TOPICS OF THE ft X.
BOULANGISM.
ACORRESPONDENT whose good opinion we value asks us to state frankly whether, as we have given so much space to the Boulangist movement, we secretly approve Boulangism. We hardly comprehend, if he has done us the honour to study the Spectator, how such a question can have occurred to his mind ; but we answer,— " Most emphatically, no !" We do not approve of dictator- ships, except for precisely defined purposes and strictly limited. penods. It may be expedient to make a man Dictator during an invasion or a civil war, or to carry through some indispensable work, such as the organisa- tion of an Army, for which a Parliament is incompetent. We shall never get a Code unless a man is authorised to pass it, and never set Indian finance right except through a Commissioner invested. with the powers of Parliament. But the general dictatorship even of a wise man is morally wrong, because a nation has no right to shirk its own responsibilities, and it must always be purchased at too high a price,—namely, a decline in the vitality and the experience of the people. Men can grow "out of practice" in self-government, as in everything else. The subjects of a Dictator become like veteran soldiers, who, when deprived of the word of command, are but a huddled crowd. Dictatorship has in it every evil of autocracy, with this aggravation, that it is the autocrat's interest to secure able servants, and that it is the dictator's interest to get his work done by men who can never be his rivals. The great Napoleon's Marshals showed every quality except original genius, and Napoleon 711, never had a Minister even of the third rank, and left France, after his fall, to be governed. by a generation older than his own. The men who grew in his time are the mediocrities whom we see and whom France despises. As regards General Boulanger himself, we can see no evidence whatever to justify France in throwing herself at his feet. He has not proved himself a great General. He has never had a, chance of showing himself a great civil adminis- trator. He is not, as the d'Aumale episode showed, a man possessed of any loftiness of character. He is believed, on imperfect evidence, to be a good military organiser, and he has certainly wisdom enough to remain silent under provocation ; but neither of those capacities justifies his claims to be the single Representative and solitary Minister of France, and the country, in con- ceding them, though it may be acting on one of those strange popular instincts which sometimes confound ex- perience, is more probably committing a supreme folly. She will certainly be running a wholly unjustifiable risk. Our relation to General Boulanger is that of lookers-on, intensely interested in all phases of European history, and especially in a development of French feeling almost entirely new. It has• for a century been the way of France, when discontented with the results of self- government, not to change her representatives, or to take affairs into her own hands, but to choose for herself a temporary Dictator ; and that she persists in this way even when no visibly qualified Dictator is at hand, is a fact of profound. importance to her future position in the world. If she is content with a manufactured master, masters will never be wanting to her call. The plebiscite for an unknown man seems to show that the French people are not naturally democratic in the best sense of the word ; that they seek only certain results of democracy, such as equality and comfort; and that they regard self-government as involving too sustained and too tiresome a labour. They are willing to go on with it as long as it is successful, but are not willing to correct their own mistakes, to endure the cost of their own errors, to choose out continuously a large body of representatives of capacity and character. They have not the pluck to "stay," as the sporting men phrase it, through a losing race. If that theory is correct, and certainly much of French history tends to confirm it, France is not a genuinely democratic country at all ; her history will not be for democrats an example, but a warning ; and she will ultimately evolve out of herself a new, and it may be extremely dangerous, form of govern- ment. CEesars with a fixed term would be new phenomena in history, and urged on as they would be, being French- men, by a furious desire to make some grand mark in the world during their brief predominance, they might easily prove the most powerful, as well as the most vexatious, of all its disturbing forces. A succession of Clesars in France might mean a. succession of explosions in Europe as well as in the country itself. To mark the rise or possible rise of a new system of government in France, seems to us matter that should be of passionate interest for all poli- ticians; and that a new system of some sort is on its road, we can entertain no doubt. There may be a hundred opinions as to General Bora FM ger, but there can be but one as to the discontent of which he is the accepted representative. The Republic as it now exists is doomed, let who will be the executioner. Parliamentary government requires organised parties, and the individualism of Frenchmen, whether it arise from their virtues or their vices, is too great for the formation of solid parties. A sculptor might as well try to make a statue out of five hundred playing- marbles, as a statesman attempt to make a stable Govern- ment out of five hundred French Deputies invested with sovereign power, and exempted from dismissal by the Con- stitution. Every one thinks of himself, and only merges himself even in a group in order to give his individuality more weight in securing patronage.
