Chapter XIII (1)

Concert of Europe after 1815--Spirit of the Foreign Policy of Alexander, of Metternich, and of the English Ministry--Metternich's action in Italy, England's in Sicily and Spain--The Reaction in France--Richelieu and the New Chamber--Execution of Ney--Imprisonments and persecutions--Conduct of the Ultra-Royalists in Parliament--Contests on the Electoral Bill and the Budget--The Chamber prorogued--Affair of Grenoble--Dissolution of the Chamber--Electoral Law and Financial Settlement of 1817--Character of the first years of peace in Europe generally--Promise of a Constitution in Prussia--Hardenberg opposed by the partisans of autocracy and privilege--Schmalz's Pamphlet--Delay of Constitutional Reform in Germany at large--The Wartburg Festival--Progress of Reaction--The Czar now inclines to repression--Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle--Evacuation of France--Growing influence of Metternich in Europe--His action on Prussia--Murder of Kotzebue--The Carlsbad Conference and measures of repression in Germany--Richelieu and Decazes--Murder of the Duke of Berry--Progress of the reaction in France--General causes of the victory of reaction in Europe.

[Concert of Europe regarding France.]

For nearly twenty years the career of Bonaparte had given to European history the unity of interest which belongs to a single life. This unity does not immediately disappear on the disappearance of his mighty figure. The Powers of Europe had been too closely involved in the common struggle, their interests were too deeply concerned in the maintenance of the newly-established order, for the thoughts of Governments to be withdrawn from foreign affairs, and the currents of national policy to fall at once apart into separate channels. The Allied forces continued to occupy France with Wellington as commander-in-chief; the defence of the Bourbon monarchy had been declared the cause of Europe at large; the conditions under which the numbers of the army of occupation might be reduced, or the period of occupation shortened, remained to be fixed by the Allies themselves. France thus formed the object of a common European deliberation; nor was the concert of the Powers without its peculiar organ. An International Council was created at Paris, consisting of the Ambassadors of the four great Courts. The forms of a coalition were, for the first time, preserved after the conclusion of peace. Communications were addressed to the Government of Louis XVIII., in the name of all the Powers together. The Council of Ambassadors met at regular intervals, and not only transacted business relating to the army of occupation and the payment of indemnities, but discussed the domestic policy of the French Government, and the situation of parties or the signs of political opinion in the Assembly and the nation.

[Action of the Powers outside France.]

In thus watching over the restored Bourbon monarchy, the Courts of Europe were doing no more than they had bound themselves to do by treaty. Paris, however, was not the only field for a busy diplomacy. In most of the minor capitals of Europe each of the Great Powers had its own supposed interests to pursue, or its own principles of government to inculcate. An age of transition seemed to have begun. Constitutions had been promised in many States, and created in some; in Spain and in Sicily they had reached the third stage, that of suppression. It was not likely that the statesmen who had succeeded to Napoleon's power in Europe should hold themselves entirely aloof from the affairs of their weaker neighbours, least of all when a neighbouring agitation might endanger themselves. In one respect the intentions of the British, the Austrian, and the Russian Governments were identical, and continued to be so, namely, in the determination to countenance no revolutionary movement. Revolution, owing to the experience of 1793, had come to be regarded as synonymous with aggressive warfare. Jacobins, anarchists, disturbers of the public peace, were only different names for one and the same class of international criminals, who were indeed indigenous to France, but might equally endanger the peace of mankind in other countries. Against these fomenters of mischief all the Courts were at one.

[Alexander.]

Here, however, agreement ceased. It was admitted that between revolutionary disturbance and the enjoyment of constitutional liberty a wide interval existed, and the statesmen of the leading Powers held by no means the same views as to the true relation between nations and their rulers. The most liberal in theory among the Sovereigns of 1815 was the Emperor Alexander. Already, in the summer of 1815, he had declared the Duchy of Warsaw to be restored to independence and nationality, under the title of the Kingdom of Poland; and before the end of the year he had granted it a Constitution, which created certain representative assemblies, and provided the new kingdom with an army and an administration of its own, into which no person not a Pole could enter. The promised introduction of Parliamentary life into Poland was but the first of a series of reforms dimly planned by Alexander, which was to culminate in the bestowal of a Constitution upon Russia itself, and the emancipation of the serf. [251] Animated by hopes like these for his own people, hopes which, while they lasted, were not merely sincere but ardent, Alexander was also friendly to the cause of constitutional government in other countries. Ambition mingled with disinterested impulses in the foreign policy of the Czar. It was impossible that Alexander should forget the league into which England and Austria had so lately entered against him. He was anxious to keep France on his side; he was not inclined to forego the satisfaction of weakening Austria by supporting national hopes in Italy; [252] and he hoped to create some counterpoise to England's maritime power by allying Russia with a strengthened and better-administered Spain. Agents of the Czar abounded in Italy and in Germany, but in no capital was the Ambassador of Russia more active than in Madrid. General Tatistcheff, who was appointed to this post in 1814, became the terror of all his colleagues and of the Cabinet of London from his extraordinary activity in intrigue; but in relation to the internal affairs of Spain his influence was beneficial; and it was frequently directed towards the support of reforming Ministers, whom King Ferdinand, if free from foreign pressure, would speedily have sacrificed to the pleasure of his favourites and confessors.

[Metternich.]

[Metternich's policy in Germany.]

[In Italy.]

In the eyes of Prince Metternich, the all-powerful Minister of Austria, Alexander was little better than a Jacobin. The Austrian State, though its frontiers had been five times changed since 1792, had continued in a remarkable degree free from the impulse to internal change. The Emperor Francis was the personification of resistance to progress; the Minister owed his unrivalled position not more to his own skilful statesmanship in the great crisis of 1813 than to a genuine accord with the feelings of his master. If Francis was not a man of intellect, Metternich was certainly a man of character; and for a considerable period they succeeded in impressing the stamp of their own strongly-marked Austrian policy upon Europe. The force of their influence sprang from no remote source; it was due mainly to a steady intolerance of all principles not their own. Metternich described his system with equal simplicity and precision as an attempt neither to innovate nor to go back to the past, but to keep things as they were. In the old Austrian dominions this was not difficult to do, for things had no tendency to move and remained fixed of themselves; [253] but on the outside, both on the north and on the south, ideas were at work which, according to Metternich, ought never to have entered the world, but, having unfortunately gained admittance, made it the task of Governments to resist their influence by all available means. Stein and the leaders of the Prussian War of Liberation had agitated Germany with hopes of national unity, of Parliaments, and of the impulsion of the executive powers of State by public opinion. Against these northern innovators, Metternich had already won an important victory in the formation of the Federal Constitution. The weakness and timidity of the King of Prussia made it probable that, although he was now promising his subjects a Constitution, he might at no distant date be led to unite with other German Governments in a system of repression, and in placing Liberalism under the ban of the Diet. In Italy, according to the conservative statesman, the same dangers existed and the same remedies were required. Austria, through the acquisition of Venice, now possessed four times as large a territory beyond the Alps as it had possessed before 1792; but the population was no longer the quiescent and contented folk that it had been in the days of Maria Theresa. Napoleon's kingdom and army of Italy had taught the people warfare, and given them political aims and a more masculine spirit. Metternich's own generals had promised the Italians independence when they entered the country in 1814; Murat's raid a year later had actually been undertaken in the name of Italian unity. These were disagreeable incidents, and signs were not wanting of the existence of a revolutionary spirit in the Italian provinces of Austria, especially among the officers who had served under Napoleon. Metternich was perfectly clear as to the duties of his Government. The Italians might have a Viceroy to keep Court at Milan, a body of native officials to conduct their minor affairs, and a mock Congregation or Council, without any rights, powers, or functions whatever; if this did not satisfy them, they were a rebellious people, and government must be conducted by means of spies, police, and the dungeons of the Spielberg. [254]

[Scheme of an Austrian Protectorate over Italy.]

On this system, backed by great military force, there was nothing to fear from the malcontents of Lombardy and Venice: it remained for Metternich to extend the same security to the rest of the peninsula, and by a series of treaties to effect the double end of exterminating constitutional government and of establishing an Austrian Protectorate over the entire country, from the Alps to the Sicilian Straits. The design was so ambitious that Metternich had not dared to disclose it at the Congress of Vienna; it was in fact a direct violation of the Treaty of Paris, and of the resolution of the Congress, that Italy, outside the possessions of Austria, should consist of independent States. The first Sovereign over whom the net was cast was Ferdinand of Naples. On the 15th of June, 1815, immediately after the overthrow of Murat, King Ferdinand signed a Treaty of Alliance with Austria, which contained a secret clause, pledging the King to introduce no change into his recovered kingdom inconsistent with its own old monarchical principles, or with the principles which had been adopted by the Emperor of Austria for the government of his Italian provinces. [255] Ferdinand, two years before, had been compelled by Great Britain to grant Sicily a Constitution, and was at this very moment promising one to Naples. The Sicilian Constitution was now tacitly condemned; the Neapolitans were duped. By a further secret clause, the two contracting Sovereigns undertook to communicate to one another everything that should come to their knowledge affecting the security and tranquillity of the Italian peninsula; in other words, the spies and the police of Ferdinand were now added to Metternich's staff in Lombardy. Tuscany, Modena, and Parma entered into much the same condition of vassalage; but the scheme for a universal federation of Italy under Austria's leadership failed through the resistance of Piedmont and of the Pope. Pius VII. resented the attempts of Austria, begun in 1797 and repeated at the Congress of Vienna, to deprive the Holy See of Bologna and Ravenna. The King of Sardinia, though pressed by England to accept Metternich's offer of alliance, maintained with great decision the independence of his country, and found in the support of the Czar a more potent argument than any that he could have drawn from treaties. [256]

