CHATEAUBRIAND AND LOUIS PHILIPPE.

(From our Paris Correspondent.)

THOUGH far from deserving all the honour of the comparison, M. De Chateaubriand is a kind of political Lord Byron, at least, according, not to our individual, but to the vulgar, notions of the latter. He is interesting and repulsive, amiable and detestable; now formidable for his talents, now only remarkable for his eccentricities. His character is not of the best, being a roué of public life, as Byron was of private the errors of both, being redeemed by a multitude of generous and noble acts. There is similarity despite the inequality betwixt their literary powers, both delighting in the sublime of exaggeration, and only preserved by their genius from tumbling each instant into the ridiculous. Both were endowed with unexampled mastery over their respective languages. The English language in Byron's hand was, as he pleased it, a plaything or a thunderbolt; like Aaron's staff, now a rod to walk tranquilly and lordly withal, now a serpent devouring its neighbours. Chateaubriand has a similar power, longo intervallo in sooth, over the French, which is far less plastic and manageable. Except Montaigne, Voltaire, and Paul Louis Courrier, he has made more than any Frenchman of his language, which resembles a splendid suit of armour, adorning the wearer indeed, but demanding and exhausting all his strength to support its weight.

In personal respects the comparison may be followed closer. Chateaubriand is noble, inheriting all the prejudices and few of the advantages of rank; poor, as Byron was, for his caste; looked down upon by his fellows, and obliged to have recourse to the plebeian's noblesse, viz. genius, for pre-eminence. Bred amongst a people with whom unbelief was a dogma, Chateaubriand ran tilt against received opinions, and asserted religion, when the Church had not a votary. Byron, we know, did the same contrarywise, and assailed the religious dogmas of his countrymen with a chivalrous spirit of contradiction. And now Chateaubriand has succeeded by his political paradoxes, misfortunes, and talents, in placing himself, with respect to the French public, in much the same station that Byron held in the eye of the English. He is by himself a puissance-how is this to be translated?-a crowned head, the crown being but laurel, which all parties reverence, court, and dread. A victim to his liberal principles, Chateaubriand resigned his embassy, on the appointment of Polignac ; a victim to his royalism, he is now without place or means of support, except his pen. With a blundering foresight, worthy of the economy of a poet, he deposited his savings in the Dutch funds, as then the most secure in revolutionary Europe, and the most likely to stand firm by the political exile. On the contrary it proved, that in the political tempest the Dutchman's sheet-anchor was the first to drag. Now Chateaubriand is the Carlist, the only man in France, who dares hold out for the discarded race; (the Journal des Debats, so long the organ of his opinions, has here forsaken the noble Viscount's guidance ;) and, moreover, he is the only man whose Carlism the French can pardon.

Twice since the revolution of July, has M. de Chateaubriand come forward with a pamphlet. He spoke in the Upper Chamber for the Duke of Bordeaux; that scouted, his device has since been war to 2 N

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the present order of things. His first pamphlet went to prove that an elective monarchy was an absurdity; that it could not endure. Or, that in order to endure, one of two alternatives was requisite ; viz. either to declare war, occupy Belgium, run the same muck against Europe that Napoleon had failed in, and acquire that 'baptisin of blood,' which alone, it was argued, could consecrate a new dynasty. 'If you do not make war,' cried M. de Chateaubriand, to Louis Philippe, the French will never respect you. Their pretended love of liberty is a farce; it is glory they love, and without glory they will never live. See the unquiet population; how with the least pretext it rises in tumult; how men grasp at the old revolutionary ideas! see the clubs and the press driving still on to anarchy. Nothing but war can occupy and satisfy these men. In avoiding it, you will be driven upon the other alternative-tyranny, proscriptions, and those arbitrary means, that both Napoleon and the Bourbons were compelled to use.'

Unfortunately for M. de Chateaubriand's character as a prophet, Louis Philippe has adopted neither of these alternatives. He has neither declared war abroad with Europe, nor with Liberty at home. He has gone on quietly, peaceably, steadily, and surely in a middle course, repressing tumultuous mobs by patience, and wearing out, rather than crushing, sedition. Yet he reigns, and his throne acquires daily more solidity. Mobs are at an end. The sounds of war have died away. The funds rise like a thermometer in June, and Perier is hailed as the Richelieu of his time.

M. de Chateaubriand is profoundly vexed at all this. It should not have been so; and he has just issued another pamphlet to prove it: a pamphlet, in which every power, and interest, and argument are brought forward, that are at all hostile to the existing government; no matter how little consistent or compatible with each other. Since royalist feelings can be no longer appealed to, M. de Chateaubriand appeals to the republicans, to the men of the mouvement, and calls to the anarchists to raise the standard of Henry the Fifth. What a coalition that of Wilson Croker and Henry Hunt is a marriage within the affinities, compared with it.

