CHAP. many years cut off. Provence and Languedoc pined in consequence. The clergy recovered their influence, and preached unfortunately neither humanity nor tolerance. Nowhere more than in the south prevailed that jealousy which the lower and the needy class entertain of what they call the bourgeois, which had become prosperous by industry. The same middle class was generally hated by the relics of the old gentry. The Duke d'Angoulême in 1814 had raised bands in the south to resist Napoleon. They called themselves Royalist volunteers. Beaten by the Imperial generals, they still held together; and when the news came of Napoleon's defeat, they collected again for ascendency and revenge. Owing to these causes, the city of Marseilles, when tidings of Waterloo reached it, was in complete insurrection. General Verdier, who was there with a few troops, withdrew to Toulouse, and Marseilles became a scene of plunder and massacre. The citizens stigmatised as Bonapartists were robbed and slain. Other towns would not be left behind in the work of vengeance and rapine. In the fertile district at the foot of the Cevennes, the Protestants formed the bourgeoisie-they were the well-todo, the industrious population. The ragamuffins resolved to plunder these, and hoisted the flag of religious orthodoxy to prove their right to murder. The article of the charter making Catholicism the state religion, and the evident tendency to restore the Church its power and ascendency, had alarmed the Protestants of the south, and they had accordingly welcomed the return of Napoleon. His fall, therefore, was the signal for their enemies to take vengeance. And a general massacre of the Protestants took place, especially at Nismes. Ruffians of the name of Trestaillons and Truphemie, led bands which acted up to the fell spirit of Bartholomew's eve, and of the September massacres, and deluged the country with blood. The most illustrious victim was Marshal Brune, who had so gallantly defended Holland. He had no doubt been a Terrorist in his day. Arnaud, in his memoirs, describes him as one of the most active members of the Cordelier club. He had quitted the command at Toulouse, and was journeying north, by Avignon, when he was stopped at the post-house of that town, signalised as a Bonapartist, or worse, and compelled to take refuge in the principal inn, which is near the Rhone. Here Brune was soon besieged by the ferocious mob of Avignon, there being no military force to keep them in order. The authorities and a few national guards did all in their power to save the marshal. But the mob scaled the wall, got into the inn by the roof, reached the room in which Brune was, and shot him. There was an attempt to conduct the body to burial, but the mob tore it from the coffin and precipitated it into the Rhone. General Ramel underwent a similar fate at Toulouse. And the execution of the brothers Faucher at Bordeaux, though preceded by a mock trial, was scarcely less an act of murder. Whilst the government of Talleyrand and Fouché was thus so little able to prevent the crimes of the ultra-Royalists in the provinces, it was less so to resist their influence or violence in the elections. On the nature of these, in fact, depended the future course of politics. The Chamber of Peers had been remodelled, by no means in a liberal sense. All those who had consented to sit in the Senate of the Hundred Days were removed aside, with the exception of Lanjuinais, Boissy d'Anglas, and Molé. Some eighty new peers were added. The number of deputies was also increased to 402. Napoleon had set the example of not recurring to real and popular elections, having left the old electoral colleges still in possession of their exclusive rights. The Restoration now did the same. The district colleges were merely to elect candidates CHAP. XLIV. CHAP. out of which the departmental colleges were to be chosen.* XLIV. Talleyrand, in fact, made the same mistake that Napoleon had done, in forming a chamber, consisting of, and chosen by, the wealthier classes. The royal dukes were appointed presidents each of an important college. Prefects of ultra-Royalist stamp were allowed to influence others. There was no idea in the head of either functionary or notable of supporting a government. It was the Royalist party that every one looked to join, to flatter, and to please. There was nothing to be gained or attained by choosing Bonapartists. And as to Liberals and Constitutionalists, independent of the two dynastic parties, it could scarcely be said to exist. Whilst the country or its upper classes were thus blindly conferring representative power upon men who were fanatical from ultra-royalism, tragical events came to give the interest of actual reality to the fiercest passions of vengeance. Colonel