TOPICS OF THE DAY.
GENERAL BOULANGER'S FLIGHT. THE flight of General Boulanger, whether excusable or not, seems to us more natural than it does to most of our contemporaries. It has been evident for some days past that whatever were the original views of the General and his advisers as to the possibility of overawing the Govern- ment by an armed demonstration, they had finally resolved to await the dissolution, and base their revolution upon a legal vote. It has also been evident that the Government must bring General Boulanger to trial, and would, in order to prevent disturbance, subject him to a preventive arrest. It was too absurd, as we have repeatedly remarked, to subject M. Wroulede, who is an honest fanatic, and M. Naquet, who is only a second-in- command, to a prosecution, yet leave the General at liberty with a new staff to carry out all his plans. The " further step" was a logical necessity, and the moment it was known that it would be taken, the alterna- tives before the " National Committee," the General's Privy Council, were reduced to three. Their leader might descend into the streets, using the Patriotic League to overawe the Chambers ; or he might submit to his arrest and subsequent sentence of imprisonment ; or he might quit France for the interval before a General Election. The first alternative was discarded, it may be because the party felt doubtful of the troops, or it may be because they have the capacity to perceive that power may be much more solidly built upon a legal vote. A coup d'etat could only produce a dictatorship, but a vote may produce a Constitution in which the President shall have all the reality of power and little of its odium. The second, and to Englishmen the natural alternative, was also rejected, probably for three reasons. The General does not trust the Senate, -which he has frequently insulted, and steadily striven to destroy, and in which he has but a single partisan, the Jewish Senator, M. Naquet. He thought that the imprisonment might last six months—that is, till October—during the whole of which time his party would be without its Commander-in-Chief, and he himself im- mured in a disagreeable seclusion. The accusation of cowardice is only rhetorical, and we do not suppose the General believes, as M. Naquet professes to do, that he is in danger from either knife or poison ; but to a man who lives a luxurious and over-full life in the very centre of affairs, confinement in a fortress, which is the legal penalty for " plotting against the State," can never be an agreeable prospect. And finally, he was afraid that during the trial, some of the mili- tary allies whom he has evidently, on his own admissions to interviewers, tried to secure, might be dangerously com- promised, to the ruin of all his ultimate plans. The first two alternatives rejected, there remained only the third, and the General promptly accepted it, probably choosing Belgium as his place of retreat because it is more accessible, and because the little State is just now ruled by a clerical Government which has considerable sympathy with his designs, or at least with the parties hostile to a Radical Republic. It will be noted that the students of Brussels were very promptly prevented from making a demonstration against him, and it will, we think, be found that the Belgian Government, if asked to expel the refugee, will plead the right of asylum with some energy.
The flight is natural enough, but as to its wisdom there will, of course, be two opinions. Most Englishmen believe that it will greatly damage the General, who will be accused of cowardice, of selfishness, and of want of patriotism, and who will in his exile run the risk of being forgotten ; but that view may prove to be ill-founded. So far as we understand French feeling, flight from a tribunal or a political enemy is not considered cowardly, most politicians of eminence having fled at some period or other of their lives. Neither Louis Blanc nor Victor Hugo were ever taunted with cowardice for flying, nor, in the height of the Revolutionary passion, was that among the accusa- tions flung against the émigrés, a good many of whom were also guilty of military desertion. Flight, in fact, is considered, among a people accustomed to revolutions, as a move in the political game, just as it was among our- selves during the seventy years of the Jacobite con- spiracies. As to desertion, the friends whom the General
leaves behind are not more but lees liable to punishment
through his departure, for they can hardly be tried before the Senate ; and the Government, relieved of immediate danger, will become less energetic, perhaps reveal some dangerous internal divisions. M. Bouchez is not the only great official who regards the prosecution before a tribunal to be created for the purpose as a violation of that regu- larity of legal procedure which a Republic ought to respect. The real objection to the flight is the danger lest France should forget the absent favourite, or possibly find some other leader,—M. Antoine, for example, the Deputy for Metz in the Reichsrath, who has just renounced his German nationality and returned to Paris. We should think that danger to the Boulangists, under ordinary circumstances, very serious ; but the reply of General Boulanger's friends is not without its force. They say that imprisonment in a fortress and residence in Belgium will be, in the eyes of the electors, much the same thing, with this important difference, that in Belgium the General can receive information, see his friends, issue orders, and, above all, prepare measures for his return whenever sum- moned. An unexpected appearance in Paris may become essential, and will be possible to a resident in Brussels, just as it was to the Comte de Chambord, but impossible to a prisoner under military guard in Melun or the Chliteau d'If. True, the General loses the éclat to be gained from a great State trial, and all the chances which might arise from growing excitement in Paris ; but then, he also avoids the deadly cross-examination of a French tribunal, and the chance that witnesses might betray him under terror of the police. The General tells his interviewers that he has never broken any law ; but he can hardly have organised an entire party for the overthrow of the existing regime, a party which must include many soldiers, without having brought himself within the grip of a Code which was drawn up, among other objects, specially to protect the State from secret conspiracy.. We should think it probable, on the whole, that the Boulangists understood their position as well as their critics ; but, of course, the true question is the effect of the flight upon that unknown quantity, the minds of the peasant electors. It is quite possible that they may con- sider their favourite a defeated man, who has displayed weakness, to say the least, in running away, and may desert his cause ; and in that case, the Bonapartists and Legitimists will probably inherit much of the support the General will lose. They are, however, at present, as Mr. Hamerton affirms in this month's Contemporary Review, strongly upon his side ; and their judgment may be that " those rascals in Paris," whom they never trust, have driven the patriotic General away, probably in obedience to orders from Bismarck, who has not been dislodged by the eighteen years of peace from his position as the peasants' supreme bogey, invisible but omnipresent, and the cause of every disaster. In that case, there will be no chatter, and no forgetting, and when the elections at last arrive, it will be found that the General's nominees, standing in every district with no programme except his right to return, will number two-thirds of the new Chamber. The peasantry have shown that kind of determination twice in the past twenty years, and if they show it again, there will be practically no appeal. All depends in the end upon them, and the great drama now acting in Paris, exciting as it may be, and full of risks, is still practically and essentially a grand issue of electoral addresses to the least instructed of the community.
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