehrlich, 622
Dordogne, 201, 600 Eiffel, 282
Dore", 412 Eisenmann, 385
Dorgeres, 674 Eliot, Charles W., 157
Dorian, 44 Ellington, Duke, 605
Doriot, 561, 661, 697, 712 Emily, 323
Dormoy, Jean, 293, 299 Ems, 9, 10, 12, 13,392,456
Dorten, Dr., 567 Enfidaville, 226
Douaumont, 488 f.
Engels, 66, 288, 290, 292
Douay, Abel, 23 Enghien, Due <T, 185
Douglas, Stephen, 393 Epernay, 406
Doullcns, 500 Ephrussi, ^75
Doumer, Paul, 222, 241 f., 386, 591, 593, EpinaJ, 463
646 Epinay-sur-Orge, 51
Doumerguc, 4^0 f., 453, 507, 588, 646, Epinay-sur-Seine, 51
660-3, ^>5 f., 66H, 673, 675, 689 Ernoul, 104
Draveil, 423 Esperey, Franchct d', 474, 476, 483,
Drcux-Brc'/r, H6, 132, 161 55> 506
Dreyfus, Alftvcl, 305-8, 310, 329-41, Esterhazy, 330, 331, 333, 334, 335, 336,
3-15 f- 349* 351-6, 369, 379> 394 , 338> 349, 353> 354.- 359
Dreyfus, Camille, 196, 272, 277, 329 Etienne, 220, 326, 393, 394
Dreyfus, Madame, 307, 322 Eudes, 64, 196, 289
Dreyfus, Matthieu, 329, 331 f., 334, 338 Eugenie, 31, 34, 101, 132, 205
Droits de I'Homme, Les, 290 Evans, 31
Drude, 435
Drumont, 206, 245-8, 274, 284, 305, Fabre, 306, 452, 453, 454
307 f., 340, 344, 358 f. Faidherbe, 52, 53, 247
Dubail, 483 Failly, 25, 29
Dubarry, 652 f., 660 Falkenhayn, 477, 481, 487, 490, 492
Dubost, 446 Fallieres, 274, 444 f., 646
Ducatel, 69 Falloux, 85, 88, 98, 147
Duchfcne, 502 Fashoda, 320, 323 f., 326, 394 f.
Duchesne, 244 f. Fauconnerie, Dugue" de la, 264, 281 IT.,

Ducrot, u, 29, 41, 47, 50, 52, 64, 86 303


Dufaure, 65, 96 f., 99, 113, 128-31, 134, Faure, Paul, 644, 712, 720
140, 143 Faure, Sebastian, 370
Duhamel, 728 Favre, Jules, 21, 31, 36, 42, 4/1, 40, 53 f.,
Dumas, 104 56> 72, 79 * i4> H7> 286, 303 1., 318,
Dumay, 584 333 ff., 346 f.

Dunkirk, 482, 607 Fayolle, 491


Dunois, 560 Feisal, 574 f.

Dupanloup, 84, 90 f., 112, 119, 130!*., F&ielon, 129


Ferdinand of Bulgaria, 433, 508
Duperr6, 262 Ferrata, 642
Dupleix, 239 Ferre, 58, 71
Dupuis, 237 Ferry, Charles, 196
Dupuy, 301, 356, 350 Ferry, D&ir*, 484

