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 The Assassination of Jacques Lemaigre Dubreuil

This is a fascinating study of a forgotten patriot—now ranked as a national hero in Morocco-who struggled
to realise his vision for France and North Africa amidst the turmoil of mid-twentieth century social unrest,
war, defeat and occupation, resistance and liberation, and postwar decolonization
The French industrialist and political activist Jacques Lemaigre Dubreuil (1894–1955) was:

• president of the Taxpayers’ Federation in the 1930s;

• entrepreneur in wartime France and Africa;
• organizer of the ‘Group of Five’ in Algiers which prepared for the Allied landings in North Africa
(November 1942);
• ‘inventor’ of General Henri Giraud as a candidate for the leadership of liberated North and West Africa;
• negotiator of the Murphy-Giraud Agreements and the Anfa Memorandum with President Roosevelt
(1942 and 1943);
• political writer on the postwar future of France in Morocco;
• the owner of the liberal newspaper Maroc-Presse.

His assassination in Casablanca by French counter-terrorists in June 1955 was a ‘turning point’ event which
pushed the French government to grant independence to Morocco. Was he a rabble-rouser, a demagogue, a
betrayer of French interests at home and overseas or a reformer, a patriot, a hero of the anti-German
resistance, and a champion of Franco-Moroccan solidarity? Written by a prize-winning author, this story is
of great interest to students and researchers in modern French and Moroccan history, French Colonial
history, African history, Islamic history and politics.
William A.Hoisington, Jr is Professor Emeritus of Modern European and French Colonial History at the
University of Illinois at Chicago. He has published widely, and is the author of two prize-winning books on
the history of French imperialism in North Africa, The Casablanca Connection: French Colonial Policy,
1936–1943 and Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco.
 History and society in the Islamic world
Edited by Anoushiravan Ehteshami
University of Durham and George Joffé Centre for International Studies, Cambridge University
ISSN: 1466–9390
Contemporary events in the Islamic world dominate the headlines and emphasize the crises of the Middle
East and North Africa, yet the Islamic world is far larger and more varied than we realize. Current affairs
there too mask the underlying trends and values that have, over time, created a fascinating and complex
world. This new series is intended to reveal that other Islamic reality by looking at its history and society over
the ages, as well as at the contemporary scene. It will also reach far further afield, bringing in Central Asia
and the Far East as part of a cultural space sharing common values and beliefs but manifesting a vast
diversity of experience and social order.
French Military Rule in Morocco
Colonialism and its consequences
Moshe Gershovich
Tribe and Society in Rural Morocco
David M.Hart
North Africa, Islam and the Mediterranean World
From the Almoravids to the Algerian War
Edited by Julia Clancy-Smith
The Walled Arab City in Literature, Architecture and History
The living Medina in the Maghrib
Edited by Susan Slyomovics
Tribalism and Rural Society in the Islamic World
David M.Hart
Technology, Tradition and Survival
Aspects of material culture in the Middle East and Central Asia
Richard Tapper and Keith McLachlan
Lebanon
The politics of frustration—the failed coup of 1961
Adel Beshara
Britain and Morocco During the Embassy of John Drummond Hay
Khalid Ben Srhir
The Assassination of Jacques Lemaigre
Dubreuil
A Frenchman Between France and North Africa

William A.Hoisington, Jr.

LONDON AND NEW YORK

 First published 2005 by RoutledgeCurzon
2 Park Square, Milton Park,
Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by RoutledgeCurzon
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection
of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
RoutledgeCurzon is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
© 2005 William A.Hoisington, Jr.
Professor Emeritus of Modern European and French Colonial History
University of Illinois at Chicago
Chicago, Illinois, USA.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0-203-00496-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-35032-8 (Print Edition)

 To the memory of Jean-Pierre Lemaigre Dubreuil

Jacques Lemaigre Dubreuil (Collection Roger Viollet)

 Contents

List of plates vii

Acknowledgements viii
Preface ix

1 Taxpayer revolt in France 1

2 France’s fall and the Vichy change 37
3 Defending French Africa 49
4 Working for Giraud 66
5 To die in Casablanca 80
Conclusion 111

Notes 113
Bibliography 138
Index 145
 Plates

Jacques Lemaigre Dubreuil v

1 ‘A la porte les exploiteurs,’ January–February 1936 19
2 ‘Contribuables!,’ 1936, 20
3 ‘Le désastre,’ July–August 1937 25
4 ‘Contribuable souviens-toi…,’ February 1938 29
5 ‘Les Pantins!,’ June 1938 30
6 ‘Une victoire des contribuables parisiens,’ January 1939 33
7 ‘Arrêtez les voleurs,’ October–November 1938 35
 Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the late Gordon Wright of Stanford University, a lucid interpreter of French history who
could turn even the writing of a textbook into an art form, for first suggesting this project to me. And to my
friends and colleagues who listened to and commented on parts of this text in its various stages of development
over the years, especially the late William B.Cohen of Indiana University at Bloomington, French colonial
historian ‘sans peur et sans reproche,’ and Arthur Layton Funk of the University of Florida at Gainesville,
the only historian I know who in the course of his own work on France and America during the Second
World War met and interviewed Lemaigre Dubreuil. Sharon Leigh Hoisington encouraged me to keep on this
research trail despite the interruptions of other writing projects and we will never forget the generous
hospitality of the Lemaigre Dubreuil family in Paris, Rabat, and Casablanca. Finally, I am ever and always
indebted to my three daughters for their unflagging interest in and enthusiasm for my work.
I dedicate this book to the memory of Jean-Pierre Lemaigre Dubreuil who made his father’ s papers
available to me and by so doing introduced me to the contours of the political life of a passionate and
determined individual.
The author and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reprint material previously
published in article form: The University of Chicago Press for ‘The Struggle for Economic Influence in
Southeastern Europe: The French Failure in Romania, 1940,’ Journal of Modern History, 43, 3 (September
1971); Alfred University for ‘Toward the Sixth of February: Taxpayer Protest in France, 1928–1934,’
Historical Reflections/ Réflexions historiques, 3, 1 (Summer 1976); Sage Publications Ltd for ‘Commerce
and Conflict: French Businessmen in Morocco, 1952–55,’ Journal of Contemporary History, 9, 2 (1974);
L’Express and Chantal Blondeau for permission to reproduce the cover of L’Express (June 18, 1955); and
Roger Viollet for permission to reprint the late-1930s photograph of Jacques Lemaigre Dubreuil used as the
frontispiece.
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to reprint material in this
book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not here acknowledged
and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions of this book.
 Preface

‘Et comme toujours ce sont les meilleurs qui tombent,

et le pays vient de perdre un grand Français.’
‘It is always the finest who fall,
and once again our country has lost a great Frenchman.’
Alphonse Juin, Maréchal de France

‘Les Français du Maroc et les Marocains peuvent également s’ enorgueillir du nom

de Jacques Lemaigre Dubreuil C’est beaucoup, pour sceller l’amitié de deux peuples, que
d’avoir les mêmes martyrs.’
‘The Frenchmen of Morocco and the Moroccans themselves can take equal pride in the name
of Jacques Lemaigre Dubreuil. To seal a friendship between two peoples it is important to have
the same martyrs.’
François Mauriac, de l'Académie Française

The assassination of Jacques Lemaigre Dubreuil in Casablanca in June 1955 was a turning point in modern
Moroccan history, speeding up the process of colonial independence much as the murder of Dr Émile
Mauchamp in Marrakech almost 50 years earlier had triggered quite the opposite action—the French
occupation of Oujda which was the prelude to the French protectorate of 1912.1 Matters Moroccan occupy a
large part of this text, but so do matters French and North African. This explains the title of my book.
Jacques Lemaigre Dubreuil presided over the vegetable-oil firm of Georges Lesieur et ses Fils of Dunkirk
(‘L’Huile Lesieur transforme les plats les plus simples en régals délicieux,’ 1938). In the 1930s he headed
the Taxpayers’ Federation, a noisy citizen anti-tax group, was an elected member of the Bank of France, and
owned the Paris newspaper, Le Jour-Écho de Paris. During the Second World War he transferred Lesieur
factories from devastated and German-occupied France to French Africa (Algiers, Casablanca, Dakar) and
conspired with American diplomatic agents to prepare for the Allied landings in North Africa in November
1942, ‘inventing’ General Henri Giraud as a rival to the austere, uncompromising Charles de Gaulle along
the way. After the war he made Casablanca his North African headquarters and worked to resolve the
political disputes that put France and the Sultan of Morocco at odds. Until his death, his newspaper articles
in Le Monde (and his purchase of the Casablanca daily Maroc-Presse) made him a leader of French
‘liberals’ determined to end Moroccan ‘terrorism’ (and the French ‘counter-terrorism’ that paralleled it)
which accompanied the forced exile of Sultan Sidi Mohammed Ben Youssef in August 1953 and to create a
new FrancoMoroccan partnership.
x

Someone once called Lemaigre Dubreuil a ‘born conspirator’ and his life has elements that would fit a
spy novel or a screen thriller.2 He walked the streets of wartime Casablanca while Humphrey Bogart and
Ingrid Bergman were practicing their lines for Casablanca (1942) on a Hollywood sound stage. And Alfred
Hitchcock filmed his 1956 classic The Man Who Knew Too Much in Marrakech the month before Lemaigre
Dubreuil died in a hail of machine-gun bullets.3 Was he a rabble-rouser, a demagogue, a betrayer of French
interests at home and overseas or a reformer, a patriot, a hero of the resistance, and a champion of Moroccan
independence?
Chapter 1 introduces the French taxpayer movement of the 1930s, then centers on Lemaigre Dubreuil’s
presidency of the Taxpayers’ Federation between 1935 and 1940. Chapter 2 describes Lemaigre Dubreuil’s
wartime mission to Romania (1940), his purchase of Le Jour-Écho de Paris, and his transfer of Georges
Lesieur et ses Fils to French Africa. Chapters 3 and 4 view Vichy France and the war years from Algiers,
emphasizing Lemaigre Dubreuil’s role in securing the political agreements that preceded the Allied
landings in North Africa, then as an adviser to General Giraud. Chapter 5 details Lemaigre Dubreuil’s work
in Morocco, especially his political writing, culminating with his assassination in June 1955.
All his life Jacques Lemaigre Dubreuil was plagued with a hyphen— Lemaigre-Dubreuil—that he did
not want. In the end he accepted it, even from the copy editors of the newspapers he owned and managed. Here,
however, he will get what he wanted, a hyphen-free name spelled as he and the members of his family
wrote it.
 1
Taxpayer revolt in France

‘Contribuables, réveillez-vous!’
‘Taxpayers, wake up!’

Le Réveil du contribuable, April 1931

Toward 6 February
The Taxpayers’ Federation was the creation of Louis-Alphonse Large, an enterprising small-town auditor
from east-central France, who set up a Taxpayer Defense League, the Ligue de Défense des Intérêts du
Contribuable, in 1921. Three years later, in 1924, he began mailing a newsletter from Paris (where he now
headed the accounting department of Maison Lamoesse Frères) entitled Défendre, filled with suggestions for
the harried taxpayer. In November 1928, together with journalist Auguste Cavalier of the conservative
L’Intérêt français, and Paris businessman Charles Kula, Large established the National Taxpayers’
Federation, the Fédération Nationale des Groupements et Syndicats des Contribuables, with the financial
support of perfume manufacturer François Coty. Cavalier and Kula were committed to taxpayer
organization and action; Kula believed that France was ‘collapsing under the weight of excessive taxation’
and had founded his own taxpayer group, the Confédération Générale des Contribuables, early in 1928 as a
symbolic counterweight to the power of organized labor and the political groups of the Left which he said were
leading France to ‘moral and economic ruin.’1 Coty yearned for a public role. He owned the Paris
newspaper Le Figaro, launched the mass circulation daily L’Ami du peuple in 1928, and generously
subsidized organizations of a conservative persuasion; he founded and presided over the veterans’
organization, the Croix de Feu, and in 1933, he formed his own political group, the Solidarité Française.2
It is not difficult to account for this flurry of taxpayer activity, given France’s tax history and its postwar
economic problems. The battle over an income tax had preoccupied the Chamber of Deputies for 40 years
and although it did not rival the Dreyfus Affair in sound, fury, or passion, it made active combatants out of
usually passive citizens. The tax was finally adopted in 1913 as an emergency national defense measure.
Nevertheless, with the exception of the income tax, the French tax system in 1919 was virtually identical to
that which had been created by the governments of the French Revolution. Out of touch with
the contemporary realities of wealth and income, taxes in France were inequitable and inelastic, a mockery
of the democratic ideal and woefully inadequate to cope with the financial needs of the Third Republic in
the third decade of the twentieth century. Still, rather than recast the tax system, French political leaders
counted on German reparations and even American loans to provide required revenues. This was not to be.
2 THE ASSASSINATION OF JACQUES LEMAIGRE DUBREUIL

The wrangling over war debts, reparations, and international loans lasted a full decade after the end of the Great
War and France was none the richer for it. As a result, taxes had to increase. And they climbed steadily
during the 1920s, perhaps most dramatically in 1924 with Premier Raymond Poincaré’s 20 percent across-
the-board increase, a levy which the middle-income taxpayer, especially the small businessman and
investor, considered harsh. At the same time a persistent inflation and the devaluation of the currency
robbed Frenchmen of the value of their savings and destroyed the worth of government bonds and private
securities.3
Unfortunately, taxation also became connected with the social struggle in France. Champions of the
income tax such as Socialist Jean Jaurès, for example, saw it as a way to redistribute national wealth,
furnishing ‘new means of action to the workers.’4 Opponents of the tax such as the Association for the
Defense of the Middle Classes viewed it as a knife at the throat of the bourgeoisie.5 The sales tax, adopted
in 1920 in order to produce a steady, easily collectible flow of revenue to the state which would adjust
automatically with prices, also created an ideological battlefield even though the adversaries disagreed on
its effect: the Left argued that it discriminated against the poor whereas the Right complained that it taxed
business unfairly.6 Taxes were regarded as weapons in a class conflict rather than as instruments for raising
national revenue. And this was precisely how the Taxpayers’ Federation saw them. ‘Excessive taxation has
created divisions [among Frenchmen]… Not since the end of the hostilities have Frenchmen fought so
much! Economic war and social hatred have replaced the hatred of the invader.’7
Predictably, the National Taxpayers’ Federation drew its support from those conservative middle sectors
in French society which saw high taxes and government spending as the root causes of France’s economic
crisis and the organization of the classes moyennes as the sine qua non of class survival and national
salvation. ‘We want…substantial economies,’ demanded Baron Albert d’Anthouard de Wasservas, a former
minister to Brazil and the federation’s first president. ‘We want the state to reduce its expenses instead of
spending money recklessly. We want those who…are the guardians of these expenditures to stop pushing
toward extravagance.’ D’Anthouard insisted that much of the money paid to the government went for ‘an
army of civil servants’ which was little more than a political instrument to be used at election time. And he
admitted that in part the taxpayers had organized to oppose the civil servants’ union, the Confédération
Générale des Fonctionnaires. However, this was not the federation’s main purpose. ‘We want the financial
forces of the nation…to be used to their maximum effectiveness and developed rationally. Our aim, our
only aim, is to make France more prosperous, to allow its inhabitants to enjoy more comfort and security.
However, we protest the disorder which invades our public finances and rips at the fabric of our national life
because it engenders anarchy and ruins the general economy. The abuses of the tax system are unacceptable
because they destroy family, property, and production, and by reducing the birthrate prepare our country for
its ruin and destruction.’8
Such sentiments won the ringing endorsement of traditional bourgeois agricultural, commercial, and
professional groups such as the Société d’Agriculteurs de France, the Association des Viticulteurs de
France, the Syndicat Général du Commerce et de l’Industrie, the Fédération des Commerçants-Détaillants
de France, the Union de la Propriété Bâtie de France, the Chambre Syndicale des Propriétés Immobilières
de la Ville de Paris, the Fédération des Porteurs de ValeursMobilières, the Chambre des Avoués, and the
Fédération des Architectes de France. They were joined by those concerned with the interests of women and
the family, the Action Sociale de la Femme, the Société pour l’Amléioration du Sort de la Femme, and the
Alliance Nationale pour l’Accroissement de la Population Française as well as others interested in national
economic development such as the Union des Grandes Associations Françaises pour l’Essor National.9
It was from organizations such as these that the federation drew its leaders. From 1928 to 1934 the
governing board (comité d’action) included president d’Anthouard, landowner [agriculteur] from the
 TAXPAYER REVOLT IN FRANCE 3

Haute-Loire; vice-presidents Paul Lefaivre, landowner (Seine), Édouard Ferrasse, lawyer and winegrower
(Hérault), Claude Gaillard, architect (Rhône), Alfred-Joseph Colmart, landowner (Marne); delegate-general
Louis Large, journalist (Seine); secretary-general Paul Lefebvre, lawyer (Seine); treasurer Arthur Denuit,
notary (Seine); and members Georges Barthet, pharmacist (Seine), Jacques Buisson, businessman [industriel]
(HauteGaronne), Gustave Durandeau, businessman (Gironde), Georges d’Hattecourt, landowner (Maine-et-
Loire), Georges Mongelard, merchant [commerçant] (Gard), Jean Pequin, retired Forests and Waterways
inspector (Charente-Inférieure), Frédéric Saucet, avoué (Haute-Garonne), Georges Segalen, merchant
(Loire-Inférieure), François Tillet, merchant (Rhône), Amedée Vallée, insurance representative (Ille-
etVilaine), and Marquis Aymar Davy de Virville, landowner (Mayenne).10
But the federation aspired to represent a much larger constituency in middle-class France. It sought to
rally those among the artisans, shopkeepers, merchants, small businessmen, professionals, and property
owners who had been most seriously affected by the economic crisis and who sought a remedy for present
and future hardships, those for whom economic questions now took precedence over political ones. ‘There
are no reds or whites or pinks in the federation and whether the government is royalist, radical, or socialist
makes little difference to us. What we want is tax relief. We simply ask for the end of waste, fraud, and the
spoils of office.’11 The non-partisan stance was somewhat forced, since the federation blamed the trade
unions and the parties of the Left for France’s difficulties, but it was not entirely disingenuous. Kula was
ousted from the federation in 1930 for what d’Anthouard considered intemperate statements about the
responsibility of the unions, the Radical-Socialist party, and freemasonry for France’s decline.12
The federation was headquartered in the ninth arrondissement at 24 rue de Clichy (and later nearby at 22
rue LaFayette). Large was the delegate-general responsible for the federation’s day-to-day operation and its
monthly journal, Le Réveil du contribuable, and Baron d’Anthouard presided over the federation’s
governing board which oversaw the work of the federation. The board, elected by a central committee, had
a membership of twenty-four, each member serving a three-year term, staggered so that eight seats were
renewed every year. The central committee of about 100 members was composed of the representatives of
departmental federations formed by local and municipal taxpayer unions and groups. The central committee
met once a year to review the federation’s activity and to discuss and vote on federation reports, committees,
and programs. Funds for the national federation were provided by the departmental federations, which
contributed 20 percent of their annual receipts to Paris, and the affiliated social, corporative, and
professional groups, which supplied the federation with as much money as they could spare. This was never
a satisfactory arrangement. In November 1930, the treasurer revealed that the federation existed only
through the generosity of the members of the governing board; a year later, however, there was a budget
surplus of 4400 francs. But in November 1933, the federation reported a deficit of 35,000 francs. There
was, of course, the guardian angel, François Coty, but even before he founded Solidarité Française which
took enormous amounts of his time and money he had become less interested in the fortunes of the
federation. Le Réveil du contribuable lived a separate life; it was supported by advertising and subscriptions
of six francs a year.13
In December 1931 d’Anthouard announced that the federation had ‘nearly 700,000 individual members’
and the support of ‘more than 150 associations of corporative, syndical, and social defense, of veterans and
war victims, and of victims of the depreciation of the franc.’ When tallied up, this gave the federation the
backing of ‘about five million taxpayers.’14 Undoubtedly these were exaggerated estimates. Yet there
appear to have been no paper committees. The member groups of the federation, however small some may
have been, did exist, met, carried out the work of organization and propaganda, and in many cases had
remarkable success in persuading the public authorities to act on their recommendations. They took credit
for the reduction of municipal taxes in towns scattered across France (Alès, Carpentras, Decize, Dunkirk,
4 THE ASSASSINATION OF JACQUES LEMAIGRE DUBREUIL

