APPENDIX XIV.

REPORT OF THE FRENCH SENATORIAL COMMITTEE ON THE PETITIONS TO CHANGE THE REPUBLIC INTO AN EMPIRE, IN NOVEMBER 1852, AND THE SENATUS CONSULTUM ADOPTED IN CONFORMITY WITH IT.

MESSIEURS LES SENATEURS: France, attentive and excited, now demands from you a great political act-to put an end to her anxieties, and to secure her future.

But this act, however serious it may be, does not meet with any of those capital difficulties which hold in suspense the wisdom of legislators. You know the wishes expressed by the councils general, the councils of arrondissement, and the addresses of the communes of France: wishes for stability in the government of Louis Napoleon, and for return to a political form which has struck the world by the majesty of its power, and by the wisdom of its laws. You have heard that immense petition of a whole people rushing on the steps of its liberator, and those enthusiastic cries, which we may almost call a plebiscite by anticipation, proceeding from the hearts of thousands of agriculturists and workmen, manufacturers and tradesmen. Such manifestations simplify the task of statesmen. There are circumstances in which fatal necessities prevent the firmest legislator from acting in accordance with public opinion and with his own reason; there are others where he requires a long consideration in order to solve questions on which the country has not sufficiently decided. You, gentlemen, are not exposed either to this constraint or to this embarrassment. The national will presses and supplicates you, and your exalted experience tells you, that in yielding to her entreaties you will contribute to replace France in the paths which are suitable to her interests, to her grandeur, and to the imperious necessities of her situation. All this is in fact explained by the events which take place before you.

After great political agitations, it always happens that nations throw themselves with joy into the arms of the strong man whom Providence sends to them. It was the fatigue of civil wars which

1 This report was read by M. Troplong, chairman of the committee. It is universally ascribed to him, and M. Troplong is now president of the senate. Whether this remarkable paper be considered as a political creed or confiteor, or as a piece of attempted logic to connect certain occurrences, and account for surprising turns, or as a high state paper of singular shallowness-in whatever light it may be viewed, it will be allowed on all hands that it fully deserves preservation.

made a monarch of the conqueror of Actium; it was the horror of revolutionary excesses, as much as the glory of Marengo, which raised the imperial throne. In the midst of the recent dangers of the country, this strong man showed himself on the 10th of December, 1848, and on the 2d of December, 1851, and France confided to him her standard, which was ready to perish. If she has declared her will to confide it to him for ever in this memorable journey, which was only one suite of triumphs, it is because, by his courage and by his prudence, the man has shown himself equal to the task; it is because, when a nation feels herself tormented by the agitations of a stormy, government, a necessary reaction leads it towards him who can best secure order, stability, and repose.

Louis Napoleon, therefore, is in this wonderful situation, that he alone holds in his hands these inestimable gifts. He has, in the eyes of France, his immense services, the magic of his popularity, the souvenirs of his race, the imperishable remembrance of order, of organization, and of heroism, which make the hearts of all Frenchmen beat. He again revives in the eyes of Europe the greatest name of modern days, no more for the military triumphs for which his history is so rich, but for chaining down the political and social tempests, for endowing France with the conquests of peace, and for strengthening and fertilizing the good relations of states. Both at home and abroad, it is to him that is attached a vast future of pacific labour and of civilization. That future must not be delivered to the chance of events and to the surprise of factions.

That is why France demands the monarchy of the emperor; that is to say, order in revolution, and rule in democracy. She wished it on the 10th December, when the artifices of an inimical constitution prevented the people from expressing their opinion. She wished it again on December 20, when the moderation of a noble character prevented its being demanded. But now the public sentiment overflows like a torrent; there are moments when enthusiasm has also the right of solving questions. For some time past visible signs announced what must be the mission of Louis Napoleon, and the foreseeing reason of statesmen put itself in accordance with the popular instinct in order to fix the character of it. After the bitter sarcasm which put the heir to a crown at the head of the republic, it was evident that France, still democratic from her habits, never ceased to be monarchical in her instincts, and that she wished for the reestablishment of the monarchy in the person of the prince who

revealed himself to her as the conciliator of two ages and of two minds, the line of union of the government and of the people, the monarchical symbol of organized democracy.

At the end of the last century, the preponderance of the democratic element gave rise to a belief, in speculative or ardent minds, that France ought to mark the new era into which she had entered by a divorce between her government and the monarchical form. The republic was borrowed from the souvenirs of antiquity. But in France political imitations seldom succeed. Our country, although taxed with frivolity, is invincibly attached to certain national ideas and to certain traditional habits, by which it preserves the originality of which it is proud. The republic could not acclimatize itself on the French soil. It perished from its own excesses, and it only went into those excesses because it was not in the instincts of the nation. It was but an interval, brilliant abroad, and terrible at home, between two monarchies.

