Louis Philippe had been handsome, and when aged, remained graceful: though not always admired by the nation he was always so by the mob, for he had the art of pleasing and the gift of charm. He was deficient in majesty, and neither wore a crown though king, nor displayed white hair though an old man. His manners belonged to the ancient régime, and his habits to the new,—a mixture of the noble and the citizen which suited 1830. Louis Philippe was transition on a throne, and retained the old pronunciation and orthography, which he placed at the service of modern opinions: he was fond of Poland and Hungary, but he wrote "les Polonois," and pronounced, "les Hongrais." He wore the uniform of the National Guard like Charles X., and the ribbon of the Legion of Honor like Napoleon. He went but rarely to Mass, not at all to the chase, and never to the opera: he was incorruptible by priests, whippers-in, and ballet girls, and this formed part of his citizen popularity. He had no Court, and went out with an umbrella under his arm, and this umbrella for a long time formed part of his nimbus. He was a bit of a mason, a bit of a gardener, and a bit of a surgeon: he bled a postilion who had fallen from his horse, and no more thought of going out without his lancet than Henry III. would without his dagger. The Royalists ridiculed this absurd king, the first who shed blood in order to cure.
A deduction must be made in the charges which history brings against Louis Philippe, and they formed three different columns, each of which gives a different total,—one accusing royalty, the second the reign, and the third the king. Democratic right confiscated, progress made the second interest, the protests of the streets violently repressed, the military execution of insurrections, revolt made to run the gauntlet, the Rue Transnonain, the councils of war, the absorption of the real country in the legal country, and the government on joint account with three hundred thousand privileged persons—are the deeds of royalty: Belgium refused, Algeria too harshly conquered with more of barbarity than civilization, like India by the English, the breach of faith to Abd-el-Kader, Blaye, Deutz bought and Pritchard paid—are chargeable to the reign; while the policy which cares more for the family than the nation belongs to the king. As we see, when the deductions have been made, the charge against the king is reduced; but his great fault was that he was modest in the name of France. Whence comes this fault?
Louis Philippe was a king who was too much a father, and this incubation of a family which is intended to produce a dynasty is frightened at everything, and does not like to be disturbed. Hence arises excessive timidity, which is offensive to a nation which has July 14th in its civil traditions and Austerlitz in its military annals. However, when we abstract public duties, which should ever be first fulfilled, the family deserved Louis Philippe's profound tenderness for it. This domestic group was admirable, and combined virtue with talent. One of the daughters of Louis Philippe, Marie d'Orléans, placed the name of her race among artists as Charles d'Orléans had done among the poets, and she created from her soul a statue which she called Joan of Arc. Two of Louis Philippe's sons drew from Metternich this demagogic praise: "They are young men whose like can be found nowhere, and such princes as were never seen before." Here is the truth, without extenuating or setting down aught in malice, about Louis Philippe. It was his good fortune to be in 1830 the Prince Égalité, to bear within him the contradiction between the Restoration and the Revolution, to possess that alarming revolutionary side which becomes reassuring in the governor: and there was never a more complete adaptation of the man to the event, for one entered the other and the incarnation took place. Louis Philippe is 1830 made man, and he had also on his side that great designation to a throne, exile. He had been proscribed, wandering, and poor, and had lived by his own labor. In Switzerland, this heir to the richest princely domains of France was obliged to sell a horse, in order to eat; at Reichenau, he had given mathematical lessons while his sister Adelaide was embroidering and sewing. These souvenirs blended with a king rendered the bourgeoisie enthusiastic. With his own hands he had demolished the last iron cage at Mont St. Michel, erected by Louis XI. and employed by Louis XV. He was the companion of Dumouriez and the friend of Lafayette; he had belonged to the Jacobin Club, and Mirabeau had tapped him on the shoulder, and Danton said to him, "Young man." At the age of twenty-four in '93, when M. de Chartres, he had witnessed from an obscure gallery in the Convention, the trial of Louis XVI., so well named "that poor tyrant." The blind clairvoyance of the revolution breaking royalty in the king, and the king with royalty, while hardly observing the man in the fierce crushing of the idea; the vast storm of the Convention Tribune; Capet not knowing what to answer; the frightful and stupefied vacillation of this royal head before the raging blast; the relative innocence of all mixed up in this catastrophe, of those who condemned as well as of him who was condemned,—he, Louis Philippe, had looked at these things and contemplated these vertigos; he had seen centuries appear at the bar of the Convention; he had seen behind Louis XVI., that unfortunate and responsible victim, the real culprit, monarchy, emerging from the darkness, and he retained in his soul a respectful terror of this immense justice of the people which is almost as impersonal as the justice of God. The traces which the revolution left upon him were prodigious, and his memory was a living imprint of these great years, minute by minute. One day, in the presence of a witness whose statements we cannot doubt, he corrected from memory the entire letter A in the list of the Constituent Assembly.
