HISTORY OF CONTEMPORARY FRANCE

1870-1900

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BOOK I 1870-1873

BOOK II 1873-1875

BOOK III (1875-1877)

BOOK IV 1877-1890

 

The men of the Third Republic:

THE DUC GASTON D'AUDIFFRET-PASQUIER

(1823-1905)

 

THE Duc d'Audiffret-Pasquier is the one "new man" whom the recent French Session has produced. Gaston, Count, afterwards Duke d'Audiffret-Pasquier, was born at Paris in 1815. He is grand-nephew and adopted son of the Chancellor Baron Pasquier, who was raised to a dukedom by royal ordinance of King Louis Philippe, dated 16th of December, 1844. The present duke was declared heir to the title and estates of Pasquier by the terms of this patent, and it was confirmed by Napoleon III. That was all which could be said of his grace worth hearing till 1871, when he was returned to the National Assembly as member for the Department of the Orne by 60,226 free and independent voters residing in the neighbourhood of his landed property. A year ago he was politically unknown; if an Orleanist restoration were effected tomorrow, he would probably be Minister of Finance in a Cabinet having M. Casimir Perier, his brother-inlaw, for its chief, the Duc de Broglie for its Foreign Secretary, Duc Decazes at the Home Office, and M. Saint Marc Girardin at the Education Board.

How long he would agree with these distinguished men is another question, for he has a great deal of that earnestness which makes politicians love the front seats on Ministerial benches, and we should doubtless soon be having a Pasquier party and a Broglie party united in considering M. Perier objectionable from his Thiersist antecedents; but divided on the capital point as to who should take M. Perier' s place when once he had been supplanted. The contention would no doubt end by each of the gentlemen having his turn at the chief office; and then, so far as can be at present judged, M. d'Audiffret-Pasquier would show himself a good Prime Minister of the active and meddling kind—well meaning but obstinate, shrewd but not thoughtful or learned, honest but being daily taunted with jobbery by the Bonapartists and extreme Republicans, who would be on the look-out for the slightest financial abuses in his administration in order to magnify and contrast them with the two virtuous speeches which have brought M. d'Audiffret-Pasquier to celebrity. These two speeches were those delivered by the duke in his capacity as chairman of the Commission for investigating the war contracts.

After the peace with Germany, the clamours about official jobbery and peculation were so vehement and universal, that the Assembly was obliged to appoint a Commission of Inquiry, armed with more than ordinary prying powers. The Commission at its first meeting proceeded to elect a chair-man; but the choice, under the circumstances, was extremely difficult to make. A man was required who should be personally clever, bear a popular name, or hold such high rank as to command respect, and yet be free from all ties to any political party. Such men are not common, and it was really a windfall that sent M. d'Audiffret-Pasquier, a duke, the son of an able financier (Receiver-General from 1839 to 1856), and the nephew of the much-respected Chancellor Pasquier—a man who had never pledged himself to any political creed, and yet one who, in his short parliamentary career, had already earned a name for most commendable zeal in private committee work. There are many members who, like M. d'Audiffret, shine greatly in committees, but who, less favoured than he, never get the chance of a sensational speech to hoist them into public fame. They are generally quiet men, with a taste for toil, who come down to Versailles by the early Paris trains, and carry sheaves of statistical papers under their arms. They read the yellow books (French for blue books), muse over the estimates, and are more respected than liked in official circles. But their grateful and lazier colleagues in committee appreciate them to the full, and mark their sense of this by electing them to report on bills. This means that the honoured and hard-working member shuts himself up in his study and writes with painful conscientiousness one of those elaborate documents which take three hours to read, and are as remarkable for the grace of style they exhibit as for their magic potency in causing the House to thin. On the morrow of the reading, various newspapers dub the report " eloquent " or " soul-stirring;" the members who speak to its contents asperse it with a word of civil praise, and this constitutes all the hard-working member's reward. The solid glory is reaped by the haranguers who have not heard the report read, have at most skimmed through it in its printed form, but who hold this superiority over the reporter, that they possess the gift of ready tongues. M. d'Audiffret-Pasquier, a reporter who could speak as well as work and indite, was an exception to the general rule, and when people saw this small, sallow, and rather clerkly-looking man stand up, and beard that still dreaded champion of Caesarism, Kouher, it took everybody by surprise. The exordium of his thrilling speech on the 22nd May was like the rattling of war drums, and every one of his phrases came up fast and firm as companies of soldiers at the double. There was no halting for the right word, no uncertainty of gesture. Facts, accusations, statistics, deductions, all followed each other with the rapidity of a charge, and when on his apostrophising his antagonist with the words Vare, lègiones redde! the whole House rose, quivering in its excitement and acclaiming, the sight was one not to be forgotten. There may be various styles of eloquence, and that style may be the most respectable which allows the speaker to remain cool and his audience to sit quiet ; but if it still be oratory to bring seven hundred gentlemen to their legs with moist eyes, hoarse throats, and extended hands, then assuredly the Due d'Audiffret-Pasquier is an orator.

