to lower any sovereign in the public estimation, and to turn his
defeats into disgraces, than to threaten in a moment of impotence. The
second manifesto of the Duke of Brunswick appeared, therefore, to the
world to be extremely ill-timed. However, if his menaces in that
manifesto had been seasonable, they were not without an object. Great
crimes then apprehended, and great evils then impending, were to be
prevented. At this time, every act which early menaces might possibly
have _prevented_ is done. Punishment and vengeance alone remain,--and
God forbid that they should ever be forgotten! But the punishment of
enormous offenders will not be the less severe, or the less exemplary,
when it is not threatened at a moment when we have it not in our power
to execute our threats. On the other side, to pass by proceedings of
such a nefarious nature, in all kinds, as have been carried on in
France, without any signification of resentment, would be in effect to
ratify them, and thus to become accessaries after the fact in all those
enormities which it is impossible to repeat or think of without horror.
An absolute silence appears to me to be at this time the only safe
course.
The second usual matter of manifestoes is composed of _promises_ to
those who cooperate with our designs. These promises depend in a great
measure, if not wholly, on the apparent power of the person who makes
them to fulfil his engagements. A time of disaster on the part of the
promiser seems not to add much to the dignity of his person or to the
effect of his offers. One would hardly wish to seduce any unhappy
persons to give the last provocation to a merciless tyranny, without
very effectual means of protecting them.
The time, therefore, seems (as I said) not favorable to a general
manifesto, on account of the unpleasant situation of our affairs.
However, I write in a changing scene, when a measure very imprudent
to-day may be very proper to-morrow. Some great victory may alter the
whole state of the question, so far as it regards our _power_ of
fulfilling any engagement we may think fit to make.
But there is another consideration of far greater importance for all the
purposes of this manifesto. The public, and the parties concerned, will
look somewhat to the disposition of the promiser indicated by his
conduct, as well as to his power of fulfilling his engagements.
Speaking of this nation as part of a general combination of powers, are
we quite sure that others can believe us to be sincere, or that we can
be even fully assured of our own sincerity, in the protection of those
who shall risk their lives for the restoration of monarchy in France,
when the world sees that those who are the natural, legal,
constitutional representatives of that monarchy, if it has any, have not
had their names so much as mentioned in any one public act, that in no
way whatever are their persons brought forward, that their rights have
not been expressly or implicitly allowed, and that they have not been in
the least consulted on the important interests they have at stake? On
the contrary, they are kept in a state of obscurity and contempt, and in
a degree of indigence at times bordering on beggary. They are, in fact,
little less prisoners in the village of Hanau than the royal captives
who are locked up in the tower of the Temple. What is this, according to
the common indications which guide the judgment of mankind, but, under
the pretext of protecting the crown of France, in reality to usurp it?
I am also very apprehensive that there are other circumstances which
must tend to weaken the force of our declarations. No partiality to the
allied powers can prevent great doubts on the fairness of our intentions
as supporters of the crown of France, or of the true principles of
legitimate government in opposition to Jacobinism, when it is visible
that the two leading orders of the state of France, who are now the
victims, and who must always be the true and sole supports of monarchy
in that country, are, at best, in some of their descriptions, considered
only as objects of charity, and others are, when employed, employed only
as mercenary soldiers,--that they are thrown back out of all reputable
service, are in a manner disowned, considered as nothing in their own
cause, and never once consulted in the concerns of their king, their
country, their laws, their religion, and their property. We even affect
to be ashamed of them. In all our proceedings we carefully avoid the
appearance of being of a party with them. In all our ideas of treaty we
do not regard them as what they are, the two leading orders of the
kingdom. If we do not consider them in that light, we must recognize the
savages by whom they have been ruined, and who have declared war upon
Europe, whilst they disgrace and persecute human nature, and openly defy
the God that made them, as real proprietors of France.
