Book: History of Modern Europe 1792 1878

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[Contest on the Budget.]

[The Chambers prorogued, April 29.]

The Electoral Bill was not the only object of conflict between Richelieu's
Ministry and the Chamber, nor indeed the principal one. The Budget excited
fiercer passions, and raised greater issues. It was for no mere scheme of
finance that the Government had to fight, but against a violation of public
faith which would have left France insolvent and creditless in the face of
the Powers who still held its territory in pledge. The debt incurred by the
nation since 1813 was still unfunded. That part of it which had been raised
before the summer of 1814 had been secured by law upon the unsold forests
formerly belonging to the Church, and upon the Communal lands which
Napoleon had made the property of the State: the remainder, which included
the loans made during the Hundred Days, had no specified security. It was
now proposed by the Government to place the whole of the unfunded debt upon
the same level, and to provide for its payment by selling the so-called
Church forests. The project excited the bitterest opposition on the side of
the Count of Artois and his friends. If there was one object which the
clerical and reactionary party pursued with religious fervour, it was the
restoration of the Church lands: if there was one class which they had no
scruple in impoverishing, it was the class that had lent money to Napoleon.
Instead of paying the debts of the State, the Committee of the Chamber
proposed to repeal the law of September, 1814, which pledged the Church
forests, and to compel both the earlier and the later holders of the
unfunded debt to accept stock in satisfaction of their claims, though the
stock was worth less than two-thirds of its nominal value. The resolution
was in fact one for the repudiation of a third part of the unfunded debt.
Richelieu, seeing in what fashion his measure was about to be transformed,
determined upon withdrawing it altogether: the majority in the Chamber,
intent on executing its own policy and that of the Count of Artois, refused
to recognise the withdrawal. Such a step was at once an insult and a
usurpation of power. So great was the scandal and alarm caused by the
scenes in the Chamber, that the Duke of Wellington, at the instance of the
Ambassadors, presented a note to King Louis XVIII. requiring him in plain
terms to put a stop to the machinations of his brother. [274] The
interference of the foreigner provoked the Ultra-Royalists, and failed to
excite energetic action on the part of King Louis, who dreaded the sour
countenance of the Duchess of Angouleme more than he did Wellington's
reproofs. In the end the question of a settlement of the unfunded debt was
allowed to remain open. The Government was unable to carry the sale of the
Church forests, the Chamber did not succeed in its project of confiscation.
The Budget for the year, greatly altered in the interest of the landed
proprietors, was at length brought into shape. A resolution of the Lower
House restoring the unsold forests to the Church was ignored by the Crown;
and the Government, having obtained the means of carrying on the public
services, gladly abstained from further legislation, and on the 29th of
April ended the turmoil which surrounded it by proroguing the Chambers.

[Rising at Grenoble, May 6th. Executions.]

It was hoped that with the close of the Session the system of imprisonment
and surveillance which prevailed in the Departments would be brought to an
end. Vaublanc, the Minister of coercion, was removed from office. But the
troubles of France were not yet over. On the 6th of May, a rising of
peasants took place at Grenoble. According to the report of General
Donnadieu, commander of the garrison, which brought the news to the
Government, the revolt had only been put down after the most desperate
fighting. "The corpses of the King's enemies," said the General in his
despatch, "cover all the roads for a league round Grenoble." [275] It was
soon known that twenty-four prisoners had been condemned to death by
court-martial, and sixteen of these actually executed: the court-martial
recommended the other eight to the clemency of the Government. But the
despatches of Donnadieu had thrown the Cabinet into a panic. Decazes, the
most liberal of the Ministers, himself signed the hasty order requiring the
remaining prisoners to be put to death. They perished; and when it was too
late the Government learnt that Donnadieu's narrative was a mass of the
grossest exaggerations, and that the affair which he had represented as an
insurrection of the whole Department was conducted by about 300 peasants,
half of whom were unarmed. The violence and illegality with which the
General proceeded to establish a regime of military law soon brought him
into collision with the Government. He became the hero of the
Ultra-Royalists; but the Ministry, which was unwilling to make a public
confession that it had needlessly put eight persons to death, had to bear
the odium of an act of cruelty for which Donnadieu was really responsible.
The part into which Decazes had been entrapped probably strengthened the
determination of this Minister, who was now gaining great influence over
the King, to strike with energy against the Ultra-Royalist faction. From
this time he steadily led the King towards the only measure which could
free the country from the rule of the Count of Artois and the
reactionists--the dissolution of Parliament.

