I.
The Constituent Assembly had abdicated in a storm.
This assembly had consisted of the most imposing body of men that had
ever represented, not only France, but the human race. It was in fact
the oecumenical council of modern reason and philosophy. Nature seemed
to have created expressly, and the different orders of society to have
reserved, for this work, the geniuses, characters, and even vices most
requisite to give to this focus of the lights of the age the greatness,
_éclat_, and movement of a fire destined to consume the remnants of an
old society, and to illumine a new one. There were sages, like Bailly
and Mounier; thinkers, like Siéyès; factious partisans, like Barnave;
statesmen like Talleyrand; men, epochs, like Mirabeau, and men,
principles like Robespierre. Each cause was personified by what most
distinguished each party. The very victims were illustrious. Cazalès,
Malouet, Maury, sounded forth in bursts of grief and eloquence the
successive falls of the throne, the aristocracy, and the clergy. This
active centre of the thoughts of a century, was sustained during the
whole time by the storm of perpetual political conflict. Whilst they
were deliberating within, the people were acting without, and struck at
the doors. These twenty-six months of consultations were one
uninterrupted sedition. Scarcely had one institution crumbled to pieces
in the tribune, than the nation swept it away to clear the space for
another institution. The anger of the people was only its impatience of
obstacles, its madness was only the excitement of its reason. Even in
its fury it was always a truth that agitated it. The tribunes only
blinded, by dazzling it. The unique characteristic of this Assembly was
that passion for the ideal which it always felt itself irresistibly
urged on to accomplish. An act of perpetual faith in reason and justice:
a holy passion for the good and right, which possessed it, and made it
devote itself to its work; like the statuary who seeing the fire in the
furnace, where he was casting his bronze, on the point of being
extinguished, threw his furniture, his children's bed, and even his
house into the flame, preferring rather that all should perish than that
his work should be lost.
Thus it is that the Revolution has become a date in the human mind, and
not merely an event in the history of the people. The men of the
Constituent Assembly were not Frenchmen, they were universal men. We
mistake, we vilify them when we consider them only as priests,
aristocrats, plebeians, faithful subjects, malcontents or demagogues.
They were, and they felt themselves to be, better than that,--workmen of
God; called by him to restore social reason, and found right and justice
throughout the universe. None of them, except those who opposed the
Revolution, limited the extent of its thought to the boundaries of
France. The declaration of the Rights of Man proves this. It was the
decalogue of the human race in all languages. The modern Revolution
called the Gentiles, as well as the Jews, to partake of the light and
reign of Fraternity.
II.
Thus, not one of its apostles who did not proclaim peace amongst
nations. Mirabeau, La Fayette, Robespierre himself erased war from the
symbol which they presented to the nation. It was the malcontent and
ambitious who subsequently demanded it, and not the leading
Revolutionists. When war burst out the Revolution had degenerated. The
Constituent Assembly took care not to place on the frontiers of France
the boundaries of its truths, and to limit the sympathising soul of the
French Revolution to a narrow patriotism. The globe was the country of
its dogmata. France was only the workshop; it worked for all other
people. Respectful of, or indifferent to, the question of national
territories, from the first moment it forbade conquest. It only reserved
to itself the property, or rather the invention of universal truths
which it brought to light. As vast as humanity, it had not the
selfishness to isolate itself. It desired to give, and not to deprive.
It sought to spread itself by right, and not by force. Essentially
spiritual, it sought no other empire for France than the voluntary
empire which imitation by the human mind conferred upon it.
Its work was prodigious, its means a nullity; all that enthusiasm can
inspire, the Assembly undertook and perfected, without a king, without a
military leader, without a dictator, without an army, without any other
strength than deep conviction. Alone, in the midst of an amazed people,
with a disbanded army, an emigrating aristocracy, a despoiled clergy, a
conspiring court, a seditious city, hostile Europe--it did what it
designed. Such is the will, such the real power of a people--and such is
truth, the irresistible auxiliary of the men who agitate themselves for
God. If ever inspiration was visible in the prophet or ancient
legislator, it may be asserted that the Constituent Assembly had two
years of sustained inspiration. France was the inspired of civilisation.
III.
