96 The Coalition defeats Martignac [1829

towards public affairs by their social position, the consciousness of their own ability, and the force of example? What means have you of satisfying their natural and legitimate impatience ? Open for them a new career at their doors. They are ambitious to win men's suffrages in their honour. Give them the means to satisfy this noble ambition at home, and draw round them a circle of honour within which there is profit and glory to be won by remaining." Men might really have thought that they had returned to the ancien regime and the days of Turgot. To a nation which had known the Constituante and the Convention, and which was being constantly reminded by Thiers and Mignet and the other Liberals of the glorious memories of the great national assemblies, Martignac vouchsafed the concession of provincial assemblies. He admitted, that he was seeking "to divide the current of men's minds in order to made its actions less forceful and less impetuous."

Thus on April 8, 1829, the party of the Left declared open war against him by throwing out his measure, or rather by forcing him to withdraw it. The Royalists of the extreme Right, " irritated by these concessions to democracy," had taken part in the struggle with equal violence. What was not sufficiently Liberal for the one side was too much so for the other. From that time the Ministers, who had just lost by the defection of the Left the sole majority by whose aid they could resist the influences of the Court and the demands of the extremists, and who were reduced to making Liberal protestations at the tribune, while defending reactionary measures imposed upon them by the secret counsellors of the King, were, in spite of their skill, really powerless to fulfil their mission. Their weakness became obvious in the summer of 1829, in the course of the discussion of the Budget. Without a party in the Chamber, without credit at Court, without support in public opinion, Martignac had failed in this fifteen months' attempt, which indeed was foredoomed from the beginning.

In point of fact, the period from April 8 to August 9, 1829, witnessed the second victory of this strange coalition, formed in the last days of Villele's Ministry, a coalition composed of extreme parties who could not govern in union. Under Martignac, the system of prudent reaction and prudent temporisation, which had for so long been practised by Villele, showed clearly that it had had its day.

Charles X thus found himself forced in 1829 to make a choice, decisive for the future of his monarchy, between the two parties whose ephemeral coalition had ruined the policy followed by his Ministers ever since 1821. Like Louis XVIII in 1816, he was compelled to declare himself on the side of the no-compromise Royalist party, who were impatient to complete without half-measures or diplomacy the restoration of the old order, of privilege, and of the ultramontane Church, or on the side of men who, like Remusat, had for their

1829] The Polignac Ministry 97

programme "to defend the Revolution and continue it without the revolutionary spirit." The crisis had not changed after thirteen years ; it was the same at the end as at the beginning. The solution, however, was more difficult for Charles X than it had been for his brother.

Charles had neither the subtlety of mind nor the sceptical prudence of Louis XVIII. Fickle and volatile from youth, Charles was, by the habits of his riper age, passed amid the flatteries of the ultraRoyalists who surrounded him, by his conviction that Providence would guide him by mysterious ways towards the accomplishment of the divine mission with which he believed himself charged, by his lack of reflexion and his obstinacy, ill fitted to make the necessary concessions. Moreover, those which he would have to make to the Liberals, if he separated himself from the ultra-Royalists, would thenceforth be greater than those which would have been sufficient for his brother. Defeated and occupied by the enemy, tired of revolutions and of war, France in 1815 hungered less for liberty than for repose. Since then new generations had arisen with the design and the desire to take up once more by teaching and action the national task which France seemed to have abandoned through fatigue. Against the royal will of the Bourbons, restored by means of foreign aid, which had seemed to be the foundation of the Charter they had granted, these younger Liberals put forward the rights of the nation, in their eyes the only true foundation of that Charter. More and more, Liberalism invoked principles irreconcilable with the ideas that the restored Bourbons, especially Charles X and his friends, held concerning the rights of the Crown. " There is no way of dealing with these people," said the King to Martignac on April 9, 1829. " It is time to call halt." On August 9 he entrusted Prince de Polignac, his ambassador in London and his favourite, with the task of forming a Ministry. The period of halting was past. This was a declaration of war, not an act of negotiation.

