The Restoration

THE RESTORATION Who was to govern France? Republican or imperial, the regime which owed its origin to the Revolution was condemned in the war. France could do no more and the eagerness with which Napoleon's marshals ranged themselves on the side of Louis XVIII. showed that they, too, had had enough : the only possible solution lay in a restoration of the Bourbons, as recommended by Talleyrand and England. Without the Bourbons France was doomed to slavery or partition. The allies ended by accepting the dynasty.

The First Peace of Paris.

For the moment Louis' restoration seemed thoroughly popular as a guarantee of peace and liberty. Louis XVIII., who possessed experience, cleverness and dignity, preserved the civil work of the Revolution, despite the opposition of the émigrés, in the charter of June 4, by adopting a constitu tion on the English model, achieving the transition from absolute to constitutional monarchy, and thus reconciling the past with the present.

The first task of the allies was to make peace. This was by no means easy, and the hard conditions laid down showed that they had fought not against the Revolution, nor Napoleon, but against France. After having broken their promises made to the Comte d'Artois at the armistice of April 23 to evacuate French territory and to restore the frontiers of 1792 the allies, in the first Treaty of Paris of May 3o, 1814, reduced France, except for some slight modifications, to the frontiers she possessed before the Revolu tion. England, who had waged war for so long to prevent the French domination of Belgium, insisted, as in 1713, on a "bar rier" between the Scheldt and the north-western frontier of France, and stretched an eager hand over all the colonies and naval bases by whose possession she would be able to achieve her 18th century plan of naval supremacy.

Louis XVIII., with the brilliant assistance of Talleyrand, profited in the congress of Vienna by the rivalries of Prussia and Russia with Austria and England. In the name of the principle of legitimacy, which had caused him to concede the Charter ("concedee et octroyee") instead of accepting it, and in the name also of the disinterestedness of France, he was successful in pro tecting Germany from Prussia, Italy from Austria and Turkey from Russia. Scarcely a year after the entry of the allies into Paris France had recovered her place in Europe to an extent beyond all expectations.

The Hundred Days.

It was only necessary, however, for Napoleon to escape from Elba, with an audacity which recalled his return from Egypt, for nearly the whole of France to go over to him. What the natural friction between the returned emigres and the society which had grown up in their absence, and the discontent of half-pay officers, was unable to accomplish, the personal magnetism of Napoleon achieved. Disembarking on March 1, 1815, near Cannes he returned to the Tuileries in tri umph on the loth, while Louis XVIII. fled to Ghent. But it was in vain that Napoleon sought, by the acte additionnel of April 22, to win over the remnants of the Jacobins and the liberal oppo sition by proclaiming his intention of founding a new empire that should be at once democratic and pacific; he merely succeeded in endowing French politics with yet another illusion, one which Napoleon III. was to exploit with such disastrous success. The cannon of Waterloo (June 18, 1815) put an end to an adventure of which the last act was played out at St. Helena.

Louis XVIII. (1814-24) .

The results of the Hundred Days were very serious for France. They brought her into conflict with Europe and threatened her with the loss of what Talleyrand had obtained with such effort in 1814. The allies increased their de mands in the second Treaty of Paris. Subjected to military occu pation and bled white financially, France was reduced to less than she had been before the Revolution and was confronted by the Holy Alliance. Reconciliation at home was a matter of still greater difficulty ; for France was henceforth divided into parties —both equally intransigent; the one ultra-royalist, anxious for reprisals and scornful of the Charter ; the other composed of Bonapartists and Republicans united by the speedily concocted legend of a liberal Empire, chafing under their defeat and irre concilable. Once again the France of the ancien regime and the France of the Revolution came into conflict, and the whole 19th century is filled with the bitterness of their strife.

