Chapter XVI: Introduction: I (2)

The sceptre passed as quietly from Louis XVIII. to Charles X. in France as from George IV. to William IV. in England. So far, indeed, as public disorder indicates public discontent, the English monarchy was in greater peril during the period between 1815 and 1830 than the French monarchy. When the Revolution of July came, no man thought seriously of asking France to accept a second trial of the Republic, and the crown was pressed upon the Duc d'Orléans, with the anxious assent of Lafayette, the friend of Washington, Mirabeau's 'Grandison-Cromwell' of the Revolution of 1789. Under the long reign of Louis Philippe France again prospered exceedingly. French art and French literature more than recovered their ancient prestige. Attempts were made to restore the elder branch of the Bourbons and to restore the dynasty of the Bonapartes. But no serious attempt was made to restore the Republic.

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.

Therefore, the presence of M. Leroy-Beaulieu in the Chamber of Deputies is a thing to be prevented at any price. The 'Republicans' of the Hérault this year tried to prevent it not only by treating 'informal' ballots thrown for him as invalid, and accepting 'informal' ballots thrown against him as valid, but, as the report of a Committee of the Chamber admits, by 'irregularities' which in other countries would be described in harsher terms.

Yet the majority of the new Chamber has postponed action upon this report of its own Committee till after the recess, and M. Leroy-Beaulieu is not yet allowed to occupy the seat which the voters of Lodève undoubtedly chose him to fill.

If we accept M. Leroy-Beaulieu's estimate of the average annual deficiency in the French budget as correct, it is clear that the 'true Republicans' have mulcted France since 1879 in the round sum of five milliards of francs--or, in other words, of a second German War Indemnity!

But a banker of eminence, thoroughly familiar with the French finances, tells me that M. Leroy-Beaulieu has underestimated the amount. He puts it himself at an annual average for the past decade of 700,000,000 francs. Thanks to the device adopted, I am sorry to say, by M. Léon Say, in 1879, of transferring to what is called the 'extraordinary budget' of each year numerous items which should properly find a place in the 'ordinary budget' of each year, it is not very easy to get at a precise and definite basis for estimating the real amount of these annual deficiencies.

M. Amagat, a Republican deputy for the Department of the Cantal, who has distinguished himself and earned the hostility of the Carnot Government by his cool and methodical treatment of these financial matters, denounces this device as 'deplorable,' and as keeping alive the most strange 'illusions' among well-meaning French Republicans about the real condition of the national finances.

Precisely! But the device was adopted expressly to keep alive these 'illusions,' in order that the 'illusions' might keep alive the politicians who adopted the device.

It served M. Léon Say, who knew better, in 1879. It serves M. Rouvier, who, perhaps, does not know better, in 1890. The new Chamber met on November 12, 1889. A fortnight had hardly passed when M. Rouvier, as Minister of the Finances, the 'Minister of ill-omen' as M. Amagat calls him, rose in his place and, without a blush, affirmed that the budget for 1889 showed an excess of receipts over expenditure of 'forty millions of francs!' This bold statement was promptly telegraphed from Paris, by the correspondents of the foreign press in that city, to the four corners of the globe. What did it mean? It meant simply this: that, thanks to the financial success of the Government investment of the public money in a grand raree show at Paris, called a 'Universal Exposition,' such an excess of income over outlay appeared in what is called the 'ordinary budget.' As to the 'extraordinary' budget--oh! that is quite another matter.

It is as if an English householder should divide his yearly accounts into 'ordinary' and 'extraordinary' accounts, putting under the 'ordinary' accounts his cab and railway fares, his club expenses, his transactions on the turf, and his ventures at Monte Carlo, but remitting to the 'extraordinary' accounts such unconsidered trifles as house-rent, domestic expenses, the bills of tailors and milliners, and taxes, local and imperial. For 1879, for example, M. Léon Say, as Finance Minister, gave in his 'ordinary' budget at 2,714,672,014 francs, which showed a reduction of 78,705,790 francs from the 'ordinary' budget of 1878; but with this cheerful statement M. Léon Say gave in also his 'extraordinary' budget at 460,674,566 francs, the whole of which rather important sum was to be raised, not out of the revenue, but by a loan!

This system has been carried on ever since 1877, when the 'true Republicans' got possession of the legislature, two years before they put M. Grévy into the Elysée as President.

