The actions of these representatives its of the people kept pace with their emphatic language. Upwards of four hundred of the most respectable citizens of Lyons were executed by the guillotine and by discharges of musketry.* Menaced with the vengeance which overtook some of his colleagues, Fouché sheltered himself under the protection of Tallien, and afterwards under that of Barras, and totally changed his opinions in politics. He was the foremost to denounce the club of jacobins, in which he had so often presided; and in the revolution of 18th Brumaire, (8th November, 1799,) when the vision of Liberty and Equality vanished before a military government, Fouché was the first to hail the rising sun. He kept pace with Napoleon in promotion, and as his master became Consul for ten years, for life, and finally Emperor, Fouché became Senator, Grand Eagle of the Legion of Honour, Duke, and Peer of France. But these were only honorary distinctions. As an apostate priest, Fouché was without religion; as a Septembrizer, he was devoid of mercy; unfettered by the scruples of Carnot, he made few pretensions to political consistency, and was therefore, in every point of view, suited for the office of minister of police, which, for nearly ten years, he held under Napoleon. During this all-seeing and all-scrutinizing occupation, Fouché, doubtless, became the master of many a dark and dangerous secret, and the agent of much hidden oppression. The journals, the theatres, the management of domestic spies, the charge of watching the intrigues of the clergy, the emigrants, the Chouans, the Vendeans-all fell under his charge; and the well-known kidnapping of Sir Thomas Rumbold, Mr Drake, Georges, Pichegru, Moreau, and the Duke D'Enghien, attested his

VOL. VIII. PART I.

capacity for this important office. It is certain that he lost for a season the confidence of the jacobin faction while acting under the imperial government; but he regained it in some measure by his disgrace with Buonaparte. The occasion was never distinctly known, but it has been supposed that Buonaparte suspected Fouché of a desire to form an interest separate from his own, by means of the immense influence and extensive information vested in him by virtue of his office. The pretext of the government of Rome removed this dangerous servant into an honourable exile, and the breach between the emperor and his minister of police, restored to the latter the confidence of his republican friends. But Fouché did not belong to that class of statesmen who make a point of becoming the victims of their principles. By means which may easily be conceived, he had acquired immense wealth, and was in no hurry to lose it by engaging in any hazardous adventure, until he had examined the probable stability of the new royal government, and ascertained whether his services would be acceptable to Louis XVIII. He solicited and obtained an audience of the king soon after acknowledging his sovereignty. While he attended in the anti-chamber to be introduced, he observed a sneer on the countenance of some royalists who were in waiting, and gave them a lesson that a minister of police, even when he has lost his office, is not a person to be jested with. "You, sir,” said he, to a gentleman, "seem proud of the lilies with which you are adorned. Do you recollect the language you held respecting the Bourbon family some time since in such a company?-And you, madam," (he continued, addressing a lady,) "to whom

I

I gave a passport to England, may, perhaps, wish to be reminded of what then passed betwixt us on the subject of Louis XVIII." The laughers were conscience-struck, and Fouché was introduced into the cabinet. What passed betwixt Louis and this person cannot be known; but it may be presumed that Fouché's motives were to offer his services to the king, and it is said that he recommended the organization of a police, which should be effectual for the security of the government, without being odious or oppressive to the people. It would certainly have been of the last consequence to Louis to have secured the attachment of this sagacious, though unprincipled statesman, and through him a complete acquaintance with the secrets of Napoleon's government. Accordingly, Louis is said to have received him with courtesy, and even favour. But Fouché's vote on the late king's death could scarce be forgiven by his brother, even if the memory of that and his other crimes had not been thundered into the ears of Louis by the royalists around him. Fouché soon saw all hopes from the royal favour were vain, and placed himself once more at the head of the jacobin, or, as they called themselves, the patriotic party, whom he had deserted and betrayed under the reign of Napoleon, and whom he was destined, in the course of this marvellous year, once more to desert and betray.

