FRENCH ELECTIONEERING.
NOTHING- can be more unlike than English and French Electioneering. A smart agent in the confidence of his party who had pulled a candidate through a brisk borough contest would laugh to scorn the tactics pursued or the oppor- tunities lost by the latter. Your French candidate does not know all the changes which can be rung upon a napo- leon. His agent—if he has one, which is unlikely—does not take due care at the outset of the campaign to secure all the cabarets and estaminets, so that all good liquor may flow freely on the side of purity, probity, and patriotism. We miss in French electioneering the in- genious and familiar devices for cloaking bribery ; no well-paid "watchers," as at Bewdley, who watch nothing ; there is no official corresponding to "the man in the moon," or practice answering to 4‘ kissing the baby ;" and no crowds of canvassers, each of whom has been heavily feed. The wives of candidates do not run up prodigious bills at all the tradesmen's shops, as the election draws near ; and their lords do not scatter eleemosynary coals with prodigal hands, and tipsy voters are not " hocussed," "bagged," and locked up in an outhouse until the battle is over. There are no champagne- breakfasts or heavy suppers given in close proximity to the day of the election. We do not mean to say that French elections are at bottom very much purer and fairer than ours, but they are very unlike, and one point of dissimilarity in which French electioneering shows very much to disadvantage, as an English electioneering-agent might think, is that siege is not laid to the voters' stomachs, and that the purse is not quite BO potent as with us.
But let not the sharp English attorney who lands his em- ployer at the top of the poll at a cost of four thousand pounds in published expenses, with unknown expenses unpublished, and who snaps his fingers at those who suspect the worst and talk about a petition, plume himself on his superior cunning. Electioneering is tolerably well understood in France. The experience of half a century has not been thrown away. In fact, if we are not much mistaken, the art is being improved, and we do not know to what degree of perfection it may arrive at the present pace. When M. de Tocqueville gave evidence in 1885 before a Sele3t Committee as to electoral malpractices in France, the condition of things which he described was truly utopian. He could think of no case in which complaints had been made of bribery, as we understand it ; intimidation was almost un- known; and he wished the Committee to believe that even in 1827, when M. Villele's Government put out all their strength to obtain a majority, the influence which they were really able to wield was small. In short, the art was then only in its infancy. It was left to the Second Empire to show how universal suffrage could be manipulated and jockeyed, and M. de Fourtou, who matriculated in that school, bids fair to sur- pass his master. M. de Persigny proved by ocular demonstra- tion that it was perfectly possible to get une majorite' sans fantaisie, or a majority with no nonsense about it ; and M. de Fourtou means to do the same,—if he can. Their chief weapons are the same, for the great electioneering agent in France is, and always has been, the Prefect. It is he who does what a nimble attorney is expected to do here. He finds out what Government candidate will have most chance in every locality, and what means are best for discrediting the Opposition. It is he who must tell the niaires to pass the 'word to the cabaretiers that they will lose their licences, or be forced to close early, if they do not go with the Government. He must see that every functionary, from the sous-prerfet to the garde chamketre, shall vote and speak as is proper, On his shoulders falls the the task of writing, or at least revising, the candidate's addresses, if the latter is not clever or handy with a pen ; and he must take care that the little local paper, which goes with the Government through thick and thin, and whose principles are those of the Vicar of Bray, publishes its periodical instalment of abuse of Gambetta and the 363. If he is an energetic prefect, he will be sure, as the day of voting draws near, to write a letter to two or three mires, stating that he has directed the chief of the Engineers to consider and report upon certain plans for a new branch line connecting certain communes with the trunk line, and intimating pretty plainly at the end that these patriotic projects might be reluctantly abandoned if the Govern- ment found the peasantry ungrateful or disaffected. Very busy is the life of a Minister of the Interior and his Pashas at this time. They have no light task in manipulating les moyens propres a epurer le suffrage universel, as elec- toral manceuvres have been euphemistically called. When M. de Fourtou gives the word to his lieutenants to fall to work, in every commune in France a battle begins in which no one is too insignificant or too great to be spared. The Grand Cafe' is peremptorily closed, on the in- formation of some spy, because it has become tin foyer de discussions politiques ; and the Café Anglais shares the same fate, because some one said very loudly over his cups, "Vive la Rdpublique l" Professors who have comfortable posts at important lyceums are exiled to small towns, there to repent of their freedom of speech. 'The village schoolmasters arc told not to meet together to talk gossip and " shop ; " they spend their small salaries away from their families, and the Prefect thinks they will do more good to their families, and keep out of the temptation of talking politics, if they stay at home. Some forgotten Imperial law, of the year 1852, is fished up, and railway-guards, drivers, and stokers are told that if they smuggle Radical newspapers along their routes, there is a rod in pickle for them. The Prefects are told to look sharply after the behaviour of their subordinates, and in fact, all State officials. They must report to head-quarters if any member of the municipality has been talking of the Manhalas a blunderer, or of M. de Fourtou as an adventurer. If too many Radical newspapers are to be seen in the postal or railway bureaux, down goes the fact in the report, so that the offenders may be duly warned that if they do not find, as their betters do, the .111oniteur or the Bulletin des Communes good enough reading, they must go elsewhere. At the Kiosques, no Republique Frangaise, Rappel, or Temps is for sale, while you are pressed to buy a sheet in which the 363 are denounced as friends of the Commune, and their victory said to be the certain precursor of revolution. The colporteurs who will persist in selling Radical wares are worried and harassed, and on the slightest pretext have their licenses rescinded. They must open their packs to inspection, so that it may be seen whether they are not carrying about unlicensed books or papers. Woe to clubs, Masonic meetings, literary institutes I An active Prefect is sure to find that they are the hotbeds of discussion, and to give orders for their closing. These are daily incidents in the first stage of electioneering; but if the resemblance to the system of the Empire is to be kept up to the end, we shall hear of other devices still more questionable than even these. We shall learn that the mayor of some commune has insisted upon taking the ballot-urn home with him, after the votes are deposited in it, and that the mere effect of its remaining one night under the roof of a true Conservative has been a notable miracle, a commune notorious for Radicalism, and long in the bad-books of the Prefect, proving to have voted for the official candidate. And about that same official candidate we shall hear much before October. We shall find the Government dismissing some of its adopted candidates for insubordination in the ranks, and insisting that, as M. de Broglie once said, the duty of an official can- didate is "Rester les mat'ns pendantes is long de corps, is regard fixe' dans la vide, ausel pre'pard 4 avancer en ligne, gu' a tourner par le )(lane." M. do Fourtou says he is confident as to the ultimate result. But we take it, that his confidence, if sincere, is a delusion. Even if he has improved upon the electoral tactics of the Empire, even if he has added to the resources of that system of mendacity and bullying, and if, what we greatly doubt, the old breed of docile official candidates can be easily obtained, the people of France are more capable of parrying such weapons than they were. They have learned the lesson of self-restraint, they have thrown aside a good many pre- judices during the last eix years, and knowing now their own strength, the peasantry are not likely to suffer themselves to be cajoled by tactics which might have been successful under the Empire.
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