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France History (2)
1911 Encyclopedia Britannica
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(Continued from France:History
After the scourge of war, the horrors of conscription, and the despotism which had discounted glory, every one seemed to rejoice in the return of the Bourbons, which atoned for humiliations by restoring liberty. But questions of form, which aroused questions of sentiment, speedily Bourbons. led to grave dissensions. The hurried armistice of the 23rd of April, by which the comte dArtois delivered over disarmed France to her conquerors; Louis XVIII.s excessive gratitude to the prince regent of England; the return of the migrs; the declaration of St Ouen, dated from the nineteenth year of the new reign; the charter of June 4th, concde ci octroye, maintaining the effete doctrine of legitimacy in a country permeated with the idea of national sovereignty; the slights put upon the army; the obligatory processions ordered by Comte Beugnot, prefect of police; all this provoked a conflict not only between two theories of government but between. two groups of men and of interests. An avowedly imperialist party was soon again formed, a centre of heated opposition to the royalist party; and neither Baron Louis excellent finance, nor the peace, nor the charter of June 4th which despite the irritation of the migrs preserved the civil gains of the Revolutionprevented the man who was its incarnation from seizing an. opportunity to bring about another military coup detat. Having landed in the Bay of Jouan on the 1st of March, on the 20th Napoleon re-entered the Tuileries in triumph, while Louis XVIII. fled to Ghent. By the Acte additionnel of the l2rldof April he induced Carnot and Fouch the last of the Jacobinsand the heads of the Liberal The opposition, Benjamin Constant and La Fayette, to side Hundmd with him against the hostile Powers of Europe, occupied Days. in dividing the spoils at Vienna. He proclaimed his Mai~b intention of founding a new democratic empire; and French policy was thus given another illusion, which was to be exploited with fatal success by Napoleons namesake. But the cannon of Waterloo ended this adventure (June 18, I8f 5), and, thanks to Fouchs treachery, the triumphal progress of Milan, Rome, Naples, Vienna, Berlin, and even of Moscow, wa to end at St Helena.
The consequences of the Hundred Days were very serious France was embroiled with all Europe, though Talleyrand clever diplomacy had succeeded in causing divisio:
over Saxony and Poland by the secret Austro-Anglc French alliance of the 3rd of January 1815, and th Coalition destroyed both Frances pol~tical independence an national integrity by the treaty of peace of November 20th she found herself far weaker than before the Revolution, and i:
the power of the European Alliance. The Hundred Day divided the nation itself into two irreconcilable parties: on ultra-royalist, eager for vengeance and retaliation, refusing t accept the Charter; the other imperialist, composed of Bona partists and Republicans, incensed by their defeatof whor Branger was the Tyrtaeusboth parties equally revolutionar and equally obstinate. Louis XVIII., urged by his more ferven supporters towards th~ ancien rgime, gave his policy an exactl contrary direction; he had common-sense enough to maintaij the Empires legal and administrative tradition, accepting it institutions of the Legion of Honor, the Bank, the University and the imperial nobilitymodifying only formally certai] rights and the conscription, since these had aroused the natioi against Napoleon. He even went so far as to accept advice fron the imperial ministers Talleyrand and Fouch. Finally, as th chief political organization had become thoroughly demoralized he imported into France the entire constitutional system o England, with its three powers, king, upper hereditary chambef and lower elected chamber; with its plutocratic electorate and even with details like the speech from the throne, th debate on the address, &c. This meant importing also clifficultie such as ministerial responsibility, as well as electoilal and pres legislation.
Louis XVIII., taught by time and misfortune. wished not ti reign over two parties exasperated by contrary passions am desires; but his dynasty was from the outset implicated in th struggle, which was to be fatal to it, between old France am revolutionary France. Anti-monarchical, liberal and anti clerical France at once recommenced its revolutionary work the whole 19th century was to be filled with great spasmodi upheavals, and Louis XVIII. was soon overwhelmed by th White Terrorists of 1815.
Vindictive sentences against men like Ney and Labdoyr were followed by violent and unpunished action by the Whit Terror, which in the south renewed the horrors of St Bartholome~ and the September massacres. The elections of August 14 1815, made under the influence of these royalist and religiou:
passions, sent the C/sombre introuvable to Paris, an unforeseer revival of the ancien rgime. Neither the substitution of thi due de Richelieus ministry for that of Talleyrand and Fouch nor a whole series of repressive laws in violation of the charter were successful in satisfying its tyrannical loyalism, and Loui:
XVIII. needed something like a coup detat, in September 1816 to rid himself of the ultras.
He succeeded fairly well in quieting the opposition betweel the dynasty and the constitution, until a reaction took placi The Con- between 1820 and 1822. State departments workec stitulional regularly and well, under the direction of Decazes partys Lam, De Serre and Pasquier, power aiternatin~ rule, between two great well-disciplined parties almost ir the English fashion, and many useful measures were passed the reconstruction of finance stipulated for as a condition 0:
evacuation of territory occupied by foreign troops; the electora law of February 5, 1817, which, by means of direct electior and a qualification of three hundred francs, renewed the pre ponderance of the bourgeoisie; the Gouvion St-Cyr law 01 1818, which for half a century based the recruiting of thf French army on the national principle of conscription; and ir 1819, after Richelieus dismissal, liberal regulations for the press under control of a commission. But the advance of the Libera movement, and the election of the generalsFoy, Lamarque Lafayette and of Manuel, excited the ultras and caused th dismissal of Richelieu; while that of the constitutional bishop Grgoire led to the modification in a reactionary direction ofth~ electoral law of 1817. The assassination of the duc de Berry I second son of the comte dArtois (attributed to the influence o~
i Liberal ideas), caused the downfall of flecazes, and caused th - kingmore weak and selfish than everto override the charter and embark upon a reactionary path. After 1820, Madame dt I Cayla, a trusted agent of the ultra-royalist party, gained great influence over the king; and M. de The r Villle, its leader, supported by the kings brother, ~8
soon eliminated the Right Centre by the dismissal of the duc de Richelieu, who had been recalled to tide over th crisisjust as the fall of M. Decazes had signalized the defeal - of the Left Centre (December 15, 1821)and moderate policy i thus received an irreparable blow.
