THE NEW FRENCH PRESIDENT AND THE CONSTITUTION.
ALTHOUGH we write before the event, that is to say on the day of the meeting at Versailles, there seems to be little doubt that M. Millerand will be elected the new President of the French Republic. All friends of France have watched with sorrow the illness of M. Paul Desohanel. Not often has a President been elected who seemed, likely to fill his office with quite so much grace and learning ; indeed, M. Deschanel was an ideal man to be French • President in that he had both the gift of speech and the power to gratify the strong French sense of symbolism in public life. But it was not to be. M. Deachanel's illness made his resignation inevitable, and. not the least dignified act of his career was the letter in which he announced his determination and described his grief at not being able to serve " adored France " in the highest office. The general acceptance of M. 111illerand's candidature for the Presidency is remarkable because it is the first time a Presidential candidate has associated himself with a definite political programme. M. Millerand laid down the conditions on which alone he would consent to be President. As the Paris correspondent of the Times says, M. Millerand repeats the programme which he issued at the General Election in November. He then outlined a whole scheme of constitutional reform, one of the objects of which was to prevent the further encroachment of Parliament on the domain of the Executive. M. Mlllerand, to. quote the Times correspondent, would like to see the President " not merely the chief Parliamentarian but actually the real representative of France." For this purpose he advocates an extension of the franchise on which the President is elected. The President would be chosen not merely, as now, by the members of the Chamber and the Senate, but by delegates from the regional councils, the large corporations of employers and workmen, agricultural, commercial and industrial interest% and also by repre- sentatives of the intellectual professions and the artistic classes. Nor would M. Millerand confine franchise reform to the election of the President. He hopes that the prin- ciple of professional representation will be introduced into Parliament. It is strange, by the way, that the Socialists should now be opposing a man who suggests such a reform as this, for " vocational representation " is one of the popular socialistic ideas of the day. The explanation, of course, is that M. Millerand embeds this idea in a great many other proposals which the Socialists dislike. Needless to say, all these franchise reforms would take a long time to build up, and when we write the new President is being elected on the old system by both Houses of Parliament in Congress at Versailles. M. Millerand, with all his conditions, is supported by the whole of the Monarchist Right, by the Conservative Centre and by moderate Radicals. Tile opposition is composed roughly of the pure Socialists and the Radical Socialists. If M. Millerand be. elected, M. Briand will probably be the leading force in the next Ministry. It does not follow' that M. Briand will be Prime Minister, but the ideas of the Ministry, whatever form it may take, are likely to be those of M. Briand. It is a commonplace of biographers that the normal tendency of political man is to mellow throughout his career—for the firebrand. youth to end as the sage and moderate Elder Statesman. This is by no means always true, for every one can think of several British statesmen who have changed their early Conservatism to strong Radicalism in later life. But so far as it is true that it is characteristic of politicians to moderate their views with experience, M. Millerand is obviously the very type. He first became known as a politician in the early eighties, wheir he was a Socialist pure, and simple and took part in organ- izing miners' strikes. Ten years later, about 1893, he was the guiding spirit in bringing about the junction of the Socialists with their Radical allies, and for several years afterwards, in collaboration with M. Jaures, he was a leader of this alliance. Drastic social reform without revolution was the purpose of his party. He did a really great work for French Labour while all the time interesting himself in " high politics " and trying to ensure the safety and credit of France. For example, he joined the Ministry of 1898 for the revision of the Dreyfus Case. He was also a member of M. Waldeck-Rousseau's " Ministry of Repub- lican Defence " from 1899-1902. He joined that Ministry with the full sanction of his Socialist colleagues, Messrs. Jaures, Viviani, and Briand. By that time, however, he had already become too sound and temperate a statesman to satisfy the extremists of his party, and in 1901 he was expelled from the Congress of the Socialist Party by the revolutionary majority. Messrs. Viviani and Briand suffered the same fate. That episode did not prevent M. Millerand from continuing his services to Labour. In a sense it may greatly have helped him, because the Right and Centre well understood that he was above all a good Frenchman who desired only reforms which were corn- - patible with the security of France. It thus came about that be had not much difficulty in setting up Labour Councils, shortening the working day, and introducing other practical changes which were somewhat overdue in France twenty years ago. The part played by M. Millerand during and since the war is too recent to need recalling.
The conditions which M. Millerand laid down for accept- ing the Presidency recall a very old French controversy, and it is possible that this controversy may be reopened before long in some striking way. The French Constitu- tion gives the President a little more authority than is possessed by our Constitutional Monarch, but he has not nearly so much power as belongs to the President of the United States, who can be more nearly an autocrat than seems credible under a Republican system. Ministers in France are responsible to Parliament and not to the President, whereas in the United States the President is quite independent of Congress, and members of the Executive are responsible to him and not to Congress. The American President, as we all know from the familiar Presidential Messages to Congress, lays down the line of policy. Whether M. Millerand contemplates claiming for himself something comparable with the functions of the American President we do not know, but the Figaro seems to think that he desires to originate policy, and it approves of this intention. Few Englishmen, we imagine, can contemplate the constitu- tional difficulties inherent in the Presidencies of France and America without being devoutly thankful for our own simple and satisfactory system. Since it has been accepted that the British Sovereign acts invariably upon the advice of his Ministers there has not been the least trouble. Moreover, we are saved the expenditure, at regular intervals, of an enormous amount of money and nervous energy on Presidential elections. Yet again, the principle of an hereditary President, with its accompanying idea of personal allegiance, is an untold convenience in the govern- ance of an Empire such as ours containing millions of back- ward subjects. Finally, our hereditary Presidency enjoys both respect and affection because, being rooted in the past and standing for the continuity and the evolution of our institutions, it is bound up with the whole history of the nation. For our part we do not suppose for a moment that M. Millerand wants to reopen vital questions which have long been regarded as settled. At the same time, there can be no doubt that the French Parliament has trespassed a good deal upon the Presidential field, and the tendency has been for the President to become a less prominent figure than he was designed to be, and, we must add, a figure less suited to the French lilting for the heroic or personal gesture. In saying this we do not in the least mean that there is room for two kings in France any more than in Brentford. It should be quite possible to let the President be more the representative of the whole French people without constitutional retrogression. Indeed, there might even be a recovery of something which the constitution provided for but has lost. The best remembered attempt to obtain more power for the French Presidency was when Marshal MacMahon dismissed his Premier, M. Jules Simon. Liter- ally the action of MacMahon cannot be said to have infringed the Constitution, but it was nevertheless regarded as a high-handed and unwarrantable intervention by the President in the interests of the Clericals. Apart from the constitutional question, ' the incident became famous, because it was then that Gambetta exclaimed : " Le Clericalistne ; voila l'ennemi " MacMabon dissolved the Chamber, having duly obtained the authorization of the Senate, but both the country (at the General Election) and the newly elected Chamber showed their strong dis- approval of the President's acts. Probably all this offers no very strong analogy for to-day, because when MacMahon was President the question of " Monarchy versus Republic " was not yet settled, and every election and every act of the President had to be read in the light of the fact that a Pretender was lurking in the background. The Third French Republic of France, although French Ministries notoriously do not have long lives, has become one of the most stable political systems in the world. Without in any way injuring that stability—the last thing which ho would wish to do—M. Millerand might very well show the way to make the French President on more frequent occasions the true symbolical representative and spokes- man of the nation.
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