Let us examine its work. The principle of power was entirely displaced:
royalty had ended by believing that it was the exclusive depositary of
power. It had demanded of religion to consummate this robbery in the
eyes of the people, by telling them that tyranny came from God, and was
responsible to God only. The long heirship of throned races had made it
believed that there was a right of reigning in the blood of crowned
families. Government instead of being a function had become a
possession; the king master instead of being chief. This misplaced
principle displaced everything. The people became a nation, the king a
crowned magistrate. Feudality, subaltern royalty, assumed the rank of
actual property. The clergy, which had had institutions and inviolable
property, was now only a body paid by the state for a sacred service. It
was from this only one step to receiving a voluntary salary for an
individual service. The magistracy ceased to be hereditary. They left it
its unremoveability to confirm its independence. It was an exception to
the principle of offices when a dismissal was possible, a
semi-sovereignty of justice--but it was one step towards the truth. The
legislative power was distinct from the executive power. The nation in
an assembly freely chosen, declared its will, and the hereditary and
irresponsible king executed it. Such was the whole mechanism of the
Constitution--a people--a king--a minister. But the king irresponsible,
and consequently passive, was evidently a concession to custom, the
respectful fiction of suppressed royalty.
IV.
He was no longer will; for to will is to do. He was not a functionary;
for the functionary acts and replies. The king did not reply. He was but
a majestic inutility in the constitution. The functions destroyed, they
left the functionary. He had but one attribute, the _suspensive veto_,
which consisted of his right to suspend, for three years, the execution
of the Assembly's decrees. He was an obstacle; legal, but impotent for
the wishes of the nation. It was evident that the Constituent Assembly,
perfectly convinced of the superfluity of the throne in a national
government, had only placed a king at the summit of its institutions to
check ambition, and that the kingdom should not be called a republic.
The only part of such a king was to prevent the truth from appearing,
and to make a show in the eyes of a people accustomed to a sceptre. This
fiction, or this nullity cost the people 30,000,000 (of francs) a year
in the civil list, a court, continual jealousies, and the interminable
corruption practised by the court on the organs of the nation. This was
the real vice of the constitution of 1791: it was not consistent.
Royalty embarrassed the constitution; and all that embarrasses injures.
The motive of this inconsistency was less an error of its reason than a
respectful piety for an ancient prejudice, and a generous tenderness
towards a race which had long worn the crown. If the race of the
Bourbons had been extinct in the month of September 1791, certainly the
Constituent Assembly would not have invented a king.
V.
However, the royalty of '91, very little different from the royalty of
to-day, could work for a century, as well as a day. The error of all
historians is to attribute to the vices of the constitution the brief
duration of the work of the Constituent Assembly. In the first place,
the work of the Constituent Assembly was not principally to perpetuate
this wheelwork of useless royalty, placed out of complaisance to the
people's eyes, in machinery which did not regulate it. The work of the
Constituent Assembly was the regeneration of ideas and government, the
displacing of power, the restoration of right, the abolition of all
subjugation even of the mind, the freedom of consciences, the formation
of an administration; and this work lasts, and will endure as long as
the name of France. The vice of the institution of 1791 was not in any
one particular point. It has not perished because the _veto_ of the king
was suspensive instead of absolute; it has not perished, because the
right of peace or war was taken from the king, and reserved to the
nation; it has not perished, because it did not place the legislative
power in one chamber only instead of in two: these asserted vices are to
be found in many other constitutions, which still endure. The diminution
of the royal power was not the main danger to royalty in '91; it was
rather its salvation, if it could have been saved.
VI.
The more power was given to the king, and action to the monarchical
principle, the quicker the king and the principle would have fallen; for
the greater would have been the distrust and hatred against him. Two
chambers, instead of one, would not have preserved any thing. Such
divisions of power would have no value, but in proportion as they are
sacred. They are only sacred in proportion as they are the
representatives of real existing force in the nation. Would a revolution
which had not paused before the iron gates of the Château of Versailles
have respected the metaphysical distinction of power of two kinds!
Besides, where were, and where would be now, the constitutive elements
of two chambers, in a nation whose entire revolution is but a convulsion
towards unity? If the second chamber be democratic and temporary, it is
but a twofold democracy with but one common impulse. It can only serve
to retard the common impulse, or destroy the unity of the public will.