"Why should a republic be considered to be an unachievable chimera ?" exclaims the royalist pamphleteer. "Since the discovery of representative government, it has been proved that the system of representation may be realized by a great people in a republican, as well as in a monarchic form. A republic possesses incontestable advantages. It is cheap. It is noble. It assigns to different degrees of intellect their natural ranks."

He then quotes Samuel's advice to the Israelites, dissuading them to choose a king, and continues:

"If a republican government had been the result of the revolution of July, it would have set many consciences at ease. In swearing allegiance to it there could have been no treason; it would have been merely a change of principle, not one king substituted for another. There would not have been an usurpation, but merely another order of things. As for me, who am republican by nature, monarchic by reason, and Bourbonist from honour, I should have far sooner become reconciled with a democracy, since the legitimate monarchy was impossible, than with the bastard monarchy, which has been octroyed to us by the Lord knows whom."

Now, we have no dissent to express from M. de Chateaubriand's

panegyric of a republic; our wonder and disgust is to hear such from his mouth. As to his scruples about the allegiance, which it is treason to pay to Louis Philippe, the elect of the people, and no treason to pay to a republic, these, together with his reasons for the same, appear to us as flagrant specimens of Jesuitism as ever were exposed by Pascal. His peroration in favour of a republic, M. de Chateaubriand winds up, like certain members of our House of Commons, who are wont to speak on one side, and vote on the other, with an avowal that it was incompatible with the state of opinion and society in France; when he proceeds to consider the claims and advantages of two competitors.

There remained the choice betwixt two species of legitimacies; the Duke of Bordeaux, heir of a great race; the Duke of Reichstadt, heir of a great wan. These two legitimacies, which, at different epochs of history, drew their right from the same source, popular election, might have equally suited France."

Here is an admission for the author of "Bonaparte et les Bourbons !" The legitimacies of both families are equal, and derived from the same source. Now, Louis Philippe derives his title from this very source; yet his legitimacy is denied. M. de Chateaubriand, who swore allegiance to the two former sovereigns, finds an oath to this, and no religious oath either, stick in his throat.

"The advantages which ancient and royal blood gave to the Duke of Bordeaux, the illustrious fame of his sire gave to the Duke of Reichstadt. Napoleon's life was tantamount to a generation; his years were centuries. The Duke of Reichstadt, moreover, presented advantages, to win alike men of religious, and men of aristocratic prejudices,-a consecration by the hands of the Sovereign Pontiff to the one, his mother's blood, that of the modern Cæsars, to the other. His mother brought to him the past, his sire bequeathed to him the future."

We would give a new reading to M. de Chateaubriand's confession of faith above quoted, and say that he was "Republican from paradox, Bourbonist from prejudice, and Bonapartist from antithesis." All these suppositions, all this beautiful diction and bad logic, however, are idle attacks upon the throne of Louis Philippe. People are little given to study or examine theories now-a-days, above all, political ones; and the origin of power has become of far less importance than its utility and beneficence. In all the departments of internal administration, the government of the elective monarchy has "worked well." But its external policy is certainly the weak part of this government, weak, because inglorious. M. de Chateaubriand is too skilful and polemic not to direct his chief attack on this side, and his animadversions are here more likely to be felt, and to have influence with the French people.

"The elective monarchy of France hath as yet little honoured the flag which it has adopted; it has floated but over the portals of ministers' palaces, and under -the walls of Lisbon: it has been torn but by the winds; the rain washes away its scarlet and azure, and leaves but a flag of dirty white, true emblem of quasilegitimacy. The tricolour was not so when attached to the republican pike. Under the Duke of Reichstadt it would have been borne anew by those eagles which soared over so many fields of battle, but which no longer lend their mighty wings and talons to a humiliated standard."

From the mouth of a soldier, from that of one of the veterans of Austerlitz, we should admire this spirit, perhaps applaud this indig

nation; but uttered by one who bore arms against his country in his youth, and who in his age struggled to prolong its occupation by a foreign force, what feeling can it excite? With what grace can M. de Chateaubriand, who was minister of Louis XVIII. at Ghent, and who re-entered Paris amongst the English baggage-carts, now assume the bullying tone of a Buonapartist, and halloo his countrymen against the British?

