Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 70, No. 433, November 1851

"It is a bitter answer, your royal highness," replied Dumas, taking his leave, "but still it will console the mother's heart."

"And now," muses Mr Stahr, "the shattered bones of the unfortunate young Duke of Orleans have long been mouldering in the grave, his statue in the court of the Louvre has been dragged down and stowed away in a corner of the Versailles Museum, and the Adventurer of Strasburg rules France as a republic, with power more unlimited than the wily Louis Philippe ever possessed over it as a monarchy! For so long as it lasts, that is to say; for methinks the feet of those who shall carry him out are already before the door. But how did he ever get in? How was it that even his candidature for the presidency was not overwhelmed and rendered impossible by that most dangerous of all opponents in France, the curse of the Ridiculous, which had already decorated with cap and bells the hero of the blunders of Strasburg and Boulogne, the trainer of the tame eagle, the special constable of London?" It has puzzled acuter politicians than Mr Stahr to reply to this question, which millions have asked. The riddle interests him, and he runs about on all sides seeking its solution. He has little success, and evidently himself mistrusts the ingenious and original conclusion to which he at last comes, that the election of Louis Napoleon was a homage to the hereditary principle. "When I recently, on my way across the plain of Satory, asked a countryman if he had given his vote to the President, his reply was, 'Of course! was he not the rightful heir, his uncle's legitimate successor?' This may sound ill for the republican education of the people of the French republic; but it is the truth. The principle of hereditary rule may be perfectly incompatible with that of 'liberty and equality,' but it is, or was, (at the time of Louis Napoleon's election,) the prevailing principle in the heads of the French rural population. 'One must know the French peasantry as I know them, who have grown up amongst them,' lately said to me the representative De Flotte, 'to find their conduct in this matter quite natural. The French peasant has only one fundamental idea in politics, and that is derived from his own family relations. That fundamental idea is the sacredness and necessity of hereditary right. That the territorial property of the father should descend to the son, or next of kin, seems to him the main condition or all human existence.'" Admitting, for argument's sake, the soundness of this statement, and that the French peasant is thus devoted to the hereditary principle, the natural inference is that, when he perceived his country to be in a state of transition, ruled by provisional intruders, and anxiously looking out for a more permanent chief of the state, he should have hoisted the white cockade, and tossed up his beaver for the Fifth Henry. Messrs Stahr and De Flotte explain why he did not do this. "The French peasant has no longer any sort of sympathy with the elder Bourbons. For him the glory of Louis XIV. is far too remote. What else he knows of them is, that they brought the foreigner into his country, and on that account he curses them." In this there is some truth. The old royalist spirit still lingers in certain departments of France, but in the country generally the Count de Chambord's partisans are rather intelligent and influential than numerous. Should he ascend the throne, it will not be in virtue of zeal for the principle of legitimacy or of personal attachment to himself, but because the nation will see in his accession the best guarantee of order and economical administration. These two things are the real wants and desires of the mass of the population. The peasant who told Mr Stahr he wished for peace and light taxation, spoke the feeling of a great majority of Frenchmen. "The dynasty of Orleans," says the professor's informant, continuing his explanation of the concurrence of circumstances which raised Louis Napoleon to the president's chair, "never enjoyed much prestige amongst the rural population, who did not forgive old Louis Philippe for having violated the principle of hereditary right." This is rather far-fetched. If the provinces cared little for Louis Philippe, it was because he had troubled himself little about them. True to his system of centralisation, Paris, to him, was France, and ungrateful Paris it was that finally abandoned and expelled him. It is unnecessary to go out of one's way to seek reasons for the fact, that when, in December 1848, the French, exhausted by nine months' anarchy and misery, and ashamed of those February follies into which a few deluded and designing men had led them, cast about for a ruler under whom they might hope for respite and breathing time, none turned a wishful or expectant eye to any member of the house of Orleans. The family had been weighed and found wanting. From the astute politician, "whose word no man relied on," and who reaped in his latter days those bitter fruits of usurpation and anarchy whose seeds he had sown in his prime, down to the youngest of the sons to whose advancement he had sacrificed his conscience and his country, and who, in the supreme hour of peril and confusion, were found utterly deficient in princely and manly qualities, in self-possession, energy, and resource, there was not one of the line whom France would trust. The time was too short that had elapsed since the picture of selfishness and incapacity had been exhibited to wondering Europe: the cause had been unable to revive from the grievous and self-inflicted shock; it lay supine and seemingly dead, awaiting the day when intrigue and hypocrisy should galvanise it into a precarious vitality. When the crisis of May 1852 arrives, we shall see what has been the effect of the complicated manœuvres of the house of Orleans, which, in December 1848, stood so low in public estimation. Then, according to Mr Stahr, Buonapartism was the only political creed that appealed to the prejudices and feelings of the French peasant, and it required no great skill to get him to write upon his election-ticket the name of the prince whom he looked upon as the rightful heir of the Emperor. "He did it of his own accord, out of a conviction that he was performing an act of justice, and that hereditary right demanded it. Other motives concurred. The forty-five-centime impost had embittered the countryman against the Republic, which had increased instead of lightening his load. Upon the Democrat-Socialists he looked distrustfully. He would have nought to say to those 'partageux' (dividers.) He cared nothing for the fine speeches of parliamentary orators. The peasant is by nature taciturn, and has little confidence in assemblies of great talkers. He was not disposed to make a stir about the freedom of the press, of which he makes no use. His political understanding did not extend beyond one wish, and that wish was, a strong government, which should secure to him the enjoyment and inheritance of his property. And who could do that better than a Napoleon – Napoleon himself, the Emperor of Béranger? – for there are many places where the country people have never believed the Emperor dead." The clever author of Jerome Paturot has expressed a similar opinion as regards the prevalence of this scarcely credible delusion amongst the uneducated classes in certain districts of France. It does not appear to be entirely confined to that country. "I myself am witness," says Mr Stahr, "that, in the year 1848, a peasant of a province of Northern Germany, on hearing of the new French revolution, and of its first consequences in Germany, remarked that, 'without doubt old Buonaparte had a finger in the pie.'" It is Mr Stahr's belief that Louis Napoleon is destined to dispel, by his inability to fulfil the expectations of the ignorant portion of his constituents, that Buonapartist prestige to which he partly owed his election, and that attachment to the hereditary principle which the professor assumes still to exist in France. "The nephew of the great Emperor," he says, "is selected by fate to disturb, if not to destroy, the idolatry with which a large portion of the French nation has hitherto regarded the name and memory of its greatest tyrant. Napoleon the Second throws a grey shadow over Napoleon the First."

