THE ATTITUDE OF FRANCE.
BY far the greatest puzzle in the situation, to English observers, is the attitude of France. It is so opposed at once to her traditional course of action and to her most recent policy in Egypt, that many Englishmen suspect her of ulti- mate designs, and bid the British Government beware lest there should be treachery in Paris. That advice is sent home in guarded language in every telegram from the East, and is not, we see reason to believe, entirely absent in official communi- cations. The traditional idea of successive French Govern- ments has been that France has special interests in Egypt, has a right to some kind of ascendancy there, and must always be the foremost of the Powers in influencing the course of Egyptian affairs. This idea was asserted with a kind of violence during the long negotiations on the construction of the Suez Canal, and greatly influenced Lord Palmerston in his steady, bitter, and as it turned out, mistaken opposition to the completion of that great work. More recently, it was France which insisted on deposing Ismail, because he proposed to repudiate the Egyp- tian Debt (" We must guard the national fortune," said M. Baraguay d'Hilliers, apparently unconscious of any cynicism); France, which suggested the Joint Control ; France, which proposed the Dual Note demanding the dismissal of Arabi Pasha, and the restoration of Tewflk's authority ; and France, which demurred to asking the Sultan to intervene in the Delta by force. Under compulsion of the logic of her own action, France ought to have objected to consult Europe, lest Europe should use the Sultan as instrument ; ought to have joined England in a special joint demonstration before Alexandria, and ought, if Arabi Pasha still resisted, to have furnished a heavy contingent to the joint army of occupation. Instead of this, M. de Freycinet first agreed to consult Europe, then ac- ceded to the demonstration before Alexandria, and then, when it became necessary to act to secure the safety of the Fleets, and to carry out menaces in which he had himself joined, ordered the French Admiral to re- tire from the scene of action, and of course declines to join in any scheme of occupation. At the same time, he increases the French Fleet in the Mediterranean, asks for a small credit for the Naval Service—a trumpery sum, £300,000—and warns the corps d' arme's of which Toulon is the central depot to be ready for active service. What does that mean ?
It means, we believe, that France is passing through a phase of feeling so unusual and so much at variance with her history as to excite among Englishmen a natural, but unjustified, incredulity. The Government which now exists in France differs in one important respect from any Government which we call Constitutional. It secretly•recognises the sovereignty which the Assembly claims, and is determined to carry out, not its own will, subject to the Parliamentary right of dismissal, but the will of the sovereign power. It obeys the Assembly—that is, virtually, the Chamber—as passively as a Prussian Ministry obeys the King. The Cham- ber, in its turn, is influenced to an unprecedented degree by the constituencies, and the constituencies are actuated by a profound, though, as we believe, temporary, horror of war, and especially of foreign and African expeditions. The pea- sants, who feel the severe taxation, are morbidly anxious that the industrial prosperity should continue, are fearful lest war of any sort should end in another Prussian invasion—. the most extraordinary suspicions fly through France upon this subject—and are, before all things, enraged with the suffer- ings of their children and friends in the- mismanaged expedi- tion to Tunis. The administration of the sanitary department in that affair was absolutely shocking. We reproduced some of the details on medical authority, but the figures were con- cealed with invincible tenacity. Nearly twenty thousand men are believed to have been sent home sick ; with diseases like dysentery and African fever, to be dispersed through the villages, and carry into every cabaret the story of the inefficiency and callousness of " those men in Paris." For months on end every steamer that arrived at Toulon debarked French soldiers looking like corpses. The peasantry feel that their children are ruined for life by such attacks of disease, and unless the de- mand is imperative, and France attacked, they will have no more of expeditions. This resolve is intensified by an ignor- ance which we should despair of conveying fully to our readers. The long connection of the British with India, the dependence of thousands of households on Indian news, the coming and going of the great Indian garrison, have familiar- ised Englishmen to some extent with Egypt ; of which, again, they possess the