LEON GAMBETTA.
IT is quite natural that M. Leon Gambetta, stoutish Marseillaise advocate of thirty-five, with the look of a traffic-manager, and Dictator of France outside Paris, should have BMOC difficulty in obtaining recognition even from those Englishmen who are favourable to the French cause. He is an offence to all their instincts. That a man, not being a Prince by birth, should bear rule without " legal " title, with- out patent from any King, or election by any Assembly, or sanction from any plaiscite, is to most Englishmen an annoy- ance; and that he should be a lawyer and, according to English precedents, a young man, is almost an affront. Englishmen groan, it is true, under the sway of the old, denounce the electoral system as fatal to young ability, and, whenever they have anything to do outside political or military business, select men under forty to do it ; but never- theless old men govern opinion in England as elsewhere, and the rise of a man not yet worn out to the highest position is to them an offence requiring to be excused. They follow a middle-class Premier with enthusiasm, and are delighted because he has transferred to the sons of the professionals a monopoly of administrative work ; but still in their hearts they cannot believe that a man without birth, or wealth, or long experience can be a fitting ruler for a great nation even in the -throes of a Revolution. Add to his want of "blood," of posi- tion, and of years, the fact that he belongs to the race which gave Napoleon to France, and that he is still essentially a Southerner, a man of superficially impulsive emotion and lyrical utterance and fiery temper, who, if he thinks a General a traitor, says so without inquiry, and it is easy to understand why Englishmen cannot appreciate or even endure M. Leon Gambetta, are inclined to defend Marshal Bazaine because he has been denounced by that "young despot," and are half pleased at reverses they yet dislike because they prove that his Southern sanguineness of speech is so little justified by events. We have nothing to say, of course, against their impression, based as it is on a perfectly honest ignorance that there can be men, and considerable men, who are not in the least like English- men. If M. Gambetta were an Englishman, and yet wrote and spoke as he does, the chances that he would be a fool in action would be overwhelming; but being what he is, an -energetic Southerner, trained to write and speak for a Southern multitude, it may be expedient, despite English impressions, to look a little deeper than his words to find him. And so looking, we see, or think we see, a personage who -is not the English idea of M. Gambetta at all, but one entirely different. Judging by visible facts alone, we dis- cern in M. Gambetta a man of a type common among Italian politicians and men of business,—men who are superficially fussy and oratorical, or even vulgar, with nothing about them indicating power except steady eyes and square brows ; but who have nevertheless a faculty of succeeding, of choosing men, and of impressing themselves upon other men. That M. Gambetta possesses this last faculty in an unusual degree is self-evident. Of legal title to rule France he has in the English sense of legality not a shadow. Of moral title to take his special position as Minister both of War and of the Interior he had only this,—that General Trochu considered him, on the whole, the fittest man for those offices. His colleagues in Tours might fairly have been jealous of him as a recruit who had
superseded veterans, his subordinates in the War Department might reasonably have distrusted him as a civilian who never saw a field-piece. He had immediately and directly to rule the most exacting, self-opinionated, and independent body of men in the world,—the General officers of the old French Army,—men who disliked him as a Republican, dreaded him
as a Red, and detested him as a Pekin. Yet from the moment when he dropped, tired out with a journey by balloon, into his
chair in the old Archiepiscopal Palace of Tours, and announced that he was invested with full powers to defend the country, no one throughout France has seriously disputed his authority. His colleagues have become his clerks, and have as his clerks reorganized the Army Intendance till complaints of deficient supplies have all but disappeared. The Treasury was empty,
but he refilled it. The arsenals were half empty, but one great army, perhaps two, have now artillery, horses, gunners, and breech-loaders. The loan in England, the immense con- tract for arms with America, the still greater contracts in France itself for artillery, provisions, carts, and clothes, were all arranged by himself, and are all "drawing,"—the actual cash, goods, transport, munitions, which were not in being two months ago, being there to-day at General D'Aurelles' disposal. These were acts within the competence of any energetic business man ; but M. Gambetta had three questions to decide of infinitely greater importance to the future of France and of the war, and he has, to all appearance, decided all successfully. First of all, he had to determine by action, and not by words, whether the Republicans or the Reds were to conduct the war, whether he would employ organization or anarchy as his grand weapon. Red in his energy and his impulsiveness, M. Gambetta is Republican by brain, by virtue of that common-sense which never in the highest whirlwind of his passion quite leaves an Italian ; and he decided for the Republic. Lyons, Marseilles, Toulouse were in insurrection for the Red flag ; to quarrel with it was, feeble men said, to introduce civil war ; but M. Gambetta faced the danger, told the Lyonnese Reds in so many words that they were wicked fools, risked actual war at Marseilles, where a well-meaning Prefect, weakened by English ideas about bloodshed, had made himself agent of the Ultras ; and within two months from his arrival compelled every free city in France, Lyons and Marseilles included, to submit quietly to his agents. The respectables everywhere rose at his summons, the anarchists have everywhere been beaten, and the revolt of the Lyons Gardes Mobiles on their march westward is probably the last spurt of a resistance which, since the tide of victory