liberality. Thus he told the people of Grenoble that he de'signed himself to revise the imperial constitutions, in order 'to develope from them a true representative monarchy, the only 'form of government worthy of a nation so enlightened as the 'French.' But even between these three declarations there is a suspicious difference of tone. M. Thiers is himself constrained to acknowledge that the language of Napoleon was 'somewhat more imperial' at Lyons than it had been at Grenoble; although he takes care to subdue the obvious inference by declaring that no one questioned that Napoleon was sincere.' The Emperor declares it his object to assure the constitutional 'throne of his son,' thus throwing himself discreetly into the background, much as he afterwards qualified his second abdication by declaring that he would be his son's general. But the promises of peace still more rapidly recede as the eagle flies on.

6

The immediate acts which accompanied these promises of reform show that Napoleon returned from Elba in the temper of a despot. What Talleyrand said of the Bourbons on their return to France in 1814, that they had learnt nothing and had forgotten nothing,' has some application to Napoleon himself. On the 13th of March, in the midst of his liberal speeches at Lyons, and while Louis XVIII. was still reigning at Paris, he published a decree confiscating the property of the Princes of the House of Bourbon, and of all the French emigrant nobles who had not received amnesty before the 1st of January, 1814, expelling them within a fortnight from the French territory, and declaring that, if they should linger in France after that time had expired, they should be arrested and tried according to the laws of the Revolution.* We say nothing of the expulsion of these emigrant nobles from the army, for that was a permissible severity on which the safety of the Empire perhaps depended. But while M. Thiers acknowledges the decree of exile against the nobles, he is silent as to the confiscation of their property. The Bourbons are condemned with justice, as impolitic and illiberal, both by Napoleon and M. Thiers, in not accepting the social results of the Revolution. Because, for instance, they threatened to reinstate tithes, and to disturb the tenure and title of property, they are denounced by both as the real conspirators against their own reign. But we find Napoleon immediately disturbing the results of the Restoration with tenfold harshness. M. Duvergier de Hauranne drily remarks, that this was a singular prelude to

* Duvergier de Hauranne, Hist. Parl. vol. ii. p. 474.

a constitutional régime. M. Thiers will reply that this measure, after all, was no more than a Loi des Suspects, which could be invented by a Bonaparte marked by Dutch apathy, as well as by a Bonaparte marked by Italian passion. But the present Emperor of the French did not promise parliamentary government in the same breath in which he proclaimed a Loi des Suspects.

6

Proscription on account of the past is in our judgment very much akin to absolutism for the future. There is other evidence that Napoleon, on his return, prosecuted his former policy of proscription with unabated zeal. M. Thiers has published a smothered declaration, written at Lyons, which it would have implied a strong effort of candour on his part to produce, had it not already appeared elsewhere. This is a projected com'minatory decree' against certain domestic enemies of Napoleon, such as Talleyrand, who had schemed against him, Marmont who had, as he said, betrayed him, and Augereau who had insulted him at Avignon. But it included also the Duc de Dalberg and M. de Vitrolles. M. Thiers is forced to acknowledge that this decree betrayed a violent reaction, 'which contrasted with the clemency promised in his procla'mations.' It was at length abandoned only because the Majorgeneral, Bertrand, refused to countersign it. But it had been drawn up by Napoleon at Lyons, at the moment that he was promising by word of mouth, peace, liberty, and pardon.

This was the conduct of Napoleon to his national enemies and to his personal opponents. How then did he act towards his own adherents, and to the ministers of his choice? There can be no doubt that he deceived them, just as he had deceived Caulaincourt, Duke of Vicenza, at Dresden, two years before, in regard to the renewal of the German war. Carnot declares that he and his colleagues long and firmly believed that Napoleon quitted Elba under a secret compact with a section of the Congress of Vienna, and that the Empress and the King of Rome would soon rejoin him at Paris. We must allow, indeed, for the extreme perils of Napoleon's situation, and for the apprehension of disheartening adherents, who should be made aware of the immense confederacy formed against him in reality as well as in name. But the ruler who would dissemble to his own ministers would hardly scruple to dissemble to the nation. We think that throughout the conduct of Napoleon at this time, a uniform object may be traced (except only where passion compromised his consistency) to bid for power against the Bourbons. With the imperfect reliance that was to be placed upon a feeble army, he was convinced that his domestic policy

must be favourably distinguished from theirs. They had just been playing his game. The public animosity to their rule in the last century, which had led to the great Revolution, had been forgotten; for a new generation meanwhile had grown up in France. But during their eleven months of power they contrived to awaken it again. The reopening of such questions as the right of tithe, and the territorial pretensions of the nobles, assailed the still surviving principles of the Revolution. Napoleon discerned his advantage, and his promised reforms are directed to precisely those questions on which the Bourbons had just before wrecked their popularity.

Let us take an example or two from M. Thiers' own volume. So early as his arrival at Grenoble, and in so small a matter as the payment of his personal expenses, he chose to lodge at an auberge, instead of at the Prefecture; in order,' M. Thiers avers, to distinguish himself from the Bourbon princes, whose 'journeys had been very onerous to the provinces they visited.' When he reached Lyons, he pronounced the dissolution of the two Chambers of Louis XVIII., alleging against each of them grounds most likely to render them unpopular.' Thus he denounced the Peers as either in league with the enemy, or as emigrants returning under their flag; and he held up the Deputies to indignation for their unnational votes of the public money, to pay the debts incurred by the King during a long period of civil war in France. Again, they were accused of an intention to re-establish the right of the clergy to tithe. Accordingly, Napoleon tells the peasantry that he comes to save them from the exactions of the clergy; the possessors of national property, that he comes to save them from an imminent spoliation on the part of the nobles; the army, that he comes to save them from insufferable humiliations; and France in general, that he comes to insure the triumph of the prin'ciples of 1789,' with which his own crown was as inconsistent as the pretensions of the nobles and the clergy themselves.

