Episode 15: The Miracle Child

This is The Siècle, Episode 15: The Miracle Child.

In February 1820, the assassination of the Duc de Berry proved to be the final straw for the already precarious political position of prime minister Élie Decazes. Loathed by the right and mistrusted by the left, Decazes had no support left except for the king’s personal devotion to him. But in the furor after Berry’s death, Louis XVIII was persuaded to cut Decazes loose. We covered all that in Episode 14: Slipped on the Blood.

So who would lead Louis’s government if not his favorite, Decazes? Fortunately, you don’t have to learn any new names just yet. The king summoned his prior prime minister, the duc de Richelieu.

Below: Thomas Lawrence, “Portrait of Armand Emmanuel, Duke of Richelieu,” 1818. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Just to refresh, Richelieu was an old-line aristocrat of impeccable personal character. He was Louis’s prime minister from 1815 to 1818, and left over a dispute with Decazes: Richelieu wanted to govern with an alliance of the political center and the right wing, while Decazes wanted to govern with center and left. In 1820, Decazes’ liberal experiment had collapsed, and now Louis turned back to his old minister to oversee a turn to the right.

But Richelieu, having been forced out in a power struggle just a few years before, wasn’t so willing to step back into the fray. Previously, his attempts to govern from the center-right had been met by scorn and opposition from the Ultra-royalists, and he wisely demanded assurances that this time he’d get more support. He got these assurances from no less than the king’s brother, the Comte d’Artois, who was the Ultras’ leader. Artois met with Richelieu and promised, “Your policy will be mine. On the faith of a gentleman, I will be your most loyal soldier.”¹

With that vow in his pocket, Richelieu took office with a goal of putting a lid on the kingdom’s virulent political climate.² Left, right and center had been savaging each other for years, especially after press censorship had been lifted in 1819. Berry’s assassination had turned everything up to 11, with wild conspiratorial accusations and a general feeling of “panic” in a large part of the political class.³

Part of this attempt to calm was simply from his person. Richelieu had an sterling reputation for honesty and morals. His relative moderation eased concerns by moderate royalists that French politics would swing too far to the right, while Ultras were still celebrating the fall of the hated Decazes, and had developed somewhat more patience they had shown in the days of the Chambre introuvable (see Episode 8).⁴

The Exceptional Laws

But Richelieu also took more concrete steps to try to restore calm, by passing new laws to clamp down on perceived risks to public order. These so-called ‘Exceptional Laws’ weren’t new. In fact, Decazes had proposed them before the assassination, as part of his ineffectual effort to move to the right. But Richelieu stuck with them, in part because he genuinely believed they were useful,⁵ and in part because Louis refused to pretend, as some Ultras wanted, that simply getting rid of his beloved Decazes would fix everything.⁶

The first law, called the Security Law or Law of Suspects, suspended the right of habeas corpus, enabling anyone suspected of plotting against the king or state to be arrested for up to three months without being charged with a crime. The second, the Press Law, reimposed harsh censorship that had been lifted just a year before. Once again, newspapers would have to get government authorization to publish, and would have to submit all their articles to censors to get approval before going to print.⁷

Neither of these laws were unprecedented. As we’ve seen, censorship had been in effect as recently as 1819, while a similar measure to the Security Law had been passed in 1817, amid the famine-driven civil unrest of that year. (See Episode 11.) So, given the climate of the times, it’s unsurprising that a majority of the deputies dismissed opposition from liberals, who charged that the new laws were tyrannical, a return of the Reign of Terror or the despotisms of the ancien régime. Richelieu spoke for many when he said reimposing censorship would “while silencing the forces of unrest, prepare the way for the passage of a law establishing freedom of the press on a just basis.”⁸

The other key fact that explained the widespread support for the two laws was that — much like the controversial Alien and Sedition Laws in the United States two decades prior — the Security and Press Laws were temporary. Both were scheduled to expire after only one year, a fact repeated endlessly by supporters of the law during the debates.⁹ Though some Ultras argued the laws were good and justified even without a particular emergency, many in the Chamber were at least a little uneasy about the repression — especially since many Ultras had attacked the very same ideas as tyrannical just a few months earlier, when they had been proposed by the hated Decazes.¹⁰ Assured by the expiration date, the Chamber of Deputies passed the Security Law by a 134-115 margin on March 15, and the Press Law 15 days later by a 136-109 vote.¹¹

