The young Bourbon dukes, Berry and Angoulême, knew nothing whatever of war, practically or otherwise; yet they were put in highest military command; and they gave themselves airs which neither Wellington, Blücher, or Napoleon ever assumed. These young princes of the blood-royal told French veterans on parade that their twenty years of service under the Republic and under the Empire were but twenty years of brigandage. When Napoleon’s Old Guard failed to manœuvre as the youthful Duke of Angoulême would have them do, they were sneeringly advised to go to England to learn their drill. Does a colonel so displease the Duke of Berry that he must be cashiered, disgraced? The haughty Bourbon tears off the epaulets with his own hand! At another time the same doughty warrior strikes a soldier on parade. Word goes out that a monument is to be raised to the invading émigrés whom English vessels had landed at Quiberon in 1795, and whom the republicans had slaughtered there. Honors to these being granted, Pichegru and Georges Cadoudal were not forgotten. Their names were mentioned with honor, masses recited for the repose of their souls, and a patent of nobility granted to Cadoudal’s family.
By the Charter, laws were to be made by king, peers, and deputies acting together. In actual practice the King made his own laws. From the mouths of such men as Lainé, whom Napoleon had thoroughly understood and denounced, the gospel of non-resistance was heard in all its ancient simplicity, “If the King wills it, the law wills it.”
Incredible as it may seem, the members of the old Parliament of Paris met at a private house, and drew up a protest against the Charter. With one accord nobles and priests began to speak of the return of feudalism, of seignorial rights, of tithes, of benefices, of exclusive chase, and of the confiscated lands. The clergy of Paris, in their address to the King (August, 1814), expressed their earnest desire for the restoration of “that old France, in which were intermingled, without distinction, in every heart, those two sacred names,—God and King.”
At least one sermon was preached in which those citizens who did not restore to the nobles and the Church the lands which the Revolution had taken away were threatened with the doom of Jezebel—and they should be devoured by dogs. Three hundred petitions were found at one time lying upon the table of the Bourbon minister of the interior, sent there by distressed Catholics who declared that their priests refused them absolution on account of their being owners of national properties. To the trembling devotee, the poor slave of superstition, the priest said, “Surrender to Church and nobles the land you bought and paid for, else the gates of heaven shall remain shut to you!” Under the spell of clerical duress many a middle-class and peasant proprietor swapped good land for a verbal free passage to the new Jerusalem. Many nobles, imitating a king who had mentally abolished all changes since 1789, began to claim forgotten dues and to exercise offensive feudal privileges. The Duke of Wellington himself acted the grand seigneur of the Old Régime; and with a cavalcade of friends and a pack of hounds went charging at his pleasure over the crops of the farmers around Paris, trampling their young grain with serene disregard of peasant rights. These nobles of old France, who had fled from the dangers of the Revolution, and who had been restored by Napoleon, or by foreign bayonets, were as proud, as intolerant, as though they had accomplished the Bourbon restoration by themselves. They regarded the nobles of Napoleon’s creation with unconcealed contempt. The wives of men whose fathers had been ennobled for shady services to shadier Bourbon kings, looked with lofty scorn upon the ladies of such men as Marshal Ney, whom Napoleon had ennobled for service as gallant as any soldier ever rendered to France. To mark beyond all mistake the dividing line between the old nobility and the new, the military schools were reëstablished, in which a hundred years of nobility were necessary for admission—another violation of the Charter.
Louis XVIII. was not devoid of talent, nor of worldly wisdom; but he was not the man to contrast favorably with Napoleon. It was his misfortune to be personally repulsive. Like his brother, Louis XVI. he was swinish in tastes and habits. So fat that he could not mount a horse, so unwieldy that he could only waddle about in velvet gaiters, he was no man’s hero—nor woman’s either. Those who loved the ancient system were compelled to use him, not because they loved him, but because they adored the system.
Gifted with small talent for governing, how could he bring order out of the chaos Napoleon’s fall had left? How could he reconcile the intemperate greed of the partisans of the Old Order with the advocates of liberal ideas in France? How could he harmonize emancipated peasants with lords of Church and State who were clamorous to reënslave them? How could he restore prosperity to the French manufacturer suddenly ruined by the flood of English goods, which flood Napoleon had so long dammed with his Continental system? And when the curé of St. Roch refused holy burial to an actress, how could the feeble Louis control either arrogant priest or indignant, riotous friends of the actress? And how could he prevent all France from remembering that once before when this same priest had refused Christian burial to an opera dancer, the iron hand of Napoleon Bonaparte had fallen upon the unchristian curé, inflicting chastisement, and the reproof that “Jesus Christ commanded us to pray even for our enemies”?
No wonder, then, that when Carnot published a memorial, arraigning the government for its breaches of faith, and pointing out its rapid progress to absolutism, the book had a vast circulation. Chateaubriand was brought forward to write a reply, and he wrote it; but even Chateaubriand could not slay facts with a pen, though the courtiers at the palace seem to have believed that he had done so.
Such was the Bourbon restoration. Undoing much of the work of the Revolution, it menaced all. Apparently it was only a question of time when France would be clothed again in the political and religious garb of 1789. Those who had flattered themselves that they were getting constitutional monarchy in exchange of Napoleon’s despotism, soon realized that the Bourbon system had most of Napoleon’s vices and none of his virtues. Talleyrand, Fouché, and Company had expected to rule the kingdom as constitutional ministers. They found that their influence was nothing when opposed by such royalist courtiers as the empty-headed Blacas. Three months did not elapse after Talleyrand and Fouché had plotted the downfall of Napoleon before they were plotting the overthrow of Louis XVIII.
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At length the Congress of Nations assembled at Vienna (September, 1814), and a very grand gathering of notabilities it was. The Czar of Russia, the kings of Prussia, Denmark, Bavaria, and Würtemberg, the Emperor Francis of Austria, were present in person; the kings of England and France were represented by Lord Castlereagh and Prince Talleyrand, respectively; Saxony, Naples, and other small states were represented by delegations more or less official, and more or less recognized.