M. FAURE'S OPPONENTS. T HERE are criminals in the world with
whom one would positively like to make acquaintance. The reasons indeed which suggest the wish are quite unlike those upon which acquaintanceship is usually founded. The intimacy would not last long, and would be slight while it lasted. But for the moment it would have an interest of its own. Among the types of low crime which suggest this desire, assaults upon character have perhaps the highest place. In almost every other case, the criminal can at least plead the excuse of a strong temptation. There is a lust to be gratified, or an interest to be served, a physical pleasure to be enjoyed, or money to be made. But in the case of assaults upon character, none of these pleas can be sustained. We exclude, of course, those which aim simply at the extortion of blackmail. It is one of the lowest ways of making money ; but still it has money-making for its object. But to extort blackmail is not the only motive which prompts these assaults. They are some- times the offspring of pure malignity. The pleasure they give begins and ends in the pain inflicted.
The President of the French Republic has lately been the victim of an attack of this kind. For some time past a variety of rumours about him have been in simulation. The Paris correspondent of the Times tells tis that one of the scavengers of journalism offered him some months ago "a very interesting story" relating to the family of Madame Faure. M. de Blowitz's visitor probably thought that a journal of the wealth and enterprise of the Times would be delighted to be the means of introducing this scandal to the world, and would pay handsomely for the privilege. So far, therefore, the proposal may have had no worse motive than to turn a dishonest penny. We do not know what forms the attempt may have taken during the interval between the visit to the Times' correspondent and the circulation which has lately been given to the story. Possibly its authors hoped that the President would be weak enough to try to hush the matter up. There are men in whom sensitiveness to the unveiling of a family scandal assumes the character of a mental delusion. They have so long accustomed themselves to regard discovery as the greatest of misfortunes that they have lost the power of measuring the consequences that would follow upon it. Possibly the President's assailants hoped, in the first instance, to find in him an instance of this weakness. If so, they were still no worse than blackmailers. They knew some- thing which all the world did not know, and they wanted to turn their knowledge to profitable account. In this case, however, they had mistaken their man. M. Faure's experience in business and politics may well have taught him that of all forms of expenditure hush-money is the most profitless. The only thing, therefore, that is uncertain about these scandal-mongers, is whether they reached their present pitch of vileness at one step or at two,—whether they originally put the story about out of pure malice or . were at first guilty only of the lesser vice of trying to make money by threatening to put it about ? In the end, how- ever, there is no doubt that they were acting from the worse motive. Their malignity could bring them in nothing ; they must have held it to be its own reward. It could not even wear the ragged cloak of political spite, as it might have done in the case of M. Casimir-Perier. M. Faure is not, like his predecessor, credited with the ambition to be something more than a constitutional President. On the contrary, he is the first President that has had the courage to appoint a frankly Radical Ministry, because the Chamber had repeatedly refused to support a Moderate one. But he is prosperous and distinguished ; and these facts are sufficient of themselves to gain him the hate of this lowest grade of offenders. It is one of the advantages of monarchical Government that it places the chief of the State beyond the reach of this kind of envy. Its natural object is not the man born in the purple, but the man on whom the purple has descended by chance. M. Faure was a clerk in a tannery in 1861, be is President of the Republic in 1895; what conjunction can be more damning?
Scandals about public men have a gourd-like capacity of growth, and but for M. Faure's wise determination not to give them even the little time that they need, all France might soon have been agitated by sus- picions of the President's history, and then, by an easy transition, of the President's integrity. Nothing would have been positively known, and anything would have been confidently believed. M. Faure, however, took the prudent and straightforward course of publishing the plain facts in the Figaro and in the Journal des De'bats. The skeleton was brought out of the cupboard and at once tumbled into fragments. No doubt the character of the person to whom the story really related was not such as would have led M. Faure to choose him for a father-in- law. M. Belluot married a girl in the character of a pros- perous solicitor, and then four months afterwards deserted his wife, taking care at the same time to take her dowry with him. But, happily for his wife and for his daughter, he saw them no more. Mdlle. Belluot lived as a child and a young woman with her grandfather and her uncle, each of whom was for many years Mayor of Amboise, and the latter of whom was successively Deputy and Senator. Her marriage to M. Faure had more romance about it than is common in France. They first saw one another in 1862, and would have liked to marry at once. But as M. Faure had not the means of supporting a wife, they waited for three years. By that time he was doing so well in business that this difficulty no longer stood in the way. Mdlle. Belluot's relatives told M. Faure the circumstances of her father's history, but naturally these made no differ- ence in his wish to marry her. Nothing, in short, could have been more honourable and straightforward than the action on both sides, or more creditable to the actors. This was the story of which it was seemingly supposed that the President would be so ashamed that he would either pay for its suppression, or at least be greatly annoyed by its publication. Happily his assailants reckoned alike without their host and without the public. M. Faure has caused the simple facts to be communicated to the Press, and has thereby placed on a new and more assured basis the popularity which it was hoped he would lose, and which, had he made any mystery about the facts, or shown the faintest desire for concealment, he probably would have lost. Some of the President's friends whose zeal is greater than their discretion, are said to see in this incident an occasion for the introduction of a new law designed to give additional protection to the chief of the State against reckless or un- scrupulous attacks in the Press. They have surely mis- read the lesson of recent events. No added stringency of penalty or procedure could have done so much for M. Faure as his own straightforward action. He has upset a whole edifice of lies by the simple expedient of telling the truth. If a more severe law were now asked to punish those by whom, or in whose interest, the disquieting rumours were started, the effect would certainly be to insinuate that he was too well conscious of the weak places in his armour, to be willing to leave himself any longer without further statutory protection. The law as it stands has hitherto been found adequate to protect the person and character of the President, and there is nothing in the recent attack upon M. Faure that suggests the need of any additions to it. No law can prevent the circulation of garbled presentations of real facts, or of suggestions that there are facts in the background that have not been disclosed, and therefore are presumably damaging. Be- sides, Senators and Deputies are capable of slander, and no law can shut their mouths. Statements of this kind can only be met in the way in which M. Faure has met them.
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