Labitte mounted the extemporised platform. The proceedings had to be suspended for a few moments as the attention of the audience was suddenly drawn to the high road by the galloping past of two generals in full uniform, with their staff officers, from St.-Omer. There was no nomination of a chairman or a secretary, none of the inevitable formalities of an English or American political gathering. M. Labitte called the meeting to order by the simple process of beginning to address it. Nothing could be more direct and business-like than his speech. It was exactly what he told his hearers he meant it to be, an account of his stewardship as their councillor-general. He said not a word about the personal aspects of the party conflicts raging in France, and very little about the national aspects of that conflict. Speaking in a frank conversational way, and referring to his notes only for figures and dates, he gave his const.i.tuents a succinct picture of the effect upon their own local interests of the policy pursued by the Government of the Republic. He told them how much of their money had been spent under the action of the Council-General during the six years of his term, and on what it had been spent, and with what results. If they liked the picture, well and good; if not, the remedy was in their own hands at the next election. He had forewarned me to expect nothing demonstrative in the att.i.tude of his audience. "They listen most attentively," he said, "but they give you no sign either of agreement or disagreement, of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. At night, after the meeting is over, they will break up into little knots and coteries, and talk it all over among themselves. If they are pleased on the whole, one of the group finally will say: "Well, Labitte told us the truth," and that being admitted by the rest, the conference will be a success!"
On this occasion the auditors were much more outspoken during the conference. Speaking of the unequal pressure upon the different communes of the military service, M. Labitte told them a story of a youth who came to him to get an exemption from service. "I told him," said M.
Labitte, "that I should be very glad to get it for him, but that his commune was not at that moment ent.i.tled to an exemption, and that I could not be a party to putting an injustice upon another commune. He was annoyed at this, and thought I ought to do him a favour, no matter at whose cost. I declined, and he went away. Some time after I met him, when he exultingly told me that he had seen one of my colleagues, a Republican, and had got from him the exemption he wanted. After that I heard stories put about to the effect that Labitte cared nothing about the pressure of the military service on the labouring people! Was I not right? Was it not my duty to see no favouritism shown to one commune at the expense of another?"
To these queries there was a prompt and general response, "Yes! yes! You were quite right," and several voices cried out, "Bravo!--quite right, Labitte."
Again, in dealing with the question of education, M. Labitte told his hearers of three instances in which small communes had been made to expend sums inordinately disproportionate to their resources upon what he called "scholastic palaces," although a great majority of the people in each instance distinctly refused to send their children to the lay schools established in these "palaces." One case was that of a commune of some seven hundred souls compelled to expend more than sixty thousand francs, or 2,400_l._ sterling, upon a "scholastic palace"! "I opposed these expenditures," he said, "for I think it is part of the duty of a councillor-general to look closely into the use made of your money."
This, also, the hearers applauded, not noisily at all, but with a kind of gratified murmur, not unlike the very loud purring of a very large cat. By this time it was evident that the speaker had his audience well in hand, and M. Labitte took up some points of attack made on himself.
One of these was that he was a "clerical." He said that he certainly was a "clerical," if that meant a man who had a religion and respected it, and wished to see the religion of other people respected; and gliding on from this to the question of the religious education of children, he asked the people whether they wished to see the curates forbidden to teach their children the principles of their religion. He was instantly answered by a man standing in the crowd just outside the door of the barn, who, in a loud and rather husky voice, shouted out that "the priest had no business in the school." Several of the audience met this interruption with derisive laughter, and two or three of them sharply invited the man to hold his tongue and go about his business. For a moment it seemed as if we were about to have a scene. But M. Labitte interposed. With perfect good temper he replied to the man that he was quite of his opinion as to the proper place of a priest, and that he had no wish to see the children at school interfered with in their school hours by any instruction not a part of the school programme. He suggested, however, that, instead of shouting and clamouring, the man should wait till he, M. Labitte, had got through, and then come up "amiably and prettily" on the platform and state his own views as fully as he liked. This made the man in the doorway angrier than ever, and as the audience good-naturedly laughed at him, he began to use rather abusive language. Upon this several stalwart peasants rose and made their way towards him with very plain intimations that if he did not take to the highway he would be carried there. The uproar was all over in five minutes. Some companions of the anti-clerical gentleman, not liking the look of the audience, contrived to surround him and led him off, and he disappeared uttering a threat or two of incoherent defiance as he went out of the farmyard. A burly farmer seated near me explained that "the fellow was drunk. But," he added, "he was sent here to do all this, and I know who sent him. Do you see that high chimney across the road some way off among the trees? Well, he is a factory hand there.
