ItKl. *.^?^' CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924082193131 CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 3 1924 082 193 1 31 HISTORY OF THE REIGNS OF LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. BY EYEE EVANS CEOWE, AUTHOK OF " TliK HISTOKY OF FRANCE," " THIS GRBEK. AND THE TURK,' ETC. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. LONDON: EICHAED BENTLEY, J&\MKf)et in ©rHiiiaiB to J^er Majtsis- MDCCCLIV. lonhon ; printed by w. Clowes and sons, stamfokd street, and cnARiNO cross. RBA. PREFACE. It would be idle to enumerate tlie sources of almost contemporary history. The journals of a parliamentary period are ample storehouses of material, of which the use is facilitated by the excellent Annuaire, or French Annual Register. The pamphlets, so numerous when- ever the daily press was restricted, and the monthly or bi-monthly periodicals, are the records of opinion and argument. The Memoirs of the period, sufficiently numerous with reference to the first years of the Restoration, but much fewer as it advances, have been' referred to by name for facts or opinions which at all diifer from those generally recounted or received. The French histories of the Restoration must themselves be regarded in the light of original and genuine sources of information ; the writers of them having derived much of their knowledge from personal relations and from their connexion with political party. M. Lubis and M. de Lamartine enjoyed in the early and the latter periods of the Restoration the confidence of iv PEEPACB. the Royalists, and may be considered as advancing their arguments and stating their views. M. Vaulabelle is the historian of the Liberal side. M. Bignon, as far as he goes, was the exponent of Imperialist claims. M. Capefigue, the intimate of Messieurs Decazes and Pasquier, later the journalist of Martignac, has written his narrative of events and of their causes as these politicians beheld them. These I have of course consulted. M. Guizot's numerous pamphlets throw more light on the epoch than the writings of any other man. In the Glohe and the Revue Franqaise are to be found the opinions of his friends and party. But although much may still be written respecting the epoch of the Restoration, there are few secrets now that remain to be revealed, and no mysteries that require solving. The struggles and events of French politics during that period took place more in the forum than the closet ; and there remains little that garrulity has not already revealed, or that the proverbial curiosity of the nation has not penetrated and exposed. London, July, 1854. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. pauses which led to Military Ascendaacy : advantages and disadvan- tages of it---- --_--_-_ CHAPTER II. Imperialism : its rise and fall ---------36 CHAPTER III. Recall of the Bourbons — Claims of Hereditary Royalty and Constitu- tional Rights — The Count d'Artois summoned to Paris by Prince Talleyrand — His short triumph and unpopularity — Act of Abdica- tion signed by Napoleon — Arrival of Louis XVIII. at Compiegne — ^Exphcation between the King and the Emperor Alexander — Royal Declaration issued from St. Ouen — The King's entry into Paris — Formation of a Ministry — New Charter — False system of Representation — Departure of the Allied Sovereigns from Paris - 96 CHAPTER IV. Fatuity of the Royalists — Inertness of the King — Chateaubriand — The Censorship — Debate on the Press — Revenue and Expenditure — ^Prohibition to Work on Sunday— Extravagance of the Religious Party— Soult in the War-office -------- 129 CONTENTS. CHAPTER V. PAGE Congress of Vienna— Pretensions of Talleyrand— Claims of Russia and Prussia to absorb Poland and Saxony— Formation of alliance between Austria, England, and France- Division of Saxony— Settlement of Belgium— Return of Napoleon from Elba— Flight of the King - 151 CHAPTER VI. "Weakness of the Bourbons — Perplexity in the Government of France — Napoleon forms a Ministry — Cambacir^s — FouchS — Camot — M0I6 — Communications with Lafayette — Overtures to Benjamin Constant — ^Enrolment of the F6der6s — Assembly of the Champ de Mai — Promulgation of a Constitution — InteUigence of Napoleon's Invasion reaches Vienna — ^Manifesto of the ADied Powers — Mih- tary operations — Marshal Ney's attack on Quatre Bras — Battle of Waterloo -------------192 CHAPTER VII. Liberalism of Alexander — Royahsts at Ghent — Resistance of the Deputies to Napoleon — They compel his second Abdication — Posi- tion of the Allies — Firmness of Wellington — Return of the King — FouchS's appointment — Louis re-enters the Capital. - - - 240 CHAPTER VIII. Mismanagement of the Elections by Fouch6 and Talleyrand — Works of Art in the Louvre seized and restored — Dissolution of the Army — Lists of Proscriptions — Trial of Labedoyere — Murder of Brune — Fouche superseded by Decazes — Dismissal of Talleyrand - - 264 CHAPTER IX. The Duke of Richelieu's Ministry — Treaty settling new Frontier of France, and Occupation — The Holy Alhance - First Session of CJltra- Eoyalist Chamber — Law of Arrest — Prevotal Courts — Trials of Lavalette and Ney ------_____ 303 CHAPTER X. Attempt to introduce a more hberal Electoral Law defeated by the Royahsts — Desire to preserve State Lands for the Church Chambre Introuvable — Vaublano retires— Marriage of the Due de Berri — Insurrection of Grenoble -----___ 333 CONTENTS. CHAPTER XI. PACK The Doctrinaires and Chateaubriand — Ordonnanoe of September 5, dissolving Chamber, and modifying the Eule of Election — Decazes' Policy of the Bascule — Debate on Finance — Law establishing direct Election introduced and passed — Liberty of the Person and of the Press — Pseudo-insurrection at Lyons — Marmont's Mission, and Fabvier's exposure of it ---____-- 360 CHAPTER XII. Merits of Decazes as a Liberal Statesman — Liberals in the Chamber — Law organizing the Army — Villele's preference of Militia to Con- scription — Objection to a Ministry of PoUce — The Plot of the Bords de I'Eau— The Note Secrfete ---------387 CHAPTER XIII. The Duke of Kicheheu leans to the Royalists, and is obhged to resign — Decazes forms a Ministry — Opposition in Peers quashed by a large creation — New Law of the Press — Decline of the Middle Party, and cause of it - -- - - - - - -- 415 CHAPTER XIV. Insurrectionary spirit throughout Europe — Election of Gregoire — Decazes prepares to render Electoral Law less hberal — Three Ministers resign — Assassination of the Due de Berri — Its conse- quences — EaU of Decazes --------- 449 Appendix ------------- 432 THE HISTORY OF THE REIGNS OF LOUIS XYIII. AND CHARLES X. From 1815 to 1830. CHAPTER I. CAUSES WHICH LED TO MILITAEY ASCENDANCY : ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF IT. No more curious or interesting problem has arisen out of the events of modern history, than that suggested by the failure of a nation, so civilized, so spirited, so intellectual, and so fond of freedom, as the French, to establish and to work satisfactorily and permanently a constitutional monarchy. No country had ever more fearful experience of extremes in government. Within the space of little more than a quarter of a century, France offered the spectacle of the absurd pretensions and imbecile attempts to govern of an absolute, hereditary, and civilian monarchy, of the equally hopeless and far more criminal efforts of a people, after deposing their sovereign, to suffice to the task of ruling and organizing themselves. A senatorial government of revolutionary notables, dethroning in turn the sovereign people, proved not more just, more efficient, VOL. I. B 2 HISTOEY OF THE REIGNS OP or more respectable. Every political institution and every social class having been tried, found unworthy, and swept away (parliaments and representative assemblies not ex- cepted), there remained the army, the sole body which was organized and disciplined, that could obey a superior, without that superior decimating it, and fulfil the soldiers' duty of defending the country, without proscribing, sacri- ficing, and massacring each other. The rise of the army in France, to dominate over all other classes and insti- tutions, cannot be considered as owing so much to the ambition of its chief as to the necessity of things. Similar events will produce similar results. And whenever the people of a great country refuse to obey their old masters, and fail to discover or agree upon any mode of organizing themselves in a political system, power must devolve upon any body or class which possesses association or disci- pline, an acknowledged authority, or a combined will. In many countries, and at several epochs, the clergy formed the most perfect and formidable association : they domi- nated in consequence. In the present day, circumstances endow the military with this advantage, which is denied to almost all other classes and professions. The consequence is, that when civilian efforts fail, when the nobles, shorn of what they consider their right, rebel against the rest of society, when the middle and lower classes, the employing and employed, fall into deep and irremediable dissension, the army necessarily steps in, not to conquer or grasp the right of domination, but to assume it as a task that cannot be declined. Military usurpations have ever been due more to the follies and foibles of those who Were not soldiers, than to the ambition or audacity of those who were. Military domination is, however, but a temporary remedy, LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 3 for military power can in reality found nothing. If, indeed, the warlike struggle be tedious and severe, if the force or the foes to overcome present obstacles which it requires years to subdue, then the conqueror may, no doubt, form military establishments, and organize the comitry, as if the whole object of life was soldiering, and the only aim of mankind the science of slaughtering, pillaging, and oppress- ing each other. But even supposing a kingdom or country engaged in a struggle with the surrounding world, and sacrificing everything to soldierdom, an end must come at last. It will be attained even by victory ; for after victory will come the task of administering in peace both the con- quering and the conquered. But military institutions no longer suffice for this. The sons even of the soldier who has conquered the world, must seek other means of livelihood and eminence than the sword. Commerce engages the one : intellectual, forensic, political eminence attracts another. The rich seek to enjoy, the less rich to advance. Such a world requires freedom as the sphere of its activity, the necessity of its development ; and a prolonged attempt to consider a country as a camp could not but ultimately fail and overwhelm the bold but silly man who persisted in it, even were he a Cssar or a Napoleon. A military dic- tatorship, therefore, however it may obviate a temporary difficulty, cannot solve the permanent problem of providing a government for a numerous, civilized, intellectual, and physically developed people. A military government succeeding to a free one, in which publicity of discussion by mouth and by the press was allowed, has the immense advantage of being fully acquainted with the wants and wishes of all classes, together with the means proposed and discussed for satisfying and accom- b2 i HISTOEY OP THE EBIGNS OF plishing them. Napoleon, in fact, when he assumed power, had simply to put in practice by that power all those plans of amelioration which legislators, publicists, and statesmen had been disclosing and discussing for ten previous years. The mind of the nation had been pro- ducing its annual crop, garnered more than used, but winnowed and sifted for use. Napoleon had but to select and appropriate, whilst assuming the glory of an originator. And though suppressing for the actual time of his do- minion every expression of the cultivated mind or the popular will, he still had the open and well-filled volume of past publicity to recur to, and to be guided by, in order to his preserving the character of representative of the nation, accomplisher of its will, and satisfier of its wants. The prince who establishes a free or constitutional on the ruins of a military government has no such advantages as these. The immediately past is to him a tenebrous space, into which no light had broken. What people have thought, have desired, if indeed they had not ceased to think, he has no means of knowing. No in- tellect was then awake, save that of courtiers. Not only the people, but the professional classes, forbidden to think, speak, or write of public affairs, had become, for all the great and public purposes of freedom, worthless and servile. The nation counted subjects, not citizens. Those with any experience of administration had been educated to look exclusively to persons above them, never to people below. So that a prince, situated like Louis XVIII. undertook a herculean task, when he attempted to govern constitutionally a race, which had neither the principles the materials, the instruments, the knowledge, or the LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 5 pride requisite for their concurrence and co-operation in working the representative system. It is denied, however, to an age as to a man to have more than one great aim or purpose. The predominant necessity with France at the close of the last century was its defence, and consequently the military defence of its territory, its influence, and its great social changes. To save liberty from licentiousness and faction at home, whilst defending it from enemies abroad, was a double task, of which France was incapable. And if the sacrifice of the one to the other filled the higher intellects and cultivated classes of the nation with shame and with regret, the mass of the people, who had found freedom, as it was called, hideous, extortionate, and incapable, but too naturally gave up the hope of fashioning it to aught that was practicable or noble, and not grudgingly gave it in exchange for glory. In tacitly striking this bargain, the French people, what- ever right they resigned, were at least not deceived in the promised return. The power of France was established over Europe, and the dominion thus extended opened to a large proportion of the French a splendid career of advancement, eminence, and wealth. But the more perfectly France became organized and disciplined for war and domination, the more unfit did it become to establish its influence peaceably and perma- nently over that Europe which it had conquered. For, thanked be Providence and civilization, there are no rights which have been so modified and curtailed as those of conquest. Of old the victor might make of the van- quished his slave, and partition his territory to new holders. But the days of exterminating a people, of enslaving or dispossessing them, are past. The race and the soil remain, 6 HISTORY OP THE EBIGNS OP and the victors must devise some means of satisfying the wants and even the pride of the vanquished, for the rule of brute intimidation is far too ineffectual and costly. Had the French republic achieved wide conquest, however turbulent and irregular its rule in foreign countries, it would at least have found friends amongst the classes it emancipated, and by degrees it would have succeeded in the formation of allied states, republics like itself. But a military chief and an embryo emperor, commanding the French soldiers, and through them master of the state, saw or would see nothing in other nations, but monarchs like himself With these alone he would negotiate — these alone conciliate or court. Napoleon, from character as well as position, was fitted to enact this part of the mere crowned head. His early experience made him acquainted with all that was abhorrent and impuissant in democracy. He thus learnt to ignore the existence of a people altogether. His political optics were so formed as exclusively to discern princes, and courts, and armies. He neither knew what the word people meant, nor the worth, nor the power, which it implied. Hence it was, that although he made the imperial eagle victorious throughout Europe, he made no real effort to implant either French influence or ideas, at least in that popular soil, wherein they could alone take root. Whilst despising the people and popular modes of influence. Napoleon was by no means either skilled or apt to conciliate princes. Personal affections he had none. He soared far above them. But even of political friend- ship or sincere alliance he was incapable. His own policy and views were continually changing. They became modified and enlarged, as circumstances extended the LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 7 sphere of his power. And in the new contingencies and possibilities, which from year to year arose to attract and dazzle him, the ally of one day became the foe of the next ; so trifling seemed the fate of even dynasties and nations, in comparison with what appeared to be the predestined and unlimited grandeur of his own. This utter want of consideration for others, this blindness to the necessity of large conciliations, lost Napoleon the friendship of every sovereign, as it procured him the mistrust of every people. There was in truth not a sovereign in Europe, whom he might not have converted into a firm friend ; the King of Prussia at one time, the Emperor of Austria at another, the Czar at last. But he was so avaricious of power and dominion, that, like a stupid miser, he knew not how to part with it even for security and profit. It was im- possible for an independent country to have humbled itself more to France than Prussia did, which for a long series of years not only tolerated, but aided in French aggran- dizement. Such patience and attachment were of no avail, and counted as nothing with Napoleon, who, when Prussia at the eleventh hour flew to arms, showed himself as mer- ciless to it, as he could have been to a power, which, like England, had shown him unswerving enmity from the first. Generosity, as well as policy, would have dictated such large concessions to Austria, especially after Napoleon had espoused one of its princesses, as would have soothed the pride, satisfied the interests, and secured the aUiance of the Court of Vienna. But no : Napoleon could not be generous; and he left the dominions of that first of European princes, into whose family he had married, just as circumscribed and oppressed, with all the wounds in- flicted by the sword of conquest still open and unhealed. 8 HISTOEY OF THE EEIGNS OF to ponder and to doubt, whether Austria had really gained anything by its gift of an Archduchess to the French Emperor, save an increase of severity, exaction, and con- tempt. Nothing could be more sensible or more just, than the representations which Metternich frankly and repeatedly made to the French Emperor, that his con- cessions should be large and his treatment generous, if he would knit a firm friendship and alliance. But with many high qualities Napoleon had all the petty meanness of the dealer, whose first principle is never to be overreached ; and thus he lost every chance of a steady and firm ally during his rise by want of generosity, as he threw away every chance of treating during the period of his fall by the same higgling spirit, which could never reconcile itself to a fit and large concession in time. There is this, however, to be said for Napoleon, that in the entire course of his power, he never enjoyed a moment which he could really call peace, in which he could con- sider his power fixed and his position determined, and in which he could relax from the duty of grasping all the means of war and of offence within his reach, in order to carry on the struggle with his mortal, irreconcilable, indomitable antagonist. One great fact stood prominent throughout the whole epoch, and threw all others into the distance and the shade. This was the great rivalry of France and England. There was in truth no other effectual antagonism. All the forces which other kings or countries marshalled against Napoleon, he swept with ease from the battle-field, and if they rose again year after year to occupy rather than resist him, it was English inveteracy and English wealth that gave galvanic life to these oft-slain raonarchs, and enabled them to bring once LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 9 more their armies into the field. To reduce, to humble, to subdue England, became necessarily the one and only thought of the conqueror of the Continent, in his treaties and arrangements with the powers of which, he was com- pelled to look rather to array them against England, than attach them to France. In this, fortunately, wisdom did not keep pace with power. And it is curious to observe, upon what foolish reasons and futile hopes the great commanding spirits of the age were wont to rely in conducting the great struggle with each other. Pitt feared not to provoke France and to persist in interminable war with a country, which by its very revolution^ by the inveteracy which it caused, was able to convert the entire of its life and produce into the instruments and resources of war. Pitt, whose political vision embraced in its sphere only such objects as a regular budget, an active trade, capitalists feeding industry, and all by contributions and by credit sustaining a certain number of armed men to fight ; — Pitt could not compre- hend a whole country rising to arms, snatching hastily the food which the land afibrded, and then rushing on to pro- cure sustenance, equipments, guns, and military skill at the expense of the foreign foes whom they repelled, and of the foreign soil which they came to occupy. That war could feed itself, Pitt for a long time did not understand. If such mistakes and miscalculations led Pitt into war with an enemy whom he was unable to strike, still greater mistakes and miscalculations led Napoleon into a world- wide antagonism, in which he contrived to undo by his policy the successive advantages which his arms achieved. Could Napoleon, as he worsted and subdued each European foe, have shut out England from his thoughts, and instead 10 HISTOEY OF THE REIGNS OF of mulcting and gensd'arming each European country into an active ally against England, treated it as an equal and independent power, with which he was to live in amity and peace, exercising great ascendancy and undoubted influence, but without wounding the pride or wasting the resources of these nations, then Europe would have been Napoleon's at least for all wise purposes of influence, and England, isolated and powerless, must have ended by accepting a peace, and acknowledging a rival, whom it was hopeless to disturb. But as Pitt believed that a French army could not continue to exist without a budget, so Napoleon imagined that England must expire of poverty and distress if con- tinental trade was cut off from it. It is marvellous, that Napoleon, who was a man of figures, did not procure some statement of the amount of England's habitual trade with the Continent. He might have seen at a glance the small amount of profit accruing from it contrasted with the great annual production of the country's wealth. A little consideration might have taught him, that South America, opened to English trade, was even of itself suffi- cient to compensate for Europe being closed, even if it could be entirely closed. But Napoleon clung not the less obstinately astride of his idea, which compelled him to treat the powers of the Baltic, especially, as so many vassals, with their necks bowed down to a ])olicy, as powerless to accomplish the aim of him who dictated, as irreconcilable with the interests of those subjected to it. One of the states, which the monomania of Napoleon led him to treat as secondary, and as necessarily amenable to him, was Kussia, in which the proprietors of the soil, comprising the whole influence and wealth of the country. LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 11 were most injured by the suspension of trade. Russia could not bear so unnatural a pressure. Yet its rebellion against the continental system obliged Napoleon in con- sistency to march to Moscow-^a straining of the sinews of his empire, which not even success would have warranted, or could have repaired. It was the necessities imposed upon Napoleon by his antagonism with England, and by the mistaken principles upon which he thought it best to carry out that antagonism, — it was this, more than actual greed of territory, which led Napoleon so deeply and irrevocably to offend each of the great powers of Europe. If he swallowed up Holland in his empire, as well as Genoa and Venice, it was that he felt it necessary to close every seaport. If he annexed Hamburg, and deprived Prussia of the course of the Elbe, taking from it Magdeburg, the bulwark of the kingdom, it was with the vain wish to exclude British trade from the great rivers of North Germany. If Austria was deprived of Illyria, and condemned to be an inland power, it was because Napoleon was determined to be master of every coast, from which he might defy his naval enemy, and that, possessed of Dalmatia, he might in time have the means of coercing Turkey, or conquering it, if it proved refractory to his will. It was this same necessity which drove Napoleon into the blunder of invading Spain. His first aim in the peninsula was to strike a blow at Portugal, because it was English. This could not be done without dominating Spain. But how depend upon such creatures as either the reigning monarch of that country, or his son, to conduct or persevere in any policy whatsoever ? Their dethrone- ment became necessary, and the task of governing and conquering the whole peninsula became attached, like a 12 HISTORY OF THE EEIGNS OF millstone, around the neck of the Emperor Napoleon, and weighed him to the ground. The discomfiture and fall of the empire and influence of Napoleon were in truth but a question of time. A greater degree of military and political prudence might no doubt have prolonged it, and the glory of his name might have enabled it to endure as long as his life ; but the true elements of stability were wanting. The predominant war-spirit, beneath which all Europe was compelled to bow, founded nothing. Whatever good had been indirectly accomplished by the destruction of feudal and other antiquated privileges was shut out and obscured by greater wrongs. The pride and spirit of three great races, the English, the German, and the Spanish, were excited to the intensity of antagonism to France. The pride and spirit of their rulers and aristocracy were, if possible, still more provoked to stand up in the same quarrel. Napoleon opposed nothing to this circle of enmity, save military skill and force ; but these were qualities which his enemies were acquiring every day, and by no means imperceptibly. The Austrians at Aspern and at Wagram were as good soldiers as the French, after having been so lately inferior at Austerlitz and at Ulm. The Eussians, who had proved equally inferior in Moravia, learned at Eylau that their foe was not indomitable. Military advantages and prowess between nations soon become equalized, since enslavement or extermination is no longer possible. The only real and^ personal danger to Europe would have consisted in Napoleon's having followed up his military conquests by civil institutions. It would not have been difficult for him to have invented governments superior to the miserable and stupid despotisms which he LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 13 vanquished. There was not a class that he might not have bettered and contented with a share of power and an increase of influence. Aristocracy, people, priesthood, trade, professions, were and are still, so vilely, so unfairly, and so absurdly treated eastward of the Rhine, that a modern Charlemagne had carte blanche for the establish- ment of an European Empire, could he have even seen the materials under his hand. But the smoke of battle offuscated him. How, indeed, could he, who was unable to propose a rational or tolerable system of government for France, nothing in fact beyond treating that great country as a mere corps de garde — how could he elevate his mind to the task of legislating for Europe, or reorganizing it, so as that it should be grateful to him for freedom, development, or amelioration ? We often hear Napoleon extolled as a great civilian and legislative genius. The want in him of those qualities and of that intelligence, which constitute such a genius, is far more striking. The reaction of Europe, therefore, and its recovery from a merely military yoke was inevitable, sooner or later. It ran, however, several serious risks of seeing that wished- for moment indefinitely postponed. Tilsit produced one of those great risks ; — Tilsit, where after having measured their forces in war, with results sufficiently glorious to one, without being discreditable to the other, the two great autocrats of the East and West, met in amity and under- standing for the purpose of dividing the world's power and influence between them. That division seemed so natural, so obvious, so easy, that it is marvellous and providential that they did not succeed in attaining the end to their mutual satisfaction. But if the want of wisdom and policy in the motives and the means of the struggle between 14 HISTORY OF THE REIGNS OP them is remarkable in the case of Pitt and Bonaparte, it is still more remarkable in the celebrated interview between Napoleon and Alexander. Napoleon obtained nothing but the closing of the Kussian ports against England: Kussia nothing save the contingent possession of Walla- chia, Moldavia, and Finland. The two monarchs in- dulged in dreams and in deceptions, conversed about future projects in the East, whilst they left unsettled and un- defined the limits of their respective influence in central Europe, by leaving out of sight and making no account of which the French Emperor was so soon to inflict an indelible affront upon his Eussian brother. To any intelligent ob- server or witness of the conference of Tilsit, it would have been evident, that the two sovereigns were merely patch- ing up a momentary truce, instead of laying the foundation of a lasting peace, or a firmer accord between them. But there was no such witness. Talleyrand, who inclined always to the policy of France securing Austria as an ally, and making to it the largest concessions for that purpose, was not trusted by Napoleon in his negotiations with Alexander. Caulaincourt was preferred to him as a secre- tary, and as a soldier, who would be an obedient instrument in drawing up the terms of the alliance, and not an un- seasonable dealer in remonstrance and advice. It did not require to be a profound politician in order to see that Napoleon in his position had but two alterna- tives, either to make a firm friend and thorough ally of the Eussian Emperor, or to crush him and put it out of his power to weigh in any proportion with France upon the affairs of Europe. Had Napoleon a council or a cabinet, had he even two or three independent statesmen, whose voice he could have listened to in such matters, they could LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 15 not have failed to impress upon him so great a truth. And yet he was blind to it. He had learned at Eylau and at Friedland what he never fully recognised before, that Russia was a first-rate military power, not to be broken in one campaign, or one war, and requiring a very considerable display of force to crush it. This he had not with him in the campaign of Friedland. He wanted peace and breathing-time to muster such armies. This alone was his secret thought at Tilsit. But the affection- ate and enthusiastic friendship which Alexander evinced, overcame Napoleon's purely political intentions, and led him to hope that he might long maintain his personal ascendancy over the Czar, and complete his subjugation of England and Spain, that is, become completely master of the West of Europe, with Alexander's tolerance or aid, deferring till after that consummation the regulation or division of Asia and the East of Europe with Russia. The sudden affection and admiration of Alexander for the French and for their Emperor were more sincere than this, but were not even so durable. All autocrat as he was, the Czar was surrounded by nobles, by courtiers, by friends as well as by the members of his own family, who not only looked with disapprobation upon his alliance with France, but who esteemed it a dereliction of duty and of pride. The Russian aristocracy could not take to their bosom the revolutionary chief, whose arm had com- pleted the destruction of all that was antiquated in Europe, and who had advanced from the Seine to the Niemen to dictate to Russia a breaking off of old alliance, and an acquiescence in new. The noble, the consistent, the unswerving stand that England was making against this terrible power, piqued the emulation of the Russians. 16 HISTOKY OF THE REIGNS OF Alexander, setting at nought all these sentiments, stood alone in his own Court. Even the spirit of adulation could induce no voice to echo him ; and he well knew, that this disapprobation, however tacit, would extend from the Court, and from the class informed in politics, to the people and the country at large, amongst whom he might become dangerously unpopular. He could face and despise all this, however, if as the fruit of the French alliance he could show some great acquisition, on the side of Turkey : the empire pushed to the Danube, or perhaps to the -^gean, would more than silence every critic. He accord- ingly pressed Niapoleon in this sense, but Napoleon was deaf A strange numbness at the time pervaded both the policy and the armies of both potentates. Napoleon, instead of pouring his whole force into the peninsula, crushing the Spaniards, and sweeping the English from it, led back his army from the Russian frontier slowly, allowing them to press upon Germany, and indulging them with fetes, and triumphs. Alexander could not even drive the Turks from the principalities, at a time when he was raving and clamouring for the empire of the East. At last Napoleon met the fatal rebuff, not indeed from Alexander, but from the Empress-mother, who refused to give him a Russian princess for a wife. Pique drove Napoleon to make the same demand, or accept the same honour from Austria, and by that one act of marriage the alliance between the Emperor of France and Russia was definitively dissolved.