gathered round him on his return to Paris, and among these
were several whose fame was of earlier date than his own. La
Fayette, the man of 1789; Carnot, organizer of victory to the
Convention; Lucien, who had decided the revolution of
Brumaire,--all these met in that comfortless deliberation.
Carnot was for a dictatorship of public safety, that is, for
renewing his great days of 1793; Lucien too liked the Roman
sound of the word dictator. 'Dare!' he said to his brother,
but the spring of that terrible will was broken at last. 'I
have dared too much already;' said Napoleon. Meanwhile, in the
Chamber of Representatives the, word was not dictatorship but
liberty. Here La Fayette caused the assembly to vote itself
permanent, and to declare guilty of high treason whoever
should attempt to dissolve it. He hinted that, if the word
abdication were not soon pronounced on the other side, he
would himself pronounce the word 'dechéance.' The second
abdication took place on June 22d. 'I offer myself a sacrifice
to the hatred of the enemies of France. My public life is
finished, and I proclaim my son, under the title of Napoleon
II., Emperor of the French.' On the 25th he retired to
Malmaison, where Josephine had died the year before. He had by
no means yet ceased to hope. When his son was passed over by
the Chamber of Representatives, who named an executive
commission of five, he protested that he had not intended to
make way for a new Directory. ... On the 27th he went so far
as to offer his services once more as general, 'regarding
myself still as the first soldier of the nation;' He was met
by a refusal, and left Malmaison on the 29th for Rochefort,
well furnished with books on the United States. France was by
this time entering upon another Reign of Terror. Massacre had
begun at Marseilles as early as the 25th. What should Napoleon
do? He had been formerly the enemy of every other nation, and
now he was the worst enemy, if not of France, yet of the
triumphant faction in France. He lingered some days at
Rochefort, where he had arrived on July 3d, and then, finding
it impossible to escape the vigilance of the English cruisers,
went on the 15th on board the 'Bellerophon' and surrendered
himself to Captain Maitland. It was explained to him that no
conditions could be accepted, but that he would be 'conveyed
to England to be received in such manner as the Prince Regent
should deem expedient:' He had written at the Île d'Aix the
following characteristic letter to the Prince Regent:--'Royal
Highness,--A prey to the factions which divide my country and
to the enmity of the powers of Europe, I have terminated my
public career, and I come, like Themistocles, to seat myself
at the hearth of the British people. I place myself under the
protection of its laws, which I claim from your Royal Highness
as the most powerful, the most constant, and the most generous
of my enemies.' It was perhaps the only course open to him. In
France his life could scarcely have been spared, and Blücher
talked of executing him on the spot where the Duc d'Enghien
had fallen. He therefore could do nothing but what he did. His
reference to Themistocles shows that he was conscious of
being the worst enemy that England had ever had.
{1366}
Perhaps he remembered that at the rupture of the treaty of
Amiens he had studied to envenom the contest by detaining the
English residents in France. Still he might reflect, on the
other hand, that England was the only great country which had
not been trampled down and covered with massacre by his
soldiers. It would have been inexcusable if the English
Government had given way to vindictive feelings, especially as
they could well afford to be magnanimous, having just won the
greatest of all victories. But it was necessary to deprive him
of the power of exciting new wars, and the experiment of Elba
had shown that this involved depriving him of his liberty. The
frenzy which had cost·the lives of millions must be checked. This
was the principle laid down in the declaration of March 15th,
by which he had been excommunicated as a public enemy. It was
therefore necessary to impose some restraint upon him. He must
be separated from his party and from all the revolutionary
party in Europe. So long as he remained in Europe this would
involve positive imprisonment. The only arrangement therefore
which would allow him tolerable personal comfort and enjoyment
of life, was to send him out of Europe. From these
considerations grew the decision of the Government to send him
to St. Helena. An Act of Parliament was passed 'for the better
detaining in custody Napoleon Bonaparte,' and another Act for
subjecting St. Helena to a special system of government. He
was kept on board the 'Bellerophon' till August 4th, when he
was transferred to the 'Northumberland.' On October 15th he
arrived at St. Helena, accompanied by Counts Montholon, Las
Cases, and Bertrand, with their families, General Gourgaud,
and a number of servants. In April, 1816, arrived Sir Hudson
Lowe, an officer who had been knighted for bringing the news
of the capture of Paris in 1814, as governor. The rest of his
life, which continued till May 5, 1821, was occupied partly in
quarrels with this governor, which have now lost their
interest, partly in the task he had undertaken at the time of
his first abdication, that of relating his past life. He did
not himself write this narrative, nor does it appear that he
even dictated it word for word. It is a report made partly by
General Gourgaud, partly by Count Montholon, of Napoleon's
impassioned recitals; but they assure us that this report, as
published, has been read and corrected throughout by him. It
gives a tolerably complete account of the period between the
siege of Toulon and the battle of Marengo. On the later period
there is little, except a memoir on the campaign of 1815, to
which the editors of the Correspondence have been able to add
another on Elba and the Hundred Days."
