CONTEMPORARY FRANCE.*

MONSIEUR TRIERS is the central figure, if not precisely the hero, of the first volume of M. Hanotaux's valuable book. Everybody knows Bonnat's portrait of the brilliant little bourgeois who dragged France through her agony with such a curious mixture of patriotic devotion and personal ambition, and with an opportunism at first so successful. " Fresh, smart, clothed in his maroon frock-coat, the white crest-like tuft on the top of his head, his round eyes behind his spectacles," Adolphe Thiess, with his Southern blood, his courage, his common-sense, his marvellous energy and self-confidence, his unflinching resolution, his skill in governing, his knowledge of men, stands before us as a typical Frenchman of a high rank in mind, if not in soul. It is one great merit of M. Hanotaux's new book that it sets the interesting figure of M. Thiers before us in the prominence which belongs to a great statesman, and yet with the fairness that an historian owes to posterity. In the impression the book leaves on one's mind, France in the tragic years of the war and its immediate consequences is dominated by M. Thiess ; her life depends on him ; he rescues her, with terrible losses and wounds not yet healed, from the grip of her enemy ; he lifts her to her feet and gives her wonderful vitality the chance to spring again. It is not always • remembered, in our indifference to contemporary history, that the losses of France in those years amounted, including the indemnity, to four hundred and twenty-two million pounds sterling. And this was only for the " extraordinary expenses of the war," the enormous loans which still weigh upon the finances of France. Thus France paid, be it said in passing, for rushing into war unprepared. M. Thiers had foreseen it all, and prophesied, at the cost of his own popularity. when the crowds were shouting " A Berlin!" Afterwards his first thought and care was to reorganise the Army. He said that armies were not to be improvised. He knew that under the Empire " on avait fait la guerre avec des cadres." The word has all his own point and effective clearness.

At the same time, M. Hanotaux, being a fair and honest writer, cannot disguise the less admirable side of M. Thiers's statesmanship. No one will blame him

4. Contemporary Prance. By Gabriel Hanotaux. Translated by John Charles Terror. With Portraits. Vol. I., 1870-I1373., London: A. Constable and Co. [15s. not.]

very much, for the now known, fact that a little more, patience and cleverness, a little keener observation of the

changing attitude of other, nations towards Franc* in her death-struggle, would almost certainly have saved Metz, if not

indeed the provinces. To set against this he saved Belfort, and lessened the indemnity, by a milliard of francs. But however correct may have been the forecast that directed his clever management of the Assembly, however after-events and the Republic's prosperity may have justified him, the handling

of parties, in which his genius showed itself, was hardly the highest kind of -statesmanship. And granting that he really

believed the Republic to be the Empire's necessary successor, it lessens the grandeur of his single-mindedness, his passionate Jove of country, to know that to him the Republic meant Thiers, and Thiers meant the Republic. It was a very human and natural feeling, especially in a restless and ambitious soul.

Re had saved her, and he had a right to the first place in her counsels; she could not do without him. It is very natural, but ,not purely patriotic. M. Hanotaux, whether he intends

A or .not—and by his eulogium of M. Thiers at the end of the volume he seems inclined to do away with the impression— certainly brings out the first President's selfishness and ambi- tion quite as strongly as his distinguished talent and higher qualities. After all, at seventy-three he was the same Thiers as in 1830. He flirted with the Right as long as they were necessary to him, and promised a restored Monarchy which he never intended to exist. When, by the help and support of the Right, he had carried France through that time of neutrality as to forms of government which gave the necessary first breathing- space after the war, the time during which peace was the one and only necessity, the object of a Government's existence, he gradually began to show his hand and to express his con- victions. The idea of the fusion between the Royal families, of the "united Monarchy," never really entered into his calculations, though he used it to flatter the then majority. When the mistakes of the Right and the Comte de Chambord's stupidity, happily for France, ruined the cause of the Restora- tion, Thiers had already become openly the head of the Re- publican party. It was then, of course, the only thing he could do ; his interest and his convictions went hand-in-hand. And whatever we may think about his perfect honesty as a politician, one cannot read the history of the triumph of the Right in 1873, when the Republicans turned against Thiers and his resignation became a necessity, without feeling that France as a whole was ungrateful to the old man who had done so much for her.

