Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 - Patrick Fraser Tytler (good books to read in english txt) 📗

A lawyer, who lived upon the same floor with this gentleman, was astonished, one morning, by the entry of the police officers into his room at four in the morning, without the slightest previous warning. They pulled him out of bed—hurried him away to the police office, kept him in strict custody for several days, seized all his papers; and having at last discovered that their suspicions were ill-founded, and that he had been secured upon erroneous information, he was brought back to his lodgings by the same hands, and in the same summary manner in which he had been removed; and he is to this day ignorant of the cause of his detention, or the nature of the offence of which he had been suspected.

Amongst the few English who, along with Mr B. were detained in Paris, it was naturally to be expected, that the precautions taken to deceive the police, and to prevent the suspicion of any secret intercourse, were still more severe and rigorous than were used by the native French. As the subjects of this country, they naturally became the objects of continual suspicion, and were more strictly watched than any other persons. They contrived, however, to procure, although at distant intervals, the sight of an English newspaper. Nine or ten months frequently elapsed without their receiving any intelligence from England. When they had the good fortune to procure one, the precautions necessary to be adopted were hardly to be believed. The same gentleman informed me, that upon receiving an English paper, he did not venture to mention the circumstance even to his wife and children, lest, in their joy, some incautious words might have escaped from them before the servants of the family, in which case, detection would have been immediate, and imprisonment inevitable. Keeping it, therefore, entirely to himself, he concealed it from every eye during the day, and at night, after the family had gone to bed, he sat up, lighted his taper, and, when every thing was still and silent about him, ventured, only then, to read over the paper, and to get by heart the most important parts of the intelligence regarding England; and he afterwards transmitted the invaluable present to some secret friend, who, in the same manner, dared only to peruse it at midnight, and with the same precautions.

A very sensible distinction has been made in the French code, in the difference of punishment which is inflicted upon robbery, when it has or has not been accompanied by murder; and the consequence of such distinction is, that in that country the most determined robberies are seldom, as they often are with us, accompanied with murder; whilst the accurate proportionment of punishment to the crimes, encourages persons possessing information to come forward, and removes those natural scruples which all must feel, when they reflect that they may be the chief instruments in bringing down a capital penalty upon the head of an individual, whose trivial offence was in no respect deserving of this last and severest punishment of the law.

The crime of which I heard most frequently, and of which the common occurrence may be traced to the miserable condition to which trade and commerce were, during the last few years, reduced in France, and to that general laxity of moral conduct which even now distinguishes that country, was Fraudulent Bankruptcy. The merchant, no longer possessing the means of making his fortune by fair speculation, has recourse to this nefarious mode of bettering his condition. He settles with his creditors for a small per centage; disposes of his property by fictitious sales, ventes simulees, and thus enriches himself upon the ruin of his creditors. At a small town in the south of France, where I for sometime resided, there were several individuals, who, it was well known, had made their fortunes in this manner; and at Marseilles it had, as I understood, become in some measure a common practice. The crime is seldom discovered, attended at least with those circumstances of corroborative evidence which are necessary in bringing it to trial. Upon detection, accompanied by complete proof, the punishment is severe. It consists in being condemned for fourteen years, or for life, to the galleys, and in branding the delinquent with letters denoting his crime: B F for Fraudulent Bankruptcy. At one of the trials of the Aix assizes, at which I was present, a young man of excellent family, son of the Chevalier de St Louis, was convicted of this crime, and although it was proved that he had been deceived by his partner, a man of decidedly bad character, but possessed of deep cunning, he was condemned for fourteen years to the galleys: Owing to a flaw in the process, the sentence was set aside by the Cour de Cassation, or Supreme Court of Appeal at Paris, and a new trial was ordered.

From the same cause, which I have mentioned above, the perfection of their police, petty theft is not of such common occurrence in France as in England. The country, in short, at the time when we passed through it, was very quiet, and few crimes were committed; but on the disbanding of the troops, a great change may be expected. These restless creatures must find work, or they will make it for themselves. It is a hard question how the un-warlike Louis is to employ them. Many talk of the necessity of sending an immense force to St Domingo; and it would appear wise policy to devise some expedition of this nature, which would swallow up the restless, the profligate, and the abandoned.

It is not our intention, nor indeed would the limits of our work permit, of entering into the question of what ought to be the conduct of the King. But there is another question, from answering which we can scarcely escape.

