ENDING THE MONARCHY
On the 20th and 21st of September 1792 the Convention met, the Bourbon
monarchy fell, and the Duke of Brunswick was defeated, a coincidence of
memorable events.
Brunswick, pushing on from Verdun into the defiles of the Argonne, had
two armies operating against him, trying to stop his march; the one
under Dumouriez, the other under Kellermann. He forced a way, however,
but at the further side, about the hills of Valmy, had to face the
combined armies of his adversaries. Brunswick was now much reduced by
sickness, and was much worried over supplies and his lengthening line
of communications. In a faint-hearted way he deployed for attack.
Dumouriez for the moment checked him by a skillful disposition of his
superior artillery. But if the superbly drilled Prussian infantry were
sent forward it seemed as though the result could not be long in doubt.
{158} Brunswick methodically and slowly made his preparations for the
attack, but just at the moment when it should have been delivered,
Dumouriez, divining his opponent's hesitation, imposed on him. Riding
along the French front with his staff he placed his hat on the point of
his sword and rode forward, singing the Marseillaise. His whole army
catching the refrain advanced towards the enemy; and Brunswick at once
took up a defensive attitude, which he maintained till the close of the
battle. The unsteady battalions and half-drilled volunteers of
Dumouriez had suddenly revealed the fact that they were a national
army, and that they possessed the most formidable of military weapons,
patriotism. That was an innovation in 18th-century warfare, an
innovation that was to result in some notable triumphs. At Valmy it
led to the Prussians retiring from a battle field on which they had
left only a few score of dead. Soon afterwards Brunswick began a
retreat that was to lead him back to the Rhine.
On the day after Valmy, the Convention assembled. The extreme
Jacobins, soon to be known from their seats in the assembly as the
Mountain, numbered about fifty. Danton and {159} Robespierre were the
two most conspicuous; among their immediate supporters not hitherto
mentioned may be noted Carnot, Fouché, Tallien, and St. Just. A much
larger group, of which the moderate Jacobins formed the backbone, were
inclined to look to Brissot for leadership and are generally described
as Girondins. This name came from the small group of the deputies of
the Gironde, that represented perhaps better than any other, the best
force of provincial liberalism but at the same time a revolt against
terrorism, massacre and the supremacy of Paris. Within the last sixty
years, however, the term Girondin has come into use as a label for all
those positive political elements in the Convention that attempted a
struggle against the Mountain for leadership and against Paris for
moderate and national government. Among the Girondins may be noted
Brissot, Vergniaud, Condorcet; and the Anglo-American veteran of
republicanism, Tom Paine. Between the Mountain and the Gironde sat the
Plaine, or the Marais, as it was called, that non-committal section of
the house strongest in numbers but weakest in moral courage, where sat
such men as Barras, Barère, Cambon, Grégoire, Lanjuinais, {160} Sieyès.
These were the men who mostly drifted, and, as the Mountain triumphed,
threw into it many more or less sincere recruits.
The first business of the new assembly was pressing; it did not comport
much variation of opinion. The constitutional question must be
settled; and so a vote, immediately taken, pronounced the fall of the
monarchy. Even at this moment, however, there was no enthusiasm for a
republic and there was no formal pronouncement that France accepted
that régime. Yet in fact she had; and on the following day the
Convention, in further decrees, assumed the existence of the Republic
to be an established fact.
There was a question, however, even more burning, because more
debatable, than the fall of the monarchy; and this was the massacres,
and beyond the massacres, the policy of the party that had accepted
them. The great majority of the deputies on arriving in Paris from the
provinces had been horror-struck. Lanjuinais said: "When I arrived in
Paris, I shuddered!" Brissot and the Girondins put that feeling of the
assembly behind their policy. They adopted an attitude of
uncompromising condemnation towards the men of September, and attempted
to wrest their influence from {161} them. To accomplish this they had
among other things to outbid their rivals for popular support, and so
it happened that many of them who were at heart constitutional
monarchists adopted a strong republican attitude which went beyond
their real convictions.
The Girondins attacked at once. The conduct of the Commune, of the
sectional committees was impugned. Marat, on taking his seat, was
subjected to a furious onslaught that nearly ended in actual violence.
