COMPOSITION OF THE NEW CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES.—THE CABINET IN A
MAJORITY.—ELEMENTS OF THAT MAJORITY, THE CENTRE PROPERLY SO
CALLED, AND THE DOCTRINARIANS.—TRUE CHARACTER OF THE CENTRE.—TRUE
CHARACTER OF THE DOCTRINARIANS, AND REAL CAUSE OF THEIR
INFLUENCE.—M. DE LA BOURDONNAYE AND M. ROYER-COLLARD AT THE
OPENING OF THE SESSION.—ATTITUDE OF THE DOCTRINARIANS IN THE
DEBATE ON THE EXCEPTIONAL LAWS.—ELECTORAL LAW OF FEBRUARY 5TH,
1817.—THE PART I TOOK ON THAT OCCASION.—OF THE ACTUAL AND
POLITICAL POSITION OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES.—MARSHAL GOUVION ST. CYR,
AND HIS BILL FOR RECRUITING THE ARMY, OF THE 10TH OF MARCH,
1818.—BILL RESPECTING THE PRESS, OF 1819, AND M. DE
SERRE.—PREPARATORY DISCUSSION OF THESE BILLS IN THE STATE
COUNCIL.—GENERAL ADMINISTRATION OF THE COUNTRY.—MODIFICATION OF
THE CABINET FROM 1816 TO 1820.—IMPERFECTIONS OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL
SYSTEM.—ERRORS OF INDIVIDUALS.—DISSENSIONS BETWEEN THE CABINET
AND THE DOCTRINARIANS.—THE DUKE DE RICHELIEU NEGOCIATES, AT
AIX-LA-CHAPELLE, THE ENTIRE RETREAT OF FOREIGN TROOPS FROM
FRANCE.—HIS SITUATION AND CHARACTER.—HE ATTACKS THE BILL ON
ELECTIONS.—HIS FALL.—CABINET OF M. DECAZES.—HIS POLITICAL
WEAKNESS, NOTWITHSTANDING HIS PARLIAMENTARY SUCCESS.—ELECTIONS OF
1819.—ELECTION AND NON-ADMISSION OF M. GRÉGOIRE.—ASSASSINATION OF
THE DUKE DE BERRY.—FALL OF M. DECAZES.—THE DUKE DE RICHELIEU
RESUMES OFFICE.—HIS ALLIANCE WITH THE RIGHT-HAND PARTY.—CHANGE IN
THE LAW OF ELECTIONS.—DISORGANIZATION OF THE CENTRE, AND PROGRESS
OF THE RIGHT-HAND PARTY.—SECOND FALL OF THE
DUKE DE RICHELIEU.—M. DE VILLÈLE AND THE RIGHT-HAND PARTY OBTAIN POWER.
A violent outcry was raised, as there ever has been and always will be,
against ministerial interference at the elections. This is the sour
consolation of the beaten, who feel the necessity of accounting for
their defeat. Elections, taken comprehensively, are almost always more
genuine than interested and narrow-minded suspicion is disposed to
allow. The desires and ability of the powers in office, exercise over
them only a secondary authority. The true essence of elections lies in
the way in which the wind blows, and in the impulse of passing events.
The decree of the 5th of September, 1816, had given confidence to the
moderate party, and a degree of hope to the persecuted of 1815. They all
rallied round the Cabinet, casting aside their quarrels, antipathies,
and private rancours, combining to support the power which promised
victory to the one and safety to the other.
The victory, in fact, remained with the Cabinet, but it was one of those
questionable triumphs which left the conquerors still engaged in a
fierce war. The new Chamber comprised, in the centre a ministerial
majority, on the right a strong and active opposition, and on the left a
very small section, in which M. d'Argenson and M. Lafitte were the only
names recognized by the public.
The ministerial majority was formed from two different although at that
time closely-united elements,—the centre, properly called the grand
army of power, and the very limited staff of that army, who soon
received the title of doctrinarians.
I shall say of the centre of our assemblies since 1814, what I have just
said of M. Cuvier; it has been misunderstood and calumniated, when
servility and a rabid desire for place have been named as its leading
characteristics. With it, as with others, personal interests have had
their weight, and have looked for their gratification; but one general
and just idea formed the spirit and bond of union of the party,—the
idea that, in the present day, after so many revolutions, society
required established government, and that to government all good
citizens were bound to render their support. Many excellent and
honourable sentiments,—family affection, a desire for regular
employment, respect for rank, laws, and traditions, anxieties for the
future, religious habits,—all clustered round this conviction, and had
often inspired its votaries with rare and trusting courage. I call these
persevering supporters of Government, citizen Tories; their defamers are
weak politicians and shallow philosophers, who neither understand the
moral instincts of the soul, nor the essential interests of society.
The doctrinarians have been heavily attacked. I shall endeavour to
explain rather than defend them. When either men or parties have once
exercised an influence over events, or obtained a place in history, it
becomes important that they should be correctly known; this point
accomplished, they may rest in peace and submit to judgment.
It was neither intelligence, nor talent, nor moral dignity—qualities
which their acknowledged enemies have scarcely denied them—that
established the original character and political importance of the
doctrinarians.
Other men of other parties have possessed the same qualities; and
between the relative pretensions of these rivals in understanding,
eloquence, and sincerity, public opinion will decide. The peculiar
characteristic of the doctrinarians, and the real source of their
importance in spite of their limited number, was that they maintained,
against revolutionary principles and ideas, ideas and principles
contrary to those of the old enemies of the Revolution, and with which
they opposed it, not to
destroy
but to reform and purify it in the name
of justice and truth. The great feature, dearly purchased, of the French
revolution was, that it was a work of the human mind, its conceptions
and pretensions, and at the same time a struggle between social
interests. Philosophy had boasted that it would regulate political
economy, and that institutions, laws, and public authorities should only
exist as the creatures and servants of instructed reason,—- an insane
pride, but a startling homage to all that is most elevated in man, to
his intellectual and moral attributes! Reverses and errors were not slow
in impressing on the Revolution their rough lessons; but even up to 1815
it had encountered, as commentators on its ill-fortune, none but
implacable enemies or undeceived accomplices,—the first thirsting for
vengeance, the last eager for rest, and neither capable of opposing to
revolutionary principles anything beyond a retrograde movement on the
one side, and the scepticism of weariness on the other. "There was
nothing in the Revolution but error and crime," said the first; "the
supporters of the old system were in the right."—"The Revolution erred
only in excess," exclaimed the second; "its principles were sound, but
carried too far; it has abused its rights." The doctrinarians denied
both these conclusions; they refused to acknowledge the maxims of the
old system, or, even in a mere speculative sense, to adhere to the
principles of the Revolution. While frankly adopting the new state of
French society, such as our entire history, and not alone the year 1789,
had made it, they undertook to establish a government on rational
foundations, but totally opposed to the theories in the name of which
the old system had been overthrown, or the incoherent principles which
some endeavoured to conjure up for its reconstruction. Alternately
called on to combat and defend the Revolution, they boldly assumed from
the outset, an intellectual position, opposing ideas to ideas, and
principles to principles, appealing at the same time to reason and
experience, affirming rights instead of maintaining interests, and
requiring France, not to confess that she had committed evil alone, or
to declare her impotence for good, but to emerge from the chaos into
which she had plunged herself, and to raise her head once more towards
heaven in search of light.
Let me readily admit that there was also much pride in this attempt; but
a pride commencing with an act of humility, which proclaims the mistakes
of yesterday with the desire and hope of not repeating them today. It
was rendering homage to human intelligence while warning it of the
limits of its power, respecting the past, without undervaluing the
present or abandoning the future. It was an endeavour to bestow on
politics sound philosophy, not as a sovereign mistress, but as an
adviser and support.
I shall state without hesitation, according to what experience has
taught me, the faults which progressively mingled with this noble
design, and impaired or checked its success. What I anxiously desire at
present is to indicate its true character. It was to this mixture of
philosophical sentiment and political moderation, to this rational
respect for opposing rights and facts, to these principles, equally new
and conservative, anti-revolutionary without being retrograde, and
modest in fact although sometimes haughty in expression, that the
doctrinarians owed their importance as well as their name.
Notwithstanding the numerous errors of philosophy and human reason, the
present age still cherishes reasoning and philosophical tastes; and the
most determined practical politicians sometimes assume the air of acting
upon general ideas, regarding them as sound methods of obtaining
justification or credit. The doctrinarians thus responded to a profound
and real necessity, although imperfectly acknowledged, of French minds:
they paid equal respect to intellect and social order; their notions
appeared well suited to regenerate, while terminating the Revolution.
Under this double title they found, with partisans and adversaries,
points of contact which drew them together, if not with active sympathy,
at least with solid esteem: the right-hand party looked upon them as
sincere royalists; and the left, while opposing them with acrimony,
could not avoid admitting that they were neither the advocates of the
old system, nor the defenders of absolute power.
Such was their position at the opening of the session of 1816: a little
obscure still, but recognized by the Cabinet as well as by the different
parties. The Duke de Richelieu, M. Lainé, and M. Decazes, whether they
liked the doctrinarians or not, felt that they positively required their
co-operation, as well in the debates of the Chambers as to act upon
public opinion. The left-hand party, powerless in itself, accorded with
them from necessity, although their ideas and language sometimes
produced surprise rather than sympathy. The right, notwithstanding its
losses at the elections, was still very strong, and speedily assumed the
offensive. The King's speech on opening the session was mild and
somewhat indistinct, as if tending rather to palliate the decree of the
5th of September, than to parade it with an air of triumph: "Rely," said
he, in conclusion, "on my fixed determination to repress the outrages of
the ill-disposed, and to restrain the exuberance of overheated zeal."
"Is that all?" observed M. de Châteaubriand, on leaving the royal
presence; "if so, the victory is ours:" and on that same day he dined
with the Chancellor. M. de la Bourdonnaye was even more explicit. "The
King," said he, with a coarse expression, "once more hands his ministers
over to us!" During the session of the next day, meeting
M. Royer-Collard, with whom he was in the habit of extremely free
conversation, "Well," said he, "there you are, more rogues than last
year." "And you not so many," replied M. Royer-Collard. The right-hand
party, in their reviving hopes, well knew how to distinguish the
adversaries with whom they would have to contend.
As in the preceding session, the first debates arose on questions of
expediency. The Cabinet judged it necessary to demand from the Chambers
the prolongation, for another year, of the two provisional laws
respecting personal liberty and the daily press. M. Decazes presented a
detailed account of the manner in which, up to that period, the
Government had used the arbitrary power committed to its hands, and also
the new propositions which should restrain it within the limits
necessary to remove all apprehended danger. The right-hand party
vigorously rejected these propositions, upon the very natural ground
that they had no confidence in the Ministers, but without any other
reasoning than the usual commonplace arguments of liberalism. The
doctrinarians supported the bills, but with the addition of commentaries
which strongly marked their independence, and the direction they wished
to give to the power they defended. "Every day," said M. de Serre, "the
nature of our constitution will be better understood, its benefits more
appreciated by the nation; the laws with which you co-operate, will
place by degrees our institutions and habits in harmony with
representative monarchy; the government will approach its natural
perfection,—that unity of principle, design, and action which forms the
condition of its existence. In permitting and even in protecting legal
opposition, it will not allow that opposition to find resting-points
within itself. It is because it can be, and ought to be, watched over
and contradicted by independent men, that it should be punctually
obeyed, faithfully seconded and served by those who have become and wish
to remain its direct agents. Government will thus acquire a degree of
strength which can dispense with the employment of extraordinary means:
legal measures, restored to their proper energy, will be found
sufficient." "There is," said M. Royer-Collard, "a strong objection
against this bill; the Government may be asked, 'Before you demand
excessive powers, have you employed all those which the laws entrust to
you? have you exhausted their efficacy?' ... I shall not directly answer
this question, but I shall say to those who put it, 'Take care how you
expose your Government to too severe a trial, and one under which nearly
all Governments have broken down; do not require from it perfection;
consider its difficulties as well as its duties.' ... We wish to arrest
its steps in the course it pursues at present, and to impose daily
changes. We demand from it the complete development of institutions and
constitutional enactments; above all, we require that vigorous unity of
principles, system, and conduct without which it will never effectually
reach the end towards which it advances. But what it has already done,
is a pledge for what it will yet accomplish. We feel a just reliance
that the extraordinary powers with which we invest it will be exercised,
not by or for a party, but for the nation against all parties. Such is
our treaty; such are the stipulations which have been spoken of: they
are as public as our confidence, and we thank those who have occasioned
their repetition, for proving to France that we are faithful to her
cause, and neglect neither her interests nor our own duties."
