TUMULTUOUS POLITICS AT THE NATIONAL LEVEL

Uncertainty shrouded the First Restoration. Most historians have concluded that the First Treaty of Paris, signed on 30 May 1814, was relatively lenient: France was reduced to her 1792 frontiers and lost colonies in the West Indies and the Indian Ocean, but would not have to pay reparations. The French, however, had grown accustomed to victory under Napoleon and what was lost was at least as apparent to them as what had been salvaged. Talleyrand would represent France at the Vienna Congress, but it was by no means clear that la grande nation would have much say in the post-war settlement. Wounded patriotism, thus, posed unsettling questions for a regime installed by the Allied powers.

Perhaps the prospect of peace might have enabled the Bourbon monarchy to entrench itself, had the government not exacerbated tensions by committing a series of errors. There was little immediate administrative purge at the start of the First Restoration; 76 per cent of the Imperial corps was maintained. By February 1815, however, the Minister of the Interior, the abbé François-Xavier de Montesquiou, was asking prefects for lists with comments on the worthiness of fonctionnaires, and change was accelerating. More potentially explosive were alterations in the army. Reduction by about three-fifths was perhaps not a great danger where common soldiers were concerned; many of the latter had simply melted away in the face of defeat.