_Louis XVI.--The Great Revolution--Fall of the Monarchy_
Crowned vice was now succeeded by crowned folly. The grandson of Louis
XV., a well-meaning but weak and foolish youth, and his thoughtless,
pleasure-loving queen, were confronted by state problems that would
have taxed the genius of a Richelieu in the maturity of his powers.
Injustice, misery, oppression, discontent, were clamant and almost
universal; taxes had doubled since the death of Louis XIV.; there were
30,000 beggars in Paris alone, and from 720,000 in 1700 the population
had in 1784 decreased to 620,000. The penal code was of inhuman
ferocity; law was complicated, ruinous and partial, and national
credit so low that loans could be obtained only against material
pledges and at interest five times as great as that paid by England.
Wealthy bishops and abbots[157] and clergy, noblesse and royal
officials, were wholly exempt from the main incidents of taxation; for
personal and land taxes, tithes and forced labour, were exacted from
the common people alone. No liberty of worship, nor of thought:
Protestants were condemned to the galleys by hundreds; booksellers met
the same fate. Authors and books were arbitrarily sent by _lettres de
cachet_ to the Bastille or Vincennes. Yet in spite of all repression,
a generation of daring, witty, emancipated thinkers in Paris was
elaborating a weapon of scientific, rationalistic and liberal doctrine
that cut at the very roots of the old _regime_. "I care not whether a
man is good or bad," says the Deity in Blake's prophetic books, "all I
care, is whether he is a wise man or a fool." While France was in
travail of the palingenesis of the modern world, the futile king was
trifling with his locks and keys and colouring maps, the queen playing
at shepherdesses at Trianon or performing before courtiers, officers
and equerries the _roles_ of Rosina in the _Barbier de Seville_ and of
Colette in the _Devin du Village_, the latter composed by the
democratic philosopher, whose _Contrat Social_ was to prove the Gospel
of the Revolution.[158] Jean Jacques Rousseau, the solitary,
self-centred Swiss engraver and musician, has described for us in
words that will bear translation how an ineffaceable impression of the
sufferings of the people was burnt into his memory, and the fire of an
unquenchable hatred of their oppressors was kindled in his breast.
Journeying on foot between Paris and Lyons, he was one day diverted
from his path by the beauty of the landscape, and wandered about,
seeking in vain to discover his way. "At length," he writes, "weary,
and dying of thirst and hunger, I entered a peasant's house, not a
very attractive one, but the only one I could see. I imagined that
here as in Switzerland every inhabitant of easy means would be able to
offer hospitality. I entered and begged that I might have dinner by
paying for it. The peasant handed me some skim milk and coarse barley
bread, saying that was all he had. The milk seemed delicious and I ate
the bread, straw and all, but it was not very satisfying to one
exhausted by fatigue. The man scrutinised me and judged by my
appetite the truth of the story I had told. Suddenly, after saying
that he perceived I was a good, honest youth and not there to spy upon
him, he opened a trap door, descended and returned speedily with some
good wheaten bread, a ham appetising but rather high, and a bottle of
wine which rejoiced my heart more than all the rest. He added a good
thick omelette and I enjoyed a dinner such as those alone who travel
on foot can know. When it came to paying, his anxiety and fears again
seized him; he would have none of my money and pushed it aside,
exceedingly troubled, nor could I imagine what he was afraid of. At
last he uttered with a shudder the terrible words, _commis, rats de
cave_" ("assessors, cellar rats"). He made me understand that he hid
the wine because of the _aides_,[159] and the bread because of the
_tailles_,[160] and that he would be a ruined man if it were supposed
that he was not dying of hunger. That man, although fairly well-off,
dared not eat the bread earned by the sweat of his brow, and could
only escape ruin by pretending to be as miserable as those he saw
around him. I issued forth from that house indignant as well as
affected, deploring the lot of that fair land where nature had
lavished all her gifts only to become the spoil of barbarous
tax-farmers (_publicans_)." And Voltaire, that implacable avenger of
injustice, in verse that rends the heart, has in _les Finances_,
(1775), pictured a peaceful home ruined; its inmates evicted to
misery, to the galleys and to death, by the cruel exactions of the
royal director of the _aides_ and _gabelles_, with his _sergents de la
finance habilles en guerriers_. The elder Mirabeau too has told how he
saw a bailiff cut off the hand of a peasant woman who had clung to her
kitchen utensils when distraint was made on her poor possessions for
dues exacted by the tax-farmers. In 1776 two poor starving wretches
were hanged on the gallows of the Place de Greve at Paris for having
stolen some bread from a baker's shop.
