23 FEBRUARY 1889, Page 5

THE FRENCH CRISIS.

MCARNOT is evidently not a strong man, or rather • not an original one ; but he has, we suspect, a certain capacity of persistence which is not infrequently found in his type of mind, and is sometimes a working equivalent for strength. There is something of Lord Iddesleigh about him, though he is wanting in the quality of humour which so distinctly coloured the thoughts, though not the speeches, of the English statesman. Throughout this crisis he has been pelted with suggestions, frequently offered by the spokesmen of large parties and pressed with extreme energy ; but he has pushed them all aside, and held to his own plan, which is to form a moderately Radical Ministry, charged to conduct affairs quietly for a few months, to preside over the Exhibition, and then, " when the existing swell of the public mind has calmed down," to manage the elections in October. In obedience to this policy, the President has tried quite a dozen Cabinet combinations and at least six Premiers,—M. Maine, M. Rouvier, M. de Freycinet, M. Magnin (this was the " Senatorial " com- bination), M. Fallieres, and finally M. Tirard. Each successive combination broke up under the pressure either of personal dislikes or conscious powerlessness— M. Fallieres' plea—or reluctance to enter office with M. de Freycinet as Minister of War, a reluctance having its root, we believe, in the suspicion entertained by many grave Opportunists that in an hour of crisis M. de Freycinet, who began as " Gambetta's man " and worked under a dictatorship, might pronounce for General Boulanger. Still, the President went on calmly shuffling his cards, and at last got a Ministry together with M. Tirard as its respectable figure-head, M. de Freycinet as War Minister, and M. Constans as Minister of the Interior and the vivifying energy. The last is a strong man, a real Jacobin, loathed by every Catholic in France for his method of dissolving the monastic institutions, and supposed to be capable of displaying " extreme energy,"—that is, of firing on a mob first, and asking a Bill of Indemnity after- wards. A Minister of the Interior, even in France, can, however, do little without the President and the Minister of War ; and the new Cabinet, apart from M. Constans, has no element of strength. It cannot avoid proposing something —the Budget, for example—and it may be overset at a moment's notice by an adroit combination such as overthrew M. Floquet. Its chance of a majority is, indeed, less than his, for since his fall seventy Republican Deputies, either trembling for their seats or convinced that the existing Con- stitution will not work, have formally professed themselves adherents of General Boulanger. With that large group, and the Reactionaries, and the men affronted by M. Carnot's neglect of their unrevealed capacities, and the section of the Extremists which votes against Ministers under all circumstances, General Boulanger may, if he pleases, out- vote the Government once more ; and of course he will please. He can gain nothing by delay, and he must gain by every exposure of the difficulty of inducing this Chamber to support any Government of any kind. He is seeking a dissolution, and if this Cabinet is overthrown, M. Carnot will have no resource left excepting an appeal to the people. He has no foothold whatever except the Constitu- tion, he has not developed any loyalty towards himself among the statesmen, and he cannot plead the necessity of supporting the authority of the Chamber, which has just declared by a radical alteration of the Electoral Law that it was returned by a method which does not properly represent the feeling of the country. He has, moreover, against him the permanent difficulty of French rulers, the nervous character of Frenchmen which makes them not so much unwilling as unable to bear protracted suspense. The Army, of course, can compel them to bear anything, but the Republicanism of the Army is uncertain ; and the notion that Paris, if left to itself, will wait seven months with a revolution hanging over it, and amuse itself all that time with a gigantic shop, seems, to us at least, inconsistent with the whole history of the past hundred years. It is a curious irony of fate, by-the- way, which compels France to occupy itself during the centenary of 1789 with the chances for and against a return to personal rule. The advance has been great in many things—privilege is dead, for example, and men reap the fruits of their labour—but it has not been ex- hibited, as was hoped, in the consolidation of representa- tive institutions. General Boulanger, if he is to rule, will have all the power of a Bourbon King, and will have been chosen by accident, or Providence, just as much as if he had acceded to it by right of birth.

As yet we see no prospect of violence, and there is no panic in Paris, the most certain sign of which would be a flow of securities and other treasures into London. Whether M. de Freycinet protested against the arrest of General Boulanger, as the Times' correspondent says he did, or whether, as Admiral Maxse writes to us, that remarkable scene is imaginary—we suspect it occurred, but that the proposer of rashnesses was not M. Floquet- it is most rmlikely that the President will sanction a coup d'etat of any kind—and the arrest of a Deputy, inviolable under the Constitution, would be a coup d'etat—and short of that provocation, General Boulanger cannot appeal to force. It would betoken a weak impatience to throw away the chance he possesses of rising by legal means to the head- ship of the State, as the " Elect of France ;" and uncertain as his inner character is, he has as yet given no sign of weak impatience. Indeed, we should say that the only two things clear about him are that he can wait, and that he has the quality of talkative taciturnity in a most unusual degree. He is perpetually issuing manifestoes, yet nobody knows his purposes ; and he talks all day and every day to all manner of clever men, yet keeps every secret of import- ance, especially that most difficult one, the source from whence he derives his extraordinary command of money. Every journalist in Paris has made his guess at that, and it remains a secret still. He will, we believe, continue to work through the Chamber, make government impossible without a dissolution, and only appeal to force should the Senate reject M. Carnot's appeal, a contingency we regard as morally impossible. The Senate has not the courage, and would not have even if it were sure that the Constitu- tion intended to leave it independent. That, however, is extremely doubtful, the idea of its framers—who had Monarchy in full view—having been to give the power of dissolution to the head of the State, but to relieve him of the full responsibility.