On July 22, 1882, M. Daynaud, an authority on questions of finance, summed up the results in a speech delivered in the Chamber of Deputies. The Government in 1877 spent, in round numbers, 3,177,000,000 francs. In 1883 it spent 4,040,000,000 francs. All this without including what are called 'supplementary credits.' So that, putting these aside, it appears from the speech of M. Daynaud that, in seven years, between 1877 and 1883, the 'true Republicans' subjected the people of France to an increase of no less than 863,000,000 francs in their annual public expenditure.

Meanwhile these same 'true Republicans,' who were thus adding hundreds of millions yearly to the public debt, struck hundreds of thousands out of the lawful income of the clergy of France. They ordered the dispersion by Executive decrees, and 'if necessary by military force,' of all religious orders and communities not 'authorised' by the Government. They drove nuns and Sisters of Charity, with violence and insult, out of their abodes. They expelled the religious nurses from the hospitals and the priests from the prisons and the almshouses. They 'laicised' the schools of France, throwing every symbol of religion--in many cases literally--into the street, forbidding, literally, the name of God to be mentioned within the walls of a school, and striking out every allusion to the Christian faith from the text-books supplied at the cost of the Christian parents of France to their children in the schools supported out of taxes paid by themselves.

It is simply impossible to overstate the virulence and the violence of this official Republican war against religion which began under the Waddington Ministry almost as soon as it took possession of the government in 1879. It was formally opened under the leadership of M. Ferry. M. Ferry is admitted to be the ideal statesman of the Opportunist Republicans now in power. To him M. Carnot owes his Presidency of the Republic. In March 1879 M. Jules Ferry asked the Republican majority of the House to pass a law concerning the 'higher education,' in the draft of which he had inserted a clause ever since famous as 'Article 7,' depriving any Frenchman who might be a member of any religious corporation 'not recognised by the State' of the right to teach. This 'Article 7' was a revival of an amendment offered to but not carried by the Legislative Assembly of the Second Republic in 1849. The principle of it is as old as the Emperor Julian, who forbade Christians to teach in the schools of the Empire.

M. Ferry's law was intended to repeal a previous law adopted in 1875, and which had not been then three years in operation. By the Law of July 12, 1875, the Republic of Thiers and Macmahon had modified, in the interest of liberty, the monopoly of higher education in France enjoyed by the State. It was an essentially wise, liberal, and 'progressive' law. But the Republicans of Gambetta could not endure it, for it gave the Christians of France the right to provide for the higher education of their children in their own way; so it must be abolished.

It was abolished; and though the Senate, making a partial stand for law and for the equal rights of French citizens, struck out 'Article 7,' M. Ferry and his friends, who controlled the President, caused him to issue an Executive decree, to which I have already referred, breaking up the religious orders aimed at in 'Article 7.' This was in 1880. In 1882 the Chamber adopted a law proposed by M. Paul Bert, confirming to the State the monopoly of secondary education; and to-day we see M. Clémenceau, the avowed enemy of M. Jules Ferry and of the Opportunists, shaking hands with them in public, after the elections of 1889, on this one question of deadly hostility to all religion in the educational establishments of France. At a banquet given on December 3 by certain anti-Boulangist students in Paris to the Government deputies for the Seine, M. Clémenceau declared himself in favour of 'the union of all Republicans'--upon what lines and to what end?--'To prepare the Grand Social Revolution and make war upon the theocratic spirit which seeks to reduce the human mind to slavery!'

In other words, the Third Republic is to combine the Socialism of 1848 with the Atheism of 1793, the National workshops with the worship of Reason, and to join hands, I suppose, with the extemporised 'Republic of Brazil' in a grand propaganda which shall secure the abolition, not only of all the thrones in Europe, but of all the altars in America. If language means anything and facts have any force, this is the inevitable programme of the French Republic of 1890, and this is the entertainment to which the Christian nations of the New World and the Old were invited at Paris in the great 'centennial' year 1889.

Believing this to be the inevitable programme of the Republic, as represented by the Government of President Grévy so long ago as 1880, I was yet surprised, as 1 have said, to see the strength of the protest recorded against it by the voters of France at the Legislative elections in 1885, because the Republic of Thiers and Macmahon had made, and deservedly, so much progress in the confidence of the French people, that I had hardly expected to see the essentially conservative heart of France startled, even by three or four years' experience of the Government of M. Grévy, into an adequate sense of the perils into which these successors of the Maréchal-Duc were leading the country.

