Juliette Adam had from an early age cultivated the excellent habit of keeping a diary, and making notes of the interesting conversations she heard while they were fresh in her memory.[394] Sometimes, in order to make sure of their accuracy, she would revise these notes with friends present on the same occasions. One of her volumes of Souvenirs, Mes Illusions et nos Souffrances pendant le siège de Paris, had appeared earlier, in 1871, first as a serial in the newspaper Le Rappel, and later in volume, with the title Journal du Siège. This part of her diary, originally intended for her daughter, had a great success. When it was appearing in Le Rappel, Mme. Adam’s life-long friend, Henri de Rochefort, was undergoing imprisonment for the part he had played in the Commune. He wrote to her from his prison:[395] “The success of your Siège de Paris here is insupportable. Every one tries to steal my newspaper, and I do nothing but endeavour to recover it. Some of our convicts are actually copying the serial. After the next amnesty you will have the greatest difficulty in the world in escaping nomination as candidate for the chamber of deputies. So exactly have you photographed the physiognomy of Paris that every day, as I read you, I discover things which I had entirely forgotten, and which I see again as I did when they were happening.”
Mme. Adam had distinguished herself among her fellow-countrywomen by the foundation and brilliant editing of La Nouvelle Revue. Now in these seven volumes of recollections, written in a forcible and dramatic style, stamped each one with the hall-mark of sincerity, virility and passionate patriotism, she stood out above all other Frenchwomen. That such striking volumes should create a sensation, that they should cause antagonism as well as admiration, was inevitable.
Ardent republicans of the Gambettist school accused Mme. Adam of injustice towards one who had once been her idol and her friend. A fellow-nationalist, M. Henri Galli, wrote a book, Gambetta et Alsace Lorraine, with the set purpose of proving that Gambetta had not, as Mme. Adam declared, abandoned the policy of la Revanche. The only answer to such a contention is that Gambetta was an opportunist, and that passages from his speeches may be quoted to prove the correctness of both Mme. Adam’s and M. Galli’s points of view. To those who accuse Mme. Adam of having vilified and belittled the Great Tribune, we may reply that she passed over many things, revealing only those matters of his private life which were intimately connected with his public career. Against the attacks made upon her, the author of Mes Souvenirs defended herself ably in the columns of the Figaro and the Gaulois.
The most serious of the charges brought against Mme. Adam is that of being un génie démolisseur. To those who make this accusation we would reply that it reveals a complete misunderstanding of Mme. Adam’s mind and temperament. It is true that her recollections show la grande Française to be also la grande Désabusée, disappointed with the imperfect realisation of those high republican ideals held up before her youthful mind by her revolutionary father and his comrades of 1848. But that one in whom hopefulness and optimism had ever predominated should now give way to despair, that one so passionately patriotic should ever completely lose faith in la patrie, is impossible.
Even in the days when she saw, to her sorrow, la patrie forgetting la Revanche and pursuing what seemed to her the disastrous dream of colonial dominion, she could still write: “L’esprit ailé de l’avenir s’est posé aux confins de notre horizon; il nous apparaît là-bas, là bas, mais clairement.”[396] M. Léon Daudet believes that her great strength, sa principale force, resides in the fact that she has never despaired.[397]
In the most desperate of situations she is always convinced that il y a toujours dans un coin une petite chance que l’on n’a pas entrevue. And what is this petite chance dans un coin which, when the war is over and Frenchmen have time to think about domestic politics, Mme. Adam believes may deliver la patrie from the evils of political corruption and maladministration, the existence of which cannot be denied by the most fervent admirers of France? Mme. Adam’s opinion is that these serious flaws in the body politic proceed largely from over-centralisation.
With her fellow-nationalist, Charles Maurras,[398] Mme. Adam advocates decentralisation. She would like to see the revival of the old provincial assemblies. When, in Alsace, France comes into her own again, might not that ancient institution, the Alsatian Landschutz, respected by the autocratic Louis XIV and even to a certain extent by the despotic German, serve as a model for similar assemblies throughout the French provinces? Thus might provincial France be delivered from the octopus of Paris.
Enthusiastic for “her Paris” as Mme. Adam has ever been, she nevertheless realises that the hereditary virtues of France are best exemplified in the provinces. With the literary movement of “regionalism” initiated by Taine, continued by Mistral and Maurice Barrès, she has ever sympathised. Her own early novels are redolent with the breath of her native Picardy, her later books with the spirit of that gay Provence which is the land of her adoption.
We in England, with our age-long experience of local government, are only too well aware of its drawbacks. But institutions work differently in different countries. And there is no doubt that the over-centralisation of French administration does aggravate the evils of bureaucracy. Of the multiplicity of petty officials Mme. Adam constantly complains in her Souvenirs. Would they be reduced if another of her favourite schemes were carried out? With René Bazin,[399] with her dead hero Skobeleff,[400] and other conservative reformers, she would like to see parliamentary government replaced by an assembly elected separately by and representing the various interests of the different classes, professions and trades throughout the country.