But he packed the galleries with his supporters, retorted bitterly in
the _Ami du peuple_, and succeeded in weathering the storm. But the
Convention agreed that a committee of six should investigate, and that
a guard of 4,500 men should be drawn from the departments for the
protection of the Convention. This was a worthy beginning, but it
ended, as it began, in words. Paris answered the Girondins with deeds.
The proposed bringing in of an armed force from the departments stirred
Paris to fury once more. Brissot was expelled from the Jacobin Club.
Many of the sections presented petitions protesting against the
departmental guard. But for a while the moderates held their ground,
even appeared to gain a {162} little. Addresses kept reaching the
assembly from the departments protesting against the domination of
Paris. Small detachments of loyal national guards arrived in the city;
and in November, on an election being held for the mayoralty of Paris,
although very few voters went to the polls, the Jacobins failed to
carry their candidate. It was to be their last defeat before the 9th
of Thermidor.
It was at this moment that took place the famous iron chest incident.
A safe was discovered and broken open during the perquisitions made in
the palace of the Tuileries. Roland placed in the custody of the house
a packet of papers found in this safe, and among these papers were
accounts showing the sums paid to Mirabeau, and to other members of the
assembly, by the Court. There resulted much abuse of Mirabeau, whose
body was removed from the Pantheon where it had been ceremoniously
interred, and also much political pressure on deputies who either were
or feared to be incriminated.
A number of the young Girondins were now meeting constantly at Madame
Roland's, and their detestation of the Mountain was heightened and
idealized by the enthusiasms of their charming hostess. Louvet,
brilliant, {163} ambitious, hot-headed, threw himself into the
conflict, and, on the 29th of October, launched a tremendous philippic
against Robespierre. As oratory it was successful, but it failed in
political effect. After their ill success against Marat, the Girondins
stood no chance of success against Robespierre unless their words led
to immediate action, unless their party was solid and organized, unless
they had some means of obtaining a practical result. In all this they
failed. Robespierre obtained a delay to prepare his reply, and then a
careful speech and packed galleries triumphed over Louvet's ill-judged
attack.
The Mountain had survived the first storms. It was soon able to use
the question of the King as a means of distracting attention from the
massacres, and of giving the party a ground on which it might hope to
meet the Gironde on more even terms. For any attempt at moderation on
the part of the Girondins could be met with the charge of veiled
royalism, of anti-patriotism, and such a charge at that moment was the
most damning that a party or an individual could incur.
The Convention, having agreed that it would consider the question of
Louis, and having appointed a committee to that end, heard the {164}
report of its committee on the 3rd of November. From this it appeared
that there were numerous charges that could be preferred against Louis;
but what was the tribunal before which such charges could be tried?
There could be but one answer. Only the people of France could judge
Louis, and the Convention stood for the people. Lengthy debates
followed on these questions, and the speech of Robespierre, a speech in
which he stood nearly alone in taking a logical view of the situation,
was perhaps its most remarkable product. Robespierre said: "The
assembly has been drawn off on side issues. There is no question here
of a legal action. Louis is not an accused person; you are not
judges,--you are only representatives of the nation. It is not for you
to render judgment, but to take a measure of national security. . . .
Louis was king, and the republic has come into existence; the wonderful
question you are debating is resolved by these words. Louis was
dethroned for his crimes; Louis denounced the people of France as
rebels; he called to chastise them the armies of his brother tyrants to
his help; victory and the people have decided that he alone is the
rebel; Louis therefore cannot be judged because he has been judged. He
{165} stands condemned, or if not, then the republic stands not
acquitted. . . . For if Louis can be the subject of an action, Louis
may be pronounced guiltless. . . . A people does not judge after the
manner of a judicial body; it does not render sentence, it launches the
thunderbolt."
On the same day, the 3rd of December, without accepting Robespierre's
point of view, the Convention voted that the King should be brought to
trial. The Gironde, feeling the current now drawing them fast to a
catastrophe, attempted, in feeble fashion, to change its direction,
urging that an appeal should be made to the country. This failed, and
a week later Louis was brought before the assembly.