There are honester men who profess the same opinions with consistency, and we respect them. They argue that peace can never endure or be solid betwixt the rival principles of liberty and absolutism; that war must come, sooner or later, to decide the question of which shall advance, which recede ;—and that war immediately after the revolution would have been a natural consequence, a relief; and a fit vent for the population that have since that event been starving; that war at any future period will be a greater evil; that it will be daily attended with less chances of success; that the enthusiasm which at that time surpassed the frenzy of ninety-two, and which now evaporates, can never be re-kindled; that Poland can never be again reformed, with a national and disciplined army in the field; that France has only preserved peace by truckling; that the hostile principle prevails in all her frontiers, except that of Belgium, beyond the Pyrenees, the Alps, and the Rhine; and that the country is in the disgraceful state of a political quarantine, shut in from Europe until the cholera of liberty consume itself and die away.

On the other hand, the Louis Philippite responds, that the late Revolution will have more influence and make more imitators by peace and order, than by war; that the cause of liberty, which is certainly progressing in Germany and in England, would at least in those countries be inevitably retarded, if not crushed, by French aggression. These, not to mention the weighty reasons to be drawn from the internal state of the country, should suffice. But they assert that others are not wanting; that even supposing the dynasty firm upon the throne, and the new institutions stable, still it has been proved that France alone is not able to war single-handed with Europe, that she has need of an ally, of one powerful ally at least. Napoleon, in the height of his power, acknowledged this principle, and acted upon it. He first aimed at the alliance of Prussia, then of Russia, lastly of Austria, and when all failed him, he fell.

The party of the mouvement or of the republican, with whom M. de Chateaubriand (his present companions, we learn, are Messrs. Cavaignac and Trelat, this we say with no reproach, for all honest men and principles are to be respected,) has enlisted, owned the soundness of this maxim, when, immediately after July 1830, they cried out, that France should ally with Russia, that Russia was the country most disposed to yield territorial aggrandizement to the former. Events proved the absurdity of hoping to have Russia for an ally. And Louis Philippe turned towards England, a country opposed indeed to the territorial aggrandizement of her neighbour, but certainly one of the great well-wishers to liberty.

Prince Talleyrand is considered, with reason, to be the originator and supporter of the alliance and amity with England, which had been long an idea of his, the one upon which he acted to bring about the

agreement of Amiens. Since Cardinal Dubois, he is the only minister that has entertained such a thought; and singular enough to say, both these statesmen were able to pursue this policy by princes of the house of Orleans. England, indeed, on her part, has rendered few or scanty returns for such unusual confidence on the part of her neighbour. But, allowances are made for the difficulties of Lord Grey's situation, and France hopes yet to reap the benefits of England's active alliance, when Reform shall have infused fresh life into a land so long "overlain with the putrid carcase of oligarchic corruption." In the mean time, however Frenchmen may find pretexts to complain against Louis Philippe, his caution and his government; we, as Englishmen, can have none. He has proffered us the hand of amity, that the Bourbons, even the weakest of them, never held out. If we do not prove grateful, all that is to be said is, that we deserve to be shut out from the Continent by another Buonaparte; and to have our colonies and dependent states insurrectionized by another Vergennes.*

It is very conceivable that M. de Chateaubriand, at present a Carlist under the garb of a republican, may exclaim against this moderate and honest policy. Louis Philippe in a death struggle with the rest of Europe, is that which would most flatter the hopes of the family at Holyrood. Even apart the consistency and political honour of the man,-making to him the huge compliment of forgetting the precedents and successive creeds of his past life, and allowing him full credit to be what he pretends, a political mariner disengaged from party by the wreck of his own, and clinging since that to patriotism, we can neither admit the justness, nor sympathize with what he deems the nobleness of his views.

M. de Chateaubriand is a poet, not a statesman; and consequently his ideas turn upon feelings, rather than upon principles. He considers a nation as the hero of a romance, of whom the duty is not so much to be honest, happy, wealthy, free, as to be interesting and noble. The model of a monarch, to him, is Charlemagne, surrounded by his Paladins, converting the Saxons to Christianity by fire and sword, as M. de Chateaubriand, when minister, converted the Spaniards to despotism by bayonets, unobserved capitulations, and the gallows. Thus it is little wonderful, that, after forswearing his admiration of Napoleon, he should resume and re-express it; and that after having mainly aided to overthrow the Bourbons, for being inimical to liberty, as he then protested, he should now come forward to represent France, as careless of Freedom, but demanding Glory as the indispensable condition of her existence.

C.

* Later whispers have said, and indeed, later circumstances have proved, that Talleyrand's policy and address have not been limited to an alliance betwixt England and France, but that Austria was won over to second these two powers in the task of shutting out the Northern potentates from weighing upon Europe. This triple juncture of interests, though too late for the safety of Poland, came at least in time to place the majority of the Conference at London, on the side of peace and fairness.