Oh! sire, sire, was it not the shades of these martyrs which appeared to you on 24 February, frightening you into the inert and fugitive king who fell down on the place de la Révolution, at the foot of the Obélisque, on the very spot where the head of King Louis XVI. had fallen?
And Italy, stirred up by promises given her by La Fayette, promises which the old general thought he could keep; Italy, who, in order to carry out her revolution, only asked for an Army Corps to be stationed on the Alps, looked in vain towards the West; for the route taken by Hannibal and Charlemagne and Napoleon remained unoccupied.
As for Poland—we know M. Sébastiani's famous saying: "Order reigns at Warsaw!"
In domestic legislation, reaction was just as obvious. First, they had chosen M. Talleyrand as Ambassador to London, that political Mephistopheles, who had watched the Republic, the Directory, the Empire and the Restoration perish in his hands beneath his skeleton smile. The abolition of the penalty of death had miscarried in the Chamber. Lastly, orders had been given to efface the bullet marks of July from the front of all public buildings. Certainly, this latter Ordinance did not pass without raising opposition. Upon my return to Paris the walls were still pasted with a protest, which I may be permitted to quote, as the tone of the times is clearly shown in the few lines of which it is composed; and, further, because the chief merit of these Memoirs should be the preserving intact and reproduction of the character of the times in which I lived, for the benefit of the future, which is always inclined to become hazy. This is it:—
"REVERENCE FOR MONUMENTS
"Each glorious epoch of our history has its own special trophies and monuments: the hero has his bronze statue and his Arcs de Triomphe; but what living witness will there be to teach the races to come the doings of that cycle of the Three Days and its immortal people? What pages of history will tell future ages at what a cost the monarchical system of a thousand years, ancient in despotism, was destroyed? What monument will teach our posterity that there, behind these mutilated columns, their fathers fell in defence of liberty? Is our Charter, patched up in a day, a fitting monument to the sovereignty of the people? We have nothing to show but our tombs and the traces of the bullets on our walls and the marks made by grapeshot which adorn the pediments of our palaces. Those are our bas-reliefs and inscriptions, our celebrations of that great week; in them the People read their triumph and the King sees there the lessons he ought to learn. On those blackened walls, the temples of Science and of Art, the bullets of Charles X. have written, in ineffaceable characters, the love and gratitude and impartiality we might have looked for in a Bourbon! There, if the imprint had been religiously preserved, we might, perhaps, have discovered the traces of the balls of yet another Charles! What Vandal hand, then, has dared to attack these noble reliques? Some sacrilegious order, given by I know not what authority, would efface those sublime breaches! If they disappear, it will soon be forgotten that thousands of victims fell for a principle, and that their blood flowed for an ephemeral liberty which only shone upon us for three days! Are they friends? Can they be brothers who dare thus to insult our deeds? The Austrians, Russians and Prussians paid respect to our Column, our Arcs de Triomphe, and shall the shameful insignias of the conqueror of the Trocadéro still soil the Arc-de-Triomphe of the conqueror of Austerlitz?
"Courage, men of the morrow! Courage! Continue your heroic work! Tear down those wooden crosses, those tricolour flags that adorn the tombs of our brothers, and then you will have succeeded in effacing every last trace of our Revolution!
"(Signed)
LANNOY, student of the École polytechnique;
PLOCQUE, advocate;
TH. MASSOT, advocate;
GUYOT, medical student;
ÉTIENNE ARAGO;
CH. LOTHON, student of the École polytechnique."
You see these poor July fighters did not make any great demands; they, who had seen the Republic snatched from them, who had been enclosed in the treaties of 1815, to whom a king had been given, the son of a regicide, who had renounced the Convention, only asked that the bullet marks of the Swiss and Royal Guards imprinted on the façades of their public monuments should be allowed to remain intact. Their demand, as in reason bound, was judged exorbitant and refused accordingly. Thus, just as I said before, when I returned to Paris, M. Guizot was Minister, and they were scraping the Institut.
[1] Here are King Louis-Philippe's very own words:— "As for Ferdinand VII., they can hang him if they wish: he is the biggest blackguard that ever lived!"