Development of Modern France 1870-1939
Development of Modern France 1870-1939
Development of Modern France 1870-1939
MODERN FRANCE
(1870-1939)
THE DEVELOPMENT
OF MODERN FRANCE
(1870-1939)
HAMISH HAMILTON
90 GREAT RUSSELL STREET LONDON
DEDICATED
to
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.
Vlll
CONTENTS
CHAP. PACK
III
IV
THE SIEGE OF PARIS
GAMBETTA'S
THE COMMUNE
WAR ........
........
35
47
55
II
III.
II
BOULANGER
D6ROULEDE
IV.
......... IN
183
1 88
III
IV
THE CRISIS
THE COLLAPSE OF BOULANGISM ..... 192
208
II
THE
PANAMA ....
'RALLIEMENT' *. . . . . . . .
257
268
III
IV
V
THE REVIVAL
CAPTAIN DREYFUS ........
OF SOCIALISM
. .
.
.
.
.
286
305
3 1 1
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
II
THE FRONT
THE REAR
.........
. .
IX.
.
463
511
.....
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
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
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-
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
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
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
.
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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:
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
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
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
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
'
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
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
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
*
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
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
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
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-
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
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
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
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
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
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
'
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
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
. . .
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
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
again.
It is possible that if the Versailles troops had rushed ahead that
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.
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
(which was the first thought of the majority), the Assembly had to *
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-
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
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
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
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
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
.
94
THE REPUBLIC FILLS i
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
95
H*4*rf ?''
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
'
*
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.
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
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
105
CHAPTER II
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
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
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
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? . . .
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
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
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
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,
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
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
'
123
*
te*
ATQ
ior;
BOOK III
would not abandon, for that would mean 'legalizing the Convention*,
since he thought the Senate would fall with the Presidency. It was
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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- ,
II
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
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-
'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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
'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
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
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.
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
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
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-
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
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;
still looked on Boulanger as one of their own, and the more cautious
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
193
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
Thiers carried thrift to pathological extremes, but not only was there
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 (
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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?
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!
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
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
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
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
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
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:
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
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
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
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
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
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-
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
254
BOOK VI
THE 'RALLIEMENT
I
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
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, ,.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 (
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,
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
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
II
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
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
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
,
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
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
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
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
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
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
were not satisfied with such belated conversion. There had been a
marked growth in collectivist belief even since the Congress of the
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
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
II
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
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
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
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
Mercier and his subordinates prepared the case which would justify
their neglect of the prudential advice of MM. Hanotaux and Saussier.
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.
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
'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
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
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
something more than formal good relations with France, although the
fall of Ferry and the rise of Boulanger showed how transient such a
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
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
'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
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
Ill
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
321
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
From the Mediterranean to the Congo, the continent was kers, save
all
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
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
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
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
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
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. -
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
'
II
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
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
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
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
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
,
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 decision from the Criminal -clion to the whole Court, made no
.'
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
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
parliamentarian .
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
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
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
356
CHAPTER III
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
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
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
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-
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
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
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
Ill
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
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
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
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,
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
HGSIPPE SIMON.
declare war, Italy would still be neutral. What was a 'direct provo-
cation'? The
Italian Foreign Minister, Prinetti, reassured Delcasse by
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
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
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
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
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,
;
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
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
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,
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.
*
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
psychology.
whom is a revolutionary, than between two revolutionaries one of whom
is a
deputy.'
II
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
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-
431
CHAPTER IV
RUMOURS OF WAR
I
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
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-
.
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
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
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
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.
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
Europe was on the eve of a long peace was still a tenable opinion.
Ill
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.
'
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
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
aging rebellion
<
1 1 < (
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
,
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.
THE FRONT
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
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
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.
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
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,
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
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
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
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,
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-
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
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
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.
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
it was realized that the offensive could succeed only so far as the artillery
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
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
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.
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
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.
;
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
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
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.'
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
*
-;,
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
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
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
*
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
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
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
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,
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
523
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FRANCE
a& idea of the size and variety of their empire when they saw men from
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,
526
THE WAR
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
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
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-
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 .
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 .
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
Germany to resort to arms. would have been more candid and less
It
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*
;
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-
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.
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
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
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-
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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-
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
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)
580
CHAPTER III
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
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
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
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
II
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
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
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
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
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
598
CHAPTER IV
RECONSTRUCTION
I
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
it was to re-allot the land were sometimes driven off with stones,
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
II
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
IV
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
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
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
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
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
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
suffered from the great loss of population that civilization had brought,
and attempts to use Indo-Chinese labour had merely provided the
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
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
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
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
634
CHAPTER VI
BACK TO POLITICS
I
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
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
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
. . .
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
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-
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
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
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
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
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
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
650
CHAPTER VII
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
Stavisky .
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
w
the Mayor of Bayonne, who was
not big game. The second
Stavisky
^ "^
mystery
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
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.
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-
,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
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
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!.
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
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.
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.
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
*
wj*v ******
'
-*.-
was thought
,
to be most sinister
alarmed. As the panic subsided, the old party lines had begun to
first
668
CHAPTER VIII
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,
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
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 ,
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
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
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 -
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
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
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
II
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
-
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;
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
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,
firmly intimidated.
The apparently sudden interest of the British Government in the
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
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-
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
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^
<,
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
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
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
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.
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
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 (
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.
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
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
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
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-
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. ,
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
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
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.
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
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
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 :
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
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 ,
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.
Ebert, 61 1
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.
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 .
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.
741
INDEX
Trocadero, 166 Viollet, Paul, 340
Trochu, 31, 38, 41 f., 44 f., 47, 51, 63, Vionville, 27 f.
744
/5 2-