[Decazes.]

[Dissolution of the Chamber, Sept. 5, 1816.]

Louis XVIII. depended much on the society of some personal favourite.
Decazes was young and an agreeable companion; his business as
Police-Minister gave him the opportunity of amusing the King with anecdotes
and gossip much more congenial to the old man's taste than discussions on
finance or constitutional law. Louis came to regard Decazes almost as a
son, and gratified his own studious inclination by teaching him English.
The Minister's enemies said that he won the King's heart by taking private
lessons from some obscure Briton, and attributing his extraordinary
progress to the skill of his royal master. But Decazes had a more effective
retort than witticism. He opened the letters of the Ultra-Royalists and
laid them before the King. Louis found that these loyal subjects jested
upon his infirmities, called him a dupe in the hands of Jacobins, and
grumbled at him for so long delaying the happy hour when Artois should
ascend the throne. Humorous as Louis was, he was not altogether pleased to
read that he "ought either to open his eyes or to close them for ever." At
the same time the reports of Decazes' local agents proved that the
Ultra-Royalist party were in reality weak in numbers and unpopular
throughout the greater part of the country. The project of a dissolution
was laid before the Ministers and some of the King's confidants. Though the
Ambassadors were not consulted on the measure, it was certain that they
would not resist it. No word of the Ministerial plot reached the rival camp
of Artois. The King gained courage, and on the 5th of September signed the
Ordonnance which appealed from the Parliament to the nation, and, to the
anger and consternation of the Ultra-Royalists, made an end of the
intractable Chamber a few weeks before the time which had been fixed for
its re-assembling.

[Electoral law, 1817.]

France was well rid of a body of men who had been elected at a moment of
despair, and who would either have prolonged the occupation of the country
by foreign armies, or have plunged the nation into civil war. The elections
which followed were favourable to the Government. The questions fruitlessly
agitated in the Assembly of 1815 were settled to the satisfaction of the
public in the new Parliament. An electoral law was passed, which, while it
retained the high franchise fixed by the Charta, and the rule of renewing
the Chamber by fifths, gave life and value to the representative system by
making the elections direct. Though the constituent body of all France
scarcely numbered under this arrangement a hundred thousand persons, it was
extensive enough to contain a majority hostile to the reactionary policy of
the Church and the noblesse. The men who had made wealth by banking,
commerce, or manufactures, the so-called higher bourgeoisie, greatly
exceeded in number the larger landed proprietors; and although they were
not usually democratic in their opinions, they were liberal, and keenly
attached to the modern as against the old institutions of France, inasmuch
as their industrial interests and their own personal importance depended
upon the maintenance of the victory won in 1789 against aristocratic
privilege and monopoly. So strong was the hostility between the civic
middle class and the landed noblesse, that the Ultra-Royalists in the
Chamber sought, as they had done in the year before, to extend the
franchise to the peasantry, in the hope of overpowering wealth with
numbers. The electoral law, however, passed both Houses in the form in
which it had been drawn up by the Government. Though deemed narrow and
oligarchical by the next generation, it was considered, and with justice,
as a great victory won by liberalism at the time. The middle class of Great
Britain had to wait for fifteen years before it obtained anything like the
weight in the representation given to the middle class of France by the law
of 1817.

[Establishment of financial credit.]

