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Calais

The men who, in 1790, brought about the formal division of France into departments, no doubt thereby facilitated the ephemeral transformation, in September 1792, of the ancient French monarchy into a French republic, 'one and indivisible.' But they also put their improvised republic thereby at the mercy of the marvellous Italian who blew its flimsy framework into shreds with his cannon in October 1795.

In working out what George Sand calls 'the great practical joke' of the First Consulate, and the formidable reality of the Empire, Napoleon found, ready-fashioned to his hand and undamaged by the republican tinkers, a system of administration essentially despotic. This system did for him what Charlemagne did for himself when he got rid of the tribal dukes of the Merovingian epoch, and, as Gneist and Sir Robert Morier have shown, gathered into his own control the four unities which make up the unity of the State—the military, the police, the judiciary, and the finances. The counts of Charlemagne, removable at his pleasure, with no root in their comitatus save his sovereign will, were the true prototypes of the modern French prefect. If the old provinces of France, which had a local life, organisation, and spirit of their own, had been taken as the units of government in 1790, the monarchy perhaps might hardly have been abolished in 1792 by a Convention so headlong and tumultuous that for one day it actually forgot, after abolishing the monarchy, to establish any government in its place.

But if a republic had been founded through the action of the provinces of France, it would probably have been harder for Napoleon to make an end of it, than it was for Charlemagne to dispense with the recognition of local rights to which the Merovingian kings had submitted in the appointment of their hereditary subreguli, from among the local magnates of the shires. This, it seems to me, may be inferred from the fact, admitted on all hands in France, that the departments remain to-day what they were at first—mere administrative divisions which have taken no hold on the feelings and sympathies of the people, while the 'local patriotism' of the provinces is still a vivid reality.

Frenchmen are still Gascons and Provençals, Bretons and Normans, Burgundians and Picards, and no country in the world is richer than France in local histories and chronicles. But so late as 1877 the local history of the Department of the Pas-de-Calais, in which I am now writing, could be described as 'unique in France,' and this local history is really a history, not of the department at all, but of the two important and interesting provinces of which it consists—Artois, namely, and the Boulonnais—each of which still preserves, after nearly a century, its own distinctive character in the physiognomy of the people, in their habits, their turn of mind, and their traditions. The attempt to fuse them into a new political entity has completely failed. No more has, apparently, come of it, locally, than would have come of an attempt to fuse Massachusetts and Rhode Island into a Department of Martha's Vineyard, or Kent and Sussex into a Department of New Haven. Possibly even less. For Artois and the Boulonnais never passed definitely under the French crown until the middle of the seventeenth century. Even Calais, after the Duke of Guise had wrested it from England, was conquered for Spain by the Archduke Albert, and a smiling little agricultural commune alone now commemorates, in its name of Thérouanne, the once great and flourishing episcopal capital of Morinia in which Clodion began the French monarchy, and which was mercilessly razed to the ground and abolished from off the face of the earth, little more than three hundred years ago, by the victorious emperor Charles the Fifth.

Of this artificial department Calais is neither the chief town nor capital. It has scarcely a third of the population of Boulogne, and not much more than half the population of Arras, which is the seat of the préfecture; and though it is by no means so dreary and uninteresting a place as the casual traveller, seeing only the landing-pier, and the new station, which bears the name of the heroic Eustache de St.-Pierre, is apt to take it to be, it cannot compare, in point of beauty and interest, either with Boulogne or with Arras. But as the French head of the great historic ferry between England and the Continent, and as the seat of sundry thriving factories, it is both a busy and prosperous town. I found its streets swarming with people and its houses a flutter of flags and banners, when I came to it on June 3, 1889, to see the 'inauguration,' by President Carnot, of the works on which the French Government has been spending millions of francs during the past decade, with an eye to deepening and enlarging the harbour. The weather was magnificent. Several men-of-war of the Channel squadron lay off the port. Excursion steamers came in from England, bringing members of Parliament and miscellaneous British subjects, of the sort once indignantly denounced to me by the little old verger of a Midland cathedral as 'them terrible trippers.' The active and good-natured railway porters at the station were worn out with throngs of travellers pouring in from all the country round about. There was much animation everywhere, but nowhere any enthusiasm, though Calais, I suppose, must be a republican town, as at the election of a deputy, held here in 1886, the Government candidate, M. Camescasse, received 5,196 votes against 2,233 given to his Conservative opponent, M. Labitte. I am told, too, there is a good deal of Socialism among the factory workmen; and I can see that the place is full of cabarets and débits, flowing not only with light beer and sour wine, but with spirits of a sort to make the consumers more clamorous about the rights than solicitous about the duties of man.

