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

by Princess Catherine Radziwill

But when Marshal MacMahon had at last made up his mind to retire, and when the various candidates had been eliminated for one reason or another, the name of M. Jules Grévy immediately met with sympathy, and he was elected by common consent. He made a good chief of a Democratic State—dignified, calm, gifted with tact, and animated by the most sincere desire to govern according to the wishes of the majority that had elected him. He brought with him to the Elysée the manners of the bourgeoisie to which he belonged, proved hostile to everything that savoured of ostentation and luxury, and went on living the same life he had led at Besançon, when, as a young advocate, he had had to fight his way in the world. Madame Grévy was also an excellent woman, a good mother and an exemplary wife, who mended her husband’s socks and never attempted to meddle in matters that did not concern her. Under her rule festivities were but rare at the Elysée, but charity was practised on a large scale. M. Grévy did not show himself the nonentity he was later on represented to be, and several of his ministers, with whom I had an opportunity of discussing the President, told me that his advice always proved most valuable to them, and that, whenever serious matters came to the front, his strong common sense and clear judgment generally found the best way to put an end to the difficulties which had arisen. He was not a genius, but he had statesmanlike views, and these, more than once, proved useful to France.

Unfortunately, M. Grévy survived himself, politically speaking. Had he retired at the end of his first seven years he would have been remembered with gratitude by his country as well as by his family. But several untoward events and scandals gave a sad celebrity to his term of office.

One was the affair of the Union Générale; the first and the last attempt of French aristocracy to meddle with finance. Since that time it has grown wiser, and has had nothing more to do with banks, except marrying bankers’ daughters. But under the Presidency of M. Grévy it hoped to make up for its defeat in the field of politics by securing a great triumph in the field of finance. In M. Bontoux it thought it had found the man capable of retrieving its fallen fortunes, and almost all the proudest names of France co-operated in the enterprise which he started, and which he fondly hoped would rival the power of the Rothschilds and of Jewish finance in general. For some little time everything went well, and the shares of the Union Générale rose out of all proportion. Then one fine day the end came suddenly and crushingly, M. Bontoux was imprisoned, and all the numerous enterprises of which he had been the promoter suffered disaster.

Later on somehow, in other hands, the venture proved prosperous, and his creditors recovered something like ninety per cent. of their money. But at the moment that the catastrophe occurred half France was ruined by it, and as of course the Jews were accused of having brought it about, I think I am not much mistaken in saying that it is from that period that anti-Semitism began to flourish in the country, and that people like Drumont became popular.

The crash of the Union Générale and the Panama scandal, which began to ooze out among the public, would have been enough to throw a shadow on the Presidency of M. Grévy, but the drama which closed it stamped it with a shame that he himself did not deserve, and which, whatever has been said about it by his enemies, he felt acutely.

As everybody knows, Mademoiselle Grévy, the President’s only daughter, had married Daniel Wilson, the son of a very rich sugar refiner, who in the merry days of the Empire had formed part of that jeunesse dorée, whom the Café Anglais still remembers. He had grown bald, and he had become poorer since those halcyon days; but he had a sister, Madame Pelouze, the owner of the lovely château of Chenonceaux, in the valley of the Loire, who had considerable influence over him, and who imagined that by arranging a marriage between him and the daughter of the President of the Republic he would retrieve his fallen fortunes. Daniel Wilson listened to her, and soon found himself installed at the Elysée.

Once there, the rest was easy for a man of his intelligence, and this is a quality that his most bitter adversaries concede to him. He soon acquired unbounded influence on the mind of his father-in-law, and M. Grévy, grown old and perhaps even lazy, was very glad to find in his son-in-law a person capable of helping him and of bringing to his notice many things which he might perhaps have otherwise forgotten, as well as to give him good advice when he needed it. Very soon M. Wilson became a political power, and this brought him many friends, even more flatterers, and a host of demands. At first he was careful, then he grew bolder, at last he quite forgot that he was at the mercy of the least indiscretion, and finally, when it became known that he had accepted monetary considerations in return for promotions in the Order of the Legion of Honour, the scandal became so immense that poor M. Grévy, who had known nothing at all about it, was peremptorily asked to resign his functions as Head of the State.

To those who read of this now, the whole affair cannot but appear strange, especially if they have followed the course of events in France since that day, and they can but wonder at the sensitiveness of public feeling then. To-day, when almost everything from the great Cross of the Legion of Honour down to a modest bureau de tabac is to be had for money in France—and quite recently rumour spreads to the other side of the channel—one can only grieve for poor M. Grévy that he had been born too soon, and had not become President of the Republic some fifteen years later.

In the scandal that accompanied his fall the real services which he had rendered to the State, and his sincere attempts to restrain the great development of Radicalism in the country, were quite forgotten. He had been weak in many things, blind in some others, but he had always been honest, even when his son-in-law was doing questionable things in his name. And certainly at the time of the Schnaebele incident it had only been by his intervention and his wisdom that a war with Germany had been avoided. He had, in that dangerous moment, shown both dignity and firmness, and succeeded in settling with honour difficulties which but for him might have led to the most serious consequences. France, when thinking of him or talking about him, should never forget this.

When he resigned, there was again a question raised as to who should be asked to become his successor, and the name of Jules Ferry was once more put forward. But Jules Ferry was considered as far too Conservative by the Paris Municipal Council, which sent delegates to the National Assembly to warn it that, should he be chosen, the population of the faubourgs would come down to Versailles in order to signify its veto. To tell the truth, Ferry’s energy was feared, and it was dreaded that he would prove himself a master rather than a President. M. de Freycinet was out of the question, when suddenly M. Carnot’s candidature was put forward by M. Clemenceau, who was beginning already to assume the leadership of the Radical party, and to make himself respected by all the others.