With a more gentle effusion of mind and heart, M. Camille Jordan held
the same language; the bills passed; the right-hand party felt as blows
directed against itself the advice suggested to the Cabinet, and the
Cabinet saw that in that quarter, as necessary supporters, they had also
haughty and exacting allies.
Their demands were not fruitless. The Cabinet, uninfluenced either by
despotic views or immoderate passions, had no desire to retain
unnecessarily the absolute power with which it had been entrusted. No
effort was requisite to deprive it of the provisional laws; they fell
successively of themselves,—the suspension of the securities for
personal liberty in 1817, the prevôtal courts in 1818, the censorship of
the daily press in 1819; and four years after the tempest of the Hundred
Days, the country was in the full enjoyment of all its constitutional
privileges.
During this interval, other questions, more and less important, were
brought forward and decided. When the first overflowing of the reaction
of 1815 had a little calmed down, when France, less disturbed with the
present, began once more to think of the future, she was called upon to
enter on the greatest work that can fall to the lot of a nation. There
was more than a new government to establish; it was necessary that a
free government should be imbued with vigour. It was written, and it
must live,—a promise often made, but never accomplished. How often,
from 1789 to 1814, had liberties and political rights been inscribed on
our institutes and laws, to be buried under them, and held of no
account. The first amongst the Governments of our day, the Restoration,
took these words at their true meaning; whatever may have been its
traditions and propensities, what it said, it did; the liberties and
rights it acknowledged, were taken into real co-operation and action.
From 1814 to 1830, as from 1830 to 1848, the Charter was a truth. For
once forgetting it, Charles X. fell.
When this work of organization, or, to speak more correctly, when this
effectual call to political life commenced in 1816, the question of the
electoral system, already touched upon, but without result, in the
preceding session, was the first that came under notice. It was included
in the scope of the fortieth article of the Charter, which ran
thus:—"The electors who nominate the Deputies can have no right of
voting, unless they pay a direct contribution of 300 francs, and have
reached the age of thirty,"—an ambiguous arrangement, which attempted
more than it ventured to accomplish. It evidently contained a desire of
placing the right of political suffrage above the popular masses, and of
confining it within the more elevated classes of society. But the
constitutional legislator had neither gone openly to this point, nor
attained it with certainty; for if the Charter required from the
electors who were actually to name the Deputies, 300 francs of direct
contribution, and thirty years of age, it did not forbid that these
electors should be themselves chosen by preceding electoral assemblies;
or rather it did not exclude indirect election, nor, under that form,
what is understood by the term universal suffrage.
I took part in drawing up the bill of the 5th of February, 1817, which
comprised, at that time, the solution given to this important question.
I was present at the conferences in which it was prepared. When ready,
M. Lainé, whose business it was, as Minister of the Interior, to present
it to the Chamber of Deputies, wrote to say that he wished to see me: "I
have adopted," he said, "all the principles of this bill, the
concentration of the right of suffrage, direct election, the equal
privilege of voters, their union in a single college for each
department; and I really believe these are the best that could be
desired: still, upon some of these points, I have mental doubts and
little time to solve them. Help me in preparing the exposition of our
objects." I responded, as I was bound, to this confiding sincerity, by
which I felt equally touched and honoured. The bill was brought in; and
while my friends supported it in the Chamber, from whence my age for the
present excluded me, I defended it, on behalf of the Government, in
several articles inserted in the 'Moniteur.' I was well informed as to
its intent and true spirit, and I speak of it without embarrassment in
presence of the universal suffrage, as now established. If the electoral
system of 1817 disappeared in the tempest of 1848, it conferred on
France thirty years of regular and free government, systematically
sustained and controlled; and amidst all the varying influences of
parties, and the shock of a revolution, this system sufficed to maintain
peace, to develop national prosperity, and to preserve respect for all
legal rights. In this age of ephemeral and futile experiments, it is the
only political enactment which has enjoyed a long and powerful life. At
least it was a work which may be acknowledged, and which deserves to be
correctly estimated, even after its overthrow.
A ruling idea inspired the bill of the 5th of February, 1817,—to fix a
term to the revolutionary system, and to give vigour to the
constitutional Government. At that epoch, universal suffrage had ever
been, in France, an instrument of destruction or deceit,—of
destruction, when it had really placed political power in the hands of
the multitude; of deceit, when it had assisted to annul political
rights for the advantage of absolute power, by maintaining, through the
vain intervention of the multitude, a false appearance of electoral
privilege. To escape, in fine, from that routine of alternate violence
and falsehood, to place political power in the region within which the
conservative interests of social order naturally predominate with
enlightened independence, and to secure to those interests, by the
direct election of deputies from the country, a free and strong action
upon its Government,—such were the objects, without reserve or
exaggeration, of the authors of the electoral system of 1817.
In a country devoted for twenty-five years, on the subject of political
elections, whether truly or apparently, to the principle of the
supremacy of number, so absurdly called the sovereignty of the people,
the attempt was new, and might appear rash. At first, it confined
political power to the hands of 140,000 electors. From the public, and
even from what was already designated the liberal party, it encountered
but slight opposition; some objections springing from the past, some
apprehensions for the future, but no declared or active hostility. It
was from the bosom of the classes specially devoted to conservative
interests, and from their intestine discussions, that the attack and the
danger emanated.
During the session of 1815, the old royalist faction, in its moderated
views, and when it renounced systematic and retrograding aspirations,
had persuaded itself that, at least, the King's favour and the influence
of the majority would give it power in the departments as at the seat of
government. The decree of the 5th of September, 1816, abolished this
double expectation. The old Royalists called upon the new electoral
system to restore it, but at once perceived that the bill of the 5th of
February was not calculated to produce such an effect; and forthwith
commenced a violent attack, accusing the new plan of giving over all
electoral power, and consequently all political influence, to the middle
classes, to the exclusion of the great proprietors and the people.
At a later period, the popular party, who neither thought nor spoke on
the subject in 1817, adopted this argument in their turn, and charged,
on this same accusation of political monopoly for the benefit of the
middle classes, their chief complaint, not only against the electoral
law, but against the entire system of government of which that law was
the basis and guarantee.
I collect my reminiscences, and call back my impressions. From 1814 to
1848, under the government of the Restoration, and under that of July, I
loudly supported and more than once had the honour of carrying this flag
of the middle classes, which was naturally my own. What did we
understand by it? Have we ever conceived the design, or even admitted
the thought, that the citizens should become a newly privileged order,
and that the laws intended to regulate the exercise of suffrage should
serve to found the predominance of the middle classes by taking, whether
in right or fact, all political influence, on one side from the relics
of the old French aristocracy, and on the other from the people?
Such an attempt would have been strangely ignorant and insane. It is
neither by political theories nor articles in laws, that the privileges
and superiority of any particular class are established in a State.
These slow and pedantic methods are not available for such a purpose; it
requires the force of conquest or the power of faith. Society is
exclusively controlled by military or religious ascendency; never by the
influence of the citizens. The history of all ages and nations is at
hand to prove this to the most superficial observer.
In our day, the impossibility of such a predominance of the middle
classes is even more palpable. Two ideas constitute the great features
of modern civilization, and stamp it with its formidable activity; I sum
them up in these terms:—There are certain universal rights inherent in
man's nature, and which no system can legitimately withhold from any
one; there are individual rights which spring from personal merit alone,
without regard to the external circumstances of birth, fortune, or rank,
and which every one who has them in himself should be permitted to
exercise. From the two principles of legal respect for the general
rights of humanity, and the free development of natural gifts, ill or
well understood, have proceeded, for nearly a century, the advantages
and evils, the great actions and crimes, the advances and wanderings
which revolutions and Governments have alternately excited in the bosom
of every European community. Which of these two principles provokes or
even permits the exclusive supremacy of the middle classes? Assuredly
neither the one nor the other. One opens to individual endowments every
gate; the other demands for every human being his place and his portion:
no greatness is unattainable; no condition, however insignificant, is
counted as nothing. Such principles are irreconcilable with exclusive
superiority; that of the middle classes, as of every other, would be in
direct contradiction to the ruling tendencies of modern society.
The middle classes have never, amongst us, dreamed of becoming
privileged orders; and no rational mind has ever indulged in such dreams
for them. This idle accusation is but an engine of war, erected under
cover of a confusion of ideas, sometimes by the hypocritical dexterity,
and at others by the blind infatuation of party spirit. But this does
not prevent its having been, or becoming again, fatal to the peace of
our social system; for men are so constructed that chimerical dangers
are the most formidable they can encounter: we fight boldly with
tangible substances, but we lose our heads, either from fear or anger,
when in presence of phantoms.
It was with real dangers that we had to cope in 1817, when we discussed
the electoral system of France. We saw the most legitimate principles
and the most jealous interests of the new state of society indistinctly
menaced by a violent reaction. We felt the spirit of revolution spring
up and ferment around us, arming itself, according to old practice, with
noble incentives, to cover the march and prepare the triumph of the most
injurious passions. By instinct and position, the middle classes were
the best suited to struggle with the combined peril. Opposed to the
pretensions of the old aristocracy, they had acquired, under the Empire,
ideas and habits of government. Although they received the Restoration
with some mistrust, they were not hostile to it; for under the rule of
the Charter, they had nothing to ask from new revolutions. The Charter
was for them the Capitol and the harbour; they found in it the security
of their conquests, and the triumph of their hopes. To turn to the
advantage of the ancient monarchy, now become constitutional, this
anti-revolutionary state of the middle classes, to secure their
co-operation with that monarchy by giving them confidence in their own
position, was a line of policy clearly indicated by the state of facts
and opinions. Such was the bearing of the electoral bill of 1817. In
principle this bill cut short the revolutionary theories of the
supremacy of numbers, and of a specious and tyrannical equality; in
fact, it brought the new society under shelter from the threats of
counter-revolution. Assuredly, in proposing it, we had no intention of
establishing any antagonism between the great and small proprietors; but
when the question was so laid down, we evinced no hesitation; we
supported the bill firmly, by maintaining that the influence, not
exclusive but preponderating, of the middle classes was confirmed, on
one side by the spirit of free institutions, and on the other in
conformity with the interests of France as the Revolution had changed
her, and with the Restoration itself as the Charter had defined when
proclaiming it.
The election bill occupied the session of 1816. The bill for recruiting
was the great subject and work of the session of 1817. The right-hand
party opposed it with vehement hostility: it disputed their traditions
and disturbed their monarchical tendencies. But the party had to contest
with a minister as imperturbable in his convictions and will as in his
physiognomy. Marshal Gouvion St. Cyr had a powerful, original, and
straightforward mind, with no great combination of ideas, but
passionately wedded to those which emanated from himself. He had
resolved to give back to France what she no longer possessed—an army.
And an army in his estimate was a small nation springing from the large
one, strongly organized, formed of officers and soldiers closely united,
mutually knowing and respecting each other, all having defined rights
and duties, and all well trained by solid study or long practice to
serve their country effectually when called upon.
Upon this idea of an army, according to the conception of Marshal St.
