The Swiss were back, ranged before the palace and in reserve in the

central hall and by the great staircase. All the muskets were loaded

again, though the affair was thought to be finished after that first

brief and successful skirmish, when the sound of regular marching and

the rumble of cannon-wheels were heard.

At his window, overlooking the still empty enclosures beneath him, stood

Louis, heavy with insufficient sleep; by his side stood an official of

the county, Roederer. The column of the popular attack came swinging

through the arches which led from the river quay under the Long Gallery;

their cannon were ready, and their muskets charged. This time it was

war.

While each armed body facing the other held its fire, awaiting the

advantage gained by such reserve,--for in those days of short range, to

let a trained troop opposing one fire first was to have a heavy

advantage in the returning fire at close quarters,--Westermann, an

Alsatian, Danton’s friend, mounted upon a horse, rode out from the

popular ranks to parley in their own tongue with these Swiss

mercenaries, German in speech, like himself. One of these fired, I

think,--at least, so the best story goes,--and immediately a rapidly

increasing, alternative rattle of individual shots broke out from the

line of the windows, above from the militia and the volunteers below;

and unexpectedly, the ranks opening to let them through, the two cannon

from Marseilles gave tongue against the cannon of the guards. This time

there was no breaking, and the more trained firing of the militia and

the provincial volunteers permitted of no further charge from the

guards. But the reciprocal attack began to fill the space before the

palace with fallen men, neither side yet proclaiming an advantage. The

Swiss Guards still held the main door of the Tuileries; the fire from

its long tiers of windows was still well nourished; the muskets in the

hands of the half-trained populace were still regularly recharged, and

held their own.

It was in this moment of doubt that Roederer, the politician who stood

by the king at his eastern window, said to Louis that it was the duty of

a monarch not to risk the state. “Look, Sire! A whole people are

advancing! If the palace must fall, let it fall; but let the crown be

saved.” Louis

[Illustration: THE TUILERIES AND ITS GARDEN IN 1757

_To face p. 111_

]

looked dully out of that window, and thence he could see the Paris of

the kings.

This place stretched back beyond the origins of religion into the roots

of Rome; thirteen full hundred years of monarchy had sat therein. The

huge pile of the Louvre, stretching out into the morning, was the story

of Henry IV, of the Medicean woman before him, and of the Valois. The

turrets upon the more distant island were the roofs of St. Louis. Eudes,

the son of Robert, the founder of all the royal line, had beaten the

barbarian off just where the slate pinnacles of the Châtelet pierced the

sky half a mile away. Behind all these visible things were the ghosts of

Clovis and of Charlemagne.

He turned to go. He went back through the palace to the western gardens,

where the sound of the firing upon the eastern front was deadened by the

mass of the palace between. His wife and his children were with him, and

a few men of the guard. He crossed between the regular trees--his little

boy, his heir, kicking the fallen leaves before him with his foot--and

entering the riding-school, Louis took refuge with the parliament.

There stood that day upon the quays outside the southern end of the

Tuileries a young man, a young man of twenty-three, a lieutenant of

guns, Napoleon Bonaparte, on leave in Paris. He was alone. He had

watched all that business curiously, a spectator. He had already some

knowledge of what the soul is in men fighting. He has left his judgment

upon record that had Louis not turned back that day “to save the

monarchy,” the monarchy would have been saved. He believed, and his

judgment of arms is not negligible, that if the king had shown himself

even then in the open spaces before the palace and in danger, preferably

upon a horse, that would have happened to the defence which would have

saved it.

It was in the Long Gallery of the Louvre, where that arm of building

joins the Tuileries, that the weak point of the defence had been

discovered. The young men of the populace, eager and curious, had flowed

up the stairways of the Long Gallery and had found the flooring cut and

a gap between them and the entry to the Tuileries. That gap they had

fought for, conquered, leaped, and bridged with planks; and just as the

defence of the palace against the frontal attack was holding its last

desperate own before the great main portal, just as the Swiss themselves

were wondering how long the pressure they suffered could be resisted,

the upper floor of the Tuileries was enfiladed: the first contingents

from the Long Gallery were beginning to shoot down and through those

open suites of rooms; the garrison was caught in flank and wavered.

Hervilly, an officer commanding the Swiss Guards, in that desperate

moment received half a sheet of paper folded in four. The curious may

peer at it to-day under glass in the Carnavalet in Paris. It was an

order from the king to bid the guards cease fire and march out of the

palace back to their barracks to the west of the town. That order had

been sent from the place where Louis was in refuge, from the parliament

in the riding-school. Hervilly read it. He put it in his pocket again.

He still maintained the fire of the guards.

But it was too late. The Tuileries were pierced from the south: those

that had found the entry by the Long Gallery called to others behind

them; room after room was swept; hundred after hundred of the armed

populace pressed through the gap, killing and cleaning out the

garrison.

As the fire from the palace windows was thus quenched, the attack from

the open against the outer front began to triumph; the main door was

forced; the Swiss Guards were broken in the hall and upon the great

marble staircase; their remnants were driven out backward through the

western doors upon the Tuileries Gardens beyond.

There was no battle any more. The last shots died away as one hunted

refugee after another, discharging his last desperate cartridge, was run

down with the bayonet; and at last all that sound of men in arms ceased

and gave place to the muffled tumult rolling in the rooms of the palace,

a looting and a scuffling, a rumbling sound upon the many stairs.

There chimed, heard through this new lull, the strokes of ten o’clock

from the dial upon the garden front and from the church of St. Roch,

hard by. In those two hours since eight all had been accomplished.

[Illustration: THE STRUGGLE IN THE HALLS OF THE TUILERIES, AUGUST 10,

1792

_To face p. 114_

]

PART FOUR

THE ROLE OF LAFAYETTE

INTRODUCTION

After the palace had been stormed, it seemed as though Lafayette, who

was in command of the principal army toward the frontier, might change

all the destinies of France. It was a moment in which discipline had

been very badly shaken, and he had the best trained troops to his hand.

He was trusted by the wealthier classes in Paris, and though the queen

and the royal family as a whole disliked him, it was known that he would

not consent to the abolition of the monarchy. Undoubtedly if Lafayette

had been either a less scrupulous or a more energetic man, he would have

intervened; but that would have required a certain amount of

preparation. He would have had to “feel” the opinion of his

subordinates, and perhaps compromise with the new Government. He did

neither. He acted immediately, but too simply, refused to acknowledge

the new Government, failed to resist it, and was superseded by it.

Doubting his power to unite his command against the new state of

affairs, he crossed the frontier and abandoned both his country and its

king.

PART FOUR

THE ROLE OF LAFAYETTE

The life of Lafayette has one supreme critical moment, which coincides

with a supreme and critical moment in the story of our civilization. It

was that moment in the afternoon of Sunday, the nineteenth of August,

1792, when he crossed the frontier and abandoned upon one side his king,

upon the other the defence of his own country.

Both the story and the legend of Lafayette have another aspect; an

aspect more familiar in the United States than in Britain. He came there

as the leader to a rally of young Frenchmen who were enthusiastic for an

experiment in political freedom. He was immensely wealthy and the master

of his own young life, for his father and mother were long dead; there

was nothing to trammel his action; and though he was only a boy not yet

of age, his figure acquired, as was right, a simple and luminous quality

in the eyes of those whom he had joined before they had successfully

confirmed their independence.

Lafayette came back to America long after, when time had added to this

conception of him nothing that was not to his advantage. He was, in that

second coming of his, surrounded by younger men, who felt for him all

the reverence we humans feel for an older generation of heroes (he was

nearer seventy than sixty years of age). He was known to have kept

himself pure from the excesses of the French Revolution--excesses which

were nowhere more detested than in America, and which had not yet been

made explicable by the judgment of history. He came back to them,

preserving the same ideal of liberty that he had discovered among them

nearly fifty years before.

It is no wonder that the view held of him in the foreign country he had

served under arms should be what we know it to be.

Nevertheless, if his career be considered as a whole, his interior

temperament and character, as well as the external effect of these upon

his contemporaries, are best judged not by his appearance in American

history, as a boy in the War of Independence, as an old man on his

return, but by that conspicuous ordeal through which he passed in the

vigour of his manhood, when he decided neither to defend nor to coerce

the French people, but to be rid of his native soil and the obligations

of his birth. This ordeal showed Lafayette under the strongest light and

in his fullest development. Whether he was wrong or right _then_, if

wrong or right, _why_, are final answers to the problem of his place in

history.

At the moment when he deliberately abandoned the French army for exile

he was within a few weeks of his thirty-fifth birthday, and the events

which had led up to that final catastrophe had concerned the fullest and

most active years of his career. We know him most largely and we can

judge him most justly if we consider his work between the April when war

first put its novel and moulding pressure upon the French Revolution and

the August day in which he saw fit to surrender his command. That last

crisis belongs to August, 1792. Let us turn to the origin of his

political position in 1787.

Lafayette was then a man just thirty years of age, in the enjoyment of a

fame which, both in character and in extent, was unexampled, when

economic necessity, which is to great political changes what the trigger

is to the firing of a rifle, compelled the French crown to play the

experiment of summoning the Assembly of Notables.

In that futile (and necessarily barren) council he sat of right, and he

found there the atmosphere which was fated to embarrass his whole effort

among the French, his people, when once they were aroused. He found in

that assembly the enmity of many of his equals among the very small

clique of wealthy nobles of which he was a natural part, the friendship

of a few, the enthusiasm of none; he found himself possessed of a

greatly exaggerated popularity with the plebeian public outside, which

was attached to his name and his story, and knew nothing of his

character; and while he desired to erect a new state, he figured only as

one of those who in that assembly proposed financial reforms irritating

to the court and, to the appetite of the French for an ideal society, so

much chaff.

It would be a grave error in judgment to conceive of Lafayette then, or

at any subsequent period of his life, even to his extreme old age, as a

man lacking in that peculiar devotion to a political theory which

distinguishes the masters of national fate from the statesman or the

mere politician.

He _did_ enjoy, and throughout his life he displayed, a firm faith in a

certain and definite political ideal. It was a faith so clear that it

was capable of expression in a creed, and so secure that he held it

without a modification from his earliest youth to his very death; and

that through changes of fortune, and under the strain of a varying

environment more violent than any that oppressed his contemporaries.

Unfortunately for him, his creed was a creed peculiarly unacceptable to

the French people. It consisted largely of negative articles. It

proposed the exact toleration of all religion that did not offend the

current morality of his time (an attitude which he and many others

mistook for a complete scheme of toleration). It proposed an acceptation

of popular sovereignty but a popular sovereignty with Lafayette, quite

unlike the mass of Frenchmen, believed could be accurately expressed by

a representative system. This creed acquiesced in the political

privileges of wealth. It would confine civic activity and responsibility

to those citizens who happened to be possessed of certain property: no

doctrine is more odious to Catholic Europe. Finally Lafayette’s creed

was summed up in a curiously passionate attachment to the letter of

organic laws or, as men put that foible in English, “a respect for the

Constitution.”

This last article in the political faith of Lafayette was certainly that

which most strongly possessed him, and that which he most tenaciously

defended to the end. He had in his feeling for it something of religion.

Indeed, it was in part the absence of other religion from his character

which must account for so singular and so unnational an intellectual

weakness. His passion for a constitution was as little based on reason,

as unanswerable and as strong, as is the passion of any worshipper for

the object of his worship. He did not postulate a constitution as

something necessary to any state,--which it is,--nor did he accept it as

one accepts any other inevitable mechanical condition of national life:

he adored it. And he gave to his idol, as men always must to any idol,

concrete form.

