A Royalist Fiasco

PROFESSOR WILL was introduced by Major W. James Baxter, M.C., President.

MAJOR BAXTER: Today is a day of special significance to one of our head table guests. I refer to the Honourable Sir William Hearst, who is seventy years old today. (Applause.) I will take a few minutes of your time in paying tribute to Sir William on your behalf. Sir William has been long and actively identified with public life in Canada. Nat only had he given unstintedly of himself in public service and the welfare of this country but during the War his two sans both experienced overseas service. We remember him far his leadership of the Province during those days of trial, from 1914 to 1918 and many of us here remember the leadership he gave the Club during the year he was President ire 1922.

So, I ask you all to join in extending to Sir William our best wishes. He is one of Ontario's finest sans and we wish him "Many Happy Returns of the Day."

(Three lusty cheers and a tiger were given at this juncture for Sir William.)

The two great nations which are bound to Canada by ties of kinship and sentiment are England and France, and just now the latter country has teen occupying a lot of the front pages of our newspapers. And because she is experiencing, as other nations have experienced, as period of internal dissension, it is fitting that we have as our guest of honour a man who can tell us something of the causes underlying the present disturbances.

The presence of Professor Will here today is indeed gratifying on two counts: One, because the sentiment for world peace is usually furthered by understanding of and sympathy with other nations arid Professor Will is well equipped to interpret the French nation to us. He is a close student of French history, he has written much on the subject and he has spent some twenty years in France.

The second is that Professor Will has made the study of France and the French people his life work. He is a three generation Canadian and is proud of it. He is the second Canadian who has been before the Club this year who has the mind and the outlook of the pure cosmopolitan, which produces not narrow nationalism but broad and sympathetic citizens of the world.

I have much pleasure in introducing to you Professor Will.

PROFESSOR J. S. WILL: Major Baxter and Members of the Empire Club: It is a real pleasure and a real honour to be here today. But if I were to be quite frank I should say that my sense of the honour done me outweighs considerably my sense of pleasure in the occasion, and to gain your indulgence for such a statement I need do no more than recall to you the terms of your President's opening remarks. I hope however, to find some pleasure in talking to you about a country in which my interest has continued unabated far more than a quarter of a century. But the responsibility laid upon the formal or the informal interpreter of a great nation at any moment in its history--how much mare in times of crisis--is not to be assumed lightly and the thought that the imperfect information of yesterday may be belied by the events of tomorrow rubs me of much of the satisfaction I felt in accepting your kind invitation. I am reassured, however, by the reflection that I am not expected to look into the future and vaticinate. You ask me only to throw what light I can upon the events of the past week in Paris. Even that is not an easy matter. The actions of those we think we know best are often incomprehensible to us as ours to them, while their thoughts are almost completely hidden from us. Therefore, to the end that we may the better understand each other, we erect laborious codes and conventions and laws as frames for our conduct. Then we fill in the intervening spaces with sentiment. We say: 'We do not understand him but he's a good fellow.' Our conventions carry such prestige that zany one who disregards them even in the slightest degree is viewed with mistrust, perhaps with suspicion and a very special effort is needed to understand him. The artist is often in this case and that, too, is why it is so difficult to understand other nations, particularly older nations, especially if they differ from us in blood and language. Their ways are not our ways. But we are anxious, more and more anxious to understand, and we are willing to make the effort. That greater desire to understand other nations is one of the most significant signs of an enlarging Canadian mind I think. It is, perhaps, one of the few good results of the War and one of the many good results of what is generally called the Depression but what I call the return to normal.

We, as Britishers, have been friends and enemies of the French off and on for more thaw a thousand years. We have fought against them in many wars. We have fought side by side with them in almost as many. We have had constant political and economic affiliations with them and are linked with them more profoundly, if not by sentiment, then by ties of thought and civilization than with any other people. As Canadians we are bound to them as to a second Motherland, and I fancy mast of you agree with your President when he says that, at bottom" the safety of the world and especially the future of civilization depend as much at least upon good relations between the French and English races as capon any other element in the modern world. It is wise that we should understand our enemies, it is gracious to try to' understand our friends.