735
INDEX
Ferry, Jules, 39, 44 ff., 55, 84, 87 f., Gambetta, Book I passim, 94, 1 12
f., 117,

130 f-* 149-52, *54 160, fi4t *72f., 123 ; Book III passim, 188, 209, 225,
176, 178 f., 191, 196 ff., 208 f., 212, 229 ff., 267, 269, 272, 289, 293, 344,
218, 223, 225, 235 ff., 241, 254, 454, 505, 619, 675
265 ,313,646 Gambia, 247, 395
Fez, 399, 436, 438 Garat, 653, 662, 664
Figaro, 280, 335, 451 Carets, 217
Finaly, 676 Garibaldi, 49, 53, 78
Flanders, 52, 408, 415, 477 f., 516 .Gamier, 233 f., 238
Flandin, 668, 673 f., 679 f., 697, 726 Gamier-Pages, 45, 676
Flaubert, 50, 137 Gascony, 407, 60 1
Floquet, 170, 196, 203, 205-8, 278, 280 f., Gaulois, 202, 210, 275, 354
3ia, 452 Gautier, 300
Florence, 4x2 Gazette de France, 8, 264, 339
Flourens, 39, 44, 49, 64 Gazette des Ardennes, 524, 526
Foch, 28, 424, 464, 468 f., 476 f., 481 ff., Geneva, 695
485 f., 49i-4> 499-5<>7, 5', 538, Genoa, 574, 605
547, 552, 559, 640, 700 Gent, 49
Fontainebleau, 42, 45, 80 G&ault-Richard, 303, 344
Fontane, 282 Gibraltar, 395, 631
Fontcnay-lcs-Roses, 153 Gide, Andre, 627, 687
Foo Chow, 235 Gide, Charles, 385, 554
Forain, 183 Giers, 315
Forez, 413 Gilly, Numa, 268, 284
Forton, 27 f. Girardin, mile de, 10, 15, 136, 270
Fortou, 136, i38f. Gironde, 396
Forzinetti,310 Glais-Bizoin, 35
Fouch, 200 Goblet, 189
Fougercs, 415 Goblot, 155
Fouquier-Tinville, 210 Gobron, 282
Fourichon, 35, 42 Godesberg, 726
France, Anatole, 73, 87, 147, 172, 266, Gonse, 331 ff., 336, 343
336, 340, 345 , 372, 385 Gontaut-Biron, 91, 117
France Juive, La, 308 Gorchakow, Prince, 122
France Libre, La, 534, 559 Gordon, 320
Francis-Joseph, 318, 391 Goree, 247
Franco, 714, 727 Got, 50
Francois-Marsal, 585, 590 Gouraud, 575
Franconia, 21 Gramont, 7f., 10-14, 21, 26
Frankfort, 54, 396, 483, 547 Grandmaison, 469
Franklin-Bouillon, 576 Granger, 205
Frederic Charles, Prince, 24, 43, 45 f., Granville, Lord, 5, 229
52 Grave, 292 f., 300 f.
Frederick the Great, 20, 506 Gravelotte, 28, 467
French, Sir John, 473, 477, 485, 500 f.
Green, John Richard, 74
Freppel, 153, 264 f. GreVy, Jules, 33, 78, 95, 97, 102, 107,
Freycinet, 33, 43, 48, 52 f., 146, j6o, 164, '39, '43-6, 160, 164, 183, 186, 189,
167, 171 f., 179, 189, 196, 229 ff., 193-8, 221, 230, 272 f., 281 ff., 445,
273, 278, 3^5, 345 726
Friedjung, 456 Grevy, Madame, 272, 303
Frohsdorf, 99 f., 104 ff. Grey, Sir Edward, 320, 458 f.
Frossard, 23 ff. Griffuelhes, 424, 426
Frossard, L.-O., 533, 560 Grmgmre,6Qj, 717
Frot, 560, 656, 660 f., 669 Grzesinski, 657
Guepratte, 482
Gabes, 225 Gueranger, Dom, 92
Gabriac, 44, 286 Guerin, Jean, 277, 348, 357 f.
GaUieni, 241, 244 f., 465, 474, 484, 485, Guesde, 287, 289-95, 2 97 f., 300 f., 352,
372 f., 376, 4'9, 426, 483, 5^2, 527 f.,
Gftllife" 184, 196, 213, 350 ff., 355, 379 53*> 562, 587, 636
736
INDEX
Guiana, 218, 627 Hugo, Victor, 3, 32, 55, 74, 109, 172, 297,
Guibert, 99 309, 352, 369* 532
Guieysse, 322, 372 Hugues, Clovis, 294, 569
Guillaumat, 505 Hulst, 249, 263, 265
Guinea, 248 HumaniM, 344, 426, 658
Guise, 94, 472, 671
Guizot, 336, 658 Imerina, 243 f.
Guynemer, 640 Indre et Loire, 52 1
Guyot, 59, 428 f. Innsbruck, 21
Intransigeant, 202, 344
Haase, 528 !raq, 575*631, 633
Habert, 194, 348 Ireland, Archbishop, 264, 378
Haig, 485, 491 f., 494, 499 ff., 504 Irun, 714
HaleVy, Daniel, 104, 108, 129, 387, 60 1 Isabella II, 5
Hamilton, Ian, 485 Isere, 532
Hammond, 5 Ismail, 228 ff.

