exempted from the jurisdiction of these new tribunals. That is, those
persons are exempted from the power of the laws who ought to be the most
entirely submitted to them. Those who execute public pecuniary trusts
ought of all men to be the most strictly held to their duty. One would
have thought that it must have been among your earliest cares, if you
did not mean that those administrative bodies should be real, sovereign,
independent states, to form an awful tribunal, like your late
parliaments, or like our King's Bench, where all corporate officers
might obtain protection in the legal exercise of their functions, and
would find coercion, if they trespassed against their legal duty. But
the cause of the exemption is plain. These administrative bodies are the
great instruments of the present leaders in their progress through
democracy to oligarchy. They must therefore be put above the law. It
will be said that the legal tribunals which you have made are unfit to
coerce them. They are, undoubtedly. They are unfit for any rational
purpose. It will be said, too, that the administrative bodies will be
accountable to the general Assembly. This, I fear, is talking without
much consideration of the nature of that Assembly or of these
corporations. However, to be subject to the pleasure of that Assembly is
not to be subject to law, either for protection or for constraint.
This establishment of judges as yet wants something to its completion.
It is to be crowned by a new tribunal. This is to be a grand state
judicature; and it is to judge of crimes committed against the nation,
that is, against the power of the Assembly. It seems as if they had
something in their view of the nature of the high court of justice
erected in England during the time of the great usurpation. As they have
not yet finished this part of the scheme, it is impossible to form a
direct judgment upon it. However, if great care is not taken to form it
in a spirit very different from that which has guided them in their
proceedings relative to state offences, this tribunal, subservient to
their inquisition, _the Committee of Research_, will extinguish the last
sparks of liberty in France, and settle the most dreadful and arbitrary
tyranny ever known in any nation. If they wish to give to this tribunal
any appearance of liberty and justice, they must not evoke from or send
to it the causes relative to their own members, at their pleasure. They
must also remove the seat of that tribunal out of the republic of
Paris.[126]
Has more wisdom been displayed in the constitution of your army than
what is discoverable in your plan of judicature? The able arrangement of
this part is the more difficult, and requires the greater skill and
attention, not only as a great concern in itself, but as it is the third
cementing principle in the new body of republics which you call the
French nation. Truly, it is not easy to divine what that army may become
at last. You have voted a very large one, and on good appointments, at
least fully equal to your apparent means of payment. But what is the
principle of its discipline? or whom is it to obey? You have got the
wolf by the ears, and I wish you joy of the happy position in which you
have chosen to place yourselves, and in which you are well circumstanced
for a free deliberation relatively to that army, or to anything else.
The minister and secretary of state for the War Department is M. de La
Tour du Pin. This gentleman, like his colleagues in administration, is a
most zealous assertor of the Revolution, and a sanguine admirer of the
new Constitution which originated in that event. His statement of facts
relative to the military of France is important, not only from his
official and personal authority, but because it displays very clearly
the actual condition of the army in France, and because it throws light
on the principles upon which the Assembly proceeds in the administration
of this critical object. It may enable us to form some judgment how far
it may be expedient in this country to imitate the martial policy of
France.
M. de La Tour du Pin, on the fourth of last June, comes to give an
account of the state of his department, as it exists under the auspices
of the National Assembly. No man knows it so well; no man can express it
better. Addressing himself to the National Assembly, he says,--
"His Majesty has _this day_ sent me to apprise you of the multiplied
disorders of which _every day_ he receives the most distressing
intelligence. The army [_le corps militaire_] threatens to fall into the
most turbulent anarchy. Entire regiments have dared to violate at once
the respect due to the laws, to the king, to the order established by
your decrees, and to the oaths which they have taken with the most awful
solemnity. Compelled by my duty to give you information of these
excesses, my heart bleeds, when I consider who they are that have
committed them. Those against whom it is not in my power to withhold the
most grievous complaints are a part of that very soldiery which to this
day have been so full of honor and loyalty, and with whom for fifty
years I have lived the comrade and the friend.
"What incomprehensible spirit of delirium and delusion has all at once
led them astray? Whilst you are indefatigable in establishing uniformity
in the empire and moulding the whole into one coherent and consistent
body, whilst the French are taught by you at once the respect which the
laws owe to the rights of man and that which the citizens owe to the
laws, the administration of the army presents nothing but disturbance
and confusion. I see in more than one corps the bonds of discipline
relaxed or broken,--the most unheard-of pretensions avowed directly and
without any disguise,--the ordinances without force,--the chiefs without
authority,--the military chest and the colors carried off,--the
authority of the king himself [_risum teneatis_] proudly defied,--the
officers despised, degraded, threatened, driven away, and some of them
prisoners in the midst of their corps, dragging on a precarious life in
the bosom of disgust and humiliation. To fill up the measure of all
these horrors, the commandants of places have had their throats out
under the eyes and almost in the arms of their own soldiers.