Cyr, the principles of his bill were naturally framed. Every class in
the State was required to assist in the formation of this army. Those
who entered in the lowest rank were open to the highest, with a certain
advantage in the ascending movement of the middle classes. Those who
were ambitious of occupying at once a higher step, were compelled in the
first instance to pass certain examinations, and then to acquire by
close study the particular knowledge necessary to their post. The term
of service, active or in reserve, was long, and made military life in
reality a career. The obligations imposed, the privileges promised, and
the rights recognized for all, were guaranteed by the bill.
Besides these general principles, the bill had an immediate result which
St. Cyr ardently desired. It enrolled again in the new army, under the
head of veterans and reserve, the remains of the old discharged legions,
who had so heroically endured the penalty of the errors committed by
their crowned leader. It effaced also, in their minds, that reminiscence
of a distasteful past, while by a sort of special Charter it secured
their future.
No one can deny that this plan for the military organization of France,
embraced grand ideas and noble sentiments. Such a bill accorded with the
moral nature and political conduct of Marshal Gouvion St. Cyr, who
possessed an upright soul, a proud temperament, monarchical opinions,
and republican manners; and who, since 1814, had given equal proofs of
loyalty and independence. When he advocated it in the tribune, when,
with the manly solemnity and disciplined feeling of an experienced
warrior, at once a sincere patriot and a royalist, he recapitulated the
services and sufferings of that nation of old soldiers which he was
anxious for a few years longer to unite with the new army of France, he
deeply moved the public and the Chambers; and his powerful language, no
less than the excellent propositions of his bill, consecrated it on the
instant in the affectionate esteem of the country.
Violently attacked in 1818, Marshal St. Cyr's recruiting bill has been
since that date several times criticised, revised, and modified. Its
leading principles have resisted assault, and have survived alteration.
It has done more than last, through soundness of principle; it has
given, by facts, an astounding denial to its adversaries. It was accused
of striking a blow at the monarchy; on the contrary, it has made the
army more devotedly monarchical than any that France had ever known,—an
army whose fidelity has never been shaken, either in 1830 or 1848, by
the influence of popular opinion, or the seduction of a revolutionary
crisis. Military sentiment, that spirit of obedience and respect, of
discipline and devotion, one of the chief glories of human nature, and
the necessary pledge of the honour as of the safety of nations, had been
powerfully fomented and developed in France by the great wars of the
Revolution and the Empire. It was a precious inheritance of those rough
times which have bequeathed to us so many burdens. There was danger of
its being lost or enfeebled in the bosom of peaceful inaction, and
during endless debates on liberty. It has been firmly maintained in the
army which the law of 1818 established and incessantly recruits. This
military sentiment is not only preserved; it has become purified and
regulated. By the honesty of its promises and the justice of its
arrangements in matters of privilege and promotion, the bill of Marshal
St. Cyr has imbued the army with a permanent conviction of its rights,
of its own legal and individual rights, and, through that feeling, with
an instinctive attachment to public order, the common guarantee of all
rights. We have witnessed the rare and imposing sight of an army capable
of devotion and restraint, ready for sacrifices, and modest in
pretension, ambitious of glory, without being athirst for war, proud of
its arms, and yet obedient to civil authority. Public habits, the
prevailing ideas of the time, and the general character of our
civilization have doubtless operated much upon this great result; but
the bill of Marshal St. Cyr has had its full part, and I rejoice in
recording this honourable distinction, which, amongst so many others,
belongs to my old and glorious friend.
The session of 1818, which opened in the midst of a ministerial crisis,
had to deal with another question not more important, but even more
intricate and dangerous. The Cabinet determined to leave the press no
longer under an exceptional and temporary law. M. de Serre, at that time
Chancellor, introduced three bills on the same day, which settled
definitively the penalty, the method of prosecution, and the
qualification for publishing, in respect to the daily papers, while at
the same time they liberated them from all censorship.
I am one of those who have been much assisted and fiercely attacked by
the press. Throughout my life, I have greatly employed this engine. By
placing my ideas publicly before the eyes of my country, I first
attracted her attention and esteem. During the progress of my career, I
have ever had the press for ally or opponent; and I have never hesitated
to employ its weapons, or feared to expose myself to its blows. It is a
power which I respect and recognize willingly, rather than compulsorily,
but without illusion or idolatry. Whatever may be the form of
government, political life is a constant struggle; and it would give me
no satisfaction—I will even say more—I should feel ashamed of finding
myself opposed to mute and fettered adversaries. The liberty of the
press is human nature displaying itself in broad daylight, sometimes
under the most attractive, and at others under the most repelling
aspect; it is the wholesome air that vivifies, and the tempest that
destroys, the expansion and impulsive power of steam in the intellectual
system. I have ever advocated a free press; I believe it to be, on the
whole, more useful than injurious to public morality; and I look upon it
as essential to the proper management of public affairs, and to the
security of private interests. But I have witnessed too often and too
closely its dangerous aberrations as regards political order, not to
feel convinced that this liberty requires the restraint of a strong
organization of effective laws and of controlling principles. In 1819,
my friends and I clearly foresaw the necessity of these conditions; but
we laid little stress upon them, we were unable to bring them all into
operation, and we thought, moreover, that the time had arrived when the
sincerity as well as the strength of the restored monarchy was to be
proved by removing from the press its previous shackles, and in risking
the consequences of its enfranchisement.
The greater part of the laws passed with reference to the press, in
France or elsewhere, have either been acts of repression, legitimate or
illegitimate, against liberty, or triumphs over certain special
guarantees of liberty successively won from power, according to the
necessity or opportunity of gaining them. The legislative history of the
press in England supplies a long series of alternations and arrangements
of this class.
The bills of 1819 had a totally different character. They comprised a
complete legislation, conceived together and beforehand, conformable
with certain general principles, defining in every degree liabilities
and penalties, regulating all the conditions as well as the forms of
publication, and intended to establish and secure the liberty of the
press, while protecting order and power from its licentiousness;—an
undertaking very difficult in its nature, as all legislative enactments
must be which spring from precaution more than necessity, and in which
the legislator is inspired and governed by ideas rather than commanded
and directed by facts. Another danger, a moral and concealed danger,
also presented itself. Enactments thus prepared and maintained become
works of a philosopher and artist, the author of which is tempted to
identify himself with them through an impulse of self-love, which
sometimes leads him to lose sight of the external circumstances and
practical application he ought to have considered. Politics require a
certain mixture of indifference and passion, of freedom of thought and
restrained will, which is not easily reconciled with a strong adhesion
to general ideas, and a sincere intent to hold a just balance between
the many principles and interests of society.
I should be unwilling to assert that in the measures proposed and passed
in 1819, on the liberty of the press, we had completely avoided these
rocks, or that they were in perfect harmony with the state of men's
minds, and the exigencies of order at that precise epoch. Nevertheless,
after an interval of nearly forty years, and on reconsidering these
measures now with my matured judgment, I do not hesitate to look on them
as grand and noble efforts of legislation, in which the true points of
the subject were skilfully embraced and applied, and which, in spite of
the mutilation they were speedily doomed to undergo, established an
advance in the liberty of the press, properly understood, which sooner
or later cannot fail to extend itself.
The debate on these bills was worthy of their conception. M. de Serre
was gifted with eloquence singularly exalted and practical. He supported
their general principles in the tone of a magistrate who applies, and
not as a philosopher who explains them. His speech was profound without
abstraction, highly coloured but not figurative; his reasoning resolved
itself into action. He expounded, examined, discussed, attacked, or
replied without literary or even oratorical preparation, carrying up the
strength of his arguments to the full level of the questions, fertile
without exuberance, precise without dryness, impassioned without a
shadow of declamation, always ready with a sound answer to his
opponents, as powerful on the impulse of the moment as in prepared
reflection, and, when once he had surmounted a slight hesitation and
slowness at the first onset, pressing on directly to his end with a firm
and rapid step, and with the air of a man deeply interested, but
careless of personal success, and only anxious to win his cause by
communicating to his listeners his own sentiments and convictions.
Different adversaries presented themselves during the debate, from those
who had opposed the bills for elections and recruiting the army. The
right-hand party attacked the two latter propositions; the left assailed
the measures regarding the press. MM. Benjamin Constant, Manuel,
Chauvelin, and Bignon, with more parliamentary malice than political
judgment, overwhelmed them with objections and amendments slightly
mingled with very qualified compliments. Recent elections had lately
readmitted into the assembly these leaders of the Liberals in the
Chamber of the Hundred Days. They seemed to think of nothing but how to
bring once more upon the scene their party, for three years beaten down,
and to re-establish their own position as popular orators. Some of the
most prominent ideas in the drawing up of these three bills, were but
little in conformity with the philosophic and legislative traditions
which since 1791 had become current on the subject. They evidently
comprised a sincere wish to guarantee liberty, and a strong desire not
to disarm power. It was a novel exhibition to see Ministers frankly
recognizing the liberty of the press, without offering up incense on its
shrine, and assuming that they understood its rights and interests
better than its old worshippers. In the opposition of the left-hand
party at this period, there was much of routine, a great deal of
complaisance for the prejudices and passions of the press attached to
their party, and a little angry jealousy of a cabinet which permitted
liberal innovation. The public, unacquainted with political factions,
were astonished to see bills so vehemently opposed which diminished the
penalties in force against the press, referred to a jury all offences of
that class, and liberated the journals from the censorship,—measures
which in their eyes appeared too confident. The right-hand party held
dexterously aloof, rejoicing to see the Ministers at issue with reviving
opponents who were likely soon to become their most formidable enemies.
It was during this debate that I ascended the tribune for the first
time. M. Cuvier and I had been appointed, as Royal Commissioners, to
support the proposed measures,—a false and weak position, which
demonstrates the infancy of representative government. We do not argue
politics as we plead a cause or maintain a thesis. To act effectively in
a deliberative assembly, we must ourselves be deliberators; that is to
say, we must be members, and hold our share with others in free
thought, power, and responsibility. I believe that I acquitted myself
with propriety, but coldly, of the mission I had undertaken. I
sustained, against M. Benjamin Constant, the general responsibility for
the correctness of the accounts given of the proceedings of the
Chambers, and, against M. Daunou, the guarantees required by the bill
for the establishment of newspapers. The Chamber appeared to appreciate
my arguments, and listened to me with attention. But I kept on the
reserve, and seldom joined in the debate; I have no turn for incomplete
positions and prescribed parts. When we enter into an arena in which the
affairs of a free country are discussed, it is not to make a display of
fine thoughts and words; we are bound to engage in the struggle as true
and earnest actors.
As the recruiting bill had established a personal and political
reputation for Marshal Gouvion St. Cyr, so the bills on the press
effected the same for M. de Serre. Thus, at the issue of a violent
crisis of revolution and war, in presence of armed Europe, and within
the short space of three sessions, the three most important questions of
a free system—the construction of elective power, the formation of a
national army, and the interference of individual opinions in public
affairs through the channel of the press—were freely proposed, argued,
and resolved; and their solution, whatever might be the opinion of
parties, was certainly in harmony with the habits and wishes of that
honest and peaceably disposed majority of France who had sincerely
received the King and the Charter, and had adopted their government on
mature consideration.
During this time, many other measures of constitutional organization,
or general legislation, had been accomplished or proposed. In 1818, an
amendment of M. Royer-Collard settled the addition to the budget of an
annual law for the supervision of public accounts; and in the course of
the following year, two ministers of finance, the Baron Louis and
M. Roy, brought into operation that security for the honest appropriation
of the revenue. By the institution of smaller "Great-books" of the
national debt, the state of public credit became known in the
departments. Other bills, although laid before the Chambers, produced no
result; three, amongst the rest, may be named: on the responsibility of
Ministers, on the organization of the Chamber of Peers into a court of
justice, and on the alteration of the financial year to avoid the
provisional vote of the duty. Others again, especially applicable to the
reform of departmental and parochial administrations, and to public
instruction, were left in a state of inquiry and preliminary discussion.
Far from eluding or allowing important questions to linger, the
Government laboriously investigated them, and forestalled the wishes of
the public, determined to submit them to the Chambers as soon as they
had collected facts and arranged their own plans.
I still preserve a deep remembrance of the State Council in which these
various bills were first discussed. This Council had not then any
defined official existence or prescribed action in the constitution of
the country; politics nevertheless were more prominently argued there,
and with greater freedom and effect, than at any other time; every
shade, I ought rather to say every variation, of the royalist party,
from the extreme right to the edge of the left, were there represented;
the politicians most in repute, the leaders of the majority in the two
Assemblies, were brought into contact with the heads of administration,
the old senators of the Empire, and with younger men not yet admissible
to the Chambers, but introduced by the Charter into public life.
MM. Royer-Collard, de Serre, and Camille Jordan sat there by the side of
MM. Siméon, Portalis, Molé, Bérenger, Cuvier, and Allent; and MM. de
Barante, Mounier, and myself deliberated in common with MM. de
Ballainvilliers, Laporte-Lalanne, and de Blaire, unswerving
representatives of the old system. When important bills were examined by
the Council, the Ministers never failed to attend. The Duke de Richelieu
often presided at the general sittings. The discussion was perfectly
free, without oratorical display or pretension, but serious, profound,
varied, detailed, earnest, erudite, and at the same time practical. I
have heard Count Bérenger, a man of disputatious and independent temper,
and a quasi-republican under the Empire, maintain there, with ingenious
and imposing subtlety, universal suffrage, and distinctions of
qualification for voting, against direct election and the concentrated
right of suffrage. MM. Cuvier, Siméon, and Allent were the constant
defenders of traditional and administrative influence. My friends and I
argued strongly for the principles and hopes of liberty strongly based,
which appeared to us the natural consequences of the Charter and the
necessary conditions for the prosperity of the Restoration. Reforms in
criminal legislation, the application of trial by jury to offences of
the press, the introduction of the elective principle into the
municipal system, were argued in the Council of State before they were
laid before the Chambers. The Government looked to the Council, not only
for a study of all questions, but for a preparatory and amicable
experience of the ideas, desires, and objections it was destined to
encounter at a later period, in a rougher contest, and a more tumultuous
theatre.
The Cabinet, composed as it was at the time when the decree of the 5th
of September, 1816, appeared, was not equal to that line of policy,
continually increasing in moderation, sometimes resolutely, liberal,
and, if not always provident, at least perpetually active. But the same
progress which accompanied events, affected individuals. During the
course of the year 1817, M. Pasquier, Marshal Gouvion St. Cyr, and
M. Molé replaced M. Dambray, the Duke of Feltri, and M. Dubouchage in the
departments of justice, war, and the marine. From that time the
Ministers were not deficient either in internal unity, or in
parliamentary and administrative talent. They endeavoured to infuse the
same qualities into all the different branches and gradations of
government, and succeeded tolerably in the heart of the State. Without
reaction or any exclusive spirit, they surrounded themselves with men
sincerely attached to a constitutional policy, and who by their
character and ability had already won public esteem. They were less firm
and effective in local administration; although introducing more changes
than are generally believed, they were unable to reconcile them with
their general policy. In many places, acts of violence, capricious
temper, haughty inexperience, offensive pretension and frivolous alarm,
with all the great and little party passions which had possessed the
Government of 1815, continued to weigh upon the country. These
proceedings kept up amongst the tranquil population a strong sentiment
of uneasiness, and sometimes excited active malcontents to attempts at
conspiracy and insurrection, amplified at first with interested or
absurd credulity, repressed with unmitigated rigour, and subsequently
discussed, denied, extenuated, and reduced almost to nothing by
never-ending explanations and counter-charges. From thence arose the
mistakes, prejudices, and false calculations of the local authorities;
while the supreme powers assumed alternately airs of levity or weakness,
which made them lose, in the eyes of the multitude, the credit of that
sound general policy from which they, the masses, experienced little
advantage. The occurrences at Lyons in June 1817, and the long debates
of which they became the subject after the mission of redress of the
Duke of Ragusa, furnish a lamentable example of the evils which France
at this period had still to endure, although at the head of government
the original cause had disappeared.
Things are more easily managed than men. These same Ministers, who were
not always able to compel the prefects and mayors to adopt their policy,
and who hesitated to displace them when they were found to be obstinate
or incapable, were ever prompt and effective when general administration
was involved, and measures not personal were necessary for the public
interest. On this point, reflection tells me that justice has not been
rendered to the Government of the day; religious establishments, public
instruction, hospital and prison discipline, financial and military
administration, the connection of power with industry and commerce, all
the great public questions, received from 1816 to 1820 much salutary
reform and made important advances. The Duke de Richelieu advocated an
enlightened policy and the public good; he took pride in contributing to
both. M. Lainé devoted himself with serious and scrupulous anxiety to
the superintendence of the many establishments included in his
department, and laboured to rectify existing abuses or to introduce
salutary limitations. The Baron Louis was an able and indefatigable
minister, who knew to a point how regularity could be established in the
finances of the State, and who employed for that object all the
resources of his mind and the unfettered energy of his will. Marshal
Gouvion St. Cyr had, on every branch of military organization, on the
formation and internal system of the different bodies, on the scientific
schools as well as on the material supplies, ideas at once systematic
and practical, derived either from his general conception of the army or
from long experience; and these he carried into effect in a series of
regulations remarkable for the unity of their views and the profound
knowledge of their details. M. Decazes was endowed with a singularly
inquiring and inventive mind in seeking to satisfy doubts, to attempt
improvements, to stimulate emulation and concord for the advantage of
all social interests, of all classes of citizens, in connection with the
Government; and these combined objects he invariably promoted with
intelligent, amiable, and eager activity. In a political point of view,
the Administration left much to regret and to desire; but in its proper
sphere it was liberal, energetic, impartial, economical from probity and
regularity, friendly to progress at the same time that it was careful of
order, and sincerely impressed with the desire of giving universal
prevalence to justice and the public interest.[14]
Here was undoubtedly a sensible and sound Government, in very difficult
and lamentable circumstances; and under such rule the country had no
occasion to lament the present or despair of the future. Nevertheless
this Government gained no strength by permanence; its enemies felt no
discouragement, while its friends perceived no addition to their power
or security. The Restoration had given peace to France, and laboured
honestly and successfully to restore her independence and rank in
Europe. Under this flag of stability and order, prosperity and liberty
sprang up again together. Still the Restoration was always a disputed
question.
If we are to believe its enemies, this evil was inherent and inevitable.
According to them the old system, the emigrants, the foreigners, the
hatreds and suspicions of the Revolution devoted the House of Bourbon to
their obstinately precarious situation. Without disputing the influence
of such a fatal past, I cannot admit that it exercised complete empire
over events, or that it suffices in itself to explain why the
Restoration, even in its best days, always was and appeared to be in a
tottering state. The mischief sprang from more immediate and more
personal causes. In the Government of that date there were organic and
accidental infirmities, vices of the political machine and errors of the
actors, which contributed much more than revolutionary remembrances to
prevent its firm consolidation.
A natural and important disagreement exists between the representative
government instituted by the Charter, and the administrative monarchy
founded by Louis XIV. and Napoleon. Where administration and policy are
equally free, when local affairs are discussed and decided by local
authorities or influences, and neither derive their impulse nor solution
from the central power, which never interferes except when the general
interest of the State absolutely requires it to do so,—as in England,
and in the United States of America, in Holland and Belgium, for
instances,—the representative system readily accords with an
administrative Government which never appeals to its co-operation except
on important and rare occasions. But when the supreme authority
undertakes at the same time to govern with freedom, and to administer by
centralization,—when it has to contend, at the seat of power, for the
great affairs of the State, and to regulate, under its own
responsibility, in all the departments, the minor business of every
district,—two weighty objections immediately present themselves: either
the central power, absorbed by the care of national questions, and
occupied with its own defence, neglects local affairs, and suffers them
to fall into disorder and inaction; or it connects them closely with
general questions, making them subservient to its own interests; and
thus the whole system of administration, from the hamlet to the palace,
degenerates into an implement of government in the hands of political
parties who are mutually contending for power.
I am certainly not called upon today to dwell on this evil; it has
become the hackneyed theme of the adversaries of representative
government, and of political liberty. It was felt long before it was
taken advantage of; but instead of employing it against free
institutions, an attempt was made to effect its cure. To achieve this
end, a double work was to be accomplished; it was necessary to infuse
liberty into the administration of local affairs, and to second the
development of the local forces capable of exercising authority within
their own circle. An aristocracy cannot be created by laws, either at
the extremities or at the fountain-head of the State; but the most
democratic society is not stripped of natural powers ready to display
themselves when called into action. Not only in the departments, but in
the divisions, in the townships and villages, landed property, industry,
employments, professions, and traditions have their local influences,
which, if adopted and organized with prudence, constitute effectual
authority. From 1816 to 1848, under each of the two constitutional
monarchies, whether voluntarily or by compulsion, the different cabinets
have acted under this conviction; they have studied to relieve the
central Government, by remitting a portion of its functions, sometimes
to the regular local agents, and at others to more independent
auxiliaries. But, as it too often happens, the remedy was not rapid
enough in operation; mistrust, timidity, inexperience, and routine
slackened its progress; neither the authorities nor the people knew how
to employ it with resolution, or to wait the results with patience. Thus
compelled to sustain the burden of political liberty with that of
administrative centralization, the newly-born constitutional monarchy
found itself compromised between difficulties and contradictory
responsibilities, exceeding the measure of ability and strength which
could be reasonably expected from any Government.
Another evil, the natural but not incurable result of these very
institutions, weighed also upon the Restoration. The representative
system is at the bottom, and on close analysis, a system of mutual
sacrifices and dealings between the various interests which coexist in
society. At the same time that it places them in antagonism, it imposes
on them the absolute necessity of arriving at an intermediate term, a
definite measure of reciprocal understanding and toleration which may
become the basis of laws and government. But also, at the same time, by
the publicity and heat of the struggle, it throws the opposing parties
into an unseemly exaggeration of vehemence and language, and compromises
the self-love and personal dignity of human nature. Thus, by an
inconsistency teeming with embarrassment, it daily renders more
difficult that agreement or submission which, in the end, it has also
made indispensable. Herein is comprised an important difficulty for this
system of government, which can only be surmounted by a great exercise
of tact and conciliation on the part of the political actors
themselves, and by a great preponderance of good sense on that of the
public, which in the end recalls parliamentary factions and their
leaders to that moderation after defeat, from which the inflated passion
of the characters they have assumed too often tends to estrange them.
This necessary regulator, always difficult to find or institute, was
essentially wanting to us under the Restoration; on entering the course,
we were launched, without curb, on this precipice of extreme
demonstrations and preconceived ideas, the natural vice of parties in
every representative government. How many opportunities presented
themselves from 1816 to 1830, when the different elements of the
monarchical party could, and in their struggle ought to have paused on
this brink, at the point where the danger of revolution commenced for
all! But none had the good sense or courage to exercise this provident
restraint; and the public, far from imposing it on them, excited them
still more urgently to the combat,—as at a play, in which people
delight to trace the dramatic reflection of their own passions.