* After such an intimate bond of connexion, it was im- possible not to believe that Napoleon would take mea- * For the origin of the Russian match, see Villemain's Count De Nar- bonne. LOUIS XVIII. AND CHAELES X. 17 sures for indemnifying his Imperial father-in-law for his losses, and for resuscitating his empire. This was incom- patible with the abandonment of Turkey to Russia. Prince Metternich knew well how to circulate and suffer to escape such little secrets and rumours as aggravated the suspi- cions of the Court of St. Petersburg. Some proposals that the French Emperor made in certain contingencies to Austria were allowed to transpire, and Alexander had reason to believe, that, far from opening to him the con- quest of Turkey or of the East, Napoleon was meditating some new distribution of Poland. Poland is a name that no Russian potentate can abide. One would say that in political, as in a private murder, the ghost of the victim haunted the assassin. Certain it is, that at the first rumours of the French emperor meditat- ing the resuscitation of Poland, the Russian demanded a categorical declaration, conveyed in a solemn treaty, that France would never lend itself to the resuscitation of Poland. If such a stipulation were a disgrace to France, the demand was an outrage on the part of Russia. It could not but be refused, and the refusal act as a corrobo- ration of the suspicions which the Czar had been led to entertain. It was no wonder that the Czar entertained such a suspicion ; for, from the moment that France was not certain of the cordiality and close alliance of Russia, it became important to guard against her as a foe. The single, the obvious, the almost unavoidable mode of doing this was to resuscitate Poland. The monarch who would confer on the Poles that boon, might count on the eternal and strenuous gratitude of every class of them, and, indeed, the respect and favour of the whole Sclavonic race. Pro- vidence, one might also say, had provided that race as the VOL. I. c 18 HISTOEY OP THE REIGNS OF true and natural bulwark against the barbarism of the North. It had saved Germany from the Turks ; and its mission was to defend Germany and Europe from the great nomad and military power of the united north of Europe and Asia. That it was Napoleon's intention finally to restore Poland it is difficult to doubt. To establish French influence solidly in the east of Europe was impossible without it, and the act seemed so natural, and so just, and so fully due from him to those legions of gallant Poles who fought and bled for him, that the project could have been but adjourned in the mind of Napoleon. To re- establish Poland, however, was to have at once Russia, Prussia, and Austria for enemies ; and his object at the time was not so much to crush them and eject their dynasties, as to make use of these powers and their resources to dr ve he English from the Continent. The restoration of Poland was therefore adjourned, and Prus- sia, as well as Austria, allowed to keep up those skeletons of armies which it was easy to complete into national and gigantic ones, when opportunity should serve or incite. Napoleon had, in fact, but the same hold over Europe, that he had over France — his legions, and his name. The first blow given to his military power shook all the rest of his political edifice, at home and abroad, as if it had been built of card. Such is a brief sketch of the policy observed by Napo- leon to Europe up to the remarkable year of 1812, when the elements, with unwonted severity, came down upon the entire military resources of his empire, amassed and con- centrated by him around Moscow, and irreparably swept away the greater and more valuable portion of them from LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 19 existence. He had then only France to fall back upon ; and it is now time to consider what he had made it. In the narrative and historic accounts which have appeared of these events and this struggle, it has been invariably the habit of every writer to consider Napoleon as all in all it : is his ascendancy that is admired — his fall that is lamented; whilst the whole current of human events — of the French first struggling to emancipate themselves from inglorious and political despotism at home — of Europe's leaguing to menace and coerce them in matters of which other nations were as ignorant and incapable as France — of the French, rallying to defend themselves, and, in that glorious defence, putting forth an amount of national energy and military genius such as no country ever did before, — all these, the acts and products of a great country, whose spirit evoked, and from whose will sprang, those great armies and great men, are passed by as almost unworthy of notice. The prominent fact of the first years of the century does not so much consist in the personal ascendancy of Napoleon, who was in truth only an instrument or a weapon, as in the empire which France and the French, their ideas and interests, had acquired, and seemed likely to exercise over Europe. 1812, and the sub- sequent years, overthrew that empire, and reduced France to its normal influence and dimensions ; a reaction and a counter-revolution, in the magnitude of which, the personal fortunes of the Emperor Napoleon, however interesting to the painter or romancer, are in the eye of history nothing. It is not here intended to deny the genius of Napoleon ; but this genius, it may be observed, was more of the temper of the strong and trenchant blade, which is the most power- fill of instruments, tiian that of a great mind, evolving from c2 20 HISTORY OF THE BEIGNS OF its reflections, and striking forth from the profundity of its wisdom, any great or new scheme of policy or govern- ment. That power must devolve upon the army, and be concentrated in its hands, had been for some time mani- fest ; and it was also manifest that he who took first rank by common fame and admission in that army must be the ruler of the State : to occupy that place, Bonaparte, after his first Italian victories, evidently looked. Faire du pouvoir — build up renown with as few stains upon him, as possible, of the current meanness of the time, was mani- festly his object, that same which drove him to Egypt in the first instance, and hurried him back from it the moment that the utmost victory was achieved, and re- verses seemed the probable result of the expedition. By his acts, and by his character, Bonaparte fully obtained his first aim, that of being the first general of the army, the representative of the military interests, and the wielder of its authority. Nor was it merely his military talent which secured him this, but his great good sense, the total ab- sence from his mind of bigotry, of fanaticism, of party spirit, of hallucination, or inveteracy of any kind. He was neither Jacobin nor Royalist. Of good birth (he was refused admission to the College of Brienne, till he showed proofs of noble birth^a strange and fatal attempt of the old system, to deny military proficiency to any man of the people), he had the tendencies, without the prejudices, of the gentleman. But what peculiarly distinguished him, and gave him power over his generation and his time, was, that he never despaired of its mission. Serving the great cause of revolution and reversal of an antiquated regime, he never looked back in terror, as did Mirabeau and Moreau, to the old monarchy, to save the country from LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 21 the results of its excesses. A weak spirit is apt to take refuge in the past, and to invoke safety in rummaging and upturning the ashes of dead things. A bold spirit trusts to the future, and does not despair of finding something good and something new. But his view of the future was limited to empire, and to the founding of that empire by arms, and by such institutions as were corollaries to arms. At the same time, when he seized power, Bonaparte was not prepared to destroy or to ignore, more than was indispensable, all those ideas, or, at least, those semblances of free institutions, that the revolution had put forth and had essayed. Though anxious for great authority, and believing in no other mode of governing, he was desirous of obtaining not only popular adhesion, but the assistance of the men possessed of talent and experience in the country. He wanted not, indeed, their control, but their concurrence. At the time of Napoleon's rise to supreme authority, all the experiments of political philosophy, the results of con- stitutional and republican experiments at mixed and popular government, were by general admission concentrated in the capacious mind of one man. This was Sieyes. He was the great Mufti of constitutional science, the great oracle of the political religion of the day. He had commenced the revolution by simply asking a question ; and he had done little more since, than propound questions, without ever attempting to answer them. He was one of those lately clothed with the power of the executive, and was thus fully aware how little authority a civilian could wield without the employment of terror and proscription. Bo- naparte, who knew nothing, and cared less, for constitutional systems, left the fabrication of the new machinery to 22 HISTORY OF THE REIGNS OF Sieyes. As the latter proceeded in his complicated work, his military colleague mocked and reproached him by turns for much that was impracticable. When Sieyes had done, however, Bonaparte accepted his handiwork, made what alterations in it he pleased, ran his pen through this representative truth, and dropped a blot of ink over that constitutional control, but accepted most of Sieyes' ideas, such as a senate and a council of state of veterans and of active functionaries, with a legislative body, which after hearing a tribunate on behalf of the people, and a councillor of the state on behalf of the government^ discuss them, was to vote laws in silence. All this complicated machinery of public bodies, and of institutions mimicking the forms of free government, served merely to give place and pay to all of that capable class who could pretend to it ; thus feeing them to discard their attachment to freedom, and hiring and drilling what was really but a household of valets to wear the garb and assume the attitude of persons engaged in the real task of representative government. The advantages of a free and constitutional system are first to develop the intellect and energies of the people in their own several pursuits and occupations, and also in those where government itself requires experience and aid. This, as well as the contentment which it occasions, and the pride which it awakes in a nation, are the chief virtues of a represent- ative government. The mimic system, invented by Sieyes, rendered still more shadowy and null by Bona- parte, has none of these advantages. It merely calls forth talent and proficiency in the one direction — the adminis- trative and the military — and even then does not create first-rate proficiency and talent. The great statesmen, as LOUIS XVIII. AND GHAELES X. 23 the. great generals of Napoleon's empire, were thrown out, educated, and formed under the Republic. Those brought up under the Empire itself served but to betray it by their treachery, and disgrace it by their incapacity and ■ their meanness. The state machine had been, however, but a short time in motion, when it was perceived how useless, yet how obstructive, were all the wheels and inventions of Sieyes, which certainly suggested and encouraged a series of ideas, and a kind of ambition, opposed to and incom- patible with the purely tyrannical spirit of a military chief. Napoleon therefore cast off the last rags of consti- tutionalism, in order to robe himself with the Imperial purple. Rejecting everything modern or European, Napoleon fell back to the Byzantine empire, taking its ideas and its hierarchy, its centralization and the sacro- sanctity of the sovereign, as the basis of a government which he had the stupendous ignorance and folly of considering suited to Europe in the nineteenth century. Nor was he without a flattering unguent of philosophy wherewith to varnish the monstrosity of his governmental experiment. The French, said he, and says his school, care not for liberty, all they prize is equality. As if a proud nation was better satisfied with equality, which renders a herd of men undistinguishable one from the other, or as if, indeed, equality was possible without freedom! The French rose in 1798 against a system which gave the soil and the State, with the profits of the one and the honours of both, to one class, and condemned all others to burdens and to baseness. But is a functionary aristocracy more fair than a feudal one ? Is not the class which possesses wealth, influence, with all the opportuni- 24 HISTORY OF THE EEIGNS OF ties of attracting the attention and winning the favour of the great place-bestowers, cannot this class form a naonopoly as close, and one as difficult to break through, as any- feudal aristocracy whatever ? If there be freedom, indeed, and every subject of the State have the power, through the press, or by word of mouth, to show his claim, his fitness, his intellectual eminence, or high discernment, then, indeed, the State may boast of bestowing a certain equality ; and should this freedom exist with respect to industry, it may be said, that all men and all classes have a chance for rising, as fair and as great as is compatible with the permanence of property and the defectibility of human institutions. But equality without freedom is a fallacy, of which not even Frenchmen can remain the dupes. When Napoleon, however, completed his great functionary sys- tem, there were place and scope in it for almost every Frenchman. To men of spirit the military career offered the noblest chances ; to those of mercantile habits the mere supply of such vast armies was a field, greater than even legitimate trade in time of peace. It was the same in every department. And the revolution scarcely con- veyed a greater boon to the peasant when it flung open to him the soil, than Napoleon conferred on the middle and educated classes, when he opened to all and each a career and a profession which the State, in one way or another, was to feed and to remunerate. But the most important characteristic of a great func- tionary class is the centralization which holds it together, and which effectually consecrates and embodies the prin- ciple of power emanating from above, not below. This was a portion of Napoleon's administrative arrangements far more durable than his empire, and far more important LOUIS XVm. AND CHARLES X. 25 in its consequence. For a mere form of government, like a dynasty, may disappear, and give place to another, whereas one system of administration established in the habits of a people, and extinguishing all other, becomes indispensable and ineradicable. We need only mentioji China as an example and a proof. And, unfortunately, that which Napoleon established is so incompatible with constitutional government, so diametrically opposed to it in principle and in working, that this centralized adminis- tration has contributed more than any other cause to prevent any constitutional system from working honestly or well, and from taking root either in the minds, hopes, and habits of the people, or in the conscience and convic- tion of monarch or of statesmen. Unfortunately, the same excuses which may be alleged for Napoleon's establishment of political despotism may be urged in behalf of his centralized system of adminis- tration. The republican assemblies, when they decreed the abrogation of all powers from above, and when they sought to regulate its proceedings accruing from below, naturally made the municipal and cantonal bodies the basis of their system. And to these were given far greater authority than such bodies could honestly and effectually use. The disposal of the confiscated property of the noblesse and clergy, with the preparation of those lists of property by which taxation was measured — such duties alone flung to the local assemblies of France precisely those tasks which local interests must lead them to neglect or abuse. One of the consequences of this merging of a salutary and necessary central authority in a local one, was the suspension of all revenue in France. The re- publican assemblies, true to principle, had taken off the 26 HISTORY OF THE EEIGNS OF burdens of indirect taxation, as well as abolished the monopolies, such as salt. There remained only the great source of direct taxation, land, which the government cared not so much to regulate, so long as it could coin assignats on the supposed amount of the property which had accrued to the nation. But as assignats ceased to have value, and as whatever government was installed must again resort to the old sources of both direct and indirect taxation, a reform in provincial and adminis- trative authority was also requisite. And for the moment there could be no other than withdrawing authority from local assemblies and vesting it in the officers of government. To argue, however, as the French are in the habit of doing, from the almost inevitable abuse of those powers by the provincial bodies at a period of political and pro- prietorial revolution, or from the consequent laxity in fulfilling those fiscal duties — to argue from this to a total abrogation of municipal liberty or control, and to a cen- tralization of fiscal and political power, is as irrational as it is liberticidal and impolitic. That the French should have made light of the loss of their municipal liberties in 1799, and welcomed a more re- gular, though, at the same time, a more despotic adminis- tration, will not be wondered at when it is considered that after the revolution of Brumaire the public treasury had no more than would pay the couriers necessary to inform the provinces of the change. The army, writes the Due de Gaete, was without pay, functionaries without salaries, the Church had not been paid for ten months. The public creditor, after having had two-thirds of his claims cut off, could sell his remaining third of five per cent, for no more than ten in the market. The Directory had tried to live LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 27 by forced loans, in amount progressive as private fortunes were greater. Fiscal tyranny, poverty, and incapacity had reached their maximum. The annual expenses were, in the mean time, from thirty to forty millions sterling. The revolution had, nevertheless, sufficiently simplified finance. It had destroyed all privileges, exemptions, divisions. The troubles and the wars to which it gave birth had destroyed foreign trade. The produce of the soil, and such manu- factures as wrought a portion of this produce into a more valuable shape, constituted the wealth of the country. The French minister of 1811 valued the former at two hundred millions of pounds sterling brute produce, the latter at fifty millions. Of these twelve millions sterling were demanded in the shape of property-tax, and nearly eight millions more for registration and transfer duties and domains. Twenty millions sterling were thus demanded from property direct. Napoleon raised about eleven mil- lions more by other means, between four and five millions from excise, and about four millions from customs ; the rest were small items. In such proportions was levied the Imperial revenue, which certainly weighed as heavily as the payer could afford ; especially as these taxes, and the additions subse- quently demanded, were paid (not, as in England, out of those private incomes and expenditure, fed even by war, and swelled by loans, but) by a class of agriculturists who had neither the capital nor the knowledge necessary to raise from the soil much more than its mere cultivators consumed, and who, moreover, were mulcted by the con- scription either in hands or in heavy sums. Yet as land was the only investment for money, the only security against poverty and destitution, the price of it remained. 28 HISTOEY OF THE REIGNS OP and indeed still remains, too exorbitant to permit agricul- ture to be followed as a commercial speculation. In his fiscal arrangements Napoleon not only disinherited local authorities and assemblies of all control, but adopted one of the worst habits of the old regime, by appointing receivers- general in each department, who have ever since contrived to make large profits of the sums which the receipts of the revenue bring into their hands. Napoleon appointed them for the sake of having men of moneyed or commercial mark to draw government bills upon in anticipation of the re- venue. Though unnecessary, as soon as his finances were in a regular state, the receivers-general have been pre- served, merely from their offering, like the old farmers- general, a lucrative and influential place for government to bestow. The judicial and political was, of course, in accordance with the fiscal administration. Justices of peace in the country districts, a tribunal of first procedure in small towns, an imperial court in the chef lieu, with a tribunal of appeal in the capital, constituted a hierarchy. As prosecu- tion of criminals was considered a duty of the State, a public accuser, with all his aids, was requisite in each court. The system of juges d' instruction, who performed the pre- liminary duties and inquiries of our grand juries, required more public law officers. These to the inferior courts were necessarily young men, pooriy paid ; in fact, such offices they served as apprenticeship, and looked to advancement. They became, in turn, avocats and procureurs-generaux, or judges of secondary and inferior courts. The result was, to form a class or body of Crown lawyers and judges, totally distinct from the bar, strangers to its practice, and being, from the first, in the pay of the government, to study LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 29 whose interests and consult whose will was the first duty of the legal official as of the judge. Need it be said how utterly subversive of the independence of the legal profes- sion is this, and how entirely opposed in habits and spirit such a body of legists must be to any system of constitu- tional government? Connected with Napoleon's judicial organization stands that which is considered the great civil achievement and glory of his reign — the Code. And certainly, if men were born to have no political rights and no social privileges, the French Code is, as far as regards the more plain and obvious questions disputed, a sure and equable rule. In the most complicated and difficult questions, however, the Code, like everything else, has been found obscure from very brevity, and the attempt to dispense with legal learning has failed. In trying to interpret the meaning of the Code by the intentions of its propounders, it has been found that these framers of the Code had no intentions and no pro- ftmdity ; that they borrowed right and left, from Justinian here and Cujas there ; so that, to arrive at the real origin or purpose of a rule, it is necessary to search back into the re- cords of the Byzantine or old French law, and thus sink once more behind the Code into the old mining depths of legal learning. Another boast of the Code is its establishment of equality for all before the law. No boast can be more untrue. The Code is merely the law of the subject and unsalaried Frenchman ; but one-half of France is functionary in some way or another, and for disputes between functionaries and non-functionaries there is altogether another code and other tribimals. Nor was the feudal aristocracy of ancient days ever so completely privileged and protected by pecuHar jurisdiction against the just complaints of the ignoble, as the 30 HISTORY OF THE BBIGNS OF functionary class of French are, at the present day, privi- leged and protected against the common herd of French subjects whom it may please them to injure or to tread upon. In the same narrow spirit with which he treated the law, Napoleon organized public instruction and the Church. His regulations respecting the former were a mere reversal of the large views of the Constituent Assembly ; to educate the people formed no part of the system of Napoleon. His aim extended no farther than to drill the children of the middle classes in Lycfees, where they soon acquired the knowledge requisite to make them apt soldiers and servile subjects, not overlearned in the classics, untainted with philosophy of any kind, and taught that the peculiar science of mathematics and physics opened the only sphere in which the intellect could be usefully exercised. One fault of his successors, indeed, he avoided ; that of subjecting his school to the ecclesiastical spirit or dictation. There wag nothing he took greater care to guard against than this. Although Napoleon refused to make over public educa- tion to the clergy however, lest they should encroach beyond their sphere, and interfere with the political religion that he sought to inculcate, he did not take the true precautions against the naturally retrograde spirit of the Catholic clergy, by rendering them nationally instructed, and at least in some degree independent. In no part of his policy, indeed, was Napoleon so criminal and ungrateful to the re- volution, and so opposed to its great principles, as in his dealings with the Church. In that Church, as in the State, were two parties : the one which had accepted the revolu- tion, and adhered to its constitutional arrangement, which rendered the clergy dependant on the people and the State; the other party, like the Royalist aristocracy. LOUIS XVIII. AND CHAELES X. 31 showed themselves inimieal to all that had taken place since 1790. Out of the constitutional prelates and clergy Napoleon might have founded a national Church suffi- ciently attached to Rome to avoid schism, but sufficiently independent of it, to have made clergy and laity one people. Instead of this. Napoleon, still tinctured by his Italian education, threw overboard all that the Constituent Assembly had decreed, set aside anything like election in Church appointments, shared between his own dictatorial will and that of the Pope the nomination of the prelates, and thus abandoned the lesser clergy altogether, their edu- cation, position, and prospects, to the prelates. This con- stitution of a clergy, utterly distinct from the laity and its interests, and independent of their suffrages and opinions, and looking merely to the government and to Rome for support and promotion, established a Church fundamentally opposed to every idea and principle of constitutionalism. No doubt it agreed well with the Emperor's functionary hierarchy, of which it was a counterpart; but it proved, and proves, a monstrous obstruction in the way of any con- stitutional or even liberal system. Whilst all professions and all classes were thus organized in a kind of hierarchy, the political administration was equally so. Under the new system, to leave a department or provincial region to itself would have been anomalous and pernicious. There was no aristocracy to be trusted, no man of property or wealth to whom the management of even local concerns could be abandoned ; the Emperor was, therefore, represented in each chef lieu of a department by a Prefect, in each smaller one by a sub-prefect, whilst in each village government appointed a Mayor. The Prefect, well remunerated, living in a palace, was the centre of the 32 HISTORY OF THE EEIGNS OF urban society — France knows no other ; and whilst the gend'armes performed the functions of police in keeping the people quiet, or at least of discovering when they were not so, the Prefect was equally active to secure the adhesion of the better classes, or to intimidate any contrary sentiment. Such a functionary was indeed necessary under the regime of Napoleon, for the pressure of conscription and taxation weighed so heavily on the provinces, especially in the later years of the empire, that the enforcement of both with effect, yet without exciting the resistance of the popu- lation, required local administrators possessed of much address as well as firmness. As long as parents beheld their sons run the common risks of war in a campaign upon the Danube or the Elbe, the chances, or even the inevitable bereavements, were borne with patriotism and resignation. But when not merely regiments, but armies were swallowed up in disasters, were swept down the Beresina, or entombed in the snows of Russia, mothers rebelled. Innumerable were the sums expended at times to save a favourite son from destruction. Substitutes were furnished ten times over, and were obliged to be furnished again when epidemy or a hostile bullet put an end to the substitute. The person or the price of a son registered was unpitiably demanded, even at a time when the son had died. Chateaubriand in one of his pamphlets has gibbeted the Emperor Napoleon with the clauses and the consequences of his terrible con- scription law. And certainly they were sufficient to hold him up to the execration of all France. Never was a country so ruthlessly drained of its life's blood. Such was the France that Napoleon organized into the docile instrument of his power, or the tacit audience and LOUIS XVm. AND CHARLES X. 33 admirer of his heroic deeds. Nor were his arrangements ill imagined for a reign which was to be marked by a series of victories, and which was to be but a continued fete. It is necessary, however, to provide for the storm rather than the sunshine, and to make preparation for the reverses rather than for the successes of life. And these had scarcely come upon Napoleon ere he had ample means of judging how perishing and flimsy were the foundations which he laid for the permanence of his Imperial power. Whilst still in Moscow, the conqueror of the Russian armies, but with his communications intercepted, an adventurous officer, aided by a serjeant, undertook, and wellnigh accomplished a conspiracy for dethroning the great Emperor. At night Mallet put on a general's uniform, attired his attached serjeant as an aide-de-camp, and in this garb presented himself at the barracks of several regiments in the capital, at the hotel of the Prefect, and the quarters of the commanding officer. The latter he was obliged to shoot; but all the others listened to and credited his plausible story, that the Emperor had been cut ofi' in Russia, and was no more, and that he, Mallet, was intrusted to form a Provisional Government to dispose of the future empire of France. Not a word was said of the King of Rome or of the Imperial succession. Nor do the high functionaries of Napoleon's creation and appointment display a sign that either the Imperial re'gime or the Imperial dynasty was uppermost in their thoughts. The conspiracy failed through a mere chance, the escape of an officer. And Napoleon returned furious, to ask of his mystified functionaries whether the continuance of his empire depended upon his mere presence, or his name, and might be expected to VOL. I. ^ 34 HISTOEY OP THE REIGNS OP disappear the moment that name and that presence were withdrawn. Had Napoleon left society to form its naturally inde- pendent classes, had he allowed those classes their due influence over pubhc opinion and public affairs, by means of the press and of those free institutions which develop and express opinion, he would no doubt have experienced resistance and obstruction in his arbitrary schemes, but he would in recompense have been supported, when Europe became unjust and severe to him, by the spontaneous effort of an indignant and powerful nation. But Napoleon had blotted out the nation, had stifled its voice, and betrayed its freedom. He still, indeed, found generous and chivalrous adhesion in the remnant of his armies and in the juvenile population, which joined his shattered ranks. But beyond the sight of his military eagles there was no Imperial France. There was no mass of people, no body of citizens, no class beyond the military, which showed at that time any devotion, or were prepared for any sacrifice. Even those preferred and salaried func- tionaries, who held high office as mock legislators and senators, as ministers and councillors of State, had no aid to bring to their tottering sovereign, for in truth they pos- sessed no intrinsic authority or respect. All such power, even of usefulness, flowed from the great centralized source beneath the throne, and as this was dried up, so disappeared all power, and even all loyalty and subordi- nation. The very senators, whilst passing forced decrees for the levy of troops and the raising of contributions, were more busied in considering how they could most conveniently and decorously sacrifice the Emperor to the preservation of their own dignities, and act the part of LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 35 executioner to him and to his dynasty whilst preserving their own titles and emoluments. Never was the inevit- able meanness and insufficiency of a functionary aristocracy more completely brought to proof and to light. The Allied Sovereigns and armies which marched into France, did so with the determination to crush its military and dominating spirit. But they approached and passed the frontier of France, not only with respect, but awe, of a people, which had achieved such vast things. Had there been at the time a people, visible elsewhere than in camps, a public opinion in the habit or with the facilities of expressing itself, had there been independent bodies or assemblies accustomed to discuss and free to declare the result of their deliberations, the Allied Sovereigns would have been obliged to respect the will of the French people, and would have been delighted to have made honourable peace with civilian France. That, however, did not exist. The strength, the honour, and the majesty of the country were concentrated in its armies, and, it being unavoidable to send them beneath the yoke, the country was subjected with them to its ignominy, and the seeds of resentment and reaction sown, not those of any future harvest of peace. D 2 36 HISTORY OP THE REIGNS OF CHAPTER II. IMPERIALISM : ITS RISE AND FALL. Whilst Napoleon was labouring to found a monarchy based upon his exploits as a soldier, his ability as an administrator, and upon the full satisfaction which he gave to the uni- versal love of equality and of order in France, the repre- sentatives and the votaries of the exploded principle of legitimate and hereditary right, laboured to the best of their judgments and the utmost of their zeal to keep their political faith alive and their claims respected. Their first hopes were, that sentiments of goodwill and loyalty would at length prevail with the masses of the French themselves, and turn them from the crimes and the anarchy of revolutions to the resumption of the old government, and the recal of their hereditary princes. The French found more profit and more pride in continuing the revolution : and such was the violence of the long pent-up spirit of freedom, that rush onwards it must for still many years, before it will become exhausted, and that even then anything like a government or an empire must be built up of the ruins and materials which the popular torrent had swept down, and had amassed, and which LOUIS XVIII. AND CHAELES X. 37 occupied the soil to the utter obliteration of all that had preceded. Deceived in the hope of reaction in the French mind, the princes and the nobles who had emigrated turned their attention and efforts to obtain foreign aid. The courts and the governments which bordered upon the French Republic seemed, however, smitten with far greater respect for its energies and its courage, than either appalled by its crimes or moved by any chivalrous enthusiasm for the restoration of the monarchical principle. In Germany, the land of feudalism, the French noblesse might expect to have found most sympathy. But after a very brief ex- perience of the tough resistance which was to be expected from the French, whether as republicans or soldiers, the North Germans abandoned their antagonism to the Revo- lution and its chiefs altogether ; and even Austria, whilst continuing the war, struggled exclusively for the recovery of lost provinces, not for the re-edification of a shattered throne. The Princes of the House of Bourbon were not endowed with the qualities fitted either to command sympathy or to awaken hope for their fortunes. Weaker men or paler characters than the three royal brothers, whom fate had placed to withstand, or be the victims ofj the most violent of revolutions, it was difficult to imagine. Louis XVI. was a child in goodness, in helplessness, in irresolution, — saying little, thinking less. Shrinking from this and from every other act of manhood, he was a perfect specimen of that inane shadow in which centuries of absolute power, un- bridled lust, and uncultivated intellect, in one privileged family, but too naturally terminate. The Count de Provence, or Monsieur, as the next brother to the monarch was emphatically called, was 38 HISTORY OF THE EEIGNS OF considered superior in capacity — and although, like a true descendant of Louis XIV., he avoided showing any symptom of that mutinous opposition, which the Duke of Orieans hazarded, he still kept aloof from the follies and' extravagance of the Court, cultivating a taste for letters, and affecting, as far as was decorous and safe, the philo- sopher and the wit. Far too timid and too loyal to flatter the Parliament, join in its judicial malcontentism, or form connexion with the rising demagogy. Monsieur still showed himself liberal in the Committees of the Assembly of Nota- bles, over which he presided. In these he went far enough to be considered by the Queen and the ultra-royalist parti- zans as no friend to the throne, yet he did not go far enough to win the confidence even of those who lent an impulse to the revolution in the hope that it would check its onward course, and settle down into some form of con- stitutional government. The constitutionalists at first preferred the Duke of Orleans, as possessed of boldness at least. The pure royal- ists placed their hopes in the King's younger brother, the Count d'Artois, a Prince possessed of those physical advantages which his elders wanted. He was tall, grace- ful, handsome, fond of the chace, and when at Court had gallant adventures, sufficient to make him a reputation. One of these, which ended tragically, had such an effect upon him, as to lead to his forswearing in future any such pursuit or such connexion. The piety and virtue of the Prince, originating in such a cause, shed a certain atmosphere of romance about him. Moreover as he was equally resolute and enthusiastic in political opinions, and in his attachment to the obsolete monarchy, which was perishing before his eyes, as well as to the aristocratic LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 39 cause, with which it was indissolubly linked, the Count d'Artois was considered the Prince Rupert of the French Revolution, one at least who would flush his sabre in oflering resistance, nor yield till he had fought and bled. With such sentiments and such a reputation the Count d'Artois left Versailles with the first batch of emigrants. The army of Conde was already formed, and Europe at war with France, before the Comte de Provence thought it advisable to escape from the Palace of the Luxembourg. The Prince has left an account of his escape, penned by his afterwards royal hand. It is remarkable for the almost womanly tenderness expressed towards his friend d'Avaray, the horror which he avowed for a family dinner, and the inimitably expressive remark of an old woman, to the coarseness and colour of whose bread the fat and Epicurean Prince objected, " Man^ez en" said she, " cela vous de- graissera." The Counts of Provence and of Artois agreed as little in exile as at their brother's court. Proud of having run away from the very first menaces of the Revolution, the nobles and princes thus distinguished looked down upon those whose exile was of later date, and deemed that to have awaited for necessity was a disgrace, not an excuse. The chivalrous nobles rallied round the Count d'Artois. Those of the exiles, who pretended to the calm and gravity of politicians, followed the Count de Provence, Un- fortunately the politicians had no policy, and the cavalier princes little chivalry. Their first years of exile in common were spent in squabbles with each other, and in disputes about their respective dignities, rather than in intelligible plans for either overcoming the resistance or even earning the respect of the French. 