human mind have been taught to look on religious opinions as the only
cause of enthusiastic zeal and sectarian propagation. But there is no
doctrine whatever, on which men can warm, that is not capable of the
very same effect. The social nature of man impels him to propagate his
principles, as much as physical impulses urge him to propagate his kind.
The passions give zeal and vehemence. The understanding bestows design
and system. The whole man moves under the discipline of his opinions.
Religion is among the most powerful causes of enthusiasm. When anything
concerning it becomes an object of much meditation, it cannot be
indifferent to the mind. They who do not love religion hate it. The
rebels to God perfectly abhor the Author of their being. They hate Him
"with all their heart, with all their mind, with all their soul, and
with all their strength." He never presents Himself to their thoughts,
but to menace and alarm them. They cannot strike the sun out of heaven,
but they are able to raise a smouldering smoke that obscures him from
their own eyes. Not being able to revenge themselves on God, they have a
delight in vicariously defacing, degrading, torturing, and tearing in
pieces His image in man. Let no one judge of them by what he has
conceived of them, when they were not incorporated, and had no lead.
They were then only passengers in a common vehicle. They were then
carried along with the general motion of religion in the community, and,
without being aware of it, partook of its influence. In that situation,
at worst, their nature was left free to counterwork their principles.
They despaired of giving any very general currency to their opinions:
they considered them as a reserved privilege for the chosen few. But
when the possibility of dominion, lead, and propagation presented
themselves, and that the ambition which before had so often made them
hypocrites might rather gain than lose by a daring avowal of their
sentiments, then the nature of this infernal spirit, which has "evil for
its good," appeared in its full perfection. Nothing, indeed, but the
possession of some power can with any certainty discover what at the
bottom is the true character of any man. Without reading the speeches of
Vergniaud, Français of Nantes, Isnard, and some others of that sort, it
would not be easy to conceive the passion, rancor, and malice of their
tongues and hearts. They worked themselves up to a perfect frenzy
against religion and all its professors. They tore the reputation of the
clergy to pieces by their infuriated declamations and invectives, before
they lacerated their bodies by their massacres. This fanatical atheism
left out, we omit the principal feature in the French Revolution, and a
principal consideration with regard to the effects to be expected from a
peace with it.
The other sort of men were the politicians. To them, who had little or
not at all reflected on the subject, religion was in itself no object of
love or hatred. They disbelieved it, and that was all. Neutral with
regard to that object, they took the side which in the present state of
things might best answer their purposes. They soon found that they could
not do without the philosophers; and the philosophers soon made them
sensible that the destruction of religion was to supply them with means
of conquest, first at home, and then abroad. The philosophers were the
active internal agitators, and supplied the spirit and principles: the
second gave the practical direction. Sometimes the one predominated in
the composition, sometimes the other. The only difference between them
was in the necessity of concealing the general design for a time, and in
their dealing with foreign nations: the fanatics going straight forward
and openly, the politicians by the surer mode of zigzag. In the course
of events, this, among other causes, produced fierce and bloody
contentions between them; but at the bottom they thoroughly agreed in
all the objects of ambition and irreligion, and substantially in all the
means of promoting these ends.
Without question, to bring about the unexampled event of the French
Revolution, the concurrence of a very great number of views and passions
was necessary. In that stupendous work, no one principle by which the
human mind may have its faculties at once invigorated and depraved was
left unemployed; but I can speak it to a certainty, and support it by
undoubted proofs, that the ruling principle of those who acted in the
Revolution _as statesmen_, had the exterior aggrandizement of France as
their ultimate end in the most minute part of the internal changes that
were made. We, who of late years have been drawn from an attention to
foreign affairs by the importance of our domestic discussions, cannot
easily form a conception of the general eagerness of the active and
energetic part of the French nation, itself the most active and
energetic of all nations, previous to its Revolution, upon that subject.
