[Richelieu's Ministry, Sept. 1815.]

His successor, the Duc de Richelieu, was recommended to Louis XVIII. by the Czar. Richelieu had quitted France early in the Revolution, and, unlike most of the emigrants, had played a distinguished part in the country which gave him refuge. Winning his first laurels in the siege of Ismail under Suvaroff, he had subsequently been made Governor of the Euxine provinces of Russia, and the flourishing town of Odessa had sprung up under his rule.

His reputation as an administrator was high; his personal character singularly n.o.ble and disinterested. Though the English Government looked at first with apprehension upon a Minister so closely connected with the Czar of Russia, Richelieu's honesty and truthfulness soon gained him the respect of every foreign Court. His relation to Alexander proved of great service to France in lightening the burden of the army of occupation; his equity, his acquaintance with the real ends of monarchical government, made him, though no lover of liberty, a valuable Minister in face of an a.s.sembly which represented nothing but the pa.s.sions and the ideas of a reactionary cla.s.s. But Richelieu had been too long absent from France to grasp the details of administration with a steady hand. The men, the parties of 1815, were new to him: it is said that he was not acquainted by sight with most of his colleagues when he appointed them to their posts. The Ministry in consequence was not at unity within itself. Some of its members, like Decazes, were more liberal than their chief; others, like Clarke and Vaublanc, old servants of Napoleon now turned ultra-Royalists, were eager to make themselves the instruments of the Count of Artois, and to carry into the work of government the enthusiasm of revenge which had already found voice in the elections.

[Violence of the Chamber of 1815.]

The session opened on the 7th of October. Twenty-nine of the peers, who had joined Napoleon during the Hundred Days, were excluded from the House, and replaced by adherents of the Bourbons; nevertheless the peers as a body opposed themselves to extreme reaction, and, in spite of Chateaubriand's sanguinary harangues, supported the moderate policy of Richelieu against the majority of the Lower House. The first demand of the Chamber of Deputies was for retribution upon traitors; [263] their first conflict with the Government of Louis XVIII. arose upon the measures which were brought forward by the Ministry for the preservation of public security and the punishment of seditious acts. The Ministers were attacked, not because their measures were too severe, but because they were not severe enough.

While taking power to imprison all suspected persons without trial, or to expel them from their homes, Decazes, the Police-Minister, proposed to punish incitements to sedition by fines and terms of imprisonment varying according to the gravity of the offence. So mild a penalty excited the wrath of men whose fathers and brothers had perished on the guillotine.

Some cried out for death, others for banishment to Cayenne. When it was pointed out that the infliction of capital punishment for the mere attempt at sedition would place this on a level with armed rebellion, it was answered that a distinction might be maintained by adding in the latter case the ancient punishment of parricide, the amputation of the hand.

Extravagances like this belonged rather to the individuals than to a party; but the vehemence of the Chamber forced the Government to submit to a revision of its measure. Transportation to Cayenne, but not death, was ultimately included among the penalties for seditious acts. The Minister of Justice, M. Barbe-Marbois, who had himself been transported to Cayenne by the Jacobins in 1797, was able to satisfy the Chamber from his own experience that they were not erring on the side of mercy. [264]

[Ney executed, Dec. 7.]

It was in the midst of these heated debates that Marshal Ney was brought to trial for high treason. A so-called Edict of Amnesty had been published by the King on the 24th of July, containing the names of nineteen persons who were to be tried by courts-martial on capital charges, and of thirty-eight others who were to be either exiled or brought to justice, as the Chamber might determine. Ney was included in the first category. Opportunities for escape had been given to him by the Government, as indeed they had to almost every other person on the list. King Louis XVIII. well understood that his Government was not likely to be permanently strengthened by the execution of some of the most distinguished men in France; the emigrants, however, and especially the d.u.c.h.ess of Angouleme, were merciless, and the English Government acted a deplorable part. "One can never feel that the King is secure on his throne," wrote Lord Liverpool, "until he has dared to spill traitors' blood." It is not that many examples would be necessary; but the daring to make a few will alone manifest any strength in the Government. [265] Labedoyere had already been executed. On the 9th of November Ney was brought before a court-martial, at which Castlereagh and his wife had the bad taste to be present. The court-martial, headed by Ney's old comrade Jourdan, declared itself incompetent to judge a peer of France accused of high treason, [266] Ney was accordingly tried before the House of Peers. The verdict was a foregone conclusion, and indeed the legal guilt of the Marshal could hardly be denied. Had the men who sat in judgment upon him been a body of Vendean peasants who had braved fire and sword for the Bourbon cause, the sentence of death might have been p.r.o.nounced with pure, though stern lips: it remains a deep disgrace to France that among the peers who voted not only for Ney's condemnation but for his death, there were some who had themselves accepted office and pay from Napoleon during the Hundred Days. A word from Wellington would still have saved the Marshal's life, but in interceding for Ney the Duke would have placed himself in direct opposition to the action of his own Government. When the Premier had dug the grave, it was not for Wellington to rescue the prisoner. It is permissible to hope that he, who had so vehemently reproached Blucher for his intention to put Napoleon to death if he should fall into his hands, would have asked clemency for Ney had he considered himself at liberty to obey the promptings of his own nature. The responsibility for Marshal Ney's death rests, more than upon any other individual, upon Lord Liverpool.

