To the Order of the Weather-cock succeeded, in 1819, when priestly ascendency at court was but too manifest, the Family of the Extinguishers. In the picture given below, the reader has the pleasure of viewing some of the family portraits, and in another he sees members of the family at work, rekindling the fire and extinguishing the lights. The fire was to consume the charter of French liberty and the records of science; the lights are the men to whom France felt herself indebted for liberty and knowledge—Buffon, Franklin, D'Alembert, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Montaigne, Fénélon, Condorcet, and their friends. Above is the personified Church, with sword uplifted, menacing mankind with new St. Bartholomews and Sicilian Vespers. Underneath this elaborate and ingenious work was the refrain of Béranger's song of 1819, entitled "Les Missionnaires," which was almost enough of itself to expel the Bourbons:
"Vite soufflons, soufflons, morbleu!
Éteignons les lumières
Et rallumons le feu."
The historian of that period will not omit to examine the songs which the incomparable Béranger wrote during the reign of the two kings of the Restoration. "Le peuple, c'est ma Muse," the poet wrote many years after, when reviewing this period. The people were his Muse. He studied the people, he adds, "with religious care," and always found their deepest convictions in harmony with his own. He had been completely fascinated by the "genius of Napoleon," never suspecting that it was Napoleon's lamentable want of ability which had devolved upon the respectable Louis XVIII. an impossible task. But he perceived that the task was impossible. There were two impossibilities, he thought, in the way of a stable government. It was impossible for the Bourbons, while they remained Bourbons, to govern France, and it was impossible for France to make them any thing but Bourbons. Hence, in lending his exquisite gift to the popular cause, he had no scruples and no reserves; and he freely poured forth those wonderful songs which became immediately part and parcel of the familiar speech of his countrymen. Alas for a Bourbon when there is a Béranger loose in his capital! Charles X. attempted the Bourbon policy of repression, and had the poet twice imprisoned. But he could not imprison his songs, nor prevent his writing new ones in prison, which sung themselves over France in a week. Caricature, too, was severely repressed—the usual precursor of collapse in a French government.
The Jesuits at Court. (Paris, 1819.)
"Quick! Blow! blow! Let us put out the lights and rekindle the fires!"
The end of the Restoration, in 1830, occurred with a sudden and spontaneous facility, which showed, among other things, how effectively Béranger had sung from his garret and his prison. The old king in 1824 had his wish of dying in his own bed, and is said to have told his successor, with his dying breath, that he owed this privilege to the policy of tacking ship rather than allowing a contrary wind to drive her upon the rocks. He advised "Monsieur" to pursue the same "tacking policy." But Monsieur was Comte d'Artois, that entire and perfect Bourbon, crusted by his sixty-seven years, a willing victim in the hands of Jesuit priests. In six years the ship of state was evidently driving full upon the rocks; but, instead of tacking, he put on all sail, and let her drive. At a moment when France was in the last extremity of alarm for the portion of liberty which her constitution secured her, this unhappy king signed a decree which put the press under the control of the Minister of Police, and the rest of the people of France under Marshal Marmont. Twenty-one days after, August 16th, 1830, the king and his suite were received on board of two American vessels, the Charles Carroll and the Great Britain, by which they were conveyed from Cherbourg to Portsmouth. "This," said the king to his first English visitors, "is the reward of my efforts to render France happy. I wished to make one last attempt to restore order and tranquillity. The factions have overturned me." The old gentleman resumed his daily mass, and found much consolation for the loss of a crown in the slaughter of beasts and birds. Louis Philippe was King of the French, by the grace of Lafayette and the acquiescence of a majority of the French people.
Caricature, almost interdicted during the last years of the Restoration, pursued the fugitive king and his family with avenging ridicule. Gavarni, then an unknown artist of twenty-six, employed by Émile de Girardin to draw the fashion plates of his new periodical, La Mode, gave Paris, in those wild July days of 1830, the only political caricatures he ever published. One represented the king as an old-clothes man, bawling, "Old coats! old lace!" In another he appeared astride of a lance, in full flight, in a costume composed of a priest's black robe and the glittering uniform of a general; white bands at his neck, the broad red ribbon of the Legion of Honor across his breast, one arm loaded with mitres, relics, and chaplets, with the scissors of the censer on the thumb, on the other side the end of a sabre, and the meagre legs encompassed by a pair of huge jack-boots. Another picture, called the "Lost Balloon," exhibited the king in the car of a balloon, with the same preposterous boots hanging down, along with the Duc d'Angoulême clinging to the sides, and the duchess crushing the king by her weight. The royal banner, white, and sown with fleurs-de-lis, streamed out behind as the balloon disappeared in the clouds.
These were the only political caricatures ever published by the man whom Frenchmen regard as the greatest of their recent satirical artists. He cared nothing for politics, and had the usual attachment of artists and poets to the Established Order. Having aimed these light shafts at the flying king in mere gayety of heart, because every one else was doing the same, he soon remembered that the king was an old man, past seventy-three, as old as his own father, and flying in alarm from his home and country. He was conscience-stricken. Reading aloud one day a poem in which allusion was made to a white-haired old man going into exile with slow, reluctant steps, his voice broke, and he could scarcely utter the lines: