Children of the Revolution Page 6

  RESTORING THE ANCIEN RÉGIME?

  Just as in 1814 Talleyrand had tried to manage the transition from empire to monarchy, in order to safeguard the interests of the political class, so in 1815 it was Fouché the regicide who tried to salvage what he could from the republican and imperial period as Louis XVIII and his court headed back to Paris. He persuaded the Duke of Wellington, who was very much arbiter of the situation, that he alone could control a Chamber of Deputies elected under the Additional Act that preferred a regency in the name of Napoleon’s son to the restoration of monarchy, and likewise that he had control over the 25,000 fédérés or revolutionary volunteers in Paris who had sworn to prevent another restoration.52 Wellington thus insisted that Fouché serve as minister of police in a government headed by Talleyrand who, just back from Vienna where he had signed a peace treaty with the Allies, must also be foreign minister.

  This incongruous duo at the head of French affairs did not, however, long outlast the elections to the new Chamber of Deputies in August 1815. On the crest of the White Terror 350 ultra-royalists were returned to the so-called Chambre Introuvable or Matchless Chamber, a decisive verdict of an electorate of 75,000 propertied voters who had opposed the Revolution, endured Napoleon, but felt abandoned by the recycling of the political elite, tarnished by the Revolution or the Empire, whenever the monarchy was restored. One of their leaders was the Comte de Villèle, appointed mayor of Toulouse in July 1815 by the Duc d’Angoulême. He claimed to be against the worst excesses of the White Terror, but challenged the authority of Augustin de Rémusat, now prefect at Toulouse, and was unable to stop the brutal murder of General Ramel, commander of the National Guard in Toulouse, on 17 August. The final fall of Napoleon, according to Villèle, had to be used to ‘deliver a mortal blow to the ideas of the Revolution which he represented’.53

  The triumph of the ultra-royalists in the Chamber indeed brought about a settling of accounts with the old political class. The Talleyrand–Fouché ministry was driven unceremoniously from office, and replaced on 24 September by a ministry headed by the Duc de Richelieu. Richelieu was a high-profile émigré who had not only left the country but had served under Russian emperors he judged to be more legitimate than revolutionary assemblies or Napoleon, and finished up as governor-general of New Russia (the Ukraine). He was dismissed by Talleyrand as ‘the Frenchman who knows the Crimea best’, but in fact did what he could to maintain a moderate royalist line while constantly harassed by the reactionary court faction of the Comte d’Artois.54

  The triumph of the ultras settled the fate of Marshal Ney, whose defection in March that year had forced the court to flee precipitately to Belgium. Tried by the Chamber of Peers in November 1815 he was found guilty of treason by 157 of the 161 peers, with just three finding extenuating circumstances and only one voting against. This was the thirty-year-old Victor de Broglie, whose best friend was Madame de Staël’s son and who would marry her daughter in 1816; he refused to call into question Ney’s fundamental patriotism.55 De Broglie managed to rally seventeen peers in favour of deportation, but 139 voted for the death penalty, including weathercocks such as Marshal Marmont, who had deserted Napoleon in April 1814, and careerists who had rallied to Napoleon in the Hundred Days and were trying to refashion a royalist virginity, like Comte Molé.56

  The triumph of the ultras provoked a purge of revolutionaries who were finally called to answer for their crimes. The instrument of proscription, used so effectively by the revolutionaries against their enemies, was now turned against the revolutionaries themselves. The most vindictive proposal of the Chambre Introuvable would have condemned 850 people to death or deportation. The law passed on 12 January 1816 singled out the regicides in particular for exile, their departure for Brussels or Geneva echoing the flight of royalists to Coblenz or Turin a generation earlier. Talleyrand, who was not a regicide, wriggled out again but justice finally caught up with Fouché who, hurried off to be ambassador in Dresden after he fell from power, was added to the list of exiles in 1816 and died in Trieste in 1820. Carnot, also exiled, died in Magdeburg in 1823.

  In order to survive, however, the restored monarchy needed to be more than a tool of the ultras. Like any regime it needed to build bridges to a wider constituency. The role model for the Duc de Richelieu was Sully, the judicious first minister of Henri I V, who had ended the French Wars of Religion and whose statue on the Pont-Neuf, destroyed in the Revolution, was returned to its plinth with great ceremony in 1818.57 His most influential minister was Élie Decazes, a bourgeois of Libourne in the Gironde, who under the Empire became a magistrate in Paris and secretary to Napoleon’s mother, Madame Mère, and then to Napoleon’s brother, Louis, King of Holland, managing his affairs in France. Too close to the imp erial family to enjoy favour with the Bourbons in 1814, he steered clear of the emperor during the Hundred Days and after Waterloo used his role on the Paris National Guard to counter the threat of the fédérés and ensure the safe return to the capital of the royal family. Made Paris prefect of police by Talleyrand and minister of police under Richelieu, he also won the confidence of the childless Louis XVIII, who began to treat him as his own adoptive son, writing to him as ‘mon cher enfant’ and ‘mon bon fils’.58 The maxim of Decazes was ‘to nationalize the royalty and to royalize France’.59 He saw that at some point the ministry would need to break free of the grip of the Chambre Introuvable and obtained the ordinance of 5 September 1816 from the king to dissolve it. This was regarded as nothing less than a coup d’état by the ultras, and Chateaubriand, already smarting from not having been offered a portfolio in the government, unleashed a biting attack on the ministers whose policy since the Restoration, he alleged, had been to ‘govern France in the revolutionary interest’.60

