The Sun.
London, England, 1869-08-12 00:00:00

LOADO.N, THURSDAY, AUGUST 12, 1869.

France has a better opportunity now than she had
nearly forty years ago of seeing inaugurated, with a
reasonable prospect of permanence, the political
system and the political institutions known as th3se
f Constitutional Government. In the July of 1830
Lhe transformation effected was little better than a
stock-jobbing transaction. CHARLES X. made way
'or Louis PHlLlPPE—Absolutism, under the nominal
guise of Constitutionalism, yielded up its ground to a
set of Parliamentarians. There was fighting for three
days in the streets of Paris, and when tranquillity
was restored, in lieu of the white cockade, and the
white flag, and the lilies of the BuLTRBON, there wero
displayed, under a bran new ORLEANS dynasty, the
old revolutionary tri-colour that—according to the
memorable phrase of LAMARTINE, nearly twenty years

,aterwards, when the reign of the Citizen Monarch
bad been brought with a sort of disgust abruptly to
an end—had made the tour of the world at the head
of the conquering armies of France with her liberties
and her glory. For seventeen, for very nearly

eighteen years, that Citizen King was housed, there,
at the Tuileries. PIIILIPPON, the carcicaturist,
likened him to an old pear-head. BON GUALTIER,
in one excruciatingly ridiculous apostrophe,
made the Arab exclaim of him, with a sort of scorn
—" His head is like a pen 1" Grotesque pencils

galore identified him with ROBERT MACAIRE, as
thoroughly as the genius of comic acting identified

with that character the name and person of M.
FREDERIC LEMAITRE. All the while, during the
lapse of those seventeen or eighteen years, there was

a consciousness in France, there was a consciousness
throughout Europe, that in the person of King Loris

PHILIPPE, there was nothing than a shrewd, some
thought a clever kind of a huckstering Sovereign. His

reign was filled, or at any rate, was dotted at plentiful
intervals, with mistakes. Whatever sympathy he

obtained, he derived from what Mr. GLADSTONE has
taught us to call " unavoidable calamity." The acci -
_lental destruction of the life of his eldest son, the

DUC D'ORLEANS, was one of these calamities. The
atrocious attempt at his assassination, or rather of
the massacre of the KING himself and his entourage,
by means of the aptly called infernal machine of the
wretched conspirator FIESCUI, was another. A third
was the premature demise of the gifted young Prin-
cess, his daughter, one maniNstation of whose Intel-
' lectual capacity stilt survives, for the recognition of
us all, in that well-known and lovely statuette of
JEAN D'Artc clasping her cross-handled sword to her
bosom. The sympathy felt for the bereaved father,
for the outraged Sovereign, for the nominal or left-
handed founder of a kind of a new dynasty—that of
the younger branch of the House of Bourbon—
the sympathy springing out of these and other
unavoidable calamities proved in each instance, how-
ever, to be only very fugitive. Turn by turn they
gradually faded out of the popular remembrance.
People could not, for the life of them, lose the recol-
lection that the Citizen King was the son of the in-
famous regicidal EgaLte. There was a sense, in-
lelible and ineradicable, that the head of Orleanism
was (as we have already said) at the best a kind of a
huckstering Sovereign. The crowning acts of his
public life, the anal achievements of his reign, more
than justified the popular impression as to

he unheroic character of the man who

had, in the July of 1830, been placed by
a stock-jobbing intrigue at the head of France,
as the chief of a system of Parliamentary Govern-
ment. The Spanish Marriages set the iv:al to his
h'storical career. The Citizen King was ignomini-
ously cicasseed out of France, shorn of his whiskers,
deprived of his wig, with an old pa jacket wrapped
about him instead of a royal robe, with a shabby
peaked travelling cap on h;s head instead of a crown,
his very title degraded to the homeliest pseudonym.
<urely, that any Monarch ever accepted—namely, that
of another Mr. SMITH. 'rhea came the Republic. First
of all the three months' power of LAMARTINE and
the Provisional Government. Then the six months'