_J. R. Seeley,
Short History of Napoleon I.,
chapter 6, section 5._
ALSO IN:
_Count de Las Cases,
Life, Exile and Conversations of Napoleon._
_General Count Montholon,
History of the Captivity of Napoleon._
_W. Forsyth,
History of the Captivity of Napoleon._
_B. E. O'Meara,
Napoleon in Exile._
_Sir W. Scott,
Life of Napoleon,
volume 2, chapters 49-56._
_A. Thiers,
History of the Consulate and the Empire,
chapters 61-62 (volume 5)._
FRANCE: A. D. 1815 (July-November).
English and Prussian armies in Paris.
Return of Louis XVIII.
Restoration of the art-spoils or Napoleon.
Indemnities demanded.
Russian, Austrian and Spanish armies on French soil.
The second Treaty or Paris.
"The 7th of July was the proudest day in the annals of
England. On that day her victorious army, beaded by
Wellington, made their public entry, along with the Prussians,
into Paris, where an English drum had not been heard for
nearly four hundred years. ... The French regarded them with
melancholy hearts and anxious looks. Few persons were to be
seen in the streets. ... The English established themselves in
the Bois de Boulogne in a regular camp; the Prussians
bivouacked in the churches, on the quays, and in the principal
streets. On the following day Louis, who had followed in the
rear of the English army from Ghent, made his public entrance,
escorted by the national guard. But his entry was attended by
still more melancholy circumstances, and of sinister augury to
the future stability of his dynasty. Even the royalists were
downcast; their patriotic feelings were deeply wounded by the
defeat of France. ... There was something in the restoration
of the monarch by the arms of the old rivals and enemies of
France which added inexpressibly to its bitterness. ... The
reality of subjugation was before their eyes. Blucher kept
aloof from all intercourse with the court, and haughtily
demanded a contribution of 100,000,000 francs ... for the pay
of his troops, as Napoleon had done from the Prussians at
Berlin. Already the Prussian soldiers insisted with loud cries
that the pillar of Austerlitz should be pulled down, as
Napoleon had destroyed the pillar of Rosbach; and Blucher was
so resolute to destroy the bridge of Jena, that he had
actually begun operations by running mines under the arches
for blowing it up. ... Wellington as steadily resisted the
ruthless act, but he had great difficulty in maintaining his
point; and it was only by his placing a sentinel on the
bridge, and repeated and earnest remonstrances, that the
destruction of that beautiful monument was prevented. ... A
still more melancholy humiliation than they had yet
experienced ere long befell the French nation. The Allied
sovereigns now arrived in Paris, and insisted upon the
restoration of the objects of art in the museum of the Louvre,
which had been pillaged from their respective states by the
orders of Napoleon. The justice of this demand could not be
contested: it was only wresting the prey from the robber. ...