Thenceforward the government of M. dc Villlea clever statesman, but tied to his partydid nothing for six years bul promulgate a long series of measures against Liberalism and thc The suspension of individual liberty, the re-establishment of thi i censorship; the electoral right of the double vote, favlourinf taxation of the most oppressive kind; and the handing over i of education to the clergy: these were the first achievement~ of this anti-revolutionary ministry. The Spanish expedition, ir which M. de Villles hand was forced by Montmorency and F Chateaubriand, was the united work of the association 01
Catholic zealots known as the Congregation and of the autocratic powers of the Grand Alliance; it was responded toas at Napler and in Spainby secret Carbonari societies, and by severely repressed military conspiracies. Politics now bore the doubk imprint of two rival powers: the Congregation and Carbonarism, By 1824, nevertheless, the dynasty seemed firmthe Spanish War had reconciled the army, by giving back military prestige I the Liberal opposition had been decimated; revolutionary conspiracies discouraged; and the increase of public credit and material prosperity pleased the whole nation, as was proved by the Chambre retrouve of 1824. The law of septennial elections tranquillized public life by suspending any legal or regular manifestation by the nation for seven years.
It was the monarchy which next became revolutionary, or the accession of Charles X. (September 16, 1824). This incon~ sistent prince soon exhausted his popularity, and Ch.sles X remained the fanatical head of those migrs who had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. While the opposition became conservative as regards the Charter and French liberties, the king and the clerical party surrounding him challenged th~ spirit of modern France by a law against sacrilege, by a bill for re-establishing the right of primogeniture, by an indemnity of a milliard francs, which looked like cofjipensation given to thi migrs, and finally by the loi de libert et damour against th press. The challenge was so definite that in 1826 the Chamber of Peers and the Academy had to give the Villle ministry a lesson in Liberalism, for having lent itself to this ancien rgime reaction by its weakness and its party-promises. The elections de colre et de vengeance of January 1827 gave the Left VIcfo,~ ol a majority, and the resultant short-lived Martignac the conministry tried to revive the Right Centre which had stifutioni supported Richelieu and Decazes (January 1828). ~
Martignacs accession to power, however, had only meant personal concessions from Charles X., not any concession of principle: he supported his ministry but was no rca] stand-by. The Liberals, on the other hand, made bargains for supporting the moderate royalists, and Charles X. profited by this to form a fighting ministry in conjunction with the prince d~ Polignac, one of the migrs, an ignorant and visionary person, and the comte de Bourmont, the traitor of Waterloo. Despitt all kinds of warnings, the former tried by a coup detat to put intc practice his theories of the supremacy of the royal prerogative:
and the battle of Navarino, the French occupation of the Morea, and the Algerian expedition could not make the nation forgel this conflict at home. The united opfosition of monarchisi Liberals and imperialist republicans responded by legal resistance, then by a popular coup detat, to the ordinances of July 1830, which dissolved the intractable Chamber, elimiThe MI nated licensed dealers from the electoral list, and On muzzled the press. After fighting for three days against the troops feebly led by the Marniont of 1814, the workmen, driven to the barricades by the deliberate closing of Liberal workshops, gained the victory, and sent the white flag of the Bourbons on the road to exile.
The rapid success of the Three Glorious Days (les Trois Glorieuses), as the July Days were called, put the leaders of the ~epul,n- parliamentaryopposition into an embarrassing position. can and While they had contented themselves with words, Orleanist the small Republican-Imperialist party, aided by the parties. almost entire absence of the army and police, and by the convenience which the narrow, winding, paved streets of those times offered for fighting, had determined upon the revolution and brought it to pass. But the Republican party, which desired to re-establish the Republic of 1793, recruited chiefly from among the students and workmen, and led by Godefroy Cavaignac, the son of a Conventionalist, and by the chemist Raspail, had no hold on the departments nor on the dominating opinion in Paris. Consequently this premature attempt was promptly seized upon by the Liberal bourgeoisie and turned to the advantage of the Orleanist party, which had been secretly organized since 1829 under the leadership of Thiers, with the National as its organ. Before the struggle was yet over, Benjamin Constant, Casimir Prier, Lafitte, and Odilon Barrot had gone to fetch the duke of Orleans from Neuilly, and on receiving his promise to defend the Charter and the tricolour flag, installed him at the Palais Bourbon as lieutenant-general of the realm, while La Fayette and the Republicans established themselves at the Hotel de Vile.
An armed conflict between the two governments was ~hO:pe. imminent, when Lafayette, by giving his support to Louis Philippe, decided matters in his favor. In order to avoid a recurrence of the difficulties which had arisen with the Bourbons, the following preliminary conditions were imposed upon the king: the recognition of the supremacy of the people by the title of king of the French by the grace of God and the will of the people, the responsibility of ministers, the suppression of hereditary succession to the Chamber of Peers, now reduced to the rank of a council of officials, the suppression of article 14 of the charter which had enabled Charles X. to supersede the laws by means of the ordinances, and the liberty of the press. The qualification for electors was lowered from 300 to 200 francs, and that for eligibility from boo to 500 francs, and the age to 25 and 30 instead of 30 and 40; finally, Catholicism lost its privileged position as the state religion. The bourgeois National Guard was made the guardian of the charter. The liberal ideas of the son of Philippe Egalit, the part he had played at Valmy and Jemappes, his gracious manner and his domestic virtues, all united in winning Louis Philippe the good opinion of the public.
