France -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
Du Bousquier now posed as a banker. This miniature Lafitte was a
partner in all new enterprises, taking good security. He served
himself while apparently serving the interests of the community. He
was the prime mover of insurance companies, the protector of new
enterprises for public conveyance; he suggested petitions for asking
the administration for the necessary roads and bridges. Thus warned,
the government considered this action an encroachment of its own
authority. A struggle was begun injudiciously, for the good of the
community compelled the authorities to yield in the end. Du Bousquier
embittered the provincial nobility against the court nobility and the
peerage; and finally he brought about the shocking adhesion of a
strong party of constitutional royalists to the warfare sustained by
the "Journal des Debats," and M. de Chateaubriand against the throne,
--an ungrateful opposition based on ignoble interests, which was one
cause of the triumph of the bourgeoisie and journalism in 1830.
Thus du Bousquier, in common with the class he represented, had the
satisfaction of beholding the funeral of royalty. The old republican,
smothered with masses, who for fifteen years had played that comedy to
satisfy his vendetta, himself threw down with his own hand the white
flag of the mayoralty to the applause of the multitude. No man in
France cast upon the new throne raised in August, 1830, a glance of
more intoxicated, joyous vengeance. The accession of the Younger
Branch was the triumph of the Revolution. To him the victory of the
tricolor meant the resurrection of Montagne, which this time should
surely bring the nobility down to the dust by means more certain than
that of the guillotine, because less violent. The peerage without
heredity; the National Guard, which puts on the same camp-bed the
corner grocer and the marquis; the abolition of the entails demanded
by a bourgeois lawyer; the Catholic Church deprived of its supremacy;
and all the other legislative inventions of August, 1830,--were to du
Bousquier the wisest possible application of the principles of 1793.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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