Restoration, with the stormy dissensions, corrupt influences, and iron rule which have alternately prevailed since its fall. 114. If the constituency was small, and the franchise high, subsequent experience gives no countenance to the idea that either could have been established on a more popular basis, with any advantage to the cause of freedom. Universal suffrage, by an overwhelming majority, placed the imperial crown, with absolute power, on the head of Louis Napoleon. It is difficult to imagine the freedom of the press more fully established than it was in a country where it proved itself adequate to overturn a dynasty; and even the few extracts from the parliamentary debates contained in these pages will demonstrate how thoroughly the independence of the tribune was secured. Yet with all these advantages, alike social and political, with which it was attended, the Government of the Restoration, from first to last, was the object of the most impassioned and persevering hostility in France: the leading members of the Opposition, in and out of Parliament, were engaged in a ceaseless conspiracy to overturn it by all means, legal or illegal; and though, in the final struggle, it appeared as the aggressor, yet it was so in form, and not in reality. The Crown was driven to the desperate expedient of a coup d'état, because the parliamentary opposition had brought matters to such a pass that the government could no longer be carried on without an entire abandonment of the prerogative just as the weaker state is often forced to be the first to commence hostilities, from the ceaseless pacific encroachments of the stronger. 115. Without doubt this general and long-continued hostility is in some degree to be ascribed to the disastrous circumstances which had preceded the return of the ancient kings. Though the Bourbons were in no degree implicated in the wars of the Revolution, and, on the contrary, had done their utmost to avert them, yet they were never able to get over the obloquy cast upon them, in common esti mation, of having succeeded to the throne in consequence of the greatest external calamities France had ever known. It was notorious that they had approached Paris in the rear of the allied armies; that, but for the overthrow of the national arms, they would never have ascended the throne. Indescribable was the mischief which this unfortunate circumstance did to the royal cause. "Post hoc ergo prop ter hoc" is a rule of thought sufficiently common with mankind under any circumstances; and when the events which fortune had placed in close juxtaposition were the double capture of Paris and the replacing of the ancient dynasty on the throne, it was no wonder that they were generally considered to be cause and effect. In vain did the Royalist writers observe that the Bourbons were not responsible for the wars of the Empire; that they were undertaken by a usurper, in opposition to their interest and against their will; that they were not brought in contact with them till the defeats had been experienced, and then interfered only to mitigate their effects, and obtain better terms for the vanquished than they otherwise could have gained. All this, how true and just soever, was as nothing in assuaging the soreness of the public mind: the Count d'Artois had first appeared with Schwartzenberg's army; Louis XVIII. had entered Paris the day after Blucher and Wellington; his ministers had signed the treaties abandoning the frontier of the Rhine,—and that was enough. 116. The national disasters which preceded the fall of Napoleon, however, might in the progress of time have come to be forgotten, had the Government of the Restoration been able to continue the system of universal conquest, and of making war maintain war, which he so successfully pursued. But, unfortunately for them, though fortunately for the world, this had become impossible. The memory of the double capture of Paris operated as a continual restraint, if not upon the wishes of the people, at least on the measures of Govern than doubtful whether the vast genius and iron hand of Napoleon would have been equal to the task. Certain it is that he shrank from undertaking it. To the Bourbons, with inferior ability, and without the prestige of his name, was left the difficult duty of governing France when in a state of compulsory peace, and coercing the strength of the Revolution without any gratification to its passions. It is not surprising that they failed in the attempt. ment; the Germanic Confederation | governing revolutionary France withstood ready with four hundred thou-out the aid of foreign war to drain off sand men to check any attempt to the national passions, that it is more cross the Rhine. So far from pursuing schemes of foreign conquest, the wisest and most far-seeing governments, after 1815, were employed with anxious schemes to avert a third capture of the capital, by surrounding Paris with a girdle of detached forts. As much as this prudential awe was a blessing to the other states of Europe, by averting the scourge of war, which had so often been let loose upon them from behind the iron frontier of France, did it augment the difficulty of governing and retaining in subjection its gallant and aspiring inhabitants. For the first time for two centuries, the French were kept in a state of compulsory peace. This was not only the utmost violence to the warlike propensities which in every age have been their great characteristic, but in an especial manner imposed a barrier to the passions which brought about and were fostered by the Revolution. 