But the interest of M. Hanotaux's history is by no means confined to his brilliant study of M. Thiers as a man and a statesman. Without going into any long detail, he gives in his earlier pages a clear account of the war and its causes, and in a few sentences which thrill with patriotic emotion reminds his countrymen' of the state of France during that time of supreme trial:: The clear elegance of his style suffers a good deal from translation, but such a quotation as this gives an idea of his more picturesque pages. There are not very many of them, for he deals with actual politics in a plainer and more • bUsinesslike, though always excellent, style :—

" The slowly moving wisdom of the provincial mind, sinking from one disillusion to another, but ill understood what had really happened. . . . . . After a reign so brilliant, so rapid a defeat, then, suddenly, ruin, the suspension of life, eight months of sorrows and sacrifices, the summer coming to an end, then the autumn, then the winter, the invasion creeping on like an oil- stain, infecting the cities, the towns, the villages, the hamlets; the arrival of the Irhlans with their long mantles, their tolpacks, lance or carbine in hand, in little bands, furtive and inquisitional, the trot of their horses on the deserted road, the requisitions, the demands for quarters, the promiscuity, the smile of servility, fury in the heart, and the cup of shame ; then alarms, deeds of violence, the mocking whistle of the fife, the dull roll of drums, spikes of helmets, and the Wacht-ani-Rhein rising from the plains on the evening after a battle Every family was smitten, savings destroyed, hidden, or threatened, houses aban- doned, fields deserted, homes decimated. . . . . . These pangs had been driven deep into the heart of the Provinces by one blow

after another." •

M. Hanotaux is, of course, a convinced Republican. But he is not narrow-minded. The dangers of democratic govern- ment are quite as visible to him as its advantages. It is not

without intention, we fancy, that he allows himself to quote the Marquis -de bampierre, among the " fine minds, honest souls, and enlightened intelligences" whom the " ardent and personal optimism of X Thiers" attempted to hurry Wind- fold down the slope that ended in the Third Republic

" I have no fixed prejudice against the Republic : I have ems been a Republican myself in my day; I know that in the signifi- canoe of this word there is a powerful attraction ; but the voice of - common sense cries to me every day more loudly that we are not virtuous enough, nor sufficiently submissive to the divine law, nor- disinterested enough, nor moderate enough, to keep in its purity the theory of government which, in principle, ought to give the- power to the worthiest, which in practice will always hand it over- to the noisiest and the most audacious. How can we fail to. remark,' further said this Monarchist, that the Republic, always enthroned by the strong arm, has never been able to maintain, itself for any length of time except by the dictatorship? How• can we not see that it is its impotence to give order, to assure all. interests, which has always made it end by fatality in despotism P How can we not remember that the triumph of the Republic has- always been the signal for insulting or persecuting religions

ions faith ? ' " The above remarks, little as he may agree with them, are quoted by a patriot without reproach in 1903. Can we fail.

to hear a note of warning to his country ?

In another place M. Hanotaux expresses his own liberal and , tolerant views on the religious question in France, " the real

cleavage of the country " between ancient faiths and free- thought; and seems to appeal from sectarian hatred to the influence of—

"those rare minds, who, raised above both parties, recognise• that both alike represent forces, noble, useful, indispensable, con- victions worthy of respect, and who, making an appeal to tolera- tion, to the necessity of living in common and in mutual love,. consecrate themselves, before all things, to the service of the fatherland, and recommend to all mutual kindness and patient endurance of life's problems."

We shall look forward with real interest and expectation to