Nothing wounded the French so profoundly as this breaking up
of the trophies of the war. It told them, in language not to
be misunderstood, that conquest had now reached their doors:
the iron went into the soul of the nation. A memorial from all
the artists of Europe at Rome claimed for the Eternal City the
entire restoration of the immortal works of art which had once
adorned it. The Allied sovereigns acceded to the just demand;
and Canova, impassioned for the arts and the city of his
choice, hastened to Paris to superintend the removal. It was
most effectually done. The bronze horses ... [from Venice]
were restored to their old station in front of the Church of
St. Mark. The Transfiguration and the Last Communion of St.
Jerome resumed their place in the halls of the Vatican; the
Apollo and the Laocoon again adorned the precincts of St.
Peter's; the Venus was enshrined anew amidst beauty in the
Tribune of Florence; and the Descent from the Cross by Rubens
was restored to the devout worship of the Flemings in the
cathedral of Antwerp. ...
{1367}
The claims preferred by the different Allied powers for
restitution not merely of celebrated objects of art, but of
curiosities and valuable articles of all kinds, which had been
carried off by the French during their occupation of the
different countries of Europe, especially under Napoleon, were
immense, and demonstrated at once the almost incredible length
to which the system of spoliation and robbery had been carried
by the republican and imperial authorities. Their amount may
be estimated by one instance from an official list, prepared
by the Prussian authorities in 1815, It appears that, during
the years 1806 and 1807, there had been violently taken from
the Prussian states, on the requisition of M. Donore, and
brought to Paris,--statues, paintings, antiquities, cameos,
manuscripts, maps, gems, antiques, rarities, and other
valuable articles, the catalogue of which occupies 53 closely
printed pages of M. Schoell's valuable Recueil. Among them are
127 paintings, many of them of the very highest value, taken from
the palaces of Berlin and Potsdam alone; 187 statues, chiefly
antique, taken from the same palaces during the same period;
and 86 valuable manuscripts and documents seized in the city
of Aix-la-Chapelle, on the occupation of that city, then a
neutral power, in 1803, by the armies of the First Consul on
the invasion of Hanover. The total articles reclaimed by the
Prussians exceeded two thousand. ... The claims of states and
cities for indemnity on account of' the enormous exactions
made from them by the French generals, under the authority of
the Convention and the Emperor, were still more extraordinary.
... The vast amount of these claims for indemnities in money
or territories, and the angry feelings with which they were
urged, were of sinister augury to the French nation, and
augmented, in a most serious degree, the difficulties
experienced by those who were intrusted with the conduct of
the negotiations. But, be they what they may, the French had
no means of resisting them; all they could trust to was the
moderation or jealousies of their conquerors. The force which,
during the months of July and August, advanced from all
quarters into their devoted territory, was immense, and such
as demonstrated that, if Napoleon had not succeeded in
dissolving the alliance by an early victory in the
Netherlands, the contest, even without the battle of Waterloo,
would have been hopeless. The united armies of Russians and
Austrians, 350,000 strong, under Schwartzenberg and Barclay de
Tolly, crossed the Rhine in various places from Bâle to
Coblentz, and, pressing rapidly forward, soon occupied the
whole eastern provinces of France. The Austrians and
Piedmontese, a hundred thousand more; passed Mont Cenis, or
descended the Rhone, from Geneva to Lyons. The Spaniards made
their appearance in Bearn or Roussillon. The armies of Blucher
and Wellington, now reinforced to 200,000 effective men,
occupied Paris, its environs, Normandy, and Picardy. Eighty
thousand Prussians and Germans, in addition, were advancing
through the Rhenish provinces and Belgium. Before the Allied