"These evils are great; but they are not the worst consequences which
may be produced by such military insurrections. Sooner or later they may
menace the nation itself. _The nature of things requires_ that the army
should never act but as _an instrument_. The moment that, erecting
itself into a deliberate body, it shall act according to its own
resolutions, _the government, be it what it may, will immediately
degenerate into a military democracy_: a species of political monster
which has always ended by devouring those who have produced it.
"After all this, who must not be alarmed at the irregular consultations
and turbulent committees formed in some regiments by the common soldiers
and non-commissioned officers, without the knowledge, or even in
contempt of the authority, of their superiors?--although the presence
and concurrence of those superiors could give no authority to such
monstrous democratic assemblies [_comices_]."
It is not necessary to add much to this finished picture,--finished as
far as its canvas admits, but, as I apprehend, not taking in the whole
of the nature and complexity of the disorders of this military
democracy, which, the minister at war truly and wisely observes,
wherever it exists, must be the true constitution of the state, by
whatever formal appellation it may pass. For, though he informs the
Assembly that the more considerable part of the army have not cast off
their obedience, but are still attached to their duty, yet those
travellers who have seen the corps whose conduct is the best rather
observe in them the absence of mutiny than the existence of discipline.
I cannot help pausing here for a moment, to reflect upon the expressions
of surprise which this minister has let fall relative to the excesses he
relates. To him the departure of the troops from their ancient
principles of loyalty and honor seems quite inconceivable. Surely those
to whom he addresses himself know the causes of it but too well. They
know the doctrines which they have preached, the decrees which they have
passed, the practices which they have countenanced. The soldiers
remember the sixth of October. They recollect the French guards. They
have not forgot the taking of the king's castles in Paris and at
Marseilles. That the governors in both places were murdered with
impunity is a fact that has not passed out of their minds. They do not
abandon the principles, laid down so ostentatiously and laboriously, of
the equality of men. They cannot shut their eyes to the degradation of
the whole noblesse of France, and the suppression of the very idea of a
gentleman. The total abolition of titles and distinctions is not lost
upon them. But M. du Pin is astonished at their disloyalty, when the
doctors of the Assembly have taught them at the same time the respect
due to laws. It is easy to judge which of the two sorts of lessons men
with arms in their hands are likely to learn. As to the authority of the
king, we may collect from the minister himself (if any argument on that
head were not quite superfluous) that it is not of more consideration
with these troops than it is with everybody else. "The king," says he,
"has over and over again repeated his orders to put a stop to these
excesses; but in so terrible a crisis, _your_ [the Assembly's]
concurrence is become indispensably necessary to prevent the evils which
menace the state. _You_ unite to the force of the legislative power
_that of opinion_, still more important." To be sure, the army can have
no opinion of the power or authority of the king. Perhaps the soldier
has by this time learned, that the Assembly itself does not enjoy a much
greater degree of liberty than that royal figure.
It is now to be seen what has been proposed in this exigency, one of the
greatest that can happen in a state. The minister requests the Assembly
to array itself in all its terrors, and to call forth all its majesty.
He desires that the grave and severe principles announced by them may
give vigor to the king's proclamation. After this we should have looked
for courts civil and martial, breaking of some corps, decimating of
others, and all the terrible means which necessity has employed in such
cases to arrest the progress of the most terrible of all evils;
particularly, one might expect that a serious inquiry would be made into
the murder of commandants in the view of their soldiers. Not one word of
all this, or of anything like it. After they had been told that the
soldiery trampled upon the decrees of the Assembly promulgated by the
king, the Assembly pass new decrees, and they authorize the king to make
new proclamations. After the secretary at war had stated that the
regiments had paid no regard to oaths, _prêtés avec la plus imposante
solennité_, they propose--what? More oaths. They renew decrees and
proclamations as they experience their insufficiency, and they multiply
oaths in proportion as they weaken in the minds of men the sanctions of
religion. I hope that handy abridgments of the excellent sermons of
Voltaire, D'Alembert, Diderot, and Helvétius, on the Immortality of the
Soul, on a Particular Superintending Providence, and on a Future State
of Rewards and Punishments, are sent down to the soldiers along with
their civic oaths. Of this I have no doubt; as I understand that a
certain description of reading makes no inconsiderable part of their
military exercises, and that they are full as well supplied with the
ammunition of pamphlets as of cartridges.
