Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Fox, George" to "France" (part 4)

Napoleon began by removing the gag which was keeping the country in silence. On the 24th of November 1860, “by a coup d’état matured during his solitary meditations,” like a conspirator in his love of hiding his mysterious thoughts even from his ministers, he granted to the Chambers the right to vote an address annually in answer to the speech from the throne, and to the press the right of reporting parliamentary debates. He counted on the latter concession to hold in check the growing Catholic opposition, which was becoming more and more alarmed by the policy of laissez-faire practised by the emperor in Italy. But the government majority already showed some signs of independence. The right of voting on the budget by sections, granted by the emperor in 1861, was a new weapon given to his adversaries. Everything conspired in their favour: the anxiety of those candid friends who were calling attention to the defective budget; the commercial crisis, aggravated by the American Civil War; and above all, the restless spirit of the emperor, who had annoyed his opponents in 1860 by insisting on an alliance with Great Britain in order forcibly to open the Chinese ports for trade, in 1863 by his ill-fated attempt to put down a republic and set up a Latin empire in Mexico in favour of the archduke Maximilian of Austria, and from 1861 to 1863 by embarking on colonizing experiments in Cochin China and Annam.

The same inconsistencies occurred in the emperor’s European politics. The support which he had given to the Italian cause had aroused the eager hopes of other nations. The proclamation of the kingdom of Italy on the 18th of February 1861 after the rapid annexation of Tuscany and the kingdom of Naples had proved the danger of half-measures. But when a concession, however narrow, had been made to the liberty of one nation, it could hardly be refused to the no less legitimate aspirations of the rest. In 1863 these “new rights” again clamoured loudly for recognition, in Poland, in Schleswig and Holstein, in Italy, now indeed united, but with neither frontiers nor capital, and in the Danubian principalities. In order to extricate himself from the Polish impasse, the emperor again had recourse to his expedient—always fruitless because always inopportune—of a congress. He was again unsuccessful: England refused even to admit the principle of a congress, while Austria, Prussia and Russia gave their adhesion only on conditions which rendered it futile, i.e. they reserved the vital questions of Venetia and Poland.

Thus Napoleon had yet again to disappoint the hopes of Italy, let Poland be crushed, and Germany triumph over Denmark in the Schleswig-Holstein question. These inconsistencies resulted in a combination of the opposition parties, Catholic, Liberal and Republican, in the Union libérale. The elections of May-June 1863 gained the Opposition forty seats and a leader, Thiers, who at once urgently gave voice to its demand for “the necessary liberties.”

It would have been difficult for the emperor to mistake the importance of this manifestation of French opinion, and in view of his international failures, impossible to repress it. The sacrifice of Persigny, minister of the interior, who was responsible for the elections, the substitution for the ministers without portfolio of a sort of presidency of the council filled by Rouher, the “Vice-Emperor,” and the nomination of V. Duruy, an anti-clerical, as minister of public instruction, in reply to those attacks of the Church which were to culminate in the Syllabus of 1864, all indicated a distinct rapprochement between the emperor and the Left. But though the opposition represented by Thiers was rather constitutional than dynastic, there was another and irreconcilable opposition, that of the amnestied or voluntarily exiled republicans, of whom Victor Hugo was the eloquent mouthpiece. Thus those who had formerly constituted the governing classes were again showing signs of their ambition to govern. There appeared to be some risk that this movement among the bourgeoisie might spread to the people. As Antaeus recruited his strength by touching the earth Napoleon believed that he would consolidate his menaced power by again turning to the labouring masses, by whom that power had been established.

This industrial policy he embarked upon as much from motives of interest as from sympathy, out of opposition to the bourgeoisie, which was ambitious of governing or desirous of his overthrow. His course was all the easier, since he had only to exploit the prejudices of the working classes. They had never forgotten the loi Chapelle of 1791, which by forbidding all combinations among the workmen had placed them at the mercy of their employers, nor had they forgotten how the limited suffrage had conferred upon capital a political monopoly which had put it out of reach of the law, nor how each time they had left their position of rigid isolation in order to save the Charter or universal suffrage, the triumphant bourgeoisie had repaid them at the last with neglect. The silence of public opinion under the Empire and the prosperous state of business had completed the separation of the labour party from the political parties. The visit of an elected and paid labour delegation to the Universal Exhibition of 1862 in London gave the emperor an opportunity for re-establishing relations with that party, and these relations were to his mind all the more profitable, since the labour party, by refusing to associate their social and industrial claims with the political ambitions of the bourgeoisie, maintained a neutral attitude between the parties, and could, if necessary, divide them, while by its keen criticism of society it aroused the conservative instincts of the bourgeoisie and consequently checked their enthusiasm for liberty. A law of the 23rd of May 1863 gave the workmen the right, as in England, to save money by creating co-operative societies. Another law, of the 25th of May 1864, gave them the right to enforce better conditions of labour by organizing strikes. Still further, the emperor permitted the workmen to imitate their employers by establishing unions for the permanent protection of their interests. And finally, when the ouvriers, with the characteristic French tendency to insist on the universal application of a theory, wished to substitute for the narrow utilitarianism of the English trade-unions the ideas common to the wage-earning classes of the whole world, he put no obstacles in the way of their leader M. Tolain’s plan for founding an International Association of Workers (Société Internationale des Travailleurs). At the same time he encouraged the provision made by employers for thrift and relief and for improving the condition of the working-classes.

Thus assured of support, the emperor, through the mouthpiece of M. Rouher, who was a supporter of the absolutist régime, was able to refuse all fresh claims on the part of the Liberals. He was aided by the cessation of the industrial crisis as the American civil war came to an end, by the apparent closing of the Roman question by the convention of the 15th of September, which guaranteed to the papal states the protection of Italy, and finally by the treaty of the 30th of October 1864, which temporarily put an end to the crisis of the Schleswig-Holstein question. But after 1865 the momentary agreement which had united Austria and Prussia for the purpose of administering the conquered duchies gave place to a silent antipathy which foreboded a rupture. Yet, though the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 was not unexpected, its rapid termination and fateful outcome came as a severe and sudden shock to France. Napoleon had hoped to gain fresh prestige for his throne and new influence for France by an intervention at the proper moment between combatants equally matched and mutually exhausted. His calculations were upset and his hopes dashed by the battle of Sadowa (Königgrätz) on the 4th of July. The treaty of Prague put an end to the secular rivalry of Habsburg and Hohenzollern for the hegemony of Germany, which had been France’s opportunity; and Prussia could afford to humour the just claims of Napoleon by establishing between her North German Confederation and the South German states the illusory frontier of the Main. The belated efforts of the French emperor to obtain “compensation” on the left bank of the Rhine, at the expense of the South German states, made matters worse. France realized with an angry surprise that on her eastern frontier had arisen a military power by which her influence, if not her existence, was threatened; that in the name of the principle of nationality unwilling populations had been brought under the sway of a dynasty by tradition militant and aggressive, by tradition the enemy of France; that this new and threatening power had destroyed French influence in Italy, which owed the acquisition of Venetia to a Prussian alliance and to Prussian arms; and that all this had been due to Napoleon, outwitted and outmanœuvred at every turn, since his first interview with Bismarck at Biarritz in October 1865.

All confidence in the excellence of imperial régime vanished at once. Thiers and Jules Favre as representatives of the Opposition denounced in the Legislative Body the blunders of 1866. Émile Ollivier split up the official majority by the amendment of the 45, and gave it to be understood that a reconciliation with the Empire would be impossible until the emperor would grant entire liberty. The recall of the French troops from Rome, in accordance with the convention of 1864, also led to further attacks by the Ultramontane party, who were alarmed for the papacy. Napoleon III. felt the necessity for developing “the great act of 1860” by the decree of the 19th of January 1867. In spite of Rouher, by a secret agreement with Ollivier the right of interpellation was restored to the Chambers. Reforms in press supervision and the right of holding meetings were promised. It was in vain that M. Rouher tried to meet the Liberal opposition by organizing a party for the defence of the Empire, the “Union dynastique.” But the rapid succession of international reverses prevented him from effecting anything.

The year 1867 was particularly disastrous for the Empire. In Mexico “the greatest idea of the reign” ended in a humiliating withdrawal before the ultimatum of the United States, while Italy, relying on her new alliance with Prussia and already forgetful of her promises, was mobilizing the revolutionary forces to complete her unity by conquering Rome. The chassepots of Mentana were needed to check the Garibaldians. And when the imperial diplomacy made a belated attempt to obtain from the victorious Bismarck those territorial compensations on the Rhine, in Belgium and in Luxemburg, which it ought to have been possible to exact from him earlier at Biarritz, Benedetti added to the mistake of asking at the wrong time the humiliation of obtaining nothing (see Luxemburg). Napoleon did not dare to take courage and confess his weakness. And finally was seen the strange contrast of France, though reduced to such a state of real weakness, courting the mockery of Europe by a display of the external magnificence which concealed her decline. In the Paris transformed by Baron Haussmann and now become almost exclusively a city of pleasure and frivolity, the opening of the Universal Exhibition was marked by Berezowski’s attack on the tsar Alexander II., and its success was clouded by the tragic fate of the unhappy emperor Maximilian of Mexico. Well might Thiers exclaim, “There are no blunders left for us to make.”

But the emperor managed to commit still more, of which the consequences both for his dynasty and for France were irreparable. Old, infirm and embittered, continually keeping his ministers in suspense by the uncertainty and secrecy of his plans, surrounded by a people now bent almost entirely on pleasure, and urged on by a growing opposition, there now remained but two courses open to Napoleon III.: either to arrange a peace which should last, or to prepare for a decisive war. He allowed himself to drift in the direction of war, but without bringing things to a necessary state of preparation. It was in vain that Count Beust revived on behalf of the Austrian government the project abandoned by Napoleon since 1866 of a settlement on the basis of the status quo with reciprocal disarmament. Napoleon refused, on hearing from Colonel Stoffel, his military attaché at Berlin, that Prussia would not agree to disarmament. But he was more anxious than he was willing to show. A reconstitution of the military organization seemed to him to be necessary. This Marshal Niel was unable to obtain either from the Bonapartist Opposition, who feared the electors, in whom the old patriotism had given place to the commercial or cosmopolitan spirit, or from the Republican opposition, who were unwilling to strengthen the despotism. Both of them were blinded by party interest to the danger from outside.

The emperor’s good fortune had departed; he was abandoned by men and disappointed by events. He had vainly hoped that, though by the laws of May-June 1868, granting the freedom of the press and authorizing meetings, he had conceded the right of speech, he would retain the right of action; but he had played into the hands of his enemies. Victor Hugo’s Châtiments, the insults of Rochefort’s Lanterne, the subscription for the monument to Baudin, the deputy killed at the barricades in 1851, followed by Gambetta’s terrible speech against the Empire on the occasion of the trial of Delescluze, soon showed that the republican party was irreconcilable, and bent on the Republic. On the other hand, the Ultramontane party were becoming more and more discontented, while the industries formerly protected were equally dissatisfied with the free-trade reform. Worse still, the working classes had abandoned their political neutrality, which had brought them nothing but unpopularity, and gone over to the enemy. Despising Proudhon’s impassioned attacks on the slavery of communism, they had gradually been won over by the collectivist theories of Karl Marx or the revolutionary theories of Bakounine, as set forth at the congresses of the International. At these Labour congresses, the fame of which was only increased by the fact that they were forbidden, it had been affirmed that the social emancipation of the worker was inseparable from his political emancipation. Henceforth the union between the internationalists and the republican bourgeois was an accomplished fact. The Empire, taken by surprise, sought to curb both the middle classes and the labouring classes, and forced them both into revolutionary actions. On every side took place strikes, forming as it were a review of the effective forces of the Revolution.

The elections of May 1869, made during these disturbances, inflicted upon the Empire a serious moral defeat. In spite of the revival by the government of the cry of the red terror, Ollivier, the advocate of conciliation, was rejected by Paris, while 40 irreconcilables and 116 members of the Third Party were elected. Concessions had to be made to these, so by the senatus-consulte of the 8th of September 1869 a parliamentary monarchy was substituted for personal government. On the 2nd of January 1870 Ollivier was placed at the head of the first homogeneous, united and responsible ministry. But the republican party, unlike the country, which hailed this reconciliation of liberty and order, refused to be content with the liberties they had won; they refused all compromise, declaring themselves more than ever decided upon the overthrow of the Empire. The murder of the journalist Victor Noir by Pierre Bonaparte, a member of the imperial family, gave the revolutionaries their long desired opportunity (January 10). But the émeute ended in a failure, and the emperor was able to answer the personal threats against him by the overwhelming victory of the plebiscite of the 8th of May 1870.

But this success, which should have consolidated the Empire, determined its downfall. It was thought that a diplomatic success should complete it, and make the country forget liberty for glory. It was in vain that after the parliamentary revolution of the 2nd of January that prudent statesman Comte Daru revived, through Lord Clarendon, Count Beust’s plan of disarmament after Sadowa. He met with a refusal from Prussia and from the imperial entourage. The Empress Eugénie was credited with the remark, “If there is no war, my son will never be emperor.” The desired pretext was offered on the 3rd of July 1870 by the candidature of a Hohenzollern prince for the throne of Spain. To the French people it seemed that Prussia, barely mistress of Germany, was reviving against France the traditional policy of the Habsburgs. France, having rejected for dynastic reasons the candidature of a Frenchman, the duc de Montpensier, saw herself threatened with a German prince. Never had the emperor, now both physically and morally ill, greater need of the counsels of a clear-headed statesman and the support of an enlightened public opinion if he was to defeat the statecraft of Bismarck. But he could find neither.

Ollivier’s Liberal ministry, wishing to show itself as jealous for national interests as any absolutist ministry, bent upon doing something great, and swept away by the force of that opinion which it had itself set free, at once accepted the war as inevitable, and prepared for it with a light heart. In face of the decided declaration of the duc de Gramont, the minister for foreign affairs, before the Legislative Body of the 6th of July, Europe, in alarm, supported the efforts of French diplomacy and obtained the withdrawal of the Hohenzollern candidature. This did not suit the views either of the war party in Paris or of Bismarck, who wanted the other side to declare war. The ill-advised action of Gramont in demanding from King William one of those promises for the future which are humiliating but never binding, gave Bismarck his opportunity, and the king’s refusal was transformed by him into an insult by the “editing” of the Ems telegram. The chamber, in spite of the desperate efforts of Thiers and Gambetta, now voted by 246 votes to 10 in favour of the war.

France found herself isolated, as much through the duplicity of Napoleon as through that of Bismarck. The disclosure to the diets of Munich and Stuttgart of the written text of the claims laid by Napoleon on the territories of Hesse and Bavaria had since the 22nd of August 1866 estranged southern Germany from France, and disposed the southern states to sign the military convention with Prussia. Owing to a similar series of blunders, the rest of Europe had become hostile. Russia, which it had been Bismarck’s study both during and after the Polish insurrection of 1863 to draw closer to Prussia, learnt with annoyance, by the same indiscretion, how Napoleon was keeping his promises made at Stuttgart. The hope of gaining a revenge in the East for her defeat of 1856 while France was in difficulties made her decide on a benevolent neutrality. The disclosure of Benedetti’s designs of 1867 on Belgium and Luxemburg equally ensured an unfriendly neutrality on the part of Great Britain. The emperor counted at least on the alliance of Austria and Italy, for which he had been negotiating since the Salzburg interview (August 1867). But Austria, having suffered at his hands in 1859 and 1866, was not ready and asked for a delay before joining in the war; while the hesitating friendships of Italy could only be won by the evacuation of Rome. The chassepots of Mentana, Rouher’s “Never,” and the hostility of the Catholic empress to any secret article which should open to Italy the gates of the capital, deprived France of her last friend.

Marshal Leboeuf’s armies were no more effective than Gramont’s alliances. The incapacity of the higher officers of the French army, the lack of preparation for war at headquarters, the selfishness and shirking of responsibility on the part of the field officers, the absence of any fixed plan when failure to mobilize had destroyed all chance of the strong offensive which had been counted on, and the folly of depending on chance, as the emperor had so often done successfully, instead of scientific warfare, were all plainly to be seen as early as the insignificant engagement of Saarbrücken. Thus the French army proceeded by disastrous stages from Weissenburg, Forbach, Froeschweiler, Borny, Gravelotte, Noisseville and Saint-Privat to the siege of Metz and the slaughter at Illy. By the capitulation of Sedan the Empire lost its only support, the army, and fell. Paris was left unprotected and emptied of troops, with only a woman at the Tuileries, a terrified Assembly at the Palais-Bourbon, a ministry, that of Palikao, without authority, and leaders of the Opposition who fled as the catastrophe approached.

(P. W.)

The Third Republic 1870-1909

The Third Republic may be said to date from the revolution of the 4th of September 1870, when the republican deputies of Paris at the hôtel de ville constituted a provisional government under the presidency of General Trochu, military governor of the capital. The Empire had fallen, and the emperor was a prisoner in Germany. As, however, since the great Revolution régimes in France have been only passing expedients, not inextricably associated with the destinies of the people, but bound to disappear when accounted responsible for national disaster, the surrender of Louis Napoleon’s sword to William of Prussia did not disarm the country. Hostilities were therefore continued. The provisional government had to assume the part of a Committee of National Defence, and while insurrection was threatening in Paris, it had, in the face of the invading Germans, to send a delegation to Tours to maintain the relations of France with the outside world. Paris was invested, and for five months endured siege, bombardment and famine. Before the end of October the capitulation of Metz, by the treason of Marshal Bazaine, deprived France of the last relic of its regular army. With indomitable courage the garrison of Paris made useless sorties, while an army of irregular troops vainly essayed to resist the invader, who had reached the valley of the Loire. The acting Government of National Defence, thus driven from Tours, took refuge at Bordeaux, where it awaited the capitulation of Paris, which took place on the 29th of January 1871. The same day the preliminaries of peace were signed at Versailles, which, confirmed by the treaty of Frankfort of the 10th of May, transferred from France to Germany the whole of Alsace, excepting Belfort, and a large portion of Lorraine, including Metz, with a money indemnity of two hundred millions sterling.

On the 13th of February 1871 the National Assembly, elected after the capitulation of Paris, met at Bordeaux and assumed the powers hitherto exercised by the Government of National Defence. Since the meeting of the states-general in 1789 no representative body in France had ever contained so many men of distinction. Elected to conclude a peace, the great majority of its members were monarchists, Gambetta, the rising hope of the republicans, having discredited his party in the eyes of the weary population by his efforts to carry on the war. The Assembly might thus have there and then restored the monarchy had not the monarchists been divided among themselves as royalist supporters of the comte de Chambord, grandson of Charles X., and as Orleanists favouring the claims of the comte de Paris, grandson of Louis Philippe. The majority being unable to unite on the essential point of the choice of a sovereign, decided to allow the Republic, declared on the morrow of Sedan, to liquidate the disastrous situation. Consequently, on the 17th of February the National Assembly elected Thiers as “Chief of the Executive Power of the French Republic,” the abolition of the Empire being formally voted a fortnight later. The old minister of Louis Philippe, who had led the opposition to the Empire, and had been the chief opponent of the war, was further marked out for the position conferred on him by his election to the Assembly in twenty-six departments in recognition of his tour through Europe after the first defeats, undertaken in the patriotic hope of obtaining the intervention of the Powers on behalf of France. Thiers composed a ministry, and announced that the first duty of the government before examining constitutional questions, would be to reorganize the forces of the nation in order to provide for the enormous war indemnity which had to be paid to Germany before the territory could be liberated from the presence of the invader. The tacit acceptance of this arrangement by all parties was known as the “pacte de Bordeaux.” Apart from the pressure of patriotic considerations, it pleased the republican minority to have the government of France officially proclaimed a Republic, while the monarchists thought that pending their choice Of a monarch it might popularize their cause not to have it associated with the imposition of the burden of war taxation. From this fortuitous and informal transaction, accepted by a monarchical Assembly, sprang the Third Republic, the most durable régime established in France since the ancient monarchy disappeared in 1792.

