The ideas of the French democracy were in the beginning revolutionary, disorderly, and subversive of national consistency and good faith. No doubt the French democracy had a much better excuse for identifying democracy with a system of abstract rights and an indiscriminate individualism than had the American democracy. The shadow of the Old Régime hung over the country; and it seemed as if the newly won civil and political rights could be secured only by erecting them into absolute conditions of just political association and by surrounding them with every possible guarantee. Moreover, the natural course of the French democratic development was perverted by foreign interference and a constant condition of warfare; and if the French nation had been allowed to seek its own political salvation without interference, as was this English nation, the French democracy might have been saved many an error and excess. But whatever excuses may be found for the disorders of the French democracy, the temporary effect of the democratic idea upon the national fabric was, undoubtedly, a rending of the roots of their national stability and good feeling. The successive revolutionary explosions, which have constituted so much of French history since 1789, have made France the victim of what sometimes seem to be mutually exclusive conceptions of French national well-being. The democratic radicals are "intransigeant." The party of tradition and authority is "ultramontane." The majority of moderate and sensible people are usually in control; but their control is unstable. The shadow of the Terror and the Commune hangs over every serious crisis in French politics. The radicals jump to the belief that the interests and rights of the people have been betrayed and that the traitors should be exterminated. Good Frenchmen suffer during those crises from an obsession of suspicion and fear. Their mutual loyalty, their sense of fair play, and their natural kindliness are all submerged under a tyranny of desperate apprehension. The social bond is unloosed, and the prudent bourgeois thinks only of the preservation of person and property.
This aspect of the French democracy can, however, easily be over-emphasized and usually is over-emphasized by foreigners. It is undoubtedly a living element in the composition of the contemporary France; but it was less powerful at the time of the Commune than at the time of the Terror, and is less powerful to-day than it was in 1871. French political history in the nineteenth century is not to be regarded as a succession of meaningless revolutions, born of a spirit of reckless and factious insubordination, but as the route whereby a people, inexperienced in self-government, have been gradually traveling towards the kind of self-government best fitted to their needs. It is entirely possible that the existing Republic, modified perhaps for the purpose of obtaining a more independent and a more vigorous executive authority, may in the course of time give France the needed political and social stability. That form of government which was adopted at the time, because it divided Frenchmen the least, may become the form of government which unites Frenchmen by the strongest ties. Bismarck's misunderstanding of the French national character and political needs was well betrayed when he favored a Republic rather than a Legitimist monarchy in France, because a French Republic would, in his opinion, necessarily keep France a weak and divided neighbor. The Republic has kept France divided, but it has been less divided than it would have been under any monarchical government. It has successfully weathered a number of very grave domestic crises; and its perpetuity will probably depend primarily upon its ability to secure and advance by practical means the international standing of France. The Republic has been obliged to meet a foreign peril more prolonged and more dangerous than that which has befallen any French government since 1600. From the time of Richelieu until 1870, France was stronger than any of her continental neighbors. Unless they were united against her she had little to fear from them; and her comparative strength tempted her to be aggressive, careless, and experimental in her foreign policy. That policy was vacillating, purposeless, and frequently wasteful of the national resources. Eventually, it compromised the international position of France. After 1871, for the first time in almost three hundred years, the very safety of France in a time of peace became actively and gravely imperiled. The third Republic reaped the fruit of all the former trifling with the national interest of France and that of its neighbors; and the resulting danger was and is so ominous and so irretrievable that it has made and will make for internal stability. If the Republic can provide for French national defense and can keep for France the position in Europe to which she is entitled, the Republic will probably endure. And in that case it will certainly deserve to endure, because it will have faced and overcome the most exacting possible national peril.
Even the most loyal friend of France can, however, hardly claim that the French democracy is even yet thoroughly nationalized. It has done something to obtain national cohesion at home, and to advance the national interest abroad; but evidences of the traditional dissociation between French democracy and French national efficiency and consistency are still plainly visible. Both the domestic and the foreign policies of the Republic have of late years been weakened by the persistence of a factious and anti-national spirit among radical French democrats.
The most dangerous symptom of this anti-national democracy is that an apparently increasing number of educated Frenchmen are rebelling against the burdens imposed upon the Republic by its perilous international position. They are tending to seek security and relief, not by strengthening the national bond and by loyalty to the fabric of their national life, but by personal disloyalty and national dissolution. The most extreme of democratic socialists do not hesitate to advocate armed rebellion against military service in the interest of international peace. They would fight their fellow-countrymen in order to promote a union with foreigners. How far views of this kind have come to prevail, an outsider cannot very well judge; but they are said to be popular among the school teachers, and to have impaired the discipline of the army itself. Authoritative French journals claim that France cannot afford to run the risk of incurring the ill-will of Germany, even in a good cause, because the country is no longer sure of its military efficiency. There is no present danger of this anti-nationalist democracy capturing control of the French government, as did the revolutionary democracy at an earlier date; but its existence is a source of weakness to a nation whose perilous international situation requires the most absolute patriotic devotion on the part of her sons.
