Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day. Volume 2

ALL these larger administrative municipal details, and the Third Republic itself, date from 1870, the most important year in the history of France, and it may be thought that no record, however brief, of the machinery of government, of the characteristics, the aspirations, and tendencies of this modern society, would be approximately correct without some allusion to its recent origin, to those tremendous political events which so transformed it, and which still remain for it an endless and hopelessly bitter source of speculation, of discussion, and of fierce recrimination. In this overthrow of a nation, it is the great figure of the Chancellor of the German Empire that fills the scene, moving apparently at his will kings, emperors, and ambassadors, and influencing, even at this late day, every measure of the government of the capital and the nation by an enduring Consternation,—by a fear that does but increase from year to year. The incompetence of the Emperor, the folly of the Empress, probably but served to aid or to accelerate the ruin which Bismarck thought necessary to secure his great building,—the Confederation of the North German states had been consolidated by the defeat of Austria at Sadowa, but France, he was convinced, would never consent to the re-establishment of the German Empire. Even the vanquished admit that he did not want war for the sake of war; but, by his own admission, in 1892, he was willing to secure this necessary result by any trick, even that of the forger.

Despite the recent assertions of the French minister, M. Ollivier, it is probable that the Empire of Louis Napoleon had lost all its allies. Austria, anxious to avenge Sadowa, was restrained by the threat of the intervention of Russia; that power still considered the dual empire its rival in the Balkans and still remembered the Crimea; an offensive and defensive alliance had been concluded by Prussia with the German states south of the Main. Thus prepared, the chancellor waited for an opportunity, and as none presented itself soon enough, he made one. The revolution in Spain in 1868 had driven Queen Isabella into exile and left her throne vacant; Marshal Prim, who retained the reins of power, was negotiating in the different courts of Europe to find an acceptable new sovereign. At the beginning of July, 1870, Paris was surprised to hear that the candidate chosen by him, and who would probably be proclaimed by the Cortès, was Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern. This negotiation had been carried on secretly, the French ambassador at Madrid had been informed of nothing, and from Marshal Prim's documents it was afterward learned that Bismarck himself had suggested the prince for the crown. It was very certain that France would oppose this union of the dynasties of Berlin and Madrid, and, in fact, on the 6th of July the government sent a message to the Chamber protesting against this candidature and declaring that it would be compelled to oppose it, if necessary, to the last extremity.

Three days later, M. Benedetti, the French ambassador at Berlin, sought an interview with the King of Prussia at Ems, where he was taking the waters, and requested him, as head of the Hohenzollern family, not to give his consent to the candidature of Prince Leopold. The king replied that, in this affair, he had intervened not as King of Prussia but as head of the family, and the interview ended without any definite assurances on his part. However, Prince Anthony of Hohenzollern, the father of Leopold, officially announced that his son was no longer a candidate. Then the French diplomacy came to Bismarck's aid by committing a great blunder; M. Benedetti sought another interview with the king, who had not yet heard of this withdrawal, informed him of it, and requested him to give the French government formal assurance that Prince Leopold would abide by it. This promise the king refused to give, but he notified the ambassador that he would inform him when he had received a confirmation of the renunciation. When this was received, he sent word to M. Benedetti by an aide-de-camp, refusing him the third audience which he requested, stating that he approved of the prince's decision, but declining to bind himself with regard to any future negotiations.

An official statement of these interviews was drawn up under the eyes of the king by his private councillor Abeken, and telegraphed to Bismarck, with authority to publish it. This statement contained nothing that need inflame the national feeling in either Germany or France, but, as re-edited by the chancellor, it represented the French ambassador as unduly importunate, and as having received a flat refusal from the monarch. The patriotism on both sides took fire; and war was declared on the 19th of July. The Germans assert that it would have been inevitable in any case, without this falsification of the despatch of Ems, but the Iron Chancellor is convicted, on his own testimony, of having desired it and of having wrought to bring it about.

M. Émile Ollivier, Louis Napoleon's minister, president of the Conseil, whose "light heart" for the "great responsibility" of the war with Germany has earned him a special measure of obloquy, has within the last two or three years appeared again in public, in his own defence. In an interview granted an editor of the Gil Blas on the twenty-sixth anniversary of his fall, the ex-minister made a series of statements justifying the men and measures of that fatal period, and contributing some very important assertions to history. "We committed no faults," said M. Ollivier; "we were unfortunate, that was all, and I have nothing, nothing with which to reproach myself." France, he declares, was assured of the alliance of Austria and Italy, even after Reischoffen; the plan of campaign, which has been so much criticised, the scattering of the troops along the frontier, was imposed by the Austrian general staff. Sedan, however, chilled these allies, and delivered Germany, as Bismarck himself wrote, from all danger of a coalition against her. The inertia of the Emperor, who was ill with the stone, who could not command himself, and "would suffer no one to take the command in his place;" the errors of the generals, including Mac-Mahon; the treason of Bazaine, and the council of war held by the ministers and presided over by the Empress, at which the fatal march on Sedan was determined upon, all combined to ruin the national cause. The Empress would not comprehend, notwithstanding the instances of the Emperor, of Mac-Mahon, of Prince Napoleon, that "it was at Paris alone that the Empire could be defended, at Paris that France could be armed, at Paris that the allies, who had promised their aid, could be constrained to pronounce their adherence." Through a false conception of the interests of the dynasty, it was resolved to go to Sedan, notwithstanding the Emperor, who said to Mac-Mahon: "Since it is so, let us go and get our heads broken." The last volume of M. Ollivier's work, L'Empire libéral: études, récits et souvenirs, has appeared in this present year (1898), and completes an able and very interesting defence of a dynasty which has not found many apologists as yet.

