France from Behind the Veil: Fifty Years of Social and Political Life

by Princess Catherine Radziwill

The Duc de Broglie possessed a high moral character. He had strong prejudices, no indulgence for others, perhaps because he had never had any for himself; he was narrow-minded in some things, but generous in everything that did not touch on the question of principles. He came from an Orleanist family, and never wavered in his allegiance to the younger branch of the house of France, and when he accepted office, under Marshal MacMahon, he certainly did so with the idea that he could in time bring back Philippe VII. to Paris as King.

In spite of his apparent coldness and austerity, he had strong political passions, the only ones that his soul had ever known. These passions made him sometimes lose sight of the obstacles in his way, and the natural hauteur of a grand seigneur made him despise adversaries that he ought either to have tried to conciliate or else to have reckoned with more carefully than he did. He was not sympathetic, and very few liked him, but this latter fact did not trouble him much. The only thing he cared for was to be respected, esteemed, honoured by his foes as well as by his friends. No man was ever more respectful of a given word than the Duc de Broglie, and he would rather have died than have broken a promise once made, no matter how rash that promise might have been. He was certainly not a politician of the modern school, and both for him and for his country it might have been better had he confined himself to the historical studies which have made for him such a great name in modern French literature of the graver sort.

An amusing anecdote is related of the Duc de Broglie. He was staying with one of his friends in the country, and one day took up a novel which, forgotten, had been left on the table. With the attention that he always gave to everything he did, he read it through—it was the “Histoire de Sybille,” of Octave Feuillet—and then gravely asked his host whether one of the heroes of it was still alive? When the latter, more than surprised, inquired what he meant, he found out that the Duke had thought the book treated of facts that had really occurred, and had not imagined that the tale was just a novel. “Why waste one’s time in writing about things that have never existed?” he remarked. “Life is too short to afford it!” And when Feuillet was elected to the Academy he would never consent to give him his vote, saying that through him he had lost a few hours he might have employed in reading something more useful than a mere romance. For he could not forgive the fact that it had interested him in spite of his abomination for that kind of literature.

One can imagine that a man with such strength of character could not well understand the weakness of Marshal MacMahon, and it is not to be wondered at that the two serious discussions during the few months that elapsed between the birth and the fall of that Cabinet were always known in the annals of Parliamentary France as “the Cabinet of the 16th of May.” The Duc de Broglie would have liked to carry through the elections under the flag of Orleanism, to which he was so very much attached, and for whose profit, he had imagined, the Marshal had decided upon his coup d’état when he dismissed Jules Simon. When he perceived that the Duc de Magenta had simply given way to an attack of bad temper, the disillusion which he experienced was very great, but he did not think it right to desert the post which he had accepted under a misapprehension, and he and his colleagues only left office when the result of the elections made it but too apparent that their day had come to an end.

The Duc de Broglie never returned to political life after that effort. He spent the rest of his existence in retirement, absorbed in his studies, and seeking among his books an enjoyment that nothing else could give him. One did not meet him often in society, but sometimes he put in an appearance at the house parties given by his son, Prince Amédée de Broglie, at his splendid castle of Chaumont sur Loire, once the residence of Catherine de Medici.

Prince Amédée had married an heiress, Mademoiselle Say, the daughter of the great sugar refiner, who had brought him something like twenty million francs as her dowry. When her marriage took place one was not used yet in aristocratic France to these unions between the representatives of great names and daughters of the people, and one evening at a party given in honour of the young bride the Comte Horace de Choiseul, well known for his caustic tongue, approached her, and showing her a spot on her dress made by an ice that had fallen upon it, he said: “Vous avez une tâche de sucre sur votre robe, Princesse” (“You have a spot of sugar on your gown, Princess”). Madame de Broglie turned round, and instantly retorted: “Je préfère une tâche de sucre à une tâche de sang” (“I prefer a spot of sugar to a spot of blood”), thus alluding to the murder of the Comte de Choiseul’s mother, the Duchesse de Praslin, by her husband.

She is an amiable woman that Princesse de Broglie, in spite of her sharp tongue, and certainly she is one of the pleasantest in Paris society at present.

The Duc Decazes was a great contrast to the Duc de Broglie. Just as clever, though perhaps not so learned as the latter, he was, moreover, a most accomplished man of the world in the fullest sense of that expression. He made himself friends wherever he went, even among the ranks of his adversaries. During the seven years that he remained in charge of the Foreign Office, in several Cabinets, he succeeded in winning for France the respect of Europe, and in presenting the idea that though governments might change in that country, its foreign policy would not depart from the line it had taken. He was frank, loyal, a cultured, gentle, and an excellent, though not a brilliant, politician. Placed in office at a very difficult moment, just after the disasters of the Franco-German War had entirely destroyed the prestige of his fatherland, he contrived to raise it in the opinion of foreign governments, and to give them a high idea of its moral resources and dignity.

The advent of the Republic had, of course, been received with every feeling of apprehension and distrust, and the old Monarchists, who had already considerably hesitated before they admitted the Bonapartes as their equals, could not but look with distrust at the political adventurers who had replaced them. The Duc Decazes contrived to win for the governments of M. Thiers and of Marshal MacMahon the respect of all those with whom they had to be in contact; he continued, also, the tradition of the grand manners which had distinguished the Duc de Morny, Count Walewski, the Marquis de Moustiers, and all the high-born gentlemen to whom had been entrusted, for nearly a quarter of a century, the task of speaking in the name of France abroad. He renewed old links, and succeeded in forming new friendships which were to be very useful to him as well as to his country in the future.

The name of the Duc Decazes will always remain associated with the so-called German aggression in 1875, when, it is still currently believed in some quarters, the Prussian Government wanted to declare war against France, a war that was only averted by the intervention of the Emperor Alexander II. of Russia, to whom the French Foreign Minister had appealed for help. The story has been related a thousand times, but what has not been said is that with all his intelligence, his tact and his political experience the Duc Decazes fell a victim to the intrigues of the French Ambassador in Berlin, the Vicomte de Gontaut Biron.