rise to a level with the situation either in 1814 or in 1815. In 1814,
it is true, they were almost stunned by the crash of the Empire, and
little as they foresaw the restoration of the Bourbons, still less could
they have anticipated the extraordinary follies which were to be
perpetrated. In 1815 there was less excuse for their helplessness, and,
overawed as they were by the mass of foes which was pouring on them to
complete the disaster of Waterloo, still it is disappointing to find that
there was no one to seize the helm of power, and, confronting the Allies,
to stipulate proper terms for France, and for the brave men who had
fought for her. The Steady Davoust was there with his 100,000 men to add
weight to their language, and the total helplessness of the older line of
the Bourbons had been too evidently displayed to make their return a
certainty, so that there is no reason to doubt that a firm-hearted
patriot might have saved France from much of the degradation and loss
inflicted on her when once the Allies had again got her at their mercy.
At-the least the Bourbons might have been deprived of the revenge they
sought for in taking some of the best blood of France. Better for Ney
and his comrades to have fallen in a last struggle before Paris than to
be shot by Frenchmen emboldened by the presence of foreign troops.
Talleyrand, the most prominent figure among the statesmen, was away. His
absence at Vienna during the first Restoration was undoubtedly the cause
of many of the errors then committed. His ability as displayed under
Napoleon has been much exaggerated, for, as the Duke of Wellington said,
it was easy enough to be Foreign Minister to a Government in military
possession of Europe, but at least he was above the petty trivialities
and absurdities of the Bourbon' Court. On the receipt of the news of the
landing of Napoleon he really seems to have believed that the enterprise
would immediately end in disaster, and he pressed on the outlawing of the
man who had overwhelmed him with riches, and who had, at the worst, left
him when in disgrace in quiet possession of all his ill-gotten wealth.
But, as the power of Napoleon became more and more displayed, as perhaps
Talleyrand found that the Austrians were not quite so firm as they wished
to be considered, and as he foresaw the possible chances of the Orleans
family, he became rather lukewarm in his attention to the King, to whom
he had recently been bewailing the hardships of his separation from his
loved monarch. He suddenly found that, after a Congress, the first duty
of a diplomatist was to look after his liver, and Carlsbad offered an
agreeable retreat where he could wait till he might congratulate the
winner in the struggle.
Louis deeply resented this conduct of his Foreign Minister, and when
Talleyrand at last joined him with all his doubts resolved, the King took
the first opportunity of dismissing him, leaving the calm Talleyrand for
once stuttering with rage. Louis soon, however, found that he was not
the free agent he believed. The Allies did not want to have to again
replace their puppet on the throne, and they looked on Talleyrand and
Fouche as the two necessary men. Talleyrand was reinstated immediately,
and remained for some time at the head of the Ministry. He was, however,
not the man for Parliamentary Government, being too careless in business,
and trying to gain his ends more by clever tricks than straightforward
measures. As for the state into which he let the Government fall, it was
happily characterised by M. Beugnot. "Until now," said he, "we have
only known three sorts of governments--the Monarchical, the Aristocratic,
and the Republican. Now we have invented a new one, which has never been
heard of before,--Paternal Anarchy."
In September 1815 the elections to the Chamber were bringing in deputies
more Royalist than the King, and Talleyrand sought to gain popularity by
throwing over Fouche. To his horror it appeared that, well contented
with this step, the deputies next asked when the former Bishop was to be
dismissed. Taking advantage of what Talleyrand conceived to be a happy
way of eliciting a strong expression of royal support by threatening to
resign, the King replaced him by the Duc de Richelieu. It was well to
cut jokes at the Duke and say that he was the man in France who knew most
of the Crimea (the Duke had been long in the Russian service, with the
approval of Napoleon), but Talleyrand was overwhelmed. He received the
same office at Court which he had held under Napoleon, Grand Chamberlain,
and afterwards remained a sardonic spectator of events, a not unimposing
figure attending at the Court ceremonials and at the heavy dinners of the
King, and probably lending a helping hand in 1830 to oust Charles X.
from the throne. The Monarchy of July sent him as Ambassador to England,
where he mixed in local politics, for example, plotting against Lord
Palmerston, whose brusque manners he disliked; and in 1838 he ended his
strange life with some dignity, having, as one of his eulogists puts it,
been faithful to every Government he had served as long as it was
possible to save them.
