Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Volume V.

by Walter Scott

La Fayette, indeed, contended that the present representatives of France stood in the same situation as the convention parliaments of England, and the army encamped in Hounslow-heath, at the time of the English Revolution. To have rendered this parallel apt, it required all the peculiar circumstances of justice which attended the great event of 1688. The French should have been able to vindicate the reason of their proceedings by the aggressions of their exiled monarch, and by the will of the nation generally, nay, almost unanimously, expressed in consequence thereof. This, we need not say, they were wholly unable to do. But the English history did afford one example of an assembly, exactly resembling their own, in absence of right, and exuberance of pretension; and that precedent existed when the Rump Parliament contrived to shuffle the cards out of the hands of Richard Cromwell, as the Provisional Commissioners at Paris were endeavouring by legerdemain to convey the authority from Napoleon II. This Rump Parliament also sat for a little time as a government, and endeavoured to settle the constitution upon their own plan, in despite of the whole people of England, who were longing for the restoration of their lawful monarch, as speedily was shown to be the case, when Monk, with an armed force, appeared to protect them in the declaration of their real sentiments. This was the most exact parallel afforded by English history to the situation of the Provisional Commissioners of France; and both they and the Rump Parliament being equally intrusive occupants of the supreme authority, were alike justly deprived of it by the return of the legitimate monarch.

SECOND RESTORATION.

While the allied powers were thus desirous that the King of France should obtain possession of a throne which he had never forfeited, they, and England in particular, saw at once the justice and the policy of securing to France every accession of well-regulated freedom, which she had obtained by and through the Revolution, as well as such additional improvements upon her constitution as experience had shown to be desirable. These were pointed out and stipulated for by the celebrated Fouché, who, on this occasion, did much service to his country. Yet he struggled hard, that while the King acknowledged, which he was ready to do, the several benefits, both in point of public feeling and public advantage, which France had derived from the Revolution, the sovereign should make some steps to acknowledge the Revolution itself.[175] He contended for the three-coloured banners being adopted, as a matter of the last importance;—in that, somewhat resembling the archfiend in the legends of necromancy, who, when the unhappy persons with whom he deals decline to make over their souls and bodies according to his first request, is humble enough to ask and accept the most petty sacrifices—the paring of the nails, or a single lock of hair, providing it is offered in symbol of homage and devotion. But Louis XVIII. was not thus to be drawn into an incidental and equivocal homologation, as civilians term it, of all the wild work of a period so horrible, which must have been by implication a species of ratification even of the death of his innocent and murdered brother. To preserve and cherish the good which had flowed from the Revolution, was a very different thing from a ratification of the Revolution itself. A tempest may cast rich treasures upon the beach, a tornado may clear the air; but while these benefits are suitably prized and enjoyed, it is surely not requisite that, like ignorant Indians, we should worship the wild surge, and erect altars to the howling of the wind.

The King of France having steadily refused all proposals which went to assign to the government an authority founded on the Revolution, the constitution of France is to be recognised as that of a hereditary monarchy, limited by the Royal Charter, and by the principles of freedom. It thus affords to the other existing monarchies of Europe a guarantee against sudden and dangerous commotion; while in favour of the subject, it extends all the necessary checks against arbitrary sway, and all the suitable provisions for ameliorating and extending the advantages of liberal institutions, as opportunity shall offer, and the expanding light of information shall recommend.

The allies, though their treaty with France was not made in the same humour of romantic generosity which dictated that of 1814, insisted upon no articles which could be considered as dishonourable to that nation. The disjoining from her empire three or four border fortresses was stipulated, in order to render a rapid and successful invasion of Germany or the Netherlands more difficult in future. Large sums of money were also exacted in recompense of the heavy expenses of the allies; but they were not beyond what the wealth of France could readily discharge. A part of her fortresses were also detained by the allies as a species of pledge for the peaceable behaviour of the kingdom; but these were to be restored after a season, and the armies of Europe, which for a time remained within the French territories, were at the same time to be withdrawn. Finally, that splendid Museum, which the right of conquest had collected by the stripping of so many states, was transferred by the same right of conquest, not to those of the allies who had great armies in the field, but to the poor and small states, who had resigned their property to the French under the influence of terror, and received it back from the confederates with wonder and gratitude.

