which his ambition directed him at a very early stage in his career. English society has undergone metamorphosis since eighty years ago, and the conditions of success in political adventure are not what they were. Whether the new phase is in any sense an improvement upon the old one remains to be seen. The possibilities of change are not exhausted. CHAPTER IX THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR AND THE COMMUNE OF PARIS Son aigle est resté dans la poudre, P. J. BERANGER, Le Vieux Drapeau (1820). THE phase of British foreign policy represented by Palmerston closed abruptly with his death in 1865. A rather widely spread contemporary view was that the policy of Palmerston involved too much interference in the political affairs of the continent of Europe on the part of Great Britain, and that a respite in which domestic affairs should occupy a larger share of public attention was highly advisable. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, an anonymous article upon the war appeared in the Quarterly Review. When Gladstone published his Gleanings of Past Years, he acknowledged that he had written this article by publishing it in his collection of papers on foreign affairs. He stated in the article that when Prussia was exerting the pressure upon Denmark which led to the conquest of Schleswig-Holstein, Palmerston had urged Napoleon III. to co-operate with England in protesting, and in armed intervention if that should be necessary. Napoleon, apparently on the ground of friendship with Austria, refused to undertake an enterprise against Prussia and Austria combined. Undoubtedly this course of events had been foreseen by Bismarck. To invite the co-operation of Austria was to silence both France and England; and the alliance with Austria might afterwards be dissolved. The victorious campaign ending with Sadowa actually dissolved it. France refrained from intervening between Prussia and her victim; and thus a second time prepared the way for her own débâcle. After the defeat of Denmark, a policy of armed intervention in European affairs on the part of Great Britain became almost impossible. She had on the Continent no effective ally. There was as yet no United Italy; there were murmurings of revolution in France and the Second Empire was already showing symptoms of dissolution. It is doubtful if Palmerston would have been supported by British public opinion in an AngloFrench attack upon Prussia in 1864. The question of the Duchies was too complicated. The conduct of the Danes was by no means susceptible of unqualified approval. The interest of Great Britain was not direct or obvious. Yet the thesis might be maintained that Palmerston was right, that his political instinct was sound, and that the ambitions of Prussia ought to have been checked then, rather than at a later stage, when owing to her conquests Prussia became almost invincible. When these moments passed without intervention, and when Prussia gained the prestige resulting from two brief and skilful campaigns, the external situation as well as the internal mood of Great Britain rendered for the future intervention under any circumstances very difficult. Thus when Prussia struck and crippled France in 1870, Great Britain stood aside, although while the controversy was still in its diplomatic stage Lord Granville, who was then Foreign Minister, did everything in his power to prevent a conflict by persuading Prussia to secure the withdrawal of the Hohenzollern candidature for the crown of Spain, as well as later when the question of guarantees was advanced by Napoleon III. and Grammont. When war became inevitable, partly through the fatuous indecision of Napoleon and partly through the conduct of Bismarck, the only action Great Britain permitted herself to take was the safeguarding of Belgium, thus forcing Prussia and her German allies to attack France through Alsace and Lorraine. Even had he desired to do so, it is wholly unlikely that Gladstone could have created such a state of feeling in Great Britain as would have enabled him to go to the rescue of France at that time. The Second Empire was not popular in Great Britain. There was a not inconsiderable body of opinion favourable to France and the French people, but the Emperor was looked upon as somewhat of a charlatan. Indeed, his real capacity for international politics was probably unduly undervalued. There should also be taken into account the fact, not then widely known, that behind the Emperor there lurked a revolutionary movement which might gain overwhelming force at a critical moment. 