The royal family had been kept in very strict confinement at the
Temple. The Commune officials in whose charge they were placed were
for the most part men of the lower classes, brutal, arrogant,
suspicious, and somewhat oppressed with responsibility and the fear of
possible attempts at a rescue. In these conditions the royal family
suffered severely, and, under suffering, rapidly began to regain some
of the ground they had lost while fortune smiled. Against insult the
royal dignity asserted itself, and in adversity the simplicity and
{166} kindliness of Louis began rather suddenly to look like something
not so very remote from saintliness; such is the relation of
surroundings and background to the effect produced by a man's life and
character.
Before the Convention, on the 11th of December, Louis, mild and
dignified, listened in some bewilderment to a long list of so-called
charges, of which the most salient accused him of complicity with
Bouillé in a plot against his subjects, and of having broken his oath
to the constitution. When asked what answer he had to make, he denied
the charges, and demanded time to prepare a defence and to obtain legal
assistance. This was granted, and an adjournment was taken. From all
of which it appears that Louis accepted the false ground which the
Convention had marked out for him, and lacked the logical sense of
Robespierre.
During the adjournment, which was for two weeks, the Girondins made one
more attempt to dodge the issue, to refer the trial of the King to the
electorate. Behind them was a great mass of opinion. The department
of Finisterre passed resolutions demanding the suspension of Marat,
Robespierre and {167} Danton; it approached the neighbouring
departments with a view to combining their armed forces and sending
them to Paris. Even with such demonstrations to strengthen their hands
the Girondins were in too false a position, were too much orators and
not men of action, to save themselves; Paris held them inexorably to
their detested task.
On the 26th, the trial was resumed, and, save for judgment, concluded.
Louis was in charge of Santerre, commanding the national guard of
Paris. His advocates, Malesherbes, Tronchet and de Sèze, did their
duty with courage and ability, after which the King was removed, and
the Convention resolved itself into a disorderly and clamorous meeting
in which the public galleries added as much to the din as the members
themselves.
More debates followed, of which the turn was reached on the 3rd of
January. On that day Barère, most astute of those who sat in the
centre, keenest to detect the tremor of the straw that showed which way
public passion was about to blow, ascended the tribune and delivered
his opinion. Anxiously the house hung on the words of the oracle of
moral cowardice, and heard that oracle pronounce {168} the destruction
of the King as a measure of public safety. From that moment all
attempts to save him were in vain.
The Girondins did not confine themselves to numerous efforts to
displace the responsibility of judging from the Convention to the
people. Three days after Barère's speech Dumouriez arrived in Paris.
As La Fayette had a few months before, so did Dumouriez now, appear to
be the man of the sword so dreaded by Robespierre, the successful
soldier ready to convert the Revolution to his own profit, or if not to
his own to that of his party, the Girondins. During more than two
weeks Dumouriez remained in the city, casting about for some means of
saving the King, but constantly checked by the Jacobins, who through
Pache, minister of war, kept control of the artillery and troops near
Paris.
On the 15th of January the Convention came to a vote, amid scenes of
intense excitement. Was Louis guilty? And if so what should be his
punishment? Six hundred and eighty-three members voted affirmatively
to the first question. Three hundred and sixty-one voted the penalty
of death. About the same number equivocated in a variety of forms, the
most popular proving the one that declared for {169} imprisonment or
exile, to be changed to death in case of invasion. Vergniaud, as
president, at the end of a session that lasted 36 hours, declared the
sentence of the Convention to be death.
On the 19th of January one last effort was made. A motion for a
respite was proposed, but was rejected, 380 to 310; and the Convention
then fixed the 21st as the day for the King's execution. On that day
Louis accordingly went to the scaffold. The guillotine was set up in
the great open space known at various epochs as the Place Louis XV, de
la Revolution, and de la Concorde. Louis, after a touching farewell
from his family, and after confessing whatever he imagined to be his
sins, was driven from the Temple to the place of execution; he was
dressed in white. The streets were thronged. The national guard was
out in force, and when Louis from the platform attempted to speak,
Santerre ordered his drums to roll. A moment later the head of King
Louis XVI had fallen, and many mourning royalists were vowing loyalty
in their hearts to the little boy of eight, imprisoned in the temple,
who to them was King Louis XVII.
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