'11111 PLAN OF THE FRENCH MONARCHISTS.
IT is interesting to read of the latest plot said to have been concocted by the French Monarchists, even though the interest is necessarily of a rather sardonic kind, an interest in seeing how little great personages understand their epoch or the ideas of average men. The plot, in fact, carries us back some centuries, to a period when it was thought reasonable to suggest that Charles II., then an exile in Holland, should marry Oliver Cromwell's daughter, and be restored amidst the united acclaim of the Puritan soldiers, who detested Monarchy, and the English gentry, who detested standing armies. Both the Monarchical parties in France, it would seem, have become conscious that the spirit of the time is going against them. Neither of them have a leader whom the people know, neither of them have a cause for which any one is willing to die, and both of them see that as new generations arise their old organisations and motive-powers are becoming effete. The Monarchists have lost their best support, the exclu- sive favour of the Church ; the Bonapartists have lost their strongest shield, the fear of the peasantry that in spite of themselves the Republic would be Red. The number of Monarchical Deputies declines with each General Election, the social prejudice against Monarchists who take service with the Republic shows symptoms of dying away, and men who were once proud of being Legitimists or Bonapartists now declare with shrugs that their only course is to become Conservative Re- publicans. Allowing always for the unforeseen, there is more than a chance that before the new century attains its majority all France may have become Re- publican, and Monarchy have been transmuted, like Jacobitism, from a living faith of a great party into a pretty tradition of a few exclusive families. This does not at all suit the heads of either of the two parties, who see their rank in the world slowly waning. while their pecuniary fortunes, owing to some cause which we have not fully traced, are steadily declining. " Philippe VII." says he cannot find money for his supporters as his father did, while Napoleon IV.—or is ho Napoleon V. ?- is represented as actually poor, living in Brussels on the income and in the style of a moderately placed bourgeois. Why the latter circumstance should matter we hardly understand, recollecting the poverty alike of Stuarts, Bourbons, and Orleans Princes while in exile, but it is, we believe, a fact that modern Pretenders greatly need, or think they need, command of large sums of money. The heads of the two families therefore, advised it is said by two great ladies, the Princess Clementine, who built the throne of Bulgaria, and the Empress Eugenie, and backed by a conditional approval front the Due d'Aumale, who, besides his ability, still possesses the great wealth of the house of Conde, have resolved upon a notable project. This is nothing less than a fusion of their pretensions, which is to be made manifest to the world by the marriage of the Duo d'Orleans legitimate sovereign of France, as well as heir to the " King of the French," with the widow of the Due d'Aosta, who is half a Bonaparte. The Duo d'Orleans is then to be the candidate of both the Monarchical parties, whose mem- bers are to use their combined strength in favour of a Revision of the Constitution, and ultimately of a popular vote, which will " reconsecrate by the choice of the people the Crown inherited from St. Louis." It is, it may fairly be presumed, arranged that if France should select a Bonaparte, the Bourbons will admit his right, and that if any member of either family should be accepted, all the Princes of both will return to France with the social position, and, if Providence is very favour- able, with the fortunes, of Princes of the Blood. The two families have met at dinner without, it is fully believed, throwing wine-glasses at each others' heads, an OrhSans Princess has married the Due de Magenta, who is of course in a way a representative Bonapartist, and in the autumn all details are to be settled and the fusion announced to the world by some decided step, probably a vote of Monarchists, Radicals, and Socialists together for a Congress to revise the Constitution. It is a dreamy scheme, almost operatic in its air of unreality, and Englishmen will have a difficulty in believing, in spite of assurances from M. de Blowitz—who should, however, know if anybody knows what Orleaniets are about—that it is seriously intended. There is no large idea or visible basis of fact upon which it can rest. To give such plans even a chance of success they must either greatly decrease the majority which is at present opposed to them, or greatly increase the energy of the minority, and where in this scheme is the influence which will secure either of these results ? The average French- man might in certain contingencies, described below, decide to substitute a Monarchy for a Republic, but why the fusion should induce him so to decide we cannot even con- jecture. If he is of the historic turn of mind,or of the clerical turn, and therefore disposed to prefer a Bourbon to other candidates, he will not prefer Philippe VII. more because he is supported by Bonapartists, or because he has made what he will probably regard as a misalliance, the Prin- cess Letitia, Duchess d'Aosta, being only half-Royal, or if he is of the ambitious turn of mind, loves