With the darker side of Talleyrand's character we have nothing to do
here; it is sufficient for our purposes to say that the part the leading
statesman of France took during the Cent Tours was simply nil. In 1814,
he had let the reins slip through his hands; 1815 he could only follow
the King, who even refused to adopt his advice as to the proper way in
which to return to France, and though he once more became Chief Minister,
Talleyrand, like Louis XVIII., owed his restoration in 1815 solely to the
Allies.
The Comte d'Artois, the brother of the King, and later King himself as
Charles X., was sent to Lyons, to which place the Duc d'Orleans followed
him, and where the two Princes met Marshal Macdonald. The Marshal did
all that man could do to keep the soldiers true to the Bourbons, but he
had to advise the Princes to return to Paris, and he himself had to fly
for his life when he attempted to stop Napoleon in person. The Duc
d'Orleans was then sent to the north to hold Lille, where the King
intended to take refuge, and the Comte d'Artois remained with the Court.
The Court was very badly off for money, the King, and Clarke, Duke of
Feltre, the War Minister, were the only happy possessors of carriages.
They passed their time, as the Abbe Louis once bitterly remarked, in
saying foolish things till they had a chance of doing them.
The Comte d'Artois, who, probably wisely, certainly cautiously, had
refused to go with De Vitrolles to stir up the south until he had placed
the King in safety, had ended by going to Ghent too, while the Duc de
Berry was at Alost, close by, with a tiny army composed of the remains of
the Maison du Roi, of which the most was made in reports. The Duc
d'Orleans, always an object of suspicion to the King, had left France
with the Royal party, but had refused to stay in Belgium, as he alleged
that it was an enemy's country. He crossed to England where he remained,
greatly adding to the anxiety of Louis by refusing to join him.
The end of these Princes is well known. Louis died in 1824, leaving his
throne to his brother; but Charles only held it till 1830, when after the
rising called "the three glorious days of July," he was civilly escorted
from France, and took shelter in England. The Due Angouleme died without
issue. The Duc de Berry was assassinated in 1820, but his widow gave
birth to a posthumous son the Duc de Bordeaux, or, to fervid Royalists,
Henri V., though better known to us as the Comte de Chambord, who died in
1883 without issue, thus ending the then eldest line of Bourbons, and
transmitting his claims to the Orleans family. On the fall of Charles X.
the Duc d'Orleans became King of the French, but he was unseated by the
Revolution of 1848, and died a refugee in England. As the three Princes
of the House of Conde, the Prince de Conde, his son, the Duc de Bourbon,
and his: grandson, the Due d'Enghien, all died without further male
issue, that noble line is extinct.
When the news of the escape of Napoleon from Elba reached Vienna on the
7th of March 1815, the three heads of the Allies, the Emperors of Austria
and Russia, and the King of Prussia, were still there. Though it was
said that the Congress danced but did not advance, still a great deal of
work had really been done, and the news of Napoleon's landing created a
fresh bond of union between the Allies which stopped all further chances
of disunion, and enabled them to practically complete their work by the
9th of June 1815, though the treaties required cobbling for some years
afterwards.
France, Austria, and England had snatched the greater part of Saxony from
the jaws of Prussia, and Alexander had been forced to leave the King of
Saxony to reign over half of his former subjects, without, as he wished,
sparing him the pain of such a degradation by taking all from him.
Russia had to be contented with a large increase of her Polish dominions,
getting most of the Grand-Duchy of Westphalia. Austria had, probably
unwisely, withdrawn from her former outlying provinces in Swabia and the
Netherlands, which had before the Revolution made her necessarily the
guardian of Europe against France, preferring to take her gains in Italy,
gains which she has gradually lost in our days; while Prussia, by
accepting the Rhine provinces, completely stepped into the former post of
Austria. Indeed, from the way in which Prussia was, after 1815, as it
were, scattered across Germany, it was evident that her fate must be.
either to be crushed by France, or else, by annexing the states enclosed
in her dominions, to become the predominating power in Germany. It was
impossible for her to remain as she was left.
The Allies tightly bound France. They had no desire to have again to
march on Paris to restore Louis to the subjects who had such unfortunate
objections to being subjected to that desirable monarch. By the second
Treaty of Paris, on the 20th of November 1815, France was to be occupied
by an Allied force, in military positions on the frontier, not to exceed
150,000 men, to be taken from all the Allied armies, under a commander
who was eventually the Duke of Wellington. Originally the occupation.
was not to exceed five years, but in February 1817 the army was reduced
by 30,000 men, one-fifth of each contingent; and by the Treaty of Aix-la-
Chapelle of 9th October 1818, France was to-be evacuated by the 30th of
November 1818.