These circumstances were indeed galling to France for the moment; but they were the necessary consequence of the position in which, perhaps rather passively than actively, she had been placed by the Revolution of the Hundred Days. All the prophecies which had been circulated to animate the people against the allies, of their seeking selfish and vindictive objects, or endeavouring to destroy the high national rank which that fair kingdom ought to hold in Europe, were proved to be utterly fallacious. The conquered provinces, as they are called, the acquisitions of Louis XIV., were not rent from the French empire—their colonies were left as at the peace of Paris. The English did not impose on them an unfavourable treaty of commerce, which Napoleon affirmed was their design, and the omission to insist on which he afterwards considered as a culpable neglect of British interests by the English ministers. France was left, as she ought to be, altogether independent, and splendidly powerful.

Neither were the predictions concerning the stability of the new royal government less false than had been the vaticinations respecting the purposes of the allies. Numbers prophesied the downfall of the Bourbon dynasty. It was with difficulty that the political augurs would allow that it might last as long as the life of Louis XVIII. He now sleeps with his fathers; and his successor, generally beloved for his courteous manners, and respected for his integrity and honour, reigns over a free and flourishing people. Time, that grand pacificator, is daily abating the rancour of party, and removing from the scene those of all sides, who, unaccustomed to the general and impartial exercise of the laws, were ready to improve every advantage, and debate every political question, sword in hand, or, as they themselves express it, par voie du fait. The guarantee for the permanence of their freedom, is the only subject on which reasonable Frenchmen of the present day are anxious. We trust there is no occasion for their solicitude. Fatal indeed would be the advice which should induce the French Government to give the slightest subject for just complaints. The ultra Royalist, the Jacobin enragé, are gradually cooled by age, or fate has removed them from the scene. Those who succeed, having never seen the sword drawn, will be less apt to hurry into civil strife; and the able and well-intentioned on either side, while they find room in the Chambers for expressing their difference of opinion, will acquire the habit of enduring contradiction with candour and good-humour, and be led to entertain the wholesome doubt, whether, in the imperfect state of the human intellect, it is possible for one class of statesmen to be absolutely and uniformly right, and their opponents, in all instances, decidedly wrong. The French will learn, that it is from freedom of debate—from an appeal, not to the arms, but to the understandings of the people—by the collision of intellect, not the strife of brutal violence, that the political institutions of this ingenious people are in future to be improved.

The aspirations of France after glory in the field had been indulged, during the period of which we have treated, dreadfully for other countries, and the requital to herself was sufficiently fearful. A sentiment friendly to peace and good order has of late years distinguished even those two nations, which, by a rash and wicked expression, have been sometimes termed natural enemies. The enlarged ideas of commerce, as they spread wider, and become better understood, will afford, perhaps, the strongest and most irresistible motive for amicable intercourse—that, namely, which arises from mutual advantage; for commerce keeps pace with civilisation, and a nation, as it becomes wealthy from its own industry, acquires more and more a taste for the conveniences and luxuries, which are the produce of the soil, or of the industry, of other countries. Britain, of whom all that was selfish was expected and predicated by Napoleon and his friends—Britain, who was said to meditate enchaining France by a commercial treaty (which would have ruined her own manufactures,) has, by opening her ports to the manufactures of her neighbour, had the honour to lead the way in a new and more honourable species of traffic, which has in some degree the property ascribed by the poet to Mercy—

"It blesseth him who gives, and him who takes."

To the eye of a stranger, the number of new buildings established in Paris, and indeed throughout France, are indications of capital and enterprise, of a nature much more satisfactory than the splendid but half-finished public edifices which Napoleon so hastily undertook, and so often left in an incomplete state. The general improvement of ideas may be also distinctly remarked, on comparing the French people of 1815 and 1826, and observing the gradual extinction of long-cherished prejudices and the no less gradual improvement and enlargement of ideas. This state of advancement cannot, indeed, be regular—it must have its ebbs and flows. But on the whole, there seems more reason than at any former period of the world, for hoping that there will be a general peace of some lengthened endurance; and that Britain and France, in particular, will satisfy themselves with enjoying in recollection the laurels each country has won in the field, and be contented to struggle for the palm of national superiority by the arts of peaceful and civilized industry.