The pledges thus given were no doubt ostensibly redeemed in the new Constitution and in the new law of the press. But the Republicans do not appear to have been gainers by either. Indeed, the historians of that school rest the insincerity of Napoleon on the ground that, while he had been in such haste to dissolve the Chambers of Louis XVIII., that he proclaimed their dissolution while still an adventurer at Lyons, he refused to convoke the Chambers of his own creation until he was threatened by the active hostility of Lafayette and the other Republican leaders. In this we think they are unjust. Na'poleon,' writes M. Thiers with more truth, distrusted the

'convoking of the Chambers (during war), and feared that at the first sound of cannon they would be wanting, not in courage, but in sang-froid.' His apprehension that his first reverse in the field might be followed by a parliamentary revolution in the capital, was well founded; for his own Chambers had dethroned him before Wellington could march from Waterloo to Paris. Two years and a half ago, we saw the Chambers at Turin prorogued before the Italian campaign began, yet no one supposes that either Victor Emmanuel or Napoleon III., designed the suppression of Parliamentary Government in Sardinia.

The truth is, that there is no appreciable distinction, in point of popular authority, between the Constitution of the Hundred Days and the Constitution of the first Restoration. The Additional Act, as the former was termed, introduced distinctions which are only perceptible in phraseology. It was in fact drawn up by men who held precisely the same opinions, for it was much more the Constitution of Benjamin Constant than of Napoleon. M. Thiers tells us in his previous volume (vol. xviii. p. 177.), that the Charter, as the Constitution of the Bourbons was termed, thus settled the question of the initiative in legislation between the Crown and the Chambers. The former retained it in theory; but the latter held the privilege conjointly to supplicate' the Crown to introduce the measures they desired. He acknowledges that this privilege conveyed. the initiative to the Chambers under a form infinitely respectful, 'which detracted neither from their importance nor their au'thority.' If we now return to the nineteenth volume (p. 429.), we shall find that the Additional Act reserved the same theoretic initiative to the Imperial Crown, subject to the ridiculous distinction that while the Chambers, in addressing the Crown for projets de loi, had been required to supplicate' the King, they were now required to invite' the Emperor! The combined action of the two Chambers, touching this initiative, was still as necessary under the Additional Act as it had been under the Charter. To tell the truth, this appears to be about the only parliamentary distinction, to illustrate what M. Thiers describes as the great constitutional epoch of the Hundred Days. And he calls this a copy of the English Constitution!

If we turn from the powers of these Chambers to their composition, we find that the deputies in either Constitution were chosen in the colleges of arrondissement and the colleges of departments, though certainly the electoral qualifications differed, and the Emperor once again bid higher than the Bourbon King. But for the Upper House, Napoleon, advised by

Constant, maintained as firmly as Louis XVIII. the principle of a hereditary peerage against the unanimous opposition of the Republicans. His Chamber of Peers, indeed, was filled with very different men; but the old French nobles were scarcely likely to prove more illiberal legislators than the new French marshals.

Where, then, is the distinctive liberality of the Empire, even while upon its trial? If not to be found in the Constitution, is it to be found in the laws of the press? Napoleon by a decree of the 25th of March (only five days after he had returned to Paris) abolished the censorship; and M. Thiers accepts this decree as evidence of the emancipation of the newspapers. The measure was certainly on the face of it a liberal one. The journals were henceforward nominally made subject only to the ordinary laws administered in the ordinary courts of justice; and they were required to bear, on each copy, the name of the person accepting the post to which Fouché then gave the name of responsible editor.' It is true that they wrote in a liberal sense. M. Thiers also appeals plausibly enough to the first declaration of Napoleon at the Tuileries; when he exclaimed, The liberty of the press, why should I fear that any more? After what it has written for the last year, it has nothing more 'to say about me; and it is now its turn to say something about 'my adversaries.' (Vol. xix. p. 238.)

We fear M. Thiers will think us very uncharitable; but we must say that he has himself supplied us with the means of reconciling the abolition of the censorship with the immediate interest of Napoleon's own authority. The Emperor required above all things to gain popular credence. He aspired, for the present, to rule France by the power of moral opinion through the press, and to postpone parliamentary interposition until the latest moment. M. Thiers repeats incessantly Napoleon's own conviction, that his former government had been brought to a dead lock because all the journals of the Empire were too servile and mendacious to acquire credence. It was of no use, therefore, for avowedly enslaved newspapers to write of the liberty that was to save the Empire. There was no ground to hope for the promised Constitution while the press was gagged. Its ostensible freedom, on the other hand, was an earnest of further liberty. Being in control,' M. Thiers again argues, during his former reign, of all the organs of opinion, he had seen such an incredulity arise among the public, that he was no longer able 'to deny a falsehood or to attest a truth.'

But what was the motive of the concession? It is obvious à priori that it may have been devised as an act of liberality, or