Hanoi, 233 ff., 623 Isoard, 263


Hanotaux, 128, 237, 306 f., 322 f., 334 Issy, 67
Harmel, Le"on, 418 Isvolski, 432 f., 439
Harmsworth, Alfred, 353
Harris, Walter, 393 Jacques, 205
Hartmann, 312 Jammy-Srhmidt, 676
Hastings, 35 Jaureguib-rry, 43
Hatzfeld, 45 Jaures, Admiral, 43, 312
Hauser, 385 Jaures,Jean, 151, 155, 172, 297 ff., 310,
Haussmann, 168 338, 344, 35i ff., 361, 364, 371-4,
Haussnnville, 265 380, 384 ff., 393 f., 396 f., 421, 423 f.,
Haute-Loire, 300 426-32, 434, 437, 443, 447, 449 f.,
HautP-Viennc, 532 452, 459, 527 ff-, 532, 561 ff, 583,
Havas, 305 587,637,685,691
Havrt, Louis, 336 Jcrker, 72
Havre, 303 Jerome, Prince, 3^
Hawaii, 243 Jeze, 695
Hecker, Father, 267 Jibouti, 320, 325
Henderson, Arthur, 646 Joffre, 248, 295, 446, 458, 465-78, 480-
Henlein, 724 94,496,499,512,515^,617
Hennessy, 413 JofFrin, 294
Henri, 301 Joinville, 113
Henriot, Philippe, 712 Joliot-Gurie, Madame, 707
Henry, 305, 307 f., 310, 330-6, 338 f., Jouast, 355
341 f., 353 ff., 359, 366 Jouhaux, 426, 530, 558 f., 563, 719, 725,
HeVicourt, 53 727
Herr, Lucien, 298, 43 1 Jour, Le, 278
Herriot, fidouard, 173, 371, 584, 587 f., Jourde, 59, 67
595 f-> 619, 638, 640, 644, 649 f., Journal des Dtbals, 106, 286
656, 662, 669, 68 1, 686, 690, 717 Jouvenel, Henri de, 633
Herv6, Gustave, 429 f., 527 Jouvenel, Robert de, 427
Herz, Cornelius, 272 f., 278-81, 283 ff., Judet, Ernest, 339, 358
Jura, 287,409, 411,413
Hindenburg, 506, 525, 611, 686 Justice, 272
Hippo, 219
Hirsch, 202, 290 Kairouan, 225, 629
Hitler, 622, 646, 652 673, 683-92, 694,
f., Kamehameha, 243
697,7001*., 72 1, 724, 726, 728 Kamenev, 560
Hoare, Sir Samuel, 694, 696 Kaller, 262
Hoche, 428 Kant, 151
Hoff, 41 Karl, Anton, 9, 12
Hoover, Herbert, 524, 650, 685 Katkov, i88f., 312 f,

Hue*, 240 Kautsky, 290


Hughes, William Morris, 585 Kevala, ^42
737
INDEX
Kellogg, 616 Lasteyrie, Gomte de, 84, 591
Kcmal, 631 Laurentie, 84
Kercnsky, 703 Lausanne, 576, 650
Kcrillis, 656, 675, 690, 736, 728 Laval, 53, 529, 645 ff., 680 f., 686, 692 ff,,
Kcyncs,J. M.,554 697, 708 f., 714
Khartoum, 320, 322 Lavelcye, 290
Kiderlin-Waechter, 436 La Vendee, 82, 86, 263, 424, 544, 642
Kienthal, 532 Lavertujon, 289
Kishinev, 397 Lavigeric, 226, 258 f., 261-4, 359
Kissingen, 436 La Villette, 284 .
Kitchener, Lord, 324, 473, 485 Lavisse, 341
Klcber, 566 Lazare, Bernard, 331, 334
Klotz,537, 5 89f.,59 8 Lebanon, 632 f.

Kluck, von, 475 ff. Leblois, Louis, 333, 335 f.


Krakowski, 109 Le Bccuf, 14, 22 f., 26, 48
Kronstadt, 314, 318 Lebon, Andr6, 331
Kropotkin, Prince Peter, 295, 300, 321 Le Bourget, 44
Kruger, President, 321 Lebret, 346
Krupp, 19 Lebrun, 647, 656, 728
Lecanuet, Pere, 135
Labordere, 140 Lechapclicr, 151
Labori, 353 Lecomet, 58, 63
Laboucherc, 570 Le Creusot, 4, 416, 522, 71 1

Laboulayc, in Ledru-Rollin, 78
Lac, Pere du, 277, 324, 380 Le F16, 42, 45
Lachaise, Pere, 73 f. Le Fort, 42
Lacordaire, 91 Legouve*, fimile, 50
Lacroix, 293 Legrand, Jules, 155
Ladoucette, 41 Lemaitre, Jules, 345 f.
Ladoumegue, 608 Le Mans, 53, 73
Lafargue, Paul, 288, 290, 293, 300 Lemire, Abb, 301
Lafitte, 595 Lemoinne, John, 136
La Fere, 476 Lc Myre dc Vilers, 244
Laferre, 385 f. Lenglen, Suzanne, 608
La Fouchardiere, Georges de, 68 1 Lenient, 153
Laisant, 209 Lenin, 62, 300, 532, 534, 559 f, 638, 703
La Limouzin, 192, 194 Leo XIII, 1 60, 257 f., 260, 262, 265, 362,
Lamartine, 80, 107 370
Lambert, Baron Tristan, 257 Leon, Iconic, 166, 230
Lambessa, 74, 219, 427 Leopold II, 249, 319 f.
La Motte Rouge, 43 Leopold, Prince of Hohenzollern-Sig-
Lamy, fiticnne, 342 maringen, 5 ff., 9
Lamy, Eugene, 150, 641 Lepine, 193, 308 f.
Lancssan, 242 Leroy, 619
Lang-Son, 236 Lcroy-Bcaulicu, Anatole, 277, 311
Languedoc, 87, 409, 424, 668 Lesseps, Charles de, 282 f.
Lanrezac, 470, 482 Lesseps, Ferdinand de, 268-71, 273, 282
Lansdownc, Lord, 394 Letourncau, 290
Lanson, Gustave, 378 L6vy, 307
Lanterne, La, 31, 202, 276 Levy-Grexnieux, 271, 278
Laos, 239 f., 254 Leygues, 569
La Pallicc, 606 Lhuys, Drouyn de, 15
Laperrine, 626 IMxrtf, 103
Larcy, 100 Ubrt Parole, 274, 278 f., 305, 307, 334>
Larochejaquelein, Marquis de, 82 344,358
La Rochelle, 428 f. Libya, 625
La Rochette, 106 Liege, 488
La Ronciere, 43 Lienart, Cardinal, 641
La Roquette, 71 f.
Ligny, 500 [637,
La Salette, 92 Lille, 15$ 292 , 35** 506,

