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XXIX.

1832.

CHAP. when they overturned the government of Charles X., that the example then so generally applauded might be repeated, and under circumstances of general distress, when it might be more readily embraced by the great body of the working classes. The evils now so much contemned as a "mere dispute between masters and workmen about wages," within seventeen years afterwards overturned the throne of Louis Philippe, and convulsed every monarchy in Europe! One of the most curious and instructive lessons which history teaches is 1 Moniteur, the entire formation of general opinion in all ranks by present events, and the impossibility of getting the great majority of men even to reflect upon the past or anticipate the future.1

Nov. 26,

1831; L. Blanc, iii. 85, 86.

18. Renewed efforts of the Republi

cans.

Armand
Carrel.

The Republicans were much more alive to the signs of the times. Without disquieting themselves more than the burgher representatives in the legislature with the causes of the general distress or the means of obviating it, they were content to take the existing suffering as it stood, and to make use of it as a powerful engine to overturn the Government. They accordingly set themselves vigorously to work to improve their present advantages, both in the press and the legislature. On January 2, M. ARMAND CARREL, in the National, openly declared for a republic; and a few days after, M. Garnier Pages entered the Chamber of Deputies avowedly to support the same principle. The former of these men bore too conspicuous a part in the disturbances which ensued in the course of the year, not to deserve a place in contemporary history. His appearance and manners, his erect stature, piercing eye, and intrepid air, bespoke rather the soldier than the civilian, and his early life had been passed in camps. An officer under the Restoration, he had been faithless to his oaths, and joined in the conspiracy of Befort; repeatedly tried before courts-martial for accession to plots, he had escaped them all; a refugee in Spain, he had borne arms there against the white flag.

XXIX.

1832.

Upon the ruin of the Peninsular republicans by the CHAP. French invasion of 1823, he came to Paris, where he gained a livelihood by writing for the most violent democratic journals, and soon acquired a reputation by the vigour of his ideas and the fearlessness of his language. Irony and sarcasm were his favourite weapons, and these he wielded with tremendous effect. He did little to defend his own principles; he took them for granted, and bent the whole force of his intellect to wither and crush his adversaries. His writings exhibit little information, and no traces of originality of thought, but great vigour and capacity in individual encounter. A political dispute with him was like a single combat, in which he freely hazarded his own life, and sought only to destroy that of his adversary. But though this turn of mind deprives his writings of all value for future times, or as a magazine of thought, they only rendered them the more attractive to the present, with which a dispute of persons is always 1 L. Blanc, more exciting than one of principles, and which is ever .142, 143; happy to step from a strife of parties into a duel of 189. individuals.1

Cap. vi.

19.

Pages: his

GARNIER PAGES was in all these respects the very reverse of Armand Carrel, and as well fitted to win the Garnier suffrages of an adverse legislature as the latter was to character. excite the passions of concordant democracy. His youth had been spent in assiduous industry, the happy consequence often of apparently rigorous fortune, which had compelled him early in life to exertion. From the outset, however, he was set on great things; the ordinary advantages of wealth or station had for him no charm. "Do you take care of our fortune," said he to his brother; "I will labour for the glory of our name." Such energy and elevated objects were not long, as they seldom are, of meeting with their reward; and his entry into the Chamber brought him into the theatre where his peculiar talents had their most appropriate field for exertion. A long habit of close attention, great practical

1832.

CHAP. acquaintance with men, a temper proof against all the XXIX. acerbities of strife, a ready elocution, and remarkable facility of expression, without any of the highest powers of eloquence, rendered him eminently qualified to contend in the Chamber with a hostile majority. Many men had been heard there more qualified to bear down opposition by the torrent of eloquence; none more fitted to disarm opposition by the charm of manner and the tact of expression. Though a decided Republican in his ideas, and the avowed organ of that party in the Assembly, he never rose without commanding the attention of all parties; and his bland manner and moderate ideas went far to detach the cause of a commonwealth from the iii. 145, 146. bloody images with which it had been associated by the Reign of Terror.1

1 L. Blanc,

20.

the republican press,

Under the direction of those able leaders, the repub-. Strength of lican party soon made itself felt both in the chamber and the public press. Several journals, particularly the Forvagance of tune, the Revolution, the Movement, the National, openly the Court. advocated republican ideas, and declaimed incessantly

and extra

against the extravagance of the Court, and the entire departure of the King from the principles which had placed him upon the throne. M. de Cormenin in an especial manner excelled in this guerilla warfare, which was the more attractive to the multitude that it was levelled at individuals, not directed against principles. It must be confessed that the extravagance and insatiable demands of the courtiers afforded him too fair a subject of declamation. The civil list brought forward by Ministers proposed to settle no less than 18,535,500 francs (£748,000) a-year on the King: a sum, said the Republicans, thirty-seven times as large as that settled on Napoleon as First Consul, and an hundred and fortyeight times as large as the salary of the President of the iii. 149,157; United States of America.2 The enormity of this grant was the more conspicuous from the circumstance that the private fortune of the King, derived from the noble

2 L. Blanc,

Globe, Jan. 22, 1831.

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1831.

restoration of it by Charles X., which he had not blended CHAP. with the property of the Crown, in terms of the law of 8th November 1814, amounted to no less than 2,500,000 francs yearly (£100,000), besides 4,000,000 (£160,000) a-year from lands and forests.

21.

gance of the

To complete the picture of the results of the rule of the Citizen King, there appeared at the same time a Extravanotice from one of the boards of charity in Paris, to the civil list. effect that "24,000 persons on the lists of the poor in the twelfth arrondissement alone were without either bread or clothing." Already the people began to contrast the extravagance of the establishment of the revolutionary with the economy of that of the legitimist monarch; and it did not escape observation that the charges of the chapel-royal were ten times greater than they had been under Charles X., though no one accused Louis Philippe of being priest-ridden; that though he enjoyed excellent health, the apothecaries' bill was stated at 80,000 francs (£3200) yearly, being quadruple that of the gouty and decrepit Louis XVIII.; that 300 horses were set down at 1000 crowns a-head, being twice the salary of a member of the Privy Council or a member of the Institute; that the allowance for the personal service of the King was 3,773,000 francs (£150,000) a-year, though he affected a philosophic contempt for all physical enjoyments; and that the civil list of Charles X. never exceeded 11,500,000 francs (£450,000), though it was charged with numerous expenses thrown on the nation by his successor. So great was the clamour, that though the Ministers carried their grant to the King, no less than 180 members of the Chamber protested with Odillon Barrot against so extravagant a waste of the public money, and 107 actually voted against the grant. The truth was, that the King personally was not addicted, as many of his ancestors had been, to any great expenses, 1 L. Blanc, but he was surrounded by needy supporters, whose de- iii. 154, 156. mands could not be refused:1 and France now began to

XXIX.

1832.

CHAP. waken to the disagreeable truth, that the more democratic an old government is, the greater become its expenses; and that a throne surrounded by republican institutions, in reality means a throne surrounded by republican mendicants.

22.

Great in

crease of the

general expenditure.

These extravagant charges for the royal household were the ones most likely to irritate the people; but in reality they constituted a very small part of the national expenditure. The great bulk of it was occasioned by the vast additions made to the strength of the army; and they were so considerable, that the estimated expenditure of the year was stated by the Minister of Finance at above 1,100,000,000 francs (£44,000,000), being greatly above that of the last year of Charles X., which had been 987,000,000 francs only.* M. Lafitte boasted in the

*The budget of the year 1832 was thus stated by the Minister of Finance :—

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