XXX. 1834. CHAP. himself master of, the dry details of ordinary business. He becomes active only when the feelings are roused, and then he is often great. This turn of mind disqualifies him from being a man of business or practical statesman, though it renders him only the more attractive on a few occasions; and accordingly his career in power was soon brought to a termination, and he has since been distinguished almost entirely by his works of literature and imagination. 58. Dissolution of the Chamber, of the elec and result tions. The Government conceived with reason that the present would be a favourable time for dissolving the Chamber of Deputies, as the failure of the Duchess de Berri in La Vendée had demonstrated the weakness of the Legitimists, and the insurrections in Paris and Lyons had struck universal consternation into the bourgeoisie and holders of property. The Chamber was dissolved on the 25th May, the day after its prorogation, by royal ordonnance, and the new one appointed to meet on the 20th August. The elections, for the most part, came on towards the end of June, and the majority generally obtained for Government exceeded their most sanguine expectations. The Legitimists generally abstained from voting from conscientious scruples as to taking the oaths required of electors; and the consequence was, that they did not obtain more than fifteen in the entire Chamber. The Republicans were almost everywhere defeated. According to the calculations in the Moniteur, seventy of those in the former Chamber were thrown out, and twelve voluntarily retired from the contest. The consequence was, that the Juste Milieu, as it was called, which supported the Government, obtained a great majority-no less than three hundred and twenty votes out of four hundred and sixty. 1 Moniteur, The Opposition, Royalists and Republicans, was only ninety, and the intermediate party fifty. June 28, Aug. 9; 1834, and The result, Ann. Hist. when matters came to the test, though not quite so favourable to Government, still showed that they had gained a decisive majority over their opponents.1 On the divisions xvii. 257, 271. ΧΧΧ. 1834. for the presidency of the Chamber, the usual trial of CHAP. strength of parliamentary parties in France, M. Dupin, the ministerial candidate, had 247 votes; M. Lafitte, the Opposition, 33; M. Royer-Collard, 24; M. Odillon Barrot, 3! It was evident that the Juste Milieu had coalesced with the Ministerialists. The Republican and Legitimist oppositions were all but extinct in the popular part of the legislature. 59. the Revolu We have arrived at an important epoch in the modern history of France, and one eminently deserving of atten- Results of tion by all who consider politics as the subject of thought tion of July. and reflection, not the mere amusement of a passing hour. Just four years had elapsed since the Government of the elder branch of the house of Bourbon had been overturned by a nearly unanimous effort of the nation, and the declared will of the people substituted for the balanced authority of legitimate descent and popular influence. A throne had been established, surrounded by republican institutions; the ruling dynasty changed; the Citizen King invested with the crown; the old family sent into exile, and the whole objects of the insurrection gained. What had been the result? Had public felicity increased, the sources of discontent been removed, the wages of labour raised, the public burdens diminished, the foundations of liberty strengthened and enlarged? So far from it, in every one of these respects the condition of the nation had been changed for the worse, the influence of the popular party diminished; and none now proclaimed this so loudly as the Liberals who had brought about the change. the worse The public burdens had, on an average of years, been 60. increased fully a third; the army and all its concomitant Change for expenses doubled. Such had become the penury of the which it had working classes, especially in the great towns, the centres of induced, revolution, that they had been driven by sheer suffering into two desperate revolts both at Paris and Lyons, XXX. 1834. CHAP. which had only been suppressed after a lamentable effusion of blood and fearful exasperation on both sides. The complaints of the press, so far from having ceased, had augmented tenfold; the Citizen King had become the object of far greater vituperation than Charles X. had ever been; the Government was engaged in an incessant warfare in the courts of law with the Republicans; and peace was only preserved in the capital by the presence of forty thousand soldiers, and as many national guards and armed patrols, in every street. Several thousand Republicans, chiefly in the great towns, were languishing in prison, without either the prospect of being brought to trial, or the means of forcing it on. When the Bastile was stormed in 1789, there were only eight prisoners in it! The qualification of voters had been lowered, and 180,000 electors substituted for 90,000 in the electoral colleges; but that had only made matters worse for the Liberal party. The lowered suffrage had opened the doors wider to corruption; the increased expenditure of Government had immensely extended its influence; and the first effect of doubling the number of electors had been to double the adherents of Ministers in the Chamber, and halve the strength of Opposition. A fixed opposition of 221 deputies, elected by a constituency of 90,000, had overturned Charles X.; a fixed ministerial majority of 247, elected by 180,000, seemed to give permanent sway to Louis Philippe. 