"Pas d'outrage au vieillard qui s'exile à pas lents.
C'est une piété d'épargner les ruines.
Je n'enfoncerai pas la couronne d'épines
Que la main du malheur met sur ses cheveux blancs."
As he spoke these words the image of his old father rose vividly before his mind, and he could read no more. "I felt," said he, "as if I had been struck in the face;" and ever after he held political caricature in horror.
This feeling is one with which the reader will often find himself sympathizing while examining some of the heartless and thoughtless pictures which exasperated the elderly paterfamilias who was now called to preside over demoralized France. Louis Philippe was another good-natured Louis XVIII., minus divine right, plus a large family. With all the domestic virtues, somewhat too anxious to push his children on in the world, a good citizen, a good patriot, an unostentatious gentleman, he was totally destitute of those picturesque and captivating qualities which adventurers and banditti often possess, but which wise and trustworthy men seldom do. In looking back now upon that eighteen years' struggle between this respectable father of a family and anarchy, it seems as if France should have rallied more loyally and more considerately round him, and given him too the privilege, so dear to elderly gentlemen, of dying in his own bed. One-tenth of his virtue and one-half his intellect had sufficed under the old régime.
But since that lamentable and fatal day when the priests wrought upon Louis XIV. to decree the expulsion of the Huguenots, who were the élite of his kingdom, France had been undergoing a course of political demoralization, which had made a constitutional government of the country almost impossible. Recent events had exaggerated the criminal class. Twenty years of intoxicating victory had made all moderate success, all gradual prosperity, seem tame and flat; and the reduction of the army had set afloat great numbers of people indisposed to peaceful industry. Under the Restoration, we may almost say, political conspiracy had become a recognized profession. The new king, pledged to make the freedom of the press "a reality," soon found himself face to face with difficulties which Bourbons had invariably met by mere repression. Republicans and Legitimists were equally dissatisfied. Legitimists could only wait and plot; but Republicans could write, speak, and draw. A considerable proportion of the young, irresponsible, and adventurous talent was republican, and there was a great deal of Bohemian character available for that side. It was a time when a Louis Napoleon could belong to a democratic club.
Caricature speedily marked the "citizen king" for her own. Napoleon had employed all his subtlest tact during the last ten years of his reign in keeping alive in French minds the base feudal feeling, so congenial to human indolence and vanity, that it is nobler to be a soldier than to rear a family and keep a shop. In his bulletins we find this false sentiment adroitly insinuated in a hundred ways. He loved to stigmatize the English as a nation of shop-keepers. He displayed infinite art in exalting the qualities which render men willing to destroy one another without asking why, and in casting contempt on the arts and virtues by which the waste of war is repaired. The homely habits, the plain dress, the methodical ways, of Louis Philippe were, therefore, easily made to seem ridiculous. He was styled the first bourgeois of his kingdom—as he was—but the French people had been taught to regard the word as a term of contempt.
Unfortunately he abandoned the policy of letting the caricaturists alone. Several French rulers have adopted the principle of not regarding satire, but not one has had the courage to adhere to it long. Sooner or later all the world will come into the "American system," and all the world will at length discover the utter impotence of the keenest ridicule and the most persistent abuse against public men who do right and let their assailants alone. The chief harm done by the abuse of public men in free countries is in making it too difficult to expose their real faults. How would it be possible, for example, to make the people of the United States believe ill of a President in vilifying whom ingenious men and powerful journals had exhausted themselves daily for years? Nothing short of testimony, abundant and indisputable, such as would convince an honest jury, could procure serious attention. From President Washington to President Grant the history of American politics is one continuous proof of Mr. Jefferson's remark, that "an administration which has nothing to conceal has nothing to fear from the press."
Charles Philipon.
When Louis Philippe had been a year upon the throne appeared the first number of Le Charivari, a daily paper of four small pages, conducted by an unknown, inferior artist—Charles Philipon. Around him gathered a number of Bohemian draughtsmen and writers, not one of whom appears then to have shared in the social or political life of the country, or to have had the faintest conception of the consideration due to a fellow-citizen in a place of such extreme difficulty as the head of a government. They assailed the king, his person, his policy, his family, his habits, his history, with thoughtless and merciless ridicule. A periodical which has undertaken to supply a cloyed, fastidious public with three hundred and sixty-five ludicrous pictures per annum must often be in desperation for subjects, and there was no resource to Philipon so obvious or so sure as the helpless family imprisoned in the splendors and etiquette of royalty. Unfortunately for modern governments, the people of Europe were for so many centuries preyed upon and oppressed by kings that vast numbers of people, even in free countries, still regard the head of a government as a kind of natural enemy, to assail whom is among the rights of a citizen. And, moreover, the king, the president, the minister, is unseen by those who hurl the barbed and poisoned javelin. They do not see him shrink and writhe. To many an anonymous coward it is a potent consideration, also, that the head of a constitutional government can not usually strike back.