THE MOTIVES OF THE LEGITIMISTS.
nID the Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Bisaccia really mean that the Comte de Chambord has a divine right to rule, when, on Monday last, he called on the National Assembly to de- dare the Government of France to be a Monarchy, placed under the head of the Royal House? Most English people fancy that such must have been his meaning, because he is a Legitimist, and they marvel that such a creed could be credited by any man out of Bedlam. And it is certainly a startling creed, when it is stated by the theologians, or by those laymen who are more sacerdotal than the priests: The Bourbons, it assumes, draw their claim to rule from a divine sanc- tion infinitely more august than the parchment compacts of Par- liaments or than the will of peoples. The Bourbons are the- descendants of St. Louis, and he was the heir of Kings round whom the grace and the sanctity of Heaven grew as subtilely as the grass of the field grows over naked spots of ground. Arising before Democracy had put forth its baleful claims, their rights are independent of its decrees, and they rest on the same bads as the authority of the father over his children. The King is the father of his people. His duty is to guide them for their own good, and their duty is to obey.. Should he wrong them, they will be avenged at the Judgment Day, but they must not presume to be the ministers of their own wrath by lifting a hand against the Lord's anointed. They must leave vengeance to God. Rebellion against their King is the greatest sin that can be committed by any people. Triumph it may for a time, but Heaven will let loose its lightnings upon- rebellion in due season. The French Revolution was the greatest calamity, as well as the greatest sin, ever committed by the French people, and Heaven has doomed them to expiate their guilt in the tears and blood of generations. They will not begin .to be forgiven until they shall give the Throne back to the descendant of the King whom they murdered, and until they-free him from the degrading fetters of Democratic claims. They must once
more think of duties, instead of rights. They must fly from the thought of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, as they would from the temptations of the Devil. They must forget every Democratic lesson that they have learned during the last eighty years, and begin where they left off, before they slew the King. In order that the work of renouncing the pomps and the vanities of the Revolution may be easy, they must couple the names of Rousseau, Voltaire, Robespierre, Denton, and Napoleon with the most energetic Commination Service which can be devised by priestly piety. Finally, they must once more give themselves and their country into the keeping of Holy Church ; and when the King shall act in like manner, France will become as glorious and as pious as she was when the Bourbons were her earthly Providence.
The materials of some such theory may certainly be drawn from the sermons of Bonnet, and he may have believed it in a vague way, so long as he did not subject it to the touchstone of fact. It may also have furnished a real faith to the hysterical recluses of monasteries, to devout women, and to those devotees who looked at every event of human life from the -door of a church. But we doubt whether it was ever credited by any other human beings, and it was certainly never the creed of any other portion of the French people who could be said to have had a creed at all. The nobles did not attach such sanctity to the person of their monarch when he thwarted their wills, although they usually talked a language of loyalty as high-flown as the words of gallantry which they addressed to Court dames. On the contrary, they often rebelled against the anointed King, and indeed the theory that he had a divine right to exact absolute obedience does not seem to have taken, a dogmatic shape until the sixteenth century, when the subsiding storm of the Reformation was still shaking ancient sanctities, when men were fearful about the fate of all things in Church and State, and when the ear of prophetic anticipation might already have heard the faint notes of that tremendous convulsion which, a century and a half later, was to destroy the old systems of government. Thus the theory of Divine Right was really the application of theological buttresses to a menaced State. Men like Bossuet argued that France could not exist a monarchy, nor a monarchy further argued that the destruction of that system immeasurable injury to the Church, and therefore contend is the answer to the whole theory of Necessity,—the cer- to the eternal interests of mankind. Hence they naturally tainty, otherwise so difficult to gain whenever man has risen to thought that the existing arrangement must have been ordained the consciousness of Law, that the will is free. And if the will be by Heaven, in some high and special sense, and since the age was free, Necessity is not Queen. essentially theological, they sought a theological basis for their without the Bourbons ;
beliefs. Those secular considerations, those appeals to motives of self-interest, and those referencea to the will of peoples which seem all-important to us, could scarcely have dawned on the mind of Bossuet ; or if they did, he must have thought them as weak as we think the claims of Divine Right. He knew that the best way to
keep men loyal was to tell them that they would be damned if they should rebel, and we repeat that Bossuet may have believed his theory in a vague fashion. Thus did the civil and the ecclesiastical necessity of the State generate the theological sanction, and the theological sanction generate in turn an elaborate dogmatic system, which hedged round the King with an array of sacred rights. Precisely the same process of growth was seen in England. Her ancient Kings carried about with them the same kind of divinity as her Barons, but that did not save them from rebellions, nor did the English people believe that they were flying in the face of Heaven when they helped the nobles to resist the tyranny of John. It was not until the time of James I. and Charles I. that the theory of Divine Right began to take a defi- nite and dogmatic shape, and it did not fully blossom until it was cultivated by the High-Church divines of James II. Sancroft and Ken found that the Throne and the Altar would, in all pro- bability, stand or fall together. The best protection of Episco- pacy against the Vandal hands of Puritanism was, they saw, a strong monarchy, and they believed that no monarchy would be safe from the blows of another Cromwell unless it were sanctified by religion. So they were irresistibly led to give a theological character to the rights even of a King who was a Catholic, who oppressed the Bishops themselves, and who was notoriously eager to make his own religion that of England. We do not mean that Sancroft and the other Anglican prelates de- liberately framed or accepted the theory of Divine Right to strengthen their own position, but we do mean that they were unconsciously led to adopt it because they fancied it to be the best protection against the attacks of Puritanism. English Bishops would never have developed Divine Right into a system, if Charles II. and James IL had been converted to Presbyterianism, if they had made war upon Episcopacy, and if they had turned every parish church into a conventicle. In such a case, the Episcopal intellect would have been nimble enough to formulate the divine right, not of kings, but of rebels, provided that the rebels had been on the side of the Church.