Louis XVIII. was very quickly led away by the White Jacobins. The legal reprisals against Marshal Ney and Labedoyere, who were held responsible for the further disasters of France, were followed, above all in the south, by scenes of popular violence which recalled the horrors of St. Bartholomew and the September massacres. The elections of Aug. 14, 1815, held in a turmoil of Royalist and Catholic passions, sent to Paris the cliambre in trouvable, a revival of the ancien regime. The chamber certainly showed no sign of docility to the Government. Neither the sub stitution of the ministry of the Duc de Richelieu for that of Talleyrand and Fouche, nor the enactment of a whole series of repressive laws that violated the Charter, succeeded in satisfying its tyrannical sense of loyalty, and Louis XVIII. was driven almost to a coup d'etat in order to get rid of the "Ultras" in Sept. 1816. Until 182o the king and Decazes, with the support of the Constitutionalists and the Liberals, succeeded reasonably well in getting the Constitution to work almost on the English lines of alternation in power of two great disciplined parties— the left centre and the right centre. Baron Louis, the Restoration minister of finance, brought order into the treasury, a neces sary preliminary condition for the termination, before the speci fied date, of the foreign military occupation; the electoral law of 1817, by its institution of direct elections and a high property qualification, assured the predominance of the middle classes; Gouvion Saint-Cyr's measure, passed in 1818 and in force until 1868, based the recruitment of the army on conscription; and the Liberal press law of 1819 enacted that press offences were to be tried by jury. But the rapid progress of the Liberal movement which in the course of elections had, in three years, increased the number of Liberal deputies from 25 to 90, among them the con stitutional Bishop Gregoire, followed by the assassination of the heir to the throne, the Duc de Berri, on Feb. 13, 182o, caused the downfall of Decazes and induced the government to reconcile itself with the Right (Feb. 1820).

Until the end of 1824, Decazes's successors devoted themselves to destroying his liberalizing work, especially that of the electoral and press laws. This was the period of great activity on the part of a secret society for clerical propaganda known as the Congre gation. In order to keep himself in power, Villele, a clever man of business, but bound by his party ties, was forced to submit to the impatience of the Comte d'Artois and the majority; the sus pension of individual liberty, the re-establishment of the censor ship, the electoral law of the "double vote" which favoured the more heavily taxed electors, and the surrender of the control of education to the clergy, marked the commencement of a counter revolution. The Spanish expedition advocated by Chateaubriand to restore Ferdinand VII. to his throne, was the work of the Con gregation and the Holy Alliance. The Liberals replied with a new form of opposition in the secret Carbonari societies (as in Naples), and in Spain these societies plotted military risings which were ruthlessly suppressed. But despite all this, on the death of Louis XVIII. in 1824, the dynasty appeared to be firmly established. The success of the Spanish expedition had reconciled the army to the White Flag. The growth of public credit and material prosperity satisfied the propertied classes. The opposi tion was destroyed, and public life was sterilized by the law of sep tennial elections which was voted by the "Chambre retrouvee" and which suspended for periods of seven years any regular political demonstrations.

Charles X. (1824-30).

It was the monarchy that became revolutionary on the accession of Charles X. (Sept. 16, 1824) who, although seated on the throne and endowed with greater charm, if less statesmanship, than his brother, was the most fanatical of those émigrés who had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. He grew weary of the Liberals' incessant reproach that the monarchy had come back in the baggage-wagons of the enemy, and he had to deal with a new generation which had never known the Revolution, nor even the Empire—a generation always in a hurry, hot-headed and impatient for the immediate realization of its desires.

Hence the experienced and moderate Villele, now prime minis ter, was attacked not only by the Left, but also by the extreme Right. The latter continually threw down challenges to the modern spirit of France. The law against sacrilege, the re-estab lishment of the right of primogeniture, the indemnity of a thou sand millions designed to tranquillize the holders of State prop erty, but which looked like compensation for the émigrés, all this aroused public feeling against Villele—even the conversion of the rentes which had reached par. The moderate and statesmanlike policy of Villele in foreign affairs was no less subject to attack; a stranger to the romanticism both of the Right and of the Left, he declined to embroil Europe for the sake of tearing up the 1815 treaties. The battle of Navarino (18a 7) in which the Turkish fleet was destroyed, was fought contrary to his instructions. He resigned in Jan. 1828, and the moderate royalist, Martignac, who succeeded him was only a stop-gap whom Charles X. endured without supporting, and with whom the Liberals bargained for the price of their assistance (Aug. 1829). Charles X. took the oppor tunity to form, with the prince de Polignac, a mystical and ig norant émigré, and the Comte de Bourmont, the traitor of Water loo, a fighting ministry which should at one and the same time enforce the royal prerogative and wipe out the treaties of 1815; he thought to find a brilliant success abroad in the capture of Algiers (July 5) which was the prelude to the conquest of Algeria, but the nation was not interested : Algiers was too far from the Rhine.

The Revolution of 1830.

After winning the July elections in 183o, the coalition of Liberal Monarchists and imperialist Repub licans first tried lawful resistance and subsequently achieved a popular coup d'etat against the ordinances of July 183o which had dissolved the chambre intraitable, eliminated license dealers from the electoral list and crippled the press. After a three days' battle against the troops feebly led by the Marmont of 1814, the workers, driven to the barricades by the deliberate closing of the workshops, conquered Europe at least as much as Charles X., who bore the white flag of the Bourbons away with him into perpetual exile (Aug. 14).

