الفصل الفصل 226 · LOUIS PHILIPPE

Revolutions have a terrible arm and a happy hand, they strike firmly

and choose well. Even incomplete, even debased and abused and reduced

to the state of a junior revolution like the Revolution of 1830, they

nearly always retain sufficient providential lucidity to prevent them

from falling amiss. Their eclipse is never an abdication.

Nevertheless, let us not boast too loudly; revolutions also may be

deceived, and grave errors have been seen.

Let us return to 1830. 1830, in its deviation, had good luck. In the

establishment which entitled itself order after the revolution had been

cut short, the King amounted to more than royalty. Louis Philippe was a

rare man.

The son of a father to whom history will accord certain attenuating

circumstances, but also as worthy of esteem as that father had been of

blame; possessing all private virtues and many public virtues; careful

of his health, of his fortune, of his person, of his affairs, knowing

the value of a minute and not always the value of a year; sober,

serene, peaceable, patient; a good man and a good prince; sleeping with

his wife, and having in his palace lackeys charged with the duty of

showing the conjugal bed to the bourgeois, an ostentation of the

regular sleeping-apartment which had become useful after the former

illegitimate displays of the elder branch; knowing all the languages of

Europe, and, what is more rare, all the languages of all interests, and

speaking them; an admirable representative of the “middle class,” but

outstripping it, and in every way greater than it; possessing excellent

sense, while appreciating the blood from which he had sprung, counting

most of all on his intrinsic worth, and, on the question of his race,

very particular, declaring himself Orleans and not Bourbon; thoroughly

the first Prince of the Blood Royal while he was still only a Serene

Highness, but a frank bourgeois from the day he became king; diffuse in

public, concise in private; reputed, but not proved to be a miser; at

bottom, one of those economists who are readily prodigal at their own

fancy or duty; lettered, but not very sensitive to letters; a

gentleman, but not a chevalier; simple, calm, and strong; adored by his

family and his household; a fascinating talker, an undeceived

statesman, inwardly cold, dominated by immediate interest, always

governing at the shortest range, incapable of rancor and of gratitude,

making use without mercy of superiority on mediocrity, clever in

getting parliamentary majorities to put in the wrong those mysterious

unanimities which mutter dully under thrones; unreserved, sometimes

imprudent in his lack of reserve, but with marvellous address in that

imprudence; fertile in expedients, in countenances, in masks; making

France fear Europe and Europe France! Incontestably fond of his

country, but preferring his family; assuming more domination than

authority and more authority than dignity, a disposition which has this

unfortunate property, that as it turns everything to success, it admits

of ruse and does not absolutely repudiate baseness, but which has this

valuable side, that it preserves politics from violent shocks, the

state from fractures, and society from catastrophes; minute, correct,

vigilant, attentive, sagacious, indefatigable; contradicting himself at

times and giving himself the lie; bold against Austria at Ancona,

obstinate against England in Spain, bombarding Antwerp, and paying off

Pritchard; singing the Marseillaise with conviction, inaccessible to

despondency, to lassitude, to the taste for the beautiful and the

ideal, to daring generosity, to Utopia, to chimæras, to wrath, to

vanity, to fear; possessing all the forms of personal intrepidity; a

general at Valmy; a soldier at Jemappes; attacked eight times by

regicides and always smiling. Brave as a grenadier, courageous as a

thinker; uneasy only in the face of the chances of a European shaking

up, and unfitted for great political adventures; always ready to risk

his life, never his work; disguising his will in influence, in order

that he might be obeyed as an intelligence rather than as a king;

endowed with observation and not with divination; not very attentive to

minds, but knowing men, that is to say requiring to see in order to

judge; prompt and penetrating good sense, practical wisdom, easy

speech, prodigious memory; drawing incessantly on this memory, his only

point of resemblance with Cæsar, Alexander, and Napoleon; knowing

deeds, facts, details, dates, proper names, ignorant of tendencies,

passions, the diverse geniuses of the crowd, the interior aspirations,

the hidden and obscure uprisings of souls, in a word, all that can be

designated as the invisible currents of consciences; accepted by the

surface, but little in accord with France lower down; extricating

himself by dint of tact; governing too much and not enough; his own

first minister; excellent at creating out of the pettiness of realities

an obstacle to the immensity of ideas; mingling a genuine creative

faculty of civilization, of order and organization, an indescribable

spirit of proceedings and chicanery, the founder and lawyer of a

dynasty; having something of Charlemagne and something of an attorney;

in short, a lofty and original figure, a prince who understood how to

create authority in spite of the uneasiness of France, and power in

spite of the jealousy of Europe. Louis Philippe will be classed among

the eminent men of his century, and would be ranked among the most

illustrious governors of history had he loved glory but a little, and

if he had had the sentiment of what is great to the same degree as the

feeling for what is useful.