General Trochu, military commandant of Paris during the siege, has also, in his Mémoires, published in 1896, dwelt upon the all-important part which the capital might have played in the great drama of the national defence. "I dreamed," he says, "of a Parisian population forgetting before the grandeur of the common peril its animosity toward the Empire, in order to associate itself with us in the supreme effort which we were about to make in conjunction with it; of Paris, with its immense resources, put in a state of defence by the labor of a hundred thousand arms and, after a brief delay, rendered impregnable." This theory of the great importance of the capital is, however, by no means held by all the military critics of the war.

It is, perhaps, well to dwell, at some length, in any effort—however superficial—to appreciate the present condition and the promise for the future of this nation and this capital, on this period of the war with Germany, for the burden of contemporary testimony seems to be that there has been, practically, no recovery from the blow. Nothing is more interesting in contemporary sociology than the tone of depression, almost of humility, of lack of national elasticity and self-assertiveness, in the current French literature. There are still to be met with, of course, the familiar assertions that France is "the cradle of enlightened liberties," the "hope of struggling nationalities," and similar vague phrases, but always qualified with some allusion to the present depression and extinguishment. These admissions appear on every hand:—in Le Temps, of November 7, 1898, in its review of the second volume of M. Samuel Denis's Histoire contemporaine: La chute de L'Empire, we read: "The period comprised between the 15th of July, 1870, and the last months of the year 1875 is, perhaps, of all our national history, the most fruitful in dramatic events. It is, without any doubt, that which has for us all the keenest interest,—the most poignant. The history of these days of mourning, it is what our fathers did, with their tears and with their blood, and it is the history of events which still oppress with all their weight our national life. It is that which constitutes our malady; it is, that after twenty-eight years, we are still the vanquished." The Duc de Broglie, in an article in the Revue des Deux Mondes, July 1, 1896, a review of the colonial policy of the Third Republic between the years 1871 and 1896, a period in which her ministers strove—with very doubtful success, he thinks—to recover in some degree the prestige lost in the war and in the subsequent check in Egypt, vis-à-vis with England, sums up: "We are not alone in bearing the heavy heritage of the war of 1870; all the world has its part in the sentiment of general uneasiness, from which no one escapes. It is the common condition, and even though France should be the only one to suffer from it, the other peoples, still, should not resign themselves to it without mortification.... Well! behold it revived, this sombre right of conquest, in all its nakedness, in all its rigor;—it has installed itself in the very centre, in the full light of civilization, and all, statesmen as well as doctors of philosophy, political and social, have bowed before it.... So long as this spectacle lasts, a brand is imprinted upon the front of modern society like a memento homo which recalls to it that the progress with which it flatters itself has purified only the surface and which notifies democracy, so proud of its puissance, that it is only a dust of men, a plaything, like all human things, of all the winds that blow of brute strength or of fortune."

Some interesting details have recently appeared concerning the official residence, the Tuileries, under the last of the French Empires. For the commonplace furniture which they found there, the Emperor and the Empress gradually substituted other, much more luxurious. His apartments were on the ground-floor, communicating by a small stairway with those of the Empress on the floor above. There, the first salon, in pale green and gold, reserved for the chamberlains and the ladies of honor, was furnished with a great mirror in which were reflected all the gardens, the Champs Élysées and the Arch of Triumph in the distance; this room gave access to the pink salon, of which the chimney-piece was in white marble, set off with lapis-lazuli and gold, and the ceiling represented the Arts rendering homage to her Majesty. From this salon the visitor entered the blue one, where she gave private audience, "always receiving her guests graciously and manifesting an unwillingness to part with them." Beyond the salon bleu was a little cabinet with a secretary, a little boudoir, the library with small ebony tables, the dressing-room, the oratory, entered through folding-doors, and finally the bedchamber of the Empress.

The Imperial couple breakfasted in their apartments tête-à-tête but the dinner was served in state and in full dress. On Sundays, after déjeuner, the court heard mass in the chapel, the voices of the singers were accompanied by harps, and the sermon was never to exceed a half-hour in length. The Emperor, wearing the uniform of a general, sat through the service in imperturbable gravity, his hands crossed. On Good Friday, the Stabat Mater was chanted by the best artists; the ladies were in black, with long black veils.

A species of military discipline was imposed upon all those who were lodged in the palace. All the doors were closed at midnight, and the officer of the guard reported next morning all the delinquents who came in later. No workman from outside was admitted into the palace, all alterations and repairs were under the charge of the officials of the Régie. In addition to the military guard, a brigade of special police exercised a constant surveillance over the neighborhood and all the entrances of the building. The agents, costumed en parfaits gentlemen, stood about in groups at all the doors, and, without interrupting their conversation, watched narrowly all those who presented themselves for admission. When the Emperor went out, in a phaeton or brake, driving himself, a small unpretentious coupé or brougham followed him everywhere, a short distance behind, and in it was the chief of police attached to his person. At the masked balls of the Tuileries, every gentleman was obliged to remove his mask on entering; police officials were stationed at all the doors, and several of them, wearing the Imperial livery, passed about among the guests, serving refreshments. The official balls of the Tuileries were splendid, but invitations to the balls of the Empress on "Mondays," were the most prized. For this information, we are indebted to an article in the Century Magazine.