The Recollections Of Alexis De Tocqueville Part 19

[29: Private letter, 1 October 1849.]

In spite of the gravity of the circ.u.mstances, the English ministers, who were at that moment dispersed on account of the parliamentary holidays, took a long time before meeting; for in that country, the only country in the world where the aristocracy still carries on the government, the majority of the ministers are both great landed proprietors and, as a rule, great n.o.blemen. They were at that time on their estates, recruiting from the fatigue and _ennui_ of business; and they showed no undue hurry to return to Town. During this interval, all the English press, without distinction of party, took fire. It raged against the two Emperors, and inflamed public opinion in favour of Turkey. The British Government, thus stimulated, at once took up its position. This time it did not hesitate, for it was a question, as it said itself, not only of the Sultan, but of England's influence in the world.[30] It therefore decided, first, that representations should be made to Russia and Austria; secondly, that the British Mediterranean Squadron should proceed to the Dardanelles, to give confidence to the Sultan and, if necessary, defend Constantinople. We were invited to do the same, and to act in common. The same evening, the order was despatched to the British Fleet to sail.

[30: Private letter from M. Drouyn de Lhuys, 2 October 1849.]

The news of these decisive resolutions threw me into great perplexity. I did not hesitate to think that we should approve the generous conduct of our Amba.s.sador, and come to the aid of the Sultan;[31] but as to a warlike att.i.tude, I did not believe that it would as yet be wise to adopt it. The English invited us to do as they did; but our position was very different from theirs. In defending Turkey, sword in hand, England risked her fleet; we, our very existence. The English Ministers could rely that, in that extremity, Parliament and the nation would support them; whereas we were almost certain to be abandoned by the a.s.sembly, and even by the country, if things came so far as war. For our wretchedness and danger at home made people's minds at that moment insensible to all beside. I was convinced, moreover, that in this case threats, instead of serving to forward our designs, were calculated to frustrate them. If Russia, for it was really with her alone that we had to do, should chance to be disposed to open the question of the part.i.tion of the East by invading Turkey--a contingency that I found it difficult to believe in--the sending of our fleets would not prevent the crisis; and if it was really only a question (as was probably the case) of taking revenge upon the Poles, it would aggravate it, by making it difficult for the Tsar to retract, and causing his vanity to join forces with his resentment.

[31: Private letters to Lamoriciere and Beaumont, 5 and 9 October 1849.]

I went to the meeting of the Council with these reflections. I at once saw that the President was already decided and even pledged, as he himself declared to us. This resolve on his part had been inspired by Lord Normanby, the British Amba.s.sador, an eighteenth-century diplomatist, who had worked himself into a strong position in Louis Napoleon's good graces.... The majority of my colleagues thought as he did, that we should without hesitation adopt the line of joint action to which the English invited us, and like them send our fleet to the Dardanelles.

Failing in my endeavour to have a measure which I considered premature postponed, I asked that at least, before it was carried out, they should consult Falloux, whose state of health had compelled him to leave Paris for a time and go to the country. Lanjuinais went down to him for this purpose, reported the affair to him, and came back and reported to us that Falloux had without hesitation given his opinion in favour of the despatch of the fleet. The order was sent off at once. However, Falloux had acted without consulting the leaders of the majority or his friends, and even without due reflection as to the consequences of his action; he had yielded to a movement of impulse, as sometimes happened to him, for nature had made him frivolous and light-headed before education and habit had rendered him calculating to the pitch of duplicity. It is probable that, after his conversation with Lanjuinais, he received advice, or himself made certain reflections, opposed to the opinion he had given. He therefore wrote me a very long and very involved letter,[32] in which he pretended to have misunderstood Lanjuinais (this was impossible, for Lanjuinais was the clearest and most lucid of men both in speech and action). He revoked his opinion and sought to evade his responsibility; and I replied at once with this note:

"My dear Colleague,

"The Council has taken its resolution, and at this late hour there is nothing to be done but await events; moreover, in this matter the responsibility of the whole Council is the same. There is no individual responsibility. I was not in favour of the measure; but now that the measure is taken, I am prepared to defend it against all comers."[33]

[32: Letter from Falloux, 11 October 1849.]

[33: Letter to Falloux, 12 October 1849.]

