The Minister of War of the radicals who had triumphed was General André, a narrow, bigoted doctrinaire. The force behind the evil work of this man can be hardly realized by those who are unfamiliar with the passion with which the French invest the idea. There are times when the French, the most brilliant people in the world as a nation, seem to lack mental brakes--when the idea so obsesses them, that they become fanatics,--not the emotional, English type of fanatic, but a cold, hard-headed, intellectual Latin type. The radical Frenchman says, "Are the Gospels true?" "Presumably no, according to modern science and historical research." "Then away with everything founded on the Gospels," he replies; and begins a cold-blooded, highly intellectual campaign of destruction. Thus it is that the average French church or public building of any antiquity, whether it be in Paris or in an obscure village, has been so often mutilated that it is only a shadow of itself. France is strewn with wrecks of buildings embodying disputed ideas. And worst of all, these buildings were rarely sacked by a mob; the revolutionary commune, in many cases, paying laborers to smash windows and destroy sculpture at so much a day. André believed it his mission to extirpate all conservatism, whether Catholic or not, from the army. In a few short months, by a campaign of delation and espionage, he had completely disorganized the army, the only really national institution left in France. Officers of standing, suspected of any reactionary political tendency, were discharged by the thousand; and officers against whom no charge could be brought were refused ammunition, even though they were stationed at a ticklish point on the frontier. At the same time a like disorganization was taking place in the navy, the evil genius of the Marine being the Minister Camille Pelletan. Those who saw, in 1912, the ceremonies attendant on the deposition of the bones of Jean Jacques Rousseau in the Pantheon were sick at heart. Never had the Government of France sunk so low. The Royalists shouted, the extreme radicals hooted, and when the carriage of Fallières passed, it was seen that humorists had somehow succeeded in writing jocose inscriptions on the presidential carriage. The head of the French nation, a short, pudgy man, the incarnation of pontifying mediocrity, went by with an expression on his face like that of a terrified, elderly, pink rabbit. The bescrawled carriage and its humiliated occupant passed by to an accompaniment of jeering. Everybody--parties and populace--was jeering. The scene was disgusting.