I am much afraid, too, that we shall scarcely be believed fair
supporters of lawful monarchy against Jacobinism, so long as we continue
to make and to observe cartels with the Jacobins, and on fair terms
exchange prisoners with them, whilst the Royalists, invited to our
standard, and employed under our public faith against the Jacobins, if
taken by that savage faction, are given up to the executioner without
the least attempt whatsoever at reprisal. For this we are to look at the
king of Prussia's conduct, compared with his manifestoes about a
twelvemonth ago. For this we are to look at the capitulations of Mentz
and Valenciennes, made in the course of the present campaign. By those
two capitulations the Christian Royalists were excluded from any
participation in the cause of the combined powers. They were considered
as the outlaws of Europe. Two armies were in effect sent against them.
One of those armies (that which surrendered Mentz) was very near
overpowering the Christians of Poitou, and the other (that which
surrendered at Valenciennes) has actually crushed the people whom
oppression and despair had driven to resistance at Lyons, has massacred
several thousands of them in cold blood, pillaged the whole substance of
the place, and pursued their rage to the very houses, condemning that
noble city to desolation, in the unheard-of manner we have seen it
devoted.
It is, then, plain, by a conduct which overturns a thousand
declarations, that we take the Royalists of France only as an instrument
of some convenience in a temporary hostility with the Jacobins, but that
we regard those atheistic and murderous barbarians as the _bonâ fide_
possessors of the soil of France. It appears, at least, that we consider
them as a fair government _de facto_, if not _de jure_, a resistance to
which, in favor of the king of Prance, by any man who happened to be
born within that country, might equitably be considered by other
nations as the crime of treason.
For my part, I would sooner put my hand into the fire than sign an
invitation to oppressed men to fight under my standard, and then, on
every sinister event of war, cruelly give them up to be punished as the
basest of traitors, as long as I had one of the common enemy in my hands
to be put to death in order to secure those under my protection, and to
vindicate the common honor of sovereigns. We hear nothing of this kind
of security in favor of those whom we invite to the support of our
cause. Without it, I am not a little apprehensive that the proclamations
of the combined powers might (contrary to their intention, no doubt) be
looked upon as frauds, and cruel traps laid for their lives.
So far as to the correspondence between our declarations and our
conduct: let the declaration be worded as it will, the conduct is the
practical comment by which, and which alone, it can be understood. This
conduct, acting on the declaration, leaves a monarchy without a monarch,
and without any representative or trustee for the monarch and the
monarchy. It supposes a kingdom without states and orders, a territory
without proprietors, and faithful subjects who are to be left to the
fate of rebels and traitors.
The affair of the establishment of a government is a very difficult
undertaking for foreign powers to act in as _principals_; though as
_auxiliaries and mediators_ it has been not at all unusual, and may be a
measure full of policy and humanity and true dignity.
The first thing we ought to do, supposing us not giving the law as
conquerors, but acting as friendly powers applied to for counsel and
assistance in the settlement of a distracted country, is well to
consider the composition, nature, and temper of its objects, and
particularly of those who actually do or who ought to exercise power in
that state. It is material to know who they are, and how constituted,
whom we consider as _the people of France_.
The next consideration is, through whom our arrangements are to be made,
and on what principles the government we propose is to be established.
The first question on the people is this: Whether we are to consider the
individuals _now actually in France, numerically taken and arranged into
Jacobin clubs_, as the body politic, constituting the nation of
France,--or whether we consider the original individual proprietors of
lands, expelled since the Revolution, and the states and the bodies
politic, such as the colleges of justice called Parliaments, the
corporations, noble and not noble, of bailliages and towns and cities,
the bishops and the clergy, as the true constituent parts of the nation,
and forming the legally organized parts of the people of France.
In this serious concern it is very necessary that we should have the
most distinct ideas annexed to the terms we employ; because it is
evident that an abuse of the term _people_ has been the original,
fundamental cause of those evils, the cure of which, by war and policy,
is the present object of all the states of Europe.