At that period, glory had raised to power one of those men who found dynasties and who traverse ages. It is on that new stem that France saw flourish a monarchy suitable to modern times, and which yielded to no other in its grandeur and in its power. Was it not a great lesson to see a similar fortune reserved, fifty years after, for a second trial of the republican form? Is it not a striking example of the perseverance of the French mind in things which are like the substance of her political life? Is not the proof complete and decisive?

It will be the more so, as the imperial monarchy has all the advantages of the republic, without its dangers. The other monarchical régimes (the illustrious services of which we will not depreciate) have been accused of having placed the throne too far from the people; and the republic, boasting of its popular origin, skilfully entrenched itself against them in the masses, who believed themselves to be forgotten and overlooked. But the empire, stronger than the republic on democratic grounds, removes that objection. It was the government the most energetically supported, and the most deeply regretted by the people. It is the people who have again found it in their memory to oppose it to the dreams of ideologists, and to the attempts of perturbators. On the one hand, it is the only one which can glorify itself in the right recognised by the old monarchy, "that it is to the French nation that it belongs to choose its king;" on the other, it is the only one which has not had quarrels to settle with the people. When it disappeared in 1814,

it was not by a struggle of the nation against its government. The chances of an unequal foreign war brought about that violent divorce. But the people have never ceased to see in the empire its emanation and its work; and they placed it in their affections far above the republic—an anonymous and tumultuous government, which they remember much more by the violence of its proconsuls than by the victories which were the price of French valour.

That is why the Napoleonic monarchy absorbed the republic a first time, and must absorb it a second time. The republic is virtually in the empire, on account of the contract-like character of the institution, and of the communication and express delegation of power by the people. But the empire is superior to the republic, because it is also the monarchy; that is to say, the government of all confided to the moderating action of one, with hereditary succession as a condition, and stability as its consequence. Monarchy has the excellent quality of yielding admirably to all the progress of civilization: by turns feudal, absolutist, and mixed; always old and always modern, it only remains to it to reopen the era of its democratic transformation, which was inaugurated by the emperor. That is what France now wishes; it is what is asked of you by a country fatigued with utopian ideas, incredulous with respect to political abstractions, and whose genius, a union of sound sense and poesy, is so constituted, that it only believes in power under the figure of a hero or a prince.

Even if the love of Frenchmen for monarchy be only a prejudice, it must be respected; a people can only be governed in accordance with its ideas. But it must in particular be respected, because it is inspired by the most essential wants and the most legitimate interests of the country.

France is a great State, which wishes to preserve at home and abroad the force which a vast territory and thirty-five millions of inhabitants give. She is both agricultural and commercial. Notwithstanding the fertility of her soil, she would be poor, if manufactures were not to add immense personal to real capital, and if the taste for polite enjoyments and moderate luxury did not give to labour an aliment always new. But labour, in order to arrive at the result of its enterprises, should be seconded by so many advances of funds, and such a persevering continuance of efforts, that all success would escape it if it were interrupted or troubled by the storms of disquieting and subversive policy. It demands, therefore, stability of institutions, as the source of confidence and the mother of credit.

All these conditions of a regular and prosperous life the monarchy procures to France; any other form can only compromise them.

Monarchy is the government of great states, to which institutions made for duration are marvellously suitable, as the most solid foundations are required for a vast edifice. The republic, on the contrary, is only the government of small states, if we except the United States of America, which, by their geographical position, form an exception to all rules, and which, besides, are only a federation; a republic has never been able to establish itself except in small nations, in which the embarrassments of that difficult and complicated form of government are corrected by the small extent of territory and population.

Ancient Rome, so far from contradicting this rule, fully confirms it. The republic was only in the city and for the city. Beyond it there were only avaricious masters and oppressed subjects. If ever France can be said to have had a sort of neighbourhood with the republic, it was in the middle ages, when the republican spirit, extinguished from the time of the Cæsars, had become awakened in a part of Europe; when France was only a chessboard of almost independent provinces, and when the feudal principalities were in all parts menaced by the communal movement. But since that movement, all the interior action of France has removed her from the republican form. She, in particular, separated from it, when she gave herself a united territory, and thirty-five millions of inhabitants living under the same laws, in the same country, and united by an infinite chain of dependent interests, which the same movement of circulation causes to terminate in a sole centre. Such a people is not to be shaken, as were the citizens of a single city, even if called Athens or Rome. A country which lives by its labour, and not by the labour of slaves and presents from the state, cannot be occupied with speeches of the forum, with the permanent agitation of comitia, with the anxieties of politics always in ebullition. This fever, to which democratic republics give the name of political life, cannot with impunity be communicated to a nation whose splendour particularly consists in the pacific development of its wealth, and in the regular and intelligent activity of its private interests.

Our fathers learned these truths in the rude school of public and private misfortunes. They compose all the interior policy of the commencement of this century. Why should incorrigible innovators have in these latter times inflicted the too palpable demon

2

2 See the speeches delivered in the Tribunal on the return to monarchy in 1804.