On the 7th of December the sentence was executed. Ney was shot at early morning in an unfrequented spot, and the Government congratulated itself that it had escaped the dangers of a popular demonstration and heard the last of a disagreeable business. Never was there a greater mistake. No crime committed in the Reign of Terror attached a deeper popular opprobrium to its authors than the execution of Ney did to the Bourbon family. The victim, a brave but rough half-German soldier, [267] rose in popular legend almost to the height of the Emperor himself. His heroism in the retreat from Moscow became, and with justice, a more glorious memory than Davoust's victory at Jena or Moreau's at Hohenlinden. Side by side with the thought that the Bourbons had been brought back by foreign arms, the remembrance sank deep into the heart of the French people that this family had put to death "the bravest of the brave." It would have been no common good fortune for Louis XVIII. to have pardoned or visited with light punishment a great soldier whose political feebleness had led him to an act of treason, condoned by the nation at large. Exile would not have made the transgressor a martyr. But the common sense of mankind condemns Ney's execution: the public opinion of France has never forgiven it.

[Amnesty Bill, Dec 8.]

On the day after the great example was made, Richelieu brought forward the Amnesty Bill of the Government in the House of Representatives. The King, while claiming full right of pardon, desired that the Chamber should be a.s.sociated with him in its exercise, and submitted a project of law securing from prosecution all persons not included in the list published on July 24th. Measures of a very different character had already been introduced under the same t.i.tle into the Chamber. Though the initiative in legislation belonged by virtue of the Charta to the Crown, resolutions might be moved by members in the shape of pet.i.tion or address, and under this form the leaders of the majority had drawn up schemes for the wholesale proscription of Napoleon's adherents. It was proposed by M. la Bourdonnaye to bring to trial all the great civil and military officers who, during the Hundred Days, had const.i.tuted the Government of the usurper; all generals, prefets, and commanders of garrisons, who had obeyed Napoleon before a certain day, to be named by the a.s.sembly; and all voters for the death of Louis XVI. who had recognised Napoleon by signing the Acte Additionnel. The language in which these prosecutions were urged was the echo of that which had justified the bloodshed of 1793; its violence was due partly to the fancy that Napoleon's return was no sudden and unexpected act, but the work of a set of conspirators in high places, who were still plotting the overthrow of the monarchy. [268]

[Persecution of suspected persons over all France.]

It was in vain that Richelieu intervened with the expression of the King's own wishes, and recalled the example of forgiveness shown in the testament of Louis XVI. The committee which was appointed to report on the projects of amnesty brought up a scheme little different from that of La Bourdonnaye, and added to it the iniquitous proposal that civil actions should be brought against all condemned persons for the damages sustained by the State through Napoleon's return. This was to make a mock of the clause in the Charta which abolished confiscation. The report of the committee caused the utmost dismay both in France itself and among the representatives of foreign Powers at Paris. The conflict between the men of reaction and the Government had openly broken out; Richelieu's Ministry, the guarantee of peace, seemed to be on the point of falling. On the 2nd of January, 1816, the Chamber proceeded to discuss the Bill of the Government and the amendments of the committee. The debate lasted four days; it was only by the repeated use of the King's own name that the Ministers succeeded in gaining a majority of nine votes against the two princ.i.p.al categories of exception appended to the amnesty by their opponents. The proposal to restore confiscation under the form of civil actions was rejected by a much greater majority, but on the vote affecting the regicides the Government was defeated. This indeed was considered of no great moment. Richelieu, content with having averted measures which would have exposed several hundred persons to death, exile, or pecuniary ruin, consented to banish from France the regicides who had acknowledged Napoleon, along with the thirty-eight persons named in the second list of July 24th. Among other well-known men, Carnot, who had rendered such great services to his country, went to die in exile. Of the seventeen companions of Ney and Labedoyere in the first list of July 24th, most had escaped from France; one alone suffered death. [269] But the persons originally excluded from the amnesty and the regicides exiled by the a.s.sembly formed but a small part of those on whom the vengeance of the Royalists fell; for it was provided that the amnesty-law should apply to no one against whom proceedings had been taken before the formal promulgation of the law. The prisons were already crowded with accused persons, who thus remained exposed to punishment; and after the law had actually pa.s.sed the Chamber, telegraph-signals were sent over the country by Clarke, the Minister of War, ordering the immediate accusation of several others. One distinguished soldier at least, General Travot, was sentenced to death on proceedings thus inst.i.tuted between the pa.s.sing and the promulgation of the law of amnesty. [270] Executions, however, were not numerous except in the south of France, but an enormous number of persons were imprisoned or driven from their homes, some by judgment of the law-courts, some by the exercise of the powers conferred on the administration by the law of Public Security.

[271] The central government indeed had less part in this species of persecution than the Prefets and other local authorities, though within their own departments Clarke and Vaublanc set an example which others were not slow to follow. Royalist committees were formed all over the country, and a.s.sumed the same kind of irregular control over the officials of their districts as had been practised by the Jacobin committees of 1793.

Thousands of persons employed in all grades of the public service, in schools and colleges as well as in the civil administration, in the law-courts as well as in the army and navy, were dismissed from their posts. The new-comers were professed agents of the reaction; those who were permitted to retain their offices strove to outdo their colleagues in their renegade zeal for the new order. It was seen again, as it had been seen under the Republic and under the Empire, that if virtue has limits, servility has none. The same men who had hunted down the peasant for sheltering his children from Napoleon's conscription now hunted down those who were stigmatised as Bonapartists. The clergy threw in their lot with the victorious party, and denounced to the magistrates their parishioners who treated them with disrespect. [272] Darker pages exist in French history than the reaction of 1815, none more contemptible. It is the deepest condemnation of the violence of the Republic and the despotism of the Empire that the generation formed by it should have produced the cla.s.s who could exhibit, and the public who could tolerate, the prodigies of baseness which attended the second Bourbon restoration.

[The reactionists adopt Parliamentary theory.]

Within the Chamber of Deputies the Ultra-Royalist majority had gained Parliamentary experience in the debates on the Amnesty Bill and the Law of Public Security: their own policy now took a definite shape, and to outbursts of pa.s.sion there succeeded the attempt to realise ideas. Hatred of the Revolution and all its works was still the dominant impulse of the a.s.sembly; but whatever may have been the earlier desire of the Ultra-Royalist n.o.blesse, it was no longer their intention to restore the political system that existed before 1789. They would in that case have desired to restore absolute monarchy, and to surrender the power which seemed at length to have fallen into the hands of their own cla.s.s. With Artois on the throne this might have been possible, for Artois, though heir to the crown, was still what he had been in his youth, the chief of a party: with Louis XVIII. and Richelieu at the head of the State, the Ultra-Royalists became the adversaries of royal prerogative and the champions of the rights of Parliament. Before the Revolution the n.o.blesse had possessed privileges; it had not possessed political power. The Const.i.tution of 1814 had unexpectedly given it, under representative forms, the influence denied to it under the old monarchy. New political vistas opened; and the men who had hitherto made St. Louis and Henry IV. the subject of their declamations, now sought to extend the rights of Parliament to the utmost, and to perpetuate in succeeding a.s.semblies the rule of the present majority. An electoral law favourable to the great landed proprietors was the first necessity. This indeed was but a means to an end; another and a greater end might be attained directly, the restoration of a landed Church, and of the civil and social ascendancy of the clergy.

[Ecclesiastical schemes of the reaction.]

