As might be expected, the character of King Louis XVI has suffered more
distortion at the hands of historians than has any other of the
revolutionary figures; and this because he combined with that personal
character of his a certain office to which were traditionally