While very few people were ultimately arrested under the security law, the press law had drastic and immediate consequences: scores of newspapers were shut down, including not just liberal papers but Ultra ones, too, as the ministry applied its new powers of censorship with a very broad brush — which came as something of a shock to Ultra publishers, who had perhaps not unreasonably expected the new Ultra-backed law would hurt only their enemies on the left.¹²

The Law of the Double Vote

But all this was just an appetizer for the fiercest debate of them all: the Election Law.

Recall that in 1817, Richelieu and Decazes had passed a new election law designed to hurt the Ultra-royalists. This law still restricted voting rights to only the richest 1 percent or so of Frenchmen, those who paid at least 300 francs in direct taxes. But it eliminated the old two-stage election cycle in favor of a single round of elections held in departmental capitals where liberals tended to live — as opposed to the local elections that might be dominated by Ultra landowners.

By 1820, however, Louis’s government saw the Left, which had prospered after the 1817 election law, as a more dangerous threat than the Ultras. This only intensified after Berry’s assassination. So in addition to cracking down on the press and on sedition, Richelieu proposed to rewrite the election laws to produce a more conservative Chamber of Deputies.

The proposal returned elections for the Chamber’s 258 members to the local level, the arrondissement. But that was a relatively minor change. The big change came from the creation of a second group of elections. This group of 172 additional seats would be voted on at the departmental level — but not by the same group of wealthy voters who chose the original group of 258 deputies. Instead, the richest 25 percent of French electors — the richest 0.25 percent or so of French men — would be the only ones allowed to vote for this second group of seats. And crucially, these richest 25 percent would get to vote both in the regular arrondissement elections and also in the exclusive departmental elections. From this system came the name by which the law is known to history: the Law of the Double Vote.¹³

Supporters of the measure believed that these ultra-rich double voters would be more conservative, and that the Double Vote would thus elect huge batches of new right-wing deputies. But they also advanced more ideological arguments, drawing from a set of beliefs scholars dub “soil mysticism.” Essentially, this is “the belief that a man’s moral qualities related proportionally to the size of his land holdings: the greater one’s property, the finer one’s character.” In addition to its mystical elements, this also derived from an argument with ancient lineage, that earning passive income from property was morally superior to grubbily striving for money through business or a profession; one Ultra deputy compared “the bourgeois’s love for money” against the “love for the soil” of the great landowner. In any case, soil mysticism had a direct implication for the Law of the Double Vote: that “double-voters — being of higher moral character — would vote for the candidates that would best serve French interests.”¹⁴

Against this argument, the law’s many critics in the Chamber argued that it would destroy the balanced government of the Charter of 1814 by giving control of the government over to the aristocracy. The liberal philosopher and deputy Benjamin Constant argued that far from being guarantors of liberty, the nobles and great landowners had in fact been all too willing to work with the despot Napoleon.¹⁵

The Chamber of Deputies debated the Law of the Double Vote for the better part of a month in May and June of 1820. It was high political drama, with superb political oratory on both sides¹⁶ and genuinely high stakes. Unlike the other two Exceptional Laws, the Law of the Double Vote was not temporary. It seemed likely to shape French politics for years or decades to come.

Parisians to the streets

The significance of the moment was not lost on the people of Paris, either. People began lining up at 2 in the morning for limited spots in the Chamber’s spectator galleries. This represented people’s passion for the debate, of course, but was also in part a consequence of the Exceptional Laws: with strict censorship now in place, many newspapers were now quite boring, if they hadn’t shut down altogether. The liveliest debates in town now happened in the Palais Bourbon, where the Chamber met.¹⁷