The Germans marched down the Champs Elysées on the 1st of March 1871, and occupied Paris for forty-eight hours. The National Assembly then decided to remove its sittings to Versailles; but two days before its arrival at the palace, where the king of Prussia had just been proclaimed German emperor, an insurrection broke out in Paris. The revolutionary element, which had been foremost in proclaiming the Republic on the 4th of September, had shown signs of disaffection during the siege. On the conclusion of the peace the triumphal entry of the German troops, the threatened disbanding of the national guard by an Assembly known to be anti-republican, and the resumption of orderly civic existence after the agitated life of a suffering population isolated by siege, had excited the nerves of the Parisians, always prone to revolution. The Commune was proclaimed on the 18th of March, and Paris was declared to be a free town, which recognized no government but that chosen by the people within its walls, the communard theory being that the state should consist of a federation of self-governing communes subject to no central power. Administrative autonomy was not, however, the real aim of the insurgent leaders. The name of the Commune had always been a rallying sign for violent revolutionaries ever since the Terrorists had found their last support in the municipality of Paris in 1794. In 1871 among the communard chiefs were revolutionaries of every sect, who, disagreeing on governmental and economic principles, were united in their vague but perpetual hostility to the existing order of things. The regular troops of the garrison of Paris followed the National Assembly to Versailles, where they were joined by the soldiers of the armies of Sedan and Metz, liberated from captivity in Germany. With this force the government of the Republic commenced the second siege of Paris, in order to capture the city from the Commune, which had established the parody of a government there, having taken possession of the administrative departments and set a minister at the head of each office. The second siege lasted six weeks under the eyes of the victorious Germans encamped on the heights overlooking the capital. The presence of the enemy, far from restraining the humiliating spectacle of Frenchmen waging war on Frenchmen in the hour of national disaster, seemed to encourage the fury of the combatants. The communards, who had begun their reign by the murder of two generals, concluded it, when the Versailles troops were taking the city, with the massacre of a number of eminent citizens, including the archbishop of Paris, and with the destruction by fire of many of the finest historical buildings, including the palace of the Tuileries and the hôtel de ville. History has rarely known a more unpatriotic crime than that of the insurrection of the Commune; but the punishment inflicted on the insurgents by the Versailles troops was so ruthless that it seemed to be a counter-manifestation of French hatred for Frenchmen in civil disturbance rather than a judicial penalty applied to a heinous offence. The number of Parisians killed by French soldiers in the last week of May 1871 was probably 20,000, though the partisans of the Commune declared that 36,000 men and women were shot in the streets or after summary court-martial.

It is from this point that the history of the Third Republic commences. In spite of the doubly tragic ending of the war the vitality of the country seemed unimpaired. With ease and without murmur it supported the new burden of taxation called for by the war indemnity and by the reorganization of the shattered forces of France. Thiers was thus aided in his task of liberating the territory from the presence of the enemy. His proposal at Bordeaux to make the “essai loyal” of the Republic, as the form of government which caused the least division among Frenchmen, was discouraged by the excesses of the Commune which associated republicanism with revolutionary disorder. Nevertheless, the monarchists of the National Assembly received a note of warning that the country might dispense with their services unless they displayed governmental capacity, when in July 1871 the republican minority was largely increased at the bye-elections. The next month, within a year of Sedan, a provisional constitution was voted, the title of president of the French Republic being then conferred on Thiers. The monarchists consented to this against their will; but they had their own way when they conferred constituent powers on the Assembly in opposition to the republicans, who argued that it was a usurpation of the sovereignty of the people for a body elected for another purpose to assume the power of giving a constitution to the land without a special mandate from the nation. The debate gave Gambetta his first opportunity of appearing as a serious politician. The “fou furieux” of Tours, whom Thiers had denounced for his efforts to prolong the hopeless war, was about to become the chief support of the aged Orleanist statesman whose supreme achievement was to be the foundation of the Republic.

It was in 1872 that Thiers practically ranged himself with Gambetta and the republicans. The divisions in the monarchical party made an immediate restoration impossible. This situation induced some of the moderate deputies, whose tendencies were Orleanist, to support the organization of a Republic which now no longer found its chief support in the revolutionary section of the nation, and it suited the ideas of Thiers, whose personal ambition was not less than his undoubted patriotism. Having become unexpectedly chief of the state at seventy-four he had no wish to descend again to the position of a minister of the Orleans dynasty which he had held at thirty-five. So, while the royalists refused to admit the claims of the comte de Paris, the old minister of Louis Philippe did his best to undermine the popularity of the Orleans tradition, which had been great among the Liberals under the Second Empire. He moved the Assembly to restore to the Orleans princes the value of their property confiscated under Louis Napoleon. This he did in the well-founded belief that the family would discredit itself in the eyes of the nation by accepting two millions sterling of public money at a moment when the country was burdened with the war indemnity. The incident was characteristic of his wary policy, as in the face of the anti-republican majority in the Assembly he could not openly break with the Right; and when it was suggested that he was too favourable to the maintenance of the Republic he offered his resignation, the refusal of which he took as indicating the indispensable nature of his services. Meanwhile Gambetta, by his popular eloquence, had won for himself in the autumn a triumphal progress, in the course of which he declared at Grenoble that political power had passed into the hands of “une couche sociale nouvelle,” and he appealed to the new social strata to put an end to the comedy of a Republic without republicans. When the Assembly resumed its sittings, order having been restored in the land disturbed by war and revolution, the financial system being reconstituted and the reorganization of the army planned, Thiers read to the house a presidential message which marked such a distinct movement towards the Left that Gambetta led the applause. “The Republic exists,” said the president, “it is the lawful government of the country, and to devise anything else is to devise the most terrible of revolutions.”

The year 1873 was full of events fateful for the history of France. It opened with the death of Napoleon III. at Chislehurst; but the disasters amid which the Second Empire had ended were too recent for the youthful promise of his heir to be regarded as having any connexion with the future fortunes of France, except by the small group of Bonapartists. Thiers remained the centre of interest. Much as the monarchists disliked him, they at first shrank from upsetting him before they were ready with a scheme of monarchical restoration, and while Gambetta’s authority was growing in the land. But when the Left Centre took alarm at the return of radical deputies at numerous by-elections the reactionaries utilized the divisions in the republican party, and for the only time in the history of the Third Republic they gave proof of parliamentary adroitness. The date for the evacuation of France by the German troops had been advanced, largely owing to Thiers’ successful efforts to raise the war indemnity. The monarchical majority, therefore, thought the moment had arrived when his services might safely be dispensed with, and the campaign against him was ably conducted by a coalition of Legitimists, Orleanists and Bonapartists. The attack on Thiers was led by the duc de Broglie, the son of another minister of Louis Philippe and grandson of Madame de Staël. Operations began with the removal from the chair of the Assembly of Jules Grévy, a moderate republican, who was chosen president at Bordeaux, and the substitution of Buffet, an old minister of the Second Republic who had rallied to the Empire. A debate on the political tendency of the government brought Thiers himself to the tribune to defend his policy. He maintained that a conservative Republic was the only régime possible, seeing that the monarchists in the Assembly could not make a choice between their three pretenders to the throne. A resolution, however, was carried which provoked the old statesman into tendering his resignation. This time it was not declined, and the majority with unseemly haste elected as president of the Republic Marshal MacMahon, duc de Magenta, an honest soldier of royalist sympathies, who had won renown and a ducal title on the battlefields of the Second Empire. In the eyes of Europe the curt dismissal of the aged liberator of the territory was an act of ingratitude. Its justification would have been the success of the majority in forming a stable monarchical government; but the sole result of the 24th of May 1873 was to provide a definite date to mark the opening of the era of anti-republican incompetency in France which has lasted for more than a generation, and has been perhaps the most effective guardian of the Third Republic.

The political incompetency of the reactionaries was fated never to be corrected by the intelligence of its princes or of its chiefs, and the year which saw Thiers dismissed to make way for a restoration saw also that restoration indefinitely postponed by the fatal action of the legitimist pretender. The comte de Paris went to Frohsdorf to abandon to the comte de Chambord his claims to the crown as the heir of the July Monarchy, and to accept the position of dauphin, thus implying that his grandfather Louis Philippe was a usurper. With the “Government of Moral Order” in command the restoration of the monarchy seemed imminent, when the royalists had their hopes dashed by the announcement that “Henri V.” would accept the throne only on the condition that the nation adopted as the standard of France the white flag—at the very sight of which Marshal MacMahon said the rifles in the army would go off by themselves. The comte de Chambord’s refusal to accept the tricolour was probably only the pretext of a childless man who had no wish to disturb his secluded life for the ultimate benefit of the Orleans family which had usurped his crown, had sent him as a child into exile, and outraged his mother the duchesse de Berry. Whatever his motive, his decision could have no other effect than that of establishing the Republic, as he was likely to live for years, during which the comte de Paris’ claims had to remain suspended. It was not possible to leave the land for ever under the government improvised at Bordeaux when the Germans were masters of France; so the majority in the Assembly decided to organize another provisional government on more regular lines, which might possibly last till the comte de Chambord had taken the white flag to the grave, leaving the way to the throne clear for the comte de Paris. On the 19th of November 1873 a Bill was passed which instituted the Septennate, whereby the executive power was confided to Marshal MacMahon for seven years. It also provided for the nomination of a commission of the National Assembly to take in hand the enactment of a constitutional law. Before this an important constitutional innovation had been adopted. Under Thiers there were no changes of ministry. The president of the Republic was perpetual prime minister, constantly dismissing individual holders of portfolios, but never changing at one moment the whole council of ministers. Marshal MacMahon, the day after his appointment, nominated a cabinet with a vice-president of the council as premier, and thus inaugurated the system of ministerial instability which has been the most conspicuous feature of the government of the Third Republic. Under the Septennate the ministers, monarchist or moderate republican, were socially and perhaps intellectually of a higher class than those who governed France during the last twenty years of the 19th century. But the duration of the cabinets was just as brief, thus displaying the fact, already similarly demonstrated under the Restoration and the July Monarchy, that in France parliamentary government is an importation not suited to the national temperament.

The duc de Broglie was the prime minister in MacMahon’s first two cabinets which carried on the government of the country up to the first anniversary of Thiers’ resignation. The duc de Broglie’s defeat by a coalition of Legitimists and Bonapartists with the Republicans displayed the mutual attitude of parties. The Royalists, chagrined that the fusion of the two branches of the Bourbons had not brought the comte de Chambord to the throne, vented their rage on the Orleanists, who had the chief share in the government without being able to utilize it for their dynasty. The Bonapartists, now that the memory of the war was receding, were winning elections in the provinces, and were further encouraged by the youthful promise of the Prince Imperial. The republicans had so improved their position that the duc d’Audiffret-Pasquier, great-nephew of the chancellor Pasquier, tried to form a coalition ministry with M. Waddington, afterwards ambassador of the Republic in London, and other members of the Left Centre. Out of this uncertain state of affairs was evolved the constitution which has lasted the longest of all those that France has tried since the abolition of the old monarchy in 1792. Its birth was due to chance. Not being able to restore a monarchy, the National Assembly was unwilling definitively to establish a republic, and as no limit was set by the law on the duration of its powers, it might have continued the provisional state of things had it not been for the Bonapartists. That party displayed so much activity in agitating for a plebiscite, that when the rural voters at by-elections began to rally to the Napoleonic idea, alarm seized the constitutionalists of the Right Centre who had never been persuaded by Thiers’ exhortations to accept the Republic. Consequently in January 1875 the Assembly, having voted the general principle that the legislative power should be exercised by a Senate and a Chamber of Deputies, without any mention of the executive régime, accepted by a majority of one a momentous resolution proposed by M. Wallon, a member of the Right Centre. It provided that the president of the Republic should be elected by the absolute majority of the Senate and the Chamber united as a National Assembly, that he should be elected for seven years, and be eligible for re-election. Thus by one vote the Republic was formally established, “the Father of the Constitution” being M. Wallon, who began his political experiences in the Legislative Assembly of 1849, and survived to take an active part in the Senate until the twentieth century.

The Republic being thus established, General de Cissey, who had become prime minister, made way for M. Buffet, but retained his portfolio of war in the new coalition cabinet, which contained some distinguished members of the two central groups, including M. Léon Say. A fortnight previously, at the end of February 1875, were passed two statutes defining the legislative and executive powers in the Republic, and organizing the Senate. These joined to a third enactment, voted in July, form the body of laws known as the “Constitution of 1875,” which though twice revised, lasted without essential alteration to the twentieth century. The legislative power was conferred on a Senate and a Chamber of Deputies, which might unite in congress to revise the constitution, if they both agreed that revision was necessary, and which were bound so to meet for the election of the president of the Republic when a vacancy occurred. It was enacted that the president so elected should retain office for seven years, and be eligible for re-election at the end of his term. He was also held to be irresponsible, except in the case of high treason. The other principal prerogatives bestowed on the presidential office by the constitution of 1875 were the right of initiating laws concurrently with the members of the two chambers; the promulgation of the laws; the right of dissolving the Chamber of Deputies before its legal term on the advice of the Senate, and that of adjourning the sittings of both houses for a month; the right of pardon; the disposal of the armed forces of the country; the reception of diplomatic envoys, and, under certain limitations, the power to ratify treaties. The constitution relieved the president of the responsibility of private patronage, by providing that every act of his should be countersigned by a minister. The constitutional law provided that the Senate should consist of 300 members, 75 being nominated for life by the National Assembly, and the remaining 225 elected for nine years by the departments and the colonies. Vacancies among the life members, after the dissolution of the National Assembly, were filled by the Senate until 1884, when the nominative system was abolished, though the survivors of it were not disturbed. The law of 1875 enacted that the elected senators, who were distributed among the departments on a rough basis of population, should be elected for nine years, a third of them retiring triennially. It was provided that the senatorial electors in each department should be the deputies, the members of the conseil général and of the conseils d’arrondissement, and delegates nominated by the municipal councils of each commune. As the municipal delegates composed the majority in each electoral college, Gambetta called the Senate the Grand Council of the Communes; but in practice the senators elected have always been the nominees of the local deputies and of the departmental councillors (conseillers généraux).

The Constitutional Law further provided that the deputies should be elected to the Chamber for four years by direct manhood suffrage, which had been enjoyed in France ever since 1848. The laws relating to registration, which is of admirable simplicity in France, were left practically the same as under the Second Empire. From 1875 to 1885 the elections were held on the basis of scrutin d’arrondissement, each department being divided into single-member districts. In 1885 scrutin de liste was tried, the department being the electoral unit, and each elector having as many votes as there were seats ascribed to the department without the power to cumulate—like the voting in the city of London when it returned four members. In 1889 scrutin d’arrondissement was resumed. The payment of members continued as under the Second Empire, the salary now being fixed at 9000 francs a year in both houses, or about a pound sterling a day. The Senate and the Chamber were endowed with almost identical powers. The only important advantage given to the popular house in the paper constitution was its initiative in matters of finance, but the right of rejecting or of modifying the financial proposals of the Chamber was successfully upheld by the Senate. In reality the Chamber of Deputies has overshadowed the upper house. The constitution did not prescribe that ministers should be selected from either house of parliament, but in practice the deputies have been in cabinets in the proportion of five to one in excess of the senators. Similarly the very numerous ministerial crises which have taken place under the Third Republic have with the rarest exceptions been caused by votes in the lower chamber. Among minor differences between the two houses ordained by the constitution was the legal minimum age of their members, that of senators being forty and of deputies twenty-five. It was enacted, moreover, that the Senate, by presidential decree, could be constituted into a high court for the trial of certain offences against the security of the state.

The constitution thus produced, the fourteenth since the Revolution of 1789, was the issue of a monarchical Assembly forced by circumstances to establish a republic. It was therefore distinguished from others which preceded it in that it contained no declaration of principle and no doctrinal theory. The comparative excellence of the work must be recognized, seeing that it has lasted. But it owed its duration, as it owed its origin and its character, to the weakness of purpose and to the dissensions of the monarchical parties. The first legal act under the new constitution was the selection by the expiring National Assembly of seventy-five nominated senators, and here the reactionaries gave a crowning example of that folly which has ever marked their conduct each time they have had the chance of scoring an advantage against the Republic. The principle of nomination had been carried in the National Assembly by the Right and opposed by the Republicans. But the quarrels of the Legitimists with the duc de Broglie and his party were so bitter that the former made a present of the nominated element in the Senate to the Republicans in order to spite the Orleanists; so out of seventy-five senators nominated by the monarchical Assembly, fifty-seven Republicans were chosen. Without this suicidal act the Republicans would have been in a woeful minority in the Senate when parliament met in 1876 after the first elections under the new system of parliamentary government. The slight advantage which, in spite of their self-destruction, the reactionaries maintained in the upper house was outbalanced by the republican success at the elections to the Chamber. In a house of over 500 members only about 150 monarchical deputies were returned, of whom half were Bonapartists. The first cabinet under the new constitution was formed by Dufaure, an old minister of Louis Philippe like Thiers, and like him born in the 18th century. The premier now took the title of president of the council, the chief of the state no longer presiding at the meetings of ministers, though he continued to be present at their deliberations. Although the republican victories at the elections were greatly due to the influence of Gambetta, none of his partisans was included in the ministry, which was composed of members of the two central groups. At the end of 1876 Dufaure retired, but nearly all his ministers retained their portfolios under the presidency of Jules Simon, a pupil of Victor Cousin, who first entered political life in the Constituent Assembly of 1848, and was later a leading member of the opposition in the last seven years of the Second Empire.

The premiership of Jules Simon came to an end with the abortive coup d’état of 1877, commonly called from its date the Seize Mai. After the election of Marshal MacMahon to the presidency, the clerical party, irritated at the failure to restore the comte de Chambord, commenced a campaign in favour of the restitution of the temporal power to the Pope. It provoked the Italian government to make common cause with Germany, as Prince Bismarck was likewise attacked by the French clericals for his ecclesiastical policy. At last Jules Simon, who was a liberal most friendly to Catholicism, had to accept a resolution of the Chamber, inviting the ministry to adopt the same disciplinary policy towards the Church which had been followed by the Second Empire and the Monarchy of July. It was on this occasion that Gambetta used his famous expression, “Le cléricalisme, voilà l’ennemi.” Some days later a letter appeared in the Journal officiel, dated 16th May 1877, signed by President MacMahon, informing Jules Simon that he had no longer his confidence, as it was clear that he had lost that influence over the Chamber which a president of the Council ought to exercise. The dismissal of the prime minister and the presidential acts which followed did not infringe the letter of the new constitution; yet the proceeding was regarded as a coup d’état in favour of the clerical reactionaries. The duc de Broglie formed an anti-republican ministry, and Marshal MacMahon, in virtue of the presidential prerogative conferred by the law of 1875, adjourned parliament for a month. When the Chamber reassembled the republican majority of 363 denounced the coalition of parties hostile to the Republic. The president, again using his constitutional prerogative, obtained the authorization of the Senate to dissolve the Chamber. Meanwhile the Broglie ministry had put in practice the policy, favoured by all parties in France, of replacing the functionaries hostile to it with its own partisans. But in spite of the administrative electoral machinery being thus in the hands of the reactionaries, a republican majority was sent back to the Chamber, the sudden death of Thiers on the eve of his expected return to power, and the demonstration at his funeral, which was described as a silent insurrection, aiding the rout of the monarchists. The duc de Broglie resigned, and Marshal MacMahon sent for General de Rochebouet, who formed a cabinet of unknown reactionaries, but it lasted only a few days, as the Chamber refused to vote supply. Dufaure was then called back to office, and his moderate republican ministry lasted for the remainder of the MacMahon presidency.

Thus ended the episode of the Seize Mai, condemned by the whole of Europe from its inception. Its chief effects were to prove again to the country the incompetency of the monarchists, and by associating in the public mind the Church with this ill-conceived venture, to provoke reprisals from the anti-clericals when they came into power. After the storm, the year 1878 was one of political repose. The first international exhibition held at Paris after the war displayed to Europe how the secret of France’s recuperative power lay in the industry and artistic instinct of the nation. Marshal MacMahon presided with dignity over the fêtes held in honour of the exhibition, and had he pleased he might have tranquilly fulfilled the term of his Septennate. But in January 1879 he made a difference of opinion on a military question an excuse for resignation, and Jules Grévy, the president of the Chamber, was elected to succeed him by the National Assembly, which thus met for the first time under the Constitutional Law of 1875.

