day I see no remedy for what was done in 1784. I had no great hopes
even at the time. I was therefore very eager to record a remonstrance on
the journals of the House of Commons, as a caution against such a
popular delusion in times to come; and this I then feared, and now am
certain, is all that could be done. I know of no way of animadverting on
the crown. I know of no mode of calling to account the House of Lords,
who threw out the India Bill in a way not much to their credit. As
little, or rather less, am I able to coerce the people at large, who
behaved very unwisely and intemperately on that occasion. Mr. Pitt was
then accused, by me as well as others, of attempting to be minister
without enjoying the confidence of the House of Commons, though he did
enjoy the confidence of the crown. That House of Commons, whose
confidence he did not enjoy, unfortunately did not itself enjoy the
confidence (though we well deserved it) either of the crown or of the
public. For want of that confidence, the then House of Commons did not
survive the contest. Since that period Mr. Pitt has enjoyed the
confidence of the crown, and of the Lords, and _of the House of
Commons_, through two successive Parliaments; and I suspect that he has
ever since, and that he does still, enjoy as large a portion, at least,
of the confidence of the people without doors as his great rival. Before
whom, then, is Mr. Pitt to be impeached, and by whom? The more I
consider the matter, the more firmly I am convinced that the idea of
proscribing Mr. Pitt _indirectly_, when you cannot _directly punish_
him, is as chimerical a project, and as unjustifiable, as it would be to
have proscribed Lord North. For supposing that by indirect ways of
opposition, by opposition upon measures which do not relate to the
business of 1784, but which on other grounds might prove unpopular, you
were to drive him from his seat, this would be no example whatever of
punishment for the matters we charge as offences in 1784. On a cool and
dispassionate view of the affairs of this time and country, it appears
obvious to me that one or the other of those two great men, that is, Mr.
Pitt or Mr. Fox, must be minister. They are, I am sorry for it,
irreconcilable. Mr. Fox's conduct _in this session_ has rendered the
idea of his power a matter of serious alarm to many people who were very
little pleased with the proceedings of Mr. Pitt in the beginning of his
administration. They like neither the conduct of Mr. Pitt in 1784, nor
that of Mr. Fox in 1793; but they estimate which of the evils is most
pressing at the time, and what is likely to be the consequence of a
change. If Mr. Fox be wedded, they must be sensible that his opinions
and principles on the now existing state of things at home and abroad
must be taken as his portion. In his train must also be taken the whole
body of gentlemen who are pledged to him and to each other, and to their
common politics and principles. I believe no king of Great Britain ever
will adopt, for his confidential servants, that body of gentlemen,
holding that body of principles. Even if the present king or his
successor should think fit to take that step, I apprehend a general
discontent of those who wish that this nation and that Europe should
continue in their present state would ensue,--a discontent which,
combined with the principles and progress of the new men in power, would
shake this kingdom to its foundations. I do not believe any one
political conjecture can be more certain than this.
53. Without at all defending or palliating Mr. Pitt's conduct in 1784, I
must observe, that the crisis of 1793, with regard to everything at home
and abroad, is full as important as that of 1784 ever was, and, if for
no other reason, by being present, is much more important. It is not to
nine years ago we are to look for the danger of Mr. Fox's and Mr.
Sheridan's conduct, and that of the gentlemen who act with them. It is
at _this_ very time, and in _this_ very session, that, if they had not
been strenuously resisted, they would not only have discredited the
House of Commons, (as Mr. Pitt did in 1784, when he persuaded the king
to reject their advice, and to appeal from them to the people,) but, in
my opinion, would have been the means of wholly subverting the House of
Commons and the House of Peers, and the whole Constitution actual and
virtual, together with the safety and independence of this nation, and
the peace and settlement of every state in the now Christian world. It
is to our opinion of the nature of Jacobinism, and of the probability,
by corruption, faction, and force, of its gaining ground everywhere,
that the question whom and what you are to support is to be determined.
For my part, without doubt or hesitation, I look upon Jacobinism as the
most dreadful and the most shameful evil which ever afflicted mankind, a
thing which goes beyond the power of all calculation in its
mischief,--and that, if it is suffered to exist in France, we must in
England, and speedily too, fall into that calamity.
54. I figure to myself the purpose of these gentlemen accomplished, and
this ministry destroyed. I see that the persons who in that case must
rule can be no other than Mr. Fox, Mr. Sheridan, Mr. Grey, the Marquis
of Lansdowne, Lord Thurlow, Lord Lauderdale, and the Duke of Norfolk,
with the other chiefs of the Friends of the People, the Parliamentary
reformers, and the admirers of the French Revolution. The principal of
these are all formally pledged to their projects. If the Duke of
Portland and Lord Fitzwilliam should be admitted into that system, (as
they might and probably would be,) it is quite certain they could not
have the smallest weight in it,--less, indeed, than what they now
possess, if less were possible: because they would be less wanted than
they now are; and because all those who wished to join them, and to act
under them, have been rejected by the Duke of Portland and Lord
Fitzwilliam themselves; and Mr. Fox, finding them thus by themselves
disarmed, has built quite a new fabric, upon quite a new foundation.
There is no trifling on this subject. We see very distinctly before us
the ministry that would be formed and the plan that would be pursued. If
we like the plan, we must wish the power of those who are to carry it
into execution; but to pursue the political exaltation of those whose
political measures we disapprove and whose principles we dissent from is
a species of modern politics not easily comprehensible, and which must
end in the ruin of the country, if it should continue and spread. Mr.
Pitt may be the worst of men, and Mr. Fox may be the best; but, at
present, the former is in the interest of his country, and of the order
of things long established in Europe: Mr. Fox is not. I have, for one,
been born in this order of things, and would fain die in it. I am sure
it is sufficient to make men as virtuous, as happy, and as knowing as
anything which Mr. Fox, and his friends abroad or at, home, would
substitute in its place; and I should be sorry that any set of
politicians should obtain power in England whose principles or schemes
should lead them to countenance persons or factions whose object is to
introduce some new devised order of things into England, or to support
that order where it is already introduced, in France,--a place in which
if it can be fixed, in my mind, it must have a certain and decided
influence in and upon this kingdom.
This is my account of my conduct to my private friends. I have already
said all I wish to say, or nearly so, to the public. I write this with
pain and with an heart full of grief.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] It is an exception, that in one of his last speeches (but not
before) Mr. Fox seemed to think an alliance with Spain might be proper.
PREFACE
TO THE
ADDRESS OF M. BRISSOT
TO HIS CONSTITUENTS.
TRANSLATED BY
THE LATE WILLIAM BURKE, ESQ.
1794.
PREFACE TO BRISSOT'S ADDRESS.
The French Revolution has been the subject of various speculations and
various histories. As might be expected, the royalists and the
republicans have differed a good deal in their accounts of the
principles of that Revolution, of the springs which have set it in
motion, and of the true character of those who have been, or still are,
the principal actors on that astonishing scene.
They who are inclined to think favorably of that event will undoubtedly
object to every state of facts which comes only from the authority of a
royalist. Thus much must be allowed by those who are the most firmly
attached to the cause of religion, law, and order, (for of such, and not
of friends to despotism, the royal party is composed,)--that their very
affection to this generous and manly cause, and their abhorrence of a
Revolution not less fatal to liberty than to government, may possibly
lead them in some particulars to a more harsh representation of the
proceedings of their adversaries than would be allowed by the cold
neutrality of an impartial judge. This sort of error arises from a
source highly laudable; but the exactness of truth may suffer even from
the feelings of virtue. History will do justice to the intentions of
worthy men, but it will be on its guard against their infirmities; it
will examine with great strictness of scrutiny whatever appears from a
writer in favor of his own cause. On the other hand, whatever escapes
him, and makes against that cause, comes with the greatest weight.
In this important controversy, the translator of the following work
brings forward to the English tribunal of opinion the testimony of a
witness beyond all exception. His competence is undoubted. He knows
everything which concerns this Revolution to the bottom. He is a chief
actor in all the scenes which he presents. No man can object to him as a
royalist: the royal party, and the Christian religion, never had a more
determined enemy. In a word, it is BRISSOT. It is Brissot, the
republican, the Jacobin, and the philosopher, who is brought to give an
account of Jacobinism, and of republicanism, and of philosophy.