40 HISTORY OF THE REIGNS OF In January, 1793, the unfortunate Louis XVI. perished on a revolutionary scaffold. His young son, still a prisoner in the Temple, succeeded, in the eyes of the exiles, to the title of Louis XVII. ; but it seemed requisite that, at least during his minority, his uncles, who were at liberty, as well as of mature years, should assume some title indicative of their authority and pretensions. Deep dissensions prevailed between their partisans on this subject ; and they had recourse to foreign princes to decide the weighty matter. All declined the task as invidious and idle. At length the compromise was made by declaring Monsieur, Regent of France, and his brother, the Count d'Artois, Lieutenant-general of the kingdom. The title assumed indicated the purpose of military effort; but the German princes were not enthusiastic to second it : and the Lieutenant-general learning the chivalrous sentiments of Catherine II. Empress of Russia, for the re-establishment of the French monarchy and its royal race, repaired to St. Petersburg. He was cordially received by the Empress ; not so cordially by her ministers, who seemed indisposed to trust a military force to the guidance of the Prince. They were, however, sufficiently lavish of promises; and as he was anxious to return, in order to bring the assurances of Russian aid to his comrades, a day was fixed for his departure, and his audience of leave was arranged with great solemnity. The Empress Catherine, surrounded by her Court, ad- vanced to the Prince, holding in her hand a valuable sword, which had received priestly benediction in the Cathedral of St. Petersburg. This sword the Empress presented to her guest, with the observation that she only gave it in the persuasion that he would sooner perish LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 41 than defer to make use of it. The Count d'Artois begged the Empress to entertain no doubt upon such a subject ; yet even this was said in such a tone that Prince Esterhazy, being asked by the Count de Vauban, both of whom were present, what he thought, the Austrian replied, that " there was infinite grandeur in the Empress, but as for the Comte d'Artois, he received the sword like one who certainly would make no use of it." The remark proved true, as far as the blade was concerned, but the diamond hilt was sold not long after to a London Jew, for the sum of four thousand pounds sterling. The present of a sword, without troops or supplies, made too by a powerful and wealthy sovereign, might warrant the French Prince in not making use of what was but a valuable bauble. The English Government, however, offered the Count d'Artois a noble opportunity of wielding and employing Catherine's gift. The first insurrection of La Vendee was over ; it had terminated in a great measure because unsupported by the presence of a French Prince. The English Government resolved to reawaken the insur- rection, and ofiered to equip and to convey a large body of emigres to the coast of France. Ten thousand of them were landed at Quiberon ; whilst the Count d'Artois, then Monsieur, was conveyed on board- the Jason frigate, within view of another part of the coast, where the gallant Vendeans awaited his landing. Courage, however, failed the Prince, at the moment of trying a soldier's fortune on the soil of France. He refused to trust his person on shore, met with evasion the exhortations of those who came on board to press his landing, and at last returned to England in the Jason, to the indignation of Lord Grenville, and to the despair of the Vendeans, who had 42 HISTOEY OP THE REIGNS OP risen a second time purely in hopes of his Royal High- ness's presence. "Make efforts for such people!" ex- claimed Lord Grenville to the Austrian and Eussian envoys. The Vendean chief, Charette, proclaimed his sentiments in a letter to Louis XVIII. It was as follows :— Sire, The cowardice of your brother has lost all. Ap- pearing upon these shores, there was for him but the alternatives of winning everything or throwing all away. . His return to England has decided our fate. There now remains nothing for us but to perish uselessly for the service of your Majesty. Charette. Charette, who was taken prisoner a few months later, amidst the total discomfiture of his cause, was shot at Nantes. Some of the friends of the Count d'Artois have sought to excuse his pusillanimity by stating the objections which he entertained to M. de Puisaye and to Charette himself, as royalists not without liberal or constitutional ideas, more inclined to the Count de Provence than him- self The Prince even compared M. de Puisaye to Robes- pierre, so incapable was he of appreciating any loyalty which did not sink to servility. His royalism was a re- ligion, which he thought heresy to inoculate with a particle of liberalism or freedom. Whilst the Count d'Artois was thus flinging cold water on the burning heroism of La Vendee, Moi'isieur was coquetting with the federative movements of the south of France. That noble protest against the tyranny and criminal ascendancy of Paris might have had some chance of success, had not the royalists flung themselves into the LOUIS XVIII. AND CHAELBS X. 43 cause, and perverted it so as to disgust even the friends of moderate liberty. Such mean and foolish efforts of the royalists to creep back to power and existence under a republican disguise, resulted merely in sending the Gi- rondists to the scaffold, and in affording the first field to the military greatness of Napoleon. Had not Toulon been to be conquered, a young artillery officer might have long waited such another opportunity of distinguishing himself. The death of the hapless Dauphin furnished the Count de Provence with authority for carrying on the war of con- spiracy and intrigue. This event took place in June, 1795 ; and his uncle, then residing at Verona, instantly assumed the title of Louis XVIII. , King of France and Navarre, and published a proclamation, announcing his accession to the throne, in language far more insulting than conciliatory to the French nation. " The impenetrable decrees of Providence," said the new monarch, "have transmitted to us, with the crown, the necessity of rescuing it from revolt. Impious and factious men have dragged you into irreligion and insur- rection, from which moment a deluge of calamities has overwhelmed you. Unfaithfiil to the God of your fathers, that God, justly provoked, has made you feel the weight of his anger. You were unfaithful to the authority which he established to govern you; a sanguinary despotism, alternating with a no less cruel anarchy, have torn you unceasingly with a rage which does not abate. Your pro- perty became the prey of brigands, at the same moment that the throne fell into the hands of usurpers. Servi- tude and tyranny have not ceased to oppress you since the throne no longer covered you with its segis. Property, security, liberty, have all disappeared with the government 44 HISTORY 0¥ THE EEIGNS OF of the monarchy. Eeturn to that holy religion which brought down upon France the blessings of Heaven. Ee- establish that government, which, for fourteen centuries, was the glory and the delight of the French, which made your country the most flourishing of States, and yourselves the happiest of people. Every Frenchman, who abjures perni- cious opinions, may cast himself at the foot of the throne, and be received there. There are crimes, indeed, whose atrocity passes the bounds of clemency. Those monsters, the regicides, will be named by posterity with horror. All France calls upon those heads the sword of justice." M. de Polignac might himself have written this first emanation from the royalty of Louis XVIII., so unlike in its exaggeration to the maturer sentiments of the Prince. But Eobespierre had not long fallen. There was a strong reaction in Paris of the educated, and even of the burgess class, against the democracy of the streets and the clubs. Amongst the amnestied exiles, many royalists had re- turned, who were provided with money by governments interested in a royalist restoration; and that a successful movement for that purpose would take place, was the daily hope of the little Court of Verona. The attempt was made. Some of the boldest engaged the armed citi- zens in their sections to imitate the previous tactics of the populace, and march upon the Tuileries. A few cannon- shot, directed by General Bonaparte, sufficed to disperse them, and with them the hope of the Bourbons. Victo- rious in Paris, Bonaparte then took the command in Italy. Alarmed by his victories, the Venetian Senate begged Louis XVIII. to remove his Court from Verona. "Give me the golden book," rejoined Louis XVIII., " that I may erase from it the name of my family from LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 45 the Patriciale of Venice ; and restore me the suit of armour, which my ancestor, Henry IV., presented to your republic." In the spring of 1796, the King abandoned Italy for the Rhine, whither he was not only driven by necessity, but attracted by negotiations, wellnigh concluded between the royalists and General Pichegru. The latter promised to hoist the white flag, and march with such of the troops as would follow it, and with the corps of emigrants, to Paris. The Prince of Conde, however, would not trust Pichegru, or act secondary to him, which would alone have defeated the project, even if Pichegru could have accomplished what he proposed. The government in Paris cut short the military plot by the recal of Pichegru. The general did not despair of accomplishing, as a civilian and as a member of the representative body, that restoration which he had failed to effect by the sword. He accepted the task, but accompanied his acceptance by protesting against the apparent design of the emigrants to restore the old abso- lutism of the Bourbons. To this the King replied with some political jesuistry, and drew up a proclamation to suit Pichegru 's purposes, in which the word constitution was mentioned, but it was a constitution of the old hereditary, not the new English model. " We enjoined our agents," said Louis XVIII., " to recal our people to the holy religion of our fathers, and to the paternal government which was so long the glory of France. Explain to them the constitution of the State, which has been calumniated because it was misunderstood. Distinguish what it was originally from what was more recently introduced. Show that it was as remote from despotism as from anarchy. Consult the enlightened as to 46 HISTORY OF THE REIGNS OF how it may be perfected, and announce the government by which it may be ameliorated." To comprehend this jargon, it must be borne in mind, that the French were constitution-mongering at this epoch ; that they were very much disgusted with the republic, with its popular sovereignty, and with the results which they had produced ; but, at the same time, that they were far too proud, and had too grandiose an idea of their own capacity and originality, to admit the necessity of borrow- ing principles or systems of government from England. Constitutional monarchy had been invented by England, and consequently neither royalist nor republican would have it. The few, such as Madame de Stael, Messrs. de Montmorency and de Narbonne, were really unpopular, because they preferred to borrow the only possible form of free government from England ; and because England was a constitutional monarchy, the French were determined to be something else. That something else they became in 1800, and that something else they have again become in 1853. It remains to be seen whether prudent imitation be not better than foolish originality. A number of liberal and moderate men in France were agreed, that the first requisite for a stable government was the restoration of a Bourbon Prince. Therewas then, in truth, prospect of no other : and who could look to such rulers as Barras and Lepaux ? A BourbOn Prince once more upon the throne, his government could not but be weak enough to allow of the establishment of some po- pular or constitutional control. The best men of the time, therefore, combined to bring about a royalist restora- tion. Nor was it far from success. It had a majority in the Assemblies ; it counted in its ranks general officers of LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 47 renown ; the voice of the citizens, as well as the educated and upper class of the capital and provinces were for it. The plot, of which Pichegru was the chief, was on the very point of accomplishment. It was fixed for the 18th Fruc- tidor, when one, entrusted with the secret by the emigrant Court of Louis XVIII., betrayed it, and caused its defeat. The Duke of Carency, son of the Duke de Vauguyon, who was foreign minister and ambassador of Louis XYIIL, was at the time in Paris, living in debauchery, and embar- rassed with debt. A sum of money, and the solicitations of a mistress greedy of money, induced the Duke of Carency to betray the scheme and its accomplices to the Director Barras. He and his colleagues lost no time in counteracting it. Augereau and his republican regiments were called in to seize on the gates and chief posts of Paris, and on the night of the 17th to the 18th, the coup d'etat of Fructidor was consummated by the arrest of all concerned in the royalist restoration. Fifty deputies, di- rectors, and journalists were transported to Cayenne, and the hopes and the efforts of the royalists were drowned this time, not in blood, but in ridicule and disgrace. Henceforth the Bourbons, with ample cause, despaired of effecting any revolution in their favour by means of public opinion, or by the influence of the middle or educated classes. These had displayed their powerlessness to con- tend with the .military and dictatorial spirit of the day. The resource of continental aid was at the same time taken from them. Bonaparte dictated the terms of the treaty of Campo Formio, and Louis XVIII. was obliged to remove his person and his Court from the Elbe, as he had done from the Adige and the Rhine. Mittau, in the Duchy of Courland, within the dominions of the Emperor of Russia, 48 HISTORY OP THE REIGNS OF became his residence. The means of livelihood were fur- nished by the Eussian Court, to the amount of 24,000^. a-year, to which the Court of Madrid added between 3,000^. and 4,000Z. Fortune seemed to offer a gleam of hope, by the cessation of hostilities, which rendered the military spirit apparently less predominant in France, which even sent beyond sea the most republican legions and officers of the army under the redoubtable Bonaparte, and which delivered the destinies of France into the hands of a needy, despotic, and well-born adventurer. The folly of the royalist agents in having depended upon Pichegru exclusively, and in not having tried to win over Director Barras, became evident, when this personage, in all the pride of his triumph and supremacy, received with eagerness the offers of the Bourbon emissary. In crushing the royalists by the coup d'etat of Fructi- dor, Barras and his colleagues conceived the hope that a civilian government might still administer the affairs of France, independent of military dictation. They got rid of Bonaparte and his army in order to try the experiment ; and Bonaparte sailed to Egypt with his army, partly to allow them to try the experiment and fail, — and fail most egregiously they did. Although they had Talleyrand, and Carnot, and Fouche, and Sieyes, with the entire of the civilian talent and experience which remained true to the revolution, the Directorial Government was incapable of organizing even an administration of the provinces. They had grasped absolute power in Fructidor, had gagged the press, intimidated any opposition which rose above intrigue or chicane, yet they could not govern, could not main- tain respect, or establish authority. Finances could not be said to exist ; they declared two-thirds (that is, two mil- LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 49 liards) of the public debt cancelled, yet they were quite as remote as ever from paying the interest of the remaining third. Forced and progressive loans did not furnish wherewithal to equip the armies, which, low in confidence, as in equipment and sustenance, were driven back in dis- comfiture to the frontiers of France. Russia and Austria had again rushed to arms. There were but two modes of saving France from ruin, — to throw its whole government, fortune, and resources into the hands of a military chief, who could carry on the war, or else to make peace abroad, and put an end to faction at home by a Bourbon restor- ation. Barras preferred the latter, which he had defeated in Fructidor. He made terms, and they were granted to him in the following letters-patent : — " General Paul de Barras, having consented to re-esta- blish the French monarchy in the person of Louis XVIII., indemnity and security are pledged to him in return. The King engages his sacred word to interpose his authority against any accusation or prosecution of General Barras for his opinions or his votes. Moreover, he promises an in- demnity equal to two years of the salary and profits of the Director, estimated at twelve millions of livres-tournois, not comprising two millions destined to accomplish the revo- lution." Such a natural death was the republic about to die, in 1799, from the despair of those intrusted with the govern- ment, as well as from the progress of its enemies in the field, when Bonaparte returned from Egypt. To turn out Barras and his colleagues was a matter of such facility, that it can scarcely be called a revolution ; and to follow the example of the Directory, in expelling the opponents of the change from the Representative Assemblies, which VOL. r. E 50 HISTORY OF THE REIGNS OP had witnessed and participated in the imbecility and inca- pacity of such governors, can scarcely be considered as either a novelty or a crime. The Bourbon agents, who followed, as it were, the scent of power, as it escaped from one person or party to become vested in another, lost no time in applying to General Bonaparte, as they had done to Pichegru and to Barras. "As long as I hold the govern- ment," replied Bonaparte, honestly and frankly, " the Bourbons have no chance of coming back. Had I known of the letters-patent of Barras, I would have had him shot with them pinned upon his breast." Subsequent attempts of royalist agents upon this personage were attended with as little effect : and the reports depict him, with great sagacity and fidelity, as a man " bent upon pur- suing a solitary path, not to wealth, or to title," but, as he expressed himself, " to glory and immortality." It were well for the royalist party, if their next efforts for the resurrection of their cause could be passed over in silence. But the truth unfortunately is, that when it became hopeless either to resist the government, which Bonaparte was founding, by armies in the field, or to seduce it by all the proffers which legitimacy could make, the partisans of the discomfited cause had recourse to means as desperate as dishonourable : and the taking away the life of the First Consul became the starting point of every movement and of every plot. The degeneration of the gallant and open resistance of the Vendeans into the more individual, desperate, and unscrupulous attempts of bands of Chouans, produced for royalism a number of dangerous and reckless characters, who might have been bold leaders, with a people or a peasantry to follow them ; but who, reduced to the efforts of their single arms, or at most to LOTJIS XVIII. AND CHAELES X. 51 the support of a few determined followers, were but too naturally brought to narrow their military tactics to daring attempts at abduction or assassination. It is difficult to say how far the Princes of the House of Bourbon counte- nanced such schemes. They were ignorant, no doubt, of such criminal machinations as the explosion of the infernal machine ; but as royalist agents were at the bottom of the attempt, and as English money was frequently placed at the disposal of these agents, very great obloquy came to rest in the French public mind, both upon the Bourbons and upon the kind of support afforded them by the British Government. Nor was this disgust confined to the French. The Em- peror Paul of Russia also soon entertained similar feelings. Some disgrace to his arms, with certain causes of grievance given him by the English, coupled with the criminal attempt of the infernal machine, induced this monarch to stretch out the hand of amity to Bonaparte, and at the same time to expel from Mittau in the midst of winter Louis XVIII. and his relatives. The daughter, and then only surviving child, of the unfortunate Louis XVI. and of Marie Antoinette, had been liberated from the prison of the Temple, and allowed to join her relatives at Mittau. The first use made of her liberty was to marry her to the Duke d'Angouleme, son of the Count d'Artois, and consequently her own first cousin. The Archduke Charles of Austria had asked her in marriage ; but it was not the good fortune of the captive of the Temple to espouse that hero, who was afterwards the worthy rival of Napoleon at Aspern and Wagram. Flying from the capricious anger of the Emperor Paul, the Bourbon Princes took reiuge first in Prussia, which only consented to receive them on the pro- E 2 52 HISTORY OF THE HBIGNS OF raise of wearing no royal title, and making no effort at restoration. None of his prefects could be more obsequious at that time to the French ruler than the King of Prussia. Louis XVIII. removed to Warsaw. And here it was that the President of the Polish Diet, whether moved by Prussia, or of his own accord, imagining he should do a service to France, made the formal proposal to Louis XVIII. to renounce the crown of France for himself and his family, on the condition of receiving in return a handsome pecuniary indemnity or allowance. Bonaparte denied having ever sanctioned any one to make such an offer. But as he was meditating at the same time his; elevation to the empire, and as he was carefully inquiring how the other Courts of Europe would receive or recognise an Emperor thus fabricated, it is more than probable that he directed the proposal to be made, the acceptance of which by the Bourbons could not but have favoured Napoleon's intentions and facilitated his recognition by Europe. Louis XVIII. made the following reply : — " I do not confound Bonaparte with his predecessors., I even thank him for many acts of his administration. The good that is done for my people must be dear to me. But he mistakes in thinking he can induce me to make any compromise of my rights. On the contrary, such a step taken by him confirms those rights. I am ignorant of the designs of Providence with respect to me and my race ; but I feel the obligations imposed upon me together with my rank ; as a Christian, I will fulfil those obliga- tions to my last breath. A son of St. Louis I can, like him, respect myself, and I will make myself respected, even m irons. The successor of Francis I., I must LOUIS XVIII, AND CHARLES X. 53 keep it in my power to say like him, ' All is lost, save honour.' " As the ambition and power of Napoleon grew, and as it became each day more evident that the force of the government and the system which he was founding was concentrated in his person, the projects of assassination, baffled in the attempt of the infernal machine, were re- newed. Georges Cadoudal, the Chouan, and originator of that plot, returned to Paris in 1803, with similar intentions. Pichegru came back also. General Moreau was sounded, and did not show himself averse to a scheme for overthrow- ing the government of Bonaparte, although he doubted whether the Bourbons could be established in his place. The police got wind of the plot. The chief conspirators, Pichegru and Georges, were seized. The latter confessed that he had come to Paris to attack the First Consul, and to employ personal violence. He thus disguised assassi- nation under the plea of open war. The exasperation of Napoleon was such that he too had recourse to the same unworthy subterfuge of covering assassination under the plea of war. He caused the Due d'Enghien, the only issue of the Condes, to be seized in a neutral country, to be hurried to Vincennes and shot, although the Prince demanded an interview with the First Consul, no doubt trusting to his generosity as a soldier. The defiance cast to the Bourbons and to legitimacy by such an act, was followed by something more conclusive, the elevation of Napoleon to the empire, the Pope himself presiding at the ceremony of coronation^ and not a few of the ancient noblesse accepting offices and dignities at the new Court. The creation of an empire, with the principle of hereditary succession restored. Was considered 54 HISTOEY OF THE EEIGNS OP necessary to put an extinguisher on the ambition of the revolutionists. It was also rendered necessary by the scheme of establishing a sort of suzerainty over a great portion of Europe, the ruler of France, like another Charlemagne, imposing his policy and communicating his orders to subordinate monarchs. This again was rendered indispensable by the necessity of arraying Europe against England. The new pretensions begot resistance and war, war in which the Emperor triumphed, and which, rendering him victorious even over Russia, obliged Louis XVIII. not only to bid adieu to the Continent but to abandon the assumption of the royal title. The Bourbon Princes, like all the sovereigns of Europe, saw in the military supremacy which Napoleon was establishing over Europe a new foundation of empire which nothing could shake. They all, following the example of Napoleon himself, considered the people of Europe as nothing, and as not more than the people of France. Napoleon had made light of his own, and made no account of the other. The Kings and Courts which he crushed, did not look further or more profoundly ; nor did they see any chance in the future of escaping from that iron rule which extended over them. All the Con- tinent, therefore, turned its back upon the Bourbons. The brother Princes, in this extremity of their affairs, met at a remote town in Sweden, almost on the confines of Europe. In this interview Louis XVIII. represented to his brother that no hopes any longer existed of their restoration by virtue of the pure monarchical principle, which, forgotten by the people, was equally despaired of by the other sovereigns of Europe, who worshipped nothing but force, who bowed the knee before the usurper of the French throne, and did not shrink from giving their LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 55 daughter to him as consort. There was no longer any hope from Europe, none from the French people, none from the French noblesse, who had crowded into the Imperial ante- chambers, none from that holy religion which the Count d' Artois especially invoked, but whose chief did not shrink from proceeding to crown the modern Charlemagne — all these principles and parties, upon which the Count d'Artois had leaned, and which he, Louis XVIII. had striven to employ and conciliate, had failed. The exiled King argued, that only one party remained to appeal to, and to trust in, the constitutional party, that of the educated, the independent, yet anti-aristocratic class of French, to whom the task of founding and restoring something like a government in France sooner or later must revert. To this proposal, based upon the principles of true wisdom, the Count d'Artois replied by contempt. He refused to join in any such proclamation, or expression of principle, as Louis proposed ; all he would consent to, was to refrain from protesting against any promises which the King might publicly make. Deterred by the stupid zeal of his brother, Louis confined himself to an idle and insignificant protest against the empire, and hastened to bury himself in a retreat in England, where, estranged from politics or intrigue, he might await such chances as time and events should develop. Even in England, Louis met only with incivility and mistrust. An order from Mr. Canning bade the vessel which brought the Koyal fugitive repair to Edinburgh, instead of coming to any southern port. Louis refused to be thus thrust into a corner, although he agreed to assume merely the title of Count of Lille, and to re- frain from any active steps to recover the throne. On these conditions he was allowed to reside tranquilly in Buck- 56 HISTORY OF THE RBIONS OP inghamshire, at Gosfield Hall first, and afterwards at Hartwell. When the Bourbons thus laid aside in despair the task of restoring the ancient monarchy, Napoleon himself took it up by setting about the ruin of all the supporters of his own empire. Having blotted Prussia from the map of Europe, married an Archduchess, and still retaining Austria in the rank of a subject kingdom, Napoleon abolished the remaining vestiges of freedom in France. And thus trusting solely to his army, neglecting popular support at home, and in despair of any popular opinion abroad, he flung his soldiers, amounting with the auxiliaries to a million of men, into the heart of the Russian empire, not to conquer it (that he did not pretend to do, nor even to dismember it, for he shrunk carefully from the least ap- pearance of restoring Poland), but simply to reduce Alexander to the subordinate position of the Austrian and the Prussian monarchs. The result was the loss of his veteran army, of his undisputed claims to dictatorship at home, and of his suzerainty over Germany. Could he have abandoned or modified prudently or seasonably one or the other, he might no doubt have prolonged his reign. But he knew not how to bow to either exigency. In the campaigns, which followed after his defeat in 1813, Napoleon still showed himself superior in military power and resources to Russia and Prussia combined. From Lutzen and Bautzen he drove them before him, and although he had no cavalry to convert their defeat into rout, he still compelled the Russians to meditate a retreat into Poland, in order to reorganize their army, and reduced even the boldest Prussians to despair.* Napoleon * See Baron MufHing's book. LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 57 had but to conciliate Austria, to come to an accord with the one Prince, his father-in-law, by yielding that portion of his pretensions, which rendered him dominant over central Europe, but which in truth were of no real use to France, except in a contest with England. Yet by making peace with the Continent he reduced England, situated as was its ministry, its finances, and its public affairs, to the necessity of peace. He would not, however, abandon his dream of enacting Charlemagne, that dream which was antagonistic to, and incompatible with, the resumption of its old power and position by Austria. He braved its enmity rather than accept its equal terms of friendship. And Austria joining Prussia and Kussia crushed him finally and irrecoverably at Leipzic* When the chief of the Bourbon family, in the meeting with his brother at Calmar, previous to his retirement into England, believed that all hopes of active co-operation in France towards the restoration of the family were past, he still did not despair of the future. All the nobles, all the zealots, all the men of his party might forsake it. But the ideas and the principle would survive, he thought, as well as the necessities be reproduced, from which legitimacy might again resuscitate, though allied with the more ad- vanced and liberal wants of the age. In such belief and such sentiment Louis XYIII. was perfectly correct, for however vain to conspire against a government so vigilant and so powerful, still it was too oppressive not to generate hatred and resistance, and these sentiments, at least in the educated classes, could scarcely take any other form than constitutional Royalism. Nor was opposition altogether ex- * For Austria's conduct on this occasion see the account of Narbonne's :mission, in Villemain's " Souvenirs." 