Chapter V · (continued 2)

On leaving Aix-la-Chapelle, where he had been so fortunate, the Duke de Richelieu, although far from presumptuous, expected, I have no doubt, to be equally successful in his design of repealing the law of elections. Success deceives the most unassuming, and prevents them from foreseeing an approaching reverse. On his arrival, he found the undertaking much more difficult than he had anticipated. In the Cabinet, M. Molé alone fully seconded his intentions. M. Decazes and Marshal Gouvion St. Cyr declared strongly for the law as it stood. M. Lainé, while fully admitting that it ought to be modified, refused to take any part in the matter, having been, as he said, the first to propose and maintain it. M. Roy, who had lately superseded M. Corvetto in the department of finance, cared little for the electoral question, but announced that he would not remain in the Cabinet without M. Decazes, whom he considered indispensable, either in the Chambers or near the King's person. Discord raged within and without the Ministry. In the Chambers, the centre was divided; the left defended the law vehemently; the right declared itself ready to support any minister who proposed its reform, but at the same time repudiated M. Decazes, the author of the decree of the 5th of September, 1816, and of all its consequences. The public began to warm into the question. Excitement and confusion went on increasing. It was evidently not the electoral law alone, but the general policy of the Restoration and the Government of France, that formed the subject of debate.

In a little work which the historians of this period, M. de Lamartine amongst others, have published, the King, Louis XVIII. himself has related the incidents and sudden turns of this ministerial crisis, which ended, as is well known, in the retirement of the Duke de Richelieu, with four of his colleagues, and in the promotion of M. Decazes, who immediately constructed a new Cabinet, of which he was the head, without appearing to preside, while M. de Serre, appointed to the seals, became the powerful organ in the Chambers, and the maintenance of the law of elections was adopted as the symbol. Two sentiments, under simple forms, pervade this kingly recital: first, a certain anxiety, on the part of the author, that no blame should be attached to him in his royal character, or in his conduct towards the Duke de Richelieu, and a desire to exculpate himself from these charges; secondly, a little of that secret pleasure which kings indulge in, even under heavy embarrassments, when they see a minister fall whose importance was not derived from themselves, and who has served them without expecting or receiving favours.

"If I had only consulted my own opinion," says the King, in concluding his statement, "I should have wished M. Decazes, uniting his lot, as he had always intended, with that of the Duke de Richelieu, to have left the Ministry with him." It would have been happy for M. Decazes if this desire of the King had prevailed. Not that he erred in any point of duty or propriety by surviving the Duke de Richelieu in office, and in forming a Cabinet without him; an important misunderstanding on a pressing question had already separated them. M. Decazes, after tendering his resignation, had raised no obstacle to the Duke's efforts at finding new colleagues; it was only on the failure of those attempts, frankly avowed by the Duke himself, and at the formal request of the King, that he had undertaken to form a ministry. As a friend of M. de Richelieu, and the day before his colleague, there were certainly unpleasant circumstances and appearances attached to this position; but M. Decazes was free to act, and could scarcely refuse to carry out the policy he had recommended in council, when that which he had opposed acknowledged itself incapable. Yet the new Cabinet was not strong enough for the enterprise it undertook; with the centre completely shaken and divided, it had to contend against the right-hand party more irritated than ever, and the left evidently inimical, although through decency it lent to Government a precarious support. The Cabinet of M. Decazes, as a ministerial party, retained much inferior forces to those which had surrounded the Duke de Richelieu, and had to contest with two bitter enemies, the one inaccessible to peace or truce, the other sometimes appearing friendly, but suddenly turning round and attacking the Ministry with eager malevolence, when an opportunity offered, and with hesitating hostility when compelled to dissemble.

