ABSTRACT
Charles X, a widower like Louis XVIII, tall and active in spite of his sixty-seven years and a great huntsman, like so many Bourbons before him, possessed a charm, elegance and graciousness unknown to his brother. But his political views were far from reassuring in one who was called upon to be a constitutional monarch and to consolidate a dynasty. More passionate, but at the same time more light-hearted than Louis XVIII, he lacked his brother’s balance and sound judgement. When he acted like a sensible King, said Guizot, he did so from a sense of propriety, ‘from timid and short-sighted complaisance, because he was momentarily carried away, or from the desire to please, and not from conviction or natural choice’.1 As Comte d’Artois he had been the acknowledged leader of one of the main parties in the State, and that the very party which had the most reactionary views and was most inclined to scoff at the Charter which as King he was now bound to uphold. Moreover, dissolute in his earlier years, the new sovereign was now a devotee much under clerical influence. As an Ultra and a pious son of the Church he therefore fully believed that the Revolution was the work of the Devil and disbelieved as fully in constitutional limitations upon the divine right of Kings. The Duke of Wellington in 1818 might well wish that ‘Monsieur would read the histories of our Restoration and subsequent Revolution, or that he would recollect what passed under his own view and probably at his own instigation in the Revolution’2-Charles, if he did indulge in such reading or reflections, came only to the conclusion that he would rather chop wood than be a King like the King of England. With such a past and such an outlook it would have been difficult indeed for him to raise himself to be a King above party, even had he so wished.
