After the fall of Napoleon in June 1815, a new White Terror was carried out by the ultra-royalists, who were supported by rural France and the clergy. This “counter-revolution” sought to purge former revolutionaries and Bonapartists from all branches of power and administration and to eradicate the political and ideological legacy of that period from the country. The repression included the suppression of individual liberties, summary justice, and massacres that continued for a year until Louis XVIII dissolved the Chamber dominated by the ultras.
How Was the Second White Terror Different from the First White Terror?
White Terror in Southern France
After Waterloo (Battle of Waterloo) and Napoleon Bonaparte‘s second abdication, while in Paris, a person could be assaulted just for wearing a violet flower, new massacres were carried out in the south of France. On June 25th, severe incidents broke out in Marseille between royalists and soldiers. The latter, under orders not to respond to provocations to avoid civil war, lost 145 infantrymen and 18 cavalrymen to royalist volunteers on the road to Toulon.
In the city of Marseille, left to its own devices, it was carnage. Retired soldiers, peaceful shopkeepers, and former Mamluks brought back from Egypt by Bonaparte 15 years earlier (13 Mamluk corpses were identified, though there were more) were mercilessly massacred, sometimes with grotesque cruelty, while the crowd celebrated France’s defeat in Belgium.
The exact number of victims from this bloody celebration, known as the “Day of the Farce,” is unknown, with estimates ranging from 45 to 250. Survivors were locked up in Château d’If for safety but were mostly released by the king’s prefect, Mr. de Vaublanc.
The Assassination of Marshal Brune
Soon, in various places, rioters loyal to the Comte d’Artois hunted down and killed Protestants and former Jacobins. In Avignon, under the leadership of a man named Pointu and a supposed major Lambot, Bonapartist houses were ransacked, and dozens of people were killed—some say hundreds—including a disabled person and a baker who was boiled alive in his oven. Debtors rid themselves of their debts by drowning their creditors in the river.
In this charged atmosphere, Marshal Brune, despite having pledged allegiance to the king, was murdered by enraged mobs. Brune, a true republican rather than a Bonapartist, was falsely accused of having carried the head of Princess de Lamballe on a pike. The newly appointed royal prefect, Mr. de Saint Chamans, and other authorities tried in vain to save the marshal. Fearing disapproval from Paris, they disguised his murder as a suicide.
The rioters looted Brune’s belongings, and his body was thrown into the Rhône River, where it resurfaced and was shot at by a barrage of rifle fire. It was later retrieved and buried by pious hands, only to be exhumed, reburied in a castle moat, and left there for two years before being returned to his widow in a soap crate to avoid detection.
The Austrian occupation briefly pacified the violence, with one Austrian officer claiming he preferred Napoleon’s officers to the French nobles who had returned with the army. Like the September massacres, these atrocities were not only committed by the dregs of society but also by respectable citizens and aristocrats, with women among the perpetrators. The violence ended with festive celebrations reminiscent of rural rituals (carimantran).
The second White Terror was certainly worse than the first. In Montpellier, the announcement of the Emperor’s abdication led to a bloody clash between royalists and the still-Bonapartist garrison, with more than a hundred people dying in the ensuing bloody orgies. In Uzès, a dozen were killed.
Civil Peace Threatened
In Nîmes, the regime change, initially rejected by a faction of the army, led to clashes between soldiers and royalists. After the disarmed troops evacuated the city, they were ruthlessly massacred, with over thirty killed. Religious tensions resurfaced, as the Protestants, who made up about a third of the population in the Gard region and had welcomed the Emperor’s return, became the target of the Catholic majority.
During the Hundred Days, they had clashed with the Duke of Angoulême’s royalist soldiers, especially in Arpaillargues (where two were killed). Villages remained divided, and travelers were wise to carry multiple badges to switch allegiances quickly depending on whether the locals were Bonapartists or royalists. The royalist army from Beaucaire, a ragtag group in stolen uniforms, looted and murdered indiscriminately, even targeting fellow royalists. They punished Calvinist women by lifting their skirts and beating them with paddles adorned with fleurs-de-lis (an incident downplayed by royalists).
