No. I.

Napoleon's Speech to the National Guard.

Soldats de la garde nationale de Paris,

Je suis bien-aise de vous voir. Je vous ai formés il y a quinze mois pour le maintien de la tranquillité publique dans la capitale, et pour sa sûreté. Vous avez rempli mon attente. Vous avez versé votre sang pour la défence de Paris; et si des troupes ennemies sont rentrées dans vos murs, la faute n'en est pas à vous, mais à la trahison, et sur-tout à la fatalité qui s'est attachée à nos affaires dans ces malheureuses circonstances.

Le trône royale ne convenait pas à la France. Il ne donnait aucune sûreté au peuple sur ses intérêts les plus précieuses. Il nous avait été imposé par l'étranger. S'il eût existé, il eût été un monument de honte et de malheur. Je suis arrivé armé de toute la force du peuple et de l'armée, pour faire disparaître cette tache, et rendre tout leur éclat à l'honneur et à la gloire de la France.

Soldats de la Garde Nationale; ce matin même le télégraphe de Lyon m'a appris que le drapeau tricolore flotte à Antibes et à Marseille. Cent coups de canon, tirés sur toutes nos frontières, apprendront à l'étranger que nos dissentions civiles sont terminées; je dis les étrangers, parceque nous ne connaissons pas encore d'ennemis. S'ils rassemblent leurs troupes, nous rassemblerons les nôtres. Nos armées sont toutes composées de braves qui se sont signalés dans plusieurs batailles, et qui présenteront à l'étranger une frontière de fer; tandis que de nombreux bataillons de grenadiers et de chasseurs des gardes nationales garantiront nos frontières. Je ne me mêlerai point des affaires des autres nations: malheur aux nations qui se mêleraient des nôtres! Des revers ont retrempés le caractère du peuple français; il a repris cette jeunesse, cette vigueur qui, il y a vingt ans, étonnait l'Europe.

Soldats, vous avez été forcés d'arborer des couleurs proscrites par la nation. Mais les couleurs nationales étaient dans vos cœurs. Vous jurez de les prendre toujours pour signe de ralliement et de défendre ce trône impériale seule et naturelle garantie de nos droits. Vous jurez de ne jamais souffrir que des étrangers, chez lesquels nous avons paru plusieurs fois en maîtres, se mêlent de nos constitutions et VOL. II.-App.

B

APPENDIX.

de nôtre gouvernement. Vous jurez enfin de tout sacrifier à l'honneur et à l'independance de la France.

No. II.

The following Portrait of the Bourbon Family, traced by one of the Imperial Ministry, is inserted to show what was the Persuasion of a certain Portion of Frenchmen, during the last Reign of Napoleon.-It appeared in the Independent and the Journal de l'Empire of the 23d of May; and the Reader is warned to bear in mind, not only by whom it was composed, but that it was said of a Dynasty dethroned; and was not when written, nor is now meant to be applied to the Royal Family of France under the present circumstances.

Louis XVIII. is undoubtedly superior to his brother and nephews, but this prince possesses more learning than wisdom. He is perfectly acquainted with Horace and Juvenal, though he knows nothing of administration; he is familiar with the Greeks and Romans, but an utter stranger to the men of his own age. By a long residence in England, he has acquired some just notions of a representative government, without the least knowledge of the art of governing.

Louis XVIII. will write an able paragraph for a journal, the success of which in Paris will give him at his levee the greatest pleasure; but at the same time, he will allow his ministers to present, in his name, to the chamber of deputies, a report, by which the government will lose a hundred votes in one day, and which will do him serious injury in the public opinion. He will draw up a diplomatic declaration with precision and elegance, while he is incapable of obtaining or preserving any influence in foreign courts. His moderate policy, couched in well rounded periods, shall meet with every encomium, and kingdoms be disposed of without the slightest attention to his paternal remonstrances, or the smallest regard for his interests: in short, Louis XVIII. such as we have seen him, might, I think, be very suitably ranked in the third class of the Institute. I perceive him to be an erudite man, a good academician, but I look in vain for the king.

Besides labouring under the incorrigible weakness of the present Bourbons, Louis XVIII. is excessively headstrong on certain points; and the consequence of these two united defects in the conduct of this prince, is a fault which has been that of his whole life since the emigration; a fault which, after having exposed him among strangers, has raised him a great number of enemies in France, even among his most faithful adherents. For these last twenty-five years Louis

XVIII. has constantly had an avowed favourite, and this favourite he has always preferred to his friends, and even to his relations. Without being acquainted with this personage no hopes can be entertained of access to the king. An obstinate and jealous woman is not more assiduous to please her husband than this minion is to ingratiate himself with his master; which latter finds it impossible to admit any person, receive any address, or open any letter, without the presence or interposition of his chamber or cabinet minister; for a more dignified appellation cannot be given to those inferior characters to whom the king abandons himself without reserve.

Louis XVIII. feels this servitude; he is sometimes indignant at it; he secretly detests the author of this habitual violence, he despises and he retains him. Not possessing sufficient energy to shake off the yoke, in the absence of his tyrannical valet he grows angry; but soon resumes, without murmuring, his accustomed chain. The ascendency that may be assumed over this prince is such, that rather than resign his favourite, he would oppose his family, his friends, and all the kings of Europe.

