Episode 18: The Road to Trocadero

This is The Siècle, Episode 18: The Road to Trocadero.

Welcome back. We left off in Episode 17 in the middle of the action: liberal legislators and army officers had seized power in Spain and Naples, forcing those countries’ absolutist Bourbon kings to implement constitutions.

This spread of an ideology from one country to the next via cascading coups understandably alarmed people who saw that ideology, liberalism, as dangerous. That included Count Metternich, the influential Austrian foreign minister, as well as Tsar Alexander of Russia and most of King Louis XVIII’s French government.

So, under the system set up by the Congress of Vienna, the great powers of Europe convened a conference in the Austrian city of Troppau — now called Opava and located in Czechia — to discuss what to do about the revolutions in Spain and Naples. In particular, the focus at Troppau was Naples, which was more centrally located and considered easier to do something about.¹

On one side were Austria, Russia and Prussia, who wanted to use military force to crush the rebellion and restore King Ferdinand of Naples to absolute power. Opposed to this was Britain, which not only had more popular support for these liberal revolutions, but also saw crushing them as a danger to the balance of power: Austria, with her territory in northern Italy, would likely take the lead in any invasion, thus bolstering her influence in southern Italy, too.²

France was caught in the middle here. On the one hand, Louis was obviously opposed to a revolution compelling his Bourbon cousin to accept a constitution — something redolent of the early stages of the French Revolution, which Louis had experienced firsthand before he finally fled the country in 1791. But on the other hand, France was opposed to Austria expanding its influence in Italy — decades prior, Louis had referred to the Austrian House of Habsburg as “that hydra,” in reference to the mythological monster with many heads.³ Louis’s government also worried that too close an alliance with Europe’s reactionary powers would cost it political support from French moderates.

And so Louis’s government hemmed and hawed. They were unwilling to take a stand with Britain in defense of liberalism — but also unwilling to sign on to the counter-revolutionary alliance being assembled by Metternich. The French prime minister Richelieu tried to find a middle course, which just ended up infuriating everybody. An exasperated Tsar Alexander icily quipped: “It’s too bad for France if she can neither strike fear in her enemies nor inspire confidence in her friends.”⁴

So the rest of Europe moved on without France. The “Troppau Protocol,” issued by Austria, Russia and Prussia at the conference, announced that states that had revolutions “cease to be members of the European Alliance” and committed themselves to “if need be, by arms… bring back back the guilty state into the bosom of the Great Alliance.” This conservative, anti-revolutionary alliance of Austria, Russia and Prussia is often referred to as “the Holy Alliance,” though it’s only loosely related to the literal Holy Alliance initiated by Tsar Alexander in 1815.

This so-called Holy Alliance, then, held a follow-up conference in early 1821 at the Austrian city of Laibach, where they put the Troppau Protocol into action by authorizing Austria to invade Naples.⁵ This invasion encountered little resistance, entering Naples on March 23, 1821, and restoring Ferdinand to absolute authority. Among those not resisting this invasion was the French government, which delayed endorsing the expedition but eventually caved in.⁶

La coalition monstreuse

All this provoked a political crisis back in France. Both liberals and Ultra-royalists were disgusted with Richelieu’s timid foreign policy, albeit for completely opposite reasons: the Ultras because they wanted France to join the intervention and the liberals because they wanted France to oppose it. But in a classic example of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” these two diametric opposites found common ground in attacking the status quo. One prominent politician, the Joseph de Villèle, dubbed it a “coalition monstreuse.”⁷ This monstrous coalition combined forces to send Louis an address in November 1821 that cloaked insulting insinuations behind flowery praise:

We congratulate you, sire, on your continuously friendly relations with foreign powers, in the just confidence that such a valued peace is not purchased by sacrifices incompatible with the honor of the nation and the dignity of the crown.

Though tame stuff by 21st Century standards, this was pretty incendiary given early 19th Century standards of address, and everybody knew it. Louis responded with cold fury when representatives of the Chamber of Deputies came to formally present him with the address. I’ll read his response at length:

I am familiar with this address you are presenting. During my exile and persecution I defended my rights, the honor of my family, and that of the good name of France; now that I hold the throne and am surrounded by my people, I become indignant at the very thought that I could ever sacrifice the honor of the nation and the dignity of the crown. I should like to think that those who voted the address had not weighed all its passages. If they had had time to analyze them, they would not have tolerated these expressions which, as king, I do not want to characterize, and, as father, I should like to forget.⁸

