Paris, From the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 2Walton, William
History
Paris, From the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 2
Walton, William
Paris (France) -- Description and travel; Paris (France) -- History
The new Bourbon styled himself "king by the grace of God," without any
mention of the national will or of the foreign enemy to whom he owed his
crown; he replaced the tricolor by the white flag, and dated his
accession from the death of his nephew Louis XVII, the dauphin,
considering 1814 as the nineteenth year of his reign. So far was this
fable pushed that in certain school histories of the Restoration the
victories of the campaign in Italy were stated to have been gained by
"M. de Buonaparte, lieutenant-general of the king." In a recent review
of this reign, however, it is stated that when Blucher was mining the
bridge of Jéna, during the occupation of the capital, and refused to be
dissuaded from his purpose of blowing it up, Louis XVIII declared his
intention of stationing himself on the bridge and perishing with it. The
intervention of the Russian Emperor, Alexander, however, had probably
more to do with the preservation of the structure; and a recent
biography of the Duc de Richelieu asserts that the Czar's affection for
this minister, who had been at one time governor of Odessa, brought
about the evacuation of French territory by the allied armies at a date
earlier by two years than that fixed by the treaty of November 20, 1815.
Notwithstanding the liberal provisions of the _Charte constitutionelle_,
drawn up on the 27th of May, 1814, the restored monarchy returned so
promptly to all its old abuses that in ten months it had exhausted the
public patience and brought about the return from Elba. On the second
restoration, after the Hundred Days, it was so vindictive, as we have
seen, adding even religious persecution to political, that it also has
been given in history its reign of terror, _la Terreur blanche_. In 1824
the king was succeeded by the Comte d'Artois, under the title of Charles
X, a typical Bourbon, who had "learned nothing, forgotten nothing," who
considered himself called to revive all the powers and privileges of the
ancient monarchy, and who did not hesitate to violate the prescriptions
of the Charte when he found them in his way. Consequently, the nation,
with Paris at its head, at the end of its patience and finding its
constitutional opposition about to be encountered with a _coup d'État_,
got up the bloody revolution of July, 1830, in the streets of the
capital, and the last of the Bourbon kings took the road to permanent
exile,--let us hope.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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