The city might have held out long, as it had done against Napoleon. But Ferdinand was lavish of flattery and cajolery. He promised amnesty, clemency, and friendship to the Constitutionalists, if they would let him go, and kept on the mask till the very moment of his being landed free on the opposite shore. The instant his foot was there, he assumed his true look and character, that of the executioner. Alava, who accompanied him, saw that look, and escaped.

The French government, as soon as it received the decree of Ferdinand, abolishing the constitution and all that had taken place under it, and restoring the suicidal and priestly despotism of the previous century, was heartily ashamed. Both Châteaubriand and Villèle were so. The latter consoled himself by declaring such things inevitable, the former by the great glory, which he deemed accruing to himself. The successful campaign, whilst it delivered Spain to a stupid tyranny, which could not endure, and which was worse than the turbulence of any revolution, definitively disgusted the English government and the English people with the Bourbons. Châteaubriand defied Canning, and looked to a Russian alliance, to aid him in nothing less than a recovery of the Imperial frontier of the Rhine. The English minister, in retaliation, recognised the independence of Spanish colonies beyond the Atlantic, which had successfully won that boon, and only wanted to be confirmed in it. Such a policy had long been pressed upon the English government, but had always been evaded as impolitic and unfair. Now it became just retaliation, and Canning, as he boasted, called the New World into existence to redress the endangered balance of the Old.

It is due to the memory of the Duc d'Angoulême

Lord Grenville, and the statesmen of his day, repelled all the proposals of General Miranda for this

purpose as encouraging revolution.
-See Castlereagh Correspondence,
vol. vii.

CHAP.

XLIV.

CHAP.
XLIV.

to observe, that when left to himself, and removed from the ultra-royalist fanaticism of the court, he displayed a liberal and generous disposition. He made every effort to moderate the savage and sanguinary reaction of the Spaniards, whom his army had restored to power. When he returned, he insisted on the removal from the war office of the reactionary Duc de Bellune, and the substituting for him of General Guilleminot, who had been denounced as a Liberal. In this he had partly succeeded. But Louis the Eighteenth was sinking in health, and utterly unable to resist the exigencies of his brother and the ultras; so that Guilleminot was sent envoy to Constantinople, and an émigré, De Damas, a follower certainly of the Duc d'Angoulême, was appointed successor to the Duc de Bellune. In the exultation of its triumph, government made a clean sweep from place of every functionary that could be accused of even semi-liberalism. The celebrated professors of the Collége de France, the Cousins, the Villemains, and the Guizots, were all silenced, and the university handed over completely to the priesthood. The Ecole normale was suppressed. The tyranny exercised over Liberals and the press became almost identical with that of the ancien régime. Messrs. Corbière and Peyronnet were, indeed, far more severe and inquisitorial than any minister of Louis the Sixteenth had dared to be.

If Châteaubriand was exultant in the success of his great military exploit, Villèle was well pleased at its being brought to an end. The aim of the former was to follow up his triumph by more popular aggression on the Rhine, in concert with Russia; Villèle proposed directing the care and activity of government to domestic questions. Châteaubriand lived amongst the ideas of half a century previous, Villèle, on the contrary, looked to the present. He saw England prospering, increasing its productions, its exports, diminishing its expenditure, reducing the interest of its debt, mooting and acting

upon a variety of new and fruitful principles in commercial and colonial policy. The French minister thought, that the fixity of the English parliamentary system allowed its ministers to enter upon this path, and the great foundation of this fixity he thought he descried in Septennial elections. The recent elections had been rendered exclusively royalist, as much by the influence and dictation of the government functionaries, as by the low state of the liberal party. Villèle, therefore, resumed Decazes' project of a majority made and kept by the government. He did not perceive, that what was a rope of hemp in England, might prove a rope of sand in France. He, however, determined to try and make the utmost use of the influence that the prefects and the clergy had gained over the electoral colleges. Since the success of the army in Spain, opposition seemed idle, and especially in the provinces. The time-servers and the interested saw no other prudent line of conduct than complete subservience to the dominant party. To take advantage of this, the ministers dissolved the Chambers, and superseded the custom of annual elections of one-fifth by a simultaneous re-election of deputies throughout the whole country.

