Part 12 (1/2)

On one very important question of French politics, M. Fleury, as a practical politician in this great and active department, gives me a good deal of useful light. This is the question of the expenses of the electoral machine. In France, as in America, no limit is set by the law to the possible expenditure of a political candidate. I have already given the estimate made for me in Artois of the general cost of the legislative elections, and I have been told by more than one well-informed French politician in other parts of France, that the average cost of a candidacy for a seat in the Chamber may be roughly estimated at twenty-five thousand francs, or a thousand pounds sterling.

This would show, allowing two candidates only for each seat, an expenditure of thirty millions of francs, or twelve hundred thousand pounds, at each French parliamentary election, being very nearly the figure given me in Artois. We send only 330 members to Was.h.i.+ngton, but we elect a new House every two years. The British House of Commons, though more numerous even than the French Chamber, probably spends a good deal less upon getting itself elected than either the French or the American House.[4]

[4] At this time (October, 1889) there is a difficulty in New York about a good candidate for the seat vacated by the death of the late Mr. S. S. c.o.x, being a prominent democratic member of Congress, because the candidate must consent to an annual 'a.s.sessment' on his salary for political purposes. The French Government, I am told, collects these 'contributions' easily, the deputies 'recouping'

themselves by patronage.

One of the 'working sub-prefects' of the Boulangist party in Picardy gave M. Fleury a very frank estimate of the expense of electing the General in 1888, in the Somme. He put it, in round numbers, at nearly or quite one hundred and twenty-five thousand francs, or five thousand pounds. This unusual outlay was made necessary by the great efforts of the Government to defeat the General. Furthermore, it was swollen by the disinterested devotion of many of the General's friends. Some of these auxiliaries spent days at the best hotels in Picardy labouring for the cause, with the result of a special hotel account, amounting to several thousand francs. Nothing makes men so thirsty as political emotion.

Another partisan, at the head of a journal, sent in a bill for forty-five thousand francs expended by him upon printing and stationery, no charge being made for his personal services! The chief agents received about two thousand francs apiece. One of them must have worked very hard, for he earned no less than fifteen thousand francs. While all this expense was incurring in Picardy, furthermore, two other elections were pending, in each of which the General was a candidate, one in the Charente and one in the Nord. It would seem to be probable enough, therefore, that on these three elections In 1888 General Boulanger, or the Boulangists, must have spent at least two hundred and fifty thousand francs, or ten thousand pounds.

'Where did all this money come from?' is a not unnatural question. For M. Fleury tells me the General's bills were paid much more promptly than the bills of the Government candidates. It is an open secret apparently that the Government candidates are very bad paymasters when they are beaten. Some of the bills incurred by them in 1885, when the Conservatives swept so large a part of Northern France, were still due, it appears, in 1888. But the bills of General Boulanger were settled very soon after the close of the campaign.

M. Mermeix insisted to M. Fleury that the General's war-chest was supplied by voluntary subscriptions. 'Every day,' he said, the General finds some ten thousand francs in his mails, and his followers 'are all either beggars or millionaires.'

