The leader of the Left was now Gambetta, who managed matters with discretion and in a spirit of compromise.  From this policy his immediate followers have been called “opportunists,” because they stood by, watching the course of events, ready to promote their own plans at every opportunity.

The new Assembly proved much too republican to please the marshal.  In every way his situation perplexed and worried him.  He was not a man of eminent ability, and had never been trained to politics.  He had been used to govern as a soldier.  His head may have been a little turned by the flatteries so freely showered on him before his election, and he had come to entertain a belief that he was indispensable to France.  He saw himself the protector of order against revolutionary passions, and conceived himself to be adored as the sole hope of the people.  “Believing this, he could hardly have been expected to conform to the simple formulas which govern the councils of constitutional kings.”  Moreover, behind the marshal was his friend the Duc de Broglie, “now counselling compromise and now resistance, but always meditating a sudden blow in favor of monarchy.”

By the close of 1876 it became so evident that the government of France could not be carried on upon strictly conservative principles that even the Duc de Broglie advised the marshal to form a Cabinet from the Left, under the prime ministership of M. Jules Simon.  This gentleman had been one of the five Jules’s in the Committee of Defence in 1870.  He was an upright man, very liberal in his opinions, and philosophic in his tendencies, which made him especially unacceptable to Marshal MacMahon.

Simon formed a ministry, which governed, with perpetual parliamentary disputes, till May 16, 1877.  On that day Marshal MacMahon sent a letter to his prime minister, telling him that he did not appear to have sufficient support in the Chamber to carry on the government, and reproaching him with his Radical tendencies.  Of course the minister and his colleagues at once resigned.  The marshal then dissolved the Chamber, and appealed to the people, placing the Duc de Broglie ad interim at the head of affairs.

In spite of all the marshal and his friends could do to secure a Conservative majority in the new Chamber, it was largely and strongly Republican.  There was no help for it; as Gambetta said, the marshal must either se soumettre, ou se demettre,—­choose submission or dismission.

He had a passing thought of again dissolving the unruly Chamber, and governing by the Senate alone.  He found, however, that the country did not consider him indispensable, and was prepared to put M. Thiers in his place if he resigned.

But M. Thiers did not live to receive that proof of his country’s gratitude.  He died, as we have seen, in the summer of 1877, and the next choice of the Republican party was M. Jules Grevy.

[Illustration:  PRESIDENT JULES GREVY.]