Transcriber's note

Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Printer errors have been changed, and they are indicated with a [mouse-hover] and listed at the [end of this book]. All other inconsistencies are as in the original.

MEMOIRS
TO ILLUSTRATE
THE HISTORY OF MY TIME.

BY

F. GUIZOT,

AUTHOR OF 'MEMOIRS OF SIR ROBERT PEEL;' 'HISTORY OF OLIVER CROMWELL,' ETC. ETC.

VOLUME I.

LONDON:
RICHARD BENTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET,

Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty.

1858.

PRINTED BY
JOHN EDWARD TAYLOR, LITTLE QUEEN STREET,
LINCOLN'S INN FIELDS, LONDON.

CONTENTS

OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

CHAPTER I.
FRANCE BEFORE THE RESTORATION.
1807-1814.

CHAPTER II.
THE RESTORATION.
1814-1815.

CHAPTER III.
THE HUNDRED DAYS.
1815.

CHAPTER IV.
THE CHAMBER OF 1815.
1815-1816.

CHAPTER V.
GOVERNMENT OF THE CENTRE.
1816-1821.

CHAPTER VI.
GOVERNMENT OF THE RIGHT-HAND PARTY.
1822-1827.

CHAPTER VII.
MY OPPOSITION.
1820-1829.

CHAPTER VIII.
ADDRESS OF THE TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY-ONE.
1830.

^*_*^* This Work has been translated by J. W. Cole, Esq., who also translated the 'Celebrated Characters' of M. de Lamartine.

MEMOIRS

TO ILLUSTRATE

THE HISTORY OF MY TIME.

CHAPTER I.

FRANCE BEFORE THE RESTORATION.

1807-1814.

MY REASONS FOR PUBLISHING THESE MEMOIRS DURING MY LIFE.—MY INTRODUCTION INTO SOCIETY.—MY FIRST ACQUAINTANCE WITH M. DE CHÂTEAUBRIAND, M. SUARD, MADAME DE STAEL, M. DE FONTANES, M. ROYER-COLLARD.—PROPOSAL TO APPOINT ME AUDITOR IN THE IMPERIAL STATE COUNCIL.—WHY THE APPOINTMENT DID NOT TAKE PLACE.—I ENTER THE UNIVERSITY, AND BEGIN MY COURSE OF LECTURES ON MODERN HISTORY.—LIBERAL AND ROYALIST PARTIES.—CHARACTERS OF THE DIFFERENT OPPOSITIONS TOWARDS THE CLOSE OF THE EMPIRE.—ATTEMPTED RESISTANCE OF THE LEGISLATIVE BODY.—MM. [LAINÉ], GALLOIS, MAINE-BIRAN, RAYNOUARD, AND FLAUGERGUES.—I LEAVE PARIS FOR NISMES.—STATE OF PARIS AND FRANCE IN MARCH, 1814.—THE RESTORATION TAKES PLACE.—I RETURN TO PARIS, AND AM APPOINTED SECRETARY-GENERAL TO THE MINISTRY OF THE INTERIOR.

I adopt a course different from that recently pursued by several of my contemporaries; I publish my memoirs while I am still here to answer for what I write. I am not prompted to this by the weariness of inaction, or by any desire to re-open a limited field for old contentions, in place of the grand arena at present closed. I have struggled much and ardently during my life; age and retirement, as far as my own feelings are concerned, have expanded their peaceful influence over the past. From a sky profoundly serene, I look back towards an horizon pregnant with many storms. I have deeply probed my own heart, and I cannot find there any feeling which envenoms my recollections. The absence of gall permits extreme candour. Personality alters or deteriorates truth. Being desirous to speak of my own life, and of the times in which I have lived, I prefer doing so on the brink, rather than from the depths of the tomb. This appears to me more dignified as regards myself, while, with reference to others, it will lead me to be more scrupulous in my words and opinions. If objections arise, which I can scarcely hope to escape, at least it shall not be said that I was unwilling to hear them, and that I have removed myself from the responsibility of what I have done.

Other reasons, also, have induced this decision. Memoirs, in general, are either published too soon or too late. If too soon, they are indiscreet or unimportant; we either reveal what would be better held back for the present, or suppress details which it would be both profitable and curious to relate at once. If too late, they lose much of their opportunity and interest; contemporaries have passed away, and can no longer profit by the truths which are imparted, or participate in their recital with personal enjoyment. Such memoirs retain only a moral and literary value, and excite no feeling beyond idle curiosity. Although I well know how much experience evaporates in passing from one generation to another, I cannot believe that it becomes altogether extinct, or that a correct knowledge of the mistakes of our fathers, and of the causes of their failures, can be totally profitless to their descendants. I wish to transmit to those who may succeed me, and who also will have their trials to undergo, a little of the light I have derived from mine. I have, alternately, defended liberty against absolute power, and order against the spirit of revolution,—two leading causes which, in fact, constitute but one, for their disconnection leads to the ruin of both. Until liberty boldly separates itself from the spirit of revolution, and order from absolute power, so long will France continue to be tossed about from crisis to crisis, and from error to error. In this is truly comprised the cause of the nation. I am grieved, but not dismayed, at its reverses. I neither renounce its service, nor despair of its triumph. Under the severest disappointments, it has ever been my natural tendency, and for which I thank God as for a blessing, to preserve great desires, however uncertain or distant might be the hopes of their accomplishment.

In ancient and in modern times, the greatest of great historians, Thucydides, Xenophon, Sallust, Cæsar, Tacitus, Macchiavelli, and Clarendon, have written, and some have themselves published, the annals of the passing age and of the events in which they participated. I do not venture on such an ambitious work; the day of history has not yet arrived for us, of complete, free, and unreserved history, either as relates to facts or men. But my own personal and inward history; what I have thought, felt, and wished in my connection with the public affairs of my country; the thoughts, feelings, and wishes of my political friends and associates, our minds reflected in our actions,—on these points I can speak freely, and on these I am most desirous to record my sentiments, that I may be, if not always approved, at least correctly known and understood. On this foundation, others will hereafter assign to us our proper places in the history of the age.

I only commenced public life in the year 1814. I had neither served under the Revolution nor the Empire: a stranger to the first from youth, and to the second from disposition. Since I have had some share in the government of men, I have learned to do justice to the Emperor Napoleon. He was endowed with a genius incomparably active and powerful, much to be admired for his antipathy to disorder, for his profound instincts in ruling, and for his energetic rapidity in reconstructing the social framework. But this genius had no check, acknowledged no limit to its desires or will, either emanating from Heaven or man, and thus remained revolutionary while combating revolution: thoroughly acquainted with the general conditions of society, but imperfectly, or rather, coarsely understanding the moral necessities of human nature; sometimes satisfying them with the soundest judgment, and at others depreciating and insulting them with impious pride. Who could have believed that the same man who had established the Concordat, and re-opened the churches in France, would have carried off the Pope from Rome, and kept him a prisoner at Fontainebleau?

It is going too far to apply the same ill-treatment to philosophers and Christians, to reason and faith. Amongst the great men of his class, Napoleon was by far the most necessary for the times. None but himself could have so quickly and effectually substituted order in place of anarchy; but no one was so chimerical as to the future, for after having been master of France and Europe, he suffered Europe to drive him even from France. His name is greater and more enduring than his actions, the most brilliant of which, his conquests, disappeared suddenly and for ever, with himself. In rendering homage to his exalted qualities, I feel no regret at not having appreciated them until after his death. For me, under the Empire, there was too much of the arrogance of power, too much contempt of right, too much revolution, and too little liberty.

It is not that at that period I was much engaged in politics, or over-impatient for the freedom that should open to me the road I desired. I associated myself with the Opposition, but it was an Opposition bearing little resemblance to that which we have seen and created during the last thirty years. It was formed from the relics of the philosophic world and liberal aristocracy of the eighteenth century, the last representatives of the saloons in which all subjects whatever had been freely proposed and discussed, through the impulse of inclination, and the gratification of mental indulgence, rather than from any distinct object of interest or ambition. The errors and disasters of the Revolution had not led the survivors of that active generation to renounce their convictions or desires; they remained sincerely liberal, but without practical or urgent pretension, and with the reserve of men who had suffered much and succeeded little in their attempts at legislative reform. They still held to freedom of thought and speech, but had no aspirations after power. They detested and warmly criticized despotism, but without any open attempt to repress or overthrow existing authority. It was the opposition of enlightened and independent lookers-on, who had neither the opportunity nor inclination to interfere as actors.

After a long life of fierce contention, I recur with pleasure to the remembrance of this enchanting society. M. de Talleyrand once said to me, "Those who were not living in and about the year 1789, know little of the enjoyments of life." In fact, nothing could exceed the pleasure of a great intellectual and social movement, which, at that epoch, far from suspending or disturbing the arrangements of the world, animated and ennobled them by mingling serious thoughts with frivolous recreations, and as yet called for no suffering, or no sacrifice, while it opened to the eyes of men a dazzling and delightful perspective. The eighteenth century was, beyond all question, the most tempting and seductive of ages, for it promised to satisfy at once the strength and weakness of human nature; elevating and enervating the mind at the same time; flattering alternately the noblest sentiments and the most grovelling propensities; intoxicating with exalted hopes, and nursing with effeminate concessions. Thus it has produced, in pellmell confusion, utopians and egotists, sceptics and fanatics, enthusiasts and incredulous scoffers, different offspring of the same period, but all enraptured with the age and with themselves, indulging together in one common drunkenness on the eve of the approaching chaos.

When I first mixed with the world in 1807, the storm had for a long time burst; the infatuation of 1789 had completely disappeared. Society, entirely occupied with its own re-establishment, no longer dreamed of elevating itself in the midst of mere amusement; exhibitions of force had superseded impulses towards liberty. Coldness, absence of fellow-feeling, isolation of sentiment and interests,—in these are comprised the ordinary course and weary vexations of the world. France, worn out with errors and strange excesses, eager once more for order and common sense, fell back into the old track. In the midst of this general reaction, the faithful inheritors of the literary saloons of the eighteenth century held themselves aloof from its influence; they alone preserved two of the noblest and most amiable propensities of their age—a disinterested taste for pleasures of the mind, and that readiness of sympathy, that warmth and ardour of curiosity, that necessity for moral improvement and free discussion, which embellish the social relations with so much variety and sweetness.

In my own case, I drew from these sources a profitable experience. Led into the circle I have named, by an incident in my private life, I entered amongst them very young, perfectly unknown, with no other title than a little presumed ability, some education, and an ardent taste for refined pleasures, letters, and good company. I carried with me no ideas harmonizing with those I found there. I had been brought up at Geneva, with extremely liberal notions, but in austere habits and religious convictions entirely opposed to the philosophy of the eighteenth century, rather than in coincidence with or in admiration of its works and tendencies. During my residence in Paris, German metaphysics and literature had been my favourite study; I read Kant and Klopstock, Herder and Schiller, much more frequently than Condillac and Voltaire. M. Suard, the Abbé Morellet, the Marquis de Boufflers, the frequenters of the drawing-rooms of Madame d'Houdetot and of Madame de Rumford, who received me with extreme complaisance, smiled, and sometimes grew tired of my Christian traditions and Germanic enthusiasm; but, after all, this difference of opinion established for me, in their circle, a plea of interest and favour instead of producing any feeling of illwill or even of indifference. They knew that I was as sincerely attached to liberty and the privileges of human intelligence as they were themselves, and they discovered something novel and independent in my turn of thought, which inspired both esteem and attraction. At this period, they constantly supported me with their friendship and interest, without ever attempting to press or control me on the points on which we disagreed. From them especially, I have learned to exercise in practical life, that expanded equity, joined to respect for the freedom of others, which constitute the character and duty of a truly liberal mind.

This generous disposition manifested itself on every opportunity. In 1809, M. de Châteaubriand published 'The Martyrs.' The success of this work was at first slow, and strongly disputed. Amongst the disciples of the eighteenth century and of Voltaire, a great majority treated M. de Châteaubriand as an enemy, while the more moderate section looked on him with little favour. They rejected his ideas even when they felt that they were not called upon to contest them. His style of writing offended their taste, which was divested of all imagination, and more refined than grand. My own disposition was entirely opposed to theirs. I passionately admired M. de Châteaubriand in his ideas and language: that beautiful compound of religious sentiment and romantic imagination, of poetry and moral polemics, had so powerfully moved and subdued me, that, soon after my arrival at Paris in 1806, one of my first literary fantasies was to address an epistle, in very indifferent verse, to M. de Châteaubriand, who immediately thanked me in prose, artistically polished and unassuming. His letter flattered my youth, and 'The Martyrs' redoubled my zeal. Seeing them so violently attacked, I resolved to defend them in the 'Publicist,' in which I occasionally wrote. M. Suard, who conducted that journal, although far from coinciding with the opinions I had adopted, lent himself most obligingly to my desire. I have met with very few men of a natural temperament so gentle and liberal, and with a mind at the same time scrupulously refined and fastidious. He was much more disposed to criticize than to admire the talent of M. de Châteaubriand; but he admitted the great extent of his ability, and on that ground dealt with him gently, although with delicate irony. Besides which, the talent was full of independence, and exerted in opposition to the formidable tendencies of Imperial power. These qualities won largely upon the esteem of M. Suard, who, in consequence, allowed me an unfettered course in the 'Publicist,' of which I availed myself to espouse the cause of 'The Martyrs' against their detractors.

M. de Châteaubriand was deeply affected by this, and hastened to express his acknowledgments. My articles became the subject of a correspondence between us, which I still refer to with pleasure.[1] He explained to me his intentions and motives in the composition of his poem, discussed with susceptibility and even with some degree of temper concealed under his gratitude, the strictures mixed with my eulogiums, and finished by saying: "In conclusion, Sir, you know the tempests raised against my work, and from whence they proceed. There is another wound, not exhibited, which is the real source of all this rage. It is that Hierocles massacres the Christians in the name of philosophy and liberty. Time will do me justice, if my work deserves it, and you will greatly accelerate this justice by the publication of your articles, provided you could be induced to change and modify them to a certain point. Show me my faults, and I will correct them. I only despise those critics who are as base in their language as in the secret motives which induce them to speak. I can find neither reason nor principle in the mouths of those literary mountebanks hired by the police, who dance in the gutters for the amusement of lacqueys.... I do not give up the hope of calling to see you, or of receiving you in my hermitage. Honest men should, particularly at present, unite for mutual consolation; generous feelings and exalted sentiments become every day so rare, that we ought to consider ourselves too happy when we encounter them.... Accept, I entreat you, once more, the assurance of my high consideration, of my sincere devotion, and if you will permit, of a friendship which we commence under the auspices of frankness and honour."

Between M. de Châteaubriand and myself, frankness and honour, most certainly, have never been disturbed throughout our political controversies; but friendship has not been able to survive them. The word is too rare and valuable to be hastily pronounced.

When we have lived under a system of real and serious liberty, we feel both an inclination and a right to smile when we consider what, in other times, has been classed as factious opposition by the one side, and courageous resistance by the other. In August, 1807, eighteen months before the publication of 'The Martyrs,' I stopped some days in Switzerland, on my way to visit my mother at Nismes; and with the confident enthusiasm of youth, as anxious to become acquainted with living celebrities as I was myself unknown, I addressed a letter to Madame de Staël, requesting the honour of calling upon her. She invited me to dinner at Ouchy, near Lausanne, where she then resided. I was placed next to her; I came from Paris; she questioned me as to what was passing there, how the public were occupied, and what were the topics of conversation in the saloons. I spoke of an article by M. de Châteaubriand, in the 'Mercury,' which was making some noise at the moment of my departure. A particular passage had struck me, which I quoted according to the text, as it had strongly impressed itself on my memory. "When, in the silence of abject submission, we hear only the chains of the slave and the voice of the informer, when all tremble before the tyrant, and it is as dangerous to incur favour as to merit disgrace, the historian appears to be charged with the vengeance of nations. It is in vain that Nero triumphs. Tacitus has been born in the Empire; he grows up unnoticed near the ashes of Germanicus, and already uncompromising Providence has handed over to an obscure child the glory of the master of the world." My tone of voice was undoubtedly excited and striking, as I was myself deeply moved and arrested by the words. Madame de Staël, seizing me by the arm, exclaimed, "I am sure you would make an excellent tragedian; remain with us and take a part in the 'Andromache.'" Theatricals were at that time the prevailing taste and amusement in her house. I excused myself from her kind conjecture and proposal, and the conversation returned to M. de Châteaubriand and his article, which was greatly admired, while at the same time it excited some apprehension. The admiration was just, for the passage was really eloquent; neither was the alarm without grounds, for the 'Mercury' was suppressed precisely on account of this identical paragraph. Thus, the Emperor Napoleon, conqueror of Europe and absolute master of France, believed that he could not suffer it to be written that his future historian might perhaps be born under his reign, and held himself compelled to take the honour of Nero under his shield. It was a heavy penalty attached to greatness, to have such apprehensions to exhibit, and such clients to protect!

Exalted minds, who felt a little for the dignity of human nature, had sound reason for being discontented with the existing system; they saw that it could neither establish the happiness nor the permanent prosperity of France; but it seemed then so firmly established in general opinion, its power was so universally admitted, and so little was any change anticipated for the future, that even within the haughty and narrow circle in which the spirit of opposition prevailed, it appeared quite natural that young men should enter the service of Government, the only public career that remained open to them. A lady of distinguished talent and noble sentiments, who had conceived a certain degree of friendship for me, Madame de Rémusat, was desirous that I should be named Auditor in the State Council. Her cousin, M. Pasquier, Prefect of Police, whom I sometimes met at her house, interested himself in this matter with much cordiality, and, under the advice of my most intimate friends, I acceded to the proposition, although, at the bottom of my heart, it occasioned me some uneasiness. It was intended that I should be attached to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. M. Pasquier named me to the Duke of Bassano, then at the head of the department, and to Count d'Hauterive, Comptroller of the Archives. The Duke sent for me. I also had an interview with M. d'Hauterive, who possessed a fertile and ingenious mind, and was kindly disposed towards young men of studious habits. As a trial of ability, they ordered me to draw up a memorial on a question respecting which, the Emperor either was, or wished to appear, deeply interested—the mutual exchange of French and English prisoners. Many documents on the subject were placed in my hands. I completed the memorial; and, believing that the Emperor was sincere, carefully set forward those principles of the law of nations which rendered the measure desirable, and the mutual concessions necessary for its accomplishment. My work was duly submitted to the Duke of Bassano. I have reason to conclude that I had mistaken his object; and that the Emperor, looking upon the English detained in France as of more importance than the French confined in England, and believing also that the number of the latter pressed inconveniently on the English Government, had no serious intention of carrying out the proposed exchange. Whatever might be the cause, I heard nothing more either of my memorial or nomination, a result which caused me little regret.

Another career soon opened to me, more suitable to my views, as being less connected with the Government. My first attempts at writing, particularly my Critical Notes on Gibbon's 'History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,' and the 'Annals of Education,' a periodical miscellany in which I had touched upon some leading questions of public and private instruction, obtained for me the notice of literary men.[2] With gratuitous kindness, M. de Fontanes, Grand Master of the University, appointed me Assistant Professor to the Chair of History, occupied by M. de Lacretelle, in the Faculty of Letters in the Academy of Paris. In a very short time, and before I had commenced my class, as if he thought he had not done enough to evince his esteem and to attach me strongly to the University, he divided the Chair, and named me Titular Professor of Modern History, with a dispensation on account of age, as I had not yet completed my twenty-fifth year. I began my lectures at the College of Plessis, in presence of the pupils of the Normal School, and of a public audience few in number but anxious for instruction, and with whom modern history, traced up to its remote sources, the barbarous conquerors of the Roman Empire, presented itself with an urgent and almost contemporaneous interest. In his conduct towards me, M. de Fontanes was not entirely actuated by some pages of mine he had read, or by a few friendly opinions he had heard expressed. This learned Epicurean, become powerful, and the intellectual favourite of the most potent Sovereign in Europe, loved literature for itself with a sincere and disinterested attachment. The truly beautiful touched him as sensibly as in the days of his early youth and poetical inspirations. What was still more extraordinary, this refined courtier of a despot, this official orator, who felt satisfied when he had embellished flattery with noble eloquence, never failed to acknowledge, and render due homage to independence. Soon after my appointment, he invited me to dinner at his country-house at Courbevoie. Seated near him at table, we talked of studies, of the different modes of teaching, of ancient and modern classics, with the freedom of old acquaintances, and almost with the association of fellow-labourers. The conversation turned upon the Latin poets and their commentators. I spoke with warm praise of the great edition of Virgil by Heyne, the celebrated professor of the University of Göttingen, and of the merit of his annotations. M. de Fontanes fiercely attacked the German scholars. According to him, they had neither discovered nor added anything to the earlier commentaries, and Heyne was no better acquainted with Virgil and the ancients than Père La Rue. He fulminated against German literature in the mass, philosophers, poets, historians, or philologists, and pronounced them all unworthy of attention. I defended them with the confidence of conviction and youth; when M. de Fontanes, turning to his neighbour on the other side, said to him, with a smile, "We can never make these Protestants give in." But, instead of taking offence at my obstinacy, he was cordially pleased with the frankness of this little debate. His toleration of my independence was, not long after, subjected to a more delicate trial.

When I was about to commence my course, in December, 1812, he spoke to me of my opening address, and insinuated that I ought to insert in it a sentence or two in praise of the Emperor. It was the custom, he said, particularly on the establishment of a new professorship, and the Emperor sometimes demanded from him an account of these proceedings. I felt unwilling to comply, and told him, I thought this proposal scarcely consistent. I had to deal exclusively with science, before an audience of students; how then could I be expected to introduce politics, and, above all, politics in opposition to my own views? "Do as you please," replied M. de Fontanes, with an evident mixture of regard and embarrassment; "if you are complained of, it will fall upon me, and I must defend you and myself as well as I can."[3]

He displayed as much clear penetration and good sense as generosity, in so quickly and gracefully renouncing the proposition he had suggested. In regard to the master he served, the opposition of the society in which I lived had in it nothing of practical or immediate importance. It was purely an opposition of ideas and conversation, without defined plan or effective influence, earnest in philosophic inquiry, but passive in political action; disposed to be satisfied with tranquil life, in the unshackled indulgence of thought and speech.

On entering the University, I found myself in contact with another opposition, less apparent but more serious, without being, at the moment, of a more active character. M. Royer-Collard, at that time Professor of the History of Philosophy, and Dean of the Faculty of Letters, attached himself to me with warm friendship. We had no previous acquaintanceship; I was much the younger man; he lived quite out of the world, within a small circle of selected associates; we were new to each other, and mutually attractive. He was a man, not of the old system, but of the old times, whose character had been developed, though not controlled, by the Revolution, the principles, transactions, and leading promoters of which he judged with rigid independence, without losing sight of the primary and national cause. His mind, eminently liberal, highly cultivated, and supported by solid good sense, was more original than inventive, profound rather than expanded, more given to sift thoroughly a single idea than to combine many; too much absorbed within himself, but exercising a singular power over others by the commanding weight of his reason, and by an aptitude of imparting, with a certain solemnity of manner, the unexpected brilliancy of a strong imagination, continually under the excitement of very lively impressions. Before being called to teach philosophy, he had never made this particular branch of science the object or end of his special study, and throughout our political vicissitudes between 1789 and 1814 he had never taken an important position, or connected himself prominently with any party. But, in youth, under the influence of the traditions of Port-Royal, he had received a sound classical and Christian education; and after the Reign of Terror, under the government of the Directory, he joined the small section of Royalists who corresponded with Louis XVIII., less to conspire, than to enlighten the exiled Prince on the true state of the country, and to furnish him with suggestions equally advantageous for France and the House of Bourbon, if it were destined that the House of Bourbon and France should be re-united on some future day. He was therefore decidedly a spiritualist in philosophy, and a royalist in politics. To restore independence of mind to man, and right to government, formed the prevailing desire of his unobtrusive life. "You cannot believe," he wrote to me in 1823, "that I have ever adopted the word Restoration in the restricted sense of an individual fact; but I have always regarded, and still look upon this fact as the expression of a certain system of society and government, and as the condition on which, under the circumstances of France, we are to look for order, justice, and liberty; while, without this condition, disorder, violence, and irremediable despotism, springing from things and not from men, will be the necessary consequence of the spirit and doctrines of the Revolution." Passionately imbued with this conviction, an aggressive philosopher and an expectant politician, he fought successfully in his chair against the materialistic school of the eighteenth century, and watched from the retirement of his study, with anxiety but not without hope, the chances of the perilous game on which Napoleon daily staked his empire.

By his lofty and intuitive instincts, Napoleon was a spiritualist: men of his order have flashes of light and impulses of thought, which open to them the sphere of the most exalted truths. In his hours of better reflection, spiritualism, reviving under his reign, and sapping the materialism of the last century, was sympathetic with and agreeable to his own nature. But the principle of despotism quickly reminded him that the soul cannot be elevated without enfranchisement, and the spiritualistic philosophy of M. Royer-Collard then confused him as much as the sensual ideology of M. de Tracy. It was, moreover, one of the peculiarities of Napoleon's mind, that his thoughts constantly reverted to the forgotten Bourbons, well knowing that he had no other competitors for the throne of France. At the summit of his power he more than once gave utterance to this impression, which recurred to him with increased force when he felt the approach of danger. On this ground, M. Royer-Collard and his friends, with whose opinions and connections he was fully acquainted, became to him objects of extreme suspicion and disquietude. Not that their opposition (as he was also aware) was either active or influential; events were not produced through such agencies; but therein lay the best-founded presentiments of the future; and amongst its members were included the most rational partisans of the prospective Government.