58 HISTORY OP THE REIGNS OP tinguished. Denied the power of speech by the gagging of the Tribunate and the prohibition of all political discussion, opposition showed itself where the spirit of intellectual independence naturally takes refuge, in the sanctuary of letters. In vain were the printed works of De Stael piled in a mortar ; in vain was Chateaubriand by turns menaced and cajoled ; useless were the efforts made to enlist Ducis and Delille amongst the muses of Imperialism ; the highest literary geniuses of Napoleon's time main- tained an attitude of blame and alienation, scorning to become his servitors, even whilst abandoning as idle the duty of protest and of resistance. Strange as it may appear, Napoleon himself was obliged to support, and was led to employ many writers, whose aims and principles were strongly opposed to his. When he restored the Pope and the French clergy, his hope was to rally to him the religious and philosophic partisans of monarchy. But there also existed a literary and philo- sophic school, born of the Eevolution, or rather parent of it, the ideas of which were derived from the wits and writers of the eighteenth century, from those who had dethroned religion, overthrown the Church, scouted the philosophy which allied with them, and which had popu- larised, not proved, a system of materialism, consisting in the belief of all things seen, plain and habitual, and in a negation of all that was spiritual, either in man's nature or in that of the universe. The convictions, or rather the speculations, of Napoleon, wavered between these two diametrically opposed sys- tems of creed and of philosophy. A conscientious ex- amination of their comparative worth and truth was not in his character. To whatever would have seconded or LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 59 been attached to him cordially, he would in recompense have bestowed full favour. But neither school of philosophy was prepared to disavow all other hopes and allegiance than his, however both were willing to flatter and make use of his power as a temporary support. Both philoso- phies, indeed, aspired to freedom, freedom at least of opinion and expression. Napoleon eyed with suspicion the tendencies of both. The philosophy of the eighteenth century had produced the Revolution, and had reigned predominant in its first assemblies. However oblivious of liberty for a time such a school might be, in favour of a man who humbled Europe and reduced it to the feet of that power which the Revolution had raised up, it could never sit long in satisfaction and alliance with a military dictator, who not only made war upon books and upon thought, but who had restored the priesthood to its ancient place. In order, therefore, to counterbalance the disciples of Voltaire he took by the hand the more moderate of those who upheld a spiritual philosophy, and who joined to it a monarchical idea in politics. Of this school were De Maistre, Chateaubriand, Bonald, and Fontanes. Napo- leon was eager to employ them, if they showed anything like attachment to his government; and they in their turn were not indisposed to show a certain amount of gratitude and attachment, as far as the acts and the tyranny of the Imperial government would permit. After the cata- strophe of the Due d'Enghien, Chateaubriand, then envoy in the Valais, refused to serve Napoleon any longer. Fontanes, himself, then grand-master of the university, having been reported in the Moniteur as approving in one of his speeches the recent measures of the government, 60 HISTORY OF THE EEIGNS OF was horrified, as the word measures included the death of the Due d'Enghien. His approbation had been bestowed expressly on the laws recently promulgated. Fontanes, at the risk of displeasing Napoleon, insisted on an erratum, substituting Laws for Measures, being inserted in the Moniteur. One of the most decided acts of Napoleon in favour of the religious-philosophic school was the nomination of Fontanes to be head of the university. Fontanes, the friend of Chateaubriand and Bonald, made use of his influence to introduce into the university the principal men of the religious school, such as Bonald himself, M. de Beausset, Frayssinous. He only obtained the latter nomination after six months' eflbrts with the Emperor, who, to counteract the Church tendencies of the grand-master, insisted on the nomination of the fol- lowers of Voltaire, such as Arnauld, Fourcroy, and Laro- miguiere. This combat of the sensualist and spiritualist, of the revolutionary and the monarchic, writers and thinkers was carried on, not merely in the university, but in the press, fallen and menaced as it was. The Journal des Debats was the organ in which the Royalist contrived to fling his javelin at the Revolutionist. Napoleon so far permitted this, as to pay largely the editor, M. Fievee, not only for writing in moderate support of his opinion in the Debats, but for correspondmg directly and secretly with himself, by which the Emperor hoped to be in posses- sion of the secret views of a party, whicb he dreaded whilst he patronised. At last the Emperor saw through the full hostility which was covered with so much talent, and such a show of moderation. "These men," said he. LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 61 " are leading the way to a monarchy, different from that which it is my intention to found." The editorship of the Journal des Debats was accordingly taken from Fievee, and given to the Voltairian Etienne, whilst, not to extinguish the religious monarchists, the feuilleton, or literary and critical portion of the journal, transferred to the Journal de TEmpire, was left in the hands of GeofFroy and the anti- Voltairians. Whilst in literature and in the university the Eoyalist cause was thus kept alive, it also, as may well be supposed, survived or became resuscitated amongst the clergy. These, too, like their lay friends, were inclined to be grateful to the French Consul and Emperor for having re- stored them to influence and avenged them of the Jacobins. But the ecclesiastical, no more than the philosophical, could bring themselves to believe in the permanence of the go- vernment or the dynasty, which seemed to place its sole intrinsic reliance in itself and in the brute force of its soldiers, making use at the same time of the republican and the Royalist, the materialist and the religionist, to be the instruments and servitors of a power based upon no principle whatever, but upon force and the necessities of the moment. Napoleon himself soon perceived that he had been mis- taken in the hope of forming for himself a party in the Church. At first, and for a time, he allowed eminent doctors and preachers the same liberty in their schools and churches which he allowed to M. Fievee in the Journal des Debats. Under favour of this protection Frayssinous opened his famous conferences at St. Sulpice, whither the studious youth of the universities were attracted, and where many of these were won over from the scoffing and mate- 62 HISTOEY OF THE REIGNS OP -rialist opinions of the day, to the opposite extreme of resign nig their reason at the altar of religious faith. The police, however, which meddled with everything, soon found fault with the enthusiastic sentiments kindled by the preaching and teaching of the divine. It was signified to M. Frayssinous that he was not orthodox. "In what have I sinned against orthodoxy ?" asked the Christian preacher. " You have neither pronounced the eulogium of the Em- peror nor proved the righteousness of the law of conscrip- tion," replied Fouche. M. Frayssinous, with flexible spirit, returned thanks from the pulpit for that beneficent power which had upreared the altars of religion in France ; but this was not enough. Napoleon at the time quarrelled with the Pope and began to mistrust the clergy ; Frayssi- nous was silenced and Fontanes dismissed. After a brief trial of the effect of allowing some little liberty to the press, the pulpit, and the professorial chair, Napoleon found that none could give him influence, approval, or support, and that in pretending to work for his tyranny they in reality undermined it. And he was right; his sceptre was a sword-blade, which mere exposure to the open air of free discussion and opinion oxidised and destroyed. Such was the mutism established and the discontent sown, amidst all the intellectual, educated, and pious of the French, when Napoleon marched with his legions to subdue Kussia. Painful, therefore, as were the tidings of his great disaster, they came not unattended by a ray of hope. If the pride of conquest was to be humbled, intel- lect might hope for emancipation and freedom for yet another birth. Unfortunately these natural and noble feel- ings of the educated French were not shared by the peasant and the popular class. The people saw but the humiliation LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 63 of the national pride, the reversal of its conquests, the overthrow of its ascendancy, all summed up and repre- sented by Napoleon. Some mothers, indeed, of the hum- blest, as of the highest rank, may have felt sore at the bereavements of the conscription ; some lingering germ of Eoyalism in the west, as of Papism in the south, may have excited disaffection, but by the mass of the uneducated French, and even by the more generous spirits of the young of the middle class, Napoleon was still the hero, and his fall was marked and lamented as that of the country. Here then recommenced what had been, and what was still to be, the greatest curse of France, and the greatest obstacle in the way of the freedom and happiness of that country — a deep schism between the educated and the un- educated, the first of whom aspired to freedom as the best fruit of the Revolution, whilst the second could entertain no other thoughts than those of conquest and defeat, glory and humiliation. On his return from the disaster of Leipzic, and the escape of Hanau, Napoleon felt the indecorum and impossibility of not communicating the broken state of public afiairs both to the people at large and to the only popular body. The bulletins of the day admitted his re- verses. The Senate and the Legislative Body were con- voked in December, 1813, for the purpose of receiving communications respecting the peace which the Allies proposed. The last conditions offered were to restrict France within what they were pleased to call its natural* limits — -the Alps and the Rhine. Whatever contempt Napoleon may have had for repre- sentative bodies, he at least now confessed that they had a * See the Castlereagh Correspondence for proofs of the English disgust at Alexander's use of the term. G4: HISTORY OF THE.EEIGNS OP use, and might become a necessity. He foresaw the possi- bility of the Allies pressing upon him so severely that his only safety would be in an appeal to all Frenchmen and to every class. How was this to be done, if what was called the Legislative Body was unconsulted? Napoleon, in the Moniteur, on a memorable occasion, had denied that the Legislative Body represented the nation. It re- presented merely the departments, he argued ; he, the Emperor, alone represented the nation. Such flimsy so- phisms were soon brushed away, even by himself, when he needed the support of aught approaching a representative body. Napoleon assembled them, yet showed his distrust and dread of them in so doing. They had still the right of choosing their president. He sent one of his young ministers, M. M0I6, to tell them that, lest they should choose a president ignorant of Imperial etiquette, he would provide them with one in the person of the Duke of Massa. The Legislative Body replied by electing, as the members of the Commission who were to examine and draw up a report on the State communication, the most talented and independent men of their body. These men, Laine', Kaynouard, Gallois, Maine de Biran, and Flanquer- ques, represented fully the educated and thinking class of French, those who had not forgotten the traditions of free- dom, the struggles of the revolution, and all the rights and aspirations which Napoleon had so ruthlessly confiscated and stifled. And yet they were far from thinking that Napoleon could be personally removed, or that it was necessary to overthrow him, in order to arrive at constitutional monarchy. M. Kaynouard himself declared, that the Legislative Body ought to make such an answer to the LOUIS XVIII. AND CHAELES X. 65 Emperor's communication as would make the war national, should peace be refused by the Allies. This was what Napoleon desired. But Raynouard, in the Commission, explained what he meant by peace, when he declared that " peace was impossible unless Europe was assured that there should be no more oppression." If the spirit of the Gironde showed itself in Eaynouai'd, it was more conspicuous in Laine, who declared " it was necessary to raise up the Legislative Body, to make the cry of the people for peace be heard, as well as the groans excited by oppression." This was more than enough to alarm Napoleon. Fouche', the police minister, received his orders, and he summoned the members of the Commission, in order to acquaint them with the opinions of the Emperor. " If there are Frenchmen," Napoleon said, " who seek to come to terms with the Bourbons" (so sharp-sighted was he in descrying the tendencies of men), " let them try. But I promise them, we shall fight many a battle of Ivry." Savary also reproached Laine with a leaning to the Bourbons, and asked him, " What was his aim or his desires ?" " My aim," replied Laine, " is to save my country, or at least to breathe forth the last sigh of liberty !" " Liberty," replied Savary, " is under the safeguard of the Emperor." "The Emperor," said Laine, "ought to extend his hand to a prostrate country, and to raise it up." " This is to be thought of, when peace has been ob- tained," rejoined Fouche. " The Bourbons would sacrifice the national honour, and be contented with a kingdom in Aquitaine." VOL. I. F 66 HISTORY OF THE BBIGNS OF The report drawn up by the five members of the Cora- mission was in full accordance with the sentiments expressed by Laine, and it passed the Legislative Body by 203 votes against 51. Could Napoleon have accepted the principles there laid down, and the counsels there given, and nego- tiated upon them, the Allies would no doubt have entered into serious considerations of an accord presented by an independent body in the State as well as by the Emperor. Instead of this he dissolved the Legislative Body, sup- pressed its report, and thus placing himself alone and per- sonally in opposition to the powers of Europe, took up a position separate from the nation, and suggested to the Allies the subsequent declaration of their being at war with Napoleon, and not with France. Who will say, however, that this stern refusal of even attempting to reign as a constitutional prince, or as the sovereign of a circumscribed territory, shorn of its pre- ponderance as he of his renown, was other than a just appreciation of his own character, position, and past rela- tions with Europe and with France ? A purely selfish love of the maintenance of his own personal rank and position would have induced Napoleon to listen to the Duke of Vicenza and the other councillors, who recommended his making peace on any terms ; but his mission and his ambition were not, he felt, merely to reign, nor yet to be the legislator of a free people. He made France a pre- dominant and a conquering nation, had organized her to be such, and to accept the ills which it brought for the glory which it had achieved. Another France he would not know, and after having been Napoleon he could not again be Bonaparte. He remembered the constancy of Louis Quatorze under similar menaces and siinilar misfortunes. LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 67 Should he show himself less magnanimous, less constant than a Bourbon ? In truth Napoleon had made for himself a heroism and an ascendancy which were at variance with the age, with the independence of Europe, and the necessities of France. Fall from that height he must. All left to him was to fall nobly, courageously, and consistently ; and that he did. The following is the memorable address which he made to the members of the Legislative Body when they came to compliment him on New Year's Day, 1814. " Deputies of the Legislative Body, — You might have done much good, and you have done a great deal of harm. Five-sixths of you are good men ; the remainder are fac- tious. I called you to aid me, and you have come to say and to do what aids the foreigner. Instead of union, you bring division. Your Commission has been influenced by men in the interests of England. Your reporter, M. Laine, is a dangerous man ; his report is drawn up with cunning, and with intentions which you do not suspect. The loss of two battles in Champagne would not have done me so much harm. You have mingled the bitterest irony with your reproaches. You say that adversity has given me salutary counsels. How can you reproach me with my misfortunes ? I have supported them with honour, because I received from nature a strong and a proud character; without that pride I should not have raised myself to the first throne in the world. I had need of consolation, and I expected it from you. Instead of this you have covered me with dirt ; but I am one of those whom you can kill, but not dishonour. Is it by such reproaches that you can revive the splendour of the throne? What is f2 68 HISTORY OF THE REIGNS OF the throne after all ? Four pieces of wood covered with a scrap of velvet. All depends upon him who sits thereon. The throne is in the nation ; it is I who represent it : you cannot attack me without attacking it. Four times have I been called by the nation, four times have I had the votes of five millions of citizens. I have a title ; you have none. You are but the deputies of the departments of the empire. Is this a moment to bring me remonstrances, when two hundred thousand Cossacks are passing the frontier? Is this a moment to dispute about individual liberty, when political liberty and national independence are at stake? Your ideologists demand guarantees against Government. France would demand some against the enemy. You are not content with the constitution. You should have asked for one four months ago, or have awaited till after peace. You complain of abuses and vexations. I know them as well as you: they proceed from circumstances and the misfortunes of the times. Why drag these domestic quar- rels forth in the presence of armed Europe? People ought to wash their dirty clothes in the secrecy of 'the family. You wish to imitate the Constituent Assembly, and recommence a revolution ; but I will not imitate the Monarch of that day. I should prefer to abandon the throne, and to become one of the sovereign people, than to remain enslaved as a King." Finding so little sympathy and support from the class of politicians, especially from those who came from the provinces. Napoleon resolved to make an appeal to the citizens of Paris, that capital which he had rendered splendid, if not prosperous. The National Guard was a revolutionary institution which he disliked, yet he now armed and summoned it. And ordering a solemn review LOUIS XVIII, AND CHARLES X. 69 of this body of armed citizens in the large court of the Tuileries, he presented to them, in a touching discourse, the Empress and her son, declaring to them, that he en- trusted to their care all that was most dear to him in the world. Whatever were the waverhig or nascent sentiments of the citizens of Paris, such an appeal as this was answered with enthusiasm, and for the moment with sincere attach- ment. The Bourbons on their part were not idle. Perceiving, with M. de Talleyrand, that Napoleon's desperation in Paris, and the advance of the Allies beyond the Rhine, " was the commencement of the end," the Count d'Artois left Edinburgh for Switzerland, the Duke d'Angouleme repaired to the head-quarters of Lord Wellington in the south. An active Royalist agent had already won over the Mayor and other notabilities of Bordeaux; M. de la Rochejacquelin was busied in La Vendee. But the fate of France was no longer in its own hands ; and the senti- ments of the Emperor of Russia and of his Allies were likely to be far more conclusive than any French manifesta- tion of incipient Royalism. Of the three Allied Courts which entered France at the head of their respective armies, that of Prussia, as may well be supposed, was most inveterate against Napoleon. Blucher and his staff, as well as the mass of troops which followed him, dreamed not only of avenging in Paris the capture of Berlin, but of sweeping Napoleon and his family from the throne, nay, taking his life as forfeit. The sentiments of the Austrian court and officers were different : they sought to humble, not to destroy Napoleon. The Emperor of Russia, from character as well as position, held the middle opinion. His hatred of Napoleon was more political than personal. 70 HISTORY OF THE REIGNS OF It was the union and alliance between France and Austria which had forced Russia upon its armed defence. To break that alliance for ever could alone fully accomplish the purpose of the war; and this required the dethrone- ment of Napoleon and his family. But at the same time Alexander shrunk from re-establishing the Bourbons. He had at first thought of Moreau, as a King for France, and then had fixed his choice upon Bernadotte, which gave rise to serious difi^erences between him and Lord Castle- reagh, when the latter reached the Allied Armies. The English minister, however, strongly as he was bent upon confining France within its ancient limits, and fully as he felt that the restoration of the Bourbons could best eifect that, and at the same time offer a fair guarantee of peace, hesitated to embrace their cause openly, and objected to the Due d'Angouleme's person at the head-quarters of Wellington. What is most unusual in English politics then took place.* The Prince Regent made a personal overture to the Emperor Alexander, through Prince Lieven, full of very adroit and fulsome flattery, repre- senting that monarch as the liberator of Europe, selected by Providence for the purpose. The Regent entreated the Emperor to pursue and to accomplish the great task by dethroning Bonaparte and his family, making no peace with them, issuing a declaration to the French people, separating its interests from that of the tyrant, and at the same time recalling to the French the existence of their legitimate dynasty. This proposal of the Prince Regent, and espe- cially the mode and language in which it was conveyed, seemed to please Alexander, directed as it was against * "The King always for the boldest measures."— ilfoo»-e's Diary, Dec. 21, LOUIS XVIII. AND CHAELES X. 71 Austria, and the yearnings which the Court of Vienna still felt towards Napoleon. And, no doubt, this had a great influence upon Alexander's conduct, and fixed his wavering mind in favour of a Bourbon restoration.* It so happened that the Russian and the German armies entered France by that frontier and through that province, in which all recollection or regret of Royalism was most extinct. In the south and the west of France the old ideas of religion and of the throne were still preserved, and were not difficult to resuscitate ; but the years and wars of the Revolution had nearly swept away such reminiscences from the plains of Champagne and Lorraine; and as long as Austria entertained hopes of Napoleon's submission, it would be dangerous and unfair to excite anti-Imperial manifestations. The Count d'Artois passed the frontier from Switzerland into France, on the 9th of February, accompanied by the Count d'Escars, Melchior de Polignac, and Count Trogof. Coldly received by the Austrians, through whose quarters he passed. Mon- sieur made his way to Nancy, where he hoped better from the Russian commanders ; but even these stipulated that the Count d'Artois should wear neither title nor cockade, nor reside in a public edifice. It was about the same time that the Emperor Alexan- der took up his quarters in the town of Troyes, with some of the inhabitants of which his French aide-de-camp com- municated. The result was, that on the 1 1th of February, * In Prince Lieven's despatch, containing the proposals of the Prince Regent, in the Castlereagh Correspondence. See also the letter of Baron Stein to Count Lieven, No. 60 of the Appendix to the " Lieben von Stein" by which it appears, that whilst Lord Castlereagh compelled the Allies to treat with Napoleon at Chatillon, the recommendations of the Prince Regent made Prussia and Russia neglect these negotiations, and turn against Napoleon. 72 HISTORY OF THE EEIGNS OF eight citizens of Troyes, the Marquis de Vidranges and the Chevalier de Gouault amongst them, waited on Alexander, wearing the white cockade, and demanding the restoration of the Bourbons. This was the first time these words were mentioned in France. Alexander replied to them, that the chances of war were uncertain, and that he should be sorry to see those who addres- sed him sacrificed ; nor were his fears untrue, for the Imperialists, having some days after retaken posses- sion of Troyes, the Chevalier Gouault was arrested and shot. TheRoyalistmovement at Bordeaux was better managed, and was a more spontaneous and general movement of the population. The ports, especially those of the ocean, were the places in which not only the Imperial but the Revolutionary Government were most disliked. With the loss of the French colonies and trade, Bordeaux had lost its importance. Its commercial interests were ruined, its educated and professional classes, after having sent their quota to the revolutionary scaffold, had groaned in oppression ever since, and were ready to express their feelings, as Laine, one of their most distinguished citizens, had done. The tax on drinks had weighed most upon this region, and one of the latest acts of Napoleon's distress was to augment these taxes. M. Taffard de St. Germain, a Royalist emissary, had been for some time at Bordeaux, when the approach of the English army, and the knowledge that the Duke of AngouMme was with or near it, gave force and feasibility to plans of restoration. The Mayor of Bordeaux, Count Lynchol, was also of Royalist principles. He had seen one of the Polignacs at Paris not long previous. In a meeting between him LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 73 and M. Taffard de St. Germain, on the 27th of Feb- ruary, he had agreed to proclaim Louis XVIII. at the first fitting opportunity. M. de Larochejacquelin asked the Duke of Wellington to furnish this opportunity, by advancing upon Bordeaux; but the Congress of Chatillon was still sitting, and the English General was sensitively alive to certain accusations, which Soult made against him, of seeking to create a civil war in France. He, therefore, kept the Duke of Angouleme removed from head-quarters, where, indeed, we have Mr. Larpent's testimony for knowing that he excited no profound admi- ration. On the 7th of March, however, the Commander allowed Beresford to march on to Bordeaux with 15,000 men. He was to arrive on the 12th. On the previous day the Mayor assembled the municipal body, summoned M. de TaflFard before it. There it was agreed that the authorities should go in procession to meet the British General, before him assume the white cockade, and proclaim Louis XYIII. This was done on the 12th. The magistrates of Bordeaux proceeded to meet Beresford, who rather awkwardly and rudely professed not to understand them, and talked of taking possession of Bordeaux in the name of his master. He doubted, as did the Commander-in-chief, of the popularity of the Bourbons. They had, however, boons and arguments wherewith to win the Bordelais ; for when the Duke of Angouleme, at his public entry, promised that there should be no more war, no more con- scription, no more tax upon drinks, the people of Bordeaux flung up their caps without hesitation, and welcomed the Bourbon princes within their walls. Such events were more important for the influence they were likely to produce upon the Sovereigns then approaching Paris, than 74 HISTORY OF THE EEIGNS OF from any force that actually existed for the Bourbons in the Gironde. The historian of Napoleon has a splendid picture to paint in the doubts and alternations of fortune and of life which beset the Emperor, now crushed by numbers and broken in spirit, almost reduced to consent to reign over the France that Louis XIV. had left, now recovering hopes and pride in victory, and boasting that he was still nearer to Vienna than his enemies to Paris. But the alter- nations between confidence and despair were quite as great amongst the Allies ; and as their horizon of possibilities and contingencies was wider than his, the greater was their in- certitude. In such a state of suspense, and amongst so many wavering resolutions, it is wonderful what the energy and determination of one man may effect. Amongst the restless and ardent spirits who made a religion of their loyalty, and who scorned to serve in France other than their legitimist monarchs, was the Baron de VitroUes. He had been an officer in the emigrant array of the Prince of Conde, and was residing in Piedmont, when it was an- nounced that the Allied Armies had invaded France, and that the Bourbon princes were about to return thither. M. de Vitrolles lost no time in joining the Count d'Artois at Nancy. The Count, like all the princes and chiefs of the time, was in despair, and about to turn his back upon France and upon the Allied Sovereigns, from neither of whom was he able to win recognition or respect. The ardent spirit of Vitrolles breathed fresh confidence in the Prince ; and having done so, Vitrolles set out for the head- quarters of the Allies. He was seized by the insurgent peasants, and was wellnigh brought a prisoner before Napoleon, but his hardihood and address enabled him to LOUIS XVIII. AND CHAELES X. 75 escape. He succeeded in reaching Paris, and amongst other friends visited the Due d'Alberg. The Prince Primate of the Confederation of the Rhine, with his fortune and his dignity built up on German ground by the patronage of the French Emperor, was naturally affected by the tempest which threatened him with ship- wreck. Another Imperial dignitary, Prince Talleyrand, was much in the same predicament; but was interested, as the Due d'Alberg was not, in the setting aside of Napo- leon. The Emperor, on the very eve of quitting Paris, alluded to the enemies whom he left behind in Paris, and who were amongst his own servitors. Talleyrand at the moment took no notice of the apostrophe, but quietly con- tinued his conversation with King Joseph. He knew himself to be suspected and hated by Napoleon. Still it is too much to say that the Prince plotted the return of the Bourbons. In truth, neither he nor D'Alberg knew what to plot, for they were not even aware of the events of the day, so interrupted were the communications, so rigid the police. Some English journals, smuggled into France by the Abbe de Pradt, formed the only means of intel- ligence. But it was evident that the Emperor's power was tottering, and that it was of vital importance to the grand dignitaries to wield influence, preserve con- nexions, and render service at the moment of the great change which seemed impending. To Talleyrand's inces- sant demands for news, D'Alberg replied by proposing to send an agent to Chatillon, where the Congress was still sup- posed to be. Vitrolles was a fit person. What VitroUes wanted was the means of introducing himself to the Allied minister, or to the Emperor Alexander. Talleyrand pro- mised him a letter, but of course gave it not. The Due 76 HISTORY OF THE REIGNS OF d' Alberg had been intimate at Vienna with Count Stadion ; they were in the habit of meeting at the house of two ladies, who had received their homage, and whose names thus formed a hnk of friendship between them. Instead of a letter of introduction, the Due d' Alberg wrote the two names, and gave them to Vitrolles, as a sure and a safe passport to Stadion. Vitrolles reached Chatillon on the 9th of March. Stadion told him that Chatillon was no longer the place where grave matters were decided ; head- quarters was the place. Thither Vitrolles set off, and found Metternich and Nesselrode at Troyes. These politicians were as eager for news from Paris, and for a true account of the state of things there, as Talleyrand was to learn tidings from head-quarters. The accounts of Vitrolles were encouraging •, and the Russian and Austrian ministers had need of such, for although more convinced than ever of the impossibility of treating with Napoleon, and of the necessity of getting rid of him, they knew not how it was to be done. Vitrolles, of course, recommended them to hoist the white flag, and proclaim the Bourbons. He pro- mised zealous responses both from Paris and the pro- vinces ; but the Allied ministers shook their heads, for they saw no appearance of Royalist enthusiasm. Hereupon Vitrolles found his way to the Emperor Alexander, with whom he had a long interview on the 14th, and whom he succeeded by his energy and his information in persuading, that Paris, menaced or occupied by the Allied troops, would answer both in its senatorial and popular bodies by de- throning Napoleon, and that the citizens of the metropolis would welcome their legitimist princes as the pledges of peace and the term of disorder. Alexander inquired if there were any eminent men who would take the lead in LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 7T such a movement. M. de Vitrolles, whom the Emperor knew to be accredited by the Due d'Alberg, mentioned that Prince's name, as well as the names of Prince Talley- rand, M. de Montesquieu, and the Baron Louis. The as- surances of the Baron and Vitrolles had very great influence ill encouraging the Emperor Alexander to embrace openly Bluchers opinion, and pass over the objections of the Austrian as well as of several of his own counsellors, towards that bold line of strategy and of policy, which consisted in marching upon Paris, and procuring there the means and the materials for dethroning the Bonapartes.* Napoleon in vain exerted his military skill, and the hardihood of his generals, to avert this combined move- ment, which swept, like many converging torrents, on his capital. When the Allies were more apart, operating on a wider circumference of a circle, he could hasten with his little army from one to the other, give battle, repel an antagonist, and embarrass another who had then his flank uncovered. But as the Allied Armies approached the centre, that is, Paris, such manoeuvres became impossible. The hostile masses were too close, and in extricating himself from the attacks and even from the rout of one, he was * " The Emperor of Eussia," writes Sir Charles Stuart, at the end of January, from Langres, " avowedly declares his purpose of proceeding at all risks to Paris. The immediate hangers-on, and those who re-echo the Emperor's words — ^Baron Stein, Pozzo di Borgo, and a few others — are loud in these sentiments ; but there is a party, of which, I believe. Count Nes- selrode. Count Barclay de Tolly, and Prince Volkonski may be reckoned, who are for considering more maturely our situatien, and coming to one united object before a further advance is undertaken." What were the opinions m the Austrian army. Lord Burghersh, who accom- panied it, declares, in a letter, dated Troyes, March 12, and addressed to Lord Castlereagh : — " We are afraid of fighting. This army will not be risked in a general action. Schwarzenberg would almost wish to be back again upon the Khine. Peace is the constant cry of every ofiScer in this army." 78 HISTORY OF THE REIGNS OP sure to stumble upon another, a larger and a fresher army. He resolved, therefore, to march from out the centre, and operate upon the rear of the Allies. Was he to do this by abandoning the capital ? Did he expect Paris to hold out, and was it his intention to come to its rescue ? Napoleon never decided this in his own mind, because he could not bring himself to contemplate such an extremity. When Count Mollien, before his departure in January, pro- posed to make provision for the event of communications being cutting off between the capital and the provinces, he replied, "If the enemy arrives within sight of Paris, it is all over with the empire."