  Decazes now emerged as the king’s leading minister, first as minister of the interior in December 1818, then in November 1819 as president of the council. Among his advisers were the so-called Doctrinaires around Royer-Collard, the somewhat austere patron of the likes of Guizot. Their doctrine was that while the Revolution had committed many crimes – including the execution of his own father, of which Guizot never spoke – it had embedded certain institutional gains, such as constitutional rule, representative government, a free press and equality before the law, which must not be called into question by any regime. They were intellectuals reluctant to take office lest it compromise them, preferring to exercise influence through the Council of State, where they could draft laws, and in the Chamber of Deputies and the press, where they could influence opinion. They took credit for the electoral law of February 1817 which enfranchised a middle class that paid 300 francs in tax per year and a slightly more liberal press law of May 1819. They saw it as their task to keep the government maintained in this direction, to prevent it being swept off course by winds pushing too far to the right, or to the left.61

  After the Chambre Introuvable had been disbanded, however, the next issue was how far the ministry should seek agreement with the liberal opposition, which had flourished briefly in the troubled year 1814–15 and now again became active. Benjamin Constant, persona non grata after his role in the Hundred Days, fled to England in 1815 but returned to France in 1816 to found two new liberal papers, the Mercure in 1817, and the Minerve Française in 1818, with a circulation of 10,000.62 Madame de Staël died in 1817 but her message was delivered from the grave in her posthumous Considerations on the French Revolution (1818), which while condemning Terror and tyranny praised the moderate revolution aimed at by friends of liberty such as Lafayette. Financial backing for the liberals was provided by Jacques Laffitte, a rich banker whose father had been a carpenter in Bayonne and who, despite being governor of the Banque de France, felt snubbed by the aristocratic society of the Restoration. After the ultra landslide of 1815 the electoral system of 1817 went back to the Directorial method of renewing a fifth of the Chamber every year, but while the threat under the Directory had been from royalists, now it was from liberals. The liberal financiers Laffit
te and Casimir Périer were elected in 1817, Lafayette and soldier-turned-lawyer Manuel in 1818, Constant himself and the Abbé Grégoire, former bishop in the Constitutional Church who had approved the execution of the king, in 1819. What stood between the liberal opposition and the ministry, however, was the question of amnesty for the regicides exiled in 1816. The verdict of the ministry, given by justice minister De Selves, a Doctrinaire who had unusually accepted office under Decazes, was ‘Never!’63

  The ministry’s balancing act between ultras and liberals was ended on 13 February 1820 when the Duc de Berry, the son of the Comte d’Artois and heir to the throne, was stabbed at the opera. As Decazes rushed to the scene he announced, ‘We are all assassinated!’64 Chateaubriand, on behalf of the ultras, remarked that Decazes’ own foot had ‘slipped on the blood’.65 Public opinion turned against the liberals, whose leaders were ejected from the Chamber in 1820 and 1821. Artois and the Duc and Duchesse d’Angoulême were able to prevail upon the king to dismiss Decazes, and Chateaubriand, trumpeting from his Conservative newspaper, claimed credit for promoting Villèle first to a post in the government and then to chief minister, in December 1821. The ambition of Villèle, proclaiming ‘the union of the government with the royalists’, was as far as possible to restore the Ancien Régime.66 When a liberal ministry came to power in Spain in 1823 the Duc d’Angoulême led a French army flying the white Bourbon flag to remove it on behalf of the reactionary monarch, Ferdinand VII. Louis XVIII died in 1824 and was succeeded by Artois, darling of the émigrés and ultras since 1789. His coronation as Charles X in Reims cathedral was an occasion of absolutist pomp the like of which had not been seen since that of his ill-fated brother in 1775.

  RE-RUNNING THE REVOLUTION

  The attempt by the monarchy and its reactionary ministers to put back the clock to before 1789 triggered a re-run of the French Revolution. The main difference was that the contending parties were sharply aware of what had gone before and of the lessons that needed to be learned. The argument of the reactionaries was that constitutional limitations on absolute power handed the monarchy bound and gagged into the hands of liberals who were unable to check the tide of revolution rising behind them. The argument of liberals was that constitutional monarchy was the only guarantee of both liberty and order and this time they would be careful to stop the course of revolution once this limited gain had been achieved. Republic and empire were anathema and must never be allowed to recur.

