LETTER TO HIS MAJESTY KING WILLIAM IV., FROM PRINCE TALLEYRAND, ON HIS BEING APPOINTED AMBASSADOR FROM FRANCE.
“Sire,—His Majesty the King of the French has been pleased to make me the interpreter of the sentiments he cherishes for your Majesty.
“I have joyfully accepted a mission which gives so noble a direction to the last steps of my long public career.
“Sire, amidst all the vicissitudes through which I have passed during my long life—amidst all the changes of good and ill fortune I have undergone during the last forty years, no circumstance has afforded me such perfect gratification as the appointment which brings me back to this happy country. But how great is the change between the period when I was formerly here and the present time! The jealousies and prejudices which so long divided France and England have given place to enlightened sentiments of esteem and affection. Unity of feeling rivets the bonds of amity between the two countries. England, like France, repudiates the principle of intervention in the internal affairs of neighbouring states; and the ambassador of a sovereign unanimously chosen by a great nation, feels himself at home in a land of freedom, as the missionary to a descendant of the illustrious house of Brunswick.
“I feel that I may with confidence implore your Majesty’s kind consideration of the subjects which I am commanded to submit to your attention, and I beg, Sire, to offer the homage of my profound respect.”
OPINION OF PRINCE TALLEYRAND ON THE PLAN OF LAW RELATIVE TO JOURNALS AND PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS.
Delivered in the Chamber of Peers, in the sitting of Tuesday, July 24, 1821.
“Gentlemen,—In presenting myself before this assembly, I experience the embarrassment of feeling the utter inutility of the observations I am about to make, but to which, nevertheless, I consider it my duty to give utterance. By a deplorable fatality, the causes of which it is not my purpose at present to inquire into, the questions in appearance submitted to our consideration, are already resolved—irrevocably resolved. We discuss, as though our discussions were affairs of some import; whilst, in reality, we are but the instruments of imperious necessity. Laws and budgets are laid before us, and they who would naturally be our opponents in discussing them, are not here; their absence operates as a sort of command upon us. The Chamber of Peers, by the position in which it is placed, will soon degenerate into a Court of Registration, a mere semblance of the constitutional hierarchy. Hence, it follows, that those who absolutely desire to see in France a real Chamber of Peers—that those who regard it as essential to the monarchy—seeing it annihilated for the present, look forward to the future. In their inability to remedy the present evil, they indulge in prophetic warnings, which it is easy to turn into ridicule; or they offer advice which levity despises and weakness rejects.
“I apply, gentlemen, these considerations to the law now submitted to your attention. Is it the work of the Ministry? No; for, on the one hand, it is more limited in its duration than the primitive law, a circumstance of which I am certainly not disposed to complain; and, on the other hand, its restrictions extend to literature, science, and the arts, (heretofore exempt from the coercion of the censorship:) and at these restrictions I am assuredly not disposed to rejoice. Is it certain that these various modifications meet the concurrence of the majority of this Chamber? Possibly they do not; and yet, what can we do? Are we free to amend, in our turn, the amendments of the all-powerful Chamber of Deputies? No, gentlemen; and I say so, not with the view of reflecting blame on the Chamber of Deputies, (which has merely exercised its constitutional privileges in a very constitutional manner,) but to complain that the Chamber of Peers is stripped of all its privileges by tardy presentations, which leave it neither time to deliberate nor power to resist.