* Such were his parting words to one of the ministers upon whom he most relied. When, therefore. Napoleon's idea of operating upon the rear of the enemy allowed them to bear down upon Paris with no more than 20,000 French soldiers between them and the capital, and when, in consequence, a council of regency was held to consider what was to be done, all those who possessed Napoleon's confidence, including his brother Joseph and Cambaceres, recommended the flight of the Empress and of her son to Blois. The Emperor evidently had thought it better to trust to his Imperial father-in-law than to irritate the Allies, and depopularize himself in Paris by subjecting it to the necessity of a military defence. Talleyrand was one of those who in- sisted that Marie Louise should remain. When he was overruled, he exclaimed, " Here is, then, the end. With good cards still the game is flung away. The Emperor is to be pitied, but no one will pity him, for * The " Memoires d'un Ministre," by Count Mollien, so valuable, espe- cially to financial history, were printed at the Imprimerie Eoyale, though not published by any bookseller. LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 79 having kept such people about him. It is incomprehen- sible in such a man. What a fate in history ! To give his name to a series of adventures, when he might have given it to an age. When I think of all this I can but lament over it. And, now, what is to be done ? It may not suit every one to allow himself to be swallowed up in this ruin. We shall see what will happen. The Emperor, instead of abusing me, ought to have formed a wiser judg- ment concerning those who calumniated me. He would have seen that such friends were far worse than enemies.'' In his will Prince Talleyrand defends himself against the accusation of having betrayed Napoleon, " I never," said he, " abandoned any power or government which had not previously abandoned itself." Meantime the Allies advanced, driving Marmont and Mortier before them under the walls of Paris. Marie Louise and the King of Rome had taken the route to Blois. King Joseph, who represented the Emperor, went to watch the approach of the Allies from the heights of Montmartre. When he saw Blucher approaching that position, as well as the Russians moving on the heights of Belleville, he despatched a written order to Marmont, allowing him to treat with the enemy, if he could not maintain his ground. About nightfall, on the 30th, Mar- mont took advantage of the permission, and sent an aide- de-camp to propose an armistice. The Emperor Alexander, who was at the Chateau de Bondy, was eager to grant it. Both he and the King of Prussia showed their anxiety to declare that their hostility was not against either Paris or the French, but against Napoleon. An armistice was signed for four hours, and Marmont withdrew his troops into the city. There, at his own residence in the Eue 80 HISTORY OF THE REIGNS OP Paradis Poissonniere, the General was waited updn and addressed by the principal citizens of Paris, bankers, mer- chants, members of the Municipal Body. To anxious in- quiries with regard to the probable fate of the city, the General replied that he had done all that a General could do — provided for the retreat of his troops, which he with- drew to march on Fontainebleau, where the Emperor's arrival was expected. But a capitulation was necessary to save Paris, and there was no functionary who could negotiate or obtain this save the General. A deputation of the Municipal Body entreated Marmont to conclude and sign this capitulation, in order to save the city. Con- sidering the kind of troops, and the character of some of the Generals outside the walls, the Cossacks, and Blucher, such anxieties were natural and well founded. Marmont, therefore, proposed a capitulation, which was signed at two on the morning of the 31st. It stipulated the evacuation of the capital by the French army and Marshals, and recom- mended it to the generosity of the Allied Sovereigns. On the following morning, the 31st March, took place the solemn entry of the Allied Sovereigns into Paris at the head of their troops. The crowd of spectators was im- mense — was even alarming; but no deep or unanimous sentiment animated that crowd. The long and iron reign of Napoleon had stifled everything like the expression of a popular sentiment, so that even those who saw in the en- trance of the Cossacks the humiliation of their country, remained, from habitude, silent. Such of the citizens as had property and fortune, and families perilled by the prospect of the previous day, when the capital ran the risk of being taken by assault, applauded the military proces- sion, which promised order, security, and peace ; but Alex- LOUIS XVIIL AM) CHARLES X. 81 ander looked in vain for what he sought, that recollection of the Bourbons, or enthusiasm for them, which M. Vitrolles had led him to expect. Alexander had questioned the de- putation of the Municipal Body, or rather M. t)e La Borde, a member of it, as to the disposition of the citizens with respect to a future government. The citizens of Paris, it was e'V'ident, had lost the habit of having any opinion at all. M. De La Borde spoke of Marie Louise as a possible Re- gent. Nesselrode mentioned the name of the Bourbons. M. De La Borde replied, truly enough, "That they were thought of merely in some saloons of the ancient nobility." Still some score or two more of Royalists did perambulate the city on horseback, but were received with astonishment rather than enthusiasm ; so much so, that the Sovereigns, on seeing them approach, made signs to them to go away. Sosthene de la Rochefoucauld approached the Archduke Constantine, and tried to explain to him the expediency of overthrowing the statue of Napoleon from the column of the Place Vendome. Constantine bluffly replied, that he would have nothing to do with it. Of the Allied troops, whilst some accompanied the Sovereigns in their triumphal march along the Boulevards, others followed the road outside the wall, to form a junction with those who proceeded to the Champs Elysfees from within. The Emperor of Russia and the King of Prussia spent the day of the 31st either in conducting or reviewing their troops. It was not till towards evening that the Em- peror repaired to the hotel of Prince Talleyrand, at the corner of the Rue St. Florentin. That personage, since the departure of the Baron de Vitrolles, had not seen his way more clearly. He was determined, however, not to quit Paris, as Napoleon's express orders enjoined him, in VOL. I. G 82 HISTORY OF THE REIGNS OF the suite of Marie Louise. He besought respectively Sa- vary, Pasquier, and Marmont to give him a dispensation from such order. The two last refused ; Savary not only refused, but threatened him. M. de Talleyrand was therefore obliged to recur to the manoeuvre of pretendmg to start upon his journey, and of getting himself stopped at the barrier. He set out in a carriage with the Due de Plaisance, but on some national guards demanding his passports and permit at the barrier, the Prince declared himself duly prevented from continuing his journey, and returned to his hotel. He had scarcely done this, when he learned from De La Borde that the Emperor Alexander and Nesselrode had both been inquiring most anxiously for him, and that the former purposed setting up the Imperial quarters at the Prince's hotel. It may be safely said, that at the moment M. de Talleyrand had no preference of a Bourbon restora- tion to a regency in the person of Marie Louise, which, in truth, would have suited both him and the Due d'Alberg the best, and have been definitively more popular with the great body of the nation ; it would have satisfied the Bona- partists and the revolution. It would have prevented the fatal return from Elba ; it might have allied with constitu- tional monarchy, which the great and influential portion of the Koyalists could not ; and finally, it would have given France, in return for her limited territory and restricted frontier, the close and interested alliance of Austria. For this very reason, however, Alexander would not hear of the regency of Marie Louise. If Metternich and Schwarzen- berg bowed to the Emperor in this, it was because they despaired of securing the throne to Napoleon's son, and the regency to the Empress, or feared that they could not LOUIS XVIIJ. AND CHARLES X. 83 securely and eflPectually prevent Napoleon himself exer- cising, even from exile, a political influence over the government and over France, an influence as incompatible with Austrian regeneration as with Russian aggrandize- ment. In the solemn council held that evening, however, Prince Talleyrand never himself brought forward the claim of Marie Louise. He allowed the Due d'Alberg to do so, and, on perceiving the pain and repugnance it excited in the countenance of Alexander, he, too, as well as Metternich, abandoned the dynasty, as well as the person of Napoleon. In the little conciliabule of eight princes and ministers, it was not Talleyrand who made himself the champion of the Bourbons. It was from the first pronounced that there were but three courses to pursue, — make terms with Napoleon, and take guarantees from him ; set him aside, and acknowledge his son, tinder the regency of his mother ; or reject the Bonapartes altogether, to recognize the Bourbons. No one was prepared to recommend the first. When the Due d'Alberg proposed the second, he was answered by Count Pozzo di Borgo, that countryman of Napoleon, who had risen as well as he to high position, and always in antagonism to Bonaparte. By birth a Cor- sican, by life and relations a Russian and an Englishman, Pozzo represented the necessity of finishing with the Bona- partes. Pozzo spoke but the sentiments of Alexander, and the moment that they evidently were so, all present professed the same opinion. Alexander then affected to seek out who should replace the Bonapartes, as if there could have been a doubt in his mind, or in that of any one else. Talleyrand played the easy part of showing, that, setting aside the Imperial dynasty, the ancient and the royal family g2 84 HISTORY OF THE REIGNS OF alone remained. Would the French accept the restora- tion ? Talleyrand immediately called on his friends, the Baron Louis and the Abbe' de Pradt, the latter of whom has left a circumstantial account of the interview. Both were loud in demanding a Bourbon restoration. " Who will undertake to accomplish it ? " asked Alexander ; " we are strangers." "The Senate," replied Talleyrand, who knew his veteran compeers, "will readily undertake it." The acquiescence of all present, even of the Austrian General and minister, in this determination was manifest. " If such a resolution, with the motives which produced it, were to remain a mere conversation," Talleyrand ob- served, " not a step would have been made." A proces verbal, or report of the decision of the great powers and personages, was requisite. This he instantly undertook to write ; and, under his hand, it assumed the following shape : — " "The Allied Powers having occupied the capital of France, seek to respond to the wishes of the French nation, and declare, — " That if the conditions of peace would have required the strongest guarantees in order to chain down the ambi- tion of Bonaparte, they might be much more favourable to France, if that country itself, by returning under a wise government, gave the best assurances of tranquillity. The Sovereigns proclaim in consequence, — ^ " 'That they will no more treat with Napoleon Bona- parte ' " — Here Talleyrand paused in his writing, and looked for the completion of the sentence to the Czar. After a moment's hesitation, the latter dictated — " ' nor with any member of his family.'" LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 86 The tacit consent of the Austrians present being given to the decision, the declaration continued : "The Allied Sovereigns respect the integrity of ancient France, such as it existed under its legitimate kings. They may, indeed, do more, since they always profess the principle that, for the welfare of Europe, France ought to be great and strong. " They will recognize and guarantee the Constitution that France shall give itself. They invite the Senate to appoint immediately a Provisional Government, to meet the necessities of administration, and to propose such a Constitution as may suit the French people." Whilst Alexander was thus engaged in the condemna- ation of Napoleon and the dethronement of his family, and whilst Talleyrand, having drawn up the important declaration, carefully sent it to press, in order that it might appear in all the 'journals, and upon all the walls of Paris, on the morrow, Caulaincourt, despatched by Napoleon from Fontainebleau to Alexander, was await- ing that Sovereign at the Elysee. The Grand Duke Constantine had procured his admission, and introduced him to Alexander, after the declaration had been ac- complished. The Emperor informed Caulaincourt that all was decided, that Napoleon was dethroned, and the Bourbons installed in his place. The Czar professed that it was not his doing, so much as the fate of circumstances, and the will of Providence. Caulaincourt pleaded for his master, and so powerfully, that Alexander is said to have relented and wavered, and to have detained Caulaincourt to pass the night on a couch in his apartment. At the moment of the interview a deputation of Royalists, Chateaubriand amongst them, who makes no 86 HISTORY OF THE EEIGNS OF mention of it in his Memoirs, demanded to speak to Alexander. They came accompanied by a tumultuous assembly, which had been held in the evening at the house of M. de Mortfontaine. Alexander would not see them, but Nesselrode assured them in his name, that Louis XVIII., with the support of the emperor, would ascend the throne of France. A more practical step of this assembly of Koyalists was to seize hold of all the journals. The principal organ, the Debats, which had been taken by Napoleon from its proprietors the Bertins, to be edited by Etienne, was restored to them. Tempo- rary editors were installed with authority from the E,ussian Commandant. Under such auspices the press of Paris announced on the 1st of April that the Bonaparte dynasty no longer occupied the throne, and that Louis XVIII. was King. Extracts from the timely and powerful pamphlet of Chateaubriand, entitled ' Bona- parte and the Bourbons,' accusing the former of every crime, and endowing the latter with every virtue, filled their columns in the place of more fresh intelligence. The press, once more free after so many years of servitude was read with avidity. And the bursting of the fetters which Napoleon had riveted, filled at least the in- habitants of Paris with something like joy at his fall. Whilst pure Eoyalism could only speak through the press, M. de Talleyrand undertook to obtain the opinion and the vote of the functionary aristocracy against Napoleon. He summoned the Senate, and took pains during the night and morning to persuade each senator, of the prudence and necessity of taking part in his de- thronement. Of 140 senators, not more than eighty were in Paris. Of these, sixty-five were got together, LOUIS XVIII. AND CHABLES X. 87 not without difficulty, and not till long after the hour indicated for the sitting. Talleyrand, as Vice-President, spoke a very tame and insignificant address, merely stating ■that propositions were about to be made to them. These propositions were, first, the nomination of a Provisional Government, of which Talleyrand had drawn up the list. This was voted without a remark. The Provisional Govern- ment of France, according to this list, consisted of Talley- rand himself, the Due d'Alberg, Count Jaucourt, General Beurnonville, and the Abbe Montesquieu. These three last were Royalists and supposed to be Constitutionalists. In accordance with the names the Senate voted its decla- ration, which was : — " That the Senate and Legislative Body should make part of the new ConstitutioUj with such modifications as the liberty of suffrage and opinion required. " That the army and its officers should retain their grades and pensions. That the public debt should be respected, the sales of national property maintained: no member molested for his political opinions ; the liberty of worship and conscience proclaimed, as well as that of the press, within due limits." Not a word was uttered on this first day of the sitting of the Senate respecting the dynasties to be dethroned or enthroned. Fear, delicacy, and scruples kept that assembly as well as its advisers silent. Whilst the senators were thus timidly and shamefacedly accomplishing a revolution, a bolder man than Talleyrand, M. Bellart, addressed the municipalty of Paris. This body had been appointed by the Emperor out of the citizens, as the Senate had been out of the high notabilities and fiinctionaries. On re- ceiving the municipal deputation previous to his entrance 88 HISTOEY OP THE KEIGNS OF info Paris, Alexander, amidst promises to protect the capital and maintain the National Guard, said that a government, calculated to secure the peace of France and Europe was required ; that it was for the citizens to give utterance to this wish ; and that he, Alexander, was ready to second it.* Bellart now on the part of the munici- palty of Paris drew up a proclamation, recapitulating the numerous wrongs committed by Napoleon on the property and interests of the civic class. This document signalized the conscription, taxation tripled since 1792, the sea closed, and trade annihilated, the treatment of the Pope, of the Spanish Eoyal family, the provocation to Europe, and finally armed Europe in possession of Paris, demand- ing a great guarantee of peace from its citizens. This guarantee lay in the renunciation of all allegiance to Napoleon by the municipalty representing the citizens of the capital. Talleyrand was alarmed and offended by an obscure citizen proposing and completing by a mere town-council what he should have done by the organ of the Senate. He tried to stop Bellart in vain. Bellart mus- tered one-half of the municipalty, got the proclamation voted and printed, leaving Talleyrand and the Senate to halt after him, and go through a repetition of his pro- ceedings on the following day. Accordingly when the Senate met on the 2od of April, the first word heard in it was a proposal for Napoleon's decheance. Lambrechts moved this, and it was voted without opposition or debate. Another day was taken by the Senate to draw up and vote the reasons for the dethronement or degradation of the Emperor, which was an act of accusation against Napoleon, more circumstantial than that of the municipal body, but * M^moires d'Outro Tombe. LOUIS XVIII. AND CHABLBS X. 89 not so dignified. It accused Napoleon of having violated the laws of his own Imperial Constitution, by levying taxes, declaring war, fettering the press, refusing to treat with the enemy on rational terms, lavishing his re- sources, and even abandoning his army. No voice amongst the men who voted this, had ever been raised to remonstrate with Napoleon at the time of his commit- ing these acts, to most of which he was compelled by the fortune of war, and by stern necessity. The system of despotism which enabled him to commit these or any other series of arbitrary acts, was sanctioned by this very Senate, which owed its existence, its emoluments, and dignities to this system and its founder. The puerile and captious recapitulation of faults on which these miserable senators founded their condemnation of him to whom they owed all, is perhaps the most sign&,l monument of mean- ness ever left by a class which pretended to be the aristo- cracy of a great nation. The Legislative Body more dignified, contented itself by simply adhering to the decree of forfeiture passed by the Senate. There was another body and other chiefs, more import- ant in that military empire than senators and deputies. This was the army, which, to the amount of 40,000, lay between Fontainebleau and Paris, with the facility of rallying other scattered divisions. To this army the Provisional Government hastened to address a proclama- tion, absolving it from its allegiance to Napoleon. More effectual means were used with the chiefs. Caulaincourt had returned to Fontainebleau with the intelligence that the Emperor Alexander would never treat with Napoleon. He also must have known the efforts of Talleyrand and the 90 HISTORY OP THE BBIGNS OF Eoyalists ; and that whatever were Napoleon's resolves, to fight or to abdicate, the succession of his son, and the regency of Marie Louise had become events of doubtful accomplishment. From Caulaincourt, Napoleon learnt all these circumstances in the night of the 2nd. On the following morning he announced to the Guard that he would march on Paris, and he besought them to maintain the tricolour flag, under which they had conquered. Shouts of enthusiasm responded from the soldiers, cold and gloomy looks of mistrust came- from the Marshals. Wavering between the two. Napoleon on that day merely ordered the head-quarters to be moved nearer Paris, from Fontainebleau to Essonne. During the night the mar- shals and generals, questioning Caulaincourt, learned from him, that Alexander, in recommending abdication to Napoleon, left the regency of Marie Louise and the reign of Napoleon II. a possibility, if not more. Of all the treason of that treacherous period, this was certainly the most effective. It induced honourable but headstrong officers like Ney to attempt to bully the Emperor, and to find in his resistance a pretext for deserting him. The insinua- tion made to Caulaincourt in the saloon or antechamber of Alexander, all, even that monarch, must have known to be a treachery and a trap ; for he had no intention of insisting on the claim of Marie Louise, and he not having that intention, no one had. The rumour was, however, allowed to circulate amongst the general officers of Fontainebleau, and to become accredited amongst them. So that when, on the morning of the 4th, Napoleon gave to his regiment the order to advance upon Paris, he was answered, not by obedience, but by united and rude remonstrances from Ney, Oudinot, and Lefebvre, who. LOUIS XVIII. AND OHAHLES X. 91 instead of obeying his injunction to march towards the capital, plainly demanded his abdication. Marmont had, at the same time, gone much farther. In vain had the Emperor visited his quarters and showed him every confidence and friendship. Prince Schwarzenberg, on the 3rd, despatched to Marmont the decree of the Senate and of the other corps of the State, with the procla- mation of the Provisional Government to the army. The deception practised through Caulaincourt upon Ney and Oudinot was not necessary with Marmont, who, after brief hesitation, replied on the night of the 3rd that he was ready to quit the Imperial quarters with his division n condition that it might retire freely to Normandy, and that life and liberty might be left to Napoleon with some circumscribed district of some country. He did not do this without consulting the generals under him, Souham and Bourdesoult. Whilst this treason was in progress, Napoleon himself, overcome by the urgency of the lieutenants who surrounded him, consented to abdicate in favour of his son. He wrote that abdication, and gave it to Macdonald, Ney, and Caulaincourt to bring to Paris, and to offer it, on the con- dition of the regency and the recognition of Napoleon II. The three Marshals, bearers of that document, passed through Marmont's quarters. The Marshal saw the ne- cessity of at least apparently suspending his own act of treachery, the Emperor having resigned and being in treaty for his family. Marmont, therefore, accompanied his brother Marshals to Paris, stopping on the road at Petit Bourg, the head quarters of Schwarzenberg, and making some arrangements with him, which Marmont declared were for the withdrawal of the agreement between 92 HISTORY OF THE REIGNS OF them. Marmont also declared, that he had left orders with his subordinate generals to make no movement in his absence. On that same night, however, the generals did march with their divisions, as had been arranged with Schwarzenberg, into the Russian lines, through which they were escorted, and the rear of their march was closed by the enemy's troops until they reached Versailles. What could have been the motive of the generals ? Was it fear of Napoleon, or of the punishment which awaited them, on the discovery of the agreement with the Austrian commander. This bv some is said to have been the sole motive. Others think that it was a desire of Souhani and Bourdesoult to commit, on their own account, a profitable treachery, instead of perpetrating it under the orders of Marmont. At all events the treason was com- mitted. The Marshals, in the mean time, reached Paris, and obtained admission to the Emperor Alexander, filling all those who had completed their defection with fear lest Alexander would again entertain and consent to the regency of Marie Louise and the continuation of the Empire. Macdonald depicted with the energy of an honest soldier the hopes and strength of the army, and the severe struggle that it might yet make, rather than see the family of the Emperor dethroned. At the same time he represented Napoleon as nobly resigned to a great sacri- fice, and demanding nothing for himself. Alexander was embarrassed. He answered, that affairs had gone to great lengths with the Senate. Others represented the impos- sibility of now treating with any other family than the Bourbons, since the Senate and every important personage had acknowledged them. Alexander put an end to the LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 93 conversation by saying, that he should consult the King of Prussia, and would give his answer on the morrow. He sought thus to gain time. His Imperial Majesty knew well that something might be expected before the morrow, which would offer a conclusive answer to Macdonald's proposition. And come it did, for as the Marshals awaited the promised answer, tidings arrived that the corps of Marmont had deserted. Alexander instantly seized the pretext, declared that he was reluctant to resist the desires of the French army. The army, he represented, was not unanimous ; an entire corps of it had deserted Napoleon. This rendered it impossible to be contented with a con- ditional abdication. It must, said he, be absolute and total. The countenance of Macdonald instantly fell. He perused the despatch, saw its truth, and sadly withdrew. He refused to speak to Beurnonville, one of the Provisional Government. Dupont, appointed minister of war, who had been punished by Napoleon for the surrender of Baylen, was in Macdonald's way. The latter asked him, where he had learnt to avenge his personal wrongs at the expense of his own country. " I would give an arm," said Mar- mont, " to repair the fault of my generals." " Your head. Marshal," said Macdonald, " would not be too much." One regrets to learn, that, contrasted with this noble conduct of Macdonald, Ney was in too great haste to follow Marmont's example, to allow him to return to Fon- tainebleau. He went at once to the Provisional Govern- ment, offering his adherence and his services. It is painful to contemplate such a total want of either public principle or private gratitude, or even of decency in men so high placed, as was exhibited by the members of the Senate and the chiefs of the army. Even if the 94 HISTORY OP THE EEIGNS OP latter saw the impossibility of further military resistance, still by holding firm around Napoleon, they could cer- tainly have procured for him and themselves better and more honourable treatment. Nothing indeed could have been more easy than to secure the regency for Marie Louise and the succession for her son, had the military chiefs remained true to their Sovereign ; but half treason is difficult, and persons who betray one master, naturally desire another as remote and as antagonistic as possible from him whom they have betrayed. For Marmont himself, instead of at least concerting his terms with his brother Marshals, to have entered into a mean and solitary stipulation requiring for Napoleon a roomy prison — for Ney and others, partly to bully, partly cajole him into abdication in favour of his son, whilst they well knew the baselessness of the hope, and then to desert him outright on finding Alexander's enmity implacable ; — such conduct is so vile, that no degree of animal courage, and no amount of victories and combats can compensate for it. When one sees the old Scotch blood and gentlemanly traditions of a Macdonald keep the French Marshal of that name in the path of honour and disinterestedness, whilst the upstart and vulgar heroes of the revolution and the empire sink to the vilest adulation and the most unprincipled deceit, even the man who scorns the pretensions of birth, is reluctantly compelled to acknowledge, that there is some- thing after all in the pride, the self-respect and the traditions of race ; and that, despite of reasoning, vulgarity may be a crime and gentility a virtue. After having written his profession of allegiance to the Bourbons, Ney came again to the Emperor to press for his unconditional abdication. Napoleon could not resign him- LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 95 self to the humiliation. He persisted in enumerating the forces which still remained true to him, and the generals whom he still might rally. He could get no officers to encourage him in such an idea, or to follow him on such a chance. Historians reproach Napoleon for putting all trust in his generals, and abandoning himself when they aban- doned him, instead of flinging himself upon the soldiers, whose enthusiasm and zeal were unchecked. Napoleon, how- ever, was the best judge of the necessities and materials of war. Without the old experienced generals, whom he had formed, he would not undertake to prolong the war. He deferred, however, the final act of abdication. In one of his nights of suspense or of despair, he no doubt made an attempt at suicide, by swallowing a potion which proved insufficient for the purpose. After recovering from its effects, and shrinking from a repetition of the attempt, he signed the final act, abdicating for himself and his family. The Island of Elba, suggested by Alexander, was secured to him in absolute sovereignty, with the title of Emperor. This treaty, which the English plenipotentiary approved, but refiised to sign, was concluded on the 1st of April. On the 20th, Napoleon made his well-known adieu to his Guards, and departed for the place of his exile. 96 HISTOEY OF THE REIGNS OP CHAPTER III. RECAIL OF THE BOURBONS — CLAIMS OF HEREDITARY ROYALTY AND CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS — THE COUNT d'ARTOIS SUMMONED TO PARIS BY PRINCE TALLEYRAND— HIS SHORT TRIUMPH AND UNPO- PULARITY — ACT OF ABDICATION SIGNED BY NAPOLEON — ARRIVAL OF LOUIS XVIII. AT COMPIEGNE — EXPLICATION BETWIEEN THE KING AND THE EMPEROR ALEXANDER — ROYAI. DECLARATION ISSUED FROM ST. OUEN — THE KING's ENTRY USTTO PARIS — FORMATION OF A MINISTRY — NEW CHARTER — FALSE SYSTEM OF REPRESENTATION — DEPARTURE OF THE ALLIED SOVEREIGNS FROM PARIS. Whilst Imperialism expired at Fontainebleau with the military ascendancy on which it was based, another prin- ciple of rule, represented by another family of princes, mounted almost without dispute the steps of the French throne. Never did country stand so much in need of more than one royal or imperial race, and more than one set of governing principles. The only escape from the lasting pressure of foreign and conquering armies, and from spoliation, if not partition, lay in the adoption of another prince, with a new system of rule. The Bourbons and legitimacy were the sole ones that oft'ered. They were forced upon the French as much by necessity as by the dictation of the allies. Yet it is difficult to imagine things or persons more repugnant to the French as a nation than the Bourbons of that time. The French worshipped LOUIS XVIII. AND OHAELES X. 97 glory; the Bourbons brought humiliation. They had enjoyed ascendancy, if not empire, over Europe, and empire itself from the Zuyder Zee to the Gulf of Naples. The new dynasty cooped them up within the limits of the old monarchy, and robbed them of the conquests even of the first revolution. Equality, social equality even more than political, and a fierce denial of the claims of birth, was the cherished creed of every Frenchman. The Bourbons themselves, all their reminiscences, thoughts, acts, and ten- dencies, proceeded from a principle directly the reverse. The Bourbons considered France as their patrimony, and their ejection from it an act of robbery, as well as profa- nation. Such were the sentiments of even moderate royalists like Louis XVIII. As to the extravagant Royalists, who were by far the most numerous of the party, they placed faith in the legitimate king on the same line with belief in the true God, and thought a dereliction of the one a crime and a heresy as heinous as a denial of the other. Great and natural were the fears that such a new and strange current of politicians, nobles, adventurers, and princes would never amalgamate with the broad ocean of opinions, wants, and habits, which an eventful quarter of a century had created in France. Alexander himself, as well as the English statesmen who favoured and accepted the restoration of the Bourbons, strongly entertained these fears. They hoped, however, that a reconciliation might be effected between royalism and the revolution, on the ground of a constitutional and representative system. Alex- ander was a complete convert to constitutionalism in poli- tics. He recommended it for Germany, guaranteed it for France, meditated it for Poland. He had strongly urged . VOL. I. H 98 HISTORY OP THE REIGNS OF the Senate to lay down the basis of a constitutional government at the same time that they voted the degra- dation of Napoleon. A committee was in consequence formed, in which the most liberal members of the Senate, such as Lambrechts and Destutt de Tracy, were joined with the chiefs of the Provisional Government. Fearing that the princes, who were expected, would not much relish a constitution ready prepared for their acceptance, the Committee insisted on Count Nesselrode giving his presence and his sanction to their proceedings, to which strange proposition the Count in simplicity and good faith assented. In the Committee the Abb^ De Montesquiou repre- sented the rights and supported the claims of royalty, as the Bourbons understood it, and his doing so led to such discussions and professions that Napoleon, on his return during the Hundred Days, finding in the Tuileries a Report of the Committee's proceedings drawn up by M. De Montesquiou, thought he could not inflict a greater blow upon the royalist cause than by publishing the Report in the Moniteur. From this we learn the Abba's horror at the proposed declaration that " the French people freely called Louis to the throne. It was a monstrosity," he declared. " The crown belonged by right to the brother of Louis XVI." " Do you make no account of the facts and events which have occurred since 1789 ?" asked M. De Tracy. " What are facts," asked the Abbe, " in opposition to rights ?" "When the senators, waiving the abstract question of rights, sought to proceed to the positive stipulations, that their own body should be preserved, and that its privileges LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 99 should be hereditary, they found M. De Montesquiou equally intractable. He insisted upon the King's sole and irrefragable right to make peers, pronouncing with great truth the pretensions of the senators to declare themselves permanent and hereditary to be arrogant and null. The dispute took place on the 3rd. Marmont's defection had not been accomplished. The Eegency of Marie Louise was still mooted, and was still in the hands of Alexander to accept and sanction. This rendered the ultra-royalism of M. De Montesquiou somewhat more tractable ; and a project was adopted by the Commission, in which the people represented by the Senate called Louis XVIII. to the throne, whilst they asserted their own hereditary rights. But whilst Montesquiou, in fear of Count Nesselrode, consented to this declaration, he wrote to Louis XVIIL, advising him to pay no attention, but simply reject it, and in lieu thereof to issue, upon entering France, a royal edict declaratory of his inten- tions, and announcing the constitutional boons which it was the new King's pleasure to concede to his people. The Count d'Artois was in the meantime summoned to Paris by Prince Talleyrand and the Abbfe De Mon- tesquiou. On the road he was presented with the Senate's projected constitution, which he coolly put in his pocket, and refused to acknowledge or to answer. He had already assumed the title of Lieutenant-General, which had been conferred on him by his brother on the death of Louis XVI. The Senate, however, and Talleyrand, declined to acknow- ledge this assumed title, or the authority which it implied, so long as the Prince denied their right to frame the basis of a constitution. The quarrel was serious. The Count d'Artois reached Livry, the seat of his friend M. de Damas, h2 100 HISTOEY OF THE REIGNS OF on the 1 1th, preparatory to his entry into Paris the following morning. It was necessary for the Provisional Government and the other dignitaries to receive the brother of the new monarch. But in what capacity? The ingenuity of Talleyrand suggested that he should be welcomed as Monsieur, the title of old appertaining to the King's brother, but implying no authority of any kind. The welcome or address spoken by Talleyrand, as head of the Provisional Government, to Monsieur, perplexed the latter, who uttered a few unmeaning words in reply, and proceeded into Paris at the head of a somewhat motley cavalcade. He had with him about four hundred royalists, ornamented with white cockades ; the Marshals that came to meet and accompany him with the tricolor, were not to his taste. When the Vicomte de Chateaubriand was presented to him, as a personage whose genius honoured as well as served the royal cause, the Prince could not avoid being courteous, but it was evident that he had never either read the ' Genie du Christianisme,' or even heard of the name of its author. When he saw the tri-color cockade of the Marshals, he observed that he had come up from Nancy between hedges of white cockades. Bourrienne, who witnessed the procession, declared that it was closed by a squad of Cossacks. Could Alexander have thus appended such an escort to the Prince, in order to show him his true position? He had the good taste, however, to come habited in the uniform of the Cavalry of the National Guard. This corps, when they beheld the Prince, welcomed- him with acclamations, which were caught up and echoed back by the people. So that Mon- sieur's entry had sufficiently the air of a triumph. What, however, rendered it more truly a triumph was, that on LOUIS XVIII. AND CHAEtiES X. 101 the same day, the 12th of April, Napoleon signed the act of his unconditional abdication. On the following morning the Count was visited at the Tuileries by the Emperor Alexander, who explained to him the danger of an open quarrel between his Koyal Highness and the members of the Senate, who in all their, acts had had his imperial sanction and advice. The Count bowed to so powerfiil an intercessor, and a compro- mise was arranged. The Moniteur made the Prince, upon his entry, thanlc the Provisional Government for all they had done, and declare that the Count d'Artois having come back to his country, there was nothing changed, save that one Frenchman more had been added to France. The Senate, it was agreed, should appoint the Prince Lieutenant-General of the kingdom, and he was to accept from the Senate this dignity and the executive authority in the King's