The events of the past ten days in Paris have certainly been very disturbing. But I am constrained to say that we should have peen less troubled if our newspapers had given us the help we have a right to expect from theme. If we ask anything from our newspapers it is facts. We do not ask in such matters as these for the emotions. Why should our minds be clouded and our fears excited by lurid exaggerations when our judgment might be clarified and our alarm appeased by the enlargement of our information through a simple statement of the facts? When a newspaper tells me that "the streets of Paris are drenched in blood' and that 'the famous prisons of the Bastille are rapidly filling with prisoners', even if I do not know that they are writing arrant nonsense in the latter case I do suspect great exaggeration in the former and am put on my guard against the whole report. As an average well-informed man, however, I know that "the famous prisons of the Bastille" were destroyed stone by stone in 1790 so that nothing remained except a line of bricks in the pavement to mark their former emplacement and here and there a few cairns to preserve some of the very stares of the fortress. As for the phrase 'drenched in blood' it is the same phrase that is used when, in some cities not so far away, gangsters move along the street spraying the crowd with bullets and leaving, if not quite so many wounded, then, probably, as many dead or almost as many dead as have been killed in the immediate Parisian outbreak. In any cease I am inclined to think that better service might be rendered the public than by making a hysterical appeal to the savage emotions. For certainly this is riot reporting. Just as certainly it is not news. Such abuse of privilege is contrary to the best traditions of journalism and has led in certain countries very recently to the revival of rigid censorship voluntarily accepted by the Press itself in the interests of public morals.

Sifting and correcting as far as possible the news from gall available sources the situation remains, nevertheless, tense and disquieting, but disquieting only in so far as it is a question of the new government really understanding what the people demand, and having the energy to carry out fearlessly a fully national policy in spite of the opposition of sections and parties. Paris, as usual, has become the voice of the people crying out for a housecleaning. Apparently the outbreak has been limited to the city. There tens of thousands of people, the latest estimates are eighty or one hundred thousand, of organized and unorganized bodies, congregated in the great Square and Avenues about the Chamber of Deputies, the House being in session. There was violence and some bloodshed.

Many suggestions have been made to account for this unwonted disturbance. Some native French residing abroad, wishing to apologize for what has happened, put the blame far it on foreigners living in Paris. This is entirely improbable. France is indeed a great meltingpot; the greatest of them. Paris is the most popular of all homes for exiles. In addition to that, let me point out that, to replace her losses in workingmen after the War France imported three million workers from other countries. But who ever heard of an uprising of foreigners in France? Individual aliens may try to foment trouble but there is .no record of trouble with foreigners en masse. Nor can unemployment be at the root of the trouble. There were protests all over the country last year when the number of unemployed reached the unheard of total of about two hundred and fifty thousand. The Frenchman is a worker and, let me point out, during the fourteen years following the War the total number of unemployed was not as large as for any one year in Toronto during that period. The French worker is impatient of idleness and does not take willingly to relief but there is no reason for believing that the majority of the French unemployed found themselves suddenly in the streets of the Capital marching on the Chamber of Deputies. Indeed there is no reason at all far thinking that this was a demonstration by the workless.

No. We must look elsewhere far the roots of this demonstration. Economic conditions have something to do with it undoubtedly. Taxes are an always menacing burden in a country in which the life of the small investor has been made so precarious as in France in the last twenty years. Increasing cuts for the wage-earner and the salaried man have reduced their livelihood to a really perilous minimum undreamt of by us. Literally, we, on this continent, have, by comparison no idea of economy. Innumerable families of four or five persons of the muddle class in France contrive to live, educate their children and make a decent appearance on thirty-five dollars a month, or even less. But no revolution ever took place in this country of thrift on the mere basis of a difficulty in malting ends meet. The events of the past week are due to other than these alleged causes. This was not a case of just mob violence. We shall find, I thinly, that it was the more or less organized expression of a state of mind increasingly characteristic of our times, namely exasperation over the way so-called liberal institutions are working. Legislatures tend to think that they exist far themselves. Party squabbles take precedence over the country's business. A widespread materialism has deadened a nice sense of integrity in the minds of many public men leading them to am; intolerable confusion of public and private interest.