1 Cf., e.g., Correspondence, etc., France, 1870 (Blue Books Nos. 28 and 30). While the actual steps which led to war were taken on the one hand by Napoleon in insisting upon guarantees and on the other by Bismarck in his alteration of the Ems dispatch (avowed by himself with cynical candour) as well as by his manipulation of Prussian public opinion through the press, the real motive power which made for war lay in the hands of the Prussian and French people respectively. Even had either Government desired to draw back in the fina. stage of the diplomatic controversy, neither people would have permitted withdrawal. Their blood was up. If such a revolution had occurred while British troops were in France for the purpose of assisting that country in its defence, they might have found their own position seriously compromised. I do not know whether such a contingency presented itself to the minds of our diplomatists and statesmen or not; but if it did not, it ought to have done so. I was not personally aware of the details of this revolutionary movement while it was in progress, but I became aware of some of them shortly after the close of the Franco-Prussian War. As these may be new to some people, I venture to include them in this sketch. In the late sixties there were still alive many who had taken part in the revolutionary movements of 1848; there were even some survivors of the Revolution of 1830. It cannot be said that any great influence was exercised by these "old men" of the Revolution. Louis Blanc, for example, who was one of these "old men," was actively engaged in conspirative movements in Paris in 1866-70; but his activities were fruitless. Younger and more energetic elements quietly brought his efforts to nought. By way of illustration I may narrate a story which was told to me some time in the seventies by one of my French revolutionary friends. Early in 1870 Louis Blanc had secured a small supply of pistols from London, which he designed to distribute by a simple plan. The pistols were to be carried in canvas bags by revolutionists, who were to sit on public seats on the boulevards. When they rose to leave, they were to abandon the bags they carried, and these bags were to be appropriated by confederates, who in this way would secure their supply of arms. It soon became known that in almost every case the confederates failed to connect with one another, and that the bags containing the small-arms had disappeared. The fact was that the young men of the Revolution had made up their minds that the moment for an outbreak had not arrived and had determined to save the "old men" from the consequences of their precipitate and clumsily executed plots. They therefore appropriated the arms and put them out of harm's way. But the young men were by no means idle. They were nearly all professional men-lawyers, engineers, teachers, and the like-and they were also in general addicted to intellectual pursuits apart from their professional interests. These pursuits led them to the study of the very numerous French writers upon social philosophy, and particularly of Fourier. In the late sixties there were in Paris a large About the same time the influence of Fourier upon the Russian revolutionary movement was very important. number of Fourier Clubs in which social questions were discussed chiefly from Fourier's point of view. In one of his works Fourier draws an elaborate analogy between the relation to one another of elements of human character and the relation to one another of numbers. Thus he attaches a special value to numbers-one is the symbol of individuality, two society, three power, and so on. The relation of the important elements of character is thus expressible in ratios. In these Fourier Clubs it became customary to speak, partly in genuine adherence to this quasi-mathematico-social formula and partly in a vein of delicate humour, of the ratios of individual members. Thus one of my friends, who was a member of a club of this kind, told me that he was in the habit of escorting from the club to her home a lady who was the wife of another member of the same club. Although both husband and wife met frequently at meetings of the club, they did not usually meet otherwise; in fact, they lived apart. My friend, who was on equally good terms with both, ventured to suggest to the husband that perhaps he might prefer to escort his wife rather than leave this duty to another. "Why?" said the husband. "Do you not find her a very charming woman? It is not possible that she bores you." "I find her most charming," was the answer, "and it is precisely this that makes me wonder why you do not find her society so agreeable that you should wish to escort her as you have every title to do." "Ah!" said the husband. "My wife's ratio is as 7 to 11 and mine as 5 to 9." While Fourier's idea of housing social groups in phalanstères did not have many adherents, although it had some, his general view of communism was somewhat widely accepted by the French intellectual groups. This attitude on the part of these intellectual groups was undoubtedly due to reaction against bureaucratic centralisation and incompetence and the banal commercialism which had developed throughout France under the Second Empire, as well as to the decay of art which permitted and promoted the Haussmannisation of Paris. There was also growing a feeling of internationalism, due on the one hand to the acceptance of the communism of small groups in place of nationalism and still more in place of imperialism. The International Working Men's Association was originally a French idea. After a conflict for the control of the International between Mazzini, who desired to utilise it for the purpose of assisting his political movement in Italy, and Marx, who desired to dominate it personally-a conflict in which Marx was victorious-the International had a brief moment of success through its patronage of a |