To prevent the mischiefs arising from conspiracies, irregular
consultations, seditious committees, and monstrous democratic assemblies
[_comitia, comices_] of the soldiers, and all the disorders arising from
idleness, luxury, dissipation, and insubordination, I believe the most
astonishing means have been used that ever occurred to men, even in all
the inventions of this prolific age. It is no less than this:--The king
has promulgated in circular letters to all the regiments his direct
authority and encouragement, that the several corps should join
themselves with the clubs and confederations in the several
municipalities, and mix with them in their feasts and civic
entertainments! This jolly discipline, it seems, is to soften the
ferocity of their minds, to reconcile them to their bottle companions of
other descriptions, and to merge particular conspiracies in more general
associations.[127] That this remedy would be pleasing to the soldiers,
as they are described by M. de La Tour du Pin, I can readily
believe,--and that, however mutinous otherwise, they will dutifully
submit themselves to _these_ royal proclamations. But I should question
whether all this civic swearing, clubbing, and feasting would dispose
them, more than at present they are disposed, to an obedience to their
officers, or teach them better to submit to the austere rules of
military discipline. It will make them admirable citizens after the
French mode, but not quite so good soldiers after any mode. A doubt
might well arise, whether the conversations at these good tables would
fit them a great deal the better for the character of _mere
instruments_, which this veteran officer and statesman justly observes
the nature of things always requires an army to be.
Concerning the likelihood of this improvement in discipline by the free
conversation of the soldiers with the municipal festive societies, which
is thus officially encouraged by royal authority and sanction, we may
judge by the state of the municipalities themselves, furnished to us by
the war minister in this very speech. He conceives good hopes of the
success of his endeavors towards restoring order _for the present_ from
the good disposition of certain regiments; but he finds something cloudy
with regard to the future. As to preventing the return of confusion,
"for this the administration" (says he) "cannot be answerable to you, as
long as they see the municipalities arrogate to themselves an authority
over the troops which your institutions have reserved wholly to the
monarch. You have fixed the limits of the military authority and the
municipal authority. You have bounded the action which you have
permitted to the latter over the former to the right of requisition; but
never did the letter or the spirit of your decrees authorize the commons
in these municipalities to break the officers, to try them, to give
orders to the soldiers, to drive them from the posts committed to their
guard, to stop them in their marches ordered by the king, or, in a word,
to enslave the troops to the caprice of each of the cities or even
market-towns through which they are to pass."
Such is the character and disposition of the municipal society which is
to reclaim the soldiery, to bring them back to the true principles of
military subordination, and to lender them machines in the hands of the
supreme power of the country! Such are the distempers of the French
troops! Such is their cure! As the army is, so is the navy. The
municipalities supersede the orders of the Assembly, and the seamen in
their turn supersede the orders of the municipalities. From my heart I
pity the condition of a respectable servant of the public, like this war
minister, obliged in his old age to pledge the Assembly in their civic
cups, and to enter with a hoary head into all the fantastic vagaries of
these juvenile politicians. Such schemes are not like propositions
coming from a man of fifty years' wear and tear amongst mankind. They
seem rather such as ought to be expected from those grand compounders in
politics who shorten the road to their degrees in the state, and have a
certain inward fanatical assurance and illumination upon all
subjects,--upon the credit of which, one of their doctors has thought
fit, with great applause, and greater success, to caution the Assembly
not to attend to old men, or to any persons who value themselves upon
their experience. I suppose all the ministers of state must qualify, and
take this test,--wholly abjuring the errors and heresies of experience
and observation. Every man has his own relish; but I think, if I could
not attain to the wisdom, I would at least preserve something of the
stiff and peremptory dignity of age. These gentlemen deal in
regeneration: but at any price I should hardly yield my rigid fibres to
be regenerated by them,--nor begin, in my grand climacteric, to squall
in their new accents, or to stammer, in my second cradle, the elemental
sounds of their barbarous metaphysics.[128] _Si isti mihi largiantur ut
repuerascam, et in eorum cunis vagiam, valde recusem!_
The imbecility of any part of the puerile and pedantic system which they
call a Constitution cannot be laid open without discovering the utter
insufficiency and mischief of every other part with which it comes in
contact, or that bears any the remotest relation to it. You cannot
propose a remedy for the incompetence of the crown, without displaying
the debility of the Assembly. You cannot deliberate on the confusion of
the army of the state, without disclosing the worse disorders of the
armed municipalities. The military lays open the civil, and the civil
betrays the military anarchy. I wish everybody carefully to peruse the
eloquent speech (such it is) of Mons. de La Tour du Pin. He attributes
the salvation of the municipalities to the good behavior of some of the
troops. These troops are to preserve the well-disposed part of the
municipalities, which is confessed to be the weakest, from the pillage
of the worst disposed, which is the strongest. But the municipalities
affect a sovereignty, and will command those troops which are necessary
for their protection. Indeed, they must command them or court them. The
municipalities, by the necessity of their situation, and by the
republican powers they have obtained, must, with relation to the
military, be the masters, or the servants, or the confederates, or each
successively, or they must make a jumble of all together, according to
circumstances. What government is there to coerce the army but the
municipality, or the municipality but the army? To preserve concord
where authority is extinguished, at the hazard of all consequences, the
Assembly attempts to cure the distempers by the distempers themselves;
and they hope to preserve themselves from a purely military democracy by
giving it a debauched interest in the municipal.