If it be hereditary and aristocratic, it supposes an aristocracy
pre-existent in, and acknowledged by, the state. Where was this
aristocracy in 1791? Where is it now? A modern historian says, "In the
nobility, in the presence of social inequalities." But the Revolution
was made against the nobility, and in order to level social hereditary
inequalities. It was to ask of the Revolution itself to make a
counter-revolution. Besides, these pretended divisions of power are
always fictions; power is never really divided. It is always here or
there, in reality and in its integrity,--it is not to be divided. It is
like the will, it is _one_ or it is not. If there be two chambers, it is
in one of the two; the other complies or is dissolved. If there be one
chamber and a king, it is in the king or the chamber. In the king, if he
subjugates the Assembly by force, or if he buys it by corruption; in the
chamber if it agitates the public mind, and intimidates the court and
the army by the power of its language, and the superiority of its
opinions. Those who do not see this have no eyes. In this _soidisant_
balance of power there is always a controlling weight; equilibrium is a
chimera. If it did exist, it would produce mere immobility.
VII.
The Constituent Assembly had then done a good work; wise, and as durable
as are the institutions of a people in travail, in an age of transition.
The constitution of '91 had written all the truths of the times, and
reduced all human reason to its epoch. All was true in its work except
royalty, which had but one wrong, which was making the monarchy the
depository of its code.
We have seen that this very fault was an excess of virtue. It receded
before the deposing from the throne the family of its kings; it had the
superstition of the past without having its faith, and desired to
reconcile the republic and the monarchy. It was a virtue in its
intentions; it was a mistake in its results; for it is an error in
politics to attempt the impossible. Louis XVI. was the only man in the
nation to whom the constituent royalty could not be confided, since it
was he from whom the absolute monarchy had just been snatched: the
constitution was a shared royalty, and but a few days previously, and he
had possessed it entire. With any other person this royalty would have
been a gift, for him alone it was an insult. If Louis XVI. had been
capable of this abnegation of supreme power which makes disinterested
heroes (and he was one), the deposed party, of which he was the natural
head, was not like him; we may expect an act of sublime
disinterestedness from a virtuous man, never from a party _en masse_.
Party is never magnanimous; they never abdicate, they are extirpated.
Heroic acts come from the heart, and party has no heart; they have only
interests and ambition. A body is a thing of unvarying selfishness.
Clergy, nobility, court, magistracy, all abuses, all falsehoods, all
contumelies, every injustice of a monarchy, are personified, in spite of
Louis XVI., in the king. Degraded with him, they must desire to rise
with him. The nation, which well perceived this fatal connection between
the king and the counter-revolution, could not confide in the king,
however it might venerate the man; it saw, in him, of necessity, the
accomplice of every conspiracy against itself. The _parvenus_ of liberty
are as thinskinned as the _parvenus_ of fortune. Jealousies must arise,
suspicions would produce insults, insults resentments, resentments
factions, factions shocks and overthrows: the momentary enthusiasm of
the people, the sincere concessions of the king, avert nothing. The
situations were false on both sides.
If there were in the Constituent Assembly more statesmen than
philosophers, it must have perceived that an intermediate state was
impossible, under the guardianship of a half-dethroned king. We do not
confide to the vanquished the care and management of the conquests. To
act as she acts, was to drive the king, without redemption, to treason
or the scaffold. An absolute party is the only safe party in great
crises. The tact consists in knowing when to have recourse to extreme
measures at the critical minute. We say it unhesitatingly--history will
hereafter say as we do. Then came a moment when the Constituent Assembly
had the right to choose between the monarchy and the republic, and when
she had to choose the republic. There was the safety of the Revolution
and its legitimacy. In wanting resolution it failed in prudence.
VIII.
But, they say with Barnave, France is monarchical by its geography as by
its character, and the contest arises in minds directly between the
monarchy and the republic. Let us make ourselves understood:--
Geography is of no party; Rome and Carthage had no frontiers; Genoa and
Venice had no territories. It is not the soil which determines the
nature of the constitutions of people, it is time. The geographical
objection of Barnave fell to the ground a year afterwards, before the
prodigies in France in 1792. It proved that if a republic fails in unity
and centralisation, it is unable to defend a continental nationality.
Waves and mountains are the frontiers of the weak--men are the frontiers
of a people. Let us then have done with geography. It is not
geometricians but statesmen who form social constitutions.
Nations have two great interests which reveal to them the form they
should take, according to the hour of the national life which they have
attained--the instinct of their conservation, and the instinct of their
growth. To act, or be idle, to walk, or sit down, are two acts wholly
different, which compel men to assume attitudes wholly diverse. It is
the same with nations. The monarchy or the republic correspond exactly
amongst a people to the necessities of these two opposite conditions of
society--repose or action. We here understand two words; these two
words, repose and action, in their most absolute acceptation; for there
is repose in republics, as there is action in monarchies.
