Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Volume V.

by Walter Scott

Napoleon, who always showed himself sensitively alive to the public censure, established inspectors of the booksellers. The minister of police, a friend of liberty, but, as Compte, the editor of Le Censeur, neatly observed, only of liberty after the fashion of M. Fouché, used every art in his power to prevent the contagion of freedom from spreading too widely. This M. Compte was a loud, and probably a sincere advocate of freedom, and had been a promoter of Buonaparte's return, as likely to advance the good cause. Seeing the prevailing influence of the military, he published some severe remarks on the undue weight the army assumed in public affairs, which, he hesitated not to say, was bringing France to the condition of Rome, when the empire was disposed of by the Prætorian guards. This stung to the quick—the journal was seized by the police, and the minister endeavoured to palliate the fact in the Moniteur, by saying, that, though seized, it had been instantly restored. But Compte was not a man to be so silenced; he published a contradiction of the official statement, and declared that his journal had not been restored. He was summoned the next day before the prefect, alternately threatened and wheedled, upbraided at one moment with ungrateful resistance to the cause of the Emperor, and requested at the next to think of something in which government might serve him. Steeled against every proffer and entreaty, Compte only required to be permitted to profit by the restored liberty of the press; nor could the worthy magistrate make him rightly understand that when the Emperor gave all men liberty to publish what pleased themselves, it was under the tacit condition that it should also please the prefect and minister of police. Compte had the spirit to publish the whole affair.

In the meanwhile, proclamations of Louis, forbidding the payment of taxes, and announcing the arrival of 1,200,000 men under the walls of Paris, covered these walls every night in spite of the police. A newspaper, called the Lily, was also secretly, but generally circulated, which advocated the royal cause. In the better classes of society, where Buonaparte was feared and hated, lampoons, satires, pasquinades, glided from hand to hand, turning his person, ministers, and government, into the most bitter ridicule. Others attacked him with eloquent invective, and demanded what he had in common with the word Liberty, which he now pretended to connect with his reign. He was, they said, the sworn enemy of liberty, the assassin of the Republic, the destroyer of French freedom, which had been so dearly bought; the show of liberty which he held, was a trick of legerdemain, executed under protection of his bayonets. Such was his notion of liberty when it destroyed the national representation at St. Cloud—Such was the freedom he gave when he established an Oriental despotism in the enlightened kingdom at France. Such, when abolishing all free communication of sentiments among citizens, and proscribing every liberal and philosophical idea under the nickname of Ideology. "Can it be forgotten," they continued, "that Heaven and Hell are not more irreconcilable ideas, than Buonaparte and Liberty?—The very word Freedom," they said, "was proscribed under his iron reign, and only first gladdened the ears of Frenchmen after twelve years of humiliation and despair, on the happy restoration of Louis XVIII.—Ah, miserable impostor!" they exclaimed, "when would he have spoke of liberty, had not the return of Louis familiarized us with freedom and peace." The spirit of disaffection spread among certain classes of the lower ranks. The market-women (dames des halles,) so formidable during the time of the Fronde, and in the early years of the Revolution, for their opposition to the court, were now royalists, and, of course, clamorous on the side of the party they espoused. They invented, or some loyal rhymer composed for them, a song,[123] the burden of which demanded back the King, as their father of Ghent. They ridiculed, scolded, and mobbed the commissaries of police, who endeavoured to stop these musical expressions of disaffection; surrounded the chief of their number, danced around him, and chanted the obnoxious burden, until Fouché being ashamed to belie the new doctrines of liberty of thought, speech, and publication, his agents were instructed to leave these Amazons undisturbed on account of their political sentiments.

While Buonaparte was unable to form an interest in the saloons, and found that even the dames des halles were becoming discontented, he had upon his side the militia of the suburbs; those columns of pikemen so famous in the Revolution, whose furious and rude character added to the terrors, if not to the dignity, of his reign. Let us not be accused of a wish to depreciate honest industry, or hold up to contempt the miseries of poverty. It is not the poverty, but the ignorance and the vice of the rabble of great cities, which render them always disagreeable, and sometimes terrible. They are entitled to protection from the laws, and kindness from the government; but he who would use them as political engines, invokes the assistance of a blatant beast with a thousand heads, well furnished with fangs to tear and throats to roar, but devoid of tongues to speak reason, ears to hear it, eyes to see it, or judgment to comprehend it.