A mischievous, although inevitable, distribution of parts between the
opposing parties aggravated still more, from 1816 to 1820, this want of
forecast in men, and this extravagance of public passions. Under the
representative system, it is usually to one of the parties distinctly
defined and firmly resolved in their ideas and desires, that the
government belongs: sometimes the systematic defenders of power, at
others the friends of liberty, then the conservatives, and lastly the
innovators, direct the affairs of the country; and between these
organized and ambitious parties are placed the unclassed opinions and
undecided wishes, that political chorus which is ever present watching
the conduct of the actors, listening to their words, and ready to
applaud or condemn them according as they satisfy or offend their
unfettered judgment. This is, in fact, the natural bias and true order
of things under free institutions. It is well for Government to have a
public and recognized standard, regulated on fixed principles, and
sustained in action by steady adherents; it derives from that position,
not only the strength and consistent coherence that it requires, but the
moral dignity which renders power more easy and gentle by placing it
higher in the estimation of the people. It is not the chance of events
or the personal ambition of men alone, but the interests and inclination
of the public, which have produced, in free countries, the great,
acknowledged, permanent, and trusty political parties, and have usually
confided power to their hands. At the Restoration it was impossible,
from 1816 to 1820, to fulfil this condition of a Government at once
energetic and restrained. The two great political parties which it found
in action, that of the old system and of the revolution, were both at
the time incapable of governing by maintaining internal peace with
liberty; each had ideas and passions too much opposed to the established
and legal order they would have had to defend; they accepted with great
reluctance, and in a very undefined sense, the one the Charter, and the
other the old Monarchy. Through absolute necessity, power returned to
the hands of the political choir; the floating and impartial section of
the Chambers, the centre, was called to the helm. Under a free system,
the Centre is the habitual moderator and definitive judge of Government,
but not the party naturally pretending to govern. It gives or withholds
the majority, but its mission is not to conquer it. And it is much more
difficult for the centre than for strongly organized parties to win or
maintain a majority; for when it assumes government, it finds before it,
not undecided spectators who wait its acts to pass judgment on them, but
inflamed adversaries resolved to combat them beforehand;—a weak and
dangerous position, which greatly aggravates the difficulties of
Government, whether engaged in the display of power, or the protection
of liberty.
Not only was this the situation of the King's Government from 1816 to
1820, but even this was not regularly and powerfully established. Badly
distributed amongst the actors, the characters were doubtfully filled in
the interior of this new and uncertain party of the centre, on whom the
government, through necessity, devolved. The principal portion of the
heads of the majority in the Chambers held no office. From 1816 to 1819,
several of those who represented and directed the centre, who addressed
and supported it with prevailing influence, who defended it from the
attacks of the right and left-hand parties, who established its power in
debate and its credit with the public, MM. Royer-Collard, Camille
Jordan, Beugnot, and de Serre, were excluded from the Cabinet. Amongst
the eminent leaders of the majority, two only, M. Lainé and M. Pasquier
were ministers. The Government, therefore, in the Chambers, relied on
independent supporters who approved of their policy in general, but
neither bore any part in the burden, nor acknowledged any share in the
responsibility.
The doctrinarians had acquired their parliamentary influence and moral
weight by principles and eloquence rather than by deeds; they maintained
their opinions without applying them to practice; the flag of thought
and the standard of action were in different hands. In the Chambers, the
Ministers often appeared as the clients of the orators; the orators
never looked upon their cause as identical with that of the Ministers;
they preserved this distinction while supporting them; they had their
own demands to make before they assented; they qualified their approval,
and even sometimes dissented altogether. As the questions increased in
importance and delicacy, so much the more independence and discord
manifested themselves in the bosom of the ministerial party, with
dangerous notoriety. During the session of 1817, M. Pasquier, then
Chancellor, presented a bill to the Chamber of Deputies, which, while
temporarily maintaining the censorship of the daily papers, comprised in
other respects some modifications favourable to the liberty of the
press. M. Camille Jordan and M. Royer-Collard demanded much greater
concessions, particularly the application of trial by jury to press
offences; and the bill, reluctantly passed by the Chamber of Deputies,
was thrown out by the Chamber of Peers, when the Duke de Broglie urged
the same amendments on similar principles. In 1817 also, a new Concordat
had been negotiated and concluded at Rome by M. de Blacas. It contained
the double and contradictory defect of invading by some of its
specifications the liberties of the old Gallican Church; while, by the
abolition of the Concordat of 1801, it inspired the new French society
with lively alarms for its civil liberties. Little versed in such
matters, and almost entirely absorbed in the negotiations for relieving
France from the presence of foreigners, the Duke de Richelieu had
confided this business to M. de Blacas, who was equally ignorant and
careless of the importance of the old or new liberties of France,
whether civil or religious. When this Concordat, respecting which the
Ministers themselves were discontented and doubtful when they had
carefully examined it, was presented to the Chamber of Deputies by
M. Lainé, with the measures necessary for carrying it into effect, it was
received with general disfavour. In committee, in the board appointed to
report on it, in the discussions in the hall of conference, all the
objections, political and historical, of principle or circumstance, that
the bill could possibly excite, were argued and explained beforehand, so
as to give warning of the most obstinate and dangerous debate. The
doctrinarians openly declared for this premature opposition; and their
support produced a strong effect, as they were known to be sincere
friends to religion and its influences. It is true, M. Royer-Collard was
accused of being a Jansenist; and thus an attempt was made to depreciate
him in the eyes of the true believers of the Catholic Church. The
reproach was frivolous. M. Royer-Collard had derived, from family
traditions and early education, serious habits, studious inclinations,
and an affectionate respect for the exalted minds of Port-Royal, for
their virtue and genius; but he neither adopted their religious
doctrines nor their systematic conclusions on the relative ties between
Church and State. On all these questions he exercised a free and
rational judgment, as a stranger to all extreme passion or sectarian
prejudice, and not in the least disposed, either as Catholic or
philosopher, to engage in obscure and endless quarrels with the Church.
"I seek not to quibble with religion," he was wont to say; "it has
enough to do to defend itself and us from impiety." The opposition of
M. Royer-Collard to the Concordat of 1817 was the dissent of a politician
and enlightened moralist, who foresaw the mischief which the public
discussion, and adoption or rejection of this bill, would inflict on the
influence of the Church, the credit of the Restoration, and the peace of
the country. The Cabinet had prudence enough not to brave a danger which
it had created, or suffered to grow on its steps. The report on the bill
was indefinitely adjourned, and a fresh negotiation was opened with Rome
by sending Count Portalis on a special mission, which ended in 1819 by
the tacit withdrawal of the Concordat of 1817. The Duke de Richelieu,
pressed by his colleagues, and his own tardy reflections, coincided in
this retrograde movement; but he maintained a feeling of displeasure at
the opposition of the doctrinarians and others on this occasion, which
he sometimes gratified himself by indulging. In the month of March,
1818, some one, whose name I have forgotten, demanded of him a trifling
favour. "It is impossible," replied he sharply; "MM. Royer-Collard, de
Serre, Camille Jordan, and Guizot will not suffer it."
I had no reason to complain that my name was included in this
ebullition. Although not a member of the Chamber, I openly adopted the
opinions and conduct of my friends; I had both the opportunity and the
means, in the discussions of the Council of State, in the drawing-room,
and through the press,—channels which all parties employed with equal
ardour and effect. In spite of the shackles which restrained the papers
and periodical publications, they freely exercised the liberty which the
Government no longer attempted to dispute, and to which the most
influential politicians had recourse, to disseminate far and wide the
brilliant flames or smouldering fire of their opposition. M. de
Châteaubriand, M. de Bonald, M. de Villèle, in the 'Conservative,' and
M. Benjamin Constant in the 'Minerva,' maintained an incessant assault
on the Cabinet. The Cabinet in its defence, multiplied similar
publications, such as the 'Moderator,' the 'Publicist,' and the
'Political and Literary Spectator.' But, for my friends and our cause,
the defences of the Cabinet were not always desirable or sufficient; we
therefore, from 1817 to 1820, had our own journals and periodical
miscellanies,—the 'Courier,' the 'Globe,' the 'Philosophical,
Political, and Literary Archives,' and the 'French Review;' and in these
we discussed, according to our principles and hopes, sometimes general
questions, and at others the incidental subjects of current policy, as
they alternately presented themselves. I contributed much to these
publications. Between our different adversaries and ourselves the
contest was extremely unequal: whether they came from the right or the
left, they represented old parties; they expressed ideas and sentiments
long in circulation; they found a public predisposed to receive them.
We were intruders in the political arena, officers seeking to recruit an
army, moderate innovators. We attacked, in the name of liberty, theories
and passions long popular under the same denomination. We defended the
new French society according to its true rights and interests, but not
in conformity with its tastes or habits. We had to conquer our public,
while we combated our enemies. In this difficult attempt our position
was somewhat doubtful: we were at the same time with and against the
Government, royalists and liberals, ministerialists and independents; we
acted sometimes in concert with the Administration, sometimes with the
Opposition, and we were unable to avail ourselves of all the weapons of
either power or liberty. But we were full of faith in our opinions, of
confidence in ourselves, of hope in the future; and we pressed forward
daily in our double contest, with as much devotion as pride, and with
more pride than ambition.
All this has been strenuously denied; my friends and I have often been
represented as deep plotters, greedy for office, eager and shrewd in
pushing our fortunes through every opening, and more intent on our own
ascendency than on the fate or wishes of the country,—a vulgar and
senseless estimate, both of human nature and of our contemporary
history. If ambition had been our ruling principle, we might have
escaped many efforts and defeats. In times when the most brilliant
fortunes, political or otherwise, were easily within reach of those who
thought of nothing else, we only desired to achieve ours on certain
moral conditions, and with the object of not caring for ourselves.
Ambition we had, but in the service of a public cause; and one which,
either in success or adversity, has severely tried the constancy of its
defenders.
The most clear-sighted of the cabinet ministers in 1817, M. Decazes and
M. Pasquier, whose minds were more free and less suspicious than those
of the Duke de Richelieu and M. Lainé, were not deceived on this point:
they felt the necessity of our alliance, and cultivated it with anxiety.
But when it becomes a question of how to govern in difficult times,
allies are not enough; intimate associates are necessary, devoted
adherents in labour and peril. In this character, the doctrinarians, and
particularly M. Royer-Collard, their leader in the Chambers, were
mistrusted. They were looked upon as at once imperious and undecided,
and more exacting than effective. Nevertheless, in November, 1819, after
the election of M. Grégoire and in the midst of their projected reforms
in the electoral law, M. Decazes, at the strong instigation of M. de
Serre, proposed to M. Royer-Collard to join the Cabinet with one or two
of his friends. M. Royer-Collard hesitated at first, then acceded for a
moment, and finally declined. "You know not what you would do," said he
to M. Decazes; "my method of dealing with affairs would differ entirely
from yours: you elude questions, you shift and change them, you gain
time, you settle things by halves; I, on the contrary, should attack
them in front, bring them into open view, and dissect them before all
the world. I should compromise instead of assisting you."
M. Royer-Collard was in the right, and defined himself admirably, perhaps
more correctly than he imagined. He was more calculated to advise and
contest than to exercise power. He was rather a great spectator and
critic than an eminent political actor. In the ordinary course of
affairs he would have been too absolute, too haughty, and too slow. In a
crisis, I question whether his mental reservations, his scruples of
conscience, his horror of all public excitement, and his prevailing
dread of responsibility, would have permitted him to preserve the cool
self-possession, with the firm and prompt determination, which
circumstances might have required. M. Decazes pressed him no further.
Even at this moment, after all I have seen and experienced, I am not
prone to be discouraged, or inclined to believe that difficult
achievements are impossible. However defective may be the internal
constitution and combinations of the different parties who co-operate in
carrying on public affairs, the upright conduct of individuals may
remedy them; history furnishes more than one example of vicious
institutions and situations, the evil results of which have been
counteracted by the ability of political leaders and the sound sense of
the public. But when to the evils of position, the errors of men are
added,—when, instead of recognizing dangers in their true tendency, and
opposing firm resistance, the chiefs and followers of parties either
yield to or accelerate them, then the mischievous effects of pernicious
courses inevitably and rapidly develop themselves. Errors were not
wanting from 1816 to 1820 in every party, whether of Government or
Opposition, of the centre, the right, or the left, of the ministers or
doctrinarians. I make no parade of impartiality; in spite of their
faults and misfortunes, I continue, with a daily increasing conviction,
to look upon the Government I served, and the party I supported, to have
been the best; but, for our own credit, let leisure and reflection teach
us to acknowledge the mistakes we committed, and to prepare for our
cause—which assuredly will not die with us—a more auspicious future.