Henceforth the executive as well as the legislative power was in the hands of the republicans. The new president was a leader of the bar, who had first become known in the Constituent Assembly of 1848 as the advocate of the principle that a republic would do better without a president. M. Waddington was his first prime minister, and Gambetta was elected president of the Chamber. The latter, encouraged by his rivals in the idea that the time was not ripe for him openly to direct the affairs of the country, thus put himself, in spite of his occult dictatorship, in a position of official self-effacement from which he did not emerge until the jealousies of his own party-colleagues had undermined the prestige he had gained as chief founder of the Republic. The most active among them was Jules Ferry, minister of Education, who having been a republican deputy for Paris at the end of the Empire, was one of the members of the provisional government proclaimed on 4th September 1870. Borrowing Gambetta’s cry that clericalism was the enemy, he commenced the work of reprisal for the Seize Mai. His educational projects of 1879 were thus anti-clerical in tendency, the most famous being article 7 of his education bill, which prohibited members of any “unauthorized” religious orders exercising the profession of teaching in any school in France, the disability being applied to all ecclesiastical communities, excepting four or five which had been privileged by special legislation. This enactment, aimed chiefly at the Jesuits, was advocated with a sectarian bitterness which will be associated with the name of Jules Ferry long after his more statesmanlike qualities are forgotten. The law was rejected by the Senate, Jules Simon being the eloquent champion of the clericals, whose intrigues had ousted him from office. The unauthorized orders were then dissolved by decree; but though the forcible expulsion of aged priests and nuns gave rise to painful scenes, it cannot be said that popular feeling was excited in their favour, so grievously had the Church blundered in identifying itself with the conspiracy of the Seize Mai.

Meanwhile the death of the Prince Imperial in Zululand had shattered the hopes of the Bonapartists, and M. de Freycinet, a former functionary of the Empire, had become prime minister at the end of 1879. He had retained Jules Ferry at the ministry of Education, but unwilling to adopt all his anti-clerical policy, he resigned the premiership in September 1880. The constitution of the first Ferry cabinet secured the further exclusion from office of Gambetta, to which, however, he preferred his “occult dictatorship.” In August he had, as president of the Chamber, accompanied M. Grévy on an official visit to Cherbourg, and the acclamations called forth all over France by his speech, which was a hopeful defiance to Germany, encouraged the wily chief of the state to aid the republican conspiracy against the hero of the Republic. In 1881 the only political question before the country was the destiny of Gambetta. His influence in the Chamber was such that in spite of the opposition of the prime minister he carried his electoral scheme of scrutin de liste, descending from the presidential chair to defend it. Its rejection by the Senate caused no conflict between the houses. The check was inflicted not on the Chamber, but on Gambetta, who counted on his popularity to carry the lists of his candidates in all the republican departments in France as a quasi-plebiscitary demonstration in his favour. His rivals dared not openly quarrel with him. There was the semblance of a reconciliation between him and Ferry, and his name was the rallying-cry of the Republic at the general election, which was conducted on the old system of scrutin d’arrondissement.

The triumph for the Republic was great, the combined force of reactionary members returned being less than one-fifth of the new Chamber. M. Grévy could no longer abstain from asking Gambetta to form a ministry, but he had bided his time till jealousy of the “occult power” of the president of the Chamber had undermined his position in parliament. Consequently, when on the 14th of November 1881 Gambetta announced the composition of his cabinet, ironically called the “grand ministère,” which was to consolidate the Republic and to be the apotheosis of its chief, a great feeling of disillusion fell on the country, for his colleagues were untried politicians. The best known was Paul Bert, a man of science, who as the “reporter” in the Chamber of the Ferry Education Bill had distinguished himself as an aggressive freethinker, and he inappropriately was named minister of public worship. All the conspicuous republicans who had held office refused to serve under Gambetta. His cabinet was condemned in advance. His enemies having succeeded in ruining its composition, declared that the construction of a one-man machine was ominous of dictatorship, and the “grand ministère” lived for only ten weeks.

Gambetta was succeeded in January 1882 by M. de Freycinet, who having first taken office in the Dufaure cabinet of 1877, and having continued to hold office at intervals until 1899, was the most successful specimen of a “ministrable”—as recurrent portfolio-holders have been called under the Third Republic. His second ministry lasted only six months. The failure of Gambetta, though pleasing to his rivals, discouraged the republican party and disorganized its majority in the Chamber. M. Duclerc, an old minister of the Second Republic, then became president of the council, and before his short term of office was run Gambetta died on the last day of 1882, without having had the opportunity of displaying his capacity as a minister or an administrator. He was only forty-four at his death, and his fame rests on the unfulfilled promise of a brief career. The men who had driven him out of public life and had shortened his existence were the most ostentatious of the mourners at the great pageant with which he was buried, and to have been of his party was in future the popular trade-mark of his republican enemies.

Gambetta’s death was followed by a period of anarchy, during which Prince Napoleon, the son of Jerome, king of Westphalia, placarded the walls of Paris with a manifesto. The Chamber thereupon voted the exile of the members of the families which had reigned in France. The Senate rejected the measure, and a conflict arose between the two houses. M. Duclerc resigned the premiership in January 1883 to his minister of the Interior, M. Fallières, a Gascon lawyer, who became president of the Senate in 1899 and president of the Republic in 1906. He held office for three weeks, when Jules Ferry became president of the council for the second time. Several of the closest of Gambetta’s friends accepted office under the old enemy of their chief, and the new combination adopted the epithet “opportunist,” which had been invented by Gambetta in 1875 to justify the expediency of his alliance with Thiers. The Opportunists thenceforth formed an important group standing between the Left Centre, which was now excluded from office, and the Radicals. It claimed the tradition of Gambetta, but the guiding principle manifested by its members was that of securing the spoils of place. To this end it often allied itself with the Radicals, and the Ferry cabinet practised this policy in 1883 when it removed the Orleans princes from the active list in the army as the illogical result of the demonstration of a Bonaparte. How needless was this proceeding was shown a few months later when the comte de Chambord died, as his death, which finally fused the Royalists with the Orleanists, caused no commotion in France.

The year 1884 was unprecedented seeing that it passed without a change of ministry. Jules Ferry displayed real administrative ability, and as an era of steady government seemed to be commencing, the opportunity was taken to revise the Constitution. The two Chambers therefore met in congress, and enacted that the republican form of government could never be the subject of revision, and that all members of families which had reigned in France were ineligible for the presidency of the Republic—a repetition of the adventure of Louis Bonaparte in the middle of the century being thus made impossible. It also decided that the clauses of the law of 1875 relating to the organization of the Senate should no longer have a constitutional character. This permitted the reform of the Upper House by ordinary parliamentary procedure. So an organic law was passed to abolish the system of nominating senators, and to increase the number of municipal delegates in the electoral colleges in proportion to the population of the communes. The French nation, for the first time since it had enjoyed political life, had revised a constitution by pacific means without a revolution. Gambetta being out of the way, his favourite electoral system of scrutin de liste had no longer any terror for his rivals, so it was voted by the Chamber early in 1885. Before the Senate had passed it into law the Ferry ministry had fallen at the end of March, after holding office for twenty-five months, a term rarely exceeded in the annals of the Third Republic. This long tenure of power had excited the dissatisfaction of jealous politicians, and the news of a slight disaster to the French troops in Tongking called forth all the pent-up rancour which Jules Ferry had inspired in various groups. By the exaggerated news of defeat Paris was excited to the brink of a revolution. The approaches of the Chamber were invaded by an angry mob, and Jules Ferry was the object of public hate more bitter than any man had called forth in France since Napoleon III. on the days after Sedan. Within the Chamber he was attacked in all quarters. The Radicals took the lead, supported by the Monarchists, who remembered the anti-clerical rigour of the Ferry laws, by the Left Centre, not sorry for the tribulation of the group which had supplanted it, and by place-hunting republicans of all shades. The attack was led by a politician who disdained office. M. Georges Clémenceau, who had originally come to Paris from the Vendée as a doctor, had as a radical leader in the Chamber used his remarkable talent as an overthrower of ministries, and nearly every one of the eight ministerial crises which had already occurred during the presidency of Grévy had been hastened by his mordant eloquence.

The next prime minister was M. Brisson, a radical lawyer and journalist, who in April 1885 formed a cabinet of “concentration”—that is to say, it was recruited from various groups with the idea of concentrating all republican forces in opposition to the reactionaries. MM. de Freycinet and Carnot, afterwards president of the Republic, represented the moderate element in this ministry, which superintended the general elections under scrutin de liste. That system was recommended by its advocates as a remedy for the rapid decadence in the composition of the Chamber. Manhood suffrage, which had returned to the National Assembly a distinguished body of men to conclude peace with Germany, had chosen a very different type of representative to sit in the Chamber created by the constitution of 1875. At each succeeding election the standard of deputies returned grew lower, till Gambetta described them contemptuously as “sous-vétérinaires,” indicating that they were chiefly chosen from the petty professional class, which represented neither the real democracy nor the material interests of the country. His view was that the election of members by departmental lists would ensure the candidature of the best men in each region, who under the system of single-member districts were apt to be neglected in favour of local politicians representing narrow interests. When his death had removed the fear of his using scrutin de liste as a plebiscitary organization, parliament sanctioned its trial. The result was not what its promoters anticipated. The composition of the Chamber was indeed transformed, but only by the substitution of reactionary deputies for republicans. Of the votes polled, 45% were given to the Monarchists, and if they had obtained one-half of the abstentions the Republic would have come to an end. At the same time the character of the republican deputies returned was not improved; so the sole effect of scrutin de liste was to show that the electorate, weary of republican dissensions, was ready to make a trial of monarchical government, if only the reactionary party proved that it contained statesmen capable of leading the nation. So menacing was the situation that the republicans thought it wise not further to expose their divisions in the presidential election which was due to take place at the end of the year. Consequently, on the 28th of December 1885, M. Grévy, in spite of his growing unpopularity, was elected president of the Republic for a second term of seven years.

The Brisson cabinet at once resigned, and on the 7th of January 1886 its most important member, M. de Freycinet, formed his third ministry, which had momentous influence on the history of the Republic. The new minister of war was General Boulanger, a smart soldier of no remarkable military record; but being the nominee of M. Clémenceau, he began his official career by taking radical measures against commanding officers of reactionary tendencies. He thus aided the government in its campaign against the families which had reigned in France, whose situation had been improved by the result of the elections. The fêtes given by the comte de Paris to celebrate his daughter’s marriage with the heir-apparent of Portugal moved the republican majority in the Chambers to expel from France the heads of the houses of Orleans and of Bonaparte, with their eldest sons. The names of all the princes on the army list were erased from it, the decree being executed with unseemly ostentation by General Boulanger, who had owed early promotion to the protection of the duc d’Aumale, and on that prince protesting he was exiled too. Meanwhile General Boulanger took advantage of Grévy’s unpopularity to make himself a popular hero, and at the review, held yearly on the 14th of July, the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, his acclamation by the Parisian mob showed that he was taking an unexpected place in the imagination of the people. He continued to work with the Radicals, so when they turned out M. de Freycinet in December 1886, one of their group, M. Goblet, a lawyer from Amiens, formed a ministry, and retained Boulanger as minister of war. M. Clémenceau, however, withdrew his support from the general, who was nevertheless loudly patronized by the violent radical press. His bold attitude towards Germany in connexion with the arrest on the German frontier of a French official named Schnaebele so roused the enthusiasm of the public, that M. Goblet was not sorry to resign in May 1887 in order to get rid of his too popular colleague.

To form the twelfth of his ministries, Grévy called upon M. Rouvier, an Opportunist from Marseilles, who had first held office in Gambetta’s short-lived cabinet. General Boulanger was sent to command a corps d’armée at Clermont-Ferrand; but the popular press and the people clamoured for the hero who was said to have terrorized Prince Bismarck, and they encouraged him to play the part of a plebiscitary candidate. There were grave reasons for public discontent. Parliament in 1887 was more than usually sterile in legislation, and in the autumn session it had to attend to a scandal which had long been rumoured. The son-in-law of Grévy, Daniel Wilson, a prominent deputy who had been an under secretary of state, was accused of trafficking the decoration of the Legion of Honour, and of using the Elysée, the president’s official residence, where he lived, as an agency for his corrupt practices. The evidence against him was so clear that his colleagues in the Chamber put the government into a minority in order to precipitate a presidential crisis, and on Grévy refusing to accept this hint, a long array of politicians, representing all the republican groups, declined his invitation to aid him in forming a new ministry, all being bent on forcing his resignation. Had General Boulanger been a man of resolute courage he might at this crisis have made a coup d’état, for his popularity in the street and in the army increased as the Republic sank deeper into scandal and anarchy. At last, when Paris was on the brink of revolution, Grévy was prevailed on to resign. The candidates for his succession to the presidency were two ex-prime ministers, MM. Ferry and de Freycinet, and Floquet, a barrister, who had been conspicuous in the National Assembly for his sympathy with the Commune. The Monarchists had no candidate ready, and resolved to vote for Ferry, because they believed that if he were elected his unpopularity with the democracy would cause an insurrection in Paris and the downfall of the Republic. MM. de Freycinet and Floquet each looked for the support of the Radicals, and each had made a secret compact, in the event of his election, to restore General Boulanger to the war office. But M. Clémenceau, fearing the election of Jules Ferry, advised his followers to vote for an “outsider,” and after some manœuvring the congress elected by a large majority Sadi Carnot.

The new president, though the nominee of chance, was an excellent choice. The grandson of Lazare Carnot, the “organizer of victory” of the Convention, he was also a man of unsullied probity. The tradition of his family name, only less glorious than that of Bonaparte in the annals of the Revolution, was welcome to France, almost ready to throw herself into the arms of a soldier of fortune, while his blameless repute reconciled some of those whose opposition to the Republic had been quickened by the mean vices of Grévy. But the name and character of Carnot would have been powerless to check the Boulangist movement without the incompetency of its leader, who was getting the democracy at his back without knowing how to utilize it. The new president’s first prime minister was M. Tirard, a senator who had held office in six of Grévy’s ministries, and he formed a cabinet of politicians as colourless as himself. The early months of 1888 were occupied with the trial of Wilson, who was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for fraud, and with the conflicts of the government with General Boulanger, who was deprived of his command for coming to Paris without leave. Wilson appealed against his sentence, and General Boulanger was elected deputy for the department of the Aisne by an enormous majority. It so happened that the day after his election a presidential decree was signed on the advice of the minister of war removing General Boulanger from the army, and the court of appeal quashed Wilson’s conviction. Public feeling was profoundly moved by the coincidence of the release of the relative of the ex-president by the judges of the Republic on the same day that its ministers expelled from the army the popular hero of universal suffrage.

As General Boulanger had been invented by the Radicals it was thought that a Radical cabinet might be a remedy to cope with him, so M. Floquet became president of the council in April 1888, M. de Freycinet taking the portfolio of war, which he retained through many ministries. M. Floquet’s chief achievement was a duel with General Boulanger, in which, though an elderly civilian, he wounded him. Nothing, however, checked the popularity of the military politician, and though he was a failure as a speaker in the Chamber, several departments returned him as their deputy by great majorities. The Bonapartists had joined him, and while in his manifestos he described himself as the defender of the Republic, the mass of the Monarchists, with the consent of the comte de Paris, entered the Boulangist camp, to the dismay both of old-fashioned Royalists and of many Orleanists, who resented his recent treatment of the duc d’Aumale. The centenary of the taking of the Bastille was to be celebrated in Paris by an international exhibition, and it appeared likely that it would be inaugurated by General Boulanger, so irresistible seemed his popularity. In January 1889 he was elected member for the metropolitan department of the Seine with a quarter of a million votes, and by a majority of eighty thousand over the candidate of the government. Had he marched on the Elysée the night of his election, nothing could have saved the parliamentary Republic; but again he let his chance go by. The government in alarm proposed the restoration of scrutin d’arrondissement as the electoral system for scrutin de liste. The change was rapidly enacted by the two Chambers, and was a significant commentary on the respective advantages of the two systems. M. Tirard was again called to form a ministry, and he selected as minister of the interior M. Constans, originally a professor at Toulouse, who had already proved himself a skilful manipulator of elections when he held the same office in 1881. He was therefore given the supervision of the machinery of centralization with which it was supposed that General Boulanger would have to be fought at the general election. That incomplete hero, however, saved all further trouble by flying the country when he heard that his arrest was imminent. The government, in order to prevent any plebiscitary manifestation in his favour, passed a law forbidding a candidate to present himself for a parliamentary election in more than one constituency; it also arraigned the general on the charge of treason before the Senate sitting as a high court, and he was sentenced in his absence to perpetual imprisonment. Such measures were needless. The flight of General Boulanger was the death of Boulangism. He alone had saved the Republic which had done nothing to save itself. Its government had, on the contrary, displayed throughout the crisis an anarchic feebleness and incoherency which would have speeded its end had the leader of the plebiscitary movement possessed sagacity or even common courage.

The elections of 1889 showed how completely the reactionaries had compromised their cause in the Boulangist failure. Instead of 45% of the votes polled as in 1885, they obtained only 21%, and the comte de Paris, the pretender of constitutional monarchy, was irretrievably prejudiced by his alliance with the military adventurer who had outraged the princes of his house. A period of calm succeeded the storm of Boulangism, and for the first time under the Third Republic parliament set to work to produce legislation useful for the state, without rousing party passion, as in its other period of activity when the Ferry education laws were passed. Before the elections of 1889 the reform of the army was undertaken, the general term of active compulsory service was made three years, while certain classes hitherto dispensed from serving, including ecclesiastical seminarists and lay professors, had henceforth to undergo a year’s military training. The new parliament turned its attention to social and labour questions, as the only clouds on the political horizon were the serious strikes in the manufacturing districts, which displayed the growing political organization of the socialist party. Otherwise nothing disturbed the calm of the country. The young duc d’Orléans vainly tried to ruffle it by breaking his exile in order to claim his citizen’s right to perform his military service. The cabinet was rearranged in March 1890, M. de Freycinet becoming prime minister for the fourth time, and retaining the portfolio of war. All seemed to point to the consolidation of the Republic, and even the Church made signals of reconciliation. Cardinal Lavigerie, a patriotic missionary and statesman, entertained the officers of the fleet at Algiers, and proposed the toast of the Republic to the tune of the “Marseillaise” played by his pères blancs. The royalist Catholics protested, but it was soon intimated that the archbishop of Algiers’ demonstration was approved at Rome. The year 1891 was one of the few in the annals of the Republic which passed without a change of ministry, but the agitations of 1892 were to counterbalance the repose of the two preceding years.

The first crisis arose out of the peacemaking policy of the Pope. Following up his intimation to the archbishop of Algiers, Leo XIII. published in February 1892 an encyclical, bidding French Catholics accept the Republic as the firmly established form of government. The papal injunction produced a new political group called the “Ralliés,” the majority of its members being Monarchists who rallied to the Republic in obedience to the Vatican. The most conspicuous among them was Comte Albert de Mun, an eloquent exponent in the Chamber of legitimism and Christian socialism. The extreme Left mistrusted the adhesion of the new converts to the Republic, and ecclesiastical questions were the constant subjects of acrimonious debates in parliament. In the course of one of them M. de Freycinet found himself in a minority. He ceased to be prime minister, being succeeded by M. Loubet, a lawyer from Montélimar, who had previously held office for three months in the first Tirard cabinet; but M. de Freycinet continued to hold his portfolio of war. The confusion of the republican groups kept pace with the disarray of the reactionaries, and outside parliament the frequency of anarchist outrages did not increase public confidence. The only figure in the Republic which grew in prestige was that of M. Carnot, who in his frequent presidential tours dignified his office, though his modesty made him unduly efface his own personality.

