A World in Turmoil (1)
March 29, 1885.
That was the day Jules Ferry, Prime Minister of the French Third Republic, wanted—if only for a fleeting moment—to press a pistol to his temple and pull the trigger.
"There he is! He's getting out!"
"Throw it! Throw it!"
"Die, you bastard!"
The carriage door shuddered the instant he tried to step down, and from every corner of the street, as if they had been waiting since dawn, came a storm of raw curses and abuse, stones the size of a grown man's fist, and rotten tomatoes.
They struck with a sickening crack and thud, slamming into eardrums that had grown frailer by the day and yanking the nape of his neck in of its own accord.
"What a goddamn circus."
"That son of a bitch—he blocked it!"
"Die! Die! Die!"
Most of the barrage had been timed to the opening of the door. But Jules Ferry had already seen the howling citizens packing the road he had come down, and he had known a step too soon that if he simply climbed out he might be beaten to death on the spot. So he had deliberately shut the door again, then opened it once more.
A few more rounds of this nerve-war between the crowd and the Prime Minister's carriage, and the enraged citizens—having spent every missile they had brought—screamed themselves hoarse enough to drive the flies from Paris.
"Resign this instant!"
"Resign, you son of a bitch!"
"You murderer...!"
The citizens were furious. Then they were more furious still.
And the reason was exactly what all of you would expect.
Within a day of the telegram arriving from Tonkin—no, within a mere twelve hours—the entire French nation was cursing Jules Ferry's name.
That damned army headquarters had sent him two words and two words only: defeat.
No assignment of blame. No account of what had failed. Just those two syllables, packed into a wire and fired home.
"Idiots. No wonder they lose to those sausage-eating Germans—oof!"
"Go die already, you incompetent swine!"
"Stop him! Stop him!"
"Give me back my son!"
Then something heavy—something truly massive—hung for an instant in the air between the carriage and the crowd.
A dozen feelings flashed at once through Jules Ferry, the citizens, the coachman, and the bodyguards who saw it.
A bomb!
Yes. Someone had lunged forward and hurled a dense, weighty thing straight at Jules Ferry, and the startled guards closed around their Prime Minister.
"Stop it!"
"Protect His Excellency!"
But they were already too late.
Better this way.
Rather than dodge, he took one trembling step forward with a kind of courage—hoping, inwardly, that if an assassin's trick simply killed him here, they might at least grant him a state funeral and call him pitiable. A decent death, if he could manage one.
Except.
"Oh, for God's sake."
It was only a slightly larger tomato. A rotten one.
It burst against his chest with a wet slap. He stared down for a moment at the wreckage plastered across his coat and at the foul smell that rose a beat later, then hurried into the National Assembly as if fleeing a battlefield.
A fresh volley of curses and shouted abuse chased him in.
"Go die already!"
"You devil!"
"Well. So much for that."
Facing an enraged mob in the street was a waste of time now. He had failed to get himself assassinated, which meant it was the Assembly's turn: he would go inside and let furious deputies scream his eardrums to bursting.
"A fine morning to you all. A fine morning."
He walked into the white, ornate hall reeking of rotten tomato, and startled guards and clerks greeted him with dazed faces.
What are we looking at right now?
No—how is His Excellency even alive?
The first to recover was an old guardsman. He came forward with a detachment of the Assembly guard and opened his mouth.
"Your Excellency...?"
"P-Prime Minister..."
"Good morning."
Jules Ferry took his place in the entrance with an expression of forced calm. The guard who moved to stop him had shaking eyes. He glanced from the Prime Minister to the clerks and junior officials trailing anxiously behind, then toward the chamber beyond—where raised voices were already colliding in something close to a brawl—and began to stammer.
"I-I mean, inside, right now..."
The guard's gaze was almost piteous. Please. They're in there ready to hang you. Run. But Jules Ferry, who had already given his political life up for lost, did not hear the plea at all.
Or perhaps he only pretended not to.
He thanked the Assembly staff and guards who pitied him with a brief nod, and felt irritation rise in spite of himself.
If only someone had just drawn a pistol and shot me back there.
