I spoke of this allusion to the Jews with a most accomplished ecclesiastic who dined at the Archi-episcopal palace. He was very much pleased with it. 'One of the most mischievous things done,' he said, 'by the present Government is that it is certainly fomenting—I cannot say whether ignorantly or wilfully—a great deal of popular hostility to the Jews by giving important official positions to men who, though Israelites by blood, are in most cases no better Israelites than they are Christians. Very nearly half the préfectures in France are filled by such persons. When, as is too often the case, they carry out offensive and tyrannical measures against the Catholic schools and congregations in an unnecessarily offensive and tyrannical manner, it is very easy, as you must see, for hasty or malevolent persons to persuade the people that they do this because they are Jews, and as Jews hate the Christians. I know that the best Israelites in France regret this as much as I do. The policy of this Government is aimed as clearly at the extinction of the Jewish as of the Christian faith; at the Grand Rabbis as mercilessly as at the Archbishops of France.'
This same ecclesiastic gave me some particulars of the virulence with which the anti-religious war is waged. He told me of one case of recent date in Paris in which the authorities of a hospital neglected for two days to pay any heed to the entreaties of a poor patient that they would send for a priest to attend him, the doctors having given him to understand that for him the end was near. The chaplains, it will be remembered, have been expelled from all the public hospitals. Finally some person in charge of the place, more humane than his fellows, sent out to a Lazarist house in the neighbourhood and asked the Lazarists to send a priest. The priest came. He was received very rudely, kept waiting a long time in an ante-room, and when he was finally conducted through the wards to the dying man, all sorts of vulgar and foolish jeers were uttered about his mission as he passed along; and it was with the greatest trouble that he finally succeeded in imposing some sort of decent respect for the death-bed of this poor sufferer upon the hospital attendants.
'This is the spirit,' said the priest who told me thetale, 'of the Commune, or rather of those Communards who murdered the hostages. These murderers simply put this spirit into deeds instead of words. They made the name of the Commune so odious that when Victor Hugo in 1876 proposed a general amnesty of the condemned Communards, the Chamber rejected it without taking a vote.
'In 1880 the same general amnesty was proposed, and the Chamber adopted it by a very large majority. Do you wonder that thoughtful men look with horror on the current which is carrying us in such a direction as that? At this moment two men of high personal character, Admiral Krantz and M. Casimir Périer, are lending their support to a Government which represents this current, and yet Admiral Krantz and M. Casimir Périer have recorded their deliberate conviction that the men who clamoured for an unconditional, indiscriminate amnesty for the Communards were simply abusing the name of clemency for the rehabilitation of crime.
'Look again,' he said, 'at the spirit in which the laicization of the schools is conducted. There are a hundred families we will say in a village. Ninety-nine of these families are Christian families, not families of saints—I wish I knew such a village as that!—but Christian families. Go into their homes, and you will see the crucifix hanging in the chambers, religious prints upon the walls. One family is a family of atheists. I suppose the case, for as a matter of fact I know no such family. But I will suppose it. There is a school in the village, and in that school there hangs a crucifix, the gift of some pious resident. Ninety-nine fathers and mothers of the village desire that crucifix to be respected. One father and one mother (a bold supposition this!) desire it to be removed. The authoritiessend in a man who plucks it down, before the children, and throws it out of the door. I simply state what has happened over and over again! Is there any respect for equal rights—for the rule of the majority, for freedom of conscience in such proceedings? Take the case of the Virgin of Béziers. In that ancient city stood two statues of the Virgin, one in bronze and one in marble. The civil authorities called upon the Church to suppress them. The Church authorities of course declined to do this. Thereupon the civil authorities take the money of the taxpayers and expend it in depriving the city of these two monuments. Suppose the Turkish authorities were to do a thing like this in a town full of Christians under their dominion, what would all the civilised world say about the Turks?
'And it is done in a French city by Frenchmen either to carry out their own self-will or to exasperate and insult their fellow-citizens, or for both reasons at once!
'Still another case you can see for yourself at Domrémy. There under a pious and patriotic foundation to which Louis XVIII largely contributed the home of Jeanne d'Arc, religiously preserved in its original state, was confided to the keeping of some Sisters. They dwelt in a neat edifice constructed on the grounds purchased to secure the house of the Pucelle, and there the children of Domrémy and the neighbouring communes came to school and were gratuitously taught. Only the other day the local authorities were instigated, I know not by whom—perhaps by the friends of M. Ferry at St.-Dié, which is not very far off—to "laicize" instruction in Domrémy. To this end they turn the Sisters out, put the home of Jeanne d'Arc under the charge of a lay guardian, who has to be paid by the State, of course, tax the commune to pay a lay teacher, and make the schoola lay school at the very door of the home of the village maiden to whose religious faith France owes her freedom and her national existence!'
I made a visit to Nancy and the Department of the Meurthe et Moselle not long after I had this conversation in Reims. The Mother Superior of the great Sisterhood of Christian Doctrine at Nancy confirmed this amazing story of the performances at Domrémy, and gave me many particulars of the petty persecutions to which the Sisters who conduct schools all over France are subjected. The schools are open at all hours to the invasion of Inspectors, who magnify their office too often in the eyes of the children by treating the teachers (lay as well as religious) with the sort of amiable condescension which marks the demeanour of an agent of the octroi overhauling the basket of a peasant-woman at a barrier. If a Sister has a religious book, her own property, lying on her desk, it is violently snatched up, and the children are invited to say whether it has been used to poison their young minds with religious ideas. 'In short,' said the Mother Superior very quietly, 'our Sisters are really much better treated in Protestant countries than in Catholic France.'
Domrémy-la-Pucelle is a typical agricultural village of Eastern France. It is in the Department of the Vosges and in the verdant valley of the Meuse. I drove to it on a lovely summer's morning after visiting Vaucouleurs, where the Pucelle came before the stout Captain Robert de Beaudricourt and said to him, 'You must take me to the King. I must see him before Mid Lent, and I will see him if I walk my legs off to the knees!' This interview began her marvellous career.
From certain articles in newspapers about a drama ofJeanne d'Arc, now performing at Paris, I gather that Jeanne's moral conquest of France which preceded andled to her material victory over the English invaders, has at last been satisfactorily explained by the scientific believers in hypnotism! Of this I can only say, with President Lincoln on a memorable occasion, 'for those who like this kind of explanation of historical phenomena, I should suppose it would be just the kind of explanation they would like.'
The country between Vaucouleurs and Domrémy is agreeably diversified, well wooded in parts, and rich in fair meadow-lands. At Montbras a little old lady dwells and looks after her affairs in one of the most picturesque château of the sixteenth century to be seen in this part of France, machicolated, crenellated, and dominated by lofty towers. We passed, too, through Greux, a small village on the Meuse, the dwellers in which were astute enough to get themselves exempted by Charles VII from all talliages and subsidies 'by fabricating documents' to prove that Jeanne d'Arc was born there. The incident is curious as going to show that the 'downtrodden serfs' and 'manacled villeins' of the middle ages had their wits about them, and could take care of themselves when an opportunity offered, as well as the 'oppressed tenantry' of modern Ireland. Domrémy, which is no bigger than Greux, neither of them having three hundred inhabitants, straggles along the highway. The houses are well built—the church is a handsome, ogival building of the fifteenth century, restored in our day, but quite in keeping with the place and its associations. Within it, under a tomb built into the wall, lie the two brothers Tiercelin, sons of the godmother of Jeanne, who bore their testimony manfully to the character of the deliverer of France, when the Church was at last compelled to intervene in the interest of truth and justice between the French Catholics who had worshipped her as a 'creature of God,' and theEnglish Catholics who had burned her as an emissary of the Evil One.
