Nor was this the only difficulty; for the French themselves, hopelessly divided into two hostile camps, were unable to come to any satisfactory agreement. On the one hand, there were the followers of the King, reactionary in feeling, who remembered with bitterness the cruelties they had experienced during revolutionary times, and who, now that they were supported by victorious armies, demanded the revival pure and simple of the _ancien régime_. On the other hand, there was Imperial and Revolutionary France—the nation itself,—who, having irrevocably adopted new canons of social and political existence, endeavoured to make terms with the party in power for the protection of the people. There was little sympathy between the two; but the latter had no leader, and had placed themselves unreservedly in the unworthy hands of Fouché, who, having gauged the situation, deserted those he was bound to support, and sought his own personal aggrandisement by joining the party that attached itself to the King. The keen anxiety of Louis XVIII. to save France from the humiliations that were to be imposed upon her was undoubted; so also was his earnest desire to reign in accordance with the liberal spirit which the times required. He hoped to reconcile all sections of the population, and to prove himself their deliverer, not only from internal disorder, but also from foreign oppression. But though his good will and generosity were unquestioned, his prejudices remained, and were not to be eradicated even by misfortune, and his followers and intimate counsellors were not endowed with a similar noble spirit of forgetfulness for past ill-treatment. France, therefore, by the will of the Allies and with the full consent of the Royalist faction, was again to be unconditionally placed in the King’s hands, his prerogative was to be unfettered, and his power was to be absolute. Nor were his first proclamations, issued to his subjects and dated the 25th and 28th of June, calculated to give much satisfaction to a people who dreaded his rule. The King’s party, in short, had not the wisdom to perceive that a stable Restoration must be accompanied by a complete amnesty in favour of those, at least, who had no further power to resist—and resistance to the old French Monarchy had entirely ceased in the country. Hence, although Louis repudiated all intentions of restoring feudal rights, or of dispossessing those who had illegally acquired lands during the Revolution, yet he did not hesitate to threaten with punishment the men by whose assistance he imagined Napoleon had been able to install himself once again as Emperor.[34] ----- Footnote 34: