THE THRONE ASSAILED.
Angry Interview between the King and the Mayor.--Decisive
Action of La Fayette.--Expectations of the Queen.--Movement of
the Prussian Army.--Efforts of the Priests.--Secret Committee
of Royalists.--Terror in the Palace.--The Queen's View of the
King's Character.--Parties in France.--Energetic Action of the
Assembly.--Speech of Vergniaud.
The next day after the fearful scenes of the 20th of June, the Assembly
held a very tumultuous sitting. Various measures were proposed to
prevent a repetition of armed petitions, and the filing of processions
through the hall. The Jacobins were, however, in sympathy with the
mob; and the Royalists, waiting the approach of foreign armies, had
no wish to introduce order but by the sword of invasion. It was
apprehended that the mob, who had now risen above the power of law,
might again invade the palace. In the afternoon of the 21st, crowds
began to assemble at various points, but the mayor, Pétion, succeeded
in inducing them to disperse. He then hastened to the king, and said to
him,
"Sire, there is no longer cause for alarm. Order is restored. The
people have become tranquil and satisfied."
The king, who now appreciated the peril of his position, was
exasperated, and replied, with suppressed emotion, "That is not true."
"Sire--" rejoined Pétion.
"Be silent," said the king sternly, interrupting him.
"It befits not the magistrate of the people," replied Pétion, "to be
silent when he does his duty and speaks the truth."
"The tranquillity of Paris rests on your head," added the king.
"I know my duty," Pétion replied, "and shall perform it."
The king could no longer restrain himself, and passionately exclaimed,
"Enough; go and perform it. Retire."
Pétion, thus summarily turned out of doors, bowed and left. The report
of the angry interview was speedily spread through Paris. It was
rumored _through the palace_ that the mob were preparing to rise to
murder the king and all the royal family. It was rumored _through the
streets_ that the Royalists were endeavoring to provoke the people to
rise, that they might shoot them down with artillery. The mayor issued
a proclamation urging the people not to allow themselves to be excited
to fresh commotions. The king issued a proclamation, spirited and
defiant in its tone, and yet calculated only to exasperate those whom
he had no power to restrain.[330]
La Fayette, who was at this time with his division of the army on the
frontiers, heard these tidings from Paris with intense alarm. Had the
court not prevented his election as mayor, the outrages of the 20th
of June could not have occurred. His only hope for France was in the
Constitution. The invasion of the Legislative Assembly by the mob, the
irruption into the palace, and the outrages inflicted upon the royal
family, impressed him with shame and horror. He saw the terrific reign
of anarchy approaching, and was fully conscious that no one could
attempt to resist the popular torrent but at the peril of his life.
He wrote a very earnest letter of remonstrance to the Assembly, and
resolved to hasten immediately to Paris, and to brave every possible
danger in endeavoring to restore to his country the dominion of law.
Making all the arrangements in his power, that his temporary absence
might not be detrimental to the military operations then in progress,
he set out for the capital, and arrived there on the 28th of June.[331]
He thought that he might rely upon the National Guard to aid him in
maintaining the Constitution, and that, throwing himself into the
breach to save the monarchy and the king, he might place some reliance
upon the co-operation of the court. But the court hated La Fayette
and constitutional liberty, and wished for no assistance but from the
armies of the allies, through whom they might dictate terms to the
re-enslaved people.
La Fayette, immediately upon his arrival in Paris, sent a message
to the Assembly that he wished for permission to address them.
At half-past one of the 28th of June, he entered the hall. The
Constitutionalists received him with plaudits. The Republicans, both
the Girondists and the Jacobins, were silent. The general, in his bold
and spirited address, spoke of the disgrace which the outrages of the
20th of June had brought upon the nation, and the indignation which it
had excited in the army, and urged that the instigators of the riot
should be prosecuted; that the Jacobin Club, ever urging violence and
revolution, should be suppressed; and that the Constitution and the
laws should be maintained by all the armed force of the government.
This speech introduced an angry debate, in which La Fayette was
reproached with neglecting his own duties in the army to meddle with
matters in which he had no concern. La Fayette left the Assembly in the
midst of the debate, and repaired to the palace to see what assistance
he could render to the king and queen. The courtiers surrounding the
monarch, with their wonted infatuation, assailed La Fayette with the
most abusive epithets. The king and queen received him with great
coldness, and refused to accept from him of any sympathy or aid.