Almost under the shadow of the church tower stands the house in which Jeanne was born and bred. A charming, old-fashioned garden, very well kept, surrounds it. If when you leave the church you pass around by the main street of the village, you soon find yourself in front of a neat iron railing which connects two modern buildings of no great size, but neat and unpretending. Entering the gateway of this railing you see before you, shaded by well-grown trees, one or two of which may possibly be of the date of the house, the quaint fifteenth-century façade of the house of Jacques d'Arc, and his wife Isabelle Vouthon, called Romée because she had made a pilgrimage to the Eternal City. A curious demi-gable gives the house the appearance of having been cut in two. But there is no reason to suppose it was ever any larger than it is now. Probably, indeed, this façade was erected long after the martyrdom of Jeanne. Over the ogival doorway is an escutcheon showing three shields, and the date, 1480, with an inscription, 'Vive Labeur, Vive le Roy Louys!' This goes to confirm a local tradition that the façade was built at the cost of Louis XI., who understood much better than his father the political value to the crown and to the country of France of the marvellous career of the peasant girl of Domrémy. The date of this inscription is particularly significant. In 1479 was fought the battle of Guinegate, which was lost to France by the headlong flight of the French chivalry from the field. Louis XI. turned this disaster to good account. He made it the excuse for founding, in 1480, his regular army of mercenaries, liberating the peasants from the burden of personal military service to the lords, and drawing to himself the power of theState through taxation. 'Vive Labeur, Vive le Roy Louys!' was a popular cry throughout France in 1480; for Labeur in those days meant what it means now in theTerra di Lavoro—the tilling of the fields. One of the three shields above this doorway has a similar significance. It is a bearing of three ploughshares. With it are emblazoned on the house of the Pucelle two other shields, one bearing the three royal fleurs-de-lys of France, and the other the arms granted to the family of the heroine—azure, a swordargentpommelled and hiltedor, and above a crown supported by two fleurs-de-lys. With these arms, as we know, the family took the name of De Lys. The name, the arms, and the inscription over the doorway were a perpetual witness to the peasants of Champagne and Lorraine of the unity of interests established by King Louis between the spade and the sceptre. With the help of an inspired daughter of the people, King Charles had driven the English into the sea, and delivered the land. With the help of the people, King Louis had broken the power of Burgundy, and put the barons under his foot. 'Vive Labeur, Vive le Roy Louys!' I do not wonder this skilful craftsman 'of the empire and the rule' lamented on his death-bed in 1483, at Plessis-les-Tours, that he could not live to crown the edifice he had so well begun. We in England and America know him only in the magic mirror of the Wizard of the North. But France owes him a great debt. He was cruel, but in comparison with the cruelty of Lebon, of Barère, of Billaud-Varennes, his cruelty was tender mercy, He was a hypocrite, but his hypocrisy shows like candour beside the perfidy and the cant of Pétion and of Robespierre, while in the great 'art and mystery' of government he was a master where these modern apes of despotism were clumsy apprentices.
The interior of the house of Jeanne is probably in the main what it was when Jeanne dwelt here with her parents, her sister and her brothers. The ground floor contains a general living-room, the large chimney-place of which may perhaps be of the time of Jeanne, and three bedrooms, one of which, a chamber measuring three mètres by four, and lighted only by a small dormer window looking out upon the garden, tradition assigns to Jeanne and to her sister. Here, the people of Domrémy believe, the maiden sate almost within the shadow of the old church-tower, and heard the voices of St. Catherine and St. Margaret, and Michael the Archangel, patron and defender of France, mingling with the sound of the church bells, and calling upon her to arise, and leave her village home and the still forests of Domrémy and her silly sheep, and go out into a world of war and confusion and violence, and rally the broken armies of her people, and lead them, like another Deborah or Judith, to victory.
That Jeanne heard these voices or believed she heard them, the documentary evidence unearthed by Quicherat abundantly proves. It proves, too, that she was cool, clear-headed, self-possessed, thoroughly honest, and absolutely trustworthy in every relation of life. This being her character, what did she do? She made her way from her solitude in Lorraine to the court of the King at Chinon, with nothing but her faith in her voices and her mission to sustain her; put herself into the forefront of the battle of France, threw the English back into England, and saw the successor of St.-Rémi put the crown of Clovis upon the head of a prince whom nobody but herself could have led or driven to Reims.
If anybody in Paris or elsewhere knowing all this feels quite sure that Jeanne did not hear the voiceswhich she believed herself to have heard, he certainly is to be pitied. It may do him good to consider in his closet what Lord Macaulay has said in a certain celebrated essay concerning Sir Thomas More and the doctrine of Transubstantiation.
A man may intelligently believe or disbelieve in the reality of the voices heard by Jeanne, but no man who intelligently disbelieves in them can need to be told that his disbelief rests upon no better scientific ground than the belief of the man who believes in them.
To take the home of Jeanne d'Arc out of the keeping of devout women who share the faith of Jeanne, that faith which, well or ill founded, unquestionably saved France, was simply a stupid indecency. In the keeping of the Sisters the home of Jeanne was a shrine. In any other keeping it becomes a show.
The essential vulgarity of the performance is bad enough. But a sharp-witted Domrémy man who took me on to Bourlémont in his 'trap' assured me, in a matter-of-fact way, that in the village the chief mover in the affair was commonly believed to have got a goodpot-de-vinfor securing the position of keeper of the house for a person of his acquaintance. This may have been a bit of village scandal, but such performances naturally breed village scandals. Whether it was or was not a 'job' in this sense, it certainly marks as low a level of taste and education as the pillage by Barère and his copper 'Syndicate' of the historic tombs of France at St.-Denis in 1793.
Some years ago all France was incensed by a nocturnal desecration of the statue of Duguesclin which stands at Dinan in the very lists in which five hundred years ago the Breton hero met and vanquished 'Sir Thomas of Canterbury.' The indignation of France was righteous, and if there was any foundation for the popularimpression that the outrage was perpetrated by some English lads on a vacation tour, no language could well be too strong to apply to it. But I did not observe that any Parisian journalist alluded at that time to the way in which the ashes of Duguesclin himself were treated in 1795 at St.-Denis, by Frenchmen decked in tri-coloured scarves! It did not even occur to them to remember how long ago and by what hands the column of the Grand Army was pulled down in the very heart of Paris!
While the force of Philistine fatuity can no further go than it has gone in the 'laicization' of the home of Jeanne d'Arc, I ought to say that the actual keeper of the place seemed to me to be a decent sort of fellow, not wholly destitute of respect for its traditions and its significance. The house and the garden are neatly kept. In the centre of the main room stands a fine model in bronze of the well-known statue of Jeanne d'Arc, by the Princess Mary of Orléans, with an inscription stating that it was given by the King, her father, to the Department of the Vosges, to be placed in the house where Jeanne was born. Commemorative tablets are set here and there in the walls; and in one of the modern buildings in front of the house a collection is kept of objects illustrating the life of the Pucelle.
