Revolutions have a terrible arm and a happy hand. They strike firmly and choose well. Even incomplete, even debased and reduced to the state of a junior revolution like the Revolution of 1830, they nearly always retain sufficient lucidity to prevent them from falling amiss. Their eclipse is never an abdication. Nevertheless, let us not boast too loudly. Revolutions also may be deceived. Let us return to 1830. In its deviation, 1830 had good luck. In the establishment which entitled itself order after the revolution had been cut short, the King amounted to more than royalty. Louis Philippe was a rare man. The son of a father to whom history will accord certain attenuating circumstances, possessing all private virtues and many public virtues; careful of his health, of his fortune, of his person, of his affairs; knowing the value of a minute and not always the value of a year; a good man and a good prince; an admirable representative of the middle class, but outstripping it; declaring himself Orleans and not Bourbon; a frank bourgeois from the day he became king; inwardly cold, dominated by immediate interest, always governing at the shortest range; incapable of rancor and of gratitude; making France fear Europe and Europe France; fond of his country, but preferring his family; assuming more domination than authority and more authority than dignity; fertile in expedients, in countenances, in masks; a general at Valmy, a soldier at Jemappes; attacked eight times by regicides and always smiling; always ready to risk his life, never his work; knowing deeds, facts, details, dates, proper names, ignorant of the invisible currents of consciences; accepted by the surface, but little in accord with France lower down; having something of Charlemagne and something of an attorney. In short, a lofty and original figure, a prince who understood how to create authority in spite of the uneasiness of France, and power in spite of the jealousy of Europe. He would be ranked among the most illustrious governors of history had he loved glory but a little, and if he had had the sentiment of what is great to the same degree as the feeling for what is useful.
Louis Philippe had been handsome, and in his old age he remained graceful. He pleased. He had that gift of charming. He lacked majesty. He wore no crown, although a king, and no white hair, although an old man. His manners belonged to the old regime and his habits to the new. A mixture of the noble and the bourgeois which suited 1830. Louis Philippe was transition reigning. He wore the uniform of the national guard, and the ribbon of the Legion of Honour. He went a little to chapel, not at all to the chase, never to the opera. He went out with his umbrella under his arm, and this umbrella long formed a part of his aureole. He was a bit of a mason, a bit of a gardener, something of a doctor. He bled a postilion who had tumbled from his horse. The Royalists jeered at this ridiculous king, the first who had ever shed blood with the object of healing. For the grievances against him, there is one deduction to be made: that which accuses royalty, that which accuses the reign, that which accuses the King. Democratic right confiscated, the street repressed, the Rue Transnonain: these are the deeds of royalty. Belgium refused, Algeria too harshly conquered: these are the doings of the reign. The policy which was more domestic than national was the doing of the King. His great fault: he was modest in the name of France. He was rather too much of a paternal king. That incubation of a family with the object of founding a dynasty is afraid of everything and does not like to be disturbed. To be Prince Equality, to bear in his own person the contradiction of the Restoration and the Revolution, therein lay the fortune of Louis Philippe in 1830. Never was there a more complete adaptation of a man to an event. Louis Philippe is 1830 made man. Moreover, he had in his favor that great recommendation to the throne, exile. He had been proscribed, a wanderer, poor. He had lived by his own labor. In Switzerland this heir had sold an old horse in order to obtain bread. At Reichenau he gave lessons in mathematics, while his sister sewed. He had, with his own hands, demolished the iron cage of Mont-Saint-Michel. He had belonged to the Jacobins' club. At four and twenty, from the depth of a box, he had witnessed the trial of the last king of the elder branch. There had lingered in his soul the respectful fear of those immense justices of the populace, which are almost as impersonal as the justice of God.
Louis Philippe was a king of the broad daylight. While he reigned the press was free, the tribune was free, conscience and speech were free. He left his throne exposed to the light. History will do justice to him for this loyalty. His case is, as yet, only in the lower court. He was elected by those two almosts which are called the 221 and 1830: a half-Parliament, and a half-revolution. From the point of view of the absolute, outside the right of man and the right of the people, all is usurpation. What we can say, even at the present day, after making these reserves, is that Louis Philippe, taken in himself, and from the point of view of human goodness, will remain one of the best princes who ever sat on a throne. What is there against him? That throne. Take away Louis Philippe the king, there remains the man. And the man is good. He is good at times even to the point of being admirable. Often, after a day of conflict with the whole diplomacy of the continent, he returned at night to his apartments, exhausted, and what did he do? He took a death sentence and passed the night in revising a criminal suit, considering it something to hold his own against Europe, but that it was a still greater matter to rescue a man from the executioner. One day he said: I won seven last night. During the early years of his reign, the death penalty was as good as abolished, and the erection of a scaffold was a violence committed against the King. After the Fieschi machine, he exclaimed: What a pity that I was not wounded! Then I might have pardoned. On another occasion, alluding to the resistance offered by his ministry, he wrote of a political criminal: His pardon is granted; it only remains for me to obtain it. In history, where kindness is the rarest of pearls, the man who is kindly almost takes precedence of the man who is great. Louis Philippe having been severely judged by some, it is quite natural that a man, himself a phantom at the present day, who knew that king, should come and testify in his favor before history. An epitaph penned by a dead man is sincere. One shade may console another shade. It is not greatly to be feared that it will ever be said of two tombs in exile: This one flattered the other.
