Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [58]
Through Cooper and Lafayette, and on his own, Morse gained a clearer understanding of the political situation in Europe. It seemed to him that between his two visits to Paris, the government of France had been transformed. When stopping in the city nearly two years earlier, en route to Italy, he had joined a crowd in the Tuileries to gaze at King Charles X dining off gold and silver plates. But the revolution of July 1830 had forced the ultraroyalist Charles to abdicate. “How changed are the circumstances of this city,” Morse found, “blood has flowed in its streets, the price of its liberty.” The values of the current monarch, Louis-Philippe, had been shaped by three years of exile in America, which he toured from Maine to Louisiana. This middle-class “Citizen King,” Morse believed, had brought France a new, progressive political order. During his earlier visit, too, Lafayette had little influence and was out of favor at court. Now he seemed a key figure, “second only to the king in honor and influence as the head of a powerful party.”
Cooper thought otherwise. To him, a royal reception that he attended typified the nature of Louis-Philippe’s government. A woman sat in a corner of the room throughout the evening, conspicuously sewing. She had been placed there, Cooper decided, as evidence of the king’s simplicity. But the plebeian touch was a “mummery,” like the rest of Louis-Philippe’s supposed republicanism. In reality, France was rapidly returning to aristocracy. Cooper also believed that his friend Lafayette had been outmaneuvered by the party around the king, manipulated to keep republican enthusiasm under control. Nevertheless Louis-Philippe was losing popularity every day. France had become a “Volcano.”
Morse learned that Cooper was right. Soon after he arrived in Paris, news came of the fall of Warsaw, ending Poland’s attempt to win independence from the rule of Czar Nicholas I of Russia—the state where the ancien régime had been most unbudgingly preserved. France failed to aid the Polish rebels, against whom the Czar sent an army of 80,000. To many it seemed that Louis-Philippe had once again first encouraged then betrayed hopes for political emancipation. Despite the four days he had spent at Mount Vernon with George Washington, he remained reactionary, no more willing to fight Russia for the independence of Poland than he had been to fight Austria over Italy.
Parisians protested the new regime’s cowardice and perfidy, giving Morse a second glimpse of revolutionary strife. One day in the early fall of 1831 he saw shops closing down, troops assembling, cavalry on the move. People quietly filled the streets as if expecting a parade, in defiance of police notices advising them to disband. That night the tense mood erupted. On the boulevard de la Madeleine near his house, Morse watched a crowd surge toward the gates of the hotel of General Sebastiani, Louis-Philippe’s minister of foreign affairs. Trampling horses and a corps of gendarmes approached to scatter the rioters, helmets glittering in the streetlights, swords drawn: “orders were given for the charge,” he recorded, “and in an instant they dashed down the street, the people dispersing like the mist before the wind.” His fear that blood would eventually flow was realized a few weeks later with the killing of about thirty people in an uprising near the Palais-Royal.
Morse became an active sympathizer with the cause of Polish independence. He joined the American Polish Committee that met Wednesday nights at Cooper’s apartments. Among other responses to the crisis the committee raised $6000 in the United States for the relief of the many Poles exiled in Paris. Morse did his part by investigating the financial prospects of a group of exiles who wished to emigrate to America, perhaps to found a colony in Ohio. He also went with Cooper to see Minister William Rives, hoping to obtain the release of the committee’s chairman, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe of Boston.