At Court, as in the Chamber, M. de Villèle was triumphant; he had not only conquered, but he had driven away his rivals, M. de Montmorency and M. de Châteaubriand, as he had got rid of M. de La Fayette and M. Manuel. Amongst the men whose voices, opinions, or even presence might have fettered him, death had already stepped in, and was again coming to his aid. M. Camille Jordan, the Duke de Richelieu, and M. de Serre were dead; General Foy and the Emperor Alexander were not long in following them. There are moments when death seems to delight, like Tarquin, in cutting down the tallest flowers. M. de Villèle remained sole master. At this precise moment commenced the heavy difficulties of his position, the weak points of his conduct, and his first steps towards decline.
In place of having to defend himself against a powerful opposition of the Left, which was equally to be feared and resisted by the Right and the Cabinet, he found himself confronted by an Opposition emanating from the right itself, and headed, in the Chamber of Deputies, by M. de la Bourdonnaye, his companion during the session of 1815; in the Chamber of Peers and without, by M. de Châteaubriand, so recently his colleague in the Council. As long as he had M. de Châteaubriand for an ally, M. de Villèle had only encountered as adversaries, in the interior of his party, the ultra-royalists of the extreme right, M. de la Bourdonnaye, M. Delalot, and a few others, whom the old counter-revolutionary spirit, intractable passions, ambitious discontent, or habits of grumbling independence kept in a perpetual state of irritation against a power, moderate without ascendency, and clever without greatness. But when M. de Châteaubriand and the 'Journal des Débats' threw themselves into the combat, there was then seen to muster round them an army of anti-ministerialists of every origin and character, composed of royalists and liberals, of old and young France, of the popular and the aristocratic throng. The weak remains of the left-hand party, beaten in the recent elections, the seventeen old members of the Opposition, liberals or doctrinarians, drew breath when they looked on such allies; and, without confounding their ranks, while each party retained its own standard and arms, they combined for mutual support, and united their forces against M. de Villèle. M. de Châteaubriand has gratified himself by inserting in his Memoirs the testimonies of admiration and sympathy proffered to him at that time by M. Benjamin Constant, General Sebastiani, M. Étienne, and other heads of the liberal section. In the Parliamentary struggle, the left-hand party could only add to the opposers of the right a very small number of votes; but they brought eminent talents, the support of their journals, their influence throughout the country; and, in a headlong, confused attack,—some under cover of the mantle of Royalism, others shielded by the popularity of their allies,—they waged fierce war against the common enemy.
In presence of such an Opposition, M. de Villèle fell into a more formidable danger than that of the sharp contests he had to encounter to hold ground against it: he was given over without protection or refuge to the influence and views of his own friends. He could no longer awe them by the power of the left-hand party, nor find occasionally in the unsettled position of the Chamber a bulwark against their demands. There had ceased to be a formidable balance of oppositionists or waverers; the majority, and a great majority, was ministerial and determined to support the Cabinet; but it had no real apprehension of the adversaries by whom it was attacked. It preferred M. de Villèle to M. de la Bourdonnaye and M. de Châteaubriand, believing him more capable of managing with advantage the interests of the party; but if M. de Villèle went counter to the wishes of that majority, if it ceased to hold a perfect understanding with him, it could then fall back on MM. de Châteaubriand and de la Bourdonnaye. M. de Villèle had no resource against the majority; he was a minister at the mercy of his partisans.
Amongst these were some of opposite pretensions, and who lent him their support on very unequal conditions. If he had only had to deal with those I shall designate as the politicals and laymen of the party, he might have been able to satisfy and govern in concert with them. Notwithstanding their prejudices, the greater part of the country-gentlemen and royalist citizens were neither over-zealous nor exacting; they had fallen in with the manners of new France, and had either found or recovered their natural position in present society, reconciling themselves to constitutional government, since they were no longer considered as the vanquished side. The indemnity to the emigrants, some pledges of local influence, and the distribution of public functions, would have long sufficed to secure their support to M. de Villèle; but another portion of his army, numerous, important, and necessary, the religious department, was much more difficult to satisfy and control.
I am not disposed to revive any of the particular expressions which were then used as weapons of war, and have now become almost insulting. I shall neither speak of the priestly, nor of the congregational party, nor even of the Jesuits. I should reproach myself for reviving by such language and reminiscences the evil, heavy in itself, which France and the Restoration were condemned at that time, the one to fear, and the other to endure.
This evil, which glimmered through the first Restoration, through the session of 1815, and still exists, in spite of so many storms and such increasing intelligence, is, in fact a war declared by a considerable portion of the Catholic Church of France, against existing French society, its principles, its organization, political and civil, its origin and its tendencies. It was during the ministry of M. de Villèle, and above all when he found himself alone and confronted with his party, that the mischief displayed its full force.