'A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush' is an essentially French proverb. Seven years of peace, liberty, and financial prosperity under the Conservative Republic should have gone far, I thought, to convince the average French peasant that he might, after all, be safe under a republic. Doubtless this impression of mine was not wholly unfounded. Yet, in spite of this important check upon the headway of the reaction against Republicanism provoked by the fanaticism and the financial extravagance of the Government of President Grévy--and in spite, too, of the open official pressure put upon the voters of France by the then Minister of the Interior, M. Allain-Targé, who issued a circular commanding all the prefects in France to stand 'neutral' between Republican candidates of all shades, but to exert themselves for the defeat of all 'reactionary' candidates; in spite of all this, the elections of October and November 1885 sent up about two hundred monarchical members, whose seats could by no trick or device be stolen from them, to the Chamber of Deputies, and pitted a popular vote of 3,608,578 declared enemies of the existing Republic against a popular vote of 4,377,063 citizens anxious to maintain or willing to submit to it.

From that time to the present day the Government of the Third French Republic has been standing on the defensive. It has steadily lost ground, with every passing year, in the confidence and respect of the French people. The financial scandals, amid which President Grévy and his son-in-law, M. Wilson, disappeared and President Carnot was 'invented,' simply revealed a condition of things inherent in the very nature of the political organisation of France under the parliamentary revolutionists who came into power in 1879.

The Third French Republic, such as these men have made it, is condemned, hopelessly and irretrievably condemned, by its creed to be a government of persecution and by its machinery to be a government of corruption. There is no escape for it.

V

It has made the Government of France--not the Administration, but the form, the constitution of the Government--a party question, and it has organised the party which insists that France shall be a Republic, openly and avowedly upon the maxim of Danton that 'to the victors belong the spoils.' What has come of this maxim in the United States, where the form and constitution of the Republic are accepted by all political parties, and the administration of the Government alone is a party question, I need not say.

There are 'black points' even on the horizon of the American Republic, as all Americans know. But there is no point blacker than this, as to which, however, it is possible with us that good men of all political parties may act together in the future as they have acted together in the past for Civil Service Reform. But what is possible with us is not possible with the party of the Republic in France. For, by making the Republic a republic of religious persecution, the Republicans of the Republic of Gambetta, Jules Ferry, Carnot, and Clémenceau have made it necessarily a republic of political proscription, and political proscription inevitably means political corruption.

If any man needs to learn this, let him study the story of the establishment of the Protestant Succession in England by Walpole, and the story of the overthrow of the United States Bank by President Jackson, in America. He may think the Protestant Succession in England, and the overthrow of the United States Bank in America, worth the price paid for each. But he will learn at least what the price was.

It will not be the fault of the Carnot Government--certainly not of the most energetic member of that Government, M. Constans, Minister of the Interior--if the French people fail to learn this.

A very much higher price will have to be paid for the extirpation of religion out of France, and the education of the French people into what M. Jules Ferry fantastically supposes to be 'Herbert Spencer's' gospel, identifying duty with self-indulgence!

The late Chamber, doubtless having the then impending elections in view, voted to abolish the Secret Service Fund of the Ministry of the Interior. It was a Platonic vote, referring only to the Budget of 1890, nor did it take effect. But on December 14, 1889, M. Constans, having made the re-establishment of this fund a cabinet question, got up in the Chamber and boldly declared that he wanted a Secret Service Fund of 1,600,000 fr., or about 64,000_l._ sterling; that he did not care what the Right thought about such a fund; that he meant to use it to 'combat conspiracies against the Republic,' and that he expected the majority to give it to him as a mark of their personal confidence.

That the War Office, in a country like France, should need a Secret Service Fund, is intelligible. It is intelligible that a Secret Service Fund should be legitimately required, perhaps, by the Foreign Office of a country like France. But why should a Secret Service Fund of more than 60,000_l._ sterling be required by the Home Secretary of a French Republic which is supposed to be 'a government of the people, by the people, for the people'?

I have an impression, which it will require evidence to remove, that no such Secret Service Fund as this is at the disposal of the Chancellor of the German Empire; and I find the whole expense of the Home Office of the monarchy of Great Britain set down at less than half the amount which, after a brief debate, the Republicans of the new Chamber in France, by a majority of a hundred votes, quietly put under the control of the French Home Secretary, to show their 'confidence' in the excellent man to whose unhesitating manipulation, through his prefects, of the votes cast in September and October last, so many of them are universally believed in France to be really indebted for their seats!

