The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (33 page)

How then can strangers hope to look into the veiled future of France?

—R
ICHARD
R
USH

The new American minister had no sooner landed at Le Havre than he began hearing how unpopular the king and his government were. It was not what he had expected, and at Paris expressions of discontent and accusations “increased a hundred fold,” as he reported. The papers poured “daily fire” on nearly every public measure, their hostility coupled always with distrust of Louis-Philippe. He was accused of being selfish, crafty, senile, of breaking promises, of neglecting his duties to the nation. And all this seemed completely at odds with what the previous American minister, Lewis Cass, had had to say, and, for that matter, the impression one received from nearly every American who had spent any time with Louis-Philippe.

The post of minister to France was one Richard Rush had neither expected nor sought, but for which he was eminently qualified. In a long career in public service he had distinguished himself as attorney general of Pennsylvania (at age thirty-one), attorney general of the United States (at thirty-three), secretary of state, and then minister to the Court
of St. James’s, where, facing a variety of critical disputes, he proved firm and candid while creating no ill will. In four years as secretary of the treasury under President John Quincy Adams, he had never missed a day on the job. When, as Adams’s running mate in the election of 1828, they went down to defeat against Andrew Jackson, he quietly retired to private life. Yet even then he continued to serve, settling boundary disputes and securing the bequest from the Englishman James Smithson that made possible the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution.

Minister Rush had as well the advantage of a distinguished name. His father, Dr. Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia physician, had been a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Like his father, he was a man of wide intellectual interests, and at sixty-seven he was still impressively handsome, with penetrating blue eyes and a high, broad forehead. In all, he was as well suited to his new assignment as any American envoy since Jefferson. His one obvious deficiency was that he did not speak French.

Rush reached Paris in mid-July 1847, accompanied by two of his ten children, daughters Anna Marie and Sarah Catherine, who were both in their twenties. Their mother, suffering from poor health, had remained behind in Philadelphia. Rooms had been arranged at the Hôtel Windsor on the rue de Rivoli until a suitable residence could be found at a rent he could afford. Unlike his predecessor Cass, Rush was not a wealthy man.

On the afternoon of July 31 he made his first official call on the king, to present a “Letter of Credence” from President James K. Polk and deliver a brief statement about the honor of representing his country to France. The king responded in kind and in perfect English. The ceremony over, the king asked him to return for an informal dinner that evening.

By September, Rush had found a “sufficiently grand” house on the rue de Lille in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. He felt obliged to hire a carriage and a few servants as well, but only, he wrote, because they were essential to the role he must play.

I am representing a great nation at a great court. I cannot live like a curmudgeon or mechanic, but must live like a gentleman and foreign minister. … Still, I hope to meet it all if possible
with the seven thousand dollars … the struggle will be severe. …

In a short time he was on cordial terms with both Louis-Philippe and the formidable foreign minister, François Guizot, careful always to take no sides in discussions concerning French politics. He saw the king often and conversed on a range of topics. He called frequently on Guizot and attended the requisite diplomatic receptions and dinners, where he kept seeing Baron von Humboldt, who, at nearly eighty and gregarious as always, happily recalled dining at the Rush home in Philadelphia when Richard was a boy. All in all, to judge by his diary, Rush was having a grand time, his deficiency in French and financial concerns notwithstanding.

Last night we were at Mr. Walsh’s [Robert Walsh, the American consul in Paris]. The party was large. Among those present were the venerable Humboldt … M. de Tocqueville … some of the DeKalb family whose French ancestors rendered gallant services in our Revolution, and others of note in French society. Many of our own country, including ladies, were there. … There was much intellectual conversation, and much that was sprightly, with music at intervals.

Yet he was troubled, as so many were, by the growing political unrest. Reform banquets, as they were called, had become the unofficial gathering places for those most vociferously critical of the king. At one such event held at the Château Rouge outside the city, more than a thousand people turned out, including members of the Chamber of Deputies. The old “Marseillaise” was sung and nearly every act of government since 1830 vigorously denounced.

Were the grievances real, Rush wondered. To judge by “the appearance of things,” France was full of prosperity and contentment, he wrote to Secretary of State James Buchanan on September 24, 1847. “Production is everywhere increasing. Tranquility everywhere prevails.” Were Napoleon to come back again, “he would hardly know the Paris he left, so much has it advanced in size, commerce, beauty, and above all, cleanliness.”

Taxes were high, to be sure, but no higher proportionately than any other European power. For a king, Louis-Philippe lived quite modestly. To be both a king and a republican on the same throne was difficult, Rush acknowledged. The only explanation he had for such simmering hostility and unrest was the French themselves. They were always excitable. “They will find fault with their rulers when there is cause and when there is not.”

These were “loose thoughts” only, Rush cautioned. “They are thrown out with the distrust which my short residence and limited opportunities of authentic information and observation up to this date ought to inspire.”