seems to turn, has throughout France become im- possible. The mutineers were treated as mutineers, en- veloped by more faithful troops, compelled to produce their ringleaders, to see them shot, and to march on, in their hearts recognizing that the State was in France supreme once more. The second task was still more difficult,—to re-affirm once for all the vital principle forgotten for twenty years in France, that a General is a servant of the State, as much bound to obey its orders as the humblest gendarme. That task in- volved in the midst of a war a quarrel with the men of the sword. Under the Emperor every French General has felt himself an entity, a personage, a man with a separate position in the great Club which kept the Emperor on his throne, and has repudiated almost in words the notion of obedience to any civil authority whatsoever. The future historian of France will be able to show that many of the disasters of this great war had no other cause than the bicker- ings and jealousies of the Generals, their intense sense of their individual rights and privileges. So ineradicable was this evil spirit, the very root of insubordination, that even within the fortnight a French General, General Cambriels, has ventured to have and to act on a private opinion that it was beneath his position to act with another French General, named Garibaldi,—that, in fact, he had, as a "regular" soldier, a right to settle whom the State should and should not accept as its allies. M. Gambetta met this spirit in the only way in which it can be met anywhere,—by an inflexible assertion of the supremacy of the civil authority, by removing General after General without explanation or apology, by reducing officers, promoting officers and even—in defiance of all traditions since Louis Philippe in a moment of subser- viency destroyed France by accepting the Law which abolished the right of the State to dismiss an officer, and so made of the Army a self-dependent Club—making officers, until he had found the men who were prepared to obey the State, and who, therefore, have for the first time stemmed the tide of French disaster. The Generals reduced to reason, there still remained the greater task of reducing their soldiers to obedience. The difficulties in the way were enormous. Under the Empire the officers had gradually become accustomed to tolerate laxity, and found refuge from resistance in isolation,—had, to use an expressive, though unjust phrase, become "afraid of the men," till they hardly dared issue an unpleasant command, till the tradition of obedience had disappeared, while the proclamation of the Republic had of itself destroyed the tradition of mere deference. Deference, at no time strong in a French Army, where the private may be the social superior of his officer, could not be restored ; but obedience might be, and it was. Rising fully to the height of the situation, the stoutish Italian advocate who for the hour represented France decreed that in this supreme hour of danger every soldier guilty of disobedience, insubordination,j or pillage should be treated as he would be in the Prussian ' Army,—tried by court-martial of officers only and executed there and then. A stern hint was, at the same time, given to all general officers that this order had no limits, and was meant to be executed as well as read, if they intended to remain in command. The new power, which exists as an ultimate power in every army in the world, was, therefore, relentlessly but justly applied, and executions, said to have exceeded 100 in number, completely restored discipline in the Army of the Loire,—discipline of the old and true kind, under which a soldier dare no more plunder the peasantry without orders than he dare retreat before the enemy without a signal. Correspondents raged and talked of discontent, and the certainty that D'Aurelles would be shot— as if that mattered—but no army ever mutinied against dis- cipline yet ; the officers recovered their places and their con- fidence, the men found once more that they were led, and once again, for the first time since Worth, it became possible to execute manceuvres, and to move men swiftly without leaving one-hall of them behind. It had come to this with the French Army,—that a march of ten miles a day reduced it to a disorganized crowd. The instrument of which the Prus- sians make such use, the field telegraph, has been organized ; and finally, by the appointment of civil Commissaries, with absolute power of making requisitions, to accompany the Army, M. Gambetta has removed the last and most serious difficulty in the way of the Intendance, has enabled it to levy supplies from the country, without demoralizing the Army by employing soldiers in a task which, if left to them, degene- rates into unauthorized plunder. As a result of all these decrees, France has again an army which can fight a battle in the field.
We have taken every fact in this article from the letters of men who are bitterly hostile to M. Gambetta ; who consider him a foe of the army, an upstart, and a lunatic ; who are never tired of shrieking for a military dictator, and consider that France is lost because her representative "looks like a bourgeois,"—a remark, by the way, which is only true, so far as it is true, of so many French and Italian statesmen, who are apt to want the impassiveness most Englishmen and all Germans of rank are accustomed to affect. And we ask our readers deliberately whether the man who has done all this for his country, who in two months has re-established order in the great cities and discipline in the armies of France ; who, amidst unheard-of disasters, has struggled against national despair, with one hand beating down anarchists, and with the other building up armies, and who, in the very midst of a work which he believed to be on the edge of success, halted to accept an armistice he detested because his beleaguered col- leagues had approved it—a man, that is, who has displayed the energy of a _Jacobin and the self-restraint of an English Cabinet Minister—is a man to be so utterly despised ? Our prayer is that when England's hour of danger shall arrive, we also may find such a man, with the one additional quality of silence.
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