In the year 1889 the British budget shows an outlay on the Home Office of 29,963_l._

More than this, the 'Secret Service Fund' voted out of the pockets of the taxpayers of France into the strong box of the Minister of the Interior, considerably exceeds the cost of the British Treasury Office! In 1888 the British budget gave the First Lord of the Treasury, to cover the expenses of that great and important department of the British monarchical government, 60,222_l._, or nearly 4,000_l._ less than the Republicans of the Third French Republic have generously put at the disposal of M. Constans to 'combat conspiracies' against the life of a Republic of which in the same breath we are asked to believe that it has just been acclaimed with enthusiasm by the masses of the French people, as the fixed, final, and permanent government of their deliberate choice!

At this rate it will actually cost the taxpayers of Republican France more than two-thirds as much merely to keep the Republic from being suddenly done to death some fine day between breakfast and dinner, as it costs the taxpayers of Great Britain to keep up the state and dignity of the British sovereign from year to year! The total annual amount, I find, of the Civil List of Great Britain annually voted to the Queen, of the annual grants to other members of the Royal Family, and of the Viceroyalty of Ireland is 557,000_l._ Of this amount the Hereditary Revenues, surrendered to the nation, cover 464,000_l._ This leaves an annual charge upon the taxpayers of 93,000_l._ sterling, or only 29,000_l._ more than the sum deliberately voted by the Republican Chamber at Paris into the hands of M. Constans to be by him used in 'combating conspiracies' against the Republic!--or, in other words and in plain English, in making things comfortable for his political friends, and uncomfortable for his political enemies!

And this, observe, is a mere supplementary adjunct to the budget of this energetic and admirable minister, that budget having been fixed by the late Chamber for 1890 at 61,291,256 francs--or, in round numbers, 2,451,650_l._ sterling--of which handsome amount 13,059,570 francs, or 522,383_l._ sterling, being the outlay on the Central Administration and the préfectures, must be added to the 1,200,000 francs, or 48,000_l._ sterling, of the Presidential salary and allowances, in order to give us a basis for a fair approximate comparison of the cost to republican France of her executive President and prefects with the cost to monarchical Great Britain of her executive Sovereign, lords-lieutenant, and Viceroy of Ireland. Stated in round numbers, the result appears to be that for their republican President and their eighty-three republican prefects, the taxpayers of France pay annually out of their own pockets 570,383_l._ against 93,000_l._ paid annually out of their own pockets by the taxpayers of Great Britain for their monarchical sovereign, eighty-six lords-lieutenant, a Viceroy of Ireland, and thirty-two lieutenants of the Irish counties. From the point of view of the taxpayers, this would seem to lend some colour to Lord Beaconsfield's contention, that economy is to be found on the side of the system which rewards certain kinds of public service by 'public distinction conferred by the fountain of honour.'

The threadbare witticism about the Bourbons of 1815, who had learned nothing and forgotten nothing, may well be furbished up for the benefit of the Republicans who now control the Third French Republic. However true it may, or may not, have been of the Comte de Provence and the Comte d'Artois, Henri IV., who was certainly a Bourbon of the Bourbons, had a quick wit at learning, and upon occasion also a neat knack of forgetting. He thought Paris well worth a mass, heard the mass, and got Paris.

It was not necessary for the Republicans of the Third Republic, after the formidable lesson which France read them at the elections in 1885, to hear mass themselves. They were perfectly free to persist and to perish in their unbelief, and, like the hero of Sir Alfred Lyall's 'Land of Regrets,'

'Get damned in their commonplace way.'

All that Christian France asked of them in 1885 was that they would leave their fellow-citizens as free to hear mass as they themselves were free not to hear it. They had only to let the religion of the French people alone, to respect the consciences and the civil liberty of their countrymen, and the tides that were rising against them, and the Republic because of them, must inevitably have begun to subside.

The hostility between the Church and the Republic in France is absolutely, in its origin, one-sided. The Church is no more necessarily hostile to the Republic as a Republic in France, than it is to the Republic as a Republic in the United States or in Chile, or in Catholic Switzerland. The Church can be made hostile to a Republic by persecution and attack just as it can he made hostile in the same way to a monarchy. Neither Philippe le Bel nor Henry the Eighth was much of a Republican.

But the Republicans of the Third Republic, in 1885, would learn nothing and forget nothing. They met the protest of millions of voters in France with a renewed virulence of Anti-Catholic and of Anti-Christian legislation, with an increased public expenditure, and with fresh political proscriptions.

Their purpose and their programme were succinctly and clearly summed up in the explicit declaration of M. Brisson, one of the most conspicuous leaders of the Republican party, that 'the Republic should be established in France, if necessary, by arms!'