Hitherto they had ventured nothing beyond vague and half-indulged conversations, when the Emperor himself advanced their views to a consistence and publicity which they were far from assuming. On the 19th of December, 1813, he convened together the Senate and the Legislative Body, and ordered several documents to be laid before them relative to his negotiations with the Allied Powers, demanding their opinions on the subject. If he had then really intended to make peace, or felt seriously anxious to convince France, that the continuance of the war would not spring from the obstinacy of his own domineering will, there can be no doubt that he would have found in these two Bodies, enervated as they were, a strong and popular support. I often saw and talked confidentially with three of the five members of the Commission of the Legislative Body, MM. Maine-Biran, Gallois, and Raynouard, and through them I obtained a correct knowledge of the dispositions of the two others, MM. Lainé and Flaugergues. M. Maine-Biran, who, with M. Royer-Collard and myself formed a small philosophical association, in which we conversed freely on all topics, kept us fully informed as to what passed in the Commission, and even in the Legislative Assembly itself. Although originally a Royalist (in his youth he had been enrolled amongst the bodyguards of Louis XVI.), he was unconnected with any party or intrigue, scrupulously conscientious, even timid when conviction did not call for the exercise of courage, little inclined to politics by taste, and, under any circumstances, one of the last men to form an extreme resolution, or take the initiative in action. M. Gallois, a man of the world and of letters, a moderate liberal of the philosophic school of the eighteenth century, occupied himself much more with his library than with public affairs. He wished to discharge his duty to his country respectably, without disturbing the peaceful tenor of his life. M. Raynouard, a native of Provence and a poet, had more vivacity of manner and language, without being of an adventurous temperament. It was said that his loud complaints against the tyrannical abuses of the Imperial Government, would not have prevented him from being contented with those moderate concessions which satisfy honour for the present, and excite hope for the future. M. Flaugergues, an honest Republican, who had put on mourning for the death of Louis XVI., uncompromising in temper and character, was capable of energetic but solitary resolutions, and possessed little influence over his colleagues, although he talked much. M. Lainé, on the contrary, had a warm and sympathetic heart under a gloomy exterior, and an elevated mind, without much vigour or originality. He spoke imposingly and convincingly when moved by his subject; formerly a Republican, he had paused as a simple partisan of liberal tendencies, and being promptly acknowledged as the head of the Commission, consented without hesitation to become its organ. But, like his colleagues, he had no premeditated hostility or concealed engagement against the Emperor. All were desirous of conveying to him a true impression of the desires of France; externally for a pacific policy, and internally for a respect for public rights and the legal exercise of power. Their Report contained nothing beyond a guarded expression of these moderate sentiments.

With such men, animated by such views, a perfect understanding was anything but difficult. Napoleon would not even listen to them. It is well known how he suddenly suppressed the Report and adjourned the Legislative Body, and with what rude but intentional violence he received the Deputies and their Commissioners on the 1st of January, 1814. "Who are you who address me thus? I am the sole representative of the nation. We are one and inseparable. I have a title, but you have none.... M. Lainé, your mouthpiece, is a dishonest man who corresponds with England through the Advocate Desèze. I shall keep my eye upon him. M. Raynouard is a liar." In communicating to the Commission the papers connected with the negotiation, Napoleon had forbidden his Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Duke of Vicenza, to include that which specified the conditions on which the Allied Powers were prepared to treat, not wishing to pledge himself to any recognized basis. His Minister of Police, the Duke of Rovigo, took upon himself to carry to extremity the indiscretion of his anger. "Your words are most imprudent," said he to the members of the Commission, "when there is a Bourbon in the field." Thus, in the very crisis of his difficulties, under the most emphatic warnings from heaven and man, the despot at bay made an empty parade of absolute power; the vanquished conqueror displayed to the world that the ostensible negotiations were only a pretext for still trying the chances of war; the tottering head of the new dynasty proclaimed himself that the old line was there, ready to supplant him.

The day had arrived when glory could no longer repair the faults which it still covers. The campaign of 1814, that uninterrupted masterpiece of skill and heroism, as well on the part of the leader as of his followers, bore, nevertheless, the ineffaceable stamp of the false calculations and false position of the Emperor. He wavered continually between the necessity of protecting Paris, and the passion of reconquering Europe; anxious to save his throne without sacrificing his ambition, and changing his tactics at every moment, as a fatal danger or a favourable change alternately presented itself. God vindicated reason and justice, by condemning the genius which had so recklessly braved both, to sink in hesitation and uncertainty, under the weight of its own incompatible objects and impracticable desires.

While Napoleon in this closing struggle wasted the last remnants of his fortune and power, he encountered no disappointment or obstacle from any quarter of France, either from Paris or the departments, the party in opposition, or the public in general. There was no enthusiasm in his cause, and little confidence in his success, but no one rose openly against him; all hostility was comprised in a few unfavourable expressions, some preparatory announcements, and here and there a change of side as people began to catch a glimpse of the approaching issue. The Emperor acted in full liberty, with all the strength that still pertained to his isolated position, and the moral and physical exhaustion of the country. Such general apathy was never before exhibited in the midst of so much national anxiety, or so many disaffected persons abstaining from action under similar circumstances, with such numerous partisans ready to renounce the master they still served with implicit docility. It was an entire nation of wearied spectators who had long given up all interference in their own fate, and knew not what catastrophe they were to hope or fear to the terrible game of which they were the stake.

I grew impatient of remaining a motionless beholder of the shifting spectacle; and not foreseeing when or how it would terminate, I determined, towards the middle of March, to repair to Nismes, and pass some weeks with my mother, whom I had not seen for a considerable time. I have still before my eyes the aspect of Paris, particularly of the Rue de Rivoli (then in progress of construction), as I passed along on the morning of my departure. There were no workmen and no activity; materials heaped together without being used, deserted scaffoldings, buildings abandoned for want of money, hands, or confidence, and in ruins before completion. Everywhere, amongst the people, a discontented air of uneasy idleness, as if they were equally in want of labour and repose. Throughout my journey, on the highways, in the towns, and in the fields, I noticed the same appearance of inactivity and agitation, the same visible impoverishment of the country; there were more women and children than men, many young conscripts marching mournfully to their battalions, sick and wounded soldiers returning to the interior; in fact, a mutilated and exhausted nation. Side by side with this physical suffering, I also remarked a great moral perplexity, the uneasiness of opposing sentiments, an ardent longing for peace, a deadly hatred of foreign invaders, with alternating feelings, as regarded Napoleon, of anger and sympathy. By some he was denounced as the author of all their calamities; by others he was hailed as the bulwark of the country, and the avenger of her injuries. What struck me as a serious evil, although I was then far from being able to estimate its full extent, was the marked inequality of these different expressions amongst the divided classes of the population. With the affluent and educated, the prominent feeling was evidently a strong desire for peace, a dislike of the exigencies and hazards of the Imperial despotism, a calculated foreshadowing of its fall, and the dawning perspective of another system of government. The lower orders, on the contrary, only roused themselves up from lassitude to give way to a momentary burst of patriotic rage, or to their reminiscences of the Revolution. The Imperial rule had given them discipline without reform. Appearances were tranquil, but in truth it might be said of the popular masses as of the emigrants, that they had forgotten nothing, and learned nothing. There was no moral unity throughout the land, no common thought or passion, notwithstanding the common misfortunes and experience. The nation was almost as blindly and completely divided in its apathy, as it had lately been in its excitement. I recognized these unwholesome symptoms; but I was young, and much more disposed to dwell on the hopes than on the perils of the future. While at Nismes, I soon became acquainted with the events that had taken place in Paris. M. Royer-Collard wrote to press my return. I set out on the instant, and a few days after my arrival, I was appointed Secretary-General to the Ministry of the Interior, which department the King had just confided to the Abbé de Montesquiou.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] I have inserted, amongst the "Historic Documents" at the end of the Volume, three of the letters which M. de Châteaubriand addressed to me, at the time, on this subject. (Historic Documents, [No. I.])

[2] Amongst the "Historic Documents" at the end of this volume, I have included a letter, addressed to me from Brussels, by the Count de Lally-Tolendal, on the 'Annals of Education,' in which the character of the writer and of the time are exhibited with agreeable frankness. (Hist. Documents, [No. II.])

[3] Notwithstanding its imperfections, of which, no one is more sensible than I am, this address may be read, perhaps, with some little interest. It was my first historical lecture and first public discourse, and remains locked up in the Archives of the Faculty of Letters, from the day when it was delivered, now forty-five years ago. I have added it to the "Historic Documents" ([No. III.]).

CHAPTER II.

THE RESTORATION.

1814-1815.

SENTIMENTS WITH WHICH I COMMENCED PUBLIC LIFE.—TRUE CAUSE AND CHARACTER OF THE RESTORATION.—CAPITAL ERROR OF THE IMPERIAL SENATE.—THE CHARTER SUFFERS FROM IT.—VARIOUS OBJECTIONS TO THE CHARTER.—WHY THEY WERE FUTILE.—CABINET OF KING LOUIS XVIII.—UNFITNESS OF THE PRINCIPAL MINISTERS FOR CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT.—M. DE TALLEYRAND.—THE [ABBÉ] DE MONTESQUIOU.—M. DE BLACAS.—LOUIS XVIII.—PRINCIPAL AFFAIRS IN WHICH I WAS CONCERNED AT THAT EPOCH.—ACCOUNT OF THE STATE OF THE KINGDOM LAID BEFORE THE CHAMBERS.—BILL RESPECTING THE PRESS.—DECREE FOR THE REFORM OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION.—STATE OF THE GOVERNMENT AND THE COUNTRY.—THEIR COMMON INEXPERIENCE.—EFFECTS OF THE LIBERAL SYSTEM.—ESTIMATE OF PUBLIC DISCONTENT AND CONSPIRACIES.—SAYING OF NAPOLEON ON THE FACILITY OF HIS RETURN.

Under these auspices, I entered, without hesitation, on public life. I had no previous tie, no personal motive to connect me with the Restoration; I sprang from those who had been raised up by the impulse of 1789, and were little disposed to fall back again. But if I was not bound to the former system by any specific interest, I felt no bitterness towards the old Government of France. Born a citizen and a Protestant, I have ever been unswervingly devoted to liberty of conscience, equality in the eye of the law, and all the acquired privileges of social order. My confidence in these acquisitions is ample and confirmed; but, in support of their cause, I do not feel myself called upon to consider the House of Bourbon, the aristocracy of France, and the Catholic clergy, in the light of enemies. At present, none but madmen exclaim, "Down with the nobility! Down with the priests!" Nevertheless, many well-meaning and sensible persons, who are sincerely desirous that revolutions should cease, still cherish in their hearts some relics of the sentiments to which these cries respond. Let them beware of such feelings. They are essentially revolutionary and antisocial; order can never be thoroughly re-established as long as honourable minds encourage them with secret complaisance. I mean, that real and enduring order which every extended society requires for its prosperity and permanence. The interests and acquired rights of the present day have taken rank in France, and constitute henceforward the strength and vitality of the country; but because our social system is filled with new elements, it is not therefore new in itself; it can no more deny what it has been, than it can renounce what it has become; it would establish perpetual confusion and decline within itself, if it remained hostile to its true history. History is the nation, the country, viewed through ages. For myself, I have always maintained an affectionate respect for the great names and actions which have held such a conspicuous place in our destinies; and being as I am, a man of yesterday, when the King, Louis XVIII., presented himself with the Charter in his hand, I neither felt angry nor humiliated that I was compelled to enjoy or defend our liberties under the ancient dynasty of the Sovereigns of France, and in common with all Frenchmen, whether noble or plebeian, even though their old rivalries might sometimes prove a source of mistrust and agitation.

It was the remembrance of foreign intervention that constituted the wound and nightmare of France under the Government of the Restoration. The feeling was legitimate in itself. The jealous passion of national independence and glory doubles the strength of a people in prosperity, and saves their pride under reverses. If it had pleased Heaven to throw me into the ranks of Napoleon's soldiers, in all probability that single passion would also have governed my soul. But, placed as I was, in civil life, other ideas and instincts have taught me to look elsewhere than to predominance in war for the greatness and security of my country. I have ever prized, above all other considerations, just policy, and liberty restrained by law. I despaired of both under the Empire; I hoped for them from the Restoration. I have been sometimes reproached with not sufficiently associating myself with general impressions. Whenever I meet them sincerely and strongly manifested, I respect and hold them in account, but I cannot feel that I am called upon to abdicate my reason for their adoption, or to desert the real and permanent interest of the country for the sake of according with them. It is truly an absurd injustice to charge the Restoration with the presence of those foreigners which the mad ambition of Napoleon alone brought upon our soil, and which the Bourbons only could remove by a prompt and certain peace. The enemies of the Restoration, in their haste to condemn it from the very first hour, have plunged into strange contradictions. If we are to put faith in their assertions, at one time they tell us that it was imposed on France by foreign bayonets; at another, that in 1814, no one, either in France or Europe, bestowed a thought upon the subject; and again, that a few old adherences, a few sudden defections, and a few egotistical intrigues alone enabled it to prevail. Puerile blindness of party spirit! The more it is attempted to prove that no general desire, no prevailing force, from within or without, either suggested or produced the Restoration, the more its inherent strength will be brought to light, and the controlling necessity which determined the event. I have ever been surprised that free and superior minds should thus fetter themselves within the subtleties and credulities of prejudice, and not feel the necessity of looking facts in the face, and of viewing them as they really exist. In the formidable crisis of 1814, the restoration of the House of Bourbon was the only natural and solid solution that presented itself; the only measure that could be reconciled to principles not dependent on the influence of force and the caprices of human will. Some alarm might thence be excited for the new interests of French society; but with the aid of institutions mutually accepted, the two benefits of which France stood most in need, and of which for twenty-five years she had been utterly deprived, peace and liberty, might also be confidently looked for. Under the influence of this double hope, the Restoration was accomplished, not only without effort, but in despite of revolutionary remembrances, and was received throughout France with alacrity and cheerfulness. And France did wisely in this adoption, for the Restoration, in fact, came accompanied by peace and liberty.

Peace had never been more talked of in France than during the last quarter of a century. The Constituent Assembly had proclaimed, "No more conquests;" the National Convention had celebrated the union of nations; the Emperor Napoleon had concluded, in fifteen years, more pacific negotiations than any preceding monarch. Never had war so frequently ended and recommenced; never had peace proved such a transient illusion; a treaty was nothing but a truce, during which preparations were making for fresh combats.

It was the same with liberty as with peace. Celebrated and promised, at first, with enthusiasm, it had quickly disappeared under civil discord, even before the celebration and the promise had ceased; thus, to extinguish discord, liberty had also been abolished. At one moment people became maddened with the word, without caring for the reality of the fact; at another, to escape a fatal intoxication, the fact and the word were equally proscribed and forgotten.

True peace and liberty returned with the Restoration. War was not with the Bourbons a necessity or a passion; they could reign without having recourse every day to some new development of force, some fresh shock to the fixed principles of nations. Treating with them, foreign Governments could and did believe in a sincere and lasting peace. Neither was the liberty which France recovered in 1814, the triumph of any particular school in philosophy or party in politics. Turbulent propensities, obstinate theories and imaginations, at the same time ardent and idle, were unable to find in it the gratification of their irregular and unbounded appetites. It was, in truth, social liberty, the practical and legalized enjoyment of rights, equally essential to the active life of the citizens and to the moral dignity of the nation.

What were to be the guarantees of liberty, and consequently of all the interests which liberty itself was intended to guarantee? By what institutions could the control and influence of the nation in its government be exercised? In these questions lay the great problem which the Imperial Senate attempted to solve by its project of a Constitution in April, 1814, and which, on the 4th of June following, the King, Louis XVIII., effectually decided by the Charter.

The Senators of 1814 have been much and justly reproached for the selfishness with which, on overthrowing the Empire, they preserved for themselves, not only the integrity, but the perpetuity of the material advantages with which the Empire had endowed them;—a cynical error, and one of those which most depreciate existing authorities in the estimation of the people, for they are offensive, at the same time, to honest feelings and envious passions. The Senate committed another mistake less palpable, and more consistent with the prejudices of the country, but in my judgment more weighty, both as a political blunder, and as to the consequences involved. At the same moment when it proclaimed the return of the ancient Royal House, it blazoned forth the pretension of electing the King, disavowing the monarchical right, the supremacy of which it accepted, and thus exercising the privilege of republicanism in re-establishing the monarchy:—a glaring contradiction between principles and acts, a childish bravado against the great fact to which it was rendering homage, and a lamentable confounding of rights and ideas. It was from necessity, and not by choice, on account of his hereditary title, and not as the chosen candidate of the day, that Louis XVIII. was called to the throne of France. There was neither truth, dignity, nor prudence, but in one line of conduct,—to recognize openly the royal claim in the House of Bourbon, and to demand as openly in return the national privileges which the state of the country and the spirit of the time required. Such a candid avowal and mutual respect for mutual rights, form the very essence of free government. It is by this steady union that elsewhere monarchy and liberty have developed and strengthened themselves together; and by frank co-operation, kings and nations have extinguished those internal wars which are denominated revolutions. Instead of adopting this course, the Senate, at once obstinate and timid, while wishing to place the restored monarchy under the standard of republican election, succeeded only in evoking the despotic in face of the revolutionary principle, and in raising up as a rival to the absolute right of the people, the uncontrolled authority of the King.

The Charter bore the impress of this impolitic conduct; timid and obstinate in its turn, and seeking to cover the retreat of royalty, as the Revolution had sought to protect its own, it replied to the pretensions of the revolutionary system by the pretensions of the ancient form, and presented itself as purely a royal concession, instead of proclaiming its true character, such as it really was, a treaty of peace after a protracted war, a series of new articles added by common accord to the old compact of union between the nation and the King.

In this point lay the complaint of the Liberals of the Revolution against the Charter, as soon as it appeared. Their adversaries, the supporters of the old rule, assailed it with other reproaches. The most fiery, such as the disciples of M. de Maistre, could scarcely tolerate its existence. According to them, absolute power, legitimate in itself alone, was the only form of government that suited France. The moderates, amongst whom were M. de Villèle in the reply he published at Toulouse to the declaration of Saint-Ouen, accused this plan for a constitution, which became the Charter, of being an importation from England, foreign to the history, the ideas, and the manners of France; and which, they said, "would cost more to establish than the ancient organization would require for repairs."

I do not here propose to enter upon any discussion of principles, with the apostles of absolute power; as applied to France and our own time, experience, and a very overwhelming experience, has supplied an answer. Absolute power, amongst us, can only belong to the Revolution and its representatives, for they alone can (I do not say for how long) retain the masses in their interest, by withholding from them the securities of liberty.

For the House of Bourbon and its supporters, absolute power is impossible; under them France must be free; it only accepts their government by supplying it with the eye and the hand.

The objections of the moderate party were more specious. It must be admitted that the government established by the Charter had, in its forms at least, something of a foreign aspect. Perhaps too there was reason for saying that it assumed the existence of a stronger aristocratic element in France, and of a more trained and disciplined spirit of policy, than could, in reality, be found there. Another difficulty, less palpable but substantial, awaited it; the Charter was not alone the triumph of 1789 over the old institutions, but it was the victory of one of the Liberal sections of 1789 over its rivals as well as its enemies, a victory of the partisans of the English Constitution over the framers of the Constitution of 1791, and over the republicans as well as the supporters of the ancient monarchy,—a source teeming with offences to the self-love of many, and a somewhat narrow basis for the re-settlement of an old and extensive country.

But these objections had little weight in 1814. The position of affairs was urgent and imperative; it was necessary that the old monarchy should be reformed when restored. Of all the measures of improvement proposed or attempted since 1789, the Charter comprised that which was the most generally recognized and admitted by the public at large, as well as by professed politicians. At such moments controversy subsides; the resolutions adopted by men of action, present an epitome of the ideas common to men of thought. A republic would be to revive the Revolution; the Constitution of 1791 would be government without power; the old French Constitution, if the name were applicable, had been found ineffective in 1789, equally incapable of self-maintenance or amelioration. All that it had once possessed of greatness or utility, the Parliaments, the different Orders, the various local institutions, were so evidently beyond the possibility of re-establishment, that no one thought seriously of such a proposition. The Charter was already written in the experience and reflection of the country. It emanated as naturally from the mind of Louis XVIII., returning from England, as from the deliberations of the Senate, intent on renouncing the yoke of the Empire. It was the produce of the necessities and convictions of the hour. Judged by itself, notwithstanding its inherent defects and the objections of opponents, the Charter was a very practicable political implement. Power and liberty found ample scope there for exercise and defence; the workmen were much less adapted to the machine than the machine to the work.

Thoroughly distinguished from each other in ideas and character, and extremely unequal in mind and merit, the three leading Ministers of Louis XVIII. at that epoch, M. de Talleyrand, the Abbé de Montesquiou, and M. de Blacas, were all specially unsuited to the government they were called on to found.

I say only what I truly think; yet I do not feel myself compelled, in speaking of those with whom I have come in contact, to say all that I think. I owe nothing to M. de Talleyrand; in my public career he thwarted rather than assisted me; but when we have been much associated with an eminent man, and have long reciprocated amicable intercourse, self-respect renders it imperative to speak of him with a certain degree of reserve. At the crisis of the Restoration, M. de Talleyrand displayed, in a very superior manner, the qualities of sagacity, cool determination, and preponderating influence. Not long after, at Vienna, he manifested the same endowments, and others even more rare and apposite, when representing the House of Bourbon and the European interests of France. But except in a crisis or a congress, he was neither able nor powerful. A courtier and a politician, no advocate upon conviction, for any particular form of government, and less for representative government than for any other, he excelled in negotiating with insulated individuals, by the power of conversation, by the charm and skilful employment of social relations; but in authority of character, in fertility of mental resources, in promptitude of resolution, in command of language, in the sympathetic association of general ideas with public passions,—in all these great sources of influence upon collected assemblies, he was absolutely deficient. Besides which, he had neither the inclination nor habit of sustained, systematic labour, another important condition of internal government. He was at once ambitious and indolent, a flatterer and a scoffer, a consummate courtier in the art of pleasing and of serving without the appearance of servility; ready for everything, and capable of any pliability that might assist his fortune, preserving always the mien, and recurring at need to the attractions of independence; a diplomatist without scruples, indifferent as to means, and almost equally careless as to the end, provided only that the end advanced his personal interest. More bold than profound in his views, calmly courageous in danger, well suited to the great enterprises of absolute government, but insensible to the true atmosphere and light of liberty, in which he felt himself lost and incapable of action. He was too glad to escape from the Chambers and from France, to find once more at Vienna a congenial sphere and associations.

As completely a courtier as M. de Talleyrand, and more thoroughly belonging to the old system, the Abbé de Montesquiou was better suited to hold his ground under a constitutional government, and occupied a more favourable position for such a purpose, at this period of uncertainty. He stood high in the estimation of the King and the Royalists, having ever remained immovably faithful to his cause, his order, his friends, and his sovereign. He was in no danger of being taxed as a revolutionist, or of having his name associated with unpleasant reminiscences. Through a rare disinterestedness, and the consistent simplicity of his life, he had won the confidence of all honest men. His character was open, his disposition frank, his mind richly cultivated, and his conversation unreserved, without being exceptious as to those with whom he might be conversing. He could render himself acceptable to the middle classes, although indications of pride and aristocratic haughtiness might be occasionally detected in his words and manner. These symptoms were only perceptible to delicate investigators; by the great majority he was considered affable and unassuming. In the Chambers he spoke with ease and animation, if not with eloquence, and often indulged in an attractive play of fancy. He could have rendered good service to the constitutional government, had he either loved or trusted it; but he joined it without faith or preference, as a measure of necessity, to be evaded or restrained even during the term of endurance. Through habit, and deference for his party, or rather for his immediate coterie, he was perpetually recurring to the traditions and tendencies of the old system, and endeavouring to carry his listeners with him by shallow subtleties and weak arguments, which were sometimes retorted upon himself. One day, partly in jest, and partly in earnest, he proposed to M. Royer-Collard to obtain for him from the King the title of Count. "Count?" replied M. Royer-Collard, in the same tone, "make yourself a Count?" The Abbé de Montesquieu smiled, with a slight expression of disappointment, at this freak of citizen pride. He believed the old aristocracy to be beaten down, but he wished to revive and strengthen it by an infusion with the new orders. He miscalculated in supposing that none amongst the latter class would, from certain instinctive tendencies, think lightly of a title which flattered their interests, or that they could be won over by conciliation without sympathy. He was a thoroughly honourable man, with a heart more liberal than his ideas, of an enlightened and accomplished mind, naturally elegant, but volatile, inconsiderate, and absent; little suited for long and bitter contentions, formed to please rather than to control, and incapable of leading his party or himself in the course in which reason suggested that they should follow.

In the character of M. de Blacas there were no such apparent inconsistencies. Not that he was either an ardent, or a decided and stirring partisan of the contra-revolutionary reaction; he was moderate through coldness of temperament, and a fear of compromising the King, to whom he was sincerely devoted, rather than from clear penetration. But neither his moderation nor his loyalty gave him any insight into the true state of the country, or any desire to occupy himself with the subject. He remained at the Tuileries what he had been at Hartwell, a country gentleman, an emigrant, a courtier, and a steady and courageous favourite, not deficient in personal dignity or domestic tact, but with no political genius, no ambition, no statesmanlike activity, and almost as entirely a stranger to France as before his return. He impeded the Government more than he pretended to govern, taking a larger share in the quarrels and intrigues of the palace, than in the deliberations of the Council, and doing much more injury to public affairs by utter neglect, than by direct interference.

I do not think it would have been impossible for an active, determined monarch to employ these three ministers profitably, and at the same time, however much they differed from one another. Neither of them aspired to the helm, and each, in his proper sphere, could have rendered good service. M. de Talleyrand desired nothing better than to negotiate with Europe; the Abbé de Montesquiou had no desire to rule at court, and M. de Blacas, calm, prudent, and faithful, might have been found a valuable confidant in opposition to the pretensions and secret intrigues of courtiers and princes. But Louis XVIII. was not in the least capable of governing his ministers. As a King he possessed great negative or promissory qualities, but few that were active and immediate. Outwardly imposing, judicious, acute, and circumspect, he could reconcile, restrain, and defeat; but he could neither inspire, direct, nor give the impulse while he held the reins. He had few ideas, and no passion. Persevering application to business was as little suited to him, as active movement. He sufficiently maintained his rank, his rights, and his power, and seldom committed a glaring mistake; but when once his dignity and prudence were vindicated, he allowed things to take their own course; with too little energy of mind and body to control men, and force them to act in concert for the accomplishment of his wishes.

From my inexperience, and the nature of my secondary post in a special department, I was far from perceiving the full mischief of this absence of unity and supreme direction in the Government. The Abbé de Montesquiou sometimes mentioned it to me with impatience and regret. He was amongst the few who had sufficient sense and honesty not to deceive themselves as to their own defects. He reposed great confidence in me, although even within his most intimate circle of associates, efforts had been made to check this disposition. With generous irony, he replied to those who objected to me as a Protestant, "Do you think I intend to make him Pope?" With his habitual unrestraint, he communicated to me his vexations at the Court, his differences with M. de Blacas, his impotence to do what he thought good, or to prevent what he considered evil. He went far beyond this freedom of conversation, by consigning to me, in his department, many matters beyond the duties of my specific office, and would have allowed me to assume a considerable portion of his power.[4] Thus I became associated, during his administration, with three important circumstances, the only ones I shall dwell on, for I am not writing the history of the time; I merely relate what I did, saw, and thought myself, in the general course of events.

