Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)
Page 85
Louis-Philippe had been handsome as a young man and remained graceful in age. Although not always approved of by the nation as a whole, he was liked by the common people. He knew how to please, he had the gift of charm. Majesty was something that he lacked; the crown sat uneasily on him as king, and white hair did not suit him as an old man. His manners were those of the old regime, his behaviour that of the new, a blend of the aristocrat and the bourgeois that suited 1830. He was the embodiment of a period of transition, preserving the old forms of pronunciation and spelling in the service of new modes of thought. He wore the uniform of the Garde Nationale like Charles X and the sash of the Légion d’honneur like Napoleon.
He seldom went to chapel, and never hunted or went to the opera, being thus quite uninfluenced by clerics, masters-of-hounds and ballet-dancers, which had something to do with his bourgeois popularity. He kept no Court. He walked out with an umbrella under his arm, and this umbrella was for a long time a part of his image. He was interested in building, in gardening, and in medicine; he bled a postillion who had a fall from his horse, and would no more have been separated from his lancet than Henri III was from his dagger. The royalists laughed at this absurdity, saying that he was the first king who had ever shed blood in order to cure.
In the charges levelled by history against Louis-Philippe there is a distinction to be drawn. There were three types of charge, against royalty as such, against his reign, and against the king as an individual, and they belong in separate categories. The suppression of democratic rights, the sidetracking of progress, the violent repression of public demonstrations, the use of armed force to put down insurrection, the smothering of the real country by legal machinery and legality only half-enforced, with a privileged class of three hundred thousand – all these were the acts of royalty. The rejection of Belgium; the over-harsh conquest of Algeria, more barbarous than civilized, like the conquest of India by the English; the bad faith at Abd-el-Kadir and Blaye; the suborning of Deutz and compensation of Pritchard – these were acts of the reign. And family politics rather than a national policy were the acts of the king.
As we see, when the charges are thus classified, those against the king are diminished. His great fault was that he was over-modest in the name of France.
Why was this?
Louis-Philippe was too fatherly a king. His settled aim, with which nothing might be allowed to interfere, of nursing a family in order to hatch out a dynasty, made him wary of all else; it induced in him an excess of caution quite unsuited to a nation with 14 July in its civic tradition and Austerlitz in its military history.
Apart from this, and setting aside those public duties which must always take precedence, there was Louis-Philippe’s profound personal devotion to his family, which was entirely deserved. They were an admirable domestic group in which virtue went hand-in-hand with talent. One of his daughters, Marie d’Orléans, made a name for herself as an artist, as Charles d’Orléans did as a poet Her soul is manifest in the statue which she named Joan of Arc. Two others of his sons drew from Metternich the following rhetorical tribute: ‘They are young men such as one seldom sees and princes such as one never sees.’
Without distortion or exaggeration, that is the truth about Louis-Philippe.
To be by nature the ‘prince égalité’, embodying in himself the contradiction between the Restoration and the Revolution; to possess those disturbing qualities of the revolutionary which in a ruler become reassuring – this was his good fortune in 1830. Never was the man more wholly suited to the event; the one partook of the other. Louis-Philippe was the mood of 1830 embodied in a man. Moreover he had this especial recommendation for the throne, that he was an exile. He had been persecuted, a wanderer and poor. He had lived by working. In Switzerland, that heir by apanage to the richest princedoms of France had sold an old horse to buy food. At Reichenau he had given lessons in mathematics while his sister Adelaide did embroidery and needlework. These things, in association with royal blood, won the hearts of the bourgeoisie. He had with his own hands destroyed the last iron cage at Mont Saint-Michel, built to the order of Louis XI and used by Louis XV. He was the comrade of Dumouriez and the friend of Lafayette; he had been a member of the Jacobin Club; Mirabeau had clapped him on the shoulder and Danton had addressed him as ‘young man’. In 1793, when he was twenty-four, he had witnessed, from a back bench in the Convention, the trial of Louis XVI, so aptly named ‘that poor tyrant’. The blind clairvoyance of the Revolution, shattering monarchy in the person of the king and the king with the institution of monarchy, almost unconscious of the living man crushed beneath the weight of the idea; the huge clamour of the tribunal-assembly; the harsh, questioning voice of public fury to which Capet could find no answer; the stupefied wagging of the royal head under that terrifying blast; the relative innocence of everyone involved in the catastrophe, those condemning no less than those condemned – he had seen all these things, he had witnessed that delirium. He had seen the centuries arraigned at the bar of the Convention, and behind the unhappy figure of Louis XVI, the chance-comer made scapegoat, he had seen the formidable shadow of the real accused, which was monarchy; and there lingered in his heart an awed respect for the huge justice of the people, nearly as impersonal as the justice of God.