He was enthusiastic for a particular and visible scheme which he

associated with the ideal of liberty: a representative assembly of

politicians, an executive cabinet nominally responsible to that

assembly, a judicature nominally independent of either: in a word he

blindly worshipped what (to speak disrespectfully) we may call to-day

the whole discredited business of parliamentarians. If the love of

country interfered with such a scheme, or a burning zeal for equality,

or deep personal love for a military leader; if an almost physical

appetite for the ancient customs of the state rooted in the very heart

of men interfered with it, if any of these human accidents were at issue

with his idol, why, then, according to him, they must be broken at the

idol’s feet.

It is this strange, and, to French eyes, grossly insufficient ideal of a

“constitution,” which explains all that was to follow.

When the National Assembly met in May, 1789, Lafayette sat in that one

of the three separate houses which represented the nobility. The mere

presence of a parliament or congress, with a crown in its neighbourhood,

was a beginning for his dream. To the rising flood of egalitarian

feeling he gave no aid. He was not a prime mover in that prime current

of the early Revolution which drew many members of the privileged

orders--the nobles and the clergy--to sit frankly with the Commons. But

when that current was in full flood he did not resist it; when it had

conquered, and when the privileged were merged in the general flood, he

found himself a vice-president of the united assembly just before the

fall of the Bastille. Of course he drew up a Declaration of Rights,

which, equally of course, concerned taxation as the chief concern of a

Statesman, took seriously “redress before supply,” and all the rest of

the parliamentary sawdust. It was removed a thousand miles from the

temper of that Gaul which had been at hard war for two thousand years,

which had made the orthodox religion of the West, the Crusades, the

Gothic, and was now about to make the epic of Napoleon.

The capture of the Bastille was the chief incident in a group of three

days that showed suddenly, as lightning shows things on a dark night,

those national characteristics which Lafayette so completely

misunderstood that he could not serve them: the extreme rapidity of

Gallic organization, its automatic and spontaneous growth from below,

its high military aptitude, the twin growths of exaltation upon the one

hand and ferocity upon the other, the effect of song and of blood upon

the populace, the temper that made it impossible for the two massed

divisions of foreign mercenaries to coerce Paris, the supreme importance

of Paris itself when in those days Paris recaptured its secular

leadership of the French people--all this was to Lafayette no more than

a violent and incomprehensible change of condition: the levelling of a

platform, as it were, upon which the constitution was to rise.

Rise it did, and on its rising he appeared in another and greater

character than he had hitherto borne; for it was more under his

direction than is commonly allowed that the New Régime took shape. It

was he who framed the armed militia which was the physical basis of the

whole construction. He was the head and the designer of that great force

in Paris, well armed, more or less trained, but remaining wholly civic

and domestic in character, which took the name of the National Guard.

A man might do worse than examine and fix finally for history the rôle

of this force during the first two years in which the Revolution was

permitted to develop its rapid progress within the frontiers of the

French monarchy, without assault from the commercial oligarchy of

England, the ancient privileges of the German states, the despotism of

Prussia, or the heterogeneous, but enormous, might of Austria and the

empire. In the opinion of the present writer the National Guard of

Paris, with Lafayette, as its commander-in-chief, was not only an

indispensable adjunct to the first phase of the French Revolution, but

was, on the material side, the instrument of it. The voluntary quality

of that force, its association with the political debates of the moment,

its long agreement with the people and its lack of opportunity for

display, its final collapse when the Revolution became a truly military

and French thing and a crusade, have tended to obscure for posterity its

true character up to the outbreak of the great war.

Had the Revolution reached its term in the Constitution of 1791, and had

war with Europe been avoided, the National Guard of Paris would easily

be apparent as the chief factor in that achievement: and Lafayette made

it. It was he who impressed it with its particular character, he who, in

consonance with his theory of the state, made it a middle class, or, as

we should say to-day, a _capitalist_ organization; he who forbade it to

develop as such French institutions normally develop, into a powerful

military instrument, and yet he who, with his considerable talent for

command, made it strong enough to act as a powerful police and to be in

his hands a real weapon of authority that gave him a permanent and high

direction in all that followed its enrolment and formation.

It is true to say that Lafayette and his National Guard saved the

monarchy in the days of October, 1789, when Paris marched upon

Versailles. It is still truer to say that throughout 1790 and early ’91

it and he were physically the masters of Paris.

Had Lafayette loathed, as the king loathed, the religious quarrel in

which the parliament of the Revolution engaged, had he with his armed

force supported the crown in its resistance to the attempted schism with

Rome, it is conceivable, or even probable, that the Revolution would

have found a peaceable futile and ignoble termination. But to Lafayette

the religious policy of the Assembly seemed the most natural of things.

Of the enduring vigour of Catholicism he knew nothing. Catholicism was

for him, as for most well-to-do and educated men of that time, a

venerable superstition, still pleasant to many women and to crowds of

the rural poor, worthy, therefore, of a comfortable decline and of

decent burial, but quite incapable of provoking a civil war. That same

violence of popular instinct which had made the St. Bartholomew in Paris

and which was now about to make a furious assault upon the priesthood,

was alien to him in either of its diverse and contradictory forms. Even

in the end of its life, when contemporary fashion gave Lafayette some

idea of religion, it was the written gospel, not the living Church, of

which he spoke; and in this early part of the Revolution he could

neither conceive the strength of the old national vision in its obscure

remnant nor the corresponding strength of the exasperation which the

resistance of the hierarchy to the revolutionary “Constitution of the

Clergy” would arouse.

The first sign that Lafayette’s middle-class “constitutional” ideal (and

the militia force which was the backing of it) might fail was his

inability to secure for the king a free passage from the Tuileries to

the suburb of St. Cloud on the Monday of Holy Week in 1791. The populace

was already half in power, the National Guard and their leader no longer

wholly masters of the

[Illustration: ARMAND GASTON, CARDINAL DE ROHAN

After Rigaud, in Museum of Versailles

_To face p. 131_

]

capital. The next much graver evidence of this change was in the flight

of the royal family upon the night of the twentieth of June immediately

succeeding; and in this the two elements fatal to Lafayette’s future in

the Revolution appeared with equal clarity. On the one hand he had

proved unable, with all his militia, to prevent the escape of the king;

on the other hand, he thought it his duty--his duty to the

Constitution--to recapture the fugitives. The king’s flight, despite

Lafayette’s presence at the head of the National Guard, despite his

personal activity in ordering the force at the palace doors and seeing

upon that very night to the position of the sentinels, made him a

suspect in the eyes of revolutionary Paris; his activity in recapturing

the king and queen made him odious to all that growing opinion in Europe

and in France which had ceased to see in the Revolution a political

experiment and had begun to see in it only a drama--a tragedy, the

pitiful victims of which were Louis and the royal family.

It is further characteristic of Lafayette’s fate that all this activity

of his counted for nothing. It was not he that effected the recapture of

the flying king; that was done, as much had hitherto been done, by the

energy of what was popular, plebeian, and, to him, incomprehensible, in

France. But as much blame as a man could gather from the issue Lafayette

most unfortunately reaped; and when the captives were brought back again

after those torturing three days of heat, it was Lafayette who, as the

general of the armed force in the capital, must ask Marie Antoinette to

give him the keys of the palace. She threw them at him; he caught them

as a man catches a ball in a game.

Of the many things he did in those days, one is sufficiently

characteristic, and marks his attitude in all that rising anger.

There was in Auvergne a family of squires called Romeuf; they were

neighbours of the powerful and wealthy Lafayettes, whose chief estate

lay at Chavagniac, close by, and Lafayette had taken one of the young

Romeufs to be his aide-de-camp when he was put at the head of the

National Guard. As one might imagine of poor squires, the Romeufs were

intensely and personally loyal to the king; yet, whether through

negligence or because his devotion to his constitutional ideal made him

forget what personal affections might mean, or from a love of power, or

from whatever cause, it was this young Romeuf whom Lafayette sent off

post-haste along the eastern road to recapture the king and queen.

From the moment of the royal family’s flight and its enforced return to

Paris, war with Europe was apparent, and the Revolution moved toward it

as toward an approaching goal. The nearer that huge and novel thing

approached, the more did Lafayette’s conception of a perfect state and

Lafayette’s militia weapon for its achievement shrivel and lose staff.

The populace demanded the disenthronement of a king who was certainly

allied with the foreigner. This threat of popular violence was

militarily suppressed by Lafayette and his middle-class militia on the

seventeenth of July, 1791, and the few dead who had been shot by

Lafayette’s guard became the symbols of an intense hatred between the

old declining Constitutionalists and the new order that was to be

established when once the cannons had begun. From that moment, despite

all his ideals, he was merged with the privileged and the few in the

eyes of his countrymen.

A month later, at Pillnitz, the Emperor of Austria and the King of

Prussia met the French emigrants to issue their threat of a coalition

against the new democracy and of armed intervention in the affairs of

France; and when at last the accomplished Constitution of 1791,

bourgeois, satisfactory, a strict deduction from principles which

nothing so vital as the French blood has ever accepted, was compiled and

sworn to, it seemed, in the presence of approaching exultation and war,

like some merchant’s villa carefully put in order in the suburbs of our

great industrial towns--a villa just settled by some careful housewife,

bound to a narrow life--but about to receive a company of soldiers, of

poets, of gods, and of demons, very ill-suited to such furniture! Even

to the men of its own time this new Constitution, the supposed fruit of

the Revolution, seemed oddly colourless as it stood contrasted against

that great dark cloud of history which was rising upon the sky. But to

Lafayette it was a perfected ideal.

Upon the last day of September, 1791, at four o’clock in the afternoon,

the National Assembly dissolved, and the speaker of it read out these

words:

“The National and Constituent Assembly declares that it has fulfilled

its mission, and that its sessions are at an end.”

A week later Lafayette resigned his command at the head of the National

Guard. Shortly afterward the three armies upon the frontier were drawn

up, and the real game, the struggle with armed and foreign conquerors,

pledged to destroy the Revolution, had begun.

The total forces at the disposal of the French crown--and it must be

remembered that the crown, not the parliament, was still master of the

armies--were, along the whole frontier from the Alps to the sea, a

trifle over 80,000 men. They were arranged in three armies. When war was

declared in the following April, all three, the army of the north, that

of the centre, and that of the Rhine, were each under the command of a

general who would certainly defend the monarchy against the

revolutionary spirit which had its centre in the populace of Paris.

The smallest army, that of the centre, a force of somewhat less than

20,000 men, was under the direct command of Lafayette, _but he was also

the chief of the three commanders_. At this moment therefore he is the

pivot upon which everything turns; nor is it possible to grasp the

nature of what follows save through an appreciation of how Lafayette

broke down.

Two-thirds of the regimental officers had emigrated, certain of the

cavalry regiments had crossed the frontier in a body; even the artillery

had suffered the loss of one-third of its commissioned ranks in this

fashion. The forces were not homogeneous, the numerous volunteers among

them were an element of weakness and disorder, the discipline was

deplorable and daily weakening. It was a general opinion throughout

Europe that the French line could not perform its task, and the first

weak attempts of the army of the north to invade the enemy’s territory

in what is now Belgium, and was then the Austrian Netherlands, resulted

in a miserable rout and a disgraceful and murderous mutiny. The Prussian

and the Austrian forces were slowly gathering for an invasion. That the

crown, still in command of those ill-equipped regiments and guns,

desired the success of the invasion was morally certain to the populace

of Paris; and the populace of Paris was right.

