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

M. LEON GAMBETTA

(1807-1891)

 

ANYONE who has passed tlirough the Rue de l'Ancienne Comédie in Paris, may have noticed an old house with a basso-relievo high on its façade, and opposite it a card with a low front. The house is all that remains of the Theatre Français of a hundred years ago ; and the coffee-house is the distinguished Café Procope, where the wits and encyclopedians of the 18th century drank mulled claret and talked treason. The waiter will still show you in the room to the left a red marble table whereon, he asserts, M. de Voltaire used to write ; and, though one may believe this or not as one pleases—and perhaps it is better not to please, seeing how numerous are the American tourists with a taste for relics—yet it is a fact that Voltaire did write here, that d'Alembert, Diderot, the two Crebillons, and Rousseau, were paying customers, and that Marmontel, to outwit the police spies, who used to prowl in as they have done since and may do again, had invented for himself and friends a choice vocabulary, in which the names margot, javotte, and jeanneton did duty for soul, religion, and freedom. The lustre of the Café Procope has waned in the present century, but five years ago any stranger entering it of an evening might have seen there a young man who is, perhaps, destined to set as deep a mark upon history as even good M. de Marmontel. He was an almost briefless barrister then—a dark Italian-blooded young Frenchman, blind with one eye, not over well dressed, but with a voice as sounding as brass. It was the magic of the man, this voice. When silent he looked insignificant enough, but once he began to speak, the rather Bohemian crew of friends round him awoke to admiration. The desultory customers scattered about the other tables would prick their ears, and the landlord would hurry up in a scared fashion, to beg the impetuous orator to speak lower, because and here a whisper. But he with the ringing voice would shrug his shoulders at the "because," even when there was M. Pietri's name tacked on to it. He held, the evening newspaper in his hands with the report of a speech delivered by some one of that twenty-three—say Jules Favre or Ernest Picard—who breasted in the Corps Législatif the mob of M. Rouher's blatant hench-men, and, until the speech had been read through from end to end with sonorous bravos at the telling points, there was no stopping him with dread of eavesdroppers. Then when the paper was laid down more drinking of beer would, ensue than perhaps the matter strictly required, and. the young barrister would blaze out into flashing comments on what he had read, adding what Ifie would do and say if the chance were afforded him. Nor did his Bohemian friends smile at this. Each man among them felt in himself that limitless confidence which impecuniosity begets, and they were also firmly persuaded that if their companion could only find the opportunity, he would soon set men's tongues rattling about him. Their companion did find the opportunity ; and next day the name of Gambetta was famous from one end of France to the other.

