THE VICTORY OF THE FRENCH MODERATES.
THE French journals ascribe the victory of the Moderates in the French Assembly in great measure to the strong letters received from the country by the Deputies against the overthrow of M. Dufaure ;—in other words, the provinces, though heartily Republican, are heartily moderate also. They see no advantage,—great disadvantage,—in needless political sensation. They were determined to make the Senate Re- publican, lest it should conspire to give France a sensation in the direction of reaction. They were determined to prevent that, at all hazards. But though they would support any action, however strong, and even sensational, that might be necessary to prevent that, they are by no means disposed to give any excuse for needless sensation on the other side,—any excuse for a genuine panic among the parties which, though sincerely Monarchical in principle, are willing to abide by the actual laws and to obey the actual Government. France wants repose. M. Dufaure's Government, if it will but act upon its avowed inten- tion of removing all really intractable officials who use their position to undermine the Constitution, can give it repose, and more repose than any party whose antecedents are of a kind to suggest agitation and alarm. The peasantry of France believe in the Republic. But they do not believe in the kind of Republic which turns men's heads, and transforms politicians into dreamers. On the contrary, they prefer a Republic be- cause it is the form of government which will reflect most perfectly the slow caution and anxious hesitation of the great mass of thrifty Frenchmen ; because it will put the most powerful drag on the sudden military effer- vescences of the capital ; because it will present the most effective breakwater to the mad onset of the hungry and thrift- less, who grasp at communistic ideas as the starving man grasps at food, and who hope to leap at one bound from penury to luxury ; because it will be both a bulwark against Imperialism, which snatched the cup of physical prosperity from the lips of France just after the people had begun to appreciate what it meant, and a bulwark against revolution,—because, in short, it will represent all the tardiness and prudence, not to say even the carking economy, which enters so deeply into the grain of average Frenchmen, and will yet give them the enjoyment of a sense of great national power and almost unprecedented national stability.
This, at least, is the manner in which we interpret M. Dufaure's victory in the French Assembly. It was not an absolute and unconditional victory. M. Dufaure understood the temper of the people with whom he had to deal too well, not to admit frankly that the final decision of the French nation in favour of the Republic ought to involve a final revision of the official subordinates of the State, and an exclusion of every element in it which was fairly open to the charge of disloyalty to the Republican form of government. Only he claimed the right to apply this principle with moderation and lenity. He would not inflict grievous hardship on respectable and worthy men, who might be easily superannuated in a very short time without the infliction of such hardship ; "when I have to do," he said, "with a man who has been twenty-six or twenty-eight years in the magistracy, who is on the point of reaching in a few years the age of superannuation, who has long acted in conformity with the austere rules of the magis- tracy, but who has once been drawn into political errors by the pressure of his superiors, I cannot treat him in the same way as an official only recently appointed, without ante- cedents, and who has not devoted his whole life to the per- formance of his duties. If you think I have been too mild in some cases, look into them, and you will find the motive ; and I can assure you that when you see it, you will approve it, and say you would have done the same. A public servant, I must repeat, must not be an enemy of the Government in whose service he is employed." No wonder that, with these pro- mises before them, M. Dufaure's plea for lenity towards men who through a long career had discharged their duty well, till the President of the Republic, Marshal MacMahon, appealed to them to support him personally, assuring them that they should be protected against the consequences which their acts might bring upon them, from the party then in Opposition, was favourably listened to. Nothing can be more for the interest of the Republic than that its enemies should see that it is not only strong enough to prevail against them, but strong enough to temper its precautions with generosity, and yet to fear nothing for the result. M. Dufaure has pledged himself that he will allow no trifling with the will of the State. But when he adds that it is not inconsistent with that promise to
pass over single instances of short-coming in men who have given their life to the service of the public he is as prudent as he is magnanimous. A Government which can only sub- jugate its foes, and cannot afford to conciliate unsteady friends, has not the confidence in itself which is essential to true stability. The French people have no fancy for a new Administration "of ccuabat." They want to see the feuds of political society dwindling, instead of constantly renewed. The time for the closing of the great political chasms is, they think, come. For the future, there must be no disobedience, no spirit of disloyalty ; but in those who are willing to be loyal, a false step or two in the past, taken under great official temptation, may well be overlooked. Those who are not strong enough to forgive, will hardly be strong enough to prevail.
It is evident that this marked moderation of the Republicans in the constituencies is to some extent a surprise to the leaders in Paris. Even M. Gambetta himself, who doubtless desired to prevent the fall of the Government, but who cannot afford to lose the confidence of the energetic Liberals, thought it safest to vote against the Government in the first division,—the division in which it won by the narrower majority of 54,— and abstained from voting on the vote of confidence, when the Government gained the greater majority of 102. Per- haps even he, with all his minute knowledge of France, had not fully reckoned on the growing Conservatism of the rural Republicans, on their wish to see political passion tranquillised, commerce fostered, and the Church, though not indeed fully appeased by the concessions of the State, at least on such terms with it that no bitter strife shall have to be waged in the bosom of half the families of France. It is not easy for Liberals who have been half iden- tified with the Republicanism of propagandist times, who have hymned the National Convention, and glorified the memory of Mirabeau and Danton, to accommodate their minds to the new ideas which France is beginning to asso- ciate with the re'ginze of the Republic,—the ideas in favour with a toiling peasantry who have invested their small savings in the French Rentes, and do not wish to see the Rentes falling ; who are even more anxious that the Government should be quite settled than that it should be quite to their mind ; who have not the sharp, logical intelligence of the journalists, nor even the power to appreciate the biting sarcasm of French wit ; who like even such reforms as they really desire to be slowly and gradually carried into effect, so that there may be no shock and no sensation in the process. The peasantry, in short, desire politics not to interfere with business, but rather to be so managed as to afford a certain steady residuum of quiet interest, after the greater interests of the home, and the farm, and the commune, and the depart- ment,—of the school and the vineyard, and the country roads and the railways,—have been satisfactorily settled. And to Radicals of the old school in France, the Radicals accustomed to think of the French blouses and the French writers of epi- grams as their main strength, this is a very new and a some- what puzzling state of affairs. Of course, it is not new to M. Gambetta, who treats the commercial traveller as a genuine power in the State, and has, we may be sure, got all that can be got out of these commercial travellers, concerning the ideas which prevail in the millions of rural homes to whom his party owes the decision in favour of a Democratic Republic. But even M. Gambetta probably finds it somewhat diffi- cult to mediate between the ideas of Belleville and the ideas of the peasant proprietary, and sees that it will be no easy matter so to steer his course as to keep, for any length of time, the confidence of both these sections of widely divergent demo- cratic opinion. Hence, we suppose, the uncertain and rather pendulous politics of the Republique Francaise ; and hence, too, M. Gambetta's eloquent silence, and the vote given in one division for a motion intended to reproach the Government for its tardiness, but withheld altogether in the next, when those of his party who voted at all, voted in opposition to an expression of confidence in M. Dufaure. So much as this may have been due, perhaps, to the Radicals of Paris. More than this would have alienated the Democratic Conservatives of rural France.
Previous page