It had been admitted by King Louis XVIII. that the clause in the Charta relating to elections required modification, and on this point the Ultra-Royalists in the Chamber were content to wait for the proposals of the Government. In their ecclesiastical policy they did not maintain the same reserve. Resolutions in favour of the State-Church were discussed in the form of pet.i.tions to be presented to the Crown. It was proposed to make the clergy, as they had been before the Revolution, the sole keepers of registers of birth and marriage; to double the annual payment made to them by the State; to permit property of all kinds to be acquired by the Church by gift or will; to restore all Church lands not yet sold by the State; and, finally, to abolish the University of France, and to place all schools and colleges throughout the country under the control of the Bishops. One central postulate not only pa.s.sed the Chamber, but was accepted by the Government and became law. Divorce was absolutely abolished; and for two generations after 1816 no possible aggravation of wrong sufficed in France to release either husband or wife from the mockery of a marriage-tie. The power to accept donations or legacies was granted to the clergy, subject, however, in every case to the approval of the Crown. The allowance made to them out of the revenues of the State was increased by the amount of certain pensions as they should fall in, a concession which fell very far short of the demands of the Chamber. In all, the advantages won for the Church were scarcely proportioned to the zeal displayed in its cause. The most important question, the disposal of the unsold Church lands, remained to be determined when the Chamber should enter upon the discussion of the Budget.

[Electoral Bill, Dec. 18, 1815.]

The Electoral Bill of the Government, from which the Ultra-Royalists expected so much, was introduced at the end of the year 1815. It showed in a singular manner the confusion of ideas existing within the Ministry as to the nature of the Parliamentary liberty now supposed to belong to France.

The ex-prefet Vaublanc, to whom the framing of the measure was entrusted, though he imagined himself purged from the traditions of Napoleonism, could conceive of no relation between the executive and the legislative power but that which exists between a substance and its shadow. It never entered his mind that the representative inst.i.tutions granted by the Charta were intended to bring an independent force to bear upon the Government, or that the nation should be treated as more than a fringe round the compact and lasting body of the administration. The language in which Vaublanc introduced his measure was grotesquely candid. Montesquieu, he said, had pointed out that powers must be subordinate; therefore the electoral power must be controlled by the King's Government. [273] By the side of the electors in the Canton and the Department there was accordingly placed, in the Ministerial scheme, an array of officials numerous enough to carry the elections, if indeed they did not actually outnumber the private voters.

The franchise was confined to the sixty richest persons in each Canton: these, with the officials of the district, were to elect the voters of the Department, who, with a similar contingent of officials, were to choose the Deputies. Re-affirming the principle laid down in the Const.i.tution of 1795 and repeated in the Charta, Vaublanc proposed that a fifth part of the a.s.sembly should retire each year.

[Counter-project of Villele.]

If the Minister had intended to give the Ultra-Royalists the best possible means of exalting the peculiar policy of their cla.s.s into something like a real defence of liberty, he could not have framed a more fitting measure.

The creation of const.i.tuent bodies out of mayors, crown-advocates, and justices of the peace, was described, and with truth, as a mere Napoleonic juggle. The limitation of the franchise to a fixed number of rich persons was condemned as illiberal and contrary to the spirit of the Charta: the system of yearly renovation by fifths, which threatened to curtail the reign of the present majority, was attributed to the dread of any complete expression of public opinion. It was evident that the Bill of the Government would either be rejected or altered in such a manner as to give it a totally different character. In the Committee of the Chamber which undertook the task of drawing up amendments, the influence was first felt of a man who was soon to become the chief and guiding spirit of the Ultra-Royalist party. M. de Villele, spokesman of the Committee, had in his youth been an officer in the navy of Louis XVI. On the dethronement of the King he had quitted the service, and settled in the Isle of Bourbon, where he gained some wealth and an acquaintance with details of business and finance rare among the French landed gentry. Returning to France under the Empire, he took up his abode near Toulouse, his native place, and was made Mayor of that city on Napoleon's second downfall. Villele's politics gained a strong and original colour from his personal experience and the character of the province in which he lived. The south was the only part of France known to him. There the reactionary movement of 1815 had been a really popular one, and the chief difficulty of the Government, at the end of the Hundred Days, had been to protect the Bonapartists from violence. Villele believed that throughout France the wealthier men among the peasantry were as ready to follow the priests and n.o.bles as they were in Provence and La Vendee. His conception of the government of the future was the rule of a landed aristocracy, resting, in its struggle against monarchical centralisation and against the Liberalism of the middle cla.s.s, on the conservative and religious instincts of the peasantry. Instead of excluding popular forces, Villele welcomed them as allies. He proposed to lower the franchise to one-sixth of the sum named in the Charta, and, while retaining a system of double-election, to give a vote in the primary a.s.semblies to every Frenchman paying annual taxes to the amount of fifty francs. In const.i.tuencies so large as to include all the more substantial peasantry, while sufficiently limited to exclude the ill-paid populace in towns, Villele believed that the Church and the n.o.blesse would on the whole control the elections. In the interest of the present majority he rejected the system of renovation by fifths proposed by the Government, and demanded that the present Chamber should continue unchanged until its dissolution, and the succeeding Chamber be elected entire.