"If the court and the people attached to the king," writes the Marquis
de Ferrières, a decided Royalist, "had but resolved to support La
Fayette, there was force to have annihilated the two factions. But the
queen recoiled from any idea of owing her safety to a man whom she
had resolved to ruin. They refused to enter into his views, and they
thus rejected the only means of safety that Providence offered them.
Inexplicable blindness, if an explanation were not afforded by the
approaching entry of the foreign troops and the confidence reposed in
them."
The historian Toulongeon, describing these events, says, "Retired to
his hotel, La Fayette set himself to consider what was the force of
which he could avail himself. A review of the first division of the
National Guard was fixed for the next morning at break of day. The king
was to pass along the line, and La Fayette was then to harangue the
troops. But the mayor, Pétion, _was advertised of their movements by
the queen_, who feared the success of La Fayette even more than that of
the Jacobins, and a counter-order was given, and the review did _not_
take place."
La Fayette returned to the army thwarted and disheartened. His
retirement in despair from Paris was the last expiring sigh of the
Constitutional party. From this moment the Jacobins resolved upon his
destruction, and that very evening his effigy was burned at the Palais
Royal. Bertrand de Moleville, one of the most false and envenomed of
the Royalist writers, condemns La Fayette for thus leaving Paris. But
even Professor Smyth, whose English sympathies are strongly with the
court, exclaims,
"M. Bertrand de Moleville may surely be asked, on this occasion, what
resource was left for La Fayette but to move away from Paris, if the
king and the court, for whom he was hazarding both his fame and his
safety, would not honor him with the slightest countenance? Was it
to be endured that they were to seem neutral and indifferent, at the
least, and sitting with folded arms, while he was to be left to rush
into a combat in the Assembly and in the streets of Paris with their
furious and murderous enemies, and with the men who had just been
assailing the king in his palace, and who evidently only waited for an
opportunity to rob him of his crown and take away his life; was this,
I repeat, to be endured? Many are the sensations by which the heart
of man may be alienated and imbittered, but there are few more fitted
for that purpose than to find indifference to services offered, and
ingratitude for sacrifices made."[332]
Both the king and the queen knew that Prussia had already combined with
Austria, and was secretly marching an army of eighty thousand men under
the Duke of Brunswick to unite with the emigrants at Coblentz. The
queen thought that the allies would be in Paris in six weeks. She was
minutely informed of their contemplated movements; when they would be
at Verdun, when at Lille; and she, in confidence, informed her ladies
that she expected to be rescued in a month.[333]
The peril of France was now truly great, and the patriots were deeply
agitated. Foreign armies were approaching. The king not only was taking
no effectual measures for the defense of the kingdom, but had vetoed
the decrees of the Assembly raising an army for the protection of the
capital, and was also believed to be in sympathy and in traitorous
correspondence with the foe. France was threatened with invasion, and
the court of France was virtually guiding the march of the invading
armies, weakening every point of defense, and striving to betray the
patriot forces into the hands of the enemy. The only excuse which
history can offer for the king is, that he was the tool of others, and
so weak and characterless that he was unconscious of the enormity of
his crime. But this excuse, which ought to have commended him to pity,
could not be an argument for maintaining him upon his throne.
Though it was well known to all intelligent men that the Prussian
armies were marching to unite with the Austrian for the invasion of
France, yet the king, in grossest violation of duty, had made no
communication of the fact to the Legislative Assembly. All the great
roads were crowded with priests, nobles, and their partisans, hastening
to join the emigrants at Coblentz. Couriers were every where traversing
Europe, from St. Petersburg to Rome, from Stockholm to Madrid, from
Berlin to Naples, openly announcing the coalition of all Europe to
crush the revolution in France, and declaring that the armies would
move in such force that the French would not be able to resist them
for a single month. The allies were not unwilling to have their plans
known and even exaggerated, for some of them hoped that the terror
of the threat might be sufficient to drive the French patriots to
submission.[334]
It was consequently proclaimed, not officially, but with great
soundings of trumpets, that Spain was to indemnify herself for the
war by taking possession of the four beautiful southern provinces
of France which lean against the Pyrenees--Navarre, Roussillon,
Languedoc, and Guienne. The King of Sardinia was to receive the
provinces adjacent to his kingdom, whose romantic valleys penetrated
the lower Alps--Dauphiny, Provence, Lyonnois, and Bretagne. The
Stadtholder of Holland was to extend his sway over the Provinces of
Flanders and Picardy. Austria was to grasp the provinces adjoining the
Rhine--Alsace, Lorraine, Champagne. The Swiss were offered Franche
Comte if they would join the coalition. And, finally, England was
to regain her old possession of Normandy, and was to seize all the
colonial possessions of France in the two Indies.[335]
Though the British _government_ was at this time strongly in sympathy
with the coalition, it did not venture openly to join the alliance,
for the masses of the British _people_ were cordially with the French
patriots and rejoiced in the establishment of constitutional liberty in
France. These extravagant threats filled Europe. It was every where
assumed that only a small minority of the French people were opposed to
the Old Régime, and that the mass of the nation would at once arise and
welcome the invading armies.
