The Bourbon Kings of France

by Seward, Desmond

  Chateaubriand wrote sadly, ‘Yet another government hurling itself down from Nôtre-Dame.’ By that evening, a Monday, the mob was in the streets and stoning ministers. On the next day the army had to be called out; most of the troops were in Algeria or on the Belgian frontier, and the effective garrison of Paris was down to 9,000 men. Polignac concealed the gravity of the situation from Charles, who was still at Saint-Cloud, telling him it was nothing but a riot, and that were he mistaken ‘I shall give Your Majesty my head in atonement’—he also spoke of a reassuring vision he had had of Our Lady. Meanwhile barricades were going up, arsenals being stormed. By Thursday 29 July the mob—mainly petit bourgeois rather than working-class, and led by Napoleonic veterans—had taken the Louvre and the Tuileries, and the army was retreating, many men deserting to the rebels. Yet few deputies had any wish to depose Charles X; they only wanted to be rid of Polignac. If the King had been at the Tuileries in the centre of Paris, instead of outside at Saint-Cloud, a compromise would have been reached.

  At last, from the terrace at Saint-Cloud, through a spy glass, poor Charles saw the tricolore flying from Nôtre-Dame. He sent an emissary, promising to dismiss Polignac and withdraw the ordinances, and appointed the Duc de Mortemart as Prime Minister. But it was too late. Soon the situation at Saint-Cloud became so dangerous that the King had to move to the Grand Trianon, and then to Rambouillet. Throughout, the old monarch displayed his habitual dignity. Each time the cannon were heard, he gently flicked the cloth of his card-table as though he had seen a spot of dust. Later, with his usual simplicity, he told Mme de Gontaut that he had only tried to appear calm because it seemed the best thing to do. The Duchess says she cried when she saw his sad, resigned face and knew that he realized it was all over.

  On 1 August Charles appointed the Duc d’Orléans Lieutenant-General of France. On 2 August 1830, at Rambouillet, he abdicated; for a brief moment there was a Louis XIX until the Dauphin also signed an act of abdication. Then Charles saluted his grandson as King, and presented the ten-year-old Henri V to his guards. Orléans cunningly pretended that he had no authority until the Chambers had debated the abdication; as he expected, the deputies refused to accept the boy. On 7 August Orléans, produced ‘like a rabbit out of a hat’ by the Liberals, was proclaimed ‘Louis Philippe, King of the French’.

  Charles had waited trustingly at Rambouillet for the Lieutenant-General to proclaim Henri V. On 3 August, however, hearing that an armed rabble was approaching (some by the new omnibuses), he decided to leave France, although he could have cut them to ribbons. Indeed, as Chateaubriand points out, had Charles fallen back on Chartres or Tours, the monarchy would have survived, as most of the army was loyal. However, like his martyred brother, the old King was not prepared to shed French blood.

  But he did not depart like Napoleon, cowering in a closed carriage, or like Louis Philippe in 1848, disguised as an English tourist. Even the sternest critics of Charles X admit that the dignity of his exit had something of the old grandeur of the House of France. Accompanied by cavalry, artillery and infantry of the guard, he marched to Cherbourg beneath the Lilies, insisting on the observance of every detail of etiquette as though he were still King. French monarchs always dined alone at a square table, and when only a round one could be found, he ordered it to be cut square. At Cherbourg, on 16 August, after saying goodbye to his guards, he boarded a ship bound for England. He wept as it set sail.

  Charles landed at Weymouth, staying briefly at Lulworth Castle nearby before travelling to Holyrood which had once more been made available. To his relief, he discovered that nearly £ 500,000 in gold had been deposited in a London bank by Louis XVIII, in 1814, for just such an emergency. He spent two years in Edinburgh, much more agreeably than before as he was able to leave Holyrood and shoot with the Scots nobility; a great walker, he enjoyed strolling through the Edinburgh streets, when he was usually followed by a large and friendly crowd.

  In the summer of 1832, without Charles’s permission, Caroline de Berry tried to raise the Vendée for her son. The little rising was easily crushed, and later she was captured. She was then discovered to be pregnant, and Louis Philippe arranged for her delivery to be witnessed by government officials. It was hastily explained that the Duchess had secretly married her secretary the year before, but she was completely discredited. Charles never saw her again.

