PREFACE.

I.

THE rapidity of time supplies the place of distance. When we are separated by many events from the period we undertake to illustrate, we fancy that a lapse of ages has intervened. The years that have flown by since my birth have been full of vicissitudes, of falling nations, of reigns, empires, and republics. Contemporary history has, in fact, ceased to exist; for the days that have just gone by, seem already to have sunk deep into the shadow of the past. The perspective recedes by the grandeur and the multitude of events which interpose between the eye and the memory.

I scarcely exceed the middle age of man, and I have already lived under ten dominations, or ten different governments, in France. Between infancy and maturity I have witnessed ten revolutions: the Constitutional Government of Louis XVI., the first Republic, the Directory, the Consulate, the Empire, the first Restoration in 1814, the Second Government of the "Hundred Days" by Napoleon, the Second Restoration in 1815, the Reign of Louis Philippe, and the Second Republic:-ten cataracts, by which the spirit of modern liberty and the stationary or obstructive spirit have endeavoured, by turns, to descend or to remount the declivity of revolutions.

II.

My heart has throbbed with these emotions; I have lived in this current of passing events; I have been afflicted or rejoiced at these downfalls, or these successions; I have suffered

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from these subversions, and I have been instructed by these spectacles. My existence has vegetated, has made a noise, has been matured, has grown old, and has been renewed in me. I have understood, or have fancied I understood, whither the world was tending on the current of destiny. A recent vicissitude has raised me for a moment to the head of one of these movements, between a government which overthrew itself, and a community which it was necessary to collect together, to save and to re-constitute it on a new basis. The Second Republic was the result. This was for a long period, at least, the only system which could rally and incite the people. Monarchies had crumbled beneath them, one after another, whatever modifications might have been attempted in their principles of vitality. Dynasties waging civil wars for the throne, were nothing more themselves than mediums and causes of internecine conflicts, amongst the people, between their respective partisans. Claims upon the crown had become factions. The nation itself was indivisible; its pretenders were divided. The country alone could reign.

It had further to make, for the defence of the foundations of society, efforts which demand the power and the unanimity of a people. Finally, it had, it still has, to effect-in its laws, in its ideas, and in its relations of class with class, in its established religion, in its public instruction, in its philosophy, and in its manners-energetical reforms which the hand of no monarchy is sufficiently strong and sufficiently devoted to accomplish. Revolutions are made by republics. They arise from the government of the people, operating in their great experience upon themselves. This age has works of too much importance to accomplish, and questions of civilization and religion too complicated to solve, not to continue long republican, or not to return frequently to that form of government. I am therefore a republican, from a knowledge of the

things which must happen, and from devotion to the great work of the age. Without overlooking any of the inconveniences and dangers of democracy, I am of opinion that we should. accept them heroically as a task. It is the instrument which wounds and bruises the hand of the statesman; but it is the instrument of great things. We must renounce great things; we must again recline on the indolent couch of habits and prejudices; or we must risk the Republic. This is my profession of faith.

III.

Two men

It is with this conviction that I have undertaken to write the history of the two reigns of the Restoration. Let me not, however, be misunderstood; for this conviction will not render me unjust I shall have rather to divest myself of an excess of impartiality as to the events of my first epoch. are comprised in the historian,-the man of impressions, and the man of judgment. My judgment may be severe; but my impressions are excited, and almost affected, in behalf of the Restoration. Though frequently condemning it, I cannot refuse it my sympathy. "Why so?" murmurs the austere republican. I will tell him. "Tis because it was the period when feeling and imagination were allowed to mingle most with political science-'tis because succeeding historians have been unjust towards this phase of our fluctuating progress-'tis because they have written a satire rather than a history of the Restoration-'tis because we walk with facility over that which is falling-'tis that, between the enthusiasm of the servile glory of the Empire, and the vulgar utility of the reign of Louis Philippe, they have crushed two princes, two reigns, and two generations of political men, worthy of more consideration— 'tis, finally, that my heart feels an interest in that forgotten generation, though my understanding is in favour of the future.

IV.

My infancy, my earliest thoughts, my blood were royalist. In the paternal mansion I had been rocked in my cradle by those domestic narratives of the still reeking dramas of the Revolution. A young and beautiful queen, dragged from her bed, and pursued, half naked, by the daggers of the populace in her own palace, on the 5th and 6th October; her guards slaughtered in defending her, on the threshold of her chamber, by the pikes of assassins; a royal family flying, with their children in their arms, from the Tuileries to the National Assembly, the 10th of August; the towers of the Temple filled with the mysteries of their captivity; the scaffold of a king, of his wife, of his sister; his son brutalized by solitude, the mockery of a brutal artisan; his daughter left alone, to weep the destruction of her race, under the vaults of a prison worse than a sepulchre ; then liberated, in the darkness of the night, on condition of perpetual exile; princes hitherto celebrated for their intellect, their grace, and even for their volatility, wandering from court to court, from retreat to retreat, without any one knowing where they concealed their miseries;—there was, in this frightful catastrophe, something to excite the nerves of an infant. The heart, when of noble origin, is always on the side of the unfortunate the imagination is the veritable plotter of restora tions.

V.

And then again, this Restoration coincided with my youth; its rising splendour mingled with and became a portion of my existence. The hour of enthusiasm had struck. It was poetical, like the visions of old-miraculous as a resurrection. The old became young again in the memories of the past; the women wept; the clergy prayed; music resounded on

every side; infants wondered, and rejoiced in hope. The Empire had oppressed the soul of the nation. The mental spring of a whole people rectified itself at the word liberty, which for ten years had been proscribed. The republicans, avenged by the fall of him who had destroyed the Republic, embraced the royalists with a warmth of reconciliation, of which constitutional liberty was to be the pledge. This return appeared to be that of the monarchy modified by exile, and of liberty purified by expiation. It was an epoch of regeneration, pacific, intellectual, and liberal for France. Poetry, literature, and arts forgotten, enslaved, or disciplined under the police of the Empire, seemed to spring from the soil under the feet of the Bourbons. It appeared as if respiration had been restored to the world, after having been suffocated for ten years by tyrany: it breathed freely now for the past, the present, and he future. Never will the century behold a similar epoch. No one ever thought of to-morrow. Inspired by hope, the humiliations and misfortunes of the country were forgotten. The soldiers of Napoleon alone held down their heads as they laid down their arms; for their courtier chiefs had already passed over to the side of the conqueror

VI.

It is natural that such a spectacle, and the spectacles which followed the first day of this Restoration,-(the liberty of the press, the freedom of speech, the electoral movements, which at length excited a people so long motionless and mute; the books kept back by the imperial censorship, which issued in hurried numbers, like whole catacombs of thought; the pamphlets, the journals multiplied and free, the narratives of exile and of emigration; the great writers, the publicists, the philosophers, the poets, the Staëls, the Bonalds, the Chateau