France in the Nineteenth Century Part 40

He went into the Chamber as an Advanced Republican, and voted for the banishment of the Orleans family, for a republic without a president, and for other extreme measures. Before long he was elected vice-president of the Chamber.

Then came the Empire, and M. Grevy went back to his law-books.

He and his brother must have prospered at the Bar, for in 1851 they had houses in Paris, in which after the _coup d'etat_ Victor Hugo and his friends lay concealed.

When the emperor attempted const.i.tutional reforms, in 1869, Grevy was again elected deputy from the Jura. He acted with dignity and moderation, though he voted always with the advanced party. Gambetta he personally disliked, having an antipathy to his dictatorial ways. When the National a.s.sembly met at Bordeaux to decide the fate of France, Grevy was made its Speaker, or president; but when the _coup d'etat_ in favor of Henri V. was meditated, he was got rid of beforehand, after he had presided for two turbulent years over an a.s.sembly distracted and excited. Everyone respected M.

Grevy. There was very little of the typical Frenchman in his composition. He was of middle height, rather stout, with a large bald, well-shaped head. He was no lover of society, but was a diligent worker, and his favorite amus.e.m.e.nts were billiards and the humble game of dominoes. His wife was the good woman suited to such a husband; but his daughter, his only child, was considered by Parisian society pretentious and a blue-stocking. She married, after her father's elevation to the presidency, M. Daniel Wilson, a Frenchman, in spite of his English name. M. Grevy's Eli-like toleration of the sins of his daughter's husband caused his overthrow.

In Marshal MacMahon's time there were two points on which he as president insisted on having his own way; that is, anything relating to army affairs, or to the granting civilians the cross of the Legion of Honor. He did not object to the decoration of civilians, but he insisted upon knowing the antecedents of the gentlemen recommended for the distinction. Well would it have been for M. Grevy had he followed the example of his predecessor. The marshal would never give the cross to a man whom he knew to be a free-thinker. His reply to such applications always was: "If he is not a Christian, what does he want with a cross?"

It is said that in 1877, when the marshal thought of resigning rather than accepting such an advanced Republican as M. Jules Simon as chief of his Cabinet, he sent for M. Grevy, and asked him point-blank: "Do you want to become president of the Republic?" "I am not in the least ambitious for that honor," replied M. Grevy.

"If I were sure you would be elected in my place, I would resign,"

continued the marshal; "but I do not know what would happen if I were to go." "My strong advice to you is not to resign," said M.

Grevy; "only bring this crisis to an end by choosing your ministers out of the Republican majority, and you will be pleased with yourself afterwards for having done your duty."

"Well, you are an honest man, M. Grevy; I wish there were more like you," said the marshal; and having shaken hands with M. Grevy, he dismissed him, though without promising to follow his advice.

He reflected on it that night, however, and adopted it the next morning. But when advised to take Gambetta for his minister, he replied: "I do not expect my ministers to go to ma.s.s with me or to shoot with me; but they must be men with whom I can have some common ground of conversation, and I cannot talk with _ce monsieur-la_."

Indeed, Gambetta was often shy and awkward in social intercourse, seldom giving the impression in private life of the powers of burning eloquence with which he could in public move friend or foe. Nor had M. Grevy been by any means always in accord with the fiery Southerner. At Tours he objected to Gambetta's measures as wholly unconst.i.tutional. "You are one of those men," retorted Gambetta, "who expect to make omelettes without breaking the eggs." "You are not making omelettes, but a mess," retorted M. Grevy.

Both the marshal and his successor were sportsmen and gave hunting-parties, those of the marshal being as much in royal style as possible. M. Grevy preferred republican simplicity. When he was allowed, as Speaker of the House, to live in Marie Antoinette's apartments in the Chateau of Versailles, he might have been seen any day sauntering about the streets with his hands in his pockets, or smoking his cigar at the door of a _cafe_. He had a brougham, but he rarely used it. His coachman grumbled at having to follow him at a foot-pace when he took long walks into the country. His servants did not, like the marshal's, wear gray and scarlet liveries, but his household arrangements were more dignified and liberal than those of M. Thiers. He had a curious way of receiving his friends _sans ceremonie_. Three mornings in the week his old intimate a.s.sociates,--artists, journalists, deputies, etc.,--entered the presidential palace unannounced, and went straight to an apartment fitted up for fencing. There, taking masks and foils, they amused themselves, till presently M. Grevy would come in, make the tour of the room, speak a few words to each, and invite one or two of them to breakfast with him.

Both M. Grevy and Marshal MacMahon held their Cabinet meetings in that _salle_ of the elysee which is hung round with the portraits of sovereigns. Opposite to M. Grevy's chair hung a portrait of Queen Victoria; and it was remarked that he always gazed at her while his ministers discoursed around him. But his happiness, poor man! was in his private apartments, where his daughter, her husband, M. Wilson, and his little grandchild made part of his household.