If we consider the acting power in Prance, in any legal construction of
public law, as the people, the question is decided in favor of the
republic one and indivisible. But we have decided for monarchy. If so,
we have a king and subjects; and that king and subjects have rights and
privileges which ought to be supported at home: for I do not suppose
that the government of that kingdom can or ought to be regulated by the
arbitrary mandate of a foreign confederacy.
As to the faction exercising power, to suppose that monarchy can be
supported by principled regicides, religion by professed atheists, order
by clubs of Jacobins, property by committees of proscription, and
jurisprudence by revolutionary tribunals, is to be sanguine in a degree
of which I am incapable. On them I decide, for myself, that these
persons are not the legal corporation of France, and that it is not with
them we can (if we would) settle the government of France.
Since, then, we have decided for monarchy in that kingdom, we ought also
to settle who is to be the monarch, who is to be the guardian of a
minor, and how the monarch and monarchy is to be modified and supported;
if the monarch is to be elected, who the electors are to be,--if
hereditary, what order is established, corresponding with an hereditary
monarchy, and fitted to maintain it; who are to modify it in its
exercise; who are to restrain its powers, where they ought to be
limited, to strengthen them, where they are to be supported, or, to
enlarge them, where the object, the time, and the circumstances may
demand their extension. These are things which, in the outline, ought to
be made distinct and clear; for if they are not, (especially with regard
to those great points, who are the proprietors of the soil, and what is
the corporation of the kingdom,) there is nothing to hinder the complete
establishment of a Jacobin republic, (such as that formed in 1790 and
1791,) under the name of a _Démocratie Royale_. Jacobinism does not
consist in the having or not having a certain pageant under the name of
a king, but "in taking the people as equal individuals, without any
corporate name or description, without attention to property, without
division of powers, and forming the government of delegates from a
number of men so constituted,--in destroying or confiscating property,
and bribing the public creditors, or the poor, with the spoils, now of
one part of the community, now of another, without regard to
prescription or possession."
I hope no one can be so very blind as to imagine that monarchy can be
acknowledged and supported in France upon any other basis than that of
its property, _corporate and individual_,--or that it can enjoy a
moment's permanence or security upon any scheme of things which sets
aside all the ancient corporate capacities and distinctions of the
kingdom, and subverts the whole fabric of its ancient laws and usages,
political, civil, and religious, to introduce a system founded on the
supposed _rights of man, and the absolute equality of the human race_.
Unless, therefore, we declare clearly and distinctly in favor of the
_restoration_ of property, and confide to the hereditary property of the
kingdom the limitation and qualifications of its hereditary monarchy,
the blood and treasure of Europe is wasted for the establishment of
Jacobinism in France. There is no doubt that Danton and Robespierre,
Chaumette and Barère, that Condorcet, that Thomas Paine, that La
Fayette, and the ex-Bishop of Autun, the _Abbé Grégoire_, with all the
gang of the Sieyèses, the Henriots, and the Santerres, if they could
secure themselves in the fruits of their rebellion and robbery, would
be perfectly indifferent, whether the most unhappy of all infants, whom
by the lessons of the shoemaker, his governor and guardian, they are
training up studiously and methodically to be an idiot, or, what is
worse, the most wicked and base of mankind, continues to receive his
civic education in the Temple or the Tuileries, whilst they, and such as
they, really govern the kingdom.
It cannot be too often and too strongly inculcated, that monarchy and
property must, in France, go together, or neither can exist. To think of
the possibility of the existence of a permanent and hereditary royalty,
_where nothing else is hereditary or permanent in point either of
personal or corporate dignity_, is a ruinous chimera, worthy of the Abbé
Sieyès, and those wicked fools, his associates, who usurped power by the
murders of the 19th of July and the 6th of October, 1789, and who
brought forth the monster which they called _Démocratie Royale_, or the
Constitution.
I believe that most thinking men would prefer infinitely some sober and
sensible form of a republic, in which there was no mention at all of a
king, but which held out some reasonable security to property, life, and
personal freedom, to a scheme of tilings like this _Démocratie Royale,_
founded on impiety, immorality, fraudulent currencies, the confiscation
of innocent individuals, and the pretended rights of man,--and which, in
effect, excluding the whole body of the nobility, clergy, and landed
property of a great nation, threw everything into the hands of a
desperate set of obscure adventurers, who led to every mischief a blind
and bloody band of _sans-culottes._ At the head, or rather at the tail,
of this system was a miserable pageant, as its ostensible instrument,
who was to be treated with every species of indignity, till the moment
when he was conveyed from the palace of contempt to the dungeon of
horror, and thence led by a brewer of his capital, through the applauses
of an hired, frantic, drunken multitude, to lose his head upon a
scaffold.
This is the Constitution, or _Démocratie Royale_; and this is what
infallibly would be again set up in France, to run exactly the same
round, if the predominant power should so far be forced to submit as to
receive the name of a king, leaving it to the Jacobins (that is, to
those who have subverted royalty and destroyed property) to modify the
one and to distribute the other as spoil. By the Jacobins I mean
indiscriminately the Brissotins and the Maratists, knowing no sort of
difference between them. As to any other party, none exists in that
unhappy country. The Royalists (those in Poitou excepted) are banished
and extinguished; and as to what they call the Constitutionalists, or
_Democrates Royaux_, they never had an existence of the smallest degree
of power, consideration, or authority, nor, if they differ at all from
the rest of the atheistic banditti, (which from their actions and
principles I have no reason to think,) were they ever any other than the
temporary tools and instruments of the more determined, able, and
systematic regicides. Several attempts have been made to support this
chimerical _Démocratie Royale_: the first was by La Fayette, the last by
Dumouriez: they tended only to show that this absurd project had no
party to support it. The Girondists under Wimpfen, and at Bordeaux, have
made some struggle. The Constitutionalists never could make any, and
for a very plain reason: they were _leaders in rebellion_. All their
principles and their whole scheme of government being republican, they
could never excite the smallest degree of enthusiasm in favor of the
unhappy monarch, whom they had rendered contemptible, to make him the
executive officer in their new commonwealth. They only appeared as
traitors to their own Jacobin cause, not as faithful adherents to the
king.
In an address to France, in an attempt to treat with it, or in
considering any scheme at all relative to it, it is impossible we should
mean the geographical, we must always mean the moral and political
country. I believe we shall be in a great error, if we act upon an idea
that there exists in that country any organized body of men who might be
willing to treat on equitable terms for the restoration of their
monarchy, but who are nice in balancing those terms, and who would
accept such as to them appeared reasonable, but who would quietly submit
to the predominant power, if they were not gratified in the fashion of
some constitution which suited with their fancies.
[Sidenote: No individual influence, civil or military.]
I take the state of France to be totally different. I know of no such
body, and of no such party. So far from a combination of twenty men,
(always excepting Poitou,) I never yet heard that _a single man_ could
be named of sufficient force or influence to answer for another man,
much less for the smallest district in the country, or for the most
incomplete company of soldiers in the army. We see every man that the
Jacobins choose to apprehend taken up in his village or in his house,
and conveyed to prison without the least shadow of resistance,--_and
this indifferently_, whether he is suspected of Royalism, or Federalism,
Moderantism, Democracy Royal, or any other of the names of faction which
they start by the hour. What is much more astonishing, (and, if we did
not carefully attend to the genius and circumstances of this Revolution,
must indeed appear incredible,) all their most accredited military men,
from a generalissimo to a corporal, may be arrested, (each in the midst
of his camp, and covered with the laurels of accumulated victories,)
tied neck and heels, thrown into a cart, and sent to Paris to be
disposed of at the pleasure of the Revolutionary tribunals.
[Sidenote: No corporations of justice, commerce, or police.]