Louis Philippe had been handsome, and in his old age he remained

graceful; not always approved by the nation, he always was so by the

masses; he pleased. He had that gift of charming. He lacked majesty; he

wore no crown, although a king, and no white hair, although an old man;

his manners belonged to the old regime and his habits to the new; a

mixture of the noble and the bourgeois which suited 1830; Louis

Philippe was transition reigning; he had preserved the ancient

pronunciation and the ancient orthography which he placed at the

service of opinions modern; he loved Poland and Hungary, but he wrote

_les Polonois_, and he 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 a little to chapel, not at all to the chase, never to the

opera. Incorruptible by sacristans, by whippers-in, by ballet-dancers;

this made a part of his bourgeois popularity. He had no heart. He went

out with his umbrella under his arm, and this umbrella long formed a

part of his aureole. He was a bit of a mason, a bit of a gardener,

something of a doctor; he bled a postilion who had tumbled from his

horse; Louis Philippe no more went about without his lancet, than did

Henri IV. without his poniard. The Royalists jeered at this ridiculous

king, the first who had ever shed blood with the object of healing.

For the grievances against Louis Philippe, there is one deduction to be

made; there is that which accuses royalty, that which accuses the

reign, that which accuses the King; three columns which all give

different totals. Democratic right confiscated, progress becomes a

matter of secondary interest, the protests of the street violently

repressed, military execution of insurrections, the rising passed over

by arms, the Rue Transnonain, the counsels of war, the absorption of

the real country by the legal country, on half shares with three

hundred thousand privileged persons,—these are the deeds of royalty;

Belgium refused, Algeria too harshly conquered, and, as in the case of

India by the English, with more barbarism than civilization, the breach

of faith, to Abd-el-Kader, Blaye, Deutz bought, Pritchard paid,—these

are the doings of the reign; the policy which was more domestic than

national was the doing of the King.

As will be seen, the proper deduction having been made, the King’s

charge is decreased.

This is his great fault; he was modest in the name of France.

Whence arises this fault?

We will state it.

Louis Philippe was rather too much of a paternal king; that incubation

of a family with the object of founding a dynasty is afraid of

everything and does not like to be disturbed; hence excessive timidity,

which is displeasing to the people, who have the 14th of July in their

civil and Austerlitz in their military tradition.

Moreover, if we deduct the public duties which require to be fulfilled

first of all, that deep tenderness of Louis Philippe towards his family

was deserved by the family. That domestic group was worthy of

admiration. Virtues there dwelt side by side with talents. One of Louis

Philippe’s daughters, Marie d’Orleans, placed the name of her race

among artists, as Charles d’Orleans had placed it among poets. She made

of her soul a marble which she named Jeanne d’Arc. Two of Louis

Philippe’s daughters elicited from Metternich this eulogium: “They are

young people such as are rarely seen, and princes such as are never

seen.”

This, without any dissimulation, and also without any exaggeration, is

the truth about Louis Philippe.

To be Prince Equality, to bear in his own person the contradiction of

the Restoration and the Revolution, to have that disquieting side of

the revolutionary which becomes reassuring in governing power, therein

lay the fortune of Louis Philippe in 1830; never was there a more

complete adaptation of a man to an event; the one entered into the

other, and the incarnation took place. Louis Philippe is 1830 made man.

Moreover, he had in his favor that great recommendation to the throne,

exile. He had been proscribed, a wanderer, poor. He had lived by his

own labor. In Switzerland, this heir to the richest princely domains in

France had sold an old horse in order to obtain bread. At Reichenau, he

gave lessons in mathematics, while his sister Adelaide did wool work

and sewed. These souvenirs connected with a king rendered the

bourgeoisie enthusiastic. He had, with his own hands, demolished the

iron cage of Mont-Saint-Michel, built by Louis XI., and used by Louis

XV. He was the companion of Dumouriez, he was the friend of Lafayette;

he had belonged to the Jacobins’ club; Mirabeau had slapped him on the

shoulder; Danton had said to him: “Young man!” At the age of four and

twenty, in ’93, being then M. de Chartres, he had witnessed, from the

depth of a box, 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, did so almost without noticing the

man in the fierce crushing of the idea, the vast storm of the

Assembly-Tribunal, the public wrath interrogating, Capet not knowing

what to reply, the alarming, stupefied vacillation by that royal head

beneath that sombre breath, the relative innocence of all in that

catastrophe, of those who condemned as well as of the man condemned,—he

had looked on those things, he had contemplated that giddiness; he had

seen the centuries appear before the bar of the Assembly-Convention; he

had beheld, behind Louis XVI., that unfortunate passer-by who was made

responsible, the terrible culprit, the monarchy, rise through the

shadows; and there had lingered in his soul the respectful fear of

these immense justices of the populace, which are almost as impersonal

as the justice of God.

