My first appearance in the tribune was to make a speech on the
irremovability of the judges[4]: I applauded the principle, but
censured its immediate application. At the Revolution of 1830, the
members of the Left who were most devoted to that revolution wished to
suspend the irremovability for a time.

On the 22nd of February 1816, the Duc de Richelieu brought us the
autograph will of the Queen. I ascended the tribune, and said:

“He who has preserved for us the will of Marie-Antoinette[5] had bought
the property of Montboisier: himself one of Louis XVI.’s judges, he
raised in that property a monument to the memory of the defender of
Louis XVI., and himself engraved on that monument an epitaph in French
verse in praise of M. de Malesherbes. This astonishing impartiality
shows that all is misplaced in the moral world.”

On the 12th of March 1816, the question of the ecclesiastical
pensions[6] was discussed:

“You would,” I said, “refuse an allowance to the poor vicar who
devotes the remainder of his days to the altar, and you would accord
pensions to Joseph Lebon[7], who struck off so many heads; to François
Chabot[8], who asked for a law against the Emigrants of so simple a
character that a child might lead them to the guillotine; to Jacques
Roux[9], who, refusing at the Temple to receive Louis XVI.’s will,
replied to the unfortunate monarch:

“‘My only business is to take you to your death.'”

A bill had been introduced into the Hereditary Chamber relating to the
elections. I declared myself in favour of the integral renewal of the
Chamber of Deputies. It was not until 1824, being then a minister, that
I passed it into law.

It was also in this first speech on the law governing elections, in
1816[10], that I said, in reply to an opponent:

“I will not refer to what has been said about Europe watching our
discussions. Speaking for myself, gentlemen, I doubtless owe to the
French blood that flows in my veins the impatience which I experience
when, in order to influence my vote, people talk to me of opinions
existing outside my country; and, if civilized Europe tried to impose
the Charter on me, I should go to live in Constantinople.”

[Sidenote: The Chamber of Peers.]

On the 9th of April 1816, I introduced a motion to the Chamber relating
to the Barbary Powers. The house decided that there was cause for its
discussion. I was already thinking of combating slavery, before I
obtained that favourable decision from the Peers, which was the first
political intervention of a great Power on behalf of the Greeks:

“I have seen the ruins of Carthage,” I said to my colleagues; “I have
met among those ruins the successors of the unhappy Christians for
whose deliverance St. Louis sacrificed his life. Philosophy can take
its share of the glory attached to the success of my motion and boast
of having obtained in an age of light that for which religion strove in
vain in an age of darkness.”

I found myself in an assembly in which my words, for three-fourths of
the time, turned against myself. One can move a popular chamber; an
aristocratic chamber is deaf. With no gallery, speaking in private
before old men, dried-up remains of the old Monarchy, of the Revolution
and of the Empire, anything that rose above the most commonplace seemed
madness. One day, the front row of arm-chairs, quite close to the
tribune, was filled with venerable peers, one more deaf than the other,
their heads bent forward, and holding to their ears a trumpet with the
mouth turned towards the tribune. I sent them to sleep, which is very
natural. One of them dropped his ear-trumpet; his neighbour, awakened
by the fall, wanted politely to pick up his colleague’s trumpet; he
fell down. The worst of it was that I began to laugh, although I was
just then speaking pathetically on some subject of humanity, I forget
what.

The speakers who succeeded in that Chamber were those who spoke
without ideas, in a level and monotonous tone, or who found terms of
sensibility only in order to melt with pity for the poor ministers. M.
de Lally-Tolendal thundered in favour of the public liberties: he made
the vaults of our solitude resound with the praises of three or four
English Lord Chancellors, his ancestors, he said. When his panegyric
of the liberty of the press was finished, came a “but” based upon
“circumstances,” which “but” left our honour safe, under the useful
supervision of the censorship.

The Restoration gave an impulse to men’s minds; it set free the thought
suppressed by Bonaparte: the intellect, like a caryatic figure relieved
of the entablature that bent its brow, lifted up its head. The Empire
had struck France with dumbness; liberty restored touched her and gave
her back speech: oratorical talents existed which took up matters where
the Mirabeaus and Cazalès had left them, and the Revolution continued
its course.

My labours were not limited to the tribune, so new to me. Appalled at
the systems which men were embracing and at France’s ignorance of the
principles of representative government, I wrote and had printed the
_Monarchie selon la Charte._ This publication marked one of the great
epochs of my political life: it made me take rank among the publicists;
it served to determine opinion on the nature of our government. The
English papers praised the work to the skies; among us, the Abbé
Morellet even could not recover from the transformation of my style and
the dogmatic precision of the truths.

The _Monarchie selon la Charte_ is a constitutional catechism: from
it have been taken the greater part of the propositions which are put
forward as new to-day. Thus the principle that “the King reigns but
does not govern” is found fully set forth in Chapters IV., V., VI. and
VII. on the Royal Prerogative.