The seventh of August.

The 7th of August is a memorable day for me; it is the day on which I had the happiness of ending my political career as I had begun it: a happiness rare enough to-day to give reason for rejoicing in it. The declaration of the Chamber of Deputies concerning the vacancy of the throne had been brought to the Chamber of Peers. I went to take my seat, which, was in the highest row of arm-chairs, facing the President. The Peers seemed to me at once busy and depressed. If some bore on their foreheads the pride of their approaching disloyalty, others bore the shame of a remorse to which they lacked the courage to listen. I said to myself, as I watched this sad assembly:

"What! Are they who received the favours of Charles X. in his prosperity going to desert him in his ill-fortune? Will they whose special mission it was to defend the Hereditary Throne, those men of the Court who lived in the King's intimacy, will they betray him? They kept watch at his door at Saint-Cloud; they embraced him at Rambouillet; he clasped their hands in a last farewell: are they going to raise against him those hands, still warm with that last pressure? Is this Chamber, which for fifteen years has resounded with their protestations of devotion, about to hear their perjury? And yet it was for them that Charles X. ruined himself; it was they who drove him towards the Ordinances: they stamped for joy when these appeared and when they thought that they had won in that moment of silence which precedes the fall of the thunder."

These ideas rolled confusedly and sorrowfully through my mind. The peerage had become the triple receptacle of the corruptions of the old Monarchy, the Republic and the Empire. As for the Republicans of 1793, now transformed into senators, and the generals of Bonaparte, I expected of them only what they have always done: they deposed the extraordinary man to whom they owed all, they were going to depose the King who had confirmed them in the benefits and honours with which their first master had loaded them. Let the wind turn, and they will depose the usurper to whom they were preparing to throw the crown.

I ascended the tribune. A deep silence fell: the faces of the peers seemed embarrassed; they all turned sidewards in their arm-chairs and looked down at the floor. With the exception of a few peers who had resolved to retire like myself, none dared to raise his eyes to the level of the tribune.

My last speech in the Peers.

I reproduce my speech because it sums up my life and forms my principal title to the esteem of posterity:

"Gentlemen!

"The declaration which has been brought to this Chamber is to me much less complicated than it appears to those of my noble colleagues who profess an opinion different from mine. There is one fact in this declaration which appears to me to govern all the others, or rather to destroy them. Were we under a regular order of things, I should doubtless carefully examine the various changes which it is proposed to make in the Charter. Many of these changes have been proposed by myself. I am surprised only that the reactionary measure regarding the peers created by Charles X. should have been proposed to this Chamber. I shall not be suspected of any fondness for the system by which these 'batches' were created; and you know that, when threatened with them, I combated the very menace: but to make ourselves the judges of our colleagues and to erase whom we please from the list of the peerage, whenever we find ourselves the stronger party, would seem to me to savour of proscription. Do they want to destroy the peerage? Be it so: it better becomes us to surrender our existence than to beg for our lives.

"I reproach myself already for the few words I have uttered on a point which, important as it is, becomes insignificant when merged in the great proposition before us. France is without a guide; and I am now to consider what must be added to or cut away from the masts of a vessel which has lost its rudder! I lay aside, then, whatever is of a secondary interest in the declaration of the Elective Chamber; and, fixing on the single enunciated fact of the vacancy of the throne, whether true or pretended, I advance directly to my object.

"But a previous question ought first to be attended to: if the throne be vacant, we are free to choose the future form of our government.

"Before offering the crown to any individual whatever, it is well to ascertain under what political system the social body is to be constituted. Are we to establish a republic or a new monarchy?

"Does a republic or a new monarchy offer sufficient guarantees to France of strength, durability and repose?

"A republic would first of all have the recollections of the republic itself to contend with. Those recollections are far from being effaced. The time is not yet forgotten when Death made his frightful progress among us, with Liberty and Equality for supporters. If you were plunged again into anarchy, how would you reanimate the Hercules on his rock who alone was able to stifle the monster? In the course of a thousand years, your posterity may see another Napoleon. As for you, you must not expect it.

"Next, in the present state of our manners and of our relations with surrounding governments, the idea of a republic seems to me to be untenable. The first difficulty would be to bring the people of France to an unanimous vote on the subject. What right has the population of Paris to compel the population of Marseilles or any other town to adopt the forms of a republic? Is there to be but one republic, or are we to have twenty or thirty? And are they to be federative or independent? Let us suppose these obstacles to be removed. Let us suppose that there is to be but one republic: can you imagine for a moment, with the habitual familiarity of our manners, that a president, however grave, however talented and however respectable he may be, could remain for a year at the head of the government, without being tempted to retire from it? Ill-protected by the laws and unsupported by previous recollections, insulted and vilified, morning, noon and night, by secret rivals and by the agents of faction, he would not inspire the confidence which property and commerce require; he would possess neither becoming dignity, in treating with foreign governments, nor the power which is indispensable to the maintenance of internal tranquillity. If he resorted to revolutionary measures, the republic would become odious; all Europe would become disturbed and would avail itself of our divisions, first, to foment them and, afterwards, to interfere in the quarrel; and we should again be involved in an interminable struggle. A representative republic is, no doubt, to be the future condition of the world; but its time has not yet come.

