THE SENATORIAL ELECTIONS IN FRANCE.
AT BUFFET is cock-a-hoop this week, but M. Buffet's fore- I! cast of affairs has repeatedly proved to be erroneous. He believes, as is evident from his communications to the Havas Agency and the Press, from his tone in addressing the Permanent Committee, and from his Circular virtually abolishing one provision of the Press law, that the procla- mation of Marshal MacMahon has been a success, and that he is sure, at all events, of an obedient Senate. He calculates that the Communes in three-fourths of the Departments, at least, have returned the electoral delegates whom he himself would have nominated ; and that the Delegates, with the members of the Councils-General, will give him at least 150 Senators, or with the fifteen Legitimists, a steady majority of about thirty in the Second Chamber. The effect of this result will be, he imagines, that the Senate will be so obedient that it will at any time accede to the Marshal's proposals for a Dis- solution, and that the Premier will, therefore, be able to hold this threat over the Chamber should it prove too Radical, or indeed in any way refractory. Armed with this power, and with the serious means of influencing new members which every Government of France possesses, he considers himself secure, and is allowing his narrow, arbitrary, combative mind to appear in its full nature. He tells the public he has triumphed ; he forbids the leader of Opposition to deliver a speech either in Marseilles or Aix ; he refuses haughtily to submit to any interpellation from the Permanent Committee, telling them their only function is to summon the Assembly; and in spite of an express vote of the Assembly, he forbids the sale of hostile journals in the streets. When questioned as to the place to be selected for the Senatorial elections, he refused to say that it should not be the Prefecture ; when told that the Janze amendment, which was passed by the Assembly, was directly contrary to his view of the law, he replied that he had nothing to add to his own assertion that it was not ; and when interrogated about the prohibition of M. Gambetta's speech, he declined all investigation into his electoral acts, which were for the next Assembly to judge. He displayed, in fact, all the arrogance of the Minister of the Empire, without that plausible regard for " law " which M. Rouher in his most audacious moments has never failed to simulate. There is a hardness about his exultation which unites the worst foibles of the Empire and of the "regime of the Doctrinaires."
He may be exulting a little too soon. A Minister of the Interior in France knows much, but he does not necessarily know everything, as was shown in the elections of the Life Members of the Senate; and M. Buffet's assumption that he knows the mind of 36,000 Delegates, one for each Commune, is, to say the least, a bold one. Not ten per cent. of them all know their own minds, and not five per cent. have declared them fully. A large majority, no doubt, are Mayors, and a large majority of them, again, have said they would elect Conserva- tives ; but " Conservatives" is a wide word, and may be found to mean something of which M. Buffet has no idea. Not one Senator has been elected, or can be, until to-morrow week— Saturday, January 30—and in the eleven days intervening between the choice of the Delegates and the choice of the Senators three things will happen. The members of the Councils-General and the rural delegates will have met, have seen each other's faces, and have learned each other's opinions. Both will have beesassubjected to strong pressure alike from the Government and the Opposition, and both will have heard for the first time the alliances arranged. It is on those alliances that the results of the election will turn. M. Buffet counts his "Conservatives " as if they were cattle, but each of the
councillors and delegates is a man with a party, and views, and interests of his own, and a majority of them with an abiding dislike and distrust of Bonapartists which will induce them to act on their aversions as well as on their preferences. The Republicans believe that a majority will on Sunday either vote for Left-Centre men, as a compromise, or join the Republicans in lists from which only Bonapartists will be excluded, so that on 1st February the returns will show M. Buffet victorious in only one-half of the elective seats. The Life Members will then throw a decided and a steady majority for the Republicans. The Republicans may be mistaken, but they have shown themselves as well acquainted with France as the officials, they have on their side the universal feeling that anything but the Republic would now be Revolution, the new perception of all classes that the Republic can be orderly, and the passionate irritation which will be created by M. Buffet's high-handed proceedings. M. Buffet thinks he has stopped meetings, and prohibited speeches, and gagged the Press, and forgets that every man of forty in France has been accustomed during his whole manhood to that state of affairs, and has learned to give effect to his opinions notwithstanding. He relies on coercion, and forgets thatr one result, at all events, of coercion is to make men's uttered opinions very different from their votes. The Senate, like the Assembly, is elected by the ballot.
Supposing, however, M. Buffet to succeed, what will be the result ? He does not himself fancy that he can secure a majority in the Chamber, where Paris, for instance, has twenty representatives instead of only one Delegate; and if the Chamber is Radical, what will he have secured ? Only the alliance of a Senate which will be shown by the popular elections to be out of accord with the people, in which the ablest men will almost certainly be Republicans, and in which, merely to keep his voting-power together, he must make incessant concessions to the Bonapartists, who, when the pinch comes, will have no more regard for him than the Republicans have, want- ing, as they will, not an improvement in the Constitution, but a radical change in its essential features. He will have to secure the power of dissolution by courting a party which he cannot join without exciting an insurrection, and which, unless he joins it, would send him to Cayenne as soon as M. Gambetta. He relies on the law which enables the Senate to coerce the Chamber, and forgets that Louis Philippe's Peers and Napoleon's Senators had precisely the same rights—for, be it remembered, the new Senate cannot dissolve, but only give an assent to the Dissolution, which the Peers and the old Senators would have given—and that, nevertheless, neither body had the smallest influence over France. When the struggle came, their only function was to disappear. The new Senate, if elected by the people and representing their views, moderated by experience and knowledge of affairs, may be a great power ; but if it is elected by Prefects, and represents nothing except the Government, its sources of strength will be dried up, and it will be dependent absolutely for prestige upon its alliance with a Government which, if it had, like Louis Philippe and Napoleon, the right of Dissolution, would be just as strong without it. M. Buffet wants to derive addi- tional strength from the Senate, and to secure it, cuts away its moral authority till its weakness will be a burden rather than a support. He is like a man who puts on a cloak for warmth, and because it is comfortable imagines that its weight increases his walking-power. We do not believe, as we have said, that he has calculated immediate results rightly, suspecting that he is not served as his followers serve M. Gambetta, who amidst all this wears an appearance of satisfied tranquillity, and tells his friends to attend now to the elections of the Chamber ; bnt admitting M. Buffet to be right, he will only have secured the support of a body without hold on the country, and with only this attachment to himself, that out of him something may be squeezed to make restoration easier for Napoleon IV. He exults in the prospect of a " devoted Senate," and forgets that in France no ruler who has ever fallen has been without one.
Previous page