M. Greevy gave handsome dinners at the elysee, and Madame Grevy and Madame Wilson gave receptions, and occasionally handsome b.a.l.l.s.

Everything was done "decently and in order," much like an American president's housekeeping, but without show or brilliancy.

Having indulged in this gossip about the courts of the presidents (for much of which I am indebted to a writer in "Temple Bar"), we will turn to graver history.

When M. Grevy became president, Gambetta succeeded to his place as president of the Chamber. He did not desire the post of prime minister. His new position made him the second man in France, and seemed to point him out as the future candidate for the presidency.

M. Defavre became chief of the Cabinet, and M. Waddington Minister for Foreign Affairs. But Gambetta, whether in or out of office, was the leader of his party, and a sense of the responsibilities of leaders.h.i.+p made him far more cautious and less fiery than he had been in former days. Yet even then he had said emphatically: "No republic can last long in France that is not based on law, order, and respect for property."

In August, 1880, however, eighteen months after M. Grevy's elevation to the presidency, Gambetta became prime minister. He flattered himself that he might do great things for France, for he believed that he could count on the support of every true Republican. He was mistaken. Three months after he accepted office, the Radicals and the Conservatives combined for his overthrow. He was defeated in the Chamber on a question of the _scrutin de liste_, and resigned.

Gambetta's disappointment was very great. He had counted on his popularity, and had hoped to accomplish great things. He was a man of loose morals and of declining health, for, unsuspected by himself, a disorder from which he could never have recovered, was undermining his strength; this made him irritable. On the 30th of August, 1882, he was visiting, at a country house near Paris, a lady of impaired reputation; there he was shot in the hand. The wound brought on an illness, of which he died in December. It has never been known whether the shot was fired by the woman, as was generally suspected, or whether his own pistol, as he a.s.serted, was accidentally discharged.

He was buried at Pere la Chaise, without religious services; but his coffin was followed by vast crowds, and all Frenchmen (even his enemies, and they were many) felt that his country had lost an honest patriot and a great man.

On the centennial anniversary of the opening act of the French Revolution, a statue of Gambetta was unveiled in the Place du Carrousel, the courtyard of French kings. No future king, if any such should be, will dare to displace it. Gambetta's life was a sad one, and his death was sadder still. With all his n.o.ble qualities,--and there are few things n.o.bler in history than the manner in which he effaced himself to give place to his rival,--how great he might have been, had he learned early to apply his power of self-restraint to lesser things!

Gambetta wanted Paris to remain the city of cities, the centre of art, fas.h.i.+on, and culture; and he took up the Emperor Napoleon's policy of beautifying and improving it by costly public works.

"Je veux ma republique belle, bien paree" ("I want my republic beautiful and well dressed") was a sentence which brought him into trouble with the Radicals, who said he had no right to say "my republic," as if he were looking forward to being its dictator.

He voted for the return of the Communists from New Caledonia, and during the last two years of his life these returned exiles never ceased to thwart him and revile him. Some one had prophesied to him that this would be the case. "Bah!" he answered, "the poor wretches have suffered enough. I might have been transported myself, had matters turned out differently in 1870."[1] Had he lived, it is probable that in 1886 he would have supplanted M. Grevy. "Nor,"

says one of his friends, "can it be doubted that, loving the Republic as he did, and having served it with so much devotion and honesty, he would have found in his love a power of self-restraint to keep him from courses that might have been hurtful to his own work."

For the establishment of the Republic _was_ princ.i.p.ally "his own work." He proclaimed its birth, standing in a window of the Hotel de Ville in 1870; he gave it a baptism of some glory in the fiery, though hopeless, resistance he opposed to the German invasion; and he kept it standing at a time when it needed the support of a st.u.r.dy, vigilant champion. To the end it must be believed that he would, as far as in him lay, have preserved it from harm. Not long before his death, during a lull in his pain, which for a moment roused a hope of his recovery, he said to his doctor: "I have made many mistakes, but people must not imagine I am not aware of them; I often think over my faults, and if things go well I shall try the patience of my friends less often. _On se corrige!_"

[Footnote 1: Cornhill Magazine, 1883.]

When Gambetta was dead, the man who stepped into his place was Jules Ferry. He was a lawyer, born in the Vosges in 1832. He had never been personally intimate with Gambetta, but he succeeded to his political inheritance, became chief of his party, secured the majority that Gambetta never could get in the Chamber, and did all that Gambetta had failed to do.

