France and the Republic | Page 9

speak of the French Republic, for the Republic as it now exists does not
seem to me to be French, and France, as I have found it, is certainly
not Republican.
II
The Third French Republic, as it exists to-day, is just ten years old.
It owes its being, not to any direct action of the French people, but to
the success of a Parliamentary revolution, chiefly organised by M.
Gambetta. The ostensible object of this revolution was to prevent the
restoration of the French Monarchy. The real object of it was to take
the life of the executive authority in France. M. Gambetta fell by the

way, but the evil he did lives after him.
He was one of the celebrities of an age in which celebrity has almost
ceased to be a distinction. But the measure of his political capacity is
given in the fact that he was an active promoter of the insurrection of
September 4, 1870, in Paris against the authority of the Empress
Eugénie. A more signal instance is not to be found in history of that
supreme form of public stupidity which President Lincoln stigmatised,
in a memorable phrase, as the operation of 'swapping horses while
crossing a stream.'
It was worse than an error or a crime, it was simply silly. The
inevitable effect of it was to complete the demoralisation of the French
armies, and to throw France prostrate before her conquerors. A very
well-known German said to me a few years ago at Lucerne, where we
were discussing the remarkable trial of Richter, the dynamiter of the
Niederwald: 'Ah! we owe much to Gambetta, and Jules Favre, and
Thiers, and the French Republic. They saved us from a social
revolution by paralysing France. We could never have exacted of the
undeposed Emperor at Wilhelmshöhe, with the Empress at Paris, the
terms which those blubbering jumping-jacks were glad to accept from
us on their knees.'
The imbecility of September 4, 1870, was capped by the lunacy of the
Commune of Paris in 1871. This latter was more than France could
bear, and a wholesome breeze of national feeling stirs in the 'murders
grim and great,' by which the victorious Army of Versailles avenged the
cowardly massacre of the hostages, and the destruction of the Tuileries
and the Hôtel de Ville.
With what 'mandate,' and by whom conferred, M. Thiers went to
Bordeaux in 1871, is a thorny question, into which I need not here
enter. What he might have done for his country is, perhaps, uncertain.
What he did we know. He founded a republic of which, in one of his
characteristic phrases, he said that: 'it must be Conservative, or it
could not be,' and this he did with the aid of men without whose
concurrence it would have been impossible, and of whom he knew
perfectly well that they were fully determined the Republic should not

be Conservative. He became Chief of the State, and this for a time, no
doubt, he imagined would suffice to make the State Conservative.
He was supported by an Assembly in which the Monarchists of France
predominated. The triumphant invasion and the imminent peril of the
country had brought monarchical France into the field as one man. M.
Gambetta's absurd Government of the National Defence, even in that
supreme moment of danger when the Uhlans were hunting it from
pillar to post, actually compelled the Princes of the House of France to
fight for their country under assumed names, but it could not prevent
the sons of all the historic families of France from risking their lives
against the public enemy. All over France a general impulse of public
confidence put the French Conservatives forward as the men in whose
hands the reconstitution of the shattered nation would be safest. The
popular instinct was justified by the result.
From 1871 to 1877, France was governed, under the form of a republic,
by a majority of men who neither had, nor professed to have, any more
confidence in the stability of a republican form of government, than
Alexander Hamilton had in the working value of the American
Constitution which he so largely helped to frame, and which he
accepted as being the best it was possible in the circumstances to get.
But they did their duty to France, as he did his duty to America. To
them--first under M. Thiers, and then under the Maréchal-Duc de
Magenta--France is indebted for the reconstruction of her beaten and
disorganised army, for the successful liquidation of the tremendous
war-indemnity imposed upon her by victorious Germany, for the
re-establishment of her public credit, and for such an administration of
her national finances as enabled her, in 1876, to raise a revenue of
nearly a thousand millions of francs, or forty millions