His second speech, however, that in which he overhauled the contracts of Gambetta's Government, was much less successful than the first, and this for a plain reason; it was a speech made to order, delivered unwillingly, and based upon an unjust view of facts. M. d'Audiffret having assailed the Empire, simple people had clamoured, "Now you must trounce Gambetta, or else it will be unfair." And, accordingly, M. d'Audiffret had to set to work to please this simple people, or rather the six Bonapartist papers who had egged them on. But the positions of Gambetta and of the Empire were not similar, and it was only an astute and unscrupulous Bonapartist who could pretend they were. The Empire was an established Government which had never been stinted of money, and if it had honestly employed the funds entrusted to it France could have kept any coalition of armies in the world from invading its soil. Instead of that, one could not probe an Imperialist budget without detecting corruption in every branch, high or low, of the public service. Supplies voted for one department were transferred to another by the system of virements; millions of francs set down every year under the heading of artillery experiments were expended goodness knows how, for there was no keeping any watch over them; other sums were voted for changes in military uniforms, whereas it has been discovered since, that most changes of this kind were effected at the expense of the contractors, who not only charged nothing to the Treasury, but even paid heavy bribes to big people in order to obtain the contracts. Again, fortresses, ships, and arsenals were reported fully armed and stored, when in many cases they were empty; and a French Admiral has recently acknowledged that if France had gone to war with a maritime Power the collapse of her fleet must have been as utter as that of her army. It amazes one now to think of how the French, nation was hoodwinked, and the more so as the officials of the Empire had ended by growing reckless with impimity, and flaunted their ill-gotten gains defiantly in the face of the public. One could enumerate half-a-dozen Ministers who, having entered office penniless, were enabled after a comparatively short tenure of office to buy landed estates, and build sumptuous town houses. Nor did all this cease when the nation's disasters had commenced. Whilst the enemy was actually on French soil, and whilst tearful proclamations from the Empress Regent were adjuring all classes to remain united and to trust in Government, people in high places were buying up rifles, horses, and cattle, by the agency of secret friends, from whom they repurchased them on behalf of the nation at a profit to themselves of 17 francs per rifle, 75 francs per horse, and 30 francs a head per ox. These are all facts which M. d'Audiffret-Pasquier was in a position to prove. On the other hand, what was Gambetta's predicament ? This unfortunate Dictator was surrounded on all hands by enemies ; there was scarcely a soul bevond the circle of his own friends whom he dared trust. Bonapartists were defaming him in the villages, and working persistently to ruin the credit of his Government by assuring London and Belgian bankers that all debts contracted in his name would be repudiated. He was daily assailed by hordes of speculating contractors, concerning whose honesty, having no police at his command like that of the Empire, it was almost impossible to enlighten himself; besides which, with the Germans making giant strides over the whole country, contracts had to be concluded on the spur of the moment, there being no time for long parleyings. It is somewhat puerile under such circumstances to come and complain that £1,200 should have been bestowed amiss on one occasion, and £300 on another. The only wonder is that Gambetta's confidence should not have led him to be duped out of sums a hundred times more considerable in those desperate efforts he made to save his country. The Due d'Audiffret failed to establish any parallel between the Empire and Gambetta, and, being a shrewd man, he must have felt this even whilst he was speaking. All he did was to exasperate the Extreme Left, who were disposed to be on good terms with him before, and to earn some very compromising applause from those gentlemen on the Extreme Right who are never so pleased as when Republicans are being put to shame. These were meagre results, and disappointing to outsiders who admire good statesmanship without reference to party. In swelling the canting chorus against Gambetta, and putting the blunders of this sometimes erring, but always honest, politician into the same bag as the turpitudes of the Empire, he showed that he lacked judgment or impartiality. It is this which impels one to predict that he would make only a tamePrime Minister.

But M. d'Audiffret is still in the youth of politics. He is only fifty-seven, and has probably not yet allowed his defects to grow stiff upon him. He may still unlearn some of his prejudices, and if he do so his eloquence, his capacity for hard work, and his sterling hatred of dishonesty, must make of him a valuable public servant. He is much liked in the Department of the Orne, where he resides, though he has never been able to acquire there that seignorial influence which the Broglies, tlie Luynes, and the Larochefoucaulds still wield around their domains, all revolutions notwithstanding. M. d'Audiffret's enemies pretend that this chagrins him, and that he is one of those who would have the influence of the nobility re- vived on the model of the English aristocracy, hereditary Upper Chamber included. That is in all likelihood an exaggeration, for M. d'Audiffret does not talk like a man who would like to see his country begin a retrogressive voyage up stream. However, it is perhaps a pity that he should be a duke of such recent creation, for if his dignity were older he might attach less importance to it. He was allowed by special grace of Napoleon III (1862) to inherit the title of his uncle, the Baron Pasquier, who had been made a duke by the citizen King; and it is, by the way, one of the pet complaints of the Bonapartists thixt this nobleman having accepted a signal favour from the Emperor, has now turned round on his " benefactor." M. d'Audiffret, it is needless to say, applied to the Emperor, as he would have applied to the Shah of Thibet, had that monarch been in possession of France, and he did so simply because his uncle had requested him by will to take that step. But, once again, there is no blinking the fact, that if M. d'Audiffret had inherited his coronet from the crusading times, like the Harcourts or the Noailles, he might have afforded to be, not more Liberal possibly, but more Republican. That so little has been known till lately of M, d'Audiffret-Pasquier in public life is perhaps the highest compliment which can be paid to him..