TOPICS OF THE DAY.
D'ORLEANS VERSUS BONAPARTE.
TT is not difficult to understand why the Bonapartes, as a .1 dynasty, should detest the House of Orleans. It is but an illustration of the old truth, that to hate one another heartily men must have some point of contact. Between the exile of Frohsdorf and Louis Napoleon there is no debatable ground. Each, his own postulate granted, is the legitimate and inevitable sovereign of France. If hereditary right be indeed divine—as, for example, justice is divine— Henri de Bourbon is King of France, all the votes ever given to his opponents notwithstanding. If, on the other hand, universal suffrage be the only righteous basis of authority, the Elect of six millions' may claim at least pre- eminence among the candidates. Between adversaries so situated there may be war to the death, but there can be little jealousy and less irritation. Like ultra Tories and Radicals at an election, or Catholics and Quakers at a public meeting, they look on war to the knife as a natural law, to be good- humouredly and implicitly obeyed. There is an absence of fear, too, on either side, which greatly diminishes exaspera- tion. To the heir of the Bourbons Louis Napoleon is simply an usurper, whose inevitable departure from the scene he can await in patience. The dynasty of a thousand years is not imperiled by a rebellion which has even now not lasted so long as the rebellion of the Fronde. To the Emperor, again, the Count de Chambord is the leader of a party which has only traditions, the representative of principles which every day lose more of their hold upon society. But the Princes of the Orleans family occupy a widely different position. Their title is based upon the right which is the Emperor's own security. They, like himself, are the repre- sentatives of a revolution. They, like him, appeal to prin- ciples with which modern society can work, and they, like him, can recal memories Frenchmen still hold dear. If France under the first Empire led the politics of Europe, under the monarchy of July she led the movement of thought, and educated France looks back to the intellectual strife which followed 1831 at least as regretfully as the veterans of the Guard to the days of " le Petit Caporal." When a Legiti- mist talks of Henri V., he protests against the revolution, and visibly wastes his breath. When an Orleanist denounces the coup d'etat, he, like his enemy, accepts the revolution, and only prefers its development under a Constitution to its culmination in a Caesar. Between such adversaries the struggle must always be tinged with bitterness, the sharper because neither party can stifle his hatred in disdain. The Orleanists appealing to the people, have no argument on which to rest, while contemning the popular will. The Bona- partist whose only title is the suffrage, views a possible favourite with fear. Add that Constitutionalism is day by day regretted more keenly by cultivated France, that the Orleanists are strong in the navy and still popular with the higher grades of the army, that they are the chosen of the bourgeoisie, and that they must inevitably at no distant date unite the claims at once of popular election and hereditary right and the 'hate of the Bonapartes is not hard to under- stand.
It is the mode in which this hatred is displayed, the in- finite littleness to which it habitually descends, which it is so difficult to comprehend. One could imagine a great ruler outlawing a pretender, placing a price upon his head, or sending him to the scaffold if he returned from exile to raise a struggle for his throne. But a hatred which descends to espionage on family proceedings, which confiscates private property, which carries on a war of the salon with bits of scandal, which suppresses a speech because it showed ability in the speaker, and which prohibits to its rival the com- monest liberty of speech, seems to Englishmen to savour more of spite than of party precaution or statesmanlike self- defence. The Emperor of the French on ordinary occasions is dignified enough. He expressed no petulance when in- sulted by the Czar. He has allowed the Legitimists to honour a soldier whom he knew plotted for his fall. He has once or twice pardoned damaging attacks with a cold phlegm which resembled fortitude. But with the House of Orleans he seems incapable even of artificial moderation. France, too indifferent to many rights, is still sensitive to the rights of property, yet he confiscated the possessions of the family by an absolute decree. The Due d'Aumale publishes a pamphlet not a whit more savage than the speech by which it was pro- voked, and the poor printer who published it is sentenced to twice the penalty which usually expiates a libel. The Bishop of Poitiers was only reprimanded for language which in the proxy of the Dec d'Aumale is a criminal offence. A week after the Secretary of the Comtesse de Neuilly was watched by spies, dogged to Paris, and there seized, that the police might read the letters of the family. The Due d'Aumale makes a clever speech, no more political than every speech which regrets freedom or laments the suppression of thought must be in France, and the journals are commanded to suppress his words. Finally, as if pointedly to demonstrate the offi- cial character of these acts, the Minister of the Interior breaks through the few laws which still protect freedom of thought, and orders the prefects to seize all works, books, pamphlets, or articles written by exiles, before publication. The printers of such works are liable to penal sentences, the publishers to the certainty of ruin ; but all these guarantees seem insufficient. The Princes are " beyond the action of the common law"—that is, the pain of imprisonment cannot be added to the sufferings of exile—and they, as the only re- venge still possible, are sentenced par contumace to silence. There is something mean in this petty persecution, and sovereigns "who understand their epoch" should know that a meanness excites more anger than a crime. The highway- man is half defended by the men who brand the thief. The expulsion of Madame de Steal rouses the anger of historians who pass lightly over Pichegru's execution- The infinitely little is not a safe science for monarchs to explore. It is so pitifully useless, too, when all is done. An epigram hits as hardly as a pamphlet, and M. de la Guerroniere himself would be puzzled to subject a bon mot to " administrative seizure." All the press laws in the world could not have saved Louis Philippe from the effect of Beranger's refrain," His head is like a pear," nor will all the prefects who watch M. de Persigny's smile check the circulation of " La France est morte—vive Louis Napoleon !"
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