The centre, in its governing mission, had considerable advantages; it
suffered neither from moral embarrassments nor external clogs, it was
perfectly free and unshackled,—essential qualifications in a great
public career, and which at that time belonged neither to the right nor
to the left-hand party.
The right had only accepted the Charter on the eve of its promulgation,
and after strenuous resistance; a conspicuous and energetic section of
the party still persisted in opposing it. That division which had seats
in the Chambers, sided from day to day with the constitutional
system,—the officers as intelligent and reflecting men, the soldiers as
staunch and contented royalists; but neither, in these recognized
capacities, inspired confidence in the country, which looked upon their
adhesion to the Charter as constrained or conditional, always insincere
and covering other views. The right, even while honestly accepting the
Charter, had also party interests to satisfy; when it aspired to power,
it was not solely to govern according to its principles, and to place
the restored monarchy on a solid basis: it had private misfortunes to
repair and positions to re-assume. It was not a pure and regular party
of Tory royalists. The emigrants, the remains of the old court and
clergy, were still influential amongst them, and eagerly bent on
carrying out their personal expectations. By its composition and
reminiscences, the party was condemned to much reserve and imprudence,
to secret aspirations and indiscreet ebullitions, which, even while it
professed to walk in constitutional paths, embarrassed and weakened its
action at every step.
The situation of the left was no less confused. It represented, at that
exact epoch, not the interests and sentiments of France in general, but
the interests and sentiments of that portion of France which had
ardently, indistinctly, and obstinately promoted and sustained the
Revolution, under its republican or imperial form. It cherished against
the House of Bourbon and the Restoration an old habit of hostility,
which the Hundred Days had revived, which the most rational of the party
could scarcely throw off, the most skilful with difficulty concealed,
and the gravest considered it a point of honour to display as a protest
and corner-stone. In November 1816, a man of probity, as sincere in the
renunciation of his opinions of 1789 as he had formerly been in their
profession, the Viscount Matthieu de Montmorency, complained, in a
drawing-room of the party, that the Liberals had no love for legitimacy.
A person present defended himself from this reproach. "Yes," said M. de
Montmorency, with thoughtless candour, "you love legitimacy as we do the
Charter." A keen satire on the false position of both parties under the
government of the Charter and of legitimacy!
But if the right-hand party or the left, if the members of either in the
Chambers, had followed only their sincere convictions and desires, the
greater portion, I am satisfied, would have frankly accepted and
supported the Restoration with the Charter, the Charter with the
Restoration. When men are seriously engaged in a work and feel the
weight of responsibility, they soon discover the true course, and would
willingly follow it. But, both in the right and left, the wisest and
best-disposed feared to proclaim the truth which they saw, or to adopt
it as their rule of conduct; both were under the yoke of their external
party, of its passions as of its interests, of its ignorance as of its
passions. It has been one of the sorest wounds of our age, that few men
have preserved sufficient firmness of mind and character to think
freely, and act as they think. The intellectual and moral independence
of individuals disappeared under the pressure of events and before the
heat of popular clamours and desires. Under such a general slavery of
thought and action, there are no longer just or mistaken minds, cautious
or rash spirits, officers or soldiers; all yield to the same controlling
passion, and bend before the same wind; common weakness reduces all to
one common level; hierarchy and discipline vanish; the last lead the
first; for the last press and drive onwards, being themselves impelled
by that tyranny from without, of which they have been the most blind and
ready instruments.
As a political party, the centre, in the Chambers from 1816 to 1820, was
not tainted by this evil. Sincere in its adoption of the Restoration and
the Charter, no external pressure could disturb or falsify its position.
It remained unfettered in thought and deed. It openly acknowledged its
object, and marched directly towards it; selecting, within, the leaders
most capable of conducting it there, and having no supporters without
who looked for any other issue. It was thus that, in spite of its other
deficiencies for powerful government, the centre was at that time the
fittest party to rule, the only one capable of maintaining order in the
State, while tolerating the liberty of its rivals.
But to reap the full fruits of this advantage, and to diminish at the
same time the natural defects of the centre in its mission, it was
necessary that it should adopt a fixed idea, a conviction that the
different elements of the party were indispensable to each other; and
that, to accomplish the object pursued by all with equal sincerity,
mutual concessions and sacrifices were called for, to maintain this
necessary union. When Divine wisdom intended to secure the power of a
human connection, it forbade divorce. Political ties cannot admit this
inviolability; but if they are not strongly knit, if the contracting
parties are not firmly resolved to break them only in the last extremity
and under the most imperious pressure, they soon end, not only in
impotence, but in disorder; and by their too easy rupture, policy
becomes exposed to new difficulties and disturbances. I have thus
pointed out the discrepancies and different opinions which, from the
beginning, existed between the two principal elements of the centre: the
Ministers, with their pure adherents, on the one side, and the
doctrinarians on the other. From the second session after the decree of
the 5th of September, 1816, these differences increased until they grew
into dissensions.
While acknowledging the influence of the doctrinarians in the Chambers,
and the importance of their co-operation, neither the Ministers nor
their advocates measured correctly the value of this alliance, or the
weight of the foundation from which that value was derived. Philosophers
estimate too highly the general ideas with which they are prepossessed;
politicians withhold from general ideas the attention and interest they
are entitled to demand. Intelligence is proud and sensitive; it looks
for consideration and respect, even though its suggestions may be
disallowed; and those who treat it lightly or coldly sometimes pay
heavily for their mistake. It is, moreover, an evidence of narrow
intellect not to appreciate the part which general principles assume in
the government of men, or to regard them as useless or hostile because
we are not disposed to adopt them as guides. In our days, especially,
and notwithstanding the well-merited disrepute into which so many
theories have fallen, philosophic deduction, on all the leading
questions and facts of policy, is a sustaining power, on which the
ablest and most secure ministers would do wisely to rely. The
doctrinarians at that period represented this power, and employed it
fearlessly against the spirit of revolution, as well as in favour of the
constitutional system. The Cabinet of 1816 undervalued the part they
played, and paid too little attention to their ideas and desires. The
application of trial by jury to offences of the press was not, I admit,
unattended by danger; but it was much better to try that experiment, and
by so doing to maintain union in the Government party, than to divide
it by absolutely disregarding, on this question, M. Camille Jordan,
M. Royer-Collard, and their friends.
All power, and, above all, recent power, demands an impression of
grandeur in its acts and on its insignia. Order, and the regular
protection of private interests, that daily bread of nations, will not
long satisfy their wants. To secure these is an inseparable care of
Government, but they do not comprise the only need of humanity. Human
nature finds the other enjoyments for which it thirsts in opposite
distinctions, moral or physical, just or unjust, solid or ephemeral. It
has neither enough of virtue nor wisdom to render absolute greatness
indispensable; but in every position it requires to see, conspicuously
displayed, something exalted, which may attract and occupy the
imagination. After the Empire, which had accustomed France to all the
delights of national pre-eminence and glory, the spectacle of free and
lofty thought displaying itself with moral dignity, and some show of
talent, was not deficient in novelty or attraction, while the chance of
its success outweighed the value of the cost.
The Ministers were not more skilful in dealing with the personal tempers
than with the ideas of the doctrinarians, who were as haughty and
independent in character as they were elevated in mind, and ready to
take offence when any disposition was evinced to apply their opinions
and conduct without their own consent. Nothing is more distasteful to
power than to admit, to any great extent, the independence of its
supporters; it considers them treated with sufficient respect if taken
into confidence, and is readily disposed to view them as servants. M.
Lainé, then Minister of the Interior, wrote one morning to M. Cuvier to
say that the King had just named him Royal Commissioner, to second a
bill which would be presented on the following day to the Chamber of
Deputies. He had not only neglected to apprise him before of the duty he
was to undertake, but he did not even mention in the note the particular
bill he instructed him to support. M. Cuvier, more subservient than
susceptible, with power, made no complaint of this treatment, but
related it with a smile. A few days before, the Minister of Finance,
M. Corvetto, had also appointed M. de Serre Commissioner for the defence of
the budget, without asking whether this appointment was agreeable to
him, or holding any conference even on the fundamental points of the
budget he was expected to carry through. On receiving notice of this
nomination, M. de Serre felt deeply offended. "It is either an act of
folly or impertinence," said he loudly; "perhaps both." M. de Serre
deceived himself; it was neither the one nor the other. M. Corvetto was
an extremely polite, careful, and modest person; but he was of the
Imperial school, and more accustomed to give orders to agents than to
concert measures with members of the Chambers. By habits as well as
ideas, the doctrinarians belonged to a liberal system,—troublesome
allies of power, on the termination of a military and administrative
monarchy.
I know not which is the most difficult undertaking,—to transform the
functionaries of absolute power into the supporters of a free
Government, or to organize and discipline the friends of liberty into a
political party. If the Ministers sometimes disregarded the humour of
the doctrinarians, the doctrinarians in their turn too lightly
estimated the position and task of the Ministers. They had in reality,
whatever has been said of sectarian passions and ideas, neither the
ambition nor the vanity of a coterie; they possessed open, generous, and
expanded minds, extremely accessible to sympathy; but, too much
accustomed to live alone and depend on themselves, they scarcely thought
of the effect which their words and actions produced beyond their own
circle; and thus social faults were laid to their charge which they had
not the least desire to commit. Their political mistakes were more real.
In their relations with power, they were sometimes intemperate and
offensive in language, unnecessarily impatient, not knowing how to be
contented with what was possible, or how to wait for amelioration
without too visible an effort. These causes led them to miscalculate the
impediments, necessities, and practicable resources of the Government
they sincerely wished to establish. In the Chambers, they were too
exclusive and pugnacious, more intent on proving their opinions than on
gaining converts, despising rather than desiring recruits, and little
gifted with the talent of attraction and combination so essential to the
leaders of a party. They were not sufficiently acquainted with the
difficulties of carrying out a sound scheme of policy, nor with the
infinite variety of efforts, sacrifices, and cares which are comprised
in the art of governing.
From 1816 to 1818 the vices of their position and the mistakes
committed, infused into the Government and its party a continual
ferment, and the seeds of internal discord which prevented them from
acquiring the necessary strength and consistency. The mischief burst
forth towards the end of 1818, when the Duke de Richelieu returned from
the conferences of Aix-la-Chapelle, reporting the withdrawal of the
foreign armies, the complete evacuation of our territory, and the
definitive settlement of the financial burdens which the Hundred Days
had imposed on France. On his arrival he saw his Cabinet on the point of
dissolution, and vainly attempted to form a new one, but was finally
compelled to abandon the power he had never sought or enjoyed, but
which, assuredly, he was unwilling to lose by compulsion in the midst of
his diplomatic triumph, and to see it pass into hands determined to
employ it in a manner totally opposed to his own intentions.
A check like this, at such a moment, and to such a man, was singularly
unjust and unseasonable. Since 1815, the Duke de Richelieu had rendered
valuable services to France and to the King. He alone had obtained some
mitigation to the conditions of a very harsh treaty of peace, which
nothing but sincere and sad devotion had induced him to sign, while
feeling the full weight of what he sacrificed in attaching to it his
illustrious name, and seeking no self-glorification from an act of
honest patriotism. No man was ever more free from exaggeration or
quackery in the display of his sentiments. Fifteen months after the
ratification of peace, he induced the foreign powers to consent to a
considerable reduction in the army of occupation. A year later, he
limited to a fixed sum the unbounded demands of the foreign creditors of
France. Finally, he had just signed the entire emancipation of the
national soil four years before the term rigorously prescribed by
treaties. The King, on his return, thanked him in noble words: "Duke de
Richelieu," he said, "I have lived long enough, since, thanks to you, I
have seen the French flag flying over every town in France." The
sovereigns of Europe treated him with esteem and confidence. A rare
example of a statesman, who, without great actions or superior
abilities, had, by the uprightness of his character and the unselfish
tenor of his life, achieved such universal and undisputed respect!