I am convinced that the foreign speculators in France, under the old
government, were twenty to one of the same description then or now in
England; and few of that description there were who did not emulously
set forward the Revolution. The whole official system, particularly in
the diplomatic part, the regulars, the irregulars, down to the clerks in
office, (a corps without all comparison more numerous than the same
amongst us,) coöperated in it. All the intriguers in foreign politics,
all the spies, all the intelligencers, actually or late in function, all
the candidates for that sort of employment, acted solely upon that
principle.
On that system of aggrandizement there was but one mind: but two violent
factions arose about the means. The first wished France, diverted from
the politics of the Continent, to attend solely to her marine, to feed
it by an increase of commerce, and thereby to overpower England on her
own element. They contended, that, if England were disabled, the powers
on the Continent would fall into their proper subordination; that it was
England which deranged the whole Continental system of Europe. The
others, who were by far the more numerous, though not the most outwardly
prevalent at court, considered this plan for France as contrary to her
genius, her situation, and her natural means. They agreed as to the
ultimate object, the reduction of the British power, and, if possible,
its naval power; but they considered an ascendancy on the Continent as a
necessary preliminary to that undertaking. They argued, that the
proceedings of England herself had proved the soundness of this policy:
that her greatest and ablest statesmen had not considered the support of
a Continental balance against France as a deviation from the principle
of her naval power, but as one of the most effectual modes of carrying
it into effect; that such had been her policy ever since the Revolution,
during which period the naval strength of Great Britain had gone on
increasing in the direct ratio of her interference in the politics of
the Continent. With much stronger reason ought the politics of France to
take the same direction,--as well for pursuing objects which her
situation would dictate to her, though England had no existence, as for
counteracting the politics of that nation: to France Continental
politics are primary; they looked on them only of secondary
consideration to England, and, however necessary, but as means necessary
to an end.
What is truly astonishing, the partisans of those two opposite systems
were at once prevalent, and at once employed, and in the very same
transactions, the one ostensibly, the other secretly, during the latter
part of the reign of Louis the Fifteenth. Nor was there one court in
which an ambassador resided on the part of the ministers, in which
another, as a spy on him, did not also reside on the part of the king:
they who pursued the scheme for keeping peace on the Continent, and
particularly with Austria, acting officially and publicly; the other
faction counteracting and opposing them. These private agents were
continually going from their function to the Bastile, and from the
Bastile to employment and favor again. An inextricable cabal was formed,
some of persons of Rank, others of subordinates. But by this means the
corps of politicians was augmented in number, and the whole formed a
body of active, adventuring, ambitious, discontented people, despising
the regular ministry, despising the courts at which they were employed,
despising the court which employed them.
The unfortunate Louis the Sixteenth[35] was not the first cause of the
evil by which he suffered. He came to it, as to a sort of inheritance,
by the false politics of his immediate predecessor. This system of dark
and perplexed intrigue had come to its perfection before he came to the
throne; and even then the Revolution strongly operated in all its
causes.
There was no point on which the discontented diplomatic politicians so
bitterly arraigned their cabinet as for the decay of French influence in
all others. From quarrelling with the court, they began to complain of
monarchy itself, as a system of government too variable for any regular
plan of national aggrandizement. They observed that in that sort of
regimen too much depended on the personal character of the prince: that
the vicissitudes produced by the succession of princes of a different
character, and even the vicissitudes produced in the same man, by the
different views and inclinations belonging to youth, manhood, and age,
disturbed and distracted the policy of a country made by Nature for
extensive empire, or, what was still more to their taste, for that sort
of general overruling influence which prepared empire or supplied the
place of it. They had continually in their hands the observations of
Machiavel on Livy. They had Montesquieu's _Grandeur et Décadence des
Romains_ as a manual; and they compared, with mortification, the
systematic proceedings of a Roman Senate with the fluctuations of a
monarchy. They observed the very small additions of territory which all
the power of Prance, actuated by all the ambition of France, had
acquired in two centuries. The Romans had frequently acquired more in a
single year. They severely and in every part of it criticized the reign
of Louis the Fourteenth, whose irregular and desultory ambition had
more provoked than endangered Europe. Indeed, they who will be at the
pains of seriously considering the history of that period will see that
those French politicians had some reason. They who will not take the
trouble of reviewing it through all its wars and all its negotiations
will consult the short, but judicious, criticism of the Marquis de
Montalembert on that subject. It may be read separately from his
ingenious system of fortification and military defence, on the practical
merit of which I am unable to form a judgment.
