496 Thiers and Louis-Philippe [1836

of his colleagues, Broglie and Guizot, who had failed to support him. Thenceforward he only awaited an opportunity to separate himself from them : and when the King offered him the post of Chief Minister (February 22, 1836) the coveted occasion seemed to have arrived. He hoped to continue his Conservative policy under the cover of brilliant action abroad. He accepted office : his mistake was almost at once apparent.

On one occasion, Thiers said to the King with a smile, " Sire, I am very subtle." "I am more so than you," Louis-Philippe replied, "for I do not say so." The understanding between the sovereign and his Minister, resolved as each was not to be led but to lead, could not be of long duration. At the very beginning, the King informed the Prussian Cabinet " that he hoped still further to strengthen his system —resistance at home to the revolutionary movement, and such moderation abroad as enforces respect for existing treaties, while avoiding all interference in the affairs of other States." On his side Thiers, from March 18, 1836, onward, protested to Palmerston against the Treaty of the Quadruple Alliance, and reserved to France her liberty of action as regards intervention in Spain. In July, 1836, he made preparations for this intervention ; he increased the foreign legion which the Government had supplied to the Queen of Spain for use against the Carlists, and offered the services of a French general, Bugeaud or Clauzel, to command the royal army. " We intend to annihilate," he wrote to Sainte-Aulaire, " Don Carlos, the hero of Navarre." Without uttering a word, Louis-Philippe, aided by Montalivet, kept watch over the actions of his Minister. On August 24, 1836, having learnt that, by agreement with Thiers, General Lebeau, commander of the Foreign Legion, had announced that a French army would enter Spain, the King, without informing his Minister, had an official denial inserted in the Moniteur. Next, he demanded the dismissal of the recruits whom Thiers, without consulting him, had assembled at the foot of the Pyrenees. " The King does not desire intervention," the indignant Minister exclaimed. " We desire it, so I resign."

This energetic act of royal authority, contrary to the principles of parliamentary government, displaced a Ministry which had not suffered defeat in the Chambers, and made clear to the eyes of the country the bad relations which, since the death of Casimir Perier, had grown up between the monarchy and the Conservative deputies of the majority. The alliance which had been formed, in the days that followed the Revolution of July, between the Duke of Orleans, the leading Doctrinaires, and Thiers, had subsisted so long as the power which they had combined to seize appeared to be threatened; but now the problems, which bade fair to divide them, became more and more pressing. The Parliamentary party remembered that they had made a King and a constitution, but were apt to forget that without this King they could not have averted

1836-7] Guizot returns to power 497

a republic; they held that Louis-Philippe ought to reign and not to govern. The King, on the other hand, convinced that without his diplomacy and without his personal action the militant Republic would have triumphed, and impelled, by a sort of pride in his skill, to employ the same diplomacy towards his Ministers, aspired to govern while still keeping the advantage of non-responsibility. The Doctrinaires, and Thiers, first their ally, then their supplanter, like the ultra-Royalists of the Restoration, in their turn claimed the government in order to impose their will, their calculations as to national action abroad, upon the King whom they had implored to come to their aid against the Republican propaganda. Louis-Philippe, in order to maintain his system, was obliged to scheme against or get rid of the men who had dethroned Charles X for his benefit.

However, in this crisis, the decisive moment for the July monarchy, the allies of the Tuileries and the Chamber attempted for some time to avoid a breach and to resume their life in common. The breach with Thiers brought the King back to Guizot, who perhaps regretted that six months earlier he had followed the Due de Broglie into retirement. And Guizot, as a condition of his assistance, demanded the inclusion in the Ministry of three of his friends, men devoted to his person and opinions, Duchatel in the Department of Finance, Gasparin at the Home Office, and Remusat as Under-Secretary of State for Public Works. The condition imposed by the King and accepted at first by Guizot was that foreign affairs should be entrusted to a President of the Council, who was a complete stranger to the designs of the Doctrinaire party, devoted to the policy and submissive to the opinions of the King. His nominee was Count Mole.