In the last two years there have been eight changes of Cabinet in the French House which, even with their system, may be considered excessive. Cabinet changing in France means simply that the House refuses to make itself the rubber stamp of a party and insists on its powers and rights of direction. What these too frequent changes meant was that government had become the victim of party interests and that the extreme Socialist wring was powerful enough to paralyze public business because its votes were indispensable to the great RadicalSocialist or Liberal party, which is the backbone of the Republican government, and would not be given except on the basis of a quid pro quo. In addition to this flouting of the interests of the State the House had become involved during the last seven or eight years in a seemingly endless series of financial scandals. Now French public life is not more corrupt than any other, but the chances of the State being involved in such matters are perhaps somewhat more numerous than ordinary because it touches private interests at a greater number of points, as, for example, in the matter of the supervision by the House of house rentals and of an age-old system of pawnshops. In any case the Stavisky scandal of which we have all been reading and which is probably an Administration and Police case not involving the House at all directly, this case came as an exasperating climax to the Hanau affair, the Oustric affair, the Airpost affair, and others. Each one of these has meant loss aced even ruin to many small investors. Add to this the constantly increasing cost of living, the harassing question of war debts, and the failure to balance the budget and you have nearly all the required elements of an explosion.

We, too, have many of these elements present with us at times but we do not explode. What do we do? Haw do we declare our continued impatience with government. On the whole we talk and wait dumbly, exasperated but helpless. Or we may appoint a Commission which puts the figures down on a slate, wipes them off again and lets matters proceed as before. We promise ourselves a great revenge at the next elections. By the time the next election comes around we have forgotten everything and we vote piously and gloriously for the grand old party of our fathers. With us two wrongs may always make a right in political matters.

The French do always another way. The French explode.

Whether their government were monarchical or democratic the French have always found a way of telling it that the nation calls the tune. The events of the last week are not a new phenomenon in their history. They are in the line of an age-old tradition. This is as true of the ninth century as of the seventeenth and of, the nineteenth. In this way far back in the eighth century the Carolingian dynasty gave way to the Capetian and in the same way in 1789 the Capetian gave way to a Republic. The statue of Etienne Marcel at the City Hall in Paris recalls one of the many instances of the resistance of the city to corrupt administration and it was under one of the most autocratic and greatest of monarchs, Louis XIV, that the Parisian earned the distinctive epithet of 'frondeur' to describe his quickness to resent any encroachment on the part of authority upon his civil rights and liberties. Indeed the brilliance of that great monarch's reign began to lose its lustre only when he himself began to lose touch with that element in French character which identifies its own interest with the dignity and traditions of the State. This obtuseness of the Bourbons reawakened eventually in the Frenchman his ancient individualism and spirit of independence. In 1789, after several abortive attempts in the preceding one hundred and seventy-five years, his action was irresistible and excessive. That it has not been lost since was drown in 1830, in 1848,, in 1871 and again the other day.

France has representative institutions but it never for gets that they are first and foremost representative. Parliament does net fit for its own private interest and glorification, nor are Cabinets autonomous and autocratic bodies intended to reduce the character of the House toy that of a party machine or a rubber stamp. Ministers are named to do the will of the House and when they show themselves unable or unwilling to do so the House dismisses them. Similarly the House represents the people and when it seems to forget that fact too flagrantly the people do not always hesitate to recall it to a sense of its functions without waiting for the next elections. The people did not always wait for kings to die. Why should they wait for the dissolution of that hydra-headed monster called an elected chamber?

There is a certain evident flexibility here which corresponds plainly to the temper of a free people. The Cabinet is the servant of the House. The House does not wait far a misguided set of ministers to die; it kills them as a Cabinet. The House is not sacrosanct, it is the servant of the people. The people reserve the right to serve notice at any time on a blind and recalcitrant House. The dangers of such a conception and organization lie in the character of the people. Its strength lies there also and this strength lies in features of the French race which I think are fundamental in the development of its life and of enormous importance in the understanding of its actions. These features are the intense cultivation of freedom in the individual life and the success with which the sense of the freedom of the individual is combined with devotion to the idea of the nation. Usually, I think, the intensification of national life tends to be accompanied by a greater mechanization of the individual. The mass idea predominates and is intolerant of the individual. This is not true of the French. The great characteristic of their race, and it is this that makes life so liveable among them, is the way it has conciliated the individual and the social ideas, the success with which it has combined the essential liberty of the individual in everyday life with the closeness of organization necessary to a highly civilized society and to efficient national performance, so that the most closely knit social organization of modern times has not menaced, much less submerged the capacity of the individual for full living but has rather enhanced that capacity. The creation and maintenance of this balance between the individual and society is perhaps the supreme French achievement.