The Journal des Debats, a Royalist paper of moderate principles, dealt with the King's decision on August 15 in an article which was subsequently made the ground of a prosecution. In alluding to the three Ministers — Polignac, an emigre and accomplice of Georges in his conspiracies with foreign Powers, Bourmont, a hero of the wars in the Vendee, who deserted in the face of the enemy after the Hundred Days, La Bourdonnaye, who took part in the White Terror — the writer said : "Coblenz, Waterloo, 1815 — those are the three principles, the three personages of the Ministry. Squeeze and wring this Ministry, and you will get nothing from it but humiliations, misfortunes, and dangers." While at Paris the whole of the Liberal press raised a cry of defiance against the Crown, at Lyons the people acclaimed Lafayette as the republican and national hero. Companies were formed in Britanny and elsewhere for the defence of the Charter by the refusal to pay taxes.

Though he had decided to attempt the restoration of the ancien

C. M. H. x. 7

98 The Algerian enterprise [1829^30

regime by some drastic act of authority, Polignac, the trusted champion of the emigres, nevertheless at first felt some hesitation. He proclaimed his intention " to reorganise society, to give back to the clergy their weight in state affairs, to create a powerful aristocracy, and to surround it with privileges," but he took no action. Was this the fault of his colleague, La Bourdonnaye, Minister of the Interior, who, after having for ten years clamoured for war to the death against the Revolution, showed himself as incapable of undertaking as of conceiving a plan of action, and retired on November 17? The lack of decision seems in fact to be due to Polignac also. " He has made up his mind," said an opponent, " but he does not know exactly to what." The serious thing was that, having the temperament of a mystic and a touching confidence in Providence, he looked to heaven rather than to his own resources for the necessary help, and even for the signal. Foreign Ministers, Lord Stuart de Rothesay, and Villele himself, watched him march slowly towards a battle without any plan but with smiling serenity and the confidence of a somnambulist.

On March 2,1830, he convened the Chambers. He laid before them a programme of external policy, which circumstances offered him, and which he thought would be decisive for the success of his plans. At first he had thought that events in the East, the victories gained by the Russians over the Turks, would permit to France a glorious intervention in European politics, and to Charles X an act of vigorous self-assertion at home. He had formed a plan in concert with the Cabinet at St. Petersburg, — a general rearrangement of Europe, beginning with Turkey and ending with the Rhine ; but the Peace of Adrianople, which was rapidly arranged for Nicholas I by the mediation of Prussia, had upset his arrangements (November, 1829). Failing a war upon the Rhine, Polignac meditated an enterprise in Algiers, where the Bey had since 1827 refused to make any reparation to the King of France, who had been insulted in the person of his ambassador. He " made preparations for it with a prodigality of resources and a superabundance of precautions which betrayed that a greater interest was at stake than the national honour or the advantage of conquest." He wished to increase his power abroad in order to be able to strike a strong blow at home.

" If this Algerian enterprise," wrote Talleyrand, " is an expedient to facilitate government at home, it is a great mistake." The Chamber which Polignac hoped to bend to his designs was forewarned and unwilling to follow him. The future belonged to the moderate Royalists, friends or disciples of Royer-Collard, who were equally afraid of the dictatorship which the party of the extreme Right and the Cabinet were endeavouring to establish, and of the revolution for which the journals of the Left, the National, the Globe, the Republicans, and the Bonapartists, were now praying. " We must strike hard and soon," RoyerCollard insisted to his friends. Their hope was that Parliament, between

1830] Address of the Liberal deputies 99

a monarchy ready for a coup oVetat to establish its rights and the nation forced to act vigorously in defence of its own, might still perhaps be able to prevent the conflict by a firm attitude. On these grounds an address was drawn up, voted by 221 Liberal deputies, and presented to the King on March 18,1830. It was an address of reproach to the Crown for its resistance to the people's wishes by its choice of a non-representative Government instead of one chosen in consultation with them ; and at the same time it was a declaration of the deputies' principles.

Charles X took the address as a defiance of the Crown. To set up his standard, as he said, he authorised his Ministers first to prorogue, and afterwards to dissolve, this rebellious Chamber, and ordered Peyronnet, a man of battle, to take all suitable measures for the elections (May 16, 1830). Perhaps he was still reckoning on the moral effect of the expedition which was shortly to be undertaken in Algiers. He was certainly persuaded that he would escape the lot of his brother Louis XVIII by forestalling with energetic action a factious Opposition.

