THE EVE OF THE FRENCH ELECTIONS.
OF the three addresses which have been issued to the French public this week, that of M. do Broglie, though not perhaps the most important, is intellectually the most in- teresting. M, Gr6vy's circular has, of course, been scanned all over Europe with profound attention. He has succeeded to the position of M. Thiers as the recognised head of the Repub- lican party, he may speedily be President of the Republic, and his views must in any event have a great influence on the immediate destinies of France. His attitude, therefore, in the supreme moment of the crisis is worthy of patient study, and it is most reassuring alike to moderate Frenchmen and to con- stitutionalists everywhere to find that it is that of a Liberal Judge. There is no threat in his address, and only one reproach. He maintains that the Chamber elected last year "to co- operate with the other two powers in the State,"--mark the nuance of reassurance alike to the Senate and the Marshal— accurately represented Franco ; that it never contested the position of the Senate, but rather deferred to it ; that " it guarded the authority of the President with deferential respect ;" and that it was dissolved to make room for a Chamber which, if those who dissolved it succeed, will be composed only of enemies of the Republic. Its members would all desire Monarchy, and all would quarrel among themselves as to which Monarch they preferred. The issue before the electors is therefore the non-revoluttouary one, whether France will or will not "maintain the existing Govern- ment," a phrase which, while strictly trite, brings home to the people the fact that true Conservatism is on the side of the Republic. There is no weakness in M. Gr4vy's speech, but also there are no menaces, no rhetorical flights, and no promises making compromise impossible. M. Gambetta is naturally more vehement. He is a Southerner, an orator, and a party leader, and he has been provoked by a series of petty persecutions, all the more exasperating because they have been inflicted under legal forms. He has, moreover, been taunted with want of energy by his own constituents, and may have felt that it was for him to reassure the democracy of the towns, whose alliance is as essential to the success of the Republic as that of the peasantry. He pours out, there- fore, his scorn upon the men of May 16, "the allies of the men of the 2nd of December, of the servants of Henri V., and of the agents of the Syllabus and the Pope ;" declares that France will say what she thinks of this Government of com- bat "directed against the small ;" and expresses in no measured terms his belief that the country wishes to end dictatorships, to withdraw the State from clerical control, to confine the priest to the temple and the schoolmaster to the school, and to leave to the Chief of the Executive Power, now "transformed into a pldbiseitary candidate," no other alternative but to submit or to resign. "France will say what she thinks of the pretensions on the part of the Government to impose on her for another three years functionaries of all kinds, in flagrant hostility to all the men elected by the country ; she will say what she thinks of the projects and plots of this coalition of Monarchists, who prepare for her, at the close of three years of intestine con filets and divisions, in 1880 a terrible crisis, perhaps a revolu- tion; she will say what she thinks of that unclean Press which can, without incurring punishment, appeal to brute force against the men elected by universal suffrage, and can insult our valiant and noble army, now the lute of the nation and the highest hope of the country." M. Gambetta knows his countrymen, and may feel assured that his menaces to the Church, repeated and accentuated in a subsequent speech, his sneers against the Marshal, his appeal, if not to the revolu- tionary ideas, to revolutionary passion, will help to nerve the electors, who, under so much pressure, must march up to the polls ; but to Englishmen, who see in their new moderation the best evidence of the strength of the French Republicans, the suppressed fury of his tone is disappointing. It will provoke all his adversaries to believe that there can be no safety even in submission, that violence is the only alternative to proscription. Still, while we admire M. r6vy's address, and regret that of M. Gambetta, we acknowledge that there is little new in either, and little to affect the result of the elections. Every man has the defects of his qualities, and the Frenchmen are few who do not know that M. Gra;vy is almost too judicially-minded for the struggle of politics, and that the great powers of M. Gambetta are impaired by a touch of the irrestrainable Southern temperament, a tem- perament which is not inconsistent, as all history shows, with the Italian patience and finesse. We turn, therefore, with a certain expectation to the speech of the Due de Broglie, the Chief of the Cabinet, and, with possibly one exception, the closest of the Marshal's political