[Spirit of England's foreign policy.]

The part played by the British Government at this epoch has been severely judged not only by the later opinion of England itself, but by the historical writers of almost every nation in Europe. It is perhaps fortunate for the fame of Pitt that he did not live to witness the accomplishment of the work in which he had laboured for thirteen years. The glory of a just and courageous struggle against Napoleon's tyranny remains with Pitt; the opprobrium of a settlement hostile to liberty has fallen on his successors. Yet there is no good ground for believing that Pitt would have attached a higher value to the rights or inclinations of individual communities than his successors did in re-adjusting the balance of power; on the contrary, he himself first proposed to destroy the Republic of Genoa, and to place Catholic Belgium under the Protestant Crown of Holland; nor was any principle dearer to him than that of aggrandising the House of Austria as a counterpoise to the power of France. [257] The Ministry of 1815 was indeed but too faithfully walking in the path into which Pitt had been driven by the King and the nation in 1793. Resistance to France had become the one absorbing care, the beginning and end of English statesmanship. Government at home had sunk to a narrow and unfeeling opposition to the attempts made from time to time to humanise the mass of the people, to reform an atrocious criminal law, to mitigate the civil wrongs inflicted in the name and the interest of a State-religion. No one in the Cabinet doubted that authority, as such, must be wiser than inexperienced popular desire, least of all the statesman who now, in conjunction with the Duke of Wellington, controlled the policy of Great Britain upon the Continent. Lord Castlereagh had no sympathy with cruelty or oppression in Continental rulers; he had just as little belief in the value of free institutions to their subjects. [258] The nature of his influence, which has been drawn sometimes in too dark colours, may be fairly gathered from the course of action which he followed in regard to Sicily and to Spain.

[In Sicily.]

In Sicily the representative of Great Britain, Lord William Bentinck, had forced King Ferdinand, who could not have maintained himself for an hour without the arms and money of England, to establish in 1813 a Parliament framed on the model of our own. The Parliament had not proved a wise or a capable body, but its faults were certainly not equal to those of King Ferdinand, and its re-construction under England's auspices would have been an affair of no great difficulty. Ferdinand, however, had always detested free institutions, and as soon as he regained the throne of Naples he determined to have done with the Sicilian Parliament. A correspondence on the intended change took place between Lord Castlereagh and A'Court, the Ambassador who had now succeeded Lord William Bentinck. [259] That the British Government, which had protected the Sicilian Crown against Napoleon at the height of his power, could have protected the Sicilian Constitution against King Ferdinand's edicts without detaching a single man-of-war's boat, is not open to doubt. Castlereagh, however, who for years past had been paying, stimulating, or rebuking every Government in Europe, and who had actually sent the British fleet to make the Norwegians submit to Bernadotte, now suddenly adopted the principle of non-intervention, and declared that, so long as Ferdinand did not persecute the Sicilians who at the invitation of England had taken part in political life, or reduce the privileges of Sicily below those which had existed prior to 1813, Great Britain would not interfere with his action. These stipulations were inserted in order to satisfy the House of Commons, and to avert the charge that England had not only abandoned the Sicilian Constitution, but consented to a change which left the Sicilians in a worse condition than if England had never intervened in their affairs. Lord Castlereagh shut his eyes to the confession involved, that he was leaving the Sicilians to a ruler who, but for such restraint, might be expected to destroy every vestige of public right, and to take the same bloody and unscrupulous revenge upon his subjects which he had taken when Nelson restored him to power in 1799.

[Action of England in Spain.]