[Footnote 157: Taine estimates the revenues of thirty-three abbots in
terms of modern values at from 140,000 to 480,000 francs (L5,600 to
L19,200). Twenty-seven abbesses enjoyed revenues nearly as large.]
[Footnote 158: The score of Rousseau's opera is still preserved in the
Bibliotheque Nationale.]
[Footnote 159: The Excise duty.]
[Footnote 160: Personal and land-taxes paid by the humbler classes
alone.]
"But though the gods see clearly, they are slow
In marking when a man, despising them,
Turns from their worship to the scorn of fools."
Half a century had elapsed since that meal in the peasant's house when
the Nemesis that holds sleepless vigil over the affairs of men stirred
her pinions and, like a strong angel with glittering sword, prepared
to avenge the wrongs of a people whose rulers had outraged every law,
human and divine, by which human society is held together. King,
nobles, and prelates had a supreme and an awful choice. They might
have led and controlled the Revolution; they chose to oppose it, and
were broken into shivers as a potter's vessel.
After the memorable cannonade at Valmy, a knot of defeated German
officers gathered in rain and wind moodily around the circle where
they durst not kindle the usual camp-fire. In the morning the army had
talked of nothing but spitting and devouring the whole French nation:
in the evening everyone went about alone; nobody looked at his
neighbour, or if he did, it was but to curse and swear. "At last,"
says Goethe, "I was called upon to speak, for I had been wont to
enliven and amuse the troop with short sayings. This time I said,
'From this day forth, and from this place, a new era begins in the
history of the world and you can all say that you were present at its
birth.'" This is not the place to write the story of the French
Revolution. Those who would read the tremendous drama may be referred
to the pages of Carlyle. As a formal history, that work of
transcendent genius is open to criticism, especially on the score of
accuracy in detail. Indeed to the present writer the magnificent and
solemn prosody seems to partake of the nature of a Greek chorus--the
comment of an idealised spectator, assuming that the hearer has the
drama unfolding before his eyes. Recent researches have supplemented
and modified our knowledge. It is no longer possible to accept the
more revolting representations of the misery[161] of the French
peasantry as true of the whole of France, for France before the
Revolution was an assemblage of many provinces of varying social
conditions, subjected to varying administrative laws. Nor can we
accept Carlyle's portraiture of Robespierre as history, after Louis
Blanc's great work. So far from Robespierre having been the
bloodthirsty protagonist of the later Terror, it was precisely his
determination to make an end of the more savage excesses of the
extreme Terrorists and to chastise their more furious pro-consuls,
such as Carrier and Fouche, that brought about his ruin. It was men
like Collot d'Herbois, Billaud Varenne and Barrere, the bloodiest of
the Terrorists, who, to save their own heads, united to cast the odium
of the later excesses on Robespierre, and to overthrow him.[162] The
Thermidorians had no intention of staying the Terror and the actual
consequences of their success were wholly unexpected by them. But
whatever defects there be in Carlyle, his readers will at least
understand the significance of the Revolution, and why it is that the
terrible, but temporary excesses which stained its progress have been
so unduly magnified by reactionary politicians, while the cruelties of
the White Terror[163] are passed by.
[Footnote 161: It is difficult, however, to read the sober and
irrefutable picture of their miserable condition, given in the famous
Books II. and V. of Taine's _Ancien Regime_, without deep emotion.]
