Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century | Page 3

and Ducos, which--coming suddenly

on the appointed morning--broke up the Directory. Bonaparte then put
out his hand as commander of the troops. Too late the Republicans of
the Council of Five Hundred felt the earthquake swelling under their
feet. Napoleon appeared at the bar of the Assembly, and attempted a
rambling and incoherent justification for what was going on. A motion
was made to outlaw him; but the soldiers rushed in, and the refractory
members were seized and expelled. A few who were in the revolution
remained, and to the number of fifty voted a decree making Sieyes,
Bonaparte and Ducos provisional Consuls, thus conferring on them the
supreme executive power of the State. By nightfall the business was
accomplished, and the man of Ajaccio slept in the palace of the
Tuileries. He had said to his secretary, Bourriene, on that morning, "We
shall sleep to-night in the Tuileries--or in prison."
The new order was immediately made organic. There could be no
question when Three Consuls were appointed and Bonaparte one of the
number, which of the three would be First Consul. He would be that
himself; the other two might be the ciphers which should make his unit
100. The new system was defined as the "Provisionary Consulate;" but
this form was only transitional. The managers of the coup went rapidly
forward to make it permanent. The Constitution of the Year III gave
place quickly to the Constitution of the Year VIII, which provided for
an executive government, under the name of the CONSULATE.
Nominally the Consulate was to be an executive committee of three,
but really an executive committee of _one_--with two associates. The
three men chosen were Napoleon Bonaparte, Jean Jacques Cambaceres
and Charles Francois Lebrun. On Christmas day, 1799, Napoleon was
made FIRST CONSUL; and that signified the beginning of a new order,
destined to endure for sixteen and a half years, and to end at Waterloo.
The old century was dying and the new was ready to arise out of its
ashes.
HOW THE SON OF EQUALITY BECAME KING OF FRANCE.
The French Revolution spared not anything that stood in its way. The
royal houses were in its way, and they went down before the blast.
Thus did the House of Bourbon, and thus did also the House of Orleans.
The latter branch, however, sought by its living representatives to
compromise with the storm. The Orleans princes have always had a
touch of liberalism to which the members of the Bourbon branch were

strangers.
At the outbreak of the Revolution, Louis Philippe Joseph, Duke of
Orleans, fraternized with the popular party, threw away his princely
title and named himself Philippe Egalité; that is, as we should say, Mr.
Equality Philip. In this character he participated in the National
Assembly until he fell under distrust, and in despite of his defence and
protestations--in spite of the fact that he had voted for the death of his
cousin the king--was seized, condemned and guillotined.
This Equality Philip left as his representative in the world a son who
was twenty years old when his father was executed. The son was that
Louis Philippe who, under his surname of Roi Citoyen, or "Citizen
King," was destined after extraordinary vicissitudes to hold the sceptre
of France for eighteen years. Young Louis Philippe was a soldier in the
republican armies. That might well have saved him from persecution;
but his princely blood could not be excused. He was by birth the Duke
of Valois, and by succession the Duke of Chartres. As a boy, eight
years of age, he had received for his governess the celebrated Madame
de Genlis, who remained faithful to him in all his misfortunes. At
eighteen he became a dragoon in the Vendome Regiment, and in 1792
he fought valiantly under Kellermann and Dumouriez at Valmy and
Jemappes. Then followed the treason, or defection, of Dumouriez; but
young Louis remained with the army for two years longer, when, being
proscribed, he went into exile, finding refuge with other suspected
officers and many refugees in Switzerland.
Thither Dumouriez himself had gone. Of the flight of young Louis,
Carlyle says: "Brave young Egalité reaches Switzerland and the Genlis
Cottage; with a strong crabstick in his hand, a strong heart in his body:
his Princedom is now reduced to that Egalité the father sat playing
whist, in his Palais Egalité, at Paris, on the sixth day of this same
month of April, when a catchpole entered. Citoyen Egalité is wanted at
the Convention Committee!" What the committee wanted with Equality
Philip and what they did with him has been stated above.
Consider then that the Napoleonic era has at last set in blood. Consider
that the Restoration, with the reigns of Louis XVIII. and Charles X.,
has gone by. Consider that the