Yes. If he had died, those eyes would have turned to mourning and regret, and history would have written him down as a pitiable prime minister, worthy of at least a little sympathy. Instead he was about to become the butcher who had driven innocent French boys into a jungle bonfire while picking a fight with a dying old empire in some Eastern colony.
He should have been assassinated on the Assembly steps. He told himself the moment had passed, let out a long breath, and gave a calm order to the guard and clerk who still looked at him with such wretched sympathy.
"Open it."
"I beg your pardon?"
"I said open it."
The staff stared back, their eyes asking, Really? You actually want us to open it? When Jules Ferry offered no further answer, the guards looked at one another, nodded, and set their hands to either side of the heavy wooden doors, their faces set.
"...Understood."
"Opening!"
Bolstered by the Prime Minister's grim resolve, fresh strength poured into the guards' brutal grip.
The doors groaned, then shrieked on their hinges.
"Hahh—hh."
A heavy tremor ran through the floor. From within, the shouting swelled, thick with curses too vile to repeat, and Jules Ferry steeled himself as his heart began to come apart all over again.
"W-wait! Wait, Your Excellency!"
A voice. Still young—a youth's voice, by the sound of it.
The young man came running, planted himself in front of Ferry, and retched dryly, whether from nerves or sheer exhaustion.
"Your Excellency! This—!"
He was a clerk from the Foreign Ministry.
He had sprinted the length of the far corridor in a single breathless charge, and even as he gasped he did not forget his duty. He held out a telegram soaked through with sweat.
Jules Ferry took it, and his pupils shook.
For a sliver of a second, he hesitated.
Was this a first-class ticket on the express train to hell—or an angel's signpost, come to save him where he stood?
He opened his mouth before he had even unfolded the paper in his hand.
"What... what is this?"
At the tremor in his voice, the Foreign Ministry clerk sucked in a breath and answered with all the force he had left.
"An emergency telegram from Nagasaki!"
The One on high, it seemed, had not withdrawn His mercy.
An unforeseen rope of salvation had dropped from the heavens.
For Jules Ferry, a chance still remained.
It had come on a telegram from the Far Eastern Republic.
Meanwhile, inside the chamber where the shouting still crashed back and forth, Henri Brisson, President of the Chamber of Deputies, had barely clawed his way free of deputies tangled together like enraged tigers. Instead of returning to the floor, he had been summoned to the lounge across the way—and he was now staring at Prime Minister Jules Ferry with a look of thorough displeasure.
"If you've arrived, you ought to walk straight in! Why are you lurking outside like a criminal? A prime minister of a nation should at least carry himself with some dignity!"
"I haven't been hiding."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Look, let us talk first, and then decide how to—"
"And why are you here? Searching for loyalty, are you? Planning to die together?"
"N-no, that's not it at all."
Beside the two of them, Paul-Armand Challemel-Lacour—Foreign Minister, and a Moderate Republican like themselves—flicked his uneasy gaze from one man to the other.
"Don't ask me. I merely delivered His Excellency an urgent telegram that came in from the Far East."
"Nngh."
No, no, leave me out of this, the Foreign Minister's whole manner said. Brisson glared for a long moment at Jules Ferry, the man who had made such a spectacular mess of things, then began to read the hastily scrawled statement Ferry held out. At last he found his voice.
"So you're saying we should introduce a motion of no confidence ourselves?"
"That's right."
"Hahh."
The Prime Minister sat there with a face full of conviction, proposing that they hurl their own cabinet into the fire. Henri Brisson seized the back of his own neck.
"I'm going to lose my mind."
Has this man actually gone mad? Or is this an all-or-nothing plunge—his political life is finished anyway, so from here on he just does as he pleases? Truly?
At last Brisson snapped. He threw what little courtesy he had left on the floor and roared.
"You—no, Prime Minister. Have you completely lost your senses? You won't even think of the future of your own party and its members, and you can't stand to die alone, so now we all have to die together? Now? Now?!"
He snarled it out, then choked as if a door had slammed on his breath and gasped roughly several times before he found his balance again. His hands were shaking. He caught Jules Ferry—his party colleague, his Prime Minister—by the sleeve with those trembling fingers and began to reason with him.
In truth, it was halfway to begging.
