On his return from the Congress of Vienna, the reign of Talleyrand as prime minister was short; and as his power was comparatively small under both Louis XVIII. and his successor Charles X., and as he was not the representative of reactionary ideas or movements, but only of a firm government, I do not give to him the leadership of the counter-revolution.  He was unquestionably the greatest statesman at that time in France, though indolent, careless, and without power as an orator.

Who was then the great exponent of reaction, and of antagonism to liberal and progressive opinions, during the reigns of the restored Bourbons?  It was not the king himself, Louis XVIII.; for he did all he could to repress the fanatical zeal of his family and of the royalist party.  He despised the feeble mind of his brother, the Comte d’Artois, his narrow intolerance, and his court of priests and bigots, and was in perpetual conflict with him as a politician, while at the same time he clung to him with the ties of natural affection.

Was it the Duc de Richelieu, grand-nephew of the great cardinal, whom the king selected for his prime minister on the retirement of Talleyrand?  He hardly represents the return to absolutism, since he was moderate, conciliatory, and disposed to unite all parties under a constitutional government.  No man in France was more respected than he,—­adored by his family, modest, virtuous, disinterested, and patriotic.  As an administrator in the service of Russia during the ascendency of Napoleon, he had greatly distinguished himself.  He was a favorite of Alexander, and through his influence with the Czar France was in no slight degree indebted for the favorable terms which she received on the restoration of the monarchy, when Prussia exacted a cruel indemnity.  He wished to unite all parties in loyal submission to the constitution, rather than secure the ascendency of any.  While able and highly respected, Richelieu was not pre-eminently great.  Nor was Villele, who succeeded him as prime minister, and who retained his power for six or eight years, nearly to the close of the reign of Charles X., a great historical figure.

The man under the restored monarchy who represented with the most ability reactionary movements of all kinds, and devotion to the cause of absolute monarchy, I think was Francois Auguste, Vicomte de Chateaubriand.  Certainly he was the most illustrious character of that period.  Poet, orator, diplomatist, minister, he was a man of genius, who stands out as a great figure in history; not so great as Talleyrand in the single department of diplomacy, but an infinitely more respectable and many-sided man.  He had an immense eclat in the early part of this century as writer and poet, although his literary fame has now greatly declined.  Lamartine, in his sentimental and rhetorical exaggeration, speaks of him as “the Ossian of France,—­an aeolian harp, producing sounds which ravish the ear and agitate the heart, but which the mind cannot define; the poet of instincts rather than of ideas, who gained an immortal empire, not over the reason but over the imagination of the age.”