Less sincere than his elder brother, Louis XVIII. has, naturally, like him, that species of duplicity which is the inseparable companion of weakness. Genuine good-nature, with a certain severity of manners, covered this defect in Louis XVI.: studied condescension, grey hairs, and old age, deceive you at first in the same manner in Louis XVIII. Neither of these princes have been able to elude the suspicions inspired by an equivocal conduct; all eyes fixed on them, easily discerned them to be acting two different characters; the one private, the other public; and like Penelope, destroying each night the work of each day. The consequence was, an end of all confidence. Both these princes alarmed their enemies, without being able to protect their friends, who knew them too well to expect from them firmness or intrepidity in the hour of danger. In fact, the two brothers, instead of facing the storm, yielded alike in the day of peril; the one seeking refuge in the national assembly, the other amongst strangers.

In examining the conduct of the king, however we may feel prejudiced in his favour, we must still acknowledge him to have very serious faults, and such as must necessarily be the ruin of the possessor. It must be allowed that he never gave any proofs of a knowledge of men, or of things,-that to the last moment he was ignorant of the real state of France,—that he was unable to hold the reins of government: that, in short, after a reign of eleven months, during which period his authority hourly declined, he lost the throne in one day! I

appeal to all enlightened men whether such a prince be capable of governing France. I ask if we can reasonably rally round a king who runs away in all difficult circumstances; who has never been able to head a party, not even when two millions of men were in arms for his cause, and who dares not enter his native land unless accompanied by an odious retinue of foreign troops? I ask what protection, what security can be offered for the future by a king who is arrived at that age when men no longer change, and in whose character errors are so inherent, that at the age of thirty he would have committed the same as at that of sixty: Louis XVIII. is unfit to govern, nor is he more capable of selecting suitable ministers to exercise authority in his name than of acting himself. He has neither talents nor determination. Indeed we can form a just estimate of his character, no less by the weakness of his reign than the rapidity of his fall. He is not the man for France. However, I repeat it—this prince is the phoenix of the royal family.

The Comte d'Artois has received from nature neither penetration of mind nor a sound judgment; he is heedless, superficial, and uninstructed by an education in which the attention of the scholar did not repay the solicitude of the master. A wild and dissipated youth gave him an aversion to any thing solid, and rendered him incapable of application or study. His head is an empty vessel that will neither receive nor retain any thing. The heart of the Comte d'Artois is superior to his head. This calls from him sometimes certain happy sayings, which procure him a slight degree of credit, and a passing success unconfirmed by good sense. The higher endowments of reason lend no assistance to those amiable qualities and that facility of manner, which are frivolous advantages in a prince placed on the steps of a throne. The Comte d'Artois was for a moment popular; but, when upon a nearer inspection he discovered. an absolute ignorance of affairs, a hopeless incapacity; the illusion, which had fascinated the eyes of the admirers whom he had conciliated by his engaging manners vanished in an instant. I will not retrace in colours too animated the national fault by which the Comte d'Artois signalized the commencement of his administration. It suffices for him to bear the name of Frenchman; for me to wish to efface such a blemish from our history. Let us forgive this prince, but let us beware of taking such a man for a chief. He is ten times weaker than his brother, being totally void of instruction. Easy of access, more easily to be imposed upon, he has just quitted the domination of women for the empire of courtiers and priests. His last mistress, in whose tomb he appears

to have deposited the passions of his youth, has given place in his heart to a blind devotion. With such incapacity for command, it is scarcely credible, but it is true, that the Comte d'Artois is not however without ambition; he is desirous of reigning, and he has had the imprudence to promise those immediately about him great changes in the order of things, when once he shall occupy the supreme rank. It may also be said, that this prince, led away by his trusty followers, and a certain self-confidence, was adjusting himself to the character he hoped one day to assume. A small separate government was already formed in his cabinet. This government had its ministers, its administrators, its judges, and its agents in France; it paralysed the action of royal authority, forbad, or at least retarded, by a secret influence, the execution of public orders; and blamed the concessions that Louis XVIII. thought himself obliged to make to the nation. "I will answer for the future," was a sentence that escaped this imprudent prince, who never pronounced the words "constitution" or liberty," but in the last extremity; at a moment when he thought that by tardy oaths and fine words he might regain lost hearts. Such are the talents, such the disposition and conduct of the Comte d'Artois. Such were our prospects from a prince who is a stranger to the common knowledge of the age, and who is not even the shadow of him who could not maintain himself one year on the throne of France. Upon the accession of the Comte d'Artois we might look forward to a revolution at the end of six months, and expect to see our country a renewed prey to repeated dissensions.

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Whence is it that the declension of capacity and talents in this family should be so rapid and abrupt? The Duc d'Angouleme denied the exterior advantages of his father, but personally brave, it is said, knows nothing, and moreover can learn nothing. As a soldier, a common lieutenant is his superior; in civil life, he has no notion of the elements of administration, nor the slightest idea of the proceedings of government. He would at all times have been unfit for a throne, but is particularly so in the midst of a nation that requires in a chief a steady hand, joined to a strong and enlightened mind. Of a mild and placid disposi tion, he might have been beloved, were it not for a haughty, imperious wife, who soured by misfortune, and endowed with a mind rebellious to culture, and a superstitious heart, exercises over this prince a fatal ascendancy. To crown this misfortune, the Duc d'Angouleme, though young, is absorbed in the exercises of a blind devotion, fatal equally to the exertions of his head and the emotions of his heart.