The Bourbon Kings of France (32 page)

It must be remembered that a Bourbon restoration seemed almost inevitable until Napoleon was firmly established. The French people had more than a suspicion that
égalité
was killing
liberté
and
fraternité
, and the newspapers were full of royalist propaganda. Most Frenchmen longed for a return to the rule of law. Unfortunately, Louis, encouraged by reports from his agents in Paris, failed to realize that what France wanted was not the monarchy of 1789 but the constitutional monarchy of 1791. The bourgeoisie had no wish for the return of privilege; the peasants feared the re-introduction of feudal dues; and everyone who had bought
émigré
land dreaded confiscation. Nevertheless, by 1797 Royalist deputies had almost obtained control of the central government and Louis thought his restoration was imminent. But the army was still republican. On 4 September 1797—18 Fructidor, Year V, in the Revolutionary calendar—General Augereau staged a
coup d’état
and fifty-three Royalist deputies were condemned to deportation to Cayenne.

Meanwhile, the King was leading an odd, wandering life. He had left Verona for a brief spell with Condé’s army at Blanckenberg in Brunswick, before settling at Mittau in the Baltic Duchy of Courland—now part of Soviet Latvia, a coastal land famed for its beauty. From here he watched General Bonaparte’s rise to power with a mixture of hope and apprehension—was he Cromwell or was he General Monk? Before 18 Fructidor he offered him the Vice-royalty of Corsica and the title of Marshal of France if he would restore him. In 1800, when Bonaparte was First Consul, the King wrote to him: ‘You are taking a long time to give me back my throne; there is a danger that you may miss the opportunity. Without me you cannot make France happy, while without you I can do nothing for France. So be quick and let me know what positions and dignities will satisfy you and your friends.’ Bonaparte replied, ‘I have received Your Royal Highness’s letter. I have always taken a keen interest in your misfortunes and in those of your family. But you must not think of returning to France—you cannot do so without marching over a hundred thousand dead bodies.’ In 1803 Bonaparte sent an envoy to Mittau to propose that Louis and his family should surrender all claims to the French throne in return for independent principalities in Italy. The King wrote in reply, ‘I do not confuse M Bonaparte with those who preceded him. I respect his bravery and military genius…. But he is mistaken if he supposes my rights can be made the subject of bargain or compromise.’

However, Bonaparte gave the French everything which they had thought could only be supplied by a Bourbon restoration. Not only did he bring back the Church and build wonderful roads and schools, but he restored the rule of law (besides introducing the
Code Napoléon
, one of the world’s outstanding legal codes and one which could be understood by everybody, he even revived some of the courts of the old Parlement of Paris). When Napoleon assumed the title of Emperor in 1804, the King travelled to Sweden to join Artois—whom he had not seen for a decade—and issued a formal protest. But the Empire had a disquietingly permanent appearance.

Louis was forced to leave Mittau by the Tsar in 1807, whereupon he followed Artois’s example and settled in England. Although the British government gave him £ 7,000 a year, they would not let him stay in London, so he established his shabby court at Gosfield Hall in Essex, moving in 1809 to Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire. The diarist Charles Greville, accompanied by his father, visited Louis at Hartwell the following year. Greville says that there were so many people in the house—nearly 150—that the place resembled ‘a small rising colony’ and that he had never seen so many Dukes in his life. The King received them in his private closet, so small that it seemed like a ship’s cabin; the elder Greville said the way Louis heaved his huge bulk backwards and forwards made him feel seasick. He gave them a very modest dinner, carving himself; the only wines served were port and sherry. They spent the evening playing whist at threepence a point. The atmosphere was a compound of privation, hopelessness and ridiculously pompous etiquette. The diarist noted with amusement that the local yokels referred disrespectfully to their august neighbour as ‘old bungy Louis’.

The King was in constant touch with the professional adventurers and spies who were the only people in France still to take an active interest in the Bourbon cause. Most were of dubious reliability—one double agent even tried to persuade Louis to make a secret trip to Paris. Savary, Napoleon’s Minister of Police, paid the Duc d’Aumont £ 1,000 a year to send him two letters a month reporting what went on at Hartwell. (At the Restoration the King told Savary with relish, ‘You see, Monsieur, how little one can trust people. He [Aumont] always told me he was only paid £ 500—no doubt he didn’t want to pay me my royalties, as I drafted the letters myself!) However, there was a genuine traitor at Hartwell who has never been identified, probably an
émigré
courtier; he or she was responsible for the capture and death of many royal agents.

For all his undoubted probity, Avaray, the King’s favourite companion, inspired jealousy and even hatred. He particularly irritated conservative
émigrés
by speaking English and dressing like an Englishman. In 1808 a Vendéen veteran, General de Puisaye, accused Avaray of trying to have him assassinated. The scandal reached such proportions that Louis issued a public defence of ‘the most feeling of friends’ and appointed a committee of twenty-four noblemen who quickly declared Avaray innocent. The favourite at once challenged Puisaye to a duel, but the King had him arrested by the English authorities to prevent him fighting. As a mark of his esteem he then made Avaray a Duke. However, the favourite’s health was collapsing—he seems to have been tubercular—and he had to leave England for a warmer climate at the end of 1810.

Louis’s Queen, Maria Giuseppina, who despite their incompatibility had stayed with him, died the same year. The British government gave her a state funeral in Westminster Abbey, after which her body was sent home to Turin. The King was by now in his late fifties, gout-ridden, cripplingly overweight and with a digestion which must have suffered dreadfully from his love of good food. He was prostrate when news came in 1811 that Avaray had died in Madeira.

