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France and the Republic / A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 cover

France and the Republic / A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces During the 'Centennial' Year 1889

Chapter 51: FOOTNOTES
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About This Book

The author records travels through the French provinces during the centennial exposition year and combines on-the-ground reportage with political analysis, tracing how parliamentary usurpation, anticlerical policy, and centralized Parisian power shape republican institutions. He contrasts the weak executive with stronger hereditary or presidential models, examines electioneering, patronage of public employment, and fiscal strains, and recounts episodes that reveal provincial diversity and urban-provincial tensions. The narrative assesses risks to stability, including popular movements and corrupting influences, and contemplates possible outcomes ranging from social reform to a restored constitutional monarchy.




FOOTNOTES

[1] This is the popular nickname of M. de Freycinet.

[2] This is a curious sidelight on English political history. 'Lord Bromley' was obviously Sir William Bromley, M.P., the bitter enemy of Marlborough, who earned the undying hatred of the Duchess by comparing her to Alice Perrers, the mistress of Edward III. In 1705 Harley prevented the election of Bromley as Speaker by re-publishing an account of the 'Grand Toure' written by him, and foisting into it notes intended to show that Bromley was a 'Papist.' Bromley was again a candidate for the same office in 1710, and Marlborough evidently hoped to get from St.-Omer documentary proof of the 'papistry' of his foe. The second Duchess of Hamilton came, I think, of a Catholic family, and may have thought she had a clue to these documents. The intrigue, however, failed, and Bromley was elected Speaker without opposition in November, 1710.

[3] M. Turquet ran in September in the first arrondissement of the Seine against M. Yves Guyot, and there was no election. At the election in October the Government proclaimed M. Yves Guyot elected by a small majority.

[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. Cox, long a prominent democratic member of Congress, because the candidate must consent to an annual 'assessment' on his salary for political purposes. The French Government, I am told, collects these 'contributions' easily, the deputies 'recouping' themselves by patronage.

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

[6] The total revenue derived from the woods and forests of the State in France is set down in the Budget for 1890 at 25,614,300 francs, but the returns are 'lumped' and not given in detail. I am told that the forests around St.-Gobain yield about 400,000 francs of this revenue.

[7] That 'Pierre Piat' was a man of character as well as of substance appears from the fact that he was charged with seeing that his wife, the cousin of a rich and charitable lady of Chauny, Marie Martine de Feure, who died in 1400, should each year receive, under the will of this good dame, 'a large piece of linen cloth whereof to make shrouds for the poor who might die in the hospital of the Hôtel-Dieu at Chauny.' Obviously there was much better stuff for the making of a true republic among these good burghers of Chauny in the fifteenth century than was to be found among the shouting mobs of the Palais-Royal in the eighteenth.

[8] The venom of this old history recurs in the Revolution, poisoning the minds of three Lameths, concerning whom Mr. Carlyle indulges in much quite unnecessary and grotesque emotion.

[9] La Réforme intellectuelle et morale. Ernest Renan. Paris, 1872.

[10] Dieu, Patrie, Liberté. Par Jules Simon. Paris, 1882.

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