The most interesting of these is a banner given by General de Charette, to the valour of whose Zouaves the French are indebted for one of the few gleams of victory which brighten up the dark record of 1870 It was at Patay that in June 1429 the English, under Sir John Fastolf, for the first time broke in a stricken field and fled under the onset of the French, led by the Maid of Orléans, leaving the great Talbot to fall a prisoner into the hands of his enemies. And at Patay, again in December 1870, the German advance was metand repulsed by the 'Volunteers of the West,' that being the name under which the silly and intolerant 'Government of the National Defence' actually compelled the Catholic Zouaves to fight for their country, just as they forced the Duc de Chartres to draw his sword and risk his life for France as 'Robert Lefort.' These puerilities really almost disarm contempt into compassion. At Patay in 1870 the Zouaves saw three of their officers, all of one family, struck down in succession, two of them to death, as they advanced on the lines of the enemy, bearing a banner of the Sacré-Cœur, which had been presented to General de Charette by some nuns of Brittany only a few days before the battle. The banner, now at Domrémy, is a votive offering of General de Charette and his Zouaves in commemoration of the field on which they were permitted thus, after four centuries, to link the piety and the patriotic valour of modern France with the deathless traditions of Domrémy, of Orléans, and of Reims.
This little museum contains, too, a picture given by an Englishman, of Jeanne binding up the wounds of an English soldier after the repulse of one of the English attacks. The soil has risen about the house of Jeanne, and this may have made the interior seem more gloomy than it once was. But the house is well and solidly built, and if it may be thought a fair specimen of the abodes of the well-to-do peasantry of Lorraine in the fifteenth century, they were as well lodged relatively to the general average of people at that time as those of the same class in Eastern France now on the average appear to be. Charles de Lys in the early seventeenth century seems to have been a man of note and substance. But the parents of Jeanne were simply peasant proprietors. At the entrance of the village church there is a statue of Jeanne, the work of a native artist, inwhich she appears kneeling in her peasant's dress, one hand pressed upon her heart and the other lifted towards Heaven. And in a little clump of fir-trees near her house stands a sort of monumental fountain, surmounted by a bust of the Pucelle. The house itself remained in the possession of the last descendant of the family, a soldier of the Empire named Gérardin, down to the time of the Restoration. Some Englishman, it is said, then offered him a handsome price for the cottage, with the object of moving it across the Channel, as an enterprising countryman of mine once proposed to carry off the house of Shakespeare to America. Gérardin, though a poor man, or perhaps because he was a poor man, refused. The department thereupon bought the house, the King gave Gérardin the cross of the Legion, and he was made agarde forestier.
Upon the expulsion of the Sisters from the home of La Pucelle, some of the most respectable people in the department at once organized a fund, and built for them a very neat edifice in the village in which they are now installed. Fully four-fifths of the children of the country round about, I was told, still attend their free school. 'Ah! Sir,' said a cheery solid farmer of Domrémy to me, while I stood waiting for my 'trap,' to continue my journey, 'it does not amuse us at all to pay for the braying of all these donkeys! Do you know, it costs Domrémy, such as you see it, twelve hundred francs a year, this nonsense about the Sisters and the house of La Pucelle! And to what use? What harm did the Sisters do there? It is not the Pucelle who would have put them out, do you think? In the old time Domrémy paid no taxes because of the Pucelle. Now because of the Pucelle we must pay twelve hundred francs a year for what we don't want!'
Some of my readers may thank me—as the guide-book gives no very accurate information on the subject—for telling them that Domrémy-la-Pucelle may be very easily, and in fine weather very pleasantly, visited from Neufchâteau on the railway line between Paris and Mirécourt. Neufchâteau itself is an interesting and picturesque town. It suffered severely from the religious wars, but two of its churches, St. Christopher and St. Nicholas, are worth seeing. There are two very good statues of Jeanne d'Arc, and the Hôtel de la Providence, kept by a most attentive dame, is a very good specimen of a small French provincial inn. There a carriage can be had for Domrémy, and with a luncheon-basket a summer's day may be most agreeably spent between Neufchâteau and the little station of Domrémy-Maxey-sur-Meuse, at which point, about three miles beyond Domrémy-la-Pucelle, you may strike the railway which leads to Nancy. The old capital of Lorraine, though not nearly so trim and well kept as it used to be, is still one of the most characteristic and interesting cities in France.
Very near Domrémy-la-Pucelle, a resident of the country, M. Sédille, has built, on a fine hill overlooking the valley of the Meuse, a small chapel adorned with a group representing the Maiden kneeling before her Saints and the Archangel. This chapel stands on the place where, as tradition tells us, Jeanne first heard the heavenly 'voices.' It was then in the heart of a great forest, long since thinned away. It now commands a wide and beautiful view of a finely varied country. There, driving from Bourlémont on a lovely summer afternoon, I found a young pilgrim from the Far West of the United States doing homage to the memory of the Maid of Orléans. He had made his way here from Paris and the Exposition. 'I got enough of that,' he said, 'in about three days, with the help of a French conversation book.' His method was to look up a phrase as nearly as possible expressing what he wanted to say, and then to submit this phrase in the book to his interlocutor. 'How do you find the plan work?' I asked him. 'Oh, very well,' he replied; 'the French are so very obliging. I'm afraid it wouldn't work as well the other way, on our side of the pond.' His worship, not of heroes, but of heroines, was most simple and downright. 'I consider Joan of Arc,' he said, 'the greatest woman that ever walked the earth, and next to her Charlotte Corday. And these miserable Englishmen burnt one,' he added scornfully, 'and these miserable Frenchmen guillotined the other. I don't wonder this Old World is played out if they can't treat such women better than that!'
He was charmed with the story of Adam Lux (caricatured by Mr. Carlyle), who (like André Chénier) invited death by his defiant homage to Charlotte Corday. 'Well now, I suppose,' he said, 'that if there had been fifty more men in Paris then as brave as that Adam Lux, they could have taken all those cowards and murderers and chucked them into the Seine!' He rejoiced over the Bishop of Verdun's projected monument to Jeanne, and I sent him to Châtillon by telling him that the statue of Urban II. stands third in height among the religious monuments of Europe after the Virgin of Le Puy and the St.-Charles of Arona.
Bourlémont before the Revolution must have been one of the finest châteaux in France. It stands superbly on the plateau of a lofty hill. The park which surrounds it is very extensive and full of noble trees. The château was sacked and pillaged, and one great wing destroyed. This the Prince d'Hénin is now rebuilding on the original scale, and in the most perfect keeping with the stately and picturesque main body of the edifice.The whole of the interior, with the great hall and the chapel, has been restored and refurnished with admirable taste. Carved oak wainscotings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, antique armoires and cabinets and tables, mediæval tapestries—nothing is wanting. But the thoroughness of the reconstruction emphasizes the wanton folly and wickedness of the devastation which made it necessary.