The impression made on him by the Revolution was enormous. His memory was a living picture of those tremendous years, lived minute by minute. Once, in the presence of a witness whose word we cannot doubt, he recited from memory the names of all the members of the Constituent Assembly beginning with the letter A.
He was a king who believed in openness. During his reign the press was free and the law-courts were free, and there was freedom of conscience and of speech. The September laws were unequivocal. Though well aware of the destructive power of light shed upon the privileged, he allowed his throne to be fully exposed to public scrutiny, and posterity will credit him with this good faith.
Like all historic personages who have left the stage, Louis-Philippe now stands arraigned at the bar of public opinion, but his trial is still only that of the first instance. The time has not yet come when history, speaking freely and with a mature voice, will pass final judgement upon him. Even the austere and illustrious historian, Louis Blanc, has recently modified his first verdict. Louis-Philippe was elected by the approximation known as ‘the 221’ and the impulse of the year 1830 – that is to say, by a demi-parliament and a demi-revolution; and in any event, viewing him with the detachment proper to an historian, we may not pass judgement on him here without, as we have already seen, making certain reservations in the name of the absolute principle of democracy. By that absolute standard, and outside the two essential rights, in the first place that of the individual and in the second that of the people as a whole, all is usurpation. But what we can already say, subject to these reservations, is that all in all, and however we may view him, Louis-Philippe, judged as himself and in terms of human goodness, will be known, to adopt the language of ancient history, as one of the best princes who ever acceded to a throne.
What can be held against him except the throne itself? Dismissing the monarch, we are left with the man. And the man is good – good sometimes to the point of being admirable. Often, amid the heaviest perplexities, and after spending the day in battle with the diplomacy of a whole continent, he would return exhausted to his private apartments, and there, despite his fatigue, would sit up all night immersed in the details of a criminal trial, believing that, important though it was to hold his own against all Europe, it was still more important to save a solitary man from the executioner. He obstinately opposed his Keeper of the Seal and disputed every inch of the way the claims of the guillotine with the public prosecutors, those ‘legal babblers’ as he called them. The dossiers were sometimes piled high on his desk and he studied them all, finding it intolerable that he should neglect the case of any poor wretch condemned to death. On one occasion he said to the person we have already mentioned, ‘I rescued seven last night
.’ During the early years of his reign the death-penalty was virtually abolished; the erection of a public scaffold was an outrage to the king. But, the execution-place of La Grève having vanished with the senior branch of his family, a bourgeois Grève was instituted under the name of the Barrière Saint-Jacques. The ‘practical man’ felt the need of a more-or-less legitimate guillotine, and this was one of the triumphs of Casimir Perier, who stood for the bigoted side of the bourgeoisie, over Louis-Philippe, who stood for their liberalism. He annotated the case of Beccaria with his own hand, and after the Fieschi plot he exclaimed, ‘A pity I wasn’t wounded! I could have pardoned him.’ On another occasion, referring to the opposition of his ministers in the case of Barbès, one of the most noble figures of our time who was condemned to death in 1839 for his political activities, he wrote: ‘Sa grâce est accordée, il ne me reste plus qu’à l’obtenir.’*
For ourselves, in a tale wherein goodness is the pearl of rarest price, the man who was kind comes almost before the man who was great
Since Louis-Philippe has been severely judged by some, and perhaps over-harshly by others, it is only proper that a man who knew him, and today is himself a ghost, should bear witness on his behalf at the bar of History. His testimony, such as it is, is clearly and above all else disinterested. An epitaph written by the dead is sincere; a shade can console another shade, and living in the same shadows has the right to praise. There is little risk that anyone will say of those two exiles, ‘One flattered the other.’
