And the Holy Father at Rome, loosed by Napoleon from Fontainebleau at about the same time that Ferdinand of Spain had been released from Valençay, had wended his way back to Italy as Ferdinand had to Spain, and, seated again in St. Peter’s chair, had laid his pious hands to the same work in Rome which Ferdinand was busy with in Madrid.
With absolutism and feudalism triumphing all around him, why should not Louis XVIII. follow the glorious examples? Did he not owe it to God and the ancient Bourbon kings to cast out from France the devil of democracy which had rended her, and to clothe her once more in her right mind—in the docile obedience to kingly word and clerical admonition? Apparently he did; and apparently he believed that the quicker he set about it the better.
He had guaranteed freedom of the press in his Charter; but this was a promise he could not venture to keep. He meant to violate the Charter and to restore the Old Order; and he knew that this could not be done if the press remained free. He had lived in England where he may have heard Richard Brinsley Sheridan when he thrilled the House of Commons with that famous burst of eloquence, “Give them a corrupt House of Lords, give them a venal House of Commons, give them a tyrannical Prince, give them a truckling Court, and let me have but an unfettered Press, I will defy them to encroach a hair’s-breadth upon the liberties of England!” Therefore, one of his first acts was to gag the press with a censorship. With indecent haste, this royal ordinance breaching the Charter was published just six days after the official publication of the Charter itself.
Unbridled criticism by those organs which in our modern system control public opinion being thus made impossible, other measures of similar tendency followed swiftly.
Loudly condemning Napoleon’s toleration of heretics, Jews, and non-believers, the clericals induced the King to compel Frenchmen of all creeds and races to suspend business not only on the Christian Sabbath, but on the festival days of the Catholic Church.
Not satisfied with a grand religious ceremony to “purify” the spot upon which Louis XVI. had been guillotined, nor with having dug up bones supposed to be his and given them magnificent sepulture, Louis solemnly devoted France to the Virgin Mary, and her image was borne through the streets in formal procession, wherein the great dignitaries ambled along with lighted candles in their hands.
By the Charter, the army had been specially protected. Napoleon’s soldiers still had guns in their hands and rage in their hearts when Talleyrand was writing out the pledges with which the returning Bourbons were to be fettered. It was highly important to soothe these troops, or to remove their fear that the Bourbons would deal with them unjustly. Hence the sixty-ninth article of the Charter, which declared that soldiers in active service, the officers and soldiers in retreat, the widows, the officers and soldiers on the pension list, should preserve their rank, honors, and pensions.
By royal ordinance (December 16, 1814) this clause of the Charter was violated.
Fourteen thousand officers and sergeants were dismissed on half-pay; and the places of these battle-scarred heroes of the Empire were filled by five thousand nobles who had never seen service save with the enemies of France. Naval officers who had deserted the ships of their own country, and had served against their native land, were put back into the French navy, and given the rank they had won abroad. Veterans who had fought for the French Republic and the French Empire, from Valmy and Jemappes to Laon and Montmirail, found themselves officered by insolent little noblemen who had never smelt gunpowder. General Dupont, known principally for his capitulation at Baylen, was made minister of war. The tricolor flag which French soldiers had borne victoriously into every capital on the Continent was put away. Many of the bullet-shredded banners were destroyed—they and their splendid memories being hateful to the Bourbon soul.
The white flag of the old monarchy—a flag which living French soldiers knew only as the rallying-point of treason and rebellion in La Vendée—was made the national standard. The numbers of the regiments were changed, and the veterans of a dozen historic campaigns lost the names by which they were known, and which they had made glorious in the arduous test of battle. The Imperial Guard was banished from Paris; the Swiss were again enrolled to defend the palace, and clad in the uniform of 1792; a Bourbon military household was organized, filled with young nobles who had never fired a shot, who were paid fancy salaries, and decked out in a livery which made all Paris titter. To complete the burlesque, they resurrected and made chief officer of the palace the old Marquis of Chansenets, who had been Governor of the Tuileries on August 10, 1792, and had escaped massacre that day by hiding under piles of dead.