61. explanation of these changes given by The Republicans exclaim that these results have enError of the sued because their Revolution was stifled in its birth,-because an astute faction took advantage of their courage, reaped the fruits of their victory, and then, for their own the Liberal selfish purposes, established a worse tyranny in the realm than that from which they had been delivered. This doctrine sounds well, and for the next twenty years it blinded a large portion of the world to the real cause of the failure of the Revolution of July in France. It was party. XXX. 1834. believed that it had failed because it had been defeated, CHAP. whereas it failed because it had conquered. Never was revolution so quickly decided; never was a new government installed in power so completely in accordance with the general voice; never was one more cordially supported, when in possession of it, by the moral and physical strength of the party which had proved victorious in the strife. It doubled the number of electors, and intrusted the suffrage to 180,000 electors-nearly as many as were qualified to exercise it in a country where not one in ten in the entire population could read; and they returned a Chamber with a majority of four to one in favour of the Government. It raised the army above 300,000 combatants, and it on nearly every occasion remained faithful to its oaths when the hour of trial arrived. It put arms into the hands of a million of national guards, who elected their own officers, and the majority of them supported the Crown. This is decisive. When so large a part of the population capable of bearing arms is in this manner organised in armed bands, under officers of their own selection, it is in vain to assert that the government they support is not that which, upon the whole, is consistent with the national voice, how obnoxious soever it may be to certain fractions of it. 62. Revolution In truth, a very little consideration must be sufficient to show, not only that the Revolution of July failed be- How the cause it proved victorious, but how it was that this of July anomalous result came to pass. Like most other revo- failed. lutions, it was a class movement, and, like all similar convulsions, it terminated in elevating a class to supreme power. This at once and invariably proves fatal to public liberty. When one class has succeeded in beating down all others in civil strife, it invariably makes use of its victory to advance its own peculiar interests at the expense of the rest of the community. Real freedom can never be attained but by the balancing of one class against XXX. 1834. CHAP. the others: the victory of any one, if decisive, at once destroys it. The Revolution of July was made by the bourgeoisie, with the aid of the armed prolétaires of Paris; the Citizen King was their consul. The joint victory did not establish freedom; it established the despotism of the shopkeepers. But they proved more unfeeling and ruder masters than their predecessors had been; while at the same time, being supported by a much larger and more influential body in the State, they were not so easily shaken off. Marshal Soult and his cuirassiers proved very different antagonists from Prince Polignac and his priests. 63. tween the taires. wages Simultaneously with this, the condition of the working Schism be- classes was infinitely deteriorated by the termination of proprietors purchases and the shock to credit consequent on any sucand prolé- cessful popular convulsion: their sufferings were increased, while their complaints were disregarded, and their means of resistance destroyed. The capitalists and manufacturers, who had made the Revolution, turned a deaf ear to the complaints of the silk-weavers of Lyons, whose had been reduced to a third of their former amount by its effects they answered their petitions by assurances they were prosperous-stifled their rebellion by grapeshot. The masters and traders, whose interest was to buy cheap and sell dear, were insensible to all complaints as to the ruinous fall in the wages of labour; the operatives, well-nigh maddened by suffering, readily embraced the doctrines of the Socialists, who proclaimed a common unity of goods and women as the ultimate destiny of society. Such extreme principles drove all the holders of property into the other side, and filled the ranks of the national guards, wherever it was composed of others than prolétaires, with sturdy and zealous defenders of order. Hence the profound animosity which got up between the different classes of society, and the commencement of a division in the community, which, fifteen |