While giving a lesson to Falloux, I was none the less anxious and embarra.s.sed as to the part I was called upon to play. I cared little for what would happen at Vienna; for in this business I credited Austria merely with the position of a satellite. But what would the Tsar do, who had involved himself so rashly and, apparently, so irrevocably in his relations towards the Sultan, and whose pride had been put to so severe a test by our threats? Fortunately I had two able agents at St Petersburg and Vienna, to whom I could explain myself without reserve.

"Take up the business very gently," I recommended them,[34] "be careful not to set our adversaries' self-esteem against us, avoid too great and too ostensible an intimacy with the English Amba.s.sadors, whose Government is detested by the Court at which you are, although nevertheless maintaining good relations with those amba.s.sadors. In order to attain success, adopt a friendly tone, and do not try to frighten people. Show our position as it is; we do not want war; we detest it; we dread it; but we cannot act dishonourably. We cannot advise the Porte, when it comes to us for our opinion, to commit an act of cowardice; and should the courage which it has displayed, and which we have approved of, bring it into danger, we cannot, either, refuse it the a.s.sistance it asks of us. A way must therefore be found out of the difficulty. Is Kossuth's skin worth a general war? Is it to the interest of the Powers that the Eastern Question should be opened at this moment and in this fas.h.i.+on? Cannot a way be found by which everybody's honour will be saved? What do they want, after all? Do they only want to have a few poor devils handed over to them? That is a.s.suredly not worth so great a quarrel; but if it were a pretext, if at the bottom of this business lurked the desire, as a matter of fact, to lay hands upon the Ottoman Empire, then it would certainly be a general war that they wanted; for ultra-pacific though we are, we should never allow Constantinople to fall without striking a blow."

[34: Private letters to Lamoriciere and Beaumont, 5 and 9 October 1849.]

The affair was happily over by the time these instructions reached St Petersburg. Lamoriciere had conformed to them before he received them.

He had acted in this circ.u.mstance with an amount of prudence and discretion which surprised those who did not know him, but which did not astonish me in the least. I knew that he was impetuous by temperament, but that his mind, formed in the school of Arabian diplomacy, the wisest of all diplomacies, was circ.u.mspect and acute to the pitch of artifice.

Lamoriciere, so soon as he had heard rumours of the quarrel direct from Russia, hastened to express, very vividly, though in an amicable tone, that he disapproved of what had happened at Constantinople; but he took care to make no official, and, above all, no threatening, representations. Although acting in concert with the British Minister, he carefully avoided compromising himself with him in any joint steps; and when Fuad Effendi, bearing Abdul Medjid's letter, arrived, he let him know secretly that he would not go to see him, in order not to imperil the success of the negociation, but that Turkey could rely upon France.

He was admirably a.s.sisted by this envoy from the Grand Seignior, who concealed a very quick and cunning intelligence beneath his Turkish skin. Although the Sultan had appealed for the support of France and England, Fuad, on arriving at St. Petersburg, showed no inclination even to call upon the representatives of these two Powers. He refused to see anybody before his audience of the Tsar, to whose free will alone, he said, he looked for the success of his mission.

The Emperor must have experienced a feeling of bitter displeasure on beholding the want of success attending his threats, and the unexpected turn that things had taken; but he had the strength to restrain himself.

In his heart he was not desirous to open the Eastern Question, even though, not long before, he had gone so far as to say, "The Ottoman Empire is dead; we have only to arrange for its funeral."

To go to war in order to force the Sultan to violate the Law of Nations was a very difficult matter. He would have been aided in this by the barbaric pa.s.sions of his people, but reproved by the opinion of the whole civilized world. He knew what was happening in England and France.

He resolved to yield before he was threatened. The great Emperor therefore drew back, to the immeasurable surprise of his subjects and even of foreigners. He received Fuad in audience, and withdrew the demand he had made upon the Sultan. Austria hastened to follow his example. When Lord Palmerston's note arrived at St Petersburg, all was over. The best would have been to say nothing; but while we, in this business, had only aimed at success, the British Cabinet had also sought for noise. It required it to make a response to the irritation of the country. Lord Bloomfield, the British Minister, presented himself at Count Nesselrode's the day after the Emperor's decision became known; and was very coldly received.[35] He read him the note in which Lord Palmerston asked, in polite but peremptory phrases, that the Sultan should not be forced to hand over the refugees. The Russian replied that he neither understood the aim nor the object of this demand; that the affair to which he doubtless referred was arranged; and that, in any case, England had nothing to say in the matter. Lord Bloomfield asked how things stood. Count Nesselrode haughtily refused to give him any explanation; it would be equivalent, he said, to recognizing England's right to interfere in an affair that did not concern it. And when the British Envoy insisted upon at any rate leaving a copy of the note in Count Nesselrode's hands, the latter, after first refusing, at last accepted the doc.u.ment with an ill grace and dismissed his visitor, saying carelessly that he would reply to the note, that it was a terribly long one, and that it would be very tiresome. "France," added the Chancellor, "has already made me say the same thing; but she made me say it earlier and better."