excitement and adventure and military prestige among the nations, he will not sigh for a Monarchy the more ardently because the dynasty whose history among modern dynasties is the most picturesque has given up at all events its immediate claims, and is not to ascend the throne. If he believes, as some Frenchmen undoubtedly do, in right divine, he will not care in the least about Bonapartist adhesions ; while if he believes in plebiscites—and there are Frenchmen who think choice by a plebiscite constitutes divine right—he will be only irritated by being told to vote for a candidate whose claim, let him protest as he will, rests ultimately upon a historic and not a popular foundation. So far as we can see, the fusion will not necessarily bring to the combined parties one new vote, while it will necessarily diminish the internal energy of both. There is no appeal made that outsiders can perceive to the imagination of France, none to her reason, and astonishingly little to her sense of convenience, for after all the followers of an unsuccessful Pretender always disappear when the suc- cessful Pretender is enthroned. Most of them swear, and that, too, without much irritating their consciences, that they never thought of their unsuccessful friends. All that the fusion in a normal time will secure is that some of the Pretenders will pretend less visibly, which means, of course, that one of the two parties will have less heart in it, will be less disposed to run risks, and will make fewer converts from the outside. The fusion will give new energy only to the party of defence,—that is, the Republicans.
We believe, as we always have believed, that there are two chances, and, except in the most improbable event of one of the two dynasties throwing up a man of unmis- takable genius, but two chances, for Monarchy in France. If France suffered once more a humiliating defeat, if she lost two more provinces, if her military prestige were again destroyed for a generation, she probably would, if her nature remained unchanged, accuse the Republic of being the cause of her disasters, and there being prac- tically no alternative would, in order to repair them, set up some kind of throne. And it is probable, also, that if the Socialists achieved an accidental victory, if property were seriously threatened, and if at the same time the Army took the alarm, the " Haves " in despair might insist that without a hereditary ruler safety for them and theirs was no longer to be obtained. It is by no means -certain, if she had at the time a good General who had won an isolated battle, or a statesman of the iron-fisted type, that France would in either case fill this throne from the old families, the whole of the Boulanger incident be- traying a tendency to seek an entirely new head for a personal government, a man without traditions either of victory or defeat, a "dark horse," in fact, upon whom hopes could concentrate themselves ; but we have no wish to strain that possibility. The chances are, we admit, that in such a case France would think .first either of her historic dynasty, or of the dynasty under which she has twice attained a degree of pros- perity and renown, which she believes, in spite of the final failures, to have been without a precedent in her history. We grant that, but in either of those events how would the fusion work ? It simply would not work at all. Whichever of the two impulses caught the imagina- tion of France she would follow it with a rush, the Pre- tender rejected would be pronounced "impossible," and the Pretender preferred would be enthroned, if all the " arrangements " in the world had been " ratified" by all conceivable marriages. France would think for herself, and choose for herself, and though she might limit herself to the two dynastic houses because their names impress her, she very likely would choose, as she did in 1848, the darkest horse she could find of all who were Bourbons or Bonapartes, being moved first of all by hope, and knowing too much of the two eldest to choose either of them. The fusion she would utterly disregard, as utterly as the British Parliament disregarded Queen Anne's intention that her brother should be her heir. Even therefore in the ex- treme case the latest Monarchist plot could produce no good effect for Monarchists, while, intermediately, it will, whenever its existence is verified, reduce the en- thusiasm of the two halves of the Monarchical party, and increase that of the Republicans, who will exclaim, with some justice, that the two houses, and the great ladies who are supposed to be directing them, are disposing of France and her people as if she were a property. One understands how a man can claim to be King by right divine, but one does not understand how he can bargain with a competitor. And though even Radicals comprehend how a man can plead a plebiscite as a full title, men of all parties consider that title spoiled if only one candidate is allowed, or if the election of that candidate is publicly prearranged by a promise from all competitors to retire. The fusion, we are convinced, will be only a historic incident, worthy of comment only because it shows that Bourbons have in seventy years lost confidence in their own claims, and that Bonapartes have learned in a third of that time to think other things more valuable than the chance of a great throne.
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