The trace left in him by the Revolution was prodigious. Its memory was

like a living imprint of those great years, minute by minute. One day,

in the presence of a witness whom we are not permitted to doubt, he

rectified from memory the whole of the letter A in the alphabetical

list of the Constituent Assembly.

Louis Philippe was a king of the broad daylight. While he reigned the

press was free, the tribune was free, conscience and speech were free.

The laws of September are open to sight. Although fully aware of the

gnawing power of light on privileges, he left his throne exposed to the

light. History will do justice to him for this loyalty.

Louis Philippe, like all historical men who have passed from the scene,

is to-day put on his trial by the human conscience. His case is, as

yet, only in the lower court.

The hour when history speaks with its free and venerable accent, has

not yet sounded for him; the moment has not come to pronounce a

definite judgment on this king; the austere and illustrious historian

Louis Blanc has himself recently softened his first verdict; Louis

Philippe was elected by those two _almosts_ which are called the 221

and 1830, that is to say, by a half-Parliament, and a half-revolution;

and in any case, from the superior point of view where philosophy must

place itself, we cannot judge him here, as the reader has seen above,

except with certain reservations in the name of the absolute democratic

principle; in the eyes of the absolute, outside these two rights, the

right of man in the first place, the right of the people in the second,

all is usurpation; but what we can say, even at the present day, that

after making these reserves is, that to sum up the whole, and in

whatever manner he is considered, Louis Philippe, taken in himself, and

from the point of view of human goodness, will remain, to use the

antique language of ancient history, one of the best princes who ever

sat on a throne.

What is there against him? That throne. Take away Louis Philippe the

king, there remains the man. And the man is good. He is good at times

even to the point of being admirable. Often, in the midst of his

gravest souvenirs, after a day of conflict with the whole diplomacy of

the continent, he returned at night to his apartments, and there,

exhausted with fatigue, overwhelmed with sleep, what did he do? He took

a death sentence and passed the night in revising a criminal suit,

considering it something to hold his own against Europe, but that it

was a still greater matter to rescue a man from the executioner. He

obstinately maintained his opinion against his keeper of the seals; he

disputed the ground with the guillotine foot by foot against the crown

attorneys, those _chatterers of the law_, as he called them. Sometimes

the pile of sentences covered his table; he examined them all; it was

anguish to him to abandon these miserable, condemned heads. One day, he

said to the same witness to whom we have recently referred: “I won

seven last night.” During the early years of his reign, the death

penalty was as good as abolished, and the erection of a scaffold was a

violence committed against the King. The Grève having disappeared with

the elder branch, a bourgeois place of execution was instituted under

the name of the Barrière-Saint-Jacques; “practical men” felt the

necessity of a quasi-legitimate guillotine; and this was one of the

victories of Casimir Périer, who represented the narrow sides of the

bourgeoisie, over Louis Philippe, who represented its liberal sides.

Louis Philippe annotated Beccaria with his own hand. After the Fieschi

machine, he exclaimed: “What a pity that I was not wounded! Then I

might have pardoned!” On another occasion, alluding to the resistance

offered by his ministry, he wrote in connection with a political

criminal, who is one of the most generous figures of our day: “His

pardon is granted; it only remains for me to obtain it.” Louis Philippe

was as gentle as Louis IX. and as kindly as Henri IV.

Now, to our mind, in history, where kindness is the rarest of pearls,

the man who is kindly almost takes precedence of the man who is great.

Louis Philippe having been severely judged by some, harshly, perhaps,

by others, it is quite natural that a man, himself a phantom at the

present day, who knew that king, should come and testify in his favor

before history; this deposition, whatever else it may be, is evidently

and above all things, entirely disinterested; an epitaph penned by a

dead man is sincere; one shade may console another shade; the sharing

of the same shadows confers the right to praise it; it is not greatly

to be feared that it will ever be said of two tombs in exile: “This one

flattered the other.”