Although the Duke de Richelieu had only been engaged in foreign affairs,
he was better calculated than has been said, not so much to direct
effectively as to preside over the internal government of the
Restoration. A nobleman of exalted rank, and a tried Royalist, he was
neither in mind or feeling a courtier nor an Emigrant; he had no
preconceived dislike to the new state of society or the new men; without
thoroughly understanding free institutions, he had no prejudice against
them, and submitted to their exercise without an effort. Simple in his
manners, true and steady in his words, and a friend to the public good,
if he failed to exercise a commanding influence in the Chambers, he
maintained full authority near the King; and a constitutional
Government, resting on the parliamentary centre, could not, at that
period, have possessed a more worthy or more valuable president.
But at the close of 1818 the Duke de Richelieu felt himself compelled,
and evinced that he was resolved, to engage in a struggle in which the
considerations of gratitude and prosperity I have here reverted to
proved to be ineffective weapons on his side. In virtue of the Charter,
and in conformity with the electoral law of the 5th of February, 1817,
two-fifths of the Chamber of Deputies had been renewed since the
formation of his Cabinet. The first trial of votes, in 1817, had proved
satisfactory to the Restoration and its friends; not more than two or
three recognized names were added to the left-hand party, which, even
after this reinforcement, only amounted to twenty members. At the second
trial in 1818, the party acquired more numerous and much more
distinguished recruits; about twenty-five new members, and amongst them
MM. de La Fayette, Benjamin Constant, and Manuel, were enrolled in its
ranks. The number was still weak, but important as a rallying point, and
prognostic. An alarm, at once sincere and interested, exhibited itself
at court and in the right-hand party; they found themselves on the eve
of a new revolution, but their hopes were also excited: since the
enemies of the House of Bourbon were forcing themselves into the
Chamber, the King would at length feel the necessity of replacing power
in the hands of his friends. The party had not waited the issue of these
last elections to attempt a great enterprise. Secret notes, drawn up
under the eye of the Count d'Artois, and by his most intimate
confidants, had been addressed to the foreign sovereigns, to point out
to them this growing mischief, and to convince them that a change in the
advisers of the crown was the only safe measure to secure monarchy in
France, and to preserve peace in Europe. The Duke de Richelieu, in
common with his colleagues, and with a feeling of patriotism far
superior to personal interest, felt indignant at these appeals to
foreign intervention for the internal government of the country. M. de
Vitrolles was struck off from the Privy Council, as author of the
principal of the three Secret notes. The European potentates paid
little attention to such announcements, having no faith either in the
sound judgment or disinterested views of the men from whom they
emanated. Nevertheless, after the elections of 1818, they also began to
feel uneasy. It was from prudence, and not choice, that they had
sanctioned and maintained the constitutional system in France; they
looked upon it as necessary to close up the Revolution. If, on the
contrary, it once again opened its doors, the peace of Europe would be
more compromised than ever; for then the Revolution would assume the
semblance of legality. But neither in France nor in Europe did any one
at that time, even amongst the greatest alarmists and the most
intimidated, dream of interfering with the constitutional system; in
universal opinion it had acquired with us the privileges of citizenship.
The entire evil was imputed to the law of elections. It was at
Aix-la-Chapelle, while surrounded by the sovereigns and their ministers,
that the Duke de Richelieu was first apprised of the newly-elected
members whom this law had brought upon the scene. The Emperor Alexander
expressed to him his amazement; the Duke of Wellington advised Louis
XVIII. "to unite himself more closely with the Royalists." The Duke de
Richelieu returned to France with a determination to reform the
electoral law, or no longer to incur the responsibility of its results.
Institutions attacked have no voice in their own defence, and men
gladly charge on them their individual errors. I shall not commit this
injustice, or abandon a sound idea because it has been compromised or
perverted in application. The principle of the electoral law of the 5th
of February, 1817, was good in itself, and still remains good, although
it was insufficient to prevent the evil of our own want of foresight and
intemperate passions.
When a free government is seriously desired, we must choose between the
principle of the law of the 5th of February, 1817, and universal
suffrage,—between the right of voting confined to the higher classes of
society and that extended to the popular masses. I believe the direct
and defined right of suffrage to be alone effectual in securing the
action of the country upon the Government. On this common condition, the
two systems may constitute a real control over power, and substantial
guarantees for liberty. Which is to be preferred?—this is a question of
epoch, of situation, of degree of civilization, and of form of
government. Universal suffrage is well suited to republican
associations, small or federative, newly instituted or mature in wisdom
and political virtue. The right of voting confined to a more elevated
class, and exercised in a strong assumption of the spirit of order, of
independence, and intelligence, is more applicable to great single and
monarchical states. This was our reason for making it the basis of the
law of 1817. We dreaded republican tendencies, which with us, and in our
days, are nearly synonymous with anarchy; we regarded monarchy as
natural, and constitutional monarchy as necessary, to France; we wished
to organize it sincerely and durably, by securing under this system, to
the conservative elements of French society as at present constituted,
an influence which appeared to us as much in conformity with the
interests of liberty as with those of power.
It was the disunion of the monarchical party that vitiated the electoral
system of 1817, and took away its strength with its truth. By placing
political power in the hands of property, intelligence, independent
position, and great interests naturally conservative, the system rested
on the expectation that these interests would be habitually united, and
would defend, in common accord, order and right against the spirit of
license and revolution, the fatal bias of the age. But, from their very
first steps, the different elements of the great royalist party, old or
new, aristocratic or plebeian, plunged into discord, equally blind to
the weakness with which it infected them all, and thus opening the door
to the hopes and efforts of their common enemies, the revolutionists.
From thence, and not from the electoral law of 1817, or from its
principle, came the mischief which in 1818 it was considered desirable
to check by repealing that enactment.
I am ready to admit in express terms, for it may be alleged with
justice, that, when in 1816 and 1817 we prepared and defended the law of
elections, we might have foreseen the state of general feeling under
which it was to be applied. Discord between the components of the
monarchical party was neither a strange nor a sudden fact; it existed at
that time; the Royalists of old and new France were already widely
separated. I incline to think that, even had we attached more
importance to their future contests, we should still have pursued the
same course. We were in presence of an imperative necessity: new France
felt that she was attacked, and required defence; if she had not found
supporters amongst the Royalists, she would have sought for them, as she
has too often done, in the camp of the Revolution. But what may explain
or even excuse a fault cannot effect its suppression. Our policy in 1816
and 1817 regarded too lightly the disagreements of the monarchical
party, and the possible return of the Revolutionists; we miscalculated
the extent of both dangers. It is the besetting error of men
entrammelled in the fetters of party, to forget that there are many
opposite facts which skilful policy should turn to profitable account,
and to pass over all that are not inscribed with brilliancy on their
standard.
On leaving Aix-la-Chapelle, where he had been so fortunate, the Duke de
Richelieu, although far from presumptuous, expected, I have no doubt, to
be equally successful in his design of repealing the law of elections.
Success deceives the most unassuming, and prevents them from foreseeing
an approaching reverse. On his arrival, he found the undertaking much
more difficult than he had anticipated. In the Cabinet, M. Molé alone
fully seconded his intentions. M. Decazes and Marshal Gouvion St. Cyr
declared strongly for the law as it stood. M. Lainé, while fully
admitting that it ought to be modified, refused to take any part in the
matter, having been, as he said, the first to propose and maintain it.
M. Roy, who had lately superseded M. Corvetto in the department of
finance, cared little for the electoral question, but announced that he
would not remain in the Cabinet without M. Decazes, whom he considered
indispensable, either in the Chambers or near the King's person. Discord
raged within and without the Ministry. In the Chambers, the centre was
divided; the left defended the law vehemently; the right declared itself
ready to support any minister who proposed its reform, but at the same
time repudiated M. Decazes, the author of the decree of the 5th of
September, 1816, and of all its consequences. The public began to warm
into the question. Excitement and confusion went on increasing. It was
evidently not the electoral law alone, but the general policy of the
Restoration and the Government of France, that formed the subject of
debate.
In a little work which the historians of this period, M. de Lamartine
amongst others, have published, the King, Louis XVIII. himself has
related the incidents and sudden turns of this ministerial crisis, which
ended, as is well known, in the retirement of the Duke de Richelieu,
with four of his colleagues, and in the promotion of M. Decazes, who
immediately constructed a new Cabinet, of which he was the head, without
appearing to preside, while M. de Serre, appointed to the seals, became
the powerful organ in the Chambers, and the maintenance of the law of
elections was adopted as the symbol. Two sentiments, under simple forms,
pervade this kingly recital: first, a certain anxiety, on the part of
the author, that no blame should be attached to him in his royal
character, or in his conduct towards the Duke de Richelieu, and a desire
to exculpate himself from these charges; secondly, a little of that
secret pleasure which kings indulge in, even under heavy embarrassments,
when they see a minister fall whose importance was not derived from
themselves, and who has served them without expecting or receiving
favours.
"If I had only consulted my own opinion," says the King, in concluding
his statement, "I should have wished M. Decazes, uniting his lot, as he
had always intended, with that of the Duke de Richelieu, to have left
the Ministry with him." It would have been happy for M. Decazes if this
desire of the King had prevailed. Not that he erred in any point of duty
or propriety by surviving the Duke de Richelieu in office, and in
forming a Cabinet without him; an important misunderstanding on a
pressing question had already separated them. M. Decazes, after
tendering his resignation, had raised no obstacle to the Duke's efforts
at finding new colleagues; it was only on the failure of those attempts,
frankly avowed by the Duke himself, and at the formal request of the
King, that he had undertaken to form a ministry. As a friend of M. de
Richelieu, and the day before his colleague, there were certainly
unpleasant circumstances and appearances attached to this position; but
M. Decazes was free to act, and could scarcely refuse to carry out the
policy he had recommended in council, when that which he had opposed
acknowledged itself incapable. Yet the new Cabinet was not strong enough
for the enterprise it undertook; with the centre completely shaken and
divided, it had to contend against the right-hand party more irritated
than ever, and the left evidently inimical, although through decency it
lent to Government a precarious support. The Cabinet of M. Decazes, as
a ministerial party, retained much inferior forces to those which had
surrounded the Duke de Richelieu, and had to contest with two bitter
enemies, the one inaccessible to peace or truce, the other sometimes
appearing friendly, but suddenly turning round and attacking the
Ministry with eager malevolence, when an opportunity offered, and with
hesitating hostility when compelled to dissemble.
The doctrinarians, who, in co-operation with M. Decazes, had defended
the law of elections, energetically supported the new Cabinet, in which
they were brilliantly represented by M. de Serre. Success was not
wanting at the commencement. By a mild and active administration, by
studied care of its partisans, by frequent and always favourably
received appeals to the royal clemency in behalf of the exiles still
excepted from amnesty, even including the old regicides, M. Decazes
sought and won extensive popularity; Marshal Gouvion St. Cyr satisfied
the remnants of the old army, by restoring to the new the ablest of its
former leaders; M. de Serre triumphantly defended the Ministry in the
Chambers; his bills, boldly liberal, and his frank opposition to
revolutionary principles, soon acquired for him, even with his
adversaries, a just reputation for eloquence and sincerity. In the
parliamentary arena it was an effective and upright Ministry; with the
country it was felt to be a Government loyally constitutional. But it
had more brilliancy than strength; and neither its care of individual
interests, nor its successes in the tribune, were sufficient to rally
round it the great Government party which its formation had divided.
Discord arose between the Chambers themselves. The Chamber of Peers, by
adopting the proposition of the Marquis Barthélemy, renewed the struggle
against the electoral law. In vain did the Chamber of Deputies repel
this attack; in vain did the Cabinet, by creating sixty new Peers, break
down the majority in the palace of the Luxembourg; these half triumphs
and legal extremes decided nothing. Liberal governments are condemned to
see the great questions perpetually revived which revolutions bequeath
to society, and which even glorious despotism suspends without solving.