There are a number of them--they don"t belong to this country, and the manufacturer is an intriguer. He wanted to be a councillor-general, and we beat him off. He doesn"t like it--and that"s at the bottom of it all."
M. Labitte spoke for about an hour, the audience gradually increasing and listening with close attention. At the end the farmer, who had arranged the conference, got up and thanked the councillor-general for the account he had given of his services, and then the meeting broke up as quietly as it had a.s.sembled, and with as little ceremony.
Before the company began to leave the barn, a young man near the door asked for some information as to the duties likely to be imposed to protect the farmers, and getting a brief and clear reply, he said that would be very satisfactory--if only "some proprietors would not put such high prices on their land." The Count, who sat just in front of me and who had kept his hawk eye fixed on the speaker, chuckled to himself and said to me, "That shot was meant for me!"
Altogether the proceedings gave me a very favourable notion of the intelligence and the practical sense of the people. If all the const.i.tuencies in France could be handled in this direct fashion at the national elections in September, the result of those elections might be at least the approximative expression of the sense of the nation.
But this is not to be expected. There is much more canva.s.sing done, I think, by legislative candidates in France, and much less public speaking than in America or in England, and the pressure of the Government upon the voters is very much greater here even than it is in America. The proportion of office-holders to the population is much more considerable, and the recent governments have made the tenure of office in France even more dependent upon the political activity of the officials than it has ever been in the United States. This is one of the many evil legacies of the First Republic. The maxim that, "to the victors belong the spoils," I am sorry to say has been pretty extensively reduced to practice on my side of the Atlantic; but it was first formulated, not by Jackson, but by Danton. Louis Blanc tells us that this brutal Boanerges of the Jacobins startled even his allies one day, by cynically declaring that "the revolution was a battle, and, like all battles, ought to end by the division of the spoils among the victors."
Gabriel Charmes, a republican of the republicans, reviewing the conduct of the governments which have succeeded each other in France with such kaleidoscope rapidity since the death of Thiers, deliberately declares that "epuration is the watchword, and the true aim of Republican politics" in France. And "epuration" is the euphemism invented to describe the simple process of kicking out the office-holder who is in, to make room for the office-seeker who is out. Gambetta began this process in December 1870, when he wrote to the Government at Paris: "Authorise me and all my colleagues to "purify" the _personnel_ of the public administration, and it shall be done in very short order." Within a month, the Minister of the Interior telegraphed to the prefects, "you are authorised to make all the changes among the public school teachers, which, from a republican and political point of view, you may think desirable." M. Cremieux, Minister of Justice, followed the work up so energetically, that by the end of the year 1871 he declared that he had "weeded out eighteen hundred justices of the peace, and two hundred and eighty-nine magistrates of the courts and tribunals." When the republicans of the different Radical shades got into power in 1877, the newly elected deputies, according to M. Floquet, held a meeting, and insisted upon a further "epuration." They were of the mind of the sub-prefect of Roanne, who telegraphed to his superior, "If Republicans alone are not put into office, the Republicans will rise and we shall have civil war." In January 1880, M. de Freycinet, then, as now, a Minister, loudly called for a "reform of the _personnel_ of the Administration; and M. Gabriel Charmes, speaking of the then situation in France, tells us that only one prefect of the previous Republican Administration had escaped "purification," and not one procureur-general. "Has a single justice of the peace," he added, "or a single public school teacher in the slightest degree open to suspicion, escaped the avenging hands of MM. Le Royes and Jules Ferry? Certainly not."
This was nine years ago. So thorough was the weeding, M. Charmes tells us, that, "even the rural constables had not escaped, and the epuration policy had carried terror and anarchy into all branches of the public service."