The result answered his desire. The agents of government employed every means of violence and seduction. And they were the more successful as they laboured with the stream. Liberalism became gradually out of fashion, except in Paris and the great centres. Not more than thirteen members of the Left were returned. The minister opened the session by a law of Septenniality; prolonging the existence of the legislature to seven years. "Seven years," exclaimed Royer Collard, "is an age in France! Where are he men and ideas of seven years ago? Where shall we be seven years hence?" Royer Collard was a Cassandra, to whom no one listened. And the law was voted.

It was accompanied by another measure, fraught with

CHAP.

XLIV.

CHAP.
XLIV.

far graver consequences. This was a proposal to reduce
the Five per Cents. nominally to Three, but really to Four
per cent., since even the holders, who refused the con-
version, were to be paid at the rate of Seventy-five.
Whatever the merit of this as a financial measure-the
rise of the Five per Cents. above par, affording at least a
fair pretext for the operation-as a political one, it was
a move, at least for Villèle, in a wrong direction. The
money which the minister was to gain by the operation,
he proposed diverting to the purpose of paying an
indemnity to the émigrés who had lost their property.
Although this was closing one of the wounds of the
revolution, and consolidating the title of the purchasers
of confiscated property, still it was denounced by the
Liberals, and considered by them as a gratuitous offer-
ing to the now dominant classes of clergy and noblesse.
It was at the same time exceedingly invidious, and,
they declared, unjust to the commercial and middle
classes. The momentary rise in the funds which allowed
Villèle to bring forward his proposals, was, they affirmed,
temporary and artificial-Government, it was alleged,
despoiling capitalists, small and great, of one-fourth of
their income to hand it over to the émigrés and the
hobereaux, as the squires were called.
The great
bankers Périer and others maintained this opinion, and
the former was able to express them in the tribune of the
Chamber. In Paris, so full of petits rentiers, there was
a perfect storm of opposition and discontent. This
latter class found an unexpected advocate in the Arch-
bishop of Paris, who denounced Villèle's measure in the
Peers, as a war upon poor and middling fortunes. And
Villèle was obliged to promise to respect them in the
definitive law.

His concession, however, proved useless. The bill triumphantly passed the Lower Chamber, but in that of the Peers it encountered an unlooked-for opposition; that upper House was not what Villèle would have liked

XLIV.

to make it, a representative of the wealthier portion of CHAP. landed interest. It was composed of functionaries, of the veteran generals and civilians living upon pensions, and monied savings, rather than upon hereditary property. The Peers, too, were dwellers in the capital, rather than in the provinces, where they had neither interest, dignity, nor influence. They thus shared in the sentiments of the Parisians, rather than in those of the squires. And from the first they showed their dislike of the law. Their want of allegiance to the prime minister was more than countenanced by his rival in the Cabinet, Châteaubriand. That politician found all power monopolised by Villèle, who had adroitly managed to secure the favour of both the King and the Count d'Artois. For this purpose, Villèle gave up everything to his colleague Corbière and the Church party. Châteaubriand, when he wished to inaugurate fresh schemes of foreign policy, was not listened to. At this his spirit chafed; and he vented his anger in sarcasms upon Villèle's law, although Châteaubriand evidently was ignorant of the first principles of finance.

Such being the case, it was too much to expect him to become its advocate. But his opposition was so public in court as well as in the columns of the "Débats," that when he offered Villèle to resign with him, in case the Conversion bill was thrown out, the minister took it as a sarcasm, rather than a promise of adherence. The minister in selecting the Church and the retrogrades for his allies, had disgusted all the intellectual even of the royalist party. And these overwhelmed him in the press and in society. More solid and respected was the the opposition of such men as Count Roy and Mollien in the Upper Chamber, who were considered far superior in the science of finance to Villèle himself. To such combined hostility the law succumbed, its very first clause being rejected in the Chamber of Peers by 120 to 105 votes.