THE MUDDLE IN FRANCE. T HE deaths of French Ministries are
uniformly followed by at least a partial resurrection. A Cabinet never disappears altogether. It is shaken up and redistributed ; two or three of the least important members are left out, and their places filled by Deputies of the same way of thinking. There is no such thing in France as a regular Opposition. The Government has opponents in abundance, but they have no cohesion among themselves, no subordina- tion to a leader, no corporate life. Even in England, such a defeat as that which M. de Freycinet sustained last week would have led to a good deal of confusion. The Govern- ment has been beaten by a coalition of extreme parties, and, ordinarily speaking, you may do anything with coalitions except form a Ministry out of them. There is nothing odd, therefore, in the fact that M. Carnot has not asked M.
Clemenceau to become President of the Council, or sug- gested M. de Mun for the Ministry of Public Worship. What is odd, is that he has not seen in the ill-fortune of the late Ministry a warning that to be a Republican, it is no longer necessary to be anti-clerical. If M. de Freycinet had not attacked the Church, M. Cl4menceau's hostility would have been of no moment. The Moderate Republicans would all have been with him, and only a very small pro- portion of the Right would have gone against him. He fell because he was neither anti-clerical enough to please the Extreme Left, nor clerical enough to satisfy any section of the Right. Yet, in spite of this lesson, all the negotiations of the past few days have been directed to forming a Ministry which shall as nearly as possible reproduce the state of things which was proved to be impossible on Thursday week. M. Bouvier, who was at first selected, was to keep the leading members of the late Cabinet, and all that is distinctive in the late policy. He was to hunt with the hounds just so far as to frighten the hare, and to run with the hare just long enough to make the hounds dis- trust him. A French President never seems to try more than one experiment. Each time that it fails, he painfully sets to work to repeat it. Perhaps we shall gain some light on the motive of these futile negotiations if we go back upon the old puzzle, what it was that induced M. de Freycinet to pull himself up in the policy of conciliation to which he certainly inclined in the summer. We say " certainly inclined," because all that is known of M. Carnot forbids us to think that the tranquillising speeches he made in the course of his tours were made except in concert with his Ministers. At that time, therefore, M. de Freycinet was all for conciliation. The next thing to note is the moment and circumstances of his change. It took place at a time when it was doubtful, to say the least, how it would be received even by the enemies of the Church. The French pilgrims had just been insulted by the Roman populace, and it was not quite clear whether hatred to the Church or hatred to the Italians would carry the day in France. At all events, inaction on the part of the French Cabinet would have seemed natural to the majority of Frenchmen ; while any international pre- cautions which Ministers might have thought necessary could have been taken more effectually by private com- munication with the French Bishops. What, then, could have been the reason of the sudden invocation of an obsolete provision of the Concordat, and the various acts of hostility to the Church that followed, culminating as they did in the extraordinary Bill for the virtual suppression of the religious Orders P It is quite clear that the change was not due to any belief on the part of M. de Freycinet that the approximation of the Church to the Republic was a mere blind. He knew a great deal too much of what was going on behind the scenes, to be deceived in this way. France has a repre- sentative at the Vatican—the French Republic being in this respect more rational than the English Monarchy—and M. de Freycinet was doubtless kept informed of that growing purpose on the part of the Pope which has at last found formal expression in the Encyclical to the French Bishops. Nor is it probable that the Minister was actuated by any rooted conviction that the Church would demand as the price of reconciliation, a larger amount of liberty than the Republic could safely concede. Whether he had such a conviction is another question, and on that we say nothing. But even assuming that he had, it could not have been this that determined him in choosing his time for quarrelling afresh with the Church. He would rather have waited until the Church asked something in refusing which he would have the.support of a united Republican Party.
If, then, M. de Freycinet did not think the overtures of the Church insincere, and if the belief that they would prove impracticable supplied no reason for resorting to overt hostilities, what remains by way of explanation except the theory that what M. de Freycinet feared was that the Church and the Republic might become too good friends ? This seems to us to supply at all events a plausible theory of M. de Freycinet's action,—not, indeed, a theory for which anything can be said from the point of view of patriotism, but one which has much to recommend it from the point of view of party strategy. A complete reconciliation with the Church would mean a complete reconciliation with the greater part of the Conservatives. The Right would cease to be the mere faction it now is. It would no longer be outside the Republic, and by consequence it would cease to be a pantile negligeable in the affairs of the Republic. It would look forward to forming a Ministry of its own, to overthrowing Radical Cabinets, not as now for the benefit of other Cabinets not really distinguishable from those dis- placed, but for the benefit of the party overthrowing them. It is easy to see why this prospect should be distasteful to the present holders of power. To them it would simply mean a notice to quit. As regards men, the Opportunists are the most completely played out of all French parties. There is not a man among them of even fifth-rate im- portance who does not put ancien ministre on his card. But so long as the breach with the Church is unhealed, it is from their ranks that every Ministerial vacancy has to be filled up. The Extreme Left is out of the running ; the Right is out of the running; even the Moderate Republicans are out of the running. Now, it is plain that to a party which has thus used up its best material, it is very convenient to maintain a proscription of this kind. It is not merely a question of ability ; it is a question of social position and social influence. The " classes " are now in a great measure excluded from French public life, not so much by any con- scious determination of the masses that they shall not bear their part in the business of government, but simply by the fact that they have not yet accepted the institutions under which the business of government is carried on. Once let these institutions be accepted, and the next Chamber of Deputies might be of a very different complexion from the present. Last autumn, M. de Freycinet was probably convinced that if nothing was done to prevent it, this change was on the eve of being accomplished, and according to the theory we have suggested, it was to prevent this that he changed his tactics so suddenly. We admit that it is a cynical explanation, but it is the only one which seems at all to meet the facts of the case. For some reason or other, M. de Freycinet must have wished to check the drift of the Conservative Party towards the Republic, and the only way in which he could hope to do this was by renewing the attack upon the Church. It was the ecclesiastical policy of successive Republican Cabinets that had been mainly instrumental in keeping the Con- servatives at a distance, and if it could be made to appear that this ecclesiastical policy was inseparable from Republican forms, at a distance they would still remain. Hence the letter of the Minister of the Interior to the Bishops, the trial of the Archbishop of Aix, the threat of M. de Freycinet to ask for more powers to con- trol the clergy if those he had should prove insufficient, and the proposed legislation against the religions Orders.
It is true that the scheme has failed, but it has failed against all expectation. Had the Pope been only a little less patient, a. little less far-sighted, a little less determined, it would have succeeded. As it is, the reconciliation has gone on, notwithstanding M. de Freycinet's efforts ; and he has been reduced, when defending the Association Bill last week, to arguing that it could not be so very bad, or the Pope would not have spoken with so much modera- tion in his letter to the French Bishops. But the fact that a trick has failed is no evidence that it has not been tried.
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