IV
Flaws in the structure
At this moment, when our tale is about to plunge into the depths of one of those tragic clouds which obscure the beginning of Louis-Philippe’s reign, there can be no equivocation; it is essential that this book should state its position in respect of the king.
Louis-Philippe had assumed the royal authority without violence, without any positive act on his part, through a revolutionary chance which clearly had little to do with the real aims of the revolution, and in which, as Duke of Orléans, he had taken no personal initiative. He had been born a prince and believed that he was elected king. He had not conferred the mandate on himself or attempted to seize it. It had been offered him and he had accepted it in the conviction, certainly mistaken, that the offer was in accordance with the law and that to accept it was his duty. He held it in good faith. In all conscience we must declare that Louis-Philippe did occupy the throne in good faith, that democracy assailed him in good faith, and that neither side is to blame for the violence engendered by the struggle. A clash of principles is like a clash of elements, ocean fighting on the side of water, tempest on the side of air. The king defended monarchy and democracy defended the people; what was relative, which is monarchy, resisted what was absolute, which is democracy. Society shed blood in the conflict, but the present sufferings of society may later become its salvation. In any event, it is not for us to attribute blame to those who did the fighting. The right in the matter was not a Colossus of Rhodes with a foot on either side, monarchist and republican; it was indivisible and wholly on one side; but those who erred did so sincerely. The blind can no more be blamed than the partisans of La Vendée can be dismissed as brigands. Violent as the tempest was, human irresponsibility had a share in it.
Let me complete this account.
The government of 1830 was in trouble from the start, born on one day and obliged on the morrow to do battle. Scarcely was it installed than it began to feel the undertow of dissident movements directed against the newly erected and still insecure structure. Resistance was born the day after its installation, perhaps even the day before. Hostility increased month by month, and from being passive became active.
The July Revolution, little liked by the monarchs outside France, was in France subject to a variety of interpretations. God makes known His will to mankind through the event, an obscure text, written in cryptic language, which men instantly seek to decipher, producing hurried makeshift renderings filled with errors, gaps and contradictions. Very few minds are capable of reading the divine language. The wisest, calmest and most far-sighted go slowly to work, but by the time they produce their rendering the job has long been done and twenty different versions are on sale in the marketplace. Each interpretation gives birth to a political party, each contradiction to a political faction; and each party believes that it has the sole authentic gospel, each faction that it has its own light to shed.
Power itself is often no more than a faction. In all revolutions there are those who swim against the tide; they are the old political parties. To the old parties, wedded to the principle of heredity by Divine Right, it is legitimate to suppress revolution, since revolution is born of revolt. This is an error. The real party of revolt, in a democratic revolution, is not the people but the monarchy. Revolution is precisely the opposite of revolt. Every revolution, being a normal process, has its own legitimacy, sometimes dishonoured by false revolutionaries but which persists, even though sullied, and survives even though bloodstained. Revolutions are not born of chance but of necessity. A revolution is a return from the fictitious to the real. It happens because it had to happen.
Nevertheless the old legitimist parties assailed the 1830 revolution with all the venom engendered by false reasoning. Error provides excellent weapons. They attacked that revolution very shrewdly where it was most vulnerable, in the chink in its armour, its lack of logic; they attacked it for being monarchist. ‘Revolution,’ they cried to it, ‘why this king?’ Factions are blind men with a true aim.
The republicans uttered the same cry, but coming from them it was logical. What was blindness in the legitimists was clear-sightedness in the democrats. The 1830 revolution was bankrupt in the eyes of the people, and democracy bitterly reproached it with the fact. The July establishment was caught between two fires, that of the past and that of the future. It was the happening of a moment at grips with the centuries of monarchy on one side and enduring right on the other.
Moreover, in external affairs, being a revolution that had turned into a monarchy, the 1830 regime had to fall into line with the rest of Europe. Keeping the peace was an added complication. Harmony enforced for the wrong reasons may be more burdensome than war. Of this hidden conflict, always subdued but always stirring, was born a state of armed peace, that ruinous expedient of a civilization in itself suspect. The July Monarchy chafed, while accepting it, at the harness of a cabinet on European lines. Metternich would gladly have put it in leading-strings. Driven by the spirit of progress in France, it in its turn drove the reactionary monarchies of Europe. Being towed it was also a tower.