Lucien de Rubempré joins the royalist press

Lucien de Rubempré joins the royalist press in a shift that makes his political allegiance part of his pursuit of social advancement. Encouraged by Coralie, he becomes a named collaborator of Le Réveil, a royalist newspaper intended to answer the liberal press. The move promises access to power and the countship of Rubempré, but it also exposes the contradiction between Lucien’s former journalism and the position he now adopts.

The political opening

After an evening that has stirred new ideas in Lucien, he finds Coralie waiting for him in her carriage. He tells her what has happened, and is surprised when she approves of his thinking and urges him to enlist under the ministerial banner. Her advice is practical: she sees little to gain from the Liberals, whom she describes as conspiratorial and incapable of overthrowing the government, and much to gain by joining the other side. In her reckoning, royalist service could help Lucien become count of Rubempré, win appointment as a peer of France, and marry a wealthy woman.

Coralie presents these prospects as reasons to act before the political balance changes. She has heard from Madame du Val-Noble that Théodore Gaillard is establishing a small royalist newspaper, Le Réveil, to answer the jokes made by Lucien’s paper and The Mirror. She also reports the expectation that Villèle and his party will enter the Ministry within a year. Her counsel is to join while the royalists are still out of office, and to keep the plan from Étienne Lousteau and Lucien’s other friends, who might frustrate it. Political allegiance thus appears to her not as a settled conviction but as a chance to get ahead of a shift in power.

A choice challenged by friendship

Eight days later, Lucien visits Madame de Montcornet and sees Louise again. His divided attention between Louise and Coralie leaves him unable to choose between them; Louise, who has begun to feel love for him again, leaves with a desire for revenge. This episode places the royalist turn amid Lucien’s competing desires, but his friends soon confront the political decision directly.

Daniel d’Arthez arrives with Léon Giraud and Michel Chrestien. They have learned what Lucien intends and come from Rue de Vendôme to dissuade him. Daniel says that in other circumstances he would welcome Lucien’s adoption of his political convictions, but that after writing for liberal newspapers Lucien cannot move into the Ultra ranks without staining his character and compromising his life. Lucien has attacked the Romantics, the Right, and the government; in Daniel’s view, he cannot now defend those same forces. Their objection is not simply that they disagree with his new politics: they see the change as incompatible with the work and positions he has already made public.

Lucien answers that his reasons belong to a higher order of thought and that the end will justify everything. Léon then widens the argument beyond personal consistency. He says that the government, the Court, the Bourbons, and the absolutist party—despite divisions over how to suppress the Revolution—agree on the need to suppress the press. The foundation of royalist papers such as Le Réveil, La Foudre, and The White Flag is part of a response to liberal press attacks, but the political project behind them alarms the friends. Their appeal fails: they leave without offering Lucien a friendly hand, and he is briefly pensive and sad.

Public enlistment

Coralie dismisses the friends’ seriousness and renews the promise that a title can be obtained. She even offers to use her influence at the Chancellery, saying she knows how to approach des Lupeaulx, who could arrange for Lucien’s decree to be signed. Her encouragement joins intimate devotion to political calculation: she is prepared to make herself useful to his ambition, while treating the friends’ scruples as an obstacle to the life they might secure.

The next day, Lucien allows his name to be listed among the collaborators of Le Réveil. The prospectus announces his name as a conquest and is distributed in one hundred thousand copies through the Ministry’s efforts. What had been a private plan is now a conspicuous public alignment. Lucien attends a nine-hour triumphant dinner at Robert’s, near Frascati, among leading figures of the royalist press, including Martinville, Auger, and Destains. The gathering welcomes him into a camp whose writers, in the phrase reported by the narrator, made monarchy and religion their cause.

The cost and significance of the turn

At the modest home he shares with Coralie, Lucien insists that their financial and social collapse must remain unknown. He says they still have four thousand five hundred francs and that he will exploit his new position in the royalist newspapers: the following day, he says, they will inaugurate Le Réveil, and he now knows journalism well enough to make a success of it. Coralie hears love in his words and kisses him. The scene connects the press appointment to immediate material anxiety, but also shows how differently the pair understand it: Lucien speaks of professional opportunity and money, while Coralie responds to the intimacy of his promise.

The enlistment therefore brings together three forms of calculation: Coralie’s expectation of title and marriage prospects, Lucien’s hope of using journalism to recover his position, and the Ministry’s support for a newspaper campaign against the liberal press. The friends’ warning establishes the moral and political price of the move: Lucien is not entering the royalist press without a past, but carrying with him the attacks that make his new allegiance appear inconsistent. By joining Le Réveil publicly and accepting the royalist gathering’s welcome, he turns a proposed change of sides into a defining rupture with the circle that had tried to stop him.