Never was a similar war more irrational or inopportune. It checked the reaction, which had commenced under the Consulate, in favour of creeds and the sentiment of religion. I have no desire to exaggerate the value of that reaction; I hold faith and true piety in too much respect to confound them with the superficial vicissitudes of human thought and opinion. Nevertheless the movement which led France back towards Christianity was more sincere and serious than it actually appeared to be. It was at once a public necessity and an intellectual taste. Society, worn out with commotion and change, sought for fixed points on which it could rely and repose; men, disgusted with a terrestrial and material atmosphere, aspired to ascend once more towards higher and purer horizons; the inclinations of morality concurred with the instincts of social interest. Left to its natural course, and supported by the purely religious influence of a clergy entirely devoted to the re-establishment of faith and Christian life, this movement was likely to extend and to restore to religion its legitimate empire.
But instead of confining itself to this sphere of action, many members and blind partisans of the Catholic clergy descended to worldly questions, and showed themselves more zealous to recast French society in its old mould, and so to restore their church to its former place there, than to reform and purify the moral condition of souls. Here was a profound mistake. The Christian Church is not like the pagan Antæus, who renews his strength by touching the earth; it is on the contrary, by detaching itself from the world, and re-ascending towards heaven, that the Church in its hours of peril regains its vigour. When we saw it depart from its appropriate and sublime mission, to demand penal laws and to preside over the distribution of offices; when we beheld its desires and efforts prominently directed against the principles and institutions which constitute today the essence of French society; when liberty of conscience, publicity, the legal separation of civil and religious life, the laical character of the State, appeared to be attacked and compromised,—on that instant the rising tide of religious reaction stopped, and yielded way to a contrary current. In place of the movement which thinned the ranks of the unbelievers to the advantage of the faithful, we saw the two parties unite together; the eighteenth century appeared once more in arms; Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and their worst disciples once more spread [themselves] abroad and recruited innumerable battalions. War was declared against society in the name of the Church, and society returned war for war:—a deplorable chaos, in which good and evil, truth and falsehood, justice and injustice, were confounded together, and blows hurled at random on every side.
I know not whether M. de Villèle thoroughly estimated, in his own thoughts, the full importance of this situation of affairs, and the dangers to which he exposed religion and the Restoration. His was not a mind either accustomed or disposed to ponder long over general facts and moral questions, or to sound them deeply. But he thoroughly comprehended, and felt acutely, the embarrassment which might accrue from these causes to his own power; and he tried to diminish them by yielding to clerical influence in the government, imposing though limited sacrifices, flattering himself that by these means he should acquire allies in the Church itself, who would aid him to restrain the overweening and imprudent pretensions of their own friends. Already, and shortly after his accession to the ministry, he had appointed an ecclesiastic in good estimation, and whom the Pope had named Bishop of Hermopolis, the Abbé Frayssinous, to the head-mastership of the University. Two months after the fall of M. de Châteaubriand, the Abbé Frayssinous entered the Cabinet as Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs and Public Instruction—a new department created expressly for him. He was a man of sense and moderation, who had acquired, by Christian preaching without violence, and conduct in which prudence was blended with dignity, a reputation and importance somewhat superior to his actual merits, and which he had no desire to compromise. In 1816 he had been a member of the Royal Commission of Public Education, over which M. Royer-Collard at that time presided; but soon retired from it, not wishing either to share the [responsibility] of his superior or to act in opposition to him. He generally approved of the policy of M. de Villèle; but although binding himself to support it, and while lamenting the blind demands of a portion of the clergy, he endeavoured, when opportunity offered, to excuse and conceal rather than reject them altogether. Without betraying M. de Villèle, he afforded him little aid, and committed him repeatedly by his language in public, which invariably tended more to maintain his own position in the Church than to serve the Cabinet.
Three months only had elapsed since M. de Villèle, separated from his most brilliant colleagues and an important portion of his old friends, had sustained the entire weight of government, when the King Louis XVIII. died. The event had long been foreseen, and M. de Villèle had skilfully prepared for it: he was as well established in the esteem and confidence of the new monarch as of the sovereign who had just passed from the Tuileries to St. Denis; Charles X., the Dauphin, and the Dauphiness, all three looked upon him as the ablest and most valuable of their devoted adherents. But M. de Villèle soon discovered that he had changed masters, and that little dependence could be placed on the mind or heart of a king, even though sincere, when the surface and the interior were not in unison. Men belong, much more than is generally supposed, or than they believe themselves, to their real convictions. Many comparisons, for the sake of contrast, have been drawn between Louis XVIII. and Charles X.; the distinction between them was even greater than has been stated. Louis XVIII. was a moderate of the old system, and a liberal-minded inheritor of the eighteenth century; Charles X. was a true emigrant and a submissive bigot. The wisdom of Louis XVIII. was egotistic and sceptical, but serious and sincere; when Charles X. acted like a sensible king, it was through propriety, from timid and short-sighted complaisance, from being carried away, or from the desire of pleasing,—not from conviction or natural choice. Through all the different Cabinets of his reign, whether under the Abbé de Montesquiou, M. de Talleyrand, the Duke de Richelieu, M. Decazes, and M. de Villèle, the government of Louis XVIII. was ever consistent with itself; without false calculation or premeditated deceit, Charles X. wavered from contradiction to contradiction, from inconsistency to inconsistency, until the day when, given up to his own will and belief, he committed the error which cost him his throne.