This last attempt at an understanding was destined to endure only eight months, from September 6, 1836, to April 15, 1837. From the very first day Guizot resented his subordinate position in a Cabinet where his friends, the Doctrinaires, had all but a majority. His friends expressed their surprise. " What! " the Due de Broglie wrote to him, "the principal man, the very core and mainspring of the Cabinet, is forced to hold the lowest place ? " The almost immediate result was that Guizot, his adherents, and the party organs, affected to treat Mole as an upstart, rewarded beyond his merits by the success of his intrigues at the Tuileries, and almost drove him to open warfare in defence of his dignity and legitimate influence. On the other hand Mole, who, since 1818, had been alienated from the Doctrinaire party, came to power, thanks to the King's confidence, with a programme far different from theirs. An official who, ever since the Empire, had contrived under all regimes to improve his own position, tactful and persuasive in language and bearing, he regulated his conduct rather by circumstances than by theories. Thus, since he observed that former Ministers, in order to continue the policy of active " resistance "

C. M. H. x. 32

498 Mole's Ministry [1837-9

dear to the Doctrinaires, had had recourse to manifestations of force abroad which had been condemned by the King, he deemed it the simpler course to renounce this policy of repression. " The true spirit of government," he said, "consists in meeting circumstances as they present themselves, with a mind free from all prejudice arising from the past." Between this man of expedients, skilful and eloquent, and the Doctrinaires, there was almost as much difference as in 1823 between Villele and the ultra-Royalists, enamoured as they too were at the time of repression at home and glory abroad. Guizot with his friends abandoned Mole at the end of March, 1837. The King maintained the confidence which he reposed in him.

Thus between Louis-Philippe, and, to quote the phrase of an Orleanist, Sainte-Aulaire, " these princes of the tribune, these great vassals of the representative regime, who believed that they had a prescriptive right to direct the affairs of the country, who were indignant that anyone dared to dispute the legitimacy of that right," there arose a breach of which this time the country could not be ignorant, and shortly afterwards open warfare of which it was summoned to be the arbiter. This war lasted exactly two years, while by force of will and talent Mole, supported by the King, whose policy he tenaciously defended, succeeded in maintaining himself in power with uncertain majorities. At this distance of time the work which this Minister accomplished with the King's support can be appraised and judged without reference to the daily contests in face of which it was performed. The study of this work is no less important in the history of French institutions than that of the conflicts between the Court and the Parliament.

" I have always been," said Mole to his friend Barante, " in favour of a truce, of a reconciliation between parties, when the right moment should arrive. On September 6 and still more on April 15, it became necessary at all costs to start afresh, to change the course, if I was to avoid being carried I knew not whither. That is what these inflexible spirits, swayed entirely by their prepossessions instead of looking facts in the face, have never been able to understand." After repression, reconciliation. What good was it to the new regime that they had obtained a decisive victory over the Republican and Legitimist parties in 1835, if the conquerors did not know how to give or to obtain the reward of victory — peace at home ? Mole's programme had the merit of being at once far-sighted and opportune. Among the conquered parties a change was taking place at that time which turned their thoughts from their past and their resentments, and fixed their eyes upon the future.

The members of the Republican party, in prison and in exile, had reflected upon the causes of the check which they had sustained, and the acts of violence which had justified their opponents in using against them force and exceptional legislation. " For an attitude of protest, they

1836-7] Schemes of social reform 499

began to substitute an attitude of discussion." Ever since 1834, the lawyer Dupont, founder of the Revue Republicaine, had been engaged in substituting, for the tradition and methods of 1793, a carefully-considered doctrine which " should reassure the people while enlightening them." To define the democratic ideal — government by the people for the happiness of the people — the duties of the State and social aims, the question of wages and the conditions of work: this rather than acts of violence was in his eyes the proper goal for his party's efforts. This opinion was shared by Raspail and Kersausie, who said in the Reformateur, " An end to personal polemics, an end to social strife! " After the insurrection of April and the laws of September had confirmed their fears and the conclusion they had reached, this evolution became more marked. The National, under Carrel, and afterwards under Charles Thomas, devoted itself to the study of social and democratic questions. A literary organ, the Nouvelle Minerve, grouped together old and young Republicans alike for this propaganda by the force of ideas. Louis Blanc in the Bon Sens and the Tribune des proletaires, Considerant in La Phalange, the organ lent to him by Fourier, popularised in 1836 the principles of the Republican and social school. In opposition to the middle-class society established under the first Empire, they brought forward thenceforth, instead of plots and surprises, the steady force of an ideal of social and political improvement.