Luckily, Louis quickly found a new dear friend, one who had been recommended by Avaray himself. Pierre-Louis-Jean-Casimir de Blacas, Comte d’Aulps, had been born in 1771 of an ancient family of Provence. Like his predecessor, he was a career soldier, a former dragoon captain. He had joined Louis’s household at Verona and had stayed with him ever since. A quixotic figure who modelled himself on the heroes of French chivalry, he insisted on regarding his gouty master as the reincarnation of Saint Louis and Henri IV. He knew Latin, and soon Louis was devoted to him. As Blacas said later, ‘You don’t know the King—he must have a favourite and he might as well have me as anyone else.’

After the débâcle of Napoleon’s Russian campaign, Louis was optimistic enough to send an envoy to Charles XIV of Sweden (the former Marshal Bernadotte) and the Tsar, but the envoy found little encouragement, the Tsar being positively hostile. Then in October 1813 Napoleon was defeated at Leipzig. The King refused to attend a triumphal banquet in London, commenting, ‘I don’t know if the disasters overtaking the French army are a means by which providence intends to restore legitimate authority, but neither I nor the Princes of my family can rejoice at events which are such a sorrow to our country.’ None the less, Leipzig had transformed his situation. On 13 March 1814 Bordeaux hoisted the white flag of the Bourbons. To his amusement, Louis was invited by the Prince Regent to attend a ball at Carlton House for the first time; the walls were hung with draperies covered in fleurs-de-lis and the rooms filled with
émigrés
in hired court dress.

Yet the allies were still thinking of a settlement with Napoleon and even after the Marshals deserted him in April discussed such alternatives as Bernadotte and the Duc d’Orléans. Finally a demonstration in the Paris streets in favour of King Louis—carefully organized by Talleyrand and M de Vitrolles, Artois’s agent—decided them in favour of the Bourbons.

Napoleon abdicated on 6 April 1814 and departed to Elba. Under the skilful management of Talleyrand (whom Louis had once promised to break on the wheel), the Imperial Senate deposed the two-year-old Napoleon II and proclaimed Louis XVIII. Artois, who had been on the frontier of northern France since February, entered Paris on 12 April 1814 in his capacity as Lieutenant-General (Regent). He delighted the French by quickly negotiating what France wanted most of all—the evacuation of the occupying allied armies in return for withdrawing the French troops who were cut off in Italy and Germany. France kept the frontiers of 1792, including that of the Rhine.

At Hartwell, King Louis’s carriage began its triumphal progress on 20 April, drawn by Englishmen instead of horses. The Prince Regent had come to fetch him, and in London the King was cheered by what seemed to be the entire capital and serenaded by brass bands outside his hotel in Albemarle Street. He dined at Carlton House with the Regent and the Archbishop of Canterbury; Louis bestowed the
Cordon Bleu
on his host, who reciprocated with the Garter (later the Regent said that buckling it on had been like putting a girdle round the waist of a stoutish woman). The King set sail for France on 24 April, on board the
Royal Sovereign
.

His Most Christian Majesty drove into ‘his good city of Paris’ through the Porte Saint-Denis on 3 May 1814—it was almost twenty-two years since he had seen his capital and he was in tears. With him in his carriage was the Duchesse d’Angoulême, whose last roof in Paris had been the Temple prison, and the aged Prince de Condé, the once redoubtable White general who was now blind and wandering in his wits. The ‘royal invalid’, as Chateaubriand lovingly called Louis XVIII, was received with all the martial splendour of the Grande Armée; Chateaubriand (in his somewhat unreliable, but always elegant, memoirs) noted that the Old Guard were shaking with rage when they presented arms. On the whole, however, most Frenchmen agreed with Talleyrand that without the ancient dynasty’s prestige, France would have been ‘either enslaved or partitioned’.

The King was certainly very different from the Emperor. His legs were swollen by gout and the great family nose now presided over a cascade of chins. He wore his hair in the fashion of 1789—powdered white, combed into ‘pigeons’ wings’ and a pigtail tied with a bow. His snuff-stained clothes were even more antiquated; he wore knee-breeches and red velvet gaiters and carried a three-cornered hat. Yet this fat, antediluvian little creature, with its preposterous dress, high shrill voice and pedantic jokes, somehow possessed a most regal dignity. Chateaubriand tells us that Louis XVIII never forgot for one moment that he was the King, and that Napoleon’s Marshals ‘were more intimidated when in the presence of this impotent old man than they had ever been in that of the terrible master who commanded them in a hundred battles.’

Even before entering Paris, Louis had granted a constitution, by the Declaration of Saint-Ouen on 2 May 1814. He had thus avoided having to accept that prepared by Talleyrand and the Imperial Senate and, by granting rather than accepting, safeguarded the monarchic principle. The Charter, as the constitution was known, consisted of a hereditary monarchy and two chambers on the model of the English Parliament—an upper house of Peers and a lower of Deputies who were elected by less than a hundred thousand voters. The King also promised freedom of worship and of the press, guaranteed property rights for those who had purchased
émigré
land, and undertook to maintain Napoleonic titles and the Légion d’Honneur.

The two Chambers constituted a system no less representative than the contemporary English Parliament. During his time at Hartwell Louis may well have taken an interest in English politics, but unfortunately he had no first-hand knowledge of how the system worked. His dear friend Blacas, who looked back to 1689 rather than to 1789 and who as Minister for the Household was the nearest thing to a Prime Minister, was disastrously ineffectual; as in 1790–92 ministers worked directly to the King without any proper co-ordination or cabinet.