ART. VIII. THE REPUBLICAN VICTORY IN

FRANCE.

Où Allons-nous? Par Mgr. DUPANLOUP, Évêque d'Orléans. Paris. 1876.

TH

HE events which have occurred in the East during the last three months have been of such all-absorbing interest, that few men have followed the current of affairs in France as closely as they would have done at another time. Yet it is long since the state of France called so imperatively for the earnest consideration of all who have at heart the welfare and even the very existence of that nation which once worthily bore the proud title of the eldest daughter of the Church. We witness at this moment in France the uprising of the banded ranks of Liberalism, Socialism, and Infidelity, against Religion and Society. The change which has come over the face of French politics since this time last year is not the mere victory of one political party over another, not the mere preponderance of the Left over the various elements of the Right and Centre, it is the marshalling for deadly conflict of the anti-Christian revolution against Catholicity in France, and against social order and European civilization. This may perhaps seem to some not the calm utterance of unbiassed judgment, but the language of exaggeration, of panic, of political partisanship. But we believe that we shall be able to show that in our statement of the issue now to be decided in the broad arena of French politics, there is no word of exaggeration, and that so far as our judgment of events is concerned, we are neither influenced by any fear for the future, nor by any leaning towards one or other of the sections of the Conservative party in France.

In the Assembly which met at Bordeaux in 1871, and was dissolved early in the present year, the balance of political power was a very fluctuating one, and it witnessed the fall of several ministries brought about by widely different coalitions, yet the resultant of the various forces at work was Conservative, and this was proved by the final enactment of the law on Higher Education which gave to France the Free Catholic Universities. In this sense the present Senate is a very fair representative of the late Assembly, for though the Liberal element is stronger than it was in the Assembly, the Conservative senators are sufficiently numerous to be able to secure a victory on important questions; and indeed on

June 20th they reaffirmed the principle of the freedom of higher education by a small majority in the voting in the bureaux. But all this is reversed in the Chamber of Deputies. There the Liberals are practically in overwhelming strength, and can turn a division in a full house by a majority of no less than 260 votes.* To any party and in any country the possession of a majority such as this would probably be a source of temptation to a policy of violence against its adversaries, but to the French Liberals such a temptation is simply irresistible. They have never so much as dreamed of the necessity of forbearance, of respect for the rights of a minority on which the very principle of representative government must depend, if it is not to degenerate into the mere reign of brute force, under a many-headed despot; and the Chamber of Deputies had not been a single week constituted as a representative body when the Liberals gave unmistakable evidence that this was the spirit which animated them. The first act of a French legislative assembly is the validation des pouvoirs; the official act by which the deputies make good their title to a seat in the House, and upon which, where the legality of an election is suspected, a committee of inquiry is moved for to report to the House, in order that it may be in a position to confirm or annul the return. In England, if a return is disputed, the initiative towards an inquiry is taken by a number of electors filing a petition to that effect. The investigation is then committed to one of the judges of the land, and his report decides the question. Thus, though even this system has not always worked satisfactorily, we may say that in the vast majority of cases there is an impartial tribunal to which all matters of electoral law and practice are referred. But under the French law the majority in the Chamber is at once the accuser and the judge, and the sequel to the late elections gives us more than one flagrant example of the evil which may be worked by such a system in the hands of an intolerant and victorious political party. Upon the slightest pretexts objections were made against the returns of Legitimist and Bonapartist deputies. In self-defence some of the Con-. servatives ventured to lodge similar objections against certain Republican deputies whose return had been facilitated by practices which would assuredly have endangered the seat of an English Member of Parliament. In all cases committees of inquiry were appointed, but as their nomination was in the

* On June 7th, on the final reading of M. Waddington's University Bill, 516 members voted; 388 Liberals supported the bill, while the Catholics could only rally 128 deputies in opposition to it, and were thus defeated by a majority of 260.

hands of the majority, stanch Republicans were invariably selected for the important office of examining the electoral returns. As might have been expected from the very outset, they confirmed the Republican returns, and reported against those of Bonapartist and Legitimist candidates, although the evidence brought forward in support of the objections was often all but precisely the same in the case of a Republican whose seat was secured to him and a Legitimist whose election was quashed. One inquiry in particular excited more than ordinary attention in England, namely, that of which the election for Pontivy was the subject. The elected candidate was the Comte de Mun, the well-known organizer of the Catholic working men's clubs in Paris. It will be remembered that when first his election was called in question in the Chamber he defended it in a speech which called forth the general applause of the French press, and extorted from M. Gambetta the confession that in the eloquence of the young soldier-orator Montalembert had found a worthy successor. The Chamber nevertheless decided upon an inquiry, and in the report which M. Turquet, as secretary of the committee, laid before the Chamber of Deputies in June, it was recommended that M. de Mun's election should be annulled on the ground that it had been procured by a gross abuse of their influence on the part of the clergy. Mr. Justice Keogh's famous judgment on the Galway election would compare very favourably with M. Turquet's report upon that of Pontivy. The most manifestly absurd statements were put forward as evidence against the validity of M. de Mun's return. It was gravely alleged that the priests of the district had turned the confessional into an electioneering agency before the contest, and used it as a means of political inquisition after it; that they had refused absolution not only to the men who had failed to support the clerical candidate, but also to the women whose husbands had voted against M. de Mun, and that they would not allow their children to receive their first communion. In a word, M. Turquet succeeded in condensing into his report all the malice which the representative men of the Left entertain towards the priesthood. The Pontivy election was chosen as the first battle-ground, or rather as the first opportunity for a display of the force with which the Left could outnumber and crush its enemies. We do not, and we need not, stay to discuss the justice or injustice of the various reports upon the elections. The fact must be patent to all that M. Gambetta and his friends made use of the majority on their side to deliberately thin the ranks of their opponents by using against them the forms of electoral law; and even if

they had a good case in every instance, it would have been far more prudent for the Liberals to leave ten or twelve doubtful seats to their adversaries, for how could these votes turn a division? M. de Mun was of course to be feared, but only in a minor degree, for eloquent words rarely change a vote nowadays. But M. Gambetta and his friends were totally insensible to such considerations; however much he may affect at times in his speeches a moderation which his whole career contradicts, he cannot spare an adversary, and accordingly the first act of the Liberals on their accession to power proved to all Europe that there was to be only a new phase of the traditional policy of violence.

Nor has their subsequent action belied this ill-omened initiative. It has become every day more evident that the republic actually existing in France is very different from the ideal republic of amiable doctrinaires and philosophic professors of politics. That Utopian state of existence in which a government could be established which would direct a nation's destinies and foster its inner life by the dictates of its people, executed by the people's servants-in a word, the republic of the philosophes-is nowhere to be found on earth. We must judge of republics as we see them in practice, and not as we hear of them or imagine them in theory. We must look at Republics and Republicans actually existing, not at Republics and Republicans as they possibly might be. And here before us stands this concrete reality, the French Republic, established on the initiative of M. Wallon in 1875, and destined to last until the revision of the constitution in 1880, a revision which the Liberals insist can only be made in the Republican sense. And how are we to judge of it? Where are we to find something tangible that we can make the subject or the material of sound criticism upon it? We need not look for this in the brief series of resolutions adopted by the Assembly on its institution; nor shall we find anything to examine for this end in the guarded speeches and messages of the Marshal President, messages in which MacMahon does little more than pledge himself to maintain social order in the sense of internal peace. Shall we then base our judgment of the French Republic and French Republicanism on the speeches and writings of the Catholic party in France? But this would leave our conclusions open to challenge on the ground of party spirit, and wilful or unconscious misrepresentation on the part of those on whose testimony we relied. We shall therefore choose none of these alternatives, we shall take the French Republicans themselves, we shall examine their public acts, and the writings of their statesmen, their

publicists, and their journalists, and on these, and on these only, we shall base our judgment upon French Republicanism, and our forecast of its ultimate results and aims.

And here we must guard ourselves from misapprehension. We are well aware that men who live the lives of good Catholics are to be found in the Republican ranks, that they are neither contemptible in point of numbers, obscure in station, nor devoid of talent and of influence. Yet there they are, not on the Extreme Left indeed, but in the Left Centre, and though they form a portion of the Moderate wing of the party, still none the less Republicans. We do not wish to condemn them as individuals, for we know not what influences of birth, of education, of personal friendship and association have placed them in this false position. They are blind to the logical consequences of the principles which they have adopted. They fail to see the practical results of the avowed policy of Republicanism in France; they believe that by hovering on the edge of the hostile crowd they can better guard the interests of the Church than by taking their stand full front against her foes. We can no more realize their individual position, than we can picture to ourselves the conception which a man born blind forms to himself of the world and all that is in it; but we know where lies the source of all their errors, and it is to be found in that pest of our time, Liberal Catholicism, now happily rapidly dying out in France, and destined, without doubt, to receive its death-blow from the state patronage and protection which a certain section of the Republican party seems anxious to extend to it.

There is the less reason too for our doing more than referring to the Catholics who are to be found in the Republican party, because no one regards any of them as among its representative men; and indeed the late elections have brought to the front men to whom M. Jean Brunet and M. Wallon are stanch Conservatives and Clericals, and of these the mass of the Republican party is composed. It is by the acts of the recognized leaders of the Republicans that we must judge of the republic, not by the fact that a few men who would at once refuse to have any share in such acts, have given their support to it at times because they believed it would be a République Conservatrice, or because perhaps, in their bewilderment at the general disorganization of French politics, they hoped to find a moment's rest under a temporary republic. Not such are the men who listen to M. Gambetta's harangues, read the "République Française," and applaud the report of M. Turquet.

What, then, is the true character of French Republicanism?