This was when Trestaillons, whose real name was Jacques Dupont, gained notoriety. He was said to have earned his nickname because he boasted of cutting Bonapartists into three pieces, though others claimed it came from the three vineyard plots he owned. Leading armed gangs, he orchestrated the murder of many Protestants, while thousands fled. Ironically, prisons became some of the safest places, although these too were emptied, and their occupants exterminated.
Trestaillons was assisted by two accomplices, Truphémy and Servan, who varied their forms of brutality, burning and dancing around bonfires, pillaging, cutting off ears, or sometimes burning victims alive. After driving out Protestant Bonapartists from their homes, they moved their own families in. They even went as far as exhuming the ancestors of those deemed disloyal to desecrate their bodies. Foreign troops were needed to restore order; the Austrians executed about twenty rioters but spared the leaders.
For good measure, they also cracked down on the Protestant rebels of Gardonnenque, who had taken up arms to defend themselves. About sixty of them were executed for rebellion. After the Austrians left, unrest resumed, apparently encouraged by the Pavillon de Marsan, the residence of the Comte d’Artois, the future Charles X, despite the king’s disapproval.
General Le Pelletier de Lagarde tried to restore order with the support of the Duke of Angoulême. Protestant temples were reopened, but on October 12, a violent riot broke out, during which the general was gravely wounded by a madman. Three Protestant women were raped. Though the Duke of Angoulême managed to restore some semblance of calm, civil peace was far from guaranteed.
The royalists were so extreme that some of them, finding Louis XVIII too lenient, dreamed of submitting to Ferdinand VII of Spain! The assassin of General de Lagarde went unpunished, despite the indignation of the Duke of Richelieu, a friend of the slain officer. Trestaillons escaped any punishment and refused to leave Nîmes, despite the prefect’s request. Truphémy was sentenced to death, but his punishment was commuted to hard labor.
Servan was guillotined for a murder he did not commit! In contrast, eight Bonapartists involved in the massacre at Arpaillargues, where only two royalists died, albeit under terrible tortures, were condemned, including an elderly man and two women. The number of victims in the Gard is difficult to establish, with estimates ranging from a few dozen to several hundred.
However, Trestaillons was outdone in cruelty by Quatretaillons of Uzès, a man named Graffand, a former soldier turned rural guard and miquelet for the Duke of Angoulême in 1815. Like Trestaillons, he surrounded himself with a gang of bloodthirsty individuals ready to commit any crime. He executed both Catholic and Protestant prisoners in the name of popular justice, terrorized villages, and mocked the corpses of his victims.
Pardoned once, he was later brought to justice again for a common law crime committed in 1819 and was sentenced to death in absentia by the Riom court in 1821. He was definitively accused of fifteen murders, though there were likely many more. The entire south of France was rocked by the turmoil, and aside from a few enclaves like Montauban, where the prefect, Mr. de Rambuteau, showed courage and firmness, the authorities were overwhelmed almost everywhere.
The Assassination of General Ramel
In Toulouse, during the return of the usurper, Vitrolles, a trusted man of the Count of Artois, armed a cohort of “verdets,” named as such because their white cockades were adorned with a green border. The population was openly royalist. After Napoleon’s second abdication, bloody incidents broke out between the troops and the supporters of the Restoration; the army was forced to leave the city, which was then handed over to the verdets.
The most radical among them dreamed of creating a Kingdom of Aquitaine, with the Count of Artois as monarch, backed by the troops of Ferdinand VII. However, the presence of the Duke of Angoulême kept the monarchists in line until mid-August. Afterward, secret societies took control of the situation while the verdets, who were no longer being paid, began to grow impatient. The appointments of Mr. de Rémusat as prefect, General Ramel as deputy to Marshal Pérignon, who was in charge of maintaining order, and Mr. de Castellane as head of the National Guard, were received as provocations.