As for Louis-Philippe, he seemed as active and involved as ever, but looked tired and was often irritable. The death of a beloved sister, Adélaïde, had hit him hard. Further, and as Rush did not mention, predictions of the king’s downfall had been voiced for years and from many quarters. James Fenimore Cooper had long thought the king would be forced to “decamp.” Writing from Cooperstown only that fall, Cooper told a friend that all Europe was on the verge of “serious troubles,” and Louis-Philippe could well be on the way out.

In response to such forewarnings as he heard, the king himself observed that the people of Paris were not given to revolutions in winter.

With the new year under way, the Paris papers were calling the discontentment in the country “profound and universal.” Still, Rush sensed nothing to be alarmed about. “Notwithstanding all the reform banquets, I see no present prospect of a change,” he reported to Washington on January 22, 1848.

A week later, Alexis de Tocqueville warned his fellow members of the Chamber of Deputies, “We are sleeping on a volcano.”

On February 20, in fear of a revolt, the deputies and the government canceled a reform banquet scheduled for two days later. At once a great public clamor erupted. The whole issue had become “formidable,” Rush wrote privately to his family.

What followed happened with a speed no one foresaw.

On February 22, crowds marched and barricades went up in the streets to stall the advance of troops. The day after, still larger crowds
turned angry, looting shops and throwing up more barricades. That night, full-scale riots broke out. When confronted by a line of troops stationed outside the residence of Foreign Secretary Guizot, the mob kept coming. A sergeant fired a shot. Then the rest of the soldiers opened fire, killing or wounding 50 people.

An American student named Richard Morris Hunt, who had been swept along with the crowd near Guizot’s house, wrote afterward of how people kept pressing the soldiers from all sides.

We were too near to be pleasant, we saw the flash and we heard the noise of guns. For a moment we thought it was fireworks. We were pushed on by the crowd … and on and on, stopped from time to time by soldiers who will not let us advance. We cannot believe that they have drawn on the people.

Hundreds of the National Guard joined the insurgents and through the night church bells tolled across the city. At the Palace of the Tuileries an exhausted Louis-Philippe kept saying over and over, “I have seen enough blood.”

The following morning, Thursday, February 24, shaken by all that had happened and refusing to order further bloodshed, Louis-Philippe abdicated.

He and his wife fled out a side door and through the Garden of the Tuileries to a waiting carriage. After a breakneck ride out of Paris to Le Havre, and a day or two in hiding, Louis-Philippe and Marie-Amélie— “Mr. and Mrs. William Smith”—crossed the Channel to refuge in England.

Thus ended the eighteen-year reign of the last king of the French. Shortly after his arrival in England, Queen Victoria wrote in a letter to old Lord Melbourne:

The poor King and his government made many mistakes within the last two years, and were obstinate and totally blind at the last till flight was inevitable. But for
sixteen years
he did
a great deal to maintain peace and made France prosperous, which should
not
be forgotten. …

Louis-Philippe would die in exile at Claremont, Surrey, two years later in 1850, at age seventy-seven.

On the fateful morning of Thursday the twenty-fourth, at his desk on the rue de Lille, Richard Rush had dashed off a letter to Secretary Buchanan reporting all he then knew of the riots and the lives lost the day before, and to say “general confusion [and] uncertainty” still prevailed. “Even now … cavalry are hastily passing through streets within my hearing, and my servants bring in rumors that the King has abdicated. …”

What he did not yet know was that the mobs, delirious with success, had marched on the Palace of the Tuileries, broken in, and gutted it. Furniture and clothing were thrown down from the windows and burned in the garden. The king’s throne was carried off to be paraded through the streets as the ultimate symbol of triumph before it, too, was burned.

A week later Rush had more to report. On the evening the king made his escape, a new government had sprung into being as suddenly as the old monarchy had fallen, the provisional government of a republic characterized so far by “moderation and magnanimity.” But “foremost of all” in what he had to report was that he, as the American minister, “acting under a sense of independent duty in the emergency,” had taken it upon himself to recognize the new government without delay.

It was a momentous step. “I shall remain inexpressibly anxious until I know it will be officially received at home,” he wrote. “The responsibilities of my public station were upon me. What would my country expect from me? And what did I owe to my country under this emergency?”

He had never viewed Louis-Philippe and his government as did the French opposition, and he prided himself in having remained aloof from political conflicts. To have done otherwise would have been improper. “But the French people were themselves the arbiters of the conduct of their government, and the sole judges of what form of government they would have.”

Paris had quickly returned to life as usual. It was hard to believe. Shops and theaters reopened. People were out and about their business, as though nothing had happened. The new government seemed to be exercising its power appropriately, and no one was moving against it. Two months might pass before news of the abdication reached Washington and Rush received his instructions in response. What was he to do? “Was it for me to be backward when France appeared to be looking to us?”