What is the difference in principle between such a declaration as this and the attempt of the third Napoleon to establish an empire in Mexico by arms? In the one case we have a proselytising, atheistic Republic bent on abolishing the religion of an unquestionable majority of the French people; in the other, we have a proselytising emperor bent on organizing empire in Mexico. In the light of the doctrine that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, the one undertaking is as monstrous as the other. The undertaking of the Emperor failed disastrously in Mexico; I do not believe, and for many reasons, that the undertaking of the Republic will succeed in France.

One, and the chief of these reasons, is, that I believe the hold of the Christian religion upon the body of the French people to be stronger, and not weaker, than it was before the propaganda of atheism began. In some of the chapters of this volume evidence, I think, will be found to show this. Under the plan which I have adopted in constructing the book, I have not attempted to marshal and co-ordinate the evidence. I have simply presented it, where it presented itself, either in conversations had by me at one or another place with persons qualified, as I thought, to speak with some authority, or in observations made by me in passing through one or another region. It was a part of my plan too, as I have said, to register, under the general heading of one or another department, not only what struck me most while visiting that department in the way of things seen or heard there, but also such conversations bearing on general subjects as I there had, and such notes as I there made from the books bearing on French history, which I took with me wherever I went. As this book is not a treatise but a record, as it is not intended to maintain a preconceived thesis, but simply to indicate the grounds on which I have myself come to certain conclusions and convictions, I thought the method I have adopted the fairest, both to my readers and to myself, that I could pursue.

VI

But as the point I have now touched, of the religious condition of France, is a specially grave and important point, I must ask my readers to pause with me upon it for a moment here in this Introduction. I am especially moved to do this because I have reason to think that very serious and very extraordinary delusions on this point exist outside of France, and especially in England. This is not unnatural when we remember that nine foreigners in ten take their impressions of France as a nation, not only from the current journalism and literature of Paris alone, but from a very limited range of the current literature and journalism even of Paris. Most Americans certainly, and I am inclined to think most Englishmen, who visit Paris, and see and know a good deal of Paris, are really in a condition of penumbral darkness as to the true social, religious, and intellectual life of the vast majority of the population even of Paris. We see the Paris of the boulevards, the Champs-Elysées, the first nights at the theatres, the restaurants, and the fashionable shops; the _Tout Paris_ of the gossips of the press, representing, possibly, one per cent. of the population of the French capital! Of the domestic, busy, permanent Paris, which keeps the French capital alive from year to year and from generation to generation--the Paris of industry and of commerce, of the churches, of the charities, of the schools, of the convents--how much do we see? There are a number of prosperous foreign colonies living in London now, most of whose leading members maintain business or social relations, more or less active, with one or another section of the English population of the great British metropolis. Perhaps, if we could get a plain, unvarnished account from some member of one of these colonies, of England and English life as they appear to him and to his compatriots, Englishmen might be as much confounded as I have known very intelligent and well-informed Frenchmen to be, by the notions of French life and of the condition of the French people, really and seriously entertained, not by casual foreign tourists, but by highly educated foreigners who really wished to know the truth.

Not long after the Legislative Elections of 1885, the results of which astonished public men in England at the time as much almost as they did the satellites of the Government in Paris, I met at the house of a friend in London a very eminent English public man, whose name I do not feel quite at liberty to mention, but who is certainly regarded by great numbers of Englishmen as an authority without appeal, not only in regard to questions of English domestic policy, but in regard to European affairs in general. In the course of a general conversation--there were ten or twelve well-known people in the company--this distinguished public man expressed to me his great surprise at the importance which I 'seemed to attach to the religious sentiment in France.'

I assured him that I not only 'seemed' to attach, but did in fact attach very serious importance to it, and I ventured to ask him why this should 'surprise' him.

To this he replied textually--for I noted down the remark afterwards that evening--that he was 'under the impression that the religious sentiment was dead in France!'

'May I ask,' I replied, 'what can possibly have given you such an impression as this?'

'Oh, many things,' he answered with great emphasis, 'but particularly a statement which I saw in a statistical work of much authority, not very long ago, to the effect that there are in France _five millions of professed atheists_!'

All who heard this amazing assertion were, I think, as completely taken aback by it as I was. Courtesy required that I should beg the distinguished man who made it to give me, if he could, the title of the work in which he had found it. This he promptly replied that he was at the moment unable to do. He, however, very nearly asphyxiated a very quiet and well-bred young Frenchman attached to the French Embassy in London, who was present, by appealing to him on the subject. 'No, no!' exclaimed the alarmed _attaché_, 'I dare say there is such a book, no doubt--no doubt--but I have never heard of it.'