But despite Louis’s fury at the deputies, the only immediate casualty of this gambit was his prime minister, the Duc de Richelieu. Faced with a hostile parliament, Louis had two options: he could dissolve the Chamber of Deputies, or he could accomodate its large Ultra bloc by bringing some of them into the ministry. The king, now visibly declining in health, didn’t have the stamina for a major political fight, and refused to dissolve the Chamber as he had the Chambre Introuvable in 1816.⁹

That meant bringing Ultras into his government. Accordingly a group of more moderate ministers were sacked, and Richelieu set out to find Ultras to replace them. But Richelieu, a man of moderate temperament and center-right politics, found it difficult to persuade Ultras to join his ministry. In desperation, he met with the Ultras’ leader, the king’s brother, the Comte d’Artois. You might recall from Episode 16 that Richelieu had initially refused to be prime minister a second time until Artois had theatrically promised, “On the faith of a gentleman, I will be your most loyal soldier.” Now the prime minister wanted Artois to come through and bring his followers in line.

But Artois, who no longer thought he needed Richelieu, refused. “Ah, my dear Duke,” Artois replied, “you have taken my words too literally. And besides, the circumstances back there were so difficult!” The indignant Richelieu left without saying another word, and on Dec. 12¹⁰ handed in his resignation. Adding insult to injury, Louis accepted the resignation “with indifference,” rather than pleading for Richelieu to remain or expressing his deep regret over the departure. ¹¹

Adieu Richelieu

We’ll continue this narrative momentarily, but I wanted to take a moment to say goodbye to the Duc de Richelieu, who served as France’s prime minister from 1815 to 1818 and again from 1820 to 1821.

Richelieu leaves a complicated legacy, but the one thing that comes through all the sources was his personal decency. Even his critics describe him as forthright, honorable, and uncorrupt. One incident, from his first resignation in 1818, stands out to me.

After Richelieu was forced out in favor of Élie Decazes, the politicians who had just been so eager to see the duke go changed their tune and voted to thank Richelieu for his service the way rich, connected men thanked other rich, connected men in the early 19th Century: they gave him a pile of taxpayer money. The chambers voted Richelieu a pension of 50,000 francs per year — a massive sum for the time — as a parting gift for the former premier. Richelieu, however, wrote to decline the offer, saying that “too many of [France’s] citizens have suffered misfortune… for me to be able to see my fortune increased.” (Remember, this was soon after the harvest failures of the Year Without A Summer.) When the chambers insisted, Richelieu gave the money the hospitals of Bordeaux.¹²

Being a good person, of course, doesn’t mean you were a good leader, and Richelieu’s legacy as France’s head of government during this chaotic time is more debatable. On the one hand, he effectively kept Louis’s regime in power (no small feat given the times!), repeatedly beating back the most violent and reactionary instincts of the Ultras while also preventing violent overthrow from the left. He negotiated smaller penalties for France after Waterloo after Talleyrand failed, and later secured an early end to France’s “occupation of guarantee” by foreign powers.

On the other hand, he oversaw the repressive and antidemocratic crackdown of 1820, in which France imposed censorship and gave the country’s richest citizens a double vote. If your sympathies are with the Ultras rather than the liberals, then Richelieu consistently attempted to ignore the will of the voters by sidelining Ultra deputies, and supported Louis’s dissolution of the Chambre Introuvable. For all his moderation and good character, Richelieu repeatedly lacked the flexibility to forge a broad coalition with men who didn’t share his center-right views. His first stint as prime minister ended when he was unable to work with the liberals; his second when he couldn’t work with the Ultras.

I said we were saying “goodbye” to Richelieu because there will be no third stint as prime minister for him. Indeed, he’ll be dead within the year, of a stroke at age 55. After Richelieu, French politics will go in a very different direction — one that he had spent a lot of effort trying to prevent.

Age of Ultras

Below: François Séraphin Delpech, after Jean Sébastien Rouillard, “Jean-Baptiste Guillaume Joseph, comte de Villèle,” c. 1815-1825. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The new Ultra government assembled by the Comte d’Artois for Louis’s approval had, technically, no prime minister — a reflection of the divisions that existed even among the Ultras. In practice, however, it was dominated by the finance minister, the Comte de Villèle, who we’ve already heard from this episode coining the term “coalition monstreuse.” Villèle is important and has actually been around for most of the events covered in this podcast, and it’s past time to give him a proper introduction.