[Footnote 162: See also Bodley's _France_, where the author favours
the view that Robespierre was not a democrat with a thirst for blood,
but rather a man of government, destroyed as a reactionary by
surviving Revolutionists who saw their end coming.]
[Footnote 163: After the Thermidorian reaction in 1795, ninety-seven
Jacobins were massacred by the royalists at Lyons on 5th May; thirty
at Aix on 11th May. Similar horrors were enacted at Avignon, Arles,
and Marseilles, and at other places in the south.]
Camille Desmoulins has described in his Memoirs how on 11th July he
was lifted on the famous table, known as the tripod of the Revolution,
in front of the Cafe Foy, in the garden of the Palais Royal, and
delivered that short but pregnant oration which preceded the capture
of the Bastille on the 14th, warning the people that a St. Bartholomew
of patriots was contemplated, and that the Swiss and German troops in
the Champ de Mars were ready for the butchery. As the crowd rushed to
the Hotel de Ville, shouting "To arms!" they were charged by the
Prince de Lambesc at the head of a German regiment, and the first
blood of the Revolution in Paris was shed.
The Bastille, like the monarchy, was the victim of its past sins. That
grisly fortress, long useless as a defence of Paris, with the jaws of
its rusty cannon opening on the most populous quarter of the city to
overawe sedition, and its sinister memories of the Man in the Iron
Mask,[164] symbolised in the popular mind all that was hateful in the
old _regime_, though it had long ceased to be more than occasionally
used as a state prison. If we would restore its aspect we must imagine
the houses at the ends of the Rue St. Antoine and the Boulevard Henri
IV. away and the huge mass erect on their site and on the lines
marked in white stone on the present Place de la Bastille. A great
portal, always open by day, yawned on the Rue St. Antoine opposite the
Rue des Tournelles and gave access to the first quadrangle which was
lined with shops and the houses of the _personnel_ of the prison: then
came a second gate, with entrances for carriages and for foot
passengers, each with its drawbridge. Beyond these a second quadrangle
was entered, to the right of which stood the Governor's house and an
armoury. Another double portal to the left gave entrance across the
old fosse once fed by the waters of the Seine, to the prison fortress
itself, with its eight tall blackened towers, each divided into five
floors, and its crenelated ramparts.
[Footnote 164: A whole library has been written concerning the
identity of this famous prisoner. There is little doubt that the mask
was of velvet and not of iron, and that the mysterious captive who
died on 19th November 1703 in the Bastille, was Count Mattioli of
Bologna, who was secretly arrested for having betrayed the confidence
of Louis XIV.]
The Bastille, which in the time of the English rule, had seen as its
captains the Duke of Exeter, Falstaff, and invincible Talbot, was
first used in Richelieu's time as a permanent state prison, and filled
under Louis XIV. with Jansenists and Protestants, who were thus
separated from the prisoners of the common jails; and, later, under
Louis XV. by a whole population of obnoxious pamphleteers and
champions of philosophy. Books as well as their authors were
incarcerated, and released when considered no longer dangerous; the
tomes of famous _Encyclopedie_ spent some years there. From the middle
of the eighteenth century the horrible, dark and damp dungeons, half
underground and sometimes flooded, formerly inhabited by the lowest
type of criminals, were reserved as temporary cells for insubordinate
prisoners, and since the accession of Louis XIV. they were no more
used. The Bastille during the reigns of the three later Louis was the
most comfortable prison in Paris, and detention there rather than in
the other prisons was often sought for and granted as a favour; the
prisoners might furnish their rooms, and have their own libraries and
food. In the middle of the seventeenth century, certain rooms were
furnished at the king's expense for those who were without means. The
rooms were warmed, the prisoners well fed, and sums varying from three
to thirty-five francs per day, according to condition,[165] were
allotted for their maintenance. A considerable amount of personal
liberty was allowed to many and indemnities were in later years paid
to those who had been unjustly detained. But a prison where men are
confined indefinitely without trial and at a king's arbitrary pleasure
is none the less intolerable, however its horrors be mitigated.