The king was manifestly party to a moral compact with the enemy, his

chief city was already holding him answerable for treason, when, in

June, long before the invading army had reached the frontier, but when

the terror of it was already rising high in the masses of the capital,

Lafayette moved. His move was in favour of the king.

His army was the smallest of the three, but the best provided; what was

more important in the temper of that moment, it was really attached to

its chief; for though Lafayette was prepared to defend the king against

Paris, yet the king had a traditional value in the soldiers’ eyes which

Paris had not gained, and they knew that, in the midst of much intrigue

the general’s character had nothing in it at all of intrigue; he was

known and still approved by his soldiery. Lastly, and most important, he

was, as we have seen, superior over the other generals in command.

In reply to the growing menace of the populace in Paris the king

dismissed his liberal ministers. The parliament declared that they

carried with them the regrets of the nation.

It was on the thirteenth of June, I say, that this grave act was

accomplished and that the final resistance of Louis and his wife to the

Revolution was undertaken. This premature act on the part of the

monarchy, of itself a rupture with the popular forces of Paris, was

suddenly given a new and much more violent complexion, by the decision

which Lafayette, at the head of his frontier army, awaiting the invader,

took when he heard of it.

It was on the thirteenth of June, I say, that the king so acted; the

news of it reached the army on the fifteenth; on the sixteenth Lafayette

wrote his famous letter to the parliament, denouncing the Jacobin Club,

which was, so to speak, the Headquarters-staff of the new popular

movement against the foreign intrigues of the crown.

Parliament was seized of that letter and debated it on the eighteenth,

and parliament, as “constitutional” in its mediocre and null

professional mediocrity as the parliaments of a time of peace must

always be, approved of Lafayette’s intervention.

Here let the reader pause to appreciate how decisive Lafayette’s move

was bound to be. Let him remember that the future, known to us, was

unknown to the men of that time; that their past alone was known to

them. Let him recall how widely circulated--more circulated than the

name of any other man at that moment--was the name

[Illustration: CARTOON OF THE THREE ORDERS (THE CLERGY, NOBILITY, AND

COMMONS) IN THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY FORGING THE NEW CONSTITUTION

_To face p. 139_

]

of Lafayette; let him appreciate the reputation for integrity which he

had enjoyed with the mass of the nation, and the consequent trust which

they had therefore justly placed in his liberal principles; let him

further see the foreign forces, a hundred thousand strong, marching, at

last, against the French, and the nominal head of the French state in

league with them; let him retain the master-point that Lafayette was the

military chief; finally let him not forget that a French army is to the

French, as a Roman army was to the Romans, the most living thing in the

nation, the most vital of its organs,--it is an essential point,--and he

will perceive what an enormous business must have arisen, and did arise,

about this letter. It was virtually a pronunciamento.

Lafayette talked of “his brave soldiers.” A note of menace ran

throughout the document, and it was this which kept the parliament,

despite its sympathy with the constitutional policy and its dread of a

popular rebellion, doubtful as to its vote. At first it decreed the

printing of the letter and its distribution; then Guadet, eloquent and

merciless, changed that attitude by a speech. The Assembly referred the

letter to a committee, and Robespierre that night roused the Jacobins.

This letter of Lafayette’s fell at the very moment when the king, having

dismissed his liberal ministry, chose to oppose his formal veto to the

two measures wherein the parliament was most in sympathy with the

populace--the decree against the non-juring clergy and the decree for

forming a great camp of volunteers. The reply of Paris to both was the

huge and peaceable, but very menacing, rising which is called “the Day

of the twentieth of June.” For hour after hour the radical masses poured

through the king’s palace; blood was not shed, and no actual insult was

offered, but, to use a military metaphor, Paris had proved itself

capable of mobilization in those hours, and armed conflict between it

and the court seemed as near and as inevitable as would armed conflict

between two regular forces mobilized and in contact upon the field.

A courier to the frontier, leaving Paris upon the morning of the

twenty-first, would normally reach the ultimate posts of the army late

upon the twenty-second; but Lafayette, at this moment always an active

and even officious commanding officer, was passing from post to post.

The news of the insurrection did not reach him in the camp outside

Maubeuge, where was for the moment his station, but at Bavay, an hour or

two off to the west.

Lafayette never acted with a Gallic fugue, though often with a

reasonable promptitude. He did not, as legend will have it, take horse

and make for Paris, booted and spurred. He communed with himself for

some hours before arriving at any decision, and then took, with no

particular rapidity, the road for Paris.

He did not, as legend will again have it, dash into the Assembly,

splashed and sweating, at the end of a hot ride; on the contrary, he

first carefully visited and sounded those authorities in the capital who

were in sympathy with his views, and not until the twenty-eighth did he

present himself at the bar of the Assembly; the excitement was already a

week old.

When he did appear before the parliament thus in person, it was with

singular effect. A majority, challenged by Guadet, refused to condemn

him for leaving the army without permission; he again urged the

parliament by voice and presence, as he had formerly urged it by

letter, to suppress the popular societies and especially the democratic

focus of the Jacobins. He was applauded as he walked past the members

after his speech; and it seemed for a moment as though this dramatic,

but not theatrical, intervention had achieved something.

But it was the fate of that strict character to effect nothing at all in

all his long and sterile life! A Frenchman in touch with France, finding

himself, as Lafayette found himself, cheered by numbers of his old

National Guard when leaving the parliament, would have gone straight

with the mob to the Jacobins and destroyed them, taking such

consequences as might have followed. But Lafayette loved order,

apparently for its own dull sake, and that day ended in nothing but a

further accentuation of the breach between himself and the new

Revolutionary group in Paris.

Of that group the now rising name, soon to be the leading name, was that

of Robespierre; and if you will turn to Robespierre’s writing and

speaking during those days you will find how accurately he judged the

temper of his own people despite his Picard coldness. The cruellest and

the

[Illustration: A POPULAR PRINT AT THE TIME OF THE REVOLUTION

_To face p. 142_

]

truest thing said against Lafayette in those days of failure was

Robespierre’s phrase: “Lafayette, to succeed, must first win a victory

over the enemy.”

Lafayette stayed the following day, the twenty-ninth of June, Friday, in

Paris, discovered how bitterly the old constitutional position had made

him hated at court, and learned the truth of the phrase he had

heard--the queen’s phrase--“We will not be saved twice by M. de

Lafayette.” On Saturday, the thirtieth, he took his way back to his

army.

Now, note that throughout all this, that army was still closely bound to

its general, and that Lafayette, upon his return to his camp, was still

secure in the loyalty of his regiments. It was consonant with his

character that, without caring in the least for the insults of the

court, he still worked to secure the safety of the king, for the king

was part of the Constitution. He suggested--what had long been a

commonplace--the retirement of the court to Compiègne, “a town,” he

pathetically writes, “within the limits to which the Constitution allows

the king to travel from the capital”; he promised to lend the authority

of his name and the active aid of his old National Guard to the monarch

if such an evasion were attempted. He was ready, in a word, to do all

that a soldier could do for the saving of Louis and for the crushing of

the Paris radicals--just short of acting “in an unconstitutional

manner.” That he would never do! And meanwhile Fate and Europe and the

French people between them were moving with no more care for the

Constitution than right and anger and love ever have for a letter or a

precedent.

All that first fortnight of July was full of three great things in

motion: the pomp of Austria going to the coronation of the Emperor at

Frankfort before the forces of Austria should be launched upon France;

the Federates from all the French departments (and notably the armed

battalion from Marseilles) coming up to Paris to take part in the great

feast-day of the nation; the gathering of the Prussian forces upon the

Rhine. Meanwhile two other things waited: Lafayette and his army waited

to save the crown in Paris; the court in Paris waited for the success of

the invader and for its own deliverance.

Upon Saturday, the fourteenth of July, the Federates from all over

France held their great national feast in the capital. On that same day

the emperor was crowned in Frankfort; upon the following Tuesday (it was

the anniversary of the Massacre of the Champ-de-Mars!), with Paris in

full effervescence from the arrival of the Federates, the Jacobins took

their opportunity, Robespierre leading them, and petitioned the

parliament to impeach Lafayette for treason. The parliament temporized.

Upon the nineteenth, when the question was again raised, it refused to

condemn the general. Old Dückner came from his frontier command to

Paris; he was publicly accused in Parliament of having conspired with

Lafayette to march upon the capital in favour of the king. That charge

was disproved so far as letters could disprove it; but in the midst of

the excitement which it raised yet another step was taken by Destiny.

The Army of the Allies being at last concentrated at Coblenz, the Duke

of Brunswick, its commander-in-chief, signed and issued upon the

twenty-fifth of July the manifesto which had been largely dictated from

the French court, and of which the most violent clause proceeded from

the queen herself; it threatened the parliament and the town of Paris

with military execution if the king were not restored to his

pre-revolutionary power.

That document was known in Paris upon the twenty-eighth, and for the

next few days only the time and the conditions of the last conflict

between the Royal Guards, their allied volunteers and militia upon the

one hand, and the populace upon the other, were in doubt.

The armed battalion of Federates from Marseilles had marched in upon the

thirtieth of July. Upon the eighth of August one last attempt was made

to get the parliament to impeach Lafayette, and for the last time the

parliament, in its sympathy with the crown and against the Paris

populace, refused. The motion was rejected by 406 to 224.

Robespierre had never given a better example of his sharp and piercing

judgment than when he had said at the Jacobins, “The parliament will not

save the nation; the nation must save itself.”

All the night of the ninth of August Paris watched in a vigil. We have

seen how the windows were

[Illustration: MAXIMILIEN ROBESPIERRE

_To face p. 147_

]

full of lights, how the hot darkness was filled with the sound of bells

and of the royal troops marching in to occupy their post of garrison in

the Tuileries. We have seen the assault on the palace and how the

populace conquered. The monarchy was swept away, the royal family

imprisoned, and all the power of parliament passed at the same moment

into the hands of its extreme and most democratic party.

Such was the day known in history as the Tenth of August. The army of

Brunswick was within a day’s ride of the frontier. Lafayette, whose

command stood barring Brunswick’s way, was instantly called upon by his

own conscience to determine whether he should save the soil of his

country or his constitutional king.

It was a gendarme flying from Paris, and later an officer also flying

from the capital, that brought him the news of the Tenth of August; he

so received it, probably late upon Sunday, the twelfth of August. He

guessed that a provisional, and therefore, to him, a usurping,

government had been set up in the place of the old constitutional

ministry. News came through slowly, but Lafayette learned certainly by

Monday that it was so. The old dismissed ministry had been

“unconstitutionally” recalled by the parliament, acting, of course,

under the pressure of the populace of Paris, and to these had been added

most “unconstitutionally” certain ultra-revolutionary names, notably

Danton’s. This new government and its creature, the purged and

diminished parliament, was sending out commissioners, post-haste, who

should bear its orders to the armies upon the frontiers, and obtain

their allegiance to the new and quasi-republican system which Paris and

the Jacobins had established by hard fighting upon the Friday before.

Upon Tuesday, August 14th, the three commissioners, members of the

parliament bearing such orders, arrived at Lafayette’s headquarters in

Sedan; but Lafayette had already made up his mind.

When the three members of the parliament presented their message to the

municipality of Sedan, the mayor and corporation of that town, in

agreement with Lafayette and perhaps under his orders, arrested them,

and imprisoned them in the citadel of the place; Lafayette himself

provided a guard.