Unfortunately, it is also true that the official domestic policy of the Republic is not informed by a genuinely national spirit. Just as the English national interest demands the temporary loosening of traditional bonds for the sake of securing national cohesion at a smaller sacrifice of popular vitality, so, on the contrary, the French national interest demands more of the English spirit of compromise for the sake of national consistency. The wounds dealt to the integrity of French national life by the domestic conflicts of four generations require binding and healing. The Third Republic has on the whole been more national in its domestic policy than were any of the preceding French governments for over two hundred years; but it has still fallen far short of its duty in that respect. The healing of one wound has always been followed by the opening of another. Irreconcilable differences of opinion still subsist; and they are rarely bridged or dissolved by any fundamental loyalty of patriotic feeling. The French have as yet been unable to find in their democracy any conscious ideal of mutual loyalty which provides a sufficient substitute for a merely instinctive national tradition. They have not yet come to realize that the success of their whole democratic experiment depends upon their ability to reach a good understanding with their fellow-countrymen, and, that just in so far as their democracy fails to be nationally constructive, it is ignoring the most essential condition of its own vitality and perpetuity.
The French democracy is confronted by an economic, as well as a political, problem of peculiar difficulty. The effects of the Revolution were no less important upon the distribution of wealth in France than upon the distribution of political power. The people came into the ownership of the land; and in the course of time the area of this distribution has been increased rather than diminished. Furthermore, the laws under which property in France is inherited have promoted a similarly wide distribution of personal estate. France is a rich country; and its riches are much more evenly divided than is the case in Great Britain, Germany, or the United States. There are fewer large fortunes, and fewer cases of poverty. The average Frenchman is a small, but extremely thrifty proprietor, who abhors speculation and is always managing to add something to his accumulations; and the French economic system is adapted to this peculiar distribution of wealth. The scarcity in France of iron and coal has checked the tendency to industrial organization on a huge scale. The strength of the French industrial system does not consist in the large and efficient use of machinery, but in its multitude of skilled craftsmen and the excellence of their handiwork. In a system of this kind, labor naturally receives a large percentage of the gross product, and a larger proportion of wage-earners reach an independent economic position. At first sight it looks as if France was something like a genuine economic democracy, and ought to escape the evils which threaten other countries from an economic organization, in which concentrated capital plays a more important part.
But the situation is not without another and less favorable aspect. France, in becoming a country of small and extremely thrifty property owners, has also become a country of partial economic parasites with very little personal initiative and energy. Individual freedom has been sacrificed to economic and social equality; and this economic and social equality has not made for national cohesion. The bourgeois, the mechanic, and the farmer, in so far as they have accumulated property, are exhibiting an extremely calculating individualism, of which the most dangerous symptom is the decline in the birth-rate. Frenchmen are becoming more than ever disinclined to take the risks and assume the expense of having more than one or two children. The recent outbreak of anti-militarism is probably merely another illustration of the increasing desire of the French bourgeois for personal security, and the opportunity for personal enjoyment. To a foreigner it looks as if the grave political and social risks, which the French nation has taken since 1789, had gradually cultivated in individual Frenchmen an excessive personal prudence, which adds to the store of national wealth, but which no more conduces to economic, social, and political efficiency than would the incarceration of a fine army in a fortress conduce to military success. A nation or an individual who wishes to accomplish great things must be ready, in Nietsche's phrase, "to lived angerously"—to take those risks, without which no really great achievement is possible; and if Frenchmen persist in erecting the virtue of thrift and the demand for safety into the predominant national characteristic, they are merely beginning a process of national corruption and dissolution.
That any such result is at all imminent, I do not for a moment believe. The time will come when the danger of the present drift will be understood, and will create its sufficient remedy; and all good friends of democracy and human advancement should hope and believe that France will retain indefinitely her national vitality. If she should drift into an insignificant position in relation to her neighbors, a void would be created which it would be impossible to fill and which would react deleteriously upon the whole European system. But such a result is only to be avoided by the general recognition among Frenchmen that the means which they are adopting to render their personal position more secure is rendering their national situation more precarious. The fate of the French democracy is irrevocably tied up with the fate of French national life, and the best way for a Frenchman to show himself a good democrat is to make those sacrifices and to take those risks necessary for the prestige and welfare of his country.