M. GAMBETTA.
AFTER a noble, tenacious, and brilliant effort to save France, which with a few more M. Gambettas to aid him would almost certainly have succeeded, but for which single-handed he was inadequate,—after a career of splendid efforts and not inglorious errors, M. Gambetta has resigned, and the generous English Press, with a few notable exceptions, is exulting frantically over the "removal of his baneful influence." We have no sympathy with his last step,--the exclusion of Imperialist Officers from the right to accept candidatures for the Bordeaux Assembly, an exclusion which we hold to be at once impolitic and a defiance of the principle of Republican equality. But there are plenty of statesmen with more reputation for sobriety than M. Gambetta who have been guilty of like errors. He holds, no doubt not without reason, that the Imperialist policy was one long system of fraud upon the people,—that it involved the unfair manipulation of electoral influences, the direct cor- ruption of the voters where it was possible, the use of political terrorism where corruption was not possible, and, in a word, that whole assemblage of depraving influences by which the nation has reachedits present stage of helpless and disorganizedcollapse; and he doubtless thought quite honestly that to exclude " tem- porarily "—his decree expressly spoke of the exclusion as a temporary disqualification,—en masse from the right to repre- sent the people, the agents of this huge system of popular emasculation, would be a fair though rough expedient for the purification of the electoral system. We have declared ourselves convinced that he was wrong. During a twenty years' regime, the political agents of the Empire must have included many honest men ; or—if they did not, —there can be little hope indeed that political honesty would be discoverable elsewhere outside the Imperial ranks. But however great was the error, we maintain that it was a not inexcusable or in- glorious error for a man profoundly sick of the regime of corruption, and eager for an assembly which should speak the voice, not of greedy officials already hoping for a new chance of subserviency and new sources of gain, but of sincere patriotic Frenchmen. Again, M. Gambetta doubtless well understands- that the one great hope of Count Bismarck's policy,—the object of all his recent intrigues,—has been the restoration of the Imperialist dynasty, which truly or falsely he believes to be the only hopeful breakwater against the flowing of a new tide of Republican propagandism. And M. Gambetta can hardly have helped feeling that the cause for which Count Bis- marck is undoubtedly prepared to exhaust every secret influ- ence which a great conqueror can manipulate, would have an undue advantage on its side that could only be balanced by some counter-move on behalf of the Republic. With a third of France occupied by the Germans, and the strings of many a secret influence in their hands, it is hardly credible that the Imperialist party, of which Count Bismarck is the open friend and favourer, should not gain some very great and unfair advantages at the forthcoming elections ; and if only as a set-off against these, he may have thought it fair to put his veto on the candidature of Imperialist officials. No doubt, as we have admitted already, he was wrong,—wrong in both principle and policy. But the error was not a crime of that monstrous and disgraceful kind which English journalists, eager for peace at any price, and delighted to find any vulnerable point in the policy of the one really great Frenchman of the time, are pleased to regard it. It is not a crime like the German arrest and imprisonment of every German democrat who pleads for a peace without territorial confiscation. It is hardly more severe than the exclusion by the North from all political rights of men who had taken an active part in the policy of Secession. It was a grave error, but error for which there is political excuse that reflects no disgrace on the man who committed it.
Indeed, take M. Gambetta's career during the last five months as a whole, and we shall find that it is by no means marked by that hysterical and frantic character in the light of which it has pleased furious political bigots like " W. R. G." to represent it. What we must say of him is that he missed success very narrowly, and through the very natural error of ascribing to Frenchmen stupified and prostrated by a long course of politieal laxatives and opiates, more of his own indomitable spirit than they really possessed. The Daily News, in a fair though otherwise hostile article, says, not, we believe, underrating the true influence of M. Gambetta, that with five or six colleagues of his own vigour and fire he would have raised the siege of Paris and saved France. Two more M. Gambettas—one in Paris and one in Metz—would, we believe, have sufficed. As it was, tame, cowed, half-hearted France, under M. Gambetta's inspiration came very near suc- cess. The Germans themselves believe that had Metz held out another fortnight the siege of Paris would have been raised; Metz would have held out more than another fortniht with a single M. Gambetta at the head of affairs there ' • and even now we do not doubt that if the Government of the National Defence consisted of men like himself, instead of a respectable and worthy, but dispirited and exhausted, knot of patriots, the war would go on with a vigour that would amaze and disgust the Germans, and eventually exhaust the magnificent pertinacity which they are showing in their very bad cause. However, M. Gambetta has failed, and like all who have failed without conciliating the victors by ac- quiescing in a policy of failure,—which he still thinks might, with more of his own spirit, be avoided,—he is run down, and will be run down, by vanquished and victors alike. Let us, however, attempt to do justice to the one great man whom France in her despair and bewilderment has produced.
