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Preamble to the July Revolution of 1830
Eugene Delacroix, La Liberte guidant le peuple, July 28, 1840
Preamble to the July Revolution On July 24, 1830, M. de Chantelauze, confidant of King Charles X and the publicist of the King's coup d'etat establishing his absolute dictatorship, read a certain preamble, approved in advance by the King, to the Council. Lamartine said of it rightly that, "This preamble... was the report truly and eloquently traced of the great suit pending in all ages between authority and freedom.... It was an irrevocable declaration of war against liberty." As we read the preamble in the United States today, where the French aspect of the American Revolution is continually being denigrated by right-wing authoritarian misleaders who have gone so far as to rename French Fries, Liberty Fries, and who have done everything in their power to make "liberal" a dirty word even in the "democratic" party, - we are given due cause to be ashamed of the American media for not doing its job: "Listen, Sire, to that lengthened cry of indignation and terror that springs from every point of your kingdom. Men of peace, men of property, and friends of good order, raise their supplicating hands to your majesty.... A too turbulent democracy, which has penetrated even into our laws, is endeavoring to substitute itself for legitimate power.... The constitution of the state is shaken, and your majesty alone possesses the power of restoring and confirming it on its basis.... Imperious necessity will no longer brook delay in the exercise of supreme power...." The preamble led to the King's "hesitant" signing of Orders in Council, police orders suspending liberty of the press, dissolving the chamber of deputies, curtailing elector liberty, and, by "returning to the Charter (constitution)" by means of its strictest construction, ridding the realm of other liberal "modifications" to the Charter in order to once again upraise Crown and Church in France. Charles X succeeded to the throne when his younger brother Louis XVIII died in 1824. Both brothers got out of France to avoid the Revolution, leaving Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to lose their royal heads to France's Revolutionary "razor." Their child, Louis XVII, was taken away from Antoinette in prison and soon disappeared. Louis XVIII mounted the after Napoleon's fall, when the Bourbon line was restored. He reigned by virtue of the Charter, an ambiguous compromise between revolutionary and ultra-royal principles. The liberals insisted that they had won the Charter, the royalists insisted that it was a gift that could be taken back. In fact, the Charter was granted because the Duke of Wellington, after the victory at Waterloo, had insisted on a moderate government for France, wherefore Louis XVIII promised he would provide for a free press and free elections and for the abolition of confiscations and hereditary peerage. A relatively moderate faction, few in number, called the Doctrinaires, led by one Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, who had served as Louis XVIII's correspondent in France while the King was in exile, struggled to maintain a healthy constitutional balance between the ultra-royalists and revolutionaries. The Doctrinaires, contrary to our modern connotation of their name, really had no doctrine set in stone. The Doctrinaires were what we would call old-style liberals. They were constitutional monarchists or Legitimists who believed that the monarch simply represented the continuous principle of national unity, the Descartian "I" of the kingdom, and not the egomaniacal god of absolute despotism. The Doctrinaires co-opted the Principles of 1789, and declared that the Revolution was over. The Revolution had accomplished its aims, they claimed, which were embodied in the Charter. The Charter presumably excluded the return of the old order, the ancien regime, and carried forward the centralization of government and equality under the law. Alas, the document had fatal faults: it did not provide a specific press law; the mode of elections was not fixed; it did not specify how the king could select the betters for his government, whether from his personal friends or the majority - was the government merely constitutional? or was it to be a parliamentary government?
Chateaubriand had ardently advocated peaceful reconciliation and understanding between the left and right. Royer-Collard agreed, and declared such policy to be the true foundation of a legitimate monarchical system. He and his Doctrinaires worked to consolidate and define the liberal gains of the Revolution. Besides liberal press laws, Royer-Collard advocated religious tolerance: private conscience must be protected from assault by an absolute state; the choice is not between atheism and faith, but between an illegitimate weapon wrongly used by the state, and the adminission that religion has no legitimate place in politics. Further more he wanted the Church taken out of education and education decentralized. Royer Collard also advocated direct elections and suffrage for the middle class: "Above the middle class is the longing for power; below it is ignorance, the habit of dependence, and, therefore, the incapacity of exercising the (electoral) functions in question." The ultra-royalists wanted weighted (double-vote) suffrage for the wealthy and wanted suffrage expanded to the ignorant peasants who typically favor conservative authority. Of course the ultra-royalists and arch-conservatives hated the compromise; they were bitter over the fact that the liberals had rejected bids by Louis XVIII and Napoleon II for power; the ultra-royalists wanted the king to wreak vengeance on the regicides who had stayed in France for the Revolution - Napoleon Bonaparte, by the way, had granted what the ultra-royalist's wanted to deny: he punished no one, providing they were obedient.