sovereigns returned to Paris, in the middle of July, the
French territory was occupied by 800,000 men, to oppose which
no considerable force remained but the army beyond the Loire,
which mustered 65,000 combatants. ... Austria insisted upon
getting back Lorraine and Alsace; Spain put in a claim to the
Basque provinces; Prussia alleged that her security would be
incomplete unless Mayence, Luxembourg, and all the frontier
provinces of France adjoining her territory, were ceded to
her; and the King of the Netherlands claimed the whole of the
French fortresses of the Flemish barrier. The monarchy of
Louis seemed on the eve of dissolution; and so complete was
the prostration of the vanquished, that there appeared no
power capable of preventing it. It was with no small
difficulty, and more from the mutual jealousies of the
different powers than any other cause, that these natural
reprisals for French rapacity were prevented from taking
place. The negotiation was protracted at Paris till late in
autumn; Russia, which had nothing to gain by the proposed
partition, took part with France throughout its whole
continuance; and the different powers, to support their
pretensions in this debate, maintained their armies, who had
entered on all sides, on the French soil; so that above
800,000 foreign troops were quartered on its inhabitants for
several months. At length, however, by the persevering efforts
of Lord Castlereagh, M. Nesselrode, and M. Talleyrand, all
difficulties were adjusted, and the second treaty of Paris was
concluded in November 1815, between France and the whole
Allied powers. By this treaty, and the relative conventions
which were signed the same day, conditions of a very onerous
kind were imposed upon the restored government. The French
frontier was restored to the state in which it stood in 1790,
by which means the whole of the territory, far from
inconsiderable, gained by the treaty of 1814, was resumed by
the Allies. In consequence of this, France lost the fortresses
of Landau, Sarre-Louis, Philipville, and Marienburg, with the
adjacent territory of each. Versoix, with a small district
round it, was ceded to the canton of Geneva; the fortress of
Huningen was to be demolished; but the little country of the
Venaisin, the first conquest of the Revolution, was preserved
to France. Seven hundred millions of francs (£28,000,000
sterling) were to be paid to the Allied powers for the
expenses of the war; in addition to which it was stipulated
that an army of 150,000 men, composed of 80,000 from each of
the great powers of England, Russia, Austria, and Prussia, and
the lesser powers of Germany, was to occupy, for a period not
less than three, or more than five years, the whole frontier
fortresses of France; ... and this large force was to be
maintained entirely at the expense of the French government.
In addition to this, the different powers obtained indemnities
for the spoliations inflicted on them by France during the
Revolution, which amounted to the enormous sum of 735,000,000
of francs more (£29,400,000 sterling). A hundred millions of
francs were also provided to the smaller powers as an
indemnity for the expenses of the war; so that the total sums
which France had to pay, besides maintaining the army of
occupation, amounted to no less than fifteen hundred and
thirty-five millions of francs, or £61,400,000 sterling. ...
Great Britain, in a worthy spirit, surrendered the whole sum
falling to her out of the indemnity for the war, amounting to
nearly £5,000,000 sterling, to the King of the Netherlands, to
restore the famous barrier against France which Joseph II. had
so insanely demolished."
_Sir A. Alison,
History of Europe, 1789-1815,
chapter 95 (volume 20)._
ALSO IN:
_Prince de Talleyrand,
Memoirs,
part 9 (volume 8)._
_E. Hertslet,
The Map of Europe by Treaty,
Number 40 (volume 1)._
{1368}
FRANCE: A. D. 1815 (September).
The Holy Alliance.
See HOLY ALLIANCE.
FRANCE: A. D. 1815-1830.
The restored monarchy.
Louis XVIII. and Charles X.
Career of the Reactionaries.
Conquest of Algiers.
Ordinances of July.
Revolution.
Abdication and exile of the king.