But crowds did more than just line up to watch. They also began to assert opinions on the matters under debate through mass protest — and sometimes violence. The unrest had begun out in the provinces, with student protests in Grenoble and Besançon, both liberal-leaning parts of eastern France that the king’s surviving nephew, the Duc d’Angoulême, visited in a misguided attempt at a conciliatory gesture.¹⁸ But affairs reached a boiling point in Paris in early June, when huge crowds turned out to protest against the Exceptional Laws in the streets outside the Palais Bourbon. However, among the anti-government protesters were also a healthy number of royalists, including off-duty royal guardsmen who came armed with canes and truncheons. Fights broke out between anti-government students and pro-government guardsmen, the latter chanting “Long live the king!” and the former “Long live the Charter!” Troops were sent in to disperse the crowds, and in the ensuing chaos, a protesting student named Lallemand was shot and killed on June 3, 1820 by a member of the royal guard.¹⁹

The immediate response to this tragedy was something very modern: both sides engaged in a PR battle to control the narrative. Liberal newspapers hailed Lallemand as a martyr, while royalist papers said he had been a violent revolutionary, not a peaceful protester, and that he had been killed because he had attacked a soldier. Lallemand’s father, then, published a striking open letter defending his son from what he called “libels” by right-wing newspapers.

I must reject the accusations made against him; he certainly did not try to disarm a soldier; he was walking, unarmed, and he was hit from behind; the investigation will prove that this was so.²⁰

Lallemand’s death, combined with the fierce political debate, created a critical situation in the streets of Paris. Repeatedly throughout the 19th Century, insurrections in Paris will follow a common script, whether successful or not — a commonly understood set of actions and symbols that historian Richard Cobb termed the “revolutionary passion play.” Things began with grievances, which were then focused and harnessed by leaders, often operating with some degree of secrecy. Eventually crowds would pour out into the streets of Paris en masse, often peacefully at first, forcing the government to respond. To attempt to quell the crowd by force might enflame the situation, but to show weakness could be just as bad for a regime. The first time shots were fired and blood was shed was always decisive.²¹

In June of 1820, all these ingredients for revolution were in place. The people of Paris had profound grievances. They had leadership in the liberal deputies — especially two key liberals, a pair of wealthy bankers-turned-politicians named Jacques Laffitte and Casimir Perier, who used their resources to mobilize mass support for the left — though exactly who did what early in the summer of 1820 remains a mystery. The people had taken to the streets, violence had broken out, and now there was a revolutionary martyr to fire up the crowd.

Right: Artist unknown, “Portrait de Jacques Laffitte,” date unknown. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

My sources don’t agree on the precise order of what happened next, but the gist is clear: at some point after the funeral of the student Lallemand, a huge crowd of 20 to 30,000 people including both students and workers, began marching toward the Tuileries Palace, Louis’s residence and the seat of government. They chanted “Long live the Charter,” referring to the liberal claim that the Exceptional Laws were unconstitutional violations of the 1814 Charter. But other chants were more ominous: “Down with the Chambers!”, “Long live liberty!”, and even, “Long live Napoleon!”²²

A hefty military force under Marshal Jacques Macdonald, a Napoleonic veteran, was stationed all around the palace, waiting for the crowd, and may have been strong enough to repel a determined assault. But at the moment that it seemed revolutionary bloodshed was inevitable, a twist of fate intervened: the skies opened up with a sudden, torrential downpour. The rain significantly dampened the crowd’s ardor and people soon dispersed to their homes.²³

As it turned out, this aborted insurrection was a high water mark for the liberals — or perhaps a last-ditch effort. Even before Lallemand’s death, the Chamber had already rejected one amendment that would have effectively preserved the 1817 election law. It was a narrow defeat, 133 against to 123 for, but it showed the limits of liberal strength in the Chamber — almost, but not quite, strong enough to exert their will.

