MARSHAL MACMAHON.

THER

HERE are few, if any, contemporary men of mark regarding whose actual personality so little is known by the world at large as is the case with Marie Edmé Patrice Maurice Macmahon, Duke of Magenta, Marshal of France, Ex-President of the French Republic. The reason is not far to seek. He has played a great part in recent history without himself being great, except in a very secondary and subordinate sense. The cruel circumstances of his time and country placed him in a position of unexampled difficulty. Honest and brave, he was wholly deficient in those intellectual endowments which are absolutely indispensable in those who are called upon to cope with novel and distracting emergencies. Instead of ruling the storm he was ruled by the storm. He became the sport of political factions, which he had neither the dexterity to soothe nor the firmness to control. "Become a Saviour of Society!" urged the leaders of the three Monarchical sections of the Legislature, with all that is implied in that ominous phrase. "Il faudra ou se soumettre ou se démettre!" thundered Gambetta, as the spokesman of the Republicans. Never was unfortunate ruler more awkwardly placed. Here there were no "three courses" open-only two: the one full of peril, the other fraught with humiliation. He was the nominee of the united monarchical parties, and in their interest, as a man of honour, was he bound to act. To elevate him they had combined to depose the illustrious Thiers, the liberator of the soil of France. Such sacrifices must not go unrewarded. But which of the three monarchical parties was to be the beneficiary? Clearly all could not. There could not be three kings of France: the bloodiest and most successful coup d'état could not realise such a result. On the other hand, was he humbly to walk in the Republican footsteps of the eminent man whom the majority of Frenchmen in their hearts believed he had shamefully betrayed? From the first the problem was insoluble, and after keeping the country for many months in a feverish state of anxiety, "Macmahon I." not only submitted, but resigned also, before the end of the "Marshalate." The memory of his fall is still so fresh in the public mind that it is unnecessary at this stage to allude to it further than to remark that it was complete, and that it will in all probability be found to be irretrievable. It is "the unexpected that always happens," to be sure, but it would take something like a miracle to re-open the public career of the Ex-President of the Republic. Events have rendered him powerless for future good or evil.

Yet the career of this man is not without interest, as it has not been without honour. His virtues are his own, and the errors he has committed are in a great measure to be attributed to the faults of early training and associations rather than to any native perversity of character. A staunch Catholic, a Legitimist nobleman, a barrack-room politician: how was it to be expected that he was to understand the needs or aspirations of modern France?

clearly indicates, is of Irish extraction on the paternal

No man in practice can rise higher than his theoretical ideal, and Macmahon has, on the whole, been true to his. The France of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité-peaceful, progressive, liberal France-is to him a sealed book. Only a mind of great native force could have risen superior to antecedents such as were those of le Comte de Macmahon. Pride of faith and pride of birth are things hard for ordinary flesh and blood to overcome. The Marshal, as his name so side. The first of his ancestors who settled in France followed the fortunes of the last of the Stuarts in 1689, for the sake of his religion and his king, and ever since then the traditions of the family have ranged them on the side of despotic authority, whether in religion or in politics. The Irish Jacobite of 1689 lives in the French Legitimist of 1879. The father of the Marshal was one of the personal friends of Charles X., a peer of France, and Lieutenant-General of the kingdom under the restored monarchy. While the "king enjoyed his own again" it fared well, as may readily be supposed, with his immediate followers. Macmahon, senior, had a very large family, and their interests were not neglected. A Montmorency, Rohan, or Macmahon had but to ask and it was given. The great military school at St. Cyr swarmed with young aristocrats, the Government of the day, naturally enough, deeming it good policy to officer the army with the cadets of noble houses, who would have a direct interest in maintaining privileged authority. Accordingly, thither young Macmahon was sent in 1825, in his seventeenth year, having been born at Sully, near Autun, in the department of Saône-et-Loire, in 1808. He found the place purged from all taint of plebeian camaraderie, and with the old revolutionary and Bonapartist leaven completely extruded. Nothing remained but the bluest of blue blood, combined with the most extravagant devotion to Royalty.