The Comte de Chambord doubtless holds some loose theory that his right to govern France is such as Parliaments did not give, and cannot take away. M. de Belcaatel and the other Clerical fanatics who form his body-guard certainly hold that opinion in a definite form. M. Louis Veuillot delights to express it with rhetorical ferocity, when he seeks to show his boundless hatred of the Revolution and his scorn for the men who are still doing its work. All these zealots have certainly a speechless contempt for popular rights, and a religious belief in the rights of the Kir g. Yet we doubt whether even they would try to reverse the chief work of the Revolution. At least the great majority of the Legitimists would not dream of doing anything so in- sane, for they do not believe in the old theory of Divine Right, or in the theological dogmas of the clergy. Many of them are as determined Voltairians as M. Gambetta himself, even when they talk glibly about the guidance of Holy Church. When M. Batbie does so, no one fancies that he is in earnest. He patronises the Church because she commands an immense force of religious gets d'armes, and because she would place it at the service of a monarchy. He advocates the erection of a monarchy because he thinks that it would be the only stable form of government. And • he demands a Legitimate Monarchy, in order to get rid of pre- tenders to the Throne, and to utilise all the loyalty that still exists in France. Nay, M. Renan is also a Legitimist, and he has written the subtlest plea in favour of restoring the old monarchy. Democracy seems, then, poor and vulgar to his fastidious soul ; his imagination is fired by the tales of the glory which attended the France of these Bourbons ; and he fears that, under the Republic, this nation would become a collection of disunited parishes. Such men as M. Renan or M. Batbie are Legitimists in precisely the same sense as Mr. Disraeli or Mr. Lowe. They say to themselves that, if there must be a King at all, he ought to be the one whose claim will be least contestable. Other Legiti- mists go farther. Family ties link them to the old re'gime, or real , theological beliefs make them enthusiastic devotees of-Royalty, or their sympathies are kindled by the tales of regal France, and they are fired by that passionate and unreasoning royalty which is the religion of politics. Such persons may vaguely assert the rights of the King, denounce the Revolution, and clamour for the White Flag. But it does not follow that they would become the slaves of any King, and indeed they might stubbornly press the . rights of Parliament, if the Comte de Chambord were on the throne. . Louis XVLLI. found out that fact so soon as he had to govern France. The nobles were as ready to thwart the King as they had been before the Revolution ; and, in spite of them-
selves, the hard aristocratic crust of their minds had been softened by the solvents of democratic teaching. Nay, the Church itself was submissive to the King only so long as he obeyed her influence, and it was easy to see that even she could become revolutionary. Divine Right, there- fore, as it is understood by moat of the Legitimists, is not the absurd theory which most English suppose it to be ; and the Due de la Rochefoucauld-Bisaccia, who is a sensible man, would doubtless refuse to recite the idolatrous rhetoric in which Bossuet celebrates the glories, the perfections, and the absolute powers of the Bourbon Kings. Legitimacy is certainly laden with so many mischievous tenets as to be the old Toryism of France, and she would indeed be stricken with calamity if it were to triumph ; but the spirit of the creed is mistaken by those who imagine it to be merely a bundle of antiquated absurdities, consecrated by the fictions of priests.
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