Prisoners were sometimes forgotten, and letters are extant from
Louvois and other ministers, asking the governor to report how many
years certain prisoners had been detained, and if he remembered what
they were charged with. In Louis XIV.'s reign 2228 persons were
incarcerated there; in Louis XV.'s, 2567. From the accession of Louis
XVI. to the destruction of the prison the number had fallen to 289.
Seven were found there when the fortress was captured, the remainder
having been transferred to Vincennes and other prisons by the governor
who had some fears of treachery within but none of danger from
without. Four were accused of forgery, two insane; one, the Count of
Solages, accused of a monstrous crime, was detained there to spare the
feelings of his family. So unexpected was the attack, that although
well furnished with means of defence, the governor had less than
twenty-four hours' provisions in hand when the assault began.
[Footnote 165: Only five francs were allowed for a bourgeois; a man of
letters was granted ten; a Marshal of France obtained the maximum.]
The Bastille, some time before its fall, was already under sentence of
demolition, and various schemes for its disposal were before the
court. One project was to destroy seven of the towers, leaving the
eighth standing in a dilapidated state. On the site of the seven, a
pedestal formed of chains and bolts from the dungeons and gates was to
bear a statue of Louis XVI. in the attitude of a liberator, pointing
with outstretched hand towards the remaining tower in ruins. But Louis
XVI. was always too late, and the Place de la Bastille, with its
column raised to those who fell in the Revolution of July, 1830, now
recalls the second and final triumph of the people over the Bourbon
kings. Some stones of the Bastille were, however, "in order that they
might be trodden under foot by the people for ever," built into the
new Pont Louis Seize, subsequently called Pont de la Revolution and
now known as Pont de la Concorde; others were sold to speculators and
were retailed at prices so high that people complained that Bastille
stones were as dear as the best butcher's meat. Models of the
Bastille, dominoes, inkstands, boxes and toys of all kinds were made
of the material and had a ready sale all over France.
Far to the west and on the opposite side of the Seine is the immense
area of the Champ de Mars, where, on the anniversary of the fall of
the Bastille, was enacted the fairest scene of the Revolution. The
whole population of Paris, with their marvellous instinct of order and
co-operation, spontaneously set to work to dig the vast amphitheatre
which was to accommodate the 100,000 representatives of France, and
400,000 spectators, all united in an outburst of fraternal love and
hope to swear allegiance to the new Constitution before the altar of
the Fatherland. The king had not yet lost the affection of his people.
As he came to view the marvellous scene an improvised bodyguard of
excavators, bearing spades, escorted him about. When he was swearing
the oath to the Constitution, the queen, standing on a balcony of the
_Ecole militaire_, lifted up the dauphin as if to associate him in his
father's pledge. Suddenly the rain which had marred the great festival
ceased, the sun burst forth and flooded in a splendour of light, the
altar, Bishop Talleyrand, his four hundred clergy, and the king with
upraised hand. The solemn music of the _Te Deum_ mingled with the wild
paean of joy and enthusiasm that burst from half a million throats.
The unconscionable folly, the feeble-minded vacillation and miserable
trickery by which this magnificent popularity was muddled away is one
of the saddest tragedies in the stories of kings. It is clear from Sir
S. Romilly's letters that after the acceptance of the Constitution,
Louis was popular among all classes. But the people, with unerring
instinct, had fixed on the queen as one of the chief obstacles to what
might have been a peaceful revolution. Neither Marie Antoinette nor
Louis Capet comprehended the tremendous significance of the forces
they were playing with--the resolute and invincible determination of a
people of twenty-six millions to emancipate itself from the
accumulated wrongs of centuries. "_Eh bien! factieux_," said Marie to
the Commissioners from the Assembly after the return from Varennes,
"_vous triomphez encore!_" The despatches and opinions of American
ambassadors during this period are of much value. The democratic
Thomas Jefferson, reviewing in later years the course of events,
declared that had there been no queen there would have been no
revolution. Governor Morris, whose anti-revolutionary and conservative
leanings made him the friend and confidant of the royal family, writes
to Washington on January 1790: "If only the reigning prince were not
the small-beer character he is, and even only tolerably watchful of
events, he would regain his authority," but "what would you have," he
continues scornfully "from a creature who, in his situation, eats,
drinks, and sleeps well, and laughs, and is as merry a grig as lives.