For a little time after Buonaparte's return, crowds of artisans of the lowest order assembled under the windows of the Tuileries, and demanded to see the Emperor, whom, on his appearance, they greeted with shouts, as le Grand Entrepreneur, or general employer of the class of artisans, in language where the coarse phraseology of their rank was adorned with such flowers of rhetoric as the times of terror had coined. Latterly, the numbers of this assembly were maintained by a distribution of a few sous to the shouters.

However disgusted with these degrading exhibitions, Buonaparte felt he could not dispense with this species of force, and was compelled to institute a day of procession, and a solemn festival, in favour of this description of persons, who, from the mode in which they were enrolled, were termed Federates.

FESTIVAL OF THE FEDERATES.

On 14th May, the motley and ill-arranged ranks which assembled on this memorable occasion, exhibited, in the eyes of the disgusted and frightened spectators, all that is degraded by habitual vice, and hardened by stupidity and profligacy. The portentous procession moved on along the Boulevards to the court of the Tuileries, with shouts, in which the praises of the Emperor were mingled with imprecations, and with the Revolutionary songs (long silenced in Paris,)—the Marseilloise Hymn, the Carmagnole, and the Day of Departure. The appearance of the men, the refuse of manufactories, of work-houses, of jails; their rags, their filth, their drunkenness; their ecstacies of blasphemous rage, and no less blasphemous joy, stamped them with the character of the willing perpetrators of the worst horrors of the Revolution. Buonaparte himself was judged, by close observers, to shrink with abhorrence from the assembly he himself had convoked. His guards were under arms, and the field artillery loaded, and turned on the Place de Carrousel, filled with the motley crowd, who, from the contrasted colour of the corn porters and charcoal-men, distinguished in the group, were facetiously called his Grey and Black Mousquetaires. He hasted to dismiss his hideous minions, with a sufficient distribution of praises and of liquor. The national guards conceived themselves insulted on this occasion, because compelled to give their attendance along with the Federates. The troops of the line felt for the degraded character of the Emperor. The haughty character of the French soldiers had kept them from fraternizing with the rabble, even in the cause of Napoleon. They had been observed, on the march from Cannes, to cease their cries of Vive l'Empereur, when, upon entering any considerable town, the shout was taken up by the mob of the place, and to suspend their acclamations, rather than mingle them with those of the pequins, whom they despised. They now muttered to each other, on seeing the court which Buonaparte seemed compelled to bestow on these degraded artisans, that the conqueror of Marengo and Wagram had sunk into the mere captain of a rabble. In short, the disgraceful character of the alliance thus formed between Buonaparte and the lees of the people, was of a nature incapable of being glossed over even in the flattering pages of the Moniteur, which, amidst a flourishing description of this memorable procession, was compelled to admit, that, in some places, the name of the Emperor was incongruously mingled with expressions and songs, which recalled an era unfortunately too famous.

Fretted by external dangers, and internal disturbances, and by the degrading necessity of appearing every night before a mob, who familiarly hailed him as Père le Violette, and, above all, galled by the suggestions of his philosophical counsellors, who, among other innovations, wished him to lay aside the style of Emperor for that of President, or Grand General of the Republic, Napoleon, to rid himself at once of occupations offensive to his haughty disposition, withdrew from the Tuileries to the more retired palace of the Elysée Bourbon, and seemed on a sudden to become once more the Emperor he had been before his abdication. Here he took into his own hands, with the assistance of Benjamin Constant, and other statesmen, the construction of a new constitution. Their system included all those checks and regulations which are understood to form the essence of a free government, and greatly resembled that granted by the Royal Charter.[124] Nevertheless, it was extremely ill received by all parties, but especially by those who expected from Napoleon a constitution more free than that which they had dissolved by driving Louis XVIII. from the throne. There were other grave exceptions stated against the scheme of government.

First, The same objection was stated against this Imperial grant which had been urged with so much vehemence against the royal charter, namely, that it was not a compact between the people and the sovereign, in which the former called the latter to the throne under certain conditions, but a recognition by the sovereign of the liberties of the people. The meeting of the Champ de Mai had indeed been summoned, (as intimated in the decrees from Lyons,) chiefly with the purpose of forming and adopting the new constitution; but, according to the present system, they were only to have the choice of adopting or rejecting that which Napoleon had prepared for them. The disappointment was great among those philosophers who desired "better bread than is made of wheat;" and could not enjoy liberty itself, unless it emanated directly from the will of the people, and was sanctioned by popular discussion. But Napoleon was determined that the convention of the 10th May should have no other concern in the constitution, save to accept it when offered. He would not intrust such an assembly with the revision of the laws by which he was to govern.

ADDITIONAL ACT.