I heard, in the course of the day, that at some points in his progress, the President was received with cries of 'Vive Boulanger!' but nothing of this sort passed under my own observation. What most struck me was that his presence appeared to be not an event at all, but merely an incident of a general holiday. Nor did the people seem to care much about the real event of the day, the 'inauguration' of the perfected port. Perhaps they knew that the port is not yet perfected. Those of them who went down to the pier at least knew, this—for a steamer of no very great size, the St.-André, I believe, trying to come in, grounded on the sand, and lay there thumping herself heavily for I know not how long. I heard this mishap described with much glee by a group of Boulonnais in the main street. 'Ah bah!' said one of them exultingly, 'they may spend what they like, Calais will never be Boulogne!'

I breakfasted with a friend who lives much on a property he has in Picardy, and who came down to Calais to meet me. When I first knew him, years ago, he was a republican of the type of Cavaignac and a bitter enemy of the Empire, some of his kinsfolk in the Gironde having been ill-treated during the persecution which raged against the republicans and the royalists alike, in and around Bordeaux, after the coup d'état of the Prince President. Of later years he has been growing indifferent to public affairs, and is now, I think, simply a pessimist, whom nothing but a foreign invasion of France is likely to rouse into activity again.

'What is the matter with the people here?' I asked him. 'Are they Boulangists, or do they simply dislike Carnot?'

'No!' he replied, 'I don't think they care much about Boulanger, and why should they dislike Carnot? There is nothing in him to like or to dislike. He is not a personality. He is only a functionary, and Frenchmen care nothing about functionaries. They know that this is an electoral job, and they care nothing about it, one way or the other.'

'But I saw an inscription on a banner in one of the streets,' I said, 'to this effect: "Calais always faithful to the Carnots!" Does that mean that the Carnots are of this country?'

'Not at all! The grandfather of Carnot was born in Burgundy somewhere. He married a young lady of St.-Omer, and in that way came to be sent by the Pas-de-Calais to the "Legislative" and the Convention. The inscription is amusing though,' he added, 'for, like these other inscriptions reciting the names of Lazare Carnot, and Hippolyte Carnot, and Sadi Carnot, it shows how hard some people are trying to work the President up into a personality. They want to make him out the heir of a dynasty—Carnot III.!'

'That is not a very republican way of looking at a President,' I observed.

'Possibly not, but it is a very French way of looking at one! We should be the most monarchical people in Europe if we were not the most anarchical. Give a public man a legend and a grandfather, and he can go a long way with us. I don't know that the grandfather will do without the legend, even when, as in this case, the grandfather has a legend of his own.'

'Is that legend of grandfather Carnot very strong in this region?' I asked.

'Neither in this region nor anywhere else,' he replied. 'I think it is very foolish of the managers in Paris to provoke comparisons by sending a political bagman to Germany to bring back the ashes of Papa Victory, as the Prince de Joinville brought back the dead Emperor from St. Helena. Carnot I., after all, was simply a good war minister, who loomed into greatness only in comparison with the rogue Pache and the phenomenal booby Bouchotte who preceded him. He was certainly no better than his successor Pétiet, and it was Pétiet, not he, who finally "organised victory" by sending Moreau to the Rhine, and Bonaparte to Italy. Napoleon, who knew them both, made Pétiet governor of Lombardy, and chose him, not Carnot, to organise the great camp at Boulogne. When Pétiet died, not long after Austerlitz, Napoleon gave him a much grander funeral in the Pantheon than can be got up now for the grandfather of Carnot. Most people have forgotten Pétiet, and it is a blunder to remind them of him. But this is a government of blunderers. See what trouble the Ferrys and the Freycinets are taking to unmake the legend Clémenceau made for Boulanger! Do what they may, that black horse is worth more to Boulanger to-day than Carnot's grandfather ever will be to Carnot III.'

'But has Carnot III. no value of his own? Has he not shown more firmness than people expected of him when this Boulangist business began?'

'Carnot III. is simply the firm-name of Ferry and De Freycinet. I am not fond of the scurrilities of Rochefort, as you know, but he sometimes hits the nail on the head very hard, as he did when, on the day after that comedy of the presidential election, he said "the fact that a man, if you ask him to dinner, will not put your spoons into his pocket is not a sufficient reason for making him president of a republic." Only,' he added reflectively, 'that was not quite their reason for making him president. It was that they thought he would let other people pocket the spoons.'