The July Monarchy (1830-48).

By summoning to the throne a Bourbon of the younger branch, the liberal bourgeoisie thought they had found the ideal solution of the problem. Would not the Duc d'Orleans, who was the son of a regicide, and who had fought at Valmy and at Jemappes, reconcile in his own person the Revolution and the ancien regime? In reality the July monarchy was affected with congenital weakness; it sought to model itself on the English monarchy which rested upon a single ancient tradi tion whereas in France there were two contradictory traditions— the Catholic-legitimist and the Revolutionary—both of which told against Louis Philippe. Under the affable mask of a bour geois and peace-loving king he hid a determination to recover an authority of which he was very jealous; from the beginning of his reign he fell foul of the legitimists, who looked upon him as the "king of the barricades" and the usurper of his cousin's crown. In the eyes of the Republicans, too, he was a usurper, since he had been chosen by only a part of a chamber in dissolution. The latter had thrown away their victory by installing the Duc d'Or leans in the Palais Bourbon. Thus, when Louis Philippe was en deavouring to reduce the revolution of 1830 to a mere substitution within the reigning family, the republicans considered that the revolutionary tradition had been revived with the tricolour and had restored to France the sympathies of the nations and demo cratic parties which sought support against Metternich's Holy Alliance. Finally, the Republican party who had withdrawn from power, if not from all activities, never ceased to remind him of the grave problem arising from the acquisition by the people of political power.

The men who, since 1829, had secretly organized the Orleanist Party and had chosen Louis Philippe, were divided among them selves on the policy to be followed in face of the opposition of the ultra-republican parties. Some thought with Laffitte and La Fayette that the July revolution and the lowering of the suffrage qualifi cation by the revision of the Charter amounted to no more than a prelude, and demanded an extension of the suffrage and a de struction of the treaties of 1815; hence their name, the "Party of Movement," and their frequent alliances with the Republicans. In the opinion of the "Party of Resistance," on the other hand, led by Casimir-Perier, Guizot and Thiers, the July monarchy should follow a conservative and pacific policy. They forgot the tempestuous experience of the electoral chambers of the Restora tion, and that Louis Philippe, who had the support neither of legitimacy nor of a plebiscite, had, in refusing universal suffrage, deprived himself of the support of the mass of the populace—at that time chiefly rural and the most conservative and pacific ele ment in the nation. From the start the new monarchy was beset with difficulties. The mob that had created it demanded its reward. Louis Philippe summoned to the ministry first Dupont de l'Eure, then Laffitte, leaders of the Party of Movement, in the hope of using them for his own ends. The ministers soon had to with stand the pressure of the mob, which demanded the death of Charles X.'s ministers, sacked the Church of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois, where the Legitimists had been guilty of a tactless demonstration, and brought about the terrible strike of the silk weavers at Lyons. But the greatest danger for Louis Philippe lay in foreign affairs: the Belgians had risen against Holland, and the question arose of the desirability of re-annexing Belgium, which seemed to be not unwilling to accept help, and so settle under the most favourable conditions the perennial problem of Flanders. Despite the insistence of Laffitte, Louis Philippe recog nized that England would never tolerate the annexation. He chose to pursue a wiser policy, the fruits of which were not gathered until 1914, and to concur in the creation of Belgium as a neutral state. He refused the crown of the new kingdom for his son (March, 1831) .

Eight months after the July Days, Casimir-Perier succeeded Laffitte as prime minister and with him came into power that "Party of Resistance" to advanced ideas which was to rule France for 17 years. Peace having been assured abroad, order had to be established at home. This was not accomplished without violent agitation, both by the Right and the Left, such as the disorder which accompanied the obsequies of General Lamarque, and the attempt of the Duchesse de Berri to raise la Vendee. The new electoral law, though lowering the age and the qualifications of the electors, left the control of the elections in the hands of the moneyed classes. The institution of a national guard provided Louis Philippe with an army. After Casimir-Perier's death from cholera in May 1832, the Soult Ministry struggled with the social ist risings in Paris and Lyons fomented by the Society of the Rights of Man, and repressed by the threatened middle-classes with a thoroughness that was the precursor of the June Days and the Commune. The attempted assassination of the king and his family by Fieschi (July 28, 1835), followed by the enactment of the September Laws, was the destruction of the Republicans. Only in Guizot's law for the regulation of primary education was a new influence evident.

