THE LAST ROYAL PAMPHLET.
TIME was when the publication of a book by a Peer was I an event, when great men, if they wrote at all, circulated their works by private favour, and were more ashamed of a good poem than of a defeated plot. As for a pamphlet, no one above the rank of a litterateur ever thought of acknowledg- ing such a production. Statesmen might pen a " Few Thoughts," or" Considerations on the Times;" but the pithy sentences went forth shrouded under the anonymous. The world advances fast, however, and at the present rate pamphleteering will soon be one of the accepted attributes of royal birth. Legitimists and liberals, old dynasts and young aspirants, alike seek the popular favour by productions to be distinguished from leading articles only by their length. The Emperor of the French is a practised and most success- ful pamphleteer. The Archduke Maximilian criticizes the Austrian navy in a pamphlet Admiral Elliott might have written. The Pope's Secretary of State defends the Vatican in a pamphlet which even his name could not rescue from eontempt. Bishops pour out their indignation by grace of M. Dentu, and now the representative of the Orleans family submits the quarrel between his House and that of Napoleon to the judgment of Paris, in a pamphlet which has been seized like that of any Red Republican. The Duc d'Aumale has published, through M. Dumineray, a letter on the History of France, signed with his own name, and which is, in fact, a speech in reply to the reflections cast upon his House by Prince Napoleon. The pamphlet has been seized, and the Prince is condemned for an act at variance with the dignity his exile renders it doubly incumbent on him to maintain. We do not know that he was in the wrong. Sir T. Stephens said wisely, years ago, that, from the time of Hemp the Fourth, the sayer of good sayings had been a power in France. The only sound objection to royal speech-making and pamphlet-writing is the necessity which arises to produce something palpably worthy of the artist's rank. An hereditary Prince talking drivel, or the aspirant to a throne writing platitudes, is a spectacle not favourable to the small remains of reverence European society retains. But excellence of any sort, though it display itself, like the learning of some of the Bonapartes, only in fantastic studies, begins to be considered respectable in Princes, and once accepted by etiquette, pamphlets offer a better vehicle for the opinions and designs of royalty than the salon gossip which formerly supplied their place. A speech by Prince Napoleon is far less dan- gerous than the sharp sentences which Poles, Hungarians, and refugees of all nations bear with them from the Palais Royal.
Regarded in this light the Due d'Aumale must be con- sidered to have achieved a triumph. His pamphlet, however we may disagree with its sentiments, is effective, and that is all which is now required to constitute a success. Nor are we aware that its sentiments will, in France, depreciate the effects of its admirable antithesis. It is doubtless annoying to Englishmen, accustomed to principle in politics, to hear a prince, whose family claim is based upon the popular will, support the pretensions of Francis II., and argue for the claims of the Papacy to oppress Rome. But French- men only regard principle in politics when not inconvenient to the interests of France, and the class who read pamphlets detest the unity of Italy. M. G-uizot would protest for the Sing of- Naples as strongly as the Due d'Aumale, not because he loves Francis de Bourbon, but because he detests the House of Savoy. Nor are the Legitimist sen- timents quite so preposterous in the mouth of an Orleanist Prince as they at first sight appear. The Due d'Aumale, though an Orleanist, is also a Bourbon, and scarcely forgets, what Englishmen never remember, that the re- presentative of the House of Orleans is but one step in blood from the old branch, that the Comte de Paris must one day inherit the pretensions of both lines, the monarchy of Hugh Capet as well as the monarchy of the Barricades, the fidelity of the Faubourg St. Germain as much as that of the bourgeoisie. An accident, a fit of the cholera, an ill- digested meal, and theories of legitimacy may be not un- becoming even in a Duc d'Aumale.
As to the personal allusions, no conceivable reasoning can make some of them sound to English ears anything but un- dignified. The only apology for them is a bad one, that an allusion to the Paterson case is as justifiable as an allusion to the Bourbon " habit of running away." The Prince who laughs at a Napoleon for disappearing from the deliberations of the Reds just as the Police came to arrest them, had him- self been taunted by his adversary with undignified haste in flight. The comparison between the Prince and Philippe Egalite is not, however, liable to the same reproach, and is perhaps as effective a hit as the past year of pamphlets has produced. " One thing," says the Prince, " astounds me, and that is that my grandfather found no favour in your sight, for you, like him, sat on the Left aide of a Republican Assembly. There, indeed, the resemblance stops, for he ex- piated his fault. He left the National Convention to mount the scaffold, while you descended from the benches of the Mountain to enter the splendid mansion in which the Duke of Orleans was born."
For the graver matter of the pamphlet we suspect the Due d'Aumale has hit upon the argument after all most effective with Frenchmen. It is not of much use to appeal against glory to rectitude, to assert in a country where every man of sixty has taken a dozen oaths that the Emperor is unreliable, or even to accuse the man who has annexed Savoy of political inconsistency. The Due d'Aumale (passes by those charges for the far heavier one of failure. He strikes sharply on that chord which vibrates in all Frenchmen, and leads them even in their dream of annexations to doubt if the retribution of 1815 may not be once more exacted. The Emperor, says the Prince in effect, promised to free Italy from the Alps to the Adriatic, and failed ; to save the tem- poral power, and failed; to redistribute Italy at Villafranea, and failed. He "imperils every day the destiny of the nation" by " great enterprises which France does not sanc- tion beforehand," and is, therefore, powerless to correct. The French mind, once convinced that these charges were true, would soon be dissatisfied with the exchange of free- dom for a glory which never arrived, and demand, if not the Bourbons, at least changes which would revive the Bourbon chance. It is the feeble, and not the immoral, poli- tician France contemns.
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