With France occupied as she was, our fortified towns garrisoned by foreign troops, could we have resisted? Once deprived of our military departments, how long should we have groaned under conquest? If we had had a sovereign of a new family, a prince at second-hand, he would never have been respected. Among the Allies, some bowed before the illusion of a great House, others thought that, under a worn-out authority, the Kingdom would lose its energy and cease to be an object of anxiety: Cobbett[614] himself agrees to this in his Letter. It is therefore a monstrous piece of ingratitude to refuse to see that, if we are still Old Gaul, we owe it to the blood which we have cursed most loudly. That blood which, since eight centuries, had flowed in the very veins of France, that blood which made her what she is saved her once more. Why persist in eternally denying the facts? They took advantage of victory against us, even as we had taken advantage of it against Europe. Our soldiers had gone to Russia; they brought after them, upon their footsteps, the soldiers who had fled before them. After action, reaction: that is the law. That makes no difference to the glory of Bonaparte, an isolated glory which remains complete; that makes no difference to our national glory, all covered as it is with the dust of Europe, whose towers have been swept by our flags. It was unnecessary, in a moment of but too justifiable spite, to go in search of any cause for our misfortunes other than the real cause. So far from their being that cause, had we not had the Bourbons in our reverses, we should have been portioned out.
Appreciate now the calumnies of which the Restoration has been made the object: examine the archives of the Foreign Office, and you shall be convinced of the independence of the language held to the Powers under the reigns of Louis XVIII. and Charles X. Our sovereigns had the sentiment of the national dignity; they were kings above all to the foreigner, who never frankly wanted the re-establishment and who witnessed the resurrection of the Elder Monarchy with regret. The diplomatic language of France at the time of which I am speaking is, it must be said, peculiar to the aristocracy; the democracy, full of broad and prolific virtues, is nevertheless arrogant when it governs: capable of incomparable munificence when there is a need for immense devotion, it splits on the rock of details; it is rarely elevated, especially in prolonged misfortunes. Part of the hatred of the Courts of England and Austria for the Legitimacy is due to the firmness of the Bourbon Cabinet.
Instead of throwing down that Legitimacy, it would have been better policy to shore up its ruins; sheltered inside it, one would have erected the new edifice, as one builds a ship that is to brave the deep under a covered dock hewn out of the rock: in this way English liberty took its form in the breast of the Norman law. It was wrong to repudiate the monarchic phantom: that centenarian of the middle-ages, like Dandolo[615], "had fine eyes in his head; and, if it could not see out of them," was an old man who could guide the young Crusaders and who, adorned with his white hair, still vigorously printed his ineffaceable footsteps in the snow.
It is conceivable that, in our prolonged fears, we should be blinded by prejudice and vain and ridiculous shame; but distant posterity will not fail to see that, historically speaking, the Restoration was one of the happiest phases of our revolutionary cycle. Parties whose heat is not extinguished may cry, "We were free under the Empire, slaves under the Monarchy of the Charter!" but future generations, going beyond this mock praise, which would be ludicrous if it were not a sophism, will say that the recalled Bourbons prevented the dismemberment of France, that they laid the foundations of representative government among us, that they brought prosperity to our finances, discharged debts which they had not contracted, and religiously paid the pension even of Robespierre's sister. Lastly, to make good our lost colonies, they left us, in Africa, one of the richest provinces of the Roman Empire.
Three things remain standing to the credit of the restored Legitimacy: it entered Cadiz; at Navarino it gave Greece her independence; it freed Christianity by seizing Algiers: enterprises in which Bonaparte, Russia, Charles V. and Europe had failed. Show me a Power of a few days (and a Power so much disputed) which has accomplished such things as these.
I believe, with my hand on my heart, that I have exaggerated nothing and set forth nothing but facts in what I have just said of the Legitimacy. It is certain that the Bourbons neither would nor could have restored a castle monarchy or cantoned themselves in a tribe of nobles and priests; it is certain that they were not brought back by the Allies; they were the accident, not the cause of our disasters: the cause is evidently due to Napoleon. But it is certain also that the return of the Third Dynasty unfortunately coincided with the success of the foreign arms. The Cossacks appeared in Paris at the moment when Louis XVIII. returned there: hence, for France humiliated, for private interests, for all excited passions, the Restoration and the invasion are two identical things; the Bourbons have become the victims of a confusion of facts, of a calumny changed, like so many others, into a truth-lie. Alas, it is difficult to escape those calamities produced by nature and the times: fight them as we may, right does not always carry victory with it. The Psylli, a nation of Ancient Africa, had taken up arms against the South wind; a whirlwind arose and swallowed up those brave men:
"The Nasamonians," says Herodotus, "seized upon their abandoned country."
The death of Henry IV.
When speaking of the last calamity of the Bourbons, I am reminded of their commencement: an indescribable omen of their grave made itself heard in their cradle. Henry IV. no sooner saw himself master of Paris than he was seized with a fatal presentiment. The repeated attempts at assassination, without alarming his courage, had an influence on his natural gaiety. In the procession of the Holy Ghost, on the 5th of January, he appeared clad in black, wearing a plaister on his upper lip, on the wound which Jean Châtel[616] had given him when aiming at his heart. He wore a gloomy visage; Madame de Balagni asking him the reason:
"How," he said, "could I be pleased to see a people so ungrateful that, while I have done and am still doing daily what I can for it and for whose safety I would sacrifice a thousand lives, if God had given me so many, it daily prepares new attempts on me, for, since I am here, I hear speak of naught else?"