He must float along on the current of events and is absolutely a
cypher." Nor would the court forego its crooked ways. "The queen is
even more imprudent," Morris writes in 1791, "and the whole court is
given up to petty intrigues worthy only of footmen and chambermaids."
Moreover, in its amazing ineptitude, the monarchy had already toyed
with republicanism by lending active military support to the
revolutionists in America, at a cost to the already over-burdened
treasury of 1,200,000,000 livres.
The American ambassador, Benjamin Franklin, was crowned at court with
laurel as the apostle of liberty, and in the very palace of
Versailles, medallions of Franklin were sold, bearing the inscription:
"_Eripui coelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis_" ("I have snatched the
lightning from heaven and the sceptre from tyrants"). The
revolutionary song, _Ca ira_, owes its origin to Franklin's invariable
response to inquiries as to the progress of the American revolutionary
movement.[166] There was explosive material enough in France to make
playing with celestial fire perilous, and while the political
atmosphere was heavy with the threatening storm, thousands of French
soldiers returned saturated with enthusiasm and sympathy for the
American revolution. Already before the Feast of the Federation the
queen had been in secret correspondence with the _emigres_ at Turin
and at Coblenz who were conspiring to throttle the nascent liberty of
France. Madame Campan relates that the queen made her read a
confidential letter from the Empress Catherine of Russia, concluding
with these words: "Kings ought to proceed in their career undisturbed
by the cries of the people as the moon pursues her course unimpeded by
the howling of dogs." Mirabeau was already in the pay of the monarchy;
and attempts were made to buy over Robespierre, who up to 10th August
was an avowed defender of the Constitution, by an offer of the
emoluments and the nominal post of tutor to the dauphin in return for
his support of the royal cause.
[Footnote 166: When Sir S. Romilly called on Franklin in 1783, the
latter expressed his amazement that the French Government had
permitted the publication of the American Constitution, which produced
a great impression in Paris. The music of _Ca ira_, taken from a dance
tune, _Le Carillon National_, very popular in the _guinguettes_ of
Paris, has been published in the _Revolution Francaise_ for 16th
December 1898.]
As early as December 1790 the court had been in secret communication
with the foreigner. Louis' brother, the Count of Artois (afterwards
Charles X.), with the queen's and king's approval, had made a secret
treaty with the House of Hapsburg, the hereditary enemy of France, by
which the sovereigns of Austria, Prussia and Spain agreed to cross the
frontier at a given signal, and close on France with an army a hundred
thousand strong. It was an act of impious treachery, and the beginning
of the doom of the French Monarchy. Yet if but some glimmer of
intelligence and courage had characterised the preparations for the
flight of the royal family to join the armed forces waiting to receive
them near the frontier, their lives at least had been saved.
The incidents of the four months' "secret" preparations to leave the
Tuileries as described by Madame Campan--the disguised purchases of
elaborate wardrobes of underlinen and gowns; the making of a
dressing-case of enormous size, fitted with many and various articles
from a warming-pan to a silver porringer; the packing of the
diamonds--read like scenes in a comedy. The story of the pretended
flight of the Russian baroness and her family; the start delayed by
the queen losing her way in the slums of the Carrousel; the colossal
folly of the whole business has been told by Carlyle in one of the
most dramatic chapters in history.