[Result of debates on Electoral Bill.]

Villele's scheme, if carried, would in all probability have failed at the first trial. The districts in which the reaction of 1815 was popular were not so large as he supposed: in the greater part of France the peasantry would not have obeyed the n.o.bles except under intimidation. This was suspected by the majority, in spite of the confident language in which they spoke of the will of the nation as identical with their own. Villele's boldness alarmed them: they antic.i.p.ated that these great const.i.tuencies of peasants, if really left masters of the elections, would be more likely to return a body of Jacobins and Bonapartists than one of hereditary landlords. It was not necessary, however, to sacrifice the well-sounding principle of a low franchise, for the democratic vote at the first stage of the elections might effectively be neutralised by putting the second stage into the hands of the chief proprietors. The a.s.sembly had in fact only to imitate the example of the Government, and to appoint a body of persons who should vote, as of right, by the side of the electors chosen in the primary a.s.semblies. The Government in its own interest had designated a troop of officials as electors: the a.s.sembly, on the contrary, resolved that in the Electoral College of each Department, numbering in all about 150 persons, the fifty princ.i.p.al landowners of the Department should be ent.i.tled to vote, whether they had been nominated by the primary const.i.tuencies or not.

Modified by this proviso, the project of Villele pa.s.sed the a.s.sembly. The Government saw that under the disguise of a series of amendments a measure directly antagonistic to their own had been carried. The franchise had been altered; the real control of the elections placed in the hands of the very party which was now in open opposition to the King and his Ministers. No compromise was possible between the law proposed by the Government and that pa.s.sed by the a.s.sembly. The Government appealed to the Chamber of Peers.

The Peers threw out the amendments of the Lower House. A provisional measure was then introduced by Richelieu for the sake of providing France with at least some temporary rule for the conduct of elections. It failed; and the const.i.tutional legislation of the country came to a dead-lock, while the Government and the a.s.sembly stood face to face, and it became evident that one or the other must fall. The Ministers of the Great Powers at Paris, who watched over the restored dynasty, debated whether or not they should recommend the King to resort to the extreme measure of a dissolution.

[Contest on the Budget.]

[The Chambers prorogued, April 29.]

The Electoral Bill was not the only object of conflict between Richelieu's Ministry and the Chamber, nor indeed the princ.i.p.al one. The Budget excited fiercer pa.s.sions, and raised greater issues. It was for no mere scheme of finance that the Government had to fight, but against a violation of public faith which would have left France insolvent and creditless in the face of the Powers who still held its territory in pledge. The debt incurred by the nation since 1813 was still unfunded. That part of it which had been raised before the summer of 1814 had been secured by law upon the unsold forests formerly belonging to the Church, and upon the Communal lands which Napoleon had made the property of the State: the remainder, which included the loans made during the Hundred Days, had no specified security. It was now proposed by the Government to place the whole of the unfunded debt upon the same level, and to provide for its payment by selling the so-called Church forests. The project excited the bitterest opposition on the side of the Count of Artois and his friends. If there was one object which the clerical and reactionary party pursued with religious fervour, it was the restoration of the Church lands: if there was one cla.s.s which they had no scruple in impoverishing, it was the cla.s.s that had lent money to Napoleon.

Instead of paying the debts of the State, the Committee of the Chamber proposed to repeal the law of September, 1814, which pledged the Church forests, and to compel both the earlier and the later holders of the unfunded debt to accept stock in satisfaction of their claims, though the stock was worth less than two-thirds of its nominal value. The resolution was in fact one for the repudiation of a third part of the unfunded debt.