Will you allow me to illustrate this point far you by recalling simple and well-known features of French life. Among the first things to strike the traveller in that country is the way the small or the average holds up its head against the large. Consider the size of its cities. In a country of more than forty million inhabitants there are only two cities of more than a million and only four or five of say about five hundred thousand. It ,is a country of small farmers, four million of whom possess less than twenty-five acres each" of small merchants, of small manufacturers and of small investors. The whale educational system is based not on the idea of mass but on the idea of individual diversity of talent and the elaboration of means for developing that diversity. The stamps on your letters from France are frequently obliterated by the words 'Sauvez les elites' and the State provides for the educational future of every child that shows special ability o-r aptitudes. An English manufacturer in France told me that his greatest difficulty was to find French workmen who would refrain from putting the individual touch into their product. Ideas must be formulated by an individual and anything that mechanizes life to such an extent that the possible operation of free intelligence is obstructed is definitely antipathetic to the French mind.

On the other hand the Frenchman subordinates the individual very definitely to certain wider concerns. You will rarely hear him talk with anything but amusement about the tallest building, the biggest ship, the largest store, the most populous city. He has other standards entirely, standards of human and average perfection. The individual is perfected in society, not outside of it. The individual monster is a grotesque and dangerous and therefore undesirable ambition. Two ideas are a veritable cult for him: the family and the nation. He looks Ripon these as the centre and the circumference of the social organism. His whole political, educational and economic system is based upon their maintenance and anything interfering with their sanctity is anathema. Enlargement along the line of the individual, the family, the nation, may seem like an overemphasis of the individual but, in any case, it is an authentically human line of development and leads to universal human sympathy more naturally than through a cult of vague abstractions.

The importance of these features in the life of the nation arid the effort to maintain a balance among them is at the bottom of a great deal that happens in France and that would happen in some other countries where the basis of conduct is more definitely merely economic. The cultivation of the individual implies a respect for and the cultivation of feeling, and the French remain a race in which the sensibilities are as tender as those of a child. Social effort is an effort of the intelligence. The harmonious operation of the two means that here you have the most artistic of peoples and the most fertile in ideas. The shock between feeling and ideas forms the very basis of drama and here you have a race which dramatizes itself as simply and naively as the child. It is not merely dramatic by nature but, as well, by nurture and tradition. France was a monarchy for fourteen hundred years arid I do not need to prove that a monarchical form of government is a dramatic form. A culture and a tradition of that duration are not easily effaced. The French still resort to ways which are colorful and dramatic in the expression of their sorrows as of their joys and angers.

The monarchical idea still persists but merely as an idea. There seems to be no prospect whatever of a return to monarchical institutions, less now than ever as we shall see. Nevertheless there is a Royalist party in the House. Its numbers are steadily decreasing but it remains an exceedingly lively party and acts as an excellent watch-dog. A definite royalist political organization has existed since 1899. It was reconstructed in 1908 and greatly strengthened by the foundation of a powerful newspaper. Since that time the royalists have remained the definite spearhead of hostility to Republican ideas and institutions. They make no bones about their programme. They proclaim it upon the housetops. Stated simply their doctrine would sound something like this: All the political evils of modern life are due to universal suffrage. The Republican; regime is government by mediocrities and is bound to be incompetent and corrupt. . Restore their monarchy and the vulgarity, the rottenness of public life will be swept away. Because of this rottenness the nation is in a state of constant agitation. Such is briefly the attitude of the royalists. Their plan of action is no secret either. It is to take advantage of the constantly recurring crisis in this cesspool of democracy, or to provoke a crisis in order to bring about a change of regime. Now this is a very radical policy and, in principle though not in purpose, is hardly distinguishable from one 'catastrophic revolution of the communists. In fact as often in politics, the two extreme parties are found at time fighting side by side. This is exactly what occurred sporadically in ,, January last when the Stavisky scandal, crowning other;recent financial disasters, seemed to furnish one of the ,crises far which the Royalists yearn. These two parties made dramatic sorties into the streets in the hope of embarrassing the administration. This is what was going on when ten days ago the people, or at least certain sections of the community, decided to take a hand, and the demonstration assumed vast and grave proportions. The people of Paris had begun to move.