The doctrinaire liberals turned the tables on the ultra-royalists and accused the reactionary aristocrats of fomenting rebellion and revolution. They pressed for liberal modifications of the Charter; for instance, on May 1, 1819, the press was liberated from royal shackles. Royer-Collard helped formulate the new press law, a tremendous advance towards liberty in France. "The only remedy for liberty is prison, the only remedy for intelligence," he declared. He had argued that freedom of the press is the foundation of political liberty, for only by its means can the mass of ideas become known and criticized. Silence fosters wrong-headedness. Moreover, silence is tyranny. Silence is death, the death of liberty. Louis XVIII, who since 1815 had been the royal subject if not the pawn of the tug-of-war between revolution and absolute royalism, was not such a bad king at the outset, but things started to get out of hand. His nephew, Duke de Berry, was assassinated in 1820, spelling the apparent end of the main Bourbon line; fortunately for the Bourbons, the Duchess de Berry bore "the miracle child" after the assassination, and this child, the Duke of Bordeaux, was expected to be the savior of the dynasty. Still the Charbonnerie and others were conspiring against the throne; threats to royalty were perceived all around by the ultra-royalists, who managed to seize power. Hence the royal crackdown ensued with intense repression, censorship, Catholic supervision of education, and so on. Charles X was even further to the right than his elder brother: he virtually embodied the ultra spirit, which was, of course, his divine right according to the Church. Bigoted fanatics ruled. The death penalty was imposed for sacrilegious acts. Returning emigres were indemnified for property confiscated during the Revolution. The press was strictly regulated. The repression further stirred up the hornet's nests on the extreme left. As for the dissident monarchists, the Orleanist factionon on the moderate right, they championed the King's cousin, Louis-Philippe, Duc d'Orleans, Wherefore the reactionary Charles X, with M. de Chantelauze's preamble in mind, signed the police orders, which the rebels called the "crimes against the Charter." We know the aftermath: in sum, the King annulled the Orders too late. Paris fell to the rebels. Republican students and workers looked to old Marquis de Lafayette for leadership, while constitutional monarchists favored Louis-Phillipe. Charles abdicated in favor of "the miracle child," but no miracle availed the Bourbons. Lafayette wrapped himself in the flag on the balcony and embraced Louis-Phillipe. Long live the King, the Citizen King, the Bourgeois King of the July Monarchy. The royal principle was therefore upheld, but illegitimately so, at least according to the supporters of the main Bourbon line. Chateaubriand, whose romantic effusions were perhaps equaled only by Byron, argued somewhat ambiguously against continuous violent revolution and for a continuous hereditary line: he formally opposed the election of the Duc d'Orleans with his speech 'Against the Monarchy of July.' Chateaubriand, although he does not say as much in the speech, would apparently approve of the removal of tyrants and bigoted fools providing the despotic or moronic kings or queens were somehow, even by revolution if need be, replaced by a close relative. The point or principle of his speech sounds rather impertinent to those of us who are accustomed to electing temporary executives for brief periods of time - a compromise again between the royal and revolutionary principles. Still it makes for interesting and even pertinent reading in the context of the continuing dialectic of our Revolution within the revolution: "But when after having lied to the last moment, the tyrant suddenly sounded the knell of freedom; when the conspiracy of folly and hypocrisy was suddenly brought to light; when a Terror of the Palace, organized by Eunuchs, was thought powerful enough to replace the Terror of the Republic and the iron yoke of the Empire, - then the people armed themselves with intelligence and courage.... "I do not aim at becoming either a Roman, a knight, or a martyr; I do not believe in the divine right of royalty, and I believe in the power of revolution and of facts. I do not even invoke the Charter, I draw my ideas from a higher source - I draw them from the philosophical sphere of the epoch in which my life expires; I simply propose the Duke of Bordeaux as a greater benefit to us than that which is being argued for.... "When the people have been given thrones, they have also often given away their liberty; I will call attention to the fact that the principle of hereditary monarchy, absurd in the first instance, has been found by trial to be superior to the principle of elective monarchy. The reasons for this are so evident that I have no need to develop them. You choose a king today; what will hinder you from choosing another tomorrow? The law, you say. The law? why, it is you who make it!" Today most of us could care less for a living monarch unless he or she were a figurehead, so to speak. Then we might feel free to love a king or queen, the person who makes apparent the organic principle of continuous unity in hereditary succession, as if he or she were the projected mirror or personification of a perpetual community. Many are those who, since the alleged death of god, have lost their taste for the divine arbitrary rights of supreme bigots, and find their happiness instead in works and their fruits. That is not to say that all who revolt are atheists, or materialists who have their heads in the dirt, for revolutionaries can take a stand on the ground with their heads held high. It so happened that "materialism" was one great revolutionary doctrine of the Enlightenment. But the Doctrinaries, as I said, were moderates. They represented a compromise of spirit and matter, yet the spirit ruled. "There is nothing that I despise so much as a fact," said Royer-Collard, who refused to grovel in the base contingencies of reality yet liked to affect