On Tuesday the whole army was mustered in

[Illustration: GEORGES JACQUES DANTON

_To face p. 149_

]

the meadows which lie beyond the river before the town, the scene of the

worst sufferings after the defeat of 1870, and an oath to obey the old

Constitution was administered to them.

Three corps refused the oath; one company of grenadiers, one of the new

volunteer battalions,--that raised by the Department of the Allier,--and

most notably the gunners. They swore to obey “the representatives of the

nation and no other.” Certain, though not all, of these were put under

arrest by Lafayette, and his act of rebellion against the new government

was completed.

Here is the critical moment: here is the hour in which he might have

directed all the future.

The mass of his army was still intact, and would still have followed him

had he then broken camp and marched on Paris. But in that decisive

moment also comes the final and most characteristic act of all:

Lafayette did not march upon Paris. He “put himself at the disposition

of the civil authority of the Department of the Ardennes”; he asked the

neighbouring departments in which troops of his command were stationed

for their orders; he refused to use military force save at the orders of

authorized civilian government; he preferred his political idea and

creed to every practical necessity of the situation; or, as he would

have put it, to every temptation the situation might offer him. He did

more: he allowed letters, pamphlets, and even emissaries from Paris to

circulate freely among his men; he allowed one of the battalions in

revolt against him, and even the commander of the guns in revolt against

him, to write freely to the new government in Paris, swearing their

adhesion to it. He sent to department after department submitting the

military to the civil power and awaiting their decision, when any other

man would have marched straight upon the capital. Paris and the new

order learned how its commissioners had been treated; new commissioners

were at once sent out; upon Sunday, the nineteenth of August, the

parliament impeached the general. Meanwhile he had decided upon his own

fate.

Lafayette upon that morning judged, _first_, that he would not join in

an enterprise against its fellow-citizens; _next_, that his own

conscience would not allow him to serve the new régime.

Taking with him a handful of friends (a few who joined him against his

will raised the total of the commissioned officers with him to

twenty-three), he proceeded through the forest of Ardennes to the little

town of Bouillon, then in French territory, now in Belgian. He first

left minute orders for the disposition of his army, notably for the

safety of the outposts to prepare them against the shock of the

immediate invasion; he also left behind him all his official papers,

sealed and in good order for use of his successor, whoever that might

be. Before sunset he crossed the bridge in front of the famous little

forest town, with its enormous castle and crusading legend, and rode out

northward with his companions, twelve miles and more through the

gathering darkness, toward Rochefort, all the way in foreign land.

To that road he was compelled. Did he deviate to the left he would fall

among the French outposts in the valley of the Meuse beyond the woods;

upon his right was the line of the Austrian advance.

He did not even know whether Rochefort itself was occupied or not. He

hoped it was not, for he intended to make his way up through the

Netherlands to England, and so to America. At the very gates of

Rochefort a great fire burning warned him of an outpost, and he knew

that the place was held. Nevertheless, he hoped against hope to pass

through free. The commander of that post, a French noble who had gone

over to the enemy, gave him so much liberty as to permit him to ride on

with his companions toward Namur, or, rather, to send a messenger on

before him to obtain the passports. But Lafayette was already recognized

and known.

In Namur the Austrian commander, Motielle, was beside himself with joy

on hearing the name. He shouted and repeated to himself aloud,

“Lafayette! Lafayette!” as though he held in his power not the last sad

exile from a soil too violently in love with freedom, but the most

active of the new revolutionaries themselves; for the name of Lafayette,

execrated by all the Nationalists as that of a traitor in league with

the king, was also execrated throughout the privileged classes of Europe

as that of a rebel who had destroyed the majesty of the French crown.

Between these opposing camps he had no body of friends. It must ever be

so with principle. It was to be so with Robespierre himself at last.

The governor of Namur held him and sold him, a valuable prey, and he

passed into the prisons of the allies.

* * * * *

The grounds which history possesses upon which to base its conception of

Lafayette and therefore of this crucial refusal he made in the very

balance of the monarchy’s destiny differ from those which suffice for

most characters, and especially for most military characters, because

two divergent traditions have arisen with regard to him: the one

American, the other of Europe.

Of these two traditions, the one which sprang in the United States of

America concerns a young, enthusiastic man, so young as to be almost a

boy, but reinforced by an independent position, a brilliant fortune, and

very solid talents, who voluntarily led the rally of young Frenchmen in

support of the new republic and who differed for the better in American

eyes from most of his contemporaries in the point that he did sincerely

and from the bottom of his soul admire those main principles upon which

the Revolution in America proceeded.

The other tradition is that of a man in the flower of his age concerned

with a vast transformation of European Society--a transformation

springing directly from the energy of his own people, and one who so

undervalued or misjudged it that, after appearing continually in places

of capital importance and as continually failing to do more than

preserve his principles, he ended by neither saving the institutions to

which he was attached nor so much as delaying their destruction. At

last, equally condemned by each section of contemporary opinion and

power, he abandoned his high command upon the frontier in the first

crisis of the great war between the Revolution and the kings, and

subsequently appeared neither in the one camp nor in the other,

neglected by both in common, a prisoner in the hands of foreigners. One

picture is that of a hero; the other that of a pale figure almost guilty

of a double treason and certainly a prig.

These two traditions are easily reconcilable if we draw for ourselves

from the many sources available to us a true picture of the man. We

shall then perceive why Marie Antoinette, with her ardent, but

unsympathetic, temperament, was violently repelled by him, especially in

his maturity; we shall understand how Carlyle,--allowing for his

grossly insufficient reading--was capable of drawing only the pale

caricature which is among the worst failures of his great study; and

above all, we shall understand how, in what is for European history the

crisis of his life, Lafayette neither led nor attacked the civilian

forces of his own people, but deliberately effaced himself; and as a

consequence of his action, though not of his own volition, suffered

those years of effacement and prison. It is fortunately possible to us,

though it is not easy, to reconstruct the character which lay at the

root of these varied actions and especially of these singular inactions.

Other great names of the French Revolution are obscured by the heat of

the main struggle in 1793 by the fact that they perished or fell into

oblivion or betrayed their original convictions. The violent prejudices

that attach to the passions of such moments have made it difficult for

the chief men of 1789-95 to be rightly judged. For whether we seek the

testimony of friends or of enemies, we are aware of worthless

exaggeration. In the case of Lafayette we do not suffer from these

causes of distortion. He was indeed most bitterly denounced,--in the

crisis of his life when he abandoned his army there was hardly anyone to

praise him,--but he was not present among the French in those moments of

superhuman exaltation which followed upon the great war, and therefore

he escaped unbalanced praise and blame therein. On the other hand, he

did not perish in that storm as did countless others, nor did he deserve

or receive oblivion upon its close. On the contrary, he entered public

life again and played a great part in it. Added to such opportunities

for being rightly judged, his own rigid adherence to his original

principles has gained him the reward which always attaches to such

fidelity--an untroubled place in history. From all these causes he can,

if we take the trouble to watch him narrowly, be seen clearly by

posterity.

Let us then attempt a summary judgment of his character. The central

axis upon which that character turned may readily be perceived and

defined, for it was at once so simple and fixed within so slight an

accretion of secondary qualities that it is plainly visible through

them.

Lafayette was essentially of that type which has had for its philosophy,

perhaps from the beginning of society, the scheme to which antiquity

gave the title of “stoic.” He was immovable in the service of those

truths which he perceived; but the truths which he perceived were few,

obvious, and though of vast, yet not of the very last, importance. He

conceived that an adhesion to such truths was sufficient for man and

still more certainly sufficient for himself.

An absolute and unswerving demeanour, drawn from so strict an adherence

to so limited a creed, lent him those qualities which are not more

admirable, though they are more popular, when they are produced by

convictions larger and more comprehensive. These are, first, courage of

that rare and indomitable sort which meets with precisely the same

rigidity physical danger, corporal pain, public shame, the accidents of

loss in affection or fortune, the change of environing things, the

default of human support even where it seemed most sure; secondly, a

minute attention to duty where duty is commanded by the logical

consequences of one’s faith rather than suggested by the affections;

thirdly, a generosity in action which proceeds not from charity of any

warmth of temperament, but from an apprehension of what a creed

demands, so that if the creed demand in certain circumstances such and

such a sacrifice, the sacrifice, however great, is unhesitatingly and

immediately made.

In such adherence to fixed principle and in the consequences of that

tenacity lay the core of Lafayette’s nature; beyond that core there was

little else. We must add to it certain extraneous details not proceeding

from it, but merely aggravated to it. He was vain after that fashion of

vanity which is certainly not a vice and is almost a virtue, since it

betrays a great carelessness of power and an indifference to anything

less noble than praise. Again--what has nothing to do with his

vanity--he loved to find himself leading men, though he did not love the

act of leadership.

This last passion, the love of leadership, one might ascribe to an

energetic activity in him were such activity discoverable in other

relations of his life; but it is not so discoverable; for in

conversation, in the emission of ideas, in the criticism of others, in

writing, planning, or doing, he was not conspicuously active, nor was he

conspicuously active in the things of the body. He was not laborious; he

neither liked nor understood the expression of high energy; nor,

conversely, was he prone to be exhausted or to be tempted to lassitude

in any form.

Many sober men in a phase of their early youth present this character.

It is the same cast of mind which often makes such youth, in that early

phase, uncompromising, constantly asserting truths apparently universal

and patent, and ready to judge the enormous (and, for it, untried)

complexity of human affairs.

The long process of years usually disturbs that image: for good and for

evil it is changed: and men as they advance in experience tend also to

suffer what the poet has nobly called the “contagion of the world’s slow

stain.” But at the same time they grow to admit into their faces a

humorous charity and a confession of fellowship with the uncertain and

erring human millions of which they are each one tiny element. Repeated

anxiety and the repeated example of the pains and dishonour that follow

upon poverty make men as they grow older exaggerate the importance of

wealth and they lose the just sense of proportion in mortal

arrangements. Principle will be sacrificed in affection, especially if

that affection be the constant and glowing affection for one’s own

family involved in one’s own precarious fortune; the manifold imbecility

of men in their political action will weaken interest in, though it does

not in the same degree destroy intellectual conviction of, those prime

political truths which make of sane and just men republicans. On the

other hand, in a hundred little details which must count heavily in the

fate of the soul, men so perturbed and declined from their early

standing show comprehension, charity, a good individual judgment for

practical affairs, and commonly, as life advances, develop virile and

useful rules of action for themselves and for others. These rules are

but subconscious in their origin, they are difficult to formularize; but

they are wise and are proved wise by their fruits.

Why did Lafayette fail to acquire this enlargement--for it is an

enlargement--of the mature mind, as he failed also to suffer those

contaminations which commonly accompany it?

Interior causes were present, to preserve him unchanged. There stood in

his mind a barrier against expanding emotion. The native limitation

which made him a stoic (and through which he has been less justly called

a prig) would in all circumstances have restrained his development,

keeping him from knowing men, but also preserving intact his high

conviction and his conspicuous morals. I say a personal inhibition of

this kind was present from the beginning, native to him, and necessarily

present in his soul; but this interior preservative constraint was

powerfully aided by two external circumstances: first, he was born

immensely wealthy and therefore had not in the whole of his life

acquired one prolonged and educative experience of what the absence of

security might effect in the character of man; secondly, the strong and

moulding emotions, which come to nearly all men successively, came to

him (as did the full control of his wealth) all at once and that in very

early youth. He was married in his teens; he was a father before he was

twenty; he was a military hero with a fame not only national, but

universal, before he was of age.