His attention when prime minister was largely devoted to the development of French industry in colonies. He began a war in Tonquin, he annexed Tunis, and commenced aggressions in Madagascar. All of these enterprises have proved difficult, unprofitable, and wasteful of life and money.

The position of France with relation to other powers has become very isolated. Her best friend, strange to say, is Russia,--the young Republic and the absolute czar! Germany, Austria, and Italy form the alliance called the Dreibund. But their military force united is not quite equal to that of France and Russia combined.

If Russia ever attacks the three powers of Central Europe on the East, it is not to be doubted that France will rush upon Alsace and Lorraine. The mob of Paris, in 1884, put M. Grevy to much annoyance and embarra.s.sment by hissing and hooting the young king of Spain on his way through the French capital because he had accepted the honorary colonelcy of a German regiment, and M. Grevy and his Foreign Minister had profoundly to apologize. The incident was traceable, it was said at the time, to the indiscretions of M. Daniel Wilson, the president's son-in-law, whose melancholy story remains to be told.

Shortly before Gambetta's death, occurred that of the Prince Imperial in Zululand, and that of the Comte de Chambord in Austria.

The son of Napoleon III. had been educated at Woolwich, the West Point Academy of England. When the Zulu war broke out, all his young English companions were ordered to Africa, and he entreated his mother to let him go. He wanted to learn the art of war, he said, and perhaps too he wished to acquire popularity with the people of England, in view of a future alliance with a daughter of Queen Victoria. The general commanding at the seat of war was far from glad to see him. He knew the dangers of savage warfare, and felt the responsibility of such a charge. For some time he kept the prince working in an office, but at last permitted him to go on a reconnoitring expedition, where little danger was antic.i.p.ated. There is no page in history so dishonorable to the valor and good conduct of an English gentleman as that which records how, when surprised by Zulus, the young prince was deserted by his superior officer and his companions, and while trying to mount his restive horse, was slain.

He left a will leaving his claims (such as they were) to the imperial throne of France to his young cousin Victor Napoleon, thus overlooking the father of that young prince, Jerome Napoleon, the famous Plon-Plon.

The reconciliation which in 1873 took place between the Comte de Chambord and his distant cousins of the house of Orleans never resulted in cordial relations, though the Comte de Paris, as his cousin's heir, visited the Comte de Chambord at Frohsdorf. The Comtesse de Chambord despised and disliked the family of Orleans, and the Monarchist party in France still remained divided into Legitimists and Orleanists, the latter protesting that they only desired a const.i.tutional sovereign, and did not hold to the doctrine of right divine.

The Comte de Chambord died Aug. 24, 1883. His malady was cancer in the stomach, complicated by other disorders. The Orleanist princes hastened to Frohsdorf to attend his funeral, but they were so disdainfully treated by his widow that they deemed it due to their self-respect to retire before the obsequies. This is how "Figaro,"

a leading Legitimist journal in Paris, speaks of the Comte de Chambord:--

"He had n.o.ble qualities and great virtues. What most distinguished him was an intense feeling of royal dignity, which he guarded most jealously by act and word. But we may be permitted to doubt whether the fifty-three years he had pa.s.sed in exile had qualified him to understand and to sympathize with the great changes in public opinion in his own country, and the true tendencies of the present and the rising generation. In his youth he was entirely guided by others, but after the _coup d'etat_ of 1851 he took things into his own hands, and directed his course up to the last moment with a firmness which admitted of neither contradiction nor dispute.

He sincerely wished to promote liberty; there was nothing in him of the despot, but he had lived all his life out of France, and could not comprehend the preferences and the habits which had grown into national feeling. He was kindly, genial, intelligent, witty, dignified, and affable. He only needed to have been brought up among his people to have made an admirable sovereign. Had the first plan of the Revolution of 1830 been carried out, and the young prince been made king, with Louis Philippe lieutenant-general till his majority, it is possible that France might have been spared great tribulations. For our own part," continues the "Figaro,"

"we have always looked upon monarchy as the best government for the peace, prosperity, and liberty of France; but with the personal politics of the Comte de Chambord we could not agree. After all France had gone through, it was necessary to nationalize the king, and to royalize the nation. M. le Comte de Chambord utterly refused to yield anything to const.i.tutional ideas and to become what he called the king of the Revolution. It is true that the White Flag of the Bourbons had been a.s.sociated with a long line of glories in France, but for a hundred years the Tricolor had been the flag under which French soldiers had marched to victory. It was this matter of the flag that prevented the success of the plan of restoration in 1873, two months after the Comte de Paris had so patriotically sacrificed some of his own most cherished feelings by his reconciliation (for his country's sake) with his cousin at Frohsdorf. The party could do nothing without its head. The Orleanist princes would not act without their chief, and the opportunity pa.s.sed, perhaps never to return."

