The allied powers named Louis XVIII., the brother of Louis XVI., for
the vacant throne, who promised the people to reign under a
constitutional government.
The man who had deserted his brother in his extremity, a man who
represented nothing--not loyalty to the past, nor sympathy with a
single aspiration of the present--was king. As he passed under
triumphal arches on the way to the Tuileries, there was sitting beside
him a sad, pale-faced woman; this was the Duchesse d'Angoulême, the
daughter of Louis XVI., the little girl who was prisoner in the Temple
twenty years before. What must she have felt and thought as she passed
the very spot where had stood the scaffold in 1793!
Almost the first act of Louis XVIII. was the removal of the mutilated
remains of the king and queen and his sister Elizabeth to the royal
vault in the Church of St. Denis. He then gave orders for a _Chapelle
Expiatoire_ to be erected over the grave where they had been lying for
two decades, and for masses to be said for the repose of the souls of
his murdered relatives. Paris was full of returning royalists.
Banished exiles with grand old names, who had been earning a scanty
living by teaching French and dancing in Vienna, London, and even in
New York, were hastening to Paris for a joyful Restoration; and Louis
XVIII., while Russian and Austrian troops guarded him on the streets of
his own capital, was freely talking about ruling by divine right!
That king was reigning under a liberal charter (as the new constitution
was called)--a charter which guaranteed almost as much personal liberty
as the one obtained in England from King John in 1215; and the palpable
absurdity of supposing that he and his supporters might at the same
time revive and maintain Bourbon traditions, as if there had been no
Revolution, was at least not an indication of much sagacity.
But there was a very smooth surface. The tricolor had disappeared.
Napoleon's generals had gone unresistingly over to the Bourbons.
Talleyrand adapted himself as quickly to the new regime as he had to
the Napoleonic; was witty at the expense of the empire and the emperor,
who, as he said, "was not even a Frenchman"; and was as crafty and as
useful an instrument for the new ruler as he had been for the
pre-existing one.
But something was happening under the surface. While the
plenipotentiaries were busy over their task of restoring boundaries in
Europe, and the other restoration was going on pleasantly in Paris, a
rumor came that Napoleon was in Lyons. A regiment was at once
despatched to drive him back; and Marshal Ney, "the bravest of the
brave," was sent with orders to arrest him.
The next news that came to Paris was that the troops were frantically
shouting "_Vive l'empereur_!" and Ney was embracing his beloved
commander and pledging his sword in his service.
At midnight the king left the Tuileries for the Flemish frontier, and
before the dawn Napoleon was in his Palace of Fontainebleau (March
20th), which he had left exactly eleven months before. The night after
the departure of the king there suddenly appeared lights passing
swiftly over the Font de la Concorde; then came the tramp of horses'
feet, and a carriage attended on each side by cavalry with drawn
swords. The carriage stopped at the first entrance to the garden of
the Tuileries, and a small man with a dark, determined face was borne
into the palace the Bourbon had just deserted.
There was consternation in the Council Chamber in London when the Duke
of Wellington entered and announced that Napoleon was in Paris, and all
must be done over again!
Immediate preparations were made for a renewal of the war. It was easy
to find men to fight the emperor's battles. All France was at his feet.
The decisive moment was at hand. Napoleon had crossed into the
Netherlands, and Wellington was waiting to meet him.
The struggle at Waterloo had lasted many hours. The result, so big
with fate, was trembling in the balance, when suddenly the booming of
Prussian guns was heard, and Wellington was re-enforced by Blücher.
This was the end. The French were defeated (June 18, 1815). Napoleon
was in the hands of the English, and was to be carried a life-prisoner
to the island of St. Helena.
Louis XVIII., who had been waiting at Ghent, immediately returned to
the Tuileries, and to his foolish task of posing as a liberal king to
his people, and as a reactionary one to his royalist adherents. The
country was full of disappointed, imbittered imperialists, and of angry
and revengeful royalists. The Chamber of Peers immediately issued a
decree for the perpetual banishment of the family of Bonaparte from
French soil; the extremists demanding that the families of the men who
had consented to the death of Louis XVI. be included in the decree.
Sentence of death was passed upon Marshal Ney, as a traitor to France.
Some might have said that a greater traitor was at the Tuileries; but
the most picturesque in that heroic group of Napoleon's marshals was
shot to death.
There was, in fact, a determined purpose to undo all the work of the
Revolution; to restore the supremacy and the property of the Church,
and the power of the nobility. In the meantime, the people, perfectly
aware that the returned exiles were impoverished, were paying taxes to
maintain foreign troops which were in France for the sole purpose of
enabling the king's government to accomplish these things!
Here was material enough for discord in a troubled reign which lasted
nine years. Louis XVIII. died September 16, 1824; and the Count of
Artois, the brother of two kings, was proclaimed Charles X. of France.
If there had been any doubt about the real sentiments of Louis XVIII.,
it must have been dispelled by the last act of his reign, when, at the
bidding of the Holy Alliance, he sent French soldiers to put down the
Spanish liberals in their fight for a constitution.
