[Footnote 1: Cornhill Magazine, 1883.]
When Gambetta was dead, the man who stepped into his place was Jules Ferry. He was a lawyer, born in the Vosges in 1832. He had never been personally intimate with Gambetta, but he succeeded to his political inheritance, became chief of his party, secured the majority that Gambetta never could get in the Chamber, and did all that Gambetta had failed to do.
His attention when prime minister was largely devoted to the development of French industry in colonies. He began a war in Tonquin, he annexed Tunis, and commenced aggressions in Madagascar. All of these enterprises have proved difficult, unprofitable, and wasteful of life and money.
The position of France with relation to other powers has become very isolated. Her best friend, strange to say, is Russia,—the young Republic and the absolute czar! Germany, Austria, and Italy form the alliance called the Dreibund. But their military force united is not quite equal to that of France and Russia combined. If Russia ever attacks the three powers of Central Europe on the East, it is not to be doubted that France will rush upon Alsace and Lorraine. The mob of Paris, in 1884, put M. Grévy to much annoyance and embarrassment by hissing and hooting the young king of Spain on his way through the French capital because he had accepted the honorary colonelcy of a German regiment, and M. Grévy and his Foreign Minister had profoundly to apologize. The incident was traceable, it was said at the time, to the indiscretions of M. Daniel Wilson, the president's son-in-law, whose melancholy story remains to be told.
Shortly before Gambetta's death, occurred that of the Prince Imperial in Zululand, and that of the Comte de Chambord in Austria.
The son of Napoleon III. had been educated at Woolwich, the West Point Academy of England. When the Zulu war broke out, all his young English companions were ordered to Africa, and he entreated his mother to let him go. He wanted to learn the art of war, he said, and perhaps too he wished to acquire popularity with the people of England, in view of a future alliance with a daughter of Queen Victoria. The general commanding at the seat of war was far from glad to see him. He knew the dangers of savage warfare, and felt the responsibility of such a charge. For some time he kept the prince working in an office, but at last permitted him to go on a reconnoitring expedition, where little danger was anticipated. There is no page in history so dishonorable to the valor and good conduct of an English gentleman as that which records how, when surprised by Zulus, the young prince was deserted by his superior officer and his companions, and while trying to mount his restive horse, was slain.
He left a will leaving his claims (such as they were) to the imperial throne of France to his young cousin Victor Napoleon, thus overlooking the father of that young prince, Jérôme Napoleon, the famous Plon-Plon.
The reconciliation which in 1873 took place between the Comte de Chambord and his distant cousins of the house of Orleans never resulted in cordial relations, though the Comte de Paris, as his cousin's heir, visited the Comte de Chambord at Fröhsdorf. The Comtesse de Chambord despised and disliked the family of Orleans, and the Monarchist party in France still remained divided into Legitimists and Orleanists, the latter protesting that they only desired a constitutional sovereign, and did not hold to the doctrine of right divine.
The Comte de Chambord died Aug. 24, 1883. His malady was cancer in the stomach, complicated by other disorders. The Orleanist princes hastened to Fröhsdorf to attend his funeral, but they were so disdainfully treated by his widow that they deemed it due to their self-respect to retire before the obsequies. This is how "Figaro," a leading Legitimist journal in Paris, speaks of the Comte de Chambord:—
"He had noble qualities and great virtues. What most distinguished him was an intense feeling of royal dignity, which he guarded most jealously by act and word. But we may be permitted to doubt whether the fifty-three years he had passed in exile had qualified him to understand and to sympathize with the great changes in public opinion in his own country, and the true tendencies of the present and the rising generation. In his youth he was entirely guided by others, but after the coup d'état of 1851 he took things into his own hands, and directed his course up to the last moment with a firmness which admitted of neither contradiction nor dispute. He sincerely wished to promote liberty; there was nothing in him of the despot, but he had lived all his life out of France, and could not comprehend the preferences and the habits which had grown into national feeling. He was kindly, genial, intelligent, witty, dignified, and affable. He only needed to have been brought up among his people to have made an admirable sovereign. Had the first plan of the Revolution of 1830 been carried out, and the young prince been made king, with Louis Philippe lieutenant-general till his majority, it is possible that France might have been spared great tribulations. For our own part," continues the "Figaro," "we have always looked upon monarchy as the best government for the peace, prosperity, and liberty of France; but with the personal politics of the Comte de Chambord we could not agree. After all France had gone through, it was necessary to nationalize the king, and to royalize the nation. M. le Comte de Chambord utterly refused to yield anything to constitutional ideas and to become what he called the king of the Revolution. It is true that the White Flag of the Bourbons had been associated with a long line of glories in France, but for a hundred years the Tricolor had been the flag under which French soldiers had marched to victory. It was this matter of the flag that prevented the success of the plan of restoration in 1873, two months after the Comte de Paris had so patriotically sacrificed some of his own most cherished feelings by his reconciliation (for his country's sake) with his cousin at Fröhsdorf. The party could do nothing without its head. The Orleanist princes would not act without their chief, and the opportunity passed, perhaps never to return."