friends. He is by ' far the ablest, as well as the most highly-placed, of that limited group of politi- cians who approve of the 16th of May, and the con- sequent appeal to the country, without being devotees of Henri V., or desirous of a Bonapartist restoration ; and he has uttered on the eve of the elections his justification for having provoked them. It is very clever, very "high-sniffing," to lase Carlyle's descriptive epithet—for example, he describes M. Gr6vy as"a gentleman very much astonished at the eclat of his own name "—and very well calculated to convince the Conservative society of his own salon. Upon the body of the people it will have no more effect than so much Chinese, or less, for it will provoke no curiosity as to what its meaning may be. The idea of the speech, delivered, characteristically enough, to a reunion intinze of friends already convinced, and first circulated through an English journal, is simple. The President of the Council holds, truly enough, that the President of a Republic has a more per- sonal position than that of a King, and that consequently Marshal MacMahon had a right to say that he would not pass under the yoke of Radicalism, and to appeal to the country to decide whether it would be governed by MacMahon or Gambetta. That, says the Duke, over and over again, is the real issue. M. Jules Simon, M. Thiers, M. Greivy arc all Gambetta's cloaks. It is lie who aspires to govern, it is he who " orders" the Marshal to submit or resign—" a phrase which Justice has had to condemn, in order to show that nobody is above the law "—and it is between his army—the Radicals—and the President's army—the Conservatives—that the "great combat" of Sunday is to be waged. There is truth of a kind in this clever defence, and if Marshal MacMahon were a President of the American type, elected by the people, with Ministers re- sponsible only to himself and the law, and entrusted with the right of veto, the truth would be almost irrefragablo. But the Constitution was not designed only to enable the President to act. By electing him through the Assembly, by refusing him the right of veto, and by making the Ministers re- sponsible to the Chamber, the framers of that document expressly provided that the Representatives should possess the ultimate controlling power, and in refusing to obey their will the President steps outside the Constitution, and mono- polises instead of sharing all power. He has assumed to be President and Assembly, instead of President alone. No doubt the Constitution presided that if the President doubted the accuracy of the Representatives' interpretation of their mandate, he might, with the assent of the Senate, appeal to the electors ; and this he has done, but then the right of dis- solution implies obedience to the verdict asked for. If the country upholds its Representatives, what will the Marshal do ? He is not bound to resign—he is right enough there—but he is bound to allow the Representatives their constitutional right of dismissing Ministers of whom they cannot approve. If he will do this, we agree with M. de Broglie that he has merely used the powers given him by the law —though lawgivers expect intelligent use of the powers they bestow—but will he do this ? Upon this subject—the one of most interest to France—the Duke de Broglie is silent, as silent as he is on the choice as official candidates of men who avowedly intend, if successful, to abolish the Republic. His fine-spun address, in fact, newer touches the heart of the subject. He does not prove, or attempt to prove, that the President will submit to the people when they have pro- nounced their will, and he does not show, or attempt to show, that Conservatism, as represented by his candidates, and the Republic are compatible. Those are the points on which the people feel, and in avoiding them he has avoided all that could make his speech an influence on the elections. Without them it becomes a mere discourse on politics, carefully weighed and finely worded, but effective only with those who see in politics a contest of dialectics, who are content if the law is not broken, and who are in- different to the use made of powers, if only certain that the powers legally exist. The French Premier's speech is not a manifesto, but only a finely-worded law-plea. In England, M. de Broglie as First Minister of the Crown would veto any law he disliked, dissolve in the middle of every Session, prosecute every opponent who called him rough names, and wonder why the House of Commons ejected and the Constituencies hooted him. We have not had a man of the kind in politics for many a long year, but if Mr. Parnell Were a great gentleman, and the head of a Ministry, and still devoted to Home-rule, we should know very nearly what he was like. No man of the kind has ever prevailed in Prance, and M. do Broglie's speech will be quoted after the elections only as evidence of the narrow arguments by which political legalists sometimes justify illegality.
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