But Charles X. did not intend to assume the thin mask worn by his
brother. He had marked out a different course. All disguise was to be
thrown aside in a Bourbon reign of the ante-revolutionary sort. The
press was strictly censored, the charter altered, the law of
primogeniture restored; and when saluted on the streets of Paris by
cries of "Give us back our charter!" the answer made to his people by
this infatuated man was, "I am here to receive homage, not counsel."
One wonders that a brother of Louis XVI., one who had been a fugitive
from a Paris mob in 1789--if he had a memory--dared to exasperate the
people of France.
On the 29th of July a revolt had become a Revolution, and once more the
Marquis de Lafayette was in charge of the municipal troops, which
assembled at St. Cloud and other defensive points.
[Illustration: The Revolution of July 28, 1830. From the painting by
Delacroix.]
In vain did Charles protest that he would revoke every offensive
ordinance, and restore the charter. It was too late.
Louis Philippe, Duke of Orleans, was appointed lieutenant-general of
the kingdom. When he appeared at the Hôtel de Ville wearing the
tricolor, his future was already assured.
There was only one thing left now for Charles to do: he formally
abdicated, and signed the paper authorizing the appointment of his
cousin to the position of lieutenant-general; and ten days later, Louis
Philippe, son of Philippe Égalité, occupied the throne he left.
The note struck by this new king was the absolute surrender of the
principle of divine right. He was a "citizen king"; his title being
bestowed not by a divine hand, but by the people, whose voice was the
voice of God! The title itself bore witness to a new order of things.
Louis Philippe was not King of France, but "King of the French." King
of France carried with it the old feudal idea of proprietorship and
sovereignty; while a King of the French was merely a leader of the
people, not the owner of their soil. The charter and all existing
conditions were modified to conform to this ideal, and on the 9th of
August the reign of the constitutional king began.
It was the middle class in France which supported this reign; the class
below that would never forget that he was, after all, a Bourbon and a
king; while the two classes above, both royalists and imperialists,
were unfriendly, one regarding him as a usurper on the throne of the
legitimate king, and the other as a weakling unfit to occupy the throne
of Napoleon.
When Charles X. tried to secure the banishment of the families of the
men who had voted for the death of Louis XVI., he may have had in mind
his cousin, the son of Philippe Égalité, the wickedest and most
despicable of the regicides. Whatever his father had been, Louis
Philippe was far from being a wicked man. Whether teaching school in
Switzerland, or giving French lessons in America, he was the
kindest-hearted and most inoffensive of gentlemen. The only trouble
with this reign was that it was not heroic. The most emotional and
romantic people in Europe had a common-place king. Only once was there
a throb of genuine enthusiasm during the eighteen years of his
occupancy of the throne, and that was when the remains of their adored
Napoleon were brought from St. Helena and placed in that magnificent
tomb in the Hôtel des Invalides by order of the king, who sent his son,
the Prince de Joinville, to bring this gift to the people. The act was
gracious, but it was also hazardous. Perhaps the king did not know how
slight was his hold upon this imaginative people, nor the possible
effect of contrast.
Under the new order of things in a constitutional monarchy the king
does not govern, he reigns. He was chosen by the people as their
ornamental figure-head. But what if he ceased to be ornamental? What
was the use of a king who in eighteen years had added not a single ray
of glory to the national name, but who was using his high position to
increase his enormous private fortune, and incessantly begging an
impoverished country for benefits and emoluments for five sons?
An excellent father, truly, though a short-sighted one. His power had
no roots. The cutting from the Orleans tree had never taken hold upon
the soil, and toppled over at the sound of Lamartine's voice
proclaiming a republic from the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville.
When invited to step down from his royal throne, he did so on the
instant. Never did king succumb with such alacrity, and never did
retiring royalty look less imposing than when Louis Philippe was in
hiding at Havre under the name of "William Smith," waiting for safe
convoy to England, without having struck one blow in defence of his
throne.
But three terrible words had floated into the open windows of the
Tuileries. With the echoes of 1792 still sounding in his ears,
"Liberty," "Equality," and "Fraternity," shouted in the streets of
Paris, had not a pleasant sound!
Republicanism was an abiding sentiment in France, even while two dull
Bourbon kings were stupidly trying to turn back the hands on the dial
of time, and while an Orleans, with more supple neck, was posing as a
popular sovereign. During all this tiresome interlude the real fact
was developing. A Republican sentiment which had existed vaguely in
the air was materializing, consolidating, into a more and more tangible
reality in the minds of thinking men and patriots.
The ablest men in the country stood with plans matured, ready to meet
this crisis. A republic was proclaimed; M. de Lamartine, Ledru-Rollin,
General Cavaignac, M. Raspail, and Louis Napoleon were rival candidates
for the office of President.
The nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, and son of Hortense, was only known
as the perpetrator of two very absurd attempts to overthrow the
monarchy under Louis Philippe. But since the remains of the great
emperor had been returned to France by England, and the splendors of
the past placed in striking contrast with a dull, lustreless present,
there had been a revival of Napoleonic memories and enthusiasm. Here
was an opportunity to unite two powerful sentiments in one man--a
Napoleon at the head of republican France would express the glory of
the past and the hope of the future.
The magic of the name was irresistible. Louis Napoleon was elected
President of the second Republic, and history prepared to repeat itself.