In 1885 more than three millions of voters recorded their protest against these methods of government, and against the deputies who had identified these methods with the Republican form of government. This protest was met by M. de Freycinet, on January 16, 1886, with a speech, in the course of which he calmly said, "Let no one henceforth forget that liberty to oppose the Government does not exist for the servants of the State."
That is to say, the Republican Government, which is itself the servant, and the paid servant, of the State, will not permit any of its fellow-servants and subordinates, who are also presumably French citizens and taxpayers, to form and express at the polls any opinion on public affairs differing from the opinions held by the ministers who make up the Government.
It was upon this simple and beautiful principle that Mr. Tweed and his colleagues consolidated the local administration of affairs of the city of New York. Applied to the administration of the affairs of thirty-six millions of people in France, it ought certainly to produce results far transcending in splendour any achieved by the Tammany Ring. For M.
Gabriel Charmes is quite in the right when he says that "under this word of "epuration" lie concealed the most deplorable forms of personal greed, and the least avowable personal spites and rancours." Like other clever devices, however, "epuration" may possibly be carried too far. If it comes to pa.s.s that no actual functionary thinks his head safe, while, at the same time, every office the Government has to give represents a dozen or twenty "expurgated," and therefore exasperated and disaffected, previous holders of that office, the confidence of the garrison may be shaken while the animosity of the a.s.sailants is intensified. This point may possibly have been reached in France. If it has not been reached, the influence of the Government upon the voters must be very formidable.
For the average French voter is hemmed in and hedged about by innumerable small functionaries who have it in their power to oblige or to disoblige him, to gratify or to vex him in all sorts of ways; and though the ballot is supposed to be sacred and secret in France, it can hardly be more sacred or more secret there than in other countries. And whatever protection against annoyance the ballot may give to the voter, nothing can protect the candidate.
What I have heard in other regions I hear in Artois, that nothing is so difficult as to persuade men of position and character to take upon themselves the troubles, and expose themselves to the inconveniences, of an important political candidacy. There are a hundred ways in which a triumphant Administration conducted on the principles of the "epuration"
policy may hara.s.s and annoy an unsuccessful banner-bearer of the Opposition. The question of expense is another obstacle in the way of a thorough organisation of public opinion against such a Government.
An average outlay of 400,000 francs per department would be required, I was told by an experienced friend in Paris, adequately to put into the line of political battle all the departments of France, large and small together. As there are eighty-three departments in France, this gives us a total of 33,200,000 francs, or some 1,300,000_l._ sterling, as the cost of a thorough political campaign against an established French Government. If we suppose each deputy to make a personal contribution of 20,000 francs to this war-chest, that will give us only about one-third of the necessary amount. The rest must be made up by the personal contributions of public-spirited citizens, and my own observation of public affairs, going back, now, over a good many lively and interesting political conflicts in the United States, leads me to believe that liberal contributions of this sort are, as a rule, more easily collected by the beneficiaries of a more or less unscrupulous Government actually in power, than by the disinterested advocates of a real political reformation.
We wound up the day of the Conference with a delightful little dinner at St.-Quentin. The traditions of the old French _cuisine_ are not yet extinct in the provinces, nor, for that matter, in the private life of the true Parisians of Paris. They all centre in the famous saying of Brillat-Savarin, that a man may learn how to cook, but must be born to roast--a saying worthy of the philosophic magistrate who, coming to America, under the impression that he was to be fed upon roots and raw meat, went back to France convinced that a New England roast turkey and an Indian pudding were not to be matched in the old world. It is one of the many curious things of this curious world of the nineteenth century, that a _cuisine_ of made dishes of which Grimod de La Reyniere long ago gave us the origin, in the downfall of the kitchens of the prince-bishops along the Rhine, should be gravely and generally accepted by Frenchmen themselves, or at least by the Parisians of literature and the boulevards, as the national _cuisine_ of France. The charming daughter of my host at St.-Quentin knew better; and she received with a graceful, housewifely satisfaction the neatly-turned compliments which one of the guests was old-fashioned and sensible enough to pay her upon the skill of her cook.
The city of Aire-sur-la-Lys itself, like St.-Omer, shows traces still of its connection with Flanders and with Spain. I do not know if it is true of Aire as M. Lauwereyns de Roosendaele, writing about Jacqueline Robins, declares it to be of St.-Omer, that there are people there, even now, who think of the days of the Spanish rule as the "good old times."
