MARSHAL MACMAHON.
THE situation in France at the present moment depends more upon the character of the man who administers, and will, if he lives, administer for six years more, the Execu- tive power of the nation, than on any political condition what- ever. When the' Sovereign Assembly' confessedly represents a number of forces in equilibrium acting on a point, we must look for any dynamical result to that single force external to the Assembly which is not compensated by any equal and opposite force ; in other words, to the force disposed of by the Marshal- President of the Republic who is so shy of admitting that it is anything but a transitory and provisional Republic of which he is President. In a situation like the present, the destiny of France really lies in the hands of the Marshal. If he were a man of political genius, which he is not, political France at the present moment in his hands would be as clay in the hands of the potter. If he were a man of unscrupulous ambition,—which, again, we believe he is not,—it would be easy for him to make himself just what he would. If, being neither a man of political genius, nor one of unscrupulous ambition, he were yet a man of steady attach- ment to any given Constitutional principles, we believe we might reasonably expect to see him gaining at least a fair trial for the special constitutional experiment in which he personally had the most faith. But Marshal MacMahon is, as far as there are any means of forming an estimate of him, neither a man of political genius, nor a man of unscrupulous personal ambition, nor one of quiet, steady constitutional convictions. He has had leanings to the Legitimist party ; he has been an Im- perialist of some distinction ; he has been elected President of a nominal Republic, partly because he was believed not to be a Republican, and partly because he was thought too neutral in politics to wish to overturn the Republic. Hence it is hardly possible to conceive a more complete microcosm than he is of at least the Conservative part of the Assembly. Right, Right Centre, Centre, and perhaps even Left Centre, have all their share in hie sympathies. Only, being personally responsible for the safety and dignity of France, and being well aware that there is something ludicrous and even contemptible in the position of the ass so completely reduced to liberty of in- difference by the two equal and opposite bundles of hay that he is positively unable to take a bite at either of them, Marshal MacMahon recognises very reluctantly that he must give an impulse to the arrested course of France in one direction or another, if only for the purpose of vindicat- ing the good sense and organising the practical life of the Conservative party and the French nation. Hence, however
unwilling he may be to take the initiative,—and it would be difficult to find even among the sober figures of the American Presidents one so little inclined to take a political initiative as Marshal MacMahon,—we must still look for the stroke that will definitively determine the direction to be taken by the whole of this inert political machine, from his hands. Now, in what direction and to what issue is it most reasonable to suppose that this stroke will be eventually given ?
Marshal MacMahon's lot has been in many respects a rather
tantalising one. His trustworthiness, tenacity, and gallantry have put him in the front of many a Illinffict which he had neither the necessary means, nor the genius which can some- Valles dispense with what would be necessary means to any oie else, to win. His first great task—the government of Algeria on those eccentric principles on which Louis Napoleon attempted in his earlier days to govern it, the principles which would have made it less a dependency or French colony than a separate Arabian kingdom almost cut loose from France—was far from a successful one. The time of his rule was rendered sad by famine, and unpopular by the disaffection of the French settlers, who emigrated in great numbers during his time from Algeria to Brazil. In fact, Marshal MacMahon in that partly civil and partly military campaign, as afterwards in more than one purely military campaign, rendered the Emperor the most self-sacri- ficing, but also, perhaps, the least appreciated of all great services, that of trying for him by proxy somewhat unfortunate ex- periments, of which the failure was due to the imperfection of the design much more than to the want of skill in the ex- perimenter. No doubt, if Marshal MacMahon had been a man of great genius, he might have supplemented the Emperor's conceptions by his own, so as to turn a failure into a success. But that he was not. For the most part he faithfully carried out instructions which did not contain the elements of success, and he only earned the merit of having stood firmly in the front of an unpromising enterprise. Such was his government of Algeria. In the Crimea, he distinguished himself, as usual, by his gallantry in holding the Malakhoff after he had once taken it, against all the desperation of the Russian attacks. In the Italian war, at Magenta, he even turned what threatened to be defeat into victory by acting on his own judgment, and not in accordance with the instructions he had received. But in the far greater war of 1870, he again became the sturdy arm of an inadequate and ill- conceived plan, and illustrated his fidelity, his courage, and even his willingness to undertake a perfectly desperate enter- prise, at the expense certainly of his military fame. The bull- dog tenacity of his resistance at Worth, fruitless as it was, was worthy of any amount of praise. The Quixotic heroism of his march on Sedan was not equally praiseworthy, for the whole fate of France hung in the balance, and a great man in his place, instead of executing orders which he must have known to be fatal, would have taken matters into his own hands, and insisted on the retreat to Paris, which would have prevented the great calamity of the siege. But the implicit obedience to orders, even to that fatal order, was characteristic of the man, who has been throughout a strong executive arm, ready to strike even the most hardy and desperate blows in deference to authority, but not one to revise effectively the mis- taken plans of his superiors. Again, in carrying out the diffi- cult and most odious duty of reducing the insurrection of the Commune, Marshal MacMahon was the mere agent of the Conservative military spirit, which he imposed on M. Thiers, and which he apparently did nothing to soften or restrain. Up to the moment of his election in May, 1873, as President of the Republic, Marshal MacMahon had been a somewhat unsuccessful military governor, a brave, but hardly more than subordinate General, who, while achieving two gallant military deeds, had been far more distinguished for failing faithfully in the attempt to carry out the ill-conceived designs of others than in any positive achievements. Above all, he had shown throughout not the constructive spirit of the great General, but the obedient spirit of the mere soldier, who accepts his orders without criticism, and makes his utmost Indeavour to carry them out.