If the French President receives but rude handling from the German republican, the Orleans family cannot congratulate themselves on much better treatment. His first reference to that fallen dynasty is suggested by a little book, which, at the time of its appearance, attracted some attention both in England and France. M. Louis Tirel's La République dans les Carrosses du Roi was neither calculated nor intended to please the democrats. Mr Stahr, however, is pretty fair in his appreciation of it, sneering a little at the author for taking what he calls a valet-de-chambre's view of the February revolution, but doing justice to the interest and instruction to be found in his pages, which show up the parties honteuses of that most disastrous and ill-advised political convulsion; the scandalous greed, vanity, and egotism of the adventurers and knaves who alone profited by the storm they had contributed to raise. M. Tirel, although to all appearance honest and truthful, certainly wrote like a partisan. His position and attachments were incompatible with a just estimate of circumstances. Whilst accurately describing events, he deluded himself as to the causes that led to them, and, above all, he could see no wrong in his master; could not for the life of him comprehend how it was that Louis Philippe, "who had so faithfully observed his oath to maintain the charter, and who had a majority in the Chambers," should have been ejected from his throne and kingdom. The worthy keeper of the royal carriages never attains to more than a glimmering and confused notion that the nation could scarcely be said to be represented by the majority in question, and that a moderate extension of the suffrage, accorded with a good grace, would probably have maintained the July dynasty at the helm of French affairs to this day, and for years to come. His admiration of Louis Philippe's wisdom and skill is unlimited, as is also his indignation at the ingratitude of the people. Mr Stahr loses patience at the affectionate manner in which the ex-controlleur des equipages lauds the virtues of the old "Jesuit-King," as the German irreverently styles the defunct monarch; and, provoked by Tirel's exaggerated encomiums, he retorts by the following severe but too true remarks with reference to the oft-repeated accusation of miserly hoarding, brought against Louis Philippe by Republican and Legitimist writers: – "Louis Philippe," he says, "was no avare such as Molière has drawn – no comedy-miser – but yet he was immoderately avaricious. There was no end to his demands of money for the princes of his house. He knew, or thought he knew, that money is power; and as he could not obtain enough of the latter, he restlessly strove after the former as the means to an object. He was a good father of a family, in the bourgeois sense of the word; but he had no conception of that which makes a king the father of his people. His defenders celebrate the care which this prince, denounced as grasping, expended upon the conservation of the royal palaces, the great sums which he laid out upon rich furniture, numerous attendants, brilliant equipages, and luxurious festivals – to which latter often three or four thousand guests were invited. 'How,' it is said, 'could the people tax such a sovereign with niggardliness and greed of gold?' But the people had no part or share in these enjoyments. It suffered hunger and want, whilst the higher and middle classes of the bourgeoisie revelled in these feasts, and grew rich by supplying their materials." Raised to the throne by the suffrages of the middle classes, Louis Philippe relied on them for support. He was bitterly disappointed. Scandalous and cowardly was the manner in which the men of July – those whom he had fed, pampered and decorated, favoured and preferred – deserted him in the hour of danger. The very national guards of Neuilly, who had lived and flourished in the shadow of the château walls, refused to turn out, when, in February 1848, the intendant of the castle appealed to them to protect from plunder the property of their patron and king. They had caught the contagion of that intense selfishness which was Louis Philippe's most striking characteristic. "Let those who choose go out to be shot," said the burghers of Neuilly; "we shall stop at home and take care of our houses." And assuredly the inert and unsympathising attitude of the Paris national guard contributed more than anything else to deter Louis Philippe from resisting by force the progress of the February revolutionists. The burghers were disgusted by the dilapidation