THE MILITARY TERROR IN FRANCE.
TIIE recovery of France after the catastrophes of
Sedan, Metz, and Paris is the wonder of the last quarter of the dying century. It has contradicted every probability and falsified every prediction. It was con- ceivable that France should abandon, at least for a generation, all thought of military greatness ; conceivable that she should reorganise her armaments on democratic principles, and seek to make a military despotism impossible by contenting herself with a National Guard, which should have nothing in common with an army except a uniform ; conceivable that she should subordinate the soldier to the civilian, and allow her military system to vary with the varying needs of political parties. What seemed hardly conceivable five-and-twenty years ago was that she should devote herself silently and steadily to build up a new army on the most approved methods, submit without a murmur to the tremendous burden thus laid upon her, keep the soldier altogether out of politics, and pursue the perfecting of the military machine without regard to the possibility of making this or that feature in it serviceable as a party cry. Yet this is what has actually come to pass. France has made the sacrifices required of her, and has reaped the fruit of them in the pos- session of an army believed to be the equal of any in Europe. Nor is this her only gain. Under the Third Republic the Army has been her one stable institution,—the one institution, that is, which has been the common care of the nation as a whole, irrespective of dynasty or party. Whatever dreams of restoration, Royalist or Bonapartist, may have been cherished by this or that faction, the Army has not been affected by them. They may have related to the use to be made of the Army under certain imaginary conditions, but they have taken the Army itself for granted. Whatever hopes Radicals or Moderates may have entertained on the eve of a General Election, their language about the Army, whether in the Tribune or on the platform, has always been the same. There has been talk, from time to time, of revision of the Con- stitution, of separation of Church and State, of suppres- sion of religious Orders, of fiscal changes vast enough to bring Socialism in their train,—but there has been no suggestion of disarmament. The present generation of Frenchmen have grown up in the unbroken habit of looking to the Army as to something for which, in the judgment of men of every shade of political or religious or social opinion, no sacrifices can be too great. The one -question that Frenchmen have allowed themselves to ask is not—What sort of army can we afford to give our- selves ? but—What must we do or forego in order to secure the very best army that can be had ? It is impossible that steady, persistent labour on these lines should go unrewarded. A nation which is thus content to keep a single object in view can hardly fail to come out of the ordeal stronger and greater than it went into it. In the creation France has scored a conspicuous success, and has done so unassisted and at great moral and material cost. That is a chapter in her history of which she may justly be proud, especially when she remembers the unparalleled disasters in which the effort had its origin.
Until lately, it seemed as though this result was wholly beneficial. Amid political uncertainty and social con- fusion the nation had secured an admirable training in discipline, in patriotism, in common labour for the common good. We did not, perhaps, take enough into account the effect that this training was calculated to have, alike on the Army and on the civil population. You cannot set up a living idol without the worship paid it influencing both the idol and the worshipper. The Army has held an exceptional position for close upon a generation. During all this time it has been the object of uniform admiration and devotion from all classes. It has seen Ministry after Ministry upset for the most trivial causes, and the Civil Service of the country again and again placed at the mercy of what, as the abstentions at every election plainly show, is a minority of the French people. What could be expected but that the soldiers, or rather their chiefs, should come in time to regard themselves as a distinct and separate force, by whose strength all that is left of value in France is kept in being, and on whose pleasure the successive Govern- ments to whose care France is nominally committed really depend ? Under any circumstances, probably this process would have gone on, b it the Republican party has in two conspicuous instances helped it forward. Left to themselves, there was no special reason why the soldiers should be less Republican than the classes from which they are for the most part taken. What the Republican party have done to supply this special reason is first, to keep the higher classes out of public life, and next, to send the seminarists into the barracks. In consequence of the former blunder, the Army is officered to a great extent by men who would, under other Goverments, have been in the Cabinet, or in the higher ranks of the Civil Service. The treatment accorded to the Rallied shows what chance a young man has of finding either of these careers open to him, and the effect of keeping the door closed has been to concentrate the attention of the upper classes on the Army. That has been the field they have chosen for their sons, and they have in a great measure made it their home. One Government after another has to all appear-
ance reasoned in this fashion We do not wish to see the partisans of the old dynasties reconciled to the Republic. We suspect the genuineness of their conversion, and we do not want to have them as rivals in the struggle for political or official advancement. Consequently we will let them go into the Army, where they can do no mischief to the Republic, and will be out of the way of Republicans.' That they have been out of the way of Republicans is un- doubtedly true. Whether this enforced seclusion has rendered them harmless to the Republic is more doubtful. For the imposition of military service upon the seminarists a more plausible case could be made out. It was sup- posed, in the first instance, that it would gradually dry up the supply of clergy by indisposing young men who had once tasted the freedom of barrack life to submit to the severe restraints of a celibate profession. Unfortu- nately for its authors, this calculation has not turned out correct. The seminarists, by all accounts, have influenced the barrack far more than the barrack has influenced the seminarists. The contact with enthusiatic young men animated by a strong sense of their mission to win back France to the Catholic Church has given the soldier a new conception of religion and of the clergy. They have found them less black than they were painted by the atheistic brush, and have come to see, or at least to suspect, that the gulf between the priest and the layman is not so deep as they fancied. A measure dreaded by the ecclesiastical authorities at least as much as it was desired by the civil authorities has disappointed the ex- pectations of both.
The Dreyfus case is the first occasion on which this new temper of the chiefs of the Army has had a chance of showing itself. No doubt the peculiar ideas of justice which they have imposed upon successive Cabinets are in some degree the creation of military indifference to means as distinct from ends. Dreyfus is guilty ; therefore Dreyfus must be condemned. Whether there is any evidence by which his guilt can be legally established is a matter of quite minor importance. The punishment of military criminals must not be hindered by mere civilian scruples. We think, however, that there is more in the case than this,—that the high officers of the Army have all along made the refusal to revise the conclusions of the Court-Martial a kind of test by which to judge the dispositions of the civil authorities, and that had these dispositions proved less satisfactory, and especially had M. Brisson insisted on reversing the decision of M. Meline, the new Cabinet would not have found the succession to office so undisputed. The incident of Pere Didon's speech made in the presence of General Jamont, the " Generalissimo " of the French Army, and the feeble censure—if censure it can be called—which the Minister has dealt out to the Commander-in-Chief simply for taking the chair at the speech-day of a private school instead of for listening without protest to the Dominican exaltation of the Army over the civil power, are only straws, but they are straws blown in the same direction. They may mean less than we think, but such meaning as they have can only be of one kind.
Previous page