  In September 1832 the King left Scotland for Bohemia, where he found a suitably regal residence in the Gothic Hradschin at Prague. Chateaubriand visited him there, to be shown in by the ever-faithful Blacas, and was much moved. He wrote, ‘Charles X, if he distressed me as a monarch, always endeared himself to me as a man.’ The King still thought that he had been right to act as he had. ‘I wanted to leave my grandson a throne more secure than mine was.’ With his unquenchable optimism the old man was certain that one day the French would call Henri back, nor was his instinct entirely wrong. Meanwhile he was as charming as ever, shot a little, played cards and said his prayers.

  In the autumn of 1836 a cholera epidemic made the King move his little court from Prague to Gorizia in north-eastern Italy, not far from Trieste. On the morning of 5 November it was realized that he had contracted the dreaded disease. He died the following day and, shrouded in the habit of a Franciscan, was buried in the friary of Castagnavizza, where he still lies. Chateaubriand comments that, when the thirty-fifth successor of Hugues Capet died, ‘an entire era of the world’s history went with him’.

  ‘Poor Charles X is dead’, King Leopold of the Belgians told his niece, the English Princess Victoria. (Leopold’s letter is often quoted, but is too important to omit.) ‘History will state that Louis XVIII was a most liberal monarch, reigning with great mildness and justice to his end, but that his brother, from his despotic and harsh disposition, upset all the other had done and lost the throne. Louis XVIII was a clever, hard-hearted man, shackled by no principle, very proud and false. Charles X an honest man, a kind friend, an honourable master, sincere in his opinions and inclined to do everything that is right.’

  Indeed, in a simpler political climate Charles might have had a peaceful and prosperous reign. It is not true, as is so often alleged, that he tried to restore the Ancien Régime; never for one moment did he attempt to destroy the legal and administrative institutions which his brother had inherited in 1814, and even in 1830 he believed that he was acting constitutionally. He was particularly unfortunate in his choice of Polignac—almost anyone else could have avoided the storm. A contemporary wrote, ‘A time will come when, secretly or openly, half the French people will regret the departure of that old man and that child and will say, “If the 1830 Revolution was to be tried all over again, it would not succeed.” ’ The writer was Balzac.

  The Third Restoration

  HENRI V (1830–1883)

  _____________

  ‘Henri V will never abandon the flag of Henri IV’

  There are some kings who never reigned, whom history none the less calls King. James III of England and Louis XVII are familiar enough. Henri V is less well known.

  Many contemporaries saw the Revolution of 1830 as a French version of the English Revolution of 1688, equating the Bourbons with the Stuarts, and in many ways Legitimism, the creed of those loyal to the Bourbon dynasty, was a kind of French Jacobitism. Its supporters included every Frenchman who loved the old kings and the old religion, while it had all the poignant romance common to great lost causes of the Right. But for many years Legitimism was very far from being a lost cause. For France did not finally make up her mind what sort of government she really wanted until the very end of the nineteenth century. In 1830, even Liberals like Stendhal thought a republic ‘a horrible condition anywhere else than in America—’tis the real cholera morbus’; and without Louis Philippe and the division among Royalists, France would almost certainly have remained a monarchy into the present century. Fervent Legitimists believed that Heaven would not allow the Orleanists—‘the regicide dynasty’—to keep the throne they h
ad stolen, and all good Catholics prayed hopefully for a Third Restoration.

  Furthermore, besides the simple creed of the Dukes and country squires, there was also an intellectual Legitimism. Balzac, Vigny, Gustave Doré and later Taine, Renan and even Pasteur, were all Legitimists. Taine and Renan, who were ‘scientific’ historians, launched a powerfully argued attack on the entire philosophy of the Revolution and on the whole cult of reason and democracy (which had been accepted by Orléanism).

