Paris, From the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 2

by William Walton

He rejoiced too soon; the Duc de Richelieu made a furious speech before the Chamber of Peers in which he openly demanded the condemnation of the marshal; in the acte d'accusation, read before this new court, "the truth was so outrageously abused and mutilated that it was justly characterized as a masterpiece of hatred." In vain his defenders demonstrated that this prosecution was a violation of the solemn engagements made by the Allies in the name of the king; Davout and his chief-of-staff, General Guilleminot, deposed that they would have "delivered battle," instead of capitulating, had it not been for article 12 of this capitulation, in which an amnesty for all persons was expressly stipulated; they were peremptorily silenced, and at nine o'clock the next morning the marshal was shot by his old comrades in arms in the grand alley of the garden of the Luxembourg. A recent monograph by M. Henri Leyret, from which we draw these details, quotes the remark of a foreigner who was present at this execution: "The French act as if they had neither history nor posterity."

During the ten years of the Empire, the aspect of Paris had greatly changed, no less than one hundred and two million of francs having been spent on the embellishment of the capital. Among the minor details of these architectural changes may be cited the regulation of the numbering of the houses in 1805, and in 1808 a serious attempt to provide some sidewalks in the principal streets. Curiously enough, this latter measure met with considerable opposition on the grounds of its impracticability because of the numerous portes cochères. But it was not till 1825 that the use of these pavements for foot-passengers became general.

M. Duruy's summing-up of the reign of Napoleon may be compared with that he gives of the epoch of Louis XIV: "Victories gained by the superiority of genius and not by that of numbers, immense works accomplished, industry awakened, agriculture encouraged by the security given to the acquirers of the biens nationaux, an administration enlightened, vigilant, and quick to act, the unity of the nation consolidated and its grandeur surpassing all imaginations,—this is what will plead always for him before posterity and to the heart of France."

The new Bourbon styled himself "king by the grace of God," without any mention of the national will or of the foreign enemy to whom he owed his crown; he replaced the tricolor by the white flag, and dated his accession from the death of his nephew Louis XVII, the dauphin, considering 1814 as the nineteenth year of his reign. So far was this fable pushed that in certain school histories of the Restoration the victories of the campaign in Italy were stated to have been gained by "M. de Buonaparte, lieutenant-general of the king." In a recent review of this reign, however, it is stated that when Blucher was mining the bridge of Jéna, during the occupation of the capital, and refused to be dissuaded from his purpose of blowing it up, Louis XVIII declared his intention of stationing himself on the bridge and perishing with it. The intervention of the Russian Emperor, Alexander, however, had probably more to do with the preservation of the structure; and a recent biography of the Duc de Richelieu asserts that the Czar's affection for this minister, who had been at one time governor of Odessa, brought about the evacuation of French territory by the allied armies at a date earlier by two years than that fixed by the treaty of November 20, 1815.

Notwithstanding the liberal provisions of the Charte constitutionelle, drawn up on the 27th of May, 1814, the restored monarchy returned so promptly to all its old abuses that in ten months it had exhausted the public patience and brought about the return from Elba. On the second restoration, after the Hundred Days, it was so vindictive, as we have seen, adding even religious persecution to political, that it also has been given in history its reign of terror, la Terreur blanche. In 1824 the king was succeeded by the Comte d'Artois, under the title of Charles X, a typical Bourbon, who had "learned nothing, forgotten nothing," who considered himself called to revive all the powers and privileges of the ancient monarchy, and who did not hesitate to violate the prescriptions of the Charte when he found them in his way. Consequently, the nation, with Paris at its head, at the end of its patience and finding its constitutional opposition about to be encountered with a coup d'État, got up the bloody revolution of July, 1830, in the streets of the capital, and the last of the Bourbon kings took the road to permanent exile,—let us hope.