imperfect and confused, but still useful, know- ledge conveyed in Sunday-schools about all " Bible lands." The poorer French know absolutely nothing of Egypt, except that Napoleon was defeated there. Even well-to-do French- men display an ignorance of the subject which strikes English interlocutors as almost comic, but the average electors know nothing about it, less—if that be conceivably possible,—than they knew about Mexico. To lose their children, and risk war,. and pay taxes for Egypt,—it is to them as if we were asked to bear an income-tax for the sake of conquering Greenland. The Chamber knew that this was the will of its masters, the. electors ; M. de Freycinet knew that this was the will of his. master, the Chamber, and therefore when the time came for action, he withdrew the French Fleet. If he had not done so, he must have sanctioned " another African expedition.' Nevertheless, he is not willing to risk a revulsion of feeling in the country, or an uprising of the Chamber, stung into revolt against the electors by M. Gambetta's eloquence ; and therefore he presses the French view in Confer- ence, and prepares soldiers and ships, so that France, if once resolved, may either assist Great Britain, or by thwarting her, reassert her right to interfere at will in Egyptian affairs. His course is, of course, facilitated by cir- cumstances of detail, by the excessive dislike of cultivated Frenchmen for war with no conquest at the end of it, by the feeling of the financial Ring—always so powerful in Paris— that England will not cheat creditors, and by a perception that Prince Bismarck is, in this matter, on the English side ; but the governing motive is dislike to offend the dominant feeling of the French masses.
M. de Freycinet may also be influenced—and we believe is,. though we cannot justify the opinion so closely—by a very serious dread of possible consequences in North Africa. He knows much better than Englishmen do how bitter is the hatred for France among the whole Moorish population of North Africa, how immense the terri- tory is which he has to watch there, and how slight an impulse, either of hope or rage, would fling the powerful force concentrated in Tripoli over the Tunisian frontier, and excite all the tribes behind the long, French sea-board—more- than a thousand miles it is—to one more armed revolt. The- Ministry at War could not attempt to suppress such a move- ment without fifty thousand fresh troops, and would de- mand a very much larger force than that, besides insisting on the necessity of watching Spain and Italy. Since the acquisi- tion of Tunis, North Africa has become an India for France,. a permanent preoccupation for her statesmen, with this aggra- vation,—that whereas India only thinks of Russia as an ex- ternal enemy, the Governor-General of Algeria must think of Turkey to the oast, jealous for Tripoli ; Spain to the west, jealous for Morocco ; and Italy to the north, jealous for her i " rights " in Tunis, and her general position in the Mediter- ranean. The dread of the Sultan's action is openly avowed, even by M. Gambetta ; and so is the danger from the excited state of feeling in Tripoli, where the mob demands the expul- sion of Tunisians, as a defiance of France. It is quite possible that the French Government, always more nervous and susceptible than our own, expects a Moorish rising as the outcome of the Egyptian troubles, and holds itself in re- serve with a feeling that it may have a heavy task on its hands, in which no ally is of any use, and may find it neces- sary to treat Tripoli and Morocco as Tunis has been treated. That would involve complications which would be grave, even for France, and the Ministry may reasonably consider that they need not increase them by helping England to do work which England can do quite well alone, and will do without permanently depriving France of interest in Egypt. That M, de Freycinet dreads keenly another uprising in Tunis is certain, and is the key to the new respect which the French are showing to the Bey. With great provinces to protect in North Africa, with the Chamber hostile to any enterprise whatever, and with Great Britain moving on her way indif- ferent to any considerations but the success of her own policy, the Government of France may abstain from action without intending any treachery, which, indeed, is impossible, since it would bring on her a coalition. We do not expect the quies- cence of France to endure for any length of time. History cannot be extinguished by the events of a year, nor can the permanent character of a people be altered by any emotion, however strong ; but for the present, France, more or less irritably and suspiciously, but still determinedly, awaits in retreat the development of events.
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