Sidebilder
PDF
ePub

possesses it in such purity as ourselves, or can point to so CHAP. illustrious a line of great and good princes.

IX.

1820.

66.

"Rivers do not flow back to their sources: accomplished facts are not restored to nonentity. A bloody Concluded. Revolution had changed the face of our earth: on the ruins of the ancient society, overturned with violence, a new society had raised itself, governed by new maxims

and new men. Like all conquerors, I say it in its presence that society was barbarous: it had neither received, in its origin nor in its progress, the true principle of civilisation-right. Legitimacy, which alone had preserved the ark of our salvation, could alone restore it to us: it has restored it. With the royal race, right has reappeared; every day has been marked by its progress in opinions, manners, and laws. In a few years we have recovered the social doctrines which we had lost. Right has succeeded to power. Legitimacy on the throne has become the guarantee of the general ascendant of law. As it is the ruling principle in society, good faith is its august character; it is profaned if it is lowered to astuteness or devoured by fraud. The proposed law sinks the legitimate monarchy to the level of the government of the Revolution, by rest- 1 Ann. Hist. ing it on fraud. The project of the proposed law is the iii. 105, most fatal which has ever come out of the councils of kings niteur, May 18-30,1820; since those, of fatal memory, which overturned the family Lac. ii. 413, of the Stuarts. It is the divorce of the nation from its vii. 30, 33. sovereign." 1

125; Mo

415; Cap.

67.

the Ministe

On the other hand, it was contended, on the part of the Government, by M. de Serres, M. Siméon, and M. Villèle: Answer by "Weare reminded of two periods-the days of our Revolu- rialists. tion and the present time. History will judge the first, and it will judge also the men who were engaged in it. But I cannot dissemble what the strange speech of M. Lafayette obliges me to declare, that he put himself at the head of the men who attacked the monarchy, and in the end overturned it. I am convinced that generous and

VOL. II.

X

IX.

CHAP. elevated sentiments animated him; but, inspired by these feelings, is it surprising to him that men attached by prin1820. ciple and duty to that monarchy should have defended it before it fell? He should be just enough not to impute to the victims of those times all the evils of a Revolution which has pressed so heavily on themselves. Have these times left in the mind of the honourable member some mournful recollections, many useful lessons? He should have known-many a time he must have felt, with death in his heart and blushes on his face-not only that, after having once roused the masses, their leaders have no longer the power to restrain them, but that they are forced to follow, and even to lead them.

68.

us.

"But let us leave these old events, and think of our Continued. present condition, and the questions which are now before What chiefly weighs with me is the declaration made by General Lafayette, that he has entered these walls to make oath to the constitution (he has not said the king and the constitution), and that that oath was reciprocal; that the acts of the legislature--your acts-have violated the constitution, and that he is absolved from his oath! He declares this in the name of himself and his friends: he declares it in the face of the nation! He adds to this declaration an éloge, as affected as it is ill-timed, of colours which cannot now be regarded as any other colours but those of rebellion. The scandal which I denounce, so far from being repented of, has been renewed a second time in the tribune. What, I ask, can be the motive for such conduct? If insensate persons, excited by such language criminally imprudent, proceed to acts of sedition, on whose head should fall the blood shed in rebellion, or in extinguishing it by the hands of the law? And when a man, who himself has precipitated the excesses of the people, saw their fury turned against himself-when that man, respectable in many respects, uses language of which his own experience should have taught him the danger, are not his words to be regarded as more

IX.

1820.

blamable than if they came from an ordinary man? The CHAP. honourable member, who should be so well aware of the danger of revolutionary movements, now pretends to be ignorant of them. With the same breath he With the same breath he pronounces a glowing eulogium on the cause of rebellion; and declares, in his own name and that of his colleagues, that he considers himself absolved from his oath of fidelity to the charter he proclaims the sovereignty of the people, which is, in other words, the right of insurrection. Is not such an appeal an incitement to rebellion? And does not that point to your duty in combating an opposition animated by such principles ?

69.