"France was defeated but not crushed. Indeed she had gained
Avignon and some districts of Alsace since 1792, and she had
gained social and political stability by having millions of
peasants as small proprietors in the soil; moreover, as
Napoleon always waged his wars at the expense of his conquered
foes, the French national debt was after all the wars only
one-sixth of the debt of Great Britain. So France soon rose to
a position of strength and prosperity hardly equalled in all
Europe, in spite of bad harvests, political unrest, and the
foreign occupation which ended in 1818. The royalists, after a
quarter of a century of repression, now revenged themselves
with truly French vehemence. In France a victorious party
generally crushes its opponents; and the elections, held
during the full swing of the royalist reaction, sent up to
Paris a Legislative Assembly 'more royalist than the king
himself.' Before it assembled, Louis XVIII., in spite of his
promise only to punish those who were declared by the Assembly
to be traitors, proscribed fifty-seven persons who had
deserted to Napoleon in the 'Hundred Days.' ... Of the
proscribed men thirty-eight were banished and a few were shot.
Among the latter the most illustrious was Marshal Ney, whose
past bravery did not shield him from the extreme penalty for
the betrayal of the military oath. ... This impolitic
execution rankled deep in the breasts of all Napoleon's old
soldiers, but for the present all opposition was swept away in
the furious tide of reaction. Brune, one of Napoleon's
marshals, was killed by the royalist populace of Avignon; and
the Protestants of the south, who were suspected of favouring
Napoleon's home policy, suffered terrible outrages at Nimes
and Uzès in this 'white terror.' The restored monarchy had far
stronger executive powers than the old system wielded before
1789, for it now drew into its hands the centralised powers
which, under the Directory and the Empire, had replaced the
old cumbrous provincial system; but even this gain of power
did not satisfy the hot-headed royalists of the Chamber. They
instituted judicial courts under a provost (prévôt), which
passed severe sentences without right of appeal. Dismissing
the comparatively Liberal ministers Talleyrand and Fouché,
Louis in September 1816 summoned a more royalist ministry
under the Duc de Richelieu, which was itself hurried on by the
reactionaries. Chateaubriand fanned the flames of royalist
passion by his writings, until the king even found it
necessary to dissolve this mischievous Chamber, and the new
deputies who assembled (February 1817) showed a more moderate
spirit. France was soon delivered from the foreign armies of
occupation, for the sovereigns of Russia, Austria, and
Prussia, meeting at Aix-la-Chapelle (September 1818), in order
to combat revolutionary attempts, decided that an early
evacuation of French territory would strengthen the Bourbon
rule in France; and they renewed the Quadruple Alliance, which
aimed at upholding existing treaties. The discontent in
Germany and Italy awakened a sympathetic echo in France, which
showed itself in the retirement of the Duc de Richelieu and
the accession of a more progressive minister, Decazes
(November 1819). This check to the royalist reaction was soon
swept away by an event of sinister import. The Duc de Berry,
second son of the Comte d'Artois, was assassinated (February
1820), as he was leaving the opera-house, by a fanatic who
aimed at cutting off the direct Bourbon line (February 1820).
His design utterly failed, for a posthumous son, the
celebrated Comte de Chambord, was born in September 1820; and
the only result was a new outburst of royalist fury. Liberty
of the press was suspended, and a new complicated electoral
system restricted the franchise to those who paid at least
1,000 francs a year in direct taxation: the, Chamber of
Deputies, a fifth part of which was renewed every year by an
electorate now representing only the wealthy, became every
year more reactionary, while the Left saw its numbers decline.
The Ultra-royalist ministry of Villèle soon in its turn
aroused secret conspiracies, for the death of Napoleon (May 5,
1821) was now awakening a feeling of regret for the
comparative liberty enjoyed in France during the Empire.