With this terrific storm from without menacing the liberties of France,
a large number of priests who had refused to accept the Constitution
were plying all the energies of the most potent superstition earth
has ever known to rouse the ignorant peasantry against civil and
religious liberty. They were told that eternal damnation was their
inevitable doom if they were not willing to lay down their lives in
defense of the king and the Pope; and that eternal blessedness was
the sure inheritance of all who should labor and pray for holy mother
Church. The queen, it was well known, was in constant conference with
the enemy, counseling, encouraging, and aiding with all the pecuniary
means she could obtain from the revenues of France. The king was a
weak-minded, fickle man, with no decision of his own, and entirely at
the disposal of those who surrounded him. Being quite in subjection
to the imperial mind of the queen, he delayed adopting any vigorous
measure to repel the approaching foe, thwarted the decrees of the
Assembly, and allowed his own enormous salary of six millions of
dollars to be appropriated by the queen and her counselors to hasten
the march of foreign invaders upon Paris.
In the very palace of the Tuileries a secret committee of old Royalists
were in session every day, planning for the enemy, informing them
of all the movements in Paris, advising them as to the best points
of attack, and organizing, in different parts of the empire, their
partisans to rise in civil war the moment the first thunderings of
hostile artillery should be heard upon the plains of France. Here
surely was a combination of wrong and outrage sufficient to drive any
people mad.[336]
During the whole month of July the interior of the palace was the abode
of terror. The inmates, apprehensive every hour of attack, had no
repose by day or night. Almost daily there was an alarm that the mob
was gathering. "During the whole month," writes Madame Campan, "I was
never once in bed. I always dreaded some night attack. One morning,
about one o'clock, footsteps were heard in the anteroom of the queen's
chamber, and then a violent struggle and loud outcries, as the groom
of the chambers grasped a man who was stealthily approaching with a
dagger, apparently to assassinate the queen."
"I begin to fear," said the queen one day, "that they will bring the
king to a trial. Me they will assassinate. But what will become of our
poor children? If they assassinate me, so much the better; they will
rid me of an existence that is painful."
"One morning, at about four o'clock, near the close of July," writes
Madame Campan, "a person came to give me information that the Faubourg
St. Antoine was preparing to march against the palace. We knew that at
least an hour must elapse before the populace, assembled upon the site
of the Bastille, could reach the Tuileries. It seemed to me sufficient
for the queen's safety that all about her should be awakened. I went
softly into her room. She was asleep. I did not awaken her.
"The king had been awakened, and so had Madame Elizabeth, who had gone
to him. The queen, yielding to the weight of her griefs, slept till
nine o'clock on that day, which was very unusual with her. The king had
already been to know whether she was awake. I told him what I had done,
and the care I had taken not to disturb her rest. He thanked me, and
said,
"'I was awake, and so was the whole palace. She ran no risk. I am very
glad to see her take a little rest. Alas! her griefs double mine.'
"What was my chagrin, when the queen, awaking and learning what had
passed, began to weep bitterly from regret at not having been called.
In vain did I reiterate that it was only a false alarm, and that she
required to have her strength recruited.
"'My strength is not exhausted,' said she; 'misfortune gives us
additional strength. Elizabeth was with the king, and I was asleep!
I, who am determined to perish by his side. I am his wife. I will not
suffer him to incur the smallest risk without my sharing it.'"
