M. Fleury replied, that this is rather the aim of the monarchists than of the Boulangists. One of General Boulanger's lieutenants, M. Mermeix, already cited, told him frankly that the Boulangists want a sort of consulate stopping short of the Empire--a strong republic with a nationally nominated chief, freedom of conscience, freedom of education, no more parliaments, a simpler public administration, and the cutting out of the financial cancer which is destroying the resources of France. The coalition now existing between the royalists, the imperialists, and the Boulangists, in view of the elections of 1889, obviously rests upon the conviction, common to all these parties, that the Republic, as at present constituted, is so far committed to a policy of reckless public expenditure and of deliberately irreligious propagandism that its leaders cannot, if they would, either readjust the national finances or let the religious question alone.
A man of much ability and of very high character, who has filled important financial posts under the Empire in this part of France, tells me that there has been no real balancing, now, of the public books for several years, because the members of the Cour des Comptes whose duty it is to get this done have found it impossible (and so reported) to get all the necessary accounts from the Ministry of Finance. As no Conservative members are permitted to sit on the Committee of the Budget, even such a monstrous thing as this passes unchecked by the Chamber. No wonder that he should tell me, M. Bethmont, one of the members of the Cour des Comptes and a Republican, is of the opinion that nothing can make matters straight again in France but an Emperor with a Liberal constitution, or, in other words, a revival of the Ollivier experiment of 1870.
I tried in vain to get from M. Fleury some definite notion of the political programme of General Boulanger. As I have been constantly assured that the General formed his programme from his observation of the institutions of my own country during the short time which he spent in America, as one of the chosen representatives of France during the centennial celebration of the crowning victory of Yorktown, in 1881, I have long been not unnaturally curious to ascertain precisely how he proposes to 'Americanise' the actual government of France. But on this point I can get no more light from M. Fleury in Picardy--though M. Fleury spent some time with the General as a not unsympathetic ally--than I have been able to get from any of the General's most devoted partisans in Paris. In Picardy as in Paris, Boulangism seems to represent a destructive--or, if the phrase be more polite, a detergent--rather than a constructive force. It is not the less worthy of consideration, perhaps, on this account. But on this account it appears to me more likely to play a subordinate than a leading part in the political movement of these times. It is rather a broom, if I may so speak, than a sceptre which the 'brav' général' is expected to wield. In conversation with M. Fleury, another of General Boulanger's intimate and confidential lieutenants, M. Turquet, formerly an Under-Secretary of State in the Ministry of Fine Arts, who ran for a seat as deputy in the Aisne in 1885, summed up the programme of Boulangism as 'a programme of liberty.' 'I mean,' he said, 'real liberty, such as exists in America, not our Liberalism, which is spurious and archaic. Our actual republicans of to-day are Jacobins, sectarians. Their only notion is to persecute and proscribe, and they are infinitely further from liberty than you royalists are, for you have at your head a prince who has a thoroughly open mind. The form of government, after all, signifies little. The real question is not whether we shall have a monarchy or an empire, an autocracy or a democracy. It is whether we shall have liberty.'[3]