But, contrary to his hopes, the majority of the nation took sides with the deputies who were sent back to them. Their re-election was the watchword given in the month of July. The election was completed on July 19, and 53 new members were added by the will of the electors to the Opposition of 221, who had in the month of March resolutely demanded the dismissal of the Polignac Ministry. That Ministry had now in the Parliament only 100 supporters, determined but powerless. This counter-stroke exasperated the King and those around him. He was incensed, like a King of the old order, that the nation could have and express a will different from his own. Force still remained to him, and he used it. Under the pretext that the Charter by virtue of Article 14 left to the Crown the right of providing for the safety of the State by ordinances issued at his own discretion, Charles X resolved upon a special act of authority supported by this legal form. On July 25 he published three ordinances, one to dissolve this Chamber, which had been regularly elected, before it had met, the second to establish a new electoral law which would permit the monarchy to reduce to submission or to remove from the lists obstinate electors, the third to crush the Opposition press.

On July 26, 1830, the printers and journalists, eager to proclaim the sovereignty of the people against that of the Bourbons, summoned the people of Paris to armed insurrection. At the same time they invited the Chamber of Deputies, the authorised representatives of the nation, to defend their rights and those of the people. To the Ministers who, believing themselves sure of Paris, while attempting an extraordinary act of authority, had left the Government with insufficient forces, and to the King himself who was on the point of departing for a hunting expedition at Rambouillet, this popular insurrection came as an entire surprise. To the citizen classes and many of the deputies, who were defenders of the law, but constantly mindful of the recollections of

100 Insurrection of July [1830

the Terror, the sight of the people of Paris under arms brought alarm and dismay. However, by July 28 the people had succeeded in gaining the mastery over the royal troops in the H6tel de Ville; the next day (July 29) the insurgents, led by former officers and young men from the schools, forced the Duke of Ragusa to evacuate the Louvre, the Tuileries, and before long Paris itself. After having attempted vainly negotiations with the Court at Saint-Cloud, which, now that it was too late, threw over Polignac and the ordinances, the deputies and Peers were fain to rally to the victorious Revolution and to proclaim the downfall of the Bourbons. It was on behalf of the Charter that the people had risen. By the popular victory the Charter ceased to be an act of royal favour conceded to obedient subjects. It became a national Constitution, a sovereign guarantee of the rights of the people.

Legitimism had finally succumbed, ruined by the faults and excesses of its partisans. As for a return to the old order — religious, social, or political — France would have none of it. The obstinacy of the Royalists, who had attempted this enterprise at first by cunning methods, and afterwards boldly, had inflicted a double injury upon the Crown. In the first place, its fall resulted. But, worse still, it caused men to forget all the services which the restored monarchy had rendered to France since 1815 — the rapid evacuation of a territory occupied by foreign armies, the liquidation of the cost of a long war, financial prosperity favourable to the development of industry and commerce. In short, peace with honour.

Nothing was fated to survive of this short-lived regime but the lasting glory of the literary and artistic achievement which testified to a real renaissance of the French genius. The honour belongs especially to Chateaubriand, whose influence and example were more potent in his writings than his political life. Though Madame de Stael, after having by her powerful imagination exercised a considerable influence upon the opinions of her day, and after having welcomed at Coppet the beginning of the reign of Romanticism, died in 1817, the author of Le Genie du Christianisme and of Les Martyrs lived on in undiminished glory, to be the guide of successive generations of writers in the new paths which both these authors in their different ways had opened, by breaking the narrow mould of classical form. The representation of nature, the expression of the deepest emotions of the soul, and the discovery of the beautiful, instead of being a convention and tradition, became the living sources of a lyrical stream which fertilised all at once the French genius.

This period saw the rise of a constellation of poets formed in the school of Chateaubriand or of foreign lyrical writers, Schiller, Byron, Manzoni. The Meditations of Lamartine, who, after a peaceful and happy youth, became a poet at thirty years of age owing to a shortlived passion, served in 1820 as the signal, the firstfruits of that harvest which was to prove so abundant. While Lamartine, in his