The Chamber of Deputies replaced him by the head of the younger branch of the Bourbons, the Duc d'Orléans, who assumed the title of Louis Philippe I, Roi des Français. The new monarch affected certain airs of bourgeois simplicity, not unmixed with bourgeois prudence. He declined to take up his lodging in the Tuileries until all traces of the devastation attending the exit of the late tenant had disappeared, and not even then until the windows opening on the garden had been protected by a ditch, bordered with lilacs and with an iron railing. "I do not wish," he said, "that my wife should be exposed to the risk of hearing all the horrors that Marie-Antoinette heard there for the space of three years." "The new royalty," writes M. de Saint-Amand, "adopted a demi-etiquette which occupied a position half-way between the customs of absolute power and those of democracy. The sovereign assumed the uniform of a general of the National Guard. He had neither écuyers, nor chamberlain, nor préfet of the palace, but there were aides-de-camp and officiers d'ordonnance. The bourgeois element increased greatly in the fêtes of the Tuileries. Nevertheless, for those who observed this court of the July monarchy, there was a sensible tendency to return to the methods of the past."

This tendency gradually became accentuated in the successive ministries which the king called to his aid; the republican and liberal aspirations on the one hand and the Bonapartist and Imperial souvenirs—greatly strengthened by the imposing ceremonial attending the return of the ashes of Napoleon to the capital in December, 1840—combined to make difficult the task of the government. Paris, which, in the words of M. Duruy, "loves to fronder as soon as it ceases to be afraid," was entirely given over to the opposition. At the opening of the session of the Chambre in 1848, the ministers persuaded the king to declare in a discourse that a hundred of the deputies were enemies of the throne. The republicans planned a great reunion at a banquet to be given in the twelfth arrondissement, the ministry forbade the assembly, the conflicts began in the streets between the citizens and the soldiers, the préfet de police, who, in his daily reports, was able to dispose of the 12th of February in this paragraph: "Order and tranquillity continue to prevail in Paris: no extraordinary agitation is to be observed," was obliged, ten days later, to conclude a long account of the manifestations in the capital by a recommendation to hold the army in readiness for an organized attack "in case the insurrection recommences." It did recommence, that night, and the next day Marshal Gérard announced to the insurgents in the Palais-Royal the abdication of the king.

He abdicated in favor of his grandson, the Comte de Paris, with the Duchesse d'Orléans for regent, and the duchess was left in the Tuileries when the king, taking off his grand cordon and his uniform, depositing his sword on a table, arrayed himself with his wife's assistance in a bourgeois costume and took his departure for Saint-Cloud. The duchess, with her two sons, was escorted to the Chamber, where the president declared that her regency should be proclaimed by that body, and Lamartine was in the midst of a speech advising the constitution of a provisory government for that purpose when he was interrupted by the invasion of a revolutionary mob shouting: "A bas la Régence! Vive la République! A bas les corrompus!" The little Comte de Paris was seized by the throat by one of these demonstrative citizens, and only saved from being choked by the intervention of a national guardsman. The provisional government proclaimed the Republic; before the Hôtel de Ville, Lamartine, in a burst of eloquence, repelled the proposition of the mob to adopt the red flag and secured the adoption of the tricolor, and the provinces, following the lead of the capital, seemed to accept the Republic.

But a stable administration of the city and the nation seemed more unattainable than ever. The new government had to suppress popular uprisings in the streets of Paris in March, in May, and in June; the new Assemblée Nationale, elected by universal suffrage,—nine millions of electors, instead of 220,000, as under the late monarchy,—made haste to organize a new government consisting of a single president, to be elected, and a single legislative body. The new president, elected by an overwhelming majority, was Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, a nephew of the Emperor. He was given power to nominate all the innumerable employés of the government, to negotiate treaties, and to organize the army, but he could not take command of the latter nor dissolve the Assemblée, and he was not eligible for re-election. The two chief powers of the government were not long in coming into collision; the legislative body, divided into numerous factions, lacked decision and initiative, and it lost in popular favor by the law of the 31st of May, 1850, which struck three millions of electors from the lists by restricting the suffrage to those only who could prove a continuous residence of three years in the canton. The President, seizing his opportunity, demanded the repeal of this law (November 4, 1851), and on the 2d of December following, by a series of summary nocturnal arrests, succeeded in putting all the chiefs of the various parties in the Assemblée, and all his most formidable opponents, under lock and key. "I have broken out of the way of legality," said he, "to re-enter that of the right;" and the nation, by 7,437,216 votes against 640,737, accepted the new constitution which he proposed for it, the renewal of his power for ten years, the abolition of the law of the 31st of May, and the dissolution of the Assemblée Nationale. The Empire followed naturally, a year later, and was ratified by the nation by an even more overwhelming majority.