The three monarchs were probably not sorry to get the Congress over on
any terms. Alexander had had his fill of displaying himself in the
salons in his favourite part of an Agamemnon generous towards Troy, and
he had worn out his first popularity. He was stung by finding some of
his favourite plans boldly opposed by Talleyrand and by Metternich, and,
indeed, was anxious to meet the last in open combat. Francis had
required all the firmness of what he called his Bohemian head to resist
the threats, entreaties, and cajoleries employed to get him to acquiesce
in the dethronement of the King of Saxony, and the wiping out of the
Saxon nationality by the very alliance which professed to fight only for
the rights of nations and of their lawful sovereigns.
All three monarchs had again the satisfaction of entering Paris, but
without enjoying the full glories of 1814. "Our friends, the enemies"
were not so popular then in France, and the spoliation of the Louvre was
not pleasant even to the Royalists. The foreign monarchs soon returned
to their own drained and impoverished States.
The Emperor Francis had afterwards a quiet reign to his death in 1835,
having only to assist his Minister in snuffing out the occasional flashes
of a love of freedom in Germany.
The King of Prussia returned in a triumph well won by his sturdy
subjects, and, in the light of his new honours, the Countess Von Voss
tells us he was really handsome. He was now at leisure to resume the
discussions on uniform, and the work of fastening and unfastening the
numerous buttons of his pantaloons, in which he had been so roughly
interrupted by Jena. The first institution of the Zollverein, or
commercial union with several States, gradually extended, was a measure
which did much for the unification of Germany. With his brother
sovereigns he revisited Paris at the end of the military occupation in
1818, remaining there longer than the others, "because," said the
Parisians, "he had discovered an actor at a small theatre who achieved
the feat of making him laugh." He died in 1840. His Queen--heartbroken,
it was said--had died in 1810.
Alexander was still brimming over with the best and most benevolent
intentions towards every one. The world was to be free, happy, and
religious; but he had rather vague ideas as to how his plans were to be
carried out. Thus it is characteristic that when his successor desired
to have a solemn coronation as King of Poland it was found that Alexander
had not foreseen the difficulties which were met with in trying to
arrange for the coronation of a Sovereign of the Greek Church as King of
a Roman Catholic State. The much-dreaded but very misty Holy Alliance
was one of the few fruits of Alexander's visions. His mind is described
as passing through a regular series of stages with each influence under
which he acted. He ended his life, tired out, disillusioned, "deceived
in everything, weighed down with regret;" obliged to crush the very hopes
of his people he had encouraged, dying in 1825 at Taganrog, leaving his
new Polish Kingdom to be wiped out by-his successors.
The minor sovereigns require little mention. They retained any titles
they had received from Napoleon, while they exulted, at being free from
his heavy hand and sharp superintendence. Each got a share, small or
great, of the spoil except the poor King of Denmark, who, being assured
by Alexander on his departure that he carried away all hearts, answered,
"Yes, but not any souls."
The reintroduction of much that was bad in the old system (one country
even going so far as to re-establish torture), the steady attack on
liberty and on all liberal ideas, Wurtemberg being practically the only
State which grumbled at the tightening of the reins so dear to
Metternich,--all formed a fitting commentary on the proclamations by
which the Sovereigns had hounded on their people against the man they
represented as the one obstacle to the freedom and peace of Europe.
In gloom and disenchantment the nations sat down to lick their wounds:
The contempt shown by the monarchs for everything but the right of
conquest, the manner in which they treated the lands won from Napoleon as
a gigantic "pool" which was to be shared amongst them, so many souls to
each; their total failure to fulfil their promises to their subjects of
granting liberty,--all these slowly bore their fruits in after years, and
their effects are not even yet exhausted. The right of a sovereign to
hold his lands was now, by the public law of Europe, to be decided by his
strength, The rights of the people were treated as not existing. Truly,
as our most gifted poetess has sung--
"The Kings crept out--the peoples sat at home,
And finding the long invocated peace
(A pall embroidered with worn images
Of rights divine) too scant to cover doom
Such as they suffered, nursed the corn that grew
Rankly to bitter bread, on Waterloo."
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Kings feel they are born general: whatever else they cannot do
That consolation which is always left to the discontented