The people, tired of Napoleon’s wars, wanting peace now as they had wanted it after the Revolution, agreed passively to the change of rulers. But Louis XVIII., a true Bourbon, soon showed that he had learned nothing from the misfortunes of his family. Lafayette met the Emperor of Russia in Paris, and the latter spoke to him with misgiving of the fact that the Bourbons appeared to be returning as obtuse and illiberal as ever. “Their misfortunes should have corrected them,” said Lafayette.
“Corrected!” exclaimed the Emperor. “They are uncorrected and incorrigible. There is only one, the Duke of Orleans, who has any liberal ideas. But from the others expect nothing at all.”
Lafayette soon found that was true. The new king proved the saying about his family, that the Bourbons never learned nor forgot. Louis XVIII. was that same Count of Provence whom Lafayette had taken pains to offend at Versailles when he did not want to be attached as a courtier to his staff. The King remembered that incident, and when Lafayette offered to serve him now showed his resentment and anger very plainly.
Seeing that there was nothing he could do in Paris, Lafayette retired again to Lagrange, and there watched the course of events. Napoleon, in exile on the island of Elba in the Mediterranean, was watching too, and he soon saw that France was not satisfied with her new sovereign. Agents brought him word that the people were only waiting for him to overthrow the Bourbon rule, and on March 1, 1815, he landed on the shores of Provence with a few hundred soldiers of his old Guard to reconquer his empire.
He had judged the situation rightly. As he advanced the people rose to greet him, the cities opened their gates, the soldiers sent to oppose him rallied to his standard. As Napoleon neared Paris Louis XVIII. fled across the frontier.
Again Lafayette went to the capital. “I had no faith in the conversion of Napoleon,” he said, “and I saw better prospects in the awkward and pusillanimous ill-will of the Bourbons than in the vigorous and profound perversity of their adversary.” But he found that the people of Paris wanted Napoleon again, and he heard with hope that the restored Emperor had agreed to a constitution and had established a Senate and a Representative Assembly elected by popular vote. These decisions sounded well, and as a result of them Lafayette allowed himself to be elected a member of the Representative Assembly, or Chamber of Deputies.
The other nations of Europe were furious when they heard of Napoleon’s return. They collected their armies again and prepared for a new campaign. Exhausted though France was, the Emperor was able to raise a new army of six hundred thousand men. With these he tried to defeat his enemies, but on the field of Waterloo on June 18, 1814, he was decisively beaten and hurried back to Paris to see what could be done to retrieve defeat.
He found the Chamber of Deputies openly hostile; its members wanted him to abdicate. He held meetings with the representatives, among whom Lafayette now held a chief place. At last the Assembly gave Napoleon an hour in which to abdicate the throne. Finally he agreed to abdicate in favor of his son. The Assembly did not want the young Napoleon as Emperor, and decided instead on a government by a commission of five men. Napoleon’s hour was over, his star had set; he was sent a prisoner to the far-distant island of St. Helena to end his days.
Lafayette wanted to see the new government adopt the ideas he had had in mind when France had first wrung a constitution from Louis XVI., and would have liked to serve on the commission that had charge of the country. Instead he was sent to make terms of peace with the allied armies that had been fighting Napoleon. And while he was away on this business the commission in Paris was dickering behind his back to restore Louis XVIII. The allies had taken possession of the French capital with their soldiers, the white flag of the Bourbons was everywhere replacing the tricolor of the Empire, and when Lafayette returned he found the King again upon his throne. Lafayette was disgusted with what he considered the folly and selfishness of the rulers of his country; he protested against the return of the old autocratic Bourbons, but the people were now more than ever eager for peace and harmony and accepted meekly whomever their leaders gave them.
Louis XVIII. was a weak, despotic ruler; the members of his house were equally narrow-minded and overbearing. Lafayette opposed their government in every way he could. In 1819 he was elected a member of the new Assembly, and for four years as a deputy he fought against the encroachments of the royal power. He took part in a conspiracy to overthrow the King, and when his friends cautioned him that he was risking his life and his property he answered, “Bah! I have already lived a long time, and it seems to me that I would worthily crown my political career by dying on a scaffold in the cause of liberty.”