[35: Letter from Lamoriciere, 19 October 1849.]

At this moment when we learnt the end of the dangerous quarrel, the Cabinet, after thus witnessing a happy conclusion to the two great pieces of foreign business that still kept the peace of the world in suspense, the Piedmont War and the Hungarian War--at that moment, the Cabinet fell.

APPENDIX

I have recently discovered these four notes in the charter-room at Tocqueville, where my grandfather had carefully deposited, by the side of our most precious family archives, all the ma.n.u.scripts of his brother that came into his possession. They seemed to me to throw some light upon the Revolution of February and the question of the revision of the Const.i.tution in 1851, and to merit publication together with the Recollections.

Comte de Tocqueville.

I

GUSTAVE DE BEAUMONT'S VERSION OF THE 24TH OF FEBRUARY.

I have to-day (24 October 1850) had a conversation with Beaumont which is worth noting. This is what he told me:

"On the 24th of February, at seven o'clock in the morning, Jules Lasteyrie and another [I have forgotten the name which Beaumont mentioned] came to fetch me to take me to M. Thiers, where Barrot, Duvergier, and several others were expected."

I asked him if he knew what had pa.s.sed during the night between Thiers and the King. He replied:

"I was told by Thiers, and especially by Duvergier, who had at once taken a note of Thiers' narrative, that Thiers had been summoned at about one o'clock; that he had found the King in an undecided frame of mind; that he had at once told him that he could only come in with Barrot and Duvergier; that the King, after raising many objections, had appeared to yield; that he had put off Thiers till the morning; that nevertheless, as he showed him to the door, he had told him that as yet no one was bound one way or the other."

Evidently the King reserved the right of attempting to form another combination before the morning.

"I must here," continued Beaumont, "tell you a curious anecdote. Do you know how Bugeaud was occupied during that decisive night, at the Tuileries itself, where he had just received the command-in-chief?

Listen: Bugeaud's hope and ambition was to become Minister of War when Thiers should come into power. Things were so turning out, as he clearly saw, as to make this appointment impossible; but what preoccupied him was to a.s.sure his preponderance at the War Office even if he was not at the head of it. Consequently, on the night of the 24th of February, or rather in the early morning, Bugeaud with his own hand wrote to Thiers from the Tuileries a letter of four pages, of which the substance was:

"'I understand the difficulties which prevent you from making me your Minister of War; nevertheless I have always liked you, and I am sure that we shall one day govern together. However, I understand the present reasons, and I give way before them; but I beg you, at least, to give M.

Magne, who is my friend, the place of Under-Secretary of State at the War Office.'"

Resuming his general narrative, Beaumont continued:

"When I arrived at the Place Saint-Georges, Thiers and his friends had already left for the Tuileries. I hastily followed them, and arrived at the same time as they did. The appearance of Paris was already formidable; however, the King received us as usual, with the same copious language and the same mannerisms that you know of. Before being shown in to him [at least, I believe it was here that Beaumont placed this incident], we talked about affairs among ourselves. I insisted urgently upon Bugeaud's dismissal. 'If you want to oppose force to the popular movement,' I said, 'by all means make use of Bugeaud's name and audacity; but if you wish to attempt conciliation and you suspend hostilities[36] ... then Bugeaud's name is a contradiction.' The others seconded me, and Thiers reluctantly and with hesitation gave way. They compromised the matter as you know: Bugeaud nominally retained the command-in-chief, and Lamoriciere was placed at the head of the National Guard. Thiers and Barrot entered the King's closet, and I do not know what happened there. The order had been given to the troops everywhere to cease firing, and to fall back upon the Palace and make way for the National Guard. I myself, with Remusat, hurriedly drew up the proclamation informing the people of these orders and explaining them.

