Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
M. Louis Blanc, for instance, makes a startling remark on the
incompatibility of royalty and a representative chamber. The two powers
are represented to us as flatly irreconcilable. "Can society," he asks,
"have two heads? Is the sovereignty divisible? Between the government of
a king and the government of an assembly, is there not a gulf which
every day makes wider? And wherever this dualism exists, are not the
people condemned to fluctuate miserably between a 10th of August and an
18th Brumaire?"--(_Int._, p. 64.) And a little further on, speaking of
the times of Louis XVIII., he writes--"Meanwhile Europe began to be
disquieted on the state of things in France. Foreign sovereigns had
thought to establish peace in our country, by establishing the empire of
the charter, and the political dualism which it consecrates. The error
was great, and they ended by discovering it. M. de Richelieu, who had
been present at the congress at Aix-la-Chapelle, brought back with him a
very lively apprehension of the future fate of the monarchy in France. A
change of the electoral law was proposed. Unhappily, it was not in the
law of the 5th February that lay the danger which occupied the congress
of Aix-la-Chapelle. To consolidate the throne, and raise it above the
storms which threatened it, not this or that electoral law, but the
electoral power itself, should, if possible, be abolished. For in
whatever hands this formidable lever was placed, it was impossible that
royalty could long resist its action. To shift the elective power was
only to give the monarchy other enemies, not to save it. * * * The aim
of the new ministry was to preserve the electoral law; which amounted to
this--the monarchy chose ministers whose programme was the destruction
of monarchy."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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