The Charter being promulgated, and the Government settled, I suggested to the Abbé de Montesquiou that it would be well for the King to place before the Chambers a summary of the internal condition of France, as he had found it, showing the results of the preceding system, and explaining the spirit of that which he proposed to establish. The Minister was pleased with the idea, the King adopted it, and I immediately applied myself to the work. The Abbé de Montesquiou also assisted; for he wrote well, and took personal pleasure in the task. On the 12th of July, the statement was presented to the two Chambers, who thanked the King by separate addresses. It contained, without exaggeration or concealment, a true picture of the miseries which unlimited and incessant war had inflicted on France, and the moral and physical wounds which it had left to be healed,—a strange portrait, when considered with reference to those which Napoleon, under the Consulate and the dawning Empire, had also given to the world; and which eulogized, with good reason at the time, the restoration of order, the establishment of rule, the revival of prosperity, with all the excellent effects of strong, able, and rational power. The descriptions were equally true, although immeasurably different; and precisely in this contrast lay the startling moral with which the history of the Imperial despotism had just concluded. The Abbé de Montesquiou ought to have placed the glorious edifices of the Consulate side by side with the deserved ruins of the Empire. Instead of losing by this course, he would have added to the impression he intended to produce; but men are seldom disposed to praise their enemies, even though the effect should be to injure them. By alluding only to the disasters of Napoleon, and their fatal consequences, the exposition of the state of the kingdom in 1814 was undignified, and appeared to be unjust. The points in which it reflected honour on the authority from whence it emanated, were the moral tone, the liberal spirit, and the absence of all quackery, which were its leading features. These recommendations had their weight with right-minded, sensible people; but they passed for little with a public accustomed to the dazzling noise and bustle of the power which had recently been extinguished.

Another exposition, more special, but of greater urgency, was presented a few days after, by the Minister of Finance, to the Chamber of Deputies. This included the amount of debt bequeathed by the Empire to the Restoration, with the Ministerial plan for meeting the arrear, as well as providing for the exigencies of 1814 and 1815. Amongst all the Government officials of my time, I have never been acquainted with any one more completely a public servant, or more passionately devoted to the public interest, than the Baron Louis. Ever resolved to cast aside all other considerations, he cared neither for personal risk nor labour, in promoting the success of what that interest demanded. It was not only the carrying out of his financial measures that he so ardently desired; he made these subservient to the general policy of which they were a portion. In 1830, in the midst of the disturbances occasioned by the Revolution of July, I one day, as Minister of the Interior, demanded from the Council, in which the Baron Louis also had a seat as Minister of Finance, the allocation of a large sum. Objections were made by several of our colleagues, on account of the embarrassed state of the treasury. "Govern well," said the Baron Louis to me, "and you will never spend as much money as I shall be able to supply." A judicious speech, worthy of a frank, uncompromising disposition, controlled by a firm and consistent judgment. The Baron Louis's financial scheme was founded on a double basis,—constitutional order in the State, and probity in the Government. With these two conditions, he reckoned confidently on public prosperity and credit, without being dismayed by debts to be paid, or expenses incurred. His assertions as to the closing state of the finances under the Empire, drew from the Count Mollien, the last Minister of the Imperial treasury, a man as able as he was honest, some well-founded remonstrances, and his measures were in consequence severely opposed in the Chambers. He had to contend with dishonest traditions, the passions of the old system, and the narrow views of little minds. The Baron Louis maintained the struggle with equal enthusiasm and perseverance. It was fortunate for him that M. de Talleyrand and the Abbé de Montesquiou had been his associates in the Church in early youth, and had always maintained a close intimacy with him. Both having enlightened views on political economy, they supported him strongly in the Council and in the Chambers. The Prince de Talleyrand even undertook to present his bill to the Chamber of Peers, adopting boldly the responsibility and the principles. This sound policy was well carried through by the whole cabinet, and justly met with complete success, in spite of prejudiced or ignorant opposition.

It was not exactly the same with another measure in which I took a more active part,—the bill relating to the press, presented to the Chamber of Deputies on the 5th of July by the Abbé de Montesquiou, and which passed into law on the 21st of the following October, after having undergone, in both assemblies, animated debates and important amendments.

In its first conception, this bill was reasonable and sincere. The object was to consecrate by legislative enactment the liberty of the press, both as a public right and as a general and permanent institution of the country; and at the same time, on the morrow of a great revolution and a long despotism, and on the advent of a free government, to impose some temporary and limited restrictions. The two persons who had taken the most active part in framing this bill, M. Royer-Collard and myself, were actuated simply and solely by this double end. I may refer the reader to a short work which I published at the time,[5] a little before the introduction of the bill, and in which its spirit and intention are stated without reserve.

It must be evident that the King and the two Chambers had the right of prescribing in concert, temporarily, and from the pressure of circumstances, certain limitations to one of the privileges recognized by the Charter. This cannot be denied without repudiating constitutional government itself, and its habitual practice in those countries in which it is developed with the greatest vigour. Provisional enactments have frequently modified or suspended, in England, the leading constitutional privileges; and with regard to the liberty of the press in particular, it was not until five years after the Revolution of 1688 that, under the reign of William III. in 1693, it was relieved from the censorship.

I recognize no greater danger to free institutions than that blind tyranny which the habitual fanaticism of partisanship, whether of a faction or a small segment, pretends to exercise in the name of liberal ideas. Are you a staunch advocate for constitutional government and political guarantees? Do you wish to live and act in co-operation with the party which hoists this standard? Renounce at once your judgment and your independence. In that party you will find upon all questions and under all circumstances, opinions ready formed, and resolutions settled beforehand, which assume the right of your entire control. Self-evident facts are in open contradiction to these opinions—you are forbidden to see them. Powerful obstacles oppose these resolutions—you are not allowed to think of them. Equity and prudence suggest circumspection—you must cast it aside. You are in presence of a superstitious Credo, and a popular passion. Do not argue—you would no longer be a Liberal. Do not oppose—you would be looked upon as a mutineer. Obey, advance—no matter at what pace you are urged, or on what road. If you cease to be a slave, you instantly become a deserter!

My clear judgment and a little natural pride revolted invincibly against this yoke. I never imagined that even the best system of institutions could be at once imposed on a country without some remembrance of recent events and actual facts, both as regarded the dispositions of a considerable portion of the country itself and of its necessary rulers. I saw not only the King, his family, and a great number of the old Royalists, but even in new France, a crowd of well-meaning citizens and enlightened minds—perhaps a majority of the middle and substantial classes—extremely uneasy at the idea of the unrestricted liberty of the press, and at the dangers to which it might expose public peace, as well as moral and political order. Without participating to the same extent in their apprehensions, I was myself struck by the excesses in which the press had already begun to indulge; by the deluge of recriminations, accusations, surmises, predictions, animated invectives, or frivolous sarcasms, which threatened to rouse into hostility all parties, with all their respective errors, falsehoods, fears, and antipathies. With these feelings and facts before me, I should have considered myself a madman to have treated them lightly, and therefore I decided at once that a temporary limitation of liberty, in respect to journals and pamphlets alone, was not too great a sacrifice for the removal of such perils and fears, or at least to give the country time to overcome by becoming accustomed to them.

But to ensure the success of a sound measure, open honesty is indispensable. Whether in the proposition or the debate, Government itself was called upon to proclaim the general right, as well as the limits and reasons for the partial restriction which it was about to introduce. It ought not to have evaded the principle of the liberty or the character of the restraining law. This course was not adopted. Neither the King nor his advisers had formed any fixed design against the freedom of the press; but they were more disposed to control it in fact than to acknowledge it in right, and wished rather that the new law, instead of giving additional sanction to the principle recorded in the Charter, should leave it in rather a vague state of doubt and hesitation. When the bill was introduced, its true intent and bearing were not clearly indicated. Weak himself, and yielding still more to the weaknesses of others, the Abbé de Montesquiou endeavoured to give the debate a moral and literary, rather than a political turn. According to his view, the question before them was the protection of literature and science, of good taste and manners, and not the exercise and guarantee of an acknowledged public right. An amendment in the Chamber of Peers was necessary to invest the measure with the political and temporary character which it ought to have borne from the beginning, and which alone confined it to its real objects and within its legitimate limits. The Government accepted the amendment without hesitation, but its position had become embarrassed. Mistrust, the most credulous of all passions, spread rapidly amongst the Liberals. Those who were not enemies to the Restoration had, like it, their foibles. The love of popularity had seized them, but they had not yet acquired foresight. They gladly embraced this opportunity of making themselves, with some display, the champions of a Constitutional principle which in fact was in no danger, but which power had assumed the air of eluding or disavowing. Three of the five honourable members who had been the first to restrain the Imperial despotism—Messrs. Raynouard, Gallois, and Flaugergues—were the declared adversaries of the bill; and in consequence of not having been boldly presented, from the opening, under its real and legitimate aspect, the measure entailed more discredit on the Government than it afforded them security.

The liberty of the press, that stormy guarantee of modern civilization, has already been, is, and will continue to be the roughest trial of free governments, and consequently of free people, who are greatly compromised in the struggles of their rulers; for in the event of defeat, they have no alternative but anarchy or tyranny. Free nations and governments have but one honourable and effective method of dealing with the liberty of the press,—to adopt it frankly, without undue complaisance. Let them not make it a martyr or an idol, but leave it in its proper place, without elevating it beyond its natural rank. The liberty of the press is neither a power in the State, nor the representative of the public mind, nor the supreme judge of the executive authorities; it is simply the right of all citizens to give their opinions upon public affairs and the conduct of Government,—a powerful and respectable privilege, but one naturally overbearing, and which, to be made salutary, requires that the constituted authorities should never humiliate themselves before it, and that they should impose on it that serious and constant responsibility which ought to weigh upon all rights, to prevent them from becoming at first seditious, and afterwards tyrannical.

The third measure of importance in which I was concerned at this epoch, the reform of the general system of public instruction, by a Royal ordinance of the 17th of February, 1815, created much less sensation than the Law of the Press, and produced even less effect than noise; for its execution was entirely suspended by the catastrophe of the 20th of March, and not resumed after the Hundred Days. There were more important matters then under consideration. This measure was what is now called the de-centralization of the University.[6] Seventeen separate Universities, established in the principal cities of the kingdom, were to be substituted for the one general University of the Empire. Each of these local colleges was to have a complete and separate organization, both as regarded the different degrees of instruction and the various scholastic establishments within its jurisdiction. Over the seventeen Universities a Royal Council and a great Normal School were appointed, one to superintend the general course of public teaching, and the other to train up for professors the chosen scholars who had prepared themselves for that career, and who were to be supplied from the local Universities. There were two motives for this reform. The first was a desire to establish, in the departments, and quite independent of Paris, leading centres of learning and intellectual activity; the second, a wish to abolish the absolute power which, in the Imperial University, held sole control over the establishments and the masters, and to bring the former under a closer and more immediate authority, by giving the latter more permanence, dignity, and independence in their respective positions. These were sound ideas, to carry out which the decree of the 17th of February, 1815, was but a timid rather than an extended and powerful application. The local Universities were too numerous. France does not supply seventeen natural centres of high learning. Four or five would have sufficed, and more could not have been rendered successful or productive. The forgotten reform which I am here recalling had yet another fault. It was introduced too soon, and was the result, at once systematic and incomplete, of the meditations of certain men long impressed with the deficiencies of the University system, and not really the fruit of public impulse and opinion. Another influence also appeared in it, that of the clergy, who silently commenced at that time their struggle with the University, and adroitly looked for the extension of their personal power in the progress of general liberty. The decree of the 17th of February, 1815, opened this arena, which has since been so fiercely agitated. The Abbé de Montesquiou hastened to bestow on the clergy an early gratification, that of seeing one of their most justly esteemed members, M. de Beausset, formerly Bishop of Alais, at the head of the Royal Council. The Liberals of the University gladly seized this occasion of increasing their action and independence; and the King, Louis XVIII., voluntarily charged his civil list with an additional million for the immediate abolition of the University tax, until a new law, contained in the preamble of the decree, should come into operation to complete the reform, and provide from the public funds for all the requirements of the new system.

It becomes my duty here to express my regret for an error which I ought to have endeavoured more urgently to prevent. In this reform, the opinion and situation of M. de Fontanes were not sufficiently estimated. As head of the Imperial University, he had rendered such eminent services to public instruction, that the title of Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour was far from being a sufficient compensation for the retirement which the new system rendered, in his case, desirable and almost necessary.

But neither reform in public education, nor any other reform, excited much interest at that moment, when France was entirely given up to different considerations. Having scarcely entered on the new system, a sudden impression of alarm and mistrust began to rise and expand from day to day. This system was liberty, with its uncertainties, its contests, and its perils. No one was accustomed to liberty, and liberty contented no one. From the Restoration, the men of old France promised themselves the ascendency; from the Charter, new France expected security. Both were dissatisfied. They found themselves drawn up in presence of each other, with their opposing passions and pretensions. It was a sad disappointment for the Royalists to find the King victorious without their being included in the triumph; and it was a bitter necessity which reduced the men of the Revolution to the defensive after they had so long domineered. Both parties felt surprised and irritated at their position, as equally an insult to their dignity and an attack upon their rights. In their irritation, they gave themselves up, in words and projects, to all the fantasies and transports of their wishes and apprehensions. Amongst the rich and powerful of the old classes, many indulged, towards the influential members of the new, in menaces and insults. At the Court, in the drawing-rooms of Paris, and much more in the provinces, by newspapers, pamphlets, and conversation, and in the daily conduct of their private lives, the nobles and the citizens, the clergy and the laity, the emigrants and the purchasers of national property, allowed their animosities, their ill humour, their dreams of hope and fear, to exhibit themselves without disguise. This was nothing more than the natural and inevitable consequence of the extreme novelty of the system which the Charter, seriously interpreted and exercised, had suddenly introduced into France. During the Revolution there was contest; under the Empire silence; but the Restoration introduced liberty into the bosom of peace. In the general inexperience and susceptibility, the excitement and stir of freedom amounted to civil war on the eve of re-commencement.

To meet the difficulties of such a state of things, to preserve at the same time liberty and peace, to cure the wounds without restraining the blows, no Government could have been too strong or too able. Louis XVIII. and his advisers were unequal to the task. With regard to a liberal system, they were neither more experienced nor inured than France herself. Their acts appeared to be regulated by no steady conviction: they believed that the Charter would check the birth of discontent; but when discontent manifested itself rather vehemently, they hastened to calm it down by abandoning or modifying the measures through which it had been excited. The celebrated rescript of Count Beugnot,[7] on the observance of Sundays and religious festivals, ended in an abortive law which never came into operation. The offensive expressions of Count Ferrand, on introducing to the Chamber of Deputies the bill for the restitution of unsold estates to their old proprietors,[8] was loudly disavowed, not only in the speeches, but in the resolutions and conduct of the Government in that matter. In reality, the interests which imagined themselves threatened were in no danger whatever; and in the midst of the alarms and remonstrances of France, the King and his principal ministers were much more inclined to yield than to contend. But having performed this act of constitutional wisdom, they believed themselves emancipated from all care, and relapsed back into their old tastes and habits, desirous also to live in peace with their ancient and familiar friends. It was indeed but a modified power, which attached importance to its oaths, and conceived no formidable designs against the new rights and interests of the country; but it was also an authority without leading vigour, isolated and a stranger in its own kingdom, divided and embarrassed within itself, weak with its enemies, weak with its friends, seeking only for personal security in repose, and called upon hourly to deal with a stubborn and restless people, who had suddenly passed from the rugged shocks of revolution and war to the difficult exercise of liberty.

Under the prolonged influence of this liberty, such a Government, without obstinate prejudices, and disposed to follow public opinion when clearly expressed, might have corrected while strengthening itself, and from day to day have become more competent to its task. But this required time and the concurrence of the country. The country, discontented and unsettled, neither knew how to wait nor assist. Of all the knowledge necessary to a free people, the most essential point is to learn how to bear what displeases them, that they may preserve the advantages they possess, and acquire those they desire.

There has been much discussion as to what plots and conspirators overthrew the Bourbons, and brought back Napoleon, on the 20th of March, 1815,—a question of inferior importance, and interesting only as an historical curiosity. It is certain that from 1814 to 1815 there existed in the army and with the remnants of the Revolution, amongst generals and conventionalists, many plans and secret practices against the Restoration, and in favour of a new Government,—either the Empire, a regency, the Duke of Orleans, or a republic. Marshal Davoust promised his support to the Imperial party, and Fouché offered his to all. But if Napoleon had remained motionless at the island of Elba, these revolutionary projects would, in all probability, have successively failed, as did those of the Generals d'Erlon, Lallemand, and Lefèvre Desnouettes, even so late as the month of March. The fatuity of the contrivers of conspiracy is incalculable; and when the event seems to justify them, they attribute to themselves the result which has been achieved by mightier and much more complicated causes than their machinations. It was Napoleon alone who dethroned the Bourbons in 1815, by calling up, in his own person, the fanatical devotion of the army, and the revolutionary instincts of the popular masses.

However tottering might be the monarchy lately restored, it required that great man and a combination of these great social powers to subvert it. Stupefied and intimidated, France left events to their course, without opposition or confidence. Napoleon adopted this opinion, with his admirable penetration:—"They allowed me to arrive," he said to Count Mollien, "as they permitted the others to depart."

Four times in less than half a century we have seen kings traverse their realms as fugitives. Different enemies have described, with evident pleasure, their helplessness and destitution in flight,—a mean and senseless gratification, which no one, in the present day, has a right to indulge. The retreats of Napoleon in 1814 and 1815 were neither more brilliant nor less bitter than those of Louis XVIII. on the 20th of March, 1815, of Charles X. in 1830, and of Louis Philippe in 1848. Each state of greatness endured the same degradation; every party has the same need of modesty and mutual respect. I myself, as much as any participator, was impressed, on the 20th of March, 1815, with the blindness, the hesitation, the imbecility, the misery of every description, to which that terrible explosion gave birth. It would afford me no pleasure, and would lead to no advantage, to repeat them. People are too much inclined at present to conceal their own weaknesses under a display of the deficiencies of royalty. I prefer recording that neither royal nor national dignity were wanting at that epoch in noble representatives. The Duchess d'Angoulême, at Bordeaux, evinced courage equal to her misfortunes, and M. Lainé, as president of the Chamber of Deputies, protested fearlessly on the 28th of March, in the name of justice and liberty, against the event at that time fully accomplished, and which no longer encountered, through the wide extent of France, any resistance beyond the solitary accents of his voice.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Included in the "Historic Documents," are two letters addressed to me by the Abbé de Montesquiou in 1815 and 1816, which furnish an idea of my intimacy with him, and show the natural and amiable turn of his mind. (Historic Documents, [No. IV.])

[5] 'Thoughts upon the Liberty of the Press,' 52 pages, 8vo, Paris, 1814. Amongst the "Historic Documents" at the end of this volume, some passages from this pamphlet are inserted, which indicate clearly its object and character. (Historic Documents, [No. V.])

[6] Amongst the "Historic Documents" I include the text of this decree, and the report to the King which explains its object and bearing. (Historic Documents, [No. VI.])

[7] June 7th, 1814.

[8] September 13th, 1814.

CHAPTER III.

THE HUNDRED DAYS.

1815.

I IMMEDIATELY LEAVE THE MINISTRY OF THE INTERIOR, TO RESUME MY LECTURES.—UNSETTLED FEELING OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES ON THE RETURN OF NAPOLEON.—ITS REAL CAUSES.—SENTIMENTS OF FOREIGN NATIONS AND GOVERNMENTS TOWARDS NAPOLEON.—APPARENT RECONCILIATION, BUT REAL STRUGGLE, BETWEEN NAPOLEON AND THE LIBERALS.—THE FEDERATES.—CARNOT AND FOUCHÉ.—DEMONSTRATION OF LIBERTY DURING THE HUNDRED DAYS, EVEN IN THE IMPERIAL PALACE.—LOUIS XVIII. AND HIS COUNCIL AT GHENT.—THE CONGRESS AND M. DE TALLEYRAND AT VIENNA.—I GO TO GHENT ON THE PART OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL ROYALIST COMMITTEE AT PARIS.—MY MOTIONS AND OPINIONS DURING THIS JOURNEY.—STATE OF PARTIES AT GHENT.—MY CONVERSATION WITH LOUIS XVIII.—M. DE BLACAS.—M. DE CHÂTEAUBRIAND.—M. DE TALLEYRAND RETURNS FROM VIENNA.—LOUIS XVIII. RE-ENTERS FRANCE.—INTRIGUE PLANNED AT MONS AND DEFEATED AT CAMBRAY.—BLINDNESS AND IMBECILITY OF THE CHAMBER OF REPRESENTATIVES.—MY OPINION RESPECTING THE ADMISSION OF FOUCHÉ INTO THE KING'S CABINET.

The King having quitted, and the Emperor having re-entered Paris, I resumed my literary pursuits, determined to keep aloof from all secret intrigue, all useless agitation, and to occupy myself with my historical labours and studies, not without a lively regret that the political career which had scarcely opened to me, should be so suddenly closed.[9] It is true I did not believe that I was excluded beyond the possibility of return. Not but that the miraculous success of Napoleon had convinced me there was a power within him which, after witnessing his fall, I was far from believing. Never was personal greatness displayed with more astounding splendour; never had an act more audacious, or better calculated in its audacity, arrested the imagination of nations. Neither was external support wanting to the man who relied so much on himself, and on himself alone.

The army identified itself with him, with an enthusiastic and blind devotion. Amongst the popular masses, a revolutionary and warlike spirit, hatred of the old system and national pride, rose up at his appearance and rushed madly to his aid. Accompanied by fervent worshippers, he re-ascended a throne abandoned to him on his approach. But by the side of this overwhelming power, there appeared almost simultaneously a proportionate weakness. He who had traversed France in triumph, and who by personal influence had swept all with him, friends and enemies, re-entered Paris at night, exactly as Louis XVIII. had quitted that capital, his carriage surrounded by dragoons, and only encountering on his passage a scanty and moody populace. Enthusiasm had accompanied him throughout his journey; but at its termination he found coldness, doubt, widely disseminated mistrust, and cautious reserve; France divided, and Europe irrevocably hostile.

The upper, and particularly the middle classes, have often been reproached with their indifference and selfishness. It has been said that they think only of their personal interests, and are incapable of public principle and patriotism. I am amongst those who believe that nations, and the different classes that constitute nations—and, above all, nations that desire to be free—can only live in security and credit under a condition of moral perseverance and energy; with feelings of devotion to their cause, and with the power of opposing courage and self-sacrifice to danger. But devotion does not exclude sound sense, nor courage intelligence. It would be too convenient for ambitious pretenders, to have blind and fearless attachment ever ready at their command. It is often the case with popular feeling, that the multitude, army or people, ignorant, unreflecting, and short-sighted, become too frequently, from generous impulse, the instruments and dupes of individual selfishness, much more perverse and more indifferent to their fate than that of which the wealthy and enlightened orders are so readily accused. Napoleon, perhaps more than any other eminent leader of his class, has exacted from military and civil devotion the most trying proofs; and when, on the 21st of June, 1815, his brother Lucien, in the Chamber of Representatives, reproached France with not having upheld him with sufficient ardour and constancy, M. de la Fayette exclaimed, with justice: "By what right is the nation accused of want of devotion and energy towards the Emperor Napoleon? It has followed him to the burning sands of Egypt, and the icy deserts of Moscow; in fifty battle-fields, in disaster as well as in triumph, in the course of ten years, three millions of Frenchmen have perished in his service. We have done enough for him!"

Great and small, nobility, citizens, and peasants, rich and poor, learned and ignorant, generals and private soldiers, the French people in a mass had, at least, done and suffered enough in Napoleon's cause to give them the right of refusing to follow him blindly, without first examining whether he was leading them, to safety or to ruin.

The unsettled feeling of the middle classes in 1815 was a legitimate and patriotic disquietude. What they wanted, and what they had a right to demand, for the advantage of the entire nation as well as for their own peculiar interests, was that peace and liberty should be secured to them; but they had good reason to question the power of Napoleon to accomplish these objects.

Their doubts materially increased when they ascertained the Manifesto of the Allied Powers assembled at the Congress of Vienna, their declaration of March 13th, and their treaty of the 25th. Every reflecting mind of the present day must see, that unless the nation had obstinately closed its eyes, it could not delude itself as to the actual situation of the Emperor Napoleon, and his prospects for the future. Not only did the Allied Powers, in proclaiming him the enemy and disturber of the peace of the whole world, declare war against him to the last extremity, and engage themselves to unite their strength in this common cause, but they professed themselves ready to afford to the King of France and the French nation the assistance necessary to re-establish public tranquillity; and they expressly invited Louis XVIII. to give his adhesion to their treaty of March 25th. They laid it down also as a principle, that the work of general pacification and reconstruction accomplished in Paris by the treaty of the 30th of May, 1814, between the King of France and confederated Europe, was in no degree nullified by the violent outbreak which had recently burst forth; and that they should maintain it against Napoleon, whose return and sudden success—the fruit of military and revolutionary excitement—could establish no European right whatever, and could never be considered by them as the prevailing and true desire of France:—a solemn instance of the implacable judgments that, assisted by God and time, great errors draw down upon their authors!

The partisans of Napoleon might dispute the opinion of the Allied Powers as to the wishes of France; they might believe that, for the honour of her independence, she owed him her support; but they could not pretend that foreign nations should not also have their independence at heart, nor persuade them that, with Napoleon master of France, they could ever be secure. No promises, no treaties, no embarrassments, no reverses, could give them confidence in his future moderation. His character and his history deprived his word of all credit.

It was not alone governments, kings, and ministers who showed themselves thus firmly determined to oppose Napoleon's return; foreign nations were even more distrustful and more violent against him. He had not alone overwhelmed them with wars, taxes, invasions, and dismemberments; he had insulted as much as he had oppressed them. The Germans, especially, bore him undying hatred. They burned to revenge the injuries of the Queen of Prussia, and the contempt with which their entire race had been treated. The bitter taunts in which he had often indulged when speaking of them were repeated in every quarter, spread abroad and commented on, probably with exaggeration readily credited. After the campaign in Russia, the Emperor was conversing, one day, on the loss sustained by the French army during that terrible struggle. The Duke of Vicenza estimated it at 200,000 men. "No, no," interrupted Napoleon, "you are mistaken; it was not so much." But, after considering a moment, he continued, "And yet you can scarcely be wrong; but there were a great many Germans amongst them." The Duke of Vicenza himself related this contemptuous remark to me; and the Emperor Napoleon must have been pleased both with the calculation and reply, for on the 28th of June, 1813, at Dresden, in a conversation which has since become celebrated, he held the same language to the Prime Minister of the first of the German Powers, to M. de Metternich himself. Who can estimate the extent of indignation roused by such words and actions, in the souls not only of the heads of the government and army—- amongst the Steins, Gneisenaus, Blüchers, and Müfflings—but in those of the entire nation? The universal feeling of the people of Germany was as fully displayed at the Congress of Vienna as the foresight of their diplomatists and the will of their sovereigns.