This reminded me of what used to be said of Secretary Seward by his enemies, that he was 'honest enough himself, but cared nothing about honesty in other people.'

'I don't mean that exactly,' said my friend. 'What I mean is, that Carnot III. is not clever enough to know whether the people around him are or are not honest. His grandfather was. Carnot I. would have cut a great figure in our present Senate, and in the party of the "sick at heart"—the respectable gentlemen, I mean, who are always consenting, under the stress of some "reason of State," to vote for one or another piece of rascality, though it makes them "sick at heart" to do so. Carnot I. voted in this way for the murder of Louis XVI., and he takes pains to tell us that all his colleagues in the Convention who voted for it did so in dread of the mob in the galleries. Just in the same way he was sharp enough to join Napoleon during the Hundred Days, because he saw that his best chance of saving his own head and staying in France was to keep out the Bourbons. This Carnot III. is, I dare say, more honest and less calculating—for he is certainly more dull—than his grandfather. Perhaps he may turn out to be the Louis XVI. of the Republic.'

How much has actually been spent on the works here to make Calais a great seaport, it is not easy to ascertain; but the lowest estimates stated to me seem to be quite out of proportion with the results actually achieved.

My conversation on this point with my friend from Picardy is worth recording.

'Ten years ago,' he said, 'the amount to be spent on Calais was set down at eleven millions of francs. I feel quite sure that at least twice this sum has been actually spent here since the work began in 1881.'

'Why do you feel sure of this?'

'Because twice the first estimate has been avowedly spent everywhere in France on the whole scheme. Calais alone figures this year in the budget for sixteen millions and a half! You were in France, were you not, in 1880, and you must surely remember the songs that used to be sung in the streets:—

"C'est Léon Say, c'est Freycinet,

C'est Freycinet, c'est Léon Say."

'These two men, both of them men of business, both financiers (though the "white mouse"[1] is a bit of a visionary) and both men of ability, deliberately adopted, in 1879, after a single conversation with Gambetta, a scheme improvised by him, who was neither a man of business nor a financier, but a declamatory Bohemian, for keeping up the war expenditure by committing France to the creation of a complete "commercial outfit."

'The Republicans won the elections in 1877 by frightening France into a belief that a Conservative victory at the polls would be followed by a new German invasion. I am not sure, mind you, that this was an idle scare. For under the Conservative administration of our affairs we had cleared off in six years' time the frightful burdens imposed upon us by the war, by the senseless Parisian revolution of 1870, and by the Communist insurrection of 1871; and it is likely enough that Bismarck may have made up his mind to attack us if he saw us persist in a sane and sensible public policy. Be that as it may, Gambetta, Léon Say, and Freycinet, between them, did his work for him by plunging the country back into the financial morass from which the Conservatives had rescued it. They carried the new chamber with them into Gambetta's scheme for doing systematically and successfully what had been clumsily attempted in the Ateliers Nationaux of 1848. France was to be made a republic by spending nearly the amount of the German War indemnity on the construction of railways, canals, and ports all over the country. The sum stated in the outset was four thousand five hundred millions of francs—rather a pretty penny you must see!'

'I remember it,' I replied, 'and I remember thinking, when the scheme was first developed, that the adoption of it was a wonderful evidence of the financial vigour and vitality of France.'

'Thank you,' he replied rather bitterly. 'It was just such a proof of vigour and vitality that Dr. Sangrado used to get from his patients with his lancet. It was a great political manœuvre, no doubt, and it commended itself to all the hungry politicians in France so promptly and so warmly, that within three years' time, in 1882, M. Tirard, who was then Finance Minister, and who is now on the box of the Carnot coach, had to admit that the expenditure then contemplated in carrying out this great idea could not possibly fall short of nine thousand one hundred and fifty millions of francs! This, observe, was seven years ago. To-day it has swelled, at the least, into eleven and perhaps to twelve thousand millions of francs. Why not? Gambetta, Léon Say, and Freycinet proclaimed the millennium of civil engineers and local candidates. What becomes of equality and fraternity if the smallest hamlet in the recesses of the Jura is not as much entitled to a local railway at the public expense as the largest port on the Bay of Biscay? Once let it be understood that the Government means to spend ten thousand millions on public works, and all the voters are ready to believe the Government has found the philosopher's stone. Nobody but the tax-gatherer will ever make them understand where the money comes from. And between the tax-gatherer and the taxpayer, a truly clever finance minister can always interpose successfully, for a certain length of time, the anodyne banker with a new form of public loan! We are the sharpest and thriftiest people alive in private affairs, and in public matters the most absolute fly-gobblers in the whole world!'