The action of the British Government in Spain showed an equal readiness to commit the future to the wisdom of Courts. Lord Castlereagh was made acquainted with the Spanish Ferdinand's design of abolishing the Constitution on his return in the year 1814. "So far," he replied, "as the mere existence of the Constitution is at stake, it is impossible to believe that any change tranquilly effected can well be worse." [260] In this case the interposition of England would perhaps not have availed against a reactionary clergy and nation: Castlereagh, was, moreover, deceived by Ferdinand's professions that he had no desire to restore absolute government. He credited the King with the same kind of moderation which had led Louis XVIII. to accept the Charta in France, and looked forward to the maintenance of a constitutional régime, though under conditions more favourable to the executive power and to the influence of the great landed proprietors and clergy. [261] Events soon proved what value was to be attached to the word of the King; the flood of reaction and vengeance broke over the country; and from this time the British Government, half confessing and half excusing Ferdinand's misdeeds, exerted itself to check the outrages of despotism, and to mitigate the lot of those who were now its victims. In the interest of the restored monarchies themselves, as much as from a regard to the public opinion of Great Britain, the Ambassadors of England urged moderation upon all the Bourbon Courts. This, however, was also done by Metternich, who neither took pleasure in cruelty, nor desired to see new revolutions produced by the extravagances of priests and emigrants. It was not altogether without cause that the belief arose that there was little to choose, in reference to the constitutional liberties of other States, between the sentiments of Austria and those of the Ministers of free England. A difference, however, did exist. Metternich actually prohibited the Sovereigns over whom his influence extended from granting their subjects liberty: England, believing the Sovereigns to be more liberal than they were, did not interfere to preserve constitutions from destruction.

[Outrages of the Royalists in the south of France, June-August.]

Such was the general character of the influence now exercised by the three leading Powers of Europe. Prussia, which had neither a fleet like England, an Italian connection like Austria, nor an ambitious Sovereign like Russia, concerned itself little with distant States, and limited its direct action to the affairs of France, in which it possessed a substantial interest, inasmuch as the indemnities due from Louis XVIII. had yet to be paid. The possibility of recovering these sums depended upon the maintenance of peace and order in France; and from the first it was recognised by every Government in Europe that the principal danger to peace and order arose from the conduct of the Count of Artois and his friends, the party of reaction. The counterrevolutionary movement began in mere riot and outrage. No sooner had the news of the battle of Waterloo reached the south of France than the Royalist mob of Marseilles drove the garrison out of the town, and attacked the quarter inhabited by the Mameluke families whom Napoleon had brought from Egypt. Thirteen of these unfortunate persons, and about as many Bonapartist citizens, were murdered. [262] A few weeks later Nismes was given over to anarchy and pillage. Religious fanaticism here stimulated the passion of political revenge. The middle class in Nismes itself and a portion of the surrounding population were Protestant, and had hailed Napoleon's return from Elba as a deliverance from the ascendancy of priests, and from the threatened revival of the persecutions which they had suffered under the old Bourbon monarchy. The Catholics, who were much more numerous, included the lowest class in the town, the larger landed proprietors of the district, and above half of the peasantry. Bands of volunteers had been formed by the Duke of Angoulême at the beginning of the Hundred Days, in the hope of sustaining a civil war against Napoleon. After capitulating to the Emperor's generals, some companies had been attacked by villagers and hunted down like wild beasts. The bands now reassembled and entered Nismes. The garrison, after firing upon them, were forced to give up their arms, and in this defenceless state a considerable number of the soldiers were shot down (July 17). On the next day the leaders of the armed mob began to use their victory. For several weeks murder and outrage, deliberately planned and publicly announced, kept not only Nismes itself, but a wide extent of the surrounding country in constant terror. The Government acted slowly and feebly; the local authorities were intimidated; and, in spite of the remonstrances of Wellington and the Russian Ambassador, security was not restored until the Allies took the matter into their own hands, and a detachment of Austrian troops occupied the Department of the Gard. Other districts in the south of France witnessed the same outbreaks of Royalist ferocity. Avignon was disgraced by the murder of Marshal Brune, conqueror of the Russians and English in the Dutch campaign of 1799, an honest soldier, who after suffering Napoleon's neglect in the time of prosperity, had undertaken the heavy task of governing Marseilles during the Hundred Days. At Toulouse, General Ramel, himself a Royalist, was mortally wounded by a band of assassins, and savagely mutilated while lying disabled and expiring.

[Elections of 1815.]