Napoleon, in quitting Elba, deceived himself as to the disposition of Europe towards him. Did he entertain the hope of treating with and dividing the Coalition? This has been often asserted, and it may be true; for the strongest minds seldom recognize all the difficulties of their situation. But, once arrived at Paris, and informed of the proceedings of the Congress, he beheld his position in its true light, and his clear and comprehensive judgment at once grappled with it in all its bearings. His conversations with the thinking men who were then about him, M. Molé and the Duke of Vicenza, confirm this opinion. He sought still to keep the public in the uncertainty that he himself no longer felt. The Manifesto of the Congress of the 13th of March was not published in the 'Moniteur' until the 5th of April, and the treaty of the 25th of March only on the 3rd of May. Napoleon added long commentaries to these documents, to prove that it was impossible they could express the final intentions of Europe. At Vienna, both by solemnly official letters and secret emissaries, he made several attempts to renew former relations with the Emperor Francis, his father-in-law, to obtain the return of his wife and son, to promote disunion, or at least mistrust, between the Emperor Alexander and the sovereigns of England and Austria, and to bring back to his side Prince Metternich, and even M. de Talleyrand himself. He probably did not expect much from these advances, and felt little surprise at not finding, in family ties and feelings, a support against political interests and pledges. He understood and accepted without a sentiment of anger against any one, and perhaps without self-reproach, the situation to which the events of his past life had reduced him. It was that of a desperate gamester, who, though completely ruined, still plays on, alone, against a host of combined adversaries, a desperate game, with no other chance of success than one of those unforeseen strokes that the most consummate talent could never achieve, but that Fortune sometimes bestows upon her favourites.

It has been, pretended, even by some of his warmest admirers, that at this period the genius and energy of Napoleon had declined; and they sought in his tendency to corpulence, in his attacks of languor, in his long slumbers, the explanation of his ill fortune. I believe the reproach to be unfounded, and the pretext frivolous. I can discover in the mind or actions of Napoleon during the hundred days, no symptoms of infirmity; I find, in both, his accustomed superiority. The causes of his ultimate failure were of a deeper cast: he was not then, as he had long been, upheld and backed by general opinion, and the necessity of security and order felt throughout a great nation; he attempted, on the contrary, a mischievous work, a work inspired only by his own passions and personal wants, rejected by the morality and good sense, as well as by the true interests of France. He engaged in this utterly egotistical enterprise with contradictory means, and in an impossible position. From thence came the reverses he suffered, and the evil he produced.

It presented a strange spectacle to intelligent spectators, and one slightly tinged with the ridiculous, on both sides, to see Napoleon and the heads of the Liberal party arranged against each other, not to quarrel openly, but mutually to persuade, seduce, and control. A superficial glance sufficed to convince that there was little sincerity either in their dispute or reconciliation. Both well knew that the real struggle lay in other quarters, and that the question upon which their fate depended would be settled elsewhere than in these discussions.

If Napoleon had triumphed over Europe, assuredly he would not long have remained the rival of M. de La Fayette and the disciple of Benjamin Constant; but when he lost the day of Waterloo, M. de La Fayette and his friends set themselves to work to complete his overthrow.

From necessity and calculation, the true thoughts and passions of men are sometimes buried in the recesses of their hearts; but they quickly mount to the surface as soon as an opportunity occurs for their reappearing with success. Frequently did Napoleon resign himself, with infinite pliability, shrewdness, and perception, to the farce that he and the Liberals were playing together; at one moment gently, though obstinately, defending his old policy and real convictions; and at another yielding them up with good grace, but without positive renunciation, as if out of complaisance to opinions which he hesitated to acknowledge. But now and then, whether from premeditation or impatience, he violently resumed his natural character; and the despot, who was at once the child and conqueror of the Revolution, reappeared in complete individuality.

When an attempt was made to induce him to insert, in the Additional Act to the Constitutions of the Empire, the abolition of the confiscation proclaimed by the Charter of Louis XVIII., he exclaimed passionately, "They drive me into a path that is not my own; they enfeeble and enchain me. France will seek, and find me no longer. Her opinion of me was once excellent; it is now execrable. France demands what has become of the old arm of the Emperor, the arm which she requires to control Europe. Why talk to me of innate virtue, of abstract justice, of natural laws? The first law is necessity; the first principle of justice is public safety ... Every day has its evil, every circumstance its law, every man his own nature; mine is not that of an angel. When peace is made, we shall see." On another occasion, on this same question of preparing the Additional Act, and with reference to the institution of an hereditary peerage, he yielded to the excursive rapidity of his mind, taking the subject by turns under different aspects, and giving unlimited vent to contradictory observations and opinions. "Hereditary peerage," said he, "is opposed to the present state of public opinion; it will wound the pride of the army, deceive the expectations of the partisans of equality, and raise against myself a thousand individual claims. Where do you wish me to look for the elements of that aristocracy which the peerage demands?... Nevertheless a constitution without an aristocracy resembles a balloon lost in the air. A ship is guided because there are two powers which balance each other; the helm finds a fulcrum. But a balloon is the sport of a single power; it has no fulcrum. The wind carries it where it will, and control is impossible."

When the question of principle was decided, and the nomination of his hereditary house of peers came under consideration, Napoleon was anxious to include many names from amongst the old Royalists; but after mature reflection, he renounced this idea, "not," says Benjamin Constant, "without regret," and exclaimed, "We must have them sooner or later; but memories are too recent. Let us wait until after the battle—they will be with me if I prove the strongest."

He would thus willingly have deferred all questions, and have done nothing until he came back a conqueror; but with the Restoration liberty once more re-entered France, and he himself had again woke up the Revolution. He found himself in conflict with these two forces, constrained to tolerate, and endeavouring to make use of them, until the moment should arrive when he might conquer both.

He had no sooner adopted all the pledges of liberty that the Additional Act borrowed from the Charter, than he found he had still to deal with another ardent desire, another article of faith, of the Liberals, still more repugnant to his nature. They demanded an entirely new constitution, which should confer on him the Imperial crown by the will of the nation, and on the conditions which that will prescribed. This was, in fact, an attempt to remodel, in the name of the sovereign people, the entire form of government, institutional and dynastic; an arrogant and chimerical mania which, a year before, had possessed the Imperial Senate when they recalled Louis XVIII., and which has vitiated in their source nearly all the political theories of our time.

Napoleon, while incessantly proclaiming the supremacy of the people, viewed it in a totally different light. "You want to deprive me of my past," said he, to his physicians; "I desire to preserve it. What becomes then of my reign of eleven years? I think I have some right to call it mine; and Europe knows that I have. The new constitution must be joined to the old one; it will thus acquire the sanction of many years of glory and success."

He was right: the abdication demanded of him was more humiliating than that of Fontainebleau; for, in restoring the throne to him, they at the same time compelled him to deny himself and his immortal history. By refusing this, he performed an act of rational pride; and in the preamble as well as in the name of the Additional Act, he upheld the old Empire, while he consented to modified reforms. When the day of promulgation arrived, on the 1st of June, at the Champ de Mai, his fidelity to the Imperial traditions was less impressive and less dignified. He chose to appear before the people with all the outward pomp of royalty, surrounded by the princes of his family arrayed in garments of white taffeta, by the great dignitaries, in orange-coloured mantles, by his chamberlains and pages:—a childish attachment to palatial splendour, which accorded ill with the state of public affairs, and deeply disgusted public feeling, when, in the midst of this glittering pageant, twenty thousand soldiers were seen to march past and salute the Emperor, on their road to death.

A few days before, a very different ceremony had revealed another embarrassing inconsistency in the revived Empire. While discussing with the Liberal aristocracy his new constitution, Napoleon endeavoured to win over and subdue, while he flattered, the revolutionary democrats. The population of the Faubourgs St. Antoine and St. Marceau became excited, and conceived the idea of forming themselves into a federation, as their fathers had done, and of demanding from the Emperor leaders and arms. They obtained their desire; but they were no longer Federates, as in 1792; they were now called Confederates, in the hope that, by a small alteration of name, earlier reminiscences might be effaced. A police regulation minutely settled the order of their progress through the streets, provided against confusion, and arranged the ceremonial of their introduction to the Emperor, in the courtyard of the Tuileries. They presented an address, which was long and heavy to extreme tediousness. He thanked them by the name of "federated soldiers" (soldats fédérés), carefully impressing upon them, himself, the character in which it suited him to regard them. The next morning, the 'Journal de l'Empire' contained the following paragraph:—"The most perfect order was maintained, from the departure of the Confederates until their return; but in several places we heard with pain the Emperor's name mingled with songs which recall a too memorable epoch." This was being rather severely scrupulous on such an occasion.

Some days later, I happened to pass through the garden of the Tuileries. A hundred of these Federates, shabby enough in appearance, had assembled under one of the balconies of the palace, shouting, "Long live the Emperor!" and trying to induce him to show himself. It was long before he complied; but at length a window opened, the Emperor came forward, and waved his hand to them; but almost instantly the window was re-closed, and I distinctly saw Napoleon retire, shrugging his shoulders; vexed, no doubt, at being obliged to lend himself to demonstrations so repugnant in their nature, and so unsatisfactory in their limited extent.

He was desirous of giving more than one pledge to the revolutionary party. Before reviewing their battalions in the court of his palace, he had taken into council the oldest and most celebrated of their leaders; but I scarcely think he expected from them any warm co-operation. Carnot, an able officer, a sincere republican, and as honest a man as an idle fanatic can possibly be, could not fail to make a bad Minister of the Interior; for he possessed neither of the two qualities essential to this important post,—knowledge of men, and the power of inspiring and directing them otherwise than by general maxims and routine.

Napoleon knew better than anybody else how Fouché regulated the police,—for himself first, and for his own personal power; next for the authority that employed him, and just as long as he found greater security or advantage in serving than in betraying that authority. I only met the Duke of Otranto twice, and had but two short conversations with him. No man ever so thoroughly gave me the idea of fearless, ironical, cynical indifference, of imperturbable self-possession combined with an inordinate love of action and prominence, and of a fixed resolution to stop at nothing that might promote success, not from any settled design, but according to the plan or chance of the moment. He had acquired from his long associations as a Jacobin proconsul, a kind of audacious independence; and remained a hardened pupil of the Revolution, while, at the same time, he became an unscrupulous implement of the Government and the Court. Napoleon assuredly placed no confidence in such a man, and knew well that, in selecting him as a minister, he would have to watch more than he could employ him. But it was necessary that the revolutionary flag should float clearly over the Empire under its proper name; and he therefore preferred to endure the presence of Carnot and Fouché in his cabinet, rather than to leave them without, to murmur or conspire with certain sections of his enemies. At the moment of his return, and during the first weeks of the resuscitated Empire, he probably reaped from this double selection the advantage that he anticipated; but when the dangers and difficulties of his situation manifested themselves, when he came to action with the distrustful Liberals within, and with Europe without,—Carnot and Fouché became additional dangers and difficulties in his path. Carnot, without absolute treachery, served him clumsily and coldly; for in nearly all emergencies and questions he inclined much more to the Opposition than to the Emperor; but Fouché betrayed him indefinitely, whispering and arguing in an under tone, of his approaching downfall, with all who might by any possible chance happen to be his successors; just as an indifferent physician discourses by the bedside of a patient who has been given over.

Even amongst his most trusted and most devoted adherents, Napoleon no longer found, as formerly, implicit faith and obedient temperaments, ready to act when and how he might please to direct. Independence of mind and a feeling of personal responsibility had resumed, even in his nearest circle, their scruples and their predominance. Fifteen days after his arrival in Paris, he summoned his Grand Marshal, General Bertrand, and presented to him, for his counter-signature, the decree dated from Lyons, in which he ordered the trials and sequestration of property of the Prince de Talleyrand, the Duke of Ragusa, the Abbé de Montesquiou, M. Bellard, and nine other persons, who in 1814, before the abdication, had contributed to his fall. General Bertrand refused. "I am astonished," said the Emperor, "at your making such objections; this severity is necessary for the good of the State." "I do not believe it, Sire." "But I do, and I alone have the right to judge. I have not asked your concurrence, but your signature, which is a mere matter of form, and cannot compromise you in the least." "Sire, a minister who countersigns the decree of his sovereign becomes morally responsible. Your Majesty has declared by proclamation that you granted a general amnesty. I countersigned that with all my heart; I will not countersign the decree which revokes it."

Napoleon urged and cajoled in vain; Bertrand remained inflexible, the decree appeared without his signature: and Napoleon might, even on the instant, have convinced himself that the Grand Marshal was not the only dissentient; for, as he crossed the apartment in which his aides-de-camp were assembled, M. de La Bédoyère said, loud enough to be overheard, "If the reign of proscriptions and sequestrations recommences, all will soon be at an end."

When liberty reaches this point in the interior of the palace, it may be presumed that it reigns predominantly without. After several weeks of stupor, it became, in fact, singularly bold and universal. Not only did civil war spring up in the western departments, not only were flagrant acts of resistance or hostility committed in several parts of the country, and in important towns, by men of consequence,—but everywhere, and particularly in Paris, people thought, and uttered their thoughts without reserve; in public places as well as in private drawing-rooms, they went to and fro, expressing hopes and engaging in hostile plots, as if they were lawful and certain of success; journals and pamphlets, increased daily in number and virulence, and were circulated almost without opposition or restraint. The warm friends and attached servants of the Emperor testified their surprise and indignation.

Fouché pointed out the mischief, in his official reports to Napoleon, and requested his concurrence in taking measures of repression. The 'Moniteur' published these reports; and the measures were decreed. Several arrests and prosecutions took place, but without vigour or efficacy. From high to low, the greater portion of the agents of government had neither zeal in their cause, nor confidence in their strength. Napoleon was aware of this, and submitted, as to a necessity of the moment, to the unlicensed freedom of his opponents, maintaining, without doubt, in his own heart, the opinion he had declared aloud on a previous occasion,—"I shall have them all with me if I prove the strongest."

I question whether he appreciated justly, and at its true value, one of the causes, a hidden but powerful one, of the feebleness that immediately succeeded his great success. Notwithstanding the widely-spread discontent, uneasiness, mistrust, and anger that the Government of the Restoration had excited, a universal feeling soon sprang up, that there was not enough to justify a revolution, the opposition of an armed force against authority legally established, or the involvement of the country in the dangers to which it was exposed. The army had been drawn towards its old chief by a strong sentiment of attachment and generous devotion, rather than from views of personal interest; the army, too, was national and popular; but nothing could change the nature of acts or the meaning of words. The violation of an oath, desertion with arms in their hands, the sudden passing over from one camp to another, have always been condemned by honour as well as duty, civil or military, and denominated treason. Individuals, nations, or armies, men under the influence of a controlling passion, may contemn, at the first moment, or perhaps do not feel the moral impression which naturally attaches itself to their deeds; but it never fails to present itself, and, when seconded by the warnings of prudence or the blows of misfortune, it soon regains its empire.

It was the evil destiny of the Government of the Hundred Days that the influence of moral opinion ranged itself on the side of its adversaries the Royalists; and that the conscience of the nation, clearly or obscurely, spontaneously or reluctantly, justified the severe judgments to which its origin had given rise.

I and my friends attentively watched the progress of the Emperor's affairs and of the public temper. We soon satisfied ourselves that Napoleon would fall, and that Louis XVIII. would re-ascend the throne. While this was our impression of the future, we felt hourly more convinced that, from the deplorable state into which the enterprise of the Hundred Days had plunged France, abroad and at home, the return of Louis XVIII. would afford her the best prospect of restoring a regular government within, peace without, and the reassumption of her proper rank in Europe. In public life, duty and reason equally dictate to us to encourage no self-delusion as to what produces evil; but to adopt the remedy firmly, however bitter it may be, and at whatever sacrifice it may demand. I had taken no active part in the first Restoration; but I concurred, without hesitation, in the attempts of my friends to establish the second under the most favourable conditions for preserving the dignity, liberty, and repose of France.

Our tidings from Ghent gave us much uneasiness. Acts and institutions, all the problems of principle or expediency which we flattered ourselves had been solved in 1814, were again brought forward. The struggle had recommenced between the Constitutional Royalists and the partisans of absolute power, between the Charter and the old system. We often smile ourselves, and seek to make others smile, when we revert to the discussions, rival pretensions, projects, hopes, and fears which agitated this small knot of exiles, gathered round an impotent and throneless monarch. Such an indulgence is neither rational nor dignified. What matters it whether the theatre be great or small, whether the actors fail or succeed, or whether the casualties of human life are displayed with imposing grandeur or contemptible meanness? The true measurement lies in the subjects discussed and the future destinies prepared. The question in debate at Ghent was how France should be governed when this aged King, without state or army, should be called on a second time to interpose between her and Europe. The problem and the solution in perspective were sufficiently important to occupy the minds of reflecting men and honest citizens.

The intelligence from Vienna was no less momentous. Not that in reality there was either doubt or hesitation in the plans or union of the Allied Powers. Fouché, who had for some time been in friendly correspondence with Prince Metternich, made many overtures to him which the Chancellor of Austria did not absolutely reject. Every possible modification which promised a government to France was permitted to suggest itself. All were discussed in the cabinets or drawing-rooms of the Ministers, and even in the conferences of the Congress. In these questions were included, Napoleon II. and a Regency, the Duke of Orleans, and the Prince of Orange. The English Ministry, speaking with the authority of Parliament, announced that they had no intention of carrying on war merely for the purpose of imposing any particular form of government or dynasty on France; and the Austrian Cabinet seconded this declaration. But these were only personal reserves, or an apparent compliance with circumstances, or methods of obtaining correct knowledge, or mere topics of conversation, or the anticipation of extreme cases to which the leaders of European politics never expected to be reduced. Diplomacy abounds in acts and propositions of little moment or value, which it neither denies nor acknowledges; but they exercise no real influence on the true convictions, intents, and labours of the directors of government.

Without wishing to proclaim it aloud, or to commit themselves by formal and public declarations, the leading kingdoms of Europe, from principle, interest, or honour, looked upon their cause at this period as allied, in France, with that of the House of Bourbon. It was near Louis XVIII. in his exile, that their ambassadors continued to reside; and with all the European Governments, the diplomatic agents of Louis XVIII. represented France. By the example and under the guidance of M. de Talleyrand, all these agents, in 1815, remained firm to the Royal cause, either from fidelity or foresight, and satisfied themselves, with him, that in that cause lay final success.

But, side by side with this general disposition of Europe in favour of the House of Bourbon, a balancing danger presented itself,—an apprehension that the sovereigns and diplomatists assembled at Vienna had become convinced that the Bourbons were incapable of governing France. They had all, for twenty years, treated with and known France such as the Revolution and the Empire had made her. They still feared her, and deeply pondered over her position. The more uneasy they became at her leaning towards anarchy and war, the more they judged it indispensable that the ruling power should be placed in the hands of considerate, able, and prudent men, capable of understanding their functions, and of making themselves understood in their turn. For a considerable time they had ceased to retain any confidence in the companions of exile and courtiers of Louis XVIII.; and late experience had redoubled their mistrust. They looked upon the old Royalist party as infinitely more capable of ruining kings than of governing states.

A personal witness to these conflicting doubts of the foreign Powers as to the future they were tracing themselves, M. de Talleyrand, at Vienna, had also his own misgivings. Amidst all the varied transformations of his life and politics, and although the last change had made him the representative of the ancient royalty, he did not desire, and never had desired, to separate himself entirely from the Revolution; he was linked to it by too many decided acts, and had acknowledged and served it under too many different forms, not to feel himself defeated when the Revolution was subdued. Without being revolutionary either by nature or inclination, it was in that camp that he had grown up and prospered, and he could not desert it with safety. There are certain defections which skilful egotism takes care to avoid; but the existing state of public affairs, and his own particular position, pressed conjointly and weightily upon him at this juncture. What would become of the revolutionary cause and its partisans under the second Restoration, now imminently approaching? What would even be the fate of this second Restoration if it could not govern and uphold itself better than its predecessor? Under the second, as under the first, M. de Talleyrand played a distinguished part, and rendered important services to the Royal cause. What would be the fruit of this as regarded himself? Would his advice be taken, and his co-operation be accepted? Would the Abbé de Montesquiou and M. de Blacas still be his rivals? I do not believe he would have hesitated, at this epoch, as to which cause he should espouse; but feeling his own power, and knowing that the Bourbons could scarcely dispense with him, he allowed his predilections for the past and his doubts for the future to betray themselves.

Well informed of all these facts, and of the dispositions of the principal actors, the Constitutional Royalists who were then gathered round M. Royer-Collard, considered it their duty to lay before Louis XVIII., without reserve, their opinions of the state of affairs, and of the line of conduct it behoved him to adopt. It was not only desirable to impress on him the necessity of perseverance in a system of constitutional government, and in the frank acknowledgment of the state of social feeling in France, such as the new times had made it; but it was also essential to enter into the question of persons, and to tell the King that the presence of M. de Blacas near him would militate strongly against his cause; to request the dismissal of that favourite, and to call for some explicit act or public declaration, clearly indicating the intentions of the monarch on the eve of re-assuming possession of his kingdom; and finally to induce him to attach much weight to the opinions and influence of M. de Talleyrand, with whom it must be observed that, at this period, none of those who gave this advice had any personal connection, and to the greater part of whom he was decidedly objectionable.

Being the youngest and most available of this small assembly, I was called on to undertake a mission not very agreeable in itself. I accepted the duty without hesitation. Although I had then little experience of political animosities and their blind extremes, I could not avoid perceiving which party of opponents would one day be likely to turn on me for taking this step; but I should feel ashamed of myself if fear of responsibility and apprehensions for the future could hold me back when circumstances call upon me to act, within the limits of duty and conviction, as the good of my country demands.

I left Paris on the 23rd of May. One circumstance alone is worthy of notice in my journey—the facility with which I accomplished it. It is true there were many police restrictions on the roads and along the frontier; but the greater part of the agents were neither zealous nor particular in enforcing them. Their speech, their silence, and their looks, implied a kind of understood permission and tacit connivance. More than one official face appeared to say to the unknown traveller, "Pass on quickly," as if they dreaded making a mistake, or damaging a useful work by interfering with its supposed design. Having arrived at Ghent, I called first on the men I knew, and whose views corresponded with my own, MM. de Jaucourt, Louis, Beugnot, de Lally-Tolendal, and Mounier. I found them all faithful to the cause of the Constitution, but sad as exiles, and anxious as advisers without repose in banishment; for they had to combat incessantly with the odious or absurd passions and plans of the spirit of reaction.

The same facts furnish to different parties the most opposite conclusions and arguments; the catastrophe, which again attached some more firmly than ever to the principles and politics of the Charter, was to others the sentence of the Charter; and a convincing proof that nothing but a return to the old system could save the monarchy. I need not repeat the details, given to me by my friends, of the advice with which the counter-revolutionists and partisans of absolutism beset the King; for in the idleness that succeeds misfortune, men give themselves up to dreams, and helpless passion engenders folly. The King stood firm, and agreed with his constitutional advisers. The Report on the state of France presented to him by M. de Châteaubriand a few days before we arrived, in the name of the whole Council, and which had just been published in the 'Moniteur of Ghent,' contained an eloquent exposition of the liberal policy acknowledged by the monarch. But the party thus rejected were not disposed to yield; they surrounded the King they were unable to control, and found their strongest roots in his own family and bosom friends. The Count d'Artois was their ostensible chief, and M. de Blacas their discreet but steady ally. Through them they hoped to gain a victory as necessary as it was difficult.

I requested the Duke de Duras to demand for me a private audience of the King. The King received me the next day, June 1st, and detained me nearly an hour. I have no turn for the minute and settled parade of such interviews; I shall therefore only relate of this, and of the impressions which it produced on me, what still appears to be worthy of remembrance.

Two points have remained strongly imprinted upon my memory—the impotence and dignity of the King. There was in the aspect and attitude of this old man, seated immovably and as if nailed to his arm-chair, a haughty serenity, and, in the midst of his feebleness, a tranquil confidence in the power of his name and rights, which surprised and touched me. What I had to say could not fail to be displeasing to him; and from respect, not calculation, I began with what was agreeable: I spoke of the royalist feeling which day by day exhibited itself more vehemently in Paris. I then related to him several anecdotes and couplets of songs, in corroboration of this. Such light passages entertained and pleased him, as men are gratified with humorous recitals, who have no sources of gaiety within themselves.

I told him that the hope of his return was general. "But what is grievous, Sire, is that, while believing in the re-establishment of the monarchy, there is no confidence in its duration." "Why is this?" I continued; "when the great artisan of revolution is no longer there, monarchy will become permanent; it is clear that, if Bonaparte returns to Elba, it will only be to break out again; but let him be disposed of, and there will be an end to revolutions also.—People cannot thus flatter themselves, Sire; they fear something beyond Bonaparte, they dread the weakness of the royal government; its wavering between old and new ideas, between past and present interests, and they fear the disunion, or at least the incoherence of its ministers."

The King made no reply. I persisted, and mentioned M. de Blacas. I said that I was expressly charged by men whom the King knew to be old, faithful, and intelligent servants, to represent to him the mistrust which attached itself to that name, and the evil that would result from it to himself. "I will fulfil all that I have promised in the Charter; names are not concerned with that; France has nothing to do with the friends I entertain in my palace, provided no act emanates from them injurious to the country? Speak to me of more serious causes of uneasiness." I entered into some details, and touched on various points of party intrigues and menaces. I also spoke to the King, of the Protestants in the south, of their alarms, of the violence even of which, in some instances, they had already been the objects. "This is very bad," said he: "I will do all I can to stop it; but I cannot prevent everything,—I cannot, at the same time, be a liberal and an absolute king." He questioned me upon several recent occurrences, and respecting some members of the Imperial Administration. "There are two, Sire, who, knowing that I was about to seek an audience of the King, have requested me to mention their names, and to assure him of their devotion." "Who are they?"—"The Arch-chancellor and M. Molé." "For M. Molé, I rely upon him, and am glad of his support; I know his worth. As to M. Cambacérès, he is one of those whom I neither ought nor wish to hear named." I paused there. I was not ignorant that at that time the King was in communication with Fouché, a much more objectionable regicide than Cambacérès; but I was a little surprised that the secret relations caused by pressing emergency did not prevent him from maintaining aloud, and as a general theory, a line of conduct most natural under his circumstances. He was certainly far from foreseeing the disgust that would ensue from his connection with the Duke of Otranto. He dismissed me with some commonplace words of kindness, leaving on me the impression of a sensible and liberal mind, outwardly imposing, shrewd with individuals, careful of appearances, thinking little, and not profoundly informed, and almost as incapable of the errors which destroy, as of the great strokes which establish the future of royal dynasties.

