Does the General-President reproach him for not having stipulated anything precise in the negotiations he had started...
I absolutely couldn't fix anything, he simply replies. I found myself without support, forced to take advice only from myself. For me there was only one legal government:that of the regency. As for the Government of National Defence, for me it could only be an insurrectionary government.
But finally, in the situation in which you had put yourself, what results did you expect to obtain from the negotiations undertaken?
I hoped to obtain for the army favorable conditions for it and for the interest of the country.
Please clarify.
The army would have gone out and taken up position in a determined neutral zone where it would have been at the disposal of the social order threatened...
And once the army under your command is established in a neutral zone, if it had seen the social order threatened, which seems very possible since you considered the government of National Defense to be an insurrectionary government, what was happening? According to the nature of your commitments, the German command launched our brave troops on the improvised soldiers who were then defending the territory... Have you, Mr. Marshal, thought about this possibility?
When I said that the army should stand at the disposal of the country and answer for order social, I believed that a general armistice would be contracted and if necessary imposed. I saw the peace and appeasement of this unhappy country brought about by these soldiers who had so valiantly done their duty before the enemy.
Allow me, Mr. Marshal, to tell you that these feelings that I do not want to discuss, and that the council will appreciate, were to enter only in the second line in your mind which, above all and above all, should have been dominated by a single thought, that of helping the resistance that your country was making abroad.
And, to give more weight to this lesson, the Duke of Aumale raises the audience. But when it resumed, the interrogation resumed and soon gave the General-President the opportunity to remind Bazaine a second time of his duty as a soldier and as a Frenchman.
Do you believe that the situation on September 29 was such that you could confer on yourself the right to conclude a military convention since, according to you, the word capitulation should read military convention?
My situation was kind of unexampled. I no longer had a government. I was, so to speak, my own government. I was no longer ruled by anyone... I was no longer ruled by my conscience.
Were those preoccupations with negotiations, then, more powerful on your mind than the strict execution of your military duties?
Yes... I freely admit that these considerations are strict when there is a legal government, a power recognized by the country, but not when you are faced with an insurrectionary government... I do not accept that.
France still existed!
The little sentence falls from above... But the one to whom it is addressed does not have a movement, not a gesture, not a shudder which lets see that it has awakened something in him.
And again the audience rose amid the murmurs of the audience.