plebeian simplicity - he was wont to loudly blow his nose before the King in a red handkerchief, thus scandalizing the courtiers. He spoke cleverly constructed speeches with a drawl, always touching on touching on the philosophical aspect of problems. Some of the Doctrinaire philosophy, particularly its idealistic and common-sense aspects, the "Scottish philosophy" that Royer-Collard borrowed from the Thomas Reid, evolved into Victor Cousin's internationally acclaimed Eclecticism, the synthesis of the great truths of the world dubbed "Spiritualism" by Cousin - his philosophical views were admired and imitated by the New England Transcendentalists. Reid was of course inspired to a certain extent by German idealism, yet Reid held that, if ideas were the only objects of thought, then idealists would be confused philosophers, for criticism of ideas by means of ideas alone yields nothing. He rejected intermediary "images" and imaginary ideas as the sole source of knowledge, and believed in the existence of a direct relation between sensation and objects sensed. He did not claim that common sense was a mystical oracle of truth, but held that language does have certain meaningful and practical structures: it does not avail us to challenge what we know to be true; for instance, that different objects and persons exist. A man who questioned the fact of his existence would be a fool (Freud wrote to Madame Maria Bonaparte that such a man would be mentally ill, thus adding almost the entire world population as potential clients of the new mental science). Royer-Collard then took up Thomas Reid against gross materialism in favor of free will and reasonable common sense. However, Royer-Collard was not a doctrinaire in the modern sense or an ideologue in the same sense. He was influenced by Jansenism, a sort of anti-Protestant, Protestant Catholicism rooted in disgust for scholastic Church dogma, which in the end tended to mysticism and hysterical convulsions in nuns. Now, then, the futile attempts to suppress the French Principles of 1789 by modern barbarians in the United States who wear Roman armor will not be stood for for long, for the real barbarians or libertarians will always win when their liberty is at stake. Hence the imperialists should mark Solomon's words well, "Do not trust in your riches to win war," and recall that Solomon made much of international trade, putting camels to good use, yet his empire shrank considerably. Frustrated imperialists have the Jewish revolts to consider as well, besides the Goths and other barbarians. The Principles of 1789 are prehistoric principles, really. The French Revolution was no mere French sedition. Its principles persist even in the United States today, not in name only but in resistance to the right-wing authoritarian forces moronic bigotry (foolish bygoddery). With all that in mind, it is best to close as begun, with a quote by Lamartine, this one taken from a speech a year prior to the Revolution of 1848: "No, the French Revolution was something different; it is not given to base material interests to produce such effects. The human race is spiritual not withstanding its calumniators; it is sometimes mute as to its interests, but that is when it lacks ideas, or when, as with us at this moment, it falls below its ideals. The human race is spiritual, and in that is its glory; and religions, revolutions, martyrs, are only the spiritualism of ideas protesting against the materialism of facts!" The World's Orators edited by Guy Carleton Lee, New York: Putnam 1900
The History of the Restoration of Monarchy in France by Alphonse de Lamartine, transl. Captain Rafter, London: Bell 1872
The History of the Ten Years 1830-1840 by Louis Blanc, New York: Kelley 1969
The Cambridge Modern History - The Restoration edited by Lord Acton, Cambridge: Union Press 1907
The Restoration and the July Monarchy by J. Lucas-Dubreton, transl. E.F. Buckley, New York: Putnam 1929
France Under the Bourbon Restoration 1814-1830 by Frederick B. Artz, Cambridge: Harvard 1931
Authority in the Modern State by Harold J. Laski, New Haven: Yale 1927
"... In spite of material prosperity unexampled in our annals, signs of disorganization and symptoms of anarchy are visible on almost every point of the Kingdom... pernicious and subversive doctrines, loudly professed, spread and propagate themselves.... Enlightened men... carried away by the ill-understood example of a neighboring nation, have imagined that the advantages of a periodical press would counterbalance its inconvenience.... At all epochs, in fact, the periodical press has been, and it is its nature never to be otherwise than, an instrument of disorder and sedition.... It is to the violent and incessant action of the press that we owe the too sudden and too frequent variations in our internal policy.... The press has thus thrown into disorder the most upright minds, shaken the most firm convictions, and produced, in the midst of society, a confusion of principles which can be made instrumental to the most fatal attempts.... The periodical press has not evinced less ardour for persecution, with its envenomous shafts, religion and the priesthood. It attempts and always will attempt, to eradicate from the hearts of the people every germ of religious sentiment....
"Never has there been a defense more legitimate and more heroic than that of the people of Paris. They have not risen against the law; as long as the social pact was respected, the people remained peaceful; without complaint they endured insults, provocations, menaces; in exchange for the Charter, their money and their blood was required - they lavished both.
"No! the Revolution has not been a miserable French sedition; for a sedition fails even in success, and leaves behind it only ruins and corpses. It is true that the Revolution has left scaffolds and ruins - that is its remorse and misfortune; but it has left a doctrine, it has left a spirit which will endure and which will perpetuate itself as long as reason lives.
Sources- the above was written from memory and from notes taken from the following sources:
