Paris, July 13, 1886.
The regular session of the French Chambers is to be closed the day after to-morrow, and the Chambers are to spend to-morrow at the Review at Longchamps, and I suppose to take part in the other nuisances which makes Paris insupportable on a National Fête day. I conclude the Chambers will come back in October for an extra session as usual. In fact, they have not yet voted the Budget; or, I had almost said, any useful measure. In Commercial matters and indeed in everything relating to intercourse with other countries, they have shown the narrowest and most exclusive spirit. Their great feat has been the law for the persecution of the Princes, which seems to be carried out as harshly as possible. I should not have said that the literal wording of the law necessitated or even justified the dismissal from the army of Princes who already belonged to it, but I suppose that was the intention of the legislators. The Duc d'Aumale's letter to the President is a powerful document, but was sure to lead to his expulsion, and was perhaps intended to have that effect.
Among people who ought to have good information from abroad, the alarm as to a war this autumn seems stronger than among the French politicians who confine themselves more closely to considering French feeling at home. Certainly it comes round to one in various ways from Germany that war is very generally expected, or at all events talked of there. The accounts current in Germany of supposed French provocations look as if there was a party there trying to work up hostile feeling against France. An alliance between France and Russia seems to be the bugbear. I don't see symptoms at present of any war spirit in this country; but of course a quarrel between Russia and Germany would be a great temptation to French Chauvinism.
The abhorred annual fête of July 14, 1886, possessed an interest which had been wanting previously, and has never since been renewed. This was due to the presence of a number of troops at the Longchamps Review who had just returned from Tonquin, and to the excitement caused by the first appearance of Boulanger at a big military display in Paris. Notwithstanding the inflated rubbish which was published the next day in the French press, there could not be the least doubt that the Tonquin troops were received without the slightest enthusiasm. In Paris the very word 'Tonquin' was hated; the country was associated with loss of life, and with heavy taxation, and nothing could have expressed more eloquently the disenchantment produced by a Spirited Colonial Policy, than the chilling reception accorded to these returned soldiers. The enthusiasm which should have been bestowed upon these humble instruments was lavished upon the charlatan who at that moment was the most prominent and popular figure in the eye of the French public.
The military mountebank (aptly christened by Jules Ferry, 'a music hall St. Arnaud') had, with some foresight, provided himself with a high-actioned black circus horse, and those who were present on the occasion will never forget the moment when he advanced to salute the President, and other notabilities established in the official Tribune. Only a few days before, it was currently believed, he had terrified his ministerial colleagues by appearing at a Cabinet Council in uniform, and now as he pranced backwards or forwards on the circus horse and the public yelled their acclamations, President Grévy and the uninteresting crowd of bourgeois ministers and deputies who surrounded him, seemed visibly to quiver and flinch as shuddering memories of December 2 and other coups d'état obtruded themselves upon their recollections.
From that day Boulanger became a dangerous man; the circus horse had done the trick; the general embodied in the public fancy the clinquant, for which the French had so long been sighing in secret; l'homme qui monte à cheval in place of l'homme qui monte à la tribune, and for a long time he survived even that ridicule which in France is supposed to kill more effectively than elsewhere. Even when he engaged in a duel with an elderly and short-sighted civilian, M. Floquet, and was decisively worsted, he continued to remain a popular hero.
Lord Rosebery, upon whom the unreasonable ill-feeling then constantly shown by the French towards England had made a painful impression, had realized in May that the Gladstone Government was doomed, and had wisely decided in consequence that a process of marking time was preferable to embarking upon anything in the nature of a heroic policy. Upon his retirement and the formation of a new administration, Lord Lyons experienced what was probably the greatest surprise of his life in the shape of the following letter from Lord Salisbury. In order to reinforce its arguments the late Lord Currie, then Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, was sent over with it to Paris.
General Boulanger.
london: edward arnold.