Crimes like these were the counterpart of the September massacres of 1792; and the terrorism exercised by the Royalists in 1815 has been compared, as a whole, with the Republican Reign of Terror twenty-two years earlier. But the comparison does little credit to the historical sense of those who suggested it. The barbarities of 1815 were strictly local: shocking as they were, they scarcely amounted in all to an average day's work of Carrier or Fouché in 1794; and the action of the established Government, though culpably weak, was not itself criminal. A second and more dangerous stage of reaction began, however, when the work of popular vengeance closed. Elections for a new Chamber of Deputies were held at the end of August. The Liberals and the adherents of Napoleon, paralysed by the disasters of France and the invaders' presence, gave up all as lost: the Ministers of Louis XVIII. abstained from the usual electoral manoeuvres, Talleyrand through carelessness, Fouché from a desire to see parties evenly balanced: the ultra-Royalists alone had extended their organisation over France, and threw themselves into the contest with the utmost passion and energy. Numerically weak, they had the immense forces of the local administration on their side. The Préfets had gone over heart and soul to the cause of the Count of Artois, who indeed represented to them that he was acting under the King's own directions. The result was that an Assembly was elected to which France has seen only one parallel since, namely in the Parliament of 1871, elected when invaders again occupied the country, and the despotism of a second Bonaparte had ended in the same immeasurable calamity. The bulk of the candidates returned were country gentlemen whose names had never been heard of in public life since 1789, men who had resigned themselves to inaction and obscurity under the Republic and the Empire, and whose one political idea was to reverse the injuries done by the Revolution to their caste and to their Church. They were Royalists because a Bourbon monarchy alone could satisfy their claims: they called themselves ultra-Royalists, but they were so only in the sense that they required the monarchy to recognise no ally but themselves. They had already shown before Napoleon's return that their real chief was the Count of Artois, not the King; in what form their ultra-Royalism would exhibit itself in case the King should not submit to be their instrument remained to be proved.

[Fall of Talleyrand and Fouché.]

[Richelieu's Ministry, Sept., 1815.]

The first result of the elections was the downfall of Talleyrand's Liberal Ministry. The Count of Artois and the courtiers, who had been glad enough to secure Fouché's services while their own triumph was doubtful, now joined in the outcry of the country gentlemen again this monster of iniquity. Talleyrand promptly disencumbered himself of his old friend, and prepared to meet the new Parliament as an ultra-Royalist; but in the eyes of the victorious party Talleyrand himself, the married priest and the reputed accomplice in the murder of the Duke of Enghien, was little better than his regicide colleague; and before the Assembly met he was forced to retire from power.

[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 noble 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 Assembly which represented nothing but the passions and the ideas of a reactionary class. 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. Barbé-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 Duchess of Angoulême, 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] Labédoyère 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 pronounced 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 Blücher 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 associated 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 title 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 petition 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 constituted the Government of the usurper; all generals, préfets, and commanders of garrisons, who had obeyed Napoleon before a certain day, to be named by the Assembly; 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 principal 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 Labédoyère 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 Assembly 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 passed 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 instituted between the passing 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 Préfets 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 assumed 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 class 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 passion there succeeded the attempt to realise ideas. Hatred of the Revolution and all its works was still the dominant impulse of the Assembly; but whatever may have been the earlier desire of the Ultra-Royalist noblesse, 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 class. 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 noblesse had possessed privileges; it had not possessed political power. The Constitution 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 assemblies 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 petitions 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 passed 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-préfet 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 institutions 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 Constitution of 1795 and repeated in the Charta, Vaublanc proposed that a fifth part of the Assembly should retire each year.

[Counter-project of Villèle.]

If the Minister had intended to give the Ultra-Royalists the best possible means of exalting the peculiar policy of their class into something like a real defence of liberty, he could not have framed a more fitting measure. The creation of constituent 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 Villèle, 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. Villèle'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. Villèle believed that throughout France the wealthier men among the peasantry were as ready to follow the priests and nobles as they were in Provence and La Vendée. 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 class, on the conservative and religious instincts of the peasantry. Instead of excluding popular forces, Villèle 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 assemblies to every Frenchman paying annual taxes to the amount of fifty francs. In constituencies so large as to include all the more substantial peasantry, while sufficiently limited to exclude the ill-paid populace in towns, Villèle believed that the Church and the noblesse 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.]

Villèle'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 nobles 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. Villèle's boldness alarmed them: they anticipated that these great constituencies 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 Assembly 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 assemblies. The Government in its own interest had designated a troop of officials as electors: the Assembly, on the contrary, resolved that in the Electoral College of each Department, numbering in all about 150 persons, the fifty principal landowners of the Department should be entitled to vote, whether they had been nominated by the primary constituencies or not. Modified by this proviso, the project of Villèle passed the Assembly. 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 passed by the Assembly. 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 constitutional legislation of the country came to a dead-lock, while the Government and the Assembly 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 principal one. The Budget excited fiercer passions, 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 class which they had no scruple in impoverishing, it was the class 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 Ambassadors, 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 Duchess of Angoulême 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 Grenoble, May 6th. Executions.]