The queen appears to have understood very perfectly the character of
her dejected, spiritless, long-suffering husband. "The king," said
she, "is not a coward. He possesses abundance of passive courage, but
he is overwhelmed by an awkward shyness, a mistrust of himself, which
proceeds from his education as much as from his disposition. He is
afraid to command, and, above all things, dreads speaking to assembled
numbers. He lived like a child, and always ill at ease, under the eyes
of Louis XV., until the age of twenty-one. This constraint confirmed
his timidity. Circumstanced as we are, a few well-delivered words
addressed to the Parisians would multiply the strength of our party
a hundred-fold. He will not utter them. What can be expected from
those addresses to the people which he has been advised to post up?
Nothing but fresh outrages. As for myself, I could do any thing, and
would appear on horseback if necessary; but, if I really were to begin
to act, that would be furnishing arms to the king's enemies. The cry
against _the Austrian_, and against the sway of a female, would become
general in France, and, moreover, by showing myself I should render
the king a mere nothing. A queen who is not regent ought, under these
circumstances, to remain passive or to die."[337]
There were now three prominent parties in France. First, the Royalists,
with the queen and the court, controlling the ever-vacillating king,
at their head. They were plotting, through foreign armies and civil
war, to restore the political and ecclesiastical despotism of the Old
Régime. This party would have been utterly powerless but for the aid of
foreign despots. Second came the Constitutional party, with La Fayette
at its head. The king _professed_ to belong to this party, and at
times, perhaps, with sincerity, but, overruled by others, he conducted
with a degree of feebleness and fickleness which amounted to treachery.
This party had originally embraced nearly the whole nation. Never did
a nobler set of men undertake national reform than were the leaders
of the French Revolution. They sought only the happiness of France,
were anxious for peace with all nations, were decidedly conservative
in their views. They had no desire to overthrow the French monarchy,
but wished only to limit that monarchy by a Constitution which should
secure to the nation civil and religious liberty.
But the Constitutional party was now daily growing weaker, simply
because its best friends saw that it was impossible to maintain the
Constitution while the king himself was co-operating with foreign
armies for its overthrow. Why should the people sustain a king, and
furnish him with a salary of five millions of dollars a year, only to
enable him to overthrow the Constitution and reinstate the rejected
despotism? Thus were thousands of the purest men in France driven with
great reluctance to the conviction that constitutional liberty could
only be preserved by dethroning the king and establishing a republic.
They were originally decidedly in favor of a constitutional monarchy.
They felt that the transition was altogether too great and too sudden
from utter despotism to republican freedom. The vast mass of the
peasant population in France could neither read nor write. They were
totally unacquainted with the forms of popular government. They were
as ignorant as children, and almost entirely under the tutelage of the
priests, to whom they believed that the keys of heaven and of hell had
been intrusted. The establishment of republican forms would render
France still more obnoxious to surrounding monarchies, and therefore
they had wished to maintain the monarchy, and they took the British
Constitution and not the American republic as their model, wishing,
however, to infuse more of the popular element into their Constitution
than has been admitted into the aristocratic institutions of England.
But now they found, to their surprise and grief, that all Europe was
combining against their liberties, and that the king, instead of
being grateful that his throne was preserved to him, was lamenting
his loss of despotic power, and was co-operating with combined Europe
for the re-enslavement of France. This left the friends of liberty
no alternative. They must either hold out their hands to have the
irons riveted upon them anew, or they must dethrone the king, rouse
the nation to repel invasion, and attempt the fearful experiment
of a republican government with a nation turbulent, unenlightened,
and totally unaccustomed to self-control. In the old despotism
there was no hope. It presented but poverty, chains, and despair.
In republicanism, with all its perils, there was at least _hope_.
Hence arose republicanism. It was the child of necessity. In the
Constituent Assembly not an individual was to be found who advocated a
republic.[338] But after the flight of the king to Varennes, republican
sentiments, as the only hope of the nation, rapidly gained ground, and
at the very commencement of the Legislative Assembly we see that a
republican party is already organized. From the beginning there were
two divisions of this party--the conservative republicans, called
Girondists, because their leaders were from the department of the
Gironde; and the radical democrats, called Jacobins from the hall where
the club held its meeting.
