THE PROVINCIAL POLITICS OF FRANCE.
Imany of the Conseils-Generaux there have been scenes 1 which forcibly illustrate the reason why all the political parties of France are embarrassed by the demand for decen-
tralisation when they are in office, however loudly they may have called for it when they were in opposition. The Republic having been established by law, and the choice of the Senators having been left to a body which will include all the members of the Conseils-Generaux, M. Cornil, the President of the body which represents the Allier, naturally referred to the political change in his opening speech. Being himself a Republican, he frankly said so, and he added that he was glad to find the Republic lifted above the intrigues of its foes.
But the Prefect of the department was scandalised at the political tone of the speech. Members of the Conseils- C eneraux had, he said, no business to meddle with politics. He himself would be loyal to the institutions which had been set up by the National Assembly, but he would not permit them to be praised at the cost of a distinct violation of the law. That is the official tone. Nevertheless, most of the other Presidents must have made direct or indirect references to the great change in the political state of France. They always drag references to political events into their addresses, and the Paris Correspondent of the Times gives an extract from one speech which hits M.
Buffet's party so hard, that we should not be surprised if it were to be made the subject of more than a reprimand by the Minister of the Interior. It was delivered by M. Magnin, who, besides being President of the Conseil- General of the Cote d'Or, is a prominent Republican Deputy. The time had passed, he said, for Administrations de Combat. They are opposed, he added, by the honest men of all parties, because such men have seen how barren have been the works and how abortive the effects of such Governments. Now, the phrase " Gouvemements de Combat" was first used in the famous report of M. Batbie after the fall of M. Thiers, and the author of it is said to have been M. de Broglie. M. Buffet was one of the leaders of the party which thus signified its determina- tion to wage war against all forms of Radicalism, and which gave Radicalism so wide a sweep that it could be made to include M. Thiers as well as M. Louis Blanc. M. Buffet was placed in the chair of the Assembly for the purpose of keeping down the Republicans. Nor is there any reason to believe that, although he has been baffled, he has any love for the Republic, and he will certainly display less of the domineering instinct than he is usually supposed to possess, if he should not bring down his official hand heavily on M. Magnin for daring to hold him up to the reprobation of all honest men. We should not be surprised to find that he had issued a circular formally warning the Conseils-Gen4raux that they have nothing to do with politics, or that he had peremptorily invited the Prefects to stop the slightest attempt to break the rule.
Here, we repeat, is an illustration of the difficulty of decen- tralising France. All the parties except the Bonapartists admit that the Government has taken far too much power into its own hands, and that one of the chief needs of the country is the development of its local institutions. Richelieu began the bad system when he made the Intendants of the Crown do much of the work that had hitherto fallen to local Courts and nobles. The Revolution found the system all but full- grown. The Consulate, however, gave it scientific complete- ness, and made it one of the most powerful engines ever placed in the hands of despotism. The Prefects were the first Emperor's Civil Generals of Division, through whom he sent his orders to the remotest corners of the State. But it was soon found that if the concentration of authority in Paris gave a stable Government an immense power of imposing its will, it also made the pressure of the Parisian mob equally for- midable, when that Government lost its grasp of the reins even for an instant. By changing all the Prefects, a band of victorious Revolutionists could crush all opposition through- out the provinces without firing a shot. Thus it came to pass that the monarchy of Louis Philippe was over- thrown by a riot in. the streets, and that not a hand was lifted to save it in any part of France, although it had many friends. The Second Empire fell in the same way. And the Imperialists calculate that the centralisation of the Executive Power will enable them to make an end with equal speed of the Third Republic. Thus the power concentrated in Paris does as much mischief to the capital as to the provinces, by encouraging a domineering spirit among the working-men of the revolutionary faubourgs. Equally evil is the feeling of helplessness which the system tends to beget among the country-people, for they learn to regard the Minister of the Interior or the Minister of Public Works as a species of Jupiter, to whom they may appeal when their waggon sticks in the mud, instead of relying on the power to help them- selves.