  Henri - Charles - Ferdinand - Marie - Dieudonné d’Artois de Bourbon, Duc de Bordeaux, styled Comte de Chambord and known to his followers as King Henri V, had been born in 1820, the son of the murdered Berry. Fatherless, forbidden to see his mother after her disgrace in 1832, deprived of his adored grandfather in 1836, Henri spent his youth in Austria in the midst of fanatical Ultra exiles. His aunt d’Angoulême filled him with tales of her martyred parents, while Jesuit tutors—arch-reactionaries in the nineteenth century—instilled an uncompromising piety into the boy, as well as some rather slanted history. He grew up unused to being contradicted, for his courtiers still followed the old etiquette, and it is hardly surprising that he acquired too much faith in his own judgement. The old King had been a father rather than a grandfather to him, and fundamentally Henri’s political convictions were those of Charles X: later he derided ‘sterile parliamentary confrontations from which the sovereign usually emerges so weakened as to be all but powerless’. Above all, he grew up to be a Catholic of the penitential sort, expecting affliction rather than mercy from his God; his natural haughtiness was tempered by genuine humility. He was devout to the point of mysticism, a faithful husband and a loyal friend. Of all his dynasty, he resembled most his great-grandfather—the Dauphin Louis, son of Louis XV.

  In appearance, Henri V was the short, stout sort of Bourbon, his face that of a man of sorrows, mournful and austere. Apart from brilliant, piercing eyes, a heavy beard and a curious hairiness, his chief characteristic was a pronounced limp due to a riding accident when he was twenty-one. In manner he was unmistakably regal, though reserved and silent. He undoubtedly possessed what is nowadays known as ‘charisma’.

  In 1843 the King set out on a long European tour, arriving in England later that year, much to Queen Victoria’s emotion. He stayed in Belgrave Square, from where he issued a manifesto: Legitimists sang Vive Henri Quatre under his window while he received their leaders. In 1846—after a sad little romance with a Russian Grand Duchess, broken off by order of the Tsar—he married a Habsburg, Archduchess Marie Theresa, daughter of the Duke of Modena. She was a tall, angular old maid, three years older than he, soured by premature deafness, arrogant and blindly reactionary in her political and religious views, and with a deep distrust of the pagan French (whose language she spoke with a peculiarly ugly accent). They were to be childless.

  Henri’s sister, Mademoiselle, had left him the year before to marry their cousin, the future Charles III of Parma. The young Duke was assassinated in 1854, whereupon Mademoiselle became Regent for her six-year-old son, Robert I. But in 1860 even Parma was lost to the Bourbons, when the Risorgimento swept Robert off his throne and incorporated the Duchy into the new Kingdom of Italy. Poor battered Mademoiselle died four years later.

  After the ‘Revolution of Contempt’ had ejected Louis Philippe and his Bourgeois Monarchy in 1848, and during the subsequent reaction, the majority in the French Assembly was divided between Legitimist and Orleanist deputies. A group of the former went to meet Henri at Wiesbaden to discuss the situation with him, but no positive policy emerged. Legitimist officers planned a coup d’état for 1849, but it never took place. In the event, Louis Napoleon took advantage of the Royalists’ disunity to give the French the strong monarchy which they sought and set himself up as Napoleon III. But the tawdry Opèra Bouffe world of the Second Empire, with its crowned adventurer, its flash court and its foreign business barons, thoroughly disgusted the Legitimists, and indeed many other Frenchmen as well.

  The Legitimist party was both well supported and well organized. There were three sorts of Legitimist. First, men of action like the Duc des Cars and General de Saint-Priest, who would have liked a coup d’état. Then the parliamentarians, such as Pierre-Antoine Berryer, a golden-voiced lawyer from Lorraine who was called ‘the tribune of the monarchy’. Although of bourgeois origin, he was the idol of the French nobility on account of his wonderful speeches: Emile Olivier (Napoleon III’s ‘liberal’ prime minister) said, ‘He who has never heard Berryer speaking on one of his good days, does not know what oratory is.’ Berryer hoped for a decentralized constitutional monarchy. Decentralization—and hatred of Paris—was one of the inspirations of the third group, the populist Legitimists, who tried to forge a kind of radical Tory alliance with the Republicans; they were led by the Marquis de Rochejacquelein, who advocated universal suffrage. Some of these democratic noblemen even went so far as to argue that true virtue was to be found only in peasants.