Another of the General's managers gave M. Fleury the names of two very rich persons, one of them a cattle merchant at La Villette, who subscribed between them a hundred and forty thousand francs to carry on the campaign in Picardy. The enormous importance given to General Boulanger by his terrified former a.s.sociates in the Government seems to me to be a very striking proof of the little confidence they really have in their own hold upon the country, or in the permanency of 'republican inst.i.tutions' as they now exist in France, and this adequately explains the readiness of speculators to 'invest' in what may be called the 'Boulangist bonds.' Such a report as that presented not very long ago to the Chamber by M. Gerville-Reache on the state of the navy in France suffices to show that the speculative maladministration of the French finances has been so great as to make it quite certain that any 'honest government' coming into power must reconstruct the system of the public indebtedness. That is an operation which can hardly be carried out by the most scrupulously honest government without very great profits to the financiers concerned in it, and I only set down what is said to me by respectable Frenchmen when I say that the Boulanger campaign funds are openly described, by persons not at all hostile to 'Boulangism,' as 'bets on the General.' 'The difference between the managers of the Boulangist campaign and the managers of the Government campaign,' said a gentleman to me in Amiens, 'is simply this--that the Boulangist managers are playing the game with private funds, and the others with public funds. So the latter, I think, will win, for they have the longest purse to draw on.' This gentleman is of the opinion, however, that but for General Saussier, in command of the garrison of Paris, General Boulanger, after the election of January 27, 1889, in which he took the capital by storm, might have turned the Government neck and heels out of doors. The weak point of Boulangism,' he said, 'is Boulanger.' 'He has no strength with the officers of the army. They have no confidence either in his character or in his ability; not that they think his character bad or deny his ability, but only that they regard him as a shallow, vacillating, and mediocre person who made himself valuable to the Republican politicians by going into alliances with them to which other officers of strong character and high ability would not stoop. As for the quarrel between Boulanger and these politicians, it is a beggars' quarrel, to be made up over the pot of broth. But it won't be made up, because they can't agree as to the distribution of the broth.

Meanwhile all the chickens of France are going into the broth, and the peasant's pot will see them no more, as in the good old days of Henry IV.!'

As for the absurd story that the Boulangist funds come from America, the only foundation I can find for that seems to be the intimacy, which, I believe, is no longer as close as it was, between General Boulanger, M.

de Rochefort, and a French n.o.bleman of an ancient historic family, who has married a very wealthy American wife, and who has long been known to entertain the most extreme, not to say revolutionary, notions in politics. The honest Boulangists who really hope to see a good government established by putting out M. Carnot and putting in General Boulanger, swell the tide of his supporters, apparently, here as elsewhere in France, because they blindly hope for everything from him which their experience forbids them to hope for from the men actually in power. As one of his most cynical supporters long ago said in Paris, he is 'the grand common sewer of the disgust of France.'

His popularity with the common soldiers is another element to be counted with in estimating the strength of this military French Mahdi.

I have struck up a friends.h.i.+p here at Amiens with an excellent woman who presides over a shop--not one of the _patisseries_ so justly celebrated by Mr. Ruskin--and who is a very good type of the shrewd, sensible French '_pet.i.te bourgeoise_,' such a woman as, I dare say, Jacqueline Robins of St.-Omer was in her own time. She has a son in the army, who is likely soon to be a corporal. '_Dame_, Monsieur,' she said to me, 'if M. Boulanger is not the best General in France, why did they make him Minister of War? You do not know what he did for the soldiers! My son when he gets his stripes is to marry--she is a very nice girl, an only child, do you know? and her father, who is very solid, will put her in her own furniture--and more than that! and they will have their own establishment. They could not have that, you know, but for General Boulanger, who made the new rule about the wives of the sub-officers.

And they used to shave the soldiers--imagine it!--just like prisoners, and such beds as they gave them--it was a horror! Well, all that he changed, and he made the soup fit to eat.'

'The other generals are not very fond of him, you say? _Parbleu!_ that is likely enough! It is like the _conseillers_ here in the city--one of them does well, the others always find something to say behind his back!

And that affair on the frontier! You know, Monsieur, he had all the army in hand--ah, well in hand--a hundred thousand men ready to march; and those rascals of Germans they knew it, and they gave up our man. I am glad we had no war. No! I do not want a war, but, _dame_, one must have teeth, you know, and be ready to show them!'

'You want to see your War Minister made president, then?' I asked.

'President? what does that signify? Chief of the State--Emperor; ah!

those were the good times here in Amiens, Monsieur, not as it is to-day with the eternal debts that M. Dauphin made us a present of. Eh! an old hypocrite that man is! and with these _centimes additionnels_ that never end! And then these water-metres! Eh! that is a pretty invention to make water as dear as wine at Amiens, and yet, G.o.d knows, wine is not too cheap, with the octroi of Amiens! It is worse than at Paris! Call him what you like, Monsieur, _c'est Boulanger qu'il nous faut_--that is to say, we must have a man at Paris. And you will see he is the man; all the mothers of soldiers will tell you that!'

