FOOTNOTES:

FOOTNOTES:[1]I have inserted, amongst the "Historic Documents" at the end of the Volume, three of the letters which M. de Châteaubriand addressed to me, at the time, on this subject. (Historic Documents,No. I.)[2]Amongst the "Historic Documents" at the end of this volume, I have included a letter, addressed to me from Brussels, by the Count de Lally-Tolendal, on the 'Annals of Education,' in which the character of the writer and of the time are exhibited with agreeable frankness. (Hist. Documents,No. II.)[3]Notwithstanding its imperfections, of which, no one is more sensible than I am, this address may be read, perhaps, with some little interest. It was my first historical lecture and first public discourse, and remains locked up in the Archives of the Faculty of Letters, from the day when it was delivered, now forty-five years ago. I have added it to the "Historic Documents" (No. III.).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There has been much discussion as to what plots and conspirators overthrew the Bourbons, and brought back Napoleon, on the 20th of March, 1815,—a question of inferior importance, and interesting only as an historical curiosity. It is certain that from 1814 to1815 there existed in the army and with the remnants of the Revolution, amongst generals and conventionalists, many plans and secret practices against the Restoration, and in favour of a new Government,—either the Empire, a regency, the Duke of Orleans, or a republic. Marshal Davoust promised his support to the Imperial party, and Fouché offered his to all. But if Napoleon had remained motionless at the island of Elba, these revolutionary projects would, in all probability, have successively failed, as did those of the Generals d'Erlon, Lallemand, and Lefèvre Desnouettes, even so late as the month of March. The fatuity of the contrivers of conspiracy is incalculable; and when the event seems to justify them, they attribute to themselves the result which has been achieved by mightier and much more complicated causes than their machinations. It was Napoleon alone who dethroned the Bourbons in 1815, by calling up, in his own person, the fanatical devotion of the army, and the revolutionary instincts of the popular masses.

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

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

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