THE LATEST INCIDENT IN PARIS. T ""Pellieux incident" in the Zola
trial, which has passed almost unmarked in this country, may turn out to be one of considerable importance. Through- out the proceedings, which even for France have been of an unusual kind, witnesses, for example, being allowed to make regular speeches to the jury, the feeling of the "Army," by which we mean that group of higher officers which really controls it, has become more and more marked. They hear reports from all the barracks of France ; they know, as the civilian world does not, what is said in those barracks ; and they are convinced that their moral authority, or as they describe it, the confidence reposed in them by their soldiers, is directly at stake. They imagine, that is, to put the case more plainly, that if M. Zola is acquitted, the soldiery will believe that the higher officers are not to be trusted, that they are capable of condemning a soldier unjustly, and that they band together to prevent justice being done. That seems to Englishmen an overstrained or even fanciful view, but France is a land where suspicion plays a, great part ; the tendency of the peasant to distrust the cultivated man is not extinguished by a uniform, and it is quite possible that an acquittal might produce some such impression, fear of which undoubtedly heightens the fury of the mobs composed of passed soldiers, who "Hurrah" everywhere for "the Army." At all events, the highest officers believe this, for they must have permitted General Pellieux, an officer remarkable for his culture and power of speech, to make his address to the jury on Monday. It was an address which no witness in England would have been allowed to deliver in Coart, being, in fact,, an eloquent and most effective appeal to the patriotism a the jury. They must, General Pellieux intimated, convict the accused lest the soldiers, losing confidence in their Generals, should in the next hour of danger, "which may be nearer than you think," be destroyed by the enemy and France be wiped out of the list of nations. "M. Jaures," said General Pellieux, in a restrained but passionate voice, "in his admirable speech, for it was not a deposition, said that the General Staff were preparing disasters for the country. Now I have had enough of the aspersions cast on men intent on doing their duty. I cannot stand it any longer, and I say that it is culpable, cruel, to deprive the Army of its confidence in its chiefs. In the day of danger—nearer, perhaps, than you think— what do you expect this Army to do ? It is to a butchery that your sons will be sent, and on that day M. Zola will have achieved a fresh debeicle the records of which will be sent broadcast over a Europe from which France, will be wiped out." Highly placed French officers do not make pes- simist statements like that in public Courts without know- ing what they are doing, nor is General Pellieux a ranter, but a man whom M. Zola's counsel believes to be the spokes- man of the Staff, picked out because his words are known to influence thoughtful men,—because, in fact, he is one of the men whom Frenchmen describe as "serious," and are apt at once to quiz and to trust implicitly. We have little doubt he speaks the sentiments of his comrades of his own rank, and that they are more than indignant at the insults which have been poured on them,—are aware, in fact, that those insults are producing their effect on soldiers' opinion, and may have the most serious conse- quences, if not on discipline, at least on that confidence and liking between officer and conscript without which discipline is only another name for servitude.
If this is the case, and that it is the case in a degree we are convinced by all the reports which arrive of the whole progress of the Dreyfus affair and of the anti- Jewish crusade, the higher officers of the Army, whom that Army, as we conceive, will always obey, must be, for the time at least, seriously alienated from the Republic, which, as they think, permits Socialists and Jews to cast insults upon them. They are, in their own judgment, insufficiently protected ; and, considering their position as guardians, rather than ordinary servants, of the State, they are disregarded in a way which to men with their traditions is exceedingly bitter. The reasons of this dis- regard are, in their eyes, sufficiently patent. Since the resignation of Marshal MacMahon in 1879, France has always been in civilian hands. The head of the State has never been a soldier. No soldier of eminence has entered a Cabinet except as Minister of War. The Chambers have been filled in large majority by lawyers and other profes- sionals, and landlords. The immense bureaucracy which holds all France in its grip is entirely civil. It is difficult for grave and able officers who have given their lives to the Army —and France possesses many such men—not to question Whether the time has not arrived when a soldier should again be head of the State, able to restore the Army to its rank among the institutions of France, and at the same time to limit the personal jealousies which so impair efficiency, and to root out the abuses which no one who has studied the Dreyfus affair can deny to exist, and which, we suspect, are more keenly felt among the better officers than among those Radiml:journalists who believe that the Staff are all banded together for some corrupt or selfish end.
Whether this feeling will result in action we are, of course, wholly unable to decide. There are many obstacles in the way, the greatest of all being that the Army, if it acted, must act together, and that some Generals in com- mand. are pledged. to the Republic beyond any reasonable possibility of change. Still, we would point out that dis- contented Frenchmen, as Mr. Bodley has just pointed out in two thoughtful volumes, always look to a personal regime as the alternative to the one they dislike, that the Army can never from its habit of mind believe strongly in Parliamentarism, and that the Republic, so productive of happiness to many classes, has never supplied its soldiers either with glory or success. There have been twenty- seven years of military reparation, but as yet they have been without result, save an Alliance supposed to be based upon a resolution to preserve the peace for a, lifetime longer, and a reinvigoration of discipline, which, if peace is always to be maintained, is not without its oppressive side. It is the custom to say over here that France possesses no General in whom the whole Army confides, but that did not prevent her nearly trusting her destinies to General Boulanger, who, if the Army were at all strenuously Republican, could. never have had a chance. Nor can we forget that among possible Pretenders is one trained soldier, Colonel Louis Bonaparte, Prince of the house of Savoy, who would bring with him a Russian affiance much closer than any which exists, and whom the chiefs of the French Army may know, though we do not,, In be an exceptionally able man. He is a son of one of the ablest men in Europe, and of that house of Savoy- which has statecraft, courage, and guile in its very blood. Such a candidature seems to many Englishmen impos- sible because of Sedan ; but was Sedan so much worse in its effects than Waterloo ? and thirty-three years after Waterloo all France elected as President a man, then powerless and considered an imbecile, because he was the great Emperor's heir. In France time begins with the Revolution, and the greatest victories since the Revolu- tion—as well, no doubt, as the greatest defeats—have been secured while a Bonaparte was in power, a fact which has preserved the Bonaparte cultus from ever dying com- pletely out. We may be dreaming, and we hope it is so, for to our mind the Republic tends to keep France at once contented and peaceful, but we cannot say we believe the Republic to be as safe as it was only six. months ago.
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