117. The grand object and moving power in that convulsion was individual ambition. Their cry was not for liberty, but equality: their object was not that every man should be left in peace to enjoy the fruits of his toil in his own sphere of life, but that every man should be elevated into a sphere above that in which he had been born and bred. Hence the animosity against the aristocracy, whether of rank or talent, by which it was characterised through all its phases, and the outcry for an equal division of property, which was gratified by the Revolutionary law of succession. Napoleon, well aware of the strength of this passion, and the extent to which it had been fanned by the marvellous glory won and fortunes made by plebeian ability during the Revolution, contrived to avoid the difficulty, and avert the tempest from his own head, by turning it upon those of his neighbours; and hence his constant affirmation that conquest was to him the condition of existence, and that the moment he ceased to advance he would begin to decline. So great was the difficulty of 118. Chateaubriand was so well aware of the difficulty of it, that he undertook the Spanish contest mainly to avoid it, by reviving the passion for war in France, and contemplated breaking through the treaties of Vienna, and establishing Bourbon monarchies in South America, to afford a vent to the ardent desires of his countrymen. So great was the effect of the Duke d'Angoulême's expedition upon the feelings of the French, that it had wellnigh established the elder branch of the house of Bourbon on the throne: followed by the regaining the frontier of the Rhine, it would unquestionably have done so. The expedition to Algiers was undertaken with the same view; and it was to have been followed, as already mentioned, by an attempt at a coalition of the Continental powers against England, which was to have been stripped of Hanover, out of which Holland and Prussia were to have been indemnified for the loss of Belgium and the Rhenish provinces. Had this project been adopted, and proved successful, it is more than probable that Henry V. would have been on the throne of France at this moment, and all its subsequent convulsions would have been prevented. 119. That such a breach of the treaties of Vienna would have been a flagrant violation of national faith, and a most ungrateful return for the aid given to the house of Bourbon during the war, is sufficiently evident. But, considered in reference to the mere interests of that dynasty, it must be re have so long afforded to the ceaseless energy of the inhabitants of the latter country. France, with a weak and discredited Government, was left, without commerce or colonies, in presence of the most formidable of all domestic foes-a mass of revolutionary energy and educated indigence. 120. Had the aristocracy survived in France, as it did in England, the storms of the Revolution, it would perhaps have been possible for the Government to have withstood these difficulties, because the press, and with it public opinion, would have been divided, and then a counterpoise to the excesses of one party might have been found in the determination of the other. But as the aristocracy had to all practical purposes been destroyed during the Revolution, and the House of Peers was little more than an assembly of titled placemen, this important element in national stability was awanting. The vast majority of the press was on one side, and hostile to the Government, simply because the vast majority of its readers were, from the causes which have been mentioned, leagued together for its overthrow. So far from being a preservative against error, the journals had become the greatest possible propagators of it, for they incessantly re-echoed its delusions, and gave additional publicity to its misrepresentations. Pleading in garded in a different light. It promised | nies and an immense foreign commerce stability to that Government, if stability can ever be acquired by acts obviously based on injustice. Before we absolutely condemn Chateaubriand and Polignac for entertaining such projects, we must recollect the situation in which they were placed, and the country they had to govern, when placed at the helm of affairs after the Revolution. Passionately thirsting for military glory, and looking back with idolatrous veneration to the recent period when so much of it had been acquired, the French suddenly found themselves stript of, and without the means of regaining it. Universally desirous of individual elevation, the great majority of them were destitute of the means of obtaining it: panting for wealth, they were without commerce; sighing for territorial distinction, they were without land; colonies they had next to none, for they had lost them all during the war, and regained few on the peace; foreign commerce, domestic industry, were only beginning slowly to recover under the tutelary arms of the Bourbons from the disasters of the Revolution. The soil of France, almost entirely divided among five millions of separate proprietors, could afford scarce the means of the most wretched subsistence to any of its owners. Thus the ambition and necessities of thirty millions of men were thrown back upon the Government; and even the thirty thou-open court is an admirable thing, if sand commissions in the army, and hundred and thirty thousand civil situations at the disposal of the Government in the Tuileries, were as nothing among such a multitude. Each place given away made one ungrateful and three discontented. Thus a change of dynasty came to be desired in France, after the Restoration had existed a few years, from the same reason which invariably, after a similar period, renders an administration unpopular in Great Britain-viz., the multitude of expectants who are kept out of place. And this pressure was much more strongly felt in France than it has ever yet been in Great Britain, from the want of the invaluable vent which extensive colo both sides are heard; but if one side only is allowed to speak, justice will be better administered if it is left to the charge of the judge. In France one side only was allowed to speak, for there was no party to fee the other side. The Royalist journals, though conducted with much energy and ability, and often adorned by the genius of the greatest men in France, could not produce any lasting impression on the nation, simply because they had so few readers—because the classes were so limited in number, and so impoverished in fortune, whose interests or feelings led them to take in their effusions. Whoever will reflect on this circumstance, and observe how entirely in Great Britain the balance of parties is which the priests made during his preserved by that free discussion on all reign, and the belief that their influsides which results from the existence ence in secret ruled the determinaof great and opposite nearly balanced tions of Government. Incalculable parties in the State, will readily per- were the effects of this jealousy of the ceive what important effects must sacerdotal power, this divorce of the have resulted in France from the cause of order from that of religion. concentration of nearly all the argu-God and the King" was no longer ment and all the declamation on one side. 121. In these circumstances the only