"I proceed to the question of a monarchy.

"A king named by the Chambers, or elected by the people, whatever may be done, will always be a novelty. Now I take it for granted that liberty is sought for, especially the liberty of the press, by which and for which the people have obtained so brilliant a triumph. Well, every new monarchy will, sooner or later, be compelled to gag this liberty. Could Napoleon himself admit of it? The offspring of our misfortunes and the slave of our glory, the liberty of the press can exist, in security, only under a government whose roots are deeply seated. A monarchy, the illegitimate offspring of one bloody night, must always have something to fear from the independent expression of public opinion. While this man proclaims republican opinions, and that some other system, is it not to be feared that laws of exception must soon be resorted to, in spite of the anathema against the censorship which has been added to Article VIII. of the Charter?

My speech continued.

"What, then, O friends of regulated liberty, have you gained by the change which is now proposed to you? You must sink, of necessity, either into a republic or into a system of legal slavery. The monarch will be surrounded and overwhelmed by factions, or the monarchy itself swept away by a torrent of democratical enactments.

"In the first intoxication of success, we suppose that everything is easy; we hope to satisfy every exigency, every interest, every humour; we flatter ourselves that every one will lay aside his personal views and vanities; we believe that the superior intelligence and the wisdom of the government will surmount innumerable difficulties; but, at the end of a few months, we find that all our theories have been belied by practice.

"I present to you, gentlemen, only a few of the inconveniences attaching to the formation of a republic or of a new monarchy. If either have its perils, there remained a third course, and one which well deserved a moment's consideration.

"The crown has been trampled on by horrible ministers, who have supported, by murder, their violation of the law; they have trifled with oaths made to Heaven and with laws sworn to on earth.

"Foreigners, who have twice entered Paris without resistance, learn the true cause of your success: you presented yourselves in the name of legal authority. If you were to fly to-day to the assistance of tyranny, do you think that the gates of the capital, of the civilized world, would open as readily before you? The French nation has grown, since your departure, under the influence of constitutional laws; our children of fourteen are giants; our conscripts at Algiers, our schoolboys in Paris have shown you that they are the sons of the conquerors of! Austerlitz, Marengo and Jena: but sons strengthened by all that liberty adds to glory.

"Never was a defense more just and more heroic than that of the people of Paris. They did not rise against the law: so long as the social compact was respected, the people remained peaceable; they bore insults, provocations and threats, without complaining; their property and their blood were the price they owed for the Charter: both have been lavished in abundance.

"But when, after a system of falsehood pursued to the last moment, slavery was suddenly proclaimed; when the conspiracy of folly and hypocrisy burst forth unawares; when the panic of the palace, organized by eunuchs, was prepared as a substitute for the terror of the republic and the iron yoke of the empire, then it was that the people armed themselves with their courage and their intelligence. It was found that those 'shopkeepers' could breathe freely amid the smoke of gunpowder and that it required more than 'four soldiers and a corporal' to subdue them. A century could not have ripened the destinies of a nation so completely as the three last suns that have shone over France. A great crime was committed; it produced the violent explosion of a powerful principle: was it necessary, on account of this crime and the moral and political triumph that resulted from it, to overthrow the established order of things? Let us examine.

"Charles X. and his son have forfeited, or abdicated, the throne, understand it which way you will; but the throne is not vacant: after them came a child, whose innocence ought not to be condemned.

"What blood now rises against him? Will you venture to say that it is that of his father? This orphan, educated in the schools of his country, in the love of a constitutional government and with the ideas of the age, would have become a king well suited to our future wants. The guardian of his youth should have been made to swear to the declaration on which you are about to vote; on attaining his majority, the young Monarch would have renewed his oath. In the meantime, the present King, the actual King would have been M. le Duc d'Orléans, the regent of the kingdom, a Prince who has lived among the people and who knows, that a monarchy, to-day can only exist by consent and reason. This natural arrangement, as it appears to me, would have united the means of reconciliation and would perhaps have saved France those agitations which are the consequence of all violent changes in a State.

"To say that this child, when separated from his masters, would not have had time to forget their very names, before arriving at manhood; to say that he would remain infatuated with certain hereditary dogmas, after a long course of popular education, after the terrible lesson which, in two nights, has hurled two kings from the throne, is, at least, not very reasonable.

"It is not from a feeling of sentimental devotion, nor from a nurse-like affection, transmitted from the swaddling-clothes of Henry IV. to the cradle of the young Henry, that I plead a cause where everything would again turn against me anew if it triumphed. I am not aiming at romance, or chivalry, or martyrdom; I do not believe in the right divine of royalty; but I do believe in the power of facts and of revolutions. I do not even invoke the Charter: I take my ideas from a higher source; I draw them from the sphere of philosophy of the period at which my life terminates: I propose the Duke of Bordeaux merely as a necessity of a purer kind than that which is now in question.

