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Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805-1859

"Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Volume 2"

not as a means but as an end; who pray for his reign, not for their
own interests, not for the interests of France, but for his own sake; who
believe that he derives his title from God, and that when the proper time
comes God will restore him; and that to subject his claims to the
smallest compromise--to admit, for instance, as the Fusionists do, that
Louis Philippe was really a king, and that the reign of Henri V. did not
begin the instant that Charles X. expired--would be a sinful contempt
of Divine right, which might deprive his cause of Divine assistance.
'There are also a very few Orleanists who, with a strange confusion of
ideas, do not perceive that a title founded solely on a revolution was
destroyed by a revolution; that if the will of the people was sufficient
to exclude the descendants of Charles X., it also could exclude the
descendants of Louis Philippe; and that the hereditary claims of the
Comte de Paris cannot be urged except on the condition of admitting the
preferable claims of the Comte de Chambord.
'The bulk, then, of the Royalists are Fusionists; but though all the
Fusionists agree in believing that the only government that can be
permanent in France is a monarchy, and that the only monarchy that can be
permanent is one depending on hereditary succession; though they agree in
believing that neither of the Bourbon branches is strong enough to seize
the throne, and that each of them is strong enough to exclude the other,
yet between the Orleanist-Fusionists and the Legitimist-Fusionists the
separation is as marked and the mutual hatred as bitter, as those which
divide the most hostile parties in England.


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