Labedoyère, the first officer who had brought his regiment over to Napoleon in Dauphiny, instead of making his escape on seeing his name in the list of those marked out for trial, ventured to Paris, to visit his wife. He was recognised and arrested early in August, and immediately brought before a court-martial. His family were of old noblesse, which rendered his crime more unpardonable to the ruling party. His defection had been manifest; he did not deny it; and the court-martial could not avoid finding him guilty. But the King might pardon. Every effort was made to induce him to do so. wife and mother of the condemned fell at the monarch's feet, and at those of the Duchess d'Angoulême. The monarch was inexorable; the daughter of Marie * There were 366 colleges of is not an election. The list for districts; but 87 of departments. Four-fifths of the electors were in manner cancelled by the form adopted. The presentation of a list a The Paris consisted of 60, of which the departmental electors chose but five. -See Lafayette's Memoirs, t. v. p. 430. XLIV. Antoinette plucked her robe from the hands of the CHAP. suppliants. Labedoyère was executed on the plain of Grenelle. At the same time, Count Lavalette, who was Minister of the Post Office during the Hundred Days, was seized. Ney also. He had sought a retreat at the foot of the Cantal Mountains. A magnificent sabre, the gift of Napoleon, betrayed him, and he was brought to Paris to be tried. One of the first acts of Prince Talleyrand, when he met the King at Mons, after Waterloo, had been to recommend an amnesty. The tide of reaction had soon borne him and his sovereign far from any such act of generosity and wisdom. He and Fouché were powerless against reaction at home, and equally feeble against the vindictiveness of Alexander. That monarch, in 1814, pretended that Louis the Eighteenth could only succeed by governing in a liberal spirit. But the passions awakened in Congress, and the success with which Talleyrand had then thwarted Russian designs, had more weight than his liberal tendencies in Alexander's mind. That prince now wavered between his old political philanthropy and a kind of mystic theory, which proposed to better the world, not by emancipating, but enslaving it. Instead of courting the converse of enlightened men as he had done the year before, Alexander now joined prayer meetings in dark rooms with Madame de Krudener. And as her coterie was linked with ultra-royalism and ultra-sacerdotalisın, Alexander underwent their influence for a time without being aware of it. The Czar had already conceived the project of the Holy Alliance, which was to throw Europe back into all the despotism and cagotism of the past. The civilised world was at the beck and the mercy of a prince who knew not his own mind, and could not keep it to one course for even six months. Unfortunately, the tide of events, nay, of even constitutional events in France, went with him. It is XLIV. CHAP. the misfortune of the French, writes M. Guizot, that "in great crises, the vanquished become merely the dead." One thought dominated the electors, to set aside the Bonapartists, and drown the cause like the name in oblivion. A chamber of red-hot Royalists was the consequence, representing the monarchic sentiment perhaps, but not the formal or general conviction of the nation. The electors on this occasion were the better classes, and yet they showed as much mobility as ever did the mob, and passions far more base. For the clamour was not merely for seeing royalism victorious, but reactionary and vindictive. If Fouché and Talleyrand were unable to resist the extravagant demands of the reactionists about court, and in the society of the capital, they could not hope to survive the meeting of the Chamber, of which the names of the members already announced the most rabid royalism. Fouché had in fact foreseen the coming storm, and alarmed at Royalist predominance had striven to conciliate by his large list of proscriptions. This not softening the rage against him, Fouché turned round and sought by reports and counsels to alarm the King of the danger of reaction, which he said truly enough would, instead of crushing Bonapartism, revive and strengthen it. He was not listened to, but received first a hint, and then an order to accept a foreign embassy and retire. He accepted that of Dresden, which he only reached to be thrust into unpensioned exile. If not so directly attacked as Fouché by the ultraRoyalists, Prince Talleyrand had an antagonist more formidable in Alexander. The Prussian ministers had drawn up a formal demand of Alsace, part of Lorraine, and the first line of French fortresses on the north.* The German powers who were to acquire the * Stein's Leben; Leben von Hardenburg. |