20 DECEMBER 1873, Page 5

THE DU /1CULTLES OF REACTION IN FRANCE.

THE Elections of the 14th September constitute the severest shock the Government of Combat' has yet received, and give the best =nuance to Liberal spectators of the struggle now going on in France, that if France can only find repre- sentatives with the right kind of steadiness in them, the game of reaction, after a long and arduous up-hill fight, must be in- evitably lost at last. Consider only the significance of the elections of last Sunday. First, there was the election in the Breton department of Finistere, the department at the extreme end of the great Breton promontory which stretches out far into the Atlantic and contains the great harbour of Brest,—a Department which is the stronghold of Legitimist sympathies and Catholic traditions. Here the candidates were M. Le Guen, a candidate of the Right party, who received only 39,000 odd votes against 59,000 odd given for M. Swiney, the Republican candidate. It is asserted by the Conservatives that the genuine Legitimists, disgusted with the failure of the movement for placing the Comte de Chambord upon the throne, and regarding themselves as betrayed by the Ministry, stayed away from the poll. This is possible. M. Le Guen was un- doubtedly put forward as the candidate of Marshal Mac- Mahon—a very indefensible course, identifying the President of the Republic with a party in the Chamber—but any way, an ultra-Conservative and Clerical deputy (M. Treveneuc) is now replaced in this department by a Liberal Republican ; and even if it be admitted that a great number of the electors stayed away from pique, it must also be admitted that so long as their favourite candidate for the throne, the Comte de Cham- bord, is not restored, they are quite indifferent whether the Conservatives or the Liberals are in power in France. In the Aude, again, where there were two vacancies, one of the vacancies was caused by the death of a Conservative and one by the death of a Liberal. Both were replaced by Liberal Republicans, and that by enormous majorities,—indeed, not only by great majorities over the individual candidates who op- posed them, but also over the combined polls of the Conservative candidates, two of whom were Buonapartists and twoLegitimists. It is worth noting that the Legitimists had not so much as half as many votes as the Buonapartists, and that the Buona- partists had not so much as half as many votes as the Repub- licans. Indeed, our latest report of the poll—the official returns

have not yet been rendered—says that the Buonapartists and 1 Legitimists together polled less than half the vote of the

Liberal Republicans. But the most telling of the defeats of the Government was that in the Seine-et-Oise, the department in which the National Assembly sits, and of which Versailles is the capital. The Seine-et-Oise is not a great manufacturing department. It contains but a small owner population. It is, on the whole, suburban and agricultural. A great number of the rich commercial men who live out of town have their villas in the Seine-et-Oise. It bears to Paris much the same relation which West Surrey bears to London, but is relatively more important just because it contains Versailles and the National Assembly, and therefore passes judgment on the politi- cal character of a Sovereign body which is always living and acting in the very presence of the people of this department. Moreover, the Government candidate had been most carefully chosen, while the Republican candidate had the disadvantage of being a comparative stranger to the department, and known to it only as the warm personal friend of 31. Thiers,—indeed, first his Secretary-General of the Ministry of the Interior, and then his Prefect of the Seine. The Government candidate, M. Levesque, is very popular in the department. He has long been a member of its Council-General, of which he is now the President. Moreover, he did not come forward with any extreme programme. He declared himself a friend of the Government, a supporter of the Provisional Republic, and some of his friends even declared that if elected he would sit with the Left Centre, and not with the Right of the Assembly at all. His opponent, M. Calmon, was well known as an ardent supporter of the Ex-President, and had, as we have already explained, absolutely no local advantages. The con- test, therefore, was one purely between the late Government and the present Government, with all the incidental circum- stances on the side of the candidate of the present Govern- ment. And the result given by this quiet part-suburban and part-rural department was 57,000 odd votes for M. Calmon to 38,000 odd for M. Levesque. This is a deliberate condemnation of the Government of Combat by a sober, yet well-instructed and influential constituency, and a deliberate verdict for Conservative-Liberal views in preference to Con- servative views of French politics.

