and legislative repression, consisting in the laws of September, which, when to mere ridicule had succeeded acts of violence, such as that of Fieschi (July 28th, 1835), aimed at facilitating the condemnation of political offenders and at intimidating the press. The party of “movement” was vanquished.
But the July Government, born as it was of a popular movement, had to make concessions to popular demands. Casimir Périer had carried a law dealing with municipal organization, which made the municipal councils elective, as they had been before the year VIII.; and The bourgeois policy. in 1833 Guizot had completed it by making the conseils généraux also elective. In the same year the law dealing with primary instruction had also shown the mark of new ideas. But now that the bourgeoisie was raised to power it did not prove itself any more liberal than the aristocracy of birth and fortune in dealing with educational, fiscal and industrial questions. In spite of the increase of riches, the bourgeois régime maintained a fiscal and social legislation which, while it assured to the middle class certainty and permanence of benefits, left the labouring masses poor, ignorant, and in a state of incessant agitation.
The Orleanists, who had been unanimous in supporting the king, disagreed, after their victory, as to what powers he was to be given. The Left Centre, led by Thiers, held that he should reign but not govern; the Right Centre, led by Guizot, would admit him to an active The socialist party. part in the government; and the third party (tiers-parti) wavered between these two. And so between 1836 and 1840, as the struggle against the king’s claim to govern passed from the sphere of outside discussion into parliament, we see the rise of a bourgeois socialist party, side by side with the now dwindling republican party. It no longer confined its demands to universal suffrage, on the principle of the legitimate representation of all interests, or in the name of justice. Led by Saint-Simon, Fourier, P. Leroux and Lamennais, it aimed at realizing a better social organization for and by means of the state. But the question was by what means this was to be accomplished. The secret societies, under the influence of Blanqui and Barbès, two revolutionaries who had revived the traditions of Babeuf, were not willing to wait for the complete education of the masses, necessarily a long process. On the 12th of May 1839 the Société des Saisons made an attempt to overthrow the bourgeoisie by force, but was defeated. Democrats like Louis Blanc, Ledru-Rollin and Lamennais continued to repeat in support of the wisdom of universal suffrage the old profession of faith: vox populi, vox Dei. And finally this republican doctrine, already confused, was still further complicated by a kind of mysticism which aimed at reconciling the most extreme differences of belief, the Catholicism of Buchez, the Bonapartism of Cormenin, and the humanitarianism of the cosmopolitans. It was in vain that Auguste Comte, Michelet and Quinet denounced this vague humanitarian mysticism and the pseudo-liberalism of the Church. The movement had now begun.
At first these moderate republicans, radical or communist, formed only imperceptible groups. Among the peasant classes, and even in the industrial centres, warlike passions were still rife. Louis Philippe tried to find an outlet for them in the Algerian war, and later by the revival The Bonapartist revival. of the Napoleonic legend, which was held to be no longer dangerous, since the death of the duke of Reichstadt in 1832. It was imprudently recalled by Thiers’ History of the Consulate and Empire, by artists and poets, in spite of the prophecies of Lamartine, and by the solemn translation of Napoleon I.’s ashes in 1840 to the Invalides at Paris.
All theories require to be based on practice, especially those which involve force. Now Louis Philippe, though as active as his predecessors had been slothful, was the least warlike of men. His only wish was to govern personally, as George III. and George IV. of England had done, Parliamentary opposition to the royal power. especially in foreign affairs, while at home was being waged the great duel between Thiers and Guizot, with Molé as intermediary. Thiers, head of the cabinet of the 22nd of February 1836, an astute man but not pliant enough to please the king, fell after a few months, in consequence of his attempt to stop the Carlist civil war in Spain, and to support the constitutional government of Queen Isabella. Louis Philippe hoped that, by calling upon Molé to form a ministry, he would be better able to make his personal authority felt. From 1837 to 1839 Molé aroused opposition on all hands; this was emphasized by the refusal of the Chambers to vote one of those endowments which the king was continually asking them to grant for his children, by two dissolutions of the Chambers, and finally by the Strasburg affair and the stormy trial of Louis Napoleon, son of the former king of Holland (1836–1837). At the elections of 1839 Molé was defeated by Thiers, Guizot and Barrot, who had combined to oppose the tyranny of the “Château,” and after a long ministerial crisis was replaced by Thiers (March 1, 1840). But the latter was too much in favour of war to please the king, who was strongly disposed towards peace and an alliance with Great Britain, and consequently fell at the time of the Egyptian question, when, in answer to the treaty of London concluded behind his back by Nicholas I. and Palmerston on the 15th of July 1840, he fortified Paris and proclaimed his intention to give armed support to Mehemet Ali, the ally of France (see Mehemet Ali). But the violence of popular Chauvinism and the renewed attempt of Louis Napoleon at Boulogne proved to the holders of the doctrine of peace at any price that in the long-run their policy tends to turn a peaceful attitude into a warlike one, and to strengthen the absolutist idea.
In spite of all, from 1840 to 1848 Louis Philippe still further extended his activity in foreign affairs, thus bringing himself into still greater prominence, though he was already frequently held responsible for failures in foreign politics and unpopular measures in home affairs. The Guizot’s ministry. catchword of Guizot, who was now his minister, was: Peace and no reforms. With the exception of the law of 1842 concerning the railways, not a single measure of importance was proposed by the ministry. France lived under a régime of general corruption: parliamentary corruption, due to the illegal conduct of the deputies, consisting of slavish or venal officials; electoral corruption, effected by the purchase of the 200,000 electors constituting the “pays légal,” who were bribed by the advantages of power; and moral corruption, due to the reign of the plutocracy, the bourgeoisie, a hard-working, educated and honourable class, it is true, but insolent, like all newly enriched parvenus in the presence of other aristocracies, and with unyielding selfishness maintaining an attitude of suspicion towards the people, whose aspirations they did not share and with whom they did not feel themselves to have anything in common. This led to a slackening in political life, a sort of exhaustion of interest throughout the country, an excessive devotion to material prosperity. Under a superficial appearance of calm a tempest was brewing, of which the industrial writings of Balzac, Eugène Sue, Lamartine, H. Heine, Vigny, Montalembert and Tocqueville were the premonitions. But it was in vain that they denounced this supremacy of the bourgeoisie, relying on its two main supports, the suffrage based on a property qualification and the National Guard, for its rallying-cry was the “Enrichissez-vous” of Guizot, and its excessive materialism gained a sinister distinction from scandals connected with the ministers Teste and Cubières, and such mysterious crimes as that of Choiseul-Praslin.[1] In vain also did they point out that mere riches are not so much a protection to the ministry who are in power as a temptation to the majority excluded from power by this barrier of wealth.
- ↑ Charles Laure Hugues Théobald, duc de Choiseul-Praslin (1805–1847), was deputy in 1839, created a peer of France in 1840. He had married a daughter of General Sebastiani, with whom he lived on good terms till 1840, when he entered into open relations with his children’s governess. The duchess threatened a separation; and the duke consented to send his mistress out of the house, but did not cease to correspond with and visit her. On the 18th of August 1847 the duchess was found stabbed to death, with more than thirty wounds, in her room. The duke was arrested on the 20th and imprisoned in the Luxembourg, where he died of poison, self-administered on the 24th. It was, however, popularly believed that the government had smuggled him out of the country and that he was living under a feigned name in England.
