M. TRIERS' DIFFICULTIES.
TRIERS is certainly not a eat man, and probably .1/1[ great ,, not a competent one ; but the political difficulties in his way are greatly under-rated in England. They are such as no statesman in the world, not even Prince Bismarck, would willingly be called upon to face. Deriv- ing his title wholly from a Parliamentary vote, and holding office during the pleasure of the Assembly, he is called upon in a time of civil war to restore order without the cordial support of the very members who elected him. Ile must either conquer Paris, or conciliate Paris, or com- promise with Paris ; and to each of these courses there exist almost insuperable obstacles, among which the temper of the Assembly is not the least. In England it is held that the first of these alternatives is the right one, and certainly it is much the simplest ; but the conquest of Paris, while its people are in arms, implies the storm of the greatest fortress in Europe,—a fortress which the greatest General alive, commanding the most powerful army in the world, pre- ferred to reduce by hunger. M. Thiers has to perform the feat which General von Moltke declined, with less than a third of his troops,—for he certainly has not 80,000 men,—those troops being soldiers not superior man for man to the Parisians, dispirited by defeat, disorganized by want of confidence in their officers, disheartened by the feeling that after flying before the foreigner their first task is to make their country- men fly before them. We do not believe in the stories of disaffection among the troops before Versailles, but we do believe those troops think the work before them excessively dangerous, not very honourable, and entirely without national profit ; that they fight fitfully, more as Sikhs fight than as Frenchmen were supposed to fight, and that they are not carried away by enthusiasm either for their cause, for their Generals, or for victory. Their numbers are con- stantly swelled by prisoners released from Germany, who are as constantly sent to a distance for re-formation ; and they are commanded by a General who is certainly able, but who has suffered from a horrible wound, who demands excessive powers, and whose probable use of those 'powers is suspected by the head of the Executive. It might be possible even with such materials to " conquer " Paris, that is, to force an entrance in despite of 100,000 -workmen, fairly drilled, well led, and capable in a fitful and desultory way of very desperate fighting, if assistance could be relied on from within the walls, but it cannot. Such assist- ance might be obtained if the Assembly would proclaim the Republic, or grant municipal liberty, or even agree to reside in Paris • but the Assembly will do none of these things,—murmurs fretfully when any of them are so much as mentioned. M. Thiers is reduced to his troops alone, and his troops either can or will conquer only through a slow, irregular, half- hearted process of campaigning, more resembling the warfare of the last century than any method of action pursued since 1798.
The conciliation of Paris is at least equally difficult, for " Paris " in the insurgent sense demands impossible conces- sions. Supposing M. Thiers, in despair, to concede the first great demand of the Commune, that Paris should be a free city like Hamburg, governed by its own Senate, and liable to the general Government only for its contingent of taxes and of men. Paris, in its profound distrust, would still demand that the National Army should be excluded from the city, a right not claimed either by Hamburg or New York, and in its historic pride that it should remain the seat of the Government of France,—in other words, that it should be independent, yet retain the power of upsetting the authority to which it does not yield. Nothing less than this would thoroughly " conciliate ' Red Paris, which indeed goes farther, and in its very latest official proclamation demands per- mission to federate itself with other great cities, and with them to exercise a predominant voice in the general legisla- ture. M. Thiers, as a statesman, could not grant these terms, which would be fatal to the unity of France ; or if he did, the Assembly would reject them, and either proceed on its own violent path, sentencing Paris to destruction, or compel him to strike a coup d'Itat, for which he has probably not the means, and which could settle nothing beyond the momentary dictatorship of an old civilian who must reign by the bayonet and the favour of the military chiefs. There is, we fear, no possibility of conciliation in any adequate sense.
There remains compromise, and this is evidently M. Thiers' idea. It must not be forgotten that he himself is Parisian, and at heart possibly slightly proud of the fuss his city is making in the world. He probably hopes that the Commune, incessantly defeated in the field, pressed by the suffering of the population of Paris, and aware that victory is hopeless, may in a few weeks listen to some conceivable compromise, such, for example, as the proclamation of the Republic by the Assem- bly, the garrisoning of Paris by national troopa, and the concession of full municipal liberty as understood in England and America. That strikes average Englishmen, as repre- sented by the Times, as quite a reasonable arrangement, but it is nearly certain that it would be rejected by the Assembly — which can be dissolved only by its own consent or by force—and quite certain that it would be regarded by the Red chiefs as a compromise worse, because more dishonourable, than a sullen submission to superior force. The Assembly does not want an orderly Re- public, or strong municipalities, or a contented Paris ; but a powerful monarchy and obedient cities and a humiliated Paris, and the nearer it seems to approach to victory the greater will its dislike to compromise become. The Red chiefs, on the other hand, do not want to place Paris under a Republican Assembly elected by peasants, but under a Council of its workmen, and the nearer they approach to defeat, the more passionately Red will they become. Compromise is as difficult as either conciliation or conquest, and but for a certain con- fidence in the unforeseen, which so frequently occurs in France, we should be apt to declare that M. Thiers had entered on a course from which there was no escape. It is one, at all events, which involves days or weeks of slaughter outside Paris, the destruction of her resources, if not of her streets, and a finale which can be little better than a dis- astrous interregnum. It adds most heavily to the misfortunes of France that the swiftest, if not the wisest road out of her difficulties, a tem- porary Dictatorship, seems so impossible or so dangerous. The absolute government of a strong man, who would honestly devote himself to revive, and not to repress, her political energies, might for the hour be a blessing to France, but where is such a man to be found whom both town and country would accept The men among whom the Assembly would choose, the descendants of St. Louis, would be mere kings, not rulers of the olass who found. Only one of them is so much as credited with high ability, and France knows nothing of the "Duo d'Aumale, except that his character is blameless, and that his pamphlets display some literary force. Why should Paris, which hates princes, or the Army, which likes soldiers, yield readily to him? The men among whom the peasantry might be inclined to choose, the Bonapartes, would be repressive, dynastic, hostile to the freedom indispensable to restore to the nation the political capacity it has lost. The man whom the towns might choose, Leon Gambetta, might succeed without repressing liberty, but why should the peasantry choose him, even if he were not too ill to undertake the task M. Thiers himself is an old man who has almost failed. No eminent Frenchman known to French- men, but outside the parties, seems to exist in France ; and as yet no soldier has appeared who is not in some way or other more or less discredited, either by failure, or by character, or by want of political head, the latter being the defect attri- buted to Marshal Machiahon. One French family, that of Bernadotte, is reigning successfully outside France, and one other, the Royal family of Belgium, thinks in French; but even the monarchists of France will not look for their leader out- side one worn-out and most unlucky family. There is, so far as we see, no man whose dictatorship even for a time would inspire confidence in Frenchmen, no one to whom the people would adhere, no one who could even compel them to main- tain order without at the same time suppressing liberty till statesmanship became extinct. We see nothing for France except the "policy" of M. Thiers, a policy which has no apparent end, which founds nothing, and which has not even the one poor merit of temporary success.
Previous page
