France and the Republic / A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces During the 'Centennial' Year 1889

by William Henry Hurlbert

The Revolution of 1848 took even Paris by surprise. The Republic which emerged from it filled France with consternation, and opened the way at once for the restoration of the Empire. On December 10, 1851, the French people made the Prince-President Dictator, by a vote the significance of which will be only inadequately appreciated if we fail to remember that the millions who cast it were by no means sure that, by putting the sword of France again into the hands of a Napoleon, they would not provoke the perils of a great European war. France did not court these perils, but she preferred them to the risks of a republic.

I spent many months in France at that time, and to me, remembering what I then saw and heard among all sorts and conditions of men, not in the departments only but in Paris itself, the persistency with which the leaders of the present Republican party have set themselves, ever since they came definitely into power with M. Grévy in 1879, to reviving all the most odious traditions of the earlier Republican experiments, and to re-identifying the Republic with all that the respectable masses of the French people most hate and dread, has seemed from the first, and now seems, little short of judicial madness.

It did not surprise me, therefore, in 1885, to find the banner of the monarchy frankly unfurled by M. Lambert de Ste.-Croix and scores of other Conservatives, as they then called themselves, at the legislative elections of that year. It did surprise me, however, to see the strength of the support which they instantly received throughout the country. For I believe the masses of the French people to be at heart monarchical, less from any sentiment of loyalty at all either to the race of their ancient kings or to the imperial dynasty, than because the experience of the last century, to which, as I think very unwisely, the Republican Government has appealed in what I cannot but call its rigmarole about the 'Centennial of 1789,' has led them to associate with the idea of a republic the ideas of instability and of anarchy, and with the idea of a monarchy the ideas of stability and of order. Now the Government of the Third Republic, first under M. Thiers and then under the Maréchal-Duc of Magenta, was so conducted from 1871 to 1877 as to shake this association.

Under it Frenchmen had seen that a Republic might actually exist in France for seven years without disturbing social order, interfering with freedom of conscience, attacking the religion of the country, or wasting its substance.

There were 'wars and rumours of wars' in the air in 1876. It was very loudly whispered that Germany, alarmed by the rapid advances of France towards a complete recovery of her national strength, meant suddenly and savagely to strike at her; and that, unless the essentially national and military Government of the Maréchal-Duc was replaced by a Government which would divert the resources of France largely into industrial, commercial, and colonial adventures, a new invasion might at any moment be feared. It ought to have been obvious that a Government which held in its hand a balance of 98,000,000 francs was much less likely to be wantonly attacked than a Government which meant to outrun its revenue. With a declared balance of 98,000,000 francs to the good, France might raise at the shortest notice 2,000,000,000 francs in a war loan. The balance of the Maréchal-Duc's Government was in fact a war-treasure, and a war-treasure of that magnitude was a tolerably effectual guarantee of peace. This ought, I say, to have been obvious; but it is the triumph of demagogic skill to prevent a great people from seeing as a mass what is perfectly plain to every man of them taken alone. Under the stress of a war-panic the French people, whose dread and dislike of republics in general had been lulled, as I have shown, into repose by seven years of a Conservative Republican rule, were led into granting the untested Republic of Gambetta the credit fairly earned by the tested Republic of Macmahon and of Thiers.

M. Grévy, thought the incarnation of thrift, of peace at any price, and of commercial development, was elected President in 1879. M. Léon Say, a man of wealth and of business, from whom more circumspection might have been expected, lent himself, as Minister of the Finances, in combination with the rather visionary M. de Freycinet, to a grand scheme devised by M. Gambetta 'in a single night,' like Aladdin's Palace, for spending indefinite millions of money upon docks, railways and ports all over France, wherever there was a seat in the Chamber to be kept or won. The 'true Republicans,' as they call themselves, must be kept in power, the Republicans who hold it to be their mission—no, not their mission, for that word smacks of a Deity—but their proud prerogative, to rid France and the world of the Christian religion, to abolish all forms of worship and of monarchy from off the face of the earth, and generally to fashion the felicity of mankind, in and out of France, after their own mind. They went to work without delay. Having made the Executive, in the person of M. Grévy, a puppet, they began at once, in 1879, to pour out the money of the taxpayers like water, for what we know in the United States as 'purposes of political irrigation'; to 'purge' the public service, in all its branches, from the highest to the lowest, of all men not ready to swear allegiance to their creed; to create new posts and to fill them with the dependents and parasites of the Republican party chiefs.

The balance of 98,291,105 fr. 28 c. (to be exact!) with which the Republic of Thiers and Macmahon had closed the year 1876, rapidly vanished.

On April 20, 1878, M. Léon Say announced to the Chamber of Deputies that he expected the country to spend for 1879 a sum of 3,173,820,114 francs, and to meet this expenditure with an estimated income of 2,698,622,014 francs!

In 1876 the expenditure of France had reached 2,680,146,977 francs, and the income of France had reached 2,778,438,082 fr. 66 c. Two years had sufficed to reverse the situation, and to convert an excess of receipts over expenditure under the Government of the Maréchal-Duc, amounting to more than 98,000,000 francs, into an excess of expenditure over receipts under his 'truly Republican' successor amounting to 475,148,100 francs!

From that moment to this the Third Republic has been steadily expending for France year after year at least five hundred millions of francs, or twenty millions of pounds sterling, more than it has been able to collect from the French people in the way of normal revenue. The exact amount of this monstrous deficiency it is not easy to state with precision. So distinguished an economist as M. Leroy-Beaulieu, a Republican of the moderate type, puts it at the sum I have stated, of five hundred millions a year for ten years. At the elections of last year the Carnot Government ordered, or encouraged, the Prefect of the Hérault, M. Pointu-Norès, to oppose openly and energetically the election of M. Leroy-Beaulieu as a deputy for the district of Lodève in that department. Why? M. Leroy-Beaulieu is one of the few really able and distinguished Frenchmen, known beyond the limits of France, who may be regarded as sincere believers in the possibility of founding a substantial and orderly French Republic. But M. Leroy-Beaulieu, when he sees a deficiency in the public accounts, calls it a deficiency, and lifts up his voice in warning against a policy which accepts an annual deficiency of five hundred millions of francs as natural, normal, and to be expected in the administration of a great Republic.