CHAPTER III--LOUIS PHILIPPE

  Revolutions have a terrible arm and a happy hand, they strike firmly andchoose well. Even incomplete, even debased and abused and reduced to thestate of a junior revolution like the Revolution of 1830, they nearlyalways retain sufficient providential lucidity to prevent them fromfalling amiss. Their eclipse is never an abdication.

  Nevertheless, let us not boast too loudly; revolutions also may bedeceived, and grave errors have been seen.

  Let us return to 1830. 1830, in its deviation, had good luck. In theestablishment which entitled itself order after the revolution had beencut short, the King amounted to more than royalty. Louis Philippe was arare man.

  The son of a father to whom history will accord certain attenuatingcircumstances, but also as worthy of esteem as that father had been ofblame; possessing all private virtues and many public virtues; carefulof his health, of his fortune, of his person, of his affairs, knowingthe 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 hiswife, and having in his palace lackeys charged with the duty of showingthe conjugal bed to the bourgeois, an ostentation of the regularsleeping-apartment which had become useful after the former illegitimatedisplays of the elder branch; knowing all the languages of Europe, and,what is more rare, all the languages of all interests, and speakingthem; an admirable representative of the "middle class," butoutstripping it, and in every way greater than it; possessing excellentsense, while appreciating the blood from which he had sprung, countingmost of all on his intrinsic worth, and, on the question of his race,very particular, declaring himself Orleans and not Bourbon; thoroughlythe first Prince of the Blood Royal while he was still only a SereneHighness, but a frank bourgeois from the day he became king; diffuse inpublic, concise in private; reputed, but not proved to be a miser; atbottom, one of those economists who are readily prodigal at their ownfancy or duty; lettered, but not very sensitive to letters; a gentleman,but not a chevalier; simple, calm, and strong; adored by his family andhis household; a fascinating talker, an undeceived statesman, inwardlycold, dominated by immediate interest, always governing at the shortestrange, incapable of rancor and of gratitude, making use without mercy ofsuperiority on mediocrity, clever in getting parliamentary majorities toput in the wrong those mysterious unanimities which mutter dully underthrones; unreserved, sometimes imprudent in his lack of reserve, butwith marvellous address in that imprudence; fertile in expedients, incountenances, in masks; making France fear Europe and Europe France!Incontestably fond of his country, but preferring his family; assumingmore domination than authority and more authority than dignity, adisposition which has this unfortunate property, that as it turnseverything to success, it admits of ruse and does not absolutelyrepudiate baseness, but which has this valuable side, that it preservespolitics from violent shocks, the state from fractures, and societyfrom catastrophes; minute, correct, vigilant, attentive, sagacious,indefatigable; contradicting himself at times and giving himself thelie; bold against Austria at Ancona, obstinate against England in Spain,bombarding Antwerp, and paying off Pritchard; singing the Marseillaisewith conviction, inaccessible to despondency, to lassitude, to the tastefor the beautiful and the ideal, to daring generosity, to Utopia, tochimæras, to wrath, to vanity, to fear; possessing all the formsof personal intrepidity; a general at Valmy; a soldier at Jemappes;attacked eight times by regicides and always smiling. Brave as agrenadier, courageous as a thinker; uneasy only in the face of thechances of a European shaking up, and unfitted for great politicaladventures; always ready to risk his life, never his work; disguisinghis will in influence, in order that he might be obeyed as anintelligence rather than as a king; endowed with observation and notwith divination; not very attentive to minds, but knowing men, that isto say requiring to see in order to judge; prompt and penetratinggood sense, practical wisdom, easy speech, prodigious memory; drawingincessantly on this memory, his only point of resemblance with Cæsar,Alexander, and Napoleon; knowing deeds, facts, details, dates, propernames, ignorant of tendencies, passions, the diverse geniuses of thecrowd, the interior aspirations, the hidden and obscure uprisings ofsouls, in a word, all that can be designated as the invisible currentsof consciences; accepted by the surface, but little in accord withFrance lower down; extricating himself by dint of tact; governing toomuch and not enough; his own first minister; excellent at creating outof the pettiness of realities an obstacle to the immensity of ideas;mingling a genuine creative faculty of civilization, of order andorganization, an indescribable spirit of proceedings and chicanery, thefounder and lawyer of a dynasty; having something of Charlemagne andsomething of an attorney; in short, a lofty and original figure, aprince who understood how to create authority in spite of the uneasinessof France, and power in spite of the jealousy of Europe. Louis Philippewill be classed among the eminent men of his century, and would beranked among the most illustrious governors of history had he lovedglory but a little, and if he had had the sentiment of what is great tothe same degree as the feeling for what is useful.

  Louis Philippe had been handsome, and in his old age he remainedgraceful; not always approved by the nation, he always was so by themasses; he pleased. He had that gift of charming. He lacked majesty; hewore 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; amixture of the noble and the bourgeois which suited 1830; Louis Philippewas transition reigning; he had preserved the ancient pronunciationand the ancient orthography which he placed at the service of opinionsmodern; he loved Poland and Hungary, but he wrote _les Polonois_, andhe 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; thismade a part of his bourgeois popularity. He had no heart. He went outwith his umbrella under his arm, and this umbrella long formed a part ofhis aureole. He was a bit of a mason, a bit of a gardener, somethingof a doctor; he bled a postilion who had tumbled from his horse; LouisPhilippe no more went about without his lancet, than did Henri IV.without his poniard. The Royalists jeered at this ridiculous king, thefirst who had ever shed blood with the object of healing.

  For the grievances against Louis Philippe, there is one deduction to bemade; there is that which accuses royalty, that which accuses the reign,that which accuses the King; three columns which all give differenttotals. Democratic right confiscated, progress becomes a matter ofsecondary interest, the protests of the street violently repressed,military execution of insurrections, the rising passed over by arms, theRue Transnonain, the counsels of war, the absorption of the realcountry by the legal country, on half shares with three hundred thousandprivileged persons,--these are the deeds of royalty; Belgium refused,Algeria too harshly conquered, and, as in the case of India by theEnglish, with more barbarism than civilization, the breach of faith, toAbd-el-Kader, Blaye, Deutz bought, Pritchard paid,--these are the doingsof the reign; the policy which was more domestic than national was thedoing of the King.

  As will be seen, the proper deduction having been made, the King'scharge 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 incubationof a family with the object of founding a dynasty is afraid ofeverything and does not like to be disturbed; hence excessive timidity,which is displeasing to the people, who have the 14th of July in theircivil and Austerlitz in their military tradition.

  Moreover, if we deduct the public duties which require to be fulfilledfirst of all, that deep tenderness of Louis Philippe towards hisfamily was deserved by the family. That domestic group was worthy ofadmiration. Virtues there dwelt side by side with talents. One of LouisPhilippe's daughters, Marie d'Orleans, placed the name of her race amongartists, as Charles d'Orleans had placed it among poets. She made ofher soul a marble which she named Jeanne d'Arc. Two of Louis Philippe'sdaughters elicited from Metternich this eulogium: "They are young peoplesuch as are rarely seen, and princes such as are never seen."

  This, without any dissimulation, and also without any exaggeration, isthe truth about Louis Philippe.

  To be Prince Equality, to bear in his own person the contradiction ofthe Restoration and the Revolution, to have that disquieting side of therevolutionary which becomes reassuring in governing power, therein laythe fortune of Louis Philippe in 1830; never was there a more completeadaptation of a man to an event; the one entered into the other, and theincarnation took place. Louis Philippe is 1830 made man. Moreover, hehad in his favor that great recommendation to the throne, exile. He hadbeen proscribed, a wanderer, poor. He had lived by his own labor. InSwitzerland, this heir to the richest princely domains in France hadsold an old horse in order to obtain bread. At Reichenau, he gavelessons in mathematics, while his sister Adelaide did wool work andsewed. These souvenirs connected with a king rendered the bourgeoisieenthusiastic. He had, with his own hands, demolished the iron cage ofMont-Saint-Michel, built by Louis XI., and used by Louis XV. He was thecompanion of Dumouriez, he was the friend of Lafayette; he had belongedto the Jacobins' club; Mirabeau had slapped him on the shoulder; Dantonhad 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 blindclairvoyance of the Revolution, breaking royalty in the King and theKing with royalty, did so almost without noticing the man in the fiercecrushing of the idea, the vast storm of the Assembly-Tribunal, thepublic wrath interrogating, Capet not knowing what to reply, thealarming, stupefied vacillation by that royal head beneath that sombrebreath, the relative innocence of all in that catastrophe, of thosewho condemned as well as of the man condemned,--he had looked on thosethings, he had contemplated that giddiness; he had seen the centuriesappear before the bar of the Assembly-Convention; he had beheld, behindLouis XVI., that unfortunate passer-by who was made responsible, theterrible culprit, the monarchy, rise through the shadows; and there hadlingered in his soul the respectful fear of these immense justices ofthe populace, which are almost as impersonal as the justice of God.

  The trace left in him by the Revolution was prodigious. Its memory waslike 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, herectified from memory the whole of the letter A in the alphabetical listof the Constituent Assembly.

  Louis Philippe was a king of the broad daylight. While he reigned thepress was free, the tribune was free, conscience and speech were free.The laws of September are open to sight. Although fully aware of thegnawing power of light on privileges, he left his throne exposed to thelight. 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, hasnot yet sounded for him; the moment has not come to pronounce a definitejudgment on this king; the austere and illustrious historian Louis Blanchas himself recently softened his first verdict; Louis Philippe waselected by those two _almosts_ which are called the 221 and 1830, thatis 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, wecannot judge him here, as the reader has seen above, except with certainreservations in the name of the absolute democratic principle; in theeyes of the absolute, outside these two rights, the right of man in thefirst 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 thesereserves is, that to sum up the whole, and in whatever manner he isconsidered, Louis Philippe, taken in himself, and from the point of viewof human goodness, will remain, to use the antique language of ancienthistory, one of the best princes who ever sat on a throne.

  What is there against him? That throne. Take away Louis Philippe theking, there remains the man. And the man is good. He is good at timeseven to the point of being admirable. Often, in the midst of his gravestsouvenirs, after a day of conflict with the whole diplomacy of thecontinent, he returned at night to his apartments, and there, exhaustedwith fatigue, overwhelmed with sleep, what did he do? He took a deathsentence and passed the night in revising a criminal suit, consideringit something to hold his own against Europe, but that it was a stillgreater matter to rescue a man from the executioner. He obstinatelymaintained his opinion against his keeper of the seals; he disputed theground with the guillotine foot by foot against the crown attorneys,those _chatterers of the law_, as he called them. Sometimes the pile ofsentences covered his table; he examined them all; it was anguish tohim to abandon these miserable, condemned heads. One day, he said tothe same witness to whom we have recently referred: "I won seven lastnight." During the early years of his reign, the death penalty wasas good as abolished, and the erection of a scaffold was a violencecommitted against the King. The Grève having disappeared with the elderbranch, a bourgeois place of execution was instituted under the nameof the Barrière-Saint-Jacques; "practical men" felt the necessity ofa quasi-legitimate guillotine; and this was one of the victories ofCasimir Périer, who represented the narrow sides of the bourgeoisie,over Louis Philippe, who represented its liberal sides. Louis Philippeannotated Beccaria with his own hand. After the Fieschi machine, heexclaimed: "What a pity that I was not wounded! Then I might havepardoned!" On another occasion, alluding to the resistance offered byhis ministry, he wrote in connection with a political criminal, who isone of the most generous figures of our day: "His pardon is granted; itonly remains for me to obtain it." Louis Philippe was as gentle as LouisIX. 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, byothers, it is quite natural that a man, himself a phantom at the presentday, who knew that king, should come and testify in his favor beforehistory; this deposition, whatever else it may be, is evidently andabove all things, entirely disinterested; an epitaph penned by a deadman is sincere; one shade may console another shade; the sharing of thesame shadows confers the right to praise it; it is not greatly tobe feared that it will ever be said of two tombs in exile: "This oneflattered the other."