The Assembly declared on hearing of Louis' flight, that the government
of the country was unaffected and that the executive power remained in
the hands of the ministers. After voting a levy of three hundred
thousand National Guards to meet the threatened invasion, they passed
calmly to the discussion of the new Penal Code.
The king returned to Paris through an immense and silent multitude.
"Whoever applauds the king," said placards in the street, "shall be
thrashed; whoever insults him, hung." The idea of a republic as a
practical issue of the situation was now for the first time put
forward by the extremists, but met with little sympathy, and a
Republican demonstration in the Champ de Mars was suppressed by the
Assembly by martial law at the cost of many lives. Owing to the
aversion felt by Marie Antoinette to Lafayette, who with affectionate
loyalty more than once had risked his popularity and life to serve the
crown, the court made the fatal mistake of opposing his election to
the mayoralty of Paris and paved the way for the triumph of Petion and
of the Dantonists.
At the news of the first victories of the invading Prussians and
_emigres_, Louis added to his amazing tale of follies by vetoing the
formation of a camp near Paris and by turning a deaf ear to the
earnest entreaties of the brave and sagacious Dumouriez and accepting
his resignation. He sent a secret agent with confidential instructions
to the _emigres_ and the coalesced foreign armies: the ill-starred
proclamation[167] of the Duke of Brunswick completed the destruction
of the monarchy. While the French were smarting under defeat and stung
by the knowledge that their natural defender, the king, was leagued
with their enemies, this foreign soldier warned a high-spirited and
gallant nation that he was come to restore Louis XVI. to his
authority, and threatened to treat as rebellious any town that opposed
his march, to shoot all persons taken with arms in their hands, and in
the event of any insult being offered to the royal family to take
exemplary and memorable vengeance by delivering up the city of Paris
to military execution and complete demolition. When the proclamation
reached Paris at the end of July 1792, it sounded the death knell of
the king and the triumph of the Republicans. Paris was now to become,
in Goethe's phrase, the centre of the "world whirlwind"--a storm
centre launching forth thunderbolts of terror. After the Assembly had
twice refused to bring the king to trial, the extremists were able to
organise and direct an irresistible wave of popular indignation
towards the Tuileries, and on 10th August the palace was stormed.
While a band of brave and devoted Swiss guards was being cut to pieces
in hundreds, the feeble and futile king had fled to the Assembly and
was sitting safely with his wife and children in a box behind the
president's chair.
[Footnote 167: It was composed by one of the _emigres_, M. de Limon,
approved by the Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia, and
signed, against his better judgment, by the Duke of Brunswick.]
No room for compromise now. The printed trial of Charles I. was
everywhere sold and read. "This," people said, "was how the English
dealt with an impossible king and became a free nation." Old and new
were in death-grapple, and the lives of many victims, for the people
lost heavily,[168] had sealed the cause of the Revolution with a
bloody consecration. Unhappily, the city of Paris, like all great
towns in times of scarcity (and since 1780 scarcity had become almost
permanent), had been invaded by numbers of starving vagabonds--the
dregs that always rise to the surface in periods of political
convulsion, ready for any villainy. When news came of the capture of
Verdun, of the indecent joy of the courtiers, and that the road to
Paris was open to the avenging army of Prussians, the horrors of the
Armagnac massacres were renewed during four September days at the
prisons of Paris, while the revolutionary ministry and the Assembly
averted their gaze and, to their everlasting shame, abdicated their
powers. The September massacres were the application by a minority of
desperate and savage revolutionists of the _ultima ratio_ of kings to
a desperate situation: the tragedy of King Louis is the tragedy of a
feeble prince called to rule in a tremendous crisis, where weakness
and well-meaning folly are the fatalest of crimes.
[Footnote 168: The numbers have been variously estimated from 100 to
5000 killed on the popular side.]
On 21st September 1792 royalty was formally abolished, and on the
22nd, when "the equinoctional sun marked the equality of day and night
in the heavens," civil equality was proclaimed at Paris.