Libourne, Montignac, Nevers, Pau, and Toulon) and departmental taxes in the Bouches-du-Rhône, Nièvre,
Saône-et-Loire, and Vienne.15 As a member of the governing board confidently remarked: ‘The taxpayer
unions constitute an important, disciplined, active unit. It is true that they are only a minority, but they
contain an intelligent elite (élite réflechie) whose decisions are capable of influencing the voting public by
educating them.’16
In general the federation desired to introduce economy into the management of the public funds of the state,
of the departments, and of the communes; to increase governmental efficiency; to restore the activity and
the rights of private initiative; to establish a tax court; and to revise the tax laws to provide for a more
‘equitable’ distribution of the tax burden.17 It suggested specific measures as well: a single basic deduction
on the income tax (abattement à la base unique) for all categories of taxpayers; the repeal or modification
of the business licensing tax (the patente); the reduction of taxes on motor vehicles, on stocks and bonds, on
property transfers, and inheritances; the repeal of the sales tax (taxe sur le chiffre d’affaires); and tax relief
for large families.18 Most of these reforms were geared to help the propertied, business-oriented middle
class.
In 1930 a major issue of concern to the taxpayers was the law on social insurance which compelled
employers in agriculture, commerce, and industry to contribute to a national social security fund. The
federation called it a ‘disaster’ for the entire country, an indirect tax on all the productive forces of the
nation.19 Henri Dorgères, editor of Le Progrès agricole de l’Ouest of Rennes and the aggressive leader of
Peasant Defense, Défense Paysanne, the farmer defense group of western France, claimed that social
insurance cost the taxpayers four billion francs a year; he characterized it as ‘the best scheme that
democracy has yet devised to take money from the pockets of the taxpayers and put it into the hands of the
bureaucrats.’20 The federation formed a Front Unique Contre les Assurances Sociales to fight for the law’s
modification or repeal, and this brought the taxpayers and the farmers together in a common cause.21
Boisterous anti-government rallies at Rennes (20,000 in attendance), Lisieux (6000), Caen (12,000), Angers
(15,000), and Chartres in the spring of 1932 gave this protest nation-wide attention.22 For a while at least,
taxpayer hatchets (‘to chop away at the forest of abuses’) and farmer pitchforks were wielded in unison. The
cooperation was not surprising. Farmers in western France were angry about the collapse of agricultural
prices which in 1930 were down 28 percent from the 1928 levels and which continued to drop through the
mid-1930s. Dorgères blamed the government for the lack of a ‘firm and coherent’ agricultural policy and
complained incessantly about the heavy farm tax burden.23 And the Taxpayers’ Federation was impressed with
the large crowds at Dorgères’s meetings as well as the farmer commitment to direct action against the
government. Moreover, federation leaders (in truth, as most Frenchmen) had a strong sentimental
attachment to peasant France. They lamented the decline of agricultural and artisan industries, endorsed the
family vote to encourage the expression of rural views, and opposed the ongoing industrialization of the
cities which drew the farm population from the land.24
Discontent with parliamentary government was mingled with the taxpayers’ protest. Since they figured
that the politicians had created their problems, how could they look to them for solutions? ‘Our elected
officials are in the majority the opponents of the taxpayers; they are preoccupied with taking care of
themselves, with ensuring their own re-election, and with satisfying only their most influential voters…;
they are professional politicians first and foremost, unconcerned with the needs of the country and…with its
problems…’.25 Still, d’Anthouard insisted that the taxpayers were not ‘in principle adversaries of either the
government, or parliament, or any departmental or municipal assembly; on the contrary it is by co-operating
with the public authorities and through the use of legitimate pressure that we can help them perform their
difficult task…’.26 ‘Our only goal is to see that those who pay the taxes are listened to…’.27 But there was a
warning as well. Should government refuse to heed them, the taxpayers would fight: ‘…we will oppose all
 TAXPAYER REVOLT IN FRANCE 5

those elected officials, whatever their political affiliation, who disregard our grievances.’28 And among their
weapons was the tax strike, first hinted at by Large in his report to the federation’s second congress in 1930,
and then openly endorsed by the federation at its third congress in 1931 as one ‘means of action’ to force
the government to reduce the national budget and to alleviate the taxpayers’ burden.29
Persuasion, however, was the federation’s preferred tactic. In a radio broadcast from Paris in January
1932, d’Anthouard outlined the federation’s program and listed the more than sixty organizations which had
approved it. The purpose was two-fold: to publicize the federation and to prove to the government that it
was a valid spokesman for taxpayer France. Moreover, the groups named indicated that the federation had
indeed broadened its base of support. Small independent merchants and businessmen had responded to the
federation’s appeal.30 In addition, the endorsement of veterans’ organizations—the Légion des Combattants
Français, the Fédération Nationale des Anciens Combattants, and the Croix de Feu—which were powerful
interest groups in inter-war France, gave a serious, militant, and patriotic tone to d’Anthouard’s declaration.
Since 1932 was an election year in France, the federation urged the spring parliamentary contestants to
accept its program or lose taxpayer support. ‘Be merciless, but fair toward all the candidates,’ counseled Le
Réveil du contribuable. It was an uncomfortable list of demands to present to candidates for the Chamber of
Deputies because the taxpayers wanted to deprive the Chamber of the right to introduce financial legislation
in order to check ‘parliamentary demagoguery,’ to reduce the number of seats in the Chamber, and to cut
the number of civil servants everywhere.31 Surprisingly, there was an encouraging response. The
conservative Fédération Républicaine incorporated the taxpayers’ complaints into its election platform.
Prime Minister André Tardieu, one of France’s few inter-war reformers, renewed his public promise for
economy in government.32 And of the deputies elected to the Chamber, over seventy pledged to support the
taxpayers’ program, among them many who would find notoriety in the 1930s and beyond, such as René
Coty (Républicain de Gauche, Seine-Inférieure), Jean Goy (Radical Independent, Seine), Pierre Mendès
France (Radical-Socialist, Eure), and Xavier Vallat (Independent, Ardèche).33 The federation credited itself
with bringing the taxpayers’ cause to the attention of all the candidates, forcing some unfriendly deputies
into run-off elections (and in certain cases of aiding in their defeat), and increasing citizen awareness of the
federation’s work.34 In the new Chamber the Group for the Protection of Taxpayer Interests had a
membership of 217.35
Unfortunately, election promises were forgotten in the business of forming a government. The Radical-
Socialist party, whose views on the need for a balanced budget were in harmony with those of the
federation, finally formed a partnership with the Socialists; this meant that no stern deflationary plan would
be adopted. In fact, the legislative session accomplished little of importance because of the basic difference
of opinion between the coalition partners in financial matters. And eventually finances destroyed the
coalition. To make matters worse, even the government leaders whom the taxpayers had counted among
their friends, such as Finance Minister Joseph Caillaux, were somewhat annoyed at the federation’s
meddling in politics.36 Presumably the politicians had all they could handle without bourgeois pressure
groups raising a fuss.
New federation directives were issued for the future action of the taxpayers: meetings would be
sponsored in cooperation with ‘the greatest possible number of corporative and professional organizations,’
and payment of taxes held back until ‘the last limit imposed by law, using…every delay and every legal
means.’37 Legal resistance to taxation was only a step away from a tax strike. ‘Those subject to taxation,’
d’Anthouard stated, ‘must be ready for anything. At a given signal they must be prepared to put the tax
strike into operation.’ But the federation hesitated. Large explained that the strike was ‘an extremely
dangerous revolutionary action,’ requiring ‘careful planning, based on indispensable education.’ He
6 THE ASSASSINATION OF JACQUES LEMAIGRE DUBREUIL

reported that at this time the federation was unready to commit itself to a strike, so the most it would do in
June 1932 was to endorse the principle of legal resistance to taxation.38
By October things had changed. Parliament had approved tax increases during the summer and the
federation’s preparations were completed. At a Paris meeting attended by 2000 citizens federation leaders
announced the strike. ‘Not a total strike,’ Large explained. ‘We are not revolutionaries. We know that the
state needs money… We have no intention of making it impossible to govern. But since the government is
ruining both itself and us, we must force it to reduce its expenditures by refusing to pay a part of the taxes
that are crushing us.’ Joined by representatives of Peasant Defense, the Comité du Salut Économique, the
Union Nationale des Combattants, the Légion des Combattants Français, and the Jeunesses Patriotes, the
taxpayers agreed that the ‘partial’ tax strike would apply to the taxes of 1932 and 1933. ‘Those who govern
us must finally realize…,’ so Dorgères told the crowd, ‘that we have had enough… C’est fini! We will not
be the eternal suckers.’39
The federation now began to draw larger crowds and to catch the interest of the political leagues whose
leaders recognized the potential of a rightist taxpayer revolt. At the Magic-City meeting hall 3500 Parisians
listened to Large and d’Anthouard denounce parliament and call for a non-partisan taxpayer coalition. ‘The
time has come to group together all the solid elements of the nation under the taxpayer banner without
regard to considerations of personal interest or political party. We have had enough of the false promises
with which our politicians fill us. We no longer have confidence in our political leaders and we are here
today to let them know that we have decided to impose our will.’ After the speech-making, Large invited
the audience to march to the Chamber of Deputies, the Senate, and the Élysée Palace as a show of taxpayer
strength and determination. Although police barricades made a mass march impossible by dividing the crowd
as it left the hall, 200 members of the royalist Action Française’s Camelots du Roi rallied some of the
taxpayers and began the move on the Chamber. Repeated police interventions dispersed the group five
blocks from Magic-City at the Pont de l’Alma. Police actions with the taxpayers and Camelots were also
reported at Place de l’Alma, avenue Marceau, avenue Pierre Ier, and rue Pierre Charron on the right bank
and rue Malar, rue Surcouf, and rue Cognacq-Jay on the left bank. In all sixteen arrests were made.40 It was
the taxpayers’ initiation into the growing fraternity of Frenchmen who were taking their protest into the
streets.
An ambitious national publicity campaign followed the Paris meeting of 28 January, culminating on 19
March—‘National Taxpayers’ Day’ —with meetings and marches in 46 provincial cities. At these rallies
federation spokesmen called for a balanced budget, economy in government, administrative reform, and the
establishment of a ‘government of authority,’ alone capable of returning order to public affairs. Following
the meetings the taxpayers marched to the prefecture or the town hall. The largest crowds were in western
France at La Roche sur Yon (14,000 in attendance), Angers (10,000), and Caen where a morning rally drew
4000 citizens, mostly farmers, and an afternoon meeting, attended by some members of parliament,
attracted 11,000. The smallest gathering at Soissons had 250 people. Most meetings were calm and orderly:
Laval (5500), Nevers (5000), Châteauroux (4000 ‘mostly farmers’), Rochefort (3000), Poitiers (2000),
Évreux (1500), Melun (1200), Versailles (1100), Corbeil (1000), Beauvais (1000), Agen (800), Toulouse
(700), Le Puy (700), Montpellier (700), Saint-Brieuc (500), Meaux (500), Besançon (500), Cherbourg (500),
and ‘several hundred’ at Libourne, Pau, Nîmes, Mâcon, and Annency. At Nîmes, Montpellier, and
Cherbourg there was a holiday atmosphere and automobiles decorated with protest posters paraded through
the streets of the cities.41
Disturbances occurred at nine meetings. According to police reports, groups belonging to ‘political and
union formations of the Left and extreme Left’ disrupted the Saint-Quentin (2000) rally: fighting broke out
and ‘Communists’ took over the speaker’s platform. ‘Extremists’ prevented any votes on taxpayer
 TAXPAYER REVOLT IN FRANCE 7

resolutions at Tours (1800). At Châtellerault (1250) there was a ‘stormy’ meeting during which ‘Socialists’
shouted their replies to taxpayer speakers, seized the rostrum several times, and chanted the ‘Internationale.’
At Houilles (3000) two members of parliament of the ‘extreme Left’ tried to respond to the federation
orators which resulted in a shouting match. At Nantes (6000) leftists tried to drown out the speakers, forcing
the police to evacuate the hall to avoid any incident; among those attending the gathering were ‘a certain
number of Camelots du Roi and members of the Jeunesses Patriotes.’ ‘Socialists’ and members of the
parties of the ‘extreme Left’ sabotaged the Reims meeting (4000) which had to be dismissed before it was
over; similar ‘Leftist’ and ‘extreme Left’ disruption caused the early termination of the Troyes (400)
meeting. On the other hand, at Angoulême (2500) the taxpayers took the initiative and surrounded the
prefecture, shouting ‘hostile cries’ at the prefect; and at Rennes (6000) a taxpayer march which included
‘farmer militants’ was stopped by the Garde Mobile and about twenty marchers were arrested.42
According to police estimates, the ‘National Taxpayers’ Day’ had involved about 100,000 citizens and
represented ‘an enormous propaganda effort among shopkeepers, businessmen, artisans, farmers, and
veterans.’43 Federation leaders admitted that the response was far greater than they had hoped for.44 But
opponents of the federation claimed to be unimpressed. Based on reports from the Reims and Tours
meetings, Le Peuple, the official journal of the Confédération Générale du Travail, dismissed the federation
as ‘a small group trying to stir up fascist agitation in France.’45 The Socialist newspaper Le Populaire saw
things in a similar way.46 On the other hand, the Communists sided ‘…with the taxpayers, the shopkeepers
[and] the peasants who are struggling against the tax burden, [and] who ask that it be alleviated.’ But they
condemned the federation and its leaders: ‘Reject your bad shepherds: the fascist grands bourgeois, the
large landowners, the sellers of fertilizer and machinery, the directors of large commercial enterprises with
multiple branches, the expropriators of small commerce. They are your enemies as well as ours… We shall
fight them together.’ For the communists, a coalition of ‘all the victims of capitalist exploitation’ was the only
answer, a coalition which would overthrow the grande bourgeoisie.47
Le Temps treated the federation seriously and with some sympathy. ‘Whether one likes it or not the spirit
of the country has changed… The good citizen, the excellent taxpayer who used to be content with
grumbling, now goes to meetings and participates in demonstrations.’ The editorialist concluded that
economies were needed in government spending to allow for reductions in taxes. ‘Until now tax increases
have been more frequent than budget cuts. We hope that…a new balance will be established. If nothing
happens, we will witness the continuation of a situation which will rapidly deteriorate, creating deeper and
deeper discontent throughout the land. This is the conclusion that we draw from yesterday’s
demonstrations.’48
Members of the government and parliament answered ‘National Taxpayers’ Day’ with a mix of ridicule
and threats. Minister of the Budget Lucien Lamoureux brushed off the taxpayer meetings as nothing more
than ‘artificial agitation,’ but hastened to add that a law passed the previous month had made it a crime to
organize ‘the collective refusal to pay taxes.’49 Taxpayers beware! Socialist leader LudovicOscar Frossard
thought the federation sinister enough to report on it to his colleagues at the Palais Bourbon. He described it
as a shabby front organization for big business and its president as a failed businessman, revealing that d’
Anthouard was a member of the board of directors of three companies—the Compagnie Française
d’Afrique, the Crédit Foncier du Brésil, and the Crédit Commercial et Industriel de Paris—that were part of
the scandal-ridden Bouilloux-Lafont group. The first two were in the process of a court-ordered dissolution
as the result of mismanagement and the third had suspended its dividend payments. This was the man,
stormed Frossard, who dared accuse parliament of corruption and the misuse of public funds!50
Frossard’s disclosures may have embarrassed the federation but did not shake its confidence in its leaders.
D’Anthouard quickly explained that while Frossard’s information was correct, the courts had cleared him of
8 THE ASSASSINATION OF JACQUES LEMAIGRE DUBREUIL

any responsibility in those business misadventures. After all, he was a career diplomat not a businessman
and had spent twenty-four years in service outside of France. In short, he was a director in name only and
quite a silent partner in matters of management.51 Although d’Anthouard’s explanation seemed to be
accepted, there was still some disagreement among federation members on the tactics which had brought
the taxpayers under such scrutiny. A vocal minority opposed the violent demonstrations and
the inflammatory statements which encouraged breaking the law.52 The majority, however, was still armed
to do battle. ‘The directors of the federation have decided not to back away from any obstacle,’ Large
announced, ‘and to go into the streets if need be, because this is a question of life or death for us all.’ He
even linked the federation with the notion of some sort of national revolution: ‘when the H-Hour is upon us,
we will call on you to come in strength to our sides.’53
Plans for the federation’s meetings in Paris on 27 May were watched closely by the police who detected a
growing sympathy for the taxpayer spirit among traditionally moderate commercial groups such as the Paris
Chamber of Commerce, the Union des Intérêts Économiques, and the Fédération des Groupements
Commerciaux et Industriels de France.54 Taxpayer propaganda was impressive. Thousands of posters
decorated the Paris region and 400,000 handbills were distributed in the city itself by the federation, the
Action Française, and the Jeunesses Patriotes. Newspaper publicity, special editions of Le Réveil du
contribuable, and favorable press comment forecasted an event of major significance for the taxpayer
movement.55
Compared with the provincial meetings of 19 March, the Paris rally was disappointing. The 4000 in
attendance, divided about evenly between two meeting halls (Magic-City and Salle Bullier), were less than
half the number expected by police and much less than that anticipated by the federation. It equaled rather
than surpassed previous gatherings in noise and numbers. Federation orators renewed their commitment to a
tax strike to bring ‘the politicians to their knees,’ demanded the establishment of a ‘new order,’ and, in
violation of a pledge made to the police, encouraged the taxpayers to take their protest from the halls into
the streets (‘vous livrer à des exercises d’action’).56 Despite the summons, however, the Camelots du Roi at
Bullier had no success at getting the crowd to march on the Chamber, and at Magic-City a small group of
Camelots and their followers were quickly dispersed between avenue Bosquet and the Esplanade des
Invalides.57 Contrary to police intelligence the disappointing turn out and the lack of street action were due
to the unwillingness of some of the taxpayer sympathizers—the Comité National d’Entente Économique,
the Jeunesses Patriotes, and the Miliciens Socialistes Nationaux—to risk fights with the police.58
Nevertheless, Large was arrested while trying to force his way into the house of the budget reporter of the
Chamber of Deputies, Paul Jacquier.59 And this incident brought forth familiar statements from the leaders
of the Republic on a time-honored theme: la République en danger! Radical-Socialist Édouard Herriot
spoke of the need ‘to defend the republican regime threatened by seditious organizations’ and Minister of the
Interior Camille Chautemps reminded citizens of the government’s duty to ensure ‘public order.’ At the
Palais Bourbon Prime Minister Édouard Daladier promised action against the taxpayers: ‘the tumultuous
movements, the threats, the violations of the homes of the representatives of the people…all will be stopped!
If the means presently at our disposal are insufficient, I will ask you for more authority. Our troubles will
not be solved by street demonstrations.’60 To all but those who knew him Daladier sounded like a
Robespierre-in-the-making ready to defend the Republic at all costs.
The federation was not cowed. Large wrote to Daladier: ‘We have decided—and nothing can stop us—to
fight with all our might against any government which works…against the national interest. We refuse to
back down before a dictatorship of incompetents and profiteers.’61 This was the tough language of the
political leagues! But was his spirited declaration credible given the poor federation performance of 19
May? It was a case of taxpayer talk without taxpayer action. The Comité National d’Entente Économique
 TAXPAYER REVOLT IN FRANCE 9

had quietly disassociated itself with the federation by sponsoring its own meetings, emphasizing that it
would pursue its goals in a ‘legal and orderly’ manner.62 The relationship with the veterans’ groups had also
deteriorated. Veterans’ leaders now warned against requesting or accepting any help whatsoever from the
taxpayers.63 And within the federation there was concern about Large’s ‘authoritarian and headstrong
nature’ and about the offhanded way in which he made federation decisions.64
The planning session for the federation’s 1933 annual meeting was devoted entirely to the ‘Large
question,’ debated in a ‘rough and excited’ manner. Large stood accused of abusing his authority by organizing
demonstrations and issuing press releases without the approval of the governing board and plunging the
federation into debt. He was charged with alienating ‘the majority of the leaders of the economic groups
affiliated with the federation’ and bringing the work of the Paris taxpayers’ group, the Syndicat des
Contribuables Parisiens, to a standstill.65 Large’s police record may have been growing, but the friends and
funds of the federation were not. There were calls for his resignation but the governing board rejected them,
proposing instead a compromise whereby a council would assist Large in directing the federation’s day-to-
day activities.66 The anti-Large forces refused to be appeased, however, and renewed their attack on him at
the December congress. But Large’s supporters who praised his ‘combative spirit’ and ‘devotion’ to the
taxpayer cause, outnumbered his opponents. The test of strength was the decision to expel the Syndicat des
Contribuables Parisiens, whose leaders were among the chief critics of Large’s conduct.67
Even after Large’s victory and the expulsion of some of the dissidents, perfect harmony was never
restored; the internal conflicts had taken their toll. Large admitted privately that the federation was in
serious financial shape. Many members had failed to renew their memberships and the contributions of
some groups were behind schedule. Regretfully he predicted that ‘since we cannot count on any significant
influx of money before the end of February, it is possible that we will remain dormant until then.’68
At the same time the federation was receiving a steady flow of protests from leaders of departmental
federations and corporative associations reproaching Large for failing to pursue an aggressive campaign
against the government and parliament.69 He was caught in a cross-fire, pressed for action by the
provincials, but held back by lack of money and the less-than-wholehearted support in Paris. In fact, while
Paris hibernated, the provinces erupted in taxpayer action; 30 meetings were held in winter 1933–1934, all
of which centered on the tax strike.70 And in December the Ligue des Contribuables de la Gironde
organized a protest march together with veterans’ groups at Bordeaux which pitted 6000 angry
demonstrators against police and firemen.71
At the beginning of January the Action Française appealed ‘to the people of Paris’ to demonstrate against
the government’s handling of the Stavisky scandal which implicated national politicians in a municipal
bond scandal. There was a special message for taxpayers. ‘At a time when the Government and the
Parliament of the Republic declare themselves incapable of balancing our budget, and continue to defend
the topsy-turvy foundations of their regime; while they refuse to reduce the burden of taxation, and are
actually inflicting more taxes on the French people, a scandal breaks out. This scandal shows that, far from
protecting the savings of the people, the Republican authorities have given free course to the colossal
rackets of an alien crook.’ The lengthy brief against government ministers and members of parliament
concluded: ‘The honest people of France who want to protect their own interests, and who care for the
cleanliness of public life, are forced to take the law into their own hands. At the beginning of this week,
Parliament will reconvene, and we urge the people of Paris to come in large numbers before the Chamber of
Deputies, to cry “Down with the Thieves,” and to clamor for honesty and justice.’72 The appeal was too
tempting to let pass and Large agreed to throw in his lot with the Action Française: ‘We shall march on this
den called the Palais Bourbon and, if necessary, use whips and clubs to clean out this Chamber of
10 THE ASSASSINATION OF JACQUES LEMAIGRE DUBREUIL

