To commemorate the dead the July Column, Liberty crowned, was raised on the site of the Bastille, and beneath it in two huge vaults lie scores upon scores of the victims of the overthrow.
The success of the revolution was a hint which even Charles could understand. He had been at Saint Cloud during the outbreak. He never went back to Paris. After his abdication he went to England and died in Austria six years later.
The political revolution was not the only sudden change of the year 1830. On the 25th of February occurred the “Battle of Hernani” when Victor Hugo’s famous play in which he embodied the principles of the new “romantic” school of writing, had its first performance. The classicists rose with howls and hisses at the very first line, in which was an infringement of classical rules, and the evening passed tempestuously, even with an interchange of blows. The piece was allowed other hearings, however, and at last the novelty became no longer a novelty but the fashion.
For all her desire for a republican form of government, France, during the great Revolution, had not been so fortunate in her leaders that she was prepared now to elevate an ordinary citizen to the headship, the more as there was no man of especial distinction with the exception of the too-aged Lafayette. It was he who, in an interview with Louis Philippe, a member of the Orleans branch of the royal house, expressed the popular wish for “a throne surrounded by republican institutions.”
Louis Philippe, who was descended from a younger brother of Louis XIV,[6] had served in the Revolutionary army, but had become entangled in a conspiracy which made it prudent for him to join his royalist friends in England. The Restoration (1814) permitted his return and he had long lived the life of a quiet bourgeois dwelling in a Paris suburb, and educating his children in the public schools. He was generally liked and it needed but small artificial stimulation to start a boom for his candidacy. On the night of the 30th of July he walked in from Neuilly and went to the Palais Royal. Three days later Lafayette presented him to the still armed and still murmuring crowds before the City Hall, and on the ninth of August the Chamber of Deputies declared him king not “of France” but “of the French” to emphasize in his title his summons from the people.
In England during this part of the nineteenth century there was much popular upheaval over the suffrage and the revolution of industry by the introduction of machinery. France was equally disturbed, but over political problems. Louis Philippe apparently had been the choice of the people, he wore the tricolor and sang the “Marseillaise” beating time for the crowd to follow, and the provisions of his government were liberal. Yet he received cordial support only from the Constitutionalists. He was opposed by the Bonapartists, by the Legitimists, who wanted a representative of the Bourbons, and by the Republicans who urged a government like America’s. To the latter belonged the Paris rabble and they never let pass an opportunity to stir up trouble for the king. Only a year after his accession when the Legitimists were holding a service in memory of the Duke of Berry in the church of Saint Germain l’Auxerrois the mob entered the building and seized the communion plate, the
THE BOURSE.
See [page 331.]