The doctrinarians, who, in co-operation with M. Decazes, had defended the law of elections, energetically supported the new Cabinet, in which they were brilliantly represented by M. de Serre. Success was not wanting at the commencement. By a mild and active administration, by studied care of its partisans, by frequent and always favourably received appeals to the royal clemency in behalf of the exiles still excepted from amnesty, even including the old regicides, M. Decazes sought and won extensive popularity; Marshal Gouvion St. Cyr satisfied the remnants of the old army, by restoring to the new the ablest of its former leaders; M. de Serre triumphantly defended the Ministry in the Chambers; his bills, boldly liberal, and his frank opposition to revolutionary principles, soon acquired for him, even with his adversaries, a just reputation for eloquence and sincerity. In the parliamentary arena it was an effective and upright Ministry; with the country it was felt to be a Government loyally constitutional. But it had more brilliancy than strength; and neither its care of individual interests, nor its successes in the tribune, were sufficient to rally round it the great Government party which its formation had divided. Discord arose between the Chambers themselves. The Chamber of Peers, by adopting the proposition of the Marquis Barthélemy, renewed the struggle against the electoral law. In vain did the Chamber of Deputies repel this attack; in vain did the Cabinet, by creating sixty new Peers, break down the majority in the palace of the Luxembourg; these half triumphs and legal extremes decided nothing. Liberal governments are condemned to see the great questions perpetually revived which revolutions bequeath to society, and which even glorious despotism suspends without solving. The right-hand party was passionately bent on repossessing the power which had recently escaped them. The left defended, at any cost, the Revolution, more insulted than in danger. The centre, dislocated and doubtful of the future, wavered between the hostile parties, not feeling itself in a condition to impose peace on all, and on the point of being confounded in the ranks of one side or the other. The Cabinet, ever victorious in daily debate, and supported by the King's favour, felt itself nevertheless feebly surrounded and precariously placed, with the air of expecting a favourable or a hostile incident, to bring the security it wanted, or to overthrow it altogether.

The events which men call accidents are never wanting in such situations. During the space of a few months the Cabinet of 1819 experienced two,—the election of M. Grégoire, and the assassination of the Duke de Berry; and these two decided its fate.

It is difficult to look upon the election of M. Grégoire as an accident; it was proposed and settled beforehand in the central committee established at Paris to superintend elections in general, and which was called the managing committee. This particular election was decided on at Grenoble in the college assembled on the 11th of September, 1819, by a certain number of votes of the right-hand party, which at the second round of balloting were carried to the credit of the left-hand candidate, and gave him a majority which otherwise he could not have obtained. To excuse this scandal, when it became known, some apologists pretended that M. Grégoire was not in fact a regicide, because, even though he had approved of the condemnation of Louis XVI. in his letters to the Convention, his vote at least had not been included in the fatal list. Again, when the admission of the deputy was disputed in the Chamber, the left-hand party, to get rid of him, while eluding the true cause of refusal, eagerly proposed to annul the election on the ground of irregularity. When improvident violence fails, men gladly shelter themselves under pusillanimous subtlety. It was unquestionably in the character of a Conventional regicide, and with premeditated reflection, not by any local or sudden accident, that M. Grégoire had been elected. No act was ever more deliberately arranged and accomplished by party feelings. Sincere in the perverse extravagancies of his mind, and faithful to his avowed principles, although forgetful and weak in their application, openly a Christian, and preaching tolerance under the Convention, while he sanctioned the most unrelenting persecution of the priests who refused to submit to the yoke of its new church; a republican and oppositionist under the Empire, while consenting to be a senator and a Count, this old man, as inconsistent as obstinate, was the instrument of a signal act of hostility against the Restoration, to become immediately the pretext for a corresponding act of weakness. A melancholy end to a sad career!

The assassination of the Duke de Berry might with much more propriety be called an accident. On the trial it was proved by evidence that Louvel had no accomplices, and that he was alone in the conception as in the execution of his crime. But it was also evident that hatred against the Bourbons had possessed the soul and armed the hand of the murderer. Revolutionary passions are a fire which is kindled and nourished afar off; the orators of the right obtained credit with many timid and horror-stricken minds, when they called this an accident;—as it is also an accident if a diseased constitution catches the plague when it infects the air, or if a powder-magazine explodes when you strike fire in its immediate neighbourhood.

