The Fall of Prince Florestan of Monaco

by Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke

“But I wish to change them,” I as often replied.

“I can understand that your Highness should wish to be thought to wish to change them, but further than that point I can not follow your Highness.”

I seriously thought of clapping Dr. Coulon into prison for his impertinence, but then he was the only liberal in Monaco, and I was a liberal prince. How I wished, though, that my uncle had not been such a fool as to invite the Jesuits, harassed in Italy in 1862, to take refuge in his dominions.

I was no further advanced than my grandfather, Florestan I., who when overtaken by the events of 1848, which lost him Mentone and Roquebrune, contemplated a parliament, which however he never formed. It was a funny constitution was that one which he posted on the walls, and over which I had often mused. It had not gone further than being posted on the walls, I should add, because my grandfather found that it would not bring back Mentone, and as he was strong enough to keep Monaco with or without it he had, very sensibly, put it in the fire. The 11th article of it was the oddest:—“La presse sera libre, mais sujette à des lois répressives.” But the first article gave the tone to the whole:—“The sole religion of the State is the Catholic, Apostolic, Roman.”

I strolled up the terraces of Monte Carlo, which always reminded me of John Martin’s idea of heaven, and consulted M. Blanc. He was in especially good humour that day, because “Madame Brisebanque” and “the Maltese” had both been losing money. Still, when I talked of my parliament and my education reform, he talked of “Jacob’s ladder” and of other infallible systems of ruining him which never had any result except that of beggaring their authors. He told me a long-winded story of how at Homburg a company called “La Contrebanque” had won twenty-four days in succession, and how on the twenty-fifth they had sent for a watchman and an iron chest to guard their winnings, how that afternoon their secretary had lost the whole capital in eighteen coups, and how the innocent watchman had marched up and down all night religiously guarding an empty chest. I tried to hark back to my subject, when off he went again at a tangent, and told me how the day before on opening the “bienfaisance” collection-box in the hall of the hotel they had found no money, but all the letters of an American gentleman who had posted them there the year before. Another of his anecdotes was of a lady who, having lost, had eaten a thousand-franc note on a slice of bread and butter to improve her luck. M. Blanc left the Casino in his carriage just after I had ridden off, and without seeming to look I saw well enough out of the corner of my eyes after he had passed me on the road, that the people uncovered to him more universally and for a longer time than to myself. There was, however, one difference between us—I returned the bows and he did not.

I gave up M. Blanc and pursued my reforming course, abandoning, however, the idea of a parliament and fearing to touch education. My government, now in working order, resembled in no way that which you English think the best of all possible polities—“constitutional monarchy”—which with you appears to me to mean a democratic republic tempered by snobbism and corruption. Mine was a socialistic autocracy, which, in spite of my failure, I maintain to be the best of governments, provided only that you can secure the best of autocrats.

I had no one to back me in what I did. Major Gasignol and some of the other officers were strongly favourable to the army reform, which gave them service and promotion. Dr. Coulon was half favourable to my views, and a quarter favourable to my ways of working them out in action. L’Abbé Ramin was conciliatory and kind. M. de Payan was grimly neutral. Every other functionary was an active, though veiled, enemy to nine-tenths of my proposals. The people were abjectly passive, and I almost wished that the auberge of the “Crapaud Volant” of Rabagas had had a real existence. At last, however, I conjured up the spirit to found a school with lay teachers, arranging to pay its cost over and above the expected fees out of my own purse. No one came to it, and the Jesuit schools and the schools of the frères de la doctrine continued to be thronged. The Catholic schools were supported by the state. Mine were supported by myself. I went a step further, and I offered Father Pellico the alternatives of stopping the state contributions to all schools, or of continuing them, provided that lay teachers only were employed during the principal hours of the day. He coldly said that an agreement of the nature proposed by me would be contrary to his duty, and that if I chose to stop the state contributions to his schools the effect of my action would be to shake my throne without harming them. He added that if he was to go to prison he was at the service of my officer of the guard. I replied that he was welcome to his opinion.

The next day the edict appeared. It was countersigned by Baron Imberty, who disapproved of it, but not by M. de Payan, who had resigned and left for Nice to consult the Bishop. As I drove through the town in the afternoon, I was coldly received by the people, and the proclamation was torn down on the following night. The weekly parade of the militia was put off for fear of a hostile demonstration; and on the day on which it would have taken place I received, instead of the muster-roll of the national regiment, a vote of thanks from the Executive Committee of the English National Education League, and notice of my unanimous election to membership of the Council of that body.

A strange event occurred in the afternoon, (it was the 11th of March), to distract my thoughts. General Garibaldi, who had been travelling incognito, and with the permission of the French Government, given conditionally on the incognito being strictly preserved, to visit his birthplace—Nice, applied to me to know whether I would receive him if he stopped at Monaco for a day on his return. I replied that I should be glad to see him, the more so as I had met his son Ricciotti at Greenwich in June 1870, at the dinner of the Cobden Club, to which orgy he and I had both been lured by the solicitations of the arch-gastronomist, the jovial Mr. T. B. Potter. I did not add that our acquaintance had been interrupted by the war in which the same clever and conceited officer had cut up my cousin’s (the King of Wurtemberg) troops at Châtillon-sur-Seine.

On the 12th the old General came, and I met him at the station and drove him to the palace. The news that he was with me soon spread through the town, and a mob collected at the palace gates. The General, to whom I had given the “bishop’s rooms,” which had once been occupied by Monseigneur Dupanloup, his arch enemy, imagined that the crowd was composed of his admirers, and, leaning upon his stick, he proceeded to harangue them from the window of the private apartments. Some hundreds of my subjects, I was afterwards informed, had listened to him languidly enough until he began to attack the Jesuits, when arose the uproar which brought me to his room, and all my household into the courtyard. I begged him to remember where he was, but the howling of the mob had excited the old lion, and the more they threatened the more violently he declaimed. When he was pulled into a chair by Major Gasignol the mischief was done, and a maddened crowd was raging on the place crying “à bas Garibaldi,” “à bas les Communistes,” “à bas le Prince.”