The diplomatic politicians of whom I speak, and who formed by far the
majority in that class, made disadvantageous comparisons even between
their more legal and formalizing monarchy and the monarchies of other
states, as a system of power and influence. They observed that France
not only lost ground herself, but, through the languor and unsteadiness
of her pursuits, and from her aiming through commerce at naval force
which she never could attain without losing more on one side than she
could gain on the other, three great powers, each of them (as military
states) capable of balancing her, had grown up on the Continent. Russia
and Prussia had been created almost within memory; and Austria, though
not a new power, and even curtailed in territory, was, by the very
collision in which she lost that territory, greatly improved in her
military discipline and force. During the reign of Maria Theresa, the
interior economy of the country was made more to correspond with the
support of great armies than formerly it had been. As to Prussia, a
merely military power, they observed that one war had enriched her with
as considerable a conquest as France had acquired in centuries. Russia
had broken the Turkish power, by which Austria might be, as formerly she
had been, balanced in favor of France. They felt it with pain, that the
two Northern powers of Sweden and Denmark were in general under the sway
of Russia,--or that, at best, France kept up a very doubtful conflict,
with many fluctuations of fortune, and at an enormous expense, in
Sweden. In Holland the French party seemed, if not extinguished, at
least utterly obscured, and kept under by a Stadtholder, leaning for
support sometimes on Great Britain, sometimes on Prussia, sometimes on
both, never on France. Even the spreading of the Bourbon family had
become merely a family accommodation, and had little effect oh the
national politics. This alliance, they said, extinguished Spain by
destroying all its energy, without adding anything to the real power of
France in the accession of the forces of its great rival. In Italy the
same family accommodation, the same national insignificance, were
equally visible. What cure for the radical weakness of the French
monarchy, to which all the means which wit could devise, or Nature and
fortune could bestow, towards universal empire, was not of force to give
life or vigor or consistency, but in a republic? Out the word came: and
it never went back.
Whether they reasoned right or wrong, or that there was some mixture of
right and wrong in their reasoning, I am sure that in this manner they
felt and reasoned. The different effects of a great military and
ambitious republic and of a monarchy of the same description were
constantly in their mouths. The principle was ready to operate, when
opportunities should offer, which few of them, indeed, foresaw in the
extent in which they were afterwards presented; but these opportunities,
in some degree or other, they all ardently wished for.
When I was in Paris in 1773, the treaty of 1756 between Austria and
France was deplored as a national, calamity; because it united France in
friendship with a power at whose expense alone they could hope any
Continental aggrandizement. When the first partition of Poland was made,
in which France had no share, and which had farther aggrandized every
one of the three powers of which they were most jealous, I found them in
a perfect frenzy of rage and indignation: not that they were hurt at the
shocking and uncolored violence and injustice of that partition, but at
the debility, improvidence, and want of activity in their government, in
not preventing it as a means of aggrandizement to their rivals, or in
not contriving, by exchanges of some kind or other, to obtain their
share of advantage from that robbery.
