THE GOOD SIDE OF FRANCE.
MANY of our friends are belittling France too much. It is natural, for there are many causes in France, both moral and political, of irritation to Englishmen, and many signs in her present condition which appear to observers menacing in proportion to their friendship for her people. Hysteria seems to have become chronic in Paris at all events, and there is in a section of the people a contempt for the abstract idea of right which is most ominous of coming disorders. The Chamber, the Army chiefs, the Press, and the populace all seem to have broken loose together from customary restraints, and there is for the moment nothing left that is dignified in France except the Court of Appeal. The Generals tell the President that they are humiliated, and the President answers that under the Constitution he is powerless to intervene ; Deputies fight each other with their fists ; the most monstrous accusations are bandied to and fro in the streets, and are some of them true; the power of securing swift remedy for wrong seems to have died away ; and that ascendency of Rumour which struck Carlyle as a special note of the early days of the first Revo- lution has established itself once more. To most English- men the scene appears as a welter of disorder, corruption, and vice, such as a nation can hardly pass through and con- tinue to exist in safety. They hardly see the other side; and yet there is another side. To begin with, the vitality of France is of a special quality. Her people, like many men known to doctors, possess the liability to grave disease and recuperative power in almost equal degree. No one would say that France at this moment had sunk, morally, politically, or intellectually, to the level she occu- pied in the later years of Louis XV. ; yet it took less than a generation to place her at the head of the world. Napoleon was five years old when Louis XV. died, and his corpse was left deserted. The strength which in other nations comes back slowly returns in France by leaps and bounds, and before her fribbles are dead she produces a whole generation of men competent in all departments of life. Her plants spring strongly up through the overlying manure. France may be dying, as so many think, but to the historian it rather appears that she is passing through one of those periods of disease which have repeatedly marked her history, which have left terrible traces on her body, but which have also left its extraordinary force to all appearance unimpaired. Even in this horrible Dreyfus imbroglio there are symptoms from which a cool observer may gather reasons for hope. The men who have cried for justice, often t.) their own immense loss and risk, include the majority of the nervous and comfort-loving " intel- lectuals " of France, and their conduct should not be passed over when one is speaking of the spiritual degradation of their country. There must be good left ia a country when a writer like M. Zola, vain, egotistic, and salacious, deliberately faces a steam engine in its rush rather than see it crush down an innocent man. Even the Jews of France, whom most Frenchmen and many Englishmen so suspect, have behaved well. They do not love the Republic, they would infinitely prefer a regime under which Socialists would be silenced ; their game, if they were mere self-seekers, was to uphold the Army, pro- vide its chiefs with money, and profit by a military revolution ; but rather than abandon an innocent co-religionist, they deliberately faced what is for them the awful and still existing danger of a popular up- rising against their caste. Nor have the people been altogether given up to evil. The foundation of the whole agitation, that which makes the struggle so formidable and inspires such doubt, if not terror, in the mighty forces arrayed against Dreyfus, is the uneasy conscience of " the people," the perception that if they were once convinced that they were crushing the innocent, they would turn in fury upon the doers of injustice. The tendency to imaginative terror and cause- less suspicion which we see in the occasional bursts of the spy mania has befogged their brains, but the consciences of the people are not quieted, and, where the victim is not a Jew, start even in Paris into fierce activity. Picquart would be a good candidate for a vacant Senator- ship in any district of Northern France. A nation is not i lost if it rejects good evidence, but only if it rejects it wilfully, and the will in France in the Picquart case is obviously distracted. After all, Titus Oates was a much less credible witness than Colonel Henry, and our own Londoners believed in him.
But, we shall be asked, if the French are not bad and fickle and on the downward grade, why are they ready to upset the Republic which has existed for twenty-five years, which has set all careers free, and to which, above all, they can give any direction they please ? They can make it economical if they will, or send it swiftly moving on the groove of foreign affairs, or use it as their instru- ment to secure any social change they may desire. Why, then, except from instability, are the French hurrahing for the Governor of Paris ? We regret their action as much as any Republican in France can do. So far from having the crypto-kindness for the Bonapartes of which some of our friends accuse us, we should, if Monarchy were desirable in France, greatly prefer a Restoration, and hold the Republic distinctly preferable to both the sets of Pretenders. There is hope in it, and a chance of peace, and there is neither if a throne is set up again to run its course and fall once more, leaving nothing founded. But we understand why great multi. tudes in France, who mean no particular mischief, have latently or openly a different opinion. Frenchmen are pining, as Englishmen have often at moments pined, for proof that they are great, for success, in short, in some grand form which the world cannot fail to recognise. They are dissatisfied and " low,"—we mean in the medical sense. It is our English instinct derived from history when we are in that condition to grumble loudly and even groan, to criticise and abuse Ministries, and if we can, to change them or persons included in them. It is French instinct, derived also from their history, though the history is modern, to change the very form of the State, which they think they can do at will without injury to the continuity of their national life. We think them wrong—probably they are wrong—for permanence is a source of strength ; but France is more populous, ten times as rich, and rather larger in area than she was when Louis XVI. mounted the scaffold. Moreover, France has broken with her past as we have never done. There is nothing which signifies to her people older than "The Year One " (1792). It is natural, therefore, that her fear of revolution should be less than ours, and that she should venture on a revolt as we venture on a forced General Election. Lastly, there is a quality in French.
men which, though it exists in all nations more or less, does not elsewhere attain the same proportions or influence. France always longs for a guide,—for some visible person to whom she can look for final decision, and on whom she can throw the ultimate responsibility. It is not a dictator she seeks, we think, so much as a guide, but a guide she will have if she is to be content. It is the mis- fortune of the Republic that since the death of M. Thiers it has appeared incapable of providing such a man either as President or as Premier, and the country has been forced to jog on with men of the second class, often unknown to the people, and always deficient in that quality of definite leadership and authority for which at heart they crave. M. Faure does not seem to them to supply the place of Henri Quatre, nor do they mistake any recent Foreign Secretary for Cardinal Richelieu. Given this discontent, this historic teaching, and this vague longing, we may easily understand why France looks round eagerly for a leader, and does not care particularly either what he calls himself or what may be the extent of the preroga- tives he claims. He must lead, and lead successfully, that is the one condition ; and if he cannot, "he can," save France to herself, "be easily overthrown." The dismissal of the Second Empire did not cost a life.
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