Page:The Annual Register 1899.djvu/254

 246] FOREIGN HISTOEY. [1899.

covered that the only way to stir it to action was to threaten its existence.

Unfortunately the same might be said of the chief of the State. M. Felix Faure, with his love of parade and his besetting " snobbishness/ ' inspired perhaps even more distrust than the shiftiness of his Prime Minister.

In both camps there existed a firm conviction that it was only necessary to find a general prepared to take the initia- tive of a pronunciamento and the republic would have to give place to Cffisarism. The Governor of Paris, General Zurlinden, was daily denounced by the Republican press as the head of the military party, which resisted the supremacy of the civil power. His speech to President Faure at the New Year's re- ception was bitterly criticised : " The Government may count more than ever upon the absolute devotion of our troops to uphold the law." It was sententiously remarked that the general made no reference to his own intention of upholding it. It was, however, General Metzinger, commanding the 15th Corps at Marseilles, who was regarded as one of the most active members of the military party, and the most eager to take part in any attack upon the established order. The Nationalists consequently singled him out as the special object of their noisy acclamations every time he appeared in public, espe- cially on the occasion of his being decorated (Jan. 7) by the President.

These manifestations found their counterpart across the Mediterranean, where Max Regis, the "King of Algiers," on his return to the capital was received with wild enthusiasm by the Anti-Semitic crowd. The horses were taken out of his carriage, and he was drawn in triumph to the Hotel de Ville, where from the balcony he denounced the Chamber of Deputies at Paris as the off-scourings of a sewer. This speech, however, cost M. Max Regis his place as Mayor of Algiers, but as he was immediately succeeded by one of his own partisans, the change brought no cessation to the disorders of which Algiers was the scene.

The state of affairs in the capital was not less serious. The violent ruled in the streets, the cynics in the press. The anni- versary of the death of the old revolutionist, Blanqui (Jan. 8), was the occasion of a regular fight between the Socialists and the friends of M. Rochefort. The latter had just captured a new ally, for the same day M. Quesnay de Beaurepaire, president of the Civil Chamber of the Court of Cassation, had suddenly thrown up his office, and in the columns of the Echo de Paris had commenced an outrageous campaign against his colleagues of the Criminal Chamber, whom he charged with having made up their minds to annul the Dreyfus judgment. He insisted, therefore, that the case should be transferred from that body. The arguments he brought forward were singularly inconclu- sive, coming as they did from a former procureur-genJral, whose