Armand Carrel is unanimously recognized as Courier's worthy successor. Both were officers, both self-taught, both left the army for the pen, both retained a kind of discipline of indiscipline; both are among the patron saints of the Third Republic.
Carrel, who was born in 1800, was a contemporary of the great Romantic generation; his death in a duel with Émile de Girardin, head of La Presse, a newspaper that was Carrel's rival to Le National, helped establish his myth. Admired by his collaborators and adversaries alike, he was a "soldier-poet", a French Byron. Littré, his first biographer, said that his whole life fell between these two appellations, the second lieutenant and the journalist. Chateaubriand, criticizing the Restoration for failing to give Carrel a role, found him military in his practice as a journalist, since he was a journalist for want of becoming the great military man he was meant to be.
Like Vigny, Carrel was a soldier who came too late. Raised in the high schools of the Empire, in admiration of the Grande Armée, he entered Saint-Cyr in 1811, ill-tempered and undisciplined. In Verdun, where he soon found himself second lieutenant in an infantry regiment, he frequented reading rooms and read "bad newspapers", making his first contacts with the charcoal industry and secret societies. He began a lasting relationship with Émilie Antoine, his captain's wife, with whom he fought a duel in 1823. His life as a young man is reminiscent of Lucien Leuwen, invented by Stendhal at the height of Carrel's fame. The years 1821-1824 were marked by military conspiracies, including the resounding affair of the four sergeants of La Rochelle, guillotined in the Place de Grève for plotting a coup against the monarchy. Carrel himself was involved in a conspiracy in Belfort, but was not detected. His battalion was sent to Marseille to be brought into line.
Carrel was discharged on March 18, 1823, just before his battalion was sent to Spain in support of the Carlist monarchy, in accordance with Chateaubriand's wishes as minister. Embarked on a fishing boat, he joined the Spanish Constitutionalists in the Foreign Legion. Under the tricolor flag and the Napoleonic eagle, he fought against his compatriots in the Restoration army.
Paradoxically, Chateaubriand admired Carrel. Even before he met him, he quoted in the preface to his Études historiques the article Carrel had written in 1828 on the Spanish War. The two men met and became friends. Chateaubriand recognized himself in him: Carrel was also, in his own way, the man of a cause lost in advance, the man of fidelity to a past.
In Figueras in September 1823, Carrel was responsible for negotiating the surrender of the Foreign Legion with General de Damas, who promised to ask for his pardon. Carrel was nevertheless tried by a council of war which declared itself incompetent, since he had left the ranks of the French army before going to Spain. The verdict was reviewed once, and Carrel was sentenced to death. In the meantime, he took advantage of his incarceration to read and make his first stand against the Restoration.
He became secretary to the historian Augustin Thierry, and completed the manuscript of his Histoire de la conquête d'Angleterre par les Normands. Especially in 1827, Carrel publishedHistoire de la contre-révolution en Angleterre sous Charles II et Jacques II, his first book and a veritable pamphlet against the Restoration, in the guise of a history book. Carrel wanted to delegitimize Charles X, to substitute what he called "consensual kingship", i.e. the line of Orléans, for legitimate kingship. He asserted himself as the proponent of a liberal line, against reference to divine right. However, Carrel was not a revolutionary: in 1830, he remained aloof from events, although he welcomed them afterwards. He defended the Charter rather than the sovereignty of the people.
Thiers, Mignet and Carrel founded Le National in 1830, but after the events of July, Carrel became its sole director.