Incompetents.’73 Taxpayers joined the Action Française on the Pont de la Concorde on 23 January and the
federation endorsed a second Action Française meeting for 27 January.74
Then on 6 February—the day when many thought that the fate of the Republic had hung in the balance—
Paris taxpayers marched together with the veterans’ groups and political leagues on the Palais Bourbon.
This march earned the Taxpayers’ Federation a permanent place in the Third Republic’s rogues’ gallery.
Socialist Léon Blum believed that those who had gathered on the Place de la Concorde that Tuesday
afternoon had been intent on overthrowing the Republic and establishing an authoritarian regime. The
bloody fighting between the police and armed citizens seemed to confirm this. Yet, despite the dead and
injured, the demonstrators probably only wanted to serve notice on the Daladier government that many
Frenchmen were still dissatisfied with the sad state of public morality.
Not surprisingly, the march did not have the formal approval of the national federation. Rather, it was the
Fédération des Contribuables de la Seine, the Paris group created after the expulsion of the Syndicat des
Contribuables Parisiens, which called on its members ‘according to their political beliefs, personal
preferences, or availability of transportation’ to join together ‘in all the movements which will take place in
Paris this Tuesday the sixth.’75 Later in testimony before the parliamentary commission established to
investigate the ‘events’ of 6 February, Large insisted that the national federation ‘had not at any moment
alerted its members to participate in those demonstrations’ and that the Fédération des Contribuables de la
Seine had acted ‘independently.’76 Large tried to have it both ways: to participate and not to participate in
the march. But there was no doubt of his personal feelings, for he took part in the clashes on the Place de la
Concorde. And participate directly or not, the national federation quickly hailed the ‘patriotmartyrs’ who
had been ‘assassinated’ by the police and exploited the tide of anti-government sentiment by asking all
taxpayers ‘to suspend immediately…all tax payments, to refuse all credit to the government, and to
withdraw all the funds that they kept in public savings institutions.’77
For many taxpayers Large had committed yet another error in judgment by embroiling the federation in
what the Left was calling a coordinated ‘fascist’ plot to overthrow the Republic and what the extreme Right
insisted was a révolution manquée. Overthrowing the Republic was farther than they wanted to go.
Moreover, Large further embarrassed the federation by telling the parliamentary commission—in a moment
of pique at their rapid-fire questions—that the Taxpayers’ Federation did not have and never had had a
program of financial reforms.78 This was untrue, of course, but it left a bad impression.
To counteract Large’s unfavorable performance the taxpayer press reminded its readers of the specific tax
and legislative proposals that the federation had made in the past.79 And in a letter to Henry Bérenger,
president of the Senate Committee for Governmental Reform, Baron d’Anthouard summed up the
taxpayers’ current agenda: the participation of taxpayer representatives in the oversight of municipal,
departmental, and national finances; the reform of the public accounting system to enable the average
citizen to understand better the government’s financial operations; the creation of a tax court and the
recognition of the right of taxpayer groups to defend their members before this body; the official
government acknowledgment of the work of the taxpayer groups, granting them the means and necessary
authority to carry out their tasks; and the establishment of a supreme court to protect the rights of citizens
whenever infringed upon by the public authorities.80
Large still praised those who had fallen on the ‘field of honor,’ but he also talked about peace and order.
‘Our duty is to quiet the passions,’ he announced, ‘to prevent killings and massacres.’ In fact, those who
wanted ‘to fight instead of to reason,’ who believed that ‘killing one another’ was the only way to solve
their problems were told ‘to enroll in those organizations which have that as their program.’81 His change of
heart had come too late. Citing financial irregularities uncovered during an audit of federation accounts, the
central committee of the Taxpayers’ Federation asked for his resignation as delegate-general in June 1934.
 TAXPAYER REVOLT IN FRANCE 11

When Large refused, the committee forced the issue and in October voted unanimously to sever all ties with
him. Regrettably, this left Large in possession of all the federation assets—the national offices on rue
Lafayette, the bank accounts, and Le Réveil du contribuable.82
It is tempting to conclude that the events of 6 February 1934 did the Taxpayers’ Federation in by casting
its middle-class members in the role of hard-bitten enemies of the Republic who used taxpayer protest
merely as a means to overturn a despised political regime. And there is no doubt of the sincerity or depth of
taxpayer anger. But these taxpayers were really quite reluctant revolutionaries who were genuinely
embarrassed by the unhappy consequences of Large’s leadership. Still, there was always grudging
admiration of the militant ‘political’ leagues and Peasant Defense. The interim president of the ‘new’
Taxpayers’ Federation—the Fédération Nationale des Contribuables—Dr. Adolphe Javal (who replaced
Baron d’Anthouard, now named ‘honorary president’) was a long-time supporter of Dorgères, as was the
interim vice-president, Louis Varinot, a successful Paris lawyer, who handled all of Peasant Defense’s legal
troubles.83 Neither of these men was shy of scandal nor wary of skirmishes with politicians in the press or
police in the streets. And Dorgères, too, was a member of the federation’s executive committee where
taxpayer activists (such as Dr. Georges Bardou, the former and controversial president of the Taxpayers’
Federation of the Seine, and André Bouton, president of the Taxpayers’ Union of the Sarthe, L’Union des
Contribuables de la Sarthe) sat in force.84 Nevertheless, when the federation sought a new president, it
looked to the traditional business community and recruited someone who had had no prior active
involvement with the taxpayers nor in fact with any political or public action group of any sort in France.

Jacques Lemaigre Dubreuil and the Taxpayers’ Federation

From March 1935 to September 1939, Jacques Lemaigre Dubreuil, the president, director-general of
Georges Lesieur et ses Fils, manufacturers of Huiles Lesieur, the premier vegetable cooking oil in France,
presided over the Taxpayers’ Federation. In these four-and-a-half years before the Second World War the
federation emerged as a pesky critic of the tax and fiscal policies of the governments of the Third Republic
and of the economic and financial policies of the political Left in France, particularly those of the Popular
Front governments of Socialist Léon Blum. Its notoriety and success were due in large part to the leadership
of Lemaigre Dubreuil who sought to apply his considerable managerial skills and the organizational
principles of a modern business enterprise to federation operations. In the collective memory of inter-war
France the Taxpayers’ Federation brought two images to mind—6 February and Jacques Lemaigre Dubreuil
—even though each represented separate and distinct moments in the federation’s history.
Lemaigre Dubreuil’s pre-Taxpayers’ Federation biography is of interest. He was born on 30 October
1894 in Solignac (Haute-Vienne), five miles south of the porcelain center of Limoges, in a region that 100
years earlier Arthur Young, the wandering English agriculturalist, had described as ‘by far the most
beautiful I have seen inFrance…85 Lemaigre Dubreuil never forgot the Limousin of his youth —the green
hills and meadows, the open fields, the deep, black, rapid rivers, the distant mountain ridges. Years later he
insisted: ‘I am not myself in this “big Paris” which I do not like because I feel too small here. I am only
myself in my dear Limousin where I love the people and the things.’86 Nevertheless, his parents (and his
father was the mayor of Solignac for over 40 years) sent him to Paris for his schooling, first to the École
Gerson, a Catholic preparatory school for boys who planned to take the baccalauréat, then to the Institut
d’Études Politiques. He was nineteen years old at the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 and he enlisted
with the Twentieth Dragoons from Limoges. The following year he was accepted at the cavalry school at
Saumur for training with light armored vehicles. In 1916 he was sent to Romania (with the rank of second
lieutenant) as part of the French military mission operating with the Romanian army against the Austrians.
12 THE ASSASSINATION OF JACQUES LEMAIGRE DUBREUIL

To reach the Romanians, however, the French contingent was first forced to sail north to the Russian port of
Murmansk on the Barents Sea, then traverse the entire north-south length of the continent by rail. This trip
was repeated in reverse six months later (in June 1917) when the French withdrew their forces. Back in
France Lemaigre Dubreuil served with the Ninth Army, winning promotion to first lieutenant on Christmas
Day 1918. He was then assigned to the military staff of the French High Commissioner in Constantinople,
followed by four years of on-the-ground commands with the Army of the Levant in Syria. Discharged in
1922 with the rank of captain, Lemaigre Dubreuil had spent eight years under the flag, decorated with the
Legion of Honor and cited many times for bravery under fire.87
Talented, educated, patriotic, and worldly-wise, Lemaigre Dubreuil returned to Paris to a job with the
Banque du Pays du Nord, ready to start his peacetime career and in an individual way to help fashion
postwar France. Within the year, he joined the firm of Marc Desaché, brokers on the Paris Stock Exchange.
Three years later (on 27 January 1926) he married Simone Lesieur, daughter of the founder of Georges
Lesieur et ses Fils of Dunkirk; and made his final career move by entering the family business. On the death
of Georges Lesieur in 1931 Lemaigre Dubreuil (at the age of 37) became the president and director-general
of the company that produced and marketed France’s foremost vegetable cooking oil, Huiles Lesieur. In
practice he shared the running of the company with Paul Lesieur, the oldest of the Lesieur sons, who chaired
the board of directors and oversaw the firm’s internal operations at the extensive Dunkirk factory and
shipping complex. From his Paris offices Lemaigre Dubreuil concentrated on national and international
assignments: the supply of raw materials to Dunkirk from Dakar (principally groundnuts from Senegal from
which the peanut oil was extracted and transformed into Lesieur oil) and the marketing of Huiles Lesieur to
France and Europe.88
The Europe that Lemaigre Dubreuil surveyed from Paris was increasingly preoccupied with the emerging
Germany under Hitler. After a short trip across the Rhine in 1934 Lemaigre Dubreuil chanced to read a
pamphlet by taxpayer militant Charles Kula who insisted that Hitler’s Germany was becoming an armed
camp and in consequence that France was in serious military danger. ‘In my opinion there is something…
more important for us than just the transformation of the civilian population into soldiers throughout all of
Germany,’ Lemaigre Dubreuil wrote to Kula. ‘It is to witness the total rebirth of their civic spirit (sens
moral) as compared with a France which is lost in parliamentary squabbles. A great people is beginning
anew under the direction of a leader who knows what he wants and who vigorously applies his principles.’89
This assessment of the Nazi revolution revealed Lemaigre Dubreuil’s own fears of a Third Republic in
decline, his frustration with the scandals and corruption of republican politics that had ended in Paris street
fighting on 6 February 1934. On that night he, too, was on the Solférino Bridge watching ‘with dreadful
sadness’ as citizens and policemen clashed, and Frenchmen killed Frenchmen. The mix of grievances that
brought citizen marchers to the point of assaulting the Palais Bourbon and quickly turning the heart of Paris
into a combat zone affected him as well. He regretted the bloodshed and said so, but he did not shrink from
the fight. In fact, he suggested that it was time to replace talk with action and partisan politics with the
interests of France. Was it not proper, he asked, to stand up for all those ‘honest people’ who in truth had
the right not to be ‘oppressed’ by a ‘disgraceful government and parliament’?90 It was this personal sense of
patriotic duty and civic spirit that made him accept the presidency of the Taxpayers’ Federation in January
1935. The invitation came in part because of his admiring letter to Kula, newly returned to the federation
fold after Large’s departure, for apparently it was Kula who first proposed Lemaigre Dubreuil for federation
president. Kula later remarked that Lemaigre Dubreuil was the kind of leader that he had ‘dreamed of seeing
at the head of an army of taxpayers.’91 Dorgères also believed that Lemaigre Dubreuil presented an
opportunity for the taxpayers (and perhaps even for Peasant Defense) to recruit a new François Coty, a
vigorous entrepreneur with real sympathy for the taxpayer cause and deep pockets as well. Unlike Coty,
 TAXPAYER REVOLT IN FRANCE 13

however, Lemaigre Dubreuil had no desire to play the role of a behind-the-scenes financier or string puller.
From the first, he preferred to be on stage, front and center. This was quite a different part for a ‘typical’
French businessman, for it momentarily pushed his business concerns to the background; and Lesieur was
ultimately eclipsed in favor of Lemaigre Dubreuil’s public and political involvement with the Taxpayers’
Federation.
In March 1935 Lemaigre Dubreuil became the federation president at a Paris meeting that was followed
by a reception which also honored two new members of the federation’s advisory committee, Marshal Louis
Franchet d’Espérey and Joseph Barthélemy, the former dean of the law faculty of the University of Paris. In
his acceptance speech Lemaigre Dubreuil promised that he would organize the federation like ‘an immense
business concern’ with an efficient and effective national office, a well-trained staff, and a professional
advertising department. He pledged to work for the abolition of ‘expensive and useless’ government offices
and monopolies, the reduction of existing taxes, and the ‘judicious use’ of taxpayer funds. The first step toward
realizing these goals, he insisted, was for parliament to surrender its right to initiate all legislation to
increase expenses, a power which he claimed rested solely with the Republic’s executive authority. The
taxpayers’ final goal, of course, was to restore those ideas vital to the nation’s health: authority, family,
economy, and country.92 The press reception was friendly but cautious. After all, who could ever imagine
the Chamber of Deputies giving up the right to spend the taxpayers’ money, its most potent and lucrative
function? Yet following Lemaigre Dubreuil’s first public address in April, the moderate Le Journal des
débats urged the federation on: ‘Tonight marks the beginning of an entirely renovated taxpayer movement.
With it go the hopes of many Frenchmen of all classes and categories. To make it strong enough to play a
role worthy of these hopes…it is the duty of everyone to join.’93
It was clear from the beginning that for Lemaigre Dubreuil the Taxpayers’ Federation was only a ‘means,
not an end in itself.’ Although he sought to satisfy the taxpayers’ complaints which he believed were
legitimate, he emphasized the need to tackle a wide variety of national problems and to use the strength of
the taxpayer movement ‘to impose a solution on them.’94 Since the force of the movement was critical to
the program’s progress, Lemaigre Dubreuil appointed a young journalist, Jean Rigault, as federation
secretary-general and his second in command, the day-to-day manager of taxpayer affairs, who would spend
the bulk of his time on press matters (both with the coordination and development of the taxpayer press and
with public relations and publicity in the Paris and provincial press) and on fund-raising as well.95 In all this
the power of advertising, especially as an instrument of political persuasion and support, was evident. Rigault’s
press office solicited business and industry contributions to the federation in the form of an agreed-upon
percentage of that company’s annual advertising budget. Then Rigault himself parceled out this advertising
to taxpayer-friendly newspapers.96
On the matter of the tax strike the new federation wanted to break with the old federation, but it was not
always a clean or easy cut. For example, at Rouen in February 1935 Dorgères warned that if the
government refused to heed the farmers’ demands, he might be forced to advocate a ‘tax strike’ and call for
the farmers to withdraw all their money from both public and private institutions. André Bouton of the
Taxpayers’ Union of the Sarthe, Union des Contribuables de la Sarthe and a member of the federation’s
executive committee wrote to Dorgères that he had reached the same conclusion for the taxpayers.
Dorgères’s speech and Bouton’s letter (which had fallen into the hands of the police) were used as evidence
of the complicity of Peasant Defense and the Taxpayers’ Federation in illegal action. Both Dorgères and
Bouton were arrested.97
At first Lemaigre Dubreuil was unwilling to do more than repudiate Bouton and deny that the federation
had anything to do with the plans for a tax strike. But when Dorgères was found guilty and sentenced to
eight months in prison, he protested the severity of the sentence, hinting that it was intended to prevent
14 THE ASSASSINATION OF JACQUES LEMAIGRE DUBREUIL

Dorgères from becoming a candidate in the spring 1936 legislative elections. In an open letter to Premier
Pierre Laval, printed in full in Le Journal des débats and Action française, he asked: ‘Can you blame
Dorgères for telling his farmers to take every means to protect their homes, their families, and their interests
when our institutions are such that to obtain certain indispensable financial measures…you are forced to ask
for decree powers from your own colleagues?’ Lemaigre Dubreuil’s letter may have had no impact at all,
but the Rouen Court of Appeals did reduce, then suspend Dorgères’s sentence.98
Now a rural celebrity of sorts, Dorgères turned up beside Lemaigre Dubreuil at a combined taxpayer-
farmer meeting in Bordeaux (8 July 1935) while airplanes showered the city with handbills. The two teamed
up at Beaupréau (Maine-etLoire) two months later at a meeting sponsored by all the agricultural
associations of Anjou, and again on 17 September at Larchamp (Mayenne) at a joint rally of the Taxpayers’
Fédération and Peasant Defense.99 Through it all Le Journal des débats praised the farmer-taxpayer
cooperation, but warned against ‘demagogic agitation’ or ‘revolutionary methods’ such as the refusal to pay
taxes. Reason, sweet reason, and, above all, a healthy respect for law and order ought to guide taxpayer
action, for, if not, the taxpayers would compromise their own reasonable goals.100 All this was not lost on
Lemaigre Dubreuil who, speaking for the Taxpayers’ Federation under his leadership, insisted: ‘We
recognize the obligation to pay taxes and have never advocated the collective refusal to pay them.’ At the
same time he commended Dorgères. ‘[W]ithout Dorgères rural poverty would have driven the farmers to
the worst form of international extremism, handing them over to foreign agents.’ These were conservative
code words for the Red Menace. Some might ‘deplore’ Dorgères’s bluntness, he continued, but it was
foolish to think, as the political Left claimed, that the current unrest among the peasantry was due to
demagogues and agitators.101
Nevertheless, at the height of Dorgères’s popularity (and perhaps in part because of it), Lemaigre
Dubreuil moved the Taxpayers’ Fédération away from Peasant Defense, breaking the strategic and financial
connections that Dorgères had hoped would grow ever stronger. Despite some advertising from the
Taxpayers’ Federation in Dorgères’s newspapers, the gulf between the farmers and taxpayers widened until
Dorgères finally left the federation’s executive committee in mid-1936. Then Lemaigre Dubreuil announced
the creation of Rural Alliance, Alliance Rurale, the federation’s own organizational link to the land, to
replace the tie with Peasant Defense.102 At a time when politics in France were becoming more polarized,
the Taxpayers’ Fédération chose to be less confrontational or at least less connected to what historian Robert
O.Paxton would later call ‘peasant fascism.’
In November 1935 Lemaigre Dubreuil’s Taxpayers’ Federation published a handsome brochure, Les
Contribuables, which stated the taxpayer case and proclaimed the taxpayer program. The federation’s
purpose was to protect ‘all those who worked and saved’ by organizing them for united action, to suggest
remedies for France’s economic recovery from the effects of the world-wide economic depression, and to
propose comprehensive and far-reaching measures for reshaping the French political, social, and economic
system.103 To those who wondered why the taxpayers did not concentrate solely on tax matters, Lemaigre
Dubreuil answered that there was a connection between ‘the general reform of the state and the particular
problems affecting the taxpayers.’ It was impossible to reform the budget without reforming the state; it was
impossible to reform the economy without reforming the state; and to reform the state and the economy
without dealing with the social question seemed inconceivable.104
According to Les Contribuables, the economic crisis of the 1930s proved the bankruptcy of economic
liberalism, a doctrine which in any event never conformed to economic realities. Textbook liberalism
proclaimed the unfettered interplay of economic forces and a free, competitive economic system, adjusting
itself naturally by the laws of supply and demand. Yet no one was prepared to permit the rules of liberal
economics to be the final arbiter of economic success or failure. Businessmen and industrialists banded
 TAXPAYER REVOLT IN FRANCE 15

together for protection or profit, lobbying the government for subsidies or pressing for favorable tariff
legislation. At the same time labor unions or workers’ parties pushed for economic concessions and social
safety nets from both employers and the government.105 In the pre-war world and at times of relative
national affluence the action of business associations, trade unions, and government on the economy went
largely unnoticed. But after the Great War, and especially at a moment of economic depression, what had
earlier been ignored or accepted with little concern was now an ‘insupportable’ burden. In particular, the state’s
demands on the taxpayer had increased at an enormous rate: in 1913 the state requisitioned 24 percent of the
national income, 38.8 percent in 1928, 43.5 percent in 1930, 55 percent in 1933, and 65 percent in 1935, the
largest part of this in direct and indirect taxes.106 And all Frenchmen were not equally affected, leading to a
‘social crisis’ and the loss of a sense of community because there was simply ‘too great a difference in the
condition of individuals within the same nation.’ Until this social question was resolved, France’s future
would hang in the balance. The first step in resolving it, however, was to recognize that economic liberalism
was unrealistic and outmoded.107
Since the government had contributed to the crisis, it was foolish to look to it for help. The increased
demands of the state were functions of its increased activity. It had constantly expanded its role in utter
disregard of liberal principles which posited a state of limited functions. This was so in large part because
the state (and its treasure) were treated as a prize to be divided up among the political parties for their own
partisan ends. The result, according to the taxpayers, was a huge public debt and the erosion of all concern
with thrift or economy in government. In the end, this would lead to ‘the death of the economy’ and ‘the
death of the taxpayer.’108 Unfortunately but predictably, the government failed to do anything to improve
the disastrous economic situation. At best, politicians tried half-hearted deflationary schemes. At worst they
did nothing, hoping that the crisis would pass on its own. Moreover, whenever solutions were proposed,
they were always partial and half-hearted measures that avoided the larger and more difficult issues.109 Les
Contribuables now addressed these issues.
To put an end to the financial legacy of the past, the Taxpayers’ Federation first demanded the liquidation
of the public and private debt. For the future, they pledged to protect the family, to organize labor, and to
reform the administrative structure of the country by reinforcing state authority, setting up professional
corporations, and decentralizing the administrative network.110
For the family, the taxpayers proposed the family vote, government aid for large families, tax exemptions,
and the abolition of legal restrictions on inheritance.111 At the heart of the labor question was
unemployment, the result of a poorly organized labor market. This was considered one of the pernicious
side effects of ‘social and economic disorder.’ Although the taxpayers endorsed piecemeal solutions such as
the restriction of foreign workers, the creation of public works projects, the organization of placement
bureaux, raising the minimum working age to fifteen, and the revival of artisan industries, their most
important recommendation was the organization of labor into professional corporations.112
The Taxpayers’ Federation realized that corporatism suggested two extremes: ‘paternalism’ and ‘state
socialism.’ ‘For some, it means a concession by the employers; for others, it means a step toward the
abolition of private property.’ For the taxpayers corporatism resolved ‘the problems of competition, of prices,
and of freedom,’ permitting a ‘free collective economy’ to replace a ‘directed individual economy.’ ‘To
establish the corporation is to organize the producers who are not yet organized, to permit them to benefit
from the advantages of the union of professional interests, a union that others have formed giving them the
means to influence the market, precisely because their adversaries are not organized. In a word, to establish
the corporation is to balance competition by limiting its effects.’113
Organized at the regional and national levels, the corporation was to be ‘an association of producers,
grouping together all those who work in the same category of production,’ employees as well as employers.
16 THE ASSASSINATION OF JACQUES LEMAIGRE DUBREUIL