It is worthy of observation, that this his account of the genius of
Jacobinism and its effects is not confined to the period in which that
faction came to be divided within itself. In several, and those very
important particulars, Brissot's observations apply to the whole of the
preceding period before the great schism, and whilst the Jacobins acted
as one body; insomuch that the far greater part of the proceedings of
the ruling powers since the commencement of the Revolution in France, so
strikingly painted, so strongly and so justly reprobated by Brissot,
were the acts of Brissot himself and his associates. All the members of
the Girondin subdivision were as deeply concerned as any of the Mountain
could possibly be, and some of them much more deeply, in those horrid
transactions which have filled all the thinking part of Europe with the
greatest detestation, and with the most serious apprehensions for the
common liberty and safety.
A question will very naturally be asked,--What could induce Brissot to
draw such a picture? He must have been sensible it was his own. The
answer is,--The inducement was the same with that which led him to
partake in the perpetration of all the crimes the calamitous effects of
which he describes with the pen of a master,--ambition. His faction,
having obtained their stupendous and unnatural power by rooting out of
the minds of his unhappy countrymen every principle of religion,
morality, loyalty, fidelity, and honor, discovered, that, when authority
came into their hands, it would be a matter of no small difficulty for
them to carry on government on the principles by which they had
destroyed it.
The rights of men and the new principles of liberty and equality were
very unhandy instruments for those who wished to establish a system of
tranquillity and order. They who were taught to find nothing to respect
in the title and in the virtues of Louis the Sixteenth, a prince
succeeding to the throne by the fundamental laws, in the line of a
succession of monarchs continued for fourteen hundred years, found
nothing which could bind them to an implicit fidelity and dutiful
allegiance to Messrs. Brissot, Vergniaud, Condorcet, Anacharsis Clootz,
and Thomas Paine.
In this difficulty, they did as well as they could. To govern the
people, they must incline the people to obey. The work was difficult,
but it was necessary. They were to accomplish it by such materials and
by such instruments as they had in their hands. They were to accomplish
the purposes of order, morality, and submission to the laws, from the
principles of atheism, profligacy, and sedition. Ill as the disguise
became them, they began to assume the mask of an austere and rigid
virtue; they exhausted all the stores of their eloquence (which in some
of them were not inconsiderable) in declamations against tumult and
confusion; they made daily harangues on the blessings of order,
discipline, quiet, and obedience to authority; they even showed some
sort of disposition to protect such property as had not been
confiscated. They who on every occasion had discovered a sort of furious
thirst of blood and a greedy appetite for slaughter, who avowed and
gloried in the murders and massacres of the 14th of July, of the 5th and
6th of October, and of the 10th of August, now began to be squeamish and
fastidious with regard to those of the 2nd of September.
In their pretended scruples on the sequel of the slaughter of the 10th
of August, they imposed upon no living creature, and they obtained not
the smallest credit for humanity. They endeavored to establish a
distinction, by the belief of which they hoped to keep the spirit of
murder safely bottled up and sealed for their own purposes, without
endangering themselves by the fumes of the poison which they prepared
for their enemies.
Roland was the chief and the most accredited of the faction. His morals
had furnished little matter of exception against him. Old, domestic, and
uxorious, he led a private life sufficiently blameless. He was therefore
set up as the _Cato_ of the republican party, which did not abound in
such characters.
This man, like most of the chiefs, was the manager of a newspaper, in
which he promoted the interest of his party. He was a fatal present
made by the revolutionists to the unhappy king, as one of his ministers
under the new Constitution. Amongst his colleagues were Clavière and
Servan. All the three have since that time either lost their heads by
the axe of their associates in rebellion, or, to evade their own
revolutionary justice, have fallen by their own hands.
These ministers were regarded by the king as in a conspiracy to dethrone
him. Nobody who considers the circumstances which preceded the
deposition of Louis the Sixteenth, nobody who attends to the subsequent
conduct of those ministers, can hesitate about the reality of such a
conspiracy. The king certainly had no doubt of it; he found himself
obliged to remove them; and the necessity, which first obliged him to
choose such regicide ministers constrained him to replace them by
Dumouriez the Jacobin, and some others of little efficiency, though of a
better description.
