TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE FRENCH SENATE.
TITE vote by which the French Assembly has declared that the Republican Senate must be elective and elected by universal suffrage will grieve ? good many, but ought not to have surprised any one. From the moment when M. Dufaure declared against a nominee Upper House, it was certain that the power of appointment would not be left to the President of the Republic. It might have been left to Marshal MacMahon personally, but in France it is a habit even with the Left Centre to distrust the disinterestedness of the Chief of the Executive ; and the Moderates in the Assembly, like M. Dufaure, were afraid of a future packing of the Senate. The President some day might be a Bonapartist. A vote for election was therefore certain, and the old difficulty stood in the way of creating any fresh electorate. The mass of French voters are small proprietors, devoted to equality, and jealous of any accusation of incompetence, and they would have resented bitterly any attempt to make a selection from their ranks ;—to impose a qualification, for instance, based either on income, or education, or official standing. Every Bonapartist print in the land would have pointed to the measure as a proof that " privilege " was still rampant, and that nothing but the Empire could restore "the fraternal equality of citizens" among each other. The only device by which, under present circum- stances, equality and a Senate could be reconciled was to allow all electors to vote, but to vote through the Members of the Councils- General, whom they already appoint, and who ought to be the picked men of the Departments. To English and American ideas this would be a natural course ; but it is rejected both by the Left Centre and the Left ; by the latter, because they think that the Councils being swayed by the Prefects, Bonapartism might be strong in them ; and by the former, because the Councillors, if vested with such power, might be chosen as mere electoral delegates—as the American Electoral College is—and be useless for local work. We dare say, too, the Conservative Deputies dislike the notion of losing their influence in these Councils, as they might do if they made unpopular selections for the Senate, and prefer to leave the responsibility with the electors direct. At all events, they adhered to the Left, the Extreme Right abstained, from a hope of causing confusion—the words in the Times' letter of Friday attributing abstention to the Extreme Left are an obvious mis- print—and the nomination of the Senate by electors only, and by all electors without distinction, was carried by a majority of twelve in a House of 632 Members.
Apparently, therefore, the Senate is to be a mere repetition of the Chamber of Deputies, and legislation entirely within the control of the masses, but the debate upon the Consti- tution is not over yet. It is very difficult to us to believe that the Conservatives in the Assembly are going to create two popular Assemblies, and therefore to abandon all "checks" ex- cept the one imposed by the delays necessary to carry any measure through two independent Houses. If our own con- viction is right., and France is Left-Centre at heart, that scheme might be safe enough ; but we cannot believe either that the majority think so, or that they will vote so merely to dis- credit the Republican Constitution. Some device for "pro- tecting society" is quite sure to be tried, and as M. Dufaure's will be inoperative, it will, we imagine, be different from M. Dufaure's. He is said to believe, though we find it difficult to credit it, in the puerile device of enforcing a "qualification," as we call it, or as Frenchmen would put it, of limiting electors' choice to certain " categories " of officials, Churchmen, General officers and large taxpayers, who are expected to be Conservative. What is the good of that ? Suppose the candidates are all Dukes, they will have to pledge themselves as if they were dust- men. Let us take an extreme instance, and suppose our own Upper House to be chosen by the householders, but only from among Peers and their eldest sons, what would happen then? The householders' if Liberals, would choose first the Liberal Peers, and then the Peers who gave Liberal pledges, and the Upper House would be nothing but a second House of Commons with a little less blood in its cheeks. We cannot bring ourselves to believe that this will not be seen, and if it is seen, then the course of events may pos- sibly go in this wise. The majority, wisely or unwisely, hold that, in order to prevent the Empire, the Repub- lic must be established. They also held, wisely or un- wisely, that in order to prevent the Republic from becoming disorderly, a conservative checking power must exist some- where within the Constitution. They will finally hold, before the debate is done, that the Senate as established will not• prove to be this power. And they will then be driven, as the American Whigs were driven, to confide in "the one- man power," and vest the veto, absolute or suspensive, in the President of the Repablic, who alone will _ be left strong enough to exercise it. That they will be reluctant in the extreme to resort to this plan is of course obvious. France detests the Veto to such an extent that Napoleon III., when he assumed nearly absolute power, replaced it by an exclusive right of initiative, but what other scheme is there visibly remaining? To elect the Senators for life ? They will in a few years be as powerless as if they were nominees, and powerless from the most fatal cause, want of rapport with the opinion of the country. To elect them for fourteen years, that is, two Presidential periods? That would make them a nuisance to everybody, President included, for they would be independent of him, and nearly inde- pendent of the country. To elect only men of fifty r Old men can pledge themselves as deeply as the young.. To elect only the rich ? Some of the bitterest and most eccentric politicians in France have been men of large- and assured incomes, as, for example, Raspail, and several lead- ing St. Simonians. To elect by arrondissement, instead of by- scrutin de liste? There is not the shadow of evidence that the plan would produce a Conservative result. We cannot imagine a plan which would make the elected under universal suffrage different on great occasions from those who elected them, and the checking power must therefore either be surrendered or transferred to other hands, that is, in practice, to the President.
We do not wish for one moment to assert that this check- ing power, to be used always in Conservative interests, is indis- pensable in France. On the contrary, we hold that the danger of Prance, the Republic once established, will be the Chinese conservatism of its people, or rather of those five millions of petty proprietors who, under a re'gime of universal suffrage, must remain its ultimate masters. They have always when let alone shown too much wish for order, too- great a desire for repression, too deep a dread of limiting the action of the Executive. They sent up the Assembly of 1848, they elected Napoleon, they chose the ex- traordinary collection of notables now voting an iron-clad Republic. But we are bound to accept as our datum not our own conviction, but the conviction of the men who are ruling the situation—of the Comte de Paris, of M. de Broglie, of M. Dufaure, of M. Laboulaye, of M. Gambetta himself— and they are all at one on the necessity of placing a checking power somewhere, preferentially in the Senate, but at all events, somewhere. If they are in earnest, and they certainly appear to be in earnest, they will act, and they must see that acting through M. Dufaure's present device will be a waste of power. That once seen, they will be driven, as we conceive, by the exhaustion of alternatives, to the American scheme, as the only, though a most imperfect substitute foi the one they desire. Indeed, we should not wonder if they were driven yet farther, and compelled to invest the President also with the right of dissolution. When the Senators are but the pale reflections of the Deputies, and are just as much afraid of Dissolutions, what is the use of consulting them as to the expediency of dissolving ? They will either be super- fluous, the Deputies being willing to dissolve without pressure ; or they will be obstinate like the Deputies, and there will exist no power of dissolution at all. If the Orleanist Republicans are not very careful, their Constitution will be full of careful provisions for dead-locks ; and as far as we see, their care must take the form of heaping powers on the Executive, and leaving them to be modified by a sharp exaction of Ministerial responsibility.
Previous page