The Princesse d'Hénin of the Revolutionary time narrowly escaped the guillotine. She was one of many women of rank and worth who owed their lives to the courage and ability and generosity of Madame de Staël. After taking refuge in Switzerland, Madame de Staël organised a complete system for bringing away her imperilled friends from Paris. She gathered about her a small corps of clever and determined Swiss girls. These she sent one by one as occasion served, or circumstances required, into France, equipped with Swiss passports. On reaching Paris one of these girls would find a lady waiting to escape, change wardrobes with her, give her a Swiss passport properly viséd by the Swiss representative in Paris, furnish her with money if necessary, and set her safely on her way to the Cantons. When news came that she had arrived, the Swiss damsel in her turn would get a new passport from her Minister and return to Switzerland. Of course, such a system as this could not have been carried out so successfully as it was without more or less co-operation on the part of the 'incorruptible' Republican functionaries in France, and there can be little doubt that, under the régime of the scoundrels who made up the Committee of Public Security—Lebon, Panis, Drouet, Ruhl, and the rest—a regular traffic in passports and protections went on during the worst times of the Terror. It is remembered to the credit of an unhappywoman, who was born in the town of Vaucouleurs, and for whom nobody finds a good word, Madame Du Barry, that she deliberately gave up the certainty of securing her own escape from Paris, in 1793, in order to save Madame de Mortemart. The Duchesse de Mortemart was in hiding on the Channel coast, when Madame Du Barry, for whom a safe-conduct under an assumed name had been bought from one of the Terrorist 'Titans,' insisted that this safe-conduct should be sent from Paris to the Duchesse. The Duchesse used it and reached England in safety. Madame Du Barry remained to perish on the scaffold, leaving her goods and chattels to be stolen by the ruffians who sent her to the guillotine, just as the goods and chattels, the money and equipments and horses of the Duc de Biron were stolen by the Republican 'General' Rossignol, his successor.
Domrémy is in the electoral district of Neufchâteau, and the elections of 1889 do not show that the 'laicization' policy has given the Republican cause a great impulse in this region. The Monarchist candidate in the Neufchâteau district received in September 1889 6,571 votes, and the Republican 6,590. This is one of the microscopic majorities which were so common in 1889, and which conclusively show what a difference in the general result was made by the open pressure of the Government on the electors. The Department of the Vosges sends up six deputies to the Chamber. In 1885 it sent up a solid Republican Deputation, including M. Méline, who was so conspicuous in 1889 in the matter of General Boulanger and M. Jules Ferry, the standard-bearer of 'laicization' and irreligion. In 1885 the Deputies were chosen by thescrutin de liste. The Republican majority shown by the vote for M. Méline was 6,949 on a total poll of 87,635. M. Méline, whoheaded the poll, received 47,292 votes. His Conservative opponent received 40,343. In 1889 the elections were made by thescrutin d'arrondissement. Five Republicans, not six, were chosen, and the defeated Republican candidate was no less a person than M. Jules Ferry himself! The first district of St.-Dié gave him 6,192 votes, and elected a Monarchist to replace him by 6,403 votes. It is not easy to overestimate the significance of this change. Probably enough the majority will emphasize it by 'invalidating' the election of the Monarchist!
A comparison of the total votes in the Vosges of the two parties in 1889 with those of 1885 is instructive. In 1885 the strength, of the two parties respectively (the Conservatives not having then openly declared for the Monarchy) was, as I have said, 47,292 and 40,343. In 1889 the Republicans polled in all the districts of the department 47,116 votes, and their opponents 42,124. Here we have a falling off of 176 votes in the highest Republican strength against an increase of 1,781 in the highest Opposition strength, or, in other words, a falling off of 1,957 votes in the aggregate Republican majority, together with the defeat in his own district of the recognised leader of the Republican Government party. And yet the total of the votes polled rose from 87,635 in 1885 to 89,240 in 1889. The inference is obvious: that the Monarchists are on the upgrade, and the Republicans on the downgrade. If, with such results in such a region and in the face of such a contest as that of 1889, the Monarchists do not in the long run win, it will clearly be nobody's fault but their own!
Val Richer.
Perhaps the most striking illustration that can be given of the true nature of the contest now waging between the Third Republic and France, is the share taken in it by the family and the representatives of the great Protestant statesman, who, under Louis Philippe, laid down the lines in France of a truly free and liberal system of public education. In the matter of education France was undoubtedly thrown backward and not forward by the First Republic. The number of illiterates—that is, of persons unable to read and write—naturally increased between 1789 and 1799 as the educational foundations which existed all over the kingdom shared the fate of the religious and charitable foundations. There was an abundance of ordinances and decrees about public education. But the chief practical work done was to confiscate the means by which the ancient system had been carried on. Baudrillart mentions educational foundations made by the great abbeys as early as in the seventh century. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Councils of the French Church created in each cathedral chapter a special prebend, the holder of which was to look after the education not only of clerical persons, but 'of all poor scholars,' and this 'gratuitously.'
In the fourteenth century lay foundations for freepublic education are found, one in particular of importance established by a rich citizen, Jean Rose, for promoting the general education of the people at Meaux, the diocese afterwards of Bossuet, who under Louis XIV. was so active in promoting 'the moral unity' of France from his point of view.
The long English wars interrupted the development of education, and many instances are found during that dismal period in which persons who had bought legal positions had to employ professional scribes to do their writing. In the sixteenth century schools increased and multiplied all over France. Rich citizens founded them for 'the instruction of all the children,' as at Provins in 1509, and at Roissy-en-Buè in 1521. In the rural regions the schoolmaster often received his pay in grain; he was sometimes attached to some public office. In many places he taught the children only for six months in each year. In short, education was carried on in France at that time very much as it was in the rural regions of the United States down to the second quarter of the current century. In many French parishes of the sixteenth century the schoolmaster 'boarded around' in the different families of the parish, just as he did in New England. The religious wars again disturbed the development of education. At Nîmes, where the archives I found had been carefully investigated by M. Puech, more than a third of the artisans could read, write, and keep their accounts at the end of the fifteenth century. After the close of the religious wars, it was no uncommon thing to find fathers signing their names in a very clerkly fashion, while their sons were forced to 'make their marks,' as being unable to write. Like causes produced like effects at the end of the eighteenth century. Not content with disestablishing the Church, the legislative tinkers of1791, by a law passed on June 27 in that year, struck out of existence at a blow all the great industrial associations and corporations of France. These had provided for the education of the children of their members for centuries; but all the educational foundations were swept away with the hospitals and the charities. The men who grew to man's estate between 1793 and 1813 in France grew up in greater ignorance than their fathers.
The worst national effects of the Terror did not disappear with the disappearance of the guillotine. Before the fall of Robespierre, the guillotine had come to be a financial expedient. 'We are coining money on the Place de la Révolution,' said the estimable Barére to his colleagues, and he counted that a poor week's work which yielded less 'than three millions of francs' from the confiscation of the property of the victims. When under the Directoryfusilladestook the place of the too conspicuous guillotine, the confiscation still went on. The Directory did no more for education than the Terror had done. The five directors had other matters on their minds.
Barras, of whom a not unfriendly historian gently observes that, 'while he lacked no other vice ancient or modern, he was neither very vain nor very cruel;' Mr. Carlyle's 'hungry Parisian pleasure-hunter,' Rewbell, of whom his special friend and colleague, Laréveillère-Lepaux, amiably records in his Memoirs that 'his legs were too small for his body,' and that he had 'a habit of attributing to himself speeches uttered and deeds done by other people;' Letourneur, a corpulent rustic, whose excellent wife loudly exulted over her joy in finding herself 'eating stewed beef out of Sèvres porcelain,' and who, being asked when he came back from the Jardin des Plantes whether he had seenLacépède, innocently replied: 'No; but I saw La giraffe!'—Carnot, 'Papa Victory,' of whom Laréveillère says that 'nobody could endure his vanity and self-conceit;' and, lastly, Laréveillère himself, whom Carnot in his Memoirs, published at London in 1799, compares to a 'viper,' and says, 'after he has made a speech he coils himself up again'—these were hardly the men to give their nights and days to reconstructing the educational system of France!