A little before this removal, and evidently as a part of the conspiracy,
Roland put into the king's hands, as a memorial, the most insolent,
seditious, and atrocious libel that has probably ever been penned. This
paper Roland a few days after delivered to the National Assembly,[2] who
instantly published and dispersed it over all France; and in order to
give it the stronger operation, they declared that he and his brother
ministers had carried with them the regret of the nation. None of the
writings which have inflamed the Jacobin spirit to a savage fury ever
worked up a fiercer ferment through the whole mass of the republicans
in every part of France.
Under the thin veil of _prediction_, he strongly _recommends_ all the
abominable practices which afterwards followed. In particular, he
inflamed the minds of the populace against the respectable and
conscientious clergy, who became the chief objects of the massacre, and
who were to him the chief objects of a malignity and rancor that one
could hardly think to exist in an human heart.
We have the relics of his fanatical persecution here. We are in a
condition to judge of the merits of the persecutors and of the
persecuted: I do not say the accusers and accused; because, in all the
furious declamations of the atheistic faction against these men, not one
specific charge has been made upon any one person of those who suffered
in their massacre or by their decree of exile.
The king had declared that he would sooner perish under their axe (he
too well saw what was preparing for him) than give his sanction to the
iniquitous act of proscription under which those innocent people were to
be transported.
On this proscription of the clergy a principal part of the ostensible
quarrel between the king and those ministers had turned. From the time
of the authorized publication of this libel, some of the manoeuvres long
and uniformly pursued for the king's deposition became more and more
evident and declared.
The 10th of August came on, and in the manner in which Roland had
predicted: it was followed by the same consequences. The king was
deposed, after cruel massacres in the courts and the apartments of his
palace and in almost all parts of the city. In reward of his treason to
his old master, Roland was by his new masters named Minister of the Home
Department.
The massacres of the 2nd of September were begotten by the massacres of
the 10th of August. They were universally foreseen and hourly expected.
During this short interval between the two murderous scenes, the furies,
male and female, cried out havoc as loudly and as fiercely as ever. The
ordinary jails were all filled with prepared victims; and when they
overflowed, churches were turned into jails. At this time the relentless
Roland had the care of the general police;--he had for his colleague the
bloody Danton, who was Minister of Justice; the insidious Pétion was
Mayor of Paris; the treacherous Manuel was Procurator of the Common
Hall. The magistrates (some or all of them) were evidently the authors
of this massacre. Lest the national guard should, by their very name, be
reminded of their duty in preserving the lives of their fellow-citizens,
the Common Council of Paris, pretending that it was in vain to think of
resisting the murderers, (although in truth neither their numbers nor
their arms were at all formidable,) obliged those guards to draw the
charges from their muskets, and took away their bayonets. One of their
journalists, and, according to their fashion, one of their leading
statesmen, Gorsas, mentions this fact in his newspaper, which he
formerly called the Galley Journal. The title was well suited to the
paper and its author. For some felonies he had been sentenced to the
galleys; but, by the benignity of the late king, this felon (to be one
day advanced to the rank of a regicide) had been pardoned and released
at the intercession of the ambassadors of Tippoo Sultan. His gratitude
was such as might naturally have been expected; and it has lately been
rewarded as it deserved. This liberated galley-slave was raised, in
mockery of all criminal law, to be Minister of Justice: he became from
his elevation a more conspicuous object of accusation, and he has since
received the punishment of his former crimes in proscription and death.
It will be asked, how the Minister of the Home Department was employed
at this crisis. The day after the massacre had commenced, Roland
appeared; but not with the powerful apparatus of a protecting
magistrate, to rescue those who had survived the slaughter of the first
day: nothing of this. On the 3rd of September, (that is, the day after
the commencement of the massacre,[3]) he writes a long, elaborate,
verbose epistle to the Assembly, in which, after magnifying, according
to the _bon-ton_ of the Revolution, his own integrity, humanity,
courage, and patriotism, he first directly justifies all the bloody
proceedings of the 10th of August. He considers the slaughter of that
day as a necessary measure for defeating a conspiracy which (with a full
knowledge of the falsehood of his assertion) he asserts to have been
formed for a massacre of the people of Paris, and which he more than
insinuates was the work of his late unhappy master,--who was universally
known to carry his dread of shedding the blood of his most guilty
subjects to an excess.
