France in the Nineteenth Century

by Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer

In 1847 he published his "Histoire des Girondins," which was received by the public with deep interest and applause. It is not always accurate in small particulars, but it is one of the most fascinating books of history ever written, and has had the good fortune to be singularly well translated. Alexandre Dumas is said to have told its author: "You have elevated romance to the dignity of history."

When the revolution of February, 1848, broke out, Lamartine, being unwell, did not make his way on the first day through the crowds to the Chamber of Deputies, nor did he go thither on the second, looking on the affair as an émeute likely to be followed only by a change of ministry. But when news was brought to him which made him feel it was a very serious affair, he went at once to the Chamber. On entering, he was seized upon by men of all parties, but especially by republicans, who drew him into a side-room and told him that the king had abdicated. He had always advocated the regency of the Duchess of Orleans in the event of Louis Philippe's death, in place of that of the Duc de Nemours. The men who addressed him implored him, as the most popular man in France, to put himself at the head of a movement to make the Duchess of Orleans regent during her son's minority, adding that France under a woman and a child would soon drift into a republic. Lamartine sat for some minutes at a table with his face bowed on his hands. He was praying, he says, for light. Then he arose, and after saying that he had never been a republican, added that now he was for a republic, without any intermediate regency, either of the duchess or of Nemours. With acclamations, the party went back into the Chamber to await events.

We know already how the duchess was received, and how a mob broke into the Chamber. A provisional government was demanded, in the midst of indescribable tumult; and by the suffrages of a crowd of roughs quite as much as by the action of the deputies, a provisional government of five members (afterwards increased to seven) was voted in, the names being written down with a pencil by Lamartine on the spur of the moment. The five men thus nominated and chosen to be rulers of France were Lamartine, Crémieux, Ledru-Rollin, Garnier-Pagès, and Arago.

Meantime in the Hôtel-de-Ville the mob had set up another provisional government under Socialistic leaders, and the first thing the more genuine provisional government had to do was to get rid of the others.

Lamartine says of himself that he felt his mission was to preserve society, and very nobly he set himself to his task. When he and his colleagues reached the Hôtel-de-Ville, where the mob was clamoring for Socialism and a republic, a compromise had to be effected; and thus Louis Blanc, the Socialistic reformer, came into the Provisional Government. It was growing night, and the announcement of this new arrangement somewhat calmed the crowd; but at midnight an attack was made on the Hôtel-de-Ville, and the new rulers had to defend themselves by personal strength, setting their backs against the doors of the Council Chamber, and repelling their assailants with their own hands. But the Press and the telegraph were at their command, and by morning the news of the Provisional Government was spread all over the provinces. "The mob," says Lamartine, "was in part composed of galley slaves who had no political ideas in their heads, nor social principles in their hearts, and partly of that scum which rises to the surface in popular commotions, and floats between the fumes of intoxication and the thirst for blood."

Lamartine was not a great man, but it was lucky for France, and for all Europe, that at this crisis he succeeded in establishing a provisional government, and that he was placed at its head. But for him, Paris might have had the Commune in 1848, as she had it in 1871, but with no great army collected at Versailles to bring it to subjection.

From such a fate France was saved by the energy and enthusiastic patriotism of one man, to whom, it seems to me, justice in history has hardly yet been done. "Lamartine was not republican enough for republicans; he lost at last his prestige among the people, and from personal causes the full sympathy of his friends; and his star sank before the rising sun of Louis Napoleon." Mrs. Oliphant also says of him,—

"In the midst of his manifold literary labors there happened to Lamartine such a chance as befalls few poets. He had it in his power, once in his life, to do something greater than the greatest lyric, more noble than any verse. At the crisis of the Revolution of 1848, chance (to use the word without irreverence) thrust him, and no other, into the place of master, and held him for one supreme moment alone between France and anarchy,—between, we might almost say, the world and another terrible revolution. And then the sentimentalist proved himself a man. He confronted raving Paris, and subdued it. The old noble French blood in his veins rose to the greatness of the crisis. With a pardonable thrill of pride in a position so strange to a writer and a man of thought, into which, without any action of his own, he found himself forced, he describes how he faced the tumultuous mob of Paris for seventy hours almost without repose, without sleep, without food, when there was no other man in France bold enough or wise enough to take that supreme part, and guide that most aimless of revolutions to a peaceful conclusion,—for the moment, at least. It was not Lamartine's fault that the Empire came after him. Long before the Empire came, he had fallen from his momentary elevation, and lost all influence with his country. But his downfall cannot efface the fact that he did actually reign, and reign beneficently, subduing and controlling the excited nation, saving men's lives and the balance of society."

The seventy hours at the Hôtel-de-Ville to which Mrs. Oliphant alludes were passed by Lamartine in making orations, in sending off proclamations to the departments, in endeavoring to calm the excited multitude and to secure the triumph of the Republic without the effusion of blood. The revolution he conducted was, if I may say so, the only respectable revolution France has ever known. Nobody expected it, nobody was prepared for it, nobody worked for it; but the whole country acquiesced in it, and men of all parties, seeing that it was an accomplished fact, gave in their adhesion to the Second Republic.

There were five great questions that came up before the Provisional Government for immediate solution,—