"Henri V. never hesitated about the matter of the flag," says another writer. "He regarded its color as above everything important. The question of white or tricolor was to him a vital thing. He said: 'Kings have their private points of personal honor like mere citizens.

I should feel myself to be sacrificing my honor, since I was born a king, if I made any concessions on the subject of the White Flag of my family. With respect to other things I may concede; but as to that, never, _never!_ The only thing for which I have ever reproached Louis XVI. was for having for one moment suffered the _bonnet rouge_ to be placed upon his head to save his royalty. Now you are proposing to me to do the same thing. No!' The count had drawn up a const.i.tution for France after his own ideas, but he would show it to no man.

No human being had any power to influence him. But he was heard to say more than once: 'I will never diminish the power of the sovereign. I desire liberty and progress to emanate from the king.

Royalty should progress with the age, but never cease to be itself in all things.' He deemed the authority he claimed to be his by right divine; but one may be permitted to think," concludes this writer, "that this authority, if it came from Heaven, has been recalled there."

Four months before his death he had a touching interview with his heir, the Comte de Paris, at Frohsdorf. The count little expected then that he would be prevented from taking the part of chief mourner at the funeral which took place Sept. 1, 1883, at Goritz, when the king, who had never reigned, was laid beside Charles X., his grandfather.

We may best conclude this account of the Comte de Chambord with some touching words which he addressed to his disappointed supporters in 1875:--

"Sometimes I am reproached for not having chosen to reign when the opportunity was offered me, and for having perhaps lost that opportunity forever. This is a misconception. Tell it abroad boldly.

I am the depositary of Legitimate Monarchy. I will guard my birthright till my last sigh. I desire royalty as my heritage, as my duty, but never by chance or by intrigue. In other times I might have been willing (as some of my ancestors have been) to recover my birthright by force of arms. What would have been possible and reasonable formerly, is not so now. After forty years of revolution, civil war, invasion, and _coups d'etat_, the monarchy I represent can only commend itself to Europe and the French people as one of peace, conciliation, and preservation. The king of France must return to France as a shepherd to his fold, or else remain in exile.

If I must not return, Divine Providence will bear me witness before the French people that I have done my duty with honest intentions.

In the midst of the prevailing ignominies of the present age it is well that the life and policy of an exiled king should stand out white in all their loyalty."

There was little of general interest in French politics during the remaining years of M. Grevy's first administration, which ended early in 1886. He was the first French president who had reached the end of his term. He was quietly re-elected by the joint vote of the two Chambers, not so much because he was popular as because there seemed no one more eligible for the position. He had not had much good fortune in his administration. M. Ferry's colonization schemes had cost great sums of money and had led to jealousies and disputes with foreign nations. French finances had become embarra.s.sed. The French national debt in 1888 was almost twice as great as that of England, and the largest additions to it were made during M. Grevy's presidency, when enormous sums were spent on public works and on M. Ferry's colonial enterprises. The mere interest on the debt amounts annually to fifty millions of dollars, and every attempt at reduction is frustrated by the Chambers, which are unwilling to approve either new taxes or new loans.

The two princ.i.p.al points of interest during the latter years of M. Grevy's first term of office concerned the persecution of the Church and the persecution of the princes of the house of Orleans.

The Republic began by taking down the crucifixes in all public places, such as court-rooms, magistrates' offices, and public schools; for in France men swear by holding up a hand before the crucifix, instead of by our own irreverent and dirty custom of "kissing the book." Then the education of children was made compulsory; but schools were closed that had been taught by priests, monks, or nuns.

Next, sisters of charity were forbidden to nurse in the hospitals, their places being supplied by women little fitted to replace them.

As to the Orleans princes, in 1886, the year of M. Grevy's second election, they were summarily ordered to quit France; not that they had done anything that called for exile, but because Prince Napoleon (who called himself the Prince Imperial and head of the Bonaparte dynasty) had put forth a pamphlet concerning his pretensions to the imperial throne. This led to the banishment of all members of ex-royal families from French soil, and their erasure from the army list, if they were serving as French soldiers.

This decree was particularly hard upon the Duc d'Aumale, who was a French general, and had done good service under Chanzy and Gambetta in the darkest days of the calamities of France.

The Comte de Paris deeply felt the outrage. He gave the world to understand that he had never conspired against the French Republic while living on his estates in France, but felt free to do so after this aggression.

The Duc d'Aumale avenged himself by an act of truly royal magnificence.

He published part of his will, bequeathing to the French Inst.i.tute, of which he was a member, that splendid estate and palace of Chantilly which he had inherited from his G.o.dfather, the old Duke of Bourbon.

With its collections, its library, its archives, and its pictures, the gift is valued at from thirty-five to forty millions of francs.