The assassination of the Duke de Berry might with much more propriety be called an accident. On the trial it was proved by evidence that Louvel had no accomplices, and that he was alone in the conception as in the execution of his crime. But it was also evident that hatred against the Bourbons had possessed the soul and armed the hand of the murderer. Revolutionary passions are a fire which is kindled and nourished afar off; the orators of the right obtained credit with many timid and horror-stricken minds, when they called this an accident;—as it is also an accident if a diseased constitution catches the plague when it infects the air, or if a powder-magazine explodes when you strike fire in its immediate neighbourhood.
M. Decazes endeavoured to defend himself against these two heavy blows. After the election of M. Grégoire, he undertook to accomplish alone what at the close of the preceding year he had refused to attempt in concert with the Duke de Richelieu. He determined to alter the law of elections. It was intended that this change should take place in a great constitutional reform meditated by M. de Serre, liberal on certain points, monarchical on others, and which promised to give more firmness to royalty by developing representative government. M. Decazes made a sincere effort to induce the Duke de Richelieu, who was then travelling in Holland, to return and reassume the presidency of the Council, and to co-operate with him in the Chambers for the furtherance of this bold undertaking. The King himself applied to the Duke de Richelieu, who positively declined, more from disgust with public affairs and through diffidence of his own power, than from any remains of ill-humour or resentment. Three actual members of the Cabinet of 1819, General Dessoles, Marshal Gouvion St. Cyr, and Baron Louis, declared that they would not co-operate in any attack on the existing law of elections. M. Decazes determined to do without them, as he had dispensed with the Duke de Richelieu, and to form a new Cabinet, of which he became the president, and in which M. Pasquier, General Latour-Maubourg, and M. Roy replaced the three retiring ministers. On the 29th of November the King opened the session. Two months passed over, and the new electoral system had not yet been presented to the Chamber. Three days after the assassination of the Duke de Berry, M. Decazes introduced it suddenly, with two bills to suspend personal liberty, and re-establish the censorship of the daily press. Four days later he fell, and the Duke de Richelieu, standing alone before the King and the danger, consented to resume power. M. Decazes would have acted more wisely had he submitted to his first defeat, and induced the King after the election of M. Grégoire, to take back the Duke de Richelieu as minister. He would not then have been compelled to lower with his own hand the flag he had raised, and to endure the burden of a great miscarriage.
The fall of the Cabinet of 1819, brought on a new crisis, and a fresh progress of the evil which disorganized the great Government party formed during the session of 1815, and by the decree of the 5th of September, 1816. To the successive divisions of the centre, were now added the differences between the doctrinarians themselves. M. de Serre, who had joined the Cabinet with M. Decazes to defend the law of elections, now determined, although sick and absent, to remain there with the Duke de Richelieu to overthrow it, without any of the compensations, real or apparent, which his grand schemes of constitutional reform were intended to supply. I tried in vain to dissuade him from his resolution.[15] In the Chamber of Deputies, M. Royer-Collard and M. Camille Jordan vehemently attacked the new electoral plan; the Duke de Broglie and M. de Barante proposed serious amendments to it in the Chamber of Peers. All the political ties which had been cemented during five years appeared to be dissolved; every one followed his own private opinion, or returned to his old bias. In the parliamentary field, all was uncertainty and confused opposition; a phantom appeared at each extremity, revolution and counter-revolution, exchanging mutual menaces, and equally impatient to come to issue.
Those who wish to give themselves a correct idea of parliamentary and popular excitement, pushed to their extreme limit, and yet retained within that boundary by legal authority and the good sense of the public,—sufficient to arrest the country on the brink of an abyss, although too weak to block up the road that leads to it,—should read the debate on the new electoral bill introduced into the Chamber of Deputies on the 17th of April, 1820, by the second Cabinet of the Duke de Richelieu, and discussed for twenty-six days in that Chamber, accompanied with riotous gatherings without, thoughtlessly aggressive and sternly repressed. If we are to believe the orators of the left, France and her liberties, the Revolution and its conquests, the honour of the present, and the security of the future, were all lost if the ministerial bill should pass. The right, on the other hand, looked upon the bill as scarcely strong enough to save the monarchy for the moment, and declared its resolution to reject every amendment which might diminish its powers. On both sides, pretensions and claims were equally ungovernable. Attracted and excited by this legal quarrel, the students, the enthusiastic young Liberals, the old professional disturbers, the idlers and oppositionists of every class, were engaged daily with the soldiers and the agents of police, in conflicts sometimes sanguinary, and the accounts of which redoubled the acrimony of the debate withindoors. In the midst of this general commotion, the Cabinet of 1820 had the merit of maintaining, while repressing all popular movement, the freedom of legislative deliberation, and of acting its part in these stormy discussions with perseverance and moderation. M. Pasquier, their Minister for Foreign Affairs, endowed with rare self-command and presence of mind, was on this occasion the principal parliamentary champion of the Cabinet; and M. Mounier, Director-General of the Police, controlled the street riots with as much prudence as active firmness. The charge so often brought against so many ministers, against M. Casimir Perrier in 1831, as against the Duke de Richelieu in 1820, of exciting popular commotions only to repress them, does not deserve the notice of sensible men. At the end of a month, all these debates and scenes, within and without, ended in the adoption, not of the ministerial bill, but of an amendment which, without destroying in principle the bill of the 5th of February, 1817, so materially vitiated it, to the advantage of the right, that the party felt themselves bound to be satisfied. The greater portion of the centre, and the more moderate members of the left, submitted for the sake of public peace. The extreme left and the extreme right, M. Manuel and M. de la Bourdonnaye entered a protest. The new electoral system was clearly destined to shift the majority, and, with the majority, power, from the left to the right; but the liberties of France, and the advantages gained by the Revolution, were not endangered by the change.