The secret societies refused to obey Paris, and the verdets demanded payment; to achieve their aims, they saw only one option: to instill fear! Mayor Malaret, under threat, preferred to step down and was replaced by Mr. de Villèle, a future minister; Rémusat refused to be intimidated, and so did Ramel: after all, he had received orders to disband the verdets.
On August 15, after a well-lubricated dinner, the conspirators went to Ramel’s residence, where they got the soldiers on guard drunk. Ramel, who was absent but warned of the brewing events, returned home amidst insults and threats. The soldier guarding his door was killed with a bayonet, while a pistol shot hit Ramel in the abdomen. The wounded man was taken to his apartment by the few people accompanying him.
The rioters demanded that he be thrown out of the window to be finished off. As the door threatened to be broken down, the two or three individuals present fled to hide. Ramel crawled as best as he could to a neighbor’s house; the neighbor refused to take him in. Outside, the verdets incited the crowd by claiming that the general had fired on the people, though they were the only ones who had used their weapons.
However, Colonel Ricard, a surgeon, and a police commissioner arrived and, following the trail of blood, found the general in an attic. The surgeon treated the wounded man while National Guards and gendarmes arrived on the scene; this force did nothing to prevent the rioters from breaking through the barriers erected to separate them from their prey. The attackers pounced on the wounded general, gouged out one of his eyes, and struck him with several blows from bladed weapons, being careful not to kill him so as to prolong the torture; nothing was spared: his uniform, which lay on a chair, was slashed with a saber.
Ramel did not die until the next day, horrifically mutilated and in terrible agony. Yet, he had been deported to Guyana after the Fructidor coup due to his royalist opinions, and he had openly supported Louis XVIII; his only fault was obeying the king’s orders by refusing to pay the verdets!
Louis XVIII, whose authority had been blatantly disregarded in this affair, demanded in vain the punishment of this attack, which threatened the unity of the kingdom. In 1816, the apartment of Mr. de Caumont, the magistrate investigating the case, was broken into, 600 francs were stolen, and many documents essential to the investigation were taken; the inquiry led nowhere.
In 1817, three of Ramel’s murderers were indeed brought before the provost court, a special tribunal that cracked down on Bonapartists, but despite the prosecutor’s harsh indictment—during which he was called a Jacobin by the audience—the defendants were reluctantly given only light sentences. Pérignon, Ramel’s superior, not only did not appear on the day of the tragedy but wrote to Paris the next day, claiming he had to replace his ailing deputy.
The old marshal’s cowardice was fittingly rewarded with exile to his estates. And, adding hypocrisy to horror, a solemn funeral was held for the martyred general, which some of his murderers had the audacity to attend. This affair remained emblematic of the mindset that prevailed at the time.
It should be noted, however, that in Vendée (War in the Vendée), where a royalist army had opposed imperial troops during the Hundred Days, the royalists offered to unite with their adversaries to defend France against invaders as soon as Napoleon abdicated. This was a fine example of civic duty, while further south, people were thinking of carving up the kingdom. In the west, only in Nantes did the Viscount of Cardaillac earn the nickname “white Carrier,” although rather unjustly since, while he persecuted, he did not kill.
In Normandy, the prefect was indeed briefly threatened by a band of madmen who tore up orders from Paris, but Caen was close to the capital, news traveled quickly, and everything was soon back in order. In the Center, the “brigands of the Loire,” as the survivors of the imperial army were called, were often threatened, especially when they returned home alone; but when they were in a group, it was enough for them to stand firm for their adversaries to scatter like a flock of sparrows.
The Second Institutional White Terror: The Prévôtal Courts
As we have seen, a perverted and chaotic justice system characterized the White Terror. The second phase of this terror, however, was different from the first. This second episode took on an institutional and regular nature, with sentences of imprisonment or death handed down to several high-ranking officers (19 generals), some of whom managed to escape the sentence, while others suffered it. Exceptional courts, known as the Prévôtal Courts, were established, reflecting in some ways the revolutionary tribunals.
