who had been drawn into what was only, at the worst, a constructive offence against the royal authority, and, in a sober and rational sense, was no offence at all, were visited with imprisonment for half a year, the journalist, who had directly attacked the constitution on which hung all the liberties of the country, escaped with a sentence of imprisonment for one month. Prosecutions did not in any respect diminish the boldness, or allay the animosity of the Journalists; they were the representatives of weighty and excited interests; they were supported by keen popular feeling and opinion. As nobody believed that the ministers could command a majority in the Chamber of Deputies; as the popular party were already speaking of the necessity of driving them from their posts by refusing to vote the supplies; and as ministers, nevertheless, instead of showing any disposition to yield to the storm, seemed to reckon on a long possession of power-people assumed that they intended to raise money with out the aid of the Chamber; and so credulous is party spirit, that associations began to be formed among the citizens to defend themselves against supposed designs, which only madmen could have entertained. These associations took their rise in Brittany. The members subscribed each ten francs. In the event of any tax being imposed without the consent of the Chambers, or with the consent of a Chamber of Deputies created by any illegal alteration of the existing law, payment of the tax was to be refused, and the money subscribed was to be employed in defending and indemnifying the persons who should so refuse, and to prosecute all who might be concerned in the imposing, or the levying of such illegal taxes. The document, containing the resolu The following were the terms of this association: "We, the inhabitants, of both sexes, in the five departments of the ancient province of Brittany, under the jurisdiction and protection of the royal court of Rennes, bound by our own oaths, and those of the beads of our families, to fidelity to the king and attachment to the charter, having considered that a handful of political madmen have conceived the audacious design of attacking the very basis of our constitutional rights conferred by the charter; having considered also that, if Brittany has found, in the enjoyment of these rights, the compensation of those that were secured to her by her union to France, her national character and her honour equally induce her to imitate the generous conduct of her ancestors, by resisting the usurpations and arbitrary caprices of ministerial authority; having considered finally that any armed resistance would be the most dreadful calamity; that it would be unjust and without motive as long as legal resistance can be had recourse to; and that the most certain means of rendering preferable a recourse to judicial authority is to ensure to the victims a mutual and paternal link with their fellow-citizens :-We declare, connected as we are by ties of honour and legal right "1. To subscribe individually for ten francs, and also the underwritten, whose names are inscribed on the electoral lists of 1830, for the 10th of the contribu tions attributed to them on the aforesaid lists; and we oblige ourselves to pay the same money on presentation of the drafts of Procurators-general, in case they should be named conformably to the third article of the present declaration. "2. This subscription will form a common stock or fund for all Brittany, destined to indemnify the subscribers for any expense they may be put to by their refusal to pay any illegal contributions imposed upon the public, either without the free, regular, and constitutional assent of the king, and the chambers established by the charter and the present laws, or even with the assent of the chambers created by any electoral tions adopted by the association, after appearing in the journals of Brittany, was reprinted in the liberal journals of Paris. They were immediately seized by the police. It was reprinted for the purpose of being indignantly commented on and denounced, by the ministerial journals: they were seized, too, and complained, with some reason, that it was hard to expect them to answer a document, the contents of which they were not allowed to make public. The ministry ordered prosecutions to be raised both against the provincial journals which had originally given it to the world, and against two of the journals of the capital which had reprinted it with approbation. The editors, who had published it without comment, or had published only to condemn it, had their papers restored to them. The case of the departmental journals was first tried, before the correctional system contrary to the same constitutional regulations. 3. In case of any illegal change in the mode of elections, or any illegal establishment of the taxes, two proxies of each district will assemble at Pontivy, and as soon as they are twenty in number, they will have power to elect amongst the subscribers three procurators-general and an under-procurator in each of the five departments. 