of the finances, and the venality of the administration – they were disgusted with Guizot for not daring to resist the headstrong will of the old king – and they cried out for electoral reform. With a little more patience they would have achieved their desire; – over-hasty, they suddenly beheld themselves plunged into revolution. They had not foreseen it; they lacked presence of mind to repel its first inroads. And they also lacked, there can be no question, that feeling of personal attachment to the sovereign which would have prevented their standing by, tame witnesses of his dethronement. "Louis Philippe," says Mr Stahr, "never knew how to inspire an earnest and cordial attachment even in those nearest his person. The circumstances of his fall are the most speaking proof of this. His own panegyrist tells us that Louis Philippe himself had a misgiving that none loved him for his own sake. He often said to his most confidential attendants: 'You serve me faithfully, but not with the zeal and warmth which distinguished the servants of Napoleon. Their devotion to his person was unbounded.' If such was the case in the French king's prosperous days, what could he expect in the hour of adversity? M. Tirel himself proves, beyond the possibility of refutation, that, when the moment of danger arrived, the nearest personal attendants of the king thought, almost without exception, only of themselves. Not one of them troubled himself about the safety of the immense sums contained in the treasury of the Tuileries. None thought of holding in readiness the necessary means of travelling, in the possible case of the departure or flight of the king and his family; and even M. Tirel exclaims, with reference to this – 'It is difficult to credit such utter want of foresight, when they knew they were standing on a volcano.'" At Neuilly, as already mentioned, the national guard refused to turn out; whilst the servants of the royal residence busied themselves in saying their own things, leaving their master's property to be pillaged and burned by the rabble, with whose disgusting and disgraceful depredations the troops of the line did not interfere. Regulars and militia, domestics and mob, the same want of feeling was manifest in all; none showed attachment or devotion to the prince, whose star was on the decline. Mr Stahr made a pilgrimage to Neuilly, and devotes a letter to it. It was a grey, sad-looking autumn afternoon, and the road was silent and deserted along which he took his way to the favourite residence of the departed king. The impression made upon him was most melancholy. "Vous verrez de belles choses," said the porter at the lodge, as he pointed out to the Germans the way to the ruins. "Up to this time," says Mr Stahr, "nothing in Paris had reminded me that here had raged, but a very few years before, the hurricane of a revolution that shook the world, and that had swept a dynasty from the soil of France like chaff from the thrashing-floor. At Neuilly I first received this impression. They made clean work of it, those bands of incendiaries of the 28th February 1848. A single night sufficed to convert that stately building, and all its splendour, into a heap of hideous ruins… High grass now grows upon the floors of the state apartments of the destroyed king's-home. Bushes spring up around the columns, over which creepers luxuriantly twine; and the red poppy and the yellow king-cup wave their blossoms in the chambers and saloons in which, so short a time ago, the ruler of proud France paced his Persian carpets, revolving plans for the eternal consolidation of his dynasty! On the ravaged foot-paths before the windows, the melted glass of the magnificent panes has flowed down and formed a brilliant flooring. At the foot of a balcony, whose pillars still supported the remains of broken beams, a flush of pale pink harvest roses exhaled their delicate fragrance. It was an incredibly melancholy sight. The closely-locked doors and shattered windows of the wing that was saved increased the gloom of the whole impression. Everywhere the tall iron lattice-work, and the iron posts supporting lamps, are rent and broken; the statues on the flights of steps are shivered to pieces; there remain but a couple of colossal sphinxes, which gaze inquiringly out of the dark green of the shrubbery. Who shall solve their riddle – the riddle of the history of France and of mankind? Louis Philippe, wise amongst the wise, thought he had done so. Where is he now? His weary bones sleep the eternal sleep in the country of the banished kings of France."