The common theory of M. Gambetta has been that he is a mere melodramatic screamer, not too much burdened with honesty. "W. R. G.," and apparently "Azamat Batuk," concur in believing that his sanguine hopes for the Army of the Loire were " deliberate misrepresentations " of his real belief,—the latter writer, "Azamat Batuk," positively asserting that he heard from one of the most intimate friends of Gambetta that " no one of the members of the Delegation of the Government of National Defence at Tours had the slightest hope of a victorious issue,"—a statement a good deal qualified, however, by the addition that "the most sanguine of these members, M. Gambetta himself, speculated only upon the difficulties the Prussians had, the inclemency of the season, and the good luck of France." Knowing what we do of the inferences which " intimate friends " of one way of thinking will draw from the language used by intimate• friends of another way of thinking, we do not regard this charge of express bad faith brought at second-hand against M. Gambetta, by an informant who frankly admitted that that Minister was " the most sanguine " of all the mem- bers of the Government, and that he " speculated on the good luck of France," is worth a halfpenny as moral evidence against him ; and we should call anyone who, after study- ing all M. Gambetta's words and acts as we have studied them, really accused him of " deliberate " (and useless) lying for the purpose of propping up for a few months longer a fall- ing partizan cause, as hardly competent to form any serious judgment on human character at all. The truth is, that though a southerner in speech, who naturally uses some of the exaggerated and even hectic colours of an ardent and oratorical temperament, M. Gambetta, ever since his flight in the balloon from Paris, has shown almost as much self- restraining power as he has of goading and stimulating power. His very first work at Tours was to decline speechmaking, and tell the agitators that deeds and not words were the need of the hour. His first great achievement was the suppression of the Lyons Reds, who tried to bring division and tumult into the Councils of the Republic. He was, no doubt, hasty, and perhaps unjust in his denunciation of the surrender of Metz as an act of treason, though all the evidence shows that had Bazaine been capable of as much forti- tude as Trochu, he would have held out at least ten days longer, and perhaps saved Paris. If M. Gambetta displaced General D'Aurelles somewhat too hastily, he passed no severer judgment than most English military critics on his failure ; and he did full justice to the unsuccessful efforts of Chanzy and Faidherbe. During his whole term of power he never, we believe, interfered with the freedom of the press, which free quently attacked him furiously. In the last instance, when smart- ing under the unpardonable blunder of M. Jules Fevre, who con- cluded in ignorance, and actually telegraphed in error to Bor- deaux, the terms of an armistice which he represented as taking effect immediately, and as applying universally, when it was not to operate for three days except in Paris, and was not even then to apply to the. East, and so led the armies of the East, already in the most imminent danger, into worse peril, M. Gambetta showed the utmost self-restraint, though urged by a number of his more violent adherents to repudiate it altogether. Finally, when asked to assume the position of dictator and overrule the Paris Government, he forcibly restrained the evidently strong impulse he felt to take a course which might too probably have led to civil war,—though the Generals of the only French armies actually in existence would undoubtedly have obeyed his orders, Garibaldi, Cremer, Chanzy, and Faid- herbe being all men of his own views,—delayed his answer for a long time, and finally decided on resignation, a decision which he declared in language of true dignity and moderation, and marked by true loyalty to his colleagues,—an act of self-restraint which, in one of his sanguine temperament and conscious power, was undoubtedly a great and patriotic effort. It was right to do, because, as we believe, the temper of the people of France is so far beneath the level needed to give success to his policy, that, alone and unaided as he is by any men at all his equals in power of hope and power of organiza- tion, the risk of civil war would have been fearful, and to incur that risk, criminal. But let not the man who, with such power in his hands, resigned it at such a moment, after re- ceiving the most urgent solicitations to pursue his own policy to the end, be called a mere screaming fanatic. M. Gambetta has in five months raised, and supplied with a singularly effec- tive artillery, armies amounting to at least 700,000 men. He has proved to Alsace and Lorraine that if they are to be lost, they were at least not tamely given up by Republican France to the first German threat, but that France has been willing to spill her blood freely in their defence ; he has shown, to- gether with something of Southern extravagance, a good deal of resolute reticence and loyalty to his feebler colleagues. He has sacrificed himself first to the defence of France against the Germans, and now to the rescue of France from the evil of civil war. Let furious detractors say what they will,—when the history of the German war comes to be written by cool historians, it will hardly be denied by any one competent to the task, that that war produced but one really great Frenchman, and that that Frenchman was M. Gambetta.
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