As the fifteenth century is commonly admitted to have been a 'feudal' century, this provision attests the power of the robe as against the sword in a very interesting way, and at an interesting point in French history. The local nobility felt the slight put upon them very strongly, and made great efforts to have the system changed. These efforts were not successful till the end of the sixteenth century. In 1588 the Duc de Montmorency, Governor of Languedoc, issued a decree convoking the Council-General to consider the subject, and this assembly, after a stormy session, decided that 'the noblemen and gentlemen of the province should hold the first consulate alternately with the advocates.' The first nobleman of Languedoc who profited by this decision was Louis de Montcalm, an ancestor of the illustrious defender of Quebec. He became first consul of Nîmes in 1589, the year after the defeat of the great Spanish Armada against England. He was a Huguenot, and Nîmes in the days of the great Religious Wars had become a Protestant stronghold after its capture by the Huguenots on November 15, 1569. The Huguenot de Calvière, Baron de St.-Cosme, who took a leading part in that military adventure, was made Governor of Nîmes and a gentleman of the King's bedchamber by Henry of Navarre.
As a Protestant and as an advocate, the father of M. Guizot naturally inclined to the Republican theory of Government in 1789. He very soon and as naturally opened his eyes to the abominations of the Republican practice, and in due course came to the guillotine under the Terror. To the day of her death his widow wore the deepest mourning for him, and his son, like the son of the murdered Victor Charles de Broglie, honoured his memory by an inflexible loyalty to the principles of justice and of liberty for which his father had died.
I was not surprised, therefore, to find M. Guillaume Guizot, the Protestant son of the great Protestant statesman, at his pleasant rural home near Uzès as earnest and active in the summer of 1889 in organizing the monarchical party for the Legislative elections, as the staunchest Catholics of the Morbihan or of Champagne. Uzès, which gives a ducal title to the family of Crussol, is a picturesque and interesting town, and its electoral district made a gallant stand for liberty and order in the elections. It gave nearly 9,000 Monarchist against about 11,000 Republican votes, and the returns of the whole Department of the Gard, when compared with those of 1885, show a marked change to the disadvantage of the powers that be. In the first place the total of the votes polled fell off more than 10 per cent. in 1889 from the total in 1885. In 1885, 110,786 were polled. In 1889, 97,828. In the next place the Republican votes in the whole department fell off in 1889 nearly 20 per cent. from the Republican total in 1885, or from 58,328 to 46,323. In the third place the Republican majority over the Monarchists fell off more than 60 per cent. from the majority in 1885, or from 5,910 to 2,062. In the fourth place the Monarchists in the first district of Nîmes had a majority of more than 1,500 votes over the Government Republicans. And in the fifth place the Republicans, who in 1885 secured the whole delegation of six members from the Gard, in 1889 lost the seat for the second district of Alais, which the Monarchists carried by a majority of 1,305 votes over the combined strength of the Government Republicans and the Boulangist Revisionists. This district is a coal and iron-mining as well as a silk-growing district. It is fall of workmen, and it has been a point of attack for the Socialist and subversive leaders in France for many years past. All the traditions of Alais itself are strongly Protestant. The fortifications of the town were destroyed by Louis XIV. at the end of the seventeenth century, and at no great distance is the Tour du Bellot, the lonely spot which witnessed one of the most desperate conflicts between Cavalier and the royal troops. The slaughter of the Camisards, shut up in their burning tower, is a tale of horror still in the countryside. At Nîmes the memories of the long and merciless strife between the Catholics and the Protestants of Southern France are fresher still and more intense. M. Guillaume Guizot well remembers the bitterness of the passions roused at Nîmes by the local struggles between the 'two Religions' which followed the Restoration. His father was one day reasoning on the subject with a Protestant citizen of Nîmes, who suddenly pointed to a man passing on the other side of the street, and said: 'That man had a hand in the killing of my father here in the streets of Nîmes. How can you ask me to forget that?'