4. The duty of the general procurators will be to receive the subscriptions, to afford indemnities conformably to the second article, at the request of any subscriber, prosecuted for the payment of illegal contributions; to sue in his name through the sub-procurator of his department for justice against the exactors by all possible means allowed by law; and to become the accusers of all those who are accomplices or abettors of the establishment of illegal taxes. "5. The subscribers named and proxies of this district to assemble with the proxies of the other districts, and to deposit the present subscription in the hands of the general procurators." tribunal of Rouen. It was insisted that the document was one which necessarily brought the king into hatred and contempt, by supposing he could sanction such measures as the association was intended to resist, as well as by the language of the document itself. It was maintained for the journals, that the association, and the language of the document, undoubtedly implied the possibility of acts deserving of all detestation on the part of the king's government, but nothing more. It implied that the ministers were willing to attack the constitution of the country ; but that was no libel; and to the king himself, to whom personally the law ascribes no evil design, or erroneous conduct, it imputed nothing. M. de Labourdonnaye himself, in a speech delivered in the Chamber of Deputies in 1824, had exhorted them not to allow oppression to crush the journals, the vigilant sentinels of liberty, and the "best defence against the inroads of ministerial despotism." That was precisely the duty which the editors of Brittany were now discharging. In giving publicity to the document in question, they were merely guarding "against the inroads of ministerial despotism." But M. Labourdonnaye was now one of the ministerial despots; in 1824, he had been in opposition, and was therefore a lover of the “ vigilant sentinels." To confound the ministry with the king, in the way which was necessary to support this prosecution, was to destroy the constitution altogether, and involve the king personally in the ridicule and odium which it would be criminal not to attach to the contemptible or dangerous conduct of a ministry. "We must either maintain that the min istry is as infallible and inviolable as the king himself; or we must admit, that, without impairing the dignity of the throne, we may censure with energy the conduct of the ministry. If the bare supposition that ministers may be guilty of treason and extortion is injurious to the king's government, why has the charter provided a punishment for such crimes? Has the charter then brought the king's government into hatred and contempt, by supposing that the king may meet with ministers guilty of such crimes? Let us reject such doctrines, because they are destructive to constitutional government, and let us avow at once that ministers must submit to the free censure of the press, first of all, from the nature of representative governments, and next, for the safety of legitimacy itself, in order that no prince may ever be identified in the eyes of his people with the misdeeds of his ministers, and that the public may know who the parties are upon whom its odium ought to fall. The court acquitted the accused, and ordered the copies which had been seized to be restored to them. But the result of the prosecutions against the Parisian journals was different; the editors were imprisoned for a month, and fined in 500 francs. The court stated the grounds on which it proceeded in finding the publication libellous to be:-"Because the Breton Association is founded on the supposition that the impost might be illegally established, either without the concurrence of the Chambers, or with the concurrence of a Chamber of Deputies formed on an electoral system, not returned agreeably to the constitutional forms;Because such a supposition cannot be realized without a violation of the fundamental laws of the state; Because the editors of the Journal du Commerce, and the Courrier Français, by publishing the prospectus of this association, and accompanying this publication with apologetical reflections, in which the pretended danger is represented as imminent, have not used the legal right of discussion and censure of the acts of the ministers, but have excited to the hatred and contempt of the government of the king." This decision excited great surprise and dissatisfaction among the Parisians; and certainly, of the two courts, the provincial tribunal of Rouen would seem to have been guided by the sounder principles. Confessedly the remedy proposed was proposed only to meet a contingent evil; if that evil should arrive, the remedy confessedly was a legal and a proper one. The association could cease to be a chimera only to become a laudable and constitutional union. The ministers lost by gaining a conviction. They were placed in the ridiculous position of being unable, or being afraid, to attack the thing itself, while they were virulent against the mere description of what the thing was. associations spread over the greater part of the kingdom; they embraced more than half the Chamber of Deputies, and a very considerable number of peers. The These prosecutions were conducted under the pretext of punishing attacks against the king; another, directed against a provincial newspaper, the Sentinelle des deux Sevres, was more plainly in defence of the ministers themselves. The editor was prosecuted for having described Polignac as a conspirator, Bourmont as a traitor, and Labour donnaye as a persecuting man "of Categories"-an appellation which had already been liberally applied to him in the Parisian papers, and which had reference to the classes, or Categories, into which he had arranged, in 1815, the multitudes who filled his lists of proscription. These are very offensive epithets in themselves; but in the present case they had a sense and an application which rendered them harmless, and expressed only indubitable facts. To the parties themselves they must have been terms of praise, for they denoted actions on which they built their credit. Polignac had undoubtedly been a conspirator against the revolutionary government; that he had been an imprisoned conspirator in the cause of the Bourbons was one of his claims to their admiration. Bourmont, beyond all doubt, had betrayed Napoleon