CHAPTER VIII

THE FIRST DUFAURE CABINET

I. First session.-The Majority.-M. Dufaure, his character and situation.— Constitution of the Dufaure Cabinet.-The Ministerial Address.Divisions in the Majority.-Tactics of the Extreme Left.-Gambetta Chairman of the Finance Committee.-First Republican Laws. II. Administrative changes.-Death of M. Ricard; M. de Marcère succeeds him.-Debate on the amnesty.-Supplementary elections.-The right of revision discussed by the Senate.-Modification by the Chamber of the Higher Education Law.-M. Buffet is made a Life-Senator. III. Party excitement.-The Mayors' Law voted by the Chamber.-Jules Ferry and Gambetta disagree.-Rejection by the Senate of the amended Education Bill.-Conflict between the two Chambers.-The 1877 Budget. -General de Cissey resigns and is succeeded by General Berthaut.-End of the ordinary Session.-Holidays.-Bye-Elections.-Marshal MacMahon at the Army Manœuvres. IV. The Vatican incident.-France and Italy.—Political speeches.-The Paris Labour Congress.-The extraordinary session of 1876.-Cessation of prosecutions subsequent to the Commune.-Fiscal reform.-The Budget. -M. Chesnelong becomes a Life-Senator.-The Senate rejects the Bill on the Commune prosecutions.-Fall of the Dufaure Ministry.

I

MATERIAL conditions often explain moral dis

positions. Before the 8th March, 1876, France was governed by the National Assembly seated in the Palace of Kings at Versailles; the President and Ministers seemed mere delegates.

From March 1876, the Parliamentary régime was inaugurated; two Chambers became co-existent; the Executive assumed a Constitutional authority.

The two Chambers sat at Versailles: the Senate, in

the Opera Hall, where the National Assembly had held its meetings; the Chamber of Deputies, in a hall built on purpose in the Southern Court.

The magic of old associations fell upon the new régime beginning its young life in long-accustomed surroundings ; it was impossible not to continue certain traditions, certain habits, and even certain trains of thought.

At Versailles, the Senate was at home. Most

Versailles. of the Senators had belonged to the National Assembly. At the very first sitting, acquaintances hailed each other across the benches. Friends and adversaries shook hands. Groups gathered once more to resume familiar conversations or interrupted confidences. A long contact had rounded off all angles; all these men together became as one body. They took up again, almost unconsciously, the mechanical routine of former times; they came and went from the Palace to the railway station according to the usual time-table, lighting a cigar or a cigarette at the same tobacconist's. Their private life was arranged to suit the necessary rites of their public life. The quiet boulevards saw without surprise the daily procession of elderly men wending their way to the Palace.

At the sittings, the herd, of its own accord, fell in with the regulations. They knew beforehand what was going to be said, their opinion was formed; they had proved the vanity of speeches and were familiar with all the oratorical "effects" of their ordinary speakers. The Senate was a survival of the National Assembly. and that was precisely the result that had been desired by the authors of the Constitution.

The Chamber of Deputies was quite different: composed for the most part of men young, impatient, thrilled by the recent tumults of electoral agitations. They had rushed up from their provinces to take

Paris by storm, and they found themselves billeted at Versailles.

At first, the short journey, in those early spring days, seemed like a pleasant outing. But irritation soon followed. That monotonous and enervating life, those regular, daily walks, the rectilinear gardens with their solemn avenues, everything was deadly dull. The return to Paris in the evening was lugubrious, the departure in the morning more lugubrious still. The Senate was too near; the Chamber of Deputies seemed to feel its suspicious supervision, ready to remonstrate at the least mistake. The young Chamber, crowned yesterday and hailed by Universal Suffrage, now found itself under the ferule of an aged and unsympathetic school-master, in a sumptuous and morose building! The President of the Republic, officially Palace supposed to reside in Versailles, was, in fact, in Paris, at the Élysée Palace. A Marshal of France, Duke of Magenta, a survivor both of the July Monarchy and of the Second Empire, a relation, connection or friend of all the French noble families, installed three years before by the National Assembly, sanctioned anew by the Legislative and Senatorial elections-in which his name was so frequently used-invested by the Constitution both with the "incommutable incommutable" Septennate and with the right of revision, Marshal MacMahon himself belonged to another epoch.

The Élysée

He also belonged to another world. "The Élysée seemed, with regard to the Republic, like a hostile camp. Only a very few members of the Left ever went there, and, if they did, the prevailing atmosphere was not calculated to make them feel at their ease. The highest Parisian Society, that of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, surrounded Madame la Maréchale, which was quite natural and unobjectionable. But "that brilliant

circle was not merely attracted by former relations; it showed with some affectation that it considered itself at home and that others were intruders, more or less. I think that the host and hostess would have wished it otherwise. But they could not help themselves."1

The Élysée represented all that was left in France of the Monarchical spirit. It was still a Court. The President himself, with his frank, easy, cordial manners, was a survival: he actually reigned over Paris, not only over the Paris of elections, but over the cosmopolitan capital, the city of luxury, tasteful elegance and festive worldliness.

M. Dufaure, with his 1830 frock-coat, eloquence and Gallicanism, went backwards and forwards between the President and the Parliament, between the Court at the Élysée and the Democrats at Versailles. He had to progress along the tight-rope of that singular Parliamentarism, drawn on one side by Universal Suffrage and on the other by the tradition to which he himself belonged. And that prodigious feat of equilibrium was to be accomplished above a yawning abyss and amidst the clamour of passionate crowds.

Gambetta

Even before the whole of the Chamber was elected, in the interval between the two ballots, Majority. Gambetta, divining that obstacles were being prepared against the future majority, had pronounced at Lyons that masterly speech which contained at the same time a precaution, an offer and a warning.

He thought himself master of the situation. But in this he was mistaken. His authority was undermined even before it had been sanctioned. The Élysée and the Rights, M. Thiers and the Left Centre, M. Grévy and the Moderate Lefts, M. Madier de Montjau and 1 De Marcère, 16th May, p. 25.

the Advanced Lefts were so many rival forces, which he had to take into account. Traps were laid in his path.

The first of them had been the constitution of the Cabinet.

Yet it seemed the most natural thing in the world. On M. Buffet's retirement, his place was given to M. Dufaure, whose Republican fidelity and Liberal authority had mapped out and defended the frontier line which his adversaries had been unable to pass. M. Dufaure had been in the thick of the fight, he was now to be honoured.

Besides his really superior Parliamentary qualities, M. Dufaure had one incomparable merit: he was reassuring reassuring for the Marshal, reassuring also for the timorous portion of the bourgeoisie, which was now turning, not without regret, from its former sympathies and tremblingly advancing towards new ideas. M. Dufaure, escorted by M. Léon Say, represented the old ruling classes and the great banking houses, watching over the steps of the young Republic, strict though indispensable tutors.

M. Dufaure, born in 1798, was then seventy

M. Dufaure. eight years old. If this man, amongst all the vicissitudes of an agitated period, had maintained himself on a level which enabled him to be useful though not indispensable, and respected though not popular, he owed it to his great moral worth, his rare talent and his perfect integrity. A bourgeois and a lawyer from head to foot, with his ungainly figure, thin legs, smooth hair, bushy eyebrows, square jaw, parchment skin, clean-shaven face, and nasal voice, he might have been taken for a comic. actor, if his vigorous soul had not revealed itself in his walk and carriage, which were those of a strong and formidable fighter. He had a quiet strength in his