The goal was to regulate the interests of the profession and its members. Employers and employees were to
be given equal rights, protected by equal representation on all boards of control or decision; disputes would
be adjudicated before regional committees with the right of appeal to a regional council and final recourse
to a government control board. Corporation membership would be optional for private individuals and
small companies, but obligatory for large companies and corporations.114
As a social organization, the corporation would concern itself with apprenticeship, job placement, health
and life insurance, unemployment compensation, and perhaps one day even the construction and
management of housing projects. It would oversee working conditions, establish professional training and
educational standards, regulate labor conflicts, design labor contracts, and enforce labor legislation. As an
economic institution, it would adapt production to consumption by regulating prices and controlling quality
in cooperation with regional, national, and international authorities; and recommend government
legislation. As a political institution, it would send delegates (equal in number to those chosen directly by
the voters through ‘integral’ universal suffrage) to regional councils. When these councils met together, they
would constitute the Chambre Legislative, the national legislative assembly.115
Taxpayers hoped that corporatism would put an end to the class struggle and the ‘partnership of labor and
capital’ became one of the important themes of their meetings. Prior to the elections of 1936, which raised class
tensions to their highest point in the century, Lemaigre Dubreuil announced: ‘To the hatred that presently
divides men and political parties, we shall answer that happiness and prosperity can only be found in class
collaboration… To capital confronting labor, we shall counter with labor associating itself with capital,
sharing the benefits of the task accomplished in common. We shall demonstrate that the employer and the
employee have a social duty to fulfill.’116 In March 1937 he stated that only with a constructive program
stressing ‘the cooperation of labor and capital’ could one outbid the revolutionaries. ‘There is no such thing
as salaries or profits by divine right. Workers and owners must have only one goal: the prosperity of the
enterprise. You cannot regulate the social question with paid vacations. The only solution, the only way to
escape state socialism is the cooperation of labor and capital, I mean the participation of everyone in the profits
of the enterprise.’117 Later, he proposed the idea as a barrier to collectivism and the socialist transformation
of society. And in Limoges in 1938 he predicted that class collaboration would bring workers a prosperity
far beyond the wildest Marxist dreams.118
The taxpayers blamed the imbalance between wholesale and retail prices for the economic depression in
the countryside and its ‘desertion’ by farmers and their families. They recommended tax relief, lower
interest rates, and the reduction of debts.119 To stop rural flight the taxpayers proposed the liquidation of the
private debt, a moratorium on taxes, a reduction in certain taxes (in particular, inheritance taxes), the
modification of inheritance laws to make the transfer of land easier and to avoid the division of family
farms among all the heirs, the regional corporative organization of agriculture (which Dorgères defined as
‘the union of members of the profession in a cooperative effort with certain resources in common and under
the direction of the best and most competent individuals’), and tariff protection.120
The taxpayers’ administrative reforms aimed at restoring the state to its proper role, limiting and
reinforcing the ‘central authority,’ and reorganizing regional administration. ‘It is necessary to limit the
state to its mission and to give it the means to accomplish it. The confusion between decision and
supervision, between the executive and the legislative branch is perhaps the most important cause of all our
troubles. It is certainly one of the permanent ones.’121 For the taxpayers the state had to be divested of all
the functions that did not concern it (for example, state banking, commercial, and insurance operations);
these should be returned to private hands. The ‘central authority’ would consist of executive and legislative
branches. The executive would be composed of eight ministries: the prime minister’s office, foreign affairs,
defense, finance, justice, colonies, public instruction, and national economy. The legislative would comprise
 TAXPAYER REVOLT IN FRANCE 17

a Conseil d’État to prepare legislative texts and decrees at the government’s request, to advise on economic
and administrative policy, and to act as an arbitration board; and a legislature, the Chambre Législative,
which would debate, ratify, or reject the money bills presented by the government, but have no right of
initiative in financial matters.122
The taxpayers accepted the judgments of the Fédération Régionaliste Française, animated by the well-
known geographers Jean Brunhes and Paul Vidal de la Blache, that the départements had created an
artificial division between la France économique and la France administrative. To overcome that split they
endorsed the establishment of twenty regional assemblies throughout France endowed with economic,
judicial, financial, and administrative powers. As the federation saw it, each region would have its own
‘spontaneous life.’ The state would intervene in the region only as the ‘regulator’ of French life, the arbiter
between different regions, and the guardian of the public order and national safety.123
The financial reforms of the Taxpayers’ Fédération were based on the contention that ‘in a modern nation
the budget, treasury, currency, and economy are closely linked, but linked precisely in that order…’ Thus,
for the taxpayers the budget was of prime importance. ‘There can be no social peace without a healthy
economy, no healthy economy without a low interest rate, no low interest rate without a strong credit
policy, no strong credit policy without a balanced budget’ To achieve a balanced budget, the taxpayers
demanded budgetary deflation and proposed a plan that would reduce government spending by over twelve
billion francs.124
At the same time the taxpayers demanded reductions in taxes which they claimed ‘absorb and devour
more than half of the country’s income.’ ‘The weight of this burden,’ they maintained, ‘is more
insupportable to Frenchmen than the unevenness of its distribution.’125 To this end they proposed the
outright abolition of the sales tax, the tax on farm profits, and direct inheritance taxes; and they suggested
the reduction of the taxes on land, the income surtax, and the tax on income from stocks and bonds.126
Taxpayers endorsed a ‘diversified’ tax system rather than the projects for a single tax whether on
expenses or receipts. They believed that the direct taxes compensated for the indirect taxes which taxed low
income groups and contributed to the high cost of living. But they did suggest the introduction of a
progressive scale in the various scheduler income taxes. They also proposed a new scale for the income
surtax, charging that its base was too narrow, its yield uncertain, and its control burdensome; and they
suggested methods for its collection and supervision. Finally, they proposed the creation of a taxe de
mainmorte mobilière, a 50 percent increase in the tax on stock market transactions and in the stamp tax, and
the combination of several small taxes into one.127
The taxpayer credo echoed themes that were familiar throughout the 1930s among conservative, middle-
class groups unhappy with the leftward march of French democracy and its political and economic
consequences. There is no doubt that taxpayer reforms would have compromised the gains made by the
working class under the Third Republic’s system of universal manhood suffrage, organized political parties,
and freely constituted labor unions. To protect the middle class the Republic needed to be reshaped. And
this was the point of the taxpayer plan which always identified the national interest with that of the middle
class. It is therefore not surprising that, although the Taxpayers’ Federation preferred to keep the political
leagues (such as the Jeunesses Patriotes and the Action Française) at arms length, it welcomed any
association with the veterans’ organizations for this underscored its patriotic, national, and militant
message.
Lemaigre Dubreuil presided over the Taxpayers’ Fédération at a time which historian Robert O.Paxton
has likened to a period of civil war in France.128 The Left—the Radical-Socialist, Socialist, and Communist
parties—had combined forces in 1934 to present a common front (called a Popular Front or front populaire)
in the 1936 legislative elections against what it termed the ‘fascism’ of the Right. The Right—moderate to
18 THE ASSASSINATION OF JACQUES LEMAIGRE DUBREUIL

conservative parliamentary groups, political leagues, and national organizations and movements of all sorts
—had joined in an organizationally weak yet ideologically strong national front (or front national) to
combat what it called the ‘communism’ of the Left.
Standing with the Right, the Taxpayers’ Fédération continued to demand the ‘abolition of parliamentary
initiative on the question of public expenses’ and in addition the elimination of 100 seats from the Chamber
of Deputies. Both proposals promised to save the taxpayers money, yet neither had any chance of success.
Despite petition drives and mass taxpayer meetings in spring 1935 parliament took no notice. Protesting
parliament’s inaction on a host of reform measures, Lemaigre Dubreuil insisted that he would ‘do the
impossible to obtain satisfaction through the normal channels,’ but he warned that he knew how to take his
responsibilities and would not shrink from putting himself at the head of an army of taxpayers ‘to go down
into the streets.’129 The taxpayers’ anti-parliamentary edge became sharper over time. In Les Contribuables,
Lemaigre Dubreuil confessed: ‘I can see only one solution: to impose these reforms outside of
parliament’130 And by January 1936 he concluded: ‘It is through the voice of the country, it is through
public opinion that the reforms—which the beneficiaries of the present system refuse to accept—will be
imposed.’131
Because of its anti-parliamentary stance, the Taxpayers’ Federation never ran candidates for public office.
But it did express opinions on both the candidates and the issues. Before the 1936 elections, taxpayer
posters condemned past governments of both the Left and the Right, urging voters to support candidates
who, once elected, would be willing ‘to step aside for the representatives of a regime based on organized
trades and professions,’ a legal revolution that would empower a new corporate state.132 Another poster
listed 285 ‘exploiters’ whom voters were told to oust from the current chamber; 240 of those named were
Socialists and Radical-Socialists and there was no one on the list from the parties of the Right.133 To make
taxpayers politics even clearer Lemaigre Dubreuil repeatedly denounced any ‘communist or communizing
experiment,’ insisting that this was opposed to French tradition, freedom, and prosperity.134
The victory of the Popular Front, made possible by the discipline of the Left on the second ballot,
brought to power a government headed by Léon Blum, the first Socialist to become a premier of France.
Blum sought to stimulate the economy by increasing consumption which he hoped would restore normal
levels of production. Since the Socialists had no qualms about budget deficits, Blum was prepared to
venture into an economic experiment which counted on increased government spending for success.
Nevertheless, the Popular Front still pledged a balanced budget, but admitted that it would be the last rather
than the first step in the economic recovery plan.135
To combat unemployment and the industrial crisis the Popular Front proposed the creation of a National
Unemployment Fund, the shortening of the work week without a corresponding reduction in workers’
salaries, the establishment of a system of ‘adequate’ pensions, and the institution of urban and rural public
works projects. For the agricultural and commercial crisis the Popular Front suggested higher produce
prices combined with a campaign against speculation and the high cost of living in order to reduce the
difference between wholesale and retail prices, the creation of a Wheat Office (Office Interprofessionnel
des Céréales), aid to agricultural cooperatives, the control of the fertilizer trade, the expansion of agricultural
credit, and the reduction of farm rents. To end the financial crisis, the Popular Front recommended
transforming the private Bank of France into a public institution; the nationalization of ‘war industries;’ the
‘democratic reform’ of the tax system by taxing ‘large fortunes’ through a ‘rapid upward progression’ of the
income surtax rate on incomes over 75,000 francs, the ‘reorganization’ of the inheritance tax, and the
taxation of the profits of ‘defacto’ monopolies; and the control of the export of capital.136
The Popular Front program was anathema to the Taxpayers’ Federation. To draw attention to its
complaints the federation scheduled a three-day meeting in Paris, a Taxpayers’ Estates-General, the États-
 TAXPAYER REVOLT IN FRANCE 19

Plate 1 ‘A la porte les exploiteurs,’ January–February 1936, author’s collection.

Généraux des Contribuables. When the first session opened on 25 June, the country was still feeling the
effects of a nation-wide strike of factory workers, begun after the April–May elections and transformed in
early June into an occupation of the factories, what labor historians would later call factory ‘sit-ins.’ These
strikes expressed in a dramatic and unexpected way the workers’ solidarity with the Popular Front and they
immediately forced angry and frightened business leaders to make major concessions on the issues of
salaries and the arbitration of labor disputes. For the taxpayers it was an example of the fearsome power of
organized labor, now working hand-in-hand with the leaders of the government. ‘Like the working class,’
Lemaigre Dubreuil predicted, ‘the taxpayers would have to seek the means to obtain satisfaction for their
20 THE ASSASSINATION OF JACQUES LEMAIGRE DUBREUIL

Plate 2 ‘Contribuables!’, 1936, author’s collection.

own just claims.’ And referring to the ongoing factory occupations he announced rather menacingly that if
the government was ‘incapable of fulfilling its essential tasks which are the maintenance of order and
freedom, we are ready to assume the responsibilities of power.’137
 TAXPAYER REVOLT IN FRANCE 21

The taxpayers attacked the Popular Front for breaking with ‘all the principles of economy’ and of ‘fiscal
justice.’ The government’s programs called for enormous sums of money which the taxpayers were certain
would come from their pockets as the Left reshaped the tax system to fit its concept of ‘democratic
taxation.’ According to Lemaigre Dubreuil, the Popular Front’s tax program would work to the
disadvantage of the largest category of taxpayers: the middle class.138 Although this was probably true, the
Popular Front did abolish the 1920 sales tax which topped the federation’s list of tax reform
recommendations. The Left opposed the sales tax because it was a tax on consumers; the federation opposed
it because in times of economic difficulty it could not always be passed on to the consumer and hence
became a tax on business. To replace the sales tax the Popular Front created a single tax to be applied at the
end of the production process, in theory a tax on the producer, not on the consumer. Even though this
production tax might have eased the tax burden on some small merchants and family businesses (which had
previously been penalized by the numerous taxable transactions from the producer to the retailer), the
federation also labeled this a tax on business and denounced it.139
But what catapulted the taxpayers to national attention was their protest of the ‘nationalization’ of the
Bank of France in July 1936 followed by the devaluation of the franc two months later (in September
1936).140 The franc’s devaluation was perhaps the most controversial of the Popular Front’s financial
initiatives. Blum had repeatedly stated his opposition to a devaluation which he dismissed as an unthinkable
‘monetary coup d’état.’ But the economic recovery that he had counted on from the Popular Front’s social
and economic reforms failed to materialize. In truth, his reform plans, particularly the wage increases and
paid vacations for factory workers, were in part responsible for the failure of economic revival. As important
was the middle-class fear of the Blum government, for this deprived France of confident investment capital
at a critical moment. And international tensions—the German remilitarization of the Rhineland and the
outbreak of the Spanish Civil War—also had an adverse effect on the French economy.141
The taxpayers saw the devaluation as simply another means of putting more money into the hands of the
government (by revalorizing its gold holdings) and not, as the government claimed, an attempt to increase
national productivity by making French prices competitive in world markets.142 It dramatically amputated
middle-class fortunes and the taxpayers decried it as another instrument and consequence of class rule. To
forestall devaluation Lemaigre Dubreuil had suggested the less severe practices of borrowing from the
Treasury, issuing government bonds, and deficit spending. But none of these would have had the economic
impact of the currency devaluation.143
On the announcement of the devaluation Lemaigre Dubreuil began legal action against Premier Blum and
Finance Minister Vincent Auriol on behalf of French taxpayers for ‘serious errors and abuse of power…
committed as a result of the recent devaluation of the franc.’ He asserted that throughout the summer of
1936 the government had declared devaluation to be an impossibility and that, as a result, this had promoted
the sale of the Treasury bonds for 1936.144 In fact, only after the bond issue had been fully subscribed did the
government move to devalue. On the face of things this seemed a cruel deception. Lemaigre Dubreuil did
not stand alone. Paris Municipal Councillors Henri Torchaussé and Gabriel Boissière, organizers of the
Committee for the Protection of Holders of Auriol Bonds, followed his lead, citing Blum and Auriol before
the twelfth Correctional Chamber.145
Within a week of his lawsuit, Lemaigre Dubreuil presented himself as a candidate for the seat of one of
the two councillors to be elected by the Bank of France’s shareholders.146 Meeting in general congress in
Paris’s Salle Pleyel on 15 October, the shareholders’ assembly was a boisterous protest over the
government’s mismanagement of the nation’s finances. Eight hundred stockholders, furious at the currency
devaluation, greeted Bank Governor Émile Labeyrie and Councillor Léon Jouhaux, secretary-general of the
General Confederation of Labor, with hoots, boos, and cries of ‘throw them out!’ and ‘we’ve been robbed!’
22 THE ASSASSINATION OF JACQUES LEMAIGRE DUBREUIL

The noise was so loud that a visibly shaken Labeyrie could not make himself heard; and whatever he did
say was met with shouts of ‘lies, lies!’ It was in this atmosphere that Lemaigre Dubreuil was elected a
Councillor of the Bank of France, a stunning repudiation of the Popular Front and the most important
victory to date for the Taxpayers’ Federation.147 He summed it up in these words: ‘They approved of the
fight that I am waging on behalf of economy in government and on behalf of the taxpayers.’148 And it
demonstrated the middle-class fury over the currency devaluation, ‘not against the deed itself,’ Lemaigre
Dubreuil explained, ‘but against the circumstances under which it was carried out.’ To devalue right after
having floated a loan was ‘a vulgar swindle.’149
Lemaigre Dubreuil broke the tradition of silence at the Bank of France. He publicized what he discovered
about the Bank’s operations in a regular column for L’Action contribuable and not surprisingly he argued that
the Bank was the victim of an ongoing ‘exploitation’ or ‘progressive invasion’ by the Popular Front
government. He predicted that this ‘last refuge of the country’s credit,’ would ‘gradually succumb’ to the
unhappy fate of the nation’s finances, if something was not done. The Bank had successfully resisted all
assailants from Napoleon Bonaparte to the Communards, but it now risked being ‘legally pillaged’ without
any cry of alarm being raised. ‘The patrimony of the Bank is the patrimony of all Frenchmen,’ he reminded
his readers. ‘To save its independence is indispensable.’150
In January 1937 he reported that one-fourth of the Bank’s active capital was tied up in credit to the
government, a figure which he knew would increase substantially if one added to it the value of government
securities put up as collateral by private interests in their dealings with the Bank.151 Because of the state’s
near monopoly of the Bank’s funds (and in consequence of its services), Lemaigre Dubreuil believed that
the government was primarily responsible for the increase in the Bank’s unproductive resources and
operating costs, and the decrease in its productive resources.152 Moreover, the Bank had loaned away its
independence to the government: the creditor had become the captive of the debtor, quite the reverse of any
healthy banking situation. Making matters worse, the state was not a good risk, engaged as it was in a policy
of ‘disguised inflation.’ Finally, there was no end in sight to the improvident and extravagant state’s demand
for funds. Lemaigre Dubreuil speculated that the legal ceiling on advances to the government had already
been exceeded by at least one billion francs, but even this had not met the state’s needs. He called for a
parliamentary debate on the issues raised by such banking practices and asked the government to make
public all the figures on state loans from the Bank.153
To transform this deplorable banking situation, Lemaigre Dubreuil insisted on a change in the government’s
economic and financial policy and in its relations with the Bank. That the Bank ought to remain a separate
and independent institution attentive to both public and private concerns became his mantra. ‘When the
credit of the Bank was separate from that of the state, the former was unassailable. Only when the Bank’s
activities are reasonably divided between private interests and those of the state, will its resources and its
future be assured.’154
To reclaim the Bank’s independence, the Taxpayers’ Federation proposed the creation of a banking
corporation, an association of all French banks within which the Bank of France would play the central role.
The corporation would be free of all government regulation, control, or guarantee, save for the lone civil
servant who served as its governor; and the state would immediately withdraw from all competitive banking
operations, such as the handling of postal savings accounts. This national banking corporation would permit
all French banks to develop in an atmosphere of ‘coordinated and supervised freedom.’155 Under this design,
inspired by a vision of socialists as unrestrained thieves in a treasure cave of riches, the Bank of France would
have greater liberty of action than it had known since 1806 and by virtue of the institutional link with other
French banks it would exercise an even greater dominion over the French banking system than it currently did.
 TAXPAYER REVOLT IN FRANCE 23