Richelieu, seeing in what fashion his measure was about to be transformed, determined upon withdrawing it altogether: the majority in the Chamber, intent on executing its own policy and that of the Count of Artois, refused to recognise the withdrawal. Such a step was at once an insult and a usurpation of power. So great was the scandal and alarm caused by the scenes in the Chamber, that the Duke of Wellington, at the instance of the Amba.s.sadors, presented a note to King Louis XVIII. requiring him in plain terms to put a stop to the machinations of his brother. [274] The interference of the foreigner provoked the Ultra-Royalists, and failed to excite energetic action on the part of King Louis, who dreaded the sour countenance of the d.u.c.h.ess of Angouleme more than he did Wellington's reproofs. In the end the question of a settlement of the unfunded debt was allowed to remain open. The Government was unable to carry the sale of the Church forests, the Chamber did not succeed in its project of confiscation.

The Budget for the year, greatly altered in the interest of the landed proprietors, was at length brought into shape. A resolution of the Lower House restoring the unsold forests to the Church was ignored by the Crown; and the Government, having obtained the means of carrying on the public services, gladly abstained from further legislation, and on the 29th of April ended the turmoil which surrounded it by proroguing the Chambers.

[Rising at Gren.o.ble, May 6th. Executions.]

It was hoped that with the close of the Session the system of imprisonment and surveillance which prevailed in the Departments would be brought to an end. Vaublanc, the Minister of coercion, was removed from office. But the troubles of France were not yet over. On the 6th of May, a rising of peasants took place at Gren.o.ble. According to the report of General Donnadieu, commander of the garrison, which brought the news to the Government, the revolt had only been put down after the most desperate fighting. "The corpses of the King's enemies," said the General in his despatch, "cover all the roads for a league round Gren.o.ble." [275] It was soon known that twenty-four prisoners had been condemned to death by court-martial, and sixteen of these actually executed: the court-martial recommended the other eight to the clemency of the Government. But the despatches of Donnadieu had thrown the Cabinet into a panic. Decazes, the most liberal of the Ministers, himself signed the hasty order requiring the remaining prisoners to be put to death. They perished; and when it was too late the Government learnt that Donnadieu's narrative was a ma.s.s of the grossest exaggerations, and that the affair which he had represented as an insurrection of the whole Department was conducted by about 300 peasants, half of whom were unarmed. The violence and illegality with which the General proceeded to establish a regime of military law soon brought him into collision with the Government. He became the hero of the Ultra-Royalists; but the Ministry, which was unwilling to make a public confession that it had needlessly put eight persons to death, had to bear the odium of an act of cruelty for which Donnadieu was really responsible.

The part into which Decazes had been entrapped probably strengthened the determination of this Minister, who was now gaining great influence over the King, to strike with energy against the Ultra-Royalist faction. From this time he steadily led the King towards the only measure which could free the country from the rule of the Count of Artois and the reactionists--the dissolution of Parliament.

[Decazes.]

[Dissolution of the Chamber, Sept. 5, 1816.]

Louis XVIII. depended much on the society of some personal favourite.

Decazes was young and an agreeable companion; his business as Police-Minister gave him the opportunity of amusing the King with anecdotes and gossip much more congenial to the old man's taste than discussions on finance or const.i.tutional law. Louis came to regard Decazes almost as a son, and gratified his own studious inclination by teaching him English.

The Minister's enemies said that he won the King's heart by taking private lessons from some obscure Briton, and attributing his extraordinary progress to the skill of his royal master. But Decazes had a more effective retort than witticism. He opened the letters of the Ultra-Royalists and laid them before the King. Louis found that these loyal subjects jested upon his infirmities, called him a dupe in the hands of Jacobins, and grumbled at him for so long delaying the happy hour when Artois should ascend the throne. Humorous as Louis was, he was not altogether pleased to read that he "ought either to open his eyes or to close them for ever." At the same time the reports of Decazes' local agents proved that the Ultra-Royalist party were in reality weak in numbers and unpopular throughout the greater part of the country. The project of a dissolution was laid before the Ministers and some of the King's confidants. Though the Amba.s.sadors were not consulted on the measure, it was certain that they would not resist it. No word of the Ministerial plot reached the rival camp of Artois. The King gained courage, and on the 5th of September signed the Ordonnance which appealed from the Parliament to the nation, and, to the anger and consternation of the Ultra-Royalists, made an end of the intractable Chamber a few weeks before the time which had been fixed for its re-a.s.sembling.

