“Corruption has existed everywhere and always. We find it written upon almost every page of the world’s history, and it is nothing new to see politicians allowing themselves to be influenced by the golden calf. Why, even Moses’s priests bent their knee before it in the desert. But the fact that they have done so does not mean that the whole nation to which they belong has followed them in their errors.
“The great mistake in this Panama affair has been that we have tried to make France and the Republic responsible. It is but seldom that a government is corrupt, and it is not guilty of the faults of those who lead it. A government is a principle; men, even though ministers, are apt to fall and to commit reprovable and even criminal acts. But why accuse a régime of the actions of a few among those who represent it, why especially shut one’s eyes to the fact that this Panama comedy or drama, call it what you like, was nothing else but one of the innumerable political intrigues of this or that party against the existing order of things? We have often discussed Boulangism; well, the Panama scandal was simply another Boulangist conspiracy under a different name. It may have disgraced some individuals, it has not taken anything away from the grandeur of France or from the merits, such as they are, of the Republic. Believe me, my friend, it is not by singing the ballad of Madame Angot that a King will re-establish himself at the Elysée. In order to do this, something more than a ‘collet noir’ and a ‘perruque blonde’ is needed. A man is required, and so far I have neither met nor seen him.”
CHAPTER XXIII
Two Presidents
From a constitutionally Republican point of view, M. Sadi Carnot, about whom already I have said a few words, made an admirable Head of the State—honest, dignified, strictly observant of his duties; of unfailing tact, and with neither slur nor blemish either in his political or in his private life. He knew how to hold himself in public, was moreover a fair speaker and a very well-read man. But he had nothing about him capable of provoking enthusiasm among the masses. His cold attitude, indeed, which drew on him the nickname of “the President with a wooden head,” did not appeal to the nation. He was generally respected and esteemed, he was even liked, but he never became popular, and the impression he produced on outsiders, and those who only saw him performing his functions, otherwise never being brought into contact with him, can be summed up in the remark made by a little schoolgirl who, on one of his provincial tournées, had presented him with a bouquet of flowers, and whom he had kissed: “Il ressemble à la poupée de cire du Musée Grévin, que l’on m’a montrée à Paris, seulement il est moins joli” (“He is like the wax doll of the Grévin Museum I was taken to see in Paris, only he is not so handsome”)
In spite of this drawback M. Carnot would very probably have been re-elected had his career not been cut short by the knife of Caserio. By a strange irony of fate, this Republican, whose ancestors had helped to overthrow royalty in France, died the death of a King. The odiousness of this crime is still remembered. It was a crime for which even the most rabid anarchists could not find excuse. With the murder of the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, it remains one of the most inexplicable crimes of modern times, and even political hatreds cannot justify it. M. Carnot was universally regretted, even by those who did not sympathise with him.
His sudden death left the field open for a race to the Presidential chair, which probably would not have been so fierce had the election of the Head of the State taken place under normal conditions, or had he even succumbed to illness or natural causes. No one had any thought of the possibility of a Presidential election, and neither Radical, nor Republican, nor the Monarchist parties had a candidate ready to step into the place left so suddenly vacant. When the Congress assembled at Versailles no one had the least idea who, among the eligible politicians of the moment, held most chances to succeed the murdered President, and the election of M. Casimir Périer was due, perhaps, more to the lack of any suitable competitors than to his own merits.
M. Casimir Périer was a remarkable man in his way. He came from a good bourgeois stock, such as had played an important part in political life at the beginning of the great revolution of 1789. It was in the castle of his grandfather, Vizille, near Grenoble, that the first revolutionary assembly of provincial states had taken place. Later on, his grandfather had been head of the Cabinet under Louis Philippe, and for more than a century the Périers had been conspicuous in France. Casimir, moreover, was extremely rich, which fact gave him an independence such as very few political men of his generation could boast. He had been born and bred in a most refined atmosphere, and always moved in the very best society, so that he found himself at his ease when he entered the Elysée.
His wife also was a most distinguished woman, who bore herself like a queen, and who had dispensed not only a semi-regal hospitality in her own house, long before she was called upon to continue doing so as the first lady in the land, but who, all her life, had also understood the duties towards the disinherited of this earth which a great fortune carries along with it. She was universally respected on account of her private virtues and blameless life, and she brought to the Elysée an atmosphere of elegance and refinement greater even than existed during the days when the Duchesse de Magenta had presided over its destinies.
The advent of the Casimir Périers did away with the reputation for meanness and dullness that had clung to the receptions of the Head of the State ever since the days of M. Grévy and his estimable but commonplace wife. Once more people belonging to the upper classes returned to the Presidency. M. and Mme. Casimir Périer visited a great deal, accepted invitations to Embassies and to the houses of members of the Cabinet; they received frequently too, and made themselves extremely well liked in fashionable Paris.
In spite of this, however, the new President did not find his position pleasant or easy. He had an authoritative character, and liked to have his own way, and also to discuss with his ministers the decisions which they submitted to his signature. He had been reared under strictly constitutional principles, but he was also very well aware of his rights under the Constitution of France, and had not the least intention of forgoing them, or of abandoning one single iota of his prerogatives. He was determined from the outset not to allow himself to become a mere figurehead in the government, but to make use of his privilege to be put au courant of everything that was being done around him. His was essentially a fighting temperament, and it was bound to bring him into conflict with his ministers, who had been accustomed to the resignation with which both M. Jules Grévy and M. Sadi Carnot had acquiesced in everything that had been proposed to them.