In those same years he was flooded by surrounding society with every

article of his political creed, and it was stamped upon him in that

plastic period of life both by the overwhelming success of his own

efforts in the service of that creed, and by that creed’s general

success in its first undertakings.

The Declaration of Independence he had helped to make triumph; once it

had triumphed he had witnessed--from a distance it is true, and with

some of the too hopeful illusions of distance--the prosperous career of

its principles upon its native soil. Such pressure coming at such a

moment in the development of a man, crystallizes him; and for fifty

mortal years, from the achievement of American independence to his death

in 1834, Lafayette remained Lafayette without growth or change.

For pages so few as these a summary so short must suffice. The reader

will expand for himself the consequences following upon this type of

sincerity, conviction, and fixed, immutable in experience. In religion

it was inevitable that such a mind should be dry. He professed, of

course, the thin Deism which some may claim in old age to have turned to

conceptions a trifle warmer and more full of stuff; but I confess these

tinges of colour seem to me superadded from social fashions contemporary

with his later years, when the Catholic Church, which in his youth

nearly all the educated class in his country took to be a dying

superstition, had reasserted its vitality.

In politics such a man stood also, of course, for those plain and

fundamental principles which all clear thought has discovered to be the

basis of just government: that sovereignty must reside with the people;

that the usurpation of that sovereignty, whether effected in the name of

the people or in contempt of them, must be equally resisted; that laws

once fixed, having in them necessarily an element of conflicting detail,

necessarily lead to dissensions, but must be obeyed by all indifferently

until they are changed by the popular voice; that violence is

permissible only against aggression from without or illegal action from

within--and so forth.

On the other hand, through an illusion common enough in men of this

type, he confounded certain modern adjuncts of these ancient truths with

the truth themselves. Thus he thought there was something sacred in

representation and could hardly distinguish between the nation and an

electoral body proceeding from it. He believed in the equality of man

without seizing the fact that this, so far from being self evident, is a

tremendous and mystical dogma allied with a particular type of religion

and rising or perishing with it. He took for granted the necessity in

any free state of leaving the courts of justice untrammelled by the

executive, but he neither devised nor thought there needed to be devised

any scheme whereby the courts, thus untrammelled, should be kept pure.

The defects in such a character superficial critics ascribe to an excess

of the intellectual faculties. It is truer to say that they are due, not

indeed to an atrophy of these, but to a limitation of them. No man, for

instance, worked in an atmosphere more purely intellectual than St.

Thomas Aquinas, yet his most general judgments upon the principles of

government stand as firm as Aristotle’s, upon which they are based and

which they complete. That supreme intelligence also affirmed the

“General Will.”

The excellences, again, of such a character as Lafayette’s are by many

imagined to belong, and would certainly have been by himself ascribed,

to the dominating power of reason. If we look closely, it is not so.

Between his strong convictions--and they were shared by countless

thousands--whether in religion or in civic theory, between such

theories, I say, and the expression of them in life lies the function of

the will. The great

[Illustration: MARIE JEAN PAUL ROCH YVES GILBERT MOTIER, MARQUIS DE

LAFAYETTE

_To face p. 164_

]

glory of such characters as Lafayette’s lies in this, that though their

intellects may not have had the strength to grasp transcendental things

or to perceive the complexity of the material with which a politician

must deal, yet an unswerving determination to do what their conscience

dictates is discoverable throughout their lives. No greater thing can be

said of any man; and it is not upon the moral side, but rather upon the

reasonable, that such characters fail. Those who affirm the fate of the

soul to depend upon right action within its lights will be secure of

such men’s salvation.

PART FIVE

UNDER THE MILL OF VALMY

INTRODUCTION

While the popular forces were gathered in Paris for that assault on the

palace which proved so successful, the Prussian and Austrian army of

invasion, under the command of the Duke of Brunswick, was marching

against the French by the valley of the Moselle. It was accompanied by

many of the French nobles who had emigrated, and who desired by any

methods, even those of foreign invasion, the destruction of the

Revolutionary movement. We have seen how Lafayette had the supreme

opportunity of meeting that invasion and had refused it. The frontier

was not crossed until some days after the palace had fallen, and after

Lafayette had abandoned his army. The invasion was immediately

successful. The frontier fortress of Verdun fell. The French forces were

largely composed of unreliable volunteers. The regulars themselves had

been badly demoralized, and the French army under General Dumouriez,

whose task it now was to stop the invasion, lay upon the line of the

Argonne, not a week’s march from Paris, with very little hope of

defending that forest-ridge successfully. But by one of the strangest

accidents in history, under this army when Dumouriez, had been

successfully turned by the invaders and was in its most desperate

plight, an action fought near the village of Valmy changed the whole

story of Europe. The result of this action, which was in a tactical

sense indecisive, and in which the opposing forces never came to close

quarters, was that the invading army was checked in its career, was

ultimately bound to retire, and the Revolution was granted just the time

it required to raise and discipline new forces for the meeting of

further invasions which were bound to follow. This action at Valmy,

which, despite its indecisive tactical quality, was one of capital

importance in the history of the world, was fought almost coincidently

with the declaration of the Republic. On this same ground--a cannon-shot

to the North--France and Germany to-day[A] stand opposed.

[note A: Feb. 25th, 1916.]

[Illustration: CEREMONIAL COSTUME OF THE CLERGY, THE NOBILITY, AND THE

COMMONS

The three Orders in the National Assembly

_To face p. 171_

]

PART FIVE

UNDER THE MILL OF VALMY

There is a country-side in western Europe upon which the fate of the

world has twice been decided, the first time when Attila and his

Asiatics were here broken by the forces of the Roman Empire; the second

when the French Revolution was saved in the action I am about to

describe; a third decision is in the balance as I write.

This country-side is known to the French, within whose territory it

lies, as the Champagne Pouilleuse. The Romans, from its capital, called

it the Catalaunian Fields; for its capital is the town of Châlons upon

the Marne.

The plain is of a peculiar nature, difficult to be seized by those who

have not known it, but, once perceived, a thing not easily forgotten, so

distinctive is it and so much apart from all that bounds it. In

formation the soil is chalky, but not of that chalk which bears the

green swards of Sussex or Normandy; not of that chalk over which the

trout streams of the Vexin or Hampshire run so clear. It is a chalk

kneaded, as it were, with clayey thickness, so that it bears only

stunted trees or none, is sterile to the plough; and the waters which

run sluggishly in the shallow dips of it are turbid, like milk and water

mixed, and all their fords are muddy and difficult to pass. Those who

drink of these waters and who live by them are few. It is an

inhospitable land.

For the shape of it, it is of an odd, rolling, confused sort, which, in

describing it, I have often compared, and shall here compare again, to

the slightly lifted waves of a sea, rounded, and heaving

indiscriminately, where currents meet near the land a day after a gale.

You will find no direction or set of up and down in these billows.

Standing upon the summit of any one, others are seen around you as low,

as smooth, as untenanted as that one from which you gaze, and between

you and them lie broad and slight depressions a mile or two across, and

hardly deep enough to hide the sparse villages of those plains. Such is

the Champagne Pouilleuse.

If a man stands upon any one of these slight

[Illustration: UNIFORMS OF THE ARMY OF FRENCH EMIGRANTS

_To face p. 172_

]

rolls of hungry land, ploughed desperately for insufficient harvest here

and there, hedgeless, and almost featureless, and looks directly

eastward towards Germany and the roads by which invasions come, he will

perceive, running black and distinct all along the horizon, a low ridge,

even enough in outline. If the weather is clear, he may perceive it to

be wooded. It stands no more than three hundred feet above the average

level of the plain, but it bounds it absolutely. This ridge is the range

of hills that, with its forest, is called “the Argonne.”

This ridge barring the main approach to Paris along the roads from the

east, traversed in one steep pass by the main road which leads to Paris

from the Germanies, Dumouriez held with his insufficient and patchwork

forces, calling on Kellermann to bring up at all speed reinforcements

from the south, and knowing well in his heart that even with those

reinforcements he had not the quality of men who in the shock that was

coming could withstand the famous discipline of the Prussians and the

training of their Austrian allies. For Dumouriez, precise in temper, a

soldier of the old strict armies, and one in very doubtful allegiance

to the Revolutionary cause, justly doubting the temper of mere

volunteers, and misjudging what the future might make even of such

undisciplined men, thought, if anything, too little of the material, bad

as it was, which he had to his hand.

If the reader should wonder why a low ridge of this kind could prove an

obstacle to the advance of armies, and should be thought even in so

desperate a case worthy of defence, the explanation is this: armies

depend for their very lives, and equally for their offensive power, upon

a train of vehicles and guns. They are tied to roads. And such a feature

as the Argonne, low though it be, dense with wood and undergrowth, and

built of deep, damp clay, was almost as effectual a barrier to invasion

as might be an equally broad arm of water. The few roads across it, cut

through the woods and hardened, in particular the great Paris road from

Germany which crossed it at the point called “les Islettes,” are like

bridges or causeways over such an arm of water, and as necessary for the

passage of any army as are bridges over water. To hold these passes, if

it were possible, was all Dumouriez’s plan. For Verdun had fallen in

the first days of this month of September (1792), more than half of

which had now run in that week when Dumouriez lay along the hillside

with his men, every pass guarded, and awaiting the shock.

That shock came in the form of direct assaults upon the roads across the

hills, attempts to carry them with the high hand. These assaults at

first failed. An enemy attempting thus to break some link in a chain of

defence will make for the weakest. If Prussia and Austria were to cross

the Argonne, it must be by that one of the four roads where the

resistance was weakest. The direct road, the great Paris road, which was

the southernmost of the four passages, they would not first attempt.

They managed in their second effort to break the line at that point

called “The Cross in the Woods,” a day’s march to the north. They lost

but few men in this success. They gained their gate; Dumouriez’s line

was pierced. Hurriedly in the night he withdrew all those of his men

who, lying to the north, would have been isolated had they waited for

the dawn, and he fell back down the hills, standing now with his back to

Germany, his face to Paris, and knowing that his position was turned.

For though the Paris road was still held, the enemy was pouring round

through the breach in the dyke above, and the way to the capital was

open for the enemy round by that northern road.

All the weather of those few days had been drenching rain. The clay of

the hills was sodden, the autumn leaves drifting upon it throughout the

forest; the bare, rolling plains and the chalk were sodden with it, too.

It was the nineteenth of September, and Kellermann, just in time by a

few hours, but with reinforcements that could hardly save his country,

had effected his junction with his chief. So Dumouriez, with Kellermann

now linked on to him to his left and to the south, stood with his back

to the Argonne and his face to Paris, waiting for inevitable

catastrophe, while round by his right hand the enemy poured through into

the open plain.

There was present with those invading columns a man supremely gifted in

the power both to observe and to express, a young man destined soon to

bear one of the greatest of names. This was Goethe. For Goethe was with

the German armies, and we have from him some account of what he saw. We

can see through his eyes the bare, dull landscape, with low, misty

clouds hurrying above

[Illustration: GOETHE, WHO WAS WITH THE GERMAN ARMY AT VALMY

_To face p. 177_

]

it, now hiding all things in rain, now in an interval of drier weather

showing a steaming reek coming up from the drenched fields; and between

those two flats of gray earth and gray sky the dark bodies of troops

moving like ordered herds westward from the Argonne and the woods, on

over the rolling of the open land.

