The last scene of his political life was singularly characteristic of his inflexible adherence to a lost cause. In the afternoon oí the 23rd of February 1848 the king summoned his minister from the chamber, which was then sitting, and informed him that the aspect of Paris and the country during the banquet agitation for reform, and the alarm and division of opinion in the royal family, led him to doubt whether he could retain his ministry. That doubt, replied Guizot, is decisive of the question, and instantly resigned, returning to the chamber only to announce that the administration was at an end and that Molé had been sent for by the king. Molé failed in the attempt to form a government, and between midnight and one in the morning Guizot, who had according to his custom retired early to rest, was again sent for to the Tuileries. The king asked his advice. “We are no longer the ministers of your Majesty,” replied Guizot; “it rests with others to decide on the course to be pursued. But one thing appears to be evident: this street riot must be put down; these barricades must be taken; and for this purpose my opinion is that Marshal Bugeaud should be invested with full power, and ordered to take the necessary military measures, and as your Majesty has at this moment no minister, I am ready to draw up and countersign such an order.” The marshal, who was present, undertook the task, saying, “I have never been beaten yet, and I shall not begin to-morrow. The barricades shall be carried before dawn.” After this display of energy the king hesitated, and soon added: “I ought to tell you that M. Thiers and his friends are in the next room forming a government!” Upon this Guizot rejoined, “Then it rests with them to do what they think fit,” and left the palace. Thiers and Barrot decided to withdraw the troops. The king and Guizot next met at Claremont. This was the most perilous conjuncture of Guizot’s life, but fortunately he found a safe refuge in Paris for some days in the lodging of a humble miniature painter whom he had befriended, and shortly afterwards effected his escape across the Belgian frontier and thence to London, where he arrived on the 3rd of March. His mother and daughters had preceded him, and he was speedily installed in a modest habitation in Pelham Crescent, Brompton.
The society of England, though many persons disapproved of much of his recent policy, received the fallen statesman with as much distinction and respect as they had shown eight years before to the king’s ambassador. Sums of money were placed at his disposal, which he declined. A professorship at Oxford was spoken of, which he was unable to accept. He stayed in England about a year, devoting himself again to history. He published two more volumes on the English revolution, and in 1854 his Histoire de la république d’Angleterre et de Cromwell (2 vols., 1854), then his Histoire du protectorat de Cromwell et du rétablissement des Stuarts (2 vols., 1856). He also published an essay on Peel, and amid many essays on religion, during the ten years 1858-1868, appeared the extensive Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de mon temps, in nine volumes. His speeches were included in 1863 in his Histoire parlementaire de la France (5 vols. of parliamentary speeches, 1863).
Guizot survived the fall of the monarchy and the government he had served twenty-six years. He passed abruptly from the condition of one of the most powerful and active statesmen in Europe to the condition of a philosophical and patriotic spectator of human affairs. He was aware that the link between himself and public life was broken for ever; and he never made the slightest attempt to renew it. He was of no party, a member of no political body; no murmur of disappointed ambition, no language of asperity, ever passed his lips; it seemed as if the fever of oratorical debate and ministerial power had passed from him and left him a greater man than he had been before, in the pursuit of letters, in the conversation of his friends, and as head of the patriarchal circle of those he loved. The greater part of the year he spent at his residence at Val Richer, an Augustine monastery near Lisieux in Normandy, which had been sold at the time of the first Revolution. His two daughters, who married two descendants of the illustrious Dutch family of De Witt, so congenial in faith and manners to the Huguenots of France, kept his house. One of his sons-in-law farmed the estate. And here Guizot devoted his later years with undiminished energy to literary labour, which was in fact his chief means of subsistence. Proud, independent, simple and contented he remained to the last; and these years of retirement were perhaps the happiest and most serene portion of his life.
Two institutions may be said even under the second empire to have retained their freedom—the Institute of France and the Protestant Consistory. In both of these Guizot continued to the last to take an active part. He was a member of three of the five academies into which the Institute of France is divided. The Academy of Moral and Political Science owed its restoration to him, and he became in 1832 one of its first associates. The Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres elected him in 1833 as the successor to M. Dacier; and in 1836 he was chosen a member of the French Academy, the highest literary distinction of the country. In these learned bodies Guizot continued for nearly forty years to take a lively interest and to exercise a powerful influence. He was the jealous champion of their independence. His voice had the greatest weight in the choice of new candidates; the younger generation of French writers never looked in vain to him for encouragement; and his constant aim was to maintain the dignity and purity of the profession of letters.
In the consistory of the Protestant church in Paris Guizot exercised a similar influence. His early education and his experience of life conspired to strengthen the convictions of a religious temperament. He remained through life a firm believer in the truths of revelation, and a volume of Meditations on the Christian Religion was one of his latest works. But though he adhered inflexibly to the church of his fathers and combated the rationalist tendencies of the age, which seemed to threaten it with destruction, he retained not a tinge of the intolerance or asperity of the Calvinistic creed. He respected in the Church of Rome the faith of the majority of his countrymen; and the writings of the great Catholic prelates, Bossuet and Bourdaloue, were as familiar and as dear to him as those of his own persuasion, and were commonly used by him in the daily exercises of family worship.
In these literary pursuits and in the retirement of Val Richer years passed smoothly and rapidly away; and as his grandchildren grew up around him, he began to direct their attention to the history of their country. From these lessons sprang his last and not his least work, the Histoire de France racontée à mes petits enfants, for although this publication assumed a popular form, it is not less complete and profound than it is simple and attractive. The history came down to 1789, and was continued to 1870 by his daughter Madame Guizot de Witt from her father’s notes.
Down to the summer of 1874 Guizot’s mental vigour and activity were unimpaired. His frame, temperate in all things, was blessed with a singular immunity from infirmity and disease; but the vital power ebbed away, and he passed gently away on the 12th of September 1874, reciting now and then a verse of Corneille or a text of Scripture.
Bibliography.—See his own Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de mon temps (8 vols., 1858-1861); Lettres de M. Guizot à sa famille et à ses amis (1884); C. A. Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi (vol. i., 1857) and Nouveaux Lundis (vols. i. and ix., 1863-1872); E. Scherer, Études critiques sur la littérature contemporaine (vol. iv., 1873); Mme de Witt, Guizot dans sa famille (1880); Jules Simon, Thiers, Guizot et Rémusat (1885); E. Faguet, Politiques et moralistes au XIXe siècle (1891); G. Bardoux, Guizot (1894) in the series of “Les Grands Écrivains français”; Maurice Guizot, Les Années de retraite de M. Guizot (1901); and for a long list of books and articles on Guizot in periodicals see H. P. Thieme, Guide bibliographique de la littérature française de 1800 à 1906 (s.v. Guizot, Paris, 1907). For a notice of his first wife see C. A. Sainte-Beuve, Portraits de femmes (1884), and Ch. de Rémusat, Critiques et études littéraires (vol. ii., 1847).
(H. R.; J. T. S.*)