de Theatre " (Mme. Rejane), and " Mme. Roger Jourdain." Recent work includes " Cardinal Mercier " (1917) and " The King and Queen of Belgium " (1919). His analysis and treat- ment of light is well seen in " La Femme qui se chauffe " in the Luxembourg, Paris, one of a large group of nude studies of which a recent example is " Une Nymphe au bord de la mer "; and in the work produced during and after a visit to India in 1911. His landscape work is represented by " L'ile heureuse," and " Un Ruisseau dans la Montagne " (1920). A symbolist in his decorative work, Besnard's frank delight in the external world and his " chic " luminous technique bring him close to the 18th-century French painters. A foundation member of the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1890, in 1913 he became a member of the Institute and commander of the Legion of Honour. He has succeeded Carolus Duran as director of the French Academy in Rome.
See also C. Mauclair, Paul Albert Besnard (1914); G. Mourey, Albert Besnard (1916). (W. G. C.)
BETHAM-EDWARDS, MATILDA (1836-1919), British author, was born at Westerfield, Ipswich, March 4 1836. She studied
French and German abroad and after some school-teach-
ing in London, she settled down with her sister in Suffolk
to manage the farm which had belonged to her father. Not
content, however, with purely rural occupations, she contributed from time to time to Household Words, having the advantage at this time of the friendship of Charles Dickens and an
early association with Charles and Mary Lamb, friends of her mother. On her sister's death she moved to London and wrote a number of novels of French life based on her frequent visits to
France and her intimate knowledge of provincial French homes. In this way she did much to promote a better understanding between the two peoples. Her chief books are : The White House
by the Sea (1857); Anglo-French Reminiscences (1898); East of Paris (1902); Home Life in France (1905); Literary Rambles in France (^907) and the posthumously published Mid-Victorian
Memories (1919), which contains a personal sketch of its author by Sarah Grand. She died at Hastings Jan. 4 1919.
BETHMANN HOLLWEG, THEOBALD VON (1856-1921), Chancellor of the German Empire from July 1909 to July 1917, was
born Nov. 29 1856 at Hohenfinow, the family property near Ber-
lin, where he also died. He was descended from the Frankfurt
banking family of Bethmann, which attained great prosperity
in the i8th century, and a branch of which was founded by
his great-grandfather Johann Jakob Hollweg, who had mar-
ried a daughter of the house. The Chancellor's grandfather
was Moritz August von Bethmann Hollweg, a Bonn pro-
fessor of law, who was a leading member of the Prussian Diet
from 1849 to 1855 and was Minister of Education under the
Prince-Regent (afterwards William I.) from 1858 to 1862. It
was to the Liberal and West-German as well as the commercial
traditions of his family that Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg
probably owed his appointment to the chancellorship in 1909
in a time of domestic and financial crisis. He had at the same
time the qualification of a specifically Prussian career, having
risen through the regular legal and official stages of promotion
as Referendar, Assessor, Landrat, Government-President at
Bromberg and Chief President of the province of Branden-
burg. In 1905 he was appointed Prussian Minister of the
Interior and in 1907 Secretary of State for the Imperial Home
Office and Vice-president of the Prussian Ministry. At the time
of Bethmann Hollweg's appointment to the chancellorship in-
ternal affairs, under his predecessor Prince Billow, had reached
a deadlock in the Reichstag owing to the revolt of a section of
the Liberal- Conservative bloc against the proposal to establish
death duties as part of the reform of the finances of the empire.
The Catholic Centre, which had left the former parliamentary
coalition before the dissolution of the Reichstag by Prince
Billow in 1907, was once more in alliance with the Conserva-
tives, and the fiscal policy which these two parties had imposed
upon the Government and the country had alienated the com-
mercial classes and led to violent political conflicts. It was not
until the general elections of 1912 had transformed the situa-
tion by bringing a great accession to the strength of the mod- erate National Liberals and the Left, especially the Social Democrats, that the Government was able to reckon upon a more amenable majority. In the interval Bethmann Hollweg endeavoured to conciliate the Catholic Centre by a policy of compromise in matters which had threatened to lead to a renewal of the Ktilturkampf, such as the denunciation of the Reformation in the Papal Encyclical of 1910 and the Catholic demand for the modification of the Jesuit law. He secured the final abrogation of this law under stress of war conditions in April 1917. Bethmann Hollweg was likewise the sponsor of the new constitution for Alsace-Lorraine, which in 1911 estab- lished the government of that territory of the empire upon the basis of popular representation in a territorial assembly and admission, though without full state rights, to the Federal Council. He was less successful with the vexed question of the Prussian franchise, which in 1910 he attempted to solve by pro- posing a direct system of election while retaining in a modified form the local division of the electorate according to income- tax assessment into three classes. His bill was ultimately re- jected by the reactionary Chamber of Deputies. This question was again to occupy him amid the stress of the war. Under the impression produced by the Russian Revolution of March 1917 he was constrained to inspire the " Easter message " of the Emperor as King of Prussia promising the abolition of the three-class system after the war, a proclamation which was fol- lowed in the same year by the edict of July n announcing that a bill would at once be introduced to enact equal direct and secret suffrage. This project of reform came too late to reconcile the revolutionary elements in the Prussian state. Bethmann Hollweg's political career ended immediately after the July edict, and, although a bill was introduced in the fol- lowing Nov. by his successor, Count Hertling, the opposition of the Prussian Conservatives and other reactionary elements prevented it from passing before the revolution. He was equally unsuccessful in dealing with an outbreak of militarism in Nov. 1913 at Zabern in Alsace, where the population, exasperated by the truculence of a young officer, was subjected to the arbi- trary exercise of martial law by the colonel in command of the garrison. Bethmann Hollweg's treatment of the incident satis- fied neither the reactionaries nor the advanced parties, and, for the first time in the history of the Reichstag, a vote of cen- sure was passed upon the Chancellor.
The foreign policy of Bethmann Hollweg was characterized by the indecision and half-heartedness which compromised his action in home politics. He shared the ambition of the Emperor and of the vast majority of his countrymen to set Germany at the head of Europe and to establish her influence throughout the world by the predominance of her commerce and industry and by the ubiquitous activity of her diplomacy supported by her preponderating military strength. In his speeches during the war the declaration " we must secure from the military and the political and also from the economic point of view the possibility of our expansion " is characteristic and recurs in various forms. In this sense he could truly have said " We could have got all we wanted without war," i.e. by establishing Germany's power in Europe, on the seas and beyond them in a way that would make her unassailable whatever her policy and action might be. What he could not realize was that the creation and maintenance of vast armaments, combined with the aggressive behaviour of those sections of German opinion which always asserted their influence in public affairs and the truculent tone of the Emperor's frequent public utterances, compelled Germany's neighbours, including Great Britain, to concert measures for meeting the imminent eventuality of active German and Austro-Hungarian aggression. He maintained, like many of his countrymen, that the Triple Entente was the arbitrary and artificial creation of the personal policy of King Edward VII., acting in accord with the feelings of commercial and political jealousy with which Germany's successes were thought to have inspired the British people. He himself, however, had much to endure before and during the war from the intrigues of the
