On Wednesday, the French Cabinet met at Fontainebleau under the
presidency of M. Carnot, and the decree fixing the polling-day for the General Elections was duly signed. The ordinary voting is to take place on September 22nd, and the second ballots on October 6th. France is thus brought face to face with one of the strangest and most momentous crises in her history. No prospect was ever more obscure. The nature of the coalition on which Boulangism rests is strikingly ex- hibited by a list of the General's candidates, in which Anarchists, Ultramontanes, Secularists, Napoleonists, and Orleanists are jumbled together in strange confusion. The spectacle of Count de Mun, the exponent of an almost medimval Catholicism ; Henri Rochefort, the Communist and anti-clerical Revolutionary; M. Naquet, the Jew author of the law of divorce ; and Paul de Cassaignac, the Napoleonic swashbuckler,—all willing to unite under the banner of General Boulanger, 18 One such as no country has ever before witnessed. If Boulangism is nothing else, it is at least the universal solvent of politics. It fuses elements otherwise absolutely incompatible. The President will, it is said, just before the elections, himself issue an address to the French people, exposing the tactics of the assailants of the Republic. Possibly this course may be useful ; but it is also possible that the electors may resent it as an interference with their right to decide for themselves.
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