France in the Nineteenth Century eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 555 pages of information about France in the Nineteenth Century.

France in the Nineteenth Century eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 555 pages of information about France in the Nineteenth Century.

Another measure, passed about the same time, brought great trouble into families.  It was a law making education compulsory, and was loaded with vexatious and arbitrary regulations.  Every child privately educated had to pass, semi-annually, a strict examination before certain village authorities.  This gave rise in families to all sorts of tribulations.  France is not exactly a land of liberty; personal liberty is sacrificed to efforts to enforce equality.

General Boulanger after his loss of office was given the command of the Thirteenth Army Corps, and was sent into a sort of exile at its headquarters at Clermont-Ferrand.  At the railroad-station in Paris a great crowd awaited him on the day of his departure.  It broke down the barriers, and delayed in-coming and out-going trains, as it pressed around him.  At first the general seemed pleased by this evidence of his popularity; then he began to feel the truth of what a friend whispered to him, “These twenty thousand men will make you forty thousand enemies,” and he grew embarrassed and annoyed by the demonstration.  Finally he mounted a locomotive, and made a brief speech to the people; then the train steamed out of the station.

The exile of the general to Clermont-Ferrand, and the harsh measures taken against him by the man who succeeded him in the War Office, caused his popularity with the populace daily to increase.  He was felt to be a power in the State, and this, when he perceived it, awakened his ambition.

In November, 1887, when all parties in France were anticipating the resignation of M. Grevy after the exposure of his son-in-law, the majority of Frenchmen, outside the Chamber of Deputies, dreaded the election of M. Jules Ferry to his place, and prophesied that it would be the signal for another civil war.  This was the opinion held (rightly or wrongly) by M. Grevy himself, by General Boulanger, and by the Comte de Paris.  By the last day of November, when it seemed impossible for M. Grevy to retain office, because no leader of influence in the Chamber would help him to form a ministry, Boulanger, who had come up to Paris, met a small party of his friends, including M. Clemenceau, leader of the Radical party, and Rochefort, the leader of the Radical press, at dinner at the house of M. and Madame Laguerre.[1] M. Laguerre was a deputy who supported Boulanger in the Chamber against his enemies.  Two gentlemen present had that afternoon seen M. Grevy, who had implored them to find some leader who would form a ministry; already had M. Clemenceau been thought of, but he was undecided.  It was evident that if he would secure the out-of-doors support of Boulanger’s popularity, his ministry must include Boulanger.  It seemed equally certain that if it did so, it would be beset by enemies in the Chamber.  In the midst of a heated discussion on the subject, General Boulanger about midnight was mysteriously called away.

[Footnote 1:  See “Les Coulisses du Boulangisme,” published in “Figaro,” and attributed to M. Mermieux.]

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France in the Nineteenth Century from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.