All France was now in a state of alarm. The Assembly passed a very
solemn decree announcing that _the country is in danger_. It declared
its sitting to be permanent, that the king might not dissolve it. All
the citizens were required to give up their arms that they might be
suitably distributed to the defenders of the country. Every man, old
and young, capable of bearing arms was ordered to be enrolled in the
National Guards for the public defense. M. Vergniaud, the leader of
the Girondists, a man of exalted virtue and of marvelous powers of
eloquence, concluded a speech which roused the enthusiasm of the whole
Assembly by proposing a firm but respectful message to Louis XVI.,
which should oblige him to choose between France and foreigners, and
which should teach him that the French were resolved to perish or
triumph with the Constitution.
"It is in the name of _the king_," said Vergniaud, "that the French
princes have endeavored to raise up Europe against us. It is to
avenge the _dignity of the king_ that the treaty of Pilnitz has been
concluded. It is to come to the _aid of the king_ that the sovereign
of Hungary and Bohemia makes war upon us, and that Prussia is marching
toward our frontiers. Now, I read in the Constitution,
"'If the king puts himself at the head of an army and directs its
forces against the nation, or if he does not oppose by a formal act an
enterprise of this kind, that may be executed in his name, he shall be
considered as having abdicated royalty.'
"What is a formal act of opposition? If one hundred thousand Austrians
were marching toward Flanders, and one hundred thousand Prussians
toward Alsace, and the king were to oppose to them ten or twenty
thousand men, would he have done a formal act of opposition? If the
king, whose duty it is to notify us of imminent hostilities, apprised
of the movements of the Prussian army, were not to communicate any
information upon the subject to the National Assembly; if a camp of
reserve necessary for stopping the progress of the enemy into the
interior were proposed, and the king were to substitute in its stead
an uncertain plan which it would take a long time to execute; if the
king were to leave the command of an army to an intriguing general
(La Fayette) of whom the nation was suspicious. If another general
(Luckner) familiar with victory were to demand a re-enforcement, and
the king were by a refusal to say to him, _I forbid thee to conquer_,
could it be asserted that the king had performed a formal act of
opposition.
"If while France were swimming in blood the king were to say to you,
'It is true that the enemies pretend to be acting for me, for my
dignity, for my rights, but I have proved that I am not the accomplice.
I have sent armies into the field; these armies were too weak, but
the Constitution does not fix the degree of their force. I have
assembled them too late; but the Constitution does not fix the time
for collecting them. I have stopped a general who was on the point of
conquering, but the Constitution does not order victories. I have had
ministers who deceived the Assembly and disorganized the government,
but their appointment belonged to me. The Assembly has passed useful
decrees which I have not sanctioned, but I had a right to act so.
I have done all that the Constitution enjoined me. It is therefore
impossible to doubt my fidelity to it.'
"If the king were to hold this language would you not have a right to
reply, 'O king, who, like Lysander, the tyrant, have believed that
truth was not worth more than falsehood, who have feigned a love for
the laws, merely to preserve the power which enabled you to defy
them--was it defending us to oppose to the foreign soldiers forces
whose inferiority left not even uncertainty as to their defeat? Was it
defending us to thwart plans tending to fortify the interior? Was it
defending us not to check a general who violated the Constitution, but
to enchain the courage of those who were serving it? No! no! man, in
whom the generosity of the French has excited no corresponding feeling,
insensible to every thing but the love of despotism, you are henceforth
nothing to that Constitution which you have so unworthily violated,
nothing to that people which you have so basely betrayed.'"
This was the first time any one had ventured to speak in the Assembly
of the forfeiture of the crown, though it was a common topic in the
journals and in the streets. The speech of Vergniaud was received with
vehement applause. The king, alarmed, immediately sent a message to
the Assembly informing them that Prussia had allied her troops with
those of Austria in their march upon France. This message, thus tardily
extorted, was received by the Assembly with a smile of contempt.
It was now manifest, beyond all dispute, that the foe of French liberty
most to be dreaded was the king and the court. M. Brissot, who had been
the bosom friend and the ardent eulogist of La Fayette, could no longer
sustain the king. Ascending the tribune he gave bold utterance to the
sentiment of the nation.