absence, which it implied. In his address on the occasion, the Count d'Artois declared that he was not provided with powers from his brother to accept the con- stitution, but he knew enough of the King's principles and sentiments to declare in his name that the bases laid down would be admitted by him. After all, what lay most at heart for the Count d'Artois, was not so much the realities of power and the due main- taining of the Koyal prerogative, as the forms, and symbols with which it was to be surrounded, the expressions it was to use, which were to be employed towards it, and the etiquette with which it was to be approached. Unfor- tunately the nation, and even its most eminent politicians, knew as little of what was the real secret and the true essence of government as the new princes. In the con- stitutional system, which was contemplated, the most 102 HISTORY OF THE EEIGNS OP important body was the Chamber of Representatives — the most capital point to be decided, the manner in which it should be elected. Not a thought was spent on the subject. The doors of the Legislative Body were closed, and its existence, present or future, forgotten ; whilst the Lieutenant-General, and the Provisional Government, the Senate, the army, and the public, were in an agony of suspense as to whether the tricolor cockade should be preserved, or the white cockade substituted. The cockade was of more importance to the Count d'Artois than the crown itself. His first step was to make the National Guard assume it, which they did with alacrity. First Marshal Jourdan, then Marmont, commanded the adoption of it by the troops in an ordre de jour. As the Count d'Artois spoke of nothing else, insisted on little else, it was necessary for every functionary and every officer to assume it. And the tricolor thus rejected by court and courtier, was cherished by both the soldiers and the citizens, who saw in it the symbol of victory, if not of republican free- dom and independence. The other acts of the Count d'Artois' brief hold of power brought upon him a far greater amount of odium and unpopularity. His chief administrative act was to despatch to each of the departments a royal commissary with dictatorial powers to enforce, it was said, the orders of the Provisional Government, but in truth to effect a complete revolution in the personal composition, as well as in the spirit of each civil departmental administration. The emigrant nobihty, most ignorant of the country, and most fanatic to bring it back to what it had been half a century previous, were despatched on this errand ; and wherever party strife and civil war did not rage, they sowed the LOUIS XVIII. AND CHAELES X. 103 seeds of it thick. At that time, as Chateaubriand says in one of his pamphlets, one half of France, by its industry, fed the other half in its idleness ; in other words, one half of the French were placemen, enjoying salaries from the state, as soldiers or civilians. To disturb and remove all these holders of place and at the same time to alarm the greater part of the holders of property themselves was of itself to throw France into a revolution. Yet the allied princes, in their wisdom, imagined they had settled and pacified France in this manner, and they pressed the Lieutenant-General to allow the evacuation of the French territory. This they were ready to do, if the fortresses, which the French still retained in the countries they had conquered, were given up. French writers cast it up as a heinous crime to the Count d'Artois and Prince Talley- rand, that they gave up all the guns, provisions, and materials : they do not say how the French Govern- ment could have retained them. Any attempt to do so would have been a continuance of the war, and would have compelled the allied sovereigns to besiege some fifty of their own towns, in order to eject the French soldiers from them. That they were to do this, and leave the king and the population of France to enjoy political ease and financial impunity, is absurd to suppose. If the fortune of war compelled Napoleon's abdication, it surely ren- dered equally compulsory the surrender of the fortresses held by the French beyond their frontier. Another crime of the Provisional Government was the opening of the ports, the admission of colonial produce, and of other commodities of which the prohibitive system of Napoleon had actually suspended the consumption. All these articles fell two-thirds of their price, to the 104 HISTORY OF THE REIGNS OP immense advantage of the million of distressed consumers. Instead of bestowing a thought upon them, French Im- perialist writers prove their sympathies for a few beetroot growers and others, who had built up their speculations on the continuance of the Empire and its prohibitions, and who, like so many other servitors and officers of Napoleon, fell with the hand, the army, and the policy, which fed them. Louis XVIII. had, in the mean time, set out from Hartwell to occupy the throne of his ancestors. His bro- ther had despatched to him the Count de Bruges, Alexander Count Pozzo di Borgo, to communicate their sentiments and desires. However profound his retreat, Louis had still been deeply influenced by the political atmosphere and ideas of England, in which the necessity of practical free- dom is admitted, covered over with the forms of unbounded respect for the throne. Louis believed the maintenance and the innocuousness of those liberties to have depended on the almost religious reverence for royalty. He thought it dangerous to introduce the one into France without the other ; and however anxious to please Alexander, who then really represented the constitutional party in France, he was also determined to keep at the head of that party, which must be his principal force, the Royalists. Enthu- siastically received in London, Louis replied to the Prince Regent in terms of grateful warmth, which were said deeply to have hurt the Emperor Alexander.* * The cause of the unhoimded gratitude evinced in this speech of Louis XVIII. to the Prince Regent remained long an enigma. It is, however, ex- plained by the publication, in the Castlereagh Corvespondence (3rd series, vol. i. p. 267), of a secret despatch from Count Lieven, which mentions that, on the 25th January, 1814, the Prince Regent sent for him, and personally urged the Emperor Alexander, through his ambassador, to have done with. Napoleon and his race, refuse to treat with them, and recal the existence of LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 105 " It is to the councils of your Eoyal Highness," said Louis, " to this glorious country, and the constancy of its inhabitants, that I shall ever attribute, after Divine Providence, the re-establishment of our family on the throne of its ancestors, as well as that happy state of things which enables me to close wounds, calm passions, and re- store peace, repose, and happiness to all nations." Embarking at Dover, under the thunder of English cannon, Louis sailed to Calais, escorted by that same frigate, " Jason," which had brought back his brother, in fear and dishonour, from La Vendue. As he put foot upon the pier, his Majesty was welcomed by General Maison, the future Marshal,* and observed by Louvel, the future assassin of the Due de Berri. Overwhelmed with felicita- tions, processions, addresses, the King sought a brief repose in the royal Chateau of Compiegne, sufficiently near to the capital to allow its chief authorities and dignitaries to come, pay their respects, and express their sentiments. On these Louis wished to meditate, before he made the important declaration expected of him, on his entrance into Paris. Not so much from an illiberal feeling, as from a sense of personal dignity, the pretensions of the Senate, (which had paid the basest adulation and submission to Napoleon,) to stand forth now as the originators and champions of the their legitimate dynasty to the French as the rightful sovereign, as well as the best intermedium of peace with armed Europe. The letter proves that it was the Prince Eegent of England who took the initiative in the project of dethroning the Bonapartes and substituting the Bourbons. For a step so important, and, as it proved, so influential and decisive, Louis XVIII. could not but be grateful. * It was Maison who as General first welcomed the return of the Bourbons to France in 1815 in the person of Louis XVIII. It was Maison who as Marshal escorted Charles X. to his embarkation at Cherbourg, iu 1830, which was the final departure of the family. 106 HISTORY OF THE REIGNS OP national liberties, disgusted Louis XVIII ; and this dis- gust was naturally rendered more intense by the care of the Senate to avoid any appeal to the public, or claim any support from it, whilst they trusted altogether to the pow- erful arm of Alexander. The main part of the Senatorial demands was to make themselves, by the grace of the Russian Emperor, the founders of the French Constitution, they themselves being endowed with hereditary rights, as members of an Upper Chamber, in recompense. That Alexander should have abetted anything so monstrous was a proof of his short- sightedness. The Marshals, in a body, as chiefs of the army, pro- ceeded to Compiegne, to oflPer their adherence to his Majesty. The Legislative Body went also, and were greeted by Louis, as being the true representatives of the people. After this the accession of Louis was complete. Secure of the adherence of the representatives of the army and the people, the monarch might well defy the Senate, though guided by the sagacity of Talleyrand, and upheld by the power of Alexander, The Royalists were not idle in appealing to that truest of all supports, popularity, on behalf of the new Monarch. Chateaubriand represented him, as " a prince known for his intelligence, inaccessible to prejudice, and a stranger to vengeance." The same great writer has left a portrait of the King as he saw him at Compiegne. "The King reached Compiegne on the 29th of April. He was clad in a blue coat, with a small star and epaulettes, his legs enveloped in large gaiters of red velvet, bordered with gold thread. He walked with difficulty, yet in a manner touching and noble. There is nothing extraordi- LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 107 nary in his stature, yet his head is superb ; his look that of a king and a man of genius. Sitting in his arm-chair, with his gaiters after the ancient fashion, his cane between his knees, you might imagine him Louis XIV. at sixty years of age." Such was the Eoyal personage to whom the principal Marshals of Napoleon, the week after his abdication, hastened not merely to do homage, but to hail as a liberator. Ber- thier and Ney were foremost in the display of extravagant zeal. Berthier spoke of the white plumes of Henry IV., and declared, " that France, groaning under a quarter of a century's misfortune, awaited the present glorious day." Ney was so heroic in his interested enthusiasm, that the King forgot his infirmity, rose up, and when his limbs refused to bear him, and some of the officers of his house- hold came forward to support him, he seized on the arms of the two Marshals, and declared that " it was upon them he would lean. Surround me. Marshals ; you have always been good Frenchmen. I hope that France will not again have need of your swords ; but should we be obliged to draw them once more, infirm as I am, I would march along with you !" Whatever we may think of the incongruity between the personage and his warlike enthusiasm, it is universally ad- mitted that the attitude and the words of Louis XVIII. had an inspiriting effect both upon the Marshals and the Court, and that the scene, if got up, was successful — if involuntary, was felicitous. The enemy which Louis XVIII. had for the moment in view, was the Senate and its champion, Alexander, of whose peremptory interference the King had some reason to be jealous. Alexander himself arrived at Compiegne on 108 HISTOBY OP THE EBIGNS OF the 1st of May, and the important explication between the Monarchs took place. Alexander, in his character of liberal Monarch, rallied his Royal brother as to his ultra-royal scruples. " Would his ' right divine,' " asked Alexander " be understood by his people ? Or could adding the formula of ' King by the grace of God ' add to the real power of the Monarch ?" Louis XVIII., against this insinuation, replied, " that mock as one might the right hereditary, or the right, divine, he was now King of France by no other right, and no other claim. Without it, what was he, Louis ? An infirm old man, exiled, and condemned to beg for bread afar from his country ; such he was but a few days back. The destitute old man was, however, in right, the King of France. And this right alone had induced the nation, en- lightened as to its real interests, to recall him to the throne." Alexander, however struck with the force of these argu- ments, still recommended the new monarch to take into account the events which had occurred, and the revolution which had been accomplished. Lamartine says, that Louis declared his determination to withdraw altogether, rather than submit to the demands of the Senate. The conver- sations of the interior are only known through royalist writers, who heard afterwards, through the King himself, or his servants, the nature of these conversations. As there was a great deal of reason in the arguments used on both sides, it ended by a compromise, Louis XVIIL, remaining firm in everything which related to principle, or to forms, whilst he consented to cede, in a declaration or charter, to the French, the possession of every solid and popular liberty. Louis would style himself King of France and Navarre, not King of the French, and would date LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 109 his reign from the death of Louis XVII. He objected to receive a constitution from the Senate, but offered to grant one himself, containing all the bases agreed to by his brother. The sovereigns separated on this understanding, that the Senate and Prince Talleyrand were to come to an accord with the monarch on these terms ; and they forth- with set about their task, whilst Louis, to facilitate the agreement, proceeded from Compiegne to take up his . quarters at the Chateau de St. Ouen, situated upon the Seine, not far from the gates of Paris. Alexander was obliged to be contented with this, but he exhaled his spleen in complaints which were not always just. In a conversa- tion with Lafayette, at Madame de Stael's, about this time, Alexander called the Bourbon princes uncorrected and incorrigible. Of them, the Duke of Orleans, he said, alone had any liberal ideas. "Why did your Majesty recall them ?" rejoined Lafayette. " I could not help it," said Alexander, " they came upon me from every side. I wanted to stop them till the nation had given itself a constitution ; but they poured in like an inundation. I went to Compiegne, to ask the King to renounce his nine- teen years of reign, and other such pretensions. The Legislative Body was there before me, accepting the monarch from all time, and without any conditions." Alexander, at the same time, complained of the servility of the press. But if Alexander really wished to allow the nation the opportunity of framing a constitution, why trust exclusively to a Senate of Napoleon's nomination, and to Prince Talleyrand ? Why neglect the Legislative Body, and shut up its hall ? Why not recur to elections ? If the press was servile, what made it so ? — the handing over the journals to royalists, under the control of M. Michaud, 110 HISTORY OF THE REIGNS OP and with the counter-order of a Russian commandant. Alexander, it is to be feared, was not more sincere in his conversation with Lafayette than in his negociation with Caulaincourt. At St. Ouen, the Senate and Louis XVIII. were in no better accord than at Compiegne. That body, deeming Alexander to have won more upon the spirit of the King than was really the case, drew up a royal declaration, such as they proposed the monarch to issue. It commenced much in the form afterwards adopted, and then put for- ward as the principal cause of the monarch's granting the constitution, " the necessity of preserving the Senate, to whose enlightened influence we chiefly owe our return to our kingdom." It concluded by a promise to swear to this constitution so soon as it was concerted by the repre- sentative bodies, and accepted by the French people. Whoever drew up the document at such a moment, and it was said to be Talleyrand, must have known that the King would not accept or adopt such expressions. The King observed, when Talleyrand read it to him, that in so accepting, he, the King, would be in fact standing, whilst Talleyrand, representing the Senate, would be seated. Adopting, therefore, the commencement and the greater part of the draft presented to him, the King made some additions of his own, and issued the following declaration from St Ouen, dated May 3rd : — " Louis, by the grace of God, King of France and of Navarre, to all, by these presents, salutation : "Eecalled, by the love of our people, to the throne of our fathers, enlightened by the misfortunes of the nation which we are destined to govern, our first thought is to invoke that mutual confidence so necessary to our repose LOUIS XVIIl. AND CHARLES X. Ill and happiness. After having attentively read the plan of the constitution proposed by the Senate, we have recognized that the bases are good, but that a great number of the articles bear so many marks of the precipitation in which they were drawn up, that they could not, in their actual form, become the fundamental laws of the State. Resolved to adopt a liberal constitution, wishing that it should be wisely combined, and not having it in our power to accept one which it is indispensable to rectify, we convoke for the tenth of next June, the Senate and Legislative Body, un- dertaking to lay before it a constitution which we shall draw up in concert with the Commission chosen from the two Assemblies, this constitution having for its basis the following guarantees : — " Representative Government to be maintained, divided into two corps, being the Senate and the Chamber of the Deputies of the Departments. Taxes to be freely con- sented to ; public and individual liberty insured ; the freedom of the press respected, save the precautions neces- sary to public tranquillity ; liberty of worship guaranteed •, property to be inviolable and sacred ; the sale of the national property irrevocable. Ministers responsible ; may be im- peached by one Chamber and judged by another ; judges to be irremovable and independent ; the public debt guaran- teed ; pensions, grades, and military honours to be pre- served, whether belonging to the old or the new noblesse ; the legion of honour, of which we shall fix the decoration, to be maintained; every Frenchman to be admissible to civil and military employment ; no individual to be dis- quieted for his votes or opinions. " Louis. "St. Ouen, May 2nd, 1814." 112 HISTORY OF THE EEIGNS OF This royal declaration, published in the Moniteur, and placarded over all the walls of Paris, gave very general satisfaction, not so much, perhaps, for the promises of liberty which it contained, as that it seemed to secure to each interest and personage the advantages which they possessed, whilst opening to others the recompense which was due. " People," writes Count Mollien, " had not at that time begun to busy their heads with political theories; the thought of every one was for himself" To this kind of satisfaction, the people were unfortunately strangers ; and their welcome of the King was not even so enthusiastic as that which greeted the Comte d'Artois. At first, the public mind was occupied with welcoming peace and the Bourbons. They were the prominent figures in the day's picture. But the minds which had small sympathy for Napoleon, sacrificing his soldiers and struggling through a third campaign vainly, without success in the field or wisdom in the council, now contemplated him in another light — dethroned, proscribed, betrayed, deserted, his throne occupied by a feeble old man, who came under the escort of the national foe. Whilst the tide of courtiers and placemen had set to lick the feet of the Bourbons, that of the popular favour and military lassitude ebbed from them back to commiseration and regret for the Emperor. On the morning of the 3rd of May the King made his entrance into the capital. He came in an open caleche, drawn by eight horses fi:-om the imperial stables, the ser- vants still wearing the imperial livery. The Duchess d'Angouleme was at his side, clad unavoidably in the English fashion of that day, which contrasted with that of the French, and considerably marred any show of sympathy. LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 113 That enthusiasm which had at first prompted some Royalist ladies to mount en croupe behind the high officers of the Allied Sovereigns, gave way before the unutterable shape of the duchess's bonnet, The Prince of Conde' and the Duke of Bourbon, his son, were also in the carriage, they were clad in a full suit such as was worn in 1 789, the ailes de pigeon not omitted. It was not the Conde's fault if a prince was wanting to represent the young and rising generation ; but when people are drawn together to see a sight or a procession, they are not wont to make allowances. And the caleche-load of superannuated coun- tenances and costumes did not impress the Parisians with any exuberant admiration for their new masters. The procession first followed the streets which led to N6tre Dame, the first wish of the King being to return thanks in his cathedral for his happy restoration. Care had been taken to avoid what had occurred on the Count d'Artois' entrance, the presence of any foreign soldiers. The Old Imperial Guard was therefore drawn up to line the streets between the Pont Neuf and the cathedral. Chateaubriand, who witnessed the scene, wrote a glowing account at the time of the enthusiasm of all beholders. In his Memoirs, written later, he confesses that " however true this might be with regard to the chiefs, I lied as far as concerned the soldiers. I have it present to my memory, as if I was beholding it still, the regiment of the Old Guard which lined the Quai des Orfevres : — Human figures could express nothing so menacing or so terrible. These grenadiers covered with wounds, the conquerors of Europe, who had seen thousands of bullets pass over their heads, who smelt of fire and powder ; these men, robbed of their old captain, were brought to grace the triumph of VOL. I. I 114 HISTORY OF THE REIGNS OP an old King, invalid with years, not wars, whilst an army of Russians, Austrians, and Prussians surrounded and watched them. Some moving the skin of their forehead, made their large fur hats descend over their eyes to pre- vent them seeing what passed before them ; others lowered the corners of their mouths in the contempt of their rage ; others athwart their moustache displayed their teeth like those of tigers. They presented arms with a fire and a fury that made one tremble. Never were men put to such a trial, or suffered such an infliction. If one voice had called them to vengeance at that moment, they should have been exterminated to a man, or they would have eaten the earth. At the extremity of the line was a young hussar on horseback. He held his sabre drawn, and he made it dance continually in a convulsive movement of anger. He was pale. His eyes rolled in their orbits. He opened and shut his mouth from time to time in gnashing his teeth, and stifling cries, of which one could only hear the first sound. He perceived a Russian officer ; the look which he cast upon him was indescribable. When the royal carriage passed he made his horse bound, and cer- tainly he was tempted to precipitate himself upon the King." The procession returned from Notre Dame along the Quais to the Tuileries. In passing the Conciergerie, and observing the grated corridor of her mother's prison, the Duchess d'Angouleme was painfully affected. On entering the palace she was overcome by emotion, and obliged to be carried to the apartments prepared for her. Many days elapsed before the Princess could overcome the terrible re- miniscences of the past by the joyful realities of the present. The first act of the King was to compose his ministry, and with the exception of the inevitable Talleyrand every LOUIS XVIIi; AND CHARLES X. 115 choice that he made was a bad one. None of them were what might be expected from the sagacity of Louis XVIII., and tended sadly to corroborate the reproach of Alexander that the Bourbons were incorrigible. Cer- tainly there was no great field for choice. Representative government had as yet made known no talents. To have chosen imperialists would have discontented the royalists ; whilst the choice of ardent royalists would have alarmed the nation. The appointment of Prince Talleyrand to be Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Abb6 Montesquiou to be Home Minister, and the Baron Louis to the management of the Finances, were but rewards due to recent services. M. D'Ambray had been noticed for talent as Advocate- General to the Parliament of Paris, previous to 1790. He had lived in retirement ever since ; but, on the strength of his old reputation, Louis XVIII. made him Chancellor. M. Ferrand was another genius of the last century whom the royal favour exhumed from oblivion. M. Beugnot, equally inept, was given the all-important department of the police to manage in the place of Fouche ; and during the many months he sat in his chair of office, never succeeded in seizing or finding the threads which conducted and moved that subtle administration. The most important, though apparently the most humble ministry in the service of a king, who from his infirmity passed his life either in his apartment or his carriage, was the chief of the household. This office, styled a ministry, was given to the Due de Blacas, who had been the intimate friend and companion of Louis at Hartwell. As his office made M. de Blacas master of the door of the King's closet, he soon, instead of allowing the other ministers to go with their portfolios to the King, I 2 116 HISTORY OF THE REIGNS OP sought to relieve them of that duty, and perform it himself. M. de Bourrieime, who was at the head of the Post-office, having resisted this pretension, was superseded in his post by M. Ferrand. And very soon his Majesty came to see and hear only through the medium of M. de Blacas, Talleyrand and Moutesquiou having, however, at all times access to him. The first pressure felt was the necessity of contenting the numerous throng of emigrants who returned to France, greedy for employ. They were fit for little else than military or naval appointments. But the regular army, diminished as it must necessarily be, afforded small scope. Indeed, the most difficult and delicate of tasks, bequeathed to the new government of France, was to deal with this decidedly hostile and discontented army ; and of the many mismanaged things, this was most mismanaged. The war department had been given to General Dupont, disgraced by Napoleon for his surrender of Baylen. The general had been in consequence a warm partizan of the Bourbons. No man was more unpopular with the army, and he increased this unpopularity by the wholesale dis- missal of able soldiers, and as wholesale appointments of generals and colonels, who had never seen a campaign except in the army of Conde', and who were a laughing stock to the soldiers. There were 60,000 French officers, who by the King's declaration were entitled to their grades and pay. As the army was to be reduced to 200,000 men, it may be conceived for how many the military profession was closed ; and yet edicts were now issued, restoring all the old corps of the body guards, and mousqmtaires rouges, regiments composed of the youth of noble and royahst families, every private of which was to have the rank and LOUIS XVllI. AND CHARLES X. 117 pay of oflBcers. To them was to be entrusted the guard of the King's person; to them would evidently accrue all fortune, favour, and advancement; whilst their braggart and often provoking loyalty was flung in the face of the old imperialist officers, as long as they stayed in the capital. Moreover as if it was determined that all should feel their humiliation, the regiments were successively called to Paris, to be paid their arrears, be purified and passed in review by the Princes. This brought the whole army successively to the capital, in contact with its dissipation and its disaffection. The troops were paid partly in bills, which as they were instantly ordered away, they were obliged to discount, and usurious harpies took the oppor- tunity of mulcting the soldiers. In short, it was impossible to unite more various or effectual ways of disgusting the old soldier, and causing him to regret the generous master and able administrator whom they had lost. M. de La- martine has drawn a splendid picture of the gardes du corps, drawn from the noble families of the kingdom. He begun life himself at this time as one of them, a circum- stance that not a little tinctures his history ; but he is compelled to admit that the formation of a little court army, large enough to excite envy, but not large enough for real support or defence, begat a general though tacit conspiracy, of all that was people and all that had been soldiers, against the Eestoration. Instead of attending to the important consideration of how the military population of France was to be con- tented and provided for, Alexander looked only to one panacea for all ills — a Constitutional Charter. He made the signature of the treaty with France, and the conse- quent withdrawal of the sovereigns and their troops, con- 118 HISTORY or THE EEIONS OP tingent on the promulgation of the Charter, Louis accordingly appointed a committee, consisting of three of his ministers, designated Koyal Commissioners, certain members of the Senate, and certain of the deputies, Laine being of the number. Before them was placed the draft of a Constitutional Charter, evidently conceived and drawn up by men, who had neither experience nor confi- dence in representative government, and who thought the only safe experiment of political machinery so danger- ous, was to establish it merely in name. The declaration of rights, however, contained a frank disavowal of those social and fiscal privileges, which had rendered the ancient noblesse odious so long, and victims at last. All Frenchmen were declared equal, whatever their title. They were to contribute without distinction to the public taxes, were equally admissible to oflice or employ. Property was inviolable, even that purchased during the Revolution. To these were added clauses or articles, which sounded well, guaranteeing personal liberty, freedom of worship, the liberty of the press, exemption from the conscription, trial by jury, and in no case by exceptional tribunals or judges. All these were solemnly set down and promised in the Charter, to the delight of Alexander ; but the party which Alexander endowed with superior power in France, ob- served not one of these promises, and respected not one of these principles, showing of how little value is a decla- ration of rights without the constitutional means of defend- ing and enforcing them. The first of all guarantees of the kind is the existence of an Assembly of National Representatives chosen by the country, expressing its opinions, and armed with its moral LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 119 weight. If a land contains a large proportion of the poor and destitute amongst the population, who are at the same time ignorant, fanatical, and bent on sudden and splenetic change, the educated or the wealthy classes can at least be fairly represented, and the National Assembly en- dowed with all the power and authority of the wide class from which it is taken. Unfortunately the principle of representation in France, as well as the experience derived from it, led not to the employment of the true repre- sentative principle either in an enlarged, or in a limited degree, but to a negation and perversion of it altogether. The custom of the French under the old system had been for the people at large of each canton to meet in their primary assemblies, and there choose delegates or electors, who subsequently assembled in the chief town of the province, and there chose the members of the Tiers Etat or commons. This was by no means a bad system for 1789, when the whole population of France were alert and full of zeal, when the people and the class above them of non-nobles had but the one great aim in view of reforming the Government, and restoring life to a country that was in a .state of industrial collapse and political anarchy. Whilst general zeal abounded, particu- lar theories had not yet been conceived or developed. To select the best-informed and best-intentioned men, true to the interests of the class they represented, was the principal object, and these were collected in the Constituent Assembly. The evils of indirect election, as the system is called, did not fail to manifest themselves at other periods. The first pernicious result is indifference in the people, who, feeling they have but to choose one man to choose another, deem such influence little worth exerting. 