The right-hand party was passionately bent on repossessing the power
which had recently escaped them. The left defended, at any cost, the
Revolution, more insulted than in danger. The centre, dislocated and
doubtful of the future, wavered between the hostile parties, not feeling
itself in a condition to impose peace on all, and on the point of being
confounded in the ranks of one side or the other. The Cabinet, ever
victorious in daily debate, and supported by the King's favour, felt
itself nevertheless feebly surrounded and precariously placed, with the
air of expecting a favourable or a hostile incident, to bring the
security it wanted, or to overthrow it altogether.
The events which men call accidents are never wanting in such
situations. During the space of a few months the Cabinet of 1819
experienced two,—the election of M. Grégoire, and the assassination of
the Duke de Berry; and these two decided its fate.
It is difficult to look upon the election of M. Grégoire as an accident;
it was proposed and settled beforehand in the central committee
established at Paris to superintend elections in general, and which was
called the managing committee. This particular election was decided on
at Grenoble in the college assembled on the 11th of September, 1819, by
a certain number of votes of the right-hand party, which at the second
round of balloting were carried to the credit of the left-hand
candidate, and gave him a majority which otherwise he could not have
obtained. To excuse this scandal, when it became known, some apologists
pretended that M. Grégoire was not in fact a regicide, because, even
though he had approved of the condemnation of Louis XVI. in his letters
to the Convention, his vote at least had not been included in the fatal
list. Again, when the admission of the deputy was disputed in the
Chamber, the left-hand party, to get rid of him, while eluding the true
cause of refusal, eagerly proposed to annul the election on the ground
of irregularity. When improvident violence fails, men gladly shelter
themselves under pusillanimous subtlety. It was unquestionably in the
character of a Conventional regicide, and with premeditated reflection,
not by any local or sudden accident, that M. Grégoire had been elected.
No act was ever more deliberately arranged and accomplished by party
feelings. Sincere in the perverse extravagancies of his mind, and
faithful to his avowed principles, although forgetful and weak in their
application, openly a Christian, and preaching tolerance under the
Convention, while he sanctioned the most unrelenting persecution of the
priests who refused to submit to the yoke of its new church; a
republican and oppositionist under the Empire, while consenting to be a
senator and a Count, this old man, as inconsistent as obstinate, was
the instrument of a signal act of hostility against the Restoration, to
become immediately the pretext for a corresponding act of weakness. A
melancholy end to a sad career!
The assassination of the Duke de Berry might with much more propriety be
called an accident. On the trial it was proved by evidence that Louvel
had no accomplices, and that he was alone in the conception as in the
execution of his crime. But it was also evident that hatred against the
Bourbons had possessed the soul and armed the hand of the murderer.
Revolutionary passions are a fire which is kindled and nourished afar
off; the orators of the right obtained credit with many timid and
horror-stricken minds, when they called this an accident;—as it is also
an accident if a diseased constitution catches the plague when it
infects the air, or if a powder-magazine explodes when you strike fire
in its immediate neighbourhood.
M. Decazes endeavoured to defend himself against these two heavy blows.
After the election of M. Grégoire, he undertook to accomplish alone what
at the close of the preceding year he had refused to attempt in concert
with the Duke de Richelieu. He determined to alter the law of elections.
It was intended that this change should take place in a great
constitutional reform meditated by M. de Serre, liberal on certain
points, monarchical on others, and which promised to give more firmness
to royalty by developing representative government. M. Decazes made a
sincere effort to induce the Duke de Richelieu, who was then travelling
in Holland, to return and reassume the presidency of the Council, and to
co-operate with him in the Chambers for the furtherance of this bold
undertaking. The King himself applied to the Duke de Richelieu, who
positively declined, more from disgust with public affairs and through
diffidence of his own power, than from any remains of ill-humour or
resentment. Three actual members of the Cabinet of 1819, General
Dessoles, Marshal Gouvion St. Cyr, and Baron Louis, declared that they
would not co-operate in any attack on the existing law of elections.
M. Decazes determined to do without them, as he had dispensed with the Duke
de Richelieu, and to form a new Cabinet, of which he became the
president, and in which M. Pasquier, General Latour-Maubourg, and M. Roy
replaced the three retiring ministers. On the 29th of November the King
opened the session. Two months passed over, and the new electoral system
had not yet been presented to the Chamber. Three days after the
assassination of the Duke de Berry, M. Decazes introduced it suddenly,
with two bills to suspend personal liberty, and re-establish the
censorship of the daily press. Four days later he fell, and the Duke de
Richelieu, standing alone before the King and the danger, consented to
resume power. M. Decazes would have acted more wisely had he submitted
to his first defeat, and induced the King after the election of
M. Grégoire, to take back the Duke de Richelieu as minister. He would not
then have been compelled to lower with his own hand the flag he had
raised, and to endure the burden of a great miscarriage.
The fall of the Cabinet of 1819, brought on a new crisis, and a fresh
progress of the evil which disorganized the great Government party
formed during the session of 1815, and by the decree of the 5th of
September, 1816. To the successive divisions of the centre, were now
added the differences between the doctrinarians themselves. M. de Serre,
who had joined the Cabinet with M. Decazes to defend the law of
elections, now determined, although sick and absent, to remain there
with the Duke de Richelieu to overthrow it, without any of the
compensations, real or apparent, which his grand schemes of
constitutional reform were intended to supply. I tried in vain to
dissuade him from his resolution.[15] In the Chamber of Deputies,
M. Royer-Collard and M. Camille Jordan vehemently attacked the new
electoral plan; the Duke de Broglie and M. de Barante proposed serious
amendments to it in the Chamber of Peers. All the political ties which
had been cemented during five years appeared to be dissolved; every one
followed his own private opinion, or returned to his old bias. In the
parliamentary field, all was uncertainty and confused opposition; a
phantom appeared at each extremity, revolution and counter-revolution,
exchanging mutual menaces, and equally impatient to come to issue.
Those who wish to give themselves a correct idea of parliamentary and
popular excitement, pushed to their extreme limit, and yet retained
within that boundary by legal authority and the good sense of the
public,—sufficient to arrest the country on the brink of an abyss,
although too weak to block up the road that leads to it,—should read
the debate on the new electoral bill introduced into the Chamber of
Deputies on the 17th of April, 1820, by the second Cabinet of the Duke
de Richelieu, and discussed for twenty-six days in that Chamber,
accompanied with riotous gatherings without, thoughtlessly aggressive
and sternly repressed. If we are to believe the orators of the left,
France and her liberties, the Revolution and its conquests, the honour
of the present, and the security of the future, were all lost if the
ministerial bill should pass. The right, on the other hand, looked upon
the bill as scarcely strong enough to save the monarchy for the moment,
and declared its resolution to reject every amendment which might
diminish its powers. On both sides, pretensions and claims were equally
ungovernable. Attracted and excited by this legal quarrel, the students,
the enthusiastic young Liberals, the old professional disturbers, the
idlers and oppositionists of every class, were engaged daily with the
soldiers and the agents of police, in conflicts sometimes sanguinary,
and the accounts of which redoubled the acrimony of the debate
withindoors. In the midst of this general commotion, the Cabinet of 1820
had the merit of maintaining, while repressing all popular movement, the
freedom of legislative deliberation, and of acting its part in these
stormy discussions with perseverance and moderation. M. Pasquier, their
Minister for Foreign Affairs, endowed with rare self-command and
presence of mind, was on this occasion the principal parliamentary
champion of the Cabinet; and M. Mounier, Director-General of the
Police, controlled the street riots with as much prudence as active
firmness. The charge so often brought against so many ministers, against
M. Casimir Perrier in 1831, as against the Duke de Richelieu in 1820, of
exciting popular commotions only to repress them, does not deserve the
notice of sensible men. At the end of a month, all these debates and
scenes, within and without, ended in the adoption, not of the
ministerial bill, but of an amendment which, without destroying in
principle the bill of the 5th of February, 1817, so materially vitiated
it, to the advantage of the right, that the party felt themselves bound
to be satisfied. The greater portion of the centre, and the more
moderate members of the left, submitted for the sake of public peace.
The extreme left and the extreme right, M. Manuel and M. de la
Bourdonnaye entered a protest. The new electoral system was clearly
destined to shift the majority, and, with the majority, power, from the
left to the right; but the liberties of France, and the advantages
gained by the Revolution, were not endangered by the change.
This question once settled, the Cabinet had to pay its debts to the
right-hand party,—rewards to those who had supported it, and
punishments to its opposers. In spite of old friendships, the
doctrinarians figured of necessity in the last category. If I had
desired it, I might have escaped. Not being a member of either Chamber,
and beyond the circle of constrained action, I could in my capacity of
State Councillor have maintained reserve and silence after giving my
advice to the Government; but on entering public life, I had resolved on
one uniform course,—to express my true thoughts on every occasion, and
never to separate myself from my friends. M. de Serre included me, with
good reason, in the measure which removed them from the Council; on the
17th of June, 1820, he wrote to MM. Royer-Collard, Camille Jordan,
Barante, and myself, to inform us that we were no longer on the list.
The best men readily assume the habits and style of absolute power.
M. de Serre was certainly not deficient in self-respect or confidence in
his own opinions; he felt surprised that in this instance I should have
obeyed mine, without any other more coercive necessity, and evinced this
feeling by communicating my removal with unqualified harshness. "The
evident hostility," he said to me, "which, without the shadow of a
pretext, you have lately exhibited towards the King's Government, has
rendered this step inevitable." My answer was simply this:—"I expected
your letter. I might have foreseen, and I did anticipate it, when I
openly evinced my disapprobation of the acts and speeches of the
Ministry. I congratulate myself that I have nothing to alter in my
conduct. Tomorrow, as yesterday, I shall belong only and entirely to
myself."[16]
The decisive step was taken; power had changed its course with its
friends. After having turned it to this new direction, the Duke de
Richelieu and his colleagues made sincere efforts during two years to
arrest its further progress. They tried all methods of conciliation or
resistance; sometimes they courted the right, at others the remains of
the centre, and occasionally even the left, by concessions of principle,
and more frequently of a personal nature. M. de Châteaubriand was sent
as Ambassador to Berlin, and General Clauzel was declared entitled to
the amnesty. M. de Villèle and M. Corbière obtained seats in the
Cabinet, the first as minister without a portfolio, and the other as
president of the Royal Council of Public Instruction; they left it,
however, at the expiration of six months, under frivolous pretexts, but
foreseeing the approaching fall of the Ministry, and not wishing to be
there at the last moment. They were not deceived. The elections of 1821
completed the decimation of the weak battalion which still endeavoured
to stand firm round tottering power. The Duke de Richelieu, who had only
resumed office on a personal promise from the Count d'Artois of
permanent support, complained loudly, with the independent spirit of a
nobleman of high rank and of a man of honour, that the word of a
gentleman, pledged to him, had not been kept. Vain complaints, and
futile efforts! The Cabinet obtained time with difficulty; but the
right-hand party alone gained ground. At length, on the 19th of
December, 1821, the last shadow of the Government of the Centre vanished
with the ministry of the Duke de Richelieu. The right and M. de Villèle
seized the reins of power. "The counter-revolution is approaching!"
exclaimed the left, in a mingled burst of satisfaction and alarm. M. de
Villèle thought differently; a little before the decisive crisis, and
after having, in his quality of vice-president, directed for some days
the deliberations of the Chamber of Deputies, he wrote as follows to
one of his friends:—"You will scarcely believe how my four days of
presidency have succeeded. I received compliments on every side, but
particularly, I own it to my shame, from the left, whom I have never
conciliated. They expected, without doubt, to be eaten up alive by an
ultra. They are inexhaustible in eulogium. Finally, those to whom I
never speak, now address me with a thousand compliments. I think in this
there is a little spite against M. Ravez. But, be that as it may, if a
president were just now to be elected, I should have almost every vote
in the Chamber.... For myself, impartiality costs me nothing. I look
only to the success of the affairs I have undertaken, and have not the
slightest prejudice against individuals. I am born for the end of
revolutions."