Such was the state of the Right under the Restoration. What about the Left ? Prevost Paradol, a severe critic, opposes its " mauvaise foi " to the " maladresse " of the Right, thereby implying that it was by far the guiltier of the two. Thureau-Dangin accuses it " d'avoir joué la comédie de l'opposition légale." Perhaps these reproaches are unnecessarily harsh. It is not easy to apply them to a party which counted among its ranks a man like General Foy, with his exquisite sense of honour and of constitutional right, who nevertheless was responsible for some of its errors. He may have been a little blind, but assuredly he was not one to "jouer la comédie."
The truth is that the action of the Left was a hundred times more important than that of the Right. One helped to weaken the Restoration, the other did more — it prepared the way for all the moral revolutions to come ; it revived Bonapartism under its most disastrous form ; it did its best to sow the seeds of insubordination in the Army and of insurrection among civilians ; and it is my firm conviction that many of its members had no idea what they were about.
How, only a few years after the fall of the