Throughout his tenure at the Bank of France Lemaigre Dubreuil complained bitterly about the
government’s lack of openness and candor. This ‘government of revolutionaries in rabbit skins’ had
promised to make the Bank of France ‘a house of glass,’ but the stockholders and even the members of the
General Council were not consulted or oftentimes informed about crucial issues.156 Of major importance to
him was the precise nature of the state’s transactions with the Bank. He observed that the Popular Front had
adopted ‘the worst practices of conservative ministers,’ then pretended to be ‘revolutionary.’ ‘The situation
of the Treasury cannot be hidden forever by playing hide-and-seek with the Bank of France.’157 He
specifically objected to including all of the gold ‘mortgaged’ in loans to Great Britain in the tally of the
Bank’s assets. ‘It is of utmost importance to distinguish between the gold reserves of the Bank that remain
its property and the gold which has been already pledged.’158
The Bank’s ‘democratization’ had reduced the control of the shareholders and isolated them from the
Bank’s affairs. Although the stockholder representatives on the General Council were elected to inform and
protect the shareholders, this was hard to do. The councillors, like the stockholders, were informed of the
Bank’s operations ‘through the newspapers.’159 In consequence, ‘in the democratized bank the stockholders
had to defend their interests themselves and to do this they needed to rely on public opinion.’160 Here the
interests of the stockholders and the Taxpayers’ Federation coincided, for the federation always favored the
reduction of state authority at the Bank and the restoration of shareholder authority by replacing some of the
government’s representatives on the Council with stock-holder representatives.161 And from the first the
federation believed that public opinion was its strong right arm: after Lemaigre Dubreuil’s election to the
Bank Council, the federation set up a Bank of France committee and L’Action contribuable ran his regular
column on the Bank of France.
The annual Bank of France stockholders’ meeting in January 1937 repeated the performance of the
October 1936 meeting. Disorderly conduct ruled the day with boos and shouts of ‘resign! resign!’ directed at
Governor Labeyrie; Le Jour called it a ‘carnival atmosphere.’ On the other hand, there was loud applause
every time Lemaigre Dubreuil spoke, so Le Canard enchainé dubbed it ‘Lemaigre Dubreuil’s General
Assembly.’162 The stockholders also showed their continuing displeasure with the government and its
relationship with the Bank by adopting a resolution requesting the government to pay off its debts to the
Bank.163
The Spanish Civil War presented the Popular Front with one of its toughest diplomatic problems, forcing
it to navigate between an ideological sympathy for the Spanish republicans and their cause and the need to
maintain a strict neutrality between the warring sides. This was hard to do. At the outset of the conflict the
republican government in Madrid sent a shipment of gold bullion from the Bank of Spain to the Bank of
France as collateral for a loan destined to purchase needed military equipment. Although all this was
handled in complete secrecy, Lemaigre Dubreuil pieced together what he knew of the dealings for his
articles in L’Action contribuable, Le Jour, and Le Journal. He revealed that the General Council had not
been informed of the negotiations between the two state banks and admitted that it was impossible to know
for sure if the Spanish gold was in French vaults. But he guessed that the bullion was indeed on deposit in
Paris, concealed in the Exchange Stabilization Fund, an account closed to everyone but the governor.
Moreover, he reported that ‘everything seems to indicate…that the Bank of France has transferred almost
the totality of the sums which have been deposited with it by means of French bank notes to the Banque
Commerciale de l’Europe du Nord in Paris and to the Peoples’ Bank of Moscow Ltd. which are the
representatives of the U.S.S.R. in France and England.’ Given the fact that the export of gold seemed to
violate Spanish currency regulations, he asked whether it was wise for the Bank of France to be involved in
this transaction. And what would happen if a victorious nationalist government refused to recognize the
obligations undertaken by the republic and insisted on the return of the gold?164
24 THE ASSASSINATION OF JACQUES LEMAIGRE DUBREUIL

Although he only discussed the financial side of the Spanish gold matter in his articles, Lemaigre
Dubreuil embarrassed the Popular Front government by showing its quiet and significant financial
intervention on the side of the Spanish republic despite its public statements of political neutrality. This was
ammunition for anti-Leftists of all sorts who opposed any aid to the Spanish Republic on political grounds,
and especially financial aid in helping it to secure the materials of war. At the same time the fact that the
General Council was ignorant of the precise nature of the Bank of France’s commitments to the Bank of
Spain pointed up the hypocrisy of the so-called ‘glass window’ in the Bank of France.165 Eight months went
by before the Bank’s governor acknowledged the presence of the Spanish gold in Paris and confirmed the
transactions about which Lemaigre Dubreuil had speculated.
In 1938 the Bank of Spain repaid the loan from the Bank of France (in much devalued French francs,
noted Lemaigre Dubreuil) and the Spanish governor requested the return of the gold bullion.166 Lemaigre
Dubreuil advised against the gold’s return until the end of the civil war because of the political split that had
developed within the Bank of Spain. The Bank’s governor was a republican appointee, but the directors
were supporters of the nationalist cause. The governor wanted the gold returned to the Republic, yet the
directors wanted it to remain in Paris until the end of the war (and the hoped-for nationalist victory). On this
issue Bank of France Governor Pierre Fournier (who had replaced Labeyrie in 1937) sided with Lemaigre
Dubreuil. While acknowledging that the republican government was the legal government of Spain, he
thought it imprudent to become involved in the internal politics of the Bank of Spain. Therefore, the gold
remained in French vaults until the end of the civil war when it was returned, as the directors had wished, to
the nationalist government of General Francisco Franco.167
In February 1937 the Blum government announced a ‘pause’ in the Popular Front’s economic and social
reforms. The first change was a renewed commitment to a balanced budget, then the re-establishment of a
free market in gold transactions, and finally the appointment of a team of conservative experts to the
Exchange Stabilization Fund.168 It all signaled a slide toward financial orthodoxy. Lemaigre Dubreuil
underscored: ‘the important thing is that Monsieur Blum is renouncing his policy of compulsion,’ but, more
than that, the new policy was ‘the exact opposite of everything that has been done since June 1936.’169 He
could see no reason why the Bank of France, which had caved in to every government request for the
previous six months, would refuse to follow the government when it returned to the traditional policy of the
directors. Yet if the new policy turned clearly toward classical liberalism, Lemaigre Dubreuil imagined it
would pose a real dilemma for Governor Labeyrie who had championed quite a different course.170
Blum resigned from the premiership in June when the Senate rejected his request for emergency financial
decree powers, ending the first and most daring Popular Front ministry. Radical-Socialist Camille
Chautemps succeeded Blum, promising to continue the Popular Front’s policies, yet he named Georges
Bonnet as his minister of finance; Bonnet had opposed the 1936 currency devaluation and ridiculed Blum’s
purchasing power theory and, therefore, was ‘anathema’ to the socialists.171 In July Pierre Fournier replaced
Labeyrie as governor of the Bank of France. Lemaigre Dubreuil welcomed him as ‘a great and eminent civil
servant,’ ‘a man of authority and of perfect courtesy who combines expert financial knowledge with a
remarkable gift of clear exposition.’172 And in time the conservative press hailed Fournier as ‘an objective
and lucid technician’ whose credo was ‘work, economy, balance.’173 These appointments signaled the return
to a much more conservative economic policy.
Nevertheless, Lemaigre Dubreuil challenged the optimistic assumption that Blum’s replacement by
Chautemps and Bonnet or the ‘pause’ policy had really changed anything. As far as he could tell, the
country was still being impoverished, transformed, and ‘proletarianized.’ National finances remained in
disorder. He granted that the treasury deficit had been dealt with in part by adopting a ‘floating franc’ —a
defacto currency devaluation—but two problems remained: the need to accelerate national production and
 TAXPAYER REVOLT IN FRANCE 25

Plate 3 ‘Le désastre,’ July–August 1937, author’s collection.

to achieve a balanced budget. Neither problem could be solved, so said Lemaigre Dubreuil, without
abandoning the 40 hour week which had become part of the mystique of the Popular Front.174
When Bonnet did present a balanced budget for the approval of the finance commission of the Chamber
of Deputies, Lemaigre Dubreuil wondered whether the balance was ‘real’ or just on paper. The projected
increase in receipts implied ‘an overwhelming resumption of economic activity.’ And Bonnet’s estimates for
26 THE ASSASSINATION OF JACQUES LEMAIGRE DUBREUIL

administrative expenses in 1938 8 were identical to those of 1937 which meant that Bonnet believed the
increase of wages and worker benefits would have no effect on costs. If indeed a stability in administrative
expenses could result from the ‘rationalization and normalization’ of administrative services, it would be
excellent news for hard-pressed businessmen who might well conclude that through organization one could
reduce retail prices yet at the same time increase both salaries and production. Lemaigre Dubreuil remained
skeptical: the Bonnet budget was based on ‘hope’ —the hope of economic revival and the success of
administrative reform.175 ‘It was exploiting the confidence of Frenchmen…to proclaim a balanced budget
when one really does not exist.’176
Bonnet’s determination to defend his budget against all comers won him Lemaigre Dubreuil’s praise. He
conceded that Bonnet’s budget, unlike those of the recent past, tended toward balance and that that was
something worth fighting for. ‘But each of us knows that an absolute balance cannot be predicted with a
floating franc, and that any budget whose receipts are based on a 30 to 40 percent increase in tax revenues
without a corresponding increase in expenses despite a rise in prices can only post a deficit at year’s end.’
Still, he congratulated Bonnet for assuming ‘the difficult task of correcting the errors of the past’ and
expressed his own hope that this economic program would bring about a ‘monetary pause’ which would
then enable the government to undertake needed ‘structural reforms.’177
The Bank’s new direction affected the stockholders’ attitudes at once. The calm, orderly annual meetings
of 1938 and 1939 contrasted with the boisterous sessions of 1936 and 1937. And when Paul Reynaud was
appointed minister of finance in 1938, the shift to orthodox financial experts was complete. Reynaud
immediately concluded an agreement with the Bank to repay the government’s debt and to increase the
amount which the state paid for the Bank’s services, matters which Lemaigre Dubreuil had championed and
decisions which he greeted with ‘enthusiasm.’178 Despite his genuine pleasure at the turn of events and a
sense of accomplishment at the Bank, Lemaigre Dubreuil remained convinced that the Popular Front’s
legacy would be difficult to overcome because the Bank continued to be the ‘prisoner of the state.’179
In January 1939 Lemaigre Dubreuil’s term of office expired and since the law forbade councillors to
succeed themselves, he chose to run for the post of adviser. ‘For three years,’ he summed up, ‘my work as a
councillor has been troublesome for a number of private interests. If I am elected an adviser, I will not
change my conduct in any way. Need I add that if I am called upon to choose between the public welfare
and the welfare of the stockholders that I will choose the public welfare?’180 After Georges Baugnies
decided not to run for re-election, the field was clear and Lemaigre Dubreuil was elected an adviser of the Bank
of France at the annual meeting on 27 January 1939. He pledged to work for the creation of a ‘powerful,
entirely independent’ stockholders’ association which would oversee the administration of the Bank,
consult with the stockholders’ representatives on the General Council, and block the ‘invasions of the
state.’181 In essence this was the taxpayer formula for the control of public finances applied to the Bank of
France.
The notoriety that Lemaigre Dubreuil gained at the Bank of France boosted the efforts of the Taxpayers’
Federation to reform municipal finances which was the federation’s principal initiative between 1937 and
the coming of war in 1939. Real reform required the establishment of budgetary control commissions under
the auspices of the Taxpayers’ Federation. ‘We want the municipal budget to be overseen by the taxpayers
of each municipality, that of the département by the departmental group, and that of the national government
by the national organization.’182 To show what the taxpayers meant in summer 1937 the federation turned to
the budget of the city of Paris.
The 1938 budget proposal of the Prefect of the Seine, Paris’s chief executive officer, called for increased
city taxes as part of a financial plan to liquidate the city’s 800 million franc deficit carried over from the
previous year. Chairman of the City Council Budget Committee François Latour, called the plan a ‘façade.’
 TAXPAYER REVOLT IN FRANCE 27

The deficit was to be covered by a special one-time contribution from the national government (187 million
francs), a temporary advance from the national government (137 million francs), and by loans (500 million
francs). Latour countered with a suggestion of ‘massive economies’ and a total financial restructuring. But
he added that the council was faced with the unhappy prospect of either voting the budget or being
dissolved by the prefect (and the prefect’s appointment of a governing commission until the next regularly
scheduled municipal elections).183
The Taxpayers’ Federation agreed with Latour’s criticism of the budget and was particularly outraged at
the prefect’s plan for more taxes. According to the federation, such a sacrifice was ‘intolerable’ because the
taxpayers simply lacked the capacity to pay, because the taxes would raise the cost of living, and because it
was unfair to make ‘one category of citizens’ —the middle class—pay for the consequences of ‘a policy of
excess and waste.’184
When the city council actually began considering the new budget proposal in November, the federation
moved into action. The federation’s supervisory committee, created ‘to examine the total amount as well as
the purpose of the taxes levied for the benefit of the city of Paris,’ told the president of the city council that
it would begin to scrutinize the city’s budget reports and that its members would attend the public sessions
of the council whenever budget matters were discussed. It asked that federation members be allowed to
follow the work of ‘various committees’ at city hall—finances, public works, health— and that they be
accredited to certain city departments.185 The request remained without response until an even sterner
demand was delivered in person to the council president who agreed to provide the taxpayers with council
documents but refused to admit the federation delegates to the closed sessions of the committees in question.
‘The powers-that-be in our public administration,’ explained L’Action contribuable, ‘both underestimate
and fear the ability of a taxpayer organization to exercise an effective control over public finances. They are
waiting for the taxpayer supervisory committee to prove its technical and administrative competence without
really believing that it is possible.’186 At the same time, however, the federation decided to show its muscle.
The federation announced a meeting of Paris taxpayers at the Salle Wagram on 15 December ‘to show its
firm intention of organizing a thoroughgoing oversight of the finances of the city of Paris.’187 And the
federation’s posters—which detailed the prefect’s proposed increases in the business, rent, and real estate
taxes and pointed out the near-doubling of water, gas, and transportation costs in the last eight months—
urged the city councillors not to vote for the budget. ‘To vote such a budget,’ the federation insisted, ‘is to
ruin merchants, renters, and owners. It is to assassinate the taxpayers!’188
At the city council, budget reporter André Puech read the federation poster aloud, then excerpts from
Lemaigre Dubreuil’s article on Paris finances which had appeared in Le Journal that very morning. He was
annoyed by the poster, but found the newspaper account ‘wiser’ and ‘more judicious,’ yet filled with con-
tradictions. Nevertheless, the federation’s advice fell on deaf ears: the city council still voted the budget by
the wide margin of 44 to 25.189
Convinced that the council had voted the budget for fear of being dismissed and not out of conviction,
Lemaigre Dubreuil insisted that as long as city councils were subject to political pressures no improvement
in the condition of local finances was possible.190 ‘The true politics, the only politics, especially in the Paris
City Council, is the sound administration of the public patrimony. Whether men are of the Left or of the
Right makes no difference. What is necessary is that they be honest, disinterested, and competent
administrators. This is the great reform that must be envisaged for a great many French administrations and
not so much in the administration itself as in the public leaders who influence it.’191
While printing Lemaigre Dubreuil’s letter on the city council, Henri de Kérillis, political editor of the
conservative L’Époque, called his ‘great reform’ hopelessly naive. It was impossible to govern Paris
without playing politics. Had the city council refused to vote the budget, the minister of the interior would
28 THE ASSASSINATION OF JACQUES LEMAIGRE DUBREUIL

gladly have replaced it with a ‘communo-socialistic team,’ making things even worse for Paris taxpayers.
Lemaigre Dubreuil’s reform ‘might be fashionable in a totalitarian regime,’ concluded de Kérillis, ‘but we
live in a democratic one!’192 The nationalist Gringoire echoed de Kérillis, predicting that had not the
prefect’s budget been passed, a Popular Front commission would have taken over city hall until the
elections of May 1941.193
The federation refused to give up. It invited the 41 conservative councillors (of the 44 municipal
councillors who had voted the budget) to explain their vote to a taxpayer rally at Salle Wagram. Since not
one of the Paris councillors showed up, 41 chairs on the speaker’s platform remained empty throughout the
9 February meeting, mute testimony to an unresponsive group of elected officials. Three months later at the
Salle de la Mutualité the federation insisted again on the importance of a policy of ‘vigorous budgetary
deflation’ to restore stability to Paris finances and once more accused the city councillors of lacking the
courage to protest tax increases. To underscore the seriousness of the situation, Lemaigre Dubreuil told
Paris taxpayers to pay only that portion of their 1938 taxes that equaled what they had paid in 1936. As for
the unpaid balance, Parisians should withhold its payment until they were convinced that their tax money
was being well spent. ‘We are willing to contribute to all necessary expenditures,’ granted Lemaigre
Dubreuil. ‘But not to the costs of demagoguery.’ In addition, he asked each taxpayer to send one of his
unpaid tax bills to the president of the taxpayers’ organization of his arrondissement or quartier so that
packets of these unpaid bills could be ceremoniously presented to the respective city councillors. The era of
‘useless hand wringing’ was over, warned Lemaigre Dubreuil, and the period of taxpayer ‘deeds’ had begun.
This was the ‘first step,’ he acknowledged, on the path toward an ‘effective tax strike,’ if those responsible
for municipal or national administration forced the taxpayers down that road.194 And it was the first time
since 6 February that the words ‘tax strike’ had been spoken with serious intent.
Despite Lemaigre Dubreuil’s threats, the Paris city council was unwilling to reverse itself, even though in
June 1938 seven council members who had voted for the budget did suggest a moratorium on taxes.195 And
in July budget reporter Puech revealed that the city’s budget deficit had climbed to almost one billion francs,
cold comfort for the federation which recalled that it had predicted this dire financial situation.196
To prepare for the debate on the 1939 city budget the Taxpayers’ Federation published a detailed study of
Paris finances, La Gestion de la ville de Paris: le projet du budget contribuable, a taxpayer budget
counterproposal.197 In it Lemaigre Dubreuil asserted that 1.5 million francs could be cut from the prefect’s
budget by reducing ‘abnormal’ expenses for city personnel, public assistance, and the Paris Metro.
Admittedly regrettable, these reductions would not affect ‘normal’ city operations. They would, however,
permit the city to balance its budget by matching expenses with receipts—the only tried and true method, ‘old
as the world and the only correct one’ — and allow for some selective tax reductions.198 And to present the
taxpayers’ case at city hall Lemaigre Dubreuil announced the formation of an Inter-professional
Coordinating Committee of Paris Taxpayers, the union of the Taxpayers’ Federation and fifteen professional
groups. The committee met with City Council President Gaston Le Provost de Launay for the first time on
Christmas Eve, 1938, then for a second time (with Lemaigre Dubreuil at its head) on 29 December.199
On the floor of city hall budget reporter André Puech, who had himself already suggested ‘a massive
reduction of expenses’ in the current budget, responded to the Taxpayers’ Federation. It was not
‘reasonably possible’ to slice one-fifth of the budget at the very start of the budget discussions, but he
acknowledged that the federation proposal was ‘more judicious’ than some might think. That was because
the cuts that the federation asked for were slated to happen over time rather than in one year alone. He
admitted that there were some ‘serious errors’ in the federation’s proposal since it had appeared before the
official budget figures were available. But Puech concluded that, all things considered, the federation was
‘rather prudent’ and its study indicated ‘a very precise understanding of the problems we face and shows an
 TAXPAYER REVOLT IN FRANCE 29

Plate 4 ‘Contribuable souviens-toi…,’ February 1938, author’s collection.

interest in financial renovation to which it is only fair to pay tribute.’ Still, in a confusing turnabout, he
rejected the federation proposal on the grounds that ‘such massive cuts at the present time would bring the city
administration to a standstill.’200
30 THE ASSASSINATION OF JACQUES LEMAIGRE DUBREUIL

Plate 5 ‘Les Pantins,’ June 1938, author’s collection.