Are the majority of the French nation well affected to the Bourbons? This is a question which is put to every person who returns from France. It is a natural, a most important, but a most difficult one to answer. I endeavoured, by every method in my power, by a communication with those gentlemen of the province where I resided, whose characters and situations entitled them to implicit credit; by endeavouring to satisfy myself as to the real sentiments of the peasantry, and by a perusal of those documents regarding the state of the country, which were believed the most authentic, to acquire upon this subject something like satisfactory information. As to the sentiments entertained at present by the generality of the French people upon this subject, I cannot speak, but with regard to the period which I passed in France, which began in November 1814, and ended at the time of the landing of Napoleon from Elba, I have no hesitation in declaring, that it appeared to me, that the majority of the French nation were at that time hostile to the interests of the Bourbons. On the other hand, in consulting the same sources of information as I have above enumerated, it was as evident that they are not generally favourable to the restoration of the Imperial Government under Napoleon. What appeared at that period to be the general desire of the nation, was the establishment of a new constitution, formed upon those principles, embracing those new interests, and compatible with that new state of things which had been created by the revolution. It was on this account that they favoured Napoleon.

The situation of France then exhibited perhaps one of the most singular pictures ever presented to view by a civilized nation; a people without exterior commerce, and whose interior trade and manufactures, except in some favourite spots, was almost annihilated; whose youth was yearly drained off to supply the army, but whose agriculture has been constantly improving, which, for the last twelve years, had been subjected to all the complicated horrors of a state of war, but which, after all this, could yet earnestly desire a continuance of this state. A nation where there was scarcely to be found an intermediate rank between the Sovereign and the peasantry—for since the destruction of the ancienne noblesse, and more particularly, since all ranks have been admitted to a participation in the dignities conferred on the military, all have become equally aspiring, and all consider themselves upon the same level:—A nation where, notwithstanding the division into parties, possessing the most opposite interests and opinions, and pulling every different way, the greater part certainly desired a government similar to Napoleon's, and would even unite to obtain it:—A nation who talked of nothing but liberty, and yet suffered themselves to be subjected to the conscription, to the loss of their trade, to the severest taxes, the greatest personal deprivations, and the most complete restraint in the expression of their opinions—to the continued extortions of a military chief, the most despotic who ever reigned in a European country, and whose acts of oppression are truly Asiatic; and who tamely bore all this oppression, supported by their national vanity, because they wish to bear the name of the great people: Great, because their ambition is unbounded; great as a nation of rapacious and blood-thirsty soldiers; great in every species of immorality and vice! Who, led away by this miserable vanity, have been false to their oaths, so recently pledged to a mild and virtuous prince, very unfit to rule such a race of villains, because he is mild and virtuous.

But it is not generally believed, that the majority in France favoured Napoleon, though it is but a natural consequence of the state of the country; I shall therefore enumerate the divisions of ranks, and the sentiments of each.—All allow that the army were his friends; on that subject, therefore, I shall say nothing.—Next to the army, let us look to the civil authorities.—All these were in his favour—all that part of the civil authorities at least, who have the immediate management of the people.—It is in vain that the heads of office in Paris, the miserable bodies styled the Chambers of Parliament and the Counsellors of the realm, were favourably inclined towards the King.—Napoleon well knew that these were not the men who rule France.—France, as an entire kingdom, may be said to be governed by these men; but France, subdivided, is governed by the prefects, and the gens-d'armes of Napoleon.—Not a man of these was displaced by the King, and although they were all furious in their proclamations against the usurper, they, with few exceptions, joined him, and these few exceptions were removed by him.—The most powerful men in France under Napoleon were these prefects and gens-d'armes, and knowing their power, he was always cautious in their selection; wherever he conceived that they really favoured the Bourbon interest, he removed them.

Next, the whole class of Receveurs were his devoted friends.—These men were all continued in place under the un-warlike reign of Louis, but where no conscription and no droits reunis were to be enforced, they had poverty staring them in the face.—Is it unnatural that they should favour him whose government enriches them?

To the shadows of nobility, to the ghost of aristocracy which had re-appeared under the King, no power or influence can be attributed,—they dared not think, and could not act.

The better classes of the inhabitants of the cities, whether the traders and manufacturers, or the bourgeoise of France, are those who were the most decided enemies of Bonaparte: but let us look how their arm is weakened and palsied by the situation of their property.—They have many of them purchased the lands of the emigrants at very low prices, and, in many instances, from persons who could only bestow possession without legal tenure.—These feel uneasy in their new possessions; they dread the ascendancy which the nobility might still obtain under their lawful Sovereign: Napoleon came proclaiming to them that he would maintain them in their properties. Nor were all the traders and manufacturers his enemies.—He