I have never been able to find this valuable work. When I do find it I shall institute a careful inquiry into the reasons which could have led five millions of French persons, or about one-seventh of the whole population of France, to take the pains to register themselves as 'atheists.' Presumably they must all have been adults, as the declaration, on such a subject, of infants, would scarcely, I take it, be collected, even by M. Jules Ferry, as evidence of the success of his great scheme for 'laicising' religion out of France.

Meanwhile, I find it set down in the usual statistical authorities accessible in 1884, that out of the 36,102,021 inhabitants of France, 35,387,703 registered themselves, or were registered, as Catholics, 580,707 as Protestants, 40,439 as Israelites, and 81,951 as 'not professing any form of religion.'

Yet I suppose that, if the eminent public man who saw, as in a vision, these five millions of registered atheists marching to the assault of Christianity in France were to announce their existence as a fact to a large public meeting in some great English provincial city to-morrow, we should have leaders in some of the English journals a day or two afterwards prognosticating the immediately impending downfall of all religion in France. Our modern democracies on both sides of the Atlantic have made such rapid and remarkable progress of late years in the art of forming opinions, that if Isaac Taylor could come back to the earth he left, not so very long ago, he would hardly, I think, recognise the planet.

The fashion of taking it for granted that the whole world is fast going over to the gospel of ganglia and bathybius, of _vox populi et præterea nihil_, is not confined to the 'fanatics of impiety' in France. I have heard it seriously stated in a London drawing-room by another public man of repute within the last year, that he believed 'Mr. John Bright and Mr. Gladstone were the last two men who would ever cite the Christian Scriptures as an authority in the House of Commons.'

The uncommonly good English of the Christian Scriptures may perhaps constitute an objection to their free use in addressing popular political assemblies. But, admitting this, I hesitate to accept the statement. That it should have been made however, and made by a man of more than ordinary ability, is perhaps a thing to be noted.

But I revert to France.

As the time drew near for the Legislative elections of 1889, the Republicans in power began to perceive that their methods had not been crowned with absolute success. The awkward corner caused by the enforced resignation of President Grévy had indeed been turned, because the Constitution of the Third Republic provides for the election of the President by the Assembly. But it is one thing to play a successful comedy in the Assembly with the help of what in America is called 'the cohesive power of the public plunder,' and quite another thing to get a satisfactory Chamber of Deputies re-elected by the people of France after four years of irritating and exasperating misrule. Much was expected from the dazzling effect upon the popular mind of the Universal Exposition at Paris--so much, indeed, that I have had the obvious incongruity of selecting for the celebration of the French Revolution by a French Republic the centennial of a year in which no French Republic existed, accounted for to me by a French Republican on the express ground that the legislative elections were fixed for 1889! There may have been some truth in this. For nothing could be more preposterous than the pretext alleged for the selection by the French Government.

This or that thing which occurred at a particular time in a particular year may reasonably be made the occasion of a centennial or a semi-centennial celebration. But how is anybody to fix and celebrate the 'centennial' of a set of notions called 'the principles of 1789'?

In the United States we have celebrated the 'Centennial' of the Declaration of Independence, and the Centennial of the first Inauguration of the first President.

Did the French Government intend to invite the monarchies of Europe to celebrate the destruction by a mob of the Bastille on July 14, 1789? Hardly, I suppose! Or the Convocation of the States-General at Versailles on May 5, 1789? Certainly not--for the States-General were convoked, not under the 'principles of 1789,' but in conformity with an ancient usage and custom of the French monarchy.

What are the 'principles of 1789'?

And why should anybody in or out of France celebrate them?

If by 'the principles of 1789' we are to understand the principles of modern constitutional government--and I know no other intelligible interpretation of the phrase--there is certainly no reason why anybody out of France should particularly concern himself with celebrating the adoption of these principles in France any more than with celebrating the adoption of them in England, or the United States, or Germany, or Spain, or Italy. The principles of modern constitutional government were certainly not intelligently adopted, and certainly not loyally carried out in France, by any of the governments which tumbled over one another in rapid succession in that distracted country between 1789 and 1815. Have they been intelligently adopted and loyally carried out in that distracted country to-day? That is a question, I think, not hastily to be answered!

