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GAMBETTA Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2010 with funding from University of Toronto http://www.archive.org/details/gambetOOdesc ^K,C^ltU»- i^^^-'^i^Q^^èZ^ GAMBETTA BY PAUL DESCHANEL President of the French Republic NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1920 DC • S 587918 y. 7, s<f Pty'nied in Great Brfiain. FOREWORD When M. Louis Battifol asked me for a book on Gambetta, and expressed a desire that its publication should coincide with the signing of Peace, I felt it impossible to decline the honour. I wrote these pages during the rare moments of leisure allowed to me by my duties in the Chamber; and thus, in a certain sense, I lived through the two wars at one and the same time. I disregarded all pane- gyrics, all pamphlets, all legends, whether flattering or not : I sought the truth alone—and no Homage could be greater. I have ignored the enthusiasms and hot-headed passions of our youth, and even the claims of gratitude—for it was Gambetta who launched me on the life of politics. In this book, only one passion is to be found : the passion for France. He loved her ardently. He gave his whole life for her. He will live in history as the personification of the nation's resist- ance in 1870. His ideal was always the regeneration of his country. His memory is for ever associated with the restoration of justice. P. D. CONTENTS PART I BEFORE THE WAR (1838-1870) CHAPTER I ,^„ HIS CHILDHOOD AND EARLY CAREER 3 CHAPTER II THE BAUDIN CASE AND GAMBETTA'S ELECTION AS A DEPUTY . 21 CHAPTER III THE QUARREL WITH PRUSSIA 34 PART II THE WAR (1870-1871) CHAPTER IV NATIONAL DEFENCE 47 CHAPTER V GAMBETTA AT TOURS 66 CHAPTER VI THE DELEGATION OF TOURS AND THE MILITARY OPERATIONS . 78 CHAPTER VII THE END OF THE DELEGATION 99 CHAPTER VIII WAR X OUTRANCE m V»i CONTENTS PART III THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE REPUBLIC (1871-1875) CHAPTER IX THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY 137 CHAPTER X THE NEW REPUBLIC 152 CHAPTER XI THE FALL OF THIERS I MARSHAL MACMAHON . 169 CHAPTER XII GAMBETTA AND THE CONSTITUTION 184 CHAPTER XIII THE SPIRIT OF THE 1875 CONSTITUTION 200 PART IV THE EARLY STAGES OF PARLIAMENTARY REPUBLIC (1876-1882) CHAPTER XIV GAMBETTA'S ideas 211 CHAPTER XV the sixteenth of MAY 220 CHAPTER XVI GAMBETTA AND BISMARCK : THE PRESIDENCY OF THE CHAMBER 246 CHAPTER XVII " " " THE POWER BEHIND THE THRONE I " THE DICTATORSHIP 27I CHAPTER XVIII THE GRAND MINISTRY 297 CHAPTER XIX DEATH 312 Bibliography 331 Index 333 viii PART I BEFORE THE WAR (1838-1870) CHAPTER I HIS CHILDHOOD AND EARLY CAREER Montfaucon and Cahors—Student Life (Jan., 1857-June, 1861)—Intellectual Development—The Young Lawyer (June, 1861) —The Buette Case (July, 1862) —The Young Friend of the Five—An Unelected Deputy (1868). Among the glories of the Gulf of Genoa, on the lowest slope of the Apennines, between Savona and Varazze, a little town looks out upon the sea from the shelter of two headlands. It is Celle in Liguria, the cradle of the Gambettas. From Celle Baptiste Gambetta, Leon's grandfather, sailed to the coast of France with the produce of his own coast, sweet oil, macaroni, vermicelli and pottery; then, from Cette, the Languedoc Canal took him to Toulouse, and he explored the tributaries of the Garonne in search of fresh markets. In 1 81 8 he arrived at Cahors, and, liking the place, he settled down there with his three sons, Paul, Michel and Joseph, and started a crockery and grocery business in the Place du Marché. In 1824 the statesman's father, Joseph, in accord- ance with the custom in such families, made a voyage to Chili as a ten-year-old cabin-boy, in a sailing-vessel from the Genoese Riviera : a vessel that carried as passengers—so it is said—Garibaldi and the priest Mastai, afterwards Pope Pius IX. In his old age Baptiste returned to Celle to die, taking with him his eldest son and leaving the two others at Cahors. When their success in business was assured they began to trade independently. Joseph opened the Genoese Bazaar in the Place de la Cathédrale, and on July 25, 1837, at the age of twenty-three, married a girl of twenty-two named Marie Magdeleine Massabie, the daughter of a chemist 3 B i GAMBETTA at Molières, in Tarn-et-Garonne. Of this marriage was born, on April 2, 1838, on the second storey of a house in the Rue du Lycée, the future Minister of National Defence. Genoese, Gascon and Cahorsin—such was Gambetta. Genoa gave him adaptability, charm and talent; Gascony gave him dash, daring and natural eloquence ; Cahors gave him his tenacious will. The Genoese Riviera evokes visions of stormy achievement, of great lives of adventure, of Columbus, Sixtus IV., Julius II., Mazzini, Garibaldi; Cahors recalls scenes of bitter struggle and fierce, tenacious resis- tance to besieging foes; thus the orator's eloquence at times was like Bessières or Murat charging the enemy. There was in him something akin to those practical doges who succeeded in founding the firmest of governments amid the distractions of civil strife. The people of the Ligurian coast have deeper emotions, more violent and unbridled desires, and more im- perious wills than ours. It was natural that he should dare greatly, that he should seize Fate as she passed and force her to follow^ him. When he was four years old his father placed him in the Petits-Carmes, at Cahors. When he was eight his life was endangered by an internal complaint that made him ill for a month. He was believed to be dying : the same malady troubled him all his life, and finally killed him at the height of his powers, both mental and physical. His next school was the little college at Montfaucon. At the age of ten he " " was a republican, writing to his father : Vive Cavaignac ! {sic)y " Down with Bonaparte! " A year later an accident cost him his right eye. During the holidays he was in the habit of visiting one of his father's neighbours, a cutler by trade. One day a workman was drilling a hole in a knife- handle of horn. The child, in his anxiety to watch the w^ork at close quarters, hid beneath the bench, then suddenly sprang out from his hiding-place. At the same instant the drill passed beyond the edge of the bench and struck the eye of the boy, who fainted away, and was drenched with blood. When he was fourteen he entered the Lycée at Cahors. His professor of rhetoric, M. Arnault, a man well versed in 4 HIS CHILDHOOD AND EARLY CAREER the humanities, divined his abilities. A speech that pur- ported to be addressed by Etienne Marcel to the States- General of 1356, but was signed Léon Gambetta, went the round of the Lycée. He already loved Rabelais. He knew the Olynthiennes by heart, and never forgot them ; and seven years later, when in the country with Clément Laurier, the young lawyer one evening recited a speech of Demosthenes with an imaginative fervour that won the admiration of Villemain. At the age of eighteen he was admitted to the degree of Bachelor. The boy had long been dreaming of Italy, of Celle in Liguria; and his father took him there as a reward. His beautiful letters to his mother during these first travels were full of enthusiasm. He w^rote of Montpellier, Lunel, Aigues-Mortes : "At Aigues-Mortes I saw the sea for the first time ; it is much the most magnificent sight among the finest that—Nature gives us"; of Nîmes and its arenas; of Marseilles " Marseilles is at our feet, and in the distance is Corsica, an enchanting and intoxicating picture that gives one a glimpse of the wonders of Italy"; of Italy itself; of Nice, where he was fated to lie in his last sleep, in ground that was no longer Italian, but French ; and of the splendour of the Genoese Riviera, where every turn of the Corniche reveals new beauties. In every drop of his blood was a passionate love for that Latin sea, whose son indeed he was. At last he came to Celle and its pretty late-Renaissance church, with the rare marbles, and the pictures by Raphael's beloved pupil, Perino del Vaga, and the rich embroideries given by the Queen of Naples. Here he found his grand- father, with " the most adorable old head anyone ever saw, and magnificent hair, soft as that of a boy but whiter than snow, and a skin whiter than his hair, and a smile on his little pink lips, and his whole face lit up by a pair of still brilliant little black eyes"; and here, too, were friends, sailors and fishermen, honest, serious folk, inured to hard work, " with something in them still of the rocks and mountains," as Dante said. Here, in a narrow, climbing street, a commemorative tablet shows the simple house with a two-windowed frontage, 5 GAMBETTA where Joseph was born when imperial France encroached on Lombardy. There I once saw Gambetta's cousin, Angelina Ghersi, a net-maker, whose mother was Joseph's sister : a true Gambetta, with the same profile, the same colouring, the same vivid, alert, magnetic glance, the same fire in eye and speech, despite her seventy-seven years. She told me secrets. " When Léon was here," she said, " he lived on the shore. He wanted to marry my sister, who was better-looking than I, but his father w-as against it because she had no dowry." The Saracen origin of these people is evident.

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