He now believed, as did indeed the great majority of the electors, that the revolution of 1830 had changed nothing but the head of the state. But in reality the July monarchy The was affected by a fundamental weakness. It sought bourgeois monarchy, to model itself upon the English monarchy, which rested upon one long tradition. But the tradition of France was both twofold and contradictory, i.e. the Catholiclegitimist and the revolutionary. Louis Philippe had them both against him. His monarchy had but one element in common with the English, namely, a parliament elected by a limited electorate. There was at this time a cause of violent outcry against the English monarchy, which, on the other hand, met with firm support among the aristocracy and the clergy. The July monarchy had no such support. The aristocracy of the ancien rgime and of the Empire were alike without social influence; the clergy, which had paid for its too close alliance with Charles X. by a dangerous unpopularity, and foresaw the rise of democracy, was turning more and more towards the people, the future source of all power. Even the monarchical principle itself had suffered from the shock, having proved by its easy defeat how far it could be brought to capitulate. Moreover, the victory of the people, who had showfi themselves in the late struggle to be brave and disinterested, had won for the idea of national supremacy a power which was bound to increase. The difficulty of the situation lay in the doubt as to whether this expansion would take place gradually and by a progressive evolution, as in England, or not.
Now Louis Philippe, beneath the genial exterior of a bourgeois and peace-loving king, was entirely bent upon recovering an authority which was menaced from the very first on the one hand by the anger of the royalists at their failures, and on the other hand by the impatience of the republicans to follow up their victory. He wanted the insurrection to stop at a change in the reigning family, whereas it had in fact revived the revolutionary tradition, and restored to France the sympathies of the nationalities and democratic parties oppressed by Metternichs system. The republican party, which had retired from power but not from activity, at once faced the new king with the serious problem of the acquisition of political power by the people, and continued to remind him of it. He put himself at the head of the party of progress (parti du mouvement) as opposed to the (parti de la cour) court party, and of the resistance, which considered that it was now necessary to check the revolution in order to make it fruitful, and in order to save it. But none of these parties were homogeneous; in the chamber they split up into a republican or radical Extreme Left, led by Gamier-Pages and ~ Arago; a dynastic Left, led by the honorable and sincere Odilon Barrot; a constitutional Right Centre and Left Centre, differing in certain slight respects, and presided over respectively by Thiers, a wonderful political orator, and Guizot, whose ideas were those of a strict doctrinaire; not to mention a small party which clung to the old legitimist creed, and was dominated by the famous avocat Berryer, whose eloquence was the chief ornament of the cause of Charles X.s grandson, the comte de Chambord. The result was a ministerial majority which was always uncertain; and the only occasion on which Guizot succeeded in consolidating it during seven years resulted in the overthrow of the monarchy.
Louis Philippe first summoned to power the leaders of the party of movement, Dupont de lEure, and afterwards Lafitte, in order to keep control of the progressive forces for his own ends. They wished to introduce democratic reforms and to uphold throughout Europe th,e revolution, which had spread from France into Belgium, Germany, Italy and Poland, while Paris was still in a state of unrest. But Louis Philippe took fright at the attack on the Chamber of Peers after the trial of the ministers of Charles X., at the sack of the church of Saint Germain lAuxerrois and the archbishops palace (February, 1831), and at the terrible strike of the silk weavers at Lyons. Casimir Prier, who was both a Liberal and a believer in a strong government, was then charged with the task of heading the resistance to advanced ideas, and applying the principle of non-intervention in foreign affairs (March 13, 1831). After his death by cholera in May 1832, the agitation which he had succeeded by his energy in checking at Lyons, at Grenoble and in the Vende, where it had been stirred up by the romantic duchess of Berry, began to gain ground. The struggle against the republicans was still longer; for having lost all their chance of attaining power by means of the Chamber, they proceeded to reorganize themselves into armed secret societies. The press, which was gaining that influence over public opinion which had been lost by the parliamentary debates, openly attacked the government and the king, especially by means of caricature. Between 1832 and 1836 the Soult ministry, of which Guizot, Thiers and the duc de Broglie were members, J~,z had to combat the terrible insurrections in Lyons that and Paris (1834). The measures of repression were threefold: military repression, carried out by the National Guard and the regulars, both under the command of Bugeaud; judicial repression, effected by the great trial of April I835;
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 Prier had carried a law dealing with municipal bourgeois organization, which made the municipal councils policy, elective, as they had been before the year VIII.; and in 1833 Guizot had completed it by making the conseils gnraux 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 rgime maintained a fiscal and social legislation which, while it assured to the middle class certainty and permanence of benefits, left the laboring 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 T to be given. The Left Centre, led by Thiers, held socialist that he should reign but not govern; the Right party. Centre, led by Guizot, would admit him to an active part in the government; and the third party (tiersparti) wavered between these two. And so between 1836 and 1840, as the struggle against the kings 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 Barbs, 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 Socit 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 pseudoliberalism of the Church. The movement had now begun.
At first these moderate republicans, radical or communist, formed only imperceptible groups. Among the peasant classes, The and even in the industrial centres, warlike passions Bona- were still rife. Louis Philippe tried to find an outlet for them in the Algerian war, and later by the 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 opposition George III. and George IV. of England had done, to the especially in foreign affairs, while at home was being Z~er. waged the great duel between Thiers and Guizot, with Mole 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 Mole to form a ministry, he would be better able to make his personal authority felt. From 1837 to 1839 Mole 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 Mole was defeated by Thiers, Guizot and Barrot, who had combined to oppose the tyranny of the Chteau, and after a long ministerial crisis was replaced by Thiers (March 1, 1840). But the latter was too much in favor 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 j5th of July 1840, he fortified Paris and proclaimed his intention to give armed support to Mehemet Ali, the ally of France (see MEHEMET ALl). 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 longrun 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 ~fgt, politics and unpopular measures in home affairs. The 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 rgime 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 legal, 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 honorable 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 iilterest 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, Eugene 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 Cubires, and such mysterious crimes as that of Choiseul~PrasIin,i 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.
i Charles Laure Hugues Thobald, duc de Choiseul-Praslin (1805 I847), 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 childrens 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.
It was in vain that beneath the inflated haute bourgeoisie which speculated in railways and solidly supported the Church, behind the shopkeeper clique who still remained Voltairian, who enviously applauded the pamphlets of Cormenin on the luxury of the court, and who were bitterly satirized by the pencil of Daumier and Gavarni, did the thinkers give voice to the mutterings of an immense industrial proletariat, which were re-echoing throughout the whole of western Europe.
In face of this tragic contrast Guizot remained unmoved, blinded by the superficial brilliance of apparent success and prosperity. He adorned by flights of eloquence his auizoes invariable theme: no new laws, no reforms, no foreign ~ complications, the policy of material interests. He preserved his yielding attitude towards Great Britain in the affair of the right of search in 1841, and in the affair of the missionary Pritchard at Tahiti (1843-1845). And when the marriage of the duc de Montpensier with a Spanish infanta in 1846 had broken this entente cordiale to which he clung, it was only to yield in turn to Metternich, when he took possession of Cracow, the last remnant of Poland, to protect the Sonderbund in Switzerland, to discourage the Liberal ardour of Pius IX., and to hand over the education of France to the Ultramontane clergy. Still further strengthened by the elections of 1846, he refused the demands of the Opposition formed by a coalition of the Left Centre and the Radical party for parliamentary and electoral reform, which would have excluded the officials from the Chambers, reduced the electoral qualification to xoo francs, and added to the number of the electors the capacaires whose competence was guaranteed by their education. For Guizot the whole country was represented by the pays legal, consisting of the king, the ministers, the deputies and the electors. When the Opposition appealedtothe country, campaign he flung down a disdainful challenge to what les ~anq~~ets. brouillons et les badauds appellent le peuple. The challenge was taken up by all the parties of the Opposition in the campaign of the banquets got up somewhat artificially in 1847 in favor of the extension of the franchise. The monarchy had arrived at such a state of weakness and corruption that a determined minority was sufficient to overthrow it. The prohibition of a last banquet in Paris precipitated the catastrophe. The monarchy which for fifteen years had overcome its adversaries collapsed on the 24th of February 1848 to the astonishment of all.
The industrial population of the faubourgs on its way towards the centre of the town was welcomed by the National Guard, The Re- among cries of Vive la rforme. Barricades were voiution raised after the unfortunate incident of the firing on of Feb. 24, the crowd in the Boulevard des Capucines. On the 1848.23rd Guizots cabinet resigned, abandoned by the petite bourgeoisie, on whose support they thought they could depend. The heads of the Left Centre and the dynastic Left, Mole and Thiers, declined the offered leadership. Odilon Barrot accepted it, and Bugeaud, commander-in-chief of the first military division, who had begun to attack the barricades, was recalled. But it was too late. In face of the insurrection which had now taken possession of the whole capital, Louis Philippe decided to abdicate in favor of his grandson, the comte de Paris. But it was too late also to be content with the regency of the duchess of Orleans. It was now the turn of the Republic, and it was proclaimed by Lamartine in the name of the provisional government elected by the Chamber under the pressure of the mob.
This provisional government with Dupont de lEure as its president, consisted of Lamartine for foreign affairs, Crmieux The Pie- for justice, Ledru-Rollin for the interior, Carnot for visional public instruction, Gondchaux for finance, Arago for Govern the navy, and Bedeau for war. Gamier-Pages was ment. mayor of Paris. But, as in 1830, the republican- socialist party had set up a rival government at the Hotel de Ville, including L. Blanc, A. Marrast, Flocon, and the workman Albert, which bid fair to involve discord and civil war. But this time the Palais Bourbon was not victorious over the HOtel de Vile. It had to consent to a fusion of the two bodies, in which, however, the predominating elements were the moderate republicans. It was doubtful what would eventually be the policy of the new government. One party, seeing that in spite of the changes in the last sixty years of all political institutions, the position of the people had not been improved, demanded a reform of society itself, the abolition of the privileged position of property, the only obstacle to equality, and as an emblem hoisted the red flag. The other party wished to maintain society on the basis of its ancient institutions, and rallied round the tricolour.
The first collision took place as to the form which the revolution of 1848 was to take. Were they to remain faithful to their original principles, as Lamartine wished, and accept Universal the decision of the country as supreme, or were they, suffrage.
as the revolutionaries under Ledru-Rollin claimed, to declare the republic of Paris superior to the universal suffrage of an insufficiently educated people? On the 5th of March the government, under the pressure of the Parisian clubs, decided in favor of an immediate reference to the people, and direct universal suffrage, and adjourned it till the 26th of April. In this fateful and unexpected decision, which instead of adding to the electorate the educated classes, refused by Guizot, admitted to it the unqualified masses, originated the Constituent Assembly of the 4th of May 1848. The provisional government having resigned, the republican and anti-socialist majority on the 9th of May entrusted the supreme power to an executive The commission consisting of five members: Arago, Executive Marie, Gamier-Pages, Lamartine and Ledru-Rollin. Conimis. But the spell was already broken. This revolution sion.
which had been peacefully effected with the most generous aspirations, in the hope of abolishing poverty by organizing industry on other bases than those of competition and capitalism, and which had at once aroused the fraternal sympathy of the nations, was doomed to be abortive.
The result of the general election, the return of a constituent assembly predominantly moderate if not monarchical, dashed the hopes of those who had looked for the establishment, by a peaceful revolution, of their ideal socialist state; but they were not prepared to yield without a struggle, and in Paris itself they commanded a formidable force. In spite of the preponderance of the tricolour party in the provisional government, so long as the voice of France had not spoken, the socialists, supported by the Parisian proletariat, had exercised an influence on policy out of all proportion to their relative numbers or personal weight. By the decree of the 24th of February the provisional government had solemnly accepted the principle of the right to work, and decided to establish national workshops for the unemployed; at the same time a sort of industrial parliament was established at the Luxembourg, under the presidency of Louis Blanc, with the object of preparing a scheme for the organization of labor; and, lastly, by the decree of the 8th of March the property qualification for enrolment in the National Guard had been abolished and the workmen were supplied with arms. Tne socialists thus formed, in some sort, a state within the state, witii a government, an organization and an armed force.
