correct idea of parliamentary and
popular excitement, pushed to their extreme limit, and yet retained
within that boundary by legal authority and the good sense of the
public,--sufficient to arrest the country on the brink of an abyss,
although too weak to block up the road that leads to it,--should read
the debate on the new electoral bill introduced into the Chamber of
Deputies on the 17th of April, 1820, by the second Cabinet of the Duke
de Richelieu, and discussed for twenty-six days in that Chamber,
accompanied with riotous gatherings without, thoughtlessly aggressive
and sternly repressed. If we are to believe the orators of the left,
France and her liberties, the Revolution and its conquests, the honour
of the present, and the security of the future, were all lost if the
ministerial bill should pass. The right, on the other hand, looked upon
the bill as scarcely strong enough to save the monarchy for the moment,
and declared its resolution to reject every amendment which might
diminish its powers. On both sides, pretensions and claims were equally
ungovernable. Attracted and excited by this legal quarrel, the students,
the enthusiastic young Liberals, the old professional disturbers, the
idlers and oppositionists of every class, were engaged daily with the
soldiers and the agents of police, in conflicts sometimes sanguinary,
and the accounts of which redoubled the acrimony of the debate
withindoors. In the midst of this general commotion, the Cabinet of 1820
had the merit of maintaining, while repressing all popular movement, the
freedom of legislative deliberation, and of acting its part in these
stormy discussions with perseverance and moderation. M. Pasquier, their
Minister for Foreign Affairs, endowed with rare self-command and
presence of mind, was on this occasion the principal parliamentary
champion of the Cabinet; and M. Mounier, Director-General of the
Police, controlled the street riots with as much prudence as active
firmness. The charge so often brought against so many ministers, against
M. Casimir Perrier in 1831, as against the Duke de Richelieu in 1820, of
exciting popular commotions only to repress them, does not deserve the
notice of sensible men. At the end of a month, all these debates and
scenes, within and without, ended in the adoption, not of the
ministerial bill, but of an amendment which, without destroying in
principle the bill of the 5th of February, 1817, so materially vitiated
it, to