Louis Philippe was an open-air king; during his reign the press was free, debates were free, conscience and speech were free. The Laws of September had a clear track. Though he knew the corrosive power of light upon privileges, he left his throne exposed to the light, and history will give him credit for this honorable behavior. Louis Philippe, like all historic men who have quitted the stage, is at the present day being tried by the human conscience, but this trial has not yet gone through its first stage. The hour when history speaks with its venerable and free accent has not yet arrived for him; the moment has not yet come for the final judgment. Even the stern and illustrious historian, Louis Blanc, has recently toned down his first verdict. Louis Philippe was elected by the two hundred and twenty-one deputies in 1830, that is to say, by a semi-Parliament and a semi-revolution; and, in any case, we cannot judge him here philosophically, without making some reservations in the name of the absolute democratic principle. In the eyes of the absolute, everything is usurpation which is outside of these two rights,—first, the right of man and in the next place the right of the people; but what we are able to say at present is, that in whatever way we may regard him, Louis Philippe, taken by himself, and looked at from the stand-point of human goodness, will remain, to employ the old language of old history, one of the best princes that ever sat on a throne. What has he against him? This throne; take the king away from Louis Philippe and the man remains. This man is good, at times so good as to be admirable. Often in the midst of the gravest cares, after a day's struggle, after the whole diplomacy of the Continent, he returned to his apartments at night; and then, though exhausted by fatigue and want of sleep, what did he? He would take up a list of sentences and spend the night in revising a criminal trial, considering that it was something to hold his own against Europe, but even greater to tear a culprit from the hands of the executioner. He obstinately resisted his keeper of the seals, and disputed the scaffold inch by inch with his attorney-generals, those "chatterers of the law," as he called them. At times piles of sentences covered his table, and he examined them all, and felt an agony at the thought of abandoning these wretched condemned heads. One day he said to the witness whom we just now quoted, "I gained seven of them last night." During the earlier years of his reign the penalty of death was, as it were, abolished, and the re-erection of the scaffold was a violence done to the king. As the Grève disappeared with the elder branch, a bourgeois Grève was established under the name of the Barrière St. Jacques, for "practical men" felt the necessity of a quasi-legitimate guillotine. This was one of the victories of Casimir Perier, who represented the narrow side of the bourgeoisie, over Louis Philippe, who represented the liberal side. The king annotated Beccaria with his own hand, and after the Fieschi machine he exclaimed, "What a pity that I was not wounded, for then I could have shown mercy!" Another time, alluding to the resistance offered by his ministers, he wrote with reference to a political culprit, who is one of the most illustrious men of the day, "His pardon is granted, and all that I have to do now is to obtain it." Louis Philippe was as gentle as Louis IX., and as good as Henri IV., and in our opinion, in history, where goodness is the rare pearl, to have been good is almost better than to have been great.
As Louis Philippe has been sternly judged by some, and perhaps harshly by others, it is very simple that a man, himself a phantom at the present day, who knew that king, should offer his testimony for him in the presence of history; this testimony, whatever its value may be, is evidently, and before all, disinterested. An epitaph written by a dead man is sincere; one shadow may console another shadow, for sharing the same darkness gives the right to praise, and there is no fear that it will ever be said of two tombs in exile,—this man flattered the other.
[CHAPTER IV.]
CRACKS IN THE FOUNDATION.
At this moment, when the drama we are recounting is about to enter one of those tragic clouds which cover the beginning of the reign of Louis Philippe, it is quite necessary that this book should give an explanation about that king. Louis Philippe had entered upon the royal authority without violence or direct action on his part, through a revolutionary change of wind, which was evidently very distinct from the real object of the revolution, but in which he, the Duc d'Orléans, had no personal initiative. He was born a prince, and believed himself elected king; he had not given himself these functions, nor had he taken them; they were offered to him and he accepted, convinced—wrongly as we think, but still convinced—that the offer was in accordance with right, and the acceptance in harmony with duty. Hence came an honest possession, and we say in all conscience that, as Louis Philippe was honest in the possession, and democracy honest in its attack, the amount of terror disengaged from social struggles cannot be laid either on the king or the democracy. A collision of principles resembles a collision of elements; ocean defends the water and the hurricane the air; the king defends royalty, democracy defends the people; the relative, which is monarchy, resists the absolute, which is the republic; society bleeds from this conflict, but what is its suffering to-day will be its salvation at a later date; and in any case those who struggle must not be blamed, for one party must be mistaken. Right does not stand, like the Colossus of Rhodes, on two shores at once, with one foot in the republic, the other in royalty, but is indivisible, and entirely on one side; those who are mistaken are honestly mistaken, and a blind man is no more a culprit than a Vendean is a brigand. We must, therefore, only impute these formidable collisions to the fatality of things, and, whatever these tempests may be, human irresponsibility is mixed up with them.
Let us finish our statement: The Government of 1830 had a hard life of it from the beginning, and born yesterday it was obliged to combat to-day. Scarce installed, it felt everywhere the vague movements of faction beneath the foundation of July, which had so recently been laid, and was still anything but solid. Resistance sprang up on the morrow, and might, perhaps, have been born on the day before, and from month to month the hostility increased, and instead of being dull became patent. The revolution of July, frowned upon by kings out of France, was diversely interpreted in France. God imparts to men His will visible in events, an obscure text written in a mysterious language. Men at once make themselves translations of it,—hasty, incorrect translations, full of errors, gaps, and misunderstandings. Very few minds comprehend the divine language; the more sagacious, the calmer, and the more profound decipher slowly, and when they arrive with their version, the work has been done long before; there are already twenty translations offered for sale. From each translation springs a party, and from each misunderstanding a failure, and each party believes that it has the only true text, and each faction believes that it possesses the light. Often enough power itself is a faction, and there are in revolutions men who swim against the current; they are the old parties. As revolutions issue from the right to revolt, the old parties that cling to heirdom by grace of God fancy that they have a right to revolt against them; but this is an error, for in revolutions the rebel is not the people but the king. Revolution is precisely the contrary of revolt; every revolution, being a normal accomplishment, contains its legitimacy within itself, which false revolutionists sometimes dishonor, but which endures even when sullied, and survives even when bleeding. Revolutions issue, not from an accident, but a necessity; for they are a return from the factitious to the real, and they take place because they must take place.