Merlin (of Douai), Minister of Justice under the quintette, really ruled France for nearly five years. This was Merlin, author of the 'Law of the Suspects,' which Mr. Carlyle, though obviously in the dark as to its real genesis and objects, finds himself constrained to stigmatize as the 'frightfullest law that ever ruled in a nation of men.' Mr. Carlyle does not seem to have observed that the author of this 'transcendental' law, the aim of which was to convert the French people into a swarm of spies and assassins, was not only one of the first of the Republican' Titans' to fall down and kiss the feet of Napoleon, but one of the first also to desert Napoleon, and embrace the knees of the returning King. On April 11, 1814, this creature, who had caused the Convention to reject a petition for a pardon presented by a man condemned for a crime, the real authors of which had confessed his innocence and their own guilt, on the ground that 'every sentence pronounced by the law should be irrevocable,' joined in a most fulsome address of welcome to the legitimate sovereign of France! His namesake Merlin (of Thionville), another 'Titan' whom Mr. Carlyle admires as riding out of captured Mayence still 'threatening in defeat,' was nimbler even than Merlin of Douai. On April 7, 1814, he wrote to King Louis begging to be allowed 'to serve the true, paternal government of France!'
Concerning Merlin (of Douai), Barras, who made him 'Minister of Justice,' placidly says: 'Poltroons are always cruel. Merlin always hid himself in the moment of danger, and came out again only to strike the vanquished party.' Proscription and confiscation kept the Government which this worthy Republican directed much too busy to leave it any time for looking after the schools of France.
When at last Napoleon gathered up the reins, he postponed the interests of public education to other, and from his point of view more pressing, concerns.
The Concordat re-established the Church in France, but it did not re-endow the Church on a scale which would have enabled it at once to reconstruct its own educational system. In fact, the Concordat can hardly be said to have re-endowed the Church at all. Under the thirteenth article the Pope formally recognized the title of the purchasers of 'national property' in France to vast domains, the property through purchase, donations, or bequest of the Church, which had been made 'national property' only by the simple processes of exiling or murdering the owners and confiscating their estates. In consideration of this recognition, the State bound itself by Article XIV. of the Concordat to 'ensure to the bishops and the curates salaries befitting their functions,' and by Article XV. to 'protect the right of the Catholics of France to re-endow the churches.'
As to the 'rising generation' of the French people the government of Napoleon concerned itself much more with the conscription than with the reconstruction of the schools, and though the Churches, both Catholic and Protestant, took this work in hand very early in the century, it was necessarily with inadequate means.
Under the First Consulate a general law regulating public instruction was enacted, on May 1, 1802.Another was enacted shortly afterwards, and in 1808 appeared the famous decree of the Emperor founding the University system of France. Heaven knows how many schemes for founding this University system had been elaborated and submitted to him before, only to be torn up as 'ideological.' Cuvier affirms that he drew up twenty-three such schemes one after another.
This decree of March 17, 1808, forbade the establishment of private schools without the authority of the Government, set up three degrees of public instruction, primary, secondary and superior, organised a body of Inspectors-General, and, in short, 'laicized' public education in France effectually as a machine to be controlled by the Imperial Government.
Under the ancient Monarchy, France possessed twenty-four Universities. The Convention suppressed them all at a blow on September 15, 1793. This was little more than three months after the Convention itself had been 'suppressed' and forced to kiss the hand that smote it by Henriot and his cannoniers on June 28, 1793. A law abolishing the freedom of education was to have been expected from an assembly itself enslaved by an oligarchy of rogues and assassins. And this law left nothing standing in France to impede the execution of the Imperial decree of 1808, the first article of which was:—'Public education in the whole Empire is exclusively confided to the University.' Another article ordained that all the schools in France should take as the basis of their instruction 'fidelity to the Emperor, to the Imperial monarchy, the trustee of the happiness of the people, and to the Napoleonic dynasty, the conservator of the unity of France and of all the liberal ideas proclaimed in the constitutions of France.' The theology of all the French schools was to be in conformity with the Royal edict of Louis XIV., issued in1682. Furthermore and expressly, 'the members of the University were required to keep the Grand-master and his officers informed of anything that may come to their knowledge contrary to the doctrine and the principles of the educational body in the establishments of public education!'
Here we have the 'moral unity' of France organized by Napoleon in 1808 on the lines in which the Third Republic has been trying ever since 1874 to organize it! Put the word 'Republic' for the word 'Empire,' the phrase 'scientific atheism' for the phrase 'propositions of the clergy of France in 1682,' and you have in the Napoleonic organization of public education the organization controlled by M. Jules Ferry. Of the two despotisms, the despotism of 1808 seems to me the more compatible with public order and public prosperity. With public liberty neither of them is compatible. Under the ancient Monarchy and the clerical system of education liberty existed. The Jesuits and the Jansenists, the Dominicans and the Oratorians and the Benedictines, had their different principles of education, their different traditions, their different text-books. Under the Imperial University, and still more under the University of the Third Republic, differences became disloyalties. Under the University of France in 1808 every young French citizen was to accept the Catholic faith as defined by the clergy of France in 1682, and true allegiance bear to the Napoleonic dynasty. Under the University of France in 1890, every young French citizen is to disbelieve in God and a future life, and true allegiance bear to the Third French Republic.
In 1808 as in 1890 the rights of freemen were first vindicated in this connection by the Catholic Church. On April 9, 1809, the Emperor issued a decree that no one should be admitted to a Catholic theologicalacademy without a bachelor's diploma of the University. The bishops came at once into collision on this point with the Imperial prefects of 1809, as the bishops now came into collision on the decree of 1880 with M. Jules Ferry and the Republican prefects. The Imperial prefects of 1809 (not a few of them rabid Republicans in 1792) were merely the valets of the Emperor, as the prefects of 1890 are the valets of a Parliamentary oligarchy.
The Emperor carried his point. But when the Emperor fell, and the constitutional monarchy was restored, the University of France ceased to be an Imperialist training-school. M. de Fontanes, appointed grand-master by the Emperor in 1809, kept his place under Louis XVIII. To keep it he made the University 'clerical.' Under Napoleon the scholars in the public schools of France had been divided into 'companies.' M. de Fontanes in 1815 ordered them to be divided into 'classes.' Under Napoleon the hours of study and of play were announced by a drum. In 1815 M. de Fontanes ordered them to be announced by a bell. Under Napoleon the boys all wore a uniform. M. de Fontanes in 1815 ordered the uniforms to be no longer of 'a military type.' Then the French Liberals who had not dared to stir under the Emperor began to attack both the clergy and the University. But when the Revolution of 1830 brought these 'Liberals' into power, they ceased at once to attack, and began at once to engineer the Imperial machinery of the University. M. Thiers even proclaimed this machinery to be 'the finest creation of the reign of Napoleon!'
In 1833 the truest Liberal of them all, M. Guizot, struck a strenuous blow at this machinery of despotism. He could not deal with the University as a system, but he framed a law affecting 'primary education,' theprinciple of winch was that no man should be forced to send his child to school, but that schools should exist all over France to which any man who pleased might send his children if he was too poor to pay for their education.