[Electoral law, 1817.]

France was well rid of a body of men who had been elected at a moment of despair, and who would either have prolonged the occupation of the country by foreign armies, or have plunged the nation into civil war. The elections which followed were favourable to the Government. The questions fruitlessly agitated in the a.s.sembly of 1815 were settled to the satisfaction of the public in the new Parliament. An electoral law was pa.s.sed, which, while it retained the high franchise fixed by the Charta, and the rule of renewing the Chamber by fifths, gave life and value to the representative system by making the elections direct. Though the const.i.tuent body of all France scarcely numbered under this arrangement a hundred thousand persons, it was extensive enough to contain a majority hostile to the reactionary policy of the Church and the n.o.blesse. The men who had made wealth by banking, commerce, or manufactures, the so-called higher bourgeoisie, greatly exceeded in number the larger landed proprietors; and although they were not usually democratic in their opinions, they were liberal, and keenly attached to the modern as against the old inst.i.tutions of France, inasmuch as their industrial interests and their own personal importance depended upon the maintenance of the victory won in 1789 against aristocratic privilege and monopoly. So strong was the hostility between the civic middle cla.s.s and the landed n.o.blesse, that the Ultra-Royalists in the Chamber sought, as they had done in the year before, to extend the franchise to the peasantry, in the hope of overpowering wealth with numbers. The electoral law, however, pa.s.sed both Houses in the form in which it had been drawn up by the Government. Though deemed narrow and oligarchical by the next generation, it was considered, and with justice, as a great victory won by liberalism at the time. The middle cla.s.s of Great Britain had to wait for fifteen years before it obtained anything like the weight in the representation given to the middle cla.s.s of France by the law of 1817.

[Establishment of financial credit.]

Not many of the persons who had been imprisoned under the provisional acts of the last year now remained in confinement. It was considered necessary to prolong the Laws of Public Security, and they were re-enacted, but under a much softened form. It remained for the new Chamber to restore the financial credit of the country by making some equitable arrangement for securing the capital and paying the interest of the unfunded debt. Projects of repudiation now gained no hearing. Richelieu consented to make an annual allowance to the Church, equivalent to the rental of the Church forests; but the forests themselves were made security for the debt, and the power of sale was granted to the Government. Pending such repayment of the capital, the holders of unfunded debt received stock, calculated at its real, not at its t.i.tular, value. The effect of this measure was at once evident. The Government was enabled to enter into negotiations for a loan, which promised it the means of paying the indemnities due to the foreign Powers. On this payment depended the possibility of withdrawing the army of occupation. Though Wellington at first offered some resistance, thirty thousand men were removed in the spring of 1817; and the Czar allowed Richelieu to hope that, if no further difficulties should arise, the complete evacuation of French territory might take place in the following year.

[Character of the years 1816-18.]

Thus the dangers with which reactionary pa.s.sion had threatened France appeared to be pa.s.sing away. The partial renovation of the Chamber which took place in the autumn of 1817 still further strengthened the Ministry of Richelieu and weakened the Ultra-Royalist opposition. A few more months pa.s.sed, and before the third anniversary of Waterloo, the Czar was ready to advise the entire withdrawal of foreign armies from France. An invitation was issued to the Powers to meet in Conference at Aix-la-Chapelle. There was no longer any doubt that the five years' occupation, contemplated when the second Treaty of Paris was made, would be abandoned. The good will of Alexander, the friendliness of his Amba.s.sador, Pozzo di Borgo, who, as a native of Corsica, had himself been a French subject, and who now aspired to become Minister of France, were powerful influences in favour of Louis XVIII. and his kingdom; much, however, of the speedy restoration of confidence was due to the temperate rule of Richelieu. The nation itself, far from suffering from Napoleon's fall, regained something of the spontaneous energy so rich in 1789, so wanting at a later period. The cloud of military disaster lifted; new mental and political life began; and under the dynasty forced back by foreign arms France awoke to an activity unknown to it while its chief gave laws to Europe. Parliamentary debate offered the means of legal opposition to those who bore no friendship to the Court: conspiracy, though it alarmed at the moment, had become the resort only of the obscure and the powerless. Groups of able men were gathering around recognised leaders, or uniting in defence of a common political creed. The Press, dumb under Napoleon except for purposes of sycophancy, gradually became a power in the land. Even the dishonest eloquence of Chateaubriand, enforcing the principles of legal and const.i.tutional liberty on behalf of a party which would fain have used every weapon of despotism in its own interest, proved that the leaden weight that had so long crushed thought and expression existed no more.