By this night of the nineteenth of September they had taken their full

march and were drawn up with their backs to Paris, their faces to the

Argonne, over against the French lines. The invaders could not leave

those forces of Dumouriez’s behind them upon their communications. It

was their task, now that the Argonne was forced, to clear away by

capture or by dispersal the army that was still in existence, though

doubtful, or, rather, only too certain of its fate.

Now, this long way round by the northern gate in the hills, this

lengthening of tortuous communications, and the persistent rain of those

days, made it imperative that the decision should be taken promptly.

Dysentery had been present in the Prussian and Austrian forces for some

time. In the abominable weather it had lately increased. Bread, which

was almost their only ration (until they should come out into more

favourable lands a day’s march ahead upon the road to Paris), came up

but tardily and clumsily by the long round of the muddy road. It was

imperative that Dumouriez and his checker-work hotchpotch of volunteers,

of foreign mercenaries, of old regulars, an army officered at random,

and even some units only half-officered, should be swept from the

communications if the invasion was to proceed; and therefore without

repose, and with the invading force as it found itself after fighting

through the Argonne and making the long march afterward, was to attack

at once, with the first light of the next day, the twentieth. That day

was to be decisive in the business of the modern world. For, by

coincidences upon which men still debate, but which I think can be

explained, and which I shall now present, the invaders failed in their

easy task. Dumouriez’s troops were left intact after the attempted

action, and the armed reduction of the Revolution was postponed so long

that it became at last impossible.

After all those days of cold and deadly rain the dawn broke uncertainly

through a dense mist that covered all the swellings of the tumbled land.

The extreme right of the invaders’ line, the Prussian regiments with

their king, reaching southward as far as the Paris road, was in the

thick of that fog. Northward it lay somewhat more loosely and thinly

where the Austrians formed the left extremity. But everywhere it was too

dense for any observation. Such scouting as was attempted groped

painfully yard by yard in that confusion, and there was at first no wind

at all, nor any lifting of the mist.

It was some two hours after sunrise before the first break in this veil

appeared, and that but a slight one. We have the relation from the pen

of a man who saw it. He was out with a small patrol of cavalry, feeling

and groping thus beyond the Paris road to discover what the French might

be doing under the cover of such white nothingness, when a momentary air

raised the curtain for fifty yards or so, and he found himself

point-blank against a battery of four guns, the French gunners standing

idly by. Their position was such that, had the day been clear, they

would have enfiladed the whole Prussian line. The young man set down in

his diary this commonplace, of awful meaning to a man who had had one

such glimpse in such a fog on such a morning:

“Upon what threads of chance do not the fates of empires depend!”

But this extreme battery of the French knew nothing of their

opportunity. The fog closed again immediately. The vague, mounted

figures that the gunners had seen were swallowed up at once, and the

effect of that strange encounter was to make the officer in command of

the guns withdraw them, fearing that in his feeling through the mist on

to that little height he had pushed his pieces too far. The Prussian

patrol _heard_, though they now could not see even so few yards away,

the hoofs of the horses sogging up with the limber, the clanking of the

hooked guns, and the retirement across the moist stubble. They heard the

swish of the wheels and occasional commands fainter and fainter, and

then nothing.

As the morning advanced, however, the wind which had carried the rain of

all those days--a wind from the south and east--began to blow again, and

drove the mist before it into very low, scurrying clouds, so low that

they covered the insignificant ridge of Argonne and so low that the

steeple of Sainte-Menehould, the little county town at the foot of the

hills, disappeared into them. But those low clouds left the rolls of

land in the plain itself free from their mist, and at last the armies

could see each other; and this is what the Prussian line drawn up upon

the one ridge saw as it looked eastward to the other.

There was more than half a mile, but less than a mile, of very shallow,

concave dip separating this swell, or crest, upon which the King of

Prussia and his staff had drawn up their regiments and another similar

swell, or crest, opposite where was the French left, the troops of

Kellermann.

This opposing crest beyond the very shallow and perfectly bare valley

bore, standing in the midst of the French line, a windmill--a windmill

famous now in the legends and songs of the French army, an object that

has grown symbolic, and that you will find in all the legends and

pictures of the battle. It was the Mill of Valmy. Indeed, Valmy village

was close by, but hidden by the crest, for it lay upon the farther

slope.

The French line thus strung on each side of the mill upon the crest

presented a contrast indeed to the strict rod-like files of the Prussian

infantry that watched them from over the depression. Their loose order,

their confusion, their lack of officers, their heterogeneous

composition, their doubtful discipline--all these in the soul of that

army were externally expressed by something straggling and unsure. The

very uniforms, so far as one could discern them at such a distance,

formed groups grotesque, often ragged, and sometimes interspersed with

dull, civilian clothes. A man, when he saw that sight, might have

thought, perhaps, that he was watching a crowd stretched out for a

spectacle rather than soldiers. But in one arm, by which the French have

often conquered, and to which the greatest of their captains was later

strongly attached,--I mean the guns,--something stricter prevailed;

forty pieces were drawn up on the cusp of the crescent near the mill.

For a mile or two, in various groups, northward of this position that

Kellermann had taken up, lay the French right under Dumouriez, and

opposite him in turn were the Austrians. From the Prussian ridge, which

I take for my point of view (since it was there, or rather in sight of

it, that the issue was determined) uncertain portions of Dumouriez’s

command and bodies of Austrians could be just discerned in the cloud.

But the immediate business lay between those two lines, the one so

[Illustration: MARSHAL FRANÇOIS-CHRISTOPHE KELLERMANN, DUKE OF VALMY

_To face p. 183_

]

strict, the other so loose, that faced each other from either crest of

that long, shallow trough under Valmy Mill.

The ground separating these two lines, the slight fall from the one, the

level at the bottom, the slight rise to the other, demands particular

notice. It was, as the reader will soon see, the whole matter upon which

the fate of this cannonade, and therefore of Europe, turned. Save in one

place, where a few bushes and superficial, disused diggings for marl

disturbed its even surface, it is for the most part ploughland. At this

date in the autumn, the twentieth of September, it is covered with

stubble, and the short, stiff straws, cut close to the soil by the

sickle, make it seem like the ground of any other open field. No trickle

of water runs through it even after rains. There is no appearance of

swamp or marsh. One is not warned by rushes or other water growths of

any difference between this field and any other field. So it dips and

rises again for its half or three quarters of a mile of breadth and for

its mile or so of length, almost everywhere under crop, and now under

autumn stubble, save here and there where balks of measly grass have

been left that show between their insufficient blades the dirty

gray-white of that half-chalky soil.

It was across such land, such to the eye at least, that the Prussian

assault upon the French must be made after the advance had been properly

prepared by artillery.

And prepared it was. The Prussian commanders let loose so furious a

cannonade as had not been heard by any living soldier of that day. Miles

away in the pass of les Islettes, an Englishman, who by strange

adventure was the brigadier-general, holding that position to protect

the rear of the French against attack, a man who had been through the

whole American war (a certain General Money, of whose strange fate I

have written elsewhere) marvelled at the continuity and sustainment of

all that fire. Distant Argonne shook with it, and the ground carried the

thuds mile upon mile. They felt it in Sainte-Menehould like the shocks

of falling timber.

But the range was long for the field-pieces of those days, and one’s

target at a thousand yards very uncertain. Many a missle flew over the

heads of the motley French line, many fell short, and buried themselves

in the wet bank of the slope before it. The losses so inflicted by hour

after hour of sustained battery-work were not great, nor did that loose

line upon each side of the mill seem to fluctuate or waver, nor were the

King of Prussia and his staff, or Brunswick, commanding all,

over-certain when the apt time for the critical charge and the advance

of their infantry would come.

For to the Prussian guns the French gunners replied with a fire almost

equally maintained and upon the whole of greater precision. They could

not dominate the enemy’s fire; they were, indeed, inferior to it, but

they did not allow themselves to be dominated by it. It was the remark

of all those who watched that field upon either side that the French

forces in this one respect of the guns had powerfully surprised the

invaders by their unexpected efficiency. So the cannonade went on until

men the least used to battle, the young recruits of Prussia, the young

poet Goethe himself, looking (and noting curiously and a little sickly

what “cannon fever” meant), were grown used to the roar and the blows of

sound, and had come to make it a sort of background for their mind.

It was at an hour that will never be precisely known,--so difficult is

it to determine by evidence the phases even of a single action, but

probably early in the afternoon, between one and two o’clock,--that all

this tornado of sound was hugely overborne by a crash and a thunder like

no other. A lucky shot from the Prussian batteries had fallen into the

midst of the French limbers, and in a sudden explosion great masses of

ammunition blew wheels, cases, horses, and men up in a sheaf of flame

and in plumes of smoke close by Valmy Mill. There, in the very centre of

the French line, the commanders, now watching eagerly through their

glasses from the Prussian ridge, saw the beginning of a breakdown: a

whole brigade was stampeding. It was, by a curious irony, a brigade of

German mercenaries still retained in the French service. But as they

broke, others also wavered; the line was in desperate confusion, and

might at any moment lose such formation as it had.

This was the opportunity for the charge, and Brunswick sent forward

one--slightly advanced, in front of and to the right of its neighbour,

in the formation called “echelon”--the companies of the famous Prussian

line. They began their descent into the shallow valley--a slow descent,

[Illustration:

A REPUBLICAN GENERAL A COLONEL OF INFANTRY

In the French Army

_To face p. 186_

]

their boots clogged by pounds of the field mud; a perilous advance, with

their own guns firing over their heads across the valley, but an advance

which, when it should be complete, the half-mile crossed, and the

opposing slope taken at the charge, would decide the main business of

the invasion, and would end the resistance of the Revolutionary armies.

Against them as they went forward was now directed some part of the

French artillery fire, such part as could be spared from the Prussian

guns above. The Prussian companies halted often, they were often

realigned, but their slow progress was still working, ordered, and

exactly maintained under that dramatic discipline which made in those

days, as it does now, the apparatus, perhaps, of Prussian excellence and

certainly of Prussian prestige. They reached the level between the two

lines; they touched the first rise of the opposing slope.

Meanwhile Kellermann, upon his horse, when the French line had wavered

upon the great explosion, rode suddenly along it, and with his feathered

general’s hat high upon the point of his sword, waving it, called loudly

for cheers--cheers for the nation, which was the Revolutionary cry. The

young men, emboldened, recovered some sort of formation, and loudly

responded with the cheers he had demanded; the brigade that had broken

was drawn up, put in reserve. The French guns during that critical five

minutes had behaved as though they had been veterans, nor had their fire

diminished, nor had a gunner moved save just in that central point where

the destruction of so much ammunition for a moment checked the rapidity

of fire.

The French guns, then, continually alive, turned more and more from the

distant Prussian batteries to the nearer infantry advancing against them

up the slope. The Prussian guns, as their men came nearer to the French,

had nearly to cease their fire or at least to diverge it to the left and

to the right. You could see along the French line the handling of the

muskets and the preparing to meet by infantry fire the Prussian charge

when it should come within its fifty or eighty yards.

But to that distance it never came. For at this last phase of the

battle, or, rather, of the cannonade,--it was no true battle,--there

happened the wholly unexpected, the almost miraculous and, in the eyes

of many historians, the inexplicable thing. The Prussian companies in

all their length, now within four hundred yards of the French line,

thinned a little by French cannon fire, but quite unmoved and morally

prepared for the advance, halted. Their progress, resumed, watched

anxiously by their commanders upon the height behind, grew slower and

slower, was made in jerks, checked in a yard or two, finally stood

still. There standing, one would say, within touch of victory, suffering

with admirable obedience the steady loss under the French shot, and with

admirable discipline closing its ranks, this Prussian infantry was seen

at last to fall back, to turn, and to retire. As slowly as they had

come, in the same order, with the same absence of looseness anywhere,

the files, suffering less and less with every yard of their retirement

from the French batteries, came nearly to their ancient stations, were

drawn up just below the crest from which they had started somewhat over

half an hour before. Valmy became again a cannonade and only a

cannonade; but at the sight of this returning of their foes the French

continually cheered, and the guns seemed to put on more vigour, and it

almost seemed as though the very numbers of the defenders grew.