I tried to console my friend by informing him that this particular kind of political financiering is not unknown in my own country. The scheme of Gambetta appears to me to be simply a development, on a grand scale, of the 'log-rolling principle,' on which, year after year, a measure known as the 'Rivers and Harbours Bill' is engineered, with more or less friction, through the Congress of the United States. It is regularly and diplomatically fought over between the two houses until an agreement about it is come to between the opposing forces, described by a recent American writer as 'the plutocracy at one end and the mobocracy at the other end' of our national legislature. In short, it has now become an 'institution,' and like other institutions it has its legendary hero, in a western legislator who is reputed to have re-elected himself for a number of years by 'putting through' successive appropriations for the 'improvement' of a stream which rose in an inaccessible mountain and emptied itself into an unfathomable swamp.

'That is very well,' said my friend gravely, 'very well indeed, but you have to do this thing every year, while Gambetta and Léon Say and De Freycinet committed France to it once for all and irremediably. And on what scale do you do this sort of thing?'

I was forced to own that, upon this point, Washington so far lags shamefully in the rear of Paris. Our grandest 'log-rolling' in finance is, to the colossal operations of Gambetta, Léon Say, and De Freycinet, as is the ordinary iron lamp-post of New York to the Eiffel Tower.

The 'Rivers and Harbours Bill,' in 1886, was only saved after a desperate struggle at the very end of the session, by a compromise over an 'ancient and fish-like' canal job in the North-West, the original promoter of which, long since passed beyond the hope, if not beyond the desire of hydraulic improvements, audaciously baptized it with the name of Father Hennepin, one of the glories of France in the New World. And yet the amount involved in the Bill did not exceed fourteen million dollars, or a beggarly seventy million francs.

'At that rate,' said my friend, 'it would take your great country more than a century to match what we have covered in ten years. And yet you are thought an enterprising people, and, what is more to the point, your treasury shows an annual surplus, while ours shows an annual deficit; and you have nearly twice our population, have you not, and more than ten times our area of territory?

'If I were to "improve" the roads and ponds on my property on the principle on which France has been "improving" her railway systems and her ports, I should bring up in bankruptcy. Where else can the country bring up? Nothing, so far, has saved us but the woollen stocking of the peasants. Come to my place in Picardy, and I will show you a dozen old fellows who go about dressed in blouses—who work like day-labourers—no! much better and harder than day-labourers now do. They will never tell you what they are thinking about; they will never tell me, though we are the best of friends; but you will see what they are—close at a bargain, shrewd, devoted to their farms and families. Well, they live on a third—yes, some of them on a quarter—of their incomes; they know just where every penny they have spent on the ground for twenty years has gone, and just what it has brought back to them, and every man of them can put his hand, if need be, on ten, twenty, thirty, forty thousand francs. That is the woollen stocking. But the most beautiful woman in the world can only give what she has. The woollen stocking holds no more than it holds. You can find the bottom of it if you keep on long enough—and then? And mark you, if I tell the shrewdest of these old fellows that the Government is spending ten thousand millions of francs on building railways from nowhere to nowhere, and digging ports in quicksands, what will he do? He will begin to think it is very hard that he can't get a railway built or a port dug. Do you wonder I am a pessimist?'

'But if this is the way in which they look at things, why do they clamour for Boulanger?'

'They don't clamour for Boulanger. That is to say the peasants, the rural people. It is in the towns—here in Calais, for example, at Boulogne, at Amiens—that they clamour for Boulanger. In the towns they read all manner of trash and listen to all manner of lies. You can get up a legend in the French towns for anybody or anything as easily to-day as in the middle ages—perhaps more easily. Look at this legend of Boulanger. It is a real legend to-day. You may be sure of that, and that is the real danger of it. The people who are fighting against it to-day are the people who made it. They wanted, they could not get on without, a great man. Ferry went to pieces, as you know, in 1885. Tonkin and the dead Courbet killed him. So they invented Boulanger. They made him War Minister. They put him on his black horse. They let him drive out the princes. Look at those five men seated there in front of that café. They are doubtless decent well-to-do shopkeepers, master mechanics—no matter what—I will wager you that of these five men, three believe Boulanger to be the first soldier of France, and that two of them believe the Government has driven him into exile to prevent the Germans from declaring war! That is enough to make them Boulangists.'