120 HISTORY OF THE REIGNS OF Then the assemblage of a limited number of electors in the capital of the province exposes them, either to be intimidated by the turbulent mob, or influential dema- gogues of the towns, in • times of political efiervescence, or to be exposed to the blandishments and menaces of the agents of the Government, in more quiet times. It was assemblies chosen by this system of indirect election, that pushed on the Revolution and precipitated the Throne. It was only when the work of destruction had been com- pleted, that direct election was intrusted to the primary assemblies of the Republic, already proclaimed by the Constitution of June 1793. The first and only employ- ment of direct election, during the Revolution, resulted in a Convention, in which vulgar incapacity, base envy, and malignant cruelty, however redeemed by a large portion of national spirit, left the country burdened and stained by an unexampled amount of folly and crime. But a num- ber of causes contributed more largely to this than the circumstance of the election having been direct. The more experienced politicians of previous assemblies had incapacitated themselves for re-election by a stupid act of self-denial. The electors were thus compelled to choose new men. It was the moment when foreign and despotic power menaced the country with invasion, and choice fell naturally upon the energetic rather than the intelligent. Direct election, however, became identified in people's minds with the crimes of the Convention, and was not to be thought of when a Constitution under regal auspices was to be framed anew. The Commission of the Constitution named by Louis XVIII. was as little prepared to trust to in- direct election as to direct. They were under the con- LOUIS XVm. AND CHARLES X. ' 121 viction that the popular sentiment was opposed to the present dynasty and settlement, and that to hope for its concurrence was vain. The Consular Establishment of 1 799 found itself much in the same predicament. After the overthrow of Robespierre and the Conventionalists, indirect election had been restored under the Directory. The result had been that royalism gained ground, and was undermining and outnumbering the republican, when mili- tary influence interfered to arrest both. The Consular Constitution was then invented by Sieyes and Bonaparte, having for its aim to establish a salaried class of digni- taries and functionaries, in lieu of the public, which they were to supersede altogether. The people were for once allowed a shadow of power, that of choosing lists of nota- bles, municipal and electoral, out of which functionaries and deputies were to be chosen. But who was to choose ? The great perplexity of the school of political mounte- banks, who, like Sieyes, could not think of allowing to the people the right of electing even a deputy, was where to vest the right of election. The plain truth is, that between popular election or the political influence of many, and the personal despotism or the absolute rule of one, there is no medium, nothing at least fixed, to which a Constitution could be attached, or on which it could be built. Sieyes, however, fondly imagined that he could frame a despotism without a despot, and he proposed to create a Grand Elector, independent of the chief or the magistrate, charged with executive powers. Napoleon laughed down poor Sieyes, but adopted his ideas, so far as to vest the right of election in the Senate. The Senate consisted of eighty notables, functionaries or ex-func- tionaries of his own choosing. He chose them, and they 122 HISTORY OP THE REIGNS OP chose the deputies, out of a list of provincial notables. This hocus pocus, this wretched parody of a representative system, which substituted a set of Government salaried functionaries for the public, was looked upon by the majority of Louis XVIII.'s Commissioners as the only safe system to pursue. M. de Fontanes, who pretended to be weary of the Imperial despotism, was a loud panegyrist of its system of appointment and election ; M. Laine, however, resisted. He did not oppose indirect election ; but the idea of a Senate or a Chamber of Peers electing a Chamber of Deputies, as some of the wise ones proposed, struck him as too preposterous. He wanted the power of final election of deputies to be at least vested in the richest notables of each department. To even this, however, the first framers of the Charter in their timidity demurred. The father of that Charter, Alexander, the Russian Emperor, was profoundly ignorant, as might be supposed, on the subject of electoral rights and electoral laws ; and it was finally agreed to adjourn the question altogether. The King might make use of the Legislative Body for this year as a Lower Chamber, thus taking an assembly that was elected by Napoleon's Senate, as the Chamber ' of Deputies of the newly-emancipated nation ! The only article of the Charter on the subject of electoral right, limited them to those who paid three hundred francs (12^.) of direct taxes. The power of proposing or initiating laws was denied to either Chamber. This was reserved for the King, who, besides the several functions of the executive power, was " to make rules and issue ordinances necessary for the execution of the laws and the surety of the state." Such are the words of the celebrated fourteenth article of the Charter, by which LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 123 Charles X. and his advisers deemed themselves entitled to make a coup d'Etat and issue ordonnances changing the entire foundation of government. In granting the liberty of the press, exception was made to such laws as were necessary to prevent or repress its abuses. The word prevent was objected to as implying the censorship, and for that very reason defended by Montesquiou and his followers. The Commission, however, cancelled the word. Whilst the Abbe de Montesquiou was charged with the care of the royal interests in drawing up the Charter, the Prince de Talleyrand was occupied in obtaining from Russia and the Allied Sovereigns all the concessions pos- sible in the demarcation of the frontier. France had been promised something more than her old frontier of 1790. And the allies were prepared to fulfil their promise by allowing France to annex Savoy, and making the higher range of Alps its frontier on the south-east. To this was to be added the territory of Avignon, which, before the Eevolution, had belonged to the Pope; On the northern frontier the allies were more inexorable. They were prepared to give merely some strip of territory, and to allow to Landau, a French fortress beyond the frontier, a connexion with the adjoining French depart- ment. The province between the Dutch territory, the sea and the Meuse, it was proposed to give to Hol- land, a plan devised by England for establishing a strong barrier, in the shape of an independent monarchy, on the northern frontier of France. The idea was to swell Holland to the size and importance of another Prussia, and make two great Protestant kingdoms, which, with Hanover, would stretch athwart the north of the Continent, united by religion, as well as by common 124 HISTORY OP THE REIGNS OF interests, and forming an inexpugnable barrier to French ambition. The idea was ingenious, and it was founded on sentiments prevalent in 1814, which were that con- stitutional liberties could, with impunity, ease, and advan- tage, be conferred and maintained by sovereigns, and would be accepted and enjoyed by the people, who in all cases could but make a large return in allegiance and attachment to whatever dynasty or rule might grant such a boon. It happened that all these territories bordering on France, and taken from the French Emperor to be engrafted with Prussia, were filled with a Roman Catholic population. To the jealousies proceeding from communities of one creed being governed by dynasties of another was joined that of nationality and race. Measures even of improvement and progress are apt to be the most ob- structive in such cases, and to be construed as tyrannical. So that the very boon, the constitutional liberty, which England resolved upon, to amalgamate Flemings and Dutch, Ehenans and Prussians, failed with the former, as they would have failed if employed by the latter; and freedom, accompanied by religious difterence, formed a greater cause of disunion (as, indeed, English statesmen might have learned at home), than a surety or a bond of empire. Prince Talleyrand employed his chief efforts against the union of Belgium and Holland, which he too made the mistake of considering a formidable barrier to France. He preferred seeing Belgium transferred once more to Austria, or erected into an independent kingdom.* The efforts of Talleyrand were, however, of no avail, * A memoir on the state of Europe, drawn up by M. de la Besnadi^re, under tlie direction of Prince Talleyrand, is frequently referred to and quoted Irura by Bignon in his history. LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 125 Belgium was decidedly to be annexed to Holland, the Khenish provinces to Prussia. Piedmont was to be indemnified for the lossof Ghambery by the acquisition of Genoa. Switzerland was to be independent. The navigation of the Khine free. England restored to France all the colonies she possessed in January 1792, with the exception of Tobago, Santa Lucia, and the Isle of France. Guadaloupe and French Guiana were restored by the powers that possessed them. France was to erect no fortifications, and to keep no more than a certain number of troops in Pondicherry. The right of fishing off" New- foundland was restored to the state of things in 1792. Other articles concerned the payment of debts incurred by France during its occupation of other European countries. Additional articles obliged France to abolish the slave- trade, as a condition of her recovering her West Indian colonies. The Ionian Islands were made over to England, and Malta left permanently in her possession. The French minister, moreover, agreed to acquiesce in the final distribution to be made of the countries beyond the Khine, as the Plenipotentiaries of the great Powers assembled in Congress should determine. After the Treaty, which bears the date of May 30th, the Allied Sovereigns withdrew their troops from Paris, and took their departure, the Emperor Alexander and the King of Prussia to England, the Emperor of Austria to his dominions. The Senate and the Legislative Body had been summoned to meet on the 1 0th of June. The Chamber of Peers was now summoned for the 14th, to hear the Charter read to them, in order that it might receive their sanction, the Legislative Body being at the same time summoned to attend. The Senators, however. 126 HISTORY OP THE REIGNS OF did not all receive their letter of convocation as peers. Fifty-four were excepted, some of them as regicides, being Cambacere's, Chaptal, Fouche, Garat, and Gregoire. Sixty of the old Senators alone remained. This number was augmented to that of 182, by the adjunction chiefly of names from the ancient noblesse. Ten of the marshals were created peers ; Ney first, and deservedly so ; for he had shown himself the most zealous to repair to Compiegne, even before Marmont, and to address the King in the name of the army. With Ney were named Berthier, Suchet, Massena, Oudinot, and Mortier. It seemed too glaring a reward of treason to ap- point Marmont. His name was thus at first passed over in silence. Brune had also paid his court at Compiegne, but was set aside as implicated in the crimes of the revolution. The military exploits of Jourdan and Augereau in the republican period also excluded them, although both had issued proclamations to their soldiers of ultra-royalist extravagance. Soult, equally willing to be servile, came too fresh from spilling useless blood at Toulouse. Davoust was proscribed by the Allied Sovereigns owing to.his severe and rapacious government of Hamburg. This somewhat motley assembly met with the Legis- lative Body, styled, in the official language of the day, the Chamber of Deputies of the Departments, on the 4th of June, in the Palais Bourbon. The King, attended by all the Princes of his family, proceeded thither in solemn state, the Marquis de Dreux Breze, the same master of the ceremonies whom Mirabeau apostrophizes for closing the door of the Assembly of the Tiers Etat, at Versailles, in 1789, now presiding over the first Constitutional Con- vocation of Louis XVIII. LOUIS XVm. AND CHARLES X. 127 The following was his Majesty's address to the Assembly : — Messieurs, Coming for the first time into this hall, surrounded by the great bodies of the State and the representatives of the nation, who give me the most touching proofs of their afiFection, I am proud to be the dispenser of benefits, which Divine Providence has vouchsafed to my people. I have concluded with Russia, Austria, England, and Prussia, a peace, in which are comprised the Allies, that is, all Chris- tian princes. The war was universal : peace is equally so. The rank which France occupied amongst nations remains to her, and has been transferred to no other state. What other states have acquired in the way of security augments that of France, and consequently its true power. The conquests, which it has been unable to preserve, do not diminish its real force. The glory of the French arms has received no tarnish : the monuments of its valour subsist, and the chefs-d'ceuvre of art now belong to us by rights more stable than those of victory. The paths of commerce, so long closed, are now fi'ee. The market of France will not be the only one open to the products of its industry and soil. Those which long use has rendered a necessity, and which are requisite to her arts, have been recovered with her colonial possessions. We shall no longer be compelled to do without them, or to obtain them at ruinous prices. Our manufactures will flourish again, our sea- ports resuscitate, and everything promises that long tran- quillity abroad, and durable felicity at home, will be the happy fruits of peace. A sad recollection comes to trouble my joy. I once flattered myself, that I was born and 128 HISTORY OP THE REIGNS OF should remain the faithful subject of the best of kings, yet I occupy his place. But Louis XVI. lives in the immortal testament which he destined for the instruction of his august and unfortunate son. My eyes fixed on that immortal production, penetrated by the sentiments that dictated it, guided by the experience, and seconded by the counsels of many amongst you, I have drawn out the Constitutional Charter, which you are about to hear read, and which establishes the prosperity of the State upon a solid basis. LOUIS XVm. AND CHARLES X. 129 CHAPTER IV. FATUITY OF THE ROYALISTS — INERTNESS OF THE KING— CHATEAU- BRIAJSTD — THE CENSORSHIP — DEBATE ON THE PRESS — REVENUE AND EXPENDITURE — PROHIBITION TO WORK ON SUNDAY — EXTRA- VAOANCE OF THE RELIGIOUS PARTY — SOULT IN THE WAR OFFICE. The promulgation of the Charter was the signal for political parties to raise their respective banners. Unfortunately, the division of sentiment was too wide to be confined within constitutional limits, for whilst some spurned the Charter as an act of Jacobinism, others repudiated the dynasty as a recantation of popular principles and a negation of national glory. One should have thought, that it required no extraordinary depth of wisdom or of prudence, for those princes and nobles who, restored to their country after a quarter of a century's exile, and, indeed, oblivion, under the protection of foreign armies, to perceive that, few in number, shorn of wealth, influence, or experience, a compromise and a reconciliation between them and the rest of the nation, could only be made by a large sur- render of their antiquated pretensions, by a rejection of what was servile and base in imperialism, but at the same time by an adoption of all that had been great, glorious, and good, both under republican rule and in the military system VOL. I. K 130 HISTOET OP THE REIGNS OP which followed. The great body of the Eoyalists who returned to France, and who were welcomed and joined by the remainder of the squires and abbes who survived the revolution, were, however, impressed with no such necessity, and prepared for no such concessions. Totally ignorant of men and of things, they had no idea that power to be held and exercised should be based upon some national or some moral support, efBcient and palpable. Napoleon reigned by his army, his glory, his acknowledged ability to govern ; the Republic by the principles which it at first proclaimed and realized, or by the terror which it inspired. What means of government could the Restoration command, so soon as foreign armies were withdrawn, if neither the army was to be conciliated by rewards and respect ; the middle classes by the freedom and equality which they prized; the educated and professional ranks by liberty of speech, of the press, and the opening of every intellectual career ; or the working men appealed to by any of the boons or promises which they prize ? The fanatic ultra-Royalists saw none of these necessities. The general acquiescence in peace, even upon its hard con- ditions, accompanied by the free acclamations which wel- comed the Princes in the hopes that they would meet the wishes of the nation, was mistaken for a general return of the country to that religion of loyalty which prevailed in olden times, which made the monarch an idol, and his subjects blind worshippers, demanding neither virtue, capacity, grandeur, nor humanity, in the personage they obeyed. The belief that they were born idols, and had a hereditary right to be worshipped and to be loved, in- dependent of their conduct or their benefi.cence, was the creed in which the infatuated Count d'Artois, his sons, LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 131 and the unfortunate Duchess of Angouleme, enwrapped themselves. These personages, now influential, had passed their lives in retirement, in ignorance, and inaction. Puerile as was their credulity, fanatic and wrong as were their opinions and their views, still an attempt might have been made to strengthen and support even these. Instead of this they did nothing, save mar the King's feeble attempts at reconciliation, by mocking and alienating every man who had grown great under the revolution and the empire, and by insisting that the present generation should be set aside. Louis XVIII., less fanatic, less insane, was still more feeble and more deceived by the outward demonstrations of attachment and adherence which poured in upon him. He had lived and relied on the self-contemplation of his own majesty, of which he seemed to think the great essential was the form and ceremony with which it was enthroned and surrounded. Louis pursued no profound political studies in his retirement, saw nobody but courtiers, and allowed his intelligence to lie, as it were, fallow. The grand objects, the great views, which might naturally open to a monarch recovering possession of power, seem not to have struck him. "When the Allies pared away his kingdom, confiscated his fortresses, and excluded him from the great council which was to repartition the territories of Europe, such things seemed not to affect him. But to be told that he was not king of France since the death of the young dauphin, to have a constitution imposed upon him, instead of his giving one, in other words, for him to stand whilst the Prince Talleyrand was sitting, this shocked and alarmed him. The restoration of the Gardes du Corps, and the inauguration and the establishment of the old mili- K 2 332 HISTORY OP THE EEIGNS OF tary household, was all that appeared to him as essential to do in the war department; and having achieved these absurdities, Louis left the Imperial Guards to exist neg- lected along with the pert young gentlemen who displaced and who mocked them. As to affairs, or the necessities of administration, foreign or domestic, Louis knew nothing, and had such insufBcient ideas of their importance, that he abandoned thera to the hands of the most incapable, inexperienced, and infatuated men, whose sole quality was that of being worshippers of royalty and its rights. Nevertheless, the King during his residence in England had acquired a vague idea of the necessity of gratifying his subjects with the name of a Con- stitution, and the semblance of a representative government. He had no intention of bestowing the reality of freedom, or of winning the support of the public, or of any class of it, by admitting them to a participation in political influence. The Abbe de Montesquiou, who had the chief hand in drawing up the Charter, declared afterwards with great truth, that he had no intention of conferring real constitu- tional liberty upon the country. M. D'Ambray, M. Fer- rand, and M. Beugnot, were partizans of what they called the Ancient Constitution by Parliament and Ordonnances. Prince Talleyrand neither knew nor cared what a Consti- tution meant. Louis, however, was not naturally a man of extremes. He was so far fitted for the part of a consti- tutional monarch, that he liked to steer a middle course between contending influences, and seek to preserve his own independence. In order to do this with fairness, pru- dence, and success, it were necessary to enable both sides to display their arguments, their aims, their force. By allowing a liberal, constitutional, and middle-class party LOUIS XVin. AND CHARLES X. 133 free development at that time, the King might have kept the balance between it and the ultra-Eoyalists ; but he would not trust the nation so far. He would not consult the country in elections, or allow a free representative assembly to meet, nor would he permit the press its free expression. The consequence was, that Louis saw but one party before him, that of the Eoyalists, which he allowed to rise up without counterpoise, and almost without con- tradiction : thus purposely depriving himself of all know- ledge of public opinion, dispensing with a genuine repre- sentative body, and silencing the mock Assembly, which he preserved, by denying it the right of originating proposi- tions or laws, Louis at the same time excluded every independent voice from his cabinet; nay, he considered a council of ministers as too free of expression for his royal ear ; and he therefore committed himself altogether to M. De Blacas, who acted as the intermediary between his Majesty and his other ministers, and who, keeping the door of the royal closet, admitted no one to converse with the King, save by his permission. Such infatuation would scarcely be believed of the Court of the Great Mogul, yet such was the conduct of a monarch restored after a quarter of a century's absence to the throne of a country, the most susceptible, the most civilized, the most agitated with con- flicting interests and sentiments of any in the world. It is difficult to say, whether those who, like the Count d'Artois, were anti-constitutional and ultra-Royalist from fanatic and religious feeling, or those who denounced the constitution as impolitic, like the Count de Villele, were most pernicious in their influence upon opinion and upon the State. The ultra-Royalists, from policy, condemned the Constitution, from a conviction that the great body of the 134 HISTOBY OF THE REIGNS OP French nation would never bear to be dominated by that narrow portion of the noblesse and gentry, possessed of hereditary fortune, who had, for the most part, emi- grated, and who deemed it irrefragably right and expe- dient that their caste should govern. No free representative system could lead to such a result. And the only chance of ever reaching it was to keep the country in leading- strings, maintain its opinions and its education stifled and repressed, allow nothing but monarchic and monastic philosophy to be taught, until France was put back, like an erring time-piece, half a century, and brought, by a despotism exercised in the name of legitimacy, to the same state of obedience, poverty, ignorance, and nullity, which prevailed in 1750. None but the idiot or the maniac, it will be said, could entertain such ideas as these. But in this sense did men of great intellectual power like De Maistre and Bonald write ; and even so practical a man as Villele thought fit to raise his voice from Toulouse against the inexpediency and folly of a Charter. On the opposite extreme an antagonistic banner of course was raised, which had need of announcing no other principles than those of truly representative government; for with freedom of the press, independence and a fair extension of election, parliament endowed with its proper right of originating laws and controlling expenses, they were certain of exer- cising vast power. They had not only the classes to ap- peal to who felt hurt and aggrieved by the narrow and exclusive spirit of restored Eoyalism, but they had the old military and imperialist as well as the republican and revolutionary parties to rely on. There were a few men who from the first took a true LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 135 view of what the government of Restoration might do, in order to content its more rational followers, and at the same time win the adherence of the nation. Such a man was Laine. Such a man, in the first years of the Restora- tion, was Chateaubriand. This powerful writer had as much of the fire and enthusiasm of legitimacy as the oldest oflBcer of the army of Conde. He worshipped foyalty, as he did religion, with the faith of a believer, and the imagination of a poet. He had served Napoleon, and even flattered him, was not blind to his military genius, and his heart had refused to remain cold to the glories of his country. But he felt assured, at least then, that legitimate Royalism could ally with liberty and with the progress of the age, of which he considered imperial despotism, even in the midst of all its victories, the fetterer and the gaoler. Carried away by hatred and by zeal he had written a pamphlet on the fall of Bonaparte, as unjust to that great man, as unworthy of the great writer ; and he had received in return that usual minimum of gratitude which men who reach power by aid of the penman bestow upon their instruments. But Chateaubriand persevered not the less zealously in his mission, which was to persuade Royalism to adopt those constitutional principles which could reconcile it to and identify it with the nation, whilst in the same breath he besought the Liberals to observe that moderation which is compatible with kingly govern- ment, and at the same time learn to feel that loyalty and enthusiasm for monarchy as an institution, wanting which it is so often compelled to trust to violence and military sup- port. All the arguments urged against the Charter and the King from one side or the other will be found stated 136 HISTOEY OF THE REIGNS OF in the '■Reflexions Politiques' of Chateaubriand, and announced by him with a copious good sense, a conclusive logic, and a sincerity of conviction, which must have made deep and salutary impression. After describing the ancient regime, and colouring it with all the brilliancy that its partizans could desire, the writer exclaims : — " But all this noble edifice has crumbled. Nor is there any use in inquiring whether it was the most solid or most perfect of governments ; whether founded on religion and antiquity, in concurrence with our habits, character, and soil, it was not more in harmony with the genius of the nation than that which prevails to-day. Man can in life only start from the point at which he has arrived. Whether the government of the Louis' was good or bad, it has gone. We are no longer in the same place we were an hundred or three hundred years ago ; and we must take things as they are, not as they happen to have been. How come back to the old state of things ? How require proofs of noblesse of young men seeking to become officers in the army ? Eestore Louis XVI., with 1 700 millions of debts, and ask a finance minister how he is to meet these without the means of consulting the public or its representatives ? How could he manage the Parlia- ment, the noblesse, and the clergy ?" The writer thus demonstrates to the hostile Royalist that the Charter truly gave him every advantage he ought reasonably to require ; and turning to the liberal opposition he equally shows to them every guarantee of freedom bestowed in the concession of the Charter. Here, however, unfortunately, his arguments stopped short and failed, for whatever was promised in the Charter, nothing was fulfilled. It became soon apparent how these pro- LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 137 mises were to be realized, when the minister came down to the Chamber of Deputies on the 5th of July with the law for regulating the press. This law demanded that no journal or periodical should appear without the royal authorization, that no printer should exercise his calling without a hrevet or patent, for which he was required to pay security, and which he was liable to forfeit on contra- vening the rules imposed upon him. Lastly, no work containing less than thirty sheets of impression, which makes a goodly volume, and implies a high price, could appear without being submitted to Government cen- sors, and approved by them. Such a law, which made a complete mockery of the promised freedom, raised at once a spirit of opposition even in the imperial Legislative Body, converted as it was into a Royalist Chamber of Deputies. The Committee appointed to report upon it unanimously declared the censorship to be unjust, dan- gerous, and unconstitutional. M. Raynouard, who was of the Commission, and seemed to have had the chief hand in drawing up the Report, pointed out that the only guarantee for the public liberties in the absence of the Chamber, was the Press, and that to place it at the mercy of the Government, was in truth to abrogate con- stitutional government: there was no longer a guarantee for even the publicity of debate, the entire faculty of printing being in the hands of the Government. The Report of M. Raynouard breathed the spirit of rational liberty, such as it was understood by every educated man. In contrast with it appeared the views and sentiments of the Government, far more narrow, more despotic, more retrograde, and more illiberal than ever were proffered by the worst ministers of the Empire, however violently they 138 HISTORY OF THE REIGNS OP may have acted. It was plain to see at a glance, that the cause of the Bourbons was lost, and that the great floating mass of the people, who disliked the Empire and the Republic, and who in reality demanded but the possibility of rallying to a constitutional king, must turn at once and for ever against a dynasty and a Government, which, after conceding a Charter, belied it, and practised the meanest chicanery to nullify what had been conceded, and escape from what had been promised The debates in the Chamber of Representatives on the law respecting the Press came on one month after its presentation, and a few days after the reading of the Report. It was the first parliamentary debate to which the attention of the French public was called and its interest excited ; and this interest was raised to the highest pitch by the totally different principles avowed by the Government, and those moderately put forward by M. Raynouard. Such was the crowd in the Chamber on the morning of the debate, that it could not take place. The very hall was full of people, and the President pre- ferred adjourning the debate to forcibly expelling the crowd. The discussion lasted several days ; it was little marked by eloquence. The minister and the reporter of the Commission were the chief orators. The principal objections of the latter were directed against the censor- ship. He seemed to admit the subjection of all printers, to Government by means of the system of brevets. Mem- bers of opposition preferred a cautionnement or deposit for journals, with the indispensable signature of a patent proprietor. A jury or the judges was proposed in lieu of the censorship. M. de Montesquiou was inexorable. He would merely concede that the censorship should apply to LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 139 works of twenty sheets, in lieu of thirty, and that the law should have but a temporary duration, and last until merely the opening of the session of 1816. The concession was sufficient to procure the passing of the law in a Chamber of 317 votes by 237 against 80. One regrets to say that M. Eoyer-CoUard, afterwards so able a champion of the freedom of the press, as of other constitutional rights, was, with M. Guizot, the principal concoctor of this law of censorship. M. Guizot was, however, then a very young man, just commencing his political career as Secretary of the Ministry of the Interior. In the Chamber of Peers the objections to the law were stated with more eloquence, and with even greater fervour, than in the Deputies ; and it was carried there by a much smaller majority, which raised the popularity of the Peers, as contrasted with the servility of the Lower Chamber. In the year 1812 Napoleon had caused to be drawn up by the Minister of the Interior, Count Montalivet, a report or statement of the wealth, produce, trade, and progress of the empire. As Genoa and Hamburg were then included within the French dominion, it was not difficult to pre- sent a glowing picture of its prosperity and resources. One of the first cares of the Abbe' de Montesquiou was to cause another escpose to be drawn up, contradictmg the brilliant report of the Imperial Minister, and representing France as bankrupt in resources and wealth as his predecessor had depicted it to be prosperous. Whilst the Imperialist had represented manufactories to be thriving, the Royalist showed that when Spain, the only outlet for French manu- factures to the new world, was closed by the war in the Peninsula, the last remnant of French industry died away, the looms of Lyons, for example, being reduced to half 140 HISTORY OF THE REiaNS OF their previous number, so completely did Napoleon's struggle to shut English trade from the Continent have the effect of excluding that of France from its best markets. The actual losses in the wars of the later years were a more fearful and more undeniable enumeration. Ten millions sterling of mere equipment were destroyed. It was in his financial statement that the Abbe de Montesquiou was most unjust. Aided by some faithless clerks of the Financial Department, ashamed of their task, though profiting by it, the Royalist Minister brought in a bill of arrears, or of deficit, against the Imperial Government of nearly seventy millions sterling. M. Mollien has fully proved the flagrancy of such a statement, and the impossibility of such a deficit existing.* The figures were coolly assumed by the French Minister as correct, and they made the chief part of the difficulties of the budget. The expenditure of the Imperial Government, previous to the Russian war, had been at the rate of thirty-five milUons sterling. Much heavier burdens weighed upon the countries occupied by war, and made up for the sixteen millions of war expenses paid out of the treasury. When the maintenance of fortresses alone figured for upwards of five millions sterling annually, the immensity of Napoleon's expenditure may be imagined. He even devoted five mil- lions to his navy, building vessels, and training sailors and marines for that struggle by sea which he contemplated engaging in, so soon as that by land had been terminated by the subjugation of the Continent. In 1812 and 1813 the regular budget rose to nearly fifty millions. Direct or property taxation, with the Crown domains, fiirnished one- half this sum. The regular customs produced not more * His Memoires d'lm Mi7iistre, printed at the Imprimerie Bmjale. LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 141 than three millions ; the excise on drinks, with salt and tobacco, brought in nearly ten millions, severely felt and grudged by the population. The augmentation of these duties, as well as the seizure and sale of the common land and forests belonging to parishes, betrayed the embarrass- ments of the Emperor, and rendered him most unpopular in the rural districts. Of supporting his Government by credit he had neither the possibility nor the idea. An arrear of a year in the payment of the debt, although the current interest at five per cent scarcely amounted to more than three and a half millions sterling, showed how little this resource was to be relied upon. Although the Bourbons had been welcomed in Bordeaux and in Paris very much on account of their promises to abolish the excise duties on drinks, it was impossible for the moment to sacrifice the revenue to popularity. A budget, much after the Imperial standard, was proposed for 1815, amounting to 618 millions of francs, not twenty-five millions sterling. The army figured in this but for eight millions sterling, and the navy but for two. Four millions was allotted to the interest of the debt, swelled by the arrears. The arrear itself was met by Government bills, payable in three years, and bearing an interest of eight per cent. The five per cent rentes, being but sixty-three for each hundred in the market, allowed of no lower interest or no better terms. It was necessary to give this paper, or these obligations, as they were called, better security of payment than a new government and a slender budget; Baron Louis, therefore, proposed the sale of three hundred thou- sand hectares of forest belonging to the State. The proposition to dispose of the forest lands in the pos- session of the State prematurely stirred two questions, 142 HISTORY OF THE REIGNS OF which rankled in the hearts of the Royalists, although they had not ventured of themselves to agitate them. The property of the Church, as well as that of the emigrant proprietors of the soil, at the commencement of the Revo- lution, had consisted in no small degree of forests. The arable land of Church and noblesse had been eagerly bought up ; much of the forest land remained unsold. It seemed but natural and just to restore them to the old proprietors. Louis XVIII., by giving to the Duke of Orleans and the Prince of Conde' such of the palaces and forests as had escaped sale by being united to the domains of the Crown, fortified the claim of the emigrants. The law that was introduced into the Chamber for the restoration of this property might have passed without discussion but for the phraseology of the Minister, M. Ferrand, who thought fit to accuse the nation of disgraceful conduct. " Those Frenchmen who had exiled themselves, and those who staid at home," said the Minister, "were now, indeed, of the same opinion, arrived at by the one in never swerv- ing from the straight line, by the other in having gone through more or less revolutionary phases. The present law," said M. Ferrand, " merely recognises a right of pro- perty which always subsisted, but in restoring which the King wishes to observe a prudent caution." Such a line of argument, assuming that the emigrants retained all their original right to the confiscated property, and that prudence alone influenced the King in withholding it, aroused again that opposition within and without the Chamber, which it was madness to provoke in words, whilst not daring to realise those words in acts. In vain did the more prudent friends of the Crown point to the article of the Charter, declaring the revolutionary sales of land to be LOUIS XYIIT. AND CHARLES X. 143 final and irrevocable. So many other promises of the Charter being eluded, how expect that this should be re- spected ? Such were the fears and feelings of the public, such almost the language of the reporter of the Commis- sion. The imprudent words of the Minister, with the threats of the Eoyalist party, led the great body of the nation to consider them as enemies, and prevented the recognition of even just claims with feelings of even justice. On the vital question, the voice of Macdonald was again heard, reconciling the dignity of the nation and the interest of the Revolution with due humanity and consi- deration for the exile. " The old defenders of the Monarchy reappear amongst us," said the Marshal-Duke, " protected by old age and misfortune. What changes do they find in all things — ■- changes achieved in their ruin ? Had we not better recon- cile them to that change, and make them one of us, instead of allowing them to remain with their old claims, stirring up old enmities ? It must be disastrous to the public tran- quillity to leave those despoiled in the presence of those enriched, without endeavouring to fill up the abyss between them : the present law does not do this. Far from casting a veil over deep dissensions, the debates of the Deputies tore it away, and awakened fears and discord ; yet what the law does is just and wise. But there remains an act of justice to complete it." And the Marshal pointed out, that, whilst it was impossible to deprive the individuals of the property which they had paid for, the nation was still rich and just enough to indemnify from the general mass those whom circumstances, not crime, had deprived of that pro- perty. The public passions were too much inflamed, and indeed the treasury too poor, for any such act of reconci- 144 HISTORY OF THE REIGNS OF liation at the moment. The cares and capabilities, indeed, of those first moments of restored royalty went no farther than to open every national wound, as if the task was to irritate and avenge, not regulate and pacify. Whilst the attitude of the Court, the acts of its Minis- ters, and the language habitually employed by both, be- traying principles and tendencies far more retrograde than even the present acts, disquieted and alarmed the nation, a crowd of circumstances, less important in magnitude, but more calculated to lay hold on the public mind and excite it, arose out of the inexperience, the fanaticism, and the vile adulation of all that was extravagant in the ruling faction by interested or infatuated men. M. Beugnot issued an ordonnance, forbidding any one to work on a Sunday — an abrupt change in the national habits and industry, which at least required time to bring about, as well as moderation and good sense not to render oppressive. Such an ordonnance applied by the majority of a people to a few objectors, may seem the right of the greater number ; but when a few intruders, as inexperienced as incapable, seek to impose their views and habits on the great mass of the population, accustomed to other views and other habits, such pretensions have all the insolence of persecution. There was no doubt room and matter for reform in the religious institutions and habits of the country, which Napoleon, in restoring, had so regulated as not to become dangerous or inimical to him. He had extended the iron hand of prohibition and of the police over the preaching of the clergy, and had silenced the pulpit as well as the press. If he forbade the clergy to open schools, and discounten- anced any religious instruction other than what the colleges LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 145 and the professors gave, it was not that he gave freedom to education, or sought to liberate the national mind from superstition. The clergy had, therefore, much reason in the clamour which they raised, in 1814, against the im- perial system of education, as in the demands which they made to have at least their share in instructing the youth of the country.