  As in 1789 the 1820s experienced a good deal of popular discontent. This time, however, it was defined by a generation of revolutionary and patriotic activity and looked back to both republican heroes and Napoleon. Former fédérés who had volunteered to defend Paris and other cities against the return of the Bourbons in 1815, demi-soldes or disbanded officers of Napoleon’s armies on half-pay, former grognards who returned to their towns and villages with scarce a pension but dreams of military grandeur, middle-class professionals who had served the Napoleonic regime in one capacity or another and students born at the turn of the century whose ambitions were crushed by the Restoration were all elements of a constituency that were not prepared to accept a return to the Ancien Régime.67 The reinvention of Napoleon as a popular leader during the Hundred Days and his death in 1821 meant that there was a powerful convergence between republican and Bonapartist opinion.68 Political activity was closely circumscribed and press censorship tightened so that opposition was often covert or conspiratorial. Goguettes or drinking clubs were favourite meeting-places for those who wished to sing the political songs of Béranger or Debraux exalting the banned tricolour flag or Napoleon’s column in the place Vendôme, pulled down in 1814, or exchange political prints such as the Grenadier of Waterloo (1818) of former fédéré Charlet.69 Secret societies of Carbonari sprang up in which civilian activists linked up with conspirators within the army and there was a spate of attempts to provoke mutiny and insurrection in garrisons: Paris in 1820, Saumur and Belfort in 1821, Strasbourg and La Rochelle in 1822. The execution of the four sergeants who had mutinied at La Rochelle was witnessed by Auguste Blanqui, a schoolboy in Paris, who henceforth saw politics as ‘a ferocious battle to which one must commit one’s liberty and one’s life’.70

  Liberal politicians and journalists were in two minds about conspiracy and revolt. Some, such as Lafayette and Manuel, were nominally members of conspiratorial organizations and offered their patronage without wanting to risk greater involvement. Others, like Guizot, feared that revolt would bring back 1793; Guizot told Manuel in 1822 that it was necessary for France to ‘expel the revolutionary spirit that still torments her’.71 After his lectures at the Sorbonne and École Normale were closed down by the Villèle government in 1822 he gave himself over to journalism, founding the liberal but severe, legalistic and antipopular Globe in 1824. A new generation of young liberals, born around 1800, were recruited to the cause. Guizot brought to the Globe the twenty-seven-year-old Charles de Rémusat, whose father Augustin had been dismissed from the prefectoral corps by Villèle in 1822 and died the following year.72 A young journalist the same age as Rémusat, Adolphe Thiers, came to Paris from Aix-en-Provence crowned by literary prizes and enjoyed the patronage of Jacques Laffitte, who employed him on a rival paper, the Constitutional, which was more enthusiastic about revolutionary spirit.73 What Guizot and Thiers had in common, however, was a commitment to rewrite the French Revolution not as a spectre of Terror to be waved by reactionaries but as the source of legitimacy for those who wanted to contest attempts to restore the Ancien Régime. Guizot achieved this in his lectures on French and European civilization which he was allowed to give again after 1828, in which he argued that the Revolution was the fruit of an alliance against feudalism of the monarchy and Third Estate or bourgeoisie that had been developing since the rise of the medieval town.74 In a hugely ambitious history of the Revolution that appeared between 1823 and 1827 Thiers demonstrated that it was an inevitable result of the awakening of the desire for freedom from the top to the bottom of the social scale, but while liberals such as Lafayette and the Girondins had rightly tried to reconcile liberty and order it had been thrown off course by the ‘excesses of the multitude’ and ‘the vile populace’ which relished dipping handkerchiefs in the blood of the beheaded Louis XVI.75

  The contest was not only between partisans of the Ancien Régime and champions of the Revolution, but also between those who wanted a revolution to bring back the Republic or install the nineteen-year-old King of Rome as Napoleon II and those who wanted a constitutional monarchy to secure the legal gains of the Revolution of 1789 but to avoid revolution-as-violence at all costs. The liberals made a breakthrough in the elections of 1827 and Villèle resigned. His successor, Martignac, from a family of Bordeaux noblesse de robe or nobles of the judiciary, had taken part in the invasion of liberal Spain in 1823 but in 1828 made an attempt to build bridges to French liberals.76 However, there was no room for a ‘Decazes of Charles X’ and he was summarily replaced in August 1829 by Jules de Polignac, son of Marie-Antoinette’s favourite, a former soldier in Condé’s army, imprisoned for conspiracy in 1804, and confidant of the Comte d’Artois, now Charles X. Together they were careless of public opinion, had no sense that a ministry should be responsible to the parliamentary majority and were prepared to violate the Charter in order to restore absolute monarchy.77 In January 1830 Thiers founded a new paper, the National, in which he campaigned for what he saw as the British system after 1688, namely an inviolable monarch and hereditary peerage but ministers responsible to the majority in the Chamber of Deputies. The king’s address to parliament on 2 March 1830 was uncompromising, and 221 opposition deputies signed an address to remind him that ‘France wants anarchy no more than you want despotism.’78 The king dissolved the Chamber, but new elections only increased the liberal opposition against him. In response Charles mounted a coup d’état with four ordinances issued from his palace of Saint-Cloud on 25 July which dissolved the Chamber that had not yet met, reduced the size of
the electorate, called new elections in September and ended press freedom.