My speech continued.

"I know that, by passing over this child, it is intended to establish the principle of the sovereignty of the people: an absurdity of the old school, which proves that our veteran Democrats have advanced no further in political knowledge than our superannuated Royalists. There is no absolute sovereignty anywhere; liberty does not flow from political right, as was supposed in the eighteenth century; it is derived from natural right, so that it exists under all forms of government; and a monarchy may be free, nay, much more free than a republic: but this is neither the time nor the place to deliver a political lecture.

"I shall content myself with observing that, when the people dispose of thrones, they often dispose also of their own liberty; I shall remark that the principle of an hereditary monarchy, however absurd it may at first appear, has been recognised, in practice, as preferable to that of an elective monarchy. The reasons for this are so obvious that I need not enlarge upon them. You choose one king to-day: who shall hinder you from choosing another to-morrow? The law, you say. The law? And it is you who make it!

"There is still a simpler mode of treating the question: it is to say, we repudiate the Elder Branch of the Bourbons. And why? Because we are victorious; we have triumphed in a just and holy cause; we use a double right of conquest.

"Very well: you proclaim the sovereignty of might. The take good care of this might; for if, in a few months, escapes from you, you will be in a bad position to complain. Such is human nature! The most enlightened and the purest minds do not always rise above success. Those minds were the first to invoke right in opposition to violence; they supported that right with all the superiority of their talent; and, at the very moment when the truth of what they said has been demonstrated by the most abominable abuse of force and by its signal overthrow, the conquerors recur to those arms they have broken! They will find them to be dangerous weapons, which will wound their own hands without serving their cause.

"I have carried the war into my enemies' camp; I have not gone to bivouac in the past under the old banner of the dead, a banner which has not been inglorious, but which droops by the flag-staff that supports it, because no breath of life is there to raise it. Were I to move the dust of thirty-five Capets, I should not draw from it an argument which should be as much as listened to. The idolatry of a name is abolished; monarchy is no longer a tenet of religious belief: it is a political form which is preferable at this moment to every other, because it has the greatest tendency to reconcile order with liberty.

"Useless Cassandra, how often have I wearied the Throne and the country[318] with my disregarded warnings! It only remains for me to sit down on the last fragment of the shipwreck which I have so often foretold. In misfortune I acknowledge every species of power except that of absolving me from my oaths of allegiance. It is also my duty to make my life uniform: after all that I have done, said and written for the Bourbons, I should be the meanest of wretches if I denied them at the moment when, for the third and last time, they are on the road to exile.

"Fear I leave to those generous royalists who have never sacrificed a coin or a place to their loyalty; to those champions of the Altar and the Throne who lately treated me as a renegade, an apostate and a revolutionary. Pious libellers, the renegade now calls upon you! Come, then, and stammer out a word, a single word, with him for the unfortunate master who loaded you with his gifts and whom you have ruined! Instigators of coups d'État, preachers of constituent power, where are you? You hide yourselves in the mire from under which you gallantly raised your heads to calumniate the faithful servants of the King; your silence to-day is worthy of your language of yesterday. Let all those doughty knights, whose projected exploits have caused the descendants of Henry IV. to be driven from their throne at the point of the pitchfork, tremble now as they crouch under the three-coloured cockade: it is natural that they should do so. The noble colours which they display will protect their persons, but will not cover their cowardice.

"In thus frankly expressing my sentiments in this tribune, I have no idea that I am performing an act of heroism. Those times are past when opinions were expressed at personal hazard: if such were now the case, I should speak a hundred times louder. The best buckler is a breast that does not fear to show itself uncovered to the enemy. No, gentlemen, we need neither fear a people whose reason is equal to its courage, nor that generous rising generation which I admire, with which I sympathize with all the faculties of my soul, and to which, as to my country, I wish honour, glory and liberty.

"Far from me, above all things, be the thought of sowing seeds of discord in France, and that has been my motive for excluding from my speech every accent of passion. If I could convince myself that a child should be left in the happy ranks of obscurity in order to procure the peace of thirty-three millions of men, I should have regarded every word as criminal which was not consistent with the needs of the time: but I am not so convinced. Had I the disposal of a crown, I would willingly lay it at the feet of M. le Duc d'Orléans. But all that I see vacant is, not a throne, but a tomb at Saint-Denis.

"Whatever destiny may await M. the Lieutenant-general of the Kingdom, I shall never be his enemy, if he promotes my country's welfare. I only ask to retain my liberty of conscience and the right of going to die where I shall find independence and repose.

"I vote against the declaration."

*

I was fairly calm when I began my speech, but gradually I was overcome with emotion. When I came to this passage: "Useless Cassandra, how often have I wearied the Throne and the country with my disregarded warnings," my voice became troubled, and I was obliged to put my handkerchief to my eyes to keep back tears of love and bitterness. Indignation restored my power of speech in the paragraph that follows: