Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844. Various
refute it yourself afterwards, or say enough to prove that you could have done so. This, well managed, gives two occasions for brilliant display; a sober statement has been converted into a couple of bold and glancing propositions. Truth, it is well proved, like the diamond, shines the more by being cut into surfaces.
M. Louis Blanc, for instance, makes a startling remark on the incompatibility of royalty and a representative chamber. The two powers are represented to us as flatly irreconcilable. “Can society,” he asks, “have two heads? Is the sovereignty divisible? Between the government of a king and the government of an assembly, is there not a gulf which every day makes wider? And wherever this dualism exists, are not the people condemned to fluctuate miserably between a 10th of August and an 18th Brumaire?”—(Int., p. 64.) And a little further on, speaking of the times of Louis XVIII., he writes—“Meanwhile Europe began to be disquieted on the state of things in France. Foreign sovereigns had thought to establish peace in our country, by establishing the empire of the charter, and the political dualism which it consecrates. The error was great, and they ended by discovering it. M. de Richelieu, who had been present at the congress at Aix-la-Chapelle, brought back with him a very lively apprehension of the future fate of the monarchy in France. A change of the electoral law was proposed. Unhappily, it was not in the law of the 5th February that lay the danger which occupied the congress of Aix-la-Chapelle. To consolidate the throne, and raise it above the storms which threatened it, not this or that electoral law, but the electoral power itself, should, if possible, be abolished. For in whatever hands this formidable lever was placed, it was impossible that royalty could long resist its action. To shift the elective power was only to give the monarchy other enemies, not to save it. * * * The aim of the new ministry was to preserve the electoral law; which amounted to this—the monarchy chose ministers whose programme was the destruction of monarchy.”
On reading such passages, we naturally set about recalling certain old-fashioned political truisms, bearing on the character and interest of that middle class of society in which the electoral power is generally lodged. We recollect that the middle classes have been held to have an interest as well in preserving, as in checking and controlling the monarchy. Alone, they could not govern society; and they have a larger share in the government, as partners with the monarchy, than if they were absorbed in the general mass of the population. They have every thing to lose by the abolition of a royalty which they have ceased to fear, and which they have bound by laws. Such a royalty, with its sway over the imagination of the multitude, with its strong hand of military power—hand in which the sword is allowed always to rest, as pomp in time of peace, as weapon in time of war—such a royalty they feel to be their best protection. Why, then, should they, in their electoral capacity, be thrust on by a blind rage to destroy it? But all this train of reflection we might have spared ourselves. M. Louis Blanc knows it all, and, if you will wait a reasonable time, he will show you that he knows it. He will put it to you very forcibly—in another place. Accordingly, some ninety pages off, he tells us:—“At bottom, the middle class (la bourgeoisie) sees in the monarchy a permanent obstacle to democratic aspirations: it would have subjected royalty, but not destroyed it.”
For the enlightenment of those who may wish to write history in the most captivating manner, and at the least possible expense to themselves, we will reveal another fruitful expedient. There are two ways of writing history. You may either deduce its great events from certain wide and steadily-operating causes, as the growing wealth or intelligence of a people, or you may raise a vulgar wonder by describing them as the result of some quite trivial incident. In the one case, you appeal to a philosophic taste; in the other, to a popular love of the marvellous. A revolution may be represented as the inevitable outbreak of the discontent and misery of the people; or it may be traced, with all its disasters, to the caprice of a courtier, or perhaps the accidental delay of a messenger. For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, the horse was lost; for want of a horse, the man—and so all was owing to the want of a nail!
The two manners seem incompatible. Never mind. Use them both—both freely, independently—just as occasion prompts, and the effect requires. Flatter the philosophic taste that delights in generalities, and please the childish wonder which loves to fancy that the whole oak—trunk, branches, leaves—lay in the acorn. M. Louis Blanc has certainly no idea of forfeiting either of these attractions by laying claim to the other. Observe the ease and boldness with which he embraces them in his narrative of the fall of Napoleon, and the restoration of the Bourbons. He commences in the generalizing mood.
“The fall of Napoleon lay in the laws of the development of the middle classes. Can a nation be at the same time essentially commercial and essentially warlike? Napoleon must have renounced his great part of military chieftain, or he must have broken with the spirit of citizenship and commerce. It was madness to think of reigning by the sword, and continuing the Constituent Assembly. France could not have, at the same time, the destinies of Rome and Carthage. Napoleon succumbed, and must have succumbed, to the Carthaginian party of the people of France. But if the necessary development of the middle classes called for the overthrow of the empire, it demanded also the return of the Bourbons. To prove this, we have only to present, in its instructive simplicity of detail, that narrative of the restoration which so many historians have distorted.”—(Int., p. 18.)
Well, he proceeds with this simple and instructive detail; and his first object is evidently to deprive Talleyrand, to whom on all occasions he manifests a singular bitterness, of the credit generally given him of having aided materially in the recall of the Bourbons in 1814. But does he effect this by showing, as from this exordium we might expect, that his countrymen of the middle class, wearied of the costly triumphs and disasters of the empire, had begun to sigh for peace and their old kings? Not at all. He transfers the personal share in the drama from Prince Talleyrand to Baron de Vitrolles. The Duke d’Alberg had introduced the baron to Talleyrand, whose intention was to employ him merely to sound the views of the Allies. Talleyrand was to have accredited him by some lines of his own writing, but ultimately refused to commit himself. How was Baron de Vitrolles, who by no means limited himself to the subordinate part designed for him, and on whom it will be seen so much really depended, to get accredited to the Allies?
The Duke d’Alberg was intimately acquainted with the Count de Stadion, representative of Austria at the congress. Now these two friends had formerly, at Munich, had a certain tender intimacy with two young girls, whose names the Duke d’Alberg remembered; he wrote them on the leaf of a pocket-book, and they served as a letter of credence to the adventurous ambassador. “Such,” exclaims our lately generalizing historian—“such is the manner in which God disposes of the fate of nations!—Voilà de quelle sorte il plait à Dieu de disposer du sort des peuples!”
The Baron de Vitrolles, we are told, found the Emperor Alexander possessed with a strong repugnance against the Bourbons. It cost him three hours’ conversation to gain him over. But he succeeded. It was he who did gain him over. On the 31st of March, when the Emperor of Russia entered Paris, Talleyrand stepped forward to receive him.
“Well,” said Alexander, “it seems that France recalls the Bourbons.”
These words occasioned M. Talleyrand a profound surprise, which, however, he was too skilful a diplomatist to betray. From that moment, he was a convert to what he considered the successful cause. “Thus,” continues our historian, “this restoration took place contrary to the will of the people, to whom the Bourbons in 1814 were unknown; contrary to the sympathies of Alexander, who feared the dangers of a reaction; contrary, in fine, to the opinion of M. Talleyrand, who had never thought it possible, and had desired only the regency of Marie Louise!”
What particle of truth there may be in this narrative, we do not stop to enquire; we refer to it only as an example of the bold union of the two historic manners. The restoration of the Bourbons was “in the laws of the development of the middle classes!” It was all owing to the Baron de Vitrolles, and that lucky little intrigue at Munich!
It is one of the boasts and privileges of history to reverse the judgment that contemporaries have formed of the character of the actors in it. This privilege M. Louis Blanc, since he writes history, is determined at all events to seize upon; and he can boast, perhaps, of having reversed more judgments of this kind than any other historian, however voluminous. M. Talleyrand has obtained his