Military conspiracies were formed, only to be discovered and
crushed, and the veteran republican Lafayette was thought to
be concerned in a great attempt projected in the eastern
departments with its headquarters at Belfort; and the terrible
society of the Carbonari secretly spread its arms through the
south of France, where it found soil as favourable as in Italy
itself. ... A revolution in Spain held Ferdinand a prisoner in
his palace at Madrid. Louis determined to uphold the throne of
his Bourbon relative, and sent an army which quickly effected
its object (1823). 'The Pyrenees no longer exist,' exclaimed
Louis XVIII. In fact, everywhere in Europe absolutism seemed
to be triumphant, and the elections of December 1823 sent up a
further reinforcement to the royalist party; also the
approaching end of the sensible old king foreshadowed a period
of still more violent reaction under his hot-headed brother
Charles. Louis XVIII. died on September 16, 1824, At his death
the restoration seemed firmly established. ... France had
quickly recovered from twenty years of warfare, and was
thought to have the strongest government in Europe. Always the
chief of the reactionary nobles, Charles had said, 'It is only
Lafayette and I who have not changed since 1789.' Honest,
sincere, and affable as the new king was, yet his popularity
soon vanished when it was seen how entirely he was under the
control of his confessor; and the ceremonies of his coronation
at Rheims showed that he intended to revive the almost
forgotten past. In Guizot's words, 'Louis XVIII was a moderate
of the old system and a liberal-minded inheritor of the 18th
century: Charles X. was a true Émigré, and a submissive bigot'
Among the first bills which Charles proposed to the Chambers was
one to indemnify those who had lost their lands in the
Revolution. To give these lands back would have caused general
unsettlement among thousands of small cultivators; but the
former landowners received an indemnity of a milliard of
francs, which they exclaimed against for its insufficiency
just as loudly as the radicals did for its extravagance: by
this tardy act of justice the State endeavoured to repair some
of the unjust confiscations of the revolutionary era. ...
{1369}
The attempts made by the Jesuits to regain their legal status
in France, in spite of the prohibition dating from before the
fall of the old regime, aroused further hostility to the king,
who was well known to favour their cause. Nothing, however, so
strengthened the growing opposition in the Chambers and in the
country at large as a rigorous measure aimed at the
newspapers, pamphlets, and books which combated the clerical
reaction. These publications were to pay a stamp duty per
page, while crushing fines were devised to ruin the offending
critics. One of the leaders of the opposition, Casimir Périer,
exclaimed against this measure as ruinous to trade: 'Printing
would be suppressed in France and transferred to Belgium.' The
king persevered in his mad enterprise: he refused to receive a
petition from the most august literary society in Europe, the
Académie Française, and cashiered its promoters as if they
were clerks under his orders. Strange to say, the Chamber of
Deputies passed the measure, while that of the Peers rejected
it--an event greeted by illuminations all over Paris (April
1827). A few days afterwards, at a review of the National
Guards in Paris, the troops raised cries for the liberty of
the press and for the charter granted in 1815. The next day
they were disbanded by royal command, but were foolishly
allowed to retain their arms, which were soon to be used
against the government. Charles next created seventy-six new
peers to outvote his opponents in the Upper House. He also
dissolved the Chamber of Deputies, but found the new members
less pliable. Finally, Charles had to give way for the time,
and accept a more moderate ministry under Martignac in place
of the reactionary Villèle Cabinet. ... Charles was soon able
to dismiss this ministry, the last hope of conciliation, and
formed (August 1829) a ministry under Count Polignac, one of
whose colleagues was the General Bourmont who had deserted to
the allies the day before Waterloo. The king's speech at the
opening of the next session (March 1830) was curt and
threatening, and the Chamber was soon prorogued. Reform
banquets, a custom which the French borrowed from English
reformers, increased the agitation, which the Polignac
ministry vainly sought to divert by ambitious projects of
invasion and partition of some neighbouring States. The only
practical outcome of these projects was the conquest of the
pirate stronghold of Algiers. This powerful fortress had been
bombarded and reduced by Lord Exmouth with the British fleet
in 1816, and the captives, mostly Italians, were released from
that den of slave-dealers; but the Dey of Algiers had resumed
his old habits, complaints from the French were met by
defiance, and at last the French envoy quitted the harbor amid
a shower of bullets. A powerful expedition effected a landing
near the strongly-fortified harbour, and easily beat back the
native attack; and then from the land side soon battered down
the defences of the city.
See BARBARY STATES: A. D. 1830.