[Prussia after 1815.]

[Edict promising a Const.i.tution, May 22, 1815.]

But if the years between 1815 and 1819 were in France years of hope and progress, it was not so with Europe generally. In England they were years of almost unparalleled suffering and discontent; in Italy the rule of Austria grew more and more anti-national; in Prussia, though a vigorous local and financial administration hastened the recovery of the impoverished land, the hopes of liberty declined beneath the reviving energy of the n.o.bles and the resistance of the friends of absolutism. When Stein had summoned the Prussian people to take up arms for their Fatherland, he had believed that neither Frederick William nor Alexander would allow Prussia to remain without free inst.i.tutions after the battle was won. The keener spirits in the War of Liberation had scarcely distinguished between the cause of national independence and that of internal liberty. They returned from the battlefields of Saxony and France, knowing that the Prussian nation had unsparingly offered up life and wealth at the call of patriotism, and believing that a patriot-king would rejoice to crown his triumph by inaugurating German freedom. For a while the hope seemed near fulfilment. On the 22nd of May, 1815, Frederick William published an ordinance, declaring that a Representation of the People should be established. [276] For this end the King stated that the existing Provincial Estates should be re-organised, and new ones founded where none existed, and that out of the Provincial Estates the a.s.sembly of Representatives of the country should be chosen. It was added that a commission would be appointed, to organise under Hardenberg's presidency the system of representation, and to draw up a written Const.i.tution. The right of discussing all legislative measures affecting person or property was promised to the a.s.sembly. Though foreign affairs seemed to be directly excluded from parliamentary debate, and the language of the Edict suggested that the representative body would only have a consultative voice, without the power either of originating or of rejecting laws, these reservations only showed the caution natural on the part of a Government divesting itself for the first time of absolute power. Guarded as it was, the scheme laid down by the King would hardly have displeased the men who had done the most to make const.i.tutional rule in Prussia possible.

[Resistance of feudal and autocratic parties.]

But the promise of Frederick William was destined to remain unfulfilled. It was no good omen for Prussia that Stein, who had rendered such glorious services to his country and to all Europe, was suffered to retire from public life. The old court-party at Berlin, politicians who had been forced to make way for more popular men, landowners who had never pardoned the liberation of the serf, all the interests of absolutism and cla.s.s-privilege which had disappeared for a moment in the great struggle for national existence, gradually re-a.s.serted their influence over the King, and undermined the authority of Hardenberg, himself sinking into old age amid circ.u.mstances of private life that left to old age little of its honour. To decide even in principle upon the basis to be given to the new Prussian Const.i.tution would have taxed all the foresight and all the constructive skill of the most experienced statesman; for by the side of the ancient dominion of the Hohenzollerns there were now the Rhenish and the Saxon Provinces, alien in spirit and of doubtful loyalty, in addition to Polish territory and smaller German districts acquired at intervals between 1792 and 1815. Hardenberg was right in endeavouring to link the Const.i.tution with something that had come down from the past; but the decision that the General a.s.sembly should be formed out of the Provincial Estates was probably an injudicious one; for these Estates, in their present form, were mainly corporations of n.o.bles, and the spirit which animated them was at once the spirit of cla.s.s-privilege and of an intensely strong localism.

Hardenberg had not only occasioned an unnecessary delay by basing the representative system upon a reform of the Provincial Estates, but had exposed himself to sharp attacks from these very bodies, to whom nothing was more odious than the absorption of their own dignity by a General a.s.sembly. It became evident that the process of forming a Const.i.tution would be a tedious one; and in the meantime the opponents of the popular movement opened their attack upon the men and the ideas whose influence in the war of Liberation appeared to have made so great a break between the German present and the past.

[Schmalz's pamphlet, 1815.]