The Bourbon Kings of France (39 page)

On 5 August 1873, two distinguished visitors arrived unexpectedly at Frohsdorf. They were Louis-Philippe-Albert, Comte de Paris and Head of the House of Orleans (he was the usurper’s grandson), and his uncle the Prince de Joinville. It was a difficult moment—Henri’s consort was known to bear a hatred for the Orleans amounting to mania. The Count, who looked more like a German professor than a French nobleman, hesitated when Henri V entered the room, then bowed and greeted his cousin as his King. Henri embraced him. ‘You were quite right to come here privately like this without waiting,’ he said. ‘The
Bon Dieu
will reward you.’ The Count, whom he now acknowledged as Dauphin, was in his mid-thirties and had as much practical ability as the King possessed idealism and honour—he had even studied English trade unionism. Shortly after his visit to Frohsdorf, the Comte de Paris publicly recognized Henri as ‘the sole representative of the monarchic principle in France’.

On the evening of 14 October a delegation headed by the Legitimist M Pierre Chesnelong—not a nobleman oddly enough, but a successful draper—met their King in a little pavilion in the garden of a hotel at Salzburg. During a pleasant dinner party, full agreement was reached on universal suffrage and ministerial responsibility. But then Henri announced grimly, ‘I will never abandon the White Flag,’ M Chesnelong, a glib Gascon, made his famous reply, ‘Your Majesty must allow me not to have heard those words.’ After an hour’s argument, the King reluctantly agreed that the
Tricolore
could remain the flag of France until after the Restoration, when he would refer the matter to the Assembly. Chesnelong returned in triumph with the wonderful news that an agreement had been reached, not only on the constitution but on the flag.

Everyone was now convinced that the King would have his own again. The President of the Assembly, the Duc d’Audiffret-Pasquier, declared triumphantly on 18 October, ‘In three weeks the national, hereditary and constitutional monarchy will be established.’ The Faubourg Saint-Germain ordered court dress, while coaches prepared for the Most Christian King’s
joyeuse entrée
into ‘his good city of Paris’ may still be seen at Chambord. Daniel Halévy writes of ‘an amazing rally of
la vieille France
, of the old nobles, of Dukes and country squires, of priests and heralds’. It was the French nobility’s final fling.

On 31 October 1873, on Henri’s orders, the Legitimist newspaper
L’Union
published a letter which he had written to M Chesnelong. The King could not abandon the White Flag. ‘I cannot agree to open a strong and healing reign by an act of weakness,’ he explained. ‘It is the fashion to contrast the stubbornness of Henri V with the flexibility of Henry IV … but I wish to remain just what I am.’

As a boy, Henri had seen the French army march off under the White Flag to conquer Algiers. With his contempt for Bonapartism, he was incapable of understanding that a new military tradition had grown up since he had left France, based on glorious victories in Italy and the Crimea, in Africa, China and Mexico, and on heroism in defeat during the martyrdom of 1870. All these campaigns had been fought under the
Tricolore
.

Marshal MacMahon, who had served beneath the Lilies as a young man, was thunderstruck by Henri’s decision. He said that if the army was forced to fly the White Flag, ‘the
chassepots
[rifles] would go off by themselves!’ Broglie decided that the only thing left was to introduce a bill extending the Marshal-President’s powers for seven years, the
Septennat
, in the hope of at least saving conservative government. The Third Restoration was over. As the Pope, Pio Nono, wryly observed, ‘Whoever heard of a man giving up a throne for a napkin?’

Then followed an incident as romantic as anything in those novels by Alexandre Dumas which the King enjoyed so much. The Assembly sat at Versailles, and there Henri arrived secretly on 10 November, accompanied only by his valet, to stay at a small house in the rue Saint-Louis. (He had to bring his valet, as he had never learnt how to tie his own tie.) His faithful gentlemen, the Duc de Blacas and the Marquis de Dreux-Brézé, joined him and were informed of an amazing scheme. He would appeal to MacMahon as a French nobleman, tell him to bring a cavalry brigade, then together, arm-in-arm
à la Française
, they would go into the Assembly, who would proclaim Henri King. Poor Blacas went to the Marshal with the preposterous plan, asking him to call on his master, by night if necessary, and leaving the key of the house in the rue Saint-Louis; obviously a King could not call on a subject. But MacMahon had taken an oath to the Assembly, and his honour would not let him break it. Henri waited in vain, before saying sadly, ‘I expected a Constable of France but I find only a Chief of Police.’ On 19 November, the Assembly voted for the
Septennat
—a tacit rejection of the monarchy. There is a legend that, disguised in a voluminous cloak, the King waited during a grey and misty afternoon in front of the palace, by the pedestal of Louis XIV’s statue, to hear the result.

Later a Legitimist general said, ‘If only we had known!’ But the King had left France for ever on that night of 19 November 1873, to return to his dreaming in Upper Austria. In June 1874 the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, as a last desperate step, proposed to the Assembly that the monarchy be restored; his motion was defeated by 272 notes to 79. On 30 January 1875, France became a Republic—by one vote.

King Henri, fortified by the rites of Holy Church, died at Frohsdorf on 24 August 1883 after a long and painful illness borne with much courage. He was never a bitter man, and one may guess that his last years were happier than they would have been had the Third Restoration succeeded. It is easy to blame him for throwing away the crown of France. Yet, as the late Sir Denis Brogan (hardly an admirer) writes, Henri V ‘had made, not by cowardice but by pride and dignity, the great refusal’. Professor Cobban even goes so far as to say of Henri that ‘trained as he said himself to expect nothing from God and nothing from man, free from worldly ambition or knowledge, lame, isolated, living in and for the past’, he was ‘perhaps the noblest of his line’.

It was fitting that Henri V should die childless. However magnificent in their days of glory, the Bourbons, like the dinosaurs, could not adapt to a new and alien environment. Theirs was the first great monarchy to fall before democracy, never to be restored. The failure of the Third Restoration announced the doom of all hereditary monarchies of the crowned and anointed sort, not only in Europe but throughout the entire world.

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_____________

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Charles X

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