Neuilly has become a place of pilgrimage for the friends of the fallen dynasty. A host of inscriptions, mostly in an anti-republican sense, were to be read upon the walls and pillars at the period of Mr Stahr's visit. Of several which he took the trouble to copy, one only is superior in tone and significance to the usual average of such scribblings. "High upon a broken column a firm hand had inscribed with charcoal, and in gigantic characters, these three words:

Droit du Talion. 1830. 1848

Other hands had tried to obliterate the writing, but in vain. The revengeful word 'RETALIATION' was still quite legible. And this word best expresses the feeling with which plain-dealing probity contemplates the fate of the overthrown July monarch. For here at Neuilly was it that he, a modern Richard III., played the hypocritical part of rejecting power, when the blood of the July revolution still reddened the streets of Paris. Here was it that he wrote the letter to Charles X. in which he assured him of his fidelity and devotion, when he was already extending a lustful hand towards the crown of the rightful heir. Here too, in Neuilly, was it that he spun that Spanish web, whose most secret documents Lord Palmerston carefully preserves, and which gave the world a glimpse into an abyss of moral foulness at which the soul shudders. And here, in presence of this funeral pile of his happiness and his splendour – here, before the memorial of his disgraceful and ignominious fall – here, when I called to mind his acts, I felt no touch of pity for the fallen King. But the man I did indeed pity, the husband and the father. He had loved this Neuilly. Here had he enjoyed such a measure of domestic happiness as is rarely vouchsafed to a monarch. This house had he, for many a long year, built up and decorated with that fine feeling for art and architecture which was proper to him. To this green retirement and solitude, to this remote dwelling, hidden from all eyes, he loved to withdraw. Here, where all was his own creation – where no stone was added, no tree planted, no path cut, but under his eye – exactly here, in the most sensitive spot, the blow struck him. The destruction of this house was more deeply felt by the man than was the loss of his throne by the king! Before the Count of Neuilly had left French ground, the building had ceased to exist from which he had borrowed the name. And all his wiles and stratagems, all his cunning, were as insufficient to avert, from the man and from the king, this last fated climax, as were the fortifications and bastilles with which he had surrounded the dreaded Paris."

