After the Trois Glorieuses, Armand Carrel made amends and admitted he hadn't understood the events. Remaining sole director of Le National - Thiers and Mignet had been called up to other duties - Carrel quickly clarified his line: it was more important than ever that Le National existed, since it was his line that had suddenly taken hold, but his new director would be careful not to let it become a ministerial paper. The journalist, with his articles, is far more formidable than any other opponent of the powers that be, as Stendhal recalls in the dialogues of Lucien Leuwen.
The bond of identification is strong between the National and Carrel, who threatens all his political opponents with a duel. In his pages, Carrel displays all his military élan: in the service of freedom of the press; against the civil list; against Casimir-Perier, President of the Council from March 1831; against the plan to build a fort at Montmartre; above all, against heredity in the Chamber of Peers, the abolition of which in October 1831 was his great victory.
At the beginning of 1832, Carrel definitively broke away from the regime and declared himself a republican, with the American rather than the English model in mind. But he had an authoritarian idea of the Republic, and this liberal, who dreamed of being "a prefect of police for twenty-four hours to bring everyone to their senses", seemed somewhat paradoxical. His military ethos deprived him of any insight into the revolutions in lecture.
His relations with other Republicans were conflictual. La Tribune criticized him for his condescending, professorial tone; he was the first incarnation of an intellectual aristocracy. Carrel was in favor of decentralization, like the Legitimists, and against the Jacobin Republicans. A detractor of sentimental republicanism, he advocated a republicanism of reason, chosen by those whom the force of events and the succession of regimes had made republican. At a time when the girouettes were being denounced, Carrel praised them: they were people who had put the sense of the State above the notion of regime. In prison at Sainte-Pélagie, Carrel refused to commemorate January 21, the date of Louis XVI's death: he drew the wrath of his fellow Republicans.
Littré and Nisard were instrumental in transforming Carrel into a willing and loyal republican saint. He is the hero of republican morality, the moral standard of the opposition press. For example, he wrote a famous article in defense of the Spanish Basque leader Zumalacarregui, whose ideas he did not share. He was also a close friend of Chateaubriand, whose pamphlets he published in the columns of Le National. Carrel reports on his trial after his Mémoire sur la captivité deMme la duchesse de Berry and defends him in the name of freedom of the press; he greets him as he leaves the court, which acquits him. In his diary, he reproduces the first extracts to appear from Mémoires d'outre-tombe.
From 1832 onwards, Le National was the subject of an ever-increasing number of legal proceedings, led by the prosecutor Persil. Trials for press offenses were heard by the assize courts: Carrel defended himself before the juries, and always won his acquittal. In January 1832, Casimir-Perier's ministry reintroduced preventive arrest for press offenses: Carrel explicitly called for resistance and won the case against him, as well as another following the June 1832 uprisings. The Ministry changed its angle of attack: it used a subtlety in the 1822 law punishing the infidelity and bad faith of newspapers reporting on Chamber and court hearings. For such crimes, the Chambers are authorized to act as sole judges as well as parties, without a jury. This is an explicit attempt to muzzle the opposition press. After the pistol shot case against Louis-Philippe, the National was forbidden to report on trials for two years, which threatened to undermine its economic equilibrium. Carrel appealed for as long as he could, transforming the National into the National of 1834 to postpone the deadline until it could be decided whether or not it was the same newspaper. On August 30, 1834, the soap opera came to an end: Carrel lost and was sentenced to six months' imprisonment in Sainte-Pélagie.