Is it a question of preservation, of reproduction, of development in
that kind of slow and insensible growth which people have like vast
vegetables? Is it a question of keeping in harmony with the European
balance of preserving its laws and manners; of maintaining its
traditions, perpetuating opinions and worship, of guaranteeing
properties and right conduct, of preventing troubles, agitation,
factions? The monarchy is evidently more proper for this than any other
state of society. It protects in lower classes that security which it
desires for its own elevated condition. It is order in essence and
selfishness: order is its life--tradition its dogma, the nation is its
heritage, religion its ally, aristocracies are its barrier against the
invasions of the people. It must preserve all this or perish. It is the
government of prudence, because it is also that of great responsibility.
An empire is the stake of a monarch--the throne is everywhere a
guarantee of immobility. When we are placed on high we fear every shake,
for we have but to lose or to fall.
When then a nation is placed in a sufficing territory, with settled
laws, fixed interests, sacred creeds, its worship in full force, its
social classes graduated, its administration organised, it is
monarchical in spite of seas, rivers, or mountains. It abdicates and
empowers the monarchy to foresee, to will, to act for it. It is the most
perfect of governments for such functions. It calls itself by the two
names of society itself, _unity_ and _hereditary right_.
IX.
If a people, on the contrary, is at one of those epochs when it is
necessary to act with all the intensity of its strength in order to
operate within and without one of those organic transformations which
are as necessary to people as is a current to waves or explosion to
compressed powers--a republic is the obligatory and fated form of a
nation at such a moment.
For a sudden, irresistible, convulsive action of the social body, the
arm and will of all is needed; the people become a mob, and rush
headlong to danger. It can alone suffice to its own danger. What other
arm but that of the whole people could stir what it has to
stir?--displace what it has to displace?--install what it desires to
found? The monarch would break his sceptre into fragments on it. There
must be a lever capable of raising thirty millions of wills--this lever
the nation alone possesses. It is in itself the moving power, the
fulcrum and the lever.
X.
We cannot ask of the law to act against the law, of tradition to act
against tradition, of established order to act against established
order. It would be to require strength from weakness, life from suicide;
and, besides, we should ask in vain of the monarchical power to
accomplish these changes, in which very often all perish, and the king
foremost. Such a course would be the contradiction to the monarchy: how
could it attempt it?
To ask a king to destroy the empire of a religion which consecrates him;
to despoil of their riches a clergy who has them by the same divine
title as that by which he has tenure of his kingdom; to degrade an
aristocracy which is the first step of his throne; to throw down social
hierarchies of which he is the head and crown; to undermine laws of
which he is the highest,--is to ask of the vaults of an edifice to sap
the foundation. The king could not do so, and would not. In thus
overthrowing all that serves him for support, he feels that he would be
rendered wholly destitute. He would be playing with his throne and
dynasty. He is responsible for his race. He is prudent by nature, and a
temporiser from necessity. He must soothe, please, manage, and be on
terms with all constituted interests. He is the king of the worship,
aristocracy, laws, manners, abuses, and falsehoods of the empire. Even
the vices of the constitution form a portion of his strength. To
threaten them is to destroy himself. He may hate them: he dares not to
attack them.
XI.
A republic alone can suffice for such crises: nations know this, and
cling to it as their sole hope of preservation. The will of the people
becomes the ruling power. It drives from its presence the timid, seeks
the bold and the determined, summons all men to aid in the great work,
makes trial of, employs, and combines the force, the devotion, the
heroism of every man. It is the populace that holds the helm of the
vessel, on which the most prompt, or the most firm seizes, until it is
again torn from him by a stronger hand. But every one governs in the
common name. Private consideration, timidity of situation, difference of
rank, all disappears. No one is responsible--to-day he rises to
power--to-morrow he descends to exile or the scaffold--there is no
_morrow_, all is _to-day_--resistance is crushed by the irresistible
power of movement. All bends--all yields before the people. The
resentments of castes--the abolished forms of worship--the decimation of
property--the extirpated abuses--the humiliated aristocracies--all are
lost in the thundering sound of the overthrow of ancient ideas and
things. On whom can we demand revenge? The nation answers for all to
all, and no man has aught to require from it. It does not survive
itself, it braves recrimination and vengeance--it is absolute as an
element--anonymous, as fatality--it completes its work, and when that is
ended, says, "Let us rest; and let us assume monarchy."