Headed by the audacious Carnot and the wily Fouché, the ancient assertors of the republican cause, as well as the later agents of Buonaparte's tyranny, with many who had played both parts in this changeful drama, began to reappear on the public stage with new courage and confidence. The members of Buonaparte's senate, who had been dismissed from the House of Peers in the most gentle manner, by receiving, namely, no intimation or letter from the king com

manding their attendance, lived in the greatest security. Cambaceres continued to maintain the same style of luxury at his table, and was quitted for the self-imposed fine of two hundred francs, (81. 6s. Ed.) subscribed towards erecting a new statue of Henri Quatre. The folding doors of the Tuilleries still opened to receive Lebrun, (late Duke of Placentia) in his capacity of arch-treasurer of the empire. Savary, so long the manager of Buonaparte's high police, with his subaltern agents of oppression, walked the streets without notice or insult. Carnot, David, and other men of letters, who had mingled in the revolution, now figured in the institute, as if literary employment was to be henceforward the business of their lives. Under all this apparent peace and security, the bonds of jacobinical fraternity were in secret renewed, and the members of the confederacy might be distinguished by the well-disciplined unanimity with which they praised or blamed, censured or approved, individuals or opinions.

But it was chiefly their business to insist upon the faults of the royal family, and their prejudices against the men and measures of that period when France was successful in foreign war, against the statesmen who directed, and the soldiers who achieved her gigantic enterprizes.-The king, they said, had suffered misfortune without having learned wisdom;-he was incapable of stepping beyond the circle of his Gothic prejudices ;-France had received him from the hand of foreign conquerors, surrounded by an emaciated groupe of mendicant nobles, whose pretensions were as antiquated and absurd as their decorations and manners. His government went to divide, they alleged, the French into two classes, opposed to each other in merits as in interests-the emigrants, who alone were regarded as faithful and willing subjects, and the rest of the

nation, in whom the Bourbons saw, at best, but repentant rebels. Too timid as yet to strike an open blow, they alledged that the king and his ministers sought every means to disqualify and displace all who had taken any active share in the events of the revolution, and to evade the general promise of amnesty Under pretext of national economy, they were disbanding the army and displacing the officers of government, depriving thus the military and civil servants of France of the provision which their long services had earned. Louis, they said, had insulted the glory of France, and humiliated her heroes, by renouncing the colours and symbols, under which twenty-five years had seen her victorious; he had rudely refused a crown, offered to him by the people, and snatched it as his own right by inheritance, as if the dominion of men could be transferred from father to son, like the property of a flock of sheep. The right of Frenchmen to chuse their own ruler was hereditary and imprescriptible; and the nation, they said, must assert it, or sink to be the contempt, instead of being the pride at once and dread of Europe.

Such was the language which nettled, while it alarmed, the idle Parisians; the departments were assailed by other arts of instigation. The chief of these was directed to excite the jealousy so often alluded to concerning the security of the property of national domains. Not content with urging every-where that a revocation of the lands of the church and emigrants was impending over the present proprietors, and that the clergy and nobles did not even deign to conceal their hopes and designs, a singular device was in many instances practised to inforce the belief of such assertions. Secret agents were dispatched into the departments where property was advertised for sale. They

made enquiries as if in the character of intending purchasers, and where the property appeared to have been derived from revolutionary confiscation, instantly objected to the security as good for nothing, and withdrew their pretended offers; thus impressing the proprietor, and all in the same situation, with the unavoidable belief, that such title was considered as invalid, owing to the expected and menaced revocation of the Bourbon government.

It is generally believed that Buonaparte was not originally the object of these intrigues. He was feared and hated by the jacobin party, who knew what a slender chance his iron government afforded of their again attempting to rear their fantastic fabrics, whether of a pure republic, or a republican monarchy. It is supposed their eyes were turned in preference towards the Duke of Orleans. As the son of the foster-father of the revolu tion, as the pupil of Madame Genlis, as having, during the very early part of his youth, worn the colours and fought under the banners of the revolution, the jacobins founded hopes upon this prince, which his upright and loyal character ought to have checked. They reckoned probably on strength of the temptation, and they thought that in supplanting Louis XVIII., and placing his kinsman in his room, they would obtain, on the one hand, a king, who should hold his power by and through the revolution, and, on the other, would conciliate both foreign powers and the constitutionalists at home by chusing him out of the family of Bourbon. The more cautious of those concerned in the intrigue recommended that nothing should be attempted during the life of the reigning monarch; but that they should reserve their force for an effort after his decease, an event which probably was not dis