The press, without nuance, demanded the punishment of the guilty in its columns, condemning some to death and others to deportation to Siberia! Some even attacked the king, judging him too lenient for having promised forgiveness upon his return to Cambrai—a promise he could not keep. The legal terror was encouraged by foreigners who wanted to teach the French a lesson and also strip them of some of their art collections, which had not always been honestly acquired.
It was in this atmosphere of vengeance that Fouché, a former regicide who was currently a minister, prepared the lists of proscription, in which he did not forget any of his former friends, perhaps unaware that he would eventually join them! True to the Jacobin policy of terror, Fouché appeased public opinion by bringing the most guilty before justice to put an end to the violence plaguing southern France and to calm the fury of the reactionaries.
The arbitrariness that presided over the selection of those who had to pay for the crimes certainly contributed to discrediting the monarchy and paving the way for 1830. Many forgave the revolutionaries for being cruel due to their lack of education; such an excuse did not hold when well-born individuals engaged in the same excesses. Hypocrisy was added to cruelty. To quote a bit of dark humor from the time, an amnesty was soon proclaimed—from which everyone was excluded! The legal sophistry of the notables had simply replaced the revolutionary fury of the people. And the Chambre introuvable, composed mostly of fanatics, prolonged a situation that only the initial moment could have excused.
The Death Sentences of Military Personnel
Let us turn to the executions. The brothers Constantin and César de Faucher, natives of La Réole, twins, who were more moderate Republicans than Bonapartists, were legally assassinated in Bordeaux. The local population, inspired by the courage displayed by the Duchess of Angoulême during the Usurper’s return, leaned royalist but did not fall into excesses beyond words. The arrest of the two brothers, for insignificant infractions, unfolded in a civil war atmosphere, reminiscent of the proximity of Bordeaux to Toulouse.
The brothers, whose only crime was their political opinions, found no lawyer to defend them, not even among their friends. A witness for the defense was even imprisoned! In appeal, their court-appointed lawyer, instead of defending them, apologized to the court for having been assigned the case! On the day of their execution, the condemned were paraded on foot for an hour to the place of execution to appease the ultras. However, while their execution briefly incited ultra-royalist frenzy, their firm composure and noble demeanor deeply moved many spectators, eventually evoking the contempt of decent people.
Colonel Charles de Labédoyère, a passionate Bonapartist who had led his regiment to Napoleon in the Alps, was executed in Paris, despite the pleas of his royalist family. Aware of his impending fate, the young colonel could have fled, but after one attempt, he hesitated, ultimately refusing to leave his wife and child. Decazes used his arrest to plot against Fouché, whose position he coveted.
Although the former secretary of Madame Mère, young and a favorite of Louis XVIII, failed this time, it was only a matter of time before the regicide police minister was forced into exile. Labédoyère’s widow was ordered to pay a reward to the soldiers who shot her husband. The ultras rejoiced, and even Chateaubriand urged the king to show firmness, but Mme de Krudener, the muse of Emperor Alexander, mourned the death of the handsome colonel.
Marshal Ney was arrested in Cantal, where he had taken refuge after unsuccessfully trying to die at Waterloo. His arrest troubled Louis XVIII, who, more astute than the ultras, foresaw that the inevitable death sentence of the hero of the Russian retreat would deal a terrible blow to the resurgent monarchy. To demand the marshal’s death, the Faubourg Saint-Germain showed more ferocity than the Faubourg Saint-Antoine had in 1793.
The military tribunal recused itself, and the Chamber of Peers, of which Ney was a member, condemned him, with the exception of the Duke of Broglie. The marshal was officially shot secretly on the Avenue de l’Observatoire, where his statue now stands. However, some believe that the execution was a charade and that he died in the United States, where a grave bearing his name exists in Brownsville, North Carolina.