Below: John Clark Ridpath, “Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette,” in the 1820s. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Faced with this reality, the liberals split along the issue of tactics. One group, including most notably the Marquis de Lafayette, believed that the battle was already lost in the Chamber; they sought to focus their efforts on rallying the French people to their side. As early as May 27, well before the June protests, Lafayette had given a speech in the Chamber that scarcely mentioned the electoral bill all, in favor of rhetoric about how the French people would be forced to seize the sacred standard “of the principles of eternal truth and sovereign justice.” It was a thinly veiled call for revolution.²⁴

Another group, led by Benjamin Constant, thought that victory in the legislature was possible if only the liberals would refrain from inflammatory remarks that alienated moderates. After Lafayette’s provocative speech came under fire from deputies, the old revolutionary didn’t bother to respond, but Constant mounted the podium to feebly try to explain what Lafayette had really meant in a bid to reassure “nervous moderates.”²⁵

As it turns out, both sides might have been sort of right. The mood of the broader electorate had swung definitively to the right after Berry’s assassination, and the momentum seemed entirely on the side of royalists. Louis also maintained the power to dissolve the Chamber that he had used in 1816 to banish the Chambre introuvable, and could have used that as a trump card if the deputies refused to pass the bill his ministry now deemed essential.²⁶ So viewing the legislative battle as a lost cause wasn’t a crazy idea.

On the other hand, this was a period before strict party discipline. For all our talk of French politics as being dominated by factions — liberals, Ultras, “ministerials” — many deputies were only loosely tied to their nominal party. There was, in one historian’s words, “a floating mass of centrist deputies between Right and Left who could be pulled in one direction or the other by some speech or maneuver.”²⁷

And the protests and unrest in the street appear to have pulled deputies in one direction: the right. As matters grew more and more intense, many of the deputies — all extremely wealthy men — seem to have recoiled. These centrist deputies may not have been big fans of ultraroyalism, but they were more scared of revolution. No less a figure than Laffitte, one of the most stalwart liberals, felt compelled to mount the podium and tell the deputies, “given my wealth, I am clearly interested in order.” ²⁸

On June 12, 1820, the Chamber of Deputies passed the Law of the Double Vote by a comfortable margin of 154-95 — a big swing from the 133-123 vote amendment just a few weeks earlier.²⁹

Plots

The Parisian protests stopped almost the moment the Law of the Double Vote passed — another reason why both contemporaries and historians tend to believe they were organized by leaders on the left rather than spontaneous.³⁰ But if so, it’s noteworthy that these ringleaders didn’t try to push further with the tens of thousands of Parisians they had been able to bring out to the streets. The Bourbon rain that stopped the march on the Tuileries didn’t necessarily mean that a similar march might not be more successful on another day. But in June 1820, liberal leaders did not appear prepared to push their confrontation all the way to revolution.³¹

Things quickly changed after the Law of the Double Vote passed in June 1820. Believing that their chances of winning power legally were now ended, many liberals embraced the idea of overthrowing the Bourbons. But it wasn’t to popular revolution that they turned — especially with their ability to reach a mass audience now limited by the Press Law — but rather to conspiracies and plots.

The primary conspiracy called for a military coup. Conspirators in the army would inspire their regiments to raise the tricolor flag in revolt in Paris, Lyons and several other cities, hopefully sweeping other soldiers along with them in a wave of mutinies that would sweep the regime aside. The coup was planned for August 19, and the planning involved prominent names such as Lafayette, the writer Victor Cousin, and the Bonapartist orator, attorney and devoted conspirator Joseph Rey.

The coup was also a fiasco. Setting aside whether it might have worked even if it went off as planned, well, it didn’t go off as planned. Someone talked. Someone always talks.

Informed of the plans by loyal officers who the plotters had unwisely invited to join their ranks, the ministry had a choice. The police prefect wanted to let the insurrection break out, then crush it, so as to capture as many conspirators as possible. But Richelieu, trying to minimize bloodshed, chose instead to preempt the coup. Some two dozen lower-ranking conspirators were immediately arrested, but the big names either fled or never had their involvement proven.³²

The fallout after the government announced the failed conspiracy was highly embarrassing for the liberals. The ultras had been calling them disloyal traitors for years, and now this incontrovertibly real plot seemed to prove it, painting even those liberals who had nothing to do with the conspiracy — like Constant — with the same traitorous brush.³³ It also bolstered the government, which demonstrated its effectiveness and also attracted the support of some moderates who recoiled at the prospect of violent coups.³⁴

Louvel and Berry, redux

While all attention was on the Law of the Double Vote, something important happened that got far less attention than you might expect: Louis-Pierre Louvel, whose assassination of the Duc de Berry had kicked off all these events, was put on trial, convicted, and executed.