  These three Legitimist groupings were co-ordinated by a high command in Paris which was appointed by the King. The Bureau du Roi consisted of twelve devoted noblemen who met once a week under the chairmanship of the Duc de Levis or the Duc des Cars—or later, the Marquis de Dreux-Brézé (one meets again all the old names so familiar under the Ancien Régime and during the Restoration). Besides laying down guidelines for policy, the Bureau also organized fund-raising, with gratifying results: despite their lamentations, the upper ranks of the French nobility had remained surprisingly wealthy. At local level there was a network of clubs and secret societies: in some instances, Freemasons’ Lodges were actually taken over. There was even a Legitimist news agency, founded in 1848 by a M de Saint-Chéron; the Correspondance Saint-Chéron sent out well-composed press releases to newspapers all over France.

  From the 1840s to the 1870s, the Legitimist party was probably the best organized and best disciplined political opposition in French history. Another Louis XVIII would have regained his throne easily in 1849 or after 1870. Alas, Henri V was incapable of being a politician. In a sense he was not even a Legitimist—to himself and to his more deluded followers he was simply the re-incarnation of la vieille France, a formula which was hardly an election winner. Legitimist leaders complained respectfully but bitterly of their King’s lack of leadership.

  Henri lived happily enough in his castle at Frohsdorf (in Upper Austria, near Salzburg) with a little court of devoted friends headed by Blacas’s son, where he was treated with simple yet impressive etiquette. He hunted and shot and played his whist and attended Mass, just as his grandfather had done, his chief pleasure being his beautiful grey horses. He was fond of his charmless, sterile wife, who loved him deeply. A romantic whose favourite authors were Dumas and Chateaubriand, his fantasies of Old France were far preferable to the reality. Only if the country which had beheaded his great-uncle, rejected his grandfather, murdered his father and disgraced his mother, begged him humbly to return, would he contemplate ascending the throne of his ancestors. He wanted no coups d’état, no Vendées, no counter-revolutions; everything must be left to Divine Providence. With his Wagnerian isolation, dreaming medieval dreams in his lonely turrets, he has been compared to the Bavarian Ludwig II at Neuschwanstein.

  The extraordinarily unreal atmosphere of his court was typified by the elder Blacas. When the old Duke died in 1839, he left instructions for his body to be buried at the feet of Charles X, in the best traditions of thirteenth-century French chivalry. This mock-medievalism was to be the ruin of the Legitimist cause.

  However, Henri made a political move in 1859, when the Risorgimento threatened the Papal States. He announced that he was ready to ‘pay with his blood for a cause which was that of France, the Church and God’. There was an enthusiastic response to his appeal. Legitimist volunteers flocked to the Pope’s army to become the redoubtable Zouaves Pontificales, who fought beneath the Bourbon Lilies; a detachment from the Vendée was only dissuaded with difficulty from wearing the Crusaders’ cross.

&
nbsp; Then, unexpectedly, Napoleon III was utterly defeated by the Prussians at Sédan on 2 September 1870, and a provisional republic was proclaimed two days later. In the general election of February the following year, the Right triumphed—180 Legitimists were returned, together with over 200 Orleanists and 30 Bonapartists, to be faced by only 200 Republicans who were split into moderates and extremists. The Left were thrown into even more disorder in the spring by the Communards’ Revolution in Paris, and by its savage repression. All that stood in the way of a restoration was the President, Adolphe Thiers, who had been prominent in bringing down Henri’s grandfather and who believed that a republic ‘would divide Frenchmen least’; and the disunity of the monarchists.

  One should not forget how alarming the idea of a republic must have seemed to many Frenchmen in 1871. The only European republic which then existed was Switzerland, while memories of the Revolution and of 1848 and its riots, and the recent and bloody experience of the Commune, did not inspire confidence among moderates. Furthermore, conservatism was strengthened by the current Catholic revival, a kind of moral rearmament which expressed itself in huge pilgrimages and in building a great basilica at Montmartre to atone for the sins of France.

  The law which exiled the Bourbons was repealed. Henri returned briefly to France in 1871, spending three days at his château of Chambord. Here he issued a proclamation declaring that, while he would never abandon the Lilies—‘I will not let the standard of Henri IV, of François I, of Jeanne d’Arc, be torn from my hands’—he was ready to accept parliamentary government. He then left France. The Orleanists tried desperately to persuade him to make way for the Comte de Paris, but in January 1872 Henri issued a second proclamation, refusing to abdicate; in February he held a monster rally at Antwerp. The impasse between Legitimists and Orleanists lasted for another year.