On the other hand, André Boulard, who had been criticized by the Taxpayers’ Federation for supporting
the previous year’s budget, volunteered to sponsor the federation’s proposal as a budget counter-project. He
 TAXPAYER REVOLT IN FRANCE 31

admitted that his own ignorance of the technical data prevented him from knowing whether the federation’s
statistics were correct or not, but he was impressed with the thoughtfulness and thoroughness of the
federation study. ‘Either the cuts proposed by the Taxpayers’ Federation are accurate, real, and in fact
admissible—and there is no reason whye we should not apply them—or else they are impossible…and we
shall ask the budget reporter and the administration to tell us why….’201
Despite some headway at city hall, Lemaigre Dubreuil encouraged resistance to the taxpayer proposals by
making undiplomatic statements in the press. He ridiculed the prefect’s proposal and said that if it were not
defeated by the council, he would publish ‘a monstrous dossier of frauds’ that had occurred under the
councillors’ noses.202 Puech and Socialist Louis Castellaz were both annoyed at the federation’s ‘insolent
orders.’203 And René Gillouin was convinced that the budget debate was being conducted ‘in an unjustified
atmosphere of nervousness and pessimism,’ unless one imagined that the specter of Lemaigre Dubreuil
hovering over the next city election was a sufficient justification.204
The Left in the city council was angry because it believed that the federation had won some converts. To
Communist Gaston Auguet, Lemaigre Dubreuil was an exponent of ‘fascist and reactionary’ politics: ‘In truth,
this so-called taxpayers’ group naturally refrains from asking the necessary sacrifices from those classes
favored with success.’ En bloc the communists at city hall rejected both the prefect’s and the Taxpayers’
Federation’s proposals in favor of their own which called for ‘a private contribution from the rich people of
Paris.’205 The Workers’ Unity Party, Parti d’Unité Prolétarienne, dissident communists since 1929, accused
Lemaigre Dubreuil and the Taxpayers’ Federation of being lost in a fairytale world of simple solutions. And
Socialist Georges Hirsch said about the same thing: ‘With what joy we would rally to these projects, if they
were reasonable! With what eagerness we would repeat the reproaches they contain, if they were justified!
But for the most part these seem improvisations which will be reiterated by other leagues, since they are
demagogic.’206
When finally brought to a vote, the budget passed 48 votes to 36. Self-appointed sponsor of the federation
proposal André Boulard abstained because he insisted that the federation proposal was never given a fair
hearing in the full council. It had been sent to the budget committee ‘where it was buried,’ the prefect and
the city administration carefully ignoring it. On the other hand, although Castellaz and the socialist group
voted against the budget, they said it was because it was inspired by the Taxpayers’ Federation. The
communists voted against the budget as well, but without comment.207
Nevertheless, the city council did reduce expenditures and the Taxpayers’ Federation took a share of the
credit. The Inter-professional Committee of Taxpayers announced:

The budget of the city of Paris which was voted yesterday provides for a loan of 310 million francs. It
must be recalled that the budget proposals at the beginning of December envisioned a deficit of nearly
800 million francs, half to be covered by taxes, half by loans. Thus, 500 million francs have been
saved. You can understand the importance of this sum if you realize that 500 million francs represents
50 percent of the property taxes… This is an example of what could happen…if the taxpayers united
against the pillagers of the budget.208

Le Journal des débats insisted that this was the first time in six years that the deficit had been reduced by
‘sizeable proportions’ and that it was the very first time that the taxpayers who had to submit to the tax burden
had organized ‘an effective control’ over the budget process. It was unfortunate that things had to be done
this way, but it would be deplorable if ‘abuses’ remained uncorrected and bankruptcy continued to be the
‘normal condition’ of city government.209 Lemaigre Dubreuil made no apologies for the taxpayer action,
calling this task a true civic obligation: ‘in a democracy the citizen has a role to play in the daily life of the state.
32 THE ASSASSINATION OF JACQUES LEMAIGRE DUBREUIL

Freedom is not the freedom to receive, it is the freedom to act. To participate day-by-day, hour-by-hour in
the life of the nation is the proper role of a great people.’210
The most rousing and significant taxpayer interventions in municipal affairs occurred in Saint-Étienne in
May 1938 and in Toulouse two months later. Both episodes involved member groups of the Taxpayers’
Federation in citizen protests against an increase in local taxes as well as the 8 percent increase in national
taxes announced by Premier Édouard Daladier in early May.
In Saint-Étienne most shops closed on the afternoon of 24 May. Storekeepers’ window signs read: ‘This
establishment will be closed Tuesday 24 May 1938 from 2 to 6 pm to protest the unusual increase in
municipal and departmental taxes’ and ‘To stop the increase in the cost of living, we protest the unusual and
unjustified increase in municipal and departmental taxes. We can pay no longer… Consumers, help us!’
During the shutdown the storekeepers marched through the streets of Saint-Étienne to the Palais des Sports
where a crowd estimated at 20,000 cheered speeches listing the taxpayer grievances and endorsed a
resolution to be presented to the public authorities. They denounced the 60–90 percent increase in local
taxes and demanded a reduction of 10 percent in departmental taxes and 20 percent in municipal taxes with
payment delays of at least eighteen months. They asked the national government ‘to improve and increase
its supervision of the department and the municipality’ and in particular to begin ‘an immediate and
rigorous…investigation’ of Saint-Étienne’s financial accounts for the 1936, 1937, and 1938 fiscal years.
The taxpayers insisted that the Saint-Étienne municipal council—described as a ‘conseil municipal de Front
Populaire’ —adopt a ‘clear policy’ of economy and reduced expenses and create ‘extra-municipal
committees’ of delegates chosen by the taxpayers themselves to oversee how this was carried out. They
called for an answer to their requests by 15 June.211
L’Action contribuable rejoiced at the formation of the Front Commun des Contribuables de Saint-Étienne
and Lemaigre Dubreuil called it a milestone in taxpayer action.

This is the first time that all those who pay have stood shoulder to shoulder, and, in a stern and
resolute demonstration of incomparable dignity, have affirmed their fierce resolve not to let
themselves be eliminated for the benefit of another class or simply for the benefit of numerous
middlemen and profiteers. The taxpayers no longer intend to be fleeced. They want to defend their
rights. They want to save themselves from being ruined.212

In fact one of the signs in the Saint-Étienne crowd had read: ‘In order to survive, we are forced to demand
the reduction of expenses and the control of municipal finances’ and L’Action contribuable printed a
cartoon showing a worried Blum whispering to an uncomfortable Auriol: ‘Alas, alas, this new front will be
more popular than our own!’213
The taxpayer deadline passed without a response and the taxpayers began to circulate petitions to
artisans, businessmen, and merchants, pledging them to close their shops and businesses as soon as and for
as long as the Front Commun wanted. The petitions received thousands of signatures. The Front Commun
alerted the city government of the intended ‘strike’ and sent a delegation to Paris to warn the national
government to prepare for supplying the economic needs of the 200,000 inhabitants of Saint-Étienne.
Premier Daladier and Minister of the Interior Albert Sarraut met with the delegation, promised an
immediate investigation of the matter, and requested the Saint-Étienne municipal council to suspend all tax
collections until the investigation had been completed. As a result, the Front Commun agreed to abandon its
strike plans.214
At the departmental level also the Front Commun met with instant success. The Conseil General de la
Loire ordered all government departments to recommend ‘feasible reductions and economies’ to ease the
 TAXPAYER REVOLT IN FRANCE 33

Plate 6 ‘Une victoire des contribuables parisiens,’ January 1939, author’s collection.

economic impact of the budget voted the previous September. And the Conseil president invited taxpayer
delegates to attend the sessions of the finance committee where he promised that their proposals and any
34 THE ASSASSINATION OF JACQUES LEMAIGRE DUBREUIL

other ‘interesting suggestions’ for budget reform would be examined carefully. In addition, he pledged to
help them secure official authorization to delay their tax payments. Tax reductions, taxpayer oversight, and
delays: on these three points, crowed L’Action contribuable, the Conseil Général has ‘recognized the
validity of our demands.’215
In Toulouse shopkeepers closed their stores for two hours on the afternoon of 6 July 1938 to attend a meeting
at the Salle de l’Ancien Pré-Catalan to protest ‘the senseless increase in government and municipal taxes.’
To an overflow crowd of 35,000 citizens, one-by-one the orators denounced recent tax increases at all
government levels, specifically targeting the centimes additionnels. ‘Voilà nos ennemis!’ declared the
representative of the Union des Propriétaires, who painted their common fate in the bleakest of terms:
poverty and ruin, a question of life or death! (L’Action contribuable chimed in that Toulouse shopkeepers
had either ‘to triumph or perish.’) The president of the Toulouse Taxpayers’ Association, the Association
des Contribuables de Toulouse et de la Haute-Garonne blamed the high taxes on the excessive demands of
the electorate, the compliance of elected officials, and the weakness of the public authorities, but other
speakers were less generous, placing the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the politicians. The tax
troubles had arisen, so said one citizen, because Frenchmen had ‘never had any leadership’ in economic
affairs.216
In the end Toulouse taxpayers voted to request a 15 percent reduction in departmental taxes, a 25 percent
reduction in municipal taxes, the abolition of the business tax and the city tax (the octroi), a ceiling on land
taxes, an adjustment of the personal property tax, and a reduction in the centimes additionnels. In addition,
they proposed changes in the national income tax laws: the elimination of all deductions at the base and the
reduction and unification of all the schedular rates. In short, a somewhat technical and sophisticated want
list, demonstrating nonetheless that these folk were merchants, businessmen, and property owners of some
substance and knew what they wanted.217
L’Action contribuable predicted a new era of taxpayer success:

Even if the politicians may misunderstand the meaning of this demonstration, all France understands
it perfectly. In the north and the south, in the east and the west, the taxpayers—large and small,
merchants, employees, members of the liberal professions—are watching with approval the action of
the taxpayers of Toulouse. Everywhere there is immense hope. Everywhere there is the expectation of
a new order. For the taxpayers of Saint-Étienne and Toulouse have broken with the old routine of
pleading and whimpering. For the first time they have presented solutions at the same time that they
have presented their complaints. By doing this they have proven what the taxpayers everywhere could
accomplish once they know how to organize and act with a plan.218

Despite some success in the city council of Paris in 1939, the new era never arrived. To be sure, taxes
always remained a concern with the middle-class shop-keepers, merchants, businessmen, and professionals
who were the mainstay of the Taxpayers’ Federation from Large to Lemaigre Dubreuil. But the Republic
had changed its stripes, abandoning its red banners, its class rhetoric, and its economic experiments—in
short, the Jacobin side of the Popular Front—for a more national and conservative tone and approach,
especially in matters economic. Frankly, at the national level the taxpayers had little to complain about from
the string of finance ministers, beginning with Georges Bonnet, who oversaw tax policy from 1938
onward, except to lament that taxes, like government expenditures, were always and everywhere much too
high.
Then, too, foreign policy took on a new urgency for all Frenchmen with the Munich Agreement of
September 1938, which so many believed narrowly averted war with Germany yet at the same time dealt
Other documents randomly have
different content
the means at their disposal to rear a splendid, lofty, and lasting
monument to justice, liberty, and humanity. Are the views then of
the allied sovereigns solely directed to these objects? That is the
simple question; and we are afraid it would be great presumption to
answer it in the affirmative. It would be supposing that the late
events have purified the hearts of princes and nations; that they have
been taught wisdom by experience, and the love of justice from the
sense of injury; that mutual confidence and good-will have
succeeded to narrow prejudices and rankling jealousy; that the race
of ambitious and unprincipled monarchs, of crafty politicians, and
self-interested speculators is at an end; that the destructive rivalry
between states has given way to liberal and enlightened views of
general safety and advantage; and that the powers of Europe will in
future unite with the same zeal and magnanimity for the common
good, as when they were bound in a common cause against the
common enemy. All this appears to us quite as Utopian as any other
scheme which supposes that the human mind can change. Happy
should we be, if instead of those magnificent and beneficial projects
in which some persons seem still to indulge their imaginations as the
results of this meeting, the whole should not turn out to be no better
than a compromise of petty interests, of shallow policy, and flagrant
injustice.
We forbore for a long time from saying any thing on this
ungrateful subject: but our forbearance has not hitherto, at least,
been rewarded. We shall therefore speak out plainly on the subject;
as we should be sorry to be thought accomplices in a delusion, which
can only end in disappointment. The professions of justice,
moderation, and the love of liberty, made by the powers of Europe at
the end of the last, and at the beginning of the present year, were
certainly admirable: they were called for at the time, and were
possibly sincere. But we are all of us apt to forego those good
resolutions which are extorted from us by circumstances rather than
from reason or habit, and to recant ‘vows made in pain as violent and
void.’ Without meaning any indirect allusion to the person into
whose mouth these words are put, we believe this, that princes are
princes, and that men are men; and that to expect any great
sacrifices of interest or passion from either in consequence of certain
well-timed and well-sounding professions, drawn from them by
necessity, when that necessity no longer exists, is to belie all our
experience of human nature. We remember what modern courts and
ministers were before the dreaded power of Bonaparte arose; and we
conceive this to be the best and only ground to argue what they will
be, now that that power has ceased. ‘Why so, being gone, they are
themselves again.’ It appears to us, that some very romantic and
extravagant expectations were entertained from the destruction of
the tyranny of Bonaparte. It is true, his violence and ambition for a
while suspended all other projects of the same kind. ‘The right divine
of kings to govern wrong’ was wrested from the puny hands of its
legitimate possessors, and strangely monopolized by one man. The
regular professors of the regal art were set aside by the superior skill
and prowess of an adventurer. They became in turn the tools, or the
victims of the machinations of the maker and puller-down of kings.
Instead of their customary employment of annoying their
neighbours, or harassing their subjects, they had enough to do to
defend their territories and their titles. The aggressions which they
had securely meditated against the independence of nations, and
their haughty contempt for the liberties of mankind, were retorted on
their own heads. The poisoned chalice was returned to their own lips.
They then first felt the sting of injustice, and the bitterness of scorn.
They saw how weak and little they were in themselves. They were
roused from the still life of courts, and forced to assume the rank of
men. They appealed to their people to defend their thrones; they
called on them to rally round the altar of their country; they invoked
the name of liberty, and in that name they conquered. Plans of
national aggrandisement or private revenge were forgotten in the
intoxication of triumph, as they had been in the agony of despair.
This sudden usurpation had so overpowered the imaginations of
men, that they began to consider it as the only evil that had ever
existed in the world, and that with it, all tyranny and ambition would
cease. War was talked of as if it had been an invention of the modern
Charlemagne, and the Golden age was to be restored with the
Bourbons. But it is hard for the great and mighty to learn in the
school of adversity: emperors and kings bow reluctantly to the yoke
of necessity. When the panic is over, they will be glad to drink of the
cup of oblivion. The false idols which had been set up to Liberty and
Nature, to Genius and Fortune, are thrown down, and they have once
more ‘all power given them upon earth.’ How they are likely to use it,
whether for the benefit and happiness of mankind, or to gratify their
own prejudices and passions, we have, in one or two instances, seen
already. No one will in future look for ‘the milk of human kindness’
in the Crown Prince of Sweden, who is a monarch of the new school;
nor for examples of romantic generosity and gratitude in Ferdinand
of Spain, who is one of the old. A jackal or baboon, dandled in the
paws of a royal Bengal tiger, may not be very formidable; but it
would be idle to suppose, if they should providentially escape, that
they would become tame, useful, domestic animals.
The King of Prussia has recovered the sword of the Great
Frederick, his humane, religious, moral, and unambitious
predecessor, only, as it appears, to unsheath it against the King of
Saxony, his old companion in arms. The Emperor of Austria seems
eager to catch at the iron crown of Italy, which has just fallen from
the brows of his son-in-law. The King of France, our King of France,
Louis the Desired, and who by the ‘all hail hereafter,’ is to receive the
addition of Louis the Wise, has improved his reflections during a
twenty years’ exile, into a humane and amiable sanction of the
renewal of the Slave Trade for five years only. His Holiness the Pope,
happy to have escaped from the clutches of the arch-tyrant and
impostor, employs his leisure hours in restoring the order of the
Jesuits, and persecuting the Freemasons. Ferdinand, the grateful and
the enlightened, who has passed through the same discipline of
humanity with the same effect, shuts up the doors of the Cortes, (as it
is scandalously asserted, at the instigation of Lord Wellington), and
throws open those of the Inquisition. At all this, the romantic
admirers of patriot kings, who fondly imagined that the hatred of the
oppressor was the same thing as the hatred of oppression, (among
these we presume we may reckon the poet-laureat,) hang their heads,
and live in hope of better times. To us it is all natural, and in order.
From this grand gaol-delivery of princes and potentates, we could
expect nothing else than a recurrence to their old habits and
favourite principles. These observations have not been hastily or
gratuitously obtruded: they have been provoked by a succession of
disgusting and profligate acts of inconsistency and treachery,
unredeemed by a single effort of heroic virtue or generous
enthusiasm. Almost every principle, almost every profession, almost
every obligation, has been broken. If any proof is wanting, look at
Norway, look at Italy, look at Spain, look at the Inquisition, look at
the Slave Trade. The mask of liberty has been taken off by most of
the principal performers; the whining cant of humanity is no longer
heard in The Courier and The Times. What then remains for us to
build a hope upon, but the Whig principles of the Prince Regent,
inherited from his ancestors, and the good nature of the Emperor of
Russia, the merit of which is entirely his own? Of the former of these
personages, our opinion is so well known, that we need not repeat it
here. Again, of the good intentions of the last-mentioned sovereign,
we declare that we have as full a persuasion. We believe him to be
docile to instruction, inquisitive after knowledge, and inclined to
good. But it has been said by those who have better means of
information than ourselves, that he is too open to the suggestions of
those about him; that, like other learners, he thinks the newest
opinion the best, and that his real good-nature and want of duplicity
render him not sufficiently proof against the selfish or sinister
designs of others. He has certainly a character for disinterestedness
and magnanimity to support in history: but history is a glass in
which few minds fashion themselves. If in his late conduct there was
any additional impulse given to the natural simplicity of his
character, it probably arose from an obvious desire to furnish a
contrast to the character of Bonaparte, and also to redeem the
Russian character, hitherto almost another name for barbarity and
ferociousness, in the eyes of civilized Europe. In this point of view,
we should not despair that something may be attempted, at least
with respect to Poland, by the present autocrat of all the Russias, to
blot out certain stains on the reputation of his grand-mother, the
Empress Catherine.
With regard to Norway, the only hope of the suspension of its fate
seems to arise out of a very natural, if not laudable jealousy and
distaste, which have been conceived by some of the old-standing
sovereigns of Europe against the latest occupier and most forward
pretender to thrones. An adventurer who has made a fortune by
gaining a prize in the lottery, or by laying qui tam informations
against his accomplices, cannot expect to be admitted, on an
equality, into the company of persons of regular character and family
estates. The Emperor of Austria, in particular, may have additional
motives of dislike to Bernadotte, connected with late events; and we
agree with the Examiner, that he may, in the end, ‘have to regret the
length to which he was hurried against a man, who was the key-stone
of all the new power which had been built on the ruin of thrones.’
 As to any immediate adjustment of the maritime rights of this
country, on general principles, satisfactory to all parties, we see no
reason to expect it. We think the following paragraph justifies us in
this opinion. ‘We are told,’ says the Morning Chronicle, ‘that on the
day when the capture of the city of Washington, and the demolition
of its public buildings reached Paris, the Duke of Wellington had a
ball: not one public ambassador of the potentates of Europe, our
good allies, presented himself to congratulate his grace on the event.’
We here see, on one side, the most absurd expectations of
disinterested sympathy with our national feelings, and as little
disposition to enter into them on the other. It is strange that the
above paragraph should have found its way into a paper which
makes an almost exclusive profession of liberal and comprehensive
views.
Nor can we indulge in any serious expectations of ‘the immediate
and general abolition of the Slave Trade.’ Africa has little to hope
from ‘the prevailing gentle arts’ of Lord Castlereagh. However sturdy
he may be in asserting our maritime rights, he will, we imagine, go to
sleep over those of humanity, and waking from his doux sommeil,
find that the dexterous prince of political jugglers has picked his
pocket of his African petitions, if, indeed, he chuses to carry the
credentials of his own disgrace about with him. There are two
obstacles to the success of this measure. In the first place, France has
received such forcible lessons from this country on the old virtues of
patriotism and loyalty, that she must feel particularly unwilling to be
dictated to on the new doctrines of liberality and humanity.
Secondly, the abolition of the Slave Trade, on our part, was itself the
act of Mr. Fox’s administration—an administration which we should
suppose there is no very strong inclination to relieve from any part of
the contempt or obloquy which it has been the fashion to pour upon
it, by extending the benefit of its measures, or recommending the
adoption of its principles.
There is another point, on which, though our doubts are by no
means strong or lasting, we do not at all times feel the same absolute
confidence—the continuance of the present order of things in France.
The principles adhered to in the determination of some of the
preceding arrangements, and the permanent views which shall
appear to actuate the other powers of Europe, may have no
inconsiderable influence on this great question. Whatever tends to
allay the ferment in men’s minds, and to take away just causes of
recrimination and complaint, must, of course, lessen the pretexts for
change. We should not, however, be more disposed to augur such a
change from the remaining attachment of individuals, or of the army,
to Bonaparte, than from the general versatility and restlessness of
the French character, and their total want of settled opinion, which
might oppose a check to military enthusiasm. Even their present
unqualified zeal, in the cause of the Bourbons, is ominous. How long
this sudden fit of gratitude, for deliverance from evils certainly
brought upon them by their slowness to admit the remedy, may
continue, it is impossible to say. A want of keeping is the
distinguishing quality of the French character. A people of this sort
cannot be depended on for a moment. They are blown about like a
weathercock, with every breath of caprice or accident, and would cry
vive l’empereur to-morrow, with as much vivacity and as little
feeling, as they do vive le roi to-day. They have no fixed principle of
action. They are alike indifferent to every thing: their self-
complacency supplies the place of all other advantages—of virtue,
liberty, honour, and even of outward appearances. They are the only
people who are vain of being cuckolded and being conquered.—A
people who, after trampling over the face of Europe so long, fell
down before their assailants without striking a blow, and who boast
of their submission as a fine thing, are not a nation of men, but of
women. The spirit of liberty, at the Revolution, gave them an impulse
common to humanity; the genius of Bonaparte gave them the spirit
of military ambition. Both of these gave an energy and consistency to
their character, by concentrating their natural volatility on one great
object. But when both of these causes failed, the Allies found that
France consisted of nothing but ladies’ toilettes. The army are the
muscular part of the state; mere patriotism is a pasteboard visor,
which opposes no resistance to the sword. Whatever they determine
will be done; an effeminate public is a non-entity. They will not relish
the Bourbons long, if they remain at peace; and if they go to war,
they will want a monarch who is also a general.
The Lay of the Laureate, Carmen Nuptiale,
by Robert Southey, Esq., Poet-Laureate,
Member of the Royal Spanish Academy, and
of the Royal Spanish Academy of History.—
London, Longmans, 1816.

Examiner, July 7, 1816.