In the circumstances a conflict was inevitable; and on the I5th of May an armed mob, headed by Raspail, Blanqui and Barbs, and assisted by the proletariat Guard, attempted to overwhelm the Assembly. They were defeated by the bourgeois battalions of the National Guard; but the situation none the less remained highly critical. The national workshops were producing the results that might have been foreseen. It was impossible to provide remunerative work even for the genuine unemployed, and of the thousands who applied the greater number were employed in perfectly useless digging and refilling; soon even this expedient failed, and those for whom work could not be invented were given a half wage of 1 franc a day. Even this pitiful dole, with no obligation to work, proved attractive, and all over France workmen threw up their jobs and streamed to Paris, where they swelled the ranks of the army under the red flag. It was soon clear that the continuance of this experiment would mean financial ruin; it had been proved by the meute of the 15th of May that it constituted a perpetual menace to the state; and the government decided to end it. The method chosen was scarcely a happy one. On the 21st of June M. de Falloux decided in the name of the parliamentary commission on labor that the workmen should be discharged within three days and such as were able-bodied should be forced to enlist.
A furious insurrection at once broke out. Throughout The June D2-s. the whole of the 24th, 25th and 26th of June, the eastern industrial quarter of Paris, led by Pujol, carried on a furious struggle against the western quarter, led by Cavaignac, who had been appointed dictator. Vanquished and decimated, first by fighting and afterwards by deportation, the socialist party was crushed. But they dragged down the Republic in their ruin. This had already become unpopular with the peasants, exasperated by the newland tax of 45 centimes imposed in order to fill the empty treasury, and with the bourgeois, in terror of the power of the revolutionary clubs and hard hit by the stagnation of business. By the massacres of the June Days the working classes were also alienated from it; and abiding fear of the Reds did the rest. France, wrote the duke of Wellington at this time, needs a Napoleon! I cannot yet see him. .. Where is he? 1
France indeed needed, or thought she needed, a Napoleon; and the demand was soon to be supplied. The granting of universal suffrage to a society with Imperialist ~ sympathies, and unfitted to reconcile the principles of 1848. of order with the consequences of liberty, was indeed - bound, now that the political balance in France was so radically changed, to prove a formidable instrument of reaction; and this was proved by the election of the president of the Republic. On the 4th of November 1848 was promulgated the new constitution, obviously the work of inexperienced hands, proclaiming a democratic republic, direct universal suffrage and the separation of powers; there was to be a single permanent assembly of 750 members elected for a term of three years by the scrutin de liste, which was to vote on the laws prepared by a council of state elected by the Assembly for six years; the executive power was delegated to a president elected for four years by direct universal suffrage, i.e. on a broader basis than that of the chamber, and not eligible for re-election; he was to choose his ministers, who, like him, would be responsible. Finally, all revision was made impossible since it involved obtaining three times in succession a majority of three-quarters of the deputies in a special assembly. It was in vain that M. Grvy, in the name of those who perceived the obvious and inevitable risk of creating, under the name of a president, a monarch and more than a king, proposed that the head of the state should be no more than a removable president of the ministerial council. Lamartine, thinking that he was sure to be the choice of the electors under universal suffrage, won over the support of the Chamber, which did not even take the precaution of rendering ineligible the members of families which had reigned over France. It made the presidency an office dependent upon popular acclamation.
The election was keenly contested; the socialists adopted as their candidate Ledru-Rollin, the republicans Cavaignac; 1. and the recently reorganized Imperialist party Prince Na,o:Ieon. Bonaparte. Louis Napoleon, unknown in 1835, and forgotten or despised since 1840, had in the last eight years advanced sufficiently in the public estimation to be elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1848 by five departments. He owed this rapid increase of popularity partly to blunders of the government of July, which had unwisely aroused the memory of the country, filled as it was with recollections of the Empire, and partly to Louis Napoleons campaign carried on from his prison at Ham by means of pamphlets of socialistic tendencies. Moreover, the monarchists, led by Thiers and the committee of the Rue de Poitiers, were no longer content even with the safe dictatorship of the upright Cavaignac, and joined forces with the Bonapartists. On the 10th of December the peasants gave over 5,000,000 votes to a name: Napoleon, which stood for order at all costs, against 1,400,000 for Cavaignac.
IT. T. de Martens, Recuell des traites, &c., xii. 248.
For three~years there went on an indecisive struggle between the heterogeneous Assembly and the prince who was silently awaiting his opportunity. He chose as his ministers men but little inclined towards republicanism, for preference Orleanists, the chief of whom was Odilon Barrot. In order to strengthen his position, he endeavoured to conciliate the reactionary parties, without committing himself to any of them. The chief instance of this was the expedition to Rome, voted by the Catholics with the object of restoring the papacy, which had been driven out by Garibaldi and Mazzini. The prince-president was also in favor of it, as beginning the work of European renovation and reconstruction which he already looked upon as his mission. General Oudinots entry into Rome provoked in Paris a foolish insurrection in favor of the Roman republic, that of the Chteau dEau, which wascrushed on the 13th of June 1849. On the other hand, when Pius IX., though only just restored, began to yield to the general movement of reaction, the president demanded that he should set up a Liberal gojzernment. The popes dilatory reply having been accepted by his ministry, the president replaced it on the 1st of November by the Fould-.Rouher cabinet.