Joseph de Villèle was raised near Toulouse in the south of France, from a family of minor nobility. He emigrated during the Revolution¹³ but returned home in 1807 and served on a local council under Napoleon. In 1815, Villèle was mayor of Toulouse when he was elected to the Chambre Introuvable. Like most of the members of the Chamber of Deputies in 1815, Villèle was an Ultra, who advocated restoring the pre-Revolutionary ancien régime and wrote that Ultras should “seize hold of this ridiculous Charter” and use it as a tool to accomplish what they wanted, since Louis would not restore the ancien régime through royal fiat. But in the heated environment of the Chambre Introuvable, Villèle was actually relatively moderate for an Ultra, which perhaps says more about the Ultras than it does Villèle. In any case, more than his positions, what won Villèle notice was his personal competence and parliamentary skill, and he soon became one of the Ultras’ leaders.¹⁴

In fact, a better word for Villèle might be “practical” rather than “moderate” — as years passed Villèle would drift apart from another faction of Ultras dubbed “the impatients,” who thought Villèle’s willingness to cooperate with Louis and accept incremental gains rather than holding out for total victory to be appallingly squishy. This split between pragmatists and purists is something we see frequently throughout history when one political group achieves power and has to decide how to wield it, with one faction arguing for sticking to the group’s core ideals and another emphasizing the practical compromises necessary to win. Even a group of people who agree on most policy goals can be torn apart by this kind of tactical question. I’ve seen it happen in my day job as a journalist covering 21st Century American politics, and we see it historically with France’s Ultra-royalists in the 1820s.

But while more impatient Ultras grew frustrated with Villèle, his pragmatic brand of Ultraism left him in a position to lead when Artois came calling in December 1821.

We’ll talk about Villèle’s domestic policies in a later episode. For now, we’re going to stay focused on France’s foreign policy, where the business-like, charmless Villèle had to work with more dashing and elevated figures.

The first of these was the foreign minister of the post-Richelieu government, Matthieu de Montmorency, a high-ranking noble from “one of the oldest noble families in France” who frequented the most prestigious Parisian salons. Montmorency was also grandmaster of an Ultra secret society, the Chevalier de la Foi or “Knights of the Faith,” and as foreign minister Montmorency tried to belatedly align France with the Holy Alliance.¹⁵ Though the Austrian army had crushed the liberal revolt in Naples — and along the way put down another liberal uprising in Piedmont — Spain’s liberal government remained in control, and Europe’s conservative leaders intended to do something about it.

When Europe’s great powers gathered for another diplomatic congress in the Austrian-ruled Italian city of Verona in 1822, Montmorency was the chief French representative. There, he tried to arrange for France to put down the Spanish liberals on behalf of a coalition of the conservative powers, on the dual justifications that it was the right thing to do (to uphold the values of monarchy and the House of Bourbon) and also the practical thing to do (or else other powers might act without France, a major loss of prestige and influence).

Unknown artist. Caricature of the Congress of Verona. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

But there were also very serious reasons for France not to get involved, and their champion in the ministry was none other than Villèle, an Ultra with no love at all for revolution or liberalism.

First, Villèle as finance minister was unsurprisingly concerned about France’s ability to pay for a war in Spain. It was less than a decade since France had been left nearly bankrupt by Napoleon and then the war indemnities levied on it after Waterloo. In 1823, France still owed more than $3.5 billion francs, nearly 40 percent of its GDP. Its financial situation had been improving, with the interest rate it had to pay to bondholders steadily falling from more than 9 percent right after Waterloo to just over 5 percent in 1822. But there were reasons to worry about France’s ability to shoulder more debt — and indeed bond yields shot back up to nearly 7 percent in late 1822 as war fears rose.¹⁶

Second, France had real reasons to worry about the military consequences of invading Spain. Napoleon had done so, and while he swept aside Spain’s formal armies, he faced guerilla warfare by irate Spaniards which made the Peninsular War Napoleon’s “Spanish ulcer.” Moreover, Spain’s resistance to France had been backed by British money and then soldiers — and now in 1822, Britain was fiercely opposing any proposals to invade Spain and crush the liberal government. Britain’s delegate at the Congress of Verona was none other than the Duke of Wellington, the British general who drove the French out of Spain — and Wellington walked out of the congress in protest at the plans for an intervention.¹⁷ Would Louis’s invasion of Spain meet the same fate as Napoleon’s?