From the point of view of the munic.i.p.al finances, the 'good old times'

of the Empire may well have a charm for the taxpayers of Amiens.

In 1870 Amiens, with 61,063 inhabitants, raised and spent a munic.i.p.al revenue of rather more than a million and a half of francs, or, in round numbers, about 25 francs, or 20 s.h.i.+llings, _per capita_ of the population. A public loan, made in 1854, had been almost wholly paid off, and the city treasury still held 600,000 francs of a loan of 1,600,000 francs made in 1862 for certain public improvements. The munic.i.p.al government cost 372,000 francs, and 180,000 francs were spent on the public schools. Of the munic.i.p.al income, 987,802 francs were derived from four forms of direct taxation, and 770,000 francs from the _octroi_. This gave an average of a little less than 13 francs _per capita_ as the burden of the _octroi_ upon the population.

In 1886 the population had increased to 74,000. The direct taxes brought in 1,184,724 francs, and the _octroi_, 1,498,459, making the average burden of the _octroi per capita_ 20 fr. 20 c., or an increase of about 50 per cent. in the pressure of that form of tax upon the population, as compared with 1870. As the _octroi_ is imposed upon food and beverages of all kinds--fuel, forage, and building materials--this tax is regarded in France as a measure for estimating the general well-being of the inhabitants. Thus measured, there would seem to be a falling off in the general well-being of the people of Amiens since 1883. For, while the pressure _per capita_ of the octroi is much greater than it was in 1870, the actual receipts from the _octroi_ were less with a population of 74,000 in 1886, than they were in 1883. In 1883 the _octroi_ yielded 1,533,140 francs. In 1886 it yielded only 1,498,459 francs. The falling off was in the receipts from beverages, from provisions, from forage, and from building materials. The tariff of the _octroi_ meanwhile has remained substantially without change from 1873 to the present time. It is an expensive tax to collect, the costs of collection in 1886 amounting to 11.85 per cent. of the receipts.

Adding together now the receipts from the direct taxes and the _octroi_ of Amiens in 1886, we have a sum of 2,683,183 francs, or in round numbers about 1,100,000 francs more than in 1870. But while, as I have stated, in 1870 the receipts equalled and balanced the expenses of the munic.i.p.al government, this is no longer the case.

In 1886 Amiens, with an income of 2,683,183 francs, spent 4,162,294 francs, giving an average munic.i.p.al outlay of 56 fr. 10 c. _per capita_ and an excess of expenditure over revenue of no less than 1,479,111 francs, or very nearly the total income and outlay of the city under the Empire. No wonder that the public debt of the department of the Somme, of which Amiens is the capital, seems in 1886 to have amounted to 18,303,496 francs! What inequalities of pressure upon the people of the department this involves may be estimated from the fact that, while there are in the Somme 836 communes, only 404, or less than half of these communes, are authorised to raise money by loans, and one-eighth of them to raise money by _octrois_. Yet we are constantly told that all inequalities and privileges were abolished throughout France by a stroke of the pen in the _annus mirabilis_ 1789![5] The taxation in 20 communes is estimated at 15 centimes, or less; in 87, at from 15 to 30; in 268, at from 31 to 50; in 428, at from 51 to 100; and in 33, at 100 centimes and upwards. These are the communal taxes. To these must be added 51 centimes for the departmental taxes, ordinary and extraordinary; 2 centimes for the land-tax; 19 centimes for the personal tax and taxes on personal property; 18.8 centimes for the doors and windows tax; and 39.6 centimes for licences. For Amiens these fractions taken together mount up to 119-4/10 centimes.

[5] 'Privileges' were, in fact, abolished only by Napoleon in 1804.

I have no wish to weary myself or my readers with figures. But these figures tell the story of the difference between the government of France under the much reviled Empire and under the present government, which is represented to us as the natural and admirable 'evolution' of republican inst.i.tutions in this country. In 1870, as I have stated, the receipts and expenditure of the city of Amiens balanced one another. The city paid its way, and lived up to, not beyond, its means.