The Bourbon Kings of France (33 page)

The one area in which the regime of 1814–15 took positive action, the military, was especially unfortunate. Old
émigré
officers from the armies of Coblenz and the Vendée were given half pay and then promoted, while most of the Imperial Army was summarily retired; 14,000 veteran officers, many of them young men, were condemned to rot; Lady Morgan mentions a Captain reduced to working as a waggoner. At court, Marshals were snubbed and reminded of their humble origins. What angered the army above all was the revival of the
Maison du Roi
, 6,000 strong, complete with Bodyguards, Horse Grenadiers, Musketeers and even the Hundred Swiss, which only noblemen could join. (Among them were two young poets—Alphonse de Lamartine and Alfred de Vigny.) Soldiers began to refer to the King as ‘The Pig’.

When Napoleon landed near Fréjus on 1 March 1815 it was therefore hardly surprising that the army rallied to him. Some Marshals were canny enough to remain loyal to Louis XVIII, but most officers behaved like Ney, ‘Bravest of the Brave’, who first swore undying fidelity to the King, promising to bring the usurper back in a cage, and who then turned his coat.

The news reached the Tuileries on Sunday 5 March. Louis, his hands crippled by gout, had difficulty opening the envelope which contained the telegram. After reading it, he put his head in his hands and then said, ‘It is the Revolution all over again.’ Blacas protested that Napoleon was mad and that there was little danger. The King interrupted him impatiently: ‘Blacas,
mon ami
, you are a very pleasant fellow but that’s not quite enough. You have been wrong many times before and I am afraid that you are deluding yourself again.’ None the less Louis started to wear the Légion d’Honneur and solemnly asked the Chamber of Deputies, ‘How can I, at the age of sixty end my life better than by dying in defence of my country?’ But the army was going over to the Corsican
en masse
. On 19 March Louis XVIII left Paris—at midnight, in his carpet slippers. Napoleon re-entered the Tuileries the very next day.

Ghent was the new Coblenz, Louis installing his court at a house lent by the King of the Netherlands. Here Guizot first saw Louis XVIII who ‘gave me the impression of a rational, liberal-minded man, elegantly superficial, courteous to everyone, careful about appearances, not particularly interested in probing to the bottom of things, and as incapable of making the sort of mistakes which ruin a dynasty as he was of ensuring a dynasty’s survival.’ Fortunately, the allies, who had not demobilized their armies, at once announced their intention of crushing the Emperor. Significantly, Talleyrand remained loyal to the Bourbons, though he wrote from Vienna that the Congress blamed the King in large part for Bonaparte’s return. Meanwhile, the people of Ghent were astounded by the immense number of dishes and bottles consumed by their venerable guest, though he also impressed them by his calm during the panic caused by conflicting reports of the outcome of Waterloo.

Louis XVIII returned to the Tuileries on 8 July 1815, in a closed carriage. Parisians scowled at the fat old man forced on them by the enemy troops who swaggered through their city. The Emperors of Austria and Russia and the King of Prussia held parades on the Champs de Mars, treating the King of France with open contempt. The peace terms were an indemnity of £ 28 million; occupation for five years by an allied army of 150,000 troops; the surrender of French Savoy to Sardinia; and handing over the Saar to Prussia (which meant the final abandonment of the Rhine frontier). French pride was shattered. People muttered, ‘The allies gave us the Bourbons but it was Frenchmen who gave us the Bonapartes.’

In fact it was a Frenchman, Talleyrand, who had given France the Bourbons. He was made Prime Minister as well as Foreign Minister by the King, who sent Blacas off to Naples as ambassador. Louis XVIII knew very well that Talleyrand had twice set the crown of France on his head and keenly resented the fact that all Europe knew it too. Although personally he despised the man, in 1814 he had greeted him with the most honeyed flattery. ‘Our families date from the same epoch. But my ancestors were cleverer; if yours had been, it is you who would be inviting me to sit down now.’ (In fact the King insisted in private that the Talleyrands only dated from the twelfth century.) For a period after the Hundred Days Louis could not do without him. Nor could he do without Fouché, the regicide Minister of the Interior. Having seen the pair go in together to kiss hands, Chateaubriand wrote, ‘All at once the door opened and there entered, in total silence, Vice supported by Crime—that is to say M de Talleyrand on the arm of M Fouché.’ Fouché was soon thrown to the wolves, but the King needed Talleyrand’s genius to obtain a favourable peace settlement. However, Tsar Alexander then told Louis that Talleyrand was unacceptable; if the King would replace him by the Duc de Richelieu, whom the Russians knew and respected, the Tsar would see that France received good terms. Greatly to Louis’s relief, Talleyrand resigned at the end of September 1815.