738
INDEX
Lintilhac, 155 f. -
Manteuffel, 116
Liotard, Victor, 322 f. Marceau, 566
Longuet, Charles, 68 Marcere, 84, 128 ff., 134, 137
Loucheur, 554, 593 Marchand, 217, 322-5, 381, 566
Louis XIV, 232, 243, 395, 566 Marin, 595, 722
Louis XV, 497 Maritain, 147, 695, 716, 728
Louis XVI, 61,69, 85, 95, 104, 232, 263, Marne, 50, 189
292, 520, 545 Marquet, 644, 651, 656
Louis XVIII, 633 MarseUles, 49, 63, 167, 222, 294 f., 520 f.,
Louis-Philippe, 43, 79, 81 f., 85, 93 f., 605, 609, 712
96, 102, 117, 128, 219, 337 Marshall, John, 449
Lourdes, 92 Martel, 95
Loynes, Madame de, 346 Martin, Ferdinand, 274
Luang-Prabang, 240 Martin, Germain, 679
Ludendorff, 488, 492, 494, 500-6, 508, Martinique, 217, 238
5io, 545 Marty, 558
LuneVille, 476 Marx, 59, 286-90, 292, 20?^ 297, 421,
Luther, Dr., 646 562
Luxemburg, 417, 472, 548 Matin, Le, 332, 334
Lyautey, 217, 241, 253, 380, 435, 493, Maubeuge, 463, 475, 524
495 f-628ff., 633, 660 Maud'huy, General de, 480
Lyonnais, 413 Maud'huy, 671
Lyons, 48 f., 60, 62, 95, 103, 129, 147, Mauriac, Franyois, 695, 716
171, i?3, 292, 300, 302, 638, 674 Maurier, George du, 413
Maurras, 339, 345, 359, 366 f., 369, 371,
Macaulay, 82 576, 642 f., 654, 682 f., 696
Maccio, 225 Maximilian, 4
MacDonald, J. Ramsay, 587 Mayer, Eugene, 196, 203
Mack, 21 Mazas, 71
Mackau, Baron de, 197, 200 f., 212, 257, Meaux, 133
343 Meckel, 25
McKenna, Reginald, 581 Mehemet Ali, 228
MacLean (Raid), 393 Meignan, 90
MacMahon, 21, 25 f., 28, 34, 64, 69, 72, Mekong, 217, 317
74,'94 97 f-, 101, 104, 1 10, 127 ff., Meline, 333, 336-7, 342, 347, 358
131 ff., 136, 138 ff., 142 ff., 198, Menelik, 320
219 Mentana, 264
Madagascar, 176, 241-6, 276, 465, 524, Mercier, 306 f., 309 f., 335, 343, 349 f.,
628 f. 353-7, 379
Madou -
Chanemouganelayoudame'liar, Merrheim, 426, 530, 532 f., 559, 563
222 Merry del Val, 642
Madrid, 6-9, 12, 7i4f. 344
Messidor,
Magenta, 21, 141 Messimy, 472, 483 f., 512
Maginot, Andre", 588, 647, 698 Metz, 27-31, 34, 37, 40, 42-6, 68, 73,
Magnc, 103, 114 121,463,470,475,539,617
Magnien, Maurice, 261 Meudon, igf.
Magnin, Joseph, 114, 168 Meuse, 173
Makoko, 249 Meyer, Arthur, 79, 202, 210, 270, 275 f.
Malakoff, 128 308
Malatesta, 300 Michaux, 608
Malmaison, 41 Michel, Louise, 63, 74, 465, 482
Malon, 287, 290, 294 f. Micheler, 496
Malvy, 435, 451, 512, 514 f., 533, 535 ff., Michelet, 486
592, 721 Micros, 274
Mamers, 592, 594 Millerand, 297 ff., 302, 350 ff., 373, 376,
Man, Henry de, 529 424,
- -' 427,
_ 483
445,*^* ** t 512, **
'-* Ji 516,* *?556,
.,
Mandel, 537 562, 564, 568 f., 54f., 587, 618
Mangin, 217, 493, 496, 500, 539, 566 f., Millevoye, 284, 336
699 Milliere,72
Manoury, 473, 475 Milncr, 500

739
INDEX
. > 95>'34 162, 19$
Mirabeau, 107 Naquct, 202 f., 206, 209 f., 212, 342
Mirman, 155 Narbonne, 63, 597
Modigliani, 412 National, 136
Mohrenhcim, 315 Nebraska, 393
Molinari, 38 N^grier, 236 f.
Mollin, 382-6 New Caledonia, 74, 195, 207, 218, 287,
Moltkc, Count von, 13, 15, 18, 23 f., 26,
30 f., 355!f- Newfoundland, 395
Moltke, General von, 472, 476 New Hebrides, 395 .

Monaco, 412 New York, 74, 589, 647


Monastir, 493 Ney, 70
Monattc, 559 Nice, 412
Monet, 336, 412, 538 f. Nicholas II, 318, 398, 400, 532
Monis, 435, 452 ff. Niel, 1 8, 22
Monod, 276 Nietzsche, 367
Montagnon, 644 Nievrc, 108
Montalembert, 91, 532 Nigeria, 395
Montauban, General de, 26 Nimes, 86, 268
Montcalm, 237 Nivellc, 475, 490, 492-7
Monte Carlo, 412 Nizan, Paul, 726
Montcil, 322 Nogaro, 593
Montmartre, 58, 69, 71, 98, 161 Noir, 451
Montmirail, 476 Normandy, 41, 50, 140, 407, 520, 640
Montpcllier, 156 Norodom, 239
Mont Val6rien, 36, 59, 61, 336, 338 Norton, 284
Monzic, Anatole de, 371, 592, 595 Noske, 430
Moore, George, 413 Noumea, 74, 426
Mordacq, 537 Noyon, 481, 486, 543
Mores, 284 Nuremberg, 21
Morny, 138, 208 Nyon, 721
Morocco, 326, 393 ff., 3996"., 432 ff.,
437 f., 444, 493, 524, 527, 628-32, O'Donnel, 393
636, 657, 699 0116-Laprune, 151
Moselle, 466 Ollivier, fimile, 4f., 10-14, 26, 139
Mosul, 574 O'Quin, 114
Moulay Hafid, 436 Oran, 393
Moulay el Hassan, 393 Orleans, 43, 46, 51
Mourey, 259 f. Orleans, Duke of, 81, 85, 348
Mulhouse, 306, 471 Ornano, Cun6o d', 225
Muller, Canon, 617 Ostend, 486
Muller, Hermann, 529 Ouest-clair, 642
Mun, Albert de, 73, 205, 261, 265, 285, Oustric, 678
342,428,450,511
Munich, 550, 724, 726, 728 Painlev, Paul, 385, 495 ff., 537, 5^8, 592