Now if you will recall the events of last week you will notice that they possess certain distinctive features. They appear to have moved in two moments and to have involved two special elements. Of these two moments the first, on Tuesday, seems, at first glance, to have been one homogeneous outbreak in the Place de la Concorde and the avenues leading into it. If you look closer you observe that it is not homogeneous. There is a double face to the situation. You are forced to reflect that if lithe tens of thousands of people in the crowd had been an unruly mob there would have been much more terrible happenings than anything suggested in the most factual reports. In fact the violence seem to have been. very definitely confined to small bands, probably of Royalists. Communists and hoodlums, who burned buses and newspaper stands, hurled paving stones and tether missiles, while in the background vast masses of citizens marched in processions of protest. It was probably the presence of these masses of serious but saber citizens that helped, by their self-restraint to keep the disorder from spreading, and turned the Royalist and hoodlum demonstration into a fiasco. In the presence and calm of this unarmed and sober mass we may see, I think, not merely a warning to the Chamber but also to fascistic and highhanded methods of every stripe. That is to say here was the average citizen making known to everybody concerned his interest in and apposition to the way the business of the country was being handled. One of the little outings organized by the Royalists and their Camelots du roi gave Mr. Average Citizen, the opportunity of disc playing openly his disapproval of the House and of all methods in the House or out which tended to discredit normal solutions in the democratic tradition.

I have tried to describe the first moment and the elements involved as I see them in imperfect reports. This moment turned out tragically. Police and citizens came into collision. Shots were exchanged. There were dead and wounded. What I find extraordinary here is that the police were forced to fire. This is not the habit of the French police. They did not fire during the much larger Boulangist demonstrations of 1888 and 1889, nor during the Dreyfus disturbances of a few years later. What happened in this instance one care only conjecture but any sane man must conclude that the police did not fire without great provocation.

Last Sunday night and Monday a general strike was called to last from one minute to twenty-four hours according to the mature of the service involved. This constitutes the second moment and is the, protest of organized labour. Compared with the strike of 19? 1, involving widespread sabotage, this was a dignified but impressive warning and by its very dignity measures the distance that Labour has covered toward self-control during the last twenty years.

In general outline, Gentlemen, such is the farm, the direction and the significance of the events of this week in Paris so disturbing to all of us. A definite, widespread protest has been made against the cynicism of the Chamber, on the one hand, and against nonconstitutional methods and the other, a warning has been given to all and sundry that the nation is democratic, and that Its interests are paramount over all parties and sectional arrangements. I feel sure that the mass demonstrations of Tuesday were under the direction of law-laving organizations but I do not know which. Certainly they were such as could manifestly claim to be representative.

What are the results? Outwardly they seem banal dough. Another cabinet has fallen.. But it has fallen through the reassertion of moral values. A terrible warning has been given and taken. To insure the validation of these values the French nation has gone in search of a man whose career is as complete a guarantee as it is possible to find. This is one of the advantages of the French system. It is not the party in power that selects the President of the Council, whom we would call the Premier, but the President of the Republic. They have turned to an older statesman. In 1871 they turned to the aged Thiers who consolidated the Republic. In 1917 to the veteran Clemenceau. In 1926 to Poincare, a farmer premier and President. In 1934 they have turned to Doumergue another former President, like the others over seventy years of age, with fatty years of political integrity behind him, a Protestant and a farmer's son. Strong measures will be needed. Strong measures will be taken. And then this country of many, sacrifices will make still more. Should Doumergue and his national cabinet fail? . . . But the peril is too great. They cannot fail.

Disturbances in France have usually had reverberations the world over. France has been a sort of political barometer. The movements of 1830 and of 1848 caused sympathetic movements throughout Europe, including Britain. On those occasions the appeal was to free institutions, however" while on this occasion the warning is directed against political turpitude. The clash with the Socialists in Austria, about which certain newspapers write again with grotesque exaggeration, is not related in any way to the French call for a housecleaning.

And now my time is spent. Let me conclude by saying that the sum of my argument is simply this: The outbreak in Paris wears to me the traditional aspect of a warning to the government that it exists by the people and far the people, not for individual politicians nor far parties, that the country's internal policy in all its relations must be seriously readjusted and that the machinery of the State, whether political, judicial or administrative must be purified, that the house must be cleaned. The capacity of the French people to say that sort of thing directly to governments was once embodied in a remarkable person and in a unique and incredible adventure. A young peasant girl from Lorraine, driven to action by the woes of her country, convinced its rulers of her divine mission, rallied it from its moral paralysis' infused her own high energy into its armies, drove back the enemy and restored the monarch to his throne. That was Joan of Arc who has became the symbol of her country, the voice of her people finding its why straight past parties to the very centre of government. If democracies are able to recreate moral values in this way hope is not dead.

The final dramatic movement in this tragedy will be the burial of the dead amid a nation's tears with that extraordinary pomp which the French devote to such matters, and, again, you will behold the demonstration of the French mind in operation, the emotions reacting upon the intelligence in an effect to satisfy the exigencies of both mind and heart.