At nine o'clock it was agreed that Thiers and Barrot should personally attempt to make an appeal to the people; Thiers was stopped on the staircase and induced to turn back, but with difficulty, I am bound to admit. Barrot set out alone, and I followed him."

[36: This clearly shows, independently of what Beaumont told me positively, how absolutely the new Cabinet had made up its mind to yield.]

Here Beaumont's account is identical with Barrot's.

"Barrot was wonderful throughout this expedition," said Beaumont. "I had difficulty in making him turn back, although when we had once arrived at the barricade at the Porte Saint-Denis, it would have been impossible to go further. Our return made the situation worse: we brought in our wake, by effecting a pa.s.sage for it, a crowd more hostile than that which we had traversed in going; by the time we arrived at the Place Vendome, Barrot feared lest he should take the Tuileries by a.s.sault, in spite of himself, with the mult.i.tude which followed him; he slipped away and returned home. I came back to the Chateau. The situation seemed to me very serious but far from desperate, and I was filled with surprise on perceiving the disorder that had gained all minds during my absence, and the terrible confusion that already reigned at the Tuileries. I was not quite able to understand what had happened, or to learn what news they had received to turn everything topsy-turvy in this fas.h.i.+on. I was dying of hunger and fatigue; I went up to a table and hurriedly took some food. Ten times, during this meal of three or four minutes, an aide-de-camp of the King or of one of the Princes came to look for me, spoke to me in confused language, and left me without properly understanding my reply. I quickly joined Thiers, Remusat, Duvergier, and one or two others who were to compose the new Cabinet. We went together to the King's closet: this was the only Council at which I was present. Thiers spoke, and started a long homily on the duties of the King and the paterfamilias. 'That is to say, you advise me to abdicate,'

said the King, who was but indifferently affected by the touching part of the speech and came straight to the point. Thiers a.s.sented, and gave his reasons. Duvergier supported him with great vivacity. Knowing nothing of what had happened, I displayed my astonishment and exclaimed that all was not lost. Thiers seemed much annoyed at my outburst, and I could not prevent myself from believing that the secret aim of Thiers and Duvergier had, from the first, been to get rid of the King, on whom they could no longer rely, and to govern in the name of the Duc de Nemours or the d.u.c.h.esse d'Orleans, after forcing the King to abdicate.

The King, who had struck me as very firm up to a certain moment, seemed towards the end to surrender himself entirely."

Here there is a void in my memory in Beaumont's account, which I will fill up from another conversation. I come to the scene of the abdication, which followed:

"During the interval, events and news growing worse and the panic increasing, Thiers had declared that already he was no longer possible (which was perhaps true), and that Barrot was scarcely so. He then disappeared--at least, I did not see him again during the last moments--which was very wrong of him, for although he declined the Ministry, he ought not, at so critical a juncture, to have abandoned the Princes, and he should have remained to advise them, although no longer their Minister. I was present at the final scene of the abdication. The Duc de Montpensier begged his father to write and urged him so eagerly that the King stopped and said, 'But look here, I can't write faster.'

The Queen was heroical and desperate: knowing that I had appeared opposed to the abdication at the Council, she took my hands and told me that such a piece of cowardice must not be allowed to be consummated, that we should defend ourselves, that she would let herself be killed, before the King's eyes, before they could reach him. The abdication was signed nevertheless, and the Duc de Nemours begged me to run and tell Marshal Gerard, who was at the further end of the Carrousel, that I had seen the King sign, so that he might announce officially to the people that the King had abdicated. I hastened there, and returned; all the rooms were empty. I went from room to room without meeting a soul. I went down into the garden; I there met Barrot, who had come over from the Ministry of the Interior, and was indulging in the same useless quest. The King had escaped by the main avenue; the d.u.c.h.esse d'Orleans seemed to have gone by the underground pa.s.sage to the water-side. No necessity had compelled them to leave the Chateau, which was then in perfect safety, and which was not invaded by the people until an hour after it had been abandoned. Barrot was determined at all costs to a.s.sist the d.u.c.h.ess. He hurriedly had horses prepared for her, the young Prince and ourselves, and wanted us to throw ourselves all together into the midst of the people--the only chance in fact, and a feeble one at that, that remained to us. Unable to rejoin the d.u.c.h.ess, we left for the Ministry of the Interior. You met us on the road; you know the rest."