When the autumn session of 1892 began all other questions were overwhelmed by the bursting of the Panama scandal. The company associated for the piercing of the Isthmus of Panama, undertaken by M. de Lesseps, the maker of the Suez Canal, had become insolvent some years before. Fifty millions sterling subscribed by the thrift of France had disappeared, but the rumours involving political personages in the disaster were so confidently asserted to be reactionary libels, that a minister of the Republic, afterwards sent to penal servitude for corruption, obtained damages for the publication of one of them. It was known that M. de Lesseps was to be tried for misappropriating the money subscribed; but considering the vast sums lost by the public, little interest was taken in the matter till it was suddenly stirred by the dramatic suicide of a well-known Jewish financier closely connected with republican politicians, driven to death, it was said, by menaces of blackmail. Then succeeded a period of terror in political circles. Every one who had a grudge against an enemy found vent for it in the press, and the people of Paris lived in an atmosphere of delation. Unhappily it was true that ministers and members of parliament had been subsidized by the Panama company. Floquet, the president of the Chamber, avowed that when prime minister he had laid hands on £12,000 of the company’s funds for party purposes, and his justification of the act threw a light on the code of public morality of the parliamentary Republic. Other politicians were more seriously implicated on the charge of having accepted subsidies for their private purposes, and emotion reached its height when the cabinet ordered the prosecution of two of its members for corrupt traffic of their offices. These two ministers were afterwards discharged, and they seem to have been accused with recklessness; but their prosecution by their own colleagues proved that the statesmen of the Republic believed that their high political circles were sapped with corruption. Finally, only twelve senators and deputies were committed for trial, and the only one convicted was a minister of M. de Freycinet’s third cabinet, who pleaded guilty to receiving large bribes from the Panama company. The public regarded the convicted politician as a scapegoat, believing that there were numerous delinquents in parliament, more guilty than he, who had not even been prosecuted. This feeling was aggravated by the sentence passed, but afterwards remitted, on the aged M. de Lesseps, who had involved French people in misfortune only because he too sanguinely desired to repeat the triumph he had achieved for France by his great work in Egypt.

Within the nation the moral result of the Panama affair was a general feeling that politics had become under the Republic a profession unworthy of honest citizens. The sentiment evoked by the scandal was one of sceptical lassitude rather than of indignation. The reactionaries had crowned their record of political incompetence. At a crisis which gave legitimate opportunity to a respectable and patriotic Opposition they showed that the country had nothing to expect from them but incoherent and exaggerated invective. If the scandal had come to light in the time of General Boulanger the parliamentary Republic would not have survived it. As it was, the sordid story did little more than produce several changes of ministry. M. Loubet resigned the premiership in December 1892 to M. Ribot, a former functionary of the Empire, whose ministry lived for three stormy weeks. On the first day of 1893 M. Ribot formed his second cabinet, which survived till the end of March, when he was succeeded by his minister of education, M. Charles Dupuy, an ex-professor who had never held office till four months previously. M. Dupuy, having taken the portfolio of the interior, supervised the general election of 1893, which took place amid the profound indifference of the population, except in certain localities where personal antagonisms excited violence. An intelligent Opposition would have roused the country at the polls against the régime compromised by the Panama affair. Nothing of the sort occurred, and the electorate preferred the doubtful probity of their republican representatives to the certain incompetence of the reactionaries. The adversaries of the Republic polled only 16% of the votes recorded, and the chief feature of the election was the increased return of socialist and radical-socialist deputies. When parliament met it turned out the Dupuy ministry, and M. Casimir-Périer quitted the presidency of the Chamber to take his place. The new prime minister was the bearer of an eminent name, being the grandson of the statesman of 1831, and the great-grandson of the owner of Vizille, where the estates of Dauphiné met in 1788, as a prelude to the assembling of the states-general the next year. His acceptance of office aroused additional interest because he was a minister possessed of independent wealth, and therefore a rare example of a French politician free from the imputation of making a living out of politics. Neither his repute nor his qualities gave long life to his ministry, which fell in four months, and M. Dupuy was sent for again to form a cabinet in May 1894.

Before the second Dupuy ministry had been in office a month President Carnot died by the knife of an anarchist at Lyons. He was perhaps the most estimable politician of the Third Republic. Although the standard of political life was not elevated under his presidency, he at all events set a good personal example, and to have filled unscathed the most conspicuous position in the land during a period unprecedented for the scurrility of libels on public men was a testimony to his blameless character. As the term of his septennate was near, parliament was not unprepared for a presidential election, and M. Casimir-Périer, who had been spoken of as his possible successor, was elected by the Congress which met at Versailles on the 27th of June 1894, three days after Carnot’s assassination. The election of one who bore respectably a name not less distinguished in history than that of Carnot seemed to ensure that the Republic would reach the end of the century under the headship of a president of exceptional prestige. But instead of remaining chief of the state for seven years, in less than seven months M. Casimir-Périer astonished France and Europe by his resignation. Scurrilously defamed by the socialist press, the new president found that the Republicans in the Chamber were not disposed to defend him in his high office; so, on the 15th of January 1895, he seized the occasion of the retirement of the Dupuy ministry to address a message to the two houses intimating his resignation of the presidency, which, he said, was endowed with too many responsibilities and not sufficient powers.

This time the Chambers were unprepared for a presidential vacancy, and to fill it in forty-eight hours was necessarily a matter of haphazard. The choice of the congress fell on Félix Faure, a merchant of Havre, who, though minister of marine in the retiring cabinet, was one of the least-known politicians who had held office. The selection was a good one, and introduced to the presidency a type of politician unfortunately rare under the Third Republic—a successful man of business. Félix Faure had a fine presence and polished manners, and having risen from a humble origin he displayed in his person the fact that civilization descends to a lower social level in France than elsewhere. Although he was in a sense a man of the people the Radicals and Socialists in the Chambers had voted against him. Their candidate, like almost all democratic leaders in France, had never worked with his hands—M. Brisson, the son of an attorney at Bourges, a member of the Parisian bar, and perpetual candidate for the presidency. Nevertheless the Left tried to take possession of President Faure. His first ministry, composed of moderate republicans, and presided over by M. Ribot, lasted until the autumn session of 1895, when it was turned out and a radical cabinet was formed by M. Léon Bourgeois, an ex-functionary, who when a prefect had been suspected of reactionary tendencies.

The Bourgeois cabinet of 1895 was remarkable as the first ministry formed since 1877 which did not contain a single member of the outgoing cabinet. It was said to be exclusively radical in its composition, and thus to indicate that the days of “republican concentration” were over, and that the Republic, being firmly established, an era of party government on the English model had arrived. The new ministry, however, on analysis did not differ in character from any of its predecessors. Seven of its members were old office-holders of the ordinary “ministrable” type. The most conspicuous was M. Cavaignac, the son of the general who had opposed Louis Bonaparte in 1848, and the grandson of J.B. Cavaignac, the regicide member of the Convention. Like Carnot and Casimir-Périer, he was, therefore, one of those rare politicians of the Republic who possessed some hereditary tradition. An ambitious man, he was now classed as a Radical on the strength of his advocacy of the income-tax, the principle of which has never been popular in France, as being adverse to the secretive habits of thrift cultivated by the people, which are a great source of the national wealth. The radicalism of the rest of the ministry was not more alarming in character, and its tenure of office was without legislative result. Its fall, however, occasioned the only constitutionally interesting ministerial crisis of the twenty-four which had taken place since Grévy’s election to the presidency sixteen years before. The Senate, disliking the fiscal policy of the government, refused to vote supply in spite of the support which the Chamber gave to the ministry. The collision between the two houses did not produce the revolutionary rising which the Radicals predicted, and the Senate actually forced the Bourgeois cabinet to resign amid profound popular indifference.

The new prime minister was M. Méline, who began his long political career as a member of the Commune in 1871, but was so little compromised in the insurrection that Jules Simon gave him an under-secretaryship in his ministry of 1876. After that he was once a cabinet minister, and was for a year president of the Chamber. He was chiefly known as a protectionist; but it was as leader of the Progressists, as the Opportunists now called themselves, that he formed his cabinet in April 1896, which was announced as a moderate ministry opposed to the policy of the Radicals. It is true that it made no attempt to tax incomes, but otherwise its achievements did not differ from those of other ministries, radical or concentration, except in its long survival. It lasted for over two years, and lived as long as the second Ferry cabinet. Its existence was prolonged by certain incidents of the Franco-Russian alliance. The visit of the Tsar to Paris in October 1896, being the first official visit paid by a European sovereign to the Republic, helped the government over the critical period at which ministries usually succumbed, and it was further strengthened in parliament by the invitation to the president of the Republic to return the imperial visit at St Petersburg in 1897. The Chamber came to its normal term that autumn; but a law had been passed fixing May as the month for general elections, and the ministry was allowed to retain office till the dissolution at Easter 1898.

The long duration of the Méline government was said to be a further sign of the arrival of an era of party government with its essential accompaniment, ministerial stability. But in the country there was no corresponding sign that the electorate was being organized into two parties of Progressists and Radicals; while in the Chamber it was ominously observed that persistent opposition to the moderate ministry came from nominal supporters of its views, who were dismayed at one small band of fellow-politicians monopolizing office for two years. The last election of the century was therefore fought on a confused issue, the most tangible results being the further reduction of the Monarchists, who secured only 12% of the total poll, and the advance of the Socialists, who obtained nearly 20% of the votes recorded. The Radicals returned were less numerous than the Moderates, but with the aid of the Socialists they nearly balanced them. A new group entitled Nationalist made its appearance, supported by a miscellaneous electorate representing the malcontent element in the nation of all political shades from monarchist to revolutionary socialist. The Chamber, so composed, was as incoherent as either of its predecessors. It refused to re-elect the radical leader M. Brisson as its president, and then refused its confidence to the moderate leader M. Méline. M. Brisson, the rejected of the Chamber, was sent for to form a ministry, on the 28th of June 1898, which survived till the adjournment, only to be turned out when the autumn session began. M. Charles Dupuy thus became prime minister for the third time with a cabinet of the old concentration pattern, and for the third time in less than five years under his premiership the Presidency of the Republic became vacant. Félix Faure had increased in pomposity rather than in popularity. His contact with European sovereigns seems to have made him over-conscious of his superior rank, and he cultivated habits which austere republicans make believe to be the monopoly of frivolous courts. The regular domesticity of middle-class life may not be disturbed with impunity when age is advancing, and Félix Faure died with tragic unexpectedness on the 16th of February 1899. The joys of his high office were so dear to him that nothing but death would have induced him to lay it down before the term of his septennate. There was therefore no candidate in waiting for the vacancy; and as Paris was in an agitated mood the majority in the Congress elected M. Loubet president of the Republic, because he happened to hold the second place of dignity in the state, the presidency of the Senate, and was, moreover, a politician who had the confidence of the republican groups as an adversary of plebiscitary pretensions. His only competitor was M. Méline, whose ambitions were not realized, in spite of the alliance of his Progressist supporters with the Monarchists and Nationalists. The Dupuy ministry lasted till June 1899, when a new cabinet was formed by M. Waldeck-Rousseau, who, having held office under Gambetta and Jules Ferry, had relinquished politics for the bar, of which he had become a distinguished leader. Though a moderate republican, he was the first prime minister to give portfolios to socialist politicians. This was the distinguishing feature of the last cabinet of the century—the thirty-seventh which had taken office in the twenty-six years which had elapsed since the resignation of Thiers in 1873.

It is now necessary to go back a few years in order to refer to a matter which, though not political in its origin, in its development filled the whole political atmosphere of France in the closing period of the 19th century. Soon after the failure of the Boulangist movement a journal was founded at Paris called the Libre Parole. Its editor, M. Drumont, was known as the author of La France juive, a violent anti-Semitic work, written to denounce the influence exercised by Jewish financiers in the politics of the Third Republic. It may be said to have started the anti-Semitic movement in France, where hostility to the Jews had not the pretext existing in those lands which contain a large Jewish population exercising local rivalry with the natives of the soil, or spoiling them with usury. That state of things existed in Algeria, where the indigenous Jews were made French citizens during the Franco-Prussian War to secure their support against the Arabs in rebellion. But political anti-Semitism was introduced into Algeria only as an offshoot of the movement in continental France, where the great majority of the Jewish community were of the same social class as the politicians of the Republic. Primarily directed against the Jewish financiers, the movement was originally looked upon as a branch of the anti-capitalist propaganda of the Socialists. Thus the Libre Parole joined with the revolutionary press in attacking the repressive legislation provoked by the dynamite outrages of the anarchists, clerical reactionaries who supported it being as scurrilously abused by the anti-Semitic organ as its republican authors. The Panama affair, in the exposure of which the Libre Parole took a prominent part soon after its foundation, was also a bond between anti-Semites and Socialists, to whom, however, the Monarchists, always incapable of acting alone, united their forces. The implication of certain Jewish financiers with republican politicians in the Panama scandal aided the anti-Semites in their special propaganda, of which a main thesis was that the government of the Third Republic had been organized by its venal politicians for the benefit of Jewish immigrants from Germany, who had thus enriched themselves at the expense of the laborious and unsuspecting French population. The Libre Parole, which had become a popular organ with reactionaries and with malcontents of all classes, enlisted the support of the Catholics by attributing the anti-religious policy of the Republic to the influence of the Jews, skilfully reviving bitter memories of the enaction of the Ferry decrees, when sometimes the laicization of schools or the expulsion of monks and nuns had been carried out by a Jewish functionary. Thus religious sentiment and race prejudice were introduced into a movement which was at first directed against capital; and the campaign was conducted with the weapons of scurrility and defamation which had made an unlicensed press under the Third Republic a demoralizing national evil.

An adroit feature of the anti-Semitic campaign was an appeal to national patriotism to rid the army of Jewish influence. The Jews, it was said, not content with directing the financial, and thereby the general policy of the Republic, had designs on the French army, in which they wished to act as secret agents of their German kindred. In October 1894 the Libre Parole announced that a Jewish officer of artillery attached to the general staff, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, had been arrested on the charge of supplying a government of the Triple Alliance with French military secrets. Tried by court-martial, he was sentenced to military degradation and to detention for life in a fortress. He was publicly degraded at Paris in January 1895, a few days before Casimir-Périer resigned the presidency of the Republic, and was transported to the Île du Diable on the coast of French Guiana. His conviction, on the charge of having betrayed to a foreign power documents relating to the national defence, was based on the alleged identity of his handwriting with that of an intercepted covering-letter, which contained a list of the papers treasonably communicated. The possibility of his innocence was not raised outside the circle of his friends; the Socialists, who subsequently defended him, even complained that common soldiers were shot for offences less than that for which this richly connected officer had been only transported. The secrecy of his trial did not shock public sentiment in France, where at that time all civilians charged with crime were interrogated by a judge in private, and where all accused persons are presumed guilty until proved innocent. In a land subject to invasion there was less disposition to criticize the decision of a military tribunal acting in the defence of the nation even than there would have been in the case of a doubtful judgment passed in a civil court. The country was practically unanimous that Captain Dreyfus had got his deserts. A few, indeed, suggested that had he not been a Jew he would never have been accused; but the greater number replied that an ordinary French traitor of Gentile birth would have been forgotten from the moment of his condemnation. The pertinacity with which some of his co-religionists set to work to show that he had been irregularly condemned seemed to justify the latter proposition. But it was not a Jew who brought about the revival of the affair. Colonel Picquart, an officer of great promise, became head of the intelligence department at the war office, and in 1896 informed the minister of his suspicion that the letter on which Dreyfus had been condemned was written by a certain Major Esterhazy. The military authorities, not wishing to have the case reopened, sent Colonel Picquart on foreign service, and put in his place Colonel Henry. The all-seeing press published various versions of the incident, and the anti-Semitic journals denounced them as proofs of a Jewish conspiracy against the French army.

At the end of 1897 M. Scheurer-Kestner, an Alsatian devoted to France and a republican senator, tried to persuade his political friends to reopen the case; but M. Méline, the prime minister, declared in the name of the Republic that the Dreyfus affair no longer existed. The fact that the senator who championed Dreyfus was a Protestant encouraged the clerical press in its already marked tendency to utilize anti-Semitism as a weapon of ecclesiastical warfare. But the religious side-issues of the question would have had little importance had not the army been involved in the controversy, which had become so keen that all the population, outside that large section of it indifferent to all public questions, was divided into “Dreyfusards” and “anti-Dreyfusards.” The strong position of the latter was due to their assuming the position of defenders of the army, which, at an epoch when neither the legislature nor the government inspired respect, and the Church was the object of polemic, was the only institution in France to unite the nation by appealing to its martial and patriotic instincts. That is the explanation of the enthusiasm of the public for generals and other officers by whom the trial of Dreyfus and subsequent proceedings had been conducted in a manner repugnant to those who do not favour the arbitrary ways of military dictatorship, which, however, are not unpopular in France. The acquittal of Major Esterhazy by a court-martial, the conviction of Zola by a civil tribunal for a violent criticism of the military authorities, and the imprisonment without trial of Colonel Picquart for his efforts to exonerate Dreyfus, were practically approved by the nation. This was shown by the result of the general elections in May 1898. The clerical reactionaries were almost swept out of the Chamber, but the overwhelming republican majority was practically united in its hostility to the defenders of Dreyfus, whose only outspoken representatives were found in the socialist groups. The moderate Méline ministry was succeeded in June 1898 by the radical Brisson ministry. But while the new prime minister was said to be personally disposed to revise the sentence on Dreyfus, his civilian minister of war, M. Cavaignac, was as hostile to revision as any of his military predecessors—General Mercier, under whom the trial took place, General Zurlinden, and General Billot, a republican soldier devoted to the parliamentary régime.

The radical minister of war in July 1898 laid before the Chamber certain new proofs of the guilt of Dreyfus, in a speech so convincing that the house ordered it to be placarded in all the communes of France. The next month Colonel Henry, the chief of the intelligence department, confessed to having forged those new proofs, and then committed suicide. M. Cavaignac thereupon resigned office, but declared that the crime of Henry did not prove the innocence of Dreyfus. Many, however, who had hitherto accepted the judgment of 1894, reflected that the offence of a guilty man did not need new crime for its proof. It was further remarked that the forgery had been committed by the intimate colleague of the officers of the general staff, who had zealously protected Esterhazy, the suspected author of the document on which Dreyfus had been convicted. An uneasy misgiving became widespread; but partisan spirit was too excited for it to cause a general revulsion of feeling. Some journalists and politicians of the extreme Left had adopted the defence of Dreyfus as an anti-clerical movement in response to the intemperate partisanship of the Catholic press on the other side. Other members of the socialist groups, not content with criticizing the conduct of the military authorities in the Dreyfus affair, opened a general attack on the French army,—an unpopular policy which allowed the anti-Dreyfusards to utilize the old revolutionary device of making the word “patriotism” a party cry. The defamation and rancour with which the press on both sides flooded the land obscured the point at issue. However, the Brisson ministry just before its fall remitted the Dreyfus judgment to the criminal division of the cour de cassation—the supreme court of revision in France. M. Dupuy formed a new cabinet in November 1898, and made M. de Freycinet minister of war, but that adroit office-holder, though a civilian and a Protestant, did not favour the anti-military and anti-clerical defenders of Dreyfus. The refusal of the Senate, the stronghold of the Republic, to re-elect M. Scheurer-Kestner as its vice-president, showed that the opportunist minister of war understood the feeling of parliament, which was soon displayed by an extraordinary proceeding. The divisional judges, to whom the case was remitted, showed signs that their decision would be in favour of a new trial of Dreyfus. The republican legislature, therefore, disregarding the principle of the separation of the powers, which is the basis of constitutional government, took the arbitrary step of interfering with the judicial authority. It actually passed a law withdrawing the partly-heard cause from the criminal chamber of the cour de cassation, and transferring it to the full court of three divisions, in the hope that a majority of judges would thus be found to decide against the revision of the sentence on Dreyfus.