What has been the influence of these elections on the persons most interested in them, the majority of the Chamber and its leaders ? Apparently none but this,—to convince them

that France ?mist be converted, must be made to repent, to cease to do evil, to learn to do well, to wash herself clean of Liberal ideas, to abjure her political blasphemies, and be recon- ciled to the preparatory septennial dispensation which is to educate France for a return to her old monarchical faith. From all accounts of the feeling with which the Right have received the result of these elections, there is but one pre- dominant idea,—' These constituencies are mad, and for their own good they must be put under some restraint, —gentle if possible, but certainly firm,—till they can be made to change their mind. Liberalism is a popular epidemic. The laws of moral health require it to be stamped out. It is no more possible to yield to Liberal ideas, than to the ideas of anarchists who would destroy the very structure of society. The only problem is how to silence Liberal ideas without putting down the semblance of re- presentative institutions altogether, how to make France (which is Liberal) seem to desire reaction.' Accordingly, we read that the great pressure put upon M. de Broglie by his party is in the direction of a restrictive organic reform which shall exclude voters enough to turn the minority into a majority. It is said that the Government is now anxious so to raise the standard for the suffrage by virtue of one expedient or another, as to disfranchise at least four out of the twelve millions of French voters at one blow, in the hope of thus gag- ging the deep Liberalism of the constituencies. That is a very calm proposal for a constitutional Government, itself elected

by the present constituencies, to make. We liked you well enough,' it seems to say, while you were disposed to put power into our hands. Now that you want to take power out of our hands, we make war upon you, we put over you a Military President pledged to our ideas, not yours, who is probably able to secure the co-opera- tion of the Army. And more than this, before asking you,— who elected us,—to elect our successors,—we will, if we can, so weed out the constituencies, that the sifted remainder shall re-elect us, or men of our way of thinking.' For politicians who really think thus, to adhere to constitutional forms at all is a piece of hypocritical farce. They don't want representatives of the people's ideas : they want representatives of their own ideas with a semblance of popular sanction. The Govern- ment of Combat want a war with popular politics, and are now in the very thick of waging it. They would be far more honest if they proposed at once to send the Assembly about its business and never call another, to instal themselves in power as Marshal MacMahon's friends, without troubling themselves artificially to manufacture an Assembly disposed to lend their views the weight of the approbation of a pseudo- representative body. But their task is surely an impossible one. They may doctor the electoral law as much as they please, and so far as we can see, the only result is likely to be that they will increase instead of diminishing the proportion of votes against them. For we must remember that Buonapartism appealed to the masses in favour of the Conservative ideas which defeated the Republican Government of 1849, and did not appeal in vain. It was the French "residuum " which voted the Empire by acclamation. If that residuum has become Republican,—as apparently it has,—where is the chance of converting it back to Con- servatism by returning to a less popular suffrage ? Why, the majority of the middle-classes in France is much more opposed to the ideas of the Due de Broglie than is the majority of the poorest class. If the Tories of France had a majority anywhere, it was among the peasantry. The peasantry have now turned Republican. What is the use of doctoring the con- stituencies, so as to exclude precisely that part of the constitu- encies least unlikely to vote either for the restoration of the ruined Empire, or for the Nominees of the Roman Catholic priesthood ? We believe, and the more cultivated of French politicians believe, that a suffrage limited, for instance, as was our suffrage before 1867, would yield results far leas favourable to the Due de Broglie than the present suffrage. The election in the department of the Seine-et- Oise is a pretty good test of this. It gives 57,000 for M. Thiers' fixed Republicanism against 38,000 for Marshal MacMahon's preparatory dispensation. There are very few Paris Radicals in that vote. The majority of 19,000 is a majority almost wholly composed of shopkeepers, mer- chants, small landed proprietors, farmers. And f the proposed third of the electorate were struck off, the chances are that the majority, instead of being only one-fifth of the total number of votes registered, would have been a quarter or a third. Have not the French Tories learnt Mr. Disraeli's great principle, that the hopes of reaction rest with the resi- duum, and that by disfranchising the residuum, they are only cutting their own throats ? No; if they will lead a crusade against Liberal ideas, we will tell them what they must do. Abolish the Ballot first. Then let the Prefect of the Depart- ment or his officer himself preside at every election, and let him make the French peasantry feel that a severe penalty follows every vote given against the Administration. Let the Govern- ment double the Police and the Army, and set up an avowed persecution of Liberal ideas. Then, if the Army does not revolt, and the Press is cowed, and external European opinion suddenly loses the influence it usually has when it ridicules the servile side of French political life, they may, perhaps, succeed in getting a good majority ; but even then only if they don't raise the suffrage, for even then their best tools will be those whom they are now proposing to strike off the electoral lists. We re- commend this course to M. de Broglie, if he insists on being the exponent of an evil and impossible order of ideas. He would probably fail even so. But he would have a trifle more chance of success than he has in the preposte:ous course on which he is now entering.