But there is a certain Castilian stateliness about the older buildings of Aire; and the portals of the larger residences, leading from the street into charming secluded courts, gay with trees and flowers, remind one of the zaguans of the Andalusian houses. Very Spanish, too, is the Jesuit Church, despite some extraordinary decorations due to the zeal of its more recent possessors.
The Flemish past of the city is commemorated especially by a very remarkable little building known as the Corps de Garde, and by certain portions of the Church of St.-Pierre.
Aire formerly had a cathedral, but during the worst period of the Terror that exemplary ruffian, Joseph Lebon of Arras, the unfrocked priest, who organised pillage and ma.s.sacre throughout the Pas-de-Calais, frightened the good people of Aire into a frenzy of destruction and devilry. The Church of St.-Pierre was then a collegiate church, but it was turned over to the worship of the Supreme Being invented by Robespierre, desecrated and defaced and left in a deplorable state. It had already suffered, like so many other churches all over France and England, from the ingenious "restorers" of the eighteenth century, who have left their sign-manual on the upper part of the edifice and on the ma.s.s of a huge organ loft which crushes and disfigures the main entrance. The greater part of the building is of the fifteenth century; and it has been restored within our own times as tastefully and effectively as in the circ.u.mstances was possible, under the supervision and in part, I believe, at the cost of a devoted and conscientious curate, a member of a Scotch family long fixed in Artois, the Abbe Scott, who took charge of the church at the end of the reign of Charles X. and who now lies buried in the building he did so much to preserve. It is a very considerable church, measuring three hundred feet in length and a hundred-and-twenty in width; with a height of seventy feet in the main nave. The ogival windows are filled with rich, stained gla.s.s; all the ancient monuments which escaped the fury of 1793 have been excellently restored, and the church bears witness in its condition to the active piety of the faithful of Aire.
The "Corps de Garde" is a quadrilateral jewel of Flemish architecture of the end of the sixteenth century. It was of old the central point of the city, where the armed citizens met who patrolled the streets like the burghers of Rembrandt"s magnificent "Ronde de Nuit." A gallery runs round it of arcades, and brickwork supported by monolithic columns.
Above these arcades runs a frieze of trophies of arms with the attributes of St. James--the mayor of the city in whose time it was built bore the name of this apostle--and the cross of Burgundy.
The princ.i.p.al facade fronts the "Grande Place," and is surmounted by a picturesque pointed roof. An attic storey, running all around the building, is richly decorated with sculptures of the Theological and Cardinal Virtues, the Four Elements, and the patron saints of Aire--St.
Nicholas and St. Anthony. On another facade is the sculptured niche, now vacant, wherein stood a statue of the Virgin, before which all the great processions, civic and military, were used to halt and do obeisance.
In 1482, after the death of Charles the Bold, Louis XI. of France succeeded, "by treachery and corruptions," in annexing Aire for a time to the French crown, and the local records give a picturesque account of a French tournament held here in 1492, the year of the discovery of America, under the auspices of no less a person than the Chevalier "sans peur et sans reproche." Pierre du Terrail, dit le Bayard, came to Aire on July 19 in that year, and at once sent a trumpeter to proclaim through all the streets and squares that on the morrow, being July 20, he would hold a tournay under the walls of Aire, for all comers, "of three charges with the lance, the steel points dulled; and twelve sword strokes to be exchanged, with no lists drawn, and on horseback in harness of battle." The next day the combat to be renewed "afoot with the lance until the breaking of the lance, and after that with the battle-axe so long as the judges might think fit." The chroniclers celebrate in superlatives the valour and skill shown by the hero in these gentle and joyous a.s.saults of arms, and the beauty of the Artesian dames and damsels who thronged from all the country round into Aire to witness the tournay, and take part in the dances and banquets which followed it. But the hearts of the people were evidently Flemish and Spanish, not French; for they hailed the restoration of the Austrian authority by Charles the Fifth with all manner of rejoicings. Charles, with his usual sagacity, confirmed all the ancient rights and privileges of the city and its corporations, which had been a good deal disturbed under the centralising rule of the French sovereigns, and a record of the year 1538 tells us that on the proclamation in that year of the truce of Borny, the Austrian authorities paid the treasurer of the city "lxxviii. sols" for silver money "thrown in joy to the people." The treasurer himself seems to have been so enthusiastic on this occasion that he threw his own cap after the silver money, for the record adds a further payment to him "for a certain cap belonging to him, which was likewise thrown to the people." All the records of this age at Aire are picturesque with lively accounts of all manner of junketings, carousals, and festivities, and the good people seem to have pa.s.sed no small part of their lives in merry-making. There is a curious entry on the occasion of the marriage of the Archduke Philip to Mary of England. This auspicious event was celebrated at Aire by a grand procession, followed by "songs and ballads in honour of the married pair;" and the treasurer paid to "Johan Gallant, goldsmith, iiii. livres iiii. sols for the silver presents, to wit, an eagle, a leopard, a lion, and a fool--all in silver--which were given to those who made the songs, ballads, and games in honour of the said good news!"