Not many of the persons who had been imprisoned under the provisional acts
of the last year now remained in confinement. It was considered necessary
to prolong the Laws of Public Security, and they were re-enacted, but under
a much softened form. It remained for the new Chamber to restore the
financial credit of the country by making some equitable arrangement for
securing the capital and paying the interest of the unfunded debt. Projects
of repudiation now gained no hearing. Richelieu consented to make an annual
allowance to the Church, equivalent to the rental of the Church forests;
but the forests themselves were made security for the debt, and the power
of sale was granted to the Government. Pending such repayment of the
capital, the holders of unfunded debt received stock, calculated at its
real, not at its titular, value. The effect of this measure was at once
evident. The Government was enabled to enter into negotiations for a loan,
which promised it the means of paying the indemnities due to the foreign
Powers. On this payment depended the possibility of withdrawing the army of
occupation. Though Wellington at first offered some resistance, thirty
thousand men were removed in the spring of 1817; and the Czar allowed
Richelieu to hope that, if no further difficulties should arise, the
complete evacuation of French territory might take place in the following
year.

[Character of the years 1816-18.]

Thus the dangers with which reactionary passion had threatened France
appeared to be passing away. The partial renovation of the Chamber which
took place in the autumn of 1817 still further strengthened the Ministry of
Richelieu and weakened the Ultra-Royalist opposition. A few more months
passed, and before the third anniversary of Waterloo, the Czar was ready to
advise the entire withdrawal of foreign armies from France. An invitation
was issued to the Powers to meet in Conference at Aix-la-Chapelle. There
was no longer any doubt that the five years' occupation, contemplated when
the second Treaty of Paris was made, would be abandoned. The good will of
Alexander, the friendliness of his Ambassador, Pozzo di Borgo, who, as a
native of Corsica, had himself been a French subject, and who now aspired
to become Minister of France, were powerful influences in favour of Louis
XVIII. and his kingdom; much, however, of the speedy restoration of
confidence was due to the temperate rule of Richelieu. The nation itself,
far from suffering from Napoleon's fall, regained something of the
spontaneous energy so rich in 1789, so wanting at a later period. The cloud
of military disaster lifted; new mental and political life began; and under
the dynasty forced back by foreign arms France awoke to an activity unknown
to it while its chief gave laws to Europe. Parliamentary debate offered the
means of legal opposition to those who bore no friendship to the Court:
conspiracy, though it alarmed at the moment, had become the resort only of
the obscure and the powerless. Groups of able men were gathering around
recognised leaders, or uniting in defence of a common political creed. The
Press, dumb under Napoleon except for purposes of sycophancy, gradually
became a power in the land. Even the dishonest eloquence of Chateaubriand,
enforcing the principles of legal and constitutional liberty on behalf of a
party which would fain have used every weapon of despotism in its own
interest, proved that the leaden weight that had so long crushed thought
and expression existed no more.

[Prussia after 1815.]

[Edict promising a Constitution, May 22, 1815.]

But if the years between 1815 and 1819 were in France years of hope and
progress, it was not so with Europe generally. In England they were years
of almost unparalleled suffering and discontent; in Italy the rule of
Austria grew more and more anti-national; in Prussia, though a vigorous
local and financial administration hastened the recovery of the
impoverished land, the hopes of liberty declined beneath the reviving
energy of the nobles and the resistance of the friends of absolutism. When
Stein had summoned the Prussian people to take up arms for their
Fatherland, he had believed that neither Frederick William nor Alexander
would allow Prussia to remain without free institutions after the battle
was won. The keener spirits in the War of Liberation had scarcely
distinguished between the cause of national independence and that of
internal liberty. They returned from the battlefields of Saxony and France,
knowing that the Prussian nation had unsparingly offered up life and wealth
at the call of patriotism, and believing that a patriot-king would rejoice
to crown his triumph by inaugurating German freedom. For a while the hope
seemed near fulfilment. On the 22nd of May, 1815, Frederick William
published an ordinance, declaring that a Representation of the People
should be established. [276] For this end the King stated that the existing
Provincial Estates should be re-organised, and new ones founded where none
existed, and that out of the Provincial Estates the Assembly of
Representatives of the country should be chosen. It was added that a
commission would be appointed, to organise under Hardenberg's presidency
the system of representation, and to draw up a written Constitution. The
right of discussing all legislative measures affecting person or property
was promised to the Assembly. Though foreign affairs seemed to be directly
excluded from parliamentary debate, and the language of the Edict suggested
that the representative body would only have a consultative voice, without
the power either of originating or of rejecting laws, these reservations
only showed the caution natural on the part of a Government divesting
itself for the first time of absolute power. Guarded as it was, the scheme
laid down by the King would hardly have displeased the men who had done the
most to make constitutional rule in Prussia possible.

