Then, too, the Royalists knew very well that time would be required to accustom France to the idea of a King, and to adjust the keen rivalries between the older and the younger branches of the Bourbon House.  Furthermore, they were anxious that the odium of signing a disastrous peace should fall on the young Republic, not on the monarch of the future.  Just as the great Napoleon in 1814 was undoubtedly glad that the giving up of Belgium and the Rhine boundary should devolve on his successor, Louis XVIII., and counted on that as one of the causes undermining the restored monarchy, so now the Royalists intended to leave the disagreeable duty of ceding the eastern districts of France to the Republicans who had so persistently prolonged the struggle.  The clamour of no small section of the Republican party for war a outrance still played into the hands of the royalists and partly justified this narrow partisanship.  Events, however, were to prove here, as in so many cases, that the party which undertook a pressing duty and discharged it manfully, gained more in the end than those who shirked responsibility and left the conduct of affairs to their opponents.  Men admire those who dauntlessly pluck the flower, safety, out of the nettle, danger.

Finally, the influence of one commanding personality was ultimately to be given to the cause of the Republic.  That strange instinct which in times of crisis turns the gaze of a people towards the one necessary man, now singled out M. Thiers.  The veteran statesman was elected in twenty-six Departments.  Gambetta and General Trochu, Governor of Paris, were each elected nine times over.  It was clear that the popular voice was for the policy of statesmanlike moderation which Thiers now summed up in his person; and Gambetta for a time retired to Spain.

The name of Thiers had not always stood for moderation.  From the time of his youth, when his journalistic criticisms on the politics, literature, art and drama of the Restoration period set all tongues wagging, to the day when his many-sided gifts bore him to power under Louis Philippe, he stood for all that is most beloved by the vivacious sons of France.  His early work, The History of the French Revolution, had endeared him to the survivors of the old Jacobin and Girondin parties, and his eager hostility to England during his term of office flattered the Chauvinist feelings that steadily grew in volume during the otherwise dull reign of Louis Philippe.  In the main, Thiers was an upholder of the Orleans dynasty, yet his devotion to constitutional principles, the ardour of his Southern temperament,—­he was a Marseillais by birth,—­and the vivacious egotism that never brooked contradiction, often caused sharp friction with the King and the King’s friends.  He seemed born for opposition and criticism.  Thereafter, his conduct of affairs helped to undermine the fabric of the Second Republic (1848-51).  Flung into prison by the minions of Louis Napoleon at the time of the coup d’etat, he emerged buoyant as ever, and took up again the role that he loved so well.