I shall say but one word of external matters. The Restoration found war in France, and France, like Europe, weary of war. This was both for France and Europe a pledge of peace. Peace was then the general law of our destiny; and in it should France have sought its power, and likewise its dignity, for the one is not separated from the other, at least for long.
Within, the Restoration found neither anarchy, impiety, contempt for the laws, struggles between classes, nor any of those revolutionary scourges of which they now speak, as if they had possessed France for twenty-five years without interruption. This is not true. The old nobility lived at peace with the new, and both with the nation. Vanity had its folly as well as its pleasures, and the country thought little about the matter. Unluckily for our prospects and our rights—I thought so then, and do so still—power was at least strongly constituted, and in such a manner that disorder was not to be feared either for us or itself. Moral disorder, that internal shamelessness which incredulity produces, that domestic license, contempt for all existing forms of things, and aversion to every rule and restraint, had disappeared. Order, an imperious and blind necessity in 1799, was in 1814 a habit and a general taste, and the Restoration found it so.
It is true that order, not only politically, but morally, was without guarantees. In political respects, no real and independent institutions subsisted by their own strength, capable of protecting either the general interests against individual pretensions, or individual interests against the tyranny of general interests and the natural vices or errors of power. One man had sufficed for many, and had pretended to suffice for all. In falling, he left power entirely naked and defenceless: for it had rights, and no means of exercising them; strength, and no means of displaying it; wants, and no means of providing for them by its own efforts.
In moral respects the evil was less apparent, but still real and profound. Order reigned in social facts, and even in manners; but the principles of order were not in the soul. These principles I may sum up in two words: the firm sentiment of right and true belief. These were almost alike wanting. I will not say that in the respect for religion and morals which replaced the revolutionary cynicism there was hypocrisy, but still there was not sincerity: it was an external respect, founded upon necessities and conveniences, not upon convictions and sentiments. People considered it good, and observed it, but without having in themselves that which occasions it, and without troubling themselves as to its legitimate nature. The head of the government set the example; but if he desired its habits, he feared its principles; for while ridiculing ideas, he acknowledged their empire. Discipline without moral rule, obedience with indifference, this is all he sought, and society gradually took the character under his hand. Never had order been at once so exact, and yet so foreign, to the inner life of man; and never had there been so much regularity united with so little faith.
As for the idea of right, it was raised little above civil relations; beyond which force reigned so supreme, that it seemed as if right belonged to it alone. When there exists in a nation a will before which everything disappears, or is reduced to silence, the sentiment of right perishes; and if this will is at the same time very active, and is possessed with the passion for displaying itself on every side, in war, in peace, manifesting itself everywhere, and considering every obstacle as illegitimate, it exercises over men the most formidable corruption they can be subject to, for it deprives them of the power and even thought of resisting—that is to say, takes from them their moral existence. Right is the right of resistance: there is no other; for take that away, and every other disappears. Bonaparte struck them all to the heart, at least in their relations with his power; and thus repulsing beliefs on the one hand, and rights on the other, he carried away from the order which he maintained, without having founded it, every guarantee but habit and his own will.
What Bonaparte did not give, the Restoration could give us: this was at once its mission and its nature. It was its mission, for a government has no other than that of satisfying the wants of the society in which it is established; not only the permanent and universal wants of society, but likewise, and above all perhaps, the special wants of its epoch. But even as Bonaparte had had to bring back external order, and to cause the cessation, by the despotism of a single will, of the anarchy of individual wills, so the Restoration, taking things where Bonaparte left them, had to infuse into external order the belief which constitutes moral order, and to replace the empire of will by the empire of right. Though less visible, these wants are not the less real; they are found at the bottom of every legitimate aspiration of every party.
It was also in the nature of the Restoration to respond to them. And from the first it was constrained to the institutions of liberty. I make use of this word, for it appears to me the only one by which the imperious necessity for the Charter can be expressed. Such constraints are not offensive to the power to which they apply, for it is Providence which directs them. The mistrust which the Restoration could not fail to excite exacted guarantees which liberty alone could offer. Thus liberty was perhaps still more necessary to the Restoration than power to the Consulate: but it is in the bosom of liberty that public beliefs are developed; it is under its shadow that general ideas germinate and grow, ideas adapted to the time and to the instinct of minds, and called forth and gathered by the secret wants of an entire people. Despotism never produces them; and the great convictions which have governed the world are never formed but against power or in a free state. The idea and the sentiment of right spring of necessity from liberty. This does not need proof, especially in modern times, when the bloody combats of the little Greek or Italian factions would not be, in the eyes of any one, liberty.
And this is not all: that which was a necessity to the Restoration was likewise analogous to its nature: it drew its force not from force itself, but from an idea. The word legitimacy has been, and will still be, much abused. One loses much by this abuse; for in trying to make it mean what it does not, we run the risk of depriving it of what it really contains of truth and strength. It expresses a right, real and obvious, though limited as rights always are, when existing simultaneously with other rights. This right has made the strength of the Restoration, and even the Restoration itself. The Restoration was the result of the influence which recollections of long possession and certain moral principles and sentiments accompanying them exercise upon the minds of men. Whatever we may think of right—its origin, conditions, limits—we should know that it is a fact, a powerful fact, and one which was felt as such by Cromwell and William III., as well as in the reign of Charles II.