I then visited M. de Blacas. He had evinced some prepossession against me. "What brings this young man here?" said he to Baron d'Eckstein, Commissary-General of Police to the King of the Netherlands, at Ghent. "He comes from I know not who, with some mission that I am ignorant of, to the King." He was fully acquainted both with my mission and my friends. However, he received me with perfect civility, and I must add with honourable frankness, inquiring what they said at Paris, and why they were so incensed against him. He spoke to me even of his differences with the Abbé de Montesquiou, complaining of the sallies and whims which had embroiled them to the detriment of the King's service. I replied with equal candour; and his bearing during the whole of our interview was dignified, with a slight degree of reserve, expressing more surprise than irritation. I find in some notes written after I left him, this sentence:—"I am much mistaken if his mistakes do not chiefly proceed from the mediocrity of his intellect."

The situation of M. de Châteaubriand at Ghent was singular. A member of the King's Council, he brilliantly exposed its policy in official publications, and defended them in the 'Moniteur of Ghent' with the same attractive power; but he was dissatisfied with everybody, and no one placed much confidence in him. I believe that neither then nor later did the King or the different Cabinets understand M. de Châteaubriand, or sufficiently appreciate his concurrence or hostility. He was, I admit, a troublesome ally; for he aspired to all things, and complained of all. On a level with the rarest spirits and most exalted imaginations, it was his chimera to fancy himself equal to the greatest masters in the art of government, and to feel bitterly hurt if he were not looked upon as the rival of Napoleon as well as of Milton. Prudent men did not lend themselves to this complaisant idolatry; but they forgot too much what, either as friend or enemy, he to whom they refused it was worth. They might, by paying homage to his genius and satisfying his vanity, have lulled to rest his ambitious dreams; and if they had not the means of contenting him, they ought in either case, from prudence as well as from gratitude, not only to have humoured, but to have gained him over completely to their side. He was one of those towards whom ingratitude was as dangerous as unjust; for they resent passionately, and know how to revenge without treachery. He lived at Ghent in great intimacy with M. Bertin, and assumed thenceforward that influence over the 'Journal des Débats' which he afterwards so powerfully employed. Notwithstanding the cordiality of our first acquaintance, there had been for some time a considerable coolness between us. In 1814 he was discontented with, and spoke ill of the Abbé de Montesquiou and his friends. I was nevertheless equally surprised at and sorry for the injustice and error committed in thinking so little of one they used so much, and I regretted not meeting him oftener, and on a more amicable footing.

In the midst of these discussions, not only of principles and parties, but of private interests and coteries, we waited, at a distance from France, and scarcely knowing how to occupy our minds or time, the issue of the struggle between Napoleon and Europe;—a most painful situation, which I endured to serve the cause I believed and have never ceased to believe just, though I hourly felt its complicated vexations. I shall not linger here to describe them; nothing is more repugnant to my nature than to volunteer a display of my own feelings, especially when I am well aware that many, who listen, cannot or will not understand or believe me. I care little for mistake or invective; either is the natural condition of public life: but I do not feel called upon to enter into useless controversies in my own defence; I know how to wait for justice without demanding it.

The battle of Waterloo terminated our passive anxiety. The King quitted Ghent on the 22nd of June, urged by his trustiest friends, and by his own judgment, not to lose a moment in placing himself between divided France and foreign invasion. I set out the next day with M. Mounier, and on the same evening we rejoined the King at Mons, where he had paused in his journey.

Then burst forth, through the agency of new actors, and by contrivances still unexplained, the dénoûment that I had been despatched to accomplish—the fall of M. de Blacas. I am not disposed to discuss the various accounts given by several who were witnesses of or interested in the event; I shall simply relate what I myself saw on the spot, as I find it detailed in a letter written at Cambray, six days afterwards,[10] to the person to whom, in the absence of immediate communication, I had the pleasure of relating all that occurred:—

"As we entered Mons (M. Mounier and I), we were told that M. de Blacas had been dismissed, and was going as ambassador to Naples; but our surprise was great when we also learned that M. de Talleyrand, who had lately left Vienna for Brussels, to be within reach of coming events, and had arrived at Mons a few hours after the King, had at the same time tendered his resignation; that the King, while refusing to accept it, had received M. de Talleyrand himself coldly, and that he had set out again for Brussels, while, contrary to his advice, the King repaired to Cateau-Cambresis, at that moment the head-quarters of the English army. We understood nothing whatever of these conflicting incidents, and our uneasiness equalled our surprise. We have since been everywhere, we have seen everybody,—those of our friends who preceded us to Mons, and the foreign ministers who followed the King—MM. de Jaucourt, Louis, Beugnot, de Châteaubriand, Pozzo di Borgo, de Vincent;—and, between half confidences, restrained anger, deceptive smiles, and sincere regrets, we have arrived at last at a tolerably clear understanding of the whole matter. The little court of the Count d'Artois, knowing that M. de Talleyrand advised the King not to hurry, and that the Duke of Wellington, on the contrary, recommended him to advance rapidly into France, thought nothing could be better than to drive away both M. de Blacas and M. de Talleyrand, and to separate the King from his constitutional advisers, as well as from his favourite, by inducing him to set out quickly for the head-quarters of the English army, surrounded only by the partisans of Monsieur, from whom they hoped he would select his ministers.

"Our friends were much excited, and the foreigners greatly displeased. The latter demanded in whom they could have confidence with regard to the French question, and with whom they should treat in such a crisis? M. de Talleyrand had returned from Vienna with a great reputation for ability and success; in the eyes of Europe he represented France and the King. The Austrian Minister had just said to him at Brussels, 'I am ordered to consult you on every occasion, and to be guided entirely by your advice.' He himself haughtily maintained his discontent, and sharply repulsed those who would have persuaded him to rejoin the King. After six hours of rather stormy conversation, it was agreed that Pozzo di Borgo should repair to Cateau, and persuade the Duke of Wellington to take some step which should put an end to this strange misunderstanding; and that MM. de Jaucourt, Louis, and Beugnot should at the same time say to the King, that the men in whom he appeared to confide entertained ideas and projects so diametrically opposed to theirs, that it was impossible they could serve him usefully, and therefore requested permission to retire. It is probable that reflections and measures in conformity with these resolutions had already taken place at Cateau; for on the morning of the 25th, at the same time that we received news of the occurrences at Paris, the abdication of Napoleon, and the embassy of the Commissioners to the Allied Sovereigns, a letter arrived at Mons, from the Duke of Wellington to M. de Talleyrand, couched, as I have been assured, in these exact terms:—

"'I regret much that you have not accompanied the King to this place; it is I who have earnestly requested him to enter France at the same time with ourselves. If I could have told you the motives which sway me in this matter, I have no doubt that you would have given the King the same advice. I trust that you will come to hear them.' M. de Talleyrand decided upon setting out instantly; and we determined to accompany him. We rejoined the King here on the 26th. It was high time; for already a proclamation, dated from Cateau, drawn up, it is said, by M. Dambray, gave a false colouring to the re-entrance of his Majesty. We have hastened to substitute another, of which M. Beugnot is the principal author, and which prognosticates a wholesome policy. The King signed it without hesitation. It appeared yesterday, to the great satisfaction of the public of Cambray. I hope it may produce a similar effect in all other quarters."

We indeed hoped and believed that the end of the great crisis which had overthrown France, as well as the smaller one which had agitated the immediate circle of royalty, was at hand. On all sides affairs appeared to tend towards the same issue. The King was in France; a moderate and national line of policy prevailed in his councils, and animated his words. A feeling of loyalty displayed itself everywhere during his progress, not only with his old party, but amongst the masses; every hand was raised towards him, as to a plank of safety in a shipwreck. The people care little for consistency. At this time I saw, in the northern departments, the same popularity surround the exiled King and the vanquished army. Napoleon had abdicated in Paris, and, notwithstanding a few unworthy alternations of dejection and feverish excitement, of resignation and momentary energy, he was evidently incapable of renewing the struggle. The Chamber of Representatives, which, from its first institution, had shown itself unfavourable to the Imperial system, and opposed to revolutionary excesses, appeared to be earnestly occupied in threading a perilous defile, by avoiding all violence and every irrevocable engagement. Popular passion sometimes murmured, but suffered itself to be easily restrained, and even stopped voluntarily, as if unaccustomed to action or dominion. The army, the scattered corps of which had successively re-united round Paris, had given itself up to patriotic fervour, and, together with France, had plunged into an abyss to prove its devotion and avenge its injuries: but amongst its oldest and most illustrious chiefs, some—such as Gouvion St. Cyr, Macdonald, and Oudinot—had refused to join Napoleon, and openly espoused the Royal cause; others—like Ney, Davoust, Soult, and Masséna—protested with stern candour against fatal delusions, considering that their well-tried courage entitled them to utter melancholy truths, to offer sage advice, and to repress, even by the sacrifice of party credit, military excitement or popular disorder; others, in fine, like Drouot, with an influence conferred by true courage and virtue, maintained discipline in the army in the midst of the mortifications of the retreat behind the Loire, and secured its obedience to the authority of a detested civil power. After so many mistakes and misfortunes, and in the midst of all differences of opinion and situation, there existed still a spontaneous desire and a general effort to preserve France from irreparable errors and total ruin.

But tardy wisdom does not avail, and, even when they wish to become prudent, political genius is wanting to those nations who are not accustomed to decide their own affairs or their own destiny. In the deplorable state into which the enterprise of an heroic and chimerical egotism had thrown France, there was evidently only one line of conduct to pursue,—to recognize Louis XVIII., to accept his liberal concessions, and to act in concert with him while treating with the foreign Powers. This was absolutely necessary; for the most limited mind could foresee that the return of the House of Bourbon was an inevitable, and all but an accomplished fact. Such a course became also a duty, to promote peace and to afford the best means of counteracting the evils of invasion; for Louis XVIII. could alone repel them with any show of authority. An auspicious future was thus opened to liberty; for reason whispered, and experience demonstrated, that, after what had passed in France since 1789, despotism could never more be attempted by the princes of the House of Bourbon—an insurmountable necessity compelled them to adopt defined and constitutional government,—if they resorted to extremes, their strength would prove unequal to success. To accept without hesitation or delay the second restoration, and to place the King, of his own accord, between France and the rest of Europe, became the self-evident dictate of patriotism and sound policy.

Not only was this left undone, but every endeavour was used to make it appear that the Restoration was exclusively the work of foreign interference, and to bring upon France, in addition to her military defeat, a political and diplomatic overthrow. It was not independence of the Empire, or good intentions towards the country, that were wanting in the Chamber of the Hundred Days, but intelligence and resolution. It neither lent itself to imperial despotism nor revolutionary violence; it was not the instrument of either of the extreme parties,—it applied itself honestly to preserve France, on the brink of that abyss towards which they had driven her; but it could only pursue a line of negative policy, it tacked timidly about before the harbour, instead of boldly entering,—closing its eyes when it approached the narrow channel, submitting, not from confidence, but from imbecility, to the blindness or infatuation of the old or new enemies by whom the King was surrounded, and appearing sometimes, from weakness itself, to consent to combinations which in reality it tried to elude;—at one moment proclaiming Napoleon II., and at another any monarch whom the sovereign people might please to select.

To this fruitless vacillation of the only existing public authority, one of the most fatally celebrated actors of the worst times of the Revolution, Fouché, owed his importance and ephemeral success.

When honest men fail to understand or execute the designs of Providence, dishonesty undertakes the task. Under the pressure of circumstances, and in the midst of general weakness, corrupt, sagacious, and daring spirits are ever at hand, who perceive at once what may happen, or what may be attempted, and make themselves the instruments of a triumph to which they have no natural claim, but of which they assume the credit, to appropriate the fruits. Such a man was the Duke of Otranto during the Hundred Days,—a revolutionist transformed into a grandee; and desirous of being consecrated in this double character by the ancient royalty of France, he employed, to accomplish his end, all the cleverness and audacity of a reckless intriguer more clear-sighted and sensible than his associates. Perhaps also—for justice ought to retain its scruples even towards those who have none themselves—perhaps a desire to save his country from violence and useless suffering may have had some share in the series of treasons and imperturbable changes of side, by means of which, while deceiving and playing alternately with Napoleon, La Fayette, and Carnot, the Empire, the Republic, and the regicidal Convention, Fouché gained the time that he required to open for himself the doors of the King's cabinet, while he opened the gates of Paris to the King.

Louis XVIII. offered some resistance, but, notwithstanding what he had said to me at Ghent respecting Cambacérès, I doubt whether he objected strongly. He was one of those who are dignified from habit and decorum rather than from a real and powerful emotion of the soul; and propriety disappeared before emergency. He had, as vouchers for the necessities of the case, two authorities who were the best calculated to influence his decision and uphold his honour; the Duke of Wellington and the Count d'Artois both urged him to accept Fouché as a minister:—Wellington, to secure an easy return for the King, and also that he himself, and England with him, might remain the principal author of the Restoration by promptly terminating the war before Paris, where he feared to be compromised through the violent hatred of the Prussians; the Count d'Artois, with impatient levity, always ready to promise and agree, and already entangled through his most active confidant, M. de Vitrolles, in the snare which Fouché had spread for the Royalists on every side.

I do not believe in the necessity which they urged upon the King. Fouché had no control over Paris; the army had retired; the Federates were more noisy than powerful; the Chamber of Representatives consoled themselves, by discussing a constitution, for not having dared or known how to form a government; no party was either able or disposed to arrest effectually the tide which carried the King along. A little less eagerness, and a little more determination, would have spared him a sad dishonour. By waiting a few days he would have incurred the risk, not of fatal resolutions or violence, but merely of the temporary continuance of disorder and alarm. Necessity presses upon people as well as on kings: that with which Fouché armed himself to become minister to Louis XVIII. was factitious and ephemeral; that which brought Louis XVIII. back to the Tuileries was real, and became hourly more urgent. There was no occasion for him to receive the Duke of Otranto into his cabinet at Arnouville; he might have remained there patiently, for they would soon have sought him. I thought thus at the time, after having passed two days in Paris, where I arrived on the 3rd of July, when the manœuvres of Fouché were following their course. All that I subsequently saw and heard tended to confirm me in this opinion.

FOOTNOTES:

[9] I owe it to myself to repeat here the retractation of an error (I am not disposed to use any other word) entertained in regard to my connection with the Hundred Days, and the part I took at that period. This retractation, which appeared thirteen years ago in the 'Moniteur Universel' of the 4th of February, 1844, is couched in the following terms:—"Several journals have recently said or implied that M. Guizot, the present Minister of Foreign Affairs, who was Secretary-General to the Ministry of the Interior in 1814 and 1815, had retained his office during the Hundred Days, under General Count Carnot, appointed Minister of the Interior by the Imperial decree of the 20th of March, 1815; that he had signed the Additional Act, and that he had been subsequently dismissed. One of these journals has invoked the testimony of the 'Moniteur.' These assertions are utterly false. M. Guizot, now Minister of Foreign Affairs, had, on the 20th of March, 1815, quitted the department of the Interior; and by an Imperial decree of the 23rd of the same month, his office of Secretary-General was conferred upon Baron Basset de Châteaubourg, formerly Prefect (see the 'Bulletin des Lois,' no. v. p. 34). The notice in the 'Moniteur' of the 14th of May, 1815, page 546, did not refer to M. François Guizot, but to M. Jean-Jacques Guizot, head-clerk at that time in the Ministry of the Interior, who was actually dismissed from his office in the course of May 1815."

Notwithstanding this official refutation, founded on official acts, and published in 1844 in the 'Moniteur,' where the error had originated, the same mis-statement appeared in 1847, in the 'History of the Two Restorations,' by M. Vaulabelle (2nd edition, vol. ii. p. 276), and again in 1851, in the 'History of the Restoration,' by M. de Lamartine (vol. iv. p. 15).

[10] June 29th, 1815.

CHAPTER IV.

THE CHAMBER OF 1815.

1815-1816.

FALL OF M. DE TALLEYRAND AND FOUCHÉ.—FORMATION OF THE DUKE DE RICHELIEU'S CABINET.—MY CONNECTION AS SECRETARY-GENERAL OF THE ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE WITH M. DE MARBOIS, KEEPER OF THE GREAT SEAL.—MEETING AND ASPECT OF THE CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES.—INTENTIONS AND ATTITUDE OF THE OLD ROYALIST FACTION.—FORMATION AND COMPOSITION OF A NEW ROYALIST PARTY.—STRUGGLE OF CLASSES UNDER THE CLOAK OF PARTIES.—PROVISIONAL LAWS.—BILL OF AMNESTY.—THE CENTRE BECOMES THE GOVERNMENT PARTY, AND THE RIGHT THE OPPOSITION.— QUESTIONS UPON THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THE STATE AND THE CHURCH.—STATE OF THE GOVERNMENT BEYOND THE CHAMBERS.—INSUFFICIENCY OF ITS RESISTANCE TO THE SPIRIT OF REACTION.—THE DUKE OF FELTRI AND GENERAL BERNARD.—TRIAL OF MARSHAL NEY.—CONTROVERSY BETWEEN M. DE VITROLLES AND ME.—CLOSING OF THE SESSION.—MORTIFICATIONS IN THE CABINET.—M. LAINÉ MINISTER OF THE INTERIOR.—I LEAVE THE MINISTRY OF JUSTICE AND ENTER THE STATE COUNCIL AS MASTER OF REQUESTS.—THE CABINET ENTERS INTO CONTESTS WITH THE RIGHT-HAND PARTY.—M. DECAZES.—POSITION OF MESSRS. ROYER-COLLARD AND DE SERRE.—OPPOSITION OF M. DE CHÂTEAUBRIAND.—THE COUNTRY RISES AGAINST THE CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES.—EFFORTS OF M. DECAZES TO BRING ABOUT A DISSOLUTION.—THE KING DETERMINES ON IT.—DECREE OF THE 5TH OF SEPTEMBER, 1816.

Three months had scarcely elapsed and neither Fouché nor M. de Talleyrand were any longer in the Ministry. They had fallen, not under the pressure of any new or unforeseen event, but by the evils connected with their personal situation, and their inaptitude for the parts they had undertaken to play. M. de Talleyrand had effected a miracle at Vienna; by the treaty of alliance concluded on the 3rd January, 1815, between France, England, and Austria, he had put an end to the coalition formed against us in 1813, and separated Europe into two parties, to the advantage of France. But the event of the 20th of March had destroyed his work; the European coalition was again formed against the Emperor and against France, who had made herself, or had permitted herself to be made, the instrument of Napoleon. There was no longer a chance of breaking up this formidable alliance. The same feeling of uneasiness and mistrust of our faith, the same desire for a firm and lasting union, animated the sovereigns and the nations. They had speedily arranged at Vienna the questions which had threatened to divide them. In this fortified hostility against France the Emperor Alexander participated, with extreme irritation towards the House of Bourbon and M. de Talleyrand, who had sought to deprive him of his allies. The second Restoration was no longer like the first, the personal glory and work of M. de Talleyrand; the honour was chiefly due to England and the Duke of Wellington. Instigated by self-love and policy, the Emperor Alexander arrived at Paris on the 10th of July, 1815, stern and angrily disposed towards the King and his advisers.

France and the King stood, nevertheless, in serious need of the goodwill of the Russian Emperor, encompassed as they were by the rancorous and eager ambition of Germany. Her diplomatists drew up the geographical chart of our territory, leaving out the provinces of which they desired to deprive us. Her generals undermined, to blow into the air, the monuments which recalled their defeats in the midst of their victories. Louis XVIII. resisted with much dignity these acts of foreign barbarism; he threatened to place his chair of state upon the bridge of Jena, and said publicly to the Duke of Wellington, "Do you think, my Lord, that your Government would consent to receive me if I were again to solicit a refuge?" Wellington restrained to the utmost of his power the violence of Blücher, and remonstrated with him by arguments equally urgent and politic; but neither the dignity of the King, nor the amicable intervention of England were sufficient to curb the overweening pretensions of Germany. The Emperor Alexander alone could keep them within bounds. M. de Talleyrand sought to conciliate him by personal concessions. In forming his cabinet, he named the Duke de Richelieu, who was still absent, Minister of the Royal Household, while the Ministry of the Interior was held in reserve for Pozzo di Borgo, who would willingly have left the official service of Russia to take part in the Government of France. M. de Talleyrand placed much faith in the power of temptations; but, in this instance, they were of no avail. The Duke de Richelieu, probably in concert with the King himself, refused; Pozzo di Borgo did not obtain, or dared not to solicit, the permission of his master to become, once more, a Frenchman. I saw him frequently, and that mind, at once quick and decisive, bold and restless, felt keenly its doubtful situation, and with difficulty concealed its perplexities. The Emperor Alexander maintained his cold reserve, leaving M. de Talleyrand powerless and embarrassed in this arena of negotiation, ordinarily the theatre of his success.

The weakness of Fouché was different, and sprang from other causes. It was not that the foreign sovereigns and their ministers regarded him more favourably than they did M. de Talleyrand, for his admission into the King's cabinet had greatly scandalized monarchical Europe; the Duke of Wellington alone persisted in still upholding him; but none amongst the foreigners either attacked him or appeared anxious for his downfall. It was from within that the storm was raised against him. With a strangely frivolous presumption, he had determined to deliver up the Revolution to the King, and the King to the Revolution, relying upon his dexterity and boldness to assist him in passing and repassing from camp to camp, and in governing one by the other, while alternately betraying both. The elections which took place at this period throughout France, signally falsified his hopes. In vain did he profusely employ agents, and circular addresses; neither obtained for him the slightest influence; the decided Royalists prevailed in nearly every quarter, almost without a struggle. It is our misfortune and our weakness, that in every great crisis the vanquished become as the dead. The Chamber of 1815 as yet appeared only in the distance, and already the Duke of Otranto trembled as though thunderstruck by the side of the tottering M. de Talleyrand. In this opposite and unequal peril, but critical for both, the conduct of these two men was very different. M. de Talleyrand proclaimed himself the patron of constitutional monarchy, boldly and greatly organized as in England. Modifications conformable to the views of the Liberal party were in some instances immediately acceded to, and in others promised by the Charter. Young men were permitted to enter the Chamber of Deputies. Fourteen Articles relative to the constitution of this Chamber were submitted for the inspection of the next Legislative Assembly. The Peerage was made hereditary. The censorship, to which works under twenty printed sheets had been subjected, was abolished. A grand Privy Council, on important occasions, united the principal men of every party. It was neither the urgent necessity of the moment, nor prevailing public opinion, that imposed on restored royalty these important reforms: they were enacted by the Cabinet from a desire of encouraging free institutions, and of giving satisfaction to the party,—I ought rather to say to the small section of enlightened and impatient spirits.

The real intentions and measures of Fouché were of a more personal nature. Violently menaced by the reaction in favour of royalty, he at first endeavoured to appease by feeding it. He consented to make himself the instrument of proscription against the very men who, but a short time before, were his agents, his confederates, his accomplices, his colleagues, and his friends. At the same time that he published memorials and circulars showing the necessity of clemency and forgetfulness of the past, he placed before the Royal Council a list of one hundred and ten names, to be excluded from all amnesty; and when strict inquiry had reduced this number to eighteen, subject to courts-martial, and to thirty-eight provisionally banished, he countersigned without hesitation the decree which condemned them. A few days afterwards, and upon his request, another edict revoked all the privileges hitherto accorded to the daily papers, imposed upon them the necessity of a new license, and subjected them to the censorship of a commission, in which several of the principal royalist writers, amongst others Messieurs Auger and Fiévée, refused to sit under his patronage. As little did the justice or national utility of his acts affect the Duke of Otranto in 1815, as in 1793; he was always ready to become, no matter at what cost, the agent of expediency. But when he saw that his severe measures did not protect himself, and perceived the rapidly approaching danger, he changed his tactics; the minister of the monarchical reaction became again the factious revolutionist. He caused to be secretly published and circulated, "Reports to the King," and the "Notes to the Foreign Ministers," less calculated to enlighten the authorities he addressed, than to prepare for himself arms and allies against the Government and the party, from which he saw that he was about to be excluded. He was of the number of those who try to make themselves feared, by striving to injure when they are no longer permitted to serve.

Neither the liberal reforms of M. de Talleyrand, nor the revolutionary menaces of the Duke of Otranto, warded off the danger which pressed on them. Notwithstanding their extraordinary abilities and long experience, both mistook the new aspect of the times, either not seeing, or not wishing to see, how little they were in unison with the contests which the Hundred Days had revived. The election of a Chamber decidedly Royalist, surprised them as an unexpected phenomenon; they both fell at its approach, and within a few days of each other; left, nevertheless, after their common downfall, in opposite positions. M. de Talleyrand retained credit; the King and his new Cabinet loaded him with gifts and royal favours; his colleagues during his short administration, Messieurs de Jaucourt, Pasquier, Louis and Gouvion St. Cyr, received signal marks of royal esteem, and retired from the scene of action as if destined to return. Having accepted the trifling and distant embassy to Dresden, Fouché hastened to depart, and left Paris under a disguise which he only changed when he reached the frontier, fearful of being seen in his native land, which he was fated never again to behold.

The Cabinet of the Duke de Richelieu entered upon office warmly welcomed by the King, and even by the party which had gained the ascendency through the present elections. It was indeed a new and thoroughly royalist Ministry. Its head, recently arrived in France, honoured by all Europe, and beloved by the Emperor Alexander, was to King Louis XVIII. what the king himself was to France, the pledge of a more advantageous peace. Two of his colleagues, Messieurs Decazes and Dubouchage, had taken no part in public affairs previous to the Restoration. The four others, Messieurs Barbé-Marbois, de Vaublanc, Coretto, and the Duke of Feltri, had recently given proofs of strong attachment to the regal cause. Their union inspired hope without suspicion, in the public mind, as well as in that of the triumphant party. I was intimately acquainted with M. de Marbois; I had frequently met him at the houses of Madame de Rumford and Madame Suard. He belonged to that old France which, in a spirit of generous liberality, had adopted and upheld, with enlightened moderation, the principles most cherished by the France of the day. I held under him, in the capacity of a confidential friend, the post of Secretary-General to the Ministry of Justice, to which M. Pasquier, then keeper of the great seal, had nominated me under the Cabinet of M. de Talleyrand. Hardly was the new minister installed in office, when the Chamber of Deputies assembled, and in its turn established itself. It was almost exclusively Royalist. With considerable difficulty, a few men, members of other parties, had obtained entrance into its ranks. They found themselves in a state of perpetual discomfort, isolated and ill at ease, as though they were strangers of suspicious character; and when they endeavoured to declare themselves and explain their sentiments, they were roughly driven back into impotent silence. On the 23rd of October, 1815, in the debate on the Bill presented by M. Decazes for the temporary suspension of personal liberty, M. d'Argenson spoke of the reports which had been spread abroad respecting the massacre of Protestants in the south. A violent tumult arose in contradiction of his statements; he explained himself with great reserve. "I name no facts," replied he, "I bring forward no charges; I merely say that vague and contradictory rumours have reached me; ... the very vagueness of these rumours calls for a report from the minister, on the state of the kingdom." M. d'Argenson was not only defeated in his object, and interrupted in his speech, but he was expressly called to order for having alluded to facts unfortunately too certain, but which the Government wished to smother up by silencing all debate on the question.