"Without the day of the 10th," says he, "it is evident that we should
have been lost. The court, prepared for a long time, waited for the
hour which was to accumulate all treasons, to display over Paris the
standard of death, and to reign there by terror. The sense of the
people, (_le sentiment_,) always just and ready when their opinion is
not corrupted, foresaw the epoch marked for their destruction, and
rendered it fatal to the conspirators." He then proceeds, in the cant
which has been applied to palliate all their atrocities from the 14th of
July, 1789, to the present time:--"It is in the nature of things,"
continues he, "and in that of the human heart, that victory should bring
with it _some_ excess. The sea, agitated by a violent storm, roars
_long_ after the tempest; but _everything has bounds_, which ought _at
length_ to be observed."
In this memorable epistle, he considers such _excesses_ as fatalities
arising from the very nature of things, and consequently not to be
punished. He allows a space of time for the duration of these
agitations; and lest he should be thought rigid and too scanty in his
measure, he thinks it may be _long_. But he would have things to cease
_at length_. But when? and where?--When they may approach his own
person.
"_Yesterday_," says he, "the ministers _were denounced: vaguely_,
indeed, as to the _matter_, because subjects of reproach were wanting;
but with that warmth and force of assertion which strike the imagination
and seduce it for a moment, and which mislead and destroy confidence,
without which no man should remain in place in a free government.
_Yesterday, again_, in an assembly of the presidents of all the
sections, convoked by the ministers, with the view of conciliating all
minds, and of mutual explanation, I perceived _that distrust which
suspects, interrogates, and fetters operations_."
In this manner (that is, in mutual suspicions and interrogatories) this
virtuous Minister of the Home Department, and all the magistracy of
Paris, spent the first day of the massacre, the atrocity of which has
spread horror and alarm throughout Europe. It does not appear that the
putting a stop to the massacre had any part in the object of their
meeting, or in their consultations when they were met. Here was a
minister tremblingly alive to his own safety, dead to that of his
fellow-citizens, eager to preserve his place, and worse than indifferent
about its most important duties. Speaking of the people, he says "that
their hidden enemies may make use of this _agitation_" (the tender
appellation which he gives to horrid massacre) "to hurt _their best
friends and their most able defenders. Already the example begins_: let
it restrain and arrest a _just_ rage. Indignation carried to its height
commences proscriptions which fall only on the _guilty_, but in which
error and particular passions may shortly involve the _honest man_."
He saw that the able artificers in the trade and mystery of murder did
not choose that their skill should be unemployed after their first work,
and that they were full as ready to cut off their rivals as their
enemies. This gave him _one_ alarm that was serious. This letter of
Roland, in every part of it, lets out the secret of all the parties in
this Revolution. _Plena rimarum est; hoc atque illac perfluit_. We see
that none of them condemn the occasional practice of murder,--provided
it is properly applied,--provided it is kept within the bounds which
each of those parties think proper to prescribe. In this case Roland
feared, that, if what was occasionally useful should become habitual,
the practice might go further than was convenient. It might involve the
best friends of the last Revolution, as it had done the heroes of the
first Revolution: he feared that it would not be confined to the La
Fayettes and Clermont-Tonnerres, the Duponts and Barnaves, but that it
might extend to the Brissots and Vergniauds, to the Condorcets, the
Pétions, and to himself. Under this apprehension there is no doubt that
his humane feelings were altogether unaffected.
His observations on the massacre of the preceding day are such as cannot
be passed over. "Yesterday," said he, "was a day upon the events of
which it is perhaps necessary to leave a _veil_. I know that the people
with their vengeance _mingled a sort of justice_: they did not take for
victims _all_ who presented themselves to their fury; they directed it
to _them who had for a long time been spared by the sword of the law_,
and who they _believed_, from the peril of circumstances, should be
sacrificed without delay. But I know that it is easy to _villains and
traitors_ to misrepresent this _effervescence_, and that it must be
checked; I know that we owe to all France the declaration, that the
_executive power_ could not foresee or prevent this excess; I know that
it is due to the constituted authorities to place a limit to it, or
consider themselves as abolished."