[Resistance of feudal and autocratic parties.]

But the promise of Frederick William was destined to remain unfulfilled. It
was no good omen for Prussia that Stein, who had rendered such glorious
services to his country and to all Europe, was suffered to retire from
public life. The old court-party at Berlin, politicians who had been forced
to make way for more popular men, landowners who had never pardoned the
liberation of the serf, all the interests of absolutism and class-privilege
which had disappeared for a moment in the great struggle for national
existence, gradually re-asserted their influence over the King, and
undermined the authority of Hardenberg, himself sinking into old age amid
circumstances of private life that left to old age little of its honour. To
decide even in principle upon the basis to be given to the new Prussian
Constitution would have taxed all the foresight and all the constructive
skill of the most experienced statesman; for by the side of the ancient
dominion of the Hohenzollerns there were now the Rhenish and the Saxon
Provinces, alien in spirit and of doubtful loyalty, in addition to Polish
territory and smaller German districts acquired at intervals between 1792
and 1815. Hardenberg was right in endeavouring to link the Constitution
with something that had come down from the past; but the decision that the
General Assembly should be formed out of the Provincial Estates was
probably an injudicious one; for these Estates, in their present form, were
mainly corporations of nobles, and the spirit which animated them was at
once the spirit of class-privilege and of an intensely strong localism.
Hardenberg had not only occasioned an unnecessary delay by basing the
representative system upon a reform of the Provincial Estates, but had
exposed himself to sharp attacks from these very bodies, to whom nothing
was more odious than the absorption of their own dignity by a General
Assembly. It became evident that the process of forming a Constitution
would be a tedious one; and in the meantime the opponents of the popular
movement opened their attack upon the men and the ideas whose influence in
the war of Liberation appeared to have made so great a break between the
German present and the past.

[Schmalz's pamphlet, 1815.]

The first public utterance of the reaction was a pamphlet issued in July,
1815, by Schmalz, a jurist of some eminence, and brother-in-law of
Scharnhorst, the re-organiser of the army. Schmalz, contradicting a
statement which attributed to him a highly honourable part in the patriotic
movement of 1808, attacked the Tugendbund, and other political associations
dating from that epoch, in language of extreme violence. In the stiff and
peremptory manner of the old Prussian bureaucracy, he denied that popular
enthusiasm had anything whatever to do with the victory of 1813, [277]
attributing the recovery of the nation firstly to its submission to the
French alliance in 1812, and secondly to the quiet sense of duty with
which, when the time came, it took up arms in obedience to the King. Then,
passing on to the present aims of the political societies, he accused them
of intending to overthrow all established governments, and to force unity
upon Germany by means of revolution, murder, and pillage. Stein was not
mentioned by name, but the warning was given to men of eminence who
encouraged Jacobinical societies, that in such combinations the giants end
by serving the dwarfs. Schmalz's pamphlet, which was written with a
strength and terseness of style very unusual in Germany, made a deep
impression, and excited great indignation in Liberal circles. It was
answered, among other writers, by Niebuhr; and the controversy thickened
until King Frederick William, in the interest of public tranquillity,
ordered that no more should be said on either side. It was in accordance
with Prussian feeling that the King should thus interfere to stop the
quarrels of his subjects. There would have been nothing unseemly in an act
of impartial repression. But the King made it impossible to regard his act
as of this character. Without consulting Hardenberg, he conferred a
decoration upon the author of the controversy. Far-sighted men saw the true
bearing of the act. They warned Hardenberg that, if he passed over this
slight, he would soon have to pass over others more serious, and urged him
to insist upon the removal of the counsellors on whose advice the King had
acted. [278] But the Minister disliked painful measures. He probably
believed that no influence could ever supplant his own with the King, and
looked too lightly upon the growth of a body of opponents, who, whether in
open or in concealed hostility to himself, were bent upon hindering the
fulfilment of the constitutional reforms which he had at heart.

[The promised Constitutions delayed in Germany.]

