THE FRENCH STRUGGLE.
French Chambers met again on Saturday, and by the
T.:I:Time these lines are in the hands of our readers, the dissolution will, in all probability, have been accorded by the Senate to Marshal MacMahon's demand, by a majority of at least fifteen. But the week of discussion has been a great thorn in the flesh to M. de Broglie, for it has exhibited him and his Cabinet hard at work in the very unsatisfactory endeavour to make bricks without straw,—to justify the sensational appeal of the Marshal to France against the im- minent dangers caused by the Government of M. Jules Simon, without a single popular or even respectable specimen of the imminent dangers thus dimly shadowed forth. The week's discussion on the peremptory dismissal of M. Jules Simon, and on the demand for a dissolution, has really, in two distinct ways, discredited a Cabinet which was already as far as possible from a position to endare fresh discredit without serious consequences. It has displayed the Marshal to the country, in the first place, as taking alarm at the fancies in his own head. In the next place, it has shown the majority of the Chamber to the country in a more dignified, more mode- rate, and more self-restraining attitude than any which they have yet assumed. The week's debate has made the fears of the Marshal look very much as a child's terrors in the darkness look when reviewed under the light of the next day's sun ; and it has presented to the country the Republican party under leaders of far more settled views, and leaders far less disturbed by revolutionary dreams, than the curious medley of Impe- rialists, Legitimists, and Orleanists who have combined to denounce and insult them. Both these aspects of the discus- sion will be noted, and take a great effect in France. The conspicuously shadowy character of the Marshal's fears will vex the French peasantry, who want to see an end put to the excitability of French Governments ; and the dramatic appeal of the Left to M. Thiers as their true leader will remove all the hesitations which the more cautious of the French Republicans may have felt concerning the danger of drifting into what the Due de Broglie so vaguely denounces as the radical " transformation of Society." And there is one other feature in the debate which, creditable as it is to the War Minister of the Marshal, will certainly have the same effect of weakening the Cabinet of Combat. On Thursday, in reply to some interrogation as to the course the Marshal would pursue, if the country replied to his appeal by again sending up a majority of the Left, General Berthaut exclaimed, " We shall do nothing illegal,—the Army will always be on the side of law." That is, of course, as it should be, and the assurance is creditable to the Government, though we had expected nothing less. Still it removes the one fear which would cer- tainly have induced a considerable number of timid voters to support the Government,—the fear that any other course might lead to a military coup d'itat. A Government of Combat like the present cannot appeal to the coun- try without some graphic popular ground of its own. And in the absence of anything like argument, the appeal to fear, to the danger of returning to the old vicious circle of coups d'etat, would certainly have been, so far as it went, a popular ground. General Berthaut, greatly to his credit, has done what is in his power to erase that fear from the hearts of the constituencies, and we seek in vain for any remaining consideration on which the Government can build its sanguine expectation of inducing the country to reverse the verdict so lately given. A French journalist, with the epigrammatic wit for which French journalists are famous, has said of M. Depeyre, the Reporter of that Committee of the Senate which asks for the concur- rence of the Senate in the dissolution, and who read his high-sounding and empty report to the Senate on Wednes- day,—"Il ne‘raisonne pas, il re.sonne,"—" He does not reason, but resound ;" and that is what France will say of the policy of the Marshal. Yet even what simply resounds pro- duces an effect, if there be something more than noise to fear. General Berthaut, in giving his praise- worthy assurance that there is nothing more than noise to fear, has deprived the Government of the only veil of mystery which, so long as it remained, covered also a ground of hope. The only remaining grounds are all conjectural. The Due de Broglie holds that the Radicals, if they retain power, would amnesty the Communists, abolish standing armies, separate Church and State, decree the elective character of the. Judges, and readjust taxation on the principle of a pro- gressive income-tax. But as the Assembly which is to
be dissolved for containing a handful of men who approve those proposals, has done nothing of the kind, it would be just as reasonable for Lord Beaconsfield to advise the Queen to dissolve Parliament only because Sir Charles Dilke once attacked the Civil List, and Mr. Butt and his friends have demanded the dissolution of the existing tie between Great Britain and Ireland. To dissolve an Assembly on grounds that are purely prophetic,—because one day or another, if certain influences go on gaining on it, it will press on the Marshal a policy he utterly disapproves, is not the act of statesmen, but of politicians who shrink from the images of their own dreams. Yet the Due de Broglie has nothing further to urge. The Marshal, he said, could not contemplate with equanimity the growing tendencies of an Assembly which might one day come into strong collision with his own principles. Very likely not. But what occasion was there for him to contemplate them with equanimity, or to contemplate them at all? If a policy had been proposed to him which he held to be definitely injurious to France, that was the time for proposing a dissolution, and explaining to France his objection to the policy forced upon him. To discount the political chimaeras of an alarmist imagination, and ask France to pass judgment not on bad counsels, but bad tendencies,—that is not the course of a practical statesman at all; it is taking a leaf from Professor Tyndall's book, and setting to work popular 'consti- tuencies, working under universal suffrage, of all agencies in the world, not to express convictions, but to desiccate " germs."
The greatest popular force, however, of the week's dis- cussion will be that exerted on the mind of France by the remarkable and rememberable scenes of last Saturday in the Chamber of Deputies. The effect of these was twofold. In the first place, the unrivalled violence and rowdyism of the Im- perialists, especially M. Paul de Cassagnac, will be impressed on the imaginations of millions who will never read the de- bates, for these Imperialists did all in their power to embody in their gesticulations and invectives that ultimate appeal to physical force on which they believe that the Empire should rest. In that way, we suppose that the least unpopular of the anti-Republican alternatives,—the Napoleonic regime,—will have suffered great and popular discredit, and will lose votes at the elections. The other appeal to the French imagination which will produce effects far more wide- spread than any argument, was the plainly unconcerted and involuntary act of homage to M. Thiers into which the reactionary Home Minister's (M. de Fourtou) want of tact led the Chamber of Deputies. "You forget," said M. de Fourtou, " that the men now in office issued from the elections of 1871, and that they formed part of that National Assembly which may be described as the pacificator of the country and the liberator of the terri- tory." Thereupon some Deputy of the Left, pointing at M. Thiers, said, " Voild la libdrateur du territoire r when the entire Left, rising, and fixing their eyes on M. Thiers, broke forth into passionate plaudits, which lasted for the space of five minutes, and M. Thiers, bowing his white head, must have felt that in that moment M. de Fourtou had done more to carry the elections against the Government, by thus unintentionally identifying the majority of the dismissed Assembly with himself, than the most eloquent oratory of the most distinguished Re- publicans could hare effected in all the months of canvass. That public act of homage will be known wherever there is a French constituency, and will carry home to the mind's eye of every Frenchman that M. Thiers, and no one else, is the alternative for the Marshal, if the Marshal should be come palled to resign. That accident of debate will plead to an imaginative people as the red cross or the flaming torch used to plead of old ; and it will plead, not for the Government, but for its opponents. Thus the week of discussion, though it will in all probability end with the accession of the Senate to the Marshal's request, will have done more to give the Marshal a great political fall than all the prerfets or sous-prifets in France can do to set him up again.
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