at Waterloo, and he claimed the confidence of the monarch, because he had done so. He had sought and obtained from the Emperor a military command for the day which was to decide that Emperor's fate; and when the enemy was before him, to begin the conflict of that day, he had abandoned his post. The act might, or might not, proceed from motives which palliated or excused it; still it was a fact, that he had betrayed the confidence reposed in him by the man whom he had asked to trust him, and at a time when treachery was, to that man, ruin. Then nobody denied the historical fact that Labourdonnaye had earnestly urged a system of very terrific proscription, and had formally classified the descriptions of persons from whom he demanded that vengeance should exact the penalty of their lives. But this conduct Labourdonnaye and his whole party must have considered honourable; while it scarcely could be libellous in others to think and to call it the result of a persecuting spirit. Incessant prosecutions did any thing but tend to allay the excited jealousy of the public. M. Mangin, too, the new prefect of police, had speedily belied the untrusted professions of his circular. In his epistles to the journals, and his intercourse with his subordinate agents, he had exhibited a tyrannical and overbearing temper, which could not fail to render power dangerous in his hands during any period of excitement. In Paris, producing so many morning papers, there were only two evening journals, the Gazette de France, which zealously supported the ministry, and the Messager des Chambres, which had been the journal of the late Cabinet, but was now in opposition. These evening papers are sold by a kind of hawkers, who establish their stall, with its lamp, or paper lanthorn, on the Boulevards, or at the corners of the streets. The prefect of the police had the power of prohibiting or permitting this species of traffic, but it was the duty of an impartial officer to extend the same degree of indulgence or restraint to all. One of the first acts of M. Mangin's authority, however, was, to send the editor of the opposition journal an order to desist from this mode of distributing his paper, while his ministerial opponent was allowed the continued benefit of the privilege. M. de Courvoisier, too, the new Keeper of the Seals, added to the mass of distrust and dissatisfaction by addressing to the Procureursgeneraux of the Royal Courts a letter, requesting them to assume a character which made them spies, and converted into spies the whole provincial magistracy. They were to send him, on the 1st of each month, a report "on the state of opinion" in their respective neighbourhoods; and they were told that they would easily obtain the necessary information from the Procureurs du Roi, as the latter were in constant communication with the mayors, and the justices of peace, of the arrondissements. "What," exclaimed the Parisians, "all the mayors, the paternal administrators of their communes, charged to make opinions a matter of police, to dive into the sentiments of their fellow-citizens, and to furnish bulletins of them to the Procureurs-general, with whom they have continual connection! Justices of peace, whose mission ought to be characterised by union, confidence, and, if we may use the expression, with friendship, placed as sentinels to surprise the secrets of those whom they are appointed to judge!—an office of conciliation transformed into an inquisitorial surveillance." During the autumn, M. de la Fayette had occasion to take a journey into the south of France. Every where he was received with public honours: the citizens, in welcoming him with banquets and processions, welcomed him as a respected representative of that policy which was now contending with the new Cabinet. The mayor of the commune of Vizille, through which the general passed, had taken part in one of these shows. For this expression of opinion the ministry immediately deprived him of his office; and the consequence was, that the whole population voted him an address of thanks and congratulation, and invited The him to a public dinner. gentleman appointed by the ministerial prefect of the department to fill the office provisionally, refused to accept it, stating, that as his predecessor had been deposed for having taken part in the honours paid to M. de la Fayette, at which he himself, as well as all the inhabitants of the commune had assisted, he was anxious to anticipate the interference of the Minister of the Interior in his own case, and therefore declined the office. These imprudent acts, and acts like these, incessantly presenting new points of collision between the Cabinet and the public, kept up the irritation, and drew forth daily some new expression of public opinion. That opinion was the opinion of the departments fully as much as of Paris. In September, after the ministers had been a month in power, a petition praying for their dismissal was addressed to the king by a number of the inhabitants of Grenoble, the language of which will suffice as a specimen of what was thought and said of them in all corners of the kingdom. "A faction," said they, "has placed itself between the prince and the people; the avenues to the throne are occupied by its leaders. Will they, who have always protested against the charter, observe it? Will they restore to us those institutions which they have deprived us of-they whom we reproach for the loss of them? Will they respect the liberty of the press-they who will never cease to be accused by France, whilst France retains a voice? Will they suppress electoral frauds-they, against whom we have ever been obliged to contest, to have them suppressed? Will they reduce the taxes that are crushing us-they |