France from Behind the Veil: Fifty Years of Social and Political Life

by Princess Catherine Radziwill

When he became Prime Minister he tried earnestly and sincerely, as his duty, to convert the President of the Republic to his views. These he was convinced would conciliate the different parties that divided the Chamber of Deputies, as well as the Senate, and if he had found the help he sought from the Head of the State, it is probable that the whole tide of events in France would have taken a different turn. But that help failed him, and after having on the 15th of May parted from Marshal MacMahon on the best of terms, and received from him the assurance that he would do his best to co-operate with him in the direction which he wanted to give to the government of the country, Jules Simon was startled by receiving the next morning the famous letter from the President of the Republic, refusing to lend himself to his plans. He replied by handing in his resignation.

It is to the honour of Jules Simon that whenever he discussed the event in later years he always refused to accuse the Duc de Magenta of duplicity, as many in his place would have done. When the electoral campaign began, he, of course, took an important part in it, but even then his attitude in regard to the Marshal was most correct, and he never allowed himself to say a word that might have been construed in the light of personal animosity. He was a real philosopher, and a political man to whom no suspicion had ever been attached. In France such are rare, and the example he gave must not be forgotten.

The Marshal called to his help men belonging to the Extreme Right, such as the Duc de Broglie and M. de Fourtoul. He could hardly have done anything else, because it is not likely that even a moderate Republican would have cared to risk the unpopularity that was bound to follow all those who had taken part in this mad venture. They accepted office only because they imagined that by dissolving the Chambers the elections might give them a majority which would have called back the Orleans to the throne and restored the Monarchy.

People who knew the Duc de Broglie well affirm that he put the condition quite clearly to the Duc de Magenta, and told him that he would enter the ministry only if he were given a free hand as regards the future in case the country supported him by sending his followers to represent it in the new Chamber.

Whether this is true or not I have not had the means of discovering, but long after the death of Marshal MacMahon, his widow one day allowed a word to escape her which might have been taken as a tacit acknowledgment of the fact. She was conversing with a friend about the events that had accompanied and followed the coup d’état of the 16th of May, and replying to a remark that friend made to the effect that very probably had it succeeded the Duc de Magenta would have remained President of the Republic until his death, she exclaimed: “Oh no, my dear, the 16th of May, even if it had been successful, would not have kept us at the Elysée.”

Had MacMahon possessed a scrap of dignity he would have resigned after the country had pronounced itself against him, and the obstinacy with which he clung to his place after his defeat is one of the most extraordinary happenings in the history of modern France. I have often wondered, and have not been the only one to do so, what he had hoped to gain by staying discredited and despised at a post which could hardly have been a bed of roses. Duty had nothing to do with it. It might have been his duty to listen to Jules Simon, at least his constitutional duty; it certainly was not to his advantage that after having ignominiously failed in carrying through his attempt to create a Monarchical Republic, he remained the head of a Radical one.

Gambetta, whose verdict was nearly always right and just, when he troubled to utter it seriously respecting men and things, once defined the Marshal, and did so perhaps even better than the Comte de Chambord had done. When asked to what motive he attributed his having remained at his post “envers et contre tous,” he replied simply: “Il est resté, parce qu’il n’a pas compris qu’il devait s’en aller” (“He remained because he did not understand that he ought to go”).

But when the Senatorial elections took place, and sent to the Upper Chamber the same majority that already existed in the Lower Chamber, even an intelligence as obtuse as that of Marshal MacMahon understood that he had better leave to others the task of governing the Republic. He retired much too late for his personal dignity, and with him the last hopes of a Conservative Republic disappeared for ever. After some discussions, M. Jules Grévy was elected his successor. Some other names had been put forward, amongst them M. de Freycinet. M. Jules Ferry was also mentioned, who was to go down to posterity as the author, later, of that famous Article 7, which was so strongly opposed by the clergy and all the parties in the Chamber, with the exception of the Radical and extreme Republican parties. He was certainly a statesman of broad views. Moreover he was honest and sincere, and his personality was highly respected; but he did not care to become an automaton as was desirable in a President of a constitutional Republic. On the other hand, he was so intensely disliked by all those whom he had contrived to wound by his political attitude that he was very soon eliminated from the list. As for M. de Freycinet, a clever, quiet, resolute individual, his opponents dreaded his great abilities, and perhaps also the subtlety of his reasonings. He had just enough friends to praise and to propose him, but not a sufficient number to ensure his election. After a few hours’ discussion the general choice fell on M. Jules Grévy as Chief Magistrate of France.

M. Grévy was an advocate of Besançon, who had signally distinguished himself by more or less violent attacks against the Empire. He was not a brilliant man, but one gifted with strong common sense, an orator of no mean value, but whose eloquence was cold and quiet, like his whole character. He disdained to appeal to the passions of the crowd. He had the reputation of being an honest man in the full sense of the word, one who would never have consented to any indelicacy, and who represented the perfect type of the French bourgeois of the time of Louis Philippe, when the lust for luxury and the hunt after notoriety had not yet invaded public life.

When the first National Assembly gathered together at Bordeaux after the war, he was unanimously elected President, and in the delicate functions of that position he showed great dignity, singular impartiality, and firmness combined with extreme politeness. His task was excessively difficult, and no one did anything to lighten it, so that, after an incident of a personal nature by which he thought himself wounded, he sent in his resignation. It was accepted with alacrity by the Right, which feared that he would be an obstacle to its plans and intentions, and which, dreaming already of the fall of M. Thiers, was desirous of having a President after its own heart, which it found in M. Buffet, the irreconcilable enemy of Grévy.