At a time when men walked in fear of the gendarmerie and of Judge Delesvaux, he had the courage to say, speaking in the Court of this very Delesvaux, that France had been waylaid by Louis Napoleon as by a highwayman and felled senseless. Rochefort had already belled the cat in a similar fashion with his Lanterne, and so had Prévost Paradol, yet earlier, with that article which entailed the suppression of the Courrier du Dimanche, and which likened France to a great lady who stoops to live with a groom. But Rochefort and Paradol were journalists—men whom one could silence by closing their presses ; whereas Gambetta was an advocate—that is, a man whom it would take trouble to gag, and who, besides, came at a moment when the Opposition was in need of a champion of a more vigorous sort than those it possessed. Jules Favre was all heart, impassionate but not aggressive enough ; Pelletan spoke like an enthusiast, Jules Simon like a professor, Picard like a wit, and Thiers as a statesman. This Gambetta was an athlete. He disdained all the classic attitudes of rhetoric, flung his arms about him, banged his fist down on the first thing that came uppermost—book, hat, or desk—rang his voice through the wildest changes, from the roar to the falsetto, and would have seemed to a deaf man the maddest contortionist out at large. But if you listened to him you were not likely to forget it. His oratory had all the energy, fire, and defiance of youth in it. He never hesitated for a word, spoke headlong, every one of his phrases being coloured with that picturesque imagery of the south, always vivid, always new, and soaring at times to surprising heights in beauty of sentiment. There is no French parallel to that speech uttered on a grimy December afternoon of 1868 in the small Court of Correctional Police. The affair was an unimportant one—a prosecution of a newspaper for opening its columns to a subscription for erecting a monument to a victim of the coup d'ètat—but Gambetta raised the case to the level of a State trial, and his harangue was an impeachment of the Second Empire such as acted like a clarion upon the entire Liberal army, and nerved it for the electoral campaign which was to be the last struggle but one of Imperialism. Yet a few weeks more, and Gambetta, no longer briefless, unknown, or ill-clad, was being favoured with something like a triumphal ovation by the population of Toulouse, whose pet organ, L'Emancipation, he had come to defend ; and yet another few weeks, and with his name staring the public in flaming posters from all the dead walls of Paris and Marseilles, he had begun his twofold canvass as leader of the "Irreconcilables." Not a trim word this, but one of his own invention, and passably significant, if one remembers that it meant war without quarter to the Government then established. Others said, "Let us rally to the Empire if it grants us what we want"; which, being interpreted, signified, "Here is an adventurer who stole our liberties from us eighteen years ago ; but, as he has managed to keep them so long, this is surely the moment for shaking hands with him if he will only give a few of them back." Gambetta declined to indorse this manly form of reasoning. He laid down the axiom that a perjured usurper should be able to rely upon the support of no man of principle ; and these views he trumpeted to the four ends of France, greatly to the chagrin of all those good casuists who are for compounding felonies and murders so long only as they are political—that is, so long as tliey extend to the rights of millions and the lives of thousands, instead of to the lives and purses of one man or two. Whether Gambetta always propounded his ideas with temper afid judgment is another question. A man who goes stumping will naturally catch the tricks of the stump, and our canvasser had not proceeded far before he had promised his future electors more goods and privileges, more freedom and wages, than even the millennium can fairly be expected to give us. But then there is this to be said for Gambetta, that even if he had vowed that every Frenchman should have a larded fowl and a bottle of Pomard every morning and evening on the establishment of the Republic, it would have been with some conscientious plan in his head for bringing this savoury consummation to pass.

When one talked to Gambetta before the war, and whilst he was yet only a deputy, one was chiefly struck by his exuberant frankness. Even when he had just come down panting and dishevelled from the Tribune, after some such thundering speech as that where he cried to Ollivier—"We accept you and your Constitutionalism as a bridge to the Republic, but nothing more"—even in such moments there was a total absence of pose or affectation in his ways. It was rather too much the contrary. A remnant of Bohemianism clung to him. In alluding to a political antagonist, the parliamentary epithets were not those which rose to his tongue soonest. He laughed loud, gripped one's hand rather than shook it, and would here and there launch from his seat, on startled M. Schneider's extreme left, some interruption in round vernacular, which would cause even those discreet persons, the ushers with silver chains, to jump in unison. When the debates waxed warm, the milder members of the Left were generally to be seen pulling him back entreatingly by the coat-tails, and the bourgeois in the galleries, who watched these things, would go home muttering in horror, "Il manque absolument de tenue ; ce n'est pas un homme sérieux." The Gambetta of 1872 is a very different man. Power has passed through his hands, blood under his eyes, and calumny over his head. He will still bound to his feet like an attacked lion, and shout in vibrating accents, "That is a lie!" when some venomous shaft is spitefully shot in his direction by a member of the Right, but in ordinary respects he is now as serieux as any grocer in the Rue St. Denis can wish, and he even dresses with some care, which seems to be a great relief to a large number of worthy people who are resigned to the notion of his becoming President, but would be appalled at the prospect of his presiding over them without gloves. But will Gambetta be President ? Amid the hurricane of abuse let loose upon him by the Bonapartists, and ignorantly swelled by the yelping of those who yelp whenever they see anybody else give tongue—amid all this it seemed for a moment as if the ex-Dictator were going to be for ever swept away. But politics are a thing of ebbs and flows, and many a Frenchman (even among Gambetta's enemies) is beginning silently to reflect that the Dictatorship of Tours may not perhaps be judged by future generations as it has been by those impartial prints which take their cue from Chiselhurst. That Gambetta committed blunders, simply proves that he is like otlier statesmen past and future ; but it would be at least candid to admit that, entrusted to a vicious or heartless man, the power which he wielded would have served to remove not a few heads still simpering very comfortably on their owners' shoulders. Nay, one may as well go the whole length and say that if Gambetta had taken a few of those ex-Imperialist mayors, prefects, and councillors-general, who spent their time in exhorting the peasantry not to fight "for the Republic and for those infidels who wanted to restore '92," and treated them as any Dictator of a hundred years ago, or as any Bonaparte of our own day would have treated them, he would have done not a little towards making his administration work smoothly, and adding to his own fame for statesmanship. That he neglected this means of promoting his reputation, and that, despite the foulest aspersions (levelled at him by all those who had least claim to throw stones of this sort), he left power no richer than he had entered it, is a fact which answers many calumnies.