George Cruikshank, “Old Bumblehead the 18th trying on the Napoleon Boots – or, Preparing for the Spanish Campaign,” 1823. A contemporary British political cartoon caricaturing Louis XVIII’s invasion of Spain. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Third, remember that there were major questions about the French army’s loyalty to the Bourbon regime. The army had gone over to Napoleon almost wholesale during the Hundred Days, and even after a series of purges and reforms over the subsequent years, the Bourbons were still facing periodic coup attempts by disgruntled units. Activating the army and sending it into Spain could very well turn suspected disloyalty into actual disloyalty. France’s most famous songwriter, the Bonapartist Pierre-Jean de Béranger, wrote a song with the refrain, “Brave soldiers, here’s the order of the day: Attention! About face!” — an incitement to mutiny — and no one could be quite sure how loyal the army would be once called out of its barracks.¹⁸

But Villèle’s caution seemed out of step with France’s Ultra-dominated politics. In Verona, Montmorency struck deals with the Holy Alliance powers for coordinated efforts to suppress the Spanish liberals, and then came home to have them ratified by the king. Villèle was the sole member of the king’s council who argued against an invasion — which made it all the more shocking when Louis backed his finance minister and repudiated Montmorency’s deals. The blue-blooded foreign minister promptly resigned, on Christmas Day 1822.

But this victory for peace and Villèle was only temporary. Montmorency’s resignation created a political crisis by threatening to turn the Ultras against Louis once more, so it was deemed expedient to appoint another Ultra to replace him. That pick is someone we’ve already met in earlier episodes: the writer and statesman François-René de Chateaubriand. Chateaubriand had backed Villèle’s arguments against a Spanish invasion, but soon after taking power concluded that pressure from both the Holy Alliance and Ultras at home made an invasion inevitable. Montmorency’s mistake was partially committing France to an uncertain war, but also partially committing France to a war under the auspices of a foreign alliance, rather than one where France would have the freedom to act as she wished. So when Chateaubriand felt he couldn’t avoid a war, he shifted his focus to trying to make the war happen in the most advantageous way possible for France — and largely succeeded. Through clever negotiations, Chateaubriand managed to secure Britain’s neutrality by eliminating any role for the Holy Alliance in the intervention — a diplomatic victory that not only removed a potential enemy from Spain but also preserved France’s diplomatic independence in a way that a coalition invasion would not have. Metternich’s irritation was a much better consequence for France than Wellington’s army.¹⁹

Trocadero

With the diplomacy complete, it was time for the fighting. And so on Jan. 28, 1823, Louis criticized the liberal Spanish government’s “deafness to our appeals” and announced that France was breaking off diplomatic relations and calling up 100,000 soldiers to “save the throne of Spain for [the Bourbons], to spare this fine kingdom from ruin, and to reconcile it with Europe.” The Chambers then funded the expedition despite the vituperous opposition of its liberal rump, who warned, or threatened, that invading Spain might provoke another revolution in France.²⁰

Below: Hippolyte Delaroche, “The Duke of Angoulême in the Battle of Trocadero by Paul Delaroche,” date unknown. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The invasion force was put under the command of Artois’s surviving son, the Duc d’Angoulême, who you might recall being described in Episode 13 as a “blubbering nonentity.” Angoulême of course had experienced French generals to “assist” him in commanding the operation, though he refused to allow a Napoleonic marshal²¹ to join him in the justifiable fear of being overshadowed.

Now all that remained to be determined was whether the warnings of doom would come to pass. Would Spain rise up against this latest French invasion? And would the French army prove to be loyal? Answers to these questions came very early on.

French soldiers crossed the Pyrenees Mountains into Spain in April 1823, and immediately faced a symbolic test. Awaiting them were not Spanish soldiers but a group of former Napoleonic officers on the side of the Spanish liberals, dressed in their French army uniforms, waving the tricolor flag and singing the Marseillaise. The French army had deserted Louis in 1815 and been the source of attempted coups since then; what would French soldiers do when faced by their own countrymen?²²

The answer, it turned out, was obey orders. Angoulême’s army gave Napoleon’s former officers a “whiff of grapeshot” from their cannons and dispersed the challenge without mutiny. It wasn’t that the French soldiers weren’t sympathetic with the Spanish liberals they were being sent in to suppress. But they were also sympathetic to to possibilities for glory and advancement that a war would bring, especially when mutiny was such a risky proposition.²³

Hippolyte Lecomte, “Episode of the French intervention in Spain 1823,” 1828. This painting depicts events on July 5, 1823. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Below: Location of Trocadero (center-right) on a map of Cadiz, from the 4th edition of Meyers Konversationslexikon. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Other clusters of Spanish opposition were overcome with equal ease. Rather than die in the face of the superior French army, Spanish garrisons opted to either retreat or surrender. And unlike during Napoleon’s invasion of Spain, the French in 1823 did not face guerrillas rising up in the countryside against them. A combination of Spanish sympathy for King Ferdinand, and the French army’s decision to pay for all its provisions instead of seizing them by force, kept the Spanish people quiet.²⁴ Angoulême captured Madrid peacefully on May 24, and then advanced on Cadiz, where the Spanish liberals planned to make their stand.