Like Calais, St.-Omer, and other cities of this region, Aire offered a refuge in 1553 to the unfortunate inhabitants of the ancient historic city of Therouanne, which, after a heroic defence by d"Esse de Montmorency, was taken in that year, five days after the death on the ramparts of the gallant commander, by the troops of Charles the Fifth, and by his orders razed to the ground. The details of this merciless destruction recall the sack of Rome by the Imperialists; and it is the blackest feature in the black record of the First French Revolution that the men who then got control for a time of the government of France, in the names of Liberty and Progress, deliberately and wantonly rivalled the most unscrupulous of the kings and emperors whom they were constantly denouncing, in their treatment, not of foreign fortresses conquered in war, but of French cities, of the lives and the property of French citizens, and of the most precious monuments of French history.
Charles the Bold at Dinant and Charles the Fifth at Therouanne were outdone, in the prost.i.tuted name of the French people, by the younger Robespierre at Toulon and by the paralytic Couthon at Lyons.
The annals of these north-eastern cities of modern France are full of most curious and valuable materials for a really instructive history of the French people. The most cursory acquaintance with them suffices to show how much worse than worthless are the huge political pamphlets which during the last hundred years have pa.s.sed current with the world as histories of the French Revolution, and how important to the future, not of France alone but of civilisation, is the work begun in our own times by writers like Mortimer-Ternaux, Granier de Ca.s.sagnac, Baudrillart, Bire, and Henri Taine. Here in Artois, under the conflicting influences of Flemish, Spanish, and French laws and customs, a genuine development of social and political life may be traced as clearly as in Scotland or in England, down to the sudden and violent strangulation of French progress by the incompetent States-General and the not less incompetent king in 1789.
The archives of Aire show that the question of public education was a practical question there, at least as far back as at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In 1613, the magistrates asked and obtained the permission of the Archduke Albert and the Archd.u.c.h.ess Isabella to lay a special tax on the city of Aire and two adjoining villages, for the purpose of founding a college, private citizens having already given an endowment of 750 florins a year for this object. The importance of this contribution may be estimated from the fact that after the siege of Aire by the French in 1641, a sum of I,000 florins left to the Collegiate Church of Aire by a canon of Tournay was found sufficient to restore the chapel of Our Lady, the whole right wing of the church, and many houses belonging to the canons, which had all been destroyed by the French artillery. No time was lost in opening the college to the youth of the city and the suburbs, and only a few years afterwards the priests in charge of it wrote to the Seigneur de Thiennes, asking for further endowments in order to increase the number of the teachers to twenty, so great was the affluence of scholars from all the country around, "to the number at that time of more than three hundred." The collegiate chapter of Aire appointed one of its canons superintendent of the school, under the t.i.tle of the "Ecolatre." There really seems to be as little foundation in fact for the common notion that there was no provision made for the education of the people in France before 1789, as for the notion, not less common, that there were no peasant proprietors in France before 1789. It is hardly excusable even that Mr. Carlyle, rhapsodising more than fifty years ago about the "dumb despairing millions," should have fallen into this error. For though De Tocqueville and Taine had not then exploded it in detail, Necker, in whose career Carlyle took so much interest, not only declared officially that there was "an immense number" of such proprietors in France, but took the trouble to explain how it had come about. The law of 1790 establishing the land-tax required every parish to furnish a detailed account of the then existing properties in land, and it is shown by these that there then existed in France nearly two-thirds as many landholders as now exist, although the population of the country is now about twenty-five per cent. greater than it then was.