XII.
Such a plan of action is the republic--the only one that befits the
trying period of transformation. It is the government of passion, the
government of crises, the government of revolutions. So long as
revolutions are unfinished, so long does the instinct of the people urge
them to a republic; for they feel that every other hand is too feeble to
give that onward and violent impulse necessary to the Revolution. The
people (and they act wisely), will not trust an irresponsible,
perpetual, and hereditary power to fulfil the commands of the epochs of
creation--they will perform them themselves. Their dictatorship appears
to them indispensable to save the nation; and what is a dictatorship but
a republic? It cannot resign its power until every crisis be over, and
the great work of revolution completed and consolidated. Then it can
again resume the monarchy, and say, "Reign in the name of the ideas I
have given thee!"
XIII.
The Constituent Assembly was then blind and weak, not to create a
republic as the natural instrument of the Revolution. Mirabeau, Bailly,
La Fayette, Siéyès, Barnave, Talleyrand, and Lameth acted in this
respect like philosophers, and not great politicians, as events have
amply proved. They believed the Revolution finished as soon as it was
written, and the monarchy converted as soon as it had sworn to preserve
the constitution. The Revolution was but begun, and the oath of royalty
to the Revolution as futile as the oath of the Revolution to royalty.
These two elements could not mingle until after an interval of an
age--this interval was the republic. A nation does not change in a day,
or in fifty years, from revolutionary excitements to monarchical repose.
It is because we forgot it at the hour when we should have remembered
it, that the crisis was so terrible, and that we yet feel its effects.
If the Revolution, which perpetually follows itself, had had its own
natural and fitting government, the republic--this republic would have
been less tumultuous and less perturbed than the five attempts we made
for a monarchy. The nature of the age in which we live protests against
the traditional forms of power: at an epoch of movement--a government of
movement--such is the law.
XIV.
The National Assembly, it is said, had not the right to act thus; for it
had sworn allegiance to the monarchy and recognised Louis XVI., and
could not dethrone him without a crime. The objection is puerile, if it
originates in minds who do not believe in the possession of the people
by dynasties. The Assembly at its outset had proclaimed the inalienable
right of the people; and the lawfulness of necessary insurrection, and
the oath of the Tennis Court (_Serment du Jeu de Paume_), were nought
but an oath of disobedience to the king and of fidelity to the nation.
The Assembly had afterwards proclaimed Louis XVI. king of the French. If
they possessed the power of proclaiming him king, they also possessed
that of proclaiming him a simple citizen. Forfeiture for the national
utility, and that of the human race, was evidently one of its
principles, and yet how did it act? It leaves Louis XVI. king, or makes
him king, not through respect for that institution, but out of respect
for his person, and pity for so great a downfall. Such was the truth; it
feared sacrilege, and fell into anarchy. It was clement, noble, and
generous. Louis XVI. had deserved well from his people; who well can
dare to censure so magnanimous a condescension? Before the king's
departure for Varennes, the absolute right of the nation was but an
abstract fiction, the _summum jus_ of the Assembly. The royalty of Louis
XVI. was respectable and respected, once again it was established.
XV.
But a moment arrived, and this moment was when the king fled his
kingdom, protesting against the will of the nation, and sought the
assistance of the army, and the intervention of foreign powers, when the
Assembly legitimately possessed the rigorous right of disposing of the
power, thus abandoned or betrayed. Three courses were open: to declare
the downfall of the monarchy, and proclaim a republican revolution; the
temporary suspension of the royalty, and govern in its name during its
moral eclipse; and, lastly, to restore the monarchy.
The Assembly chose the worst alternative of the three. It feared to be
harsh, and was cruel; for by retaining the supreme rank for the king, it
condemned him to the torture of the hatred and contempt of the people;
it crowned him with suspicions and outrages; and nailed him to the
throne, in order that the throne might prove the instrument of his
torture and his death.
Of the two other courses, the first was the most logical, to proclaim
the downfall of the monarchy and the formation of a republic.