Here, at last, they mustered some actual resistance. Ensconced in forts around the city, liberals prepared for a siege, and with good reason — during Napoleon’s invasion, Cadiz had held out against the French for three years. But on Aug. 31, 1823, French infantry swam across the Bay of Cadiz and stormed the fort of Trocadero. This bold stroke caught the Spanish by surprise and seized the fortress after a fierce battle. Now in command of a key part of Cadiz’s defenses, the French bombarded Cadiz for three weeks until the Spanish liberals released King Ferdinand and surrendered.²⁵

Unknown author. “The French siege in the Battle of Trocadero.” Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Aftermath

The French invasion of Spain in 1823 was a dramatic triumph for Louis’s regime. France accomplished her war aim of restoring Ferdinand to power. None of the terrible consequences predicted by both liberals and cautious Ultras had come to pass. Rather than provoking mutinies, it cemented the army’s loyalty to the Bourbon regime. It led neither to war with Britain nor France’s submission to the Holy Alliance. The French government turned out to be able to easily afford the war’s costs, despite a temporary hike in bond yields.²⁶

Below: Francisco Goya, “Portrait of Ferdinand VII of Spain in his robes of state,” 1815. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Chateaubriand only somewhat unfairly compared 1823 to Napoleon’s attempts to subdue Spain: “Succeeding where Bonaparte had failed, triumphing on the same soil where the armies of the great man suffered reverses, doing in six months what he was unable to do in seven years, was a marvel.”²⁷

The Marquis de Lafayette, who had been part of futile efforts to support the Spanish liberals from abroad, had a more morose take on the expedition. “The few taxes that can be had have been restored to the church,” Lafayette wrote. “A wild beast, the king, is let loose, and no authority, not even his own, is obey’d except in the way of mischief.”²⁸

Even royalists might have found it hard to disagree with Lafayette’s reading of the aftermath. Angoulême restored Ferdinand to absolute power, and then promptly despaired at how the Spanish king used it. The prudent thing, Angoulême and Louis agreed, was for Ferdinand to establish a firm foundation for his rule, and co-opt some of the opposition, by replacing the liberal Spanish constitution of 1812 not with absolute rule but with a royalist-friendly constitution along the lines of France’s Charter. Ferdinand rejected this advice in favor of bloody purges. One captured liberal general was “dragged through the streets of Madrid in a basket tied to a donkey’s tail” before being hanged.²⁹ The army was purged, censorship imposed, and books burned. French officers reacted with horror and disgust, up to and including Angoulême, who refused the honors and titles that Ferdinand tried to bestow on him and returned home to France.³⁰

Louis Ducis, “Louis XVIII and the French royal family assisting at the return of the troops of the Spanish expedition from the balcony of the Tuileries, 1824.” Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

But back home in France, there was no such ambiguity about the invasion. The novelist Stendhal, a fierce critic of the Bourbons, declared that “it cannot be said that the Bourbons were really restored in France until after the recent war in Spain.”³¹ There are multiple paintings from the time depicting the French royal family upon Angoulême’s return, including a dramatic scene in which Angoulême bows to the king on the balcony of the Tuileries palace before assembled troops, and a more private depiction set in the royal apartments, where Artois stands behind Louis, holding the infant son of the deceased Duc de Berry in a way that emphasizes the multigenerational future of the Bourbon dynasty. You can see these paintings, along with more images, charts, maps, notes and a full transcript, at thesiecle.com/episode18.

Antoine-Jean-Baptiste Thomas, “Louis XVIII Recevant Le Duc D’angoulême à Son Retour de la Campagne d’Espagne.” Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

I’m going to end the narrative there, but will be back very soon with a follow-up segment I cut out of this episode for reasons of time and narrative flow. France’s invasion of Spain was about more than Spain itself — it took place against the backdrop of grander schemes nursed by Louis’s government for Spain’s rebellious colonies in the Americas. These schemes, pursued by men such as Richelieu and Chateaubriand, will lead directly to something every American child learns about in history class. Join me next time for Episode 19: France and the Monroe Doctrine.