France and the Republic: A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces During the 'Centennial' Year 1889Hurlbert, William Henry
History
France and the Republic: A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces During the 'Centennial' Year 1889
Hurlbert, William Henry
France -- Description and travel; France -- Politics and government -- 1870-1940; Republicanism -- France
Sooner or later this tragi-comedy must end. It concerns Europe and the
world that it should end sooner rather than later, and that it should
end with a pacific restoration of France to her proper place in the
family of European States. Surely the most imperious necessity of the
immediate future in Europe is a general disarmament. No French Republic
can possibly propose or accept such a disarmament. No French Empire even
could easily propose or accept such a disarmament. For the Republic and
the Empire are jointly though not equally responsible for the
humiliations and the disasters of the great Franco-German War. The
historic French monarchy, restored through a revision of the existing
Constitution by the deliberate will of the French people, might propose
such a disarmament with a moral certainty that it would be accepted.
Would not England necessarily stand by France in such a proposal? And is
it not clear that the refusal of Central Europe to accept such a
disarmament so proposed and supported would make that alliance with the
Russian Empire, which is impossible to a French republic, both easy and
natural with a French monarchy?
I should have visited France to small purpose if I could suppose that
such considerations as this will much affect the masses of the French
people. Their present Minister of Public Instruction, M. Fallieres, gave
his measure of their average enlightenment on such points when he
actually called upon the electors of the Lot-et-Garonne in September to
vote against M. Cornelis Henry de Witt because a monarchical restoration
would 'be followed by a revival of the _droits des Seigneurs_, and--by a
Cossack invasion!'
But there are many men in France alive to such considerations as this,
and these men have many ways of reaching and influencing the political
action of the masses of their countrymen.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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