And that, again, was the precise attitude which Marshal MacMahon assumed on his election to the Presidency. He did his very utmost to interpret the circumstances of that election into a sort of general order of his Sovereign—the Sovereign Assembly—which he had only implicitly to obey. He insisted much on the term of seven years, and declared that having been placed at the head of affairs for seven years, there for seven years he intended to stay, come what would, and in whatever direction the Assembly might choose to develope the organic laws. Nay, at first he tried to interpret the wishes of the Conservative party, who constituted the majority, as part of the general order which he had received at the time of his election. Here, however, he was necessarily foiled, because the wishes of the Conservative party turned out to be quite incompatible with each other. Had all the Conservatives voted together for Henri V., we suspect he would have acqui- esced at once, and declared himself for the remainder of his seven years' term the mere Lieutenant of Henri V. As, how ever, they would not do this, he strove to define his duty as the servant of the Conservative party by the principle that he would take into the Cabinet none but members of the majority which elected him. At last, however, it has become obvious that under this rule he cannot carry on the Parliamentary Government at all ; and again, he has been compelled by the rigid logic of facts to interpret more loosely the imaginari
general order under which he is acting, and to assume that he may accept aid from " moderate men " of all parties for any purpose consistent with acknowledging the absolute sovereignty of the Assembly, and consistent also with order, by means of which the Government of France may be carried on. But still his spirit is very much that of the Duke of Wellington, who, when he acceded to anything he did not like, did it to avoid the greater scandal of a mere dead-lock,—the incalculable mis- fortune that the King's Government should from any cause come to a stand-still and be declared incapable of marching. What is the minimum in the way of an initiative to be ex- pected from Marshal MacMahon, in order that France in like manner may not come to a stand-still ?
It is pretty plainly given out that if any soldier, impatient at the dead-lock, should attempt anything of the nature of a military pronunciamiento, Marshal MacMahon will make short work of him,—will, in fact, shoot him. And there, at least, he is quite right. It would be the most fatal step downwards for France, to inaugurate the era of military pronunciamientos. But if Marshal MacMahon has this healthy feeling, as we quite believe he has, of the implicit obedience due by the Military to the Civil power, we have some reason to infer that he would in no case do himself, Chief of the Executive though he is, what he declares so utterly indefensible in others. For, as he has admitted a hundred times, he is Chief of the Execu- tive only, and is not responsible for constitutional or legislative measures. He is acting under a general order from the Sovereign Assembly which he has no power to modify. If they were to choose to erect his power into a despotism, by abolishing themselves, not providing for any successors, and making the present taxation permanent, we are not sure that Marshal MacMahon would not acquiesce and immediately enter upon the enterprise of a mild despotism. But it would be purely in deference to order, not because he coveted such power. At present he regards the Assembly as his political commander- in-chief, and till that commander-in-chief has appointed its successor, he will not, we think, transfer his allegiance.
We hope, therefore, that even though Marshal MacMahon receives bad advice,—which, if the Dissolution, whenever it is resolved upon, does not issue in the election of a very Con- servative Assembly, he is very likely to receive,—he is not the man to resolve on a coup d'e?at. He has very strongly the soldier's feeling, that he will obey orders faithfully, but not trespass on the sphere of the Legislature, whose business it is to renew the orders under which he is acting. We confess to the gravest doubts whether any Conservative Cabinet formed to bring about a dissolution and new elections will be at all likely to accept the new elections meekly when they come. The chances are that Marshal MacMahon may then be advised to use his influence as Commander-in-Chief to force the hand of France, in the interests of the Conservative party, if once it has become quite clear that France will not yield to political persuasion, or even to political pressure. We can only trust and believe that the sturdy instinct of the soldier, who knows that he has no right to put the advice of a party above the demand of a nation, will make him reject every such pro- position, and insist on giving back even to a Liberal Assembly the commission he received from a Conservative Assembly. If we have appreciated him rightly, he will execute the orders he has received as accurately as he can, but he will not violently enlarge his own powers on the advice of any one. Marshal MacMahon is not a Liberal, and probably hates Liberalism. But he is a strict disciplinarian towards himself, as well as towards his subordinates, and has no fancy for transcending the lines of the obligation imposed on him. It will not be the first time he has failed because an impos- sible task was so imposed. But he prefers failing in an im- possible task to unfaithfulness to his obligations. By this military scrupulousness, as we hope, he may save France. He must now form some Cabinet to conduct an appeal to the country, and no doubt he will form one intent on conducting that appeal with all the energy of a " Government of Combat." The Government of Combat, however, has not combatted French political feeling very successfully for the last two years, and probably will hardly begin to succeed now. An Assembly determined on proclaiming a permanent Republic will probably be returned, and then the Monarchists must make a last effort for their fanatical belief. If Marshal MacMahon meets the temptations of that final appeal with the blunt and tena- cious indifference to failure which has marked his life, he will not allow himself to be made the instrument of a political coup d'etat. He will dismiss any Minister who even proposes to him thus to exceed his powers, and so vindicate the civilised
spirit of military duty against the ambition of the military filibuster. And so only he will vindicate the confidence of the Assembly and the nation which fixed upon him as the very essence of stubborn and self-forgetful honesty and obedi- ence, no less than 'as a friend of order, and as one not nearly so ashamed to fail, as to defy the spirit of the duties he had engaged to perform.
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