The Republicans of the Third Republic, bent on coercing France into a 'moral unity' of Atheism, are fast making both Catholics and Protestants forget such things in the imminence of a new and common peril to the liberties and the rights of both. The two daughters of M. Guizot, as is well known, married two brothers, the heirs and representatives of the great Protestant and Republican family of De Witt. One of these brothers, M. Conrad de Witt, just re-elected a deputy for the Calvados, was my host at Val Richer. The other, M. Cornelis de Witt, the namesake of the statesman for whom his illustrious brother the Grand Pensionary of Holland sacrificed his own life in a vain effort to save him from the brutal fury of an ignorant and frantic multitude at the Hague, has just been taken, in the full force of his energies and his great ability, from the love of his friends and from the cause of liberty in France. As a deputy and a member of the Government he took an active part in the re-establishment of the finances and the public organisation of France after the disasters of 1870-71. As a director of the great mines at Auzin, and as Vice-President of the Paris, Lyons, and Mediterranean Railway Company, he was in close and constant touch with the working classes of France and with the great material interests of a country which he loved as his ancestors loved Holland. This is not the place in which to speak of the personal gifts and graces which will keep the name of M. Cornelis de Witt green in the memory of all who knew him. But of his great qualities as a citizen, and of the judgment absolutely unwarped by passion or by prejudice which gave weight to all his political convictions, it is the place to speak. After a fair and serious experiment, in which he took his part loyally, at founding in France the 'Conservative Republic' of M. Thiers, he thought that outlook for the future completely and hopelessly closed; and as it was neither in the traditions of Netherlandish liberty nor in his own virile and courageous temper to acquiesce in the domination of a political oligarchy ready, like Carrier and the Jacobins of 1792, to 'make France one vast cemetery rather than not regenerate it after their own minds!' M. Cornelis de Witt looked about him calmly for a way of escape.
This way he found where the sagacious Netherlanders of the seventeenth century found it after the hard-won liberties of Holland had been prostrated by the mad revolt of a misled multitude against the Government of the Grand Pensionary, who had held his own against Cromwell and against Louis XIV., made Holland the first naval power of the world, and scared London with the thunder of the Dutch cannon in the Thames. Nothing but the restoration of the hereditary principle in the person of William of Orange saved Amsterdam and Rotterdam from falling at the end of the seventeenth century, as they fell at the end of the eighteenth, under the dominion of an invader. When the hereditary principle was again abandoned after the death of William of Orange, the domestic peace as well as the national prestige of Holland vanished with it, and though the Dutch people in the middle of the eighteenth century insisted upon seeing it for a time restored, the power of the Dutch Executive towards the end of the century was so much hampered and weakened by the local jealousies of the provinces, that in the Convention which framed the Constitution of the United States, Mr. Butler, who had travelled much in the Low Countries, successfully enforced the necessity of making the American Executive monarchical by a vivid description of the evils inflicted upon Holland by her departures from that principle. We took warning as to the perils of the Union from the example of the Low Countries, and as to the importance of the Executive from the example of Great Britain. There were many Americans indeed in 1788, men of worth and of weight both in private and in public affairs, who rather than accept Edmund Randolph's plan of confiding the Executive authority to a triumvirate, would have given their adhesion to the seriously mooted project of making the American Executive absolutely hereditary, and inviting the Prince-Bishop of Osnaburg to accept the office.
The convictions of M. Cornelis de Witt are represented now with equal energy and determination in Normandy by his brother, M. Conrad de Witt, and by his son, M. Pierre de Witt, just elected a Councillor-General of the Calvados, and in Languedoc by his brother-in-law, M. Guillaume Guizot, and by his son, M. Cornelis Henri de Witt.
The home of M. Cornelis Henri de Witt, near Tonneins, in the Lot-et-Garonne, stands in the heart of a land of fruits and vines. From the terrace of his château of Peyreguilhot, the eye ranges over a fine expanse of the valley of the Garonne, which at no great distance from Tonneins mingles with the Lot beneath the promontory of Nicole. The landscape is rich in colour. Great fields of tobacco alternate with extensive orchards. It is a land to be seen in the season of blossoms. The world-famed prunes of Bordeaux come mainly from about Agen, and the pleasant little commune of Nicole probably draws a much larger tribute to-day from London, in exchange for its precocious apricots, than it ever paid to London when the Plantagenet eaglets were rending the eagle of Winchester. The old traditions of Guienne seem to be much less vivid than those of Normandy or Brittany. I have heard Bretons speak of the Duchess Anne as the Scotch Jacobites still speak of the Stuarts. But though Cœur de Lion is still a popular hero in the land of Bertrand de Born, there is nothing there like the Provençal feeling in Provence. At St. Rémy, the beautiful birthplace of Nostradamus, a lively waiter in the excellent hotel of the 'Cheval Blanc,' taking me for a Frenchman of the north, contrived very skilfully to let me know that the Provençals do not hold themselves responsible for the failure of Northern France to repulse the Germans. 'If the Comte de Paris had not got the better long ago of the Comte de Provence,' he informed me, 'France would have been Provençal and not Provence French, and then things would have gone differently altogether.' But all Languedoc is as proud of its language as Wales. A youth who took me at Agen to see the shop and house of the 'barber-bard' was clearly of the opinion that the poetry of Lamartine and Victor Hugo would have been as fine as the poetry of Jasmin had they been so fortunate as to use his mother-tongue. 'The French language was a kind of Gallic patois mixed with German, while the true langue d'Oc, as I must know, was the language of the Romans.' This same philologist took me also to the little valley of 'Verona,' where he showed me not only a small vineyard, the property of Jasmin, but the house, the fountain, and the huge stone chair of Scaliger, 'a great philosopher descended from Julius Cæsar.' Joseph Scaliger, I believe, was really born in this house, which was given to his illustrious father by the Bishop of Agen; and Joseph with his own eyes saw some three hundred Huguenots burnt alive in Agen on the great Place du Gravier, where now the annual fairs of Agen are held under the stately elms.