M. Decazes endeavoured to defend himself against these two heavy blows. After the election of M. Grégoire, he undertook to accomplish alone what at the close of the preceding year he had refused to attempt in concert with the Duke de Richelieu. He determined to alter the law of elections. It was intended that this change should take place in a great constitutional reform meditated by M. de Serre, liberal on certain points, monarchical on others, and which promised to give more firmness to royalty by developing representative government. M. Decazes made a sincere effort to induce the Duke de Richelieu, who was then travelling in Holland, to return and reassume the presidency of the Council, and to co-operate with him in the Chambers for the furtherance of this bold undertaking. The King himself applied to the Duke de Richelieu, who positively declined, more from disgust with public affairs and through diffidence of his own power, than from any remains of ill-humour or resentment. Three actual members of the Cabinet of 1819, General Dessoles, Marshal Gouvion St. Cyr, and Baron Louis, declared that they would not co-operate in any attack on the existing law of elections. M. Decazes determined to do without them, as he had dispensed with the Duke de Richelieu, and to form a new Cabinet, of which he became the president, and in which M. Pasquier, General Latour-Maubourg, and M. Roy replaced the three retiring ministers. On the 29th of November the King opened the session. Two months passed over, and the new electoral system had not yet been presented to the Chamber. Three days after the assassination of the Duke de Berry, M. Decazes introduced it suddenly, with two bills to suspend personal liberty, and re-establish the censorship of the daily press. Four days later he fell, and the Duke de Richelieu, standing alone before the King and the danger, consented to resume power. M. Decazes would have acted more wisely had he submitted to his first defeat, and induced the King after the election of M. Grégoire, to take back the Duke de Richelieu as minister. He would not then have been compelled to lower with his own hand the flag he had raised, and to endure the burden of a great miscarriage.

The fall of the Cabinet of 1819, brought on a new crisis, and a fresh progress of the evil which disorganized the great Government party formed during the session of 1815, and by the decree of the 5th of September, 1816. To the successive divisions of the centre, were now added the differences between the doctrinarians themselves. M. de Serre, who had joined the Cabinet with M. Decazes to defend the law of elections, now determined, although sick and absent, to remain there with the Duke de Richelieu to overthrow it, without any of the compensations, real or apparent, which his grand schemes of constitutional reform were intended to supply. I tried in vain to dissuade him from his resolution.[15] In the Chamber of Deputies, M. Royer-Collard and M. Camille Jordan vehemently attacked the new electoral plan; the Duke de Broglie and M. de Barante proposed serious amendments to it in the Chamber of Peers. All the political ties which had been cemented during five years appeared to be dissolved; every one followed his own private opinion, or returned to his old bias. In the parliamentary field, all was uncertainty and confused opposition; a phantom appeared at each extremity, revolution and counter-revolution, exchanging mutual menaces, and equally impatient to come to issue.

Those who wish to give themselves a correct idea of parliamentary and popular excitement, pushed to their extreme limit, and yet retained within that boundary by legal authority and the good sense of the public,—sufficient to arrest the country on the brink of an abyss, although too weak to block up the road that leads to it,—should read the debate on the new electoral bill introduced into the Chamber of Deputies on the 17th of April, 1820, by the second Cabinet of the Duke de Richelieu, and discussed for twenty-six days in that Chamber, accompanied with riotous gatherings without, thoughtlessly aggressive and sternly repressed. If we are to believe the orators of the left, France and her liberties, the Revolution and its conquests, the honour of the present, and the security of the future, were all lost if the ministerial bill should pass. The right, on the other hand, looked upon the bill as scarcely strong enough to save the monarchy for the moment, and declared its resolution to reject every amendment which might diminish its powers. On both sides, pretensions and claims were equally ungovernable. Attracted and excited by this legal quarrel, the students, the enthusiastic young Liberals, the old professional disturbers, the idlers and oppositionists of every class, were engaged daily with the soldiers and the agents of police, in conflicts sometimes sanguinary, and the accounts of which redoubled the acrimony of the debate withindoors. In the midst of this general commotion, the Cabinet of 1820 had the merit of maintaining, while repressing all popular movement, the freedom of legislative deliberation, and of acting its part in these stormy discussions with perseverance and moderation. M. Pasquier, their Minister for Foreign Affairs, endowed with rare self-command and presence of mind, was on this occasion the principal parliamentary champion of the Cabinet; and M. Mounier, Director-General of the Police, controlled the street riots with as much prudence as active firmness. The charge so often brought against so many ministers, against M. Casimir Perrier in 1831, as against the Duke de Richelieu in 1820, of exciting popular commotions only to repress them, does not deserve the notice of sensible men. At the end of a month, all these debates and scenes, within and without, ended in the adoption, not of the ministerial bill, but of an amendment which, without destroying in principle the bill of the 5th of February, 1817, so materially vitiated it, to the advantage of the right, that the party felt themselves bound to be satisfied. The greater portion of the centre, and the more moderate members of the left, submitted for the sake of public peace. The extreme left and the extreme right, M. Manuel and M. de la Bourdonnaye entered a protest. The new electoral system was clearly destined to shift the majority, and, with the majority, power, from the left to the right; but the liberties of France, and the advantages gained by the Revolution, were not endangered by the change.