This flagrant confusion of the legislative with the judicial power displayed once more the incompetence of the French rightly to use parliamentary institutions; but it left the nation indifferent. It was during the passage of the bill that the president of the Republic suddenly died. Félix Faure was said to be hostile to the defenders of Dreyfus and disposed to utilise the popular enthusiasm for the army as a means of making the presidential office independent of parliament. The Chambers, therefore, in spite of their anti-Dreyfusard bias, were determined not to relinquish any of their constitutional prerogative. The military and plebiscitary parties were now fomenting the public discontent by noisy demonstrations. The president of the Senate, M. Loubet, as has been mentioned, was known to have no sympathy with this agitation, so he was elected president of the Republic by a large majority at the congress held at Versailles on 18th February 1899. The new president, who was unknown to the public, though he had once been prime minister for nine months, was respected in political circles; but his elevation to the first office of the State made him the object of that defamation which had become the chief characteristic of the partisan press under the Third Republic. He was recklessly accused of having been an accomplice of the Panama frauds, by screening certain guilty politicians when he was prime minister in 1892, and because he was not opposed to the revision of the Dreyfus sentence he was wantonly charged with being bought with Jewish money. Meanwhile the united divisions of the cour de cassation were, in spite of the intimidation of the legislature, reviewing the case with an independence worthy of praise in an ill-paid magistracy which owed its promotion to political influence. Instead of justifying the suggestive interference of parliament it revised the judgment of the court-martial, and ordered Dreyfus to be re-tried by a military tribunal at Rennes. The Dupuy ministry, which had wished to prevent this decision, resigned, and M. Waldeck-Rousseau formed a heterogeneous cabinet in which Socialists, who for the first time took office, had for their colleague as minister of war General de Galliffet, whose chief political fame had been won as the executioner of the Communards after the insurrection of 1871. Dreyfus was brought back from the Devil’s Island, and in August 1899 was put upon his trial a second time. His old accusers, led by General Mercier, the minister of war of 1894, redoubled their efforts to prove his guilt, and were permitted by the officers composing the court a wide license according to English ideas of criminal jurisprudence. The published evidence did not, however, seem to connect Dreyfus with the charges brought against him. Nevertheless the court, by a majority of five to two, found him guilty, and with illogical inconsequence added that there were in his treason extenuating circumstances. He was sentenced to ten years’ detention, and while it was being discussed whether the term he had already served would count as part of his penalty, the ministry completed the inconsequency of the situation by advising the president of the Republic to pardon the prisoner. The result of the second trial satisfied neither the partisans of the accused, who desired his rehabilitation, some of them reproaching him for accepting a pardon, nor his adversaries, whose vindictiveness was unsated by the penalty he had already suffered. But the great mass of the French people, who are always ready to treat a public question with indifference, were glad to be rid of a controversy which had for years infected the national life.

The Dreyfus affair was severely judged by foreign critics as a miscarriage of justice resulting from race-prejudice. If that simple appreciation rightly describes its origin, it became in its development one of those scandals symptomatic of the unhealthy political condition of France, which on a smaller scale had often recurred under the Third Republic, and which were made the pretext by the malcontents of all parties for gratifying their animosities. That in its later stages it was not a question of race-persecution was seen in the curious phenomenon of journals owned or edited by Jews leading the outcry against the Jewish officer and his defenders. That it was not a mere episode of the rivalry between Republicans and Monarchists, or between the advocates of parliamentarism and of military autocracy, was evident from the fact that the most formidable opponents of Dreyfus, without whose hostility that of the clericals and reactionaries would have been ineffective, were republican politicians. That it was not a phase of the anti-capitalist movement was shown by the zealous adherence of the socialist leaders and journalists to the cause of Dreyfus; indeed, one remarkable result of the affair was its diversion of the socialist party and press for several years from their normal campaign against property. The Dreyfus affair was utilized by the reactionaries against the Republic, by the clericals against the non-Catholics, by the anti-clericals against the Church, by the military party against the parliamentarians, and by the revolutionary socialists against the army. It was also conspicuously utilized by rival republican politicians against one another, and the chaos of political groups was further confused by it.

An epilogue to the Dreyfus affair was the trial for treason before the Senate, at the end of 1899, of a number of persons, mostly obscure followers either of M. Déroulède the poet, who advocated a plebiscitary republic, or of the duc d’Orléans, the pretender of the constitutional monarchy. On the day of President Faure’s funeral M. Déroulède had vainly tried to entice General Roget, a zealous adversary of Dreyfus, who was on duty with his troops, to march on the Elysée in order to evict the newly-elected president of the Republic. Other demonstrations against M. Loubet ensued, the most offensive being a concerted assault upon him on the racecourse at Auteuil in June 1899. The subsequent resistance to the police of a band of anti-Semites threatened with arrest, who barricaded themselves in a house in the rue Chabrol, in the centre of Paris, and, with the marked approval of the populace, sustained a siege for several weeks, indicated that the capital was in a condition not far removed from anarchy. M. Déroulède, indicted at the assizes of the Seine for his misdemeanour on the day of President Faure’s funeral, had been triumphantly acquitted. It was evident that no jury would convict citizens prosecuted for political offences and the government therefore decided to make use of the article of the Law of 1875, which allowed the Senate to be constituted a high court for the trial of offences endangering the state. A respectable minority of the Senate, including M. Wallon, the venerable “Father of the Constitution” of 1875, vainly protested that the framers of the law intended to invest the upper legislative chamber with judicial power only for the trial of grave crimes of high treason, and not of petty political disorders which a well-organized government ought to be able to repress with the ordinary machinery of police and justice. The outvoted protest was justified by the proceedings before the High Court, which, undignified and disorderly, displayed both the fatuity of the so-called conspirators and the feebleness of the government which had to cope with them. The trial proved that the plebiscitary faction was destitute of its essential factor, a chief to put forward for the headship of the state, and that it was resolved, if it overturned the parliamentary system, not to accept under any conditions the duc d’Orléans, the only pretender before the public. It was shown that royalists and plebiscitary republicans alike had utilized as an organization of disorder the anti-Semitic propaganda which had won favour among the masses as a nationalist movement to protect the French from foreign competition. The evidence adduced before the high court revealed, moreover, the curious fact that certain Jewish royalists had given to the duc d’Orléans large sums of money to found anti-Semitic journals as the surest means of popularizing his cause.

The last year of the 19th century, though uneventful for France, was one of political unrest. This, however, did not take the form of ministerial crises, as, for the fourth time since responsible cabinets were introduced in 1873, a whole year, from the 1st of January to the 31st of December, elapsed without a change of ministry. The prime minister, M. Waldeck-Rousseau, though his domestic policy exasperated a large section of the political world, including one half of the Progressive group which he had helped to found, displayed qualities of statesmanship always respected in France, but rarely exhibited under the Third Republic. He had proved himself to be what the French call un homme de gouvernement—that is to say, an authoritative administrator of unimpassioned temperament capable of governing with the arbitrary machinery of Napoleonic centralization. His alliance with the extreme Left and the admission into his cabinet of socialist deputies, showed that he understood which wing of the Chamber it was best to conciliate in order to keep the government in his hands for an abnormal term. The advent to office of Socialists disquieted the respectable and prosperous commercial classes, which in France take little part in politics, though they had small sympathy with the nationalists, who were the most violent opponents of the Waldeck-Rousseau ministry. The alarm caused by the handing over of important departments of the state to socialist politicians arose upon a danger which is not always understood beyond the borders of France. Socialism in France is a movement appealing to the revolutionary instincts of the French democracy, advocated in vague terms by the members of rival groups or sects. Thus the increasing number of socialist deputies in parliament had produced no legislative results, and their presence in the cabinet was not feared on that account. The fear which their office-holding inspired was due to the immense administrative patronage which the centralized system confides to each member of the government. French ministers are wont to bestow the places at their disposal on their political friends, so the prospect of administrative posts being filled all over the land by revolutionaries caused some uneasiness. Otherwise the presence of Socialists on the ministerial bench seemed to have no other effect than that of partially muzzling the socialist groups in the Chamber. The opposition to the government was heterogeneous. It included the few Monarchists left in the Chamber, the Nationalists, who resembled the Boulangists of twelve years before, and who had added anti-Semitism to the articles of the revisionist creed, and a number of republicans, chiefly of the old Opportunist group, which had renewed itself under the name of Progressist at the time when M. Waldeck-Rousseau was its most important member in the Senate.

The ablest leaders of this Opposition were all malcontent Republicans; and this fact seemed to show that if ever any form of monarchy were restored in France, political office would probably remain in the hands of men who were former ministers of the Third Republic. Thus the most conspicuous opponents of the cabinet were three ex-prime ministers, MM. Méline, Charles Dupuy and Ribot. Less distinguished republican “ministrables” had their normal appetite for office whetted in 1900 by the international exhibition at Paris. It brought the ministers of the day into unusual prominence, and endowed them with large subsidies voted by parliament for official entertainments. The exhibition was planned on too ambitious a scale to be a financial success. It also called forth the just regrets of those who deplored the tendency of Parisians under the Third Republic to turn their once brilliant city into an international casino. Its most satisfactory feature was the proof it displayed of the industrial inventiveness and the artistic instinct of the French. The political importance of the exhibition lay in the fact that it determined the majority in the Chamber not to permit the foreigners attracted by it to the capital to witness a ministerial crisis. Few strangers of distinction, however, came to it, and not one sovereign of the great powers visited Paris; but the ministry remained in office, and M. Waldeck-Rousseau had uninterrupted opportunity of showing his governmental ability. The only change in his cabinet took place when General de Galliffet resigned the portfolio of war to General André. The army, as represented by its officers, had shown symptoms of hostility to the ministry in consequence of the pardon of Dreyfus. The new minister of war repressed such demonstrations with proceedings of the same arbitrary character as those which had called forth criticism in England when used in the Dreyfus affair. In both cases the high-handed policy was regarded either with approval or with indifference by the great majority of the French nation, which ever since the Revolution has shown that its instincts are in favour of authoritative government. The emphatic support given by the radical groups to the autocratic policy of M. Waldeck-Rousseau and his ministers was not surprising to those who have studied the history of the French democracy. It has always had a taste for despotism since it first became a political power in the days of the Jacobins, to whose early protection General Bonaparte owed his career. On the other hand liberalism has always been repugnant to the masses, and the only period in which the Liberals governed the country was under the régime of limited suffrage—during the Restoration and the Monarchy of July.

The most important event in France during the last year of the century, not from its political result, but from the lessons it taught, was perhaps the Paris municipal election. The quadrennial renewal of all the municipal councils of France took place in May 1900. The municipality of the capital had been for many years in the hands of the extreme Radicals and the revolutionary Socialists. The Parisian electors now sent to the Hôtel de Ville a council in which the majority were Nationalists, in general sympathy with the anti-Semitic and plebiscitary movements. The nationalist councillors did not, however, form one solid party, but were divided into five or six groups, representing every shade of political discontent, from monarchism to revisionist-socialism. While the electorate of Paris thus pronounced for the revision of the Constitution, the provincial elections, as far as they had a political bearing, were favourable to the ministry and to the Republic. M. Waldeck-Rousseau accepted the challenge of the capital, and dealt with its representatives with the arbitrary weapons of centralization which the Republic had inherited from the Napoleonic settlement of the Revolution. Municipal autonomy is unknown in France, and the town council of Paris has to submit to special restrictions on its liberty of action. The prefect of the Seine is always present at its meetings as agent of the government and the minister of the interior can veto any of its resolutions. The Socialists, when their party ruled the municipality, clamoured in parliament for the removal of this administrative control. But now being in a minority they supported the government in its anti-autonomic rigours. The majority of the municipal council authorized its president to invite to a banquet, in honour of the international exhibition, the provincial mayors and a number of foreign municipal magnates, including the lord mayor of London. The ministers were not invited, and the prefect of the Seine thereupon informed the president of the municipality that he had no right, without consulting the agent of the government, to offer a banquet to the provincial mayors; and they, with the deference which French officials instinctively show to the central authority, almost all refused the invitation to the Hôtel de Ville. The municipal banquet was therefore abandoned, but the government gave one in the Tuileries gardens, at which no fewer than 22,000 mayors paid their respects to the chief of the state. These events showed that, as in the Terror, as at the coup d’état of 1851, and as in the insurrection of the Commune, the French provinces were never disposed to follow the political lead of the capital, whether the opinions prevailing there were Jacobin or reactionary. These incidents displayed the tendency of the French democracy, in Paris and in the country alike, to submit to and even to encourage the arbitrary working of administrative centralization. The elected mayors of the provincial communes, urban and rural, quitted themselves like well-drilled functionaries of the state, respectful of their hierarchical superiors, just as in the days when they were the nominees of the government; while the population of Paris, in spite of its perennial proneness to revolution, accepted the rebuff inflicted on its chosen representatives without any hostile demonstration. The municipal elections in Paris afforded fresh proof of the unchanging political ineptitude of the reactionaries. The dissatisfaction of the great capital with the government of the Republic might, in spite of the reluctance of the provinces to follow the lead of Paris, have had grave results if skilfully organized. But the anti-republican groups, instead of putting forward men of high ability or reputation to take possession of the Hôtel de Ville, chose their candidates among the same inferior class of professional politicians as the Radicals and the Socialists whom they replaced on the municipal council.

The beginning of a century of the common era is a purely artificial division of time. Yet it has often marked a turning-point in the history of nations. This was notably the case in France in 1800. The violent and anarchical phases of the Revolution of 1789 came to an end with the 18th century; and the dawn of the 19th was coincident with the administrative reconstruction of France by Napoleon, on lines which endured with little modification till the end of that century, surviving seven revolutions of the executive power. The opening years of the 20th century saw no similar changes in the government of the country. The Third Republic, which was about to attain an age double that reached by any other regime since the Revolution, continued to live on the basis of the Constitution enacted in 1875, before it was five years old. Yet it seems not unlikely that historians of the future may take the date 1900 as a landmark between two distinct periods in the evolution of the French nation.

With the close of the 19th century the Dreyfus affair came practically to an end. Whatever the political and moral causes of the agitation which attended it, its practical result was to strengthen the Radical and Socialist parties in the Republic, and to reduce to unprecedented impotence the forces of reaction. This was due more to the maladroitness of the Reactionaries than to the virtues or the prescience of the extreme Left, as the imprisonment of the Jewish captain, which agitated and divided the nation, could not have been inflicted without the ardent approval of Republicans of all shades of opinion. But when the majority at last realized that a mistake had been committed, the Reactionaries, in great measure through their own unwise policy, got the chief credit for it. Consequently, as the clericals formed the militant section of the anti-Republican parties, and as the Radical-Socialists were at that time keener in their hostility to the Church than in their zeal for social or economic reform, the issue of the Dreyfus affair brought about an anti-clerical movement, which, though initiated and organized by a small minority, met with nothing to resist it in the country, the reactionary forces being effete and the vast majority of the population indifferent. The main and absorbing feature therefore of political life in France in the first years of the 20th century was a campaign against the Roman Catholic Church, unparalleled in energy since the Revolution. Its most striking result was the rupture of the Concordat between France and the Vatican. This act was additionally important as being the first considerable breach made in the administrative structure reared by Napoleon, which had hitherto survived all the vicissitudes of the 19th century. Concurrently with this the influence of the Socialist party in French policy largely increased. A primary principle professed by the Socialists throughout Europe is pacificism, and its dissemination in France acted in two very different ways. It encouraged in the French people a growth of anti-military spirit, which showed some sign of infecting the national army, and it impelled the government of the Republic to be zealous in cultivating friendly relations with other powers. The result of the latter phase of pacificism was that France, under the Radical-Socialist administrations of the early years of the 20th century, enjoyed a measure of international prestige of that superficial kind which is expressed by the state visits of crowned heads to the chief of the executive power, greater than at any period since the Second Empire.

The voting of the law which separated the Church from the state will probably mark a capital date in French history; so, as the ecclesiastical policy of successive ministries filled almost entirely the interior chronicles of France for the first five years of the new century, it will be convenient to set forth in order the events which during that period led up to the passing of the Separation Act.

The French legislature during the first session of the 20th century was chiefly occupied with the passing of the Associations Law. That measure, though it entirely changed the legal position of all associations in France, was primarily directed against the religious associations of the Roman Catholic Church. Their influence in the land, according to the anti-clericals, had been proved by the Dreyfus affair to be excessive. The Jesuits were alleged, on their own showing, to exercise considerable power over the officers of the army, and in this way to have been largely responsible for the blunders of the Dreyfus case. Another less celebrated order, which took an active part against Dreyfus, the Assumptionists, had achieved notoriety by its journalistic enterprise, its cheap newspapers of wide circulation being remarkable for the violence of their attacks on the institutions and men of the Republic. The mutual antagonism between the French government and religious congregations is a tradition which dates from the ancient monarchy and was continued by Napoleon I. long before the Third Republic adopted it in the legislation associated with the names of Jules Ferry and Paul Bert. The prime minister, under whose administration the 20th century succeeded the 19th, was M. Waldeck-Rousseau, who had been the colleague of Paul Bert in Gambetta’s grand ministère, and in 1883 had served under Jules Ferry in his second ministry. He had retired from political life, though he remained a member of the Senate, and was making a large fortune at the bar, when in June 1899, at pecuniary sacrifice, he consented to form a ministry for the purpose of “liquidating” the Dreyfus affair. In 1900, the year after the second condemnation of Dreyfus and his immediate pardon by the government, M. Waldeck-Rousseau in a speech at Toulouse announced that legislation was about to be undertaken on the subject of associations.

At that period the hostility of the Revolution to the principle of associations of all kinds, civil as well as religious, was still enforced by the law. With the exception of certain commercial societies subject to special legislation, no association composed of more than twenty persons could be formed without governmental authorization which was always revocable, the restriction applying equally to political and social clubs and to religious communities. The law was the same for all, but was differently applied. Authorization was rarely refused to political or social societies, though any club was liable to have its authorization withdrawn and to be shut up or dissolved. But to religious orders new authorization was practically never granted. Only four of them, the orders of Saint Lazare, of the Saint Esprit, of the Missions Étrangères and of Saint Sulpice, were authorized under the Third Republic—their authorization dating from the First Empire and the Restoration. The Frères de la Doctrine Chrétienne were also recognized, not, however, as a religious congregation under the jurisdiction of the minister of public worship, but as a teaching body under that of the minister of education. All the great historical orders, preaching, teaching or contemplative, were “unauthorized”; they led a precarious life on sufferance, having as corporations no civil existence, and being subject to dissolution at a moment’s notice by the administrative authority. In spite of this disability and of the decrees of 1880 directed against unauthorized monastic orders they had so increased under the anti-clerical Republic, that the religious of both sexes were more numerous in France at the beginning of the 20th century than at the end of the ancient monarchy. Moreover, in the twenty years during which unauthorized Orders had been supposed to be suppressed under the Ferry Decrees, their numbers had become six times more numerous than before, while it was the authorized Congregations which had diminished. The bare catalogue of the religious houses in the land, with the value of their properties (estimated by M. Waldeck-Rousseau at a milliard—£40,000,000) filled two White Books of two thousand pages, presented to parliament on the 4th of December 1900. The hostility to the Congregations was not confined to the anti-clericals. The secular clergy were suffering materially from the enterprising competition of their old rivals the regulars. Had the legislation for defining the legal situation of the religious orders been undertaken with the sole intention of limiting their excessive growth, such a measure would have been welcome to the parochial clergy. But they saw that the attack upon the congregations was only preliminary to a general attack upon the Church, in spite of the sincere assurances of the prime minister, a statesman of conservative temperament, that no harm would accrue to the secular clergy from the passing of the Associations Law.