CHAPTER V.
IN THE SOMME.
AMIENS
By turns English, French, and Burgundian, Upper Picardy, of which Amiens was the capital, became definitely French under the astute policy of Louis XI. The Calaisis and the Boulonnais, with Ponthieu and Vimieu, eventually const.i.tuted what was called Lower Picardy, and the whole province, divided under the Bourbons into the two "generalities" of Amiens and Soissons, formed before 1789 one of the twelve great departments of the monarchy, and was brought under the domain of the Parliament of Paris.
The city of Amiens, a.s.sociated now, I fear, chiefly, in the English and American mind, with "twenty minutes" stop" on the way between Calais and Paris, and with a buffet which perhaps ent.i.tles it to be called the Mugby Junction of France, is really one of the most interesting of French cities. No student of Ruskin can need to be told that its glorious cathedral makes it one of the most interesting, not of French only, but of European cities; and two or three excellent small hotels make it a most comfortable as well as a most instructive midway station, not for "twenty minutes," but for a couple of days, between the capitals of England and France. Arthur Young found it so a hundred years ago, when he encountered there the ill.u.s.trious Charles James Fox returning to London from a visit to the Anglomaniac Due d" Orleans, in the company of a charming "Madame Fox," of whom Arthur Young and London had no previous cognisance.
Like Dijon, and Nancy, and Toulouse, and Rennes, and Rouen, Amiens still wears that "look of a capital" which is as unmistakeable, if also as undefinable, as Hazlitt found the "look of a gentleman" to be. York and Exeter, for example, in England, have this look, while Liverpool and Hull have it not. There are traces of the Spaniards in Amiens, as there are wherever that most Roman of all the Latin peoples has ever pa.s.sed, and the curious _hortillonages_ of Amiens, which may be roughly described as a kind of floating kitchen gardens, remind one so strongly of the much more picturesque Chinampas of Mexico as to suggest the impression that the idea of establishing them may have come hither by way of Spain.
At the present time, Amiens is a point of no small political interest.
It is the bailiwick of one of the few really notable men of the actual Republican party in France--- M. Goblet--and yet it is one of the strongholds of Boulangism. There is an old song, the refrain of which, as I heard it sung, more years ago than I care to recall, always haunts me when I visit this ancient city:--
Vive un Picard, vive un Picard, Quand il s"agit de tete!
The Picards have always shown, not only sense, but a kind of stubborn independence of character. In the days of anarchy which came upon France with the brief but ill-omened triumph of the Girondins, Amiens was the first of the French provincial cities to resist and denounce the too successful attempt of Danton and the commune of Paris to terrorise France by a skilful abuse of the imbecility of Roland. The authorities of Amiens were the first to protest against the outrageous pretensions of the "commissioners," who came there with Roland"s commissions in one hand, and the secret instructions of Roland"s colleague and master, Danton, in the other, to pillage the property of the inhabitants under the pretence of gathering supplies for the national defence, and to establish an irresponsible local despotism under the pretence of suppressing "treason." To them, in the first instance, belongs the credit of compelling Roland to get up before the a.s.sembly on September 17, 1792, and confess that he had "signed in the council commissions without knowing anything about the commissioners who were to use them;"
and to them, therefore, in the first instance, history is indebted for the formal record which shows that the actual fall of the French monarchy was followed, and its formal abolition preceded, by the letting loose upon France of a swarm of scoundrels, who filled "the prisons with prisoners as to whom no one knew by whom they were arrested; who gave over to pillage the treasures acc.u.mulated in the Tuileries, and in the houses of the emigrant aristocracy; who conveyed away everything which could tempt the cupidity of a subaltern, without any record whatever; and who were delivering over Paris and France to the most absurd folly and the most insatiable greed." It was not the fault of Amiens if the efforts of Mazuyer and Kersaint demanding a law to show "whether the French nation was sovereign, or the Commune of Paris," and the sonorous eloquence of Vergniaud denouncing the "citizens of Paris" as the "slaves of the vilest scoundrels alive," only led in the end to making France herself for a time the slave of these same "vilest scoundrels alive."
