Guizot was certainly not a man of violence. He was a pacific minister of the regime which, of all those that ruled France in the nineteenth century, was the least concerned with ‘la gloire’. Louis-Philippe, the bourgeois king who preferred an umbrella to a sword, was long and well served by Guizot, who reversed Thiers’ policy of tweaking the tail of the British lion and produced the most famous summons to the arms of mammon that has ever been heard in the hemicycle of the Palais Bourbon. ‘Messieurs,’ he told the assembled deputies of 1843, ‘enrichissez-vous.’ Put in its context the remark was not nearly as materialistically self-seeking as it sounds, and Guizot never made much money for himself. Nevertheless, as a political leader he had more than a touch of Neville Chamberlain about him.
Yet outside politics there were sides to him that were well beyond the life and style of the man of Munich from Birmingham. Guizot was a savant, a slightly reluctant figure of fashion, but the far-from-reluctant lover for twenty years of the exhibitionist Princesse de Lieven, and in general a writer of letters to women on a scale that fully rivalled Asquith. To combine this with a reputation for gravitas which put him closer to Gladstone and a literary output that exceeded that of any nineteenth-century politician of either side of the Channel made Guizot a very remarkable man. Hippolyte Taine, whose historical judgement is not negligible, placed him with Balzac, Stendhal, Sainte-Beuve and Renan as one of the ‘five writers and thinkers who, since Montesquieu, have most added to the knowledge of human nature.’ He was a member of the Académie Française for the massive span of forty years, and during this period, on top of his seven years as Louis-Philippe’s first minister, he poured out his multi-volume historical works: six on the English Civil War, eight of his own memoirs, four of a history of France, another three of which were edited by his daughter after his death.
Guizot had two wives, the first twelve years older than himself, the second her niece. They were both dead, each time to his great dismay, by the time he was forty-five. Four years later, in the midst of other more exclusively epistolatory relationships, he began his very public and wildly unsuitable liaison with Dorothea de Lieven. It was unsuitable not least because he soon became a sober-sided minister of foreign affairs and she tried to be the greatest political intriguer in Europe. It was public in Paris, where he visited her house twice a day and even conducted diplomatic interviews there. But it was private, although hardly secret, in relation to his family. He spent a lot of time at a Normandy property called Val-Richer, which he acquired almost at the time he acquired her and which became almost synonymous with his name. She was only allowed to pay one morning call there. Nor was she allowed in London when he was ambassador here.
Altogether he was a strange and rewarding man, and it is not surprising that, right through to his death in 1874, he was the favourite port of call for British politicians passing through Paris. A visit to him was almost as obligatory for a would-be statesman of intellectual tastes as was a large luncheon at the Café Anglais for the Prince of Wales. And the fare that he provided, while not as rich, was more than adequately sustaining.
Nigel Lawson
This was a 1992 Sunday Telegraph review of Nigel Lawson’s ministerial memoirs The View from No. 11 (Bantam).
This Monstrous and self-obsessed book is only partially redeemed by the intelligence of the author and by his retention of a certain writing craft, which could not, however, be called art because of a lack of both overall proportion and of any positive stylistic qualities beyond that of lucidity. One may search in vain for (intentional) jokes, or for evocative writing, or for shafts of insight into the character of himself or others.
It is a long search, for we have over a thousand pages on Lord Lawson’s ten ministerial years. There are eighty chapters, a number I have rarely seen exceeded in any book other than a Victorian ‘three-decker’ novel. And The View from No. 11 does not have quite the narrative compulsion of, say, Middlemarch or Can You Forgive Her?
Memoirs or autobiographies are of course by their nature fairly solipsistic. But Nigel Lawson goes beyond the habitual bounds of egocentricity, as is illustrated in two ways. First, the photographs. In an autobiography, these necessarily include a good number of the author himself, but variety is normally sought by changing the background and the companions as much as possible. Lawson, per contra, specializes in close-ups of his own features. One page contains four different versions of the familiar countenance. I was reminded irresistibly of a long-defunct confectionary product known as Fry’s Five Boys Chocolate Bars. Each wrapping was covered in five munching faces, all displaying varying aspects of self-satisfaction.