This question once settled, the Cabinet had to pay its debts to the right-hand party,—rewards to those who had supported it, and punishments to its opposers. In spite of old friendships, the doctrinarians figured of necessity in the last category. If I had desired it, I might have escaped. Not being a member of either Chamber, and beyond the circle of constrained action, I could in my capacity of State Councillor have maintained reserve and silence after giving my advice to the Government; but on entering public life, I had resolved on one uniform course,—to express my true thoughts on every occasion, and never to separate myself from my friends. M. de Serre included me, with good reason, in the measure which removed them from the Council; on the 17th of June, 1820, he wrote to MM. Royer-Collard, Camille Jordan, Barante, and myself, to inform us that we were no longer on the list. The best men readily assume the habits and style of absolute power. M. de Serre was certainly not deficient in self-respect or confidence in his own opinions; he felt surprised that in this instance I should have obeyed mine, without any other more coercive necessity, and evinced this feeling by communicating my removal with unqualified harshness. "The evident hostility," he said to me, "which, without the shadow of a pretext, you have lately exhibited towards the King's Government, has rendered this step inevitable." My answer was simply this:—"I expected your letter. I might have foreseen, and I did anticipate it, when I openly evinced my disapprobation of the acts and speeches of the Ministry. I congratulate myself that I have nothing to alter in my conduct. Tomorrow, as yesterday, I shall belong only and entirely to myself."[16]

The decisive step was taken; power had changed its course with its friends. After having turned it to this new direction, the Duke de Richelieu and his colleagues made sincere efforts during two years to arrest its further progress. They tried all methods of conciliation or resistance; sometimes they courted the right, at others the remains of the centre, and occasionally even the left, by concessions of principle, and more frequently of a personal nature. M. de Châteaubriand was sent as Ambassador to Berlin, and General Clauzel was declared entitled to the amnesty. M. de Villèle and M. Corbière obtained seats in the Cabinet, the first as minister without a portfolio, and the other as president of the Royal Council of Public Instruction; they left it, however, at the expiration of six months, under frivolous pretexts, but foreseeing the approaching fall of the Ministry, and not wishing to be there at the last moment. They were not deceived. The elections of 1821 completed the decimation of the weak battalion which still endeavoured to stand firm round tottering power. The Duke de Richelieu, who had only resumed office on a personal promise from the Count d'Artois of permanent support, complained loudly, with the independent spirit of a nobleman of high rank and of a man of honour, that the word of a gentleman, pledged to him, had not been kept. Vain complaints, and futile efforts! The Cabinet obtained time with difficulty; but the right-hand party alone gained ground. At length, on the 19th of December, 1821, the last shadow of the Government of the Centre vanished with the ministry of the Duke de Richelieu. The right and M. de Villèle seized the reins of power. "The counter-revolution is approaching!" exclaimed the left, in a mingled burst of satisfaction and alarm. M. de Villèle thought differently; a little before the decisive crisis, and after having, in his quality of vice-president, directed for some days the deliberations of the Chamber of Deputies, he wrote as follows to one of his friends:—"You will scarcely believe how my four days of presidency have succeeded. I received compliments on every side, but particularly, I own it to my shame, from the left, whom I have never conciliated. They expected, without doubt, to be eaten up alive by an ultra. They are inexhaustible in eulogium. Finally, those to whom I never speak, now address me with a thousand compliments. I think in this there is a little spite against M. Ravez. But, be that as it may, if a president were just now to be elected, I should have almost every vote in the Chamber.... For myself, impartiality costs me nothing. I look only to the success of the affairs I have undertaken, and have not the slightest prejudice against individuals. I am born for the end of revolutions."

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