But the Revolution, though crushed, was not dead. It still had its defenders in the Press, fighting doggedly against the reaction, fighting almost as frequently with rapier as with pen; and it was from members of this irrepressible school of militant journalism that the more ardent of the St. Cyrians were wont from time to time to seek "satisfaction for their wounded feelings, whenever they chose to imagine that the royal cause had been unceremoniously handled. Macmahon's earliest military recollections are, consequently, of duels with Liberal journalists, of whom fiery little Adolphe Thiers was not the least frequently "out." Throughout life the Press has appeared to Macmahon's eyes a hydra-headed monster of disorder, to be crushed on every suitable occasion.

From this unfortunate seminary of military instruction the adolescent officer speedily passed into one that can hardly be regarded as more salutary. He sought and obtained active service in Algeria, then, and at all times, a province where officers of the French army have been wont to learn deplorable lessons in tyranny and disregard for the rights of civilians. In the face of the enemy Macmahon has ever shown a personal intrepidity worthy of his chivalrous descent. At the end of the expedition in 1830 he was decorated for his conspicuous bravery in the field, and the following year he returned to France with the rank of lieutenant.

It may here be noted that the Revolution of 1830, which seated the Orleans branch of the Bourbon family on the throne of France for a period of eighteen years, found the future Duke of Magenta, though still in heart owing allegiance to the elder branch of the royal house, by no means so irreconcilably wedded to Legitimist principles as to prevent him from taking the oath of allegiance to the new régime. In truth, with all his attachment

to Conservatism, the Marshal has never permitted his abhorrence of Liberalism to stand in the way of his professional promotion. He swore allegiance to the Republic of '48, which made him a general in its army, and he came under similar obligations of fidelity to the Second Empire, which made him a Marshal of France. Whatever he may be in theory, in practice he has uniformly shown himself a believer not in governments de jure but in governments de facto; and in this respect his conduct is in sharp contrast to that of his high-souled successor in the Presidency of the Republic, M. Jules Grévy, whom no power on earth could ever induce to disavow for a moment the Republican convictions of his youth. But to resume the record of the Marshal's military achievements. In 1833 he acted as aide-de-camp to General Achard at the siege of Antwerp, and for his services on that occasion he was rewarded with a captaincy in his twenty-fifth year. In 1837 he was the first to mount the breach at the assault of Constantine, where he was wounded. At times his personal gallantry has partaken of the character of recklessness. On one occasion the colonel of his regiment happening, with an inconsiderable escort, to get separated from the main body of the army, General Changarnier ordered Macmahon to take a squadron of horse and carry instructions to the detached party through an immense cloud of Arabs, "They are either too few or too many," said the gallant young man promptly: "too many to pass unseen, too few to beat the enemy. I will go alone." And alone he went on his dangerous mission. At the assault on the Malakoff his courage was still more conspicuous, and perhaps, from a strategic point of view, less praiseworthy, for before that notable feat of arms M. de Macmahon had been made a general, as has been said, by the Republican Government of 1848, and deeds of daring which may be commendable in a subaltern are often susceptible of a very different interpretation when performed by an officer in high command. As it was, the audacity of the general was crowned with complete success; if it had been otherwise, his disobedience to superior orders might have brought his military career to a sudden and unpleasant end. After an incessant bombardment, which had lasted for three days, the allied army, at noon on the 8th of September, 1855, advanced to the assault of Sebastopol. The French stormed in three columns, under Macmahon, LamotteRouge, and Dulac respectively. To the first was assigned the duty of seizing on the Malakoff, the key of the fortifications of that long-beleaguered city. The Russians did not expect the attack, and at first fell into confusion. But they soon recovered themselves, and recognising the vast strategic importance of the position from which they had been dislodged, they repeatedly exerted the most heroic efforts to recover it. The carnage was so appalling that twice Pelissier ordered a retreat. "Let me alone! I am master of my own skin! J'y suis, j'y reste!" shouted the general, with the lightning of battle in his eye and the fury of combat in his voice. If this was not in accordance with the strict rules of the service, and therefore not war, it may be allowed to have been grand, especially when it is added that in society the Marshal is a somewhat shy and silent man, who finds himself more at home in the company of children than of philosophers or statesmen. He is an excellent general of division, but nothing more. He is at home in the atmosphere of the barrack-room, but neither in the Legislature nor in the tented field has he ever evinced the smallest sign of capacity for supreme command. His mind is totally deficient in initiative and incapable of those rapid combinations which constitute great generalship.

Like Moltke and Grant, he is a silent man; but, unlike the former, he is not "silent in a dozen languages," and, unlike the latter, he is devoid of that superlatively sound