This paradoxical result sprang from several causes, some of them of a general nature, others due to party considerations, while the personal influence of one man perhaps turned the balance at this crisis in the history of France. We will consider them in the order here named.
Stating the matter broadly, we may say that the present Assembly was not competent to decide on the future constitution of France; and that vague but powerful instinct, which guides representative bodies in such cases, told against any avowedly partisan effort in that direction. The deputies were fully aware that they were elected to decide the urgent question of peace or war, either to rescue France from her long agony, or to pledge the last drops of her life-blood in an affair of honour. By an instinct of self-preservation, the electors, especially in the country districts, turned to the men of property and local influence as those who were most likely to save them from the frothy followers of Gambetta. Accordingly, local magnates were preferred to the barristers and pressmen, whose oratorical and literary gifts usually carry the day in France; and more than 200 noblemen were elected. They were chosen not on account of their nobility and royalism, but because they were certain to vote against the _fou furieux_.
Then, too, the Royalists knew very well that time would be required to accustom France to the idea of a King, and to adjust the keen rivalries between the older and the younger branches of the Bourbon House. Furthermore, they were anxious that the odium of signing a disastrous peace should fall on the young Republic, not on the monarch of the future. Just as the great Napoleon in 1814 was undoubtedly glad that the giving up of Belgium and the Rhine boundary should devolve on his successor, Louis XVIII., and counted on that as one of the causes undermining the restored monarchy, so now the Royalists intended to leave the disagreeable duty of ceding the eastern districts of France to the Republicans who had so persistently prolonged the struggle. The clamour of no small section of the Republican party for war _à outrance_ still played into the hands of the royalists and partly justified this narrow partisanship. Events, however, were to prove here, as in so many cases, that the party which undertook a pressing duty and discharged it manfully, gained more in the end than those who shirked responsibility and left the conduct of affairs to their opponents. Men admire those who dauntlessly pluck the flower, safety, out of the nettle, danger.