Of M. Gambetta's antecedents little is known, though much is told. He came into this world of electors at the small tipsy town of Cahors, on the Lot, the 30th of October, 1838. It is said and printed that his family were of Genoese origin; but as he would probably have done quite as well without illustrious ancestors as with them, his friends have various theories on the subject, some inclining to the belief that he is his own father. He was inscribed on the French Law List as a member of the Paris Bar in 1859. He is not considered a learned man ; but he has, nevertheless, acquired an amount of information that learned men would find useful. It is customary to think of him as a political Hercules, but his health is uncertain, and his physical strength not great. With respect to his vigour of mind, a curious anecdote is told. It is asserted that, being placed as a child in the custody of some persons he did not like, he wrote to his father to inform him, that unless he were immediately taken home he should put out one of his eyes, and as his father did not receive this communication with the respectful attention it should have commanded, he actually carried his threat into execution. That is the way in which tradition accounts for the loss of his eye ; and his likenesses are generally taken in profile.

After a brief career as an advocate he was elected deputy for Paris and Marseilles. He chose to sit for Paris, but his electoral campaign had been too much for him, and he was laid up for a long time with a painful affection of the larynx. His first parliamentary speech worthy of note was a furious attack on the Plebiscitum ; his next, a protest against the arrest of Henri Rochefort. He took little part in the opposition organized against the Prussian war, and refused the advances made to him by the International to head a popular insurrection when the Emperor had left Paris. After the catastrophe of Sedan, Gambetta's place was clearly marked out, and he became one of the most active members of the Government of National Defence. It was he who signed the decree convoking the Electoral Colleges ; it was he who ordered the renewal of the Municipal Councils, and granted to Paris the same rights as other French Communes. On the 7th of October he was appointed one of the delegates of the Provisional Government at Tours, quitted Paris in a balloon, and for nearly four months took all the powers and responsibilities of supreme authority into his own hands. He united the offices of Ministers of War, Interior, and Finance in his proper person ; and amazed the world by his activity. He raised armies out of nothing, and found money by magic to pay them. He resisted all attempts of his besieged colleagues to induce him to hold terms with the enemy, characterised their endeavours to make peace as "culpable and frivolous"; and would have fought on as long as he lived had not shrewd M. Jules Simon contrived to outwit him, and frustrate his designs. At the close of the war he was elected deputy for six departments, and subsequently for three other departments. He now sits for the Bouches du Rhone, and is (Thiers alone excepted) the most prominent statesman in France.

He still lives a good deal in the street ; he may be generally seen and heard surrounded by a devoted band of friends, who expect great things when he next comes into power, though probably he will be reluctantly compelled to disappoint.

 

Leon Gambetta