As no individuals have power and influence, so there are no
corporations, whether of lawyers or burghers, existing. The Assembly
called Constituent, destroyed all such institutions very early. The
primary and secondary assemblies, by their original constitution, were
to be dissolved when they answered the purpose of electing the
magistrates, and were expressly disqualified from performing any
corporate act whatsoever. The transient magistrates have been almost all
removed before the expiration of their terms, and new have been lately
imposed upon the people without the form or ceremony of an election.
These magistrates during their existence are put under, as all the
executive authorities are from first to last, the popular societies
(called Jacobin clubs) of the several countries, and this by an express
order of the National Convention: it is even made a case of death to
oppose or attack those clubs. They, too, have been lately subjected to
an expurgatory scrutiny, to drive out from them everything savoring of
what they call the crime of _moderantism_, of which offence, however,
few were guilty. But as people began to take refuge from their
persecutions amongst themselves, they have driven them from that last
asylum.
The state of France is perfectly simple. It consists of but two
descriptions,--the oppressors and the oppressed.
The first has the whole authority of the state in their hands,--all the
arms, all the revenues of the public, all the confiscations of
individuals and corporations. They have taken the lower sort from their
occupations and have put them into pay, that they may form them into a
body of janizaries to overrule and awe property. The heads of these
wretches they never suffer to cool. They supply them with a food for
fury varied by the day,--besides the sensual state of intoxication, from
which they are rarely free. They have made the priests and people
formally abjure the Divinity; they have estranged them from every civil,
moral, and social, or even natural and instinctive sentiment, habit, and
practice, and have rendered them systematically savages, to make it
impossible for them to be the instruments of any sober and virtuous
arrangement, or to be reconciled to any state of order, under any name
whatsoever.
The other description--_the oppressed_--are people of some property:
they are the small relics of the persecuted landed interest; they are
the burghers and the farmers. By the very circumstance of their being of
some property, though numerous in some points of view, they cannot be
very considerable as _a number_. In cities the nature of their
occupations renders them domestic and feeble; in the country it
confines them to their farm for subsistence. The national guards are all
changed and reformed. Everything suspicious in the description of which
they were composed is rigorously disarmed. Committees, called of
vigilance and safety, are everywhere formed: a most severe and
scrutinizing inquisition, far more rigid than anything ever known or
imagined. Two persons cannot meet and confer without hazard to their
liberty, and even to their lives. Numbers scarcely credible have been
executed, and their property confiscated. At Paris, and in most other
towns, the bread they buy is a daily dole,--which they cannot obtain
without a daily ticket delivered to them by their masters. Multitudes of
all ages and sexes are actually imprisoned. I have reason to believe
that in France there are not, for various state crimes, so few as twenty
thousand[33] actually in jail,--a large proportion of people of property
in any state. If a father of a family should show any disposition to
resist or to withdraw himself from their power, his wife and children
are cruelly to answer for it. It is by means of these hostages that they
keep the troops, which they force by masses (as they call it) into the
field, true to their colors.
Another of their resources is not to be forgotten. They have lately
found a way of giving a sort of ubiquity to the supreme sovereign
authority, which no monarch has been able yet to give to any
representation of his.
The commissioners of the National Convention, who are the members of the
Convention itself, and really exercise all its powers, make continual
circuits through every province, and visits to every army. There they
supersede all the ordinary authorities, civil and military, and change
and alter everything at their pleasure. So that, in effect, no
deliberative capacity exists in any portion of the inhabitants.
Toulon, republican in principle, having taken its decision _in a moment
under the guillotine_, and before the arrival of these
commissioners,--Toulon, being a place regularly fortified, and having in
its bosom a navy in part highly discontented, has escaped, though by a
sort of miracle: and it would not have escaped, if two powerful fleets
had not been at the door, to give them not only strong, but prompt and
immediate succor, especially as neither this nor any other seaport town
in France can be depended on, from the peculiarly savage dispositions,
manners, and connections among the lower sort of people in those places.
This I take to be the true state of things in France, _so far as it
regards any existing bodies, whether of legal or voluntary association,
capable of acting or of treating in corps_.