The republic, had it been properly established by the Assembly, would
have been far different from the republic traitorously and atrociously
extorted nine months after by the insurrection of the 10th of August. It
would have doubtless suffered the commotion, inseparable from the birth
of a new order of things. It would not have escaped the disorders of
nature in a country where every thing was done by first impulse, and
impassioned by the magnitude of its perils. But it would have originated
in law and not in sedition--in right, and not in violence--in
deliberation, and not in insurrection. This alone could have changed the
sinister conditions of its birth and its future fate; it might become an
agitating power, but it would remain pure and unsullied.
Only reflect for a moment how entirely its legal and premeditated
proclamation would have altered the course of events. The 10th of August
would not have taken place--the perfidy and tyranny of the commune of
Paris--the massacre of the guards--the assault on the palace--the flight
of the king to the Assembly--the outrages heaped on him there--and his
imprisonment in the temple--would have never occurred.
The republic would not have killed a king, a queen, an innocent babe,
and a virtuous princess; it would not have had the massacres of
September, those St. Bartholomews of the people--that have left an
indelible stain on the whole robes of liberty. It would not have been
baptized in the blood of three hundred thousand human beings--it would
not have armed the revolutionary tribunal with the axe of the people,
with which it immolated a generation to make way for an idea,--it would
not have had the 31st of May. The Girondists arriving at the supreme
power, unsullied by crime, would have possessed more force with which to
combat the demagogues; and the republic calmly and deliberately
instituted, would have intimidated Europe far more than an _émeute_
legitimised by bloodshed and assassination. War might have been avoided,
or, if it was inevitable, have been more unanimous and more triumphant;
our generals would not have been massacred by their soldiers amidst
cries of treason. The spirit of the people would have combated with us,
and the horror of our days of August, September, and January would not
have alienated from our standards the nations attracted thither by our
doctrines. Thus a single change in the origin of the republic changed
the fate of the Revolution.
XVI.
But if this rigorous resolution was yet repugnant to the feelings of
France, and if the Assembly had feared they had given birth to a
republic prematurely, the third course was yet open, to proclaim the
temporary cessation of royalty during ten years, and govern in a
republican form in its name until the constitution was firmly and
securely established. This course would have saved all the respect due
to royalty; the life of the king--the life of the royal family--the
rights of the people--the purity of the Revolution--it was at once firm
and calm, efficacious and legitimate. It was such a dictatorship as the
people had instinctively figured in the critical times of their
existence. But instead of a short, fugitive, disturbed, and ambitious
dictatorship of one man, it was the dictatorship of the nation,
governing itself through its National Assembly. The nation might have
respectfully laid by royalty during ten years, in order itself to carry
out a work above the power of the king. This accomplished, resentment
extinguished, habits formed, the laws in operation, the frontiers
protected, the clergy secularised, the aristocracy humbled, the
dictatorship could terminate. The king or his dynasty could ascend
without danger a throne from which all danger was now averted. This
veritable republic would have thus resumed the name of a constitutional
monarchy, without changing any thing, and the statue of royalty would
have been replaced on its pedestal when the base had been consolidated.
Such would have been the consulate of the people, far superior to that
consulate of a man who was to finish by ravaging Europe, and by the
double usurpation of a throne and a revolution.
Or, if at the expiration of this national dictatorship, the nation, well
governed and guided, found it dangerous or useless to re-establish the
throne, what prevented it from saying, I now assume as a definitive
government that which I assumed as a dictatorship: I proclaim the French
republic as the only government befitting the excitement and energy of a
regenerative epoch; for the republic is a dictatorship perpetuated and
constituted by the people. What avails a throne? I remain erect: it is
the attitude of a people in travail!
In a word, the Constituent Assembly, whose light illumined the
globe--whose audacity in two years transformed an empire, had but one
fault, that of coming to a close. It should have perpetuated itself: it
abdicated. A nation that abdicates after a reign of two years, and on
heaps of ruins, bequeaths the sceptre to anarchy. The king _could_ reign
no longer, the nation _would not_. Thus faction reigned, and the
Revolution perished; not because it had gone too far, but because it had
not been sufficiently bold. So true is it that the timidity of nations
is not less disastrous than the weakness of kings; and that a people who
knows not how to seize and guard all that which pertains to it, falls at
once into tyranny and anarchy. The Assembly dared to do every thing save
to reign: the reign of the Revolution was nought but a republic: and the
Assembly left this name to factions, and this form to terror. Such was
its fault--it expiated it: and the expiation is not yet ended for
France.