Though they were agreed as to the desirability of maintaining the monarchy the victorious middle classes were in disagreement about the powers it should exercise. The conflict of warring ambi tions and parties for the control of the ministry loosed a veritable Fronde against the king. The Right Centre, led by Guizot, were prepared to admit the king to an active share in the government : the Left Centre, led by Thiers, believed that he should reign but not govern. Between these two stood the opposition of the nearly republican monarchical Left. Louis Philippe endeavoured to take advantage of these party squabbles to ensure victory for his per sonal policy. The last experience of a ministry composed by the parliamentary majority was that of Thiers in 1836; when how ever, Thiers showed signs of embroiling himself with Metternich by an intervention on behalf of the Spanish Liberals, Louis Philippe dismissed him and replaced him by a creature of his own, Mole. Then began the period of the king's personal government and of the systematic opposition of the coalition of the two Centre parties and the monarchical Left against the "homme du château," Mole; he was defeated in the elections of 1839, as Martignac had been in 1829, and was replaced, after a long ministerial crisis, by Thiers (March 1, 1840).

The Thiers Cabinet.

Like Chateaubriand under Louis XVIII. Thiers sought to make the monarchy rival the Napoleonic glory which he himself resurrected in the pages of his history. Too bellicose to win the confidence of the king, who loved peace and the English alliance, Thiers fell from power over the Egyptian Question. The Treaty of London of July 15, 1840, was signed by the remaining great powers without the knowledge of France, since France had persistently refused her co-operation. As though this revived against her the Pact of Chaumont of 1814, Thiers fortified Paris and made a show of supporting Mohammed Ali by force of arms. The nation, stirred but little by the attempted coups d'etat (Strasbourg, 1836—Boulogne, 1840), of Louis Napo leon, son of the former king of Holland, was thrilled in 1840 by the return to France of the body of Napoleon I. Its chauvinism revealed to the advocates of peace at any price that military inaction had ended by making peace itself warlike and by demon strating the advantage of imperialism.

The Guizot Cabinet.

From 1840 to 1848 Louis Philippe's foreign policy became more and more lethargic, and he lent him self more and more to deception abroad and unpopular measures at home. Guizot fell into line and his watchword became "Peace and no reform." Except for the railway law of 1842, no single measure of importance was carried. Corruption was rampant in France; corruption, due to the illegal conduct of the deputies, many of whom were slavish or venal officials; electoral corruption, effected by the purchase of the 200,000 electors constituting the "pays legal"; and moral corruption, due to the reign of the bureau cracy and exemplified in a series of outrageous scandals. This state of stagnation pleased the dominant middle class entrenched behind its twin citadels of the property qualification and the national guard. Their rallying cry, borrowed from Guizot, was "get rich quick." This bloated, industrious, well-educated but insolent and hard-hearted bourgeoisie, which speculated in rail way shares and went in large numbers to church, forgot that wealth alone is not so much a protection for the minority in power as a temptation to the excluded majority. They remained obstinately deaf to the grievances of a growing industrial prole tariat.

In face of this tragic contrast Guizot remained unmoved, blinded by the superficial brilliance of apparent success and pros perity. He adorned by flights of eloquence his invariable theme : no new laws, no reforms, no foreign complications—the policy of material interests. He maintained his yielding attitude towards Great Britain in the affair of the right of search (1841), and in the affair of the missionary and consul, Pritchard, at Tahiti 45). And when the marriage of the Duc de Montpensier with a Spanish infanta in 1846 had broken this entente cordiale to which he clung, it was only that he might in turn yield to Metternich (who seized Cracow, the last remnant of Poland), or protect the Sonderbund in Switzerland, or discourage the Liberal ardour of Pius IX., or hand over the education of France to the Ultra montane clergy. Still further strengthened by the elections of 1846 he refused the demands of the Opposition formed by a coalition of the Left Centre and the Radical party for parliamen tary and electoral reform, which would have excluded the officials from the Chambers, reduced the electoral qualification to zoo francs, and added to the number of the electors the capacitaires whose competence was guaranteed by their education. For Guizot the whole country was represented by the "pays legal," consisting of the king, the ministers, the deputies, and the electors. When the Opposition appealed to the country, he flung down a disdainful challenge to what "les brouillons et les badauds appellent le peuple." The challenge was taken up by all the parties of the Opposition in the "campaign of the banquets" got up somewhat artificially in 1847 in favour of the extension of the franchise. The monarchy had arrived at such a state of weakness and corrup tion that a determined minority was sufficient to overthrow it. The prohibition of a last banquet in Paris precipitated the catas trophe. The monarchy which for nearly 18 years had overcome its adversaries, collapsed on Feb. 24, 1848, to the astonishment of all.