The lands of the Lot-et-Garonne are full of memories of the English wars, of the Albigensian crusade, of the long duel between the Church and the Calvinists. Tonneins, once a curious 'double city' of the middle ages, was destroyed in the seventeenth century by Louis XIII. for its fidelity to the Huguenot cause. Nérac, where Jeanne d'Albret and the two Margots held their gay and gallant courts, and Henry of Navarre established his headquarters during 'the Lovers' War,' suffered as severely for the like cause under Louis XIV. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes sent its most industrious inhabitants into exile, not a few of them crossing the Atlantic to join the Huguenot colonies in New York and in the Carolinas. 'But the Revolution of 1789 did Nérac more harm,' said an intelligent tradesman of the picturesque little city to me, 'than the Revocation. The Revocation drove away many honest people from Nérac, but the Revolution brought here a great many rogues.' The country around Nérac is extremely fertile, and great prizes were to be picked up here during the decade of proscription and confiscation. The Garenne, one of the loveliest public parks in France, in which a beautiful fountain sparkles and murmurs beneath two lofty elms planted by Henry of Navarre and Marguerite de Valois, was actually bought during the First Consulate by the city for a little over five thousand francs, or two hundred pounds sterling. The war of 1791 against 'privileges' soon became in Nérac, as elsewhere in France, a war against property. The immediate effect of this was not, what we are constantly told it was, to increase the wealth of France by 'redistributing' it amongst the active and industrious classes. It was, on the contrary, to diminish the wealth of France by lowering the real value of property. This is clearly shown by the extraordinary pains which Napoleon took to enforce respect for the rights of property as soon as he grasped the supreme power in the State. But one comes everywhere upon striking local proofs of it. At Najac in the Department of the Aveyron, for example, the obliging hotel-keeper will give you the key of one of the most magnificent ruined castles in Southern France, which, with its grand donjon, and all the massive circle of its walls and ramparts, was seized and sold, during the Terror, for twelve francs. The purchaser made a deal of money by converting the castle into a quarry, and when law and order were restored, he gladly parted with his very dubious title for the highly respectable advance on his investment of 1,500 francs. As a piece of successful 'gerrymandering' the Republican treatment of this Department of the Aveyron, by the way, in the elections of 1889, is worth mentioning. In 1885, under the scrutin de liste, the Aveyron was entitled to six deputies. It elected a solid Conservative representation. In 1889, under the scrutin d'arrondissement, the Government carved out seven seats for the Aveyron, and the electoral districts were so ingeniously framed as to secure two out of these seven seats for the Republicans—though the total of the votes cast in the department showed a clear majority for the Monarchists of 5,582!
We had a banquet of Mayors while I was at Peyreguilhot; not such a Belshazzar's feast as M. Constans gave at Paris to the thirteen thousand, but a simple and interesting gathering of about a dozen intelligent and active elective magistrates. Under a recent law all Mayors, except in Paris, are now chosen by the Councils, but the Government can revoke their commissions. Our guests at Peyreguilhot were all shrewd, quiet, active men of the country. 'We shall be beaten in September,' said one of them to me, 'because the Government employs men enough to beat us. Moreover, our farmers say, "Why vote at all, for the Mayors and the Prefect throw our votes out and cheat us?" Then, too, we must have a man to vote for before we can make them move. They will not vote for the Monarchy as a principle. But give them a man who touches their imaginations and they will make him a Monarch.' They voted for Louis Napoleon as soon as they saw him take the Assembly resolutely by the throat. They would have voted, overwhelmingly, for Boulanger on September 22 had he suddenly reappeared in Paris, demanding a revision of the verdict of the High Court.
This is true, I think, not of the Lot-et-Garonne alone, but of all France. It has been signally illustrated since the elections of 1889 by what Stendhal would have called the rapid 'crystallization' of public sympathy around the young Duc d'Orléans when he suddenly appeared in Paris. The Government was completely bewildered and demoralized by this 'bolt out of the blue.' Instead of quietly reconducting the prince to the frontier with a reprimand for his inconsiderate and unconventional patriotism, it stupidly locked him up in a prison haunted by legends disgraceful to the Republic, proceeded against him with clumsy vehemence, gave him time to show himself to the French people, in the words of the Duc d'Aumale, as a 'pur sang,' a straightforward, dashing young French prince demanding the right of performing his military duty to the State, had him condemned, tardily resolved to pardon him, and wound up finally by sending him to Clairvaux to placate the criminal bullies of the Commune!