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1 A Critical Moment For each of us there is a critical moment; well or badly chosen, it decides our future. —Chateaubriand, Les mémoires d’outre-­ tombe In the early months of 1814, an exhausted French nation watched almost impassively as its territory was invaded, and Paris offered vain resistance to the allied forces that took it on March 31. Napoleon had worked wonders to drive back the invaders, but the enemy’s crushing numerical superiority finally overwhelmed what was left of the Grand Army. The Emperor abdicated and left for Elba. The man who legitimately claimed the French throne—vacant since the execution of Louis XVI in 1793—replaced him: Louis XVIII restored the Bourbon monarchy and granted his subjects a constitution that evidenced his desire for conciliation and suggested a gentle reappropriation of the country. The peace-­ loving king spared the French a civil war, but he lacked tact, firmness, and foresight. His many blunders and errors aroused contempt for his regime and led to the Hundred Days of Napoleon’s return. This return generated quite a bit of anxiety. To the post-­ revolutionary generation that had come to maturity during the Repub­ lic and the Empire, the name Bourbon did not mean much. People scarcely knew the new king; his brother, the Count of Artois, with his two sons, the Dukes of Angoulême and Berry; and finally his niece, Marie-­ Thérèse, daughter of the martyred king. The majority of the French certainly had no need to fear the anger of an heir frustrated at being so long deprived of his legacy, but many must have been alarmed as to his true intentions toward them. This was particularly so for the surviving members of the National Convention who had voted for Louis XVI’s death, the military men who had turned monarchical Europe upside down, and the civil servants who had run the imperial machine. In one proclamation after another, the pretender to the French throne had shown a rather positive and encouraging evolution in his thought—but was he sincere? Very early, he had promised a return to the ancien régime in all its purity and eternal damnation to those monsters, the regicide members of the Convention, before relaxing his position, notably when Napoleon was crowned in 1804: absolving the crimes of the Revolution and compromising his legitimacy was out of the 14 • Chapter 1 question, but if he returned to France, he would proclaim a general amnesty, keep the military men at their ranks and the civil servants in their positions. In 1813, near London, when Napoleon’s star was beginning to pale after the Russian disaster and the possibility of a restoration of the monarchy was taking shape, he went even further, promising to forget the events of unhappy times, abolish conscription , confirm the reforms in the administration and the army, and reward those soldiers who would join his cause. Finally, in May 1814, in Saint-­Ouen, near Paris, the king—who had replaced the pretender—announced a new constitution that included all the basic freedoms but which would under no circumstances question the principle of the divine right of kings. This was the limit of Louis’ renunciation : he had merely granted his people a constitution, the Charter, read in the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies on June 4, 1814. Despite appearances, the king remained staunchly conservative, and there would be no lack of uncompromising royalists to support him in his reaction and get him to go back on his declarations. Integrate or Purge Once the time of promises and concessions had come to an end, the task of the government proved difficult, if not impossible, as it tried to amalgamate the France of its supporters, whose loyalty had to be repaid with rewarding positions, and that of the imperial soldiers and civil servants. The first Restoration could not bring together these two versions of France, divided by what the Duke of Berry called twenty-­ five years of banditry.1 It served those who had remained faithful to Louis, before those who had supported the Emperor in his conquests. Even so, most of the general officers who had fought brilliantly during the Empire accepted the change. The marshals,2 whom Napoleon had led to the summit, refused to follow him in his fall, and became the liegemen of their new overlord. After voting to depose Napoleon or approving his abdication, they all pledged allegiance to Louis XVIII. The Dictionnaire...

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