In January 1901, on the eve of the first debate in the Chamber of Deputies on the Associations bill, a discussion took place which showed that the rupture of the Concordat might be nearing the range of practical politics, though parliament was as yet unwilling to take it into consideration. The archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Richard, had published a letter addressed to him by Leo XIII. deploring the projected legislation as being a breach of the Concordat under which the free exercise of the Catholic religion in France was assured. The Socialists argued that this letter was an intolerable intervention on the part of the Vatican in the domestic politics of the Republic, and proposed that parliament should after voting the Associations Law proceed to separate Church and State. M. Waldeck-Rousseau, the prime minister, calm and moderate, declined to take this view of the pope’s letter, and the resolution was defeated by a majority of more than two to one. But another motion, proposed by a Nationalist, that the Chamber should declare its resolve to maintain the Concordat, was rejected by a small majority. The discussion of the Associations bill was then commenced by the Chamber and went on until the Easter recess. Its main features when finally voted were that the right to associate for purposes not illicit should be henceforth free of all restrictions, though “juridical capacity” would be accorded only to such associations as were formally notified to the administrative authority. The law did not, however, accord liberty of association to religious “Congregations,” none of which could be formed without a special statute, and any constituted without such authorization would be deemed illicit. The policy of the measure, as applying to religious orders, was attacked by the extreme Right and the extreme Left from their several standpoints. The clericals proposed that under the new law all associations, religious as well as civil, should be free. The Socialists proposed that all religious communities, authorized or unauthorized, should be suppressed. The prime minister took a middle course. But he went farther than the moderate Republicans, with whom he was generally classed. While he protected the authorized religious orders against the attacks of the extreme anti-clericals, he accepted from the latter a new clause which disqualified any member of an unauthorized order from teaching in any school. This was a blow at the principle of liberty of instruction, which had always been supported by Liberals of the old school, who had no sympathy with the pretensions of clericalism. Consequently this provision, though voted by a large majority, was opposed by the Liberals of the Republican party, notably by M. Ribot, who had been twice prime minister, and M. Aynard, almost the sole survivor of the Left Centre. It was remarked that in these, as in all subsequent debates on ecclesiastical questions, the ablest defenders of the Church were not found among the clericals, but among the Liberals, whose primary doctrine was that of tolerance, which they believed ought to be applied to the exercise of the religion nominally professed by a large majority of the nation. Few of the ardent professors of that religion gave effective aid to the Church during that period of crisis. M. de Mun still used his eloquence in its defence, but the brilliant Catholic orator had entered his sixtieth year with health impaired, and among the young reactionary members there was not one who displayed any talent. At the other end of the Chamber M. Viviani, a Socialist member for Paris, made an eloquent speech. As was anticipated the bill received no serious opposition in the Senate. Though not in sympathy with the attacks of the Socialists in the Chamber on property, the Upper House had as a whole no objection to their attacks on the Church, and had become a more persistently anti-clerical body than the Chamber of Deputies. The bill was therefore passed without any serious amendments, even those which were moved for the purpose of affirming the principle of liberty of education being supported by very few Republican senators. In the debates some of the utterances of the prime minister were important. On the proposal of M. Rambaud, a professor who was minister of education in the Méline cabinet of 1896, that religious associations should be authorized by decree and not by law, M. Waldeck-Rousseau said that inasmuch as vows of poverty and celibacy were illegal, nothing but a law would suffice to give legality to any association in which such vows were imposed on the members. It was thus laid down by the responsible author of the law that the third clause, providing that any association founded for an illicit cause was null, applied to religious communities. On the other hand the prime minister in another speech repudiated the suggestion that the proposed law was aimed against any form of religion. He argued that the religious orders, far from being essential to the existence of the Church, were a hindrance to the work of the parochial clergy, and that inasmuch as the religious orders were organizations independent of the State they were by their nature and influence a danger to the State. Consequently their regulation had become necessary in the interests both of Church and State. The general suppression of religious congregations, the prime minister said, was not contemplated; the case of each one would be decided on its merits, and he had no doubt that parliament would favourably consider the authorization of those whose aim was to alleviate misery at home or to extend French influence abroad. The tenor of M. Waldeck-Rousseau’s speech was eminently Concordatory. One of his chief arguments against the religious orders was that they were not mentioned in the Concordat, and that their unregulated existence prejudiced the interests of the Concordatory clergy. The speech was therefore an official declaration in favour of the maintenance of the relations between Church and State. That being so, it is important to notice that by a majority of nearly two to one the Senate voted the placarding of the prime minister’s speech in all the communes of France, and that the mover of the resolution was M. Combes, senator of the Charente-Inférieure, a politician of advanced views who up to that date had held office only once, when he was minister of education and public worship for about six months, in the Bourgeois administration in 1895-1896.

The “Law relating to the contract of Association” was promulgated on the 2nd of July 1901, and its enactment was the only political event of high importance that year. The Socialists, except in their anti-clerical capacity, were more active outside parliament than within. Early in the year some formidable strikes took place. At Montceau-les-Mines in Burgundy, where labour demonstrations had often been violent, a new feature of a strike was the formation of a trade-union by the non-strikers, who called their organization “the yellow trade-union” (le syndicat jaune) in opposition to the red trade-union of the strikers, who adopted the revolutionary flag and were supported by the Socialist press. At the same time the dock-labourers at Marseilles went out on strike, by the orders of an international trade-union in that port, as a protest against the dismissal of a certain number of foreigners. The number of strikes in France had increased considerably under the Waldeck-Rousseau government. Its opponents attributed this to the presence in the cabinet of M. Millerand, who had been ranked as a Socialist. On the other hand, the revolutionary Socialists excommunicated the minister of commerce for having joined a “bourgeois government” and retired from the general congress of the Socialist party at Lyons, where MM. Briand and Viviani, themselves future ministers, persuaded the majority not to go so far. The federal committee of miners projected a general strike in all the French coal-fields, and to that end organized a referendum. But of 125,000 miners inscribed on their lists nearly 70,000 abstained from voting, and although the general strike was voted in October by a majority of 34,000, it was not put into effect. Another movement favoured by the Socialists was that of anti-militarism. M. Hervé, a professor at the lycée of Sens, had written, in a local journal, the Pioupiou de l’Yonne, on the occasion of the departure of the conscripts for their regiments, some articles outraging the French flag. He was prosecuted and acquitted at the assizes at Auxerre in November, a number of his colleagues in the teaching profession coming forward to testify that they shared his views. The local educational authority, the academic council of Dijon, however, dismissed M. Hervé from his official functions, and its sentence was confirmed by the superior council of public education to which he had appealed. Thereupon the Socialists in the Chamber, under the lead of M. Viviani, violently attacked the Government—shortly before the prorogation at the end of the year. M. Leygues, the minister of education, defended the policy of his department with equal vigour, declaring that if a professor in the “university” claimed the right of publishing unpatriotic and anti-military opinions he could exercise it only on the condition of giving up his employment under government—a thesis which was supported by the entire Chamber with the exception of the Socialists. This manifestation of anti-military spirit, though not widespread, was the more striking as it followed close upon a second visit of the emperor and empress of Russia to France, which took place in September 1901 and was of a military rather than of a popular character. The Russian sovereigns did not come to Paris. After a naval display at Dunkirk, where they landed, they were the guests of President Loubet at Compiègne, and concluded their visit by attending a review near Reims of the troops which had taken part in the Eastern manœuvres. Compared with the welcome given by the French population to the emperor and empress in 1896 their reception on this occasion was not enthusiastic. By not visiting Paris they seemed to wish to avoid contact with the people, who were persuaded by a section of the press that the motive of the imperial journey to France was financial. The Socialists openly repudiated the Russian alliance, and one of them, the mayor of Lille, who refused to decorate his municipal buildings when the sovereigns visited the department of the Nord, was neither revoked nor suspended, although he publicly based his refusal on grounds insulting to the tsar.

It may be mentioned that the census returns of 1901 showed that the total increase of the population of France since the previous census in 1896 amounted only to 412,364, of which 289,662 was accounted for by the capital, while on the other hand the population of sixty out of eighty-seven departments had diminished.

As the quadrennial election of the Chamber of Deputies was due to take place in the spring of 1902, the first months of that year were chiefly occupied by politicians in preparing for it, though none of them gave any sign of being aware that the legislation to be effected by the new Chamber would be the most important which any parliament had undertaken under the constitution of 1875. At the end of the recess the prime minister in a speech at Saint Etienne, the capital of the Loire, of which department he was senator, passed in review the work of his ministry. With regard to the future, on the eve of the election which was to return the Chamber destined to disestablish the Church, he assured the secular clergy that they must not consider the legislation of the last session as menacing them: far from that, the recent law, directed primarily against those monastic orders which were anti-Republican associations, owning political journals and organizing electioneering funds (whose members he described as “moines ligueurs et moines d’affaires”), would be a guarantee of the Republic’s protection of the parochial clergy. The presence of his colleague, M. Millerand, on this occasion showed that M. Waldeck-Rousseau did not intend to separate himself from the Radical-Socialist group which had supported his government; and the next day the Socialist minister of commerce, at Firminy, a mining centre in the same department, made a speech deprecating the pursuit of unpractical social ideals, which might have been a version of Gambetta’s famous discourse on opportunism edited by an economist of the school of Léon Say. The Waldeck-Rousseau programme for the elections seemed therefore to be an implied promise of a moderate opportunist policy which would strengthen and unite the Republic by conciliating all sections of its supporters. When parliament met, M. Delcassé, minister for foreign affairs, on a proposal to suppress the Embassy to the Vatican, declared that even if the Concordat were ever revoked it would still be necessary for France to maintain diplomatic relations with the Holy See. On the other hand, the ministry voted, against the moderate Republicans, for an abstract resolution, proposed by M. Brisson, in favour of the abrogation of the Loi Falloux of 1850, which law, by abolishing the monopoly of the “university,” had established the principle of liberty of education. Another abstract resolution, supported by the government, which subsequently become law, was voted in favour of the reduction of the terms of compulsory military service from three years to two.

The general elections took place on the 27th of April 1902; with the second ballots on the 11th of May, and were favourable to the ministry, 321 of its avowed supporters being returned and 268 members of the Opposition, including 140 “Progressist” Republicans, many of whom were deputies whose opinions differed little from those of M. Waldeck-Rousseau. In Paris the government lost a few seats which were won by the Nationalist group of reactionaries. The chief surprise of the elections was the announcement made by M. Waldeck-Rousseau on the 20th of May, while the president of the Republic was in Russia on a visit to the tsar, of his intention to resign office. No one but the prime minister’s intimates knew that his shattered health was the true cause of his resignation, which was attributed to the unwillingness of an essentially moderate man to be the leader of an advanced party and the instrument of an immoderate policy. His retirement from public life at this crisis was the most important event of its kind since the death of his old master Gambetta. He had learned opportunist statesmanship in the short-lived grand ministère and in the long-lived Ferry administration of 1883-1885, after which he had become an inactive politician in the Senate, while making a large fortune at the bar. In spite of having eschewed politics he had been ranked in the public mind with Gambetta and Jules Ferry as one of the small number of politicians of the Republic who had risen high above mediocrity. While he had none of the magnetic exuberance which furthered the popularity of Gambetta, his cold inexpansiveness had not made him unpopular as was his other chief, Jules Ferry. Indeed, his unemotional coldness was one of the elements of the power with which he dominated parliament; and being regarded by the nation as the strong man whom France is always looking for, he was the first prime minister of the Republic whose name was made a rallying cry at a general election. Yet the country gave him a majority only for it to be handed over to other politicians to use in a manner which he had not contemplated. On the 3rd of June 1902 he formally resigned office, his ministry having lasted for three years, all but a few days, a longer duration than that of any other under the Third Republic.

M. Loubet called upon M. Léon Bourgeois, who had already been prime minister under M. Félix Faure, to form a ministry, but he had been nominated president of the new Chamber. The president of the Republic then offered the post to M. Brisson, who had been twice prime minister in 1885 and 1898, but he also refused. A third member of the Radical party was then sent for, M. Emile Combes, and he accepted. The senator of the Charente Inférieure, in his one short term of office in the Bourgeois ministry, had made no mark. But he had attained a minor prominence in the debates of the Senate by his ardent anti-clericalism. He had been educated as a seminarist and had taken minor orders, without proceeding to the priesthood, and had subsequently practised as a country doctor before entering parliament. M. Combes retained two of the most important members of the Waldeck-Rousseau cabinet, M. Delcassé, who had been at the foreign office for four years, and General André, who had become war minister in 1900 on the resignation of General de Galliffet. General André was an ardent Dreyfusard, strongly opposed to clerical and reactionary influences in the army. Among the new ministers was M. Rouvier, a colleague of Gambetta in the grand ministère and prime minister in 1887, whose participation in the Panama affair had caused his retirement from official life. Being a moderate opportunist and reputed the ablest financier among French politicians, his return to the ministry of finance reassured those who feared the fiscal experiments of an administration supported by the Socialists. The nomination as minister of marine of M. Camille Pelletan (the son of Eugène Pelletan, a notable adversary of the Second Empire), who had been a Radical-Socialist deputy since 1881, though new to office, was less reassuring. M. Combes reserved for himself the departments of the interior and public worship, meaning that the centralized administration of France should be in his own hands while he was keeping watch over the Church. But in spite of the prime minister’s extreme anti-clericalism there was no hint made in his ministerial declaration, on the 10th of June 1902, on taking office that there would be any question of the new Chamber dealing with the Concordat or with the relations of Church and state. M. Combes, however, warned the secular clergy not to make common cause with the religious orders, against which he soon began vigorous action. Before the end of June he directed the Préfets of the departments to bring political pressure to bear on all branches of the public service, and he obtained a presidential decree closing a hundred and twenty-five schools, which had been recently opened in buildings belonging to private individuals, on the ground that they were conducted by members of religious associations and that this brought the schools under the law of 1901. Such action seemed to be opposed to M. Waldeck-Rousseau’s interpretation of the law; but the Chamber having supported M. Combes he ordered in July the closing of 2500 schools, conducted by members of religious orders, for which authorization had not been requested. This again seemed contrary to the assurances of M. Waldeck-Rousseau, and it called forth vain protests in the name of liberty from Radicals of the old school, such as M. Goblet, prime minister in 1886, and from Liberal Protestants, such as M. Gabriel Monod. The execution of the decrees closing the schools of the religious orders caused some violent agitation in the provinces during the parliamentary recess. But the majority of the departmental councils, at their meetings in August, passed resolutions in favour of the governmental policy, and a movement led by certain Nationalists, including M. Drumont, editor of the anti-semitic Libre Parole, and M. François Coppée, the Academician, to found a league having similar aims to those of the “passive resisters” in our country, was a complete failure. On the reassembling of parliament, both houses passed votes of confidence in the ministry and also an act supplementary to the Associations Law penalizing the opening of schools by members of religious orders.

In spite of the ardour of parliamentary discussions the French public was less moved in 1902 by the anti-clerical action of the government than by a vulgar case of swindling known as the “Humbert affair.” The wife of a former deputy for Seine-et-Marne, who was the son of M. Gustave Humbert, minister of justice in 1882, had for many years maintained a luxurious establishment, which included a political salon, on the strength of her assertion that she and her family had inherited several millions sterling from one Crawford, an Englishman. Her story being believed by certain bankers she had been enabled to borrow colossal sums on the legend, and had almost married her daughter as a great heiress to a Moderate Republican deputy who held a conspicuous position in the Chamber. The flight of the Humberts, the exposure of the fraud and their arrest in Spain excited the French nation more deeply than the relative qualities of M. Waldeck-Rousseau and M. Combes or the woes of the religious orders. A by-election to the Senate in the spring of 1902 merits notice as it brought back to parliament M. Clémenceau, who had lived in comparative retirement since 1893 when he lost his seat as deputy for Draguignan, owing to a series of unusually bitter attacks made against him by his political enemies. He had devoted his years of retirement to journalism, taking a leading part in the Dreyfus affair on the side of the accused. His election as senator for the Var, where he had formerly been deputy, was an event of importance unanticipated at the time.

The year 1903 saw in progress a momentous development of the anti-clerical movement in France, though little trace of this is found in the statute-book. The chief act of parliament of that year was one which interested the population much more than any law affecting the Church. This was an act regulating the privileges of the bouilleurs de cru, the peasant proprietors who, permitted to distil from their produce an annual quantity of alcohol supposed to be sufficient for their domestic needs, in practice fabricated and sold so large an amount as to prejudice gravely the inland revenue. As there were a million of these illicit distillers in the land they formed a powerful element in the electorate. The crowded and excited debates affecting their interests, in which Radicals and Royalists of the rural districts made common cause against Socialists and Clericals of the towns, were in striking contrast with the less animated discussions concerning the Church. The prime minister, an anti-clerical zealot, bitterly hostile to the Church of which he had been a minister, took advantage of the relative indifference of parliament and of the nation in matters ecclesiastical. The success of M. Combes in his campaign against the Church was an example of what energy and pertinacity can do. There was no great wave of popular feeling on the question, no mandate given to the deputies at the general election or asked for by them. Neither was M. Combes a popular leader or a man of genius. He was rather a trained politician, with a fixed idea, who knew how to utilize to his ends the ability and organization of the extreme anti-clerical element in the Chamber, and the weakness of the extreme clerical party. The majority of the Chamber did not share the prime minister’s animosity towards the Church, for which at the same time it had not the least enthusiasm, and under the concordatory lead of M. Waldeck-Rousseau it would have been content to curb clerical pretensions without having recourse to extreme measures of repression. It was, however, equally content to follow the less tolerant guidance of M. Combes. Thus, early in the session of 1903 it approved of his circular forbidding the priests of Brittany to make use of the Breton language in their religious instruction under pain of losing their salaries. It likewise followed him on the 26th of January when he declined to accept, as being premature and unpractical, a Socialist resolution in favour of suppressing the budget of public worship, though the majority was indeed differently composed on those two occasions. In the Senate on the 29th of January M. Waldeck-Rousseau indicated what his policy would have been had he retained office, by severely criticizing his successor’s method of applying the Associations Law. Instead of asking parliament to judge on its merits each several demand for authorization made by a congregation, the government had divided the religious orders into two chief categories, teaching orders and preaching orders, and had recommended that all should be suppressed by a general refusal of authorization. The Grande Chartreuse was put into a category by itself as a trading association and was dissolved; but Lourdes, which with its crowds of pilgrims enriched the Pyrenean region and the railway companies serving it, was spared for electioneering reasons. A dispute arose between the government and the Vatican on the nomination of bishops to vacant sees. The Vatican insisted on the words “nobis nominavit” in the papal bulls instituting the bishops nominated by the chief of the executive in France under the Concordat. M. Combes objected to the pronoun, and maintained that the complete nomination belonged to the French government, the Holy See having no choice in the matter, but only the power of canonical institution. This produced a deadlock, with the consequence that no more bishops were ever again appointed under the Concordat, which both before and after the Easter recess M. Combes now threatened to repudiate. These menaces derived an increased importance from the failing health of the pope. Leo XIII. had attained the great age of ninety-three, and on the choice of his successor grave issues depended. He died on the 20th of July 1903. The conclave indicated as his successor his secretary of state, Cardinal Rampolla, an able exponent of the late pope’s diplomatic methods and also a warm friend of France. It was said to be the latter quality which induced Austria to exercise its ancient power of veto on the choice of a conclave, and finally Cardinal Sarto, patriarch of Venice, a pious prelate inexperienced in diplomacy, was elected and took the title of Pius X. In September the inauguration of a statue of Renan at Tréguier, his birthplace, was made the occasion of an anti-clerical demonstration in Catholic and reactionary Brittany, at which the prime minister made a militant speech in the name of the freethinkers of France, though Renan was a Voltairian aristocrat who disliked the aims and methods of modern Radical-Socialists. In the course of his speech M. Combes pointed out that the anti-clerical policy of the government had not caused the Republic to lose prestige in the eyes of the monarchies of Europe, which were then showing it unprecedented attentions. This assertion was true, and had reference to the visit of the king of England to the president of the Republic in May and the projected visit of the king of Italy. That of Edward VII., which was the first state visit of a British sovereign to France for nearly fifty years, was returned by President Loubet in July, and was welcomed by all parties, excepting some of the reactionaries. M. Millevoye, a Nationalist deputy for Paris, in the Patrie counselled the Parisians to remember Fashoda, the Transvaal War, and the attitude of the English in the Dreyfus affair, and to greet the British monarch with cries of “Vivent les Boers.” M. Déroulède, the most interesting member of the Nationalist party, wrote from his exile at Saint-Sébastien protesting against the folly of this proceeding, which merits to be put on record as an example of the incorrigible ineptitude of the reactionaries in France. The incident served only to prove their complete lack of influence on popular feeling, while it damaged the cause of the Church at a most critical moment by showing that the only persons in France willing to insult a friendly monarch who was the guest of the nation, belonged to the clerical party. Of the royal visits that of the king of Italy was the more important in its immediate effects on the history of France, as will be seen in the narration of the events of 1904.