For the first time in five-and-twenty years, the Royalists saw themselves in the ascendant. Thoroughly believing that they had obtained a legitimate triumph, they indulged unreservedly in the enjoyment of power, with a mixture of aristocratic arrogance and new-born zeal, as men do when little accustomed to victory, and doubtful of the strength they are so eager to display.

Very opposite causes plunged the Chamber of 1815 into the extreme reaction which has stamped its historical character. In the first place, and above all others, may be named, the good and evil passions of the Royalists, their moral convictions and personal resentments, their love of order and thirst for vengeance, their pride in the past and their apprehensions for the future, their determination to re-establish honour and respect for holy observances, their old attachments, their sworn pledges, and the gratification of lording it over their conquerors. To the violence of passion was joined a prudent calculation of advantage. To strengthen their party, and to advance individual fortunes, it was essential for the new rulers of France to possess themselves everywhere of place and power; therein lay the field to be worked, and the territory to be occupied, in order to reap the entire fruits of victory. Finally must be added, the empire of ideas, more influential than is commonly supposed, and often exercising more power over men, without their being conscious of it, than prejudice or interest. After so many years of extraordinary events and disputes, the Royalists had, on all political and social questions, systematic views to realize, historical reminiscences to act upon, requirements of the mind to satisfy. They hastened to apply their hands to the work, believing the day at last arrived when they could, once more, assume in their own land, morally as well as physically, in thought and deed, the superiority which had so long been wrested from them.

As it happens in every great crisis of human associations, these opposing principles in the reaction of 1815, had each its special and exclusively effective representative in the ranks of the Royalists. The party had their fighting champion, their political advocate, and their philosopher. M. de la Bourdonnaye led their passions, M. de Villèle their interests, and M. de Bonald their ideas; three men well suited to their parts, for they excelled respectively, the first in fiery attack, the second in prudent and patient manœuvring, and the third in specious, subtle, and elevated exposition; and all three, although unconnected by any previous intimacy, applied their varied talents with unflinching perseverance to the common cause.

And what, after all, was the cause? What was, in reality, the end which the leaders of the party, apparently on the very verge of success, proposed to themselves? Had they been inclined to speak sincerely, they would have found it very difficult to answer the question. It has been said and believed by many, and probably a great portion of the Royalists imagined, in 1815, that their object was to abolish the Charter, and restore the old system: a commonplace supposition of puerile credulity; the battle-cry of the enemies, whether able or blind, of the Restoration. In the height of its most sanguine hopes, the Chamber of 1815 had formed no idea so extreme or audacious. Replaced as conquerors upon the field, not by themselves, but by the errors of their adversaries and the course of European events, the old Royalist party expected that the reverses of the Revolution and the Empire would bring them enormous advantages, and restitution; but they were yet undecided as to the use they should make of victory in the government of France, when they found themselves in the undisturbed possession of power. Their views were as unsettled and confused as their passions were violent; above all things, they coveted victory, for the haughty pleasure of triumph itself, for the definitive establishment of the Restoration, and for their own predominance, by holding power at the centre of government, and throughout the departments by administration.

But in those social shocks there are deeper questions involved than the actors are aware of. The Hundred Days inflicted on France a much heavier evil than the waste of blood and treasure it had cost her; they lit up again the old quarrel which the Empire had stifled and the Charter was intended to extinguish,—the quarrel between old and new France, between the emigrants and the revolutionists. It was not alone between two political parties, but between two rival classes, that the struggle recommenced in 1815, as it originally exploded in 1789.

An unfavourable position for founding a Government, and, above all, a free Government. A certain degree of excitement and emulation invariably exists between the people and the political parties, which constitutes the very life of the social body, and encourages its energetic and wholesome development. But if this agitation is not confined to questions of legislature and the conduct of public affairs,—if it attacks society in its very basis,—if, instead of emulation between parties, there arises hostility amongst classes, the movement ceases to be healthy, and changes to a destroying malady, which leads on to the most lamentable disorders, and may end in the dissolution of the State. The undue ascendency of one class over another, whether of the aristocracy or the people, becomes tyranny. The bitter and continued struggle of either to obtain the upper hand, is in fact revolution, imminently impending or absolutely declared. The world has witnessed, in two great examples, the diametrically opposite results to which this formidable fact may lead. The contest between the Patricians and Plebeians held Rome for ages between the cruel alternations of despotism and anarchy, which had no variety but war. As long as either party retained public virtue, the republic found grandeur, if not social peace, in their quarrel; but when Patricians and Plebeians became corrupted by dissension, without agreeing on any fixed principle of liberty, Rome could only escape from ruin by falling under the despotism and lingering decline of the Empire. England presents to modern Europe a different spectacle. In England also, the opposing parties of nobles and democrats long contended for the supremacy; but, by a happy combination of fortune and wisdom, they came to a mutual compromise, and united in the common exercise of power: and England has found, in this amicable understanding between the different classes, in this communion of their rights and mutual influence, internal peace with greatness, and stability with freedom.

I looked forward to an analogous result for my own country, from the form of government established by the Charter. I have been accused of desiring to model France upon the example of England. In 1815, my thoughts were not turned towards England; at that time I had not seriously studied her institutions or her history. I was entirely occupied with France, her destinies, her civilization, her laws, her literature, and her great men. I lived in the heart of a society exclusively French, more deeply impregnated with French tastes and sentiments than any other. I was immediately associated with that reconciliation, blending, and intercourse of different classes, and even of parties, which seemed to me the natural condition of our new and liberal system. People of every origin, rank, and calling, I may almost say of every variety of opinion,—great noblemen, magistrates, advocates, ecclesiastics, men of letters, fashion, or business, members of the old aristocracy, of the Constituent Assembly, of the Convention, of the Empire,—lived in easy and hospitable intercourse, adopting without hesitation their altered positions and views, and all apparently disposed to act together in goodwill for the advantage of their country. A strange contradiction in our habits and manners! When social relations, applicable to mental or worldly pleasures, are alone involved, there are no longer distinctions of classes, or contests; differences of situation and opinion cease to exist; we have no thought but to enjoy and contribute in common our mutual possessions, pretensions, and recommendations. But let political questions and the positive interests of life once more spring up,—let us be called upon, not merely to assemble for enjoyment or recreation, but to assume each his part in the rights, the affairs, the honours, the advantages, and the burdens of the social system,—on the instant, all dissensions re-appear; all pretences, prejudices, susceptibilities, and oppositions revive; and that society which had seemed so single and united, resumes all its former divisions and differences.

This melancholy incoherence between the apparent and actual state of French society revealed itself suddenly in 1815. The reaction provoked by the Hundred Days destroyed in the twinkling of an eye the work of social reconciliation carried on in France for sixteen years, and caused the abrupt explosion of all the passions, good or evil, of the social system, against all the works, beneficial or mischievous, of the Revolution.

Attacked also by another difficulty, the party which prevailed at the opening of the session, in the Chamber of 1815, fell into another mistake. The aristocratic classes in France, although generously devoted, in public dangers, to the king and the country, knew not how to make common cause either with the crown or the people; they have alternately blamed and opposed, royal power and public liberty. Isolating themselves in the privileges which satisfied their vanity without giving them real influence in the State, they had not assumed, for three centuries, either with the monarch, or at the head of the nation, the position which seemed naturally to belong to them. After all they had lost, and in spite of all they ought to have learned at the Revolution, they found themselves in 1815, when power reverted to their hands, in the same undefined and shifting position. In its relations with the great powers of the State, in public discussion, in the exercise of its peculiar rights, the Chamber of 1815 had the merit of carrying into vigorous practice the constitutional system, which, in 1814, had scarcely emerged from its torpor under the Empire; but in its new work it lost sight of equity, moderation, and the favourable moment. It wished at the same time to control France and the King. It was independent and haughty, often revolutionary in its conduct towards the monarch, and equally violent and contra-revolutionary as regarded the people. This was to attempt too much; it ought to have chosen between the two, and to have declared itself either monarchical or popular. The Chamber of 1815 was neither the one nor the other. It appeared to be deeply imbued with the spirit of the old system, envenomed by the ideas or examples of the spirit of the revolution; but the spirit of government, even more essential under constitutional than under absolute power, was wanting altogether.

Thus, an opposition was seen to spring up quickly within its own bosom,—an opposition which became at once popular and monarchical, for it equally defended against the ruling party, the crown they had so rashly insulted, and the country they had profoundly disturbed. After some sharp contests, sustained with acrimonious determination on both sides, this opposition, strong in the royal support as in public sympathy, frequently obtained a majority, and became the party of the Government.

I had no seat at that time in the Chamber of Deputies. It has often been said that I took a more important share in the Government of the day than could be attributed to me with truth. I have never complained of this, nor shall I complain now. I accept the responsibility, not only of my own actions, but of those of the friends I selected and supported. The monarchical and constitutional party formed in 1815, became on the instant my own. I shall acknowledge frankly what experience has taught me of their mistakes, while I feel proud of having been enrolled in their ranks.

This party was formed abruptly and spontaneously, without premeditated object, without previous or personal concert, under the simple necessity of the moment, to meet a pressing evil, and not to establish any particular system, or any specific combination of ideas, resolutions, or designs. Its sole policy was at first confined to the support of the Restoration against the reaction: a thankless undertaking, even when most salutary; for it is useless to contend with a headlong counter-current. While you are supporting the power whose flag serves as a cloak to reaction, it is impossible to arrest the entire mischief you desire to check; and you seem to adopt that which you have been unable to subdue. This is one of the inevitable misconstructions which honest men, who act conscientiously, in stormy days, must be prepared to encounter.

Neither in its composition nor plans had the new Royalist party any special or decided character. Amongst its rising leaders, as in its more undistinguished ranks, there were men of every origin and position, collected from all points of the social and political horizon. M. de Serre was an emigrant, and had been a lieutenant in the army of Condé; MM. Pasquier, Beugnot, Siméon, Barante and St. Aulaire, had possessed influence under Napoleon; MM. Royer-Collard and Camille Jordan were opposed to the Imperial system. The same judgment, the same opinion upon the events of the day and the chances of the morrow, upon the rights and legitimate interests of the throne and country, suddenly united these men, hitherto unknown to each other. They combined, as the inhabitants of the same quarter run from all sides and, without acquaintance and never having met before, work in concert to extinguish a great fire.

A fact, however, disclosed itself, which characterized already the new royalist party in the impending struggle. Equally disturbed by the pretensions of the old aristocrats, the monarchy and the citizens formed a close league for mutual support. Louis XVIII. and young France resumed together the policy of their fathers. It is fruitless for a people to deny or forget the past; they cannot either annihilate or abstract themselves from it; situations and emergencies will soon arise to force them back into the road on which they have travelled for ages.

Selected as President by the Chamber itself, and also by the King, M. Lainé, while preserving, with a dignity at the same time natural and slightly studied, the impartiality which his situation required, inclined nevertheless towards the opinions of the moderate minority, and supported them by his moral influence, sometimes even by his words. The ascendency of his character, the gravity of his manners, and, at certain moments, the passionate overflowing of his soul, invested him with an authority which his abilities and knowledge would scarcely have sufficed to command.

The Session had not been many days open, and already, from conversation, from the selection of the officials, from the projects of interior movement which were announced, the Deputies began to know and arrange themselves, but still with doubt and confusion; as, in a battalion unexpectedly called together, the soldiers assemble in disorder, looking for their arms and colours. The Government propositions soon brought the different parties to broad daylight, and placed them in contest. The Session commenced, as might be expected, with measures arising from incidental circumstances. Of the four bills evidently bearing this character, two—the suspension of personal liberty, and the establishment of prevôtal courts—were proposed as exceptional and purely temporary; the others—for the suppression of seditious acts, and for a general amnesty—were intended to be definitive and permanent.

Measures of expediency, and exceptional laws, have been so often and so peremptorily condemned in France, that their very name and aspect suffice to render them suspicious and hateful,—a natural impression, after so much and such bitter experience! They supply notwithstanding, and particularly under a constitutional government, the least dangerous as well as the most efficacious method of meeting temporary and urgent necessities. It is better to suspend openly, and for a given time, a particular privilege, than to pervert, by encroachment and subtlety, the fixed laws, so as to adapt them to the emergency of the hour. The experience of history, in such cases, confirms the suggestions of reason. In countries where political liberty is finally established, as in England, it is precisely after it has obtained a signal triumph, that the temporary suspension of one or more of its special securities has, under pressing circumstances, been adopted as a Government measure. In ruder and less intelligent times, under the dominion of momentary danger, and as an immediate defence, those rigorous and artful statutes were enacted in perpetuity, in which all tyrannies have found arms ready made, without the odium of forging them, and from which a more advanced civilization, at a later period, has found it so difficult to escape.

It is necessary, I admit, to enable these exceptional laws to accomplish their end without too much danger, that, beyond the scope of their operation and during their continuance, the country should retain enough general liberty, and the authorities sufficient real responsibility, to confine these measures within their due limits, and to control their exercise. But, in spite of the blindness and rage of the beaten parties, we have only to read the debates in the Chambers of 1815, and the publications of the time, to be convinced that at that epoch liberty was far from having entirely perished; and the history of the ministers who were then in power unanswerably demonstrates that they sustained the weight of a most effective responsibility.

Of the two temporary bills introduced into the Chamber in 1815, that respecting the prevôtal courts met with the least opposition. Two very superior men, MM. Royer-Collard and Cuvier, had consented to become its official advocates, in the character of Royal Commissioners; and during the discussion, M. Cuvier took the lead. The debate was a very short one; two hundred and ninety members voted for the bill, ten only rejected it. The division may create surprise. The bill, in principle, comprised the heaviest possible infringement on common right, and the most formidable in practical application, by the suppression, in these courts, of the greater part of the privileges accorded in the ordinary modes of jurisdiction. A clause in the bill went almost to deprive the King of his prerogative of pardon, by ordering the immediate execution of the condemned criminals, unless the prevôtal court itself assumed the functions of grace by recommending them to royal clemency. One of the most enthusiastic Royalists of the right-hand party, M. Hyde de Neuville, objected energetically, but without effect, to a clause so harsh and anti-monarchical. The two most intractable of passions, anger and fear, prevailed in the Chamber; it had its own cause, as well as that of the King, to defend and avenge, and persuaded itself that it could neither strike too soon nor too strongly when both were attacked.

On this occasion, as well as on others, the memory of M. Cuvier has been unjustly treated. He has been accused of pusillanimity and servile ambition. The charge indicates little knowledge of human nature, and insults a man of genius on very slight grounds. I lived much with M. Cuvier. Firmness in mind and action was not his most prominent quality; but he was neither servile, nor governed by fear in opposition to his conscience. He loved order, partly for his own personal security, but much more for the cause of justice, civilization, the advantage of society, and the progress of intellect. In his complaisance for power, he was more governed by sincere inclination than egotism. He was one of those who had not learned from experience to place much confidence in liberty, and whom the remembrance of revolutionary anarchy had rendered easily accessible to honest and disinterested apprehensions. In times of social disturbance, men of sense and probity often prefer drifting towards the shore, to running the risk of being crushed, with many dear objects, on the rocks upon which the current may carry them.

In the debate on the bill which suspended for a year the securities for personal liberty, M. Royer-Collard, while supporting the Government, marked the independence of his character, and the mistrustful foresight of the moralist with regard to the power which the politician most desired to establish. He demanded that the arbitrary right of imprisonment should be entrusted only to a small number of functionaries of high rank, and that the most exalted of all, the Ministers, should in every case be considered distinctly responsible. But these amendments, which would have prevented many abuses without interfering with the necessary power, were rejected. Inexperience and precipitation were almost universal at the moment. The Cabinet and its most influential partisans in the Chambers had scarcely any knowledge of each other; neither had yet learned to conceive plans in combination, to settle the limits or bearing of their measures, or to enter on a combat with preconcerted arrangements.

A combined action and continued understanding, however, between the Government and the moderate Royalists, became every day more indispensable; for the divergence of several new parties which began to be formed, and the extent of their disagreements, manifested themselves with increasing strength from hour to hour. In proposing the act intended to repress sedition, M. de Marbois, a gentle and liberal nature, inclined to mild government, and little acquainted with the violent passions that fermented around him, had merely looked upon these acts as ordinary offences, and had sent the criminals before the tribunals of correctional police, to be punished by imprisonment only. Better informed as to the intentions of a portion of the Chamber, the committee appointed to examine the bill, of which M. Pasquier was the chairman, endeavoured to restrain the dissentients, while satisfying them to a certain extent. Amongst seditious acts, the committee drew a line between crimes and offences, assigning crimes to the Court of Assizes, to be punished by transportation, and prescribing for simple offences fine and imprisonment. This was still too little for the ultra-members of the party. They demanded the penalty of death, hard labour, and confiscation of property. These additions were refused, and the Chamber, by a large majority, passed the bill as amended by the committee. Undoubtedly there were members of the right-hand party who would not have dared to contest the propositions of MM. Piet and de Salaberry, but who rejoiced to see them thrown out, and voted for the bill. How many errors would men escape, and how many evils would they avoid, if they had the courage to act as they think right, and to do openly what they desire!

All these debates were but preludes to the great battle ready to commence, on the most important of the incidental questions before the Chamber. It is with regret that I use the word question. The amnesty was no longer one. On returning to France, the King, by his proclamation from Cambray, had promised it; and, with kings, to promise is to perform. What sovereign could refuse the pardon, of which he has given a glimpse to the condemned criminal? The royal word is not less pledged to a nation than to an individual. But in declaring, on the 28th of June, 1815, that he would only except from pardon "the authors and instigators of the plot which had overturned the throne," the King had also announced "that the two Chambers would point them out to the punishment of the laws;" and when, a month later, the Cabinet had, upon the report of the Duke of Otranto, arrested the individuals excepted in the two lists, the decree of the 24th of July again declared that "the Chambers should decide upon those amongst them who should be expatriated or brought to trial." The Chambers were therefore inevitably compromised. The amnesty had been declared, and yet it still remained a question, a bill was still considered necessary.

Four members of the Chamber of Deputies hastened to take the initiative in this debate, three of them with extreme violence, M. de la Bourdonnaye being the most vehement of the three. He had energy, enthusiasm, independence, political tact as a partisan, and a frank and impassioned roughness, which occasionally soared to eloquence. His project, it was said, would have brought eleven hundred persons under trial. Whatever might be the correctness of this calculation, the three propositions were tainted with two capital errors: they assumed, in fact, that the catastrophe of the 20th of March had been the result of a widely-spread conspiracy, the authors of which ought to be punished as they would have been in ordinary times, and by the regular course of law, if they had miscarried; they assigned to the Chambers the right of indicating, by general categories, and without limit as to number, the conspirators to be thus dealt with, although the King, by his decree of the 24th of July preceding, had merely conferred on them the power of deciding, amongst the thirty-eight individuals specially excepted by name, which should be banished and which should be brought to trial. There was thus, in these projects, at the same time, an act of accusation under the name of amnesty, and an invasion of the powers already exercised, as well as of the limits already imposed, by the royal authority.

The King's Government by no means mistook the bearing of such resolutions, and maintained its rights, its acts, and promises with suitable dignity. It hastened to check at once the attempt of the Chamber. The bill introduced by the Duke de Richelieu on the 8th of December, was a real act of amnesty, with no other exceptions than the fifty-six persons named in the two lists of the decree of the 24th of July, and belonging to the family of the Emperor Napoleon. A single additional clause, the fatal consequences of which were assuredly not foreseen, had been introduced into the preamble: the fifth article excepted from the amnesty all persons against whom prosecutions had been ordered or sentences passed before the promulgation of the law,—a lamentable reservation, equally contrary to the principle of the measure and the object of its framers. The character and essential value of an amnesty consist in assigning a term to trials and punishments, in arresting judicial action in the name of political interest, and in re-establishing confidence in the public mind, with security in the existing state of things, at once producing a cessation of sanguinary scenes and dangers. The King's Government had already, by the first list of exceptions in the decree of the 24th of July, imposed on itself a heavy burden. Eighteen generals had been sent before councils of war. Eighteen grand political prosecutions, after the publication of the amnesty, would have been much even for the strongest and best-established government to bear. The Duke de Richelieu's Cabinet, by the fifth article of the bill, imposed on itself, in addition, the prospective charge of an indefinite number of political prosecutions, which might rise up in an indefinite time; and no one could possibly foresee in what part of the kingdom, or under what circumstances. The evil of this short-sightedness continued, with repeated instances rapidly succeeding each other, for more than two years. It was the prolonged application of this article which destroyed the value and almost the credit of the amnesty, and compromised the royal Government in that reaction of 1815 which has left such lamentable reminiscences.

A member of the right-hand party, who was soon destined to become its leader, and who until then had taken no share in the debate, M. de Villèle, alone foresaw the danger of the fifth article, and hesitated not to oppose it. "This article," said he, "seems to me too vague and expansive; exceptions to amnesty, after such a rebellion as that which has taken place in our country, deliver over inevitably to the rigour of the laws all the excepted individuals. Now rigorous justice demands that, in such cases, none should be excepted but the most guilty and the most dangerous. Having no pledge or certain proof that the individuals attainted by the fifth article have deserved this express exception, I vote that the article be struck out." Unfortunately for the Government, this vote of the leader of the opposition passed without effect.

Independently of the question itself, this discussion produced an important result: it settled the division of the Chamber into two great parties, the right-hand side and the centre; the one the opponent, and the other the ally of the Cabinet. The differences of opinion which manifested themselves on this occasion were too keen, and were maintained on both sides with too much animosity, not to become the basis of a permanent classification. The right-hand party persisted in requiring several categories of exceptions to the amnesty, confiscations under the name of indemnity for injuries done to the State, and the banishment of the regicides who had been implicated during the Hundred Days. The centre, and the Cabinet in union, firmly resisted these propositions. M. Royer-Collard and M. de Serre, amongst others, exhibited in the course of this debate as much political intelligence as moral rectitude and impassioned eloquence. "It is not always the number of executions that saves empires," said M. Royer-Collard; "the art of governing men is more difficult, and glory is acquired at a loftier price. If we are prudent and skilful, we shall find that we have punished enough; never, if we are not so." M. de Serre applied himself chiefly to oppose the confiscations demanded under the title of indemnities. "The revolutionists have acted thus," said he; "they would do the same again if they could recover power. It is precisely for this reason that you ought not to imitate their detestable example; and by a distorted interpretation of an expression which is not open and sincere, by an artifice scarcely worthy of the theatre.... Gentlemen, our treasury may be low, but let it be pure." The categories and the indemnities were definitively rejected. At the last moment, and in the midst of almost universal silence, the banishment of the regicides was alone inscribed upon the act. Under the advice of his ministers, the King felt that he could not, in obedience to the will of Louis XVI., refuse his sanction to the amnesty, and leave this formidable question in suspense. There are Divine judgments which human authority ought not to forestall; neither is it called upon to reject them when they are declared by the course of events.

To the differences on the questions of expediency, every day were added the disagreements on the questions of principle. The Government itself excited but few. A bill on elections, introduced by the Minister of the Interior, M. de Vaublanc, was the only one which assumed this character. The debate was long and animated. The leading men on the opposite sides of the Chamber, MM. de Villèle, de la Bourdonnaye, de Bonald, Royer-Collard, Pasquier, de Serre, Beugnot, and Lainé, entered into it anxiously. But the ministerial plan was badly conceived, based upon incompatible foundations, and giving to the elections more of an administrative than of a political character. The principal orators of the Centre rejected it, as well as a counter-project proposed by the committee, in which the right-hand party prevailed, and which the Cabinet also disapproved. The last proposal was ultimately carried, but with important amendments, and vehemently opposed to the last. The Chamber of Deputies passed it by a weak majority, and in the Chamber of Peers it was thrown out. Although the different parties had clearly indicated their impressions and desires on the electoral system, the details were as yet obscure and unsettled. The question remained in abeyance. From the Chamber itself emanated the other propositions which involved matters of principle; they sprang from the right-hand party, and all tended to the same point—the position of the Church in the State. M. de Castelbajac proposed that the bishops and ministers should be authorized to receive and hold in perpetuity, without requiring the sanction of Government, all donations of property, real or personal, for the maintenance of public worship or ecclesiastical establishments. M. de Blangy demanded that the condition of the clergy should be materially improved, and that the married priests should no longer enjoy the pensions which had been given to them in their clerical character. M. de Bonald called for the abolition of the law of divorce. M. Lachèze-Murel insisted that the custody of the civil records should be given back to the ministers of religion. M. Murard de St. Romain attacked the University, and argued that public education should be confided to the clergy. The zeal of the new legislators was, above all other considerations, directed towards the re-establishment of religion and the Church, as the true basis of social power.

At the outset, the uneasiness and opposition excited by these proposals were less animated than we can at present imagine. More immediate dangers occupied the adversaries of Government and the public mind. A general sentiment in favour of religion as a necessary principle of order and morality, prevailed throughout the country; a sentiment revived even by the crisis of the Hundred Days, the moral wounds which that crisis had revealed, and the social dangers it had partially disclosed. The Catholic Church had not yet become the mark of the reaction which a little later was raised against it. The clergy took no direct part in these debates. The University had been, under the Empire, an object of suspicion and hostility on the part of the Liberals. The movement in favour of religious influences scarcely astonished those whom it displeased. But in the very bosom of the Chamber whence this movement emanated, there were enlightened understandings, who at once perceived its full range, and I foresaw the angry dissensions which sooner or later would be stirred up in the new social system by some of these propositions, so utterly opposed to its most fundamental and cherished principles. They applied themselves, with resolute good sense, to extract from the measures introduced, a selection conformable to the true interests of society and the Church. The law of divorce was abolished. The position of the parish priests, of the assistant ministers, and of several ecclesiastical establishments received important amelioration. The scandal of married clergymen still receiving official pensions ceased. But the proposal of assigning to the clergy the care of the civil records, and the control of public instruction, fell to the ground. The University, well defended and directed by M. Royer-Collard, [remained] intact. And with regard to the privilege [demanded] for the clergy, of receiving every kind of donation without the interference of the civil authorities, the Chamber of Peers, on a report, as judicious as it was elegantly composed, by the Abbé de Montesquiou, reduced it to these conditions,—that none but religious establishments recognized by law should exercise this right, and that in every individual instance the authority of the King should be indispensable. The Chamber of Deputies adopted the measure thus amended, and from this movement, which threatened to disturb so completely the relations of the Church and State, nothing eventuated to infringe seriously either on the old maxims or the modern principles of French society.

