of the Journal des Debats, for an alleged attack on the royal authority, as exercised by the king in the recent change of his ministry. The expressions on which the charge was founded were, "The bond of affection and confidence which united the monarch with the people is broken. Unhappy France! unhappy king!" These words were said to contain an offence against the king's person, and an attack on his constitutional authority; for, as the appointment of a ministry was purely the act of the royal will, any attack on the king's choice, it was argued, was an attack on the king's prerogative. The expression, again, that the bond of affection between the king and his people was broken, must imply, either that the king no longer loved his people, or that the people no longer loved their king; and, in either interpretation, it was an offence against the royal person. M. Dupin, the counsel for the newspaper, maintained, that no one was bound to love his king. Honour the king was the precept; with honour it stopped; and very often there were very good reasons for not loving him at all. The court (the tribunal of the First Instance) found the editor guilty, and condemned him to six months imprisonment, and a fine of five hundred francs. The ministry did themselves no good by this prosecution, directed as it was against an individual who had many claims on the friends of the Bourbons.* Another journal, the * M. Bertin, who was here prosecuted, one of the principal proprietors, and the sole responsible editor of the Journal des Debats, had made more sacrifices for the Bourbons than probably any of his accusers. He had suffered for their sake under the Convention, the Figaro, was prosecuted at the same time for offending against the royal person, by insinuating that his majesty must have been afflicted with a political cataract when he selected the new ministry. In this case, too, the punishment was six monthsimprisonment, and a fine of a thousand francs. The ministers, however, to shew their impartiality, prosecuted an ultra-royalist journal, which had spoken of the constitutional frame of the government in the following terms:--"It cannot be dissimulated that the source of the evil comes from an impious and atheistical charter, and from several thousand laws framed and conceived by men without faith and without religion, and by revolutionists. Justice, reason, and God himself command the destruction of these infamous acts of these monuments of impiety." The editor of this journal was likewise found guilty; but while the writers Directory, the Consulate, and the Empire; he had hailed their return in 1814; he had accompanied the king to Ghent, and defended their cause in a foreign capital, during the hundred days. If such loyal sacrifices established no claim to forbearance, M. Bertin might have Ple pleaded the general moderation of his principles, and the royalist tendency of his doctrines, together with the caution and discretion which marked the political discussions of his paper. While the law permitted the journals to have what was called editeurs responsables, and while most of them availed themselves of a legal perversion to invest with that character mere men of straw, who had no property in the papers to which their names were attached, possessed no infinence in their direction, never wrote a syllable in their columns, and were only hired at so much a day to go to prison when their employers committed a libel, M. Bertin disdained to take advantage of this legal subterfuge-remained ans. werable for every article in his paper, and never made any hireling the scape. goat of his errors or intemperance, : 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 nohody 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 without 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 jurisdic tion and protection of the royal court of Rennes, bound by our own oaths, and those of the heads 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 con sidered 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 con duct 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 re course 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 of 1830, for the 10th of the contributions 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, for any expense they may be put to by destined to indemnify the subscribers names are inscribed on the electoral lists their refusal to pay any illegal contributions imposed upon the public, either without the free, regular, and constitutional assent of the king, and the champresent laws, or even with the assent of bers established by the charter and the 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 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 dandeposit the present subscription in the gerous conduct of a ministry. "We hands of the general procurators." must either maintain that the min 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 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 Labourdonnayé 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 |