The session of 1904 began with the election of a new president of the Chamber, on the retirement of M. Bourgeois. The choice fell on M. Henri Brisson, an old Radical, but not a Socialist, who had held that post in 1881 and had subsequently filled it on ten occasions, the election to the office being annual. The narrow majority he obtained over M. Paul Bertrand, a little-known moderate Republican, by secret ballot, followed by the defeat of M. Jaurès, the Socialist leader, for one of the vice-presidential chairs, showed that one half of the Chamber was of moderate tendency. But, as events proved, the Moderates lacked energy and leadership, so the influence of the Radical prime minister prevailed. In a debate on the 22nd of January on the expulsion of an Alsatian priest of French birth from a French frontier department by the French police, M. Ribot, who set an example of activity to younger men of the moderate groups, reproached M. Combes with reducing all questions in which the French nation was interested to the single one of anti-clericalism, and the prime minister retorted that it was solely for that purpose that he took office. In pursuance of this policy a bill was introduced, and was passed by the Chamber before Easter, interdicting from teaching all members of religious orders, authorized or not authorized. Among other results this law, which the Senate passed in the summer, swept out of existence the schools of the Frères de la Doctrine Chrétienne (Christian Brothers) and closed in all 2400 schools before the end of the year.

This drastic act of anti-clerical policy, which was a total repudiation by parliament of the principle of liberty of education, should have warned the authorities of the Church of the relentless attitude of the government. The most superficial observation ought to have shown them that the indifference of the nation would permit the prime minister to go to any length, and common prudence should have prevented them from affording him any pretext for more damaging measures. The President of the Republic accepted an invitation to return the visit of the king of Italy. When it was submitted to the Chamber on March 25th, 1904, a reactionary deputy moved the rejection of the vote for the expenses of the journey on the ground that the chief of the French executive ought not to visit the representative of the dynasty which had plundered the papacy. The amendment was rejected by a majority of 502 votes to 12, which showed that at a time of bitter controversy on ecclesiastical questions French opinion was unanimous in approving the visit of the president of the Republic to Rome as the guest of the king of Italy. Nothing could be more gratifying to the entire French nation, both on racial and on traditional grounds, than such a testimony of a complete revival of friendship with Italy, of late years obscured by the Triple Alliance. Yet the Holy See saw fit to advance pretensions inevitably certain to serve the ends of the extreme anti-clericals, whose most intolerant acts at that moment, such as the removal of the crucifixes from the law-courts, were followed by new electoral successes. Thus the reactionary majority on the Paris municipal council was displaced by the Radical-Socialists on the 1st of May, the day that M. Loubet returned from his visit to Rome. On the 16th of May M. Jaurès’ Socialist organ, L’Humanité, published the text of a protest, addressed by the pope to the powers having diplomatic relations with the Vatican, against the visit of the president of the Republic to the King of Italy. This document, dated the 28th of April, was offensive in tone both to France and to Italy. It intimated that while Catholic sovereigns refrained from visiting the person who, contrary to right, exercised civil sovereignty in Rome, that “duty” was even more “imperious” for the ruler of France by reason of the “privileges” enjoyed by that country from the Concordat; that the journey of M. Loubet to “pay homage” within the pontifical see to that person was an insult to the sovereign pontiff; and that only for reasons of special gravity was the nuncio permitted to remain in Paris. The publication of this document caused some joy among the extreme clericals, but this was nothing to the exultation of the extreme anti-clericals, who saw that the prudent diplomacy of Leo XIII., which had risen superior to many a provocation of the French government, was succeeded by a papal policy which would facilitate their designs in a manner unhoped for. Moderate men were dismayed, seeing that the Concordat was now in instant danger; but the majority of the French nation remained entirely indifferent to its fate. Within a week France took the initiative by recalling the ambassador to the Vatican, M. Nisard, leaving a third-secretary in charge. In the debate in the Chamber upon the incident, the foreign minister, M. Delcassé, said that the ambassador was recalled, not because the Vatican had protested against the visit of the president to the king of Italy, but because it had communicated this protest, in terms offensive to France, to foreign powers. The Chamber on the 27th of May approved the recall of the ambassador by the large majority of 420 to 90. By a much smaller majority it rejected a Socialist motion that the Nuncio should be given his passports. The action of the Holy See was not actually an infringement of the Concordat; so the government, satisfied with the effect produced on public opinion, which was now quite prepared for a rupture with the Vatican, was willing to wait for a new pretext, which was not long in coming. Two bishops, Mgr. Geay of Laval and Mgr. Le Nordez of Dijon, were on bad terms with the clerical reactionaries in their dioceses. The friends of the prelates, including some of their episcopal brethren, thought that their chief offence was their loyalty to the Republic, and it was an unfortunate coincidence that these bishops, subjected to proceedings which had been unknown under the long pontificate of Leo XIII., should have been two who had incurred the animosity of anti-republicans. Their enemies accused Mgr. Geay of immorality and Mgr. Le Nordez of being in league with the freemasons. The bishop of Laval was summoned by the Holy Office, without any communication with the French government, to resign his see, and he submitted the citation forthwith to the minister of public worship. The French chargé d’affaires at the Vatican was instructed to protest against this grave infringement of an article of the Concordat, and, soon after, against another violation of the Concordat committed by the Nuncio, who had written to the bishop of Dijon ordering him to suspend his ordinations, the Nuncio being limited, like all other ambassadors, to communicating the instructions of his government through the intermediary of the minister for foreign affairs. The Vatican declined to give any satisfaction to the French government and summoned the two bishops to Rome under pain of suspension. So the French chargé d’affaires was directed to leave Rome, after having informed the Holy See that the government of the Republic considered that the mission of the apostolic Nuncio in Paris was terminated. Thus came to an end on the 30th of July 1904 the diplomatic relations which under the Concordat had subsisted between France and the Vatican for more than a hundred years.

Twelve days later M. Waldeck-Rousseau died, having lived just long enough to see this unanticipated result of his policy. It was said that his resolve to regulate the religious associations arose from his feeling that whatever injustice had been committed in the Dreyfus case had been aggravated by the action of certain unauthorized orders. However that may be, his own utterances showed that he believed that his policy was one of finality. But he had not reckoned that his legislation, which needed hands as calm and impartial as his own to apply it, would be used in a manner he had not contemplated by sectarian politicians who would be further aided by the self-destructive policy of the highest authorities of the Church. When parliament assembled for the autumn session a general feeling was expressed, by moderate politicians as well as by supporters of the Combes ministry, that disestablishment was inevitable. The prime minister said that he had been long in favour of it, though the previous year he had intimated to M. Nisard, ambassador to the Vatican, that he had not a majority in parliament to vote it. But the papacy and the clergy had since done everything to change that situation. The Chamber did not move in the matter beyond appointing a committee to consider the general question, to which M. Combes submitted in his own name a bill for the separation of the churches from the State.

During the last three months of 1904 public opinion was diverted to the cognate question of the existence of masonic delation in the army. M. Guyot de Villeneuve, Nationalist deputy for Saint Denis, who had been dismissed from the army by General de Galliffet in connexion with the Dreyfus affair, brought before the Chamber a collection of documents which, it seemed, had been abstracted from the Grand Orient of France, the headquarters of French freemasonry, by an official of that order. These papers showed that an elaborate system of espionage and delation had been organized by the freemasons throughout France for the purpose of obtaining information as to the political opinions and religious practices of the officers of the army, and that this system was worked with the connivance of certain officials of the ministry of war. Its aim appeared to be to ascertain if officers went to mass or sent their children to convent schools or in any way were in sympathy with the Roman Catholic religion, the names of officers so secretly denounced being placed on a black-list at the War Office, whereby they were disqualified for promotion. There was no doubt about the authenticity of the documents or of the facts which they revealed. Radical ex-ministers joined with moderate Republicans and reactionaries in denouncing the system. Anti-clerical deputies declared that it was no use to cleanse the war office of the influence of the Jesuits, which was alleged to have prevailed there, if it were to be replaced by another occult power, more demoralizing because more widespread. Only the Socialists and a few of the Radical-Socialists in the Chamber supported the action of the freemasons. General André, minister of war, was so clearly implicated, with the evident approval of the prime minister, that a revulsion of feeling against the policy of the anti-clerical cabinet began to operate in the Chamber. Had the opposition been wisely guided there can be little doubt that a moderate ministry would have been called to office and the history of the Church in France might have been changed. But the reactionaries, with their accustomed folly, played into the hands of their adversaries. The minister of war had made a speech which produced a bad impression. As he stepped down from the tribune he was struck in the face by a Nationalist deputy for Paris, a much younger man than he. The cowardly assault did not save the minister, who was too deeply compromised in the delation scandal. But it saved the anti-clerical party, by rallying a number of waverers who, until this exhibition of reactionary policy, were prepared to go over to the Moderates, from the “bloc,” as the ministerial majority was called. The Nationalist deputy was committed to the assizes on the technical charge of assaulting a functionary while performing his official duties. Towards the end of the year, on the eve of his trial, he met with a violent death, and the circumstances which led to it, when made public, showed that this champion of the Church was a man of low morality. General André had previously resigned and was succeeded as minister of war by M. Berteaux, a wealthy stock-broker and a Socialist.

The Combes cabinet could not survive the delation scandal, in spite of the resignation of the minister of war and the ineptitude of the opposition. On the 8th of January 1905, two days before parliament met, an election took place in Paris to fill the vacancy caused by the death of the Nationalist deputy who had assaulted General André. The circumstances of his death, at that time partially revealed, did not deter the electors from choosing by a large majority a representative of the same party, Admiral Bienaimé, who the previous year had been removed for political reasons from the post of maritime prefect at Toulon, by M. Camille Pelletan, minister of marine. A more serious check to the Combes ministry was given by the refusal of the Chamber to re-elect as president M. Brisson, who was defeated by a majority of twenty-five by M. Doumer, ex-Governor-General of Indo-China, who, though he had entered politics as a Radical, was now supported by the anti-republican reactionaries as well as by the moderate Republicans. A violent debate arose on the question of expelling from the Legion of Honour certain members of that order, including a general officer, who had been involved in the delation scandal. M. Jaurès, the eloquent Socialist deputy for Albi, who played the part of Éminence grise to M. Combes in his anti-clerical campaign, observed that the party which was now demanding the purification of the order had been in no hurry to expel from it Esterhazy long after his crimes had been proved in connexion with the Dreyfus case. The debate was inconclusive, and the government on the 14th of January obtained a vote of confidence by a majority of six. But M. Combes, whose animosity towards the church was keener than his love of office, saw that his ministry would be constantly liable to be put in a minority, and that thus the consideration of separation might be postponed until after the general elections of 1906. So he announced his resignation in an unprecedented manifesto addressed to the president of the Republic on the 18th January.

M. Rouvier, minister of finance in the outgoing government, was called upon for the second time in his career to form a ministry. A moderate opportunist himself, he intended to form a coalition cabinet in which all groups of Republicans, from the Centre to the extreme Left, would be represented. But he failed, and the ministry of the 24th of January 1905 contained no members of the Republican opposition which had combated M. Combes. The prime minister retained the portfolio of finance; M. Delcassé remained at the foreign office, which he had directed since 1898, and M. Berteaux at the war office; M. Etienne, member for Oran, went to the ministry of the interior; another Algerian deputy, M. Thomson, succeeded M. Camille Pelletan at the ministry of marine, which department was said to have fallen into inefficiency; public worship was separated from the department of the interior and joined with that of education under M. Bienvenu-Martin, Radical-Socialist deputy for Auxerre, who was new to official life. Although M. Rouvier, as befitted a politician of the school of Waldeck-Rousseau, disliked the separation of the churches from the state, he accepted that policy as inevitable. After the action of the Vatican in 1904, which had produced the rupture of diplomatic relations with France, many moderates who had been persistent in their opposition to the Combes ministry, and even certain Nationalists, accepted the principle of separation, but urged that it should be effected on liberal terms. So on the 27th of January, after the minister of education and public worship had announced that the government intended to introduce a separation bill, a vote of confidence was obtained by a majority of 373 to 99, half of the majority being opponents of the Combes ministry of various Republican and reactionary groups, while the minority was composed of 84 Radicals and Socialists and only 15 reactionaries.

On the 21st of March the debates on the separation of the churches from the state began. A commission had been appointed in 1904 to examine the subject. Its reporter was M. Aristide Briand, Socialist member for Saint Etienne. According to French parliamentary procedure, the reporter of a commission, directed to draw up a great scheme of legislation, can make himself a more important person in conducting it through a house of legislature than the minister in charge of the bill. This is what M. Briand succeeded in doing. He produced with rapidity a “report” on the whole question, in which he traced with superficial haste the history of the Church in France from the baptism of Clovis, and upon this drafted a bill which was accepted by the government. He thus at one bound came from obscurity into the front rank of politicians, and in devising a revolutionary measure learned a lesson of moderate statesmanship. In conducting the debates he took the line of throwing the responsibility for the rupture of the Concordat on the pope. The leadership of the Opposition fell on M. Ribot, who had been twice prime minister of the Republic and was not a practising Catholic. He recognized that separation had become inevitable,; but argued that it could be accomplished as a permanent act only in concert with the Holy See. The clerical party in the Chamber did little in defence of the Church. The abbés Lemire and Gayraud, the only ecclesiastics in parliament, spoke with moderation, and M. Groussau, a Catholic jurist, attacked the measure with less temperate zeal; but the best serious defence of the interests of the Church came from the Republican centre. Few amendments from the extreme Left were accepted by M. Briand, whose general tone was moderate and not illiberal. One feature of the debates was the reluctance of the prime minister to take part in them, even when financial clauses were discussed in which his own office was particularly concerned. The bill finally passed the Chamber on the 3rd of July by 341 votes against 233, the majority containing a certain number of conservative Republicans and Nationalists. At the end the Radical-Socialists manifested considerable discontent at the liberal tendencies of M. Briand, and declared that the measure as it left the Chamber could be considered only provisional. In the Senate it underwent no amendment whatever, not a single word being altered. The prime minister, M. Rouvier, never once opened his lips during the lengthy debates, in the course of which M. Clémenceau, as a philosophical Radical who voted for the bill, criticized it as too concordatory, while M. Méline, as a moderate Republican, who voted against it, predicted that it would create such a state of things as would necessitate new negotiations with Rome a few years later. It was finally passed by a majority of 181 to 102, the complete number of senators being 300, and three days later, on the 9th of December 1905, it was promulgated as law by the president of the Republic.

The main features of the act were as follows. The first clauses guaranteed liberty of conscience and the free practice of public worship, and declared that henceforth the Republic neither recognized nor remunerated any form of religion, except in the case of chaplains to public schools, hospitals and prisons. It provided that after inventories had been taken of the real and personal property in the hands of religious bodies, hitherto remunerated by the state, to ascertain whether such property belonged to the state, the department, or the commune, all such property should be transferred to associations of public worship (associations cultuelles) established in each commune in accordance with the rules of the religion which they represented, for the purpose of carrying on the practices of that religion. As the Vatican subsequently refused to permit Catholics to take part in these associations, the important clauses relating to their organization and powers became a dead letter, except in the case of the Protestant and Jewish associations, which affected only a minute proportion of the religious establishments under the act. Nothing, therefore, need be said about them except that the chief discussions in the Chamber took place with regard to their constitution, which was so amended, contrary to the wishes of the extreme anti-clericals, that many moderate critics of the original bill thought that thereby the regular practice of the Catholic religion, under episcopal control, had been safeguarded. A system of pensions for ministers of religion hitherto paid by the state was provided, according to the age and the length of service of the ecclesiastics interested, while in small communes of under a thousand inhabitants the clergy were to receive in any case their full pay for eight years. The bishops’ palaces were to be left gratuitously at the disposal of the occupiers for two years, and the presbyteries and seminaries for five years. This provision too became a dead letter, owing to the orders given by the Holy See to the clergy. Other provisions enacted that the churches should not be used for political meetings, while the services held in them were protected by the law from the acts of disturbers. As the plenary operation of the law depended on the associations cultuelles, the subsequent failure to create those bodies makes it useless to give a complete exposition of a statute of which they were an essential feature.

The passing of the Separation Law was the chief act of the last year of the presidency of M. Loubet. One other important measure has to be noted, the law reducing compulsory military service to two years. The law of 1889 had provided a general service of three years, with an extensive system of dispensations accorded to persons for domestic reasons, or because they belonged to certain categories of students, such citizens being let off with one year’s service with the colours or being entirely exempted. The new law exacted two years’ service from every Frenchman, no one being exempted save for physical incapacity. Under the act of 1905 even the cadets of the military college of Saint Cyr and of the Polytechnic had to serve in the ranks before entering those schools. Anti-military doctrines continued to be encouraged by the Socialist party, M. Hervé, the professor who had been revoked in 1901 for his suggestion of a military strike in case of war and for other unpatriotic utterances, being elected a member of the administrative committee of the Unified Socialist party, of which M. Jaurès was one of the chiefs. At a congress of elementary schoolmasters at Lille in August, anti-military resolutions were passed and a general adherence was given to the doctrines of M. Hervé. At Longwy, in the Eastern coal-field, a strike took place in September, during which the military was called out to keep order and a workman was killed in a cavalry charge. The minister of war, M. Berteaux, visited the scene of the disturbance, and was reported to have saluted the red revolutionary flag which was borne by a procession of strikers singing the “Internationale.”

During the autumn session in November M. Berteaux suddenly resigned the portfolio of war during a sitting of the Chamber, and was succeeded by M. Etienne, minister of the interior, a moderate politician who inspired greater confidence. Earlier in the year other industrial strikes of great gravity had taken place, notably at Limoges, among the potters, where several deaths took place in a conflict with the troops and a factory was burnt. Even more serious were the strikes in the government arsenals in November. At Cherbourg and Brest only a small proportion of the workmen went out, but at Lorient, Rochefort and especially at Toulon the strikes were on a much larger scale. In 1905 solemn warnings were given in the Chamber of the coming crisis in the wine-growing regions of the South. Radical-Socialists such as M. Doumergue, the deputy for Nîmes and a member of the Combes ministry, joined with monarchists such as M. Lasies, deputy of the Gers, in calling attention to the distress of the populations dependent on the vine. They argued that the wines of the South found no market, not because of the alleged over-production, but because of the competition of artificial wines; that formerly only twenty departments of France were classed in the atlas as wine-producing, but that thanks to the progress of chemistry seventy departments were now so described. The deputies of the north of France and of Paris, irrespective of party, opposed these arguments, and the government, while promising to punish fraud, did not seem to take very seriously the legitimate warnings of the representatives of the South.

The Republic continued to extend its friendly relations with foreign powers, and the end of M. Loubet’s term of office was signalized by a procession of royal visits to Paris, some of which the president returned. At the end of May the king of Spain came and narrowly escaped assassination from a bomb which was thrown at him by a Spaniard as he was returning with the president from the opera. In October M. Loubet returned this visit at Madrid and went on to Lisbon to see the king of Portugal, being received by the queen, who was the daughter of the comte de Paris and the sister of the duc d’Orléans, both exiled by the Republic. In November the king of Portugal came to Paris, and the president of the Republic also received during the year less formal visits from the kings of England and of Greece.

One untoward international event affecting the French ministry occurred in June 1905. M. Delcassé (see section on Exterior Policy), who had been foreign minister longer than any holder of that office under the Republic, resigned, and it was believed that he had been sacrificed by the prime minister to the exigencies of Germany, which power was said to be disquieted at his having, in connexion with the Morocco question, isolated Germany by promoting the friendly relations of France with England, Spain and Italy. Whether it be true or not that the French government was really in alarm at the possibility of a declaration of war by Germany, the impression given was unfavourable, nor was it removed when M. Rouvier himself took the portfolio of foreign affairs.