The Cabinet co-operated loyally in these debates and wise resolutions, but with less decision and ascendency than that evinced by the moderate Royalists in the Chambers. It brought into the question neither the depth of thought, nor the power of eloquence, which give a Government the control over legislative assemblies, and raise it, even in spite of its deficiencies, in public estimation. The Duke de Richelieu was universally respected. Amongst his colleagues, all men of high character and loyalty, there were several who were endowed with rare knowledge, ability, and courage. But the Cabinet wanted unity and brilliant reputation; important conditions under any system, but pre-eminently so under a free government.

Outside the Chambers, the Ministry had to sustain a still more weighty load than the pressure from within, and one which they were not better able to encounter. France had become a prey, not to the most tyrannical or the most sanguinary, but to the most vexatious and irritating of all the passing influences which the vicissitudes of frequent revolutions impose upon a nation. A party long vanquished, trampled on, and finally included in a general amnesty, the party of the old Royalty, suddenly imagined that they had become masters, and gave themselves up passionately to the enjoyment of a new power which they looked upon as an ancient right. God forbid that I should revive the sad remembrances of this reaction! I only desire to explain its true character. It was, in civil society, in internal administration, in local affairs, and nearly throughout the entire land of France, a species of foreign invasion, violent in certain places, offensive everywhere, and which occasioned more evil to be dreaded than it actually inflicted; for these unexpected victors threatened and insulted even where they refrained from striking. They seemed inclined to indemnify themselves by arrogant temerity, for their impotence to recover all that they had lost; and to satisfy their own consciences in the midst of their revenge, they tried to persuade themselves that they were far from inflicting on their enemies the full measure of what they had themselves suffered.

Strangers to the passions of this party, impressed with the mischief they inflicted on the Royal cause, and personally wounded by the embarrassments they occasioned to the Government, the Duke de Richelieu and the majority of his colleagues contended with honest sincerity against them. Even by the side of the most justly condemned proceedings during the reaction of 1815, and which remained entirely unpunished, we find traces of the efforts of the existing authorities either to check them, prevent their return, or at least to repel the sad responsibility of permitting them. When the outrages against the Protestants broke out in the departments of the south, and more than six weeks before M. d'Argenson spoke of them in the Chamber of Deputies, a royal proclamation, countersigned by M. Pasquier, vehemently denounced them, and called upon the magistrates for their suppression. After the scandalous acquittal, by the Court of Assize at Nismes, of the assassin of General Lagarde, who had protected the free worship of the Protestants, M. Pasquier demanded and obtained, from the Court of Appeal, the annulment of this sentence, in the name of the law, and as a last protestation of discarded justice. In spite of every possible intervention of delay and impediment, the proceedings commenced at Toulouse, and ended in a decree of the prevôtal court at Pau, which inflicted five years' imprisonment on two of the murderers of General Ramel. Those of Marshal Brune had never been seriously pursued; but M. de Serre, being appointed Chancellor, compelled justice to resume its course; and the Court of Assize at Riom condemned to death, in default of appearance, the assassins they were unable to apprehend. Tardy and insufficient amends, which reveal the weakness of authority, as well as the resistance with which it was opposed! Even the ministers most subservient to the extreme royalist party endeavoured to check while supporting them, and took care to contribute less assistance than they had promised. At the very time when the Government divided the old army into classes, to get rid of all the suspected officers, the Minister of War, the Duke of Feltri, summoned to the direction of the staff of his department General de Meulan, my brother-in-law, a brave soldier, who had entered the service as a private in 1797, and had won his promotion on the field of battle by dint of wounds. M. de Meulan was a royalist, but extremely attached to the army and his comrades, and deeply grieved by the severities with which they were oppressed. I witnessed his constant efforts to obtain justice for them, and to secure the continuance in the ranks, or re-admission, of all those whom he believed to be disposed to serve the King with honest loyalty. The undertaking was difficult. In 1816, one of our most able and distinguished officers of engineers, General Bernard, had been placed on half-pay, and lived in exile at Dôle. The United States of America offered him the command of that branch of service in the Republic, with considerable advantages. He accepted the proposal, and asked the permission of his minister. The Duke of Feltri summoned him to his presence, and tried to induce him to abandon this design, by offering to appoint him to any situation in France which he considered suitable. "You promise me," said Bernard, "what you are unable to perform; place me as you intend, and in a fortnight I shall be so denounced that you will have no power to support me, and so harassed that I should voluntarily resign. While the Government has no more strength than at present, it can neither employ nor protect me. In my corner, I am at the mercy of a sub-prefect and police magistrate, who can arrest and imprison me; who sends for me every day, and compels me to wait in his ante-chamber to be ill received at last. Suffer me to go to America. The United States are the natural allies of France. I have decided, and, unless imprisoned, I shall certainly take my departure." His passport was then given to him. The Duke de Berry complained to General Haxo of the course adopted by General Bernard. "After the manner in which he has been treated," replied Haxo, "I am only surprised that he has not gone before; it is by no means certain that I shall not some day follow his example."

Nothing can explain, better than this simple fact, the situation of the King's ministers at that time, and the sincerity as well as the timidity of their wishes to be prudent and just.

A great act, resolutely conceived and accomplished, on a great occasion, was necessary to raise the executive authority from the reputation as well as the actual mischief of this weakness, and to emancipate it from the party under which it succumbed while resisting. Today, so long removed as we are from that time, the more I reflect on it in the calm freedom of my judgment, the more I am convinced that the trial of Marshal Ney afforded a most propitious opportunity for such an act as that to which I now allude. There were undoubtedly weighty reasons for leaving justice to its unfettered course. Society and the royal power both required that respect for, and a salutary dread of, the law should repossess men's minds. It was important that generations formed during the vicissitudes of the Revolution and the triumphs of the Empire, should learn, by startling examples, that all does not depend on the strength and success of the moment; that there are certain inviolable duties; that we cannot safely sport with the fate of governments and the peace of nations; and that, in this momentous game, the most powerful and the most eminent risk their honour and their lives. In a political and moral sense these considerations were of the greatest importance. But another prominent truth, equally moral and political, ought to have weighed heavily in the balance against an extreme decision. The Emperor Napoleon had reigned long and brilliantly, acknowledged and admired by France and Europe, and supported by the devotion of millions of men,—by the people as well as by the army. Ideas of right and duty, sentiments of respect and fidelity, were confused and antagonistic in many minds. There were two actual and natural governments in presence of each other; and many, without perversity, might have hesitated which to choose. The King, Louis XVIII. and his advisers might in their turn, without weakness, have taken into consideration this moral confusion, of which Marshal Ney presented the most illustrious example. The greater his offence against the King, with the more safety could they place clemency by the side of justice, and display, over his condemned head, that greatness of mind and heart which has also its full influence in establishing power and commanding fidelity. The very violence of the reaction in favour of royalty, the bitterness of party passions, their thirst for punishment and vengeance, would have imparted to this act a still greater brilliancy of credit and effect; for boldness and liberty would have sprung from it as natural consequences. I heard at that time a lady of fashion, usually rational and amiable, call Mademoiselle de Lavalette "a little wretch," for aiding her mother in the escape of her father. When such extravagancies of feeling and language are indulged in the hearing of kings and their advisers, they should be received as warnings to resist, and not to submit. Marshal Ney, pardoned and banished after condemnation, by royal letters deliberately promulgated, would have given to kingly power the aspect of a rampart raising itself above all, whether friends or enemies, to stay the tide of blood; it would have been, in fact, the reaction of 1815 subdued and extinguished, as well as that of the Hundred Days.

I do not pretend to have thought and said then, all that I say and think at present. I was sorrowful and perplexed. The King's ministers were in a similar predicament. They believed that they neither could nor ought to recommend clemency. In this momentous contingency, power knew not how to be great, sometimes the only method of becoming strong. Controlled but not overthrown, and irritated while defeated, by these alternations of concession and resistance, the Right-hand party, now become decidedly the Opposition, sought, while complaining and hesitating, some channel of escape from their position at once powerful and impotent,—some breach through which they might give the assault to the Government, enter the citadel, and establish themselves firmly there. A man of mind and courage, ambitious, restless, clever, and discontented, as well on his own account as for the sake of his party, ventured an attack extremely daring in reality, but circumspect in form, and purely theoretical in appearance. M. de Vitrolles, in a short pamphlet entitled 'Of the Ministry under a Representative Government,' said:—"France in every quarter expresses the necessity, profoundly acknowledged, of sterner action in the Government. I have examined the causes of this universal feeling, and the reasons which could explain why the different Administrations that have succeeded each other within the last eighteen months have not given the King's Cabinet the character of strength and unity which the Ministers themselves feel to be so essential. I believe that I have found them in the incoherence which existed between the nature of the adopted government and the ministerial organization, which it had not been considered necessary to modify, while at the same time we received a new division of power, and that power assumed an entirely new character of action." Appealing at every sentence to the practice and example of England, M. de Vitrolles argued that the Ministry, which he called an institution, should have perfect unity in itself, a predominant majority in the Chambers, and an actual responsibility in the conduct of affairs, which would ensure for it, with the Crown, the requisite influence and dignity. On these three conditions alone could the Government be effective. A strange reminiscence to refer to at the present day! By the most confidential intimate of the Count d'Artois, and to establish the old royalist party in power, parliamentary legislation was for the first time recommended and demanded for France, as a necessary consequence of representative government.

I undertook to repulse this attack by unmasking it.[11] I explained, in reply, the essential principles of representative government, their true meaning, their real application, and the conditions under which they could be usefully developed, in the state in which France had been plunged by our revolutions and dissensions. Above all, I endeavoured to expose the bitterness of party spirit which lay behind this polished and erudite tilting-match between political rhetoricians, and the underhand blows which, in the insufficiency of their public weapons, they secretly aimed at each other. I believe my ideas were sound enough to satisfy intelligent minds who looked below the surface and onwards to the future; but they had no immediate and practical efficacy. When the great interests of nations and the contending passions of men are at stake, the most ingenious speculative arguments are a mere war of display, which has no influence on the course of events. As soon as the budget was voted, and on the very day of its announcement, the session was closed, and the Chambers of 1815 retired, having strenuously exercised, both in defence and attack, the free privileges conferred on France by the Charter; but divided into two Royalist parties: the one wavering and uneasy, although in the possession of power; the other full of expectation, and looking forward, with the opening of the next session, to a more decisive success, and both in a state of mutual irritation.

Notwithstanding their doubts and weaknesses, the advantage remained with the Cabinet and its adherents. For the first time since France had been a prey to the Revolution, the struggles of liberty assisted the advocates of a moderate policy, and essentially checked, if not completely subdued, their opponents. The waves of reaction murmured, but rose no more. The Cabinet, strongly supported in the Chambers, possessed the confidence of the King, who entertained a high esteem for the Duke de Richelieu, and a friendly disposition, becoming daily more warm, towards his young Minister of Police, M. Decazes. Eight days after the closing of the session, the Cabinet gained an important accession to its internal strength, and an eloquent interpreter of its public policy. M. Lainé replaced M. de Vaublanc as Minister of the Interior. As a slight compensation to the right-hand party, M. de Marbois, who had rendered himself very objectionable to them, was dismissed from the Ministry of Justice, and the Chancellor, M. Dambray, resumed the seals. M. de Marbois was one of those upright and well-informed men, but at the same time neither quick-sighted nor commanding, who assist power by opinion rather than force. He had opposed the reaction with more integrity than energy, and served the King with dignity, without acquiring personal influence. In October 1815, at a moment of the most violent agitation, the King expressed much anxiety for the introduction of the bill respecting the prevôtal courts. It was settled in council that the Chancellor and the Minister of War should prepare it together. A few days after, the King asked for it rather impatiently. "Sire," answered M. de Marbois, "I am ashamed to tell your Majesty that it is ready." He resigned office honourably, although with some regret. At the same time I left the post of Secretary-General to the Ministry of Justice. While there, M. de Marbois had treated me with confidence inspired by sympathy. Finding it disagreeable to remain under M. Dambray, to whom my Protestant extraction and opinions were equally unsuited, I re-assumed the place of Master of Requests in the State Council.

The Chambers had scarcely adjourned, when the conspiracy of Grenoble, planned by Didier, and that called the plot of the patriots, at Paris, in 1816, came, one upon the other, to put the moderation of the Cabinet to the proof. The details forwarded by the magistrates of the department of the Isère were full of exaggeration and declamatory excitement. The mode of repression ordered by the Government was precipitately rigorous. Grenoble had been the cradle of the Hundred Days. It was thought expedient to strike Bonapartism heavily, in the very place where it had first exploded. A natural opportunity presented itself here of dealing firmly with the abettors of treason, while in another quarter strong resistance was opposed to the advocates of reaction. Moderation sometimes becomes impatient of its name, and yields to the temptation of forgetting it for the moment.

The Government nevertheless continued to be moderate, and the public were not deceived as to the course adopted. Although M. Decazes, from the nature of his department, was the minister on whom measures of inquiry and suppression devolved, he was at the same time looked upon, and truly, as the protector of the oppressed, and of all who were suspected without cause. By natural disposition and magisterial habit, he loved justice in his heart. A stranger to all party antipathies, penetrating, fearless, indefatigably active, and as prompt in benevolence as in duty, he exercised the power which the special laws conferred on him with measure and discretion; enforcing them as much against the spirit of reaction and persecution as against detected conspiracy, and continually occupied himself in preventing or repairing the abuses in which the inferior authorities indulged. Thus he advanced equally in the good opinion of the country and the favour of the King. People and parties have an infallible instinct by which they recognize, under the most complicated circumstances, those who attack and those who defend them, their friends and their enemies. The ultra-royalists soon began to look upon M. Decazes as their chief adversary, and the moderates to regard him as their most valuable ally.

At the same time, and during the silence of the tribune, the chief representatives of moderate policy in the Chambers eagerly sought opportunities of bringing their views before the public, of proclaiming their principles, and of rallying, round the King and the constitutional government, the still hesitating support of the nation at large. It affords me much gratification to recall here the words, perhaps forgotten, of three justly celebrated men, all personal friends of my own; they demonstrate (as I think, with some brilliancy) the spirit of the monarchical party attached to the state of society which the times had engendered in France, and the opinions and sentiments they were anxious to disseminate.

On the 6th of July, 1816, M. de Serre, in establishing, as first President, the Royal Court at Colmar, spoke as follows:—"Liberty, that pretext of all seditious ambition,—liberty, which is nothing more than the reign of law, has ever been the first privilege buried with the laws under the ruins of the throne. Religion itself is in danger when the throne and laws are attacked; for everything on earth is derived from heaven, and there is perfect harmony between all divine and human institutions. If the latter are overturned, the former cannot be respected. Let all our efforts, then, be exerted to combine, purify, and strengthen that monarchical and Christian spirit which inspires the sentiment of every sacrifice to duty! Let our first care be to obtain universal respect for the Charter which the King has granted to us. Undoubtedly our laws, our Charter, may be improved; and we neither require to interdict regret for the past nor hope for the future. But let us commence by submitting heartily and without reserve to the laws as they exist; let us place this first check on the impatient restlessness to which we have been surrendered for twenty-five years; let us teach ourselves this primary conviction, that we know how to adopt and to be satisfied with a defined system. The rest may be left to time."

Six weeks later, on the 19th of August, M. Royer-Collard, when presiding over the distribution of prizes at the general meeting of the University, addressed these words to the young students:—"Today, when the reign of falsehood has ceased, and the legitimacy of power, which is truth in government, permits a more unshackled play to all salutary and generous doctrines, public instruction beholds its destinies elevated and expanded. Religion demands from it pure hearts and disciplined minds; the State looks for habits profoundly monarchical; science, philosophy, and literature expect new brilliancy and distinction. These will be the benefits bestowed by a prince to whom his people already owe so much gratitude and love. He, who has made public liberty flourish under the shadow of his hereditary throne, will know well how to base, on the tutelary principles of empires, a system of teaching worthy of the enlightened knowledge of the age, and such as France demands from him, that she may not descend from the glorious rank she occupies amongst nations."

At the expiration of eight days more, in an assembly exclusively literary, a man who had never held public office, but for half or more than half a century a sincere and steady friend to liberty, M. Suard, perpetual secretary of the French Academy, in giving an account to that body of the examination in which he had decreed the prize to M. Villemain for his 'Panegyric on Montesquieu,' expressed himself in these terms:—"The instability of governments generally proceeds from indecision as to the principles which ought to regulate the exercise of power. A prince enlightened by the intelligence of the age, by experience, and a superior understanding, bestows on royal authority a support which no other can replace, in that Charter which protects the rights of the monarch, while it guarantees to the nation all those that constitute true and legitimate liberty. Let us rally under this signal of alliance between the people and their king. Their union is the only certain pledge for the happiness of both. Let the Charter be for us what the holy ark that contained the tables of the law was for the Hebrews of old. If the shade of the great publicist who has shed light on the principles of constitutional monarchies could be present at the triumph which we now award him, he would confirm with his sanction the sentiments I venture to express."

An assembly so unanimous in opinion and intention, composed of such men, representing so many important sections of society, and voluntarily grouped round the King and his ministers, constituted in themselves a great political fact. A certain index was supplied, that, in the opinion of the moderate party, enlightened minds were not wanting to comprehend the conditions of the new system, or serious dispositions for its support. As yet, however, they only formed the scattered elements and seeds of a great conservative party under a free government. Time was necessary for this party to unite, to consolidate its natural strength, and to render itself acceptable to the country. Would time be given for this difficult undertaking? The question was doubtful. A formidable crisis approached; the Chamber of 1815 was on the point of re-opening, and undoubtedly still more ardent and aggressive than during the preceding session. The party which prevailed there had not only to retrieve their checks, and [pursue ] their designs, but they had also recent insults to avenge. During the recess they had been the objects of animated attack. The Government everywhere opposed their influence; the public loudly manifested towards them mistrust and antipathy; they were alternately charged with fanaticism and hypocrisy, with incapacity and vindictive obstinacy. Popular-anger and ridicule assailed them with unrestrained license. From notes collected at the time, I quote literally a few specimens of the sarcastic hostility with which they were pursued:—

"April 10th, 1816.—Before adjourning, the Chamber of Deputies has organized itself into a chapel. Treasurer and secretary, M. Laborie. Contractor for burials, M. de La Bourdonnaye. Grave-digger, M. Duplessis-Grénédan. Superintendent, M. de Bouville, and in his capacity of vice-president—rattlesnake. Dispenser of holy water (promise-maker), M. de Vitrolles. General of the Capuchins, M. de Villèle; and he deserves the post for his voice. Grand almoner, M. de Marcellus, who gives a portion of his own estate to the poor. Bellringers, M. Hyde de Neuville," etc. etc.

"May, 1816.—Here is the Charter which a majority of the Chamber proposes to confer upon us.—Article. The fundamental principles of the constitution may be changed as often as we wish; nevertheless, seeing that stability is desirable, they shall not be changed more than three times a year.—Art. Every law emanates from the King; this is the first evidence of the right of petition accorded to all frenchmen.—Art. The laws shall be executed according to the pleasure of the Deputies, each in their respective departments.—Art. Every representative shall have the nomination to all posts within his district."

"July 1816.—They say the King is slightly indisposed. He will be very ill indeed if he is obliged to keep his Chamber for five years."

Such were the public expressions respecting this assembly, one of the most honourable members of which, M. de Kergorlay, said, a few months before, "The Chamber had not yet whispered when the former Ministry already fell; let it speak, and the present Government will scarcely last eight days."

The Ministry, however, had held its ground, and still continued to do so; but it was evidently impossible that it could stand firm against the Chamber, once more assembled with redoubled animosity. They well knew that the Opposition was determined to renew the most violent attacks upon the existing authorities. M. de Châteaubriand printed his 'Monarchy according to the Charter;' and although this able pamphlet was not yet published, everybody knew the superior skill with which the author could so eloquently blend falsehood with truth, how brilliantly he could compound sentiments and ideas, and with what power he could entangle the blinded and unsettled public in this dazzling chaos. Neither the Ministry nor the Opposition attempted to deceive themselves as to the nature and consequences of the struggle about to commence. The question of persons was merely the symbol and cloak of the great social and political topics in dispute between the two parties. The point to be decided was, whether power should pass over to the Right-hand party, such as it had exhibited itself during the session lately terminated; that is, whether the theories of M. de Bonald and the passions of M. de La Bourdonnaye, feebly qualified by the prudence and influence, as yet unripened, of M. de Villèle, should become the rule of the King's policy.

I am not now, neither was I in 1815, amongst those who considered the Right-hand party unfit to govern France. On the contrary, I had already, although less profoundly and clearly than at present, adopted the opinion, that a concurrence of all the enlightened and independent classes, whether old or new, was absolutely necessary to rescue our country from the impending alternations of anarchy or despotism, and that without their union we could never long preserve order and liberty together. Perhaps too I might include this natural tendency amongst the reasons, not absolutely defined, which led me to desire the Restoration. Hereditary monarchy, become constitutional, presented itself to my mind both as a principle of stability, and as a natural and worthy means of reconciliation and conversion amongst the classes and parties who had been so long and continually at war. But in 1816, so soon after the revolutionary shock of the Hundred Days, and before the counter-revolutionary reaction of 1815 had subsided, the accession of the Right-hand party to power, would have been very different from the victory of men capable of governing without social disturbance, although under an unpopular system. It would have been the Revolution and the Counter-revolution once more in active contest, under an attack of raging fever; and thus the Throne and the Charter, the internal peace and security of France as well as her liberties, would be endangered by this struggle, before the eyes of Europe encamped within our territory and in arms around the combatants.

Under these menacing circumstances, M. Decazes had the rare merit of finding and applying a remedy to the gigantic evil. He was the first, and for some time the only one amongst the Ministers, who looked upon the dissolution of the Chamber of 1815 as equally necessary and possible. Undoubtedly personal interest had a share in his bold perspicuity; but I know him well enough to feel convinced, that his devotion to the country and the King powerfully contributed to his enlightened decision; and his conduct at this crisis displayed at least as much patriotism as ambition.

He had a double labour of persuasion to accomplish; first to win over his two principal colleagues, the Duke de Richelieu and M. Lainé, and afterwards the King himself. Both sincerely attached to a moderate policy, the Duke and M. Lainé were undecided, timid under great responsibility, and more disposed to wait the progress of difficulties and dangers, than to surmount by confronting them. Amongst the Duke's immediate circle were many ultra-royalists, who exercised no influence over him, and whom he even treated rudely when they displayed their violence; but he was unwilling to declare open war against them. M. Lainé, scrupulous in his resolves and fearful for their consequences, was sensitive on the point of vanity, and disinclined to any measure not originating with himself.[12] The King's irresolution was perfectly natural. How could he dissolve the first Chamber, avowedly royalist, which had been assembled for twenty-five years,—a Chamber he had himself declared incomparable, and which contained so many of his oldest and most faithful friends? What dangers to himself and his dynasty might spring up on the day of such a decree! and even now, what discontent and anger already existed in his family and amongst his devoted adherents, and consequently what embarrassment and vexation thereby recoiled upon himself.

But Louis XVIII. had a cold heart and an unfettered mind. The rage and ill-temper of his relatives affected him little, when he had once firmly resolved not to be influenced by them. It was his pride and pleasure to fancy himself a more enlightened politician than all the rest of his race, and to act in perfect independence of thought and will. On more than one occasion, the Chamber, if not in direct words, at least in act and manner, had treated him with disrespect almost amounting to contempt, after the fashion of a revolutionary assembly. It became necessary for him to show to all, that he would not endure the display of such feelings and principles either from his friends or enemies. He regarded the Charter as his own work, and the foundation of his glory. The right-hand party frequently insulted and sometimes threatened a direct attack upon the Charter. The defence lay with the King. This gave him an opportunity of re-establishing it in its original integrity. During the administration of M. de Talleyrand he had, reluctantly and against his own conviction, modified several articles, and submitted fourteen others to the revision of the legislative authorities. To cut short this revision, and to return to the pure Charter, was to restore it a second time to France, and thus to establish, for the country and himself, a new pledge of security and peace.

During more than two months, M. Decazes handled all these points with much ability and address; determined, but not impatient, persevering, yet not obstinate, changing his topic according to the tempers he encountered, and day by day bringing before these wavering minds the facts and arguments best adapted to convince them. Without taking his principal friends unconnected with the Cabinet into the full and daily confidence of his labours, he induced them, under a promise of secrecy, to assist him by reasons and reflections which he might bring under the eyes of the King, while they gave variety to his own views. Several amongst them transmitted notes to him with this object; I contributed one also, particularly bearing on the hopes which those numerous middle classes placed in the King, who desired no more than to enjoy the productive repose they derived from him, and whom he alone could secure from the dangerous uncertainty to which the Chamber had reduced them. Different in origin and style, but all actuated by the same spirit and tending to the same end, these argumentative essays became gradually more and more efficacious. Having at last decided, the Duke de Richelieu and M. Lainé concurred with M. Decazes to bring over the King, who had already formed his resolution, but chose to appear undecided, it being his pleasure to have no real confidant but his favourite. The three ministers who were known to be friends of the right-hand party, M. Dambray, the Duke of Feltri, and M. Dubouchage, were not consulted; and it was said that they remained in total ignorance of the whole affair to the last moment. I have reason to believe that, either from respect to the King, or from reluctance to enter into contest with the favourite, they soon reconciled themselves to a result which they plainly foresaw.