This principle of M. Guizot in 1883 was certainly not an outcome of the 'principles of 1789;' for it had been at the foundation of all the free schools of France during the middle ages, and under the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV. Talleyrand recognised it in his plan of 1791, which did not suit Condorcet and his 'ideologists.' It was not in the mere revival of this principle that the true liberalism of M. Guizot manifested itself. In the second article of his law this great statesman provided, in express terms, that 'the wishes of families should always be consulted and complied with in everything affecting the religious instruction of their children.' This was indeed a step far forward in the path of true liberalism. It was a distinct recognition of the rights of the family as against the encroachments of the State. It was the 'liberalism' not of the 'ideologists' of 1790, nor of the Third Republic according to M. Challemel-Lacour, but of the legislators who gave Lower Canada her equitable system of common and of dissident schools. It was the liberalism of those courageous men who, like Montgaillard, Bishop of St.-Pons, had dared, under Louis XIV., and after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, to protest in 1688 against imposing the Catholic communion by force upon the Huguenot ancestors of M. Guizot.
As Minister of Public Instruction under Louis Philippe in 1833, this lover of true liberty simply got enacted into law the principles which had led him as a brilliant and rising young man of letters in 1812 torefuse to adulate the Emperor, and which he had plainly and fearlessly set forth as the necessary conditions of the constitutional government of France in his famous interview with Louis XVIII. three years afterwards.
Under M. Guizot's law of 1833, the primary schools of France were much more than doubled in number during the reign of Louis Philippe.
In the spirit of that law M. Guizot administered the affairs of France during his long tenure of official authority, and to him, more than to any other man, must be attributed the progress which France made under Louis Philippe in the direction of liberty, as Englishmen and Americans understand that much-abused word. That progress might never have been interrupted had the counsels of M. Guizot prevailed over those of M. Thiers with the aged monarch who trusted the one but yielded to the other, in February 1848.
Now that a parliamentary oligarchy has deliberately undertaken, in the name of the 'moral unity of France,' to undo all that was done between 1833 and 1848 for educational liberty in France and to protect the moral independence of Frenchmen, it is in the highest degree interesting to find the principles of M. Guizot energetically maintained by the heirs of his blood and of his name, not only here in the Catholic Calvados which gave the great Protestant statesman so staunch a support through all his years of power, and surrounded him with affection and respect down to the last days of his long and illustrious life, but in Southern France also, and in the home of his Protestant ancestors.
Val Richer will be a place of pilgrimage for lovers of liberty in the twentieth century, as La Brède is in the nineteenth.
But the genius of the spot is more purely personalin the home of Guizot than in the birthplace of Montesquieu.
The stately rectangular library at La Brède with its thousands of soberly-clad volumes, standing as he left them on its shelves, annotated by his own hand; the manuscripts still unfinished of the 'Lettres Persanes; the grave silent cabinet, with his chair beside his study-table, as if he had quitted it a moment before you came—all these are eloquent, indeed, of the great thinker whose 'Esprit des Lois,' too rich in ripe wisdom to be heeded by the headlong and haphazard political 'plungers' of 1789 in his own country, illuminated for Washington the problem of constituting a new nationality beyond the Atlantic.
But La Brède has also a positive physiognomy of its own which takes you back to ages long before his birth. The frowning donjon of the thirteenth century, the machicolated round tower, the moat with its running water, the drawbridge, the vestibule with its columns of twisted oak, even the grand salon with the stately courtiers and captains, the gracious dames and damsels of the family of Sécondat gazing down from the walls, all these distract the eye and the mind. The distraction is agreeable, but still it is a distraction. It leads you from the biographical into the social and historical mood. You are delighted as at Meillant or Chenonceaux with a corner of ancient France, marvellously rescued from the red ruin of the Revolution.
Val Richer, on the contrary, like Abbotsford, is the creation of the master whose spirit haunts the place. Like Abbotsford, it has an earlier history and older associations, but of these there are few or no material signs. Here stood the great abbey of which Thomas à -Becket once was abbot, and where he found a refuge during that exile from which, in his own words, hewent back to England 'to play a game in which the stakes were heads!' From Bures, near Bayeux, in this department, where Henry was then holding his court, the four knights followed the Primate to Canterbury, sternly bent on showing their lord that they were neither 'sluggish nor half-hearted.' Of the abbatial buildings which stood here then few traces are left. But the handsome modern mansion built here by Guizot rests, I believe, on the massive foundations, and certainly incorporates some of the solid masonry above ground of the ancient abbot's house. The drive to Val Richer from the singularly picturesque old Norman town of Lisieux, within whose cathedral walls Henry of England was married to Eleanor of Guienne, is beautifully shaded all the way with noble trees, and bordered on either hand with parks and gardens. No English county can show a more strikingly English landscape—for this is the mother-country of Norman England, though now one of the main pillars of the nationality of France. The Lady Chapel of the Cathedral at Lisieux, indeed, was founded in the fifteenth century by Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, in express expiation of the 'false judgment on an innocent woman,' by which, as he lamentably confessed in his deed of gift, he had sent the deliverer of France to the stake at Rouen.
The park, like the mansion of Val Richer, is the creation of M. Guizot. The monks of old had prepared the ground—for here, as everywhere, they kept alive the traditions of Roman landscape art. The parks which the Norman nobles made on both sides of the Channel were mainly devoted to the chase, like the 'paradises' of the Persians; but the monasteries possessed pleasure-grounds and gardens of all sorts. The beautifully broken and undulating surface of thepark of Val Richer attests, I think, the fashioning hand of human art at more than one point; and M. Guizot, by whom most of the fine trees which now adorn the place were planted, took advantage, with the skill of a professional landscapist, of all the opportunities it offered him.
I can well believe, with the most accomplished and appreciative of his English biographers, that the years which he passed here after his return from the exile into which he was driven by the unhappy interference of M. Thiers at the most critical moment of the disturbances of February 1848, were the happiest of his long and well-filled life.
The halls and corridors of the mansion are tapestried with books. The green secluded alleys, the gentle knolls, the glades, the spacious meadows of the park, recall at every step the younger Pliny's incomparable picture of his Tuscan villa. 'Placida omnia et quiescentia.' 'A spirit of pensive peace broods over the whole place, making it not lovelier only, but more salubrious, making the sky more pure, the atmosphere more clear.'
People who imagine convulsions and cataclysms to be a necessity of political life in France, will find it hard to explain the relations which existed throughout his whole career from the time when he took part in forming the first government of Louis Philippe to the day of his death between this great Protestant statesman and the Catholics of the Calvados. These relations still exist between his representatives at Val Richer and the Catholics of the Calvados.
When the great Chancellor de l'Hôpital was using all his influence with Catherine de' Medici to prevent the outbreak of the religious wars of the sixteenth century, the Parisian rabble were set on by the satellites of the House of Guise to attack the house of theSieur de Longjumeau in the Pré aux Clercs, as being a place of meeting for the Huguenots. The Sieur de Longjumeau had no respect for the 'sacred right of insurrection,' and, getting some of his friends into his house, gave the people risen in their majesty such a thrashing that they speedily disbanded. Upon this the 'moral unity' men of that time induced the Court to banish the Sieur de Longjumeau to his estates, on the ground that 'the most incompatible thing in a State is the existence of two forms of religion.' This is the doctrine of the Third Republic to-day. France cannot live with a mixed population of believers and of unbelievers. All Frenchmen must be Atheists. The political history of the Calvados for the last half-century, and especially of this region about Lisieux and Val Richer, meets this 'moral unity' theory with a practical demonstration of its absurdity. The great Protestant statesman and his Catholic constituents at Lisieux lived and worked together for liberty and for law, not in 'moral unity,' but in moral harmony. In moral harmony his Protestant son-in-law, M. Conrad de Witt, through a quarter of a century past has lived and worked for liberty and for law with his Catholic constituents of Pont-l'Evêque.