If the soldiers once come to mix for any time in the municipal clubs,
cabals, and confederacies, an elective attraction will draw them to the
lowest and most desperate part. With them will be their habits,
affections, and sympathies. The military conspiracies which are to be
remedied by civic confederacies, the rebellious municipalities which are
to be rendered obedient by furnishing them with the means of seducing
the very armies of the state that are to keep them in order,--all these
chimeras of a monstrous and portentous policy must aggravate the
confusion from which they have arisen. There must be blood. The want of
common judgment manifested in the construction of all their descriptions
of forces, and in all their kinds of civil and judicial authorities,
will make it flow. Disorders may be quieted in one time and in one
part. They will break out in others; because the evil is radical and
intrinsic. All these schemes of mixing mutinous soldiers with seditious
citizens must weaken still more and more the military connection of
soldiers with their officers, as well as add military and mutinous
audacity to turbulent artificers and peasants. To secure a real army,
the officer should be first and last in the eye of the soldier,--first
and last in his attention, observance, and esteem. Officers, it seems,
there are to be, whose chief qualification must be temper and patience.
They are to manage their troops by electioneering arts. They must bear
themselves as candidates, not as commanders. But as by such means power
may be occasionally in their hands, the authority by which they are to
be nominated becomes of high importance.
What you may do finally does not appear: nor is it of much moment,
whilst the strange and contradictory relation between your army and all
the parts of your republic, as well as the puzzled relation of those
parts to each other and to the whole, remain as they are. You seem to
have given the provisional nomination of the officers, in the first
instance, to the king, with a reserve of approbation by the National
Assembly. Men who have an interest to pursue are extremely sagacious in
discovering the true seat of power. They must soon perceive that those
who can negative indefinitely in reality appoint. The officers must
therefore look to their intrigues in the Assembly as the sole certain
road to promotion. Still, however, by your new Constitution, they must
begin their solicitation at court. This double negotiation for military
rank seems to me a contrivance, as well adapted as if it were studied
for no other end, to promote faction in the Assembly itself relative to
this vast military patronage,--and then to poison the corps of officers
with factions of a nature still more dangerous to the safety of
government, upon any bottom on which it can be placed, and destructive
in the end to the efficacy of the army itself. Those officers who lose
the promotions intended for them by the crown must become of a faction
opposite to that of the Assembly which has rejected their claims, and
must nourish discontents in the heart of the army against the ruling
powers. Those officers, on the other hand, who, by carrying their point
through an interest in the Assembly, feel themselves to be at best only
second in the good-will of the crown, though first in that of the
Assembly, must slight an authority which would not advance and could not
retard their promotion. If, to avoid these evils, you will have no other
rule for command or promotion than seniority, you will have an army of
formality; at the same time it will become more independent and more of
a military republic. Not they, but the king is the machine. A king is
not to be deposed by halves. If he is not everything in the command of
an army, he is nothing. What is the effect of a power placed nominally
at the head of the army, who to that army is no object of gratitude or
of fear? Such a cipher is not fit for the administration of an object of
all things the most delicate, the supreme command of military men. They
must be constrained (and their inclinations lead them to what their
necessities require) by a real, vigorous, effective, decided, personal
authority. The authority of the Assembly itself suffers by passing
through such a debilitating channel as they have chosen. The army will
not long look to an Assembly acting through the organ of false show and
palpable imposition. They will not seriously yield obedience to a
prisoner. They will either despise a pageant, or they will pity a
captive king. This relation of your army to the crown will, if I am not
greatly mistaken, become a serious dilemma in your politics.