Minister, Count von, 305 Paladines, d'Aurelle de, 43, 51, 59


Murat, 481 Pal^ologue, 457
Murger, 413 Palikao, Comte de, 26, 29 ff.
Musset, Alfred, 15 Paras, 446
Mussolini, 673, 684, 689, 693, 695, 714, Panhara, 413
723, 727 Panizzardi, 305, 338
Pantheon, 69, 71 f.
Nancy, 159, 479, 502, 606 Papen, von, 686
Nantes, 412 Paquin, 413
Napoleon 1, 3, 23, 61, 105, 108, 146*, 157, Paris, Book I passim, 78 ff., 82, 84, 95,
228, 313, 396, 449 "5, J39 >42> 146, 148* I5<>> 157 ,

Napoleon III, Books I and II passim, 1 68, 1 86, 205 f., 212, 236, 265, 286,

129, 136, H
1
156, 158* 162 f., 289 f., 292, 94 301. 3i4 347,
213, 219 ff., 233, 236, 257, 259, 405, 370 f., 394 f., 402, 410-14, 4191.,
440 45*, 47, 474 "> 479, 49, 5<>2, 5",
740
INDEX
520-3, 53<> 532, 534 f-> 538, 559, Pothuau, 43
607, 619, 638, 640 f., 656 f., Poyget, 420
ff., 663, 672 ff., 684, 688, 714, Pouyer-Quertier, 67, 140
Prague, 506
Paris) Comte dc, 81 ff., 85, 98 f., 102, Prangins, 199
133, 161 f., 185, 200 ff., 204, 212 f., Pressard, 654, 657, 664 f.
257, 260, 265, 545 Pressense', Francis de, 385 f.

Paris, Gaston, 151, 158 Price, Ward, 687


Parma, Duke of, 413 Prim, 393
Parncll, 385, 456 Primo de Rivera, 631
Parthenay, 139 Prince Imperial, 23, 161 f.

Passchendaele, 499 Prinetti, 392


Pasteur, 157, 518, 622 Protttaire, Le, 294
Pau, 412, 465, 471 Protot, 69
Paul-Boncour, 588, 650, 722 Proudhon, 59, 287, 289, 296, 299 f., 421
Paulus, 186, 206 Proust, Antonin, 278, 281 f.
Pavia, 468 Proust, Marcel, 336
P&aut, Felix, 153 Provence, 86, 409
P<guy, 249, 298, 354 Provence, Comte de, 202
Pekin, 234 f. Psichari, 147
Pelletan, 45, 78, 145, 400, 425, 720, 728 Public, Le, 10
Pellieux, 335 f., 338, 380 Puy-de-D6me, 173
Pelloutier, 419, 421, 426 Pyat, 56, 292
Penhoat, 43
Percin, 382 Quib&on, 428
Pere Gerard, 136 Quinet, 7, 107, 113
Pe"ret, Raoul, 593, 646 Quotidien, 583, 584
Perigord, 60 1
Pershing, 504 Rabat, 629, 657
Pescadores, 235 Racconigi, 433
Petain, 468, 489 f., 493, 497-5<> o , 537, Radama I, 243
631, 640, 662 Radek, 560
Petit Parisien, 132, 264 Radical, Le^ 290
Petite Rtpublique, 297, 538 Rambaud, 341
Picard, Ernest, 31, 33, 37 ff., 44, 6 7 Ranavalcma III, 243
Picardy, 660 Ranc, Arthur, 33, 42, 138, 333
Picasso, 412 Randan, 7
Pichon, 457 Rapallo, 574
Picpus, 65 Raspail, Benjamin, 292
Picquart, 309, 33-9, 346, 349, 35$ Ravachol, 266, 301
Pie, 92 R6clus, Elisee, 301
Pilsudski, 689 Reed, John, 560
Piou, Jacques, 262, 285, 342, 361 R<gis, 357
Piou Piou de V Tonne, 429 Regnault, Hen^i, 49
Pitra, 260 Reichshoffen, 25
Pius VII, 363 Reinach, Baron Jacques, 271-4, 274,
Pius IX, 89-92, 121, 129, 131 ff., 158, 277 f.
260, 370, 375 Reinach, Joseph, 145, 279, 281, 385, 627
PiusX, 362, 370 f-, 376 ff., 642 Remusat, Charles de, 95 f.
Pius XI, 643 Renan, 91, 102, 147, 158, 267 f., 284,
Plevna, 467 361
PoincarS, 173, 178, 350, 364, 440, 444-6, Renard, Edouard, 658
454-7, 500, 506, 528, 536, 544, 564, Renard, Jules, 341
568, 573 579, 58i, 583 f-i 587, Renauo^ 569
595 ff., 61 1, 613, 622, 644, 661, 689 Renaudel, 532 f., 563, 584, 651 f.