No one was of more service to this ideal than Lamennais, after he had published in the preface of his Troisiemes Melanges his declaration of adherence to the democratic party (1836). His book Du Peuple, written in 1837, by its talent and generous spirit had a far-reaching influence, penetrating even to artisan circles. " I address myself," he wrote, " to cold and philosophic reason. It seems to me that there is an entire world of truths to reveal. I believe that social science is far from possessing a complete theory, and that this theory, when it comes to completion, will be of great assistance towards future perfection. We are progressing towards a magnificent unity." This programme of hope and progress received from 1836 onwards the support of Victor Hugo, who in the Presse devoted himself to the study of social questions. George Sand became an enthusiastic Republican, together with Michel de Bourges and Pierre Leroux. Thenceforward in Republican circles there were no longer heard prophecies of war, appeals to the Montagnard movement, but hymns of hopefulness or of pity for the humble, counsels of wisdom and of reason. Moreover there were fewer Republicans, and mere " democrats" or " radicals," more men like Arago, Dupont de l'Eure, and Lamartine, who were disposed to admit the possibility of a truce with a Government which should leave the tribune and the press free for the inculcation of their doctrines.

It was about the same period that the Legitimist party, which had been crushed by the defeat of the Duchess of Berry and humiliated by

500 Transformation of the Legitimist party [1834-7

her errors, transformed itself so as to become a great party of principles and of propagandism, no longer a group of embittered exiles, but of believers, active and full of dreams for the future. In this transformation the influence of Lamennais was as powerful as the lesson taught by the events of 1834. The assistance which he gave to the democrats was itself but the effect of the resistance which he at first encountered in gaining acceptation for his ideas among the defenders of the old order, among the priests of Rome and devout Frenchmen. He might have said, "Strike me, but listen." For he was attacked and listened to. He ceaselessly denounced the alliance between the Catholics, the true conservatives, champions of the order established by God, and courtier or Smiffre politicians, blind or interested partisans of a feeble dynasty soon to be swept away. Without, as he did, breaking with Rome, his disciples, Montalembert and Lacordaire, invited the youth of the Right, who had been misled by their talent and their zeal, to leave " the fatal whirlpool of politics in order to concern themselves for the future with the things of God alone." And, little by little, this band of young men, with Ozanam and the founders of the charitable societies of Saint-Vincent de Paul, with the principal writers of the Correspondant and the Univers, Came, Champagny, Meaux, Foisset, resolutely broke up "the fatal alliance between throne and altar." They held the opinion expressed by Lacordaire so early as 1834: "I have the greatest respect for the old Royalist party, all the respect that one owes to a glorious veteran. But I do not rely on the veteran, because with his wooden leg he cannot keep step with the new generation." In the eloquent words of Montalembert, they asked themselves the question: whether they ought to isolate themselves from the France of July, to withdraw from active and public life, and only to take part in it to repudiate or hamper the Government, or whether they ought not rather to accept this Government as an accomplished fact, and to offer to the country such practical assistance as should further the fulfilment of their hopes and the realisation of their social and religious ideals.

To all these men, detached by their youth or their hopes, on the Right from the fatal methods of the emigres and the extremists, on the Left from the excesses of the Terror or the Charbonnerie, a prudent Government could no longer oppose what had so long been called "resistance." Resistance to intrigues, to attempts of violence, was justified by the need of public order. Nothing could justify the futile repression of ideas and of free speech in a free country.

Mole turned to the Republicans; and, profiting by the occasion when the dynasty was being consolidated by the marriage of the Duke of Orleans with a princess of Mecklenburg, he offered them, not as a concession but as a gift suitable to the auspicious event, an amnesty which had often been demanded but hitherto refused by his predecessors (1837). The value of the gift was in proportion to the hardships which certain