The assassin went on trial before the Chamber of Peers on June 5. He remained unrepentant, but also insistent that he had acted alone. The trial lasted less than a day. After two hours of deliberation, the Peers convicted Louvel of high treason and sentenced him to death. He was guillotined on June 7.³⁵

All this received cursory attention at best. Almost from the beginning, royalists had written Louvel off as a mere pawn; the real murderer had been liberalism, whether writ large or personified in Élie Decazes. Moreover, Louvel was sullen, not a charismatic or attractive figure who might make good copy. He had, historian David Skuy writes, “drifted from the public eye almost as quickly as he entered it.”³⁶

That’s not to say that the assassination itself was forgotten. Pamphlets celebrating the Duc and the Duchesse de Berry were published throughout the year and continued to sell well. There was also an officially backed public fundraising drive launched to pay for a monument in Berry’s honor, which was a stupendous success: it raised 900,000 francs for a monument originally projected to cost 50,000 francs. Moreover, this was not a case of rich donors coughing up cartloads of cash. One sampling of the donation lists found almost 75 percent of all contributions were 10 francs or less. Though many donors were doubtlessly partly motivated by a desire to signal their support for the regime with a donation, the success of this fundraising drive lends weight to the idea that the swing to the right following Berry’s death had a genuine popular basis, rather than merely occurring among a few wealthy politicians.³⁷

The Miracle Child

Even more so than the murdered duke, the focus of attention during the summer of 1820 was on the Duchesse — or more precisely, on her womb. Even as the duke lay bleeding out at the Paris Opera, the Duchesse had revealed that she was pregnant, and a great deal was riding on the outcome of her pregnancy. If she gave birth to a healthy son, the boy would become the future of the Bourbon dynasty, given France’s strict rules that inheritance could only flow through male lines.

If, on the other hand, the Duchesse gave birth to a daughter, or miscarried — both things she had done before — then the main line of the French Bourbons would be effectively extinguished. None of the other Bourbon men seemed capable of producing heirs. The best claim to the throne of France after the deaths of Louis, his brother the Comte d’Artois, and Artois’s son the Duc d’Angoulême, would fall to the line of their cousin the Duc d’Orléans, who the Bourbons loathed for both personal and political reasons.

Throughout the summer, then, royalists assembled for weekly masses to pray for the birth of a healthy and male child. The imagery took on explicitly religious as well as dynastic tones, as in a prayer that: “In the blessed fruit of her womb, we will see the Son who will revive the glorious qualities of the Prince whom we mourn, the Son destined to transmit the royal and religious virtues of his ancestors to a long line of princes, the pride and love of France.”³⁸

Finally, at 2:35 in the morning on Sept. 29, the duchess gave birth — to a son. The news spread “like wildfire” throughout the country, prompting celebrations both official and spontaneous. The infant was dubbed the “miracle child,” and held up as a sign of God’s protection of the Bourbon kings. Huge crowds gathered at the Tuileries for a glimpse of the child. A second fundraising drive was launched, to purchase a castle called Chambord for the boy, and this was even more successful than the fundraising for Berry’s memorial, with thousands of contributions by rich and poor alike raising nearly 2 million francs. Indeed, though the infant was made the Duc de Bordeaux, the title he would adopt once he grew older was the Comte de Chambord, after the castle the people of France had bought for him.³⁹

In this widely circulated May 1820 image, the Duchesse de Berry is shown on her bed, having a vision of St. Louis, the medieval king and ancestor of the Bourbons, with two children: her daughter, and a boy representing the son the Duchesse claimed the saint told her she would bear. Rullmann, “La Vision Maternelle,” 1820. Public domain via Gallica.

No less a figure than an 18-year-old Victor Hugo wrote an ode celebrating the birth:

Now stares the world at thee, poor infant thing

Whose father sees thee not — My King!

These thoughts of piety profound

As homage to thee here I bring.

 

Thy mother’s lasting sorrow,

The sorrow of all France,

Console, O thou in suffering brought to life.

 

O’er thee may God his mighty arm extend,

And may this Bourbon crown defend

Its bearer from all harm!