The King has often been criticized for not making more use of Talleyrand, but he was totally unacceptable, not only to Ultras but to many moderates. Furthermore, he had betrayed Napoleon and might well betray the Bourbons. Louis would not willingly employ such a dangerous man, but he tried to mollify him with a shower of honours—Grand Chamberlain in 1815, a Duchy in 1817, the
cordon bleu
in 1820—and ignored his frequent attacks on royal ministers. Talleyrand once paid a grudging compliment—‘All Bourbons are idiots except Louis XVIII.’

Meanwhile, a White Terror raged throughout France, in which nearly 300 people died. Everyone dreaded the royalist bands, the
Miquelets
and the
Verdets
, who settled old scores and plundered and looted, murder gangs equipped with pocket pistols, knives and sword-sticks, often working in collusion with the local police. At Nîmes Protestants, including women, were publicly humiliated and beaten solely on account of their religion. Marshal Brune was lynched at Avignon, General Ramel assassinated at Toulouse, General Lagarde murdered at Nîmes. Nor was the government less restrained; Marshal Ney was shot for desertion, as were young General de la Bedoyère, and four other generals. The King dared not intervene, while the rest of the royal family cheered on the Whites; Artois’s son, M de Berry, joked, ‘We are going Marshal hunting.’ Great ladies, the
tricoteuses des salons
, raged against Imperialists and Liberals, as did many of the clergy. Special Provosts’ Courts sat for three years, executions continuing well into 1816. Both police and terrorists were deliberately encouraged by the new Chamber of Deputies elected in August 1815, so fiercely royalist that Louis called it the
Chambre Introuvable
—the ‘Nonesuch Chamber’. Its slogan was ‘Time for an end to clemency’; when the King resisted its more savage decrees, it openly called him a Revolutionary, a ‘crowned Jacobin’. Louis groaned, ‘They are relentless’, adding that if the Deputies could have their way ‘they would purge me too’. It was later popularly said, ‘If you have not lived through 1815, you do not know what hatred is.’

If 1815 was one of the most terrible years in French history, 1816 was scarcely better. Amid continuing anarchy, heavy rain caused a bad harvest and a cattle plague broke out; there was widespread famine. Already France was exhausted by years of warfare, years in which she had lost a million men, had been crushed by backbreaking taxes, and had had her trade crippled by the British blockade. Yet she had to find the money to pay for the indemnity and the army of occupation.

Furthermore, France was woefully disunited. Of 402 Deputies, the majority were Ultras who organized themselves into something like a political party; the Faubourg Saint-Germain formed its hard core, but its ranks were made up of small country squires and even of bourgeois and new men with landed interests. It included the
Purs
, the party’s extremists who were often Vendéens or returned
émigrés
, ghosts of the
Ancien Régime
, crying for vengeance on its murderers. On the left sat a motley collection of Liberals who, to begin with, were only united in their loathing of the new regime; most came from the
haute bourgeoisie
and the
parvenu
Napoleonic nobility, both deeply resentful of the old aristocracy. Among this opposition were indestructibles like the novelist Benjamin Constant and Lafayette—‘less a politician than a flag’.

However, when discussing Restoration parliaments, one should speak of groups of partisans rather than political parties. The groups which the King preferred were those of the Centre, sometimes known as Constitutionalists. They included Liberals who believed that France’s best hope lay in observing the Charter, and also a tiny band of intellectuals called the
Doctrinaires
—Royer-Collard, the historian Guizot, and a French Whig, the Duc de Broglie—whose basic principle was that the rights of crown and country were indistinguishable. But most Constitutionalists were simply moderate Royalists. Louis XVIII believed that the Restoration’s one chance of survival was to let such people govern France. Through them he intended to find a middle ground, adopting policies which would upset neither the old aristocracy nor the new rich of the Empire; ultimately he hoped to forge an alliance between both classes. As Balzac puts it, ‘After every revolution genius in government consists of effecting a fusion, which is what Napoleon and Louis XVIII did, both being men of true genius.’ The King’s motto, which he repeated over and over again, was ‘Unite—and forget’.

The fact that Artois was the Ultras’ acknowledged leader did not help Louis. The King was fond of his brother, or at least felt as sentimental about him as his cold nature allowed. Artois genuinely loved Louis but felt that his policies were misguided; he, Monsieur, knew what was best for France, and the Pavillon de Marsan (his wing of the Tuileries and one of the few parts which survived the fire of 1871) was the Ultras’ chief meeting-place.