* But certain of the priesthood and their partizans at Court aimed at nothing short of substituting their influence in the University for the Imperial Dictator- ship, and making public education over altogether to the Jesuits. Even the imperial organization of the higher clergy was to be swept clean away. Napoleon had suffi- ciently humbled and set aside that portion of the priest- hood, which had accepted the Republic and the civil constitution of the clergy. There remained, however, some prelates and clergy of that conforming and liberal school. These were now to be got rid of, and in order to do so, it was proposed to abolish the Concordat, and to give up to Rome the prerogative of nominating bishops, which Napoleon, as chief of the State, had wisely retained. The obstacle to this complete revolution, this destruction of the national church, was prevented, not by any voice of French remonstrance or opposition, but by the good sense of the Pope and of Cardonal Gonsalvi, who recommended the unfledged statesmen of the Tuileries to proceed more moderately and prudently in the way of High Church restoration. Not a few of the clergy set up an ultra- montanism of their own, and displayed a zeal, calculated to keep pace with the frenzied enthusiasm of the Royalists. Then France was covered with ceremonies, and monuments, and vows of expiation for crimes, or for deeds committed * See Lamennais' pampUet, " Liberty d'Bnseignmeiit," 1814. VOL. I. L 146 HISTORY OF THE BBIGNS OP during the quarter of a century of Eevolution. Some of these were but just reparation and the fulfilment of a sacred duty, against which not even the most ulcerated revolutionist could demur. When the remains of the unfortunate Louis XVI. and his Queen were disinterred from the cemetery of the Madeleine, where they had so long lain unhonoured, and transferred with solemnity to Saint Denis, Chateaubriand relates, that he was present at the exhumation, and that he recognized in the osseous remains of the skull of Marie Antoinette the smile with which the unfortunate Queen had graciously received him at Versailles ! Had the clergy confined its zeal to the celebration of acts of expiation, the public would not have been moved, and could not have complained. Mademoiselle de Raucourt, the celebrated actress, died about this time. She had been remarkable for the piety of her later years, as well as for her bounty towards the poor and clergy of her parish, which was that both of the Court and the French theatre. When her body was brought to the church of St. Roch to receive the funeral prayers previous to burial, the iron grating in front of the church was found closed. The priests of the church had revived those ancient pre- judices which had existed before the Revolution, against admitting comedians to the rites of Christian sepulture. The friends who were accompanying the remains of Mademoiselle de Raucourt expostulated with the clergy of St. Roch. They were determined not to say prayers over the body of an actress. During the parley a crowd col- lected, and grew gradually more indignant as the cause of the disturbance was made known to them. Impatience and disgust soon swelled to imprecations against the LOUIS XVIII. AND OHAELES X. 147 Government and the priests, the mob broke down the grating, entered the body of the church forcibly with the remains of Mademoiselle de Raucourt, and peremptorily demanded a priest to perform the funeral ceremony ; whilst the police outside and the new mousquetaires of the Court were totally unable to penetrate the throng or disperse it. Fortunately it was but a few steps to the Tuileries, from which the monarch might even have heard the tumult, nor was there any cause for which he would have been less prone to disturb the public tranquillity •, for Louis XVIII., though dominated by his brother and his niece, and yielding to the suggestions of the clergy rather than joining in their zeal, was a sincere lover of dramatists and the drama, whilst he was but a lukewarm and hypo- critical adherent of religion, at least in its fanatical observ- ances. The King, therefore, despatched a priest of his household to read the proper prayers over the remains of De Raucourt; and the insurrection which was rising, sunk for the moment into a more general feeling of derision and disgust. Sentiments very similar to this were excited in the entire population of Paris, about the same time, by a solemn pro- cession, which the clergy thought fit to lead through the streets, in honour of the Virgin Mary, not merely as a personage of Scripture, but as the special protectress of France. How she had become so was explained in a letter of Louis XVIII. to the French prelates, not one word of which letter Louis XVIII. believed. Indeed the monarch would have been the first to smile at the idea of France having been placed under the especial protec- tion of the Virgin, by the most astute, most cruel, and ignoble of monarchs, Louis XI. The King in England 1.2 148 HISTORY OP THE REIGNS OP attributed his restoration to the Prince Regent, in Paris he was equally complimentary in announcing to the clergy, that he owed it altogether to the interference of the BlesseJ Virgin. These acts, too shamefully hypocritical and too broadly extravagant, were more worthy of the latitude of Madrid than of Paris, and completed that contempt of the Bourbons, of which their followers were so largely sowing the seeds. 'No more excellent institutions existed than the schools, founded by Napoleon, for the orphan daughters of the members of the Legion of Honour. These schools were of different kinds. Whilst at St. Denis, the daughter of the general officer, who perished in war, would receive the education and accomplishments suitable to her expectations and rank ; the daughter of the brave peasant, who perished likewise adorned with the cross of the order, was bred up at Loges in the knowledge of those household duties, which form the worth of the farmer's or the citizen's wife. The schools of the latter kind, those most wanted and most prized, were suppressed. The whole system of charity and education for military orphans was subverted, and proofs of noblesse were demanded for admission to those schools which remained. If it had been proposed as a problem and a task to render the name and the fsystem of Napoleon once more popular by contrast with that which succeeded it, the ministers of Louis XVIII. could not have acted better for the purpose than they did. It was perceived, nevertheless, in high quarters, that far from becoming reconciled to the Bourbons, the spirit of the army was daily becoming worse, and military dis- affection gaining ground. The blame was thrown upon General Dupont, who certainly had shown neither con- LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 149 sistency nor wisdom. It was resolved, therefore, to replace him by Soult. That Marshal, since the fall of Napoleon, had seemed merely to be jealous of the superior favour which Ney and Marmont enjoyed and had earned by their early defection. Soult, therefore, took every opportunity of rivalling and imitating their royalist zeal. He was re- warded by the military command of Brittany. In this position he distinguished himself by subscribing largely to the monument proposed to be raised on the beach of Quiberon to the unfortunate emigrants, who had fallen there under the fire of the republicans. Having been appointed to the War Office, one of his first acts was to display his severity towards General Excelmans. This general, the comrade and friend of Murat, was rejoiced to find that the Congress of European powers had determined to recognize him as King of Naples. Excelmans wrote to Murat to congratulate him on the simple fact. The letter intrusted to a traveller was seized upon him and brought back to Paris. M. de Blacas considered it a crime. Louis XYIII. thought it merely necessary that General Excelmans should be warned to be more circumspect for the future. Soult, on the contrary, saw in the circumstance a good occasion for showing his zeal and admonishing the army. He therefore placed Excelmans on half-pay, and bade him retire to Bar. Excelmans replied, that the Countess his wife was about to be confined, and he therefore besought a suspension of the order, especially as he had amassed no wealth in his cam- paigns. Soult, irritated at the answer, which appeared to allude to his rapacity as a commander, ordered Excelmans to be arrested and brought off under guard to Soissons, Excelmans declared he would resist, and when a body of 150 HISTORY OP THE REIGNS OF troops came to his residence in the morning to arrest him, Excelmans exclaimed to the officer in command, that he would fire on the first who attempted to lay hands upon him. Having said this, he managed to escape by a back door, and take refuge with one of his friends, whence he petitioned ^the Chamber, appealed to the public, agitated the press, and made use of all those means of self-defence and annoyance of which a constitutional system admits, but which being quite new to Marshal Soult as Minister of War, most sadly perplexed and discomfited that func- tionary. It was a discussion on this affair of Excelmans, which closed the Session of 1814, manifesting at once the reac- tionary spirit and complete incapacity of the Government, beyond the power of such a Chamber, as that allowed to survive, to offer either remedy, succour or advice. LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 151 CHAPTER V. CONGRESS OF VIENNA — PRETENSIONS OF TALLEYRAJSTD — CLAIM OF RUSSIA AND PRUSSIA TO ABSORB POLAJSTD AND SAXONY — NEWS OF ALLIANCE BETWEEN AUSTRIA, ENGLAND, AND FRANCE DIVISION OF SAXONY — SETTLEMENT OF BELGIUM — RETURN OF NAPOLEON FROM ELBA FLIGHT OF THE KING. Whilst the princes, ministers, and champions of the Restoration were thus labouring to render the nation dis- contented and disgusted with the new rulers, and with its miscalled Constitutional Government, the only able man in his specialty, Prince Talleyrand, had assumed the difficult part of defending the interests and preserving the dignity of France at Vienna. A Congress of the Plenipo- tentiaries of all the powers of Europe had been summoned to meet there ; but domestic affairs, consequent upon the change from war to peace had occupied the sovereigns of Russia and Prussia, so that they could not repair imme- diately to Vienna, and the meeting of the Plenipotentiaries did not take place until the month of October. The Congress had been summoned, as most of the poli- tical acts of the day were decided upon, without its being well defined on what relations or with what respective powers the members should meet. Whilst France was 152 HISTOEY OF THE EEIGNS OP called to send a Plenipotentiary to the meeting, the sove- reigns who had triumphed in the late campaigns were still leagued together, and mutually styled each other Allies, determined to impose certain arrangements on France, not to consult her as to their fitness. Two of the allies, more- over, Kussia and Prussia, had entered into private stipula- tions with each other as to the new demarcation of European territory, unknown to the other allies; and none of the great powers were disposed to listen or bow to the opinion of the lesser ones in the future arrangements of either Europe or even Germany. The Congress, there- fore, which was about to be opened for the discussion and decision of those great questions by envoys from different countries, very much resembled in character the Parlia- ments, which it was proposed to summon and establish in different countries, but to which it was considered neither safe, convenient, nor necessary to intrust the ftilness or the fairness of representative rights. Russia and Prussia, which had views of territorial aggrandisement, and which aimed at appropriating to themselves those countries conquered and occupied by their armies, were for confining the superior authority of Con- gress to the four great allies. Talleyrand remonstrated, and appealed to England, whose minister could not but abet a more liberal allowance to common and general rights. The Northern powers were obliged to admit all those who had signed the treaty of Paris, and thus it resulted that the committee destined to prepare the basis of territorial rearrangement consisted of eight, being Austria, England, France, Prussia, Portugal, Sweden, Spain, and Russia. All proposals to submit any question to the united Congress, until it had been irrevocably settled by the greater powers. LOUIS XVm. AND CHARLES X. 153 were, however, positively resisted ; the sovereigns of Russia and Prussia, and even of Austria, having no idea of sub- mitting their claims to the discussion of an assembly, where as in a Parliament the majority made law. The pretensions of the chief powers, indeed, and the principles on which their pretensions were founded, were in truth not such as bear or abide discussion. Nor were the pleas of the victors of Europe in anywise different from those put forward by him whom they had conquered — the right of conquest and the law of force. The Emperor of Russia demanded to keep Poland and incorporate it with Russia, because the acquisition suited him, and had been made by his arms. Prussia demanded Saxony as its share of the spoil, the Saxon King having remained the firm ally of France and Napoleon, and as perishing justly with the support and the system to which he clung. These their several views, Russia and Prussia had com- municated to each other, and had promised mutually to support. The views of English statesmen towards the Continent were for the most part originally liberal and fair. They had a strong sense of the justice and wisdom of resusci- tating Poland, and restoring it to independence, and they had also a wish to see Germany and its several states endowed with constitutional liberties and representative rights. But they were far from taking up the broad principle of nationality, or admitting the right of a country, separated from all others by marked geographical limits, and peopled by races with the same traditions and the same tongue, to be spared the oppression of a foreign yoke, and to be allowed at least a national government 154 HISTORY OF THE BEIGNS OP and sovereign, whatever degree of liberty they were prepared for or might attain. This would have implied the freedom of Italy from Austria, as well as of Poland from Kussia, and was more than England could take upon herself to abet or to assert. The balance of power weighed more with English statesmen, at the moment, than nationality or any other element of stability. To erect bulwarks against the two great aggressive powers of France and Kussia was the anxiety of England ; and this it at first hoped to do by establishing Poland as an independent power on the Vistula, and by erecting a new kingdom of Dutch and Flemings united, which, consolidated by constitutional government, might form a permanent barrier against French extension towards the North. With respect to the Prussian demand of Saxony, the English diplomatists favoured it, thinking that Prussia must be indemnified for the sacrifice of her share of Poland, and that the great Protestant powers of Germany ought to be rendered compact and strong. But all the ire and jealousy of Austria arose at the prospect of Prus- sia's so largely extending and strengthening her power in Germany, by absorbing the territories of a power which had always been a faithful ally of the Court of Vienna. France also entertained similar views with respect to Saxonv, not only from its being the victim of French connexion, but from the traditional feeling of France having ever been to support the lesser German States against the greater, and to keep up, by these means, a third power in Germany, as a counterpoise to the two great monarchic ones. As it was impossible for England to carry its point with respect to Poland, or the Low Countries, without the support of LODIS XVm. AND CHAELBS X. 155 Austria, it was compelled to join the Austrian defence of Saxony, and thus, before Congress had been many weeks old, three of its five great Powers were arrayed against the other two. In these disputes, the great ability of Prince Talleyrand was most conspicuous; and he it was, who seemed to turn round his finger, as the phrase is, the representatives of those countries, who, flushed with triumph, scarcely deigned at first to let France into their Councils. In behalf of the King of Saxony, Talleyrand invoked the highest principles of conservatism and the indefeasible right of monarchs, which, to set aside, he declared, was opening out again, and recommencing the crimes and the principles of revolution, instead of condemning and put- ting a stop to them for ever. Whilst smiling at such arguments in the mouth of one who had aided Napoleon in carving out Europe with his sword, one is astonished to find that Talleyrand carried not only his opposition, but that of Austria and of England so far, as that a treaty was actually signed between them on the 30th of February, 1815, of mutual support and alliance against the preten- sions or attempts of Russia and Prussia. In case of war on the part of these two Powers, each of the three allies was to furnish an army of 150,000 men to oppose them. England was thus engaged to fit out and pay an army of 150,000 men on the Continent, in order that the Saxons should be ruled by a sovereign at Dresden instead of by one at Berlin ; and in order that Poland, instead of remain- ing one under Russia (for all thought of its absolute inde- pendence had been long since given up), should be divided between the three environing powers. If England, and the best prospects of Germany, and of 156 HISTORY OF THE REIGNS OP Poland were to be consulted in this matter, it would have been far more desirable to give up Saxony to complete and render compact the great Protestant kingdom of the North, whilst for the regeneration of Poland, it would have been far better, and more hopeful to unite it, even under Kussian sovereignty, than to carve definitively that ancient nation into three, and by this division interest the thre'e great environing monarchies in the permanent extinction of Poland and its nationality. In the settlement of Poland, at least one of two things ought to have been looked to, either the intrinsic strength of Poland to keep itself independent under a Russian sovereign, so as to command his respect, necessitate his conciliation, or resist his tyranny. This might have been attained by keeping Poland united, compensating Austria elsewhere for Gallicia, the possession of which gives her a weak and indefensible frontier ; whilst Prussia was ready and willing to surrender Posen for all Saxony. In this position the two great German Powers might have guaran- teed the independence of Poland, which would thus have formed a separation and a safeguard for Russia. If, how- ever, this arrangement was objectionable and unattainable, and if there was no other way of settling Poland but by dividing it, one of the results of which would be to leave the fragments of it devolving to Russia altogether Rus- sian, it was then important to erect some other defences against Russia, instead of giving up to it, not only both sides of the Vistula, but a territory so advanced into the heart of Europe, as to be within a day's march of Berlin ; Russia thus extending between Austria and Prussia into the very heart of Germany. Such, however, was the final arrangement. Lord Castlereagh, called away to take part LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 157 in the debates of Parliament, and anxious not to be com- pelled to admit there that the members of Congress were still not in accord as to the very first and principal point of the redistribution of Europe, bestirred himself to bring about a compromise. In this way every great object and principle was lost sight of, save that of plastering up the breach. The nationality of Poland was destroyed by its division, its independence rendered hopeless, even for the portion given to Russia without any serious or efficient stipulation. Germany was left open to the aggressions of Russia, by the military posts of the latter power being ad- vanced to Kalisch, thus turning and rendering utterly use- less all the line of fortresses which, including Thorn, Prussia was allowed to possess on the Lower Vistula. As sovereign of the chief portion, or nucleus of Poland, Russia was entitled to look forward to the future mastery over the whole race, as neither Prussia nor Austria could look to retain more than temporarily the provinces allotted to them. In short, the English plenipotentiary failed alto- gether in the aim of placing a just limit or efficient check to the encroachments or despotism of Russia, although, to attain this object, he had joined Austria in weakening the power of Prussia, and preventing it from assuming the shape and dimensions of a strong, compact, German kingdom. Unfortunately for herself, Prussia, in coming before Congress, adopted the mode introduced by Napoleon, of appreciating territorial acquisitions and valuing empire. He was wont himself, and he taught other European princes likewise, to count by heads of population, as by heads of cattle. A prince was lord over so many millions of souls, which he was good enough to suppose so many 158 HISTORY OF THE RBiaNS OF millions of human heads, to be divided, disposed of, slaughtered, or enslaved. Prussia came provided with this same political vocabulary, pleaded that its sovereignty counted ten millions under its sway before the peace of Tilsit, and demanded that these ten millions should be made up, where, or hpw, seemed not essential. Prussia declared it had lost one half of its ten millions, taken by Napoleon. It had, at the conclusion of the war, reconquered two of these millions — it wanted three more. Saxony very nearly supplied them ; the King of that country, by bis anti- German policy, having forfeited his right to remain a German monarch. But Prussia offered the dispossessed monarch compensation, and the same number of subjects in Luxemburg, and on the left bank of the Rhine. The proposal did not suit English views, which were directed, indeed absorbed in the project of aggrandizing the house of Orange, and establishing it finally as sovereign of the whole of the Low Countries, and giving it Luxemburg as a link with Germany. The Prussian claim of Saxony was compromised, as the Russian one of Poland had been. The Saxons, without the least regard for their national feelings, or loyal attachment, were split into two ; Lower Saxony being made over to Prussia, Leipsic and the Bohemian frontier being preserved to the King. Thus the great internal mart of trade, Leipzig, was separated by two or even thj-ee frontiers from Hamburg, its natural outlet to the sea ; and the most manufacturing district in Germany was reduced to a narrow circle, de- prived of its local market and excluded from every other. But the statesmen of the Vienna Congress had no com- mercial anxieties or interests. Dynastic prospects and military strength alone occupied their minds, as if man LOUIS XVm. AND CHARLES X. 159 could be considered in no other light than as a soldier or a subject. In recompense of that portion of Saxony which she did not obtain, Prussia was presented with the greater part of Westphalia, and of a large border on both sides of the Rhine, which placed her in contact with France, and made her the sovereign of a people who could have no feeling of allegiance or attachment to the cause of Prussia. Belonging of old to the ecclesiastical Electors, and since their destruction governed as a French department, the inhabitants of the Rhenish provinces were every way unfitted for making part of a German kingdom, governed by superannuated laws, and professing a religion antago- nistic to them. The notion of surrounding France on its northern frontier by districts and populations transferred to a foreign sovereign, for whom they could feel no affection, and with whose every act they were soon to find fault, was abetted by England as the only efficient check upon French ambition, and was combated as such by Prince Talleyrand, whilst in truth the arrangement was precisely that which left most chances and prospects for French extension, and rendered disaffection, turbulence, and rebel- lion, the inevitable prospect of the entire north of Europe. What was wanting to Congress and to its members was some sound and acknowledged principle for the disposal and distribution of the European soil. Anterior and hereditary rights, based on the assumption that heads of population and square miles of territory were merely to be treated as other kinds of property, this raised by the right of conquest, and checked by the necessity of preserving the balance of power, formed the only principle considered or consulted at Vienna. England, indeed, had another care, a higher anxiety, which was in some measure par- 160 HISTORY OF THE EEIGNS OF ticipated in by the Emperor Alexander, but with respect to which all the other powers and plenipotentiaries were ignorant or indiiferent. This was the necessity of main- taining the continuance of peace by satisfying the general aspirations of all the educated and middle classes of Eu- rope for political liberty and civil freedom. The English Ministers, practical and able in the trodden paths of public life, were not very profound philosophers. England had thriven under a Constitution, and they therefore thought a Constitution the great panacea for the most advanced as for the backward State, — for Poland as for Portugal. They did not perceive that there are deeper griefs and ills, such, for instance, as that of one people or one religion subjected and inferior to another, which ine- quality the grant of constitutional rights is only calculated to remedy by putting into the hands of the minority the means of resistance. How easily these are converted from the moral and constitutional into the violent and rebel- lious; and how naturally the offended government or nation, when victorious, confiscates those liberties which have been employed as weapons against them, Lord Castle- reagh, as an Irishman and politician, might have known ; yet he thought he had established the throne of the Low Countries on the solid basis of a Constitution. He hoped that Poland and the German States might in the same way secure their independence ; nay, the mere name of a Constitution, without much consideration of the faith with which it was observed, or the spirit in which it was directed, was deemed, capable of satisfying French susceptibility, and reconciling the irritated and humbled French to a dynasty identified with its disgrace and repug- nant to its recollections. LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 161 ' If such sanguine hopes were entertained of France under a constitutional dynasty, more of course could be enter- tained of Belgium and Holland, forming a united, free, and contented commonwealth. It was made part of their fun- damental law that Dutch and Flemings should have equal share of representative power in Parliament. In order that the new kingdom might not want a valuable colony, or be deprived of its ancient trade to, and influence in, the far hemisphere, England, whilst retaining the barren Cape, as a naval station, restored the fertile Java to the Dutch ; and, however Lord Castlereagh has been blamed for the act, it may be considered to have been as politic as it was just, England having already more colonial possessions than her population or her capital could suiEce. The labours of Congress, or of the Special Committee, had not completed the task of constituting Germany as a Federation, and fixing the respective territories of each sovereign, when the return of Napoleon from Elba placed all such decisions in doubt and such arrangements in abey- ance. . It had merely been decided that Austria should recover the territories which it had possessed in Italy before the Revolution, and that she should complete them by those of the Venetian States. The Tyrol, at the same time, being restored, united the territories of Austria from Bo- logna and Cattaro to the confines of Saxony, and fi-om the extremity of Gallicia, bordering on the Pruth, to the banks of the Ticino. Au empire so vast, though composed of so many different races and countries, was suflficient to com- pensate the House of Austria for the loss of that vain crown of the German Empire, which brought with it but empty dignity and contested rights. What concerned France more intimately was the adjunc- VOL. I. M 162 HISTORY OP THE REIGNS OP tion of the city and territory of Genoa to Piedmont, accomplished for the purpose of getting rid of a turbulent republic, and of giving strength, with an important port in the Mediterranean, to one of the powers destined to com- plete the line of defence against the so-much-dreaded am- bition and encroachments of France. A great deal of obloquy has been heaped upon Congress in general for its absorption of civic republics, and upon England especially, from one of its commanders having made a kind of promise of independence to the Genoese to induce them to surrender. A solemn stipulation, how- ever rashly made, ought to have been observed •, nor should the independence of an ancient republic be less respected than the rights of a family of princes. Still it must be admitted that the days of these civic republics were past. They may have been necessary in an age when commercial freedom did not exist, and commercial interests were not understood, and when the maintenance of the sole principle by which these can prosper at home, and fitly employ the power which makes them be respected abroad, were not to be hoped from feudal and despotic sovereigns. Then commerce concentrated in great seaports, in great central emporiums, needed self-government and municipal independence in order to exist •, now, however, that the necessities of commerce and a commercial class are better understood, it is not good that these should separate themselves, and stand apart from the country in which they are placed, to which they act as factors, and of the population and sinew of which they form a part. Better for all parties that Genoa should be part of north-western Italy, and Venice of north-eastern, with such a government in both as is compatible with a port LOUIS XVIII. AND CHARLES X. 163 and a mart, than that a jealous frontier should divide the seaboard from the land, and render the interests, ideas, and classes of the one strange and inimical to the other. The governments into which Venice and Genoa became ab- sorbed, may not have at first been enlightened or fit sove- reigns of such cities ; but the very possession of such cities taught liberal necessities and wisdom to their government, and their annexation to the country to which they belong naturally^ is a progress to civilization, although at first there may be the appearance of a republic swallowed in an abso- lute monarchy. What a country wants to liberate and to advance it, is to have the interests and energies of a middle class mingled and continually active within it. Whatever separates them into distinct parts, or confederations, or castes, isolates and neutralizes the civilizing elements, ren- ders it powerless even for development and self-aggrandize- ment, and dwarfs the country in its growth. As long, indeed, as a country is barbarous and feudal, the cities which are naturally formed at the mouths of great rivers, such as Venice, Hamburgh, Dantzic, may with advantage remain independent republics ; but as the country around, and up the great stream, comes to progress and to attain popular acquirements, and when the government itself begins to show a liberal spirit, it is better that the men of the seaport should join in the common impulse and develop- ment, than retard or resist it by their isolation. Congress, however, was actuated by no motive of this kind. Kepub- lican Genoa, like monarchic Saxony, had shown a leaning to imperial France. Napoleon had made it the most southern port of his great empire, thus opening a large market to its manufactures and scope to its trade. Genoa was gratefiil, and was, therefore, to be punished. Prince M 2 164 HISTORY OF THE EEIGNS OF Talleyrand, though he supported the cause of Saxony, the victim of French connexion, did not extend a similar sym- pathy to Genoa. He had but one object in Italy, the one great interest impressed upon him by Louis XVIII. : this was, to dispossess Murat and restore the Bourbons of Naples to their continental as well as insular dominions. Murat had remained unmolested in the possession of the throne of Naples, in consequence of a convention with Austria, by which he deserted Napoleon at his fall, and which, as Napoleon alleges, prevented Prince Eugene with his Italian army from marching to the Emperor's support. Notwithstanding, Murat's envoys were not ac- knowledged at the Congress of Vienna, and partly from mistrust hence arising, as well as from his close connexion with the family of Napoleon, he no doubt listened to their hopes and perhaps favoured their projects. As proofs of this appeared, Talleyrand pressed at Vienna for his removal; and it was felt that the presence of Napoleon at Elba, and