Now, I and you and he would probably all readily admit that’s not going in the pantheon of Victor Hugo’s greatest writings. But it goes to show what the mood was in France in the aftermath of the Comte de Chambord’s birth — and, not incidentally, also won Hugo a 1,000-franc pension from an appreciative Louis.⁴⁰

Of course, not everyone was overjoyed by the “miracle” birth. The biggest loser from that happy day was Louis-Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, whose chances of inheriting the throne immediately plummeted. His response was one of the less dignified moments in Orléans’ long life: he rushed over to the Tuileries and publicly interrogated one of the witnesses to the birth, Marshal Suchet, as to whether he had truly seen the male child attached to his mother’s umbilical cord. The suggestion was that the Bourbons would have pulled off a baby-swap, replacing a daughter with a baby boy to preserve the line. But the clever duchess had anticipated this kind of objection and made sure that witnesses of unimpeachable reputation, such as Suchet, had been present for the birth. She even made Suchet, a grizzled veteran of bloody battles, overcome his sudden squeamishness and tug on the umbilical cord himself before allowing it to be cut.⁴¹

Foiled and downcast, Louis-Philippe finally let his mask of politeness drop and barked, “So we will never count for anything in this country!”⁴² He then almost certainly had an article planted in an English newspaper that accused the duchess of fabricating her entire pregnancy.⁴³

But it was all for naught. No one believed the accusations, and most people were too busy celebrating the birth.

The Third Restoration

And it was at this precise moment that Louis’s government finally held a new round of elections, for the one-fifth of Chamber seats whose terms had expired, as well as all 172 of the seats to be elected by France’s richest voters under the Law of the Double Vote. With both election rules and the national mood in their favor, the result was unsurprisingly a landslide for the royalists. Liberals did reasonably well with the general electorate, where royalist candidates were held to a modest 57 percent majority. But exactly as Richelieu had intended, the right wing won a whopping 92 percent of the new Double Vote seats.⁴⁴

The political power of the Left, who had come so close to a majority over the past few years, was now completely broken, buried under the weight of the Double Vote seats. It would take years before France’s political climate would shift again.

This is not to say that left-wing opposition is gone from our story. The failure of the August 19 coup did not dissuade liberals and Bonapartists from the idea of plotting an armed overthrow of the government; indeed, these schemes will only accelerate over the next few years.

But for the time being, at least, Louis’s regime was on firmer footing than it had ever been — and perhaps ever would be. Louis’s biographer and friend of the show Philip Mansel has written that despite Berry’s death, “the year 1820 deserves to be called the year of the Third Restoration” — after the First Restoration in 1814 and the Second in 1815.⁴⁵ The surge in popular support for the Bourbons, coupled with the decisive defeat of the Left, the co-option of the Ultras, and the general consolidation of power, could in this framing be seen as transformative, an effective rebirth of the regime — coupled with a literal birth, of the Comte de Chambord, that had given the dynasty a future.

That reborn regime, however, was also a very different one than had existed from 1816 to 1820. Most notably, it was quite illiberal, having embraced censorship and stepped back from even the very limited democracy the Charter of 1814 had created. This illiberalism would create problems for the Restoration down the road. So, too, would the new alliance between the moderate royalists and Ultras, which will prove still bedeviled by the same obstacles that it faced in 1816. What podcaster Mike Duncan terms the “entropy of victory” will menace Louis just as much as any revolutionary regime.

All that remains in our future, however — topics to take up in The Siècle’s second year. For the upcoming holiday season, I’ve got a few interview episodes recorded, both with experts on French history and with other history podcasters. We’re also going to step back a bit from the political narrative to look at elements of the French economy and culture, and at where Restoration France fits on the international stage.

Thank you all so much for continuing to listen to and support the podcast, including a generous listener or listeners who anonymously bought me Alfred Fierro’s Historical Dictionary of Paris, which will prove an invaluable reference work, and Aurelian Craiutu’s Liberalism Under Siege: The Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires, which will form the basis of a future episode analyzing the ideology of one group of French liberals during the Restoration.

I’ve got some great episodes queued up for the next few months, and can’t wait to share them with you. Please join me in two weeks for the first of them, Episode 16: Romantiques.