In more recent times, Amiens received and entertained Gambetta on his way by balloon from Paris to Tours. I asked the veteran Count Leon de Cha.s.sepot, who for years was regularly returned at every election at the head of the munic.i.p.al councillors of Amiens, how the people received Gambetta on that memorable occasion. His answer was that there really was no "reception." Gambetta came down in his balloon at a little place some way off, between Amiens and Montdidier, and when he reached Amiens he was too tired and hungry to think of "receiving" people or making speeches. Count Leon de Cha.s.sepot had nothing, I believe, to do with the invention of the guns which bear his name. But he has a glance like a rifle-shot, and at fourscore years "Spring still makes spring in the mind" of this vivacious veteran. I asked him how Amiens behaved when the news came there of the capture of Paris by the revolutionists of September 4, 1870. Was the new republic hailed with enthusiasm?
"Enthusiasm!" he said scornfully; "why should it be? The people of Amiens were thinking of fighting the Prussians, not of upsetting the Government! They received the news with stupefaction, as a matter of little consequence in comparison with the invasion. The disaster of Sedan had afflicted them profoundly. The Empire was popular in Picardy.
At the munic.i.p.al elections which took place in Amiens just after the declaration of war--early in August 1870, that is--the Imperialist candidates had all been elected by overwhelming majorities. M. Goblet, now so prominent in the Republican counsels, made his appearance then as an anti-governmental candidate, together with M. Pet.i.t, the present Radical mayor of Amiens. M. Goblet got 530 votes, and M. Pet.i.t 423. They were the leading persons on that side, and the leading persons on the side of the Government received, respectively, 5,099 and 4,964 votes.
This being the temper of the good people of Amiens at that time, you will understand that they were more astounded than pleased by the so-called revolution of September in Paris. But they were more patriotic than the people of Paris, and they acquiesced in the overthrow of the Government to show a united front to the enemy. He was within striking distance of Amiens, by the way, and the boulevardiers unfortunately thought that Paris was out of his reach."
The first act of the revolutionists of September, it appears, was to disorganise as far as they could the public service by removing the prefects, and putting their own people into place and power. They sent a certain M. Lardiere down post-haste to Amiens to take the place of the then prefect of the Somme, M. de Guigne, and that was all they did to defend Amiens!
In the course of a pleasant morning spent with M. Ansart, a gentleman of high character and position in Amiens, and with several of his friends, I heard much that was interesting as to this critical period. The att.i.tude of the leading men throughout Picardy seems to have been in complete conformity with M. de Cha.s.sepot"s account of the bearing of the city of Amiens. The mayor of a commune not far from Amiens, a marquis and a leading Imperialist, on getting the news of the political somersault executed at Paris, read out the bulletin to the people from the mairie, reminded them that the enemy were sure to come into Picardy, and then exclaimed, "Well, my friends, since it seems we are in a republic, Long live the Republic!"
This was the general feeling of good men everywhere at that time in France. Said one gentleman, a landed proprietor from Brittany, "n.o.body out of Paris who had a head on his shoulders approved what had been done in Paris. But by common consent a great blank credit was opened for the Republic all over France. If the Republicans would do their duty to France, not as party men but as patriots, France was ready to accept them. It is their own fault, and their fault alone, that the men who made this change at Paris went to pieces so fast in the public estimation. It is the fault of the Republicans, and their fault alone, that now, after nearly eighteen years, they are an offence to sensible and liberal men from one end of France to the other."
The new prefect sent down from Paris turned out to be a wind-bag. By the middle of November it became clear that Amiens must fall into the power of the enemy. The new prefect launched a ridiculous proclamation, blazing with adjectives, at the advancing Teutons, and then one fine night got out of the way as fast as possible, leaving the city and the department of the Somme to face the wrath of the not very placable conquerors.
On November 28, the Prussians occupied the city, one French officer, Commandant Vogel, falling at his post, which he refused to surrender.