The Catholics of the Calvados are not such intense Catholics as the Catholics of Brittany and Poitou. After the Norman rising of 1793 against the tyranny at Paris had collapsed so dismally in the ridiculous 'battle' of Pacy—a battle which began with the flight in a panic from the field of the vanquished Normans, and ended with the flight in a panic from the field of their victorious enemies the Parisians—the indignant Bretons and the Poitevins marched away to wage that contest for their homes and their altars which has immortalized the name of La Vendée. The less impassioned Normans made terms and took things as theywere. To this day what is called the 'little Church' exists in Brittany, made up of peasants who regard the Concordat as an unworthy compact made with the persecutors and the plunderers of the Church of their fathers.
The feeling of the Norman Catholics after Pacy and the miserable failure of the Girondist resistance to the Mountain took the form of silent disgust with the Republic and all its works. The Norman heroine in whose heart this silent disgust named up till it made her the avenger of innocent blood upon the most noisome reptile of the Revolution, had ceased to be a Catholic before the shame of her country moved her to her glorious and dreadful deed. But if the Catholics of the Calvados are less intense, they are not less sincere, than the Catholics of Brittany or Poitou. It is no indifference in matters of religion which makes them co-operate so cordially with their Protestant friends and representatives. It is because they value their religion, and mean that it shall be respected, that they honour the memory of the great minister who held sacred and inviolable the right of the parent to be heard and obeyed in the matter of the religious education of his children. The two daughters of M. Guizot married two brothers, the heirs of one of the most illustrious names in the annals of European liberty. One of these brothers, M. Conrad de Witt, now lives at Val Richer, and administers his large agricultural property lying there in the commune of St.-Ouen-le-Pin. Many years ago he won the gold medal of the French Society of Agriculture, and for twenty years past he has been President of the Agricultural Society of Pont-l'Evêque. In 1861, under the Empire, his fellow-citizens made him a Councillor-General for the Canton of Cambremer, in the Department of the Calvados, and he has kept his seat in that body ever since, until he last year declined a re-election,and made way for the candidacy of his nephew, M. Pierre de Witt. It was my good fortune to be at Val Richer when the election came off. The canvass had been carefully pushed; for, although the Republicans ostentatiously announced their intention not to make a contest in which they were sure to be beaten, M. Conrad de Witt and his nephew are not men to take anything for granted where serious interests are concerned. There were symptoms, too, that the Prefect of the Calvados, the Comte de Brancion, a newcomer (as all prefects now are in France, the average tenure of a prefect's official life since 1879 rarely exceeding eighteen months in one place), had been advised from Paris to show his zeal by contriving in some way to thwart, or at least to dampen, the victory of the nephew in July, as a preliminary to prevent the victory of the uncle in September. For M. Conrad de Witt was not only a Councillor-General of the Calvados, and Mayor of his own commune of St.-Ouen-le-Pin, he was sent to the Chamber of Deputies in 1885 as a Monarchist by the voters of the Calvados by a majority of 13,722 on a total poll of 89,064, and when he declined a re-nomination for the Council-General, he accepted a re-nomination for the Chamber.
It was delightful to see the zealous interest taken in these contests, not only by the family at Val Richer, but by all the countryside. The elections for the Councils-General were held on Sunday, July 28, 1889. All through the preceding Saturday scouts kept coming in to Val Richer with the latest reports as to the state of things in the various communes of the canton.
The tenor of these was uniform: 'There would be no contest; the only possible Republican candidate, a respectable physician who had some local strength in the commune in which he lived, founded upon his habitof gratuitously attending the poor of that commune, had positively declined to enter the field.' 'All the same,' said one energetic volunteer from this very commune, 'we don't mean to let a single honest voter stay at home. We understand this game. They want to make out that we are lukewarm about the battle that is to come off in September. That won't go!'
'Furthermore,' said another stalwart, keen-eyed, fresh-faced young farmer, who might have passed as a Yorkshire yeoman, 'furthermore, I don't trust this Republican cock till he's dead! I believe he's shamming, but he shan't catch us asleep. This Prefect at Caen is as busy as the Evil One. He means to play us a trick.'
The shrewd young farmer was right. Early, very early, on Sunday morning, long before daybreak, indeed, there came hastening over to Val Richer from the commume of Bonnebosq, some miles away, a spirited young fellow, heart and soul in the fight, with the news that a story was putting about all over the canton that M. Pierre de Witt had decided, at the last moment, not to stand, and that, on the strength of this invention, the nomination of Dr. —— would be urged.
The polling had been fixed by the Prefect to begin in all the communes at 7 A.M., and to close at 6 P.M. No time was, therefore, to be lost in getting out a formal contradiction of this invention of the enemy, and the vigorous young volunteer from Bonnebosq had lost no time. He roused the candidate, got his instructions, and, before the polls were opened, his men were all over the canton at work. In the course of the day I drove over with M. Pierre de Witt to Bonnebosq, where we found the mother of this energetic young politician, a typical Norman mother, full of sense and fire, quietly proud of the activity and intelligence of her son, and quite as much in the day's work as he. 'Not a prettytrick,' she said, 'to play with Dr. ——. He ought to be ashamed of it—and I am sure he is,' she added, with a droll twinkle in her eye, 'for it has turned out very badly! He will just be beaten like plaster. It would have been cleverer to behave like a decent man!' Bonnebosq had a very lively, cheery aspect on that Sunday afternoon. It is a busy prosperous little place, with about a thousand inhabitants. The village church, a new and very handsome French ogival building, most creditable to the architect, has just been built at an expense of several hundred thousand francs by a Catholic lady of the canton, and the people are very proud of it. It struck me that at Bonnebosq the outlook for a moral harmony between Frenchmen of divers religious communions contending together for equal rights and well-ordered liberty was decidedly better than the outlook for a 'moral unity' of France to be promoted by the authoritative suppression of all private initiative in the education of the French people. The traditions of the Norman race do not tend kindly towards a system under which the individual is to wither that the State may be more and more!
As Mayor of the commune of St.-Ouen-le-Pin, M. Conrad de Witt had a busy day of it on Sunday, July 28. The holding of elections on Sunday is a tradition in France. Two elections were to be made—one of a Councillor-General and the other of a District Councillor. Under the laws of 1871 and 1874, these elections must be held in separate though adjoining buildings wherever this is practicable. Where the commune is too small to furnish these facilities, the two elections may be held in one place; but the votes for the two officers must be deposited in two different urns. These urns are placed upon a table, at which the Mayor of the commune presides with four assessors and a secretary, chosen bythem from among the electors. As the electors have the day before them, the Mayor and the assessors are kept close prisoners at their posts till the polls are closed. Nor is their work over then. As soon as the clock strikes 6P.M.the doors of the bureau close. But the Mayor and the assessors must then proceed 'immediately' to examine and establish the results of the voting. They choose from among the electors present a certain number of 'scrutineers' knowing how to read and write. These scrutineers take their seats at tables prepared for the purpose. At each table there must be at least four scrutineers. The Mayor and the assessors then empty the urns and count the votes, the secretary drawing up aprocès-verbalthe while. If there are more or fewer votes than there were voters registered during the day as voting, this fact is stated and affirmed. Blank or illegible votes, votes which do not accurately give the name of the candidate voted for, or on which the voters have put their own names, are not counted as valid, but they are annexed to theprocès-verbal. Votes not written on white paper, or which bear any external indication of their tenor, are included in the account as votes affecting the majority necessary to a choice, but they are not put to the credit of the candidate whose name they bear; so that, as a matter of fact, they tell against him. Moreover, if there are more votes found in the urns than voters registered as voting, the excess may be deducted from the number of votes given to the candidate who has a majority.