Whatever the case, this event further alienated the army from the new regime. In this regard, the courageous stance of Marshal Moncey, who was asked to preside over the court martial that was to condemn the hero of the Russian retreat, cannot go unmentioned. He recused himself in a letter full of dignity, which earned him the enmity of the ultras, the loss of his marshal’s rank, and three months of detention in the fortress of Ham. However, his noble attitude earned him the respect of the Prussian officers guarding him, who serenaded him every evening until the end of his detention! In 1823, during the intervention in Spain, the king recalled Moncey and entrusted him with the command of the 4th Army Corps, destined to invade Catalonia.
Mouton-Duvernet, who had only reluctantly joined Napoleon, did not participate in the Belgian campaign, and had even calmed soldiers who refused to wear the white cockade, was shot in Lyon. He had been hidden in his home by the Viscount de Meaux, the royalist mayor of Montbrison. The ladies of Lyon’s high society celebrated this triumph of the monarchy by dancing at the site of his execution, and the gentlemen devoured a sheep’s liver that had been stabbed repeatedly. One could almost be describing scenes of cannibalism!
Chartran was shot in Lille. Travot was sentenced to death for the astounding charge of showing moderation during the 1815 campaign in Vendée against royalist troops; his lawyers were punished for defending him. However, the Breton bourgeoisie, known for their strong will, were outraged and threatened to revolt if the sentence was carried out. This caused the authorities to reconsider, and the old general’s sentence was commuted to twenty years in prison, where he had time to descend into madness.
General de Belle, disgraced under the Empire and recalled during the Hundred Days after his offers of service were rejected by the first Restoration, also had his death sentence commuted to ten years in prison, following the intervention of the Duke of Angoulême, whom he had fought in 1815. General Gruyer, wounded in 1814, was sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to ten years in prison.
General Boyer was also sentenced to death for defending Guadeloupe against the English, but he was not executed. General Bonnaire, disabled, was condemned to degradation at the foot of the Vendôme Column for failing to prevent one of his soldiers from killing a spy. He died in prison, and the impulsive soldier was shot. Drouot, the wise man of the Grande Armée, voluntarily turned himself in, and, to the surprise of the ultras, the court martial acquitted him because, having followed the Emperor to Elba, he could not have betrayed the king and had, in fact, only obeyed his prince, whose attempt to reconquer the throne he had not approved.
The king personally informed him that he would not appeal the verdict. Cambronne, the man who responded so resolutely at Waterloo, was also acquitted after a passionate defense by the young royalist lawyer Berryer, to the great indignation of the ultras.
Marshal Davout, who had boldly defended his subordinates and opposed Marshal Ney’s prosecution, was stripped of his pay, ruined, and sentenced to house arrest in Louviers. Masséna was publicly insulted; he was accused of plundering, which was true, and of treason, which was false. His marshal’s baton was taken from him but had to be returned at his funeral under threat of displaying the Empire’s baton, adorned with golden bees. Soult, fearing the worst, fled to the Grand Duchy of Berg in disguise. Several volumes would be needed to recount the moving or thrilling escapes of officers and soldiers who often owed their survival in the imperial army of the Hundred Days to sheer luck.
The Persecution of Civilians and Military Personnel
Alongside military personnel, civilians were also persecuted and sentenced to death, including Lavalette, a former Minister of Posts, whom his wife helped escape from prison by taking his place, with the complicity of English soldiers; she went mad as a result. But this escape clearly showed that the majority of French people did not side with the ultras, given the great number of those who rejoiced, including among the ranks of the nobility. The purge did not only affect the army and the upper social classes. In Sarthe, four people were sentenced to death for disarming Chouans. In Montpellier, five national guards were guillotined for dispersing a royalist gathering. In Carcassonne, surgeon Baux, soldier Gardé, and another person, victims of a sordid plot, were beheaded; but their executioners, summoned by Gardé to God’s tribunal, did not survive them long: one died of illness and the other committed suicide.