This looked like a declaration of war against the Catholic and monarchist majority in the Legislative Assembly which had been elected on the 28th of May in a moment of panic. But the prince-president again pretended to be The Legisplaying the game of the Orleanists, as he had done .~ffsmb1y. in the case of the Constituent-Assembly. The complementary elections of March and April 1850 having resulted in an unexpected victory for the ttdvanced republicans, which struck terror into the reactionary leaders, Thiers, Berryer and Montalembert, the president gave his countenance to a clerical campaign against the republicans at home. The Church, which had failed in its attempts to gain control of the university under Louis XVIII. and Charles X,, aimed at setting up a rival establishment of its own. The Loi Falloux of the 1~th of March 1850, under the pretext of establishing the liberty F~~1ux. of instruction promised by the charter, again placed the teaching of the university under the direction of the Catholic Church, as a measure of social safety, and, by the facilities which it granted to the Church for propagating teaching in harmony with its own dogmas, succeeded in obstructing for half a century the work of intellectual enfranchisement effected by the men of the 18th century and of the Revolution, The electoral law of the 31st of May was another class law directed against subversive ideas. It required as a proof of Electors) three years domicile the entries in the record of direct taxes, thus cutting down universal suffrage by taking away the vote from the industrial population, which was not as a rule stationary. The law of the 16th of July aggravated the severity of the press restrictions by re-establishing the caution money (cautionnement) deposited by proprietors and editors of papers with the government as a guarantee of good behaviour. Finally, a skilful interpretatien of the law on clubs and political societies suppressed about this time all the Republican societies. It was now their turn to be crushed like the socialists.
But the president had only joined in Montalemberts cry of l)own with the Republicans! in the hope of effecting a revision of the constitution without having recourse to a coup detat. His concessions only increased the boldness of the monarchists; while they had only the Presiaccepted Louis Napoleon as president in opposition dent and to the Republic and as a step in the direction of the ~~eWbJi monarchy. A conffict was now inevitable between his personal policy and the majority of the Chamber, who were1 moreover, divided into legitimists and Orleanists, in spite of the death of Louis Philippe in August I85. Louis Napoleon skilfully exploited their projects for a restoration of the monarchy, which he knew to be unpopular in the country, and which gave him the opportunity of, furthering his own personal ambitions. From the 8th of August to the 12th of November 1850 he went about France stating the case for a revisiOn of the constitution in speeches which he varied according to each place; he held reviews, at which cries of Vive Napoleo-n showed that the army was with him; he superseded General Changarnier, on whose arms the parliament relied for the projected monarchical coup detat; he replaced his Orleanist ministry by obscure men devoted to his own cause, such as Morny, Fleury and Persigny, and gathered round him officers of the African army, broken men like General Saint-Arnaud; in fact he practically declared open war.
His reply to the votes of censure passed by the Assembly, and their refusal to increase his civil list, -was to hint at a vast communistic plot in order to scare the bourgeoisie, and to denounce Coup the electoral law of the 31st of May in order to gain. the dEtat of support of the mass of the people. The Assembly reDec. 2, taliated by throwing out the proposal for a partial ~ reform of that article of the constitution which prohibited the re-election of the president and the re-establishment of universal suffrage (July). All hope of a peaceful issue was at an end. When the questors called upon the Chamber to have posted up in all barracks the decree of the 6th of May 1848 concerning the right of the Assembly to demand the support of the troops if attacked, the Mountain, dreading a restoration of the monarchy, voted with the Bonapartists against the measure, thus disarming the legislative power. Louis Napoleon saw his opportunity. On the night between. the 1st and 2nd of December 1851, the anniversary of Austerlitz, he dissolved the Chamber, re-established universal suffrage, had all the party leaders arrested, and summoned a new assembly to prolong his term of office for ten years. The deputies who had met under Berryer at the Maine of the tenth arrondissement to defend the constitution and proclaim the deposition of Louis Napoleon were scattered by the troops at Mazas and Mont Valrian. The resistance organized by the republicans within Paris under Victor Hugo was soon subdued by the intoxicated soldiers. The more serious resistance in the departments was crushed by declaring a state of siege and by the mixed commissions. The plebiscite of the 20th of December ratified by a huge majority the coup d tat in favor of the prince-president, who alone reaped the benefit of the excesses of the Republican.s and the reactionary passions of the monarchists.
The second attempt to revive the principle of 1789 only served as a preface to the restoration of the Empire. The new anti- parliamentary constitution of the I4th of January Second 1852 was to a large extent merely a repetition of that Empire. of the year VIII. All executive power was entrusted to the head of the state, who was solely responsible to the people, now powerless to exercise any of their rights. He was to nominate the members of the council of state, whose duty it was to prepare the laws, and of the senate, a body permanently established as a constituent part of the empire. One innovation was made, namely, that the Legislative Body was elected by universal suffrage, but it had no right of initiative, all laws being proposed by the executive power. This new and violent political change was rapidly followed by the same consequence as had attended that of Brumaire. On the 2nd of December 1852, France, still under the effect of the Napoleonic virus, and the fear of anarchy, conferred almost unanimously by a plebiscite the supreme power, with the title of emperor, upon Napoleon III.