The afternoon wore on, the cannonade slackened toward evening, and it

was one fitful shot and then another, and then none at last, and when

darkness fell the two lines stood where they had stood in the morning.

But the assault had failed.

What had happened? Why had not the Prussian charge proceeded?

Now, to that question, which has produced many and strange, false,

fantastic answers, I think a true answer can be provided, and I shall

attempt to provide it upon the authority of an observation made very

closely and with the unique intention of understanding this unique

affair in the history of arms. For when I went to make myself acquainted

with Valmy field it was in the same season, in the same weather, after

the same rains, in the same mists, and I believe that I have as much as

any man lived in the circumstances under which that issue was decided. I

believe, having myself gone over that depression from the Prussian ridge

toward the French, in just that weather and after just those rains, that

the advance was stopped by nothing more mysterious than marshy soil.

History is empty of evidence here, and we have nothing to learn from it.

Upon the French side the retirement seemed inexplicable, and upon the

Prussian the shame and failure of it seemed to have tied every man’s

tongue; yet I believe it to be due to nothing more romantic than mud.

Certain of our contemporaries in modern history have said that Brunswick

did not desire to press the action, because that his sympathy was with

the Revolutionary forces. To talk like that is to misunderstand the

whole psychology of soldiery; more--in such an action it is to

misunderstand the whole psychology of men. Brunswick could not have

recalled the charge without good cause on such a day and with such men

about him as the King of Prussia, the emigrant princes and the

commanders; but the thing is, on the face of it, absurd. A wiser guess,

but made erroneously, ascribes the retirement to the persistence and

effect of the French artillery-fire as the Prussian charge approached.

This must certainly be rejected, for we know that the advance was

steady, and the retirement too, and what is more, we know how

comparatively small were the losses. It was not due to an officer losing

his head, for the whole line retired without breaking and in consonance.

It certainly was not due to any doubt as to the moral ability of the

men to continue the ordeal that had suffered so admirably over six

hundred yards of ground and over perhaps a quarter of an hour of time.

Those who will do as I did, and visit Valmy in the autumn, and after the

rains, and walk by no path or any picking of one’s way, but straight

across the stubble, as the soldiers of those deployed companies had to

do, will, I am sure, decide as I here decide. For they will come to a

belt not upon the bottom level, but at the beginning of the opposing

slope, where, under the deceitful similarity of the unchanged stubble,

and with nothing to mark the drowned state of the soil, that soil

becomes almost impassable, certainly impassable to men under fire. The

French had before them, though they did not know it, a true obstacle,

the unwitting attempt to cross which as though it were no obstacle lost

the Prussians the battle, and with the battle lost the kings and the

aristocracies of Europe their throw against the French democracy.

Night fell, still misty, but unbroken by the sound of arms or of

marching. With the next day, when the invaders counted their losses

these, not

[Illustration: UNDER THE MILL AT VALMY

_To face p. 192_

]

over-heavy, they were appalled to find made far graver by a great

increase of dysentery, which such a night in the open after such a day

had produced. At the end of a week they fell back eastward again,

followed and hampered by the French cavalry, and when they passed the

boundaries of what was now the Republic, a blank-shot fired from the

walls of Longwy closed this great episode in the story of the Gauls.

PART SIX

THE DEATH OF LOUIS XVI

[Illustration: GENERAL CHARLES-FRANÇOIS DUMOURIEZ

In Command of the French at Valmy

_To face p. 197_

]

INTRODUCTION

After the Battle of Valmy, the French armies, with the beginning of

autumn, obtained quite unexpected and, as they were to prove, ephemeral

successes. Dumouriez, a man of vast military ability, continued to

command. The Republican armies poured over the Low Countries. Coincident

with these successes, there came a period of high political excitement

in Paris, and the rise of a sort of crusading enthusiasm, to spread the

democratic principles throughout Europe and to transform society. It is

to this more than to any other cause that we must ascribe the trial and

execution of the king. There was, indeed, from the point of view of

statesmanship alone, some excuse for the trial and fate of Louis. So

long as he lived, he was necessarily a rallying-point round which all

the counter-revolution would gather. The royal family having been kept

in strict imprisonment, but not without some state and considerable

luxury, in the Tower of the Temple (a mediæval building in the

north-eastern part of Paris), it was at first uncertain what would be

done with them. The first steps in the affair took the form of an

examination of the papers found in the palace and of a report on Louis’s

conduct. The accusations against the fallen king were formulated on the

third of November. There were debates in the Revolutionary Congress as

to the legality of trying a former head of the state. The trial was

decreed exactly a month later. Louis was to plead at the bar of the

Convention,--that is, the national congress,--which had met just before

Valmy, and which had voted the Republic. Long before his trial began, he

was already separated from the rest of his family, who were given rooms

above his own in the Temple. The indictment was framed by a committee,

which reported on the tenth of December; on the eleventh Louis appeared

at the bar of the Convention. He had three advocates, the chief being

the old and highly respected legist Malesherbes. The king appeared for

the second time on the twenty-sixth of December, and withdrew after the

speeches for the defence had been made. His guilt was pronounced by the

unanimous vote of the Parliament, no one voting against, and only five

abstaining. What followed I now describe.

[Illustration: LAMOIGNON DE MALESHERBES, COUNSEL FOR THE KING AT HIS

TRIAL

_To face p. 199_

]

PART SIX

THE DEATH OF LOUIS XVI

The long trial at the bar of the Parliament was over. The pleas had been

heard, and old Malesherbes, weighty and with the dignity at once of

ancient law, of contempt for fate, and of complete self-control, had

done all that could be done for the king. The verdict had been given.

Louis was found guilty by all of betraying the nation. He had called in

the enemy. There remained to be decided by a further vote what his

penalty should be.

It was the evening of Wednesday, January 16th, 1793. The deputies of the

nation were to vote, each publicly and by name, an enormous roll-call of

hundreds of men; each was to come up the steps to the tribune, to face

the vast audience that stretched from left to right of the

riding-school, and to pronounce clearly his decision. Each was free, if

he chose, to add to his declaration the motives that had determined it.

The three great chandeliers that hung from the roof of the place were

lit, affording a mellow, but insufficient, light in which the faces of

the great throng, small dots of white on the black background, were but

ill-distinguished. Upon the tribune itself a brighter light was turned.

The sun had long set; the evening meal was over; at eight o’clock the

interminable procession began. They came on one by one, arranged in

groups according to their constituencies. They went up in turn the steps

of the tribune from the right, voted in open voice, descended by the

left. Among the first was Robespierre, because he was of those that sat

for the capital. He made a speech (too long) to explain what he was

about to do. He protested that if the penalty of death was odious to

him, and if he had combatted it consistently as a general principle of

law, yet did he now support if for this exceptional case. “I remain

compassionate for the oppressed. I know nothing of that humanity which

is for ever sacrificing whole peoples and protecting tyrants.... I vote

for death.”

One after another the deputies for Paris, the extreme men, the men of

the Mountain, mounted those few steps, faced the great silent body of

their colleagues, while those who had just voted before them were

quietly seeking their places again, and those who were about to vote

stood lined up before the steps upon the farther side, and one after the

other gave his voice for death. Each after so declaring loudly his

responsibility, his verdict, and his name, confirmed the whole by

signing of a roll.

The voice of Danton was heard, the harsh, but deep and strong, voice

that was already the first in the country. He had sat all that day by

the bedside of his wife, who was to die. He had but just come back from

the frontiers and from the army. His huge body was broken with fatigue;

his soul was heavy with grief; his powerful brain was aching from a lack

of sleep. “I am no politician,” he shouted; “I vote for death.”

So all night long the dreadful litany proceeded. Men left the hall to

take an hour or two of sleep, a snatch of food; yet the hall seemed

always full despite the coming and going of single figures, and through

the long, cold darkness of that misty weather history heard voice after

voice, weak, strong, ashamed, defiant, pitiful, muffled, outspoken,

bass, treble, old, and young, repeating at irregular intervals: “Death

absolute”; “Death with respite”; “Banishment”; “Imprisonment.” And

history saw, after each such speech or cry (for many spoke as well

before they declared the doom), an isolated man, high upon the tribune,

beneath the candles, bending over the register and signing to what he

had determined and proclaimed.

The dull dawn of winter broke through a leaden sky. No eastern window

received it. The tall, gaunt casements of the southern wall overlooking

the Tuileries Gardens grew gradually into lighter oblongs of gray. The

candles paled and were extinguished. Hardly a third of the list was

done. All that short January day (Thursday, the seventeenth of January)

the dreadful thing proceeded until darkness fell again, until once more

the chandeliers were lit. Once more it was night, and they were still

voting, still declaring.

At last, when more than twenty-four hours had passed, the business was

over. No one was left to come forward to the tribune; and this great

sleepless mass, within which some few had noted one by one the voices as

they fell, and had already calculated the issue, waited for the counting

of the votes and for the recounting. Not only by word of

[Illustration: REPUBLICAN SOLDIERS IN THE REVOLUTION

_To face p. 202_

]

mouth, nor only by the signing of the register, had the precision of so

awful an event been secured, but one by one the votes had been written

down, folded, and sealed. The clerks of the Parliament opened each

packet and arranged the sentences in rows, according to their tenor: for

death absolute, for imprisonment, for delay. So one hour went past, and

then another; but in the third, when it was perhaps ten o’clock, at

night this silent process was interrupted, and the many that had fallen

asleep, or were nodding half asleep after such a vigil, looked up

surprised to hear that two letters had reached the assembly, one from

some agent of the Bourbon king in Spain to demand a respite; the other

from the advocates of the king, who demanded to be heard once more

before the chair should announce the result of the voting.

All was interrupted; an immediate and passionate, though short, debate

began. The intervention of the King of Spain the Convention would not

consider; upon the proposal that the king’s advocates should be heard

once more a debate was allowed. Many members joined it, though in brief

periods. Robespierre among others, spoke intensely. He demanded that

sentence should be read out and given before there could be any

consideration of appeal. That opinion (not through him) prevailed, and

the opening and arranging of the votes continued. A ceaseless little

crackling of tearing papers, the whispered comments of men in groups,

now and then some cry from the public in the galleries, broke the

silence.

It was not far from midnight when a further movement among the clerks at

the table, a comparison of sums, and heads bent together, scrutinizing

the additions, prefaced the last scene of this act. The paper, with the

figures written on it, was handed up to the chairman. That chairman was

Vergniaud; perhaps the noblest, certainly the most eloquent, of the

Girondins. He rose in his place above them, holding that paper before

him, and read out in the grave and even voice which had often moved

their debates:

“It is with profound sadness that I declare the penalty incurred by

Louis Capet to be, by the vote of the majority of this assembly, that of

death.”

Of seven hundred and twenty-one men who had voted, three hundred and

ninety-seven had demanded the scaffold, a majority of seventy-three.