The year 1906 is remarkable in the history of the Third Republic in that it witnessed the renewal of all the public powers in the state. A new president of the Republic was elected on the 17th of January ten days after the triennial election of one third of the senate, and the general election of the chamber of deputies followed in May—the ninth which had taken place under the constitution of 1875. The senatorial elections of the 7th of January showed that the delegates of the people who chose the members of the upper house and represented the average opinion of the country approved of the anti-clerical legislation of parliament. The election of M. Fallières, president of the senate, to the presidency of the Republic was therefore anticipated, he being the candidate of the parliamentary majorities which had disestablished the church. At the congress of the two chambers held at Versailles on the 17th of January he received the absolute majority of 449 votes out of 849 recorded. The candidate of the Opposition was M. Paul Doumer, whose anti-clericalism in the past was so extreme that when married he had dispensed with a religious ceremony and his children were unbaptized. So the curious spectacle was presented of the Moderate Opportunist M. Fallières being elected by Radicals and Socialists, while the Radical candidate was supported by Moderates and Reactionaries. For the second time a president of the senate, the second official personage in the Republic, was advanced to the chief magistracy, M. Loubet having been similarly promoted. As in his case, M. Fallières owed his election to M. Clémenceau. When M. Loubet was elected M. Clémenceau had not come to the end of his retirement from parliamentary life; but in political circles, with his powerful pen and otherwise, he was resuming his former influence as a “king-maker.” He knew of the precariousness Of Félix Faure’s health and of the indiscretions of the elderly president. So when the presidency suddenly became vacant in January 1899 he had already fixed his choice on M. Loubet, as a candidate whose unobtrusive name excited no jealousy among the republicans. At that moment, owing to the crisis caused by the Dreyfus affair, the Republic needed a safe man to protect it against the attacks of the plebiscitary party which had been latterly favoured by President Faure. M. Constans, it was said, had in 1899 desired the presidency of the senate, vacant by M. Loubet’s promotion, in preference to the post of ambassador at Constantinople. But M. Clémenceau, deeming that his name had been too much associated with polemics in the past, contrived the election of M. Fallières to the second place of dignity in the Republic, so as to have another safe candidate in readiness for the Elysée in case President Loubet suddenly disappeared. M. Loubet, however, completed his septennate, and to the end of it M. Fallières was regarded as his probable successor. As he fulfilled his high duties in the senate inoffensively without making enemies among his political friends, he escaped the fate which had awaited other presidents-designate of the Republic. Previously to presiding over the senate this Gascon advocate, who had represented his native Lot-et-Garonne, in either chamber, since 1876, had once been prime minister for three weeks in 1883. He had also held office in six other ministries, so no politician in France had a larger experience in administration and in public affairs.

On New Year’s Day 1906, the absence of the Nuncio from the presidential reception of the diplomatic body marked conspicuously the rupture of the Concordat; for hitherto the representative of the Holy See had ranked as doyen of the ambassadors to the Republic, whatever the relative seniority of his colleagues, and in the name of all the foreign powers had officially saluted the chief of the state. On the 20th of January the inventories of the churches were commenced, under the 3rd clause of the Separation Act, for the purpose of assessing the value of the furniture and other objects which they contained. In Paris they occasioned some disturbance; but as the protesting rioters were led by persons whose hostility to the Republic was more notorious than their love for religion, the demonstrations were regarded as political rather than religious. In certain rural districts, where the church had retained its influence and where its separation from the state was unpopular, the taking of the inventories was impeded by the inhabitants, and in some places, where the troops were called out to protect the civil authorities, further feeling was aroused by the refusal of officers to act. But, as a rule, this first manifest operation of the Separation Law was received with indifference by the population. One region where popular feeling was displayed in favour of the church was Flanders, where, in March, at Boeschepe on the Belgian frontier, a man was killed during the taking of an inventory. This accident caused the fall of the ministry. The moderate Republicans in the Chamber, who had helped to keep M. Rouvier in office, withheld their support in a debate arising out of the incident, and the government was defeated by thirty-three votes. M. Rouvier resigned, and the new president of the Republic sent for M. Sarrien, a Radical of the old school from Burgundy, who had been deputy for his native Saône-et-Loire from the foundation of the Chamber in 1876 and had previously held office in four cabinets. In M. Sarrien’s ministry of the 14th of March 1906 the president of the council was only a minor personage, its real conductor being M. Clémenceau, who accepted the portfolio of the interior. Upon him, therefore devolved the function of “making the elections” of 1906, as it is the minister at the Place Beauvau, where all the wires of administrative government are centralized, who gives the orders to the prefectures at each general election. As in France ministers sit and speak in both houses of parliament, M. Clémenceau, though a senator, now returned, after an absence of thirteen years, to the Chamber of Deputies, in which he had played a mighty part in the first seventeen years of its existence. His political experience was unique. From an early period after entering the Chamber in 1876 he had exercised there an influence not exceeded by any deputy. Yet it was not until 1906, thirty years after his first election to parliament, that he held office—though in 1888 he just missed the presidency of the Chamber, receiving the same number of votes as M. Méline, to whom the post was allotted by right of seniority. He now returned to the tribune of the Palais Bourbon, on which he had been a most formidable orator. During his career as deputy his eloquence was chiefly destructive, and of the nineteen ministries which fell between the election of M. Grévy to the presidency of the Republic in 1879 and his own departure from parliamentary life in 1893 there were few of which the fall had not been expedited by his mordant criticism or denunciation. He now came back to the scene of his former achievements not to attack but to defend a ministry. Though his old occupation was gone, his re-entry excited the keenest interest, for at sixty-five he remained the biggest political figure in France. After M. Clémenceau the most interesting of the new ministers was M. Briand, who was not nine years old when M. Clémenceau had become conspicuous in political life as the mayor of Montmartre on the eve of the Commune. M. Briand had entered the Chamber, as Socialist deputy for Saint Etienne, only in 1902. The mark he had made as “reporter” of the Separation Bill has been noted, and on that account he became minister of education and public worship—the terms of the Separation Law necessitating the continuation of a department for ecclesiastical affairs. As he had been a militant Socialist of the “unified” group of which M. Jaurès was the chief, and also a member of the superior council of labour, his appointment indicated that the new ministry courted the support of the extreme Left. It, however, contained some moderate men, notably M. Poincaré, who had the repute of making the largest income at the French bar after M. Waldeck-Rousseau gave up his practice, and who became for the second time minister of finance. The portfolios of the colonies and of public works were also given to old ministers of moderate tendencies, M. Georges Leygues and M. Barthou. A former prime minister, M. Léon Bourgeois, went to the foreign office, over which he had already presided, besides having represented France at the peace conference at the Hague; while MM. Étienne and Thomson retained their portfolios of war and marine. The cabinet contained so many men of tried ability that it was called the ministry of all the talents. But the few who understood the origin of the name knew that it would be even more ephemeral than was the British ministry of 1806; for the fine show of names belonged to a transient combination which could not survive the approaching elections long enough to leave any mark in politics.

Before the elections took place grave labour troubles showed that social and economical questions were more likely to give anxiety to the government than any public movement resulting from the disestablishment of the church. Almost the first ministerial act of M. Clémenceau was to visit the coal basin of the Pas de Calais, where an accident causing great loss of life was followed by an uprising of the working population of the region, which spread into the adjacent department of the Nord and caused the minister of the interior to take unusual precautions to prevent violent demonstrations in Paris on Labour Day, the 1st of May. The activity of the Socialist leaders in encouraging anti-capitalist agitation did not seem to alarm the electorate. Nor did it show any sympathy with the appeal of the pope, who in his encyclical letter, Vehementer nos, addressed to the French cardinals on the 11th of February, denounced the Separation Law. So the result of the elections of May 1906 was a decisive victory for the anti-clericals and Socialists.

A brief analysis of the composition of the Chamber of Deputies is always impossible, the limits of the numerous groups being ill-defined. But in general terms the majority supporting the radical policy of the bloc in the last parliament, which had usually mustered about 340 votes, now numbered more than 400, including 230 Radical-Socialists and Socialists. The gains of the extreme Left were chiefly at the expense of the moderate or progressist republicans, who, about 120 strong in the old Chamber, now came back little more than half that number. The anti-republican Right, comprising Royalists, Bonapartists and Nationalists, had maintained their former position and were about 130 all told. The general result of the polls of the 6th and 20th of May was thus an electoral vindication of the advanced policy adopted by the old Chamber and a repudiation of moderate Republicanism; while the stationary condition of the reactionary groups showed that the tribulations inflicted by the last parliament on the church had not provoked the electorate to increase its support of clerical politicians.

The Vatican, however, declined to recognize this unmistakable demonstration. The bishops, taking advantage of their release from the concordatory restrictions which had withheld from them the faculty of meeting in assembly, had met at a preliminary conference to consider their plan of action under the Separation Law. They had adjourned for further instructions from the Holy See, which were published on the 10th of August 1906, in a new encyclical Gravissimo officii, wherein, to the consternation of many members of the episcopate, the pope interdicted the associations cultuelles, the bodies which, under the Separation Law, were to be established in each parish, to hold and to organize the church property and finances, and were essential to the working of the act. On the 4th of September the bishops met again and passed a resolution of submission to the Holy See. In spite of their loyalty they could not but deplore an injunction which inevitably would cause distress to the large majority of the clergy after the act came into operation on the 12th of December 1906. They knew only too well how hopeless was the idea that the distress of the clergy would call forth any revulsion of popular feeling in France. The excitement of the public that summer over a painful clerical scandal in the diocese of Chartres showed that the interest taken by the mass of the population in church matters was not of a kind which would aid the clergy in their difficult situation.

At the close of the parliamentary recess M. Sarrien resigned the premiership on the pretext of ill-health, and by a presidential decree of the 25th of October 1906 M. Clémenceau, who had been called to fill the vacancy, took office. MM. Bourgeois, Poincaré, Etienne and Leygues retired with M. Sarrien. The new prime minister placed at the foreign office M. Pichon, who had learned politics on the staff of the Justice, the organ of M. Clémenceau, by whose influence he had entered the diplomatic service in 1893, after eight years in the chamber of deputies. He had been minister at Pekin during the Boxer rebellion and resident at Tunis, and he was now radical senator for the Jura. M. Caillaux, a more adventurous financier than M. Rouvier or M. Poincaré, who had been Waldeck-Rousseau’s minister of finance, resumed that office. The most significant appointment was that of General Picquart to the war office. The new minister when a colonel had been willing to sacrifice his career, although he was an anti-Semite, to redressing the injustice which he believed had been inflicted on a Jewish officer—whose second condemnation, it may be noted, had been quashed earlier in 1906. M. Viviani became the first minister of labour (Travail et Prévoyance sociale). The creation of the office and the appointment of a socialist lawyer and journalist to fill it showed that M. Clémenceau recognized the increasing prominence of social and industrial questions and the growing power of the trade-unions.

The acts and policy of the Clémenceau ministry and the events which took place during the years that it held office are too near the present time to be appraised historically. It seems not unlikely that the first advent to power, after thirty-five years of strenuous political life, of one who must be ranked among the ablest of the twenty-seven prime ministers of the Third Republic will be seen to have been coincident with an important evolution in the history of the French nation. The separation of the Roman Catholic Church from the state, by the law of December 1905, had deprived the Socialists, the now most powerful party of the extreme Left, of the chief outlet for their activity, which hitherto had chiefly found its scope in anti-clericalism. Having no longer the church to attack they turned their attention to economical questions, the solution of which had always been their theoretical aim. At the same period the law relating to the Contract of Association of 1901, by removing the restrictions (save in the case of religious communities) which previously had prevented French citizens from forming association without the authorization of the government, had formally abrogated the individualistic doctrine of the Revolution, which in all its phases was intolerant of associations. The law of June 1791 declared the destruction of all corporations of persons engaged in the same trade or profession to be a fundamental article of the French constitution, and it was only in the last six years of the Second Empire that some tolerance was granted to trade-unions, which was extended by the Third Republic only in 1884. In that year the prohibition of 1791 was repealed. Not quite 70 unions existed at the end of 1884. In 1890 they had increased to about 1000, in 1894 to 2000, and in 1901, when the law relating to the Contract of Association was passed, they numbered 3287 with 588,832 members. The law of 1901 did not specially affect them; but this general act, completely emancipating all associations formed for secular purposes, was a definitive break with the individualism of the Revolution which had formed the basis of all legislation in France for nearly a century after the fall of the ancient monarchy. It was an encouragement and at the same time a symptom of the spread of anti-individualistic doctrine. This was seen in the accelerated increase of syndicated workmen during the years succeeding the passing of the Associations Law, who in 1909 were over a million strong. The power exercised by the trade-unions moved the functionaries of the government, a vast army under the centralized system of administration, numbering not less than 800,000 persons, to demand equal freedom of association for the purpose of regulating their salaries paid by the state and their conditions of labour. This movement brought into new relief the long-recognized incompatibility of parliamentary government with administrative centralization as organized by Napoleon.

In another direction the increased activity in the rural districts of the Socialists, who hitherto had chiefly worked in the industrial centres, indicated that they looked for support from the peasant proprietors, whose ownership in the soil had hitherto opposed them to the practice of collectivist doctrine. In the summer of 1907 an economic crisis in the wine-growing districts of the South created a general discontent which spread to other rural regions. The Clémenceau ministry, while opposing the excesses of revolutionary socialism and while incurring the strenuous hostility of M. Jaurès, the Socialist leader, adopted a programme which was more socialistic than that of any previous government of the republic. Under its direction a bill for the imposition of a graduated income tax was passed by the lower house, involving a scheme of direct taxation which would transform the interior fiscal system of France. But the income tax was still only a project of law when M. Clémenceau unexpectedly fell in July 1909, being succeeded as prime minister by his colleague M. Briand. His ministry had, however, passed one important measure which individualists regarded as an act of state-socialism. It took a long step towards the nationalization of railways by purchasing the important Western line and adding it to the relatively small system of state railways. Previously a more generally criticized act of the representatives of the people was not of a nature to augment the popularity of parliamentary institutions at a period of economic crisis, when senators and deputies increased their own annual salary, or indemnity as it is officially called, to 15,000 francs.

(J. E. C. B.)

(Continued in volume X slice VIII.)

By the Service géographique de l’armée.

The etymology of this name (sometimes wrongly written Golfe de Lyon) is unknown.

In 1907 deaths were superior in number to births by nearly 20,000.

The following list comprises the three most densely-populated and the three most sparsely populated departments in France:

Inhabitants to the Square Mile.

Seine 20,803 Basses-Alpes 42

Nord 850 Hautes-Alpes 49

Rhône 778 Lozère 64

Inspectors are placed at the head of the synodal circumscriptions; their functions are to consecrate candidates for the ministry, install the pastors, &c.

Cultures industrielles.—Under this head the French group beetroot, hemp, flax and other plants, the products of which pass through some process of manufacture before they reach the consumer.

Fibre only. In the years 1896-1905, 8130 tons of hemp-seed and 12,137 tons of flax-seed was the average annual production in addition to fibre.

The chief breeds of horses are the Boulonnais (heavy draught), the Percheron (light and heavy draught), the Anglo-Norman (light draught and heavy cavalry) and the Tarbais of the western Pyrenees (saddle horses and light cavalry). Of cattle besides the breeds named the Norman (beef and milk), the Limousin (beef), the Montbéliard, the Bazadais, the Flamand, the Breton and the Parthenais breeds may be mentioned.

The department is also entrusted with surveillance over river-fishing, pisciculture and the amelioration of pasture.

The metric ton = 1000 kilogrammes or 2204 ℔.

Includes manufactories of glue, tallow, soap, perfumery, fertilizers, soda, &c.

See the Guide officiel de la navigation intérieure issued by the ministry of public works (Paris, 1903).

Includes horses, mules and asses.

Except certain manufactures which come under the category of articles of food.

Includes small fancy wares, toys, also wooden wares and furniture, brushes, &c.

Decrease largely due to Spanish-American War (1898).

The administration of posts, telegraphs and telephones is assigned to the ministry of commerce and industry or to that of public works.

The province or provinces named are those out of which the department was chiefly formed.

The tax on land (propriétés non bâties) and that on buildings (propriétés bâties) are included under the head of contribution foncière.

With revenues of over £1200.

For a history of the French debt, see C.F. Bastable, Public Finance (1903).

In 1894 the rentes then standing at 4½% were reduced to 3½%, and in 1902 to 3%.

Algerian native troops are recruited by voluntary enlistment. But in 1908, owing to the prevailing want of trained soldiers in France, it was proposed to set free the white troops in Algeria by applying the principles of universal service to the natives, as in Tunis.

Kerguelen lies in the Great Southern Ocean, but is included here for the sake of convenience.

In 1906 the number of registered electors in these colonies was 199,055, of whom 106,695 exercised their suffrage.

In the case of Madagascar by decree of the 11th of December 1895.

The Indo-China budget is reckoned in piastres, a silver coin of fluctuating value (1s. 10d. to 2s.). The budget of 1907 balanced at 50,000,000 piastres.

St Eligius, bishop of Noyon, apostle of the Belgians and Frisians (d. 659?).

The assurement (assecuratio, assecuramentum) differed from the truce, which was a suspension of hostilities by mutual consent, in so far as it was a peace forced by judicial authority on one of the parties at the request of the other. The party desiring protection applied for the assurement, either before or during hostilities, to any royal, seigniorial or communal judge, who thereupon cited the other party to appear and take an oath that he would assure the person, property and dependents of his adversary (qu’il l’assurera, elle et les siens). This custom, which became common in the 13th century, of course depended for its effectiveness on the degree of respect inspired in the feudal nobles by the courts. It was difficult, for instance, to refuse or to violate an assurement imposed by a royal bailli or by the parlement itself. See A. Luchaire, Manuel des institutions françaises (Paris, 1892), p. 233.—(W. A. P.)

Earl of Richmond; afterwards Arthur, duke of Brittany (q.v.).

Olivier de Serres, sieur de Pradel, spent most of his life on his model farm at Pradel. In 1599 he dedicated a pamphlet on the cultivation of silk to Henry IV., and in 1600 published his Théâtre d’agriculture et ménage des champs, which passed through nineteen editions up to 1675.

Ferdinand is reported to have said: “Le capucin m’a désarmé avec son scapulaire et a mis dans capuchon six bonnets électoraux.”

Jean Orry Louis Orry de Fulvy (1703-1751), counsel to the parlement in 1723, intendant of finances in 1737, founded at Vincennes the manufactory of porcelain which was bought in 1750 by the farmers general and transferred to Sèvres.

Louis Robert Hippolyte de Bréhan, comte de Plélo (1699-1734), a Breton by birth, originally a soldier, was at the time of the siege of Danzig French ambassador to Denmark. Enraged at the return to Copenhagen, without having done anything, of the French force sent to help Stanislaus, he himself led it back to Danzig and fell in an attack on the Russians on the 27th of May 1734. Plélo was a poet of considerable charm, and well-read both in science and literature.

See Marquis de Bréhan, Le Comte de Plélo (Nantes, 1874); R. Rathery, Le Comte de Plélo (Paris, 1876); and P. Boyé, Stanislaus Leszczynski et le troisième traité de Vienne (Paris, 1898).

Charles Laure Hugues Théobald, duc de Choiseul-Praslin (1805-1847), was deputy in 1839, created a peer of France in 1840. He had married a daughter of General Sebastiani, with whom he lived on good terms till 1840, when he entered into open relations with his children’s governess. The duchess threatened a separation; and the duke consented to send his mistress out of the house, but did not cease to correspond with and visit her. On the 18th of August 1847 the duchess was found stabbed to death, with more than thirty wounds, in her room. The duke was arrested on the 20th and imprisoned in the Luxembourg, where he died of poison, self-administered on the 24th. It was, however, popularly believed that the government had smuggled him out of the country and that he was living under a feigned name in England.

T.T. de Martens, Recueil des traités, &c., xii. 248.

In the 14th volume of his L’Empire libéral (1909) M. Émile Ollivier gives a detailed and illuminating account of the events that led up to the war. He indignantly denies that he ever said that he contemplated it “with a light heart,” and says that he disapproved of Gramont’s demand for “guarantees,” to which he was not privy. His object is to prove that France was entrapped by Bismarck into a position in which she was bound in honour to declare war. (Ed.)