This question once settled, the Cabinet had to pay its debts to the right-hand party,—rewards to those who had supported it, and punishments to its opposers. In spite of old friendships, the doctrinarians figured of necessity in the last category. If I had desired it, I might have escaped. Not being a member of either Chamber, and beyond the circle of constrained action, I could in my capacity of State Councillor have maintained reserve and silence after giving my advice to the Government; but on entering public life, I had resolved on one uniform course,—to express my true thoughts on every occasion, and never to separate myself from my friends. M. de Serre included me, with good reason, in the measure which removed them from the Council; on the 17th of June, 1820, he wrote to MM. Royer-Collard, Camille Jordan, Barante, and myself, to inform us that we were no longer on the list. The best men readily assume the habits and style of absolute power. M. de Serre was certainly not deficient in self-respect or confidence in his own opinions; he felt surprised that in this instance I should have obeyed mine, without any other more coercive necessity, and evinced this feeling by communicating my removal with unqualified harshness. "The evident hostility," he said to me, "which, without the shadow of a pretext, you have lately exhibited towards the King's Government, has rendered this step inevitable." My answer was simply this:—"I expected your letter. I might have foreseen, and I did anticipate it, when I openly evinced my disapprobation of the acts and speeches of the Ministry. I congratulate myself that I have nothing to alter in my conduct. Tomorrow, as yesterday, I shall belong only and entirely to myself."[16]
The decisive step was taken; power had changed its course with its friends. After having turned it to this new direction, the Duke de Richelieu and his colleagues made sincere efforts during two years to arrest its further progress. They tried all methods of conciliation or resistance; sometimes they courted the right, at others the remains of the centre, and occasionally even the left, by concessions of principle, and more frequently of a personal nature. M. de Châteaubriand was sent as Ambassador to Berlin, and General Clauzel was declared entitled to the amnesty. M. de Villèle and M. Corbière obtained seats in the Cabinet, the first as minister without a portfolio, and the other as president of the Royal Council of Public Instruction; they left it, however, at the expiration of six months, under frivolous pretexts, but foreseeing the approaching fall of the Ministry, and not wishing to be there at the last moment. They were not deceived. The elections of 1821 completed the decimation of the weak battalion which still endeavoured to stand firm round tottering power. The Duke de Richelieu, who had only resumed office on a personal promise from the Count d'Artois of permanent support, complained loudly, with the independent spirit of a nobleman of high rank and of a man of honour, that the word of a gentleman, pledged to him, had not been kept. Vain complaints, and futile efforts! The Cabinet obtained time with difficulty; but the right-hand party alone gained ground. At length, on the 19th of December, 1821, the last shadow of the Government of the Centre vanished with the ministry of the Duke de Richelieu. The right and M. de Villèle seized the reins of power. "The counter-revolution is approaching!" exclaimed the left, in a mingled burst of satisfaction and alarm. M. de Villèle thought differently; a little before the decisive crisis, and after having, in his quality of vice-president, directed for some days the deliberations of the Chamber of Deputies, he wrote as follows to one of his friends:—"You will scarcely believe how my four days of presidency have succeeded. I received compliments on every side, but particularly, I own it to my shame, from the left, whom I have never conciliated. They expected, without doubt, to be eaten up alive by an ultra. They are inexhaustible in eulogium. Finally, those to whom I never speak, now address me with a thousand compliments. I think in this there is a little spite against M. Ravez. But, be that as it may, if a president were just now to be elected, I should have almost every vote in the Chamber.... For myself, impartiality costs me nothing. I look only to the success of the affairs I have undertaken, and have not the slightest prejudice against individuals. I am born for the end of revolutions."
FOOTNOTES:
[14] I have recapitulated amongst the "Historic [Documents]" the chief measures of general administration, which were adopted by M. Lainé, M. Decazes and Marshal Gouvion St. Cyr, in their respective departments, during this period. These short tables clearly exhibit the spirit of improvement and the rational care of public interests which animated the Cabinet. (Historic [Documents], [No. IX.])
[15] I insert in the "Historic Documents" the letter I addressed to him, with this object, on the 12th of April, 1820, to Nice, whither he had repaired towards the middle of the month of January, to seek relief from a crisis of the chest complaint which finally caused his death. I am struck today, as undoubtedly all will be who read this letter with attention, by the mixture of truth and error, of foresight and improvidence therein contained. Subsequent events alternately verified and disproved what I then wrote. (Historic Documents, [No. X.])
[16] I insert at length amongst the "Historic Documents" the correspondence interchanged on this occasion between M. de Serre, M. Pasquier, and myself. (Historic Documents, [No. XI])