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tant, to set aside his brother, and call the Duke of Orleans to the throne. It was supposed that the unpopularity of Monsieur and his sons, with the general belief that they were devoted to the interests of the emigrants and clergy, would render it comparatively easy to contest their right of succession. Others were more impatient and less cautious, and the Duke of Orleans received an intimation of their plan in an unsigned billet, containing only these words, "We will act it without you-we will act it in spite of you-we will act it FOR you,"* if putting it on his choice to be the leader or victim of the intended revo lution. The Duke of Orleans, though his intimacy with the king and princes is not supposed to be great or cordial, immediately communicated this note to the former, and acted otherwise with such prudence as greatly to cool the hopes which the jacobins had founded upon him. It became necessary that they should turn their to some other central point.

as

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The court, aware of the disaffection of the army, and the intrigues of the jacobins, seems to have formed no other plan of defence, than by flattering the military with the prospect of a speedy call to war. On the frontiers towards Flanders, the fortresses were put into a state of defence, and the inhabitants of fortified

towns were commanded to desist from erecting buildings, or laying out gardens, within three hundred toises of the outermost works. The army was recruited and furnished with clothing and arms, while great magazines were formed in centrical places for their regular supply. Many disbanded officers, who were preparing to seek their fortune in America, were commanded to remain in France, with an intimation that their services might be required.

All these military preparations received a fresh impulse, in consequence of the nomination of Soult to re-place Dupont, as minister of the war department. A general who had been usually successful would be more popular, it was supposed, with the army, than one who was only known by his disaster at Baylen; and Soult improved this favourable impression by an order of the day, promising a speedy settlement of the arrears of the army.

The language of court flatterers and court poets, who had hitherto hailed the Bourbons as the restorers of peace, began to anticipate their glory as conquerors in war. The popular aversion to foreigners, and particularly to the English, whom they regarded, not unjustly, as the original cause of the depression of France in the scale of Europe, as

sumed a tone unusually rancorous. In theatres and public places every scurrilous reflection and conimonplace satire on English customs was applied personally to our countrymen who chanced to be present, by an audience calling themselves the most civilized in the civilized world.

It was unreasonably argued, that the British government had excited, or at least aggravated, this irritation, by sending the Duke of Wellington, on whom no Frenchman could look without feelings of national humiliation, to be the resident ambassador of his Majesty at the court of France. But, not to mention that no such effects were to be apprehended, from the unbounded applause with which Paris had at first received the British general, we see no reason that our country should have lost the advantage of the duke's diplomatic talents, in deference to the unreasonable sensibility of the French, to which perhaps but too much respect had been paid in other respects. It is generally known, that Wellington, like Marlborough, (the only name in British history which approaches his own) has been as successful in treaties as in battles. Not that he possesses the winning address of Churchill, which almost gained the iron heart of Charles of Sweden; but because, open, manly, and decisive, in the cabinet as in the field, he has substituted strong reason and plain sense for artifice and finesse, and carried his point in political discussion, as in war, by marching straight up to it. He had claims upon the gratitude of many of the French generals, from his active interference with Louis in their behalf; and if his presence at Paris was disagreeable to the French, it was only because they hated in him the representative, as he had been the sustainer, of the honour of his country.

France, by the intrigues, and even open declaration of Talleyrand, her minister at the Congress, held a course hostile to Britain, and endeavoured by various means to force upon the Congress the revisal, or rather alteration, of the maritime law of nations, in hopes of arriving at the establishment of the long desiderated principle, that free bottoms make free goods. With what plausibility such a discussion could be proposed, or how it was expected that England, triumphant, and over whom not one of the powers whose plenipotentiaries were assembled in Congress, could pretend to exercise a coercive influence, should yield rights to which she had adhered as her palladium in the darkest hour of her history, it is not for us to conjecture. The attempt was probably made to shew, that the heads of the Bourbons were entirely French at heart, and free from any partiality in favour of England; or perhaps they gave way to the ebullition of national feeling, as a timid horseman contents himself with an attempt to guide the run-away steed, whose course he cannot check.

Other intrigues of France at the Congress were more consistent with the interests, or at least the feelings, of the royal family. An attempt was made to instigate the other powers against Bernadotte and Murat, whose authority in Sweden and Naples emanated originally from that of Buonaparte, and shared his taint of usurpation. Bernadotte lay distant from France, and had besides, in the campaign of 1813, deserved well of the European league. The merits of Murat were more questionable, and there were hopes of embittering against him Austria, always jealous of her Italian possessions. Various documents were exhibited to the Duke of Wellington, as tending to establish that King Joachim had play