The dog which his friend Launce brought as a present to Madam

Silvia in lieu of a lap-dog, was something like ‘The Lay of the
Laureate,’ which Mr. Southey has here offered to the Princess
Charlotte for a Nuptial Song. It is ‘a very currish performance, and
deserves none but currish thanks.’ Launce thought his own dog,
Crab, better than any other; and Mr. Southey thinks his own praises
the fittest compliment for a lady’s ear. His Lay is ten times as long,
and he thinks it is therefore ten times better than an Ode of Mr.
Pye’s.
Mr. Southey in this poem takes a tone which was never heard
before in a drawing-room. It is the first time that ever a Reformist
was made a Poet-laureate. Mr. Croker was wrong in introducing his
old friend, the author of ‘Joan of Arc,’ at Carlton-House. He might
have known how it would be. If we had doubted the good old adage
before, ‘Once a Jacobin and always a Jacobin,’ since reading ‘The Lay
of the Laureate,’ we are sure of it. A Jacobin is one who would have
his single opinion govern the world, and overturn every thing in it.
Such a one is Mr. Southey. Whether he is a Republican or a Royalist,
—whether he hurls up the red cap of liberty, or wears the lily, stained
with the blood of all his old acquaintance, at his breast,—whether he
glories in Robespierre or the Duke of Wellington—whether he pays a
visit to Old Sarum, or makes a pilgrimage to Waterloo,—whether he
is praised by The Courier, or parodied by Mr. Canning,—whether he
thinks a King the best or the worst man in his dominions,—whether
he is a Theophilanthropist or a Methodist of the church of England,—
whether he is a friend of Universal Suffrage and Catholic
Emancipation, or a Quarterly Reviewer,—whether he insists on an
equal division of lands, or of knowledge,—whether he is for
converting infidels to Christianity, or Christians to infidelity,—
whether he is for pulling down the kings of the East or those of the
West,—whether he sharply sets his face against all establishments, or
maintains that whatever is, is right,—whether he prefers what is old
to what is new, or what is new to what is old,—whether he believes
that all human evil is remediable by human means, or makes it out to
himself that a Reformer is worse than a housebreaker,—whether he
is in the right or the wrong, poet or prose-writer, courtier or patriot,
—he is still the same pragmatical person—every sentiment or feeling
that he has is nothing but the effervescence of incorrigible
overweening self-opinion. He not only thinks whatever opinion he
may hold for the time infallible, but that no other is even to be
tolerated, and that none but knaves and fools can differ with him.
‘The friendship of the good and wise is his.’ If any one is so
unfortunate as to hold the same opinions that he himself formerly
did, this but aggravates the offence by irritating the jealousy of his
self-love, and he vents upon them a double portion of his spleen.
Such is the constitutional slenderness of his understanding, its
‘glassy essence,’ that the slightest collision of sentiment gives an
irrecoverable shock to him. He regards a Catholic or a Presbyterian, a
Deist or an Atheist, with equal repugnance, and makes no difference
between the Pope, the Turk, and the Devil. He thinks a rival poet a
bad man, and would suspect the principles, moral, political, and
religious, of any one who did not spell the word laureate with an e at
the end of it.—If Mr. Southey were a bigot, it would be well; but he
has only the intolerance of bigotry. His violence is not the effect of
attachment to any principles, prejudices, or paradoxes of his own,
but of antipathy to those of others. It is an impatience of
contradiction, an unwillingness to share his opinions with others, a
captious monopoly of wisdom, candour, and common sense. He is
not an enthusiast in religion, but he is an enemy to philosophers; he
does not respect old establishments, but he hates new ones; he has
no objection to regicides, but he is inexorable against usurpers; he
will tell you that ‘the re-risen cause of evil’ in France yielded to ‘the
Red Cross and Britain’s arm of might,’ and shortly after he
denounces this Red Cross as the scarlet whore of Babylon, and warns
Britain against her eternal malice and poisoned cup; he calls on the
Princess Charlotte in the name of the souls of ten thousand little
children, who are without knowledge in this age of light, ‘Save or we
perish,’ and yet sooner than they should be saved by Joseph Fox or
Joseph Lancaster, he would see them damned; he would go himself
into Egypt and pull down ‘the barbarous kings’ of the East, and yet
his having gone there on this very errand is not among the least of
Bonaparte’s crimes; he would ‘abate the malice’ of the Pope and the
Inquisition, and yet he cannot contain the fulness of his satisfaction
at the fall of the only person who had both the will and the power to
do this. Mr. Southey began with a decent hatred of kings and priests,
but it yielded to his greater hatred of the man who trampled them in
the dust. He does not feel much affection to those who are born to
thrones, but that any one should gain a throne as he has gained the
laureate-wreath, by superior merit alone, was the unpardonable sin
against Mr. Southey’s levelling Muse!
The poetry of the Lay is beneath criticism; it has all sorts of
obvious common-place defects, without any beauties either obvious
or recondite. It is the Namby-Pamby of the Tabernacle; a Methodist
sermon turned into doggrel verse. It is a gossipping confession of Mr.
Southey’s political faith—the ‘Practice of Piety’ or the ‘Whole Duty of
Man’ mixed up with the discordant slang of the metaphysical poets of
the nineteenth century. Not only do his sentiments every where
betray the old Jacobinical leaven, the same unimpaired desperate
unprincipled spirit of partisanship, regardless of time, place, and
circumstance, and of every thing but its own headstrong will; there is
a gipsey jargon in the expression of his sentiments which is equally
indecorous. Does our Laureate think it according to court-etiquette
that he should be as old-fashioned in his language as in the cut of his
clothes?—On the present occasion, when one might expect a truce
with impertinence, he addresses the Princess neither with the fancy
of the poet, the courtier’s grace, nor the manners of a gentleman, but
with the air of an inquisitor or father-confessor. Geo. Fox, the
Quaker, did not wag his tongue more saucily against the Lord’s
Anointed in the person of Charles II., than our Laureate here assures
the daughter of his Prince, that so shall she prosper in this world and
the next, as she minds what he says to her. Would it be believed (yet
so it is) that, in the excess of his unauthorized zeal, Mr. Southey in
one place advises the Princess conditionally to rebel against her
father? Here is the passage. The Angel of the English church thus
addresses the Royal Bride:-
‘Bear thou that great Eliza in thy mind,
Who from a wreck this fabric edified;
And Her who to a nation’s voice resigned,
When Rome in hope its wiliest engines plied,
By her own heart and righteous Heaven approved,
Stood up against the Father whom she loved.’

This is going a good way. Is it meant, that if the Prince Regent, ‘to
a nation’s voice resigned,’ should grant Catholic Emancipation in
defiance of the ‘Quarterly Review,’ Mr. Southey would encourage the
Princess in standing up against her father, in imitation of the pious
and patriotic daughter of James II.?
This quaint effusion of poetical fanaticism is divided into four
parts, the Proem, the Dream, the Epilogue, and L’Envoy. The Proem
opens thus:—
‘There was a time when all my youthful thought
Was of the Muse; and of the Poet’s fame,
How fair it flourisheth and fadeth not, ...
Alone enduring, when the Monarch’s name
Is but an empty sound, the Conqueror’s bust
Moulders and is forgotten in the dust.’

This may be very true, but not so proper to be spoken in this place.
Mr. Southey may think himself a greater man than the Prince
Regent, but he need not go to Carlton-House to tell him so. He
endeavours to prove that the Prince Regent and the Duke of
Wellington (put together) are greater than Bonaparte, but then he is
by his own rule greater than all three of them. We have here perhaps
the true secret of Mr. Southey’s excessive anger at the late Usurper. If
all his youthful thought was of his own inborn superiority to
conquerors or kings, we can conceive that Bonaparte’s fame must
have appeared a very great injustice done to his pretensions; it is not
impossible that the uneasiness with which he formerly heard the
names of Marengo, of Austerlitz, of Jena, of Wagram, of Friedland,
and of Borodino, may account for the industrious self-complacency
with which he harps upon those of Busaco, Vimiera, Salamanca,
Vittoria, Thoulouse, and Waterloo; and that the Iron Crown of Italy
must have pressed upon his (Mr. Southey’s) brows, with a weight
most happily relieved by the light laureate-wreath! We are justified
in supposing Mr. Southey capable of envying others, for he supposes
others capable of envying him. Thus he sings of himself and his
office:—
‘Yea in this now, while malice frets her hour,
Is foretaste given me of that meed divine;
Here undisturbed in this sequestered bower,
The friendship of the good and wise is mine;
And that green wreath which decks the Bard when dead,
That laureate garland crowns my living head.
That wreath which in Eliza’s golden days
My master dear, divinest Spenser, wore,
That which rewarded Drayton’s learned lays,
Which thoughtful Ben and gentle Daniel[17] bore ...
Grin, Envy, through thy ragged mask of scorn!
In honour it was given, with honour it is worn!’

Now we do assure Mr. Southey, that we do not envy him this

honour. Many people laugh at him, some may blush for him, but
nobody envies him. As to Spenser, whom he puts in the list of great
men who have preceded him in his office, his laureateship has been
bestowed on him by Mr. Southey; it did not ‘crown his living head.’
We all remember his being refused the hundred pounds for his ‘Fairy
Queen.’ Poets were not wanted in those days to celebrate the
triumphs of princes over the people. But why does he not bring his
list down nearer to his own time—to Pye and Whitehead and Colley
Cibber? Does Mr. Southey disdain to be considered as the successor
even of Dryden? That green wreath which decks our author’s living
head, is so far from being, as he would insinuate, an anticipation of
immortality, that it is no credit to any body, and least of all to Mr.
Southey. He might well have declined the reward of exertions in a
cause which throws a stigma of folly or something worse on the best
part of his life. Mr. Southey ought not to have received what would
not have been offered to the author of ‘Joan of Arc.’
Mr. Southey himself maintains that his song has still been ‘to
Truth and Freedom true’; that he has never changed his opinions;
that it is the cause of French liberty that has left him, not he the
cause. That may be so. But there is one person in the kingdom who
has, we take it, been at least as consistent in his conduct and
sentiments as Mr. Southey, and that person is the King. Thus the
Laureate emphatically advises the Princess:—
‘Look to thy Sire, and in his steady way,
As in his Father’s he, learn thou to tread.’

Now the question is, whether Mr. Southey agreed with his Majesty
on the subject of the French Revolution when he published ‘Joan of
Arc.’ Though Mr. Southey ‘as beseems him well’ congratulates the
successes of the son, we do not recollect that he condoled with the
disappointments of the father in the same cause. The King has not
changed, therefore Mr. Southey has. The sun does not turn to the
sun-flower; but the sun-flower follows the sun. Our poet has
thoughtlessly committed himself in the above lines. He may be right
in applauding that one sole purpose of his Majesty’s reign which he
formerly condemned: that he can be consistent in applauding what
he formerly condemned, is impossible. That his majesty King George
III. should make a convert of Mr. Southey rather than Mr. Southey of
George III. is probable for many reasons. The King by siding with the
cause of the people could not, like King William, have gained a
crown: Mr. Southey, by deserting it, has got a hundred pounds a-
year. A certain English ambassador, who had a long time resided at
the court of Rome, was on his return introduced at the levee of
Queen Caroline. This lady, who was almost as great a prig as Mr.
Southey, asked him why in his absence he did not try to make a
convert of the Pope to the Protestant religion. He answered, ‘Madam,
the reason was that I had nothing better to offer his Holiness than
what he already has in his possession.’ The Pope would no doubt
have been of the same way of thinking. This is the reason why kings,
from sire to son, pursue ‘their steady way,’ and are less changeable
than canting cosmopolites.

The Lay of the Laureate, Carmen Nuptiale, by Robert

Southey, Esq. Poet-Laureate, Member of the Royal
 Spanish Academy, and of the Royal Spanish Academy of
History.—London: Longmans, 1816.

(CONCLUDED.)

‘Queen. Hamlet, thou hast thy Father much offended.

‘Hamlet. Madam, you have my Father much offended.’

July 14, 1816.

Though we do not think Mr. Southey has been quite consistent, we

do not think him a hypocrite. This poem proves it. How should he
maintain the same opinion all his life, when he cannot maintain it for
two stanzas together? The weakness of his reasoning shews that he is
the dupe of it. He has not the faculty of perceiving contradictions. He
is not accountable for his mistakes. There is not a single sentiment
advanced in any part of the Lay, which is not flatly denied in some
other part of it. Let us see:—
‘Proudly I raised the high thanksgiving strain
Of victory in a rightful cause achieved:
For which I long had looked and not in vain,
As one who with firm faith and undeceived,
In history and the heart of man could find
Sure presage of deliverance for mankind.’

Mr. Southey does not inform us in what year he began to look for
this deliverance, but if he had looked for it long, he must have looked
for it long in vain. Does our poet then find no presage of deliverance
for ‘conquered France’ in the same principles that he found it for
‘injured Germany’? But he has no principles; or he does not himself
know what they are. He praises Providence in this particular instance
for having conformed to his hopes; and afterwards thus gives us the
general results of his reading in history and the human heart. In the
Dream he says, speaking of Charissa and Speranza—
 ‘This lovely pair unrolled before the throne
“Earth’s melancholy map,” whereon to sight
Two broad divisions at a glance were shown,
The empires these of darkness and of light.
Well might the thoughtful bosom sigh to mark
How wide a portion of the map was dark.
Behold, Charissa cried, how large a space
Of earth lies unredeemed! Oh grief to think
That countless myriads of immortal race
In error born, in ignorance must sink,
Trained up in customs which corrupt the heart
And following miserably the evil part!
Regard the expanded Orient from the shores
Of scorched Arabia and the Persian sea,
To where the inhospitable Ocean roars
Against the rocks of frozen Tartary;
Look next at those Australian isles which lie
Thick as the stars which stud the wintry sky.
Then let thy mind contemplative survey
That spacious region where in elder time
Earth’s unremembered conquerors held the sway
And Science trusting in her skill sublime,
With lore abstruse the sculptured walls o’erspread,
Its import now forgotten with the dead.
From Nile and Congo’s undiscovered springs
To the four seas which gird the unhappy land,
Behold it left a prey to barbarous Kings,
The Robber and the Trader’s ruthless hand;
Sinning and suffering, everywhere unblest,
Behold her wretched sons, oppressing and opprest!’

This is ‘a pretty picture’ to be drawn by one who finds in the past

history of the world the sure presage of deliverance for mankind. We
grant indeed that Mr. Southey was right in one thing, viz. in
expecting from it that sort of ‘deliverance of mankind,’ bound hand
and foot, into the power of Kings and Priests, which has actually
come to pass, and which he has celebrated with so much becoming
pomp, both here and elsewhere. The doctrine of ‘millions made for
one’ has to be sure got a tolerable footing in the East. It has attained
a very venerable old age there—it is mature even to rottenness, but
without decay. ‘Old, old, Master Shallow,’ but eternal. It is
transmitted down in unimpaired succession from sire to son. Snug’s
the word. Legitimacy is not there militant, but triumphant, as the
Editor of The Times would wish. It is long since the people had any
thing to do with the laws but to obey them, or any laws to obey but
the will of their taskmasters. This is the necessary end of legitimacy.
The Princes and Potentates cut one another’s throats as they please,
but the people have no hand in it. They have no French Revolutions
there, no rights of man to terrify barbarous kings, no republicans or
levellers, no weathercock deliverers and re-deliverers of mankind, no
Mr. Southeys nor Mr. Wordsworths. In this they are happy. Things
there are perfectly settled, in the state in which they should be,—still
as death, and likely to remain so. Mr. Southey’s exquisite reason for
supposing that a crusade to pull down divine right would succeed in
the East, is that a crusade to prop it up has just succeeded in the
West. That will never do. Besides, what security can he give, if he
goes on improving in wisdom for the next five and twenty years as he
has done for the last, that he would not in the end be as glad to see
these ‘barbarous kings’ restored to their rightful thrones, as he is now
anxious to see them tumbled from them? The doctrine of ‘divine
right’ is of longer standing and more firmly established in the East
than in the West, because the Eastern world is older than ours. We
might say of it,
‘The wars it well remembers of King Nine,
Of old Assaracus and Inachus divine.’

It is fixed on the altar and the throne, safe, quite safe against Mr.
Southey’s enthusiasm in its second spring, his Missionary Societies,
and his Schools for All. It overlays that vast continent, like an ugly
incubus, sucking the blood and stopping up the breath of man’s life.
That detestable doctrine, which in England first tottered and fell
headless to the ground with the martyred Charles; which we kicked
out with his son James, and kicked twice back with two Pretenders,
to make room for ‘Brunswick’s fated line,’ a line of our own chusing,
and for that reason worth all Mr. Southey’s lines put together; that
detestable doctrine, which the French, in 1793, ousted from their
soil, thenceforward sacred in the eyes of humanity, which they
ousted from it again in 1815, making it doubly sacred; and which (oh
grief, oh shame) was borne into it once more on English shoulders,
and thrust down their throats with English bayonets; this detestable
doctrine, which would, of right and with all the sanctions of religion
and morality, sacrifice the blood of millions to the least of its
prejudices; which would make the rights, the happiness, and liberty
of nations, from the beginning to the end of time, dependent on the
caprice of some of the lowest and vilest of the species; which rears its
bloated hideous form to brave the will of a whole people; that claims
mankind as its property, and allows human nature to exist only upon
sufferance; that haunts the understanding like a frightful spectre,
and oppresses the very air with a weight that is not to be borne; this
doctrine meets with no rubs, no reverses, no ups and downs, in the
East. It is there fixed, immutable. The Jaggernaut there passes on
with its ‘satiate’ scythe over the bleeding bodies of its victims, who
are all as loyal, as pious, and as thankful as Mr. Southey. It meets
with no opposition from any ‘re-risen cause of evil’ or of good.
Mankind have there been delivered once for all!
In the passage above quoted, Mr. Southey founds his hope of the
emancipation of the Eastern world from ‘the Robber and the Trader’s
ruthless hand’ on our growing empire in India. This is a conclusion
which nobody would venture upon but himself. His last appeal is to
scripture, and still he is unfortunate:—
‘Speed thou the work, Redeemer of the World!
That the long miseries of mankind may cease!
Where’er the Red Cross banner is unfurled,
There let it carry truth, and light, and peace!
Did not the Angels who announced thy birth,
Proclaim it with the sound of Peace on Earth?’

From the length of time that this prediction has remained

unfulfilled, Mr. Southey thinks its accomplishment must be near. His
Odes will not hasten the event.
Again, we do not understand the use which Mr. Southey makes of
Red Cross in this poem. For speaking of himself he says,
‘And when that last and most momentous hour
Beheld the re-risen cause of evil yield
To the Red Cross and England’s arm of power,
I sung of Waterloo’s unrivalled field,
Paying the tribute of a soul embued
With deepest joy, devout and awful gratitude.’
 This passage occurs in the Proem. In the Dream the Angel of the
English Church is made to warn the Princess—
‘Think not that lapse of ages shall abate
The inveterate malice of that Harlot old;
Fallen tho’ thou deemest her from her high estate,
She proffers still the envenomed cup of gold,
And her fierce Beast, whose names are blasphemy,
The same that was, is still, and still must be.’

It is extraordinary that both these passages relate to one and the

same thing, namely, Popery, which our author in the first identifies
with the Christian religion, thus invoking to his aid every pure feeling
or pious prejudice in the minds of his readers, and in the last
denounces as that Harlot old, ‘whose names are blasphemy,’ with all
the fury of plenary inspiration. This is a great effort of want of logic.
Mr. Southey will hardly sing or say that it was to establish
Protestantism in France that England’s arm of power was extended
on this occasion. Nor was it simply to establish Popery. That existed
there already. It was to establish ‘the inveterate malice of that Harlot
old,’ her ‘envenomed cup,’ to give her back her daggers and her fires,
her mummeries, her holy oil, her power over the bodies and the
minds of men, to restore her ‘the same that she was, is still, and still
must be,’ that that celebrated fight was fought. The massacres of
Nismes followed hard upon the triumph of Mr. Southey’s Red Cross.
The blood of French Protestants began to flow almost before the
wounds of the dying and the dead in that memorable carnage had
done festering. This was the most crying injustice, the most
outrageous violation of principle, that ever was submitted to. What!
has John Bull nothing better to do now-a-days than to turn bottle-
holder to the Pope of Rome, to whet his daggers for him, to light his
fires, and fill his poisoned bowl; and yet, out of pure complaisance (a
quality John has learnt from his new friends the Bourbons) not
venture a syllable to say that we did not mean him to use them? It
seems Mr. Southey did not think this a fit occasion for the
interference of his Red Cross Muse. Could he not trump up a speech
either for ‘divine Speranza,’ or ‘Charissa dear,’ to lay at the foot of the
throne? Was the Angel of the English Church dumb too—‘quite
chopfallen?’ Yet though our Laureate cannot muster resolution
enough to advise the Prince to protect Protestants in France, he
plucks up spirit enough to urge him to persecute Catholics in this
country, and pretty broadly threatens him with the consequences, if
he does not. “’Tis much,” as Christopher Sly says.
There is another subject on which Mr. Southey’s silence is still
more inexcusable. It was understood to be for his exertions in the
cause of Spanish liberty that he was made Poet-Laureate. It is then
high time for him to resign. Why has he not written a single ode to a
single Spanish patriot who has been hanged, banished, imprisoned,
sent to the galleys, assassinated, tortured? It must be pleasant to
those who are suffering under the thumb-screw to read Mr.
Southey’s thoughts upon that ingenious little instrument of royal
gratitude. Has he discovered that the air of a Court does not very well
agree with remonstrances against acts of oppression and tyranny,
when exercised by those who are born for no other purpose? Is his
patriotism only a false cover, a Carlton-House convenience? His
silence on this subject is not equivocal. Whenever Mr. Southey shews
the sincerity of his former professions of zeal in behalf of Spanish
liberty, by writing an elegy on the death of Porlier, or a review of the
conduct of Ferdinand VII. (he is a subject worthy of Mr. Southey’s
prose style), or by making the lame tailor of Madrid (we forget his
name) the subject of an epic poem, we will retract all that we have
said in disparagement of his consistency—But not till then.
We meant to have quoted several other passages, such as that in
which old Praxis, that is, Experience, recommends it to the Princess
to maintain the laws by keeping all that is old, and adding all that is
new to them—that in which he regrets the piety and learning of
former times, and then promises us a release from barbarism and
brutishness by the modern invention of Sunday Schools—that in
which he speaks of his own virtues and the wisdom of his friends—
that in which he undertakes to write a martyrology.—But we are very
tired of the subject, and the verses are not worth quoting. There is a
passage in Racine which is; and with that, we take our leave of the
Laureate, to whom it may convey some useful hints in explanation of
his ardent desire for the gibbeting of Bonaparte and the burning of
Paris:—
Nabal.—Que peut vous inspirer une haine si forte?
Est-ce que de Baal le zèle vous transporte?
Pour moi, vous le savez, descendu d’Ismaël,
Je ne sers ni Baal ni le Dieu d’Israel.