But though the machinery, of government was almost the same under the Second Empire as it had been under the First, the principles upon which its founder based it were different. The function of the Empire, as he loved to repeat, was to guide the people internally towards justice and externally towards perpetual peace. Holding his power by universal suffrage, and having frequently, from his prison or in exile, reproached former oligarchical governments with neglecting social ,~uestions, he set out to solve them by organizing a system of government based on the principles of the Napoleonic Idea, i.e. of the emperor, the elect of the people as the representative of the democracy, and as such supreme; and of himself, the representative of the great Napoleon, who had sprung armed from the Revolution like Minerva from the head of Jove, as the guardian of the social gains of the revolutionary epoch. But he sood proved that social justice did not mean liberty; for he acted in such a way that those of the principles of 1848 which he had preserved became a mere sham. He proceeded to paralyze all those active national forces which tend to create the public spirit of a people, such as parliament, universal suffrage, the press, education and associations. The Legislative Body was not allowed either to elect its own president or to regulate its own procedure, or to propose a law or an amendment, or to vote on the budget in detail, or to make its deliberations public. It was a dumb parliament. Similarly, universal suffrage was supervised and controlled by means of official candidature, by forbidding free speech and action in electoral matters to the Opposition, and by a skilful adjustment of the electoral distticts in such a way as to overwhelm the Liberal vote in the mass of the rural population. The press was subjected to a system of cautionnements, i.e. caution money, deposited as a guarantee of good behaviour, and avertissemenis, i.e. requests by the authorities to cease publication of certain articles, under pain of suspension or suppression; while books were subject to a censorship. France was like a sickroom, where nobody might speak aloud. In order: to counteract the opposition of individuals, a surveillance of suspects was instituted. Orsinis attack on the emperor in 1858, though purely Italian in its motive, served as a pretext for increasing the severity of this rgime by the law of general security (s-4ret generale) which authorized the internment, exile or deportation of any suspect without trial. In the same way public instruction was strictly supervised, the teaching of philosophy was suppressed in the Lyces, and the disciplinary powers of the administration were increased. In fact for seven years France had no political life. The Empire was carried on by a series of plebiscites. Up to 1857 the Opposition did not exist; from then till 1860 it was reduced to five members: Darimon, Emile Ollivier, Hnon, J. Favre and E. Picard. The royalists waited inactive after the new and unsuccessful attempt made at Frohsdorf in 1853, by a combination of the legitimists and Orleanists, to re-create a living monarchy out of the ruin of two royal families. Thus the events of that ominous night in December were closing the future to the new generations as well as to those who had grown up during forty years of liberty.
But it was not enough to abolish liberty by conjuring up the spectre of demagogy. It had to be forgotten, the great silence had to be covered by the noise of festivities and material Material enjoyment, the imagination of the French people had prosperity to be distracted from public affairs by the taste for a conwork, the love of gain, the passion for good living. dition of The success of the imperial despotism, as of any other, des,ootism. was bound up with that material prosperity which would make all interests dread the thought of revolution. Napoleon III., therefore, looked for support to the clergy, the great -financiers, industrial magnates and landed proprietors. He revived on his own account the Let us grow rich of 1840. Under the influence of the Saint-Simonians and men of business great credit establishments were instituted and vast public works entered upon: the Credit foncier de France, the Credit mobilier, the conversion of the railways into six great companies between 1852 and 1857. The rage for speculation was increased by the inflow of Californian and Australian gold, and consumption was facilitated by a general fall in prices between 1856 and 1860, due to an economic revolution which was soon to overthrow the tariff wall, as it had done already in England. Thus French activity flourished exceedingly between 1852 and 1857, and was merely temporarily checked by the crisis of 1857. The universal Exhibition of i85~ was its culminating point. Art felt the effects of this increase of comfort and luxury. The great enthusiasms of the romantic period were over; philosophy became sceptical and literature merely amusing. The festivities of the court at Compigne set the fashion for the bourgeoisie, satisfied with this energetic government which kept such good guard over their bank balances.
If the Empire was strong, the emperor was weak. At once headstrong and a dreamer, he was full of rash plans, but irresolute in carrying them out. An absolute despot, he remained what his life had made him, a conspirator through the very mysticism of his mental habit, and a revolutionary by reason of his demagogic imperialism and his democratic chauvinism. In his ~apoIboo opinion the artificial work of the congress of Vienna, ~ involving the downfall of his own family and of France, ought to be destroyed, and Europe organized as a collection of great industrial states, united by communit3~ of interests and bound together by commercial treaties, and expressing this unity by periodical congresses presided over by himself, and by universal exhibitions. In this way he would reconciles the revolutionary principle of the supremacy of the people with historical tradition, a thing which neither the Restoration nor the July monarchy nor the Republic of 1848 had been able to achieve. Universal suffrage, the organization of Rumanian, Italian and German nationality, and commercial liberty; this was to be the work of the Revolution. But the creation of great states side by side with France brought with it the necessity for looking for territorial compensation elsewhere, and consequently for violating the principle of nationality and abjuring his system of economic peace. Napoleon III.s foreign policy was as contradictory as his policy in home affairs, LEmpire, cest la paix, was his cry; and he proceeded to make war.
So long as his power was not yet established, Napoleon III. made especial efforts to reassure European opinion, which had been made uneasy by his previous protestations cCmean against the treaties of 1815. The Crimean War, in war. which, supported by England and the king of Sardinia, he upheld against Russia the policy of the integrity of the Turkish empire, a policy traditional in France since Francis I., won him the adherence both of the old parties and and the Liberals. And this war was the prototype of all the rest. It was entered upon with no clearly defined military purpose, and continued in a hesitating way. This was the cause, after the victory of the allies at the Alma (September 14, 1854), of the long and costly siege of Sevastopol (September 8, 1855). Napoleon III., whose joy was at its height owing to the signature of a peace which excluded Russia from the Black Sea, and to the birth of the prince imperial, which ensured the continuation of his dynasty, thought that the time had arrived to make a beginning in applying his system. Count Walewski, his minister for foreign affairs, gave a sudden and unexpected extension of scope to the deliberations of the congress which met at Paris in 1856 by inviting the plenipotentiaries to consider the questions of Greece, Rome, Naples, &c. This motion contained the principle of all the upheavals which were to effect such changes in Europe between 1859 and 1871. It was Cavour and Piedmont who immediately benefited by it, for thanks to Napoleon III. they were able to lay the Italian question before an assembly of diplomatic Europe.