bond of union left which could have united the higher and lower orders was that of a common Religion, and its precepts were the only effective restraint which could have been imposed on the national passions. But as if everything had conspired to render impossible the establishment of freedom in that country, the influence of this mighty agent was not only lost to its cause, but turned over to the other side. Revolutions are often the consequence of a diseased state of the public mind, and they occur at times and under circumstances when there are no real grievances either to justify or explain them. The malady in France was mainly owing, in the first instance, to the intolerant domination of the Roman Catholics; the movement in 1789 was more against the altar than the throne. Voltaire was its apostle rather than Rousseau. Freedom of thought, intellectual liberty, the birthright of man and the chief spring of human improvement, was their great aspiration. So strong was this feeling that it survived all the changes of the Revolution: the Jesuits were the objects of antiquated dread, when they should have been perhaps rather an object of pity; and the Church was regarded as the worst enemy of freedom, even when, stript of their property, cast down from their station, its members had become state pensioners, nineteen-twentieths of whom were 66 passing rich on forty pounds a-year." By the concurrent voice of all the annalists and historians of the time, the unpopularity of Charles X., and the combination of parties against him, which ultimately produced the coup d'état of July 1830, was mainly owing to the advances the cry of the French monarchy; the throne and the altar were severed in general thought. The example of Great Britain, where the union of these great principles has in every age produced such important effects in upholding the cause of freedom and order, is sufficient to prove what must have resulted from their entire separation in France. 122. In addition to all this, there was another circumstance also, a consequence of the disruption of all moral principles at the Revolution, which had throughout the whole Restoration an important effect in rendering the populace of towns ungovernable during pacific periods, and which, when the conflict commenced, operated with decisive and fatal effect against the Government. This was the multitude of natural children who had come to form part of the population of the metropolis, and all the other great towns in the country. From the statistical tables, published by authority of the French Government in that magnificent work, the Statistique de la France, it appears that in them all the proportion was about two legitimate to one illegitimate; in other words, the natural children formed a third of the entire population. Accordingly, M. Dupin says that "every third child you see in the streets of Paris is a bastard." In London the proportion is one in thirty-six-the effect, it is to be feared, of the immense mass of promiscuous concubinage which there prevails, under circumstances where, a law of nature renders an increase of the population from that source impossible. Social and political writers have hitherto considered the state of things chiefly in reference to the index it affords to the state of public morality; but the example of France proves that it is also attended with most important effects in a political point of view.* him at once from the burden and affections of a father. The effect of a third of the entire population in great towns being composed of persons of this unsteady and dangerous description cannot be over-estimated, and has never yet received due consideration. 123. Foundlings and natural children do not always remain children; they grow up to be men and women. When they do so, in what state do they find themselves? For the most part ignorant of their parents, and bred up in infancy at a distance from the place of their birth, and without the education of the parental roof, they are at the age of puberty thrown into society without any of the safeguards which under other circumstances afford a barrier against the indulgence of the passions, whether political or personal. In the female portion it is easy to foresee the result: a soubrette speedily finds herself a mother, and gets quit of her offspring by depositing it in the basket of the foundling hospital, in the same way in which she herself had been deposited. But what comes of the boys? The answer is obvious. An "enfant trouvé de Paris" at a certain age turns into a “gamin de Paris," just as naturally, and almost as necessarily, as a chrysalis after a certain time becomes a but- | terfly. It is impossible it can be otherwise. Without known parents or relations, uneducated in infancy, destitute of property, incapable of succession, he is liberated from all the restraints which in the case of other men act as a restraint on the passions. Paternity even, that powerful moulder of the feelings, has little effect on him; the foundling hospital relieves grape-shot to each! 124. There were in 1830 about a million of persons in Paris and the villages in its immediate vicinity. A third of this number, or three hundred and thirty thousand persons, were bastards, without either property, relations, domestic education, or hopes of succession. A fourth of these, or eighty thousand men, were capable of bearing arms. Here, then, was constantly in Paris a mass of eighty thousand combatants, utterly destitute of all the restraints which in the case of other men affect the passions, and ready at any time to join in any tumult which promised to overturn the Government, and open to them the agreeable prospect of immediate plunder and ultimate command of the country. Truly the sins of the Revolution had come home to roost; Paris had become ungovernable, from the effect of the very licence of manners which the Revolution had introduced. And it was in SUCH a city, and in presence of such a force, that Prince Polignac thought he was quite safe in hazarding a coup d'état with eleven thousand men, one-half of whom could alone be trusted, eight pieces of cannon, and four rounds of *LEGITIMATE AND ILLEGITIMATE BIRTHS IN THE THREE PRINCIPAL CITIES IN Or somewhat more than 1 to 8. It is in the great towns the natural children are so numerous; in the country they are comparatively rare.—Statistique de la France-Administration Publique, pp. 89, 143, 227. 618,849 4,874,778 |