"The Electoral Law of 1817 has lost, since it was carried into execution, the most important of its defenders. Continued. It has been the cause of the present crisis in society. The same Ministers who formerly proposed, who subsequently have been compelled to defend it, convinced by experience, animated by a sense of duty, now come forward to propose its modification. The very Chamber of Peers which voted its adoption has risen up against it. Sixty peers were created to vanquish the resistance to it in that Chamber; a hundred would be required to insure its continuance. It is no wonder it is so, for the law of 1817 failed in the chief object of representative institutions. It excluded the masses alike of property and numbers. What renders it in an especial manner dangerous is, that the limited homogeneous class to which it has confined the franchise becomes every year, by the annual elections, more grasping, more selfish, more exclusive. So evident has this danger become, that if the present change is not carried, the friends of liberty will be compelled themselves to bring forward a modification of the law in the interest of freedom.

70.

"France will never bear for any time a homogeneous representation, as the proposer of the existing law at one Continued. time supposed it would: unmistakable proofs of the general revolt against such a system arise on all sides.

IX.

:

CHAP. Besides, in the present state of things, the existence of a revolutionary faction amongst us-of a faction irreligious, 1820. immoral, the enemy of restraint, the friend of usurpation— has been demonstrated beyond the possibility of a doubt. It speaks in the journals, it sits in the directing committees this conviction is forced upon all the Ministers, not merely by their reason, but their official information. I predict to the honourable members who are now the allies of that faction, that they will in the end sink under its attacks, and that they will disappear from the Chamber the moment they venture to resist it. Public opinion has already repudiated both the faction and the Electoral Law which supports it. Horror-struck at the spectacle of a regicide returned to the Chamber, real public opinion has become alarmed alike at the principle of that law and its consequences.

71.

"It has become indispensable to alter the mode of Concluded. election, since we see faction straining to support it, from a conviction that it throws the greatest influence into the lowest class of proprietors to the very class which has the least interest in the soil. The law proposed, by restoring to the larger proprietors a portion of that influence of which the existing law has deprived them, gives a share in the choice of deputies to those who are most interested in upholding it. The law will never be complete and safe till the electoral power is made to rest on the entire class of proprietors, and is intrusted by them to a smaller body, chosen from among those who pay the greatest amount of assessments; and whose list, accessible to all, and from its very nature shifting and changeable, can never constitute a privileged class, since those who fall within it to-day may be excluded from it to-morrow. In the political system pursued since the Restoration is to be found the seat of the evil which is devouring France. Under the existing law a constant system of attack against the existing dynasty is carried on. Lofty ambitions arrested in their course, great

IX.

1820.

hopes blasted, fanaticism ever rampant, have coalesced CHAP. together the conspiracy was at first turned-it has now sapped the foundations of the throne-it will soon overturn it. At Lyons, as at Grenoble, cast down but not destroyed, it ever rises again more audacious than ever, and menaces its conquerors. Intrenched in the law of elections as its last citadel, it threatens its con- 1 Moniteur, querors. It is determined to conquer or die. It is no 1820; Ann. longer a matter of opinion which it agitates, be or Hist. iii. not to be, that is the question.' The uniform suffrage has placed the monarchy at the mercy of a pure demo- vii. 35, 37. cracy." 1

to

June 1-19,

102, 125;

Lac. ii. 420,

423; Cap.

72.

Jourdan's

So sensible were the Liberal chiefs of the weight of these arguments, and of the large proportion of enlight- Camilleened opinion which adhered to them, that they did not amendment venture to meet them by a direct negative, but endeav- carried. oured to elude their force by an amendment. It was proposed by Camille-Jourdan, and was to this effect, "That each department shall be divided into as many electoral arrondissements as there are deputies to elect for the Chamber; that each of these arrondissements shall have an electoral college, which shall be composed of the persons liable to taxes, having their political domicile in the arrondissement, and paying three hundred francs of direct contribution; that every electoral college shall nominate its deputy directly." Though this was represented by him as a compromise, it in reality was not so; for, by perpetuating the uniform suffrage and direct representation, it continued political power exclusively in the hands of the most democratic portion of the community, the small proprietors. It received, accordingly, the immediate and enthusiastic support of the whole Liberal party; the democratic press was unanimous in its praise; and so nearly were parties balanced in the Chamber, that the amendment was carried against Government by a majority of one, the numbers being a hundred and twentyeight to a hundred and twenty-seven. The balance was

« ForrigeFortsett »