"Our peril," said he, "exceeds all that past ages have witnessed. The
country is in danger, not because we are in want of troops--not because
those troops want courage. No! it is in danger because its force is
paralyzed. And who has paralyzed it. A man--_one man_, the man whom
the Constitution has made its chief, and whom perfidious advisers have
made its foe. You are told to fear the Kings of Prussia and Hungary; I
say the chief force of those kings is _at the court_, and it is _there_
we must first conquer them. They tell you to strike at the dissentient
priests. I tell you to strike at the _Tuileries_, and fell all the
priests with a single blow. You are told to persecute all factious and
intriguing conspirators. They will all disappear if you knock loud
enough at the door of the _Cabinet of the Tuileries_; for that cabinet
is the point to which all these threads tend, where every scheme is
plotted, and whence every impulse proceeds. This is the secret of our
position; this is the source of the evil, and here the remedy must be
applied."[339]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 330: "Immediately after the 20th of June," writes Madame
Campan, "the queen lost all hope but from foreign succors. She wrote to
implore her own family, and the brothers of the king; and her letters
became probably more and more pressing, and expressed her fears from
the tardy manner in which the succors seemed to approach."--_Memoirs of
Marie Antoinette, by Madame Campan_, vol. ii., p. 214.]
[Footnote 331: "Marshal Luckner blamed extremely the intention La
Fayette announced of repairing to Paris, 'because,' said he, 'the _sans
culottes_ (ragamuffins) will cut off his head.' But as this was the
sole objection he made, the general resolved to set out alone."--_La
Fayette's Memoirs._]
[Footnote 332: Lectures on the French Revolution, vol. ii., p. 296.
"The queen and the court," writes Prof. Smyth, "could never endure La
Fayette, as having been the first great mover and originator of the
Revolution; the cause, as he thought, of the liberties of his country,
but a cause with which they unfortunately had no sympathy."
"The queen said to me," writes Madame Campan, "that La Fayette was
offered to them as a resource, but that it would be better for them to
perish than to owe their safety to a man who had done them the most
mischief, or to place themselves under the necessity of treating with
him."--_Mémoires of Marie Antoinette, by Madame Campan_, vol. ii., p.
223.]
[Footnote 333: Thiers, vol. i., p. 278.]
[Footnote 334: "The king had committed himself, on the subject of
the Constitution, to the allied powers, in the instructions he had
given to Mallet du Pan, and was no longer at liberty, even if he had
been disposed, on account of any such object as the Constitution, to
have united himself with La Fayette, not even though La Fayette was
endeavoring to accomplish the great point, of all others to be most
desired, the overthrow of the Girondists and the Jacobins. On the
whole, the court must be considered as now preferring the chance of
the invasion of the allied powers, and the king the chance of some
mediation between them and the people of France, that is, the chance
of better terms than the Constitution offered. This must, I think, be
supposed the line of policy that was now adopted. It was one full of
danger, and, on the whole, a mistake; but with the expectation that
was then so generally entertained of the certain success of the allied
powers, a mistake not unnatural."--_Prof. Smyth's Lectures_, vol. ii.,
p. 295.]
[Footnote 335: Hist. Phil. de la Rev. de Fr., par Ant. Fantin
Desodoards, t. ii., p. 45.]
[Footnote 336: "A court apparently in concert with the enemy resorted
to no means for augmenting the armies and exciting the nation, but,
on the contrary, employed the _veto_ to thwart the measures of the
legislative body, and the _civil list_ (the king's salary) to secure
partisans in the interior."--_Thiers_, vol. i., p. 280.]
[Footnote 337: Madame Campan, vol. ii., p. 230.]
[Footnote 338: "It becomes evident that a republic was desired only
from despair of the monarchy, that it never was a fixed fact, and that,
on the very eve of attaining it, those who were accused of having long
paved the way to it, would not sacrifice the public weal for its sake,
but would have consented to a constitutional monarchy, if it were
accompanied with sufficient safeguards."--_Thiers_, vol. i., p. 308.]
[Footnote 339: M. Brissot was a lawyer of considerable literary
distinction, who, when but twenty years of age, had been imprisoned in
the Bastille for some of his political writings. He was a passionate
admirer of the Americans, and despairing, in consequence of the
fickleness or treachery of the king, of a constitutional monarchy,
endeavored to secure for France a republic. About a year from the time
of the above speech he perished with the rest of the Girondists upon
the scaffold.--_Biographe Moderne._]