During the Bourbon Restoration in France, did former revolutionaries face any serious consequences from the new government?

by MegalomaniacMkV
dhmontgomery

Not under most people's definition of "serious consequences." The full answer, of course, is more complicated.

When Louis XVIII was restored to the throne of France in 1814 after the defeat of Napoleon, he endorsed an explicit policy of "union et oublie" — unity and forgetfulness. France was to set aside the traumatic events of the past generation and move forward under Louis's benevolent fatherly leadership. There were minimal purges of former Napoleonic officials, and even Louis's own government included many who had served under the imperial regime. Article 11 of the constitution that Louis issued declared, "All investigations of opinions and votes given prior to the restoration are forbidden. The same oblivion is required from the tribunals and from citizens."

This policy was strained a year later, when Napoleon escaped from his exile on Elba and retook power in France for the famous Hundred Days that ended after Waterloo. After Louis's Second Restoration, the Bourbon government's mood was altogether less forgiving; there were mass firings of government officials, and a number of criminal sentences up to and including death handed down. It was felt that Louis's earlier leniency was partly to blame for how easily Napoleon had retaken power. In his first act after retaking the throne, Louis issued a proclamation promising amnesty to "those Frenchmen who had gone astray," but added that "I must, however, for the dignity of my throne, the welfare of my people, and the peace of Europe, exempt from pardon those instigators and authors of that horrible plot."

Accordingly, Louis's government drew up a list of people who were to be excluded from the general amnesty, and thus subject to criminal prosecution. This list of exemptions was not directly aimed at punishing people for anything other than supporting Napoleon during the Hundred Days (and especially at those who had backed Napoleon in those crucial days before he entered Paris and retook his throne, before he could have a plausible claim to be the head of the French state).

But in the drawing up of the list, and subsequent debates about amnesty and punishment, peoples' pasts were considered, and while ex-revolutionaries in general weren't targeted, one subgroup of former revolutionaries did come under attack: those people who had voted, as part of the National Convention, to execute Louis's brother Louis XVI. These men, referred to as "the regicides," were regarded with loathing by royalists. Being a regicide was itself didn't bear any specific legal punishment — but being a regicide who had also supported Napoleon during the Hundred Days generally was. Ultimately, all those regicides who had switched sides during the Hundred Days were banished from France — though this banishment would be lifted a few years later.

Ironically, the person who drew up the list of proscriptions was himself a regicide — Joseph Fouché, the treacherous Jacobin turned Napoleonic police minister who ended up backing the Bourbons. Fouché served Napoleon during the Hundred Days, but quickly hedged his bets and betrayed Napoleon to Louis and the Allies. He was seen as sufficiently indispensable that Louis was obliged, despite his very strong misgivings, to keep in on in government. And so it was Fouché who had the responsibility of deciding who would be punished. But Fouché's own time came soon enough — once he fell from political power, he was banished from France himself, and died in exile.

So former revolutionaries by and large suffered no legal penalties under the Restoration, with one very limited exception: revolutionaries who had voted to execute the king, who had also served Napoleon during the Hundred Days. Even these men were not executed or imprisoned, but merely exiled from the country.

To this we must add two qualifications. The first is that in addition to the legal punishments meted out in the aftermath of Waterloo, there was also an extralegal White Terror — mob violence, principally in the south of France, that targeted Bonapartists, republicans, Protestants, and anyone else the royalist mobs thought deserved punishment. Still, though old grudges dating back to the Revolution (and sometimes before!) were behind some of the violence, as a general phenomenon it wasn't principally aimed at punishing ex-revolutionaries. If there was a primary target of the extralegal White Terror, it was people who had served Napoleon.

Second, the fact that only a small number of ex-revolutionaries suffered legal sanction for their actions obscures the other consequences these men could feel, including exclusion from government jobs or being stripped of honors. Some prominent ex-revolutionaries, such as the Marquis de Lafayette, did participate in politics under the Restoration and were elected to office as opposition lawmakers (despite the best efforts of the government to prevent these elections). But the 1819 election to parliament of a former revolutionary named Henri Grégoire deserves mention. Grégoire had been a member of the National Convention, where he had conducted a groundbreaking survey of language and patois in France. He had still been a member of the Convention when Louis was convicted, and though Grégoire was not present for the vote, he wrote afterward expressing his support for the verdict and sentence.

In 1819 Grégoire was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, which sparked an uproar among royalists, up to and including Louis, who felt that the election of a regicide-in-all-but-name like Grégoire was a personal insult. Even many moderate royalists felt it was inappropriate for someone like Grégoire to serve in the Chamber, and he was swiftly expelled. (The best argument Grégoire's liberal supporters could muster was to try to get him expelled for a technicality instead of for his republican past, but even this gambit failed.) Still, other than being slapped down when he entered politics, Grégoire continued to live in France under the Restoration, from 1814 through to the Restoration's fall in 1830 (and beyond).