By the end of 1815, there were nearly 3,000 political prisoners in French jails. Nine thousand political convictions were handed down by the courts of assizes, military courts, correctional tribunals, and provost courts. The purge ultimately struck thousands of people from the top of the social hierarchy to its base. To escape the executioner, many compromised French people took refuge abroad, in Europe and America, where some fought in the ranks of the liberators of Spanish colonies. Thus, Marshal Grouchy, who had distinguished himself in the defeat of the Duke of Angoulême in 1815 and had so cruelly failed at Waterloo, took refuge in the United States, where Joseph Bonaparte, former King of Spain, was also located, along with Generals Clausel, Vandamme, Lallemand, Lefebvre-Desnouettes, Rigau… and 25,000 other French survivors of various proscriptions. Many other exiles, both civilian and military, dispersed throughout Europe, in Belgium, England, Switzerland, Germany, and Austrian possessions. The great painter David died in exile, as did Fouché, among many others.
Louis XVIII, who did not approve of the excesses of the White Terror, was quite quickly forced to dismiss the “Chambre introuvable” (Unobtainable Chamber) which he considered more dangerous than useful to the Restoration. In 1816, the royal power decided to dissolve the associations that had formed, supposedly to defend it, which were engaging in extortion to support their henchmen brought before the courts. One point should be emphasized: the foreign armies that then occupied France, and were therefore responsible for its security, seem to have intervened only occasionally to maintain order and bring the excited back to reason, even if England was concerned about the fate reserved for Protestants and if officers of that nation effectively contributed to saving Lavalette from the scaffold. How could the royal power have contained the passions when the only force capable of opposing them, the army, had been disbanded? It was obviously up to the allied troops to ensure the transition, and they engaged too late and very insufficiently. But it must be acknowledged in their defense that few exactions were committed in the north and east where they were present from the aftermath of Waterloo.
The Aftermath of the Second White Terror
In 1815, the disorganization of French society was such that it opened up a vast field of operation for all kinds of outlaws. We will limit ourselves to citing only one example, but it was far from being unique. A self-proclaimed Count of Saint Helena, an escaped convict leading a gang of thieves, managed to infiltrate the National Guard; invited to the best houses, he took advantage of this to prepare the exploits of his associates who would pillage them some time later!
Contrary to what the ultras hoped, the White Terror did not at all consolidate civil peace; on the contrary, it further deepened the gap between émigré France and revolutionary France. In 1816, a thunderbolt struck in Grenoble: the Didier conspiracy, which may not have been unrelated to the severity shown by the courts against Mouton-Duvernet and Chabran, who were executed that year.
Before Didier’s escapade, various incidents had marked the return of the white flag in Isère, a region that had distinguished itself during the Flight of the Eagle; villagers did not hesitate to confront the gendarmerie to protect their own. It’s not entirely clear who Didier was plotting for; this former lawyer, law professor, ephemeral member of the Council of State, and failed industrialist had successively adhered to all causes before fighting against them. He only uttered Napoleon’s name reluctantly and to convince the half-pay officers; Fouché was suspected of manipulating him on behalf of the Duke of Orleans. Whatever the case, he fervently wove his network around Grenoble in early 1816 and even managed to convince the customs officers to participate.
In early May 1816, the plotters took advantage of the army’s departure from Grenoble, to line up for the passage of Marie-Caroline of Naples who was coming to marry her cousin the Duke of Berry, son of the Count of Artois, to trigger the movement in the name of Napoleon II, supposedly on his way, supported by the powers of Europe, with the exception of England accused of dominating France after having deported Napoleon to Saint Helena. But Didier’s procrastination, his hesitations to clearly pronounce himself for the Emperor, had sown confusion among his followers: the customs officers and others defected. Poorly led, the uprising was only a skirmish that resulted in six casualties among the insurgents and none among the law enforcement forces.
General Donnadieu, a bad character, former member of Turreau’s infernal columns in Vendée, converted to intransigent royalism, inflated the affair to promote himself. The Provost Court sentenced three prisoners to death and proposed one of the three for the king’s clemency; this lenient verdict was due to the influence of the provost, a philosophical royalist, Planta, and the king’s prosecutor Mallein who, judged too timid, were threatened with dismissal. Donnadieu and the prefect Montlivault, who hated each other, outbid each other to make themselves look good, panicking the government with information, each more exaggerated than the last.
