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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 chimeras, 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 Caesar, 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 Greve having disappeared with the elder branch, a bourgeois
place of execution was instituted under the name of the Barriere-Saint-Jacques;
"practical men" felt the necessity of a quasi-legitimate
guillotine; and this was one of the victories of Casimir Perier,
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."
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