"M. Detend will require monthly reports, young man," asked the King. "Since your bank also seeks to do business with the government the assets I have placed in it shall be managed by duly appointed persons not in government service in order not to give the appearance of mixing state business with my private business. These fellows are quite familiar with my interests and can be trusted to make all necessary decisions.
Name: Jakob Rothschild (@Davout)
Bonus Name: Absentee Financier
Description: Out of power, if tragically for a good cause, Rothschild is off to travel. [1]
PP Bonus: +.25
[1] Amusing, Rothschild was quite right from a historical perspective. All who accused him of anachronism were quite wrong; the July Monarchy paid stipends to Rabbis. Alas, we have a King of France, and not a King of the French, etc.
Vicomte de Martignac
...nothing could be more painful or more distasteful in the accusation against M. le duc de Saint-Aignan, than the statement attributed to him in the testimony of the last witness. M. le duc de Saint-Aignan groaned under the weight of the most serious accusation.
Each of the witnesses, pressed by his conscience, deposits facts of which he has no personal knowledge.
Happiness, or the truth which is a great happiness, has willed that no witness so far be the deposition of a fact which has come to his personal knowledge, which was connected with the immediate direct participation of M. le duc de Saint-Aignan in the misfortunes. And, for the first time, he is accused of one of these words, uttered without any necessity, and fatality does not allow him to clarify this fact. The witness is too honest a man, Too loyal to say that he himself has heard this; he has it from another, and my hope is that this person should be in a foreign country. I recommend this observation has to the consciousness of the man...
...we know that M. Armentiéres has made some great accusations, but what is the merit of one monarchy to accuse another, founded on an independent base, judging the past, and pleading for mercy; shedding the blood of the past will open a laceration that generations will not heal...
...illegality in his actions are not asserted; any attempt to prosecute a person would not have been contradictory to the laws governing the previous monarchy, assuming that the ordinances were legal, of which I believe they were, if highly inappropriate...
For the defence
in the trial of Marshal Moncey
It is fundamental to a case of such gravity as this, keen in its interest not only to the consumers of today's current affairs, but pertinent also to the formation of a settlement in the future, that proper boundaries be established as to the purview of the examination. Namely—and I will be brief—the court must decide whether it wishes to deal in questions of morality, or otherwise in questions of law; for the two are not always one and the same.
It is the opinion of the defence counsel that the legal case in this instance is quite simple, and here I must speak coldly and without personal prejudice, for my own opinions on the matter as a private citizen are known to many and do not accord in their entirety with what I am about to say; namely, that King Charles acted legally in issuing the ordinances of Saint-Cloud, as according to the Charter of 1814, which reserved for the king all executive power—whether this be the case de facto or not.
Therefore, what is the treason? The Marshal countersigned Charles's ordinances knowing them to be lawful. We may find this act distasteful, or unprincipled—but the courts are not the guardians of taste and principle. They must apply the law, as it was, and do so blindly, without prejudice, for this is the realm of the moral.
The moral considerations of this case are, of course, numerous. What is the significance, for example, of the Marshal's resignation? How are we to reconcile the damage done by the ordinances with their status in law? Who is to bear the responsibility for this discord? The first consideration is, I believe, a simple matter: having assented to the King's plan under certain assumptions, relating chiefly to the perceived degree of support for the King amongst the people, the Marshal came to see the scale of his misjudgement and made known his protest.
The second consideration in more troublesome, for we feel we must be entitled to legal recourse upon the breakdown of one social contract. I ask the learned gentlemen, from where does this entitlement come? We have had our redress in the form of a new and nobler charter, which has done much to correct certain abuses present in the old system. If, as the party of the current king are so keen to suggest, this represents nothing more drastic than the changing of the head of state, how do we prosper from cultivating discord where none exists?; from drawing a line of divide between the old and the new?; from establishing a new, more just France? Let us not forget the mythos of the actions of June, which we will not call treason as long as it prospers, but instead hail as a judicious exercise of the right of the citizenry to good government. Let us forget neither that the Revolution Prosper's only so long as it does not become destabilised and fall into the realm of tyrannical excess. The recent history of France is burdened with just this state of excess, and we would do well to ensure we do not carry this burden in vain. Therefore, we can do naught but lament that the old system was so imperfect as to allow Charles's actions—save to ensure that as we craft a new system if suffers from no such weaknesses.
The third consideration is pressing in examining the nature of the charges brought against the ministers. I alluded earlier to that old aphorism, that as long as treason prospers none dare call it treason. The victors of June profit from this arrangement in that it all but secures their absolution from all blame for the evil that occurred during the Revolution. The actions of the citizenry were righteous, and therefore exist in the collective mémoire with impunity. All the fault must belong to those whose actions provoked the struggle, and thus in this detail we find the basis of a need to assess wrongdoing. Yet this logic denies the revolutionaries of their agency, elsewhere so vital in their actions. I remind the court that I, too, was provoked to action by the ordinances, albeit of a reasonably pacific nature. I do not seek to abdicate this responsibility. Too often, we have seen it such that, insofar as the assumption of responsibility furthers the myth of the glory of the Revolution, it is accepted, only to be rejected when it becomes troublesome. Yet if we are to be fair in our settlement, blame must be apportioned as it is merited, thus those who led the charges against the People must be held to account on equal footing to those leading the charges in the opposite direction.
I make this point because I fear that this trial is part of an effort to abdicate some of this blame, and as such to prevent the corruption of the idea of the Revolution by impure realities. In convicting the ministers of treason—that vaguest and most helpful of charges—France establishes for itself a new history, in which the ministers own agency is amplified in its malice and robbed of all nuance. In turn, the People maintain their purity, acting only in defence of their persons and not in defence of those institutions which were so favourable to them. This chicanery abases the Revolution and shames its participants; for the mark of a sensible settlement is that its justice extends even to its own agents. It is only by the resolution of fortune that it is the ministers on trial and not the opposition leaders, hence we cannot allow any corruption of this process in the name of the advancement of the Revolution's teleology. To this end, my learned colleague has spoken of this affair in surgical terms; of the necessity of excision such that France may begin revived and anew. This is a false promise, betrayed by its zealotry, for excision in this case would be as that of scabrous tissue: premature, ill-advised and painful. The conviction of the ministers, far from speeding France's wounds in their healing, would merely aggravate them. Conviction would expose the myth of the Revolution's righteousness or generosity, demonstrating its chief agents no better in their morality than those who bayed at the foot of the scaffold for the blood of the inept and the unconvinced.
Therefore, at this juncture we must ask ourselves: when June was so abundant in crime and blunder, is it really treason we wish to pursue? Prosecute the murderers and the vandals and the thieves, all that was and is unlawful. But let us not persecute any man as a traitor, when there but for the grace of God go we all.
