D'Aurelles de Paladine, the Jesuit general, as the commander-in-chief of its National Guard.
And now we have to address a question to M. Thiers and the men of national defense, his understrappers. It is known that, through the agency of M. Pouyer-Quertier, his finance minister, Thiers had contracted a loan of two milliards, to be paid down at once. Now, is it true or not—
1. That the business was so managed that a consideration of several millions was secured for the private benefit of Thiers, Jules Favre, Ernest Picard, Pouyer-Quertier, and Jules Simon? and—
2. That no money was to be paid down until after the "pacification" of Paris?
At all events, there must have been something very pressing in the matter, for Thiers and Jules Favre, in the name of the majority of the Bordeaux Assembly, unblushingly solicited the immediate occupation of Paris by Prussian troops. Such, however, was not the game of Bismarck, as he sneeringly, and in public, told the admiring Frankfort Philistines on his return to Germany.[1]
- ↑ The four paragraphs at the end of this chapter are omitted from Longuet's French edition, to which reference is made in our Preface. Longuet gives no reason for this suppression. It will be observed that the charges of corruption which were then currently made against Thiers, Favre and others, are presented here, not in the positive but in the interrogative form. Such charges cannot be readily proved; yet every one knows that it would have been contrary to all the principles of morality by which the relations of financiers and statesmen of France were determined in those days, for the financiers who made such an enormously profitable operation to offer no reward and for the statesman to refuse any.—Note to the American Edition.