In that or nearly in that state of things and of opinions came the
Austrian match, which promised to draw the knot, as afterwards in effect
it did, still more closely between the old rival houses. This added
exceedingly to their hatred and contempt of their monarchy. It was for
this reason that the late glorious queen, who on all accounts was formed
to produce general love and admiration, and whose life was as mild and
beneficent as her death was beyond example great and heroic, became so
very soon and so very much the object of an implacable rancor, never to
be extinguished but in her blood. When I wrote my letter in answer to M.
de Menonville, in the beginning of January, 1791, I had good reason for
thinking that this description of revolutionists did not so early nor so
steadily point their murderous designs at the martyr king as at the
royal heroine. It was accident, and the momentary depression of that
part of the faction, that gave to the husband the happy priority in
death.
From this their restless desire of an overruling influence, they bent a
very great part of their designs and efforts to revive the old French
party, which was a democratic party, in Holland, and to make a
revolution there. They were happy at the troubles which the singular
imprudence of Joseph the Second had stirred up in the Austrian
Netherlands. They rejoiced, when they saw him irritate his subjects,
profess philosophy, send away the Dutch garrisons, and dismantle his
fortifications. As to Holland, they never forgave either the king or the
ministry for suffering that object, which they justly looked on as
principal in their design of reducing the power of England, to escape
out of their hands. This was the true secret of the commercial treaty,
made, on their part, against all the old rules and principles of
commerce, with a view of diverting the English nation, by a pursuit of
immediate profit, from an attention to the progress of France in its
designs upon that republic. The system of the economists, which led to
the general opening of commerce, facilitated that treaty, but did not
produce it. They were in despair, when they found, that, by the vigor of
Mr. Pitt, supported in this point by Mr. Fox and the opposition, the
object to which they had sacrificed their manufactures was lost to their
ambition.
This eager desire of raising France from the condition into which she
had fallen, as they conceived, from her monarchical imbecility, had been
the main spring of their precedent interference in that unhappy American
quarrel, the bad effects of which to this nation have not as yet fully
disclosed themselves. These sentiments had been long lurking in their
breasts, though their views were only discovered now and then in heat
and as by escapes, but on this occasion they exploded suddenly. They
were professed with ostentation, and propagated with zeal. These
sentiments were not produced, as some think, by their American alliance.
The American alliance was produced by their republican principles and
republican policy. This new relation undoubtedly did much. The
discourses and cabals that it produced, the intercourse that it
established, and, above all, the example, which made it seem practicable
to establish a republic in a great extent of country, finished the work,
and gave to that part of the revolutionary faction a degree of strength
which required other energies than the late king possessed to resist or
even to restrain. It spread everywhere; but it was nowhere more
prevalent than in the heart of the court. The palace of Versailles, by
its language, seemed a forum of democracy. To have pointed out to most
of those politicians, from their dispositions and movements, what has
since happened, the fall of their own monarchy, of their own laws, of
their own religion, would have been to furnish a motive the more for
pushing forward a system on which they considered all these things as
incumbrances. Such in truth they were. And we have seen them succeed,
not only in the destruction of their monarchy, but in all the objects
of ambition that they proposed from that destruction.
When I contemplate the scheme on which France is formed, and when I
compare it with these systems with which it is and ever must be in
conflict, those things which seem as defects in her polity are the very
things which make me tremble. The states of the Christian world have
grown up to their present magnitude in a great length of time and by a
great variety of accidents. They have been improved to what we see them
with greater or less degrees of felicity and skill. Not one of them has
been formed upon a regular plan or with any unity of design. As their
constitutions are not systematical, they have not been directed to any
_peculiar_ end, eminently distinguished, and superseding every other.
The objects which they embrace are of the greatest possible variety, and
have become in a manner infinite. In all these old countries, the state
has been made to the people, and not the people conformed to the state.
Every state has pursued not only every sort of social advantage, but it
has cultivated the welfare of every individual. His wants, his wishes,
even his tastes, have been consulted. This comprehensive scheme
virtually produced a degree of personal liberty in forms the most
adverse to it. That liberty was found, under monarchies styled absolute,
in a degree unknown to the ancient commonwealths. From hence the powers
of all our modern states meet, in all their movements, with some
obstruction. It is therefore no wonder, that when these states are to be
considered as machines to operate for some one great end, that this
dissipated and balanced force is not easily concentred, or made to bear
with the whole force of the nation upon one point.