To ask the people of England, of the United States, of Germany, of Spain, of Italy, to unite in celebrating the principles of modern constitutional government, under the name of the 'principles of 1789,' at Paris, as if the world were indebted to Paris or to France for the discovery, and the promulgation, and the adoption of those principles, was really a piece of presumption which might have been pardoned to the fatuity of the Abbé Sieyès a hundred years ago, but was hardly to have been expected from educated Frenchmen in the year 1889.

This was stated, with great good sense and commendable courtesy towards the French Government responsible for the absurdity, by the Italian Premier, Signor Crispi, in the Chamber of Deputies at Borne, on June 25, 1887.

In reply to an interpellation of Signor Cavalotti, addressed to the then Foreign Minister of Italy, Signor Depretis, as to the intentions of the Italian Government with regard to the Universal Exposition of 1889 at Paris, Signor Crispi, then Minister of the Interior, made a striking speech (Signor Depretis being then ill of the disease of which he eventually died), in which he lucidly and forcibly gave the reasons of the Italian Government for declining to take any official part in the matter. He plainly intimated his conviction (which is the conviction, by the way, of a great many sensible people not premiers of Italy) that the business of Universal Expositions has been possibly overdone. But, without dwelling upon that point, he went on to show that it would be foolish for Italy to isolate herself from the other great powers by taking an official part in this particular 'Universal Exposition.' To the plea of Signor Cavalotti that liberated Italy ought to unite with France to celebrate 'the principles of 1789,' Signor Crispi thus replied; 'I agree with the honourable member that we are sons of 1789. But I must remind him that 1789 was preceded by the glorious English Revolution, and by the great American Revolution, in both of which had been manifested and established the principles which have subsequently prevailed throughout the world.'

Whether the treatment of the Sovereign Pontiff at Rome by the government of United Italy, since 1871, has been entirely consistent with the principles of the 'glorious English Revolution,' or of the 'great American. Revolution,' I need not now consider. But that all the living political doctrines of which intelligent Frenchmen mean to speak when they talk about the 'principles of 1789' are the American political doctrines of 1776, and the English political doctrines of 1688, admits of no question. As to this, Signor Crispi was absolutely right, and it is creditable to him, as an Italian statesman and an Italian patriot, that he should have thus early and publicly declined to attach the liberty and the independence of Italy as a bob to the tail of an electioneering Exposition kite at Paris in 1889. To France and to the French Republics--first, second, and third--Italy owes a good deal less than nothing. To two rulers of France, both of them of Italian blood, the first and third Napoleon, she owes a great deal. But her chief political creditor, and her greatest statesman, Cavour, drew his political doctrines, not from the muddy French pool of the 'principles of 1789,' but from the original fountains of 1776 and 1688. Had Cavour been living in 1887, to answer the interpellation of Signor Cavalotti, he might, perhaps, have defined more sharply than it was given to Signor Crispi to do, the real relations between the French Revolution of 1789 and the national developments of modern Italy. Had the French Revolution of 1789 been left to exhaust itself within the limits of France, it would probably have ended--as the friends of the misguided Duc d'Orléans almost from the first expected to see it end--in the substitution of a comparatively capable for a positively incapable French king upon a constitutional French throne. In that event it would have interested Europe and the world no less, and no more, than the Fronde or the religious wars which came to a close with the coronation of Henry of Navarre. It was the fear of this, unquestionably, which drove the conspirators of the Gironde into forcing a foreign war upon their unfortunate country. The legend of Republican France marching as one man to the Rhine to liberate enslaved Europe has much less foundation in fact than the legend of Itsatsou and the horn of Roland. It is a pity to disturb historical fables which have flowered into immortal verse, but really there was not the slightest occasion, so far as Europe was concerned, for France in 1790 to 'stamp her strong foot and swear she would be free.' M. de Bourgoing's admirable diplomatic history of those days makes this quite clear. No power in Europe objected to her being as free as she liked. On the contrary, England, even in 1792, was both ready and anxious to recognise the insane French republic of that day, and to see the French royal family sent away to Naples or to Madrid.

Pitt was too far-sighted a statesman not to be well aware that the commerce and the colonies of such a French republic were the natural prizes of English common sense and English enterprise. Nor was Austria indisposed to see the House of Bourbon, which had successfully disputed the supremacy of Europe with the Hapsburgs, humiliated and cast down.