In the Edict of the 22nd of May, 1815, the King had ordered that the work
of framing a Constitution should be begun in the following September.
Delays, however, arose; and when the commission was at length appointed,
its leading members were directed to travel over the country in order to
collect opinions upon the form of representation required. Two years passed
before even this preliminary operation began. In the meantime very little
progress had been made towards the establishment of constitutional
government in Germany at large. One prince alone, the Grand Duke of Weimar,
already eminent in Europe from his connection with Goethe and Schiller,
loyally accepted the idea of a free State, and brought representative
institutions into actual working. In Hesse, the Elector summoned the
Estates, only to dismiss them with contumely when they resisted his
extortions. In most of the minor States contests or negotiations took place
between the Sovereigns and the ancient Orders, which led to little or no
result. The Federal Diet, which ought to have applied itself to the
determination of certain principles of public right common to all Germany,
remained inactive. Though hope had not yet fallen, a sense of discontent
arose, especially among the literary class which had shown such enthusiasm
in the War of Liberation. It was characteristic of Germany that the demand
for free government came not from a group of soldiers, as in Spain, not
from merchants and men of business, as in England, but from professors and
students, and from journalists, who were but professors in another form.
The middle class generally were indifferent: the higher nobility, and the
knights who had lost their semi-independence in 1803, sought for the
restoration of privileges which were really incompatible with any
State-government whatever. The advocacy of constitutional rule and of
German unity was left, in default of Prussian initiative, to the ardent
spirits of the Universities and the Press, who naturally exhibited in the
treatment of political problems more fluency than knowledge, and more zeal
than discretion. Jena, in the dominion of the Duke of Weimar, became, on
account of the freedom of printing which existed there, the centre of the
new Liberal journalism. Its University took the lead in the Teutonising
movement which had been inaugurated by Fichte twelve years before in the
days of Germany's humiliation, and which had now received so vigorous an
impulse from the victory won over the foreigner.

[The Wartburg Festival, Oct., 1817.]

On the 18th of October, 1817, the students of Jena, with deputations from
all the Protestant Universities of Germany, held a festival at Eisenach, to
celebrate the double anniversary of the Reformation and of the battle of
Leipzig. Five hundred young patriots, among them scholars who had been
decorated for bravery at Waterloo, bound their brows with oak-leaves, and
assembled within the venerable hall of Luther's Wartburg Castle; sang,
prayed, preached, and were preached to; dined; drank to German liberty, the
jewel of life, to Dr. Martin Luther, the man of God, and to the Grand Duke
of Saxe-Weimar; then descended to Eisenach, fraternised with the Landsturm
in the market-place, and attended divine service in the parish church
without mishap. In the evening they edified the townspeople with
gymnastics, which were now the recognised symbol of German vigour, and
lighted a great bonfire on the hill opposite the castle. Throughout the
official part of the ceremony a reverential spirit prevailed; a few rash
words were, however, uttered against promise-breaking kings, and some of
the hardier spirits took advantage of the bonfire to consign to the flames,
in imitation of Luther's dealing with the Pope's Bull, a quantity of what
they deemed un-German and illiberal writings. Among these was Schmalz's
pamphlet. They also burnt a soldier's strait-jacket, a pigtail, and a
corporal's cane, emblems of the military brutalism of past times which were
now being revived in Westphalia. [279] Insignificant as the whole affair
was, it excited a singular alarm not only in Germany but at foreign Courts.
Richelieu wrote from Paris to inquire whether revolution was breaking out.
The King of Prussia sent Hardenberg to Weimar to make investigations on the
spot. Metternich, who saw conspiracy and revolution everywhere and in
everything, congratulated himself that his less sagacious neighbours were
at length awakening to their danger. The first result of the Wartburg
scandal was that the Duke of Weimar had to curtail the liberties of his
subjects. Its further effects became only too evident as time went on. It
left behind it throughout Germany the impression that there were forces of
disorder at work in the Press and in the Universities which must be crushed
at all cost by the firm hand of Government; and it deepened the anxiety
with which King Frederick William was already regarding the promises of
liberty which he had made to the Prussian people two years before.

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