The British state is, without question, that which pursues the greatest
variety of ends, and is the least disposed to sacrifice any one of them
to another or to the whole. It aims at taking in the entire circle of
human desires, and securing for them their fair enjoyment. Our
legislature has been ever closely connected, in its most efficient part,
with individual feeling and individual interest. Personal liberty, the
most lively of these feelings and the most important of these interests,
which in other European countries has rather arisen from the system of
manners and the habitudes of life than from the laws of the state, (in
which it flourished more from neglect than attention,) in England has
been a direct object of government.
On this principle, England would be the weakest power in the whole
system. Fortunately, however, the great riches of this kingdom, arising
from a variety of causes, and the disposition of the people, which is as
great to spend as to accumulate, has easily afforded a disposable
surplus that gives a mighty momentum to the state. This difficulty, with
these advantages to overcome it, has called forth the talents of the
English financiers, who, by the surplus of industry poured out by
prodigality, have outdone everything which has been accomplished in
other nations. The present minister has outdone his predecessors, and,
as a minister of revenue, is far above my power of praise. But still
there are cases in which England feels more than several others (though
they all feel) the perplexity of an immense body of balanced advantages
and of individual demands, and of some irregularity in the whole mass.
France differs essentially from all those governments which are formed
without system, which exist by habit, and which are confused with the
multitude and with the complexity of their pursuits. What now stands as
government in France is struck out at a heat. The design is wicked,
immoral, impious, oppressive: but it is spirited and daring; it is
systematic; it is simple in its principle; it has unity and consistency
in perfection. In that country, entirely to cut off a branch of
commerce, to extinguish a manufacture, to destroy the circulation of
money, to violate credit, to suspend the course of agriculture, even to
burn a city or to lay waste a province of their own, does not cost them
a moment's anxiety. To them the will, the wish, the want, the liberty,
the toil, the blood of individuals, is as nothing. Individuality is left
out of their scheme of government. The state is all in all. Everything
is referred to the production of force; afterwards, everything is
trusted to the use of it. It is military in its principle, in its
maxims, in its spirit, and in all its movements. The state has dominion
and conquest for its sole objects,--dominion over minds by proselytism,
over bodies by arms.
Thus constituted, with an immense body of natural means, which are
lessened in their amount only to be increased in their effect, France
has, since the accomplishment of the Revolution, a complete unity in its
direction. It has destroyed every resource of the state which depends
upon opinion and the good-will of individuals. The riches of convention
disappear. The advantages of Nature in some measure remain; even these,
I admit, are astonishingly lessened; the command over what remains is
complete and absolute. We go about asking when assignats will expire,
and we laugh at the last price of them. But what signifies the fate of
those tickets of despotism? The despotism will find despotic means of
supply. They have found the short cut to the productions of Nature,
while others, in pursuit of them, are obliged to wind through the
labyrinth of a very intricate state of society. They seize upon the
fruit of the labor; they seize upon the laborer himself. Were France but
half of what it is in population, in compactness, in applicability of
its force, situated as it is, and being what it is, it would be too
strong for most of the states of Europe, constituted as they are, and
proceeding as they proceed. Would it be wise to estimate what the world
of Europe, as well as the world of Asia, had to dread from Genghiz Khân,
upon a contemplation of the resources of the cold and barren spot in the
remotest Tartary from whence first issued that scourge of the human
race? Ought we to judge from the excise and stamp duties of the rocks,
or from the paper circulation of the sands of Arabia, the power by which
Mahomet and his tribes laid hold at once on the two most powerful
empires of the world, beat one of them totally to the ground, broke to
pieces the other, and, in not much longer space of time than I have
lived, overturned governments, laws, manners, religion, and extended an
empire from the Indus to the Pyrenees?