The French Revolution became Titanic only when it ceased to be a Revolution and ceased to be French. The magnificent stanzas of Barbier tell the true story of the riderless steed re-bitted, re-bridled, and mounted by the Italian master of mankind, the Cæsar for whom the eagle-eyed Catherine of Russia had so quietly waited and looked when the helpless and hopeless orgie of 1789 began. The Past from which he emerged, the Future which he evoked, both loom larger than human in the shadow of that colossal figure. What a silly tinkle, as of pastoral bells in some Rousseau's _Devin du Village_, have the 'principles of 1789,' when the stage rings again with the stern accents of the conqueror, hectoring the senators of the free and imperial city of Augsburg, for example, on his way to Wagram and to victory twenty years afterwards!

'Your bankers are the channel through which the gold of the eternal enemy of the Continent finds its way to Austria. I have made up my mind that I will give you to some king. To whom I have not yet settled. I will attend to that when I come back from Vienna.'

And, as the faithful record of the _Drei Mohren_ tells us, 'Messieurs the senators withdrew, much mortified, and not at all pleased.'

Nevertheless, when the conqueror kept his word, and having made a king of Bavaria to give them to, gave them to the king of Bavaria, Messieurs the senators, with a suppleness and a docility which would have done credit to Debry (who after proposing, as a republican, to organise 1,200 'tyrannicides' and murder all the kings and emperors of the earth, begged Napoleon to make him a baron), made haste to come and prostrate themselves before the new Bavarian Majesty and to protest that until the fortunate day of his arrival to reign over them they had never known what real happiness was.

If there is one thing more certain than another in human history, it is that but for the English Revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution of 1776 the world in general would know and care to-day very little more about the French 'principles of 1789,' and the French Revolution, and the First French Republic, than the world in general knows or cares to-day about the wars in the Cevennes or the long conflict between the Armagnacs and the Bourguignons.

Napoleon crumpled up the 'principles of 1789' and the Revolution and the Republic in his iron hand, and flung them all together into a corner. He meant that France and the world should think of other things. In 1810 Paganel, who, having been a 'patriot' of the Convention, had naturally become a liveried servant of the Emperor and King, thought he might venture to compose a 'Historical Essay on the French Revolution.' He dedicated it to the Imperial Chancellor of the Legion of Honour, and he wound up his preface with these words: 'And thus at last we see without astonishment, after this long series of errors, misfortunes, and crimes, the Republic disappear, and France implore the Supreme Being to vouchsafe to her the one great and potent genius who in these difficult circumstances was able to lift her up, to defend her, and to govern her!' The heart of Louis XVIII. would have been touched by the grateful humility of this repentant wretch. But the Emperor simply kicked him downstairs. He forbade the book to be published. The whole edition was put under lock and key, and never saw the light till liberty came back to France, with the white nag and the Bourbon lilies, in 1815. Surely here is a fact worth noting!

Had this first history of the French Revolution, written as Paganel, a member of the Revolutionary Convention, wrote it, been published under the First Republic, the author would infallibly have been sent to the guillotine. Writing it under the First Empire he was merely snubbed, despite his fulsome adulation of the Emperor. His book was finally given to the world under the restored historic monarchy in 1818!

In 1811, Chateaubriand, having been elected to succeed Marie-Joseph Chéniér, the brother of the republican poet André, murdered by the First Republic, as a member of the Institute, prepared a speech on the Convention, to be read before that august body. Napoleon heard of it and, without troubling himself to look at it, forbade it to be delivered. 'It is well for M. de Chateaubriand,' he said, 'that it was suppressed. If he had read it before the Institute, I would have flung him into the bottom of a dungeon, and left him there the rest of his natural life!'

Napoleon knew the First Republic thoroughly. He had measured all its men, and all its records were in his hand. He could not get into or out of his carriage without treading on some incorruptible 'patriot' prostrate between its wheels with a petition for a préfecture, a title or a pension. The crimes and follies of the First Republic had made France and the world sick of its name. Its true story was a tale of shame and humiliation, not fit to be dragged out into the blaze of the glory of Imperial France.

The First Republic was the deadly enemy both of liberty and of law. The conduct of its first envoy to the United States would have justified Washington in locking him up. When a stop was put to his mischievous impertinences, he preferred exile in America to the chance of the guillotine at Paris, and his name died out, I believe, curiously enough, with one of the chief instruments of the notorious Tweed Ring in New York.

The first shots fired in anger under the American flag after the peace of 1783 were fired against cruisers of the French Republic captured in the West Indies by American men-of-war, to put an end to the ignorant and insolent attempt of what called itself a government at Paris to issue letters of marque on American soil against English commerce.