Since the fall of the Empire, some attempts have been made to strengthen the local institutions, and the Due de Broglie would join M. Gambetta in admitting that France can never be stable until every department, arrondissement, and commune shall be largely freed from the rein of the Central Government. But M. Gambetta found it necessary to make light of that theory during the exceptional time of his dictatorship, and with far less excuse the Due de Broglie exercised a sterner control over the Mayors than even the Empire had done. The Orleanists wrote beautiful essays in praise of local self-government so long as the existence of the Empire save them abundant leisure to contribute to the Revue des Deux Mondes. But they put aside their philosophical precepts, and all the rest of their good intentions, when they found the Government in their hands, and themselves compassed about with enemies. The Legitimist country gentlemen are fond of saying that they would regain much of the influence which their, yace possessed when France was really great, if the local institutions were to be liberated from the domineering grasp of Paris. But they also shrink from giving much independent power to the Conseils-Generaux or the Municipal Councils at the present time. In each case the reason of the reluctance is the same. Although these bodies are commanded to deal purely with local business, they all become more or less political in a season of excitement. Nor need such a result surprise Englishmen, for their own Municipal and School- Board elections are often determined by political considera- tions. When Birmingham is choosing the members of her Town Council, the political excitement is so keen that the town seems like France on a small scale. And the recent con- stitutional changes in that country will make the local bodies more political than ever. Most of the Senators are to be chosen by an electoral college for each department, in which will vote delegates from the Municipal Council, the members of the Conseils d'arrondissement, the members of the Conseils- Generaux, and the deputies of the Department. As the Senate is to possess in union with the President the power of dis- solving the Lower House, it may for a time be the more import- ant body of the two, and hence the rival parties will strain all their power to gain a majority of its members. Therefore they cannot afford to let slip a chance of adding to their strength in the local bodies, and the contests for seats in them must tend to become more and more political. Thus each of the 37,000 Communal Councils, each Council of an arrondissement, and each of the eighty-one departmental Councils must be miniature representations of the National Assembly. The Mayor or the Prefect may prevent them from directly debating political subjects, but he cannot stop the electors from choosing one man because he is a Bonapartist, and another because he is a Republican, nor can he keep them from thus determining the political complexion of the Senate. Nay, he will not long be able to control even the character of their debates. When the members of a particular body are chosen at the bidding of essentially political motives, that body must itself be essentially political, and it will tend to political discussion with a force that must in time overcome the official resist- ance.
To a superficial glance, it may seem that a new store of troubles will be brought to France by the importation of political passions into her local assemblies, but the truth is that nothing would tend so much to lift her above the fear of Revolution. Thus would be created provincial independence of opinion, provincial centres of political thought, provincial bodies which would resent the dictation alike of Parisian Ministers and Parisian mobs. The frequent election of those bodies, and the speeches of the local candidates for seats, would be the best of all agencies for the political education of the peasantry. The people of small country towns would thus be taught to rebel against the domination of unknown committees in the capital, as boldly as our own provincial towns disdain to tolerate any ostentatious interference by the political Com- mittee of the Reform Club. A quarter of a century of such schooling would put an end for ever to the revolutionary violence of Paris. And in the meantime, the Conseils-Generaux would form the best of all buttresses against coups cre'tat. Being political bodies, they would give warning if any Pre- fect should use the authority of the Republic to undermine it ; and they would form local centres of resistance, if the Minister of War should turn traitor, and order all the Generals of Division to hold down the provinces. Louis Napoleon would not have found it so easy to bind France hand and foot, if the Conseils-Generaux could have made themselves the guardians of the law. And now that the mass of the people are on the side of the Republic, those bodies would form a still stronger bulwark against the brute force of Bonapartism, if Marshal MacMahon should resign in disgust at the progress of Republican opinions, if the supreme power should fall into the hands of Marshal Canrobert by means of a carefully planned accident, and if General Ladmirault, the Bonapartist Governor of Paris, should find that the interests of Order—the great robber-plea of France—could be served only by the son of Napoleon III. That may seem a phantom danger to English- men, who look only to the cautious narratives sent by the Paris correspondents of our own daily journals, or to the still more reticent comments of the Paris Press. But well-informed Parisians have a different opinion. They say that if the Assembly had refused to vote the Constitutional Laws, the Marshal would have held the compact between him- self and the Royalists to be at an end. They believe that he would have resigned, and their conviction throws light on certain strangely menacing hints which came from the Paris correspondent of the Times. The Marshal's place, they think, would have been taken by soldiers who long ago bade adieu to any scruples, and they say that the Paris troops were twice under arms. M. Gambetta, they affirm, knew the real state of the case, and hence he dragged his followers into the same lobby as the Orleanists, saying to one Republican who up- braided him with the surrender of his principles, "Do you wish to wake up in Mazas." The Comte de Paris is be- lieved to have been possessed by the same apprehension, and for that reason to have pushed the Orleanists into an alliance which they hated. These may be only the dreams of fevered imaginations, but it is clear that the extra- ordinary change of front which determined the establishment of the Republic cannot be explained by the causes that lie on the surface. At all events, there has been a time of suspicion ominously like that which preceded the coup d'etat. It is the more necessary that the Republicans of all shades should cherish every means of checking the despotism of the barrack- room, and for that reason all the real friends of Order may welcome the political utterances of the Conseils-Generaux.
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