Be this as it may, on Wednesday, the 14th of August, the King held a cabinet council; the sitting was over, and the Duke of Feltri had already risen to take his departure. The King desired him to resume his place again. "Gentlemen," said he, "there is yet a question of immediate urgency,—the course to be taken with respect to the Chamber of Deputies. Three months ago I had determined to re-assemble it. Even a month since, I retained the same intention; but all that I have seen, and all that comes under my daily observation, proves so clearly the spirit of faction by which that Chamber is governed, the dangers which it threatens to France and to myself have become so apparent, that I have entirely changed my opinion. From this moment, then, you may consider the Chamber as dissolved. Start from that point, gentlemen, prepare to execute the measure, and in the meantime preserve the most inviolable secrecy on the subject. My decision is absolute." When Louis XVIII. had formed a serious resolution and intended to be obeyed, he had a tone of dignity and command which cut short all remonstrance. During three weeks, although the question deeply occupied all minds, and in spite of some returns of hesitation on the part of the King himself, the secret of the resolution adopted was so profoundly kept, that the Court believed the Chamber would re-assemble. It was only on the 5th of September, after the King had retired to bed, that Monsieur received information through the Duke de Richelieu, from his Majesty, that the decree for the dissolution was signed, and would be published in the 'Moniteur' on the following morning.

The surprise and anger of Monsieur were unbounded; he would have hastened at once to the King; the Duke de Richelieu withheld him, by saying that the King was already asleep, and had given peremptory orders that he should not be disturbed. The Princes, his sons, accustomed to extreme reserve in the King's presence, appeared to approve rather than condemn. "The King has acted wisely," said the Duke de Berry; "I warned those gentlemen of the Chamber that they had indulged in too much license." The Court was thrown into consternation, on hearing of a stroke so totally unexpected. The party against whom it was aimed, attempted some stir in the first instance. M. de Châteaubriand added an angry Postscript to his 'Monarchy according to the Charter,' and evinced symptoms of resistance, more indignant than rational, to the measures decreed, in consequence of some infraction of the regulations of the press, to retard the publication of his work.[13] But the party, having reflected a little, prudently stifled their anger, and began immediately to contrive means for re-engaging in the contest. The public, or, I ought rather to say, the entire land, loudly proclaimed its satisfaction. For honest, peaceably disposed people, the measure was a signal of deliverance; for political agitators, a proclamation of hope. None were ignorant that M. Decazes had been its first and most effectual advocate. He was surrounded with congratulations, and promises that all men of sense and substance would rally round him; he replied with modest satisfaction, "This country must be very sick indeed for me to be of so much importance."

FOOTNOTES:

[11] In a publication entitled 'Of Representative Government, and the Actual Condition of France,' published in 1816.

[12] I insert amongst the "Historic Documents" a note which he transmitted to the King, in the course of the month of August, on the question of the dissolution of the Chamber; and in which the fluctuations and fantasies of his mind, more ingenious than judicious, are revealed. (Historic Documents, [No. VII.])

[13] I have added to the "Historic Documents" the letters exchanged on this occasion between M. de Châteaubriand, M. Decazes, and the Chancellor Dambray, which characterize strongly the event and the individuals. (Historic Documents, [No. VIII.])

CHAPTER V.

GOVERNMENT OF THE CENTRE.

1816-1821.

COMPOSITION OF THE NEW CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES.—THE CABINET IN A MAJORITY.—ELEMENTS OF THAT MAJORITY, THE CENTRE PROPERLY SO CALLED, AND THE DOCTRINARIANS.—TRUE CHARACTER OF THE CENTRE.—TRUE CHARACTER OF THE DOCTRINARIANS, AND REAL CAUSE OF THEIR INFLUENCE.—M. DE LA BOURDONNAYE AND M. ROYER-COLLARD AT THE OPENING OF THE SESSION.—ATTITUDE OF THE DOCTRINARIANS IN THE DEBATE ON THE EXCEPTIONAL LAWS.—ELECTORAL LAW OF FEBRUARY 5TH, 1817.—THE PART I TOOK ON THAT OCCASION.—OF THE ACTUAL AND POLITICAL POSITION OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES.—MARSHAL GOUVION ST. CYR, AND HIS BILL FOR RECRUITING THE ARMY, OF THE 10TH OF MARCH, 1818.—BILL RESPECTING THE PRESS, OF 1819, AND M. DE SERRE.—PREPARATORY DISCUSSION OF THESE BILLS IN THE STATE COUNCIL.—GENERAL ADMINISTRATION OF THE COUNTRY.—MODIFICATION OF THE CABINET FROM 1816 TO 1820.—IMPERFECTIONS OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL SYSTEM.—ERRORS OF INDIVIDUALS.—DISSENSIONS BETWEEN THE CABINET AND THE DOCTRINARIANS.—THE DUKE DE RICHELIEU NEGOCIATES, AT AIX-LA-CHAPELLE, THE ENTIRE RETREAT OF FOREIGN TROOPS FROM FRANCE.—HIS SITUATION AND CHARACTER.—HE ATTACKS THE BILL ON ELECTIONS.—HIS FALL.—CABINET OF M. DECAZES.—HIS POLITICAL WEAKNESS, NOTWITHSTANDING HIS PARLIAMENTARY SUCCESS.—ELECTIONS OF 1819.—ELECTION AND NON-ADMISSION OF M. GRÉGOIRE.—ASSASSINATION OF THE DUKE DE BERRY.—FALL OF M. DECAZES.—THE DUKE DE RICHELIEU RESUMES OFFICE.—HIS ALLIANCE WITH THE RIGHT-HAND PARTY.—CHANGE IN THE LAW OF ELECTIONS.—DISORGANIZATION OF THE CENTRE, AND PROGRESS OF THE RIGHT-HAND PARTY.—SECOND FALL OF THE DUKE DE RICHELIEU.—M. DE VILLÈLE AND THE RIGHT-HAND PARTY OBTAIN POWER.

A violent outcry was raised, as there ever has been and always will be, against ministerial interference at the elections. This is the sour consolation of the beaten, who feel the necessity of accounting for their defeat. Elections, taken comprehensively, are almost always more genuine than interested and narrow-minded suspicion is disposed to allow. The desires and ability of the powers in office, exercise over them only a secondary authority. The true essence of elections lies in the way in which the wind blows, and in the impulse of passing events. The decree of the 5th of September, 1816, had given confidence to the moderate party, and a degree of hope to the persecuted of 1815. They all rallied round the Cabinet, casting aside their quarrels, antipathies, and private rancours, combining to support the power which promised victory to the one and safety to the other.

The victory, in fact, remained with the Cabinet, but it was one of those questionable triumphs which left the conquerors still engaged in a fierce war. The new Chamber comprised, in the centre a ministerial majority, on the right a strong and active opposition, and on the left a very small section, in which M. d'Argenson and M. Lafitte were the only names recognized by the public.

The ministerial majority was formed from two different although at that time closely-united elements,—the centre, properly called the grand army of power, and the very limited staff of that army, who soon received the title of doctrinarians.

I shall say of the centre of our assemblies since 1814, what I have just said of M. Cuvier; it has been misunderstood and calumniated, when servility and a rabid desire for place have been named as its leading characteristics. With it, as with others, personal interests have had their weight, and have looked for their gratification; but one general and just idea formed the spirit and bond of union of the party,—the idea that, in the present day, after so many revolutions, society required established government, and that to government all good citizens were bound to render their support. Many excellent and honourable sentiments,—family affection, a desire for regular employment, respect for rank, laws, and traditions, anxieties for the future, religious habits,—all clustered round this conviction, and had often inspired its votaries with rare and trusting courage. I call these persevering supporters of Government, citizen Tories; their defamers are weak politicians and shallow philosophers, who neither understand the moral instincts of the soul, nor the essential interests of society.

The doctrinarians have been heavily attacked. I shall endeavour to explain rather than defend them. When either men or parties have once exercised an influence over events, or obtained a place in history, it becomes important that they should be correctly known; this point accomplished, they may rest in peace and submit to judgment.

It was neither intelligence, nor talent, nor moral dignity—qualities which their acknowledged enemies have scarcely denied them—that established the original character and political importance of the doctrinarians.

Other men of other parties have possessed the same qualities; and between the relative pretensions of these rivals in understanding, eloquence, and sincerity, public opinion will decide. The peculiar characteristic of the doctrinarians, and the real source of their importance in spite of their limited number, was that they maintained, against revolutionary principles and ideas, ideas and principles contrary to those of the old enemies of the Revolution, and with which they opposed it, not to [destroy] but to reform and purify it in the name of justice and truth. The great feature, dearly purchased, of the French revolution was, that it was a work of the human mind, its conceptions and pretensions, and at the same time a struggle between social interests. Philosophy had boasted that it would regulate political economy, and that institutions, laws, and public authorities should only exist as the creatures and servants of instructed reason,—- an insane pride, but a startling homage to all that is most elevated in man, to his intellectual and moral attributes! Reverses and errors were not slow in impressing on the Revolution their rough lessons; but even up to 1815 it had encountered, as commentators on its ill-fortune, none but implacable enemies or undeceived accomplices,—the first thirsting for vengeance, the last eager for rest, and neither capable of opposing to revolutionary principles anything beyond a retrograde movement on the one side, and the scepticism of weariness on the other. "There was nothing in the Revolution but error and crime," said the first; "the supporters of the old system were in the right."—"The Revolution erred only in excess," exclaimed the second; "its principles were sound, but carried too far; it has abused its rights." The doctrinarians denied both these conclusions; they refused to acknowledge the maxims of the old system, or, even in a mere speculative sense, to adhere to the principles of the Revolution. While frankly adopting the new state of French society, such as our entire history, and not alone the year 1789, had made it, they undertook to establish a government on rational foundations, but totally opposed to the theories in the name of which the old system had been overthrown, or the incoherent principles which some endeavoured to conjure up for its reconstruction. Alternately called on to combat and defend the Revolution, they boldly assumed from the outset, an intellectual position, opposing ideas to ideas, and principles to principles, appealing at the same time to reason and experience, affirming rights instead of maintaining interests, and requiring France, not to confess that she had committed evil alone, or to declare her impotence for good, but to emerge from the chaos into which she had plunged herself, and to raise her head once more towards heaven in search of light.

Let me readily admit that there was also much pride in this attempt; but a pride commencing with an act of humility, which proclaims the mistakes of yesterday with the desire and hope of not repeating them today. It was rendering homage to human intelligence while warning it of the limits of its power, respecting the past, without undervaluing the present or abandoning the future. It was an endeavour to bestow on politics sound philosophy, not as a sovereign mistress, but as an adviser and support.

I shall state without hesitation, according to what experience has taught me, the faults which progressively mingled with this noble design, and impaired or checked its success. What I anxiously desire at present is to indicate its true character. It was to this mixture of philosophical sentiment and political moderation, to this rational respect for opposing rights and facts, to these principles, equally new and conservative, anti-revolutionary without being retrograde, and modest in fact although sometimes haughty in expression, that the doctrinarians owed their importance as well as their name. Notwithstanding the numerous errors of philosophy and human reason, the present age still cherishes reasoning and philosophical tastes; and the most determined practical politicians sometimes assume the air of acting upon general ideas, regarding them as sound methods of obtaining justification or credit. The doctrinarians thus responded to a profound and real necessity, although imperfectly acknowledged, of French minds: they paid equal respect to intellect and social order; their notions appeared well suited to regenerate, while terminating the Revolution. Under this double title they found, with partisans and adversaries, points of contact which drew them together, if not with active sympathy, at least with solid esteem: the right-hand party looked upon them as sincere royalists; and the left, while opposing them with acrimony, could not avoid admitting that they were neither the advocates of the old system, nor the defenders of absolute power.

Such was their position at the opening of the session of 1816: a little obscure still, but recognized by the Cabinet as well as by the different parties. The Duke de Richelieu, M. Lainé, and M. Decazes, whether they liked the doctrinarians or not, felt that they positively required their co-operation, as well in the debates of the Chambers as to act upon public opinion. The left-hand party, powerless in itself, accorded with them from necessity, although their ideas and language sometimes produced surprise rather than sympathy. The right, notwithstanding its losses at the elections, was still very strong, and speedily assumed the offensive. The King's speech on opening the session was mild and somewhat indistinct, as if tending rather to palliate the decree of the 5th of September, than to parade it with an air of triumph: "Rely," said he, in conclusion, "on my fixed determination to repress the outrages of the ill-disposed, and to restrain the exuberance of overheated zeal." "Is that all?" observed M. de Châteaubriand, on leaving the royal presence; "if so, the victory is ours:" and on that same day he dined with the Chancellor. M. de la Bourdonnaye was even more explicit. "The King," said he, with a coarse expression, "once more hands his ministers over to us!" During the session of the next day, meeting M. Royer-Collard, with whom he was in the habit of extremely free conversation, "Well," said he, "there you are, more rogues than last year." "And you not so many," replied M. Royer-Collard. The right-hand party, in their reviving hopes, well knew how to distinguish the adversaries with whom they would have to contend.

As in the preceding session, the first debates arose on questions of expediency. The Cabinet judged it necessary to demand from the Chambers the prolongation, for another year, of the two provisional laws respecting personal liberty and the daily press. M. Decazes presented a detailed account of the manner in which, up to that period, the Government had used the arbitrary power committed to its hands, and also the new propositions which should restrain it within the limits necessary to remove all apprehended danger. The right-hand party vigorously rejected these propositions, upon the very natural ground that they had no confidence in the Ministers, but without any other reasoning than the usual commonplace arguments of liberalism. The doctrinarians supported the bills, but with the addition of commentaries which strongly marked their independence, and the direction they wished to give to the power they defended. "Every day," said M. de Serre, "the nature of our constitution will be better understood, its benefits more appreciated by the nation; the laws with which you co-operate, will place by degrees our institutions and habits in harmony with representative monarchy; the government will approach its natural perfection,—that unity of principle, design, and action which forms the condition of its existence. In permitting and even in protecting legal opposition, it will not allow that opposition to find resting-points within itself. It is because it can be, and ought to be, watched over and contradicted by independent men, that it should be punctually obeyed, faithfully seconded and served by those who have become and wish to remain its direct agents. Government will thus acquire a degree of strength which can dispense with the employment of extraordinary means: legal measures, restored to their proper energy, will be found sufficient." "There is," said M. Royer-Collard, "a strong objection against this bill; the Government may be asked, 'Before you demand excessive powers, have you employed all those which the laws entrust to you? have you exhausted their efficacy?' ... I shall not directly answer this question, but I shall say to those who put it, 'Take care how you expose your Government to too severe a trial, and one under which nearly all Governments have broken down; do not require from it perfection; consider its difficulties as well as its duties.' ... We wish to arrest its steps in the course it pursues at present, and to impose daily changes. We demand from it the complete development of institutions and constitutional enactments; above all, we require that vigorous unity of principles, system, and conduct without which it will never effectually reach the end towards which it advances. But what it has already done, is a pledge for what it will yet accomplish. We feel a just reliance that the extraordinary powers with which we invest it will be exercised, not by or for a party, but for the nation against all parties. Such is our treaty; such are the stipulations which have been spoken of: they are as public as our confidence, and we thank those who have occasioned their repetition, for proving to France that we are faithful to her cause, and neglect neither her interests nor our own duties."

With a more gentle effusion of mind and heart, M. Camille Jordan held the same language; the bills passed; the right-hand party felt as blows directed against itself the advice suggested to the Cabinet, and the Cabinet saw that in that quarter, as necessary supporters, they had also haughty and exacting allies.

Their demands were not fruitless. The Cabinet, uninfluenced either by despotic views or immoderate passions, had no desire to retain unnecessarily the absolute power with which it had been entrusted. No effort was requisite to deprive it of the provisional laws; they fell successively of themselves,—the suspension of the securities for personal liberty in 1817, the prevôtal courts in 1818, the censorship of the daily press in 1819; and four years after the tempest of the Hundred Days, the country was in the full enjoyment of all its constitutional privileges.

During this interval, other questions, more and less important, were brought forward and decided. When the first overflowing of the reaction of 1815 had a little calmed down, when France, less disturbed with the present, began once more to think of the future, she was called upon to enter on the greatest work that can fall to the lot of a nation. There was more than a new government to establish; it was necessary that a free government should be imbued with vigour. It was written, and it must live,—a promise often made, but never accomplished. How often, from 1789 to 1814, had liberties and political rights been inscribed on our institutes and laws, to be buried under them, and held of no account. The first amongst the Governments of our day, the Restoration, took these words at their true meaning; whatever may have been its traditions and propensities, what it said, it did; the liberties and rights it acknowledged, were taken into real co-operation and action. From 1814 to 1830, as from 1830 to 1848, the Charter was a truth. For once forgetting it, Charles X. fell.

When this work of organization, or, to speak more correctly, when this effectual call to political life commenced in 1816, the question of the electoral system, already touched upon, but without result, in the preceding session, was the first that came under notice. It was included in the scope of the fortieth article of the Charter, which ran thus:—"The electors who nominate the Deputies can have no right of voting, unless they pay a direct contribution of 300 francs, and have reached the age of thirty,"—an ambiguous arrangement, which attempted more than it ventured to accomplish. It evidently contained a desire of placing the right of political suffrage above the popular masses, and of confining it within the more elevated classes of society. But the constitutional legislator had neither gone openly to this point, nor attained it with certainty; for if the Charter required from the electors who were actually to name the Deputies, 300 francs of direct contribution, and thirty years of age, it did not forbid that these electors should be themselves chosen by preceding electoral assemblies; or rather it did not exclude indirect election, nor, under that form, what is understood by the term universal suffrage.

I took part in drawing up the bill of the 5th of February, 1817, which comprised, at that time, the solution given to this important question. I was present at the conferences in which it was prepared. When ready, M. Lainé, whose business it was, as Minister of the Interior, to present it to the Chamber of Deputies, wrote to say that he wished to see me: "I have adopted," he said, "all the principles of this bill, the concentration of the right of suffrage, direct election, the equal privilege of voters, their union in a single college for each department; and I really believe these are the best that could be desired: still, upon some of these points, I have mental doubts and little time to solve them. Help me in preparing the exposition of our objects." I responded, as I was bound, to this confiding sincerity, by which I felt equally touched and honoured. The bill was brought in; and while my friends supported it in the Chamber, from whence my age for the present excluded me, I defended it, on behalf of the Government, in several articles inserted in the 'Moniteur.' I was well informed as to its intent and true spirit, and I speak of it without embarrassment in presence of the universal suffrage, as now established. If the electoral system of 1817 disappeared in the tempest of 1848, it conferred on France thirty years of regular and free government, systematically sustained and controlled; and amidst all the varying influences of parties, and the shock of a revolution, this system sufficed to maintain peace, to develop national prosperity, and to preserve respect for all legal rights. In this age of ephemeral and futile experiments, it is the only political enactment which has enjoyed a long and powerful life. At least it was a work which may be acknowledged, and which deserves to be correctly estimated, even after its overthrow.

A ruling idea inspired the bill of the 5th of February, 1817,—to fix a term to the revolutionary system, and to give vigour to the constitutional Government. At that epoch, universal suffrage had ever been, in France, an instrument of destruction or deceit,—of destruction, when it had really placed political power in the hands of the multitude; of deceit, when it had assisted to annul political rights for the advantage of absolute power, by maintaining, through the vain intervention of the multitude, a false appearance of electoral privilege. To escape, in fine, from that routine of alternate violence and falsehood, to place political power in the region within which the conservative interests of social order naturally predominate with enlightened independence, and to secure to those interests, by the direct election of deputies from the country, a free and strong action upon its Government,—such were the objects, without reserve or exaggeration, of the authors of the electoral system of 1817.

In a country devoted for twenty-five years, on the subject of political elections, whether truly or apparently, to the principle of the supremacy of number, so absurdly called the sovereignty of the people, the attempt was new, and might appear rash. At first, it confined political power to the hands of 140,000 electors. From the public, and even from what was already designated the liberal party, it encountered but slight opposition; some objections springing from the past, some apprehensions for the future, but no declared or active hostility. It was from the bosom of the classes specially devoted to conservative interests, and from their intestine discussions, that the attack and the danger emanated.

During the session of 1815, the old royalist faction, in its moderated views, and when it renounced systematic and retrograding aspirations, had persuaded itself that, at least, the King's favour and the influence of the majority would give it power in the departments as at the seat of government. The decree of the 5th of September, 1816, abolished this double expectation. The old Royalists called upon the new electoral system to restore it, but at once perceived that the bill of the 5th of February was not calculated to produce such an effect; and forthwith commenced a violent attack, accusing the new plan of giving over all electoral power, and consequently all political influence, to the middle classes, to the exclusion of the great proprietors and the people.

At a later period, the popular party, who neither thought nor spoke on the subject in 1817, adopted this argument in their turn, and charged, on this same accusation of political monopoly for the benefit of the middle classes, their chief complaint, not only against the electoral law, but against the entire system of government of which that law was the basis and guarantee.

I collect my reminiscences, and call back my impressions. From 1814 to 1848, under the government of the Restoration, and under that of July, I loudly supported and more than once had the honour of carrying this flag of the middle classes, which was naturally my own. What did we understand by it? Have we ever conceived the design, or even admitted the thought, that the citizens should become a newly privileged order, and that the laws intended to regulate the exercise of suffrage should serve to found the predominance of the middle classes by taking, whether in right or fact, all political influence, on one side from the relics of the old French aristocracy, and on the other from the people?

Such an attempt would have been strangely ignorant and insane. It is neither by political theories nor articles in laws, that the privileges and superiority of any particular class are established in a State. These slow and pedantic methods are not available for such a purpose; it requires the force of conquest or the power of faith. Society is exclusively controlled by military or religious ascendency; never by the influence of the citizens. The history of all ages and nations is at hand to prove this to the most superficial observer.

In our day, the impossibility of such a predominance of the middle classes is even more palpable. Two ideas constitute the great features of modern civilization, and stamp it with its formidable activity; I sum them up in these terms:—There are certain universal rights inherent in man's nature, and which no system can legitimately withhold from any one; there are individual rights which spring from personal merit alone, without regard to the external circumstances of birth, fortune, or rank, and which every one who has them in himself should be permitted to exercise. From the two principles of legal respect for the general rights of humanity, and the free development of natural gifts, ill or well understood, have proceeded, for nearly a century, the advantages and evils, the great actions and crimes, the advances and wanderings which revolutions and Governments have alternately excited in the bosom of every European community. Which of these two principles provokes or even permits the exclusive supremacy of the middle classes? Assuredly neither the one nor the other. One opens to individual endowments every gate; the other demands for every human being his place and his portion: no greatness is unattainable; no condition, however insignificant, is counted as nothing. Such principles are irreconcilable with exclusive superiority; that of the middle classes, as of every other, would be in direct contradiction to the ruling tendencies of modern society.

The middle classes have never, amongst us, dreamed of becoming privileged orders; and no rational mind has ever indulged in such dreams for them. This idle accusation is but an engine of war, erected under cover of a confusion of ideas, sometimes by the hypocritical dexterity, and at others by the blind infatuation of party spirit. But this does not prevent its having been, or becoming again, fatal to the peace of our social system; for men are so constructed that chimerical dangers are the most formidable they can encounter: we fight boldly with tangible substances, but we lose our heads, either from fear or anger, when in presence of phantoms.

It was with real dangers that we had to cope in 1817, when we discussed the electoral system of France. We saw the most legitimate principles and the most jealous interests of the new state of society indistinctly menaced by a violent reaction. We felt the spirit of revolution spring up and ferment around us, arming itself, according to old practice, with noble incentives, to cover the march and prepare the triumph of the most injurious passions. By instinct and position, the middle classes were the best suited to struggle with the combined peril. Opposed to the pretensions of the old aristocracy, they had acquired, under the Empire, ideas and habits of government. Although they received the Restoration with some mistrust, they were not hostile to it; for under the rule of the Charter, they had nothing to ask from new revolutions. The Charter was for them the Capitol and the harbour; they found in it the security of their conquests, and the triumph of their hopes. To turn to the advantage of the ancient monarchy, now become constitutional, this anti-revolutionary state of the middle classes, to secure their co-operation with that monarchy by giving them confidence in their own position, was a line of policy clearly indicated by the state of facts and opinions. Such was the bearing of the electoral bill of 1817. In principle this bill cut short the revolutionary theories of the supremacy of numbers, and of a specious and tyrannical equality; in fact, it brought the new society under shelter from the threats of counter-revolution. Assuredly, in proposing it, we had no intention of establishing any antagonism between the great and small proprietors; but when the question was so laid down, we evinced no hesitation; we supported the bill firmly, by maintaining that the influence, not exclusive but preponderating, of the middle classes was confirmed, on one side by the spirit of free institutions, and on the other in conformity with the interests of France as the Revolution had changed her, and with the Restoration itself as the Charter had defined when proclaiming it.

The election bill occupied the session of 1816. The bill for recruiting was the great subject and work of the session of 1817. The right-hand party opposed it with vehement hostility: it disputed their traditions and disturbed their monarchical tendencies. But the party had to contest with a minister as imperturbable in his convictions and will as in his physiognomy. Marshal Gouvion St. Cyr had a powerful, original, and straightforward mind, with no great combination of ideas, but passionately wedded to those which emanated from himself. He had resolved to give back to France what she no longer possessed—an army. And an army in his estimate was a small nation springing from the large one, strongly organized, formed of officers and soldiers closely united, mutually knowing and respecting each other, all having defined rights and duties, and all well trained by solid study or long practice to serve their country effectually when called upon.

Upon this idea of an army, according to the conception of Marshal St. Cyr, the principles of his bill were naturally framed. Every class in the State was required to assist in the formation of this army. Those who entered in the lowest rank were open to the highest, with a certain advantage in the ascending movement of the middle classes. Those who were ambitious of occupying at once a higher step, were compelled in the first instance to pass certain examinations, and then to acquire by close study the particular knowledge necessary to their post. The term of service, active or in reserve, was long, and made military life in reality a career. The obligations imposed, the privileges promised, and the rights recognized for all, were guaranteed by the bill.

Besides these general principles, the bill had an immediate result which St. Cyr ardently desired. It enrolled again in the new army, under the head of veterans and reserve, the remains of the old discharged legions, who had so heroically endured the penalty of the errors committed by their crowned leader. It effaced also, in their minds, that reminiscence of a distasteful past, while by a sort of special Charter it secured their future.

No one can deny that this plan for the military organization of France, embraced grand ideas and noble sentiments. Such a bill accorded with the moral nature and political conduct of Marshal Gouvion St. Cyr, who possessed an upright soul, a proud temperament, monarchical opinions, and republican manners; and who, since 1814, had given equal proofs of loyalty and independence. When he advocated it in the tribune, when, with the manly solemnity and disciplined feeling of an experienced warrior, at once a sincere patriot and a royalist, he recapitulated the services and sufferings of that nation of old soldiers which he was anxious for a few years longer to unite with the new army of France, he deeply moved the public and the Chambers; and his powerful language, no less than the excellent propositions of his bill, consecrated it on the instant in the affectionate esteem of the country.