Poitiers, 159 Renault, 134, 146, 282, 385


Pondichery, 222 Rende, 264
Pontoise, 41 Renier, Louis, 158
Populate, Le, 532, 561, 583. 658, 671, 604 Rennes, 353, 355
Post (Berlin)* 122 Renoult, 451

741
INDEX
Trocadero, 166 Viollet, Paul, 340
Trochu, 31, 38, 41 f., 44 f., 47, 51, 63, Vionville, 27 f.

68, 118 Vitet, 84, 87


Tukachevsky, 534, 720 Viviani, 297 f.
Tunis, 184, 224 ff., 229, 244, 248, 258 f., Vollard, 412
262, 393, 424, 612, 625, 629 f., 692, Volont6, 653
^ ^
Tunisia, 727
,
f.
Vorwdrts, 584
Vosges, 47, 183, 466
Tuyen-Quan, 236 Vrignault, Paul, 261
Twickenham, 200
Waddington,
Union, U, 84, 91, 103, 112 Wagram, 19
Univers, L* 9 84, 91, 202, 260 Waldeck-Rousseau, 164^, 176, 350 f.,
Uskub, 506 355, 359 ff-, 363 f-, 374, 3?6, 3?8,
Uzes, Duchesse d', 200, 204 f. 382, 436, 444, 597
Waldemar, Prince (of Denmark), 260
Vadecard, 382 ff. Wallon, no
Vaillant, 59, 289 f., 299 ff., 372 f., 428, Washburne, Elihu, 36
5">528, 530 Washington, 509, 569, 686, 720
Vaise, 532 Waterloo, 112, 120, 475
Vcnd6me, 68 Wellington, 41, 495, 500
Venezuela, 321 Wendel, 417, 676
Venice, 412 Weygand, 476, 568, 632 f., 700
Venizelos, 482, 509, 576, 585 William I, 8 ff., 12-15, 313
Verdier, 641 William II, 216, 312 ff., 354, 395, 397 ff.,
Verdun, 27, 34, 459, 463, 483, 487-94, 476, 485, 612
498 f., 516 Wilson, Daniel, 137, 192-5, 198, 210,
Verdy du Vernois, 20 213, 268
Vergennes, 443 Wilson, Henry, 477, 485
Verlaine, 137 Wilson, Woodrow, 504, 506, 534, 545 f.,

Vermesch, 63 550, 555, 567, 585


Versailles, 54, 56 f., 59-67, 69 f., 72, 80, Wimpffen, 29 f.
97, 104 f., 198, 347, 545, 549 ff., Windischgratz, 59
565, 580, 621, 646, 659 Wissembourg, 24
Veuillot, Eugene, 202, 205, 260 Witte, 402
Veuillot, Louis, 74, 84, i34f., 137 Worth, 25 f., 33, 413
Viau, Raphael, 307 Wyse, Napoleon Bonaparte, 268
Vichy, 412
Victor, Prince, 284 Yagoda, 657
Victoria, Queen, 122, 145, 285, 394 Ybarnegaray, 656, 68 1
Vie Parisienne, 640 Young, Owen D., 613
Vienne, 301 Ypres, 477
Vigo, 535 Yser, 477
Villebois-Mareuil, 355
Villele, 106, 351 Zeebrugge, 486
Villeneuve, Guyot de, 384, 386 Z6vaes, 350
Villeurbanne, 637 f. Zimmerwald, 532
Villiers, 41, 158 Zinoviev, 560, 563
Vimy Ridge, 479 Zola, 293, 335 f., 338-41, 6o2
Vinoy, 38, 6 1, 64 Zurlinden, 338 f.

744
/5 2-

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