Abstract

Special Correspondence

The article presents information on the present situation of municipal council of Paris. Every three years the inhabitants of Paris elect, by universal suffrage, municipal councilors. There are in all eighty such councilors. Their very title shows them to be distinct from the administrators. They are only chosen to vote the supplies and to supervise the employment of the public money. Their only check on the administrators is to vote more or less money, and this is only true of the expenses which are called optional, for there are many which are of an obligatory character and which can in consequence be incurred without their sanction. It is quite clear that a city like Paris, which has an annual budget of more than two hundred millions of francs, which has a foreign floating population of one hundred thousand men, which contains, though it is not nominally the political capital of the country, all that constitutes an intellectual, an artistic, a scientific capital, cannot be governed in the same way as a little municipality.