approach to the English system; and M. de Villèle sought to render the rural proprietors not only masters of the elections, but gifted with administrative power in their locality, another imitation of the English system. But this, however it succeeded in England, would in France have placed the popular masses at the mercy of the hobereaux, as the liberals denominated the squires. The scheme might have been most acceptable to a House of Lords; but the French Senate was composed chiefly of old functionaries, and these, opposed to a mere landed aristocracy, threw out the bill. Subsequently, when ministers took advantage of this to announce that the Chamber should be renewed by one-fifth, according to the old electoral law, the Assembly passed a resolution that it must not be so, and that the Chamber should be re-elected in toto, or else its session continued. On a subject still more imminent and important the Chamber was at variance with the minister. The Hundred Days had thrown the Treasury into disarray. The arrangements of Baron Louis no longer sufficed. To the ordinary expenditure of 525,000,000 francs, nearly 300,000,000 additional were due to the allies as war contributions and indemnity. The Chamber, chiefly composed of rural proprietors, stood aghast at the plans of Corvetto, the finance minister. He proposed to pay all the arrears, the debts of the Hundred Days included, by bonds at 8 per cent., mortgaged on the state forests. These had been Church property, which the Royalist Chamber looked to restore. It set aside Corvetto's proposal, and even his predecessor's arrangements, and merely offered to pay the whole arrears in 5 per cent. stock. This brought but 60 in the market, which would mulct the creditors of one-half their claims. What creditor, exclaimed M. Bonald, ever gets more than a percentage of what is due to him? The finance minister's plan was to increase the taxes on land. The Chamber begged to transfer this burden to houses and СНАР. XLIV. CHAP. similar property. The Duc de Richelieu was obliged to submit to these hard conditions. The Duke of Wellington and Count Pozzo, alarmed at seeing the Chamber take the conduct of even financial affairs into their own hands, remonstrated with the King. Louis the Eighteenth made no reply, but he meditated not the less withdrawing his neck from the ultra-Royalist yoke. What filled the measure of the King's disgust with the Chamber was, the kind of conspiracy into which its leading members entered to restore the Church to its supremacy. Louis retained much of the Voltairian spirit of the preceding century. He bore in mind the Ligue, and the several occasions in which the Church had dominated and depopularised the dynasty. The efforts of the Congregation, as the new ultra-Catholic association was called, now alarmed him. The ministry had vastly increased the yearly allotment to the Church. The Chamber required that this should be made a law, and the Church at the same time rendered capable of accepting and inheriting landed property. The ecclesiastical rule prohibiting divorce was re-established. Attempts were made to restore the civil registers to the clergy, and to hand over the university and the whole direction of public education to ecclesiastics. stop this flood of reaction, Government prorogued the Chamber in April. This was followed by the substitution of Lainé, a semi-liberal constitutionalist, for M. de Vaublanc, who leaned to the Count d'Artois in conducting the home office, and who had allowed the prince to convert his title of General of the National Guard throughout the kingdom into almost an administration.* To Whilst the marriage of the Duke of Berry with a Neapolitan princess gave some liveliness to the court, a movement at Grenoble occurred to fill it with anxiety To get a full idea of the ineptness of the ultra-Royalist party, one has but to read the memoirs of M. de Vaublanc and those of M. de la Rochefoucault. XLIV. and agitation. Grenoble had been the first French CHAP. town to proclaim the principles of the revolution. The capital of a frontier province, its population had almost all served in the army, and every village now contained an officer sprung from the ranks, and detesting the awards of 1814 and 1815. An enthusiastic adventurer, named Paul Didier, went amongst these veterans, and professed himself the agent of a society formed to overthrow the Government. His idea was to proclaim the Duke of Orleans, but the Dauphinois would only hear of a Bonaparte, and so he proposed Napoleon the Second. With such uncertain aims he still contrived to recruit some 4,000 of the population of the valley, and marched with them to Grenoble, on the night of the 1st of May, 1816. The authorities were only warned at the last moment. The first troops who met the insurgents wavered and refused to fire. When the officers seized some muskets and discharged them, the advanced part of the insurgents fled. And when the main body came up, the soldiers did fire, and Didier's band dispersed. Some thirty of the captives were brought before the prevotal court. The minister of police, consulted by telegraph, replied that no mercy was to be shown save to those who made revelations. But there were none for the poor peasants to make, and twenty-one were shot forthwith, amongst whom was a boy of sixteen, named Miard. Didier escaped at first to Savoy, but was subsequently taken and delivered up. He met his fate with fortitude. A conspiracy about the same time was alleged to have been discovered in the capital. Some twenty persons were implicated, and then selected, though with proof of little more than imprudence against them, to suffer the death of parricides, their hands being cut off before their heads. This, with the trials of some Bonapartist generals, Cambronne, Travot, Delisle and others, occupied the summer of 1816, and instead of attaining their XLIV. CHAP. intended aim of terrifying those hostile to the Bourbons, on the contrary sowed the seeds of more extended and more implacable resentment. Had this severe repression and punishment of Bonapartists taken place merely in the name and for the cause of public order, the greater part of those who objected would have passed it over. But the Government and the King were eclipsed by the Count d'Artois, and by the priesthood, who took their places. Even the replacement of M. Vaublanc by M. Lainé did not prevent the prince, as General of the National Guard, from exercising immediate authority; whilst the priesthood filled the country with missions, and disturbed every town with processions (forbidden by the law). And as the counter-revolution thus put on the garb of sanctity, the party of the revolution-that is, of the principle of equality, and of the freedom implied by itaffected Voltairianism and infidelity, which had previously slumbered, but which now awoke, to become popular and national. Every sensible man, within or without France, saw that the Count d'Artois and the Duchess d'Angoulême were driving the country to a revolution. Foreign courts and diplomatists saw it equally. Those of England, Prussia, Russia, even Austria protested, and plainly told them that unless the red-hot Royalist and Church parties were put down, and a moderate system of government established, it would be impossible for the allies to evacuate France, and abandon it to inevitable revolution. Their remonstrances aroused the Duke of Richelieu. Decazes himself had been long aware of the necessity of getting rid of the Chamber, and the King felt his prerogative infringed upon and his dignity threatened by it. On the 7th of September, in consequence, appeared a decree dissolving what Louis himself called the Chambre Introuvable. There was an explosion of rage amongst the ultras. Chateau- CHAP. The Count d'Artois was beside himself. briand came himself to defend his work, and even With this Chamber commenced a government which M. Guizot styles that of the Centre, and its enemies that of the Bascule, consisting of moderate and practical politicians, who sought to keep an even and constitutional course between the reactionary royalists and the liberals, behind which imperialists and revolutionists XLIV. |