"Please—try, if you can, to think this through rationally. What happened in Tonkin will not strip our party of its entire political life. Most of this country's voters regard the expansion of the fatherland's colonies as a kind of medal, a trophy they keep in their hearts. You must not let yourself be seduced by those Radical Leftists barking about the next government collapsing, or about the Republicans vanishing altogether!"
Brisson was desperate.
The Prime Minister before his eyes had, under the curses of an entire nation, lost even the power of judgment, and was behaving in a way that looked uncomfortably like paranoia.
A man in his right mind would have said at once, I feel the weight of this responsibility. I shall resign. He would not sit here growling, To hell with all of you. You want to throw me out? Go on and try, and urge a frontal assault.
And besides—
I cannot stand by and watch the entire Moderate Republican party become a sacrificial offering for something that should have ended with one man!
That must not happen.
Brisson himself, as a member of the same party and as President of the Chamber, could not allow it to happen. That had been the agreement.
Moreover, the decision to put Jules Ferry on the operating table had been reached only last night—in the small hours, at an emergency gathering of the party's senior men.
Cause and effect were already settled. That was the point!
So Brisson set himself to persuasion.
"Do not seriously talk that mad talk about splitting the cabinet or shattering the coalition. I beg you."
If you refuse to resign, we Moderate Republicans—who have taken power in succession—will be utterly smashed by those damned Radical Leftists!
"Please use that head of yours! The moment those worthless leftists seize power, this Republic will be nothing but one stretch of chaos after another! Who was it who had the gall to shout that even those wretched Communards deserved a shameless amnesty? Georges Clemenceau, who styles himself a friend of Léon Gambetta!"
"That's the fellow, yes."
"And the Orléanists? The Bonapartists? Those militarists? Will you hand the government back to those frauds and dictators all over again?"
"Indeed. That must never be allowed to happen."
"That's right—it must never happen! Another war and France goes straight into the coffin!"
"Mm."
Jules Ferry nodded lightly along with the Chamber President's fears.
Georges Clemenceau: the man who opposed the Ferry cabinet's colonial expansion at every turn, the anticlerical who insisted Christianity could hardly claim superiority over the Buddhism and Confucianism of the East. Add to him the Bonapartists, who were still alive and breathing, and the Orléanists, who had been grinding their teeth through decades of bitter cups.
On the French left, Georges Clemenceau now ran alone in front after Léon Gambetta's death. And there were the soldiers who still worshipped a faded dictator, and the swindler constitutionalists, any of whom might yet rise again. The Prime Minister ground his teeth at the thought—and answered, all the same, with a face that said it hardly mattered.
"But this time is different."
"This time is different, you say?"
"Yes. Different. No—everything has changed. The board has been flipped."
With a look of utter certainty, Jules Ferry held out the small telegram paper he had been keeping close, and declared in a voice that admitted no argument.
"I shall introduce a motion of no confidence."
"...A just what?"
At Jules Ferry's command—touched, for an instant, with something like madness—Henri Brisson's face crumpled of its own accord into genuine gravity.
No. By this point, it was worth seriously considering.
Whether the Prime Minister's burden had swollen so huge in the space of a single night that the man had simply snapped.
Has he actually gone mad?
He was carrying on like a genuine lunatic!
What on earth was written on that scrap of telegram paper?
Jules Ferry, for his part, could not have cared less. He was certain the telegram was more than a personal rescue, and he put the proposal to Brisson again.
He put it while holding out that little scrap of salvation.
"Read it. And since my mind will not change, you may persuade our party members and ministers or sit back and watch the cabinet collapse—that is your affair from here on. If the cabinet falls and I am driven out, well, you might even take the premiership yourself. But I have been exonerated by this unknown telegram from the Far East, and our expedition across the Indochina Peninsula has become a just war, so it makes no difference to me! I stand unashamed! God grant glory to our Republic!"
"..."
At that mad smile, at that performance, Brisson decided then and there that yes—the man had gone mad.
"Think I'm insane if you like—just read it!"
"All right!"
Worn down at last by Jules Ferry's insistence and by the Foreign Minister's anxious eyes fixed on the telegram, Brisson sighed and began, slowly, to read the brief message written there.
And a moment later, a scream so grotesque and unearthly spilled out of the Assembly lounge that the guards outside went taut with alarm.