I asked a very bright ruddy farmer in a spotless blue blouse, who was watching the elections with great interest in one of the communes, what he thought of this provision. 'It is a very good reason for watching the mayors,' he said; 'dame! a clever mayor who knows his commune, and has good loose sleeves to hiscoat, can slip in a good many votes in this way against the candidate who he knows is likely to win!'
I told him that in my own country we guarded the palladium of our liberties (a queer palladium that needs to be guarded) against this peril by using glass globes instead of the 'urns' employed in France, which are in fact wooden boxes. The idea delighted him. He rubbed his hands together with a chuckle, and said 'That would be capital! That would bother them! But for that reason we shall not have your glass urns!'
When the votes have all been emptied out of the urns and verified and counted by the Mayor and the assessors, the Mayor distributes them among the scrutineers. At each table a scrutineer takes the votes up one by one, reads out in a clear voice the name of the candidate inscribed on each vote, and passes it to another scrutineer, who sees it duly registered, the Mayor and assessors the while supervising all the proceeding. In communes containing less than 300 inhabitants the Mayor and assessors themselves may scrutinise and declare the results.
As St.-Ouen-le-Pin falls just two short of this number, M. Conrad de Witt not only lost his luncheon but his dinner. He never got back to the château till ten o'clock at night.
The polling place in this commune was a small house opposite the village church. I walked over to it after breakfast through the fields and by lovely green lanes as deep as the lanes of Devonshire, with M. Pierre de Witt and one of his kinsmen. The mass was going on in the village church, and the singing of the choir seemed to me at least as fitting an accompaniment to the expression by the sovereign people of their sovereign will through bits of white paper—Mr. Whittier's'noiseless snowflakes'—as the braying of a brass band, or the hoarse shouts of a more or less tipsy multitude.
In the Protestant corner of this Catholic churchyard, under some fine trees, M. Guizot sleeps his last sleep in the simple tomb of his family. Here, again, I thought, was a moral harmony better than any 'moral unity'!
We had a merry and an animated dinner that night at Val Richer. Message after message was brought in from the nearest communes, all of one tenor. The Republican 'trick' had evidently exasperated the worthy Norman voters, and brought them up to the polls most effectually! By ten o'clock it was clear that M. Pierre de Witt was elected by a majority too large to be 'whittled' away, and that the surreptitious appearance of the Republicans in the field had served only to emphasize their political weakness. In the canton, Cambremer itself, lying at a distance of eight or ten kilomètres, and Beuvron only remained to be heard from. It was possible harm might have been done there. For a law passed under the Empire in 1852, and undisturbed for obvious reasons by the Third Republic, allows the prefect of a department to determine into what sections he will divide a large commune for the purpose, according to the law, of 'bringing the electors nearer to the electoral urn.' This opens the way, of course, to a good deal of what in America would be known as official 'gerrymandering.' The thing may be of any country. The name we owe to Mr. Elbridge Gerry, once Vice-President of the United States; who, when his party controlled Massachusetts, devised a scheme for so framing the electoral districts of that State as to get his scattered party minorities together, and convert them thus into majorities. An outline map of the State thus districted was declared by one of his opponents to 'look like a salamander.' 'No! not like a salamander,' said another; 'it is a gerrymander.'
Val Richer was full of little fairies in that bright summer weather. The Pied Piper of Hamelin must have passed that way, losing some stragglers of his army as he moved along. Wherever you strolled in the park you came unexpectedly upon little blonde heads and laughing eyes peering through the shrubbery, and saw small imps scampering madly off across the meadows. On the Sunday night of the election, music and mirth chased the hours away, till, just after midnight, a joyous clamour in the outer hall announced some event of importance. From the far-off Cambremer and Beuvron-sur-Auge a delegation of staunch electors had arrived to announce the crowning victory. Thanks to the distance and the 'sections,' the votes had been long in counting, but they had been counted, and not found wanting. One of these bringers of good tidings might have sat or stood for a statue of William the Conqueror preparing to make France pay dearly for the jest of the French King anent his colossal bulk. He was a man in the prime of life, but he cannot possibly have weighed less than 400 pounds. Yet he moved about alertly, and he had driven over in a light wagon at full speed (the Norman horses are very strong) to congratulate his candidate on the issue of a fray in which he had borne his own part most manfully. M. Pierre de Witt had received 1,042 votes as Councillor-General, against no more than 140 given to his medical competitor!
One bold voter had deposited a single vote for General Boulanger! 'Had there been any disturbances anywhere?' No, none at all. 'We cheered when we got the returns,' said the giant; 'we cheered for M. de Witt, and we cried "Vive le Roi!" They didn't like it, but they were so badly beaten, they kept quiet. Ibelieve though,' he added, 'they would have arrested us if we had cried "Vive Bocher!" That is more than they can bear!' and therewith he laughed aloud, a not unkindly, but formidable laugh.
M. Bocher, who was made Prefect of the Calvados by M. Guizot, and who is now a senator for that department, is, I am assured, the specialbête noireof the Third Republic in Normandy. His long and honourable connection with the public service has won for him the esteem of all the people of the Calvados, while his thorough knowledge of the political history of the country and of his time, his cool clear judgment, his temperate but fearless assertion through good and evil report of his political convictions, and his keen insight into character, must give him long odds in any contest with the ill-trained and miserably-equipped political camp-followers who have been coming of late years into the front of the Republican battle.
They gave M. Bocher a banquet not long ago at Pont-l'Evêque, at which he made a very telling speech, and brought down the house by inviting his hearers to contemplate M. Grévy and M. Carnot as typical illustrations of the great superiority of a republic over a monarchy, and of the elective over the hereditary principle! The Republicans, he said, had twice elected to the chief magistracy an austerely virtuous Republican whom they had finally been compelled to throw out at the window of the Elysée, as 'the complaisant and guilty witness, if not the interested accomplice, of scandals which revolted the public conscience!' And whom had the elective principle put into his place, under the pressure of irreconcilable personal rivalries, and of a threatened popular outbreak? A man whose recommendations were his own relative personal obscurity and the traditional reputation of his grandfather!
With M. Grévy and M. Carnot the Norman farmers have a special quarrel which gave zest to the caustic periods of M. Bocher. The all-powerful son-in-law of M. Grévy, M. Wilson, proposed in the National Assembly in 1872, and with the influence of M. Thiers, then President, succeeded in passing a law heavily taxing, and in an inquisitorial fashion, the domestic fabrication of spirits. This is an old and prosperous industry in Normandy. It is carried on, according to an official estimate made in 1888, by above five hundred thousand farmers in France; and in Normandy particularly, a land of apples and pears, it is a great resource of the farmers. They make here a liquor called Calvados, which when it attains a certain age is much more drinkable and much less unwholesome than most of the casual cognac of our times. After three years this very unpopular law was repealed in 1875, mainly through the efforts of M. Bocher. It had plagued the farmers more than it benefited the Treasury.