Indeed, apart from the King, the entire royal family were Ultras. Artois’s eldest son, the ferret-eyed, long-nosed Louis, Duc d’Angoulême, was a gauche nonentity, as ill mannered as he was timid, without brains or character; he was said to be impotent. The childless Mme d’Angoulême, stiff, sour and red-faced, was the ‘Orphan of the Temple’ whose horrible experiences had so embittered her that she was dreaded by the entire court; she often reduced ladies-in-waiting to tears (though Fanny Burney found her charming). Artois’s younger son, Charles-Ferdinand, Duc de Berry, had an ungovernable temper—sometimes he struck officers on the parade ground—which was almost as embarrassing as his attempts to ape Napoleon. In
Le Rouge et Le Noir
Stendhal gives what may well be a portrait of the Duke—‘He was short and thick-set, with a florid complexion and gleaming eyes without any expression save the vicious ferocity of a wild boar.’ Yet Berry was not entirely unattractive. He could be extraordinarily generous, frequently giving money to tramps, and was democratic enough to treat the merchant banker Greffulhe as a personal friend. He played the flute, was a discerning collector of pictures, and genuinely loved the opera and the theatre—he was a keen admirer of Talma. In 1816 the Duke married a beautiful madcap Bourbon cousin from Naples to whom, though he loved her, he was frequently unfaithful. They lived in Mme de Pompadour’s old residence, the Elysée. Caroline de Berry was a small, lively blonde, with large blue eyes, and just a little too high-spirited. She joined her dour sister-in-law in constantly criticizing the weakness and foolishness of the King’s policies.

There was a Duc d’Orléans in the Palais Royal once more, although the King would not allow him to style himself ‘Royal Highness’. Louis Philippe was the son of the regicide Egalité. Before emigrating he had fought with the army of the Revolution at Valmy in 1792, and he was regarded with some suspicion by the court. A sly, watchful man, Orléans was avaricious to the point of rapacity, working ceaselessly to regain all his father’s vast estates.

The only other Prince of the Blood was the Prince de Condé, last of his line. His gallant old father had died in 1818 and the new master of Chantilly was a very different personality. He doted almost pathologically on his English mistress, Sophy Dawes, a fisherman’s daughter from the Isle of Wight and a former maid-servant, whom he had married to the Baron de Feuchères; the Baron, at first under the impression that Miss Dawes was the Prince’s illegitimate daughter, was enraged when he discovered the truth. Sophy returned to Condé and not only persuaded him to give her enormous presents but to bequeath Chantilly to the Orléans family, who had ingratiated themselves with her. The Prince does not seem to have derived much pleasure from his generosity—he hanged himself in 1830.

As Guizot puts it, ‘King Louis XVIII had a cold heart and a liberal mind. His family’s anger and irritation had little effect, once he decided not to let it bother him. It was his pride and joy to think himself clearer headed and shrewder, and to act according to his own judgement.’ Chateaubriand is even more plainly-spoken: ‘An egoist without principle, Louis XVIII wanted peace at any price. He supported his ministers for just as long as they could command a majority.’

As has been said, the Duc de Richelieu replaced Talleyrand as both Prime Minister and Foreign Minister at the end of 1815. This
grand seigneur
—‘the very personification of nobility’, Lady Morgan calls him—had made a career for himself in Russia during the emigration, becoming a Lieutenant-General and founding the town of Odessa. Hence Talleyrand’s gibe when he was appointed his successor—‘What a perfect choice, he knows the Crimea better than any man in France.’ But for all Talleyrand’s sneers, the Duke persuaded his friend the Tsar to reduce the indemnity and the allies to end their occupation in 1818, two years earlier than stipulated (some Ultras were horrified, and begged Wellington to stay). In addition, Richelieu rebuilt the country’s finances. Two former Napoleonic ministers worked a miracle for him—one an unfrocked priest, Baron Louis, and the other a Genoese, Count Corvetto. Their basic principle was that if a government wants credit, it must pay for it; accordingly they guaranteed all financial liabilities incurred by the Emperor. Stringent economies were made in the public service, civil servants being persuaded to draw only half their salaries for a six-year period. In 1817 a carefully calculated loan was negotiated from the English bankers, Messrs Baring. As a result of such measures, including an insistence that every minister must present annual accounts, the budget was balanced for the first time since 1739, while the indemnity was paid off by 1818. When Richelieu resigned that year, the Chambers voted him a pension of 50,000 francs in token of the country’s gratitude.