The department of Isère was placed under a state of siege and an exemplary punishment of the mutineers was demanded. Armed with orders from the capital, Donnadieu dismissed the Provost Court and appointed Military Commissions, perfectly contrary to the Charter, charged with punishing the rebels in an expeditious manner. The accused were tried en masse and the defense was practically silenced.
Of the thirty accused in the first batch, sixteen were sentenced to death and fourteen were shot; Donnadieu took it upon himself to pardon two at the request of a notable! A few days later, seven other people were executed by firing squad, the government having refused clemency, without submitting it to the king, despite the interventions of the Duke of Richelieu! A few days later, another person was guillotined.
Grenoble, which the revolutionary terror had spared, was plunged into stupor. As Didier was still at large, those who would harbor him were threatened with reprisals and destruction of their house; the entire region was subjected to a military regime; suspects leaving their homes to satisfy a pressing need were shot on sight; a man who had taken refuge on his roof was shot like a pigeon, dying as he was being transported by cart before the judge; the cellars of suspects were looted and their money stolen; a soldier who had not participated in the movement was promised protection so that he would surrender and could be more easily deported…
The epilogue of this affair, as farcical as it was tragic, took place on June 10 when Didier, betrayed by the family of two of his companions who were promised their lives would be spared, climbed the steps of the scaffold facing his son-in-law’s house. This was the last execution; afterwards, there were only prison sentences. Overwhelmed by fate as much as by public contempt, those who had delivered Didier did not profit from their betrayal and died miserably; as for Donnadieu, compromised in the Lyon conspiracy in 1817, recalled to Paris, he versed so completely into ultra excess that it eventually earned him prison.
Canuel’s Provocations in Lyon
In 1817, General Canuel, governor of the military region of Lyon, whose career resembled that of Donnadieu, jealous of the notoriety acquired by the latter during the events in Grenoble, took advantage of the discontent that reigned among the poor population due to a famine to secretly foment a Bonapartist uprising, in order to be able to demonstrate his zeal for the king. On June 8, to the sound of the tocsin, the population of some villages, worked on by the general’s emissaries, rose up in the name of Napoleon II.
Two hundred people were arrested in Lyon and three hundred in the surrounding towns; one hundred and eighteen were brought before the Provost Courts; seventy-nine were convicted, of whom twenty-three were sentenced to death; eleven were executed. The half-pay officers had to prove their innocence. Canuel strutted; but not for long. General Fabvier, a liberal, aide-de-camp to Marshal Marmont, and Lieutenant of Police Sainneville, charged with shedding light on this affair, vigorously denounced the deception.
Prefect Chabrol was moved while the survivors were discreetly released and Canuel was cleverly sidelined by an appointment as Inspector General of Infantry while being awarded the title of baron. Nevertheless furious, the irascible general, who had cut his teeth in the Vendée in the Republican ranks before turning his coat, wrote a libel against Favier and Sainneville; they responded with no less vigor. This epistolary agitation suited Decazes and the king, who were not unhappy to let others unmask the ultras in public opinion without compromising the government.
Many other conspiracies aimed at either maintaining ultra agitation or overthrowing the elder branch of the Bourbons followed one another; behind the latter, the shadow of Lafayette often loomed. An exhaustive account of these attempts would go beyond the scope of this article. The Three Glorious Days of 1830 finally condemned to a new exile the one who was the true leader of the ultras, King Charles X.
At the end of this overview of the White Terrors, a question naturally comes to mind: could parliamentary monarchy have taken root permanently in France if the Restoration had shown more clemency? It is obviously impossible to answer this question, which is largely futile. We will limit ourselves to making the following remark: it is infinitely easier to enter a period of bloody troubles than to get out of it. 1830 proved, once again, that one does not create martyrs with impunity.