[Illustration: PROCLAMATION OF THE PROVISIONAL EXECUTIVE COUNCIL

_To face p. 204_

]

It was in complete silence that this memorable sentence fell. That

silence was continued for some moments unbroken. The advocates of the

king were now permitted to enter, for sentence had been formally

delivered, and old Malesherbes, short, strong in figure for all his

years, and now so far oblivious of his dignity and name as to be

weeping, put forward his last plea. Sentence of death could not be

given, by all the traditions of their law, unless two-thirds of the

bench (for the French will have no single judges) concurred. And again,

the prisoner had not had all those guarantees which a prisoner should

have. And again, since it was as the head of the whole nation that he

had acted, and since it was by the whole nation that he was conceived to

be judged, then let the whole nation speak. He demanded an appeal to the

French people.

For a third time Robespierre spoke. He spoke with more emotion than his

peculiar academic style commonly permitted. Though he was in no way

representative as yet of public feeling, though he was still a lesser

man among those hundreds, for the third time his opinion coincided with

that which was to prevail. He implored the assembly not to reopen the

whole issue of civil war by putting this grave matter upon which they

had fixedly decided to a general vote of millions. Not for the first

time did this unalterable man betray for a moment his own unalterable

creed. Later he was himself to perish in punishment divine of such

deviations from the conscience of equality and of citizenship.

Guadet--Guadet, the Girondin--spoke for the king in the legal matter.

Merlin, a jurisconsult of some weight, replied. It was not true, he

said, that by the traditions of the common law a majority of two-thirds

was required to confirm so grave a sentence in any tribunal. Upon points

of _fact_, he urged, a majority not of two-thirds, but more,--of ten out

of twelve judges or assessors should determine,--but for the _penalty_ a

bare majority--three votes out of five given from the bench--had always

been held sufficient. The appeal of Louis was rejected, and the

Convention rose after a continued session of thirty-six hours.

There remained the question of respite. It was debated upon the next

day, Friday, the 18th of January. It was with a singular difficulty that

this second debate proceeded. Men left their places time and again

during the course of the day; there was such confusion that no vote

could be taken; and all the Saturday the thing hung in the balance right

on into the small hours--the dark and cold small hours of the January

night. It was three o’clock upon the Sunday morning before the final

vote appeared. Six hundred and ninety men decided it, and a majority of

seventy was found for immediate death.

That Sunday, Louis, in the prison of the Temple, in the great square

tower where he and his wife and his children and his sister had now for

many months been held captive, suffered his passion.

It is singular, instructive, a lesson in history, to note what the man’s

temper was during this prodigious time. The curious may examine

(displayed under glass in the archives for all to see) the note which he

wrote out with his own hand in his prison. It proves in its handwriting

and in its composition, in its very erasures, a momentous calm. If

courage in the presence of death be a chief index to character, admire

so complete a courage present in a man whose lack of judgment, torpor,

grave lethargies, whose imbecilities even, had helped to bring him where

he was. Louis, but for his death, might pass to history among the

negligible figures of her roll; but see how he died!

The note, written finely in even lines, asks for a delay of three days

“to permit me to appear before the presence of God.” It asks further for

the right to have his own confessor and for the guaranteeing of that

confessor (the Abbé Edgeworth, of course) from all anxiety. He asks to

see his family, and he recommends to the goodwill of the nation all

those who were attached to his person.

Here and there he changes a word, scratching out the original expression

deliberately, rewriting the substituted expression in a hand as firm as

the rest. It is curious to note that he twice expunges the term “the

National Convention.” He was making his address to the Convention, and

yet he would not use its title.

The night came early upon that Sunday, for the unbroken, drizzling sky

still stretched above Paris, and there was no sunset. Moreover, the

insufficient windows of the mediæval tower, sunk in their thick walls,

were partly boarded to prevent communication with friends outside. After

some

[Illustration:

Copyright, by Manzi-Joyant Co.

THE LAST VICTIMS OF THE TERROR

_To face p. 209_

]

hours had passed,--rather more than two hours in the light of the

candles (it was now eight in the evening),--the time for the supreme

ordeal was come; his family were to be admitted.

For some weeks now he had been separated from them. They had been

imprisoned in the rooms above. His demand for three days had been

rejected. He was to die upon the morrow, but he was to be permitted to

see his own before he died, and to discuss with his confessor what he

nobly called “the great business” of our passage from this life.

There gave upon the stair facing the narrow stone staircase of the

Temple a great oaken door, studded with many huge old nails. It opened,

and the queen came in. God! what must we not imagine her to have seemed

in that moment, this woman who had so despised him, and yet had been

faithful to him, and had principally ruined him; and who had, in these

last months, so marvellously changed and grown in soul. The queen came

in falteringly. She held by the hand her rickety little son; her

somewhat dull little daughter (the elder of the two children) followed.

The king’s sister, the Princess Elizabeth, of a different and more

simple bearing, and of a soul longer tried and longer purified, came in

more erect, the last of the four.

The king sat down and put his wife upon his left, his sister upon his

right. He took the boy, the last heir of the Capetian monarchy, and

stood him between his knees, and told him in a clear manner and in a low

and even tone the duties of a Christian in the difficult matter of

revenge, that it must be foregone. He lifted up the boy’s little right

hand to give to this direction the sanctity of an oath.

It seems that few words were spoken during that terrible time. The queen

clung to him somewhat. He mastered himself well. Altogether these three

and the two children were assembled for nearly two hours. A little

before ten he himself determined that the agony must end.

Marie Antoinette, as was her custom under stress, broke out into

passionate protestation. Then she checked herself and admitted doom. But

she implored him that they should see him again, and he said to her,

perhaps unwisely, that he would see her before he left for his passing.

He would see her in the morning at the hour when he was summoned to go.

She would have it earlier still.

[Illustration: KING LOUIS TAKING LEAVE OF HIS FAMILY IN THE TOWER OF THE

TEMPLE

_To face p. 211_

]

He said it should be earlier by half an hour. She made him promise

solemnly enough, and he promised her. Ten o’clock had struck, and the

chimes were sounding over Paris and from the great clock of the Temple

before she unloosed her hands.

He stood. The women passed out with weak knees (it is said that the girl

was half fainting). The oaken door shut behind them, and the iron door

outside it clanged to. He heard their soft steps, slow and creaking,

mounting the winding stone stairs without. Then they were lost, and he

was in silence. He prayed a moment and then lay down to sleep. He slept

deeply till five in the morning. The men bringing in the vessels for a

Mass awoke him. He rose and prayed.

In the full darkness, before it was yet six o’clock, the queen heard a

step approaching up the stairs. It could not be the king. She watched

from above her candle. It was a messenger come for books of devotion

which the king required at his mass and communion. Then she heard the

chimes of seven, and the day was breaking; upon her window the falling

mist had made a blur, and it was very cold. She waited on until eight

o’clock. There was no sound. Her agony was unrelieved. Yet another

hour, and she heard steps and the coming and going of many men upon the

stone stairs below. No one came up. The sounds sank away. The great door

that gave into the courtyard was heard creaking upon its hinges, there

was the pawing of horses upon the stones, and the cries of command to

the escort, a certain confused noise from the crowd outside the walls.

The tower was empty. She had not seen the king.

The king had passed through the prison door. He had gone on foot, with

the priest by his side, across the little court to the high wall which

surrounded the tower. The guards followed him.

Just before he came to the barrier he turned back to look at the prison.

He made a slight gesture as of constraint, and firmly turned again

toward the gate.

Outside this the guards were drawn up, and a roomy carriage of the sort

that was then hired in the streets by the wealthy stood at the entrance.

Two policemen armed with muskets were awaiting him at the carriage door.

As Louis appeared, one of these men got in and took his seat with his

back to the horses. Then the king entered, sitting in his proper place

upon the right, facing him, and motioned to the priest, Edgeworth, to

sit beside him. When they were both thus seated, the second policeman

took his place opposite, and he and his colleague set their guns before

them. The door was shut, the cab started at a foot’s pace.

As they came out on the broad streets (for they followed the

boulevards), they could see upon each side of the way, three or four

ranks deep, the soldiery and militia which guarded those trod miles

through the town. There was no crowd on the pavement behind the ranks of

soldiers, or at least but few spectators, and a curious observer might

have noted how few and rare were the uniforms, how many of the thousands

aligned were clothed in workman’s dress or in the mere remnants of

military coats. Even the windows of the uneven houses they passed (the

boulevards were then but half built) gaped empty, and no one stood at

the doors.

Before the carriage marched a great multitude of men, all enregimented

in some sort of troop, and the greater part of them drummers. These last

drummed incessantly, so that this long and very slow procession was

confused and deafened with a loud and ceaseless sound. Paris heard that

sound rolling up afar from the eastward, crashing past its houses, lost

again toward the west.

It was close upon eleven o’clock when the carriage came before the

unfinished columns of the Madeleine and turned into the Rue Royale.

Louis was reading from a book the Psalms which his confessor had pointed

out to him when he noticed that the carriage had stopped. He looked up,

turned to the priest, and said in a low voice:

“Unless I am mistaken, we are there?” The priest did not answer.

They had come to that wide open space which is now called the Place de

la Concorde, and as he looked quietly through the windows, the doomed

man perceived a great throng of people densely packed about a sort of

square of cannon which surrounded the scaffold and guillotine. That

fatal woodwork and the machine it bore stood near the entrance of the

Rue Royale and a little to the east. One of the executioners (who stood

at the foot of the scaffold) took the handle of the carriage door to

open it. Louis stopped him and, putting one hand on the priest’s knee

before he got out, said:

“Sirs, I recommend you this gentleman here.

[Illustration:

Copyright, by Manzi-Joyant Co.

A MASS UNDER THE TERROR

_To face p. 214_

]

See to it that after my death no insult shall be offered him.”

They said nothing in reply, but when the king would have continued, one

of them cried:

“Oh, yes, yes. We will see to it. Leave it to us.”

The king opened the door, and came out into the freshness of that damp

air. Above, the sky was still quite gray and low, but the misty drizzle

had ceased. They made as though to take off his coat and his collar. He

moved them aside, and himself disembarrassed his neck. Then one came

forward with a cord and took his hands.

“What are you at?” he cried.

“We must bind you,” said the man.

“Bind me!” answered the king. “I will never allow it! Fulfil your

orders, but you _shall_ not bind me!”

There was a struggle in which he turned to the priest as though for

counsel or for aid, but they bound his hands behind him.

The few steps up to the scaffold were very steep. The Abbé Edgeworth

supported him so bound, and thought for a moment, as he felt the weight

upon his arm, that the prisoner was losing courage. But even as he

turned to glance furtively at the king, in that crisis Louis had

strengthened himself, and stood upright upon the broad stage. With a few

rapid and determined steps he took his way toward the guillotine,

standing to the right of the instrument. Some yards in front of him and

below, a score of drummers were at the ready with sticks lifted,

balanced as drummers balance them between the knuckles of the hand. He

cried out, standing erect with his stout figure and heavy, impassive

face, “I die innocent of all the----” at which moment there came a

sudden cry of command, and the drums beat furiously. To that sound he

died; and those who were present relate that immediately afterward there

arose from the great mob about, which had hitherto held its breath, a

sort of loud moaning, not in anger or in hatred, but in astonishment of

the spectacle and of things to come.

THE END.

PRINTED BY THE WESTMINSTER PRESS LONDON, W.

[Illustration: THE DEATH OF KING LOUIS XVI, JANUARY 21, 1793

_To face p. 216_

]

Typographical error corrected by the etext transcriber:

fated to embarass his whole=> fated to embarrass his whole {pg 122}