It was not Orsinis attack on the i4th of January 1858 which brought this question before Napoleon. It had never ceased to Th ~ occupy him since he had taken part in the patriotic in ietaLi~ conspiracies in Italy in his youth. The triumph of his armies in the East now gave him the power necessary to accomplish this mission upon which he had set his heart. The suppression of public opinion made it impossible for him -to be enlightened as to the conflict between the interests of the country and his own generous visions. The sympathy of all Europe was with Italy, torn for centuries past between so many masters; under Alexander II. Russia, won over since the interview of Stuttgart by the emperors generosity rather than conquered by armed force, offered no opposition to this act of justice; while England applauded it from the first. The emperor, divided between the empress Eugnie, who as a Spaniard and a devout Catholic was hostile to anything which might threaten the papacy, and Prince Napoleon, who as brother-in-law of Victor Emmanuel favored the cause of Piedmont, hoped to conciliate both sides by setting up an Italian federation, intending to reserve the presidency of it to Pope Pius IX., as a mark of respect to the moral authority of the Church. Moreover, the very difficulty of the undertaking appealed to the emperor, elated by his recent success in the Crimea. At the secret meeting between Napoleon and Count Cavour (July 20, 1858) the eventual armed intervention of France, demanded by Orsini before he mounted the scaffold, was definitely promised.
The ill-advised Austrian ultimatum demanding the immediate cessation of Piedmonts preparations for war precipitated the Italian expedition. On the 3rd of May 1859 Napoleon declared his intention of making Italy free from the Alps to the Adriatic. As he had done four years ago, france. he plunged into the war with no settled scheme and without preparation; he held out great hopes, but without reckoning what efforts would be necessary to realize them. Two months later, in spite of the victories of Montebello, Magenta and Solferino, he suddenly broke off, and signed the patched-up peace of Villafranca with Francis Joseph (July 9). Austria ceded Lombardy to Napoleon III., who in turn ceded it to Victor Emmanuel; Modena and Tuscany were restored to their respective dukes, the Romagna to the pope, now president of an Italian federation. The mountain had brought forth a mouse.
The reasons for this breakdown on the part of the emperor in the midst of his apparent triumph were many. Neither Magenta nor Solferino had been decisive battles.
Further, his idea of a federation was menaced by the revolutionary movement which seemed likely to drive pa~~-,bkm. out all the princes of central Italy, and to involve him in an unwelcome dispute with the French clerical party. Moreover, he had forgotten to reckon with the Germanic Confederation, which was bound to come to the assistance of Austria. The mobilization of Prussia on the Rhine, combined with military difficulties and the risk of a defeat in Venetian territory, rather damped his enthusiasm, and decided him to put an end to the war. The armistice fell upon the Italians as a bolt from the blue, convincing them that they had been betrayed; on all sides despair drove them to sacrifice their jealously guarded independence to national unity. On the one hand the Catholics were agitating throughout all Europe to obtain the independence of the papal territory; and the French republicans were protesting, on the other hand, against the abandonment of those revolutionary traditions, the revival of which they had hailed so enthusiastically. The emperor, unprepared for the turn which events had taken, attempted to disentangle this confusion by suggesting a fresh congress of the Powers, which should reconcile dynastic interests with those of the people. After a while he gave up the attempt and resigned himself to the position, his actions having had more wide-reaching results than he had wished. The treaty of ZUrich proclaimed the fallacious principle of nonintervention (November 10, 1859); and then, by the treaty of Turin of the 24th of May i86o, Napoleon threw over his illtimed confederation. He conciliated the mistrust of Great Britain by replacing Walewski, who was hostile to his policy, by Thouvenel, an anti-clerical and a supporter of the English alliance, and he counterbalanced the increase of the new Italian kingdom by the acquisition of Nice and Savoy. Napoleon, like all French governments, only succeeded in finding a provisional solution for the Italian problem.
But this solution would only hold good so long as the emperor was in a powerful position. Now this Italian war, in which he had given his support to revolution beyond the Alps, and, Catholk though unintentionally, compromised the temporal and propower of the popes, had given great offence to the t~ca anisE Catholics, to whose support the establishment of the ~fDOSI
Empire was largely due. A keen Catholic opposition sprang up, voiced in L. Veuillots paper the Univers, and was not silenced even by the Syrian expedition (1860) in favor of the Catholic Maronites, who were being persecuted by the Druses. On the other hand, the commercial treaty with Great Britain which was signed in January i86o, and which ratified the freetrade policy of Richard Cobden and Michael Chevalier, had brought upon French industry the sudden shock of foreign competition. Thus both Catholics and protectionists made the discovery that absolutism may be an excellent thing when it serves their ambitions or interests, but a bad thing when it is exercised at their expense. But Napoleon, in order to restore the prestige of the Empire before the newly-awakened hostility of public opinion, tried to gain from the Left the support which he had lost from the Right. After the return from Italy the general amnesty of the 16th of August 1859 had marked the evolution of the absolutist empire towards the liberal, and later parliamentary empire, which was to last for ten years.
Napoleon began by removing the gag which was keeping the country in silence. On the 24th of November 1860,- by a coup detat matured during his solitary meditations, ~erai like a conspirator in his love of hiding his mysterious Empire. thoughts even from his ministers, he granted to the Chambers the right to vote an address annually in answer to the speech from the throne, and to the press the right of reporting parliamentary debates. He counted on the latter concession to hold in check the growing Catholic opposition, which was becoming more and more alarmed by the policy of laissezfaire practised by the emperor in Italy. But the government majority already showed some signs of independence. The right o~ voting on the budget by sections, granted by the emperor in 1861, was a new weapon given to his adversaries. Everything conspired in their favor: the anxiety of those candid friends who were calling attention to the defective budget; the commercial crisis, aggravated by the American Civil War; and above all, the restless spirit of the emperor, who had annoyed his opponents in 1860 by insisting on an alliance with Great Britain in order forcibly to open the Chinese ports for trade, iii 1863 by his ill-fated attempt to put down a republic and set up a Latin empire in Mexico in favor of the archdukeMaximilian of Austria, and from 1861 to 1863 by embarking on colonizing experiments in Cochin China and Annam.
The same inconsistencies occurred in the emperors European. politics. The support which he had given to the Italian cause The had aroused the eager hopes of other nations. The policy of proclamation of the kingdom of Ital
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Chisholm, Hugh, General Editor. Entry for 'France History (2)'. 1911 Encyclopedia Britanica. https://www.studylight.org/encyclopedias/eng/bri/f/france-history-2.html. 1910.