We have, however, one ground of partial sympathy with General Boulanger. He is aiming, we fear there is no doubt, at a true dictatorship, at powers which will enable him to act on his own judgment and his own dis- cretion, as if he in himself and by himself were incarnate France ; but he professes to be seeking something much better and wiser than this. He desires, he says, to per- petuate the Republic, and to remove only the causes of its sterility and want of stableness. Those causes may be reduced to one,—that right of the representative body to overturn the Executive at a moment's notice which is the essential principle not of Republican, but of Parliamentary government. He would substitute for the permanent re- sponsibility of Ministers to the Chamber, their responsibility only to the country at short and determined intervals. That is the American method, and while it is quite Republican, it has been found in America compatible with a stability, and, so to speak, a conservatism as regards institutions, almost without a parallel in the world. There is no feat in politics so difficult as to effect the smallest alteration in the Con- stitution of the United States,—the last one required a desolating civil war. Whether the same result of stability would follow in France, where the party cleavages are so deep, and social passions are so fierce, and all men are citizens of one State, and the Army is stronger than the people, and the patronage of the Execu- tive affects every voter in the land, may well be doubted ; but the experiment must be worth the trying. If the Parliamentary Republic must fall—and our theory is that it is being condemned by plebiscite—it is surely better to go on with the Republic and a new machinery, than to recommence the sterile round of Monarchy, Republic, Cfflsar, Republic, CEesar, Monarchy, which has lasted for a hundred years. And of all machinery affording some ground of hope, the American would seem to be best worth trying. It does not liberate the Executive from the control of the people, while it does liberate it from the control of the Chamber, which, in France, is the apparent source of mischief. With no patronage in their hands, with no Ministry to overturn, with a President responsible only to the law and the people, the Chamber might cease to be a disturbing force, might be disinclined to waste, and might expend its energies upon remedial legislation, while the Executive pursued a dignified and uniform line of policy abroad, and rigidly executed the law at home. We do not say that it would be so, for we distrust the self-control of any French Chamber and the disinterestedness of any French President, and should expect the Deputies to stop the supplies, and the President to proclaim himself seated for life ; but it might, and a revision with that object seems to us by no means outside the purview of reasonable statesmanship. That such a revision is asked for by an ambitious man, who is probably playing for his own hand only, and who may misuse all the powers entrusted to him, or refuse when his term expires to vacate his office, is a grave misfortune for France ; but the revision itself is neither an unrighteous nor an unwise proposal. It would be far better if the Deputies would maintain the existing Constitution, which in theory is an excellent one, confide all patronage to Inspectors-General, form themselves into two strong parties, and make it an etiquette for Governments to resign only when called upon to do so by a distinct vote. But the man who hopes that in the present temper of France such a result can be secured, is an optimist who has read the history of the past seventeen years to very little purpose. The groups which make up the majority are quarrelling even now, when, if they are not united, they stand a strong chance of seeing their Chamber closed and themselves imprisoned. Even M. Floquet has no such hope, and suggests as the alternative to the individual dictatorship, that if the Senate is only abolished or paralysed, the majority in the Chamber can play Dictator just as well as General Boulanger. We dare say it could, if a majority could be found ; but, judging from its past history, a more dangerous Dictator could not be. Unstable, unscrupulous, and given to emotions, dis- trustful of its own leaders, and prone to combinations for the most momentary or most immoral purposes, the Chamber, as head of the Executive, is capable in a great crisis of leading France to ruin, and is even now the first, though not the only source of the weakness of the Republic.
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