Quitting Neuilly, Mr Stahr was startled, as well he might be, by the terms of a bill stuck upon the park-gates —

"House of Orleans, (thus it ran,) château and domain of Neuilly to let for three years with immediate possession; about one hundred and eighty acres, meadows, forest-land, &c., bordering on the fortifications!"

Wandering through the endless galleries of Versailles, Mr Stahr is naturally enough led to reflect how strange it is that Louis Philippe, the Napoleon of Peace, as his flatterers called him, and as he loved to hear himself called – the man whose motto, as his enemies constantly asserted, was "Peace at any price," and who avowedly and upon principle disliked war – should have devised and carried out the plan of a national gallery of French military fame. A merciless analyser of the citizen king's secret thoughts and motives, Mr Stahr declares this gallery to have been a speculation of "the crowned shopkeeper," – a speculation by which his dynasty was to gain strength at the expense of a national weakness. There is truth in this; but, at the same time, the professor's opinion must not here be accepted as impartial evidence. He is evidently led into unusual fervour by his holy horror of war. We suspect him of being a member of the Peace Congress – to which he in one place kindly alludes, as the humble commencement of a great movement. Like many other adherents of the political sect which proposes to itself an aim that could never possibly be attained without terrible convulsions and sanguinary conflicts, he cannot abide the sight of blood, shudders at wounds, and recoils in terror and dismay from the "slaying and murdering, singeing and burning, cutting and stabbing," depicted upon the walls of the Versailles gallery. He looks not lovingly upon this pictorial history of France, sketched from her battle-fields, and including the exploits of her innumerable warriors, from Clodwig down to Bugeaud. On the other hand, he curiously and eagerly examines the pictures illustrating the events of 1830 and Louis Philippe's accession. Of the battle-pieces he has set down some (and not altogether without reason) as mere daubs, which no one would glance at twice but for the sake of the subject. When surveying the illustrations of the July revolution, he forgets artistic criticism in his satirical account of the personages that fill the canvass, and especially of the chief actor in those scenes, Louis Philippe himself. "His arrival at the Palais Royal," says the rancorous professor, "has something sneaking about it. He is profusely adorned with tricolor ribbons, wears white trousers, a brown coat, and a round hat. He looks like a rogue who has just crept into another man's estate. But characteristic above all is the picture in which he signs the proclamation naming him Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom (July 31, 1830.) The figures are the size of life, all in plain clothes, and decorated with the tricolor. They sit round a green council-table, the coming Citizen-King in the midst of them, dressed in a brown coat with a black velvet collar and a black satin waistcoat, a large fine shirt-frill, a neatly tied white cravat, his hair carefully curled, his eyes half closed, the corners of his month lugubriously drawn down. He holds up the momentous sheet of paper, close above which the pen in his right hand hovers, and seems to ask those around him – 'Ought I then? – must I?' All eyes are fixed trustingly upon him, especially those of honest Laffitte, in the corner on the left. Sebastiani looks somewhat keener and shrewder. Never in my life did I see a picture that so perfectly represents an assemblage of Jew bankers, gathered round their leader to advise on a 'bull' or 'bear' speculation. The whole party have this Jewish calculating expression – Louis Philippe more than any of them. And this is the countenance the man has himself had perpetuated! It is a strange historical irony. All the old Bourbons, even the two last Louises and Charles X. looked noble, or at least like noblemen, in the expression of their features, compared with this essentially common physiognomy. Their faces, at any rate, expressed the decided and undeniable consciousness of high descent, whilst the predominating expression in Louis Philippe's countenance is that of a cunning shopkeeper. And this expression is everywhere the same, in all the pictures, &c. &c." There is more in the same strain. Some may be disposed to quarrel with Mr Stahr for pressing so hard upon a dead man; but, living or dead, kings are fair subjects of criticism; and, unsparing and savage as are often the professor's strictures on the character and policy of Louis Philippe, they yet are the most truthful and just of all the political portions of his book. Messrs Montalivet and Miraflores, and the other unscrupulous panegyrists of the late King of the French, would have too good a game left them if it were forbidden to reply by more exact and impartial statements to their exaggerated encomiums.