Mathan.—Ami, peux-tu penser que d’un zèle frivole

Je me laisse aveugler pour une vaine idole!
Né ministre du Dieu qu’en ce temple on adore,
Peut-être que Mathan le serviroit encore,
Si l’amour des grandeurs, la soif de commander,
Avec son joug étroit pouvoient s’accommoder.
Qu’est-il besoin, Nabal, qu’à tes yeux je rappelle
De Joad et de moi la fameuse querelle?
Vaincu par lui j’entrai dans une autre carrière,
Et mon âme à la cour s’attacha tout entière.
J’approchai par degrés l’oreille des rois;
Et bientôt en oracle on érigea ma voix.
J’étudiai leur cœur, je flattai leurs caprices,
Je leur semai de fleurs le bord des précipices:
Près de leurs passions rien ne me fut sacré;
De mesure et de poids je changeois à leur gré,
Autant que de Joad l’inflexible rudesse
De leur superbe oreille offensoit la mollesse;
Autant je les charmois par ma dextérité,
Dérobant à leurs yeux la triste vérité,
Prêtant à leur fureur des couleurs favorables,
Et prodigue surtout du sang des misérables.[18]

Déserteur de leur loi, j’approuvai l’entreprise,

Et par là de Baal méritai la prêtrise;
Par là je me rendis terrible à mon rival,
Je ceignis la tiare, et marchai son égal.
Toutefois, je l’avoue, en ce comble de gloire,
De Dieu que j’ai quitté l’importune mémoire
Jette encore en mon âme un reste de terreur;
Et c’est ce qui redouble et nourrit ma fureur.
Heureux, si sur son temple achevant ma vengeance,
Je puis convaincre enfin sa haine d’impuissance,
Et parmi les débris, les ravages, et les morts,
A force d’attentats perdre tous mes remords.[19]

TO THE EDITOR OF THE EXAMINER

 Sir,—I hope you will not omit to notice two passages in Mr.
Southey’s poem, in which, to try his talent at natural description, he
gives an account of two of ‘the fearfullest wild-fowl living’—a British
Lion and a Saxon one. Both are striking likenesses, and would do to
hang on the outside of Exeter-‘Change to invite the curious. The
former (presumed not to be indigenous) is described to be in
excellent case, well-fed, getting in years and corpulent, with a high
collar buried in the fat of the neck, false mane, large haunches (for
which this breed is remarkable), paws like a shin of beef, large rolling
eyes, a lazy, lounging animal, sleeping all day and roaring all night, a
great devourer of carcases and breaker of bones, pleased after a full
meal, and his keepers not then afraid of him. Inclined to be uxorious.
Visited by all persons of distinction, from the highest characters
abroad down to the lowest at home.—The other portrait of the Saxon
Lion is a contrast to this. It is a poor lean starved beast, lord neither
of men nor lands, galled with its chain, which it has broken, but has
not got off from its neck. This portrait is, we understand, to be
dedicated to Lord Castlereagh.—Your constant reader,
Ne Quid Nimis.
 ‘A new View of Society; or, Essays on the
Principle of the Formation of the Human
Character, and the Application of the
Principle to Practice.’ Murray, 1816.—‘An
Address to the Inhabitants of New
Lanark, on opening an Institution for the
Formation of Character.’ By Robert Owen,
one of his Majesty’s Justices of the Peace for
the County of Lanark.’—Hatchard, 1816.
[‘Dedicated to those who have no Private Ends to accomplish, who
are honestly in search of Truth, for the purpose of ameliorating
the Condition of Society, and who have the firmness to follow
the Truth wherever it may lead, without being turned aside
from the Pursuit by the Prepossessions or Prejudices of any
part of Mankind;—to Mr. Wilberforce, the Prince Regent,’ &c.]

August 4, 1816.

‘A New View of Society’—No, Mr. Owen, that we deny. It may be

true, but it is not new. It is not coeval, whatever the author and
proprietor may think, with the New Lanark mills, but it is as old as
the royal borough of Lanark, or as the county of Lanark itself. It is as
old as the ‘Political Justice’ of Mr. Godwin, as the ‘Oceana’ of
Harrington, as the ‘Utopia’ of Sir Thomas More, as the ‘Republic’ of
Plato; it is as old as society itself, and as the attempts to reform it by
shewing what it ought to be, or by teaching that the good of the
whole is the good of the individual—an opinion by which fools and
honest men have been sometimes deceived, but which has never yet
taken in the knaves and knowing ones. The doctrine of Universal
Benevolence, the belief in the Omnipotence of Truth, and in the
Perfectibility of Human Nature, are not new, but ‘Old, old,’ Master
Robert Owen;—why then do you say that they are new? They are not
only old, they are superannuated, they are dead and buried, they are
reduced to mummy, they are put into the catacombs at Paris, they
are sealed up in patent coffins, they have been dug up again and
anatomised, they have been drawn, quartered and gibbetted, they
have become black, dry, parched in the sun, loose, and rotten, and
are dispersed to all the winds of Heaven! The chain in which they
hung up the murdered corse of human Liberty is all that remains of
it, and my Lord Shallow keeps the key of it! If Mr. Owen will get it
out of his hands, with the aid of Mr. Wilberforce and the
recommendation of The Courier, we will ‘applaud him to the very
echo, which shall applaud again.’ Till then, we must content
ourselves with ‘chaunting remnants of old lauds’ in the manner of
Ophelia:—
‘No, no, he is gone, and we cast away moan,
And will he not come again,
And will he not come again?’

Perhaps, one of these days, he may ... ‘like a cloud over the Caspian’:
then if ever, and never till then, human nature will hold up its head
again, and the holy and Triple Alliance will be dissolved. But as to
this bald spectre of Liberty and Necessity conjured up by Mr. Owen
from the falls of the Clyde, with a primer in one hand, and a
spinning-jenny in the other, coming down from the Highlands in a
Scotch mist, and discoverable only by second-sight, we may fairly say
to it—
‘Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold;
Thou hast no speculation in those eyes,
Which thou dost glare with.’

Why does Mr. Owen put the word ‘New,’ in black-letter at the head
of the advertisements of his plan of reform? In what does the New
Lanark differ from the old Utopia? Is Scotland, after all, the true
Lubber-land? Or must the whole world be converted into a cotton-
factory? Does not Mr. Owen know that the same scheme, the same
principles, the same philosophy of motives and actions, of causes and
consequences, of knowledge and virtue, of virtue and happiness,
were rife in the year 1793, were noised abroad then, were spoken on
the house-tops, were whispered in secret, were published in quarto
and duodecimo, in political treatises, in plays, poems, songs, and
romances—made their way to the bar, crept into the church,
ascended the rostrum, thinned the classes of the universities, and
robbed ‘Durham’s golden stalls’ of their hoped-for ornaments, by
sending our aspiring youth up to town to learn philosophy of the new
teachers of philosophy; that these ‘New Views of Society’ got into the
hearts of poets and the brains of metaphysicians, took possession of
the fancies of boys and women, and turned the heads of almost the
whole kingdom: but that there was one head which they never got
possession of, that turned the heads of the whole kingdom round
again, stopped the progress of philosophy and necessity by wondrous
fortitude, and that ‘thus repelled, philosophy fell into a sadness, then
into a fast, thence to a watching, then into a weakness, thence to a
lightness, and by this declension, to the lamentable state wherein it
now lies,’ hooted by the boys, laughed at by the women, spit at by
fools, trod upon by knaves, damned by poet-laureates, whined over
by maudlin metaphysicians, rhymed upon by mincing ballad-
makers, ridiculed in romances, belied in histories and travels, pelted
by the mob, sneered at by the court, driven from the country, kicked
out of society, and forced to take refuge and to lie snug for twenty
years in the New Lanark mills, with the connivance of the worthy
proprietor, among the tow and spindles; from whence he lets us
understand that it is coming up again to Whitehall-stairs, like a
spring-tide with the full of the moon, and floating on the blood that
has flowed for the restoration of the Bourbons, under the patronage
of the nobility, the gentry, Mr. Wilberforce, and the Prince Regent,
and all those who are governed, like these great personages, by no
other principle than truth, and no other wish than the good of
mankind! This puff will not take with us: we are old birds, not to be
caught with chaff: we shall not purchase in this new lottery, where
there are all prizes and no blanks! We are inclined to throw Mr.
Owen’s ‘New View,’ behind the fire-place, as we believe most people
do the letter they receive from the proprietors of the lucky lottery-
office, informing them that their ticket was drawn a blank the first
day, and in the postscript soliciting their future favours!
 Mr. Owen may think that we have all this while been jesting, when
we have been in sad and serious earnest. Well, then, we will give him
the reason why we differ with him, out of ‘an old saw,’ as good as
most ‘modern instances.’ It is contained in this sentence:—‘If to do
were as easy as to teach others what were good to be done, chapels
had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces.’ Our
author has discovered no new theory; he has advanced no new
reasons. The former reasons were never answered, but the plan did
not succeed. Why then does he think his must? All that he has done
has been to leave out the reasons for his paradoxes, and to give his
conclusions in capitals. This may take for a time with Mr.
Wilberforce and the Methodists, who like hieroglyphics, but it cannot
last. Here is a plan, strange as it may seem, ‘a new View of Society,’
published by two of our most loyal booksellers, and what is still more
extraordinary, puffed in The Courier as an extremely practical,
practicable, solid, useful, and good sort of work, which proposes no
less than to govern the world without religion and without law, by
the force of reason alone! This project is in one of its branches
dedicated to the Prince Regent, by which (if carried into effect) he
would be stuck up in his life-time as ‘a useless piece of antiquity’; and
in another part is dedicated to Mr. Wilberforce, though it would by
the same rule convert that little vital member of the community into
‘a monkey preacher,’ crying in the wilderness with no one to hear
him, and sneaking about between his character and his conscience,
in a state of ludicrous perplexity, as indeed he always appears to be
at present! What is most remarkable is, that Mr. Owen is the first
philosopher we ever heard of, who recommended himself to the great
by telling them disagreeable truths. A man that comes all the way
from the banks of the Clyde acquires a projectile force that renders
him irresistible. He has access, we understand, to the men in office,
to the members of parliament, to lords and gentlemen. He comes to
‘pull an old house about their ears,’ to batter down all their
establishments, new or old, in church or in state, civil, political, and
military, and he quietly walks into their houses with his credentials
in his pocket, and reconciles them to the prospect of the innumerable
Houses of Industry he is about to erect on the site of their present
sinecures, by assuring them of the certainty of his principles and the
infallibility of his practice, in building up and pulling down. His
predecessors were clumsy fellows; but he is an engineer, who will be
sure to do their business for them. He is not the man to set the
Thames on fire, but he will move the world, and New Lanark is the
place he has fixed his lever upon for this purpose. To shew that he
goes roundly to work with great people in developing his formidable
system of the formation of character, he asks, p. 7 of the second
Essay,—
‘How much longer shall we continue to allow generation after
generation to be taught crime from their infancy, and when so
taught, hunt them like beasts of the forest, until they are entangled
beyond escape in the toils and nets of the law? When, if the
circumstances from youth of these poor unpitied sufferers had been
reversed with those who are even surrounded with the pomp and
dignity of justice, these latter would have been at the bar of the
culprit, and the former would have been in the judgment-seat.
‘Had the present Judges of these realms, whose conduct compels
the admiration of surrounding states, been born and educated in St.
Giles’s, or some similar situation, is it not reasonable to conclude, as
they possess native energies and abilities, that ere this they would
have been at the head of their then profession, and in consequence of
that superiority and proficiency, have already suffered
imprisonment, transportation, or death? Or can we for a moment
hesitate to decide, that if some of those men whom our laws,
dispensed by the present Judges, have doomed to suffer capital
punishment, had been born, trained, and surrounded as these
Judges were born, trained, and surrounded; that some of those so
imprisoned, transported, or hanged, would have been the identical
individuals who would have passed the same awful sentences on our
present highly esteemed dignitaries of the law?’
This is a delicate passage. So then according to the author of the
‘New View of Society,’ the Prince Regent of these realms, instead of
being at the head of the allied sovereigns of Europe, might, in other
circumstances, have been at the head of a gang of bravoes and
assassins; Lord Castlereagh, on the same principle, and by parity of
reasoning, without any alteration in his nature or understanding, but
by the mere difference of situation, might have been a second Count
Fathom; Mr. Vansittart, the chancellor of the exchequer, might, if he
had turned his hand that way in time, have succeeded on the
snaffling lay, or as a pickpocket; Lord Wellington might have
entered houses, instead of entering kingdoms, by force; the Lord-
chancellor might have been a Jew-broker; the Marquis of —— or
Lord —— a bawd, and their sons, tapsters and bullies at bagnios; the
Queen (God bless her) might have been an old washer-woman,
taking her snuff and gin among her gossips, and her daughters, if
they had not been princesses, might have turned out no better than
they should be! Here’s a levelling rogue for you! The world turned
inside out, with a witness!—Such are Mr. Owen’s general principles,
to which we have nothing to say, and such his mode of illustrating
them in his prefaces and dedications, which we do not think the most
flattering to persons in power. We do not, however, wish him to alter
his tone: he goes swimmingly on at present, ‘with cheerful and
confident thoughts.’ His schemes thus far are tolerated, because they
are remote, visionary, inapplicable. Neither the great world nor the
world in general care any thing about New Lanark, nor trouble
themselves whether the workmen there go to bed drunk or sober, or
whether the wenches are got with child before or after the marriage
ceremony. Lanark is distant, Lanark is insignificant. Our statesmen
are not afraid of the perfect system of reform he talks of, and, in the
meantime, his cant against reform in parliament, and about
Bonaparte, serves as a practical diversion in their favour. But let the
good which Mr. Owen says he has done in one poor village be in
danger of becoming general,—let his plan for governing men by
reason, without the assistance of the dignitaries of the church and
the dignitaries of the law, but once get wind and be likely to be put in
practice, and his dreams of elevated patronage will vanish. Long
before he has done as much to overturn bigotry and superstition in
this country, as he says Bonaparte did on the continent, (though he
thinks the restoration of what was thus overturned also a great
blessing) Mr. Wilberforce will have cut his connection. When we see
Mr. Owen brought up for judgment before Lord Ellenborough, or
standing in the pillory, we shall begin to think there is something in
this New Lanark Scheme of his. On the other hand, if he confines
himself to general principles, steering clear of practice, the result will
be the same, if ever his principles become sufficiently known and
admired. Let his ‘New View of Society’ but make as many disciples as
the ‘Enquiry concerning Political Justice,’ and we shall soon see how
the tide will turn about. There will be a fine hue and cry raised by all
the good and wise, by all ‘those acute minds’ who, Mr. Owen tells us,
have not been able to find a flaw in his reasonings, but who will soon
discover a flaw in his reputation. Dr. Parr will preach a Spital sermon
against him; lectures will be delivered in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, to prove
that a perfect man is such another chimera as a golden mountain;
Mr. Malthus will set up his two checks of vice and misery as
insuperable bars against him; Mr. Southey will put him into the
‘Quarterly Review’; his name will be up in the newspapers, The
Times, The Courier, and The Morning Post; the three estates will set
their faces against him; he will be marked as a Jacobin, a leveller, an
incendiary, in all parts of the three kingdoms; he will be avoided by
his friends, and become a bye-word to his enemies; his brother
magistrates of the county of Lanark will refuse to sit on the bench
with him; the spindles of his spinning-jennies will no longer turn on
their soft axles; he will have gone out for wool, and will go home
shorn; and he will find that it is not so easy or safe a task as he
imagined to make fools wise, and knaves honest; in short, to make
mankind understand their own interests, or those who govern them
care for any interest but their own. Otherwise, all this matter would
have been settled long ago. As it is, things will most probably go on
as they have done, till some comet comes with its tail; and on the eve
of some grand and radical reform, puts an end to the question.
 The Speech of Charles C. Western, Esq.
M.P. on the Distressed State of the
Agriculture of the Country, delivered in the
House of Commons, March 7, 1816.

The Speech of Henry Brougham, Esq. M.P.

on the same subject, delivered in the same
place, April 9, 1816.

This is a sore subject; and it is here handled with much tenderness

and delicacy. It puts one in mind of the traveller’s nose, and the nuns
of Strasburgh, in the tale of Slaukenbergius. ‘I will touch it, said one;
I dare not touch it, said another; I wish I had touched it, said a third;
let me touch it, said a fourth.’ While the gentlewomen were debating
the point, the traveller with the great nose rode on. It would be no
ungracious task to treat of the distresses of the country, if all were
distressed alike; but that is not the case; nor is it possible to trace the
necessities of one part of the community to their source, or to hint at
a remedy, without glancing invidiously at the superfluities of others.
‘Aye, there’s the rub, that makes calamity of so long life.’ The
speeches before us are to the subject what a veil is to a lady’s face, or
a blind to a window. Almost all that has been said or written upon it
is a palpable delusion—an attempt to speak out and say nothing; to
oppose something that might be done, and propose something that
cannot be done; to direct attention to the subject, and divert it from
it; to do something and nothing; and to come to this potent
conclusion, that while nothing is done, nothing can be done. ‘But
have you then any remedy to propose instead?’ What sort of a
remedy do you mean? ‘Oh, one equally safe and efficacious, that shall
set every thing to rights, and leave every thing just as it is, that does
not touch either the tythes or the national debt, nor places and
pensions, nor property of any kind, except the poor’s fund; that you
may take from them to make them independent of the rich, as you
leave Lord Camden in possession of thirty thousand a year to make
him independent of the poor.’—Why, then, what if the Lord
Chancellor and the Chancellor of the Exchequer were to play a game
at push-pin on the top of St. Paul’s; or if Mr. Brougham and Mr.
Horner were to play at cat’s-cradle on the top of the Monument; or if
the little garden between the Speaker’s house and the river-side were
to be sown with pearls and cockle-shells? Or if——Pshaw! Patience,
and shuffle the cards.
The great problem of our great problem-finders appears to be, to
take nothing from the rich, and give it to the poor. That will never
do. We find them and their schemes of diversion well described in
Rabelais, book v. chap. xxii.

‘How Queen Whim’s Officers were employed, and how the said Lady retained us
among her Abstractors.
‘I then saw a great number of the Queen’s officers, who made blackamoors
white, as fast as hops, just rubbing their bellies with the bottom of a pannier.
‘Others, with three couples of foxes in one yoke, ploughed a sandy shore, and did
not lose their seed.
‘Others washed burnt tiles, and made them lose their colour.
‘Others extracted water out of pumice-stones, braying them a good while in a
mortar, and changed their substance.
‘Others sheered asses, and thus got long fleece wool.
‘Others gathered off of thorns grapes, and figs off of thistles.
‘Others stroked he-goats by the dugs, and saved their milk, and much they got by
it.
‘Others washed asses’ heads, without losing their soap.
‘Others taught cows to dance, and did not lose their fiddling.
‘Others pitched nets to catch the wind, and took cock lobsters in them.
‘Others out of nothing made great things, and made great things return to
nothing.
‘Others made a virtue of necessity, and the best of a bad market; which seemed
to me a very good piece of work.
‘I saw two Gibroins by themselves, keeping watch on the top of a tower; and we
were told they guarded the moon from the wolves.’
 The war has cost the country five or six hundred millions of
money. This has not been a nominal expense, a playing at ducks and
drakes with the King’s picture on the water, or a manufacturing of
bank-notes, and then lighting our pipes with them, but a real bonâ
fide waste of the means, wealth, labour, produce, or resources of the
country, in the carrying on of the war. About one hundred of these
five or six hundred millions have been sent directly out of the
country in loans to our Allies, from the year 1793 to the year 1815,
inclusive, during which period there is not a single year in which we
did not (from our desire of peace with the legitimate government of
that country) subsidise one or all of the powers of Europe, to carry on
war against the rebels, regicides, republicans, and usurpers of
France. Now the interest of this money alone would be five millions
yearly, which would be nearly enough to pay the amount of the poor-
rates of the whole country, which is seven millions of our yearly
taxes, or might at least be applied to mitigate the mild severity of Mr.
Malthus’s sweeping clauses on that defenceless part of the subject.
Here is a hundred millions then gone clean out of the country: there
are four or five hundred millions more which have been sunk in the
expenses of the war, and which might as well have been sunk in the
sea; or what has been saved out of the wreck by those who have been
most active in running the vessel aground, is in the hands of persons
who are in no hurry that the public should go snacks with them in
their excessive good fortune. In all three cases, and under each
several head of loans, waste, or monopoly, John Bull pays the piper,
or the interest of the whole money in taxes. He is just so many
hundred millions the worse for the war, (whoever may be the better
for it) not merely in paper, which would be nothing, nor in golden
guineas, which would be something; but in what is better and more
substantial than either, in goods and chattels, in the produce of the
soil, and the work of his hands—in the difference between what the
industry of man, left to itself, produces in time of peace for the
benefit of man, and what the same industry, under the direction of
government, produces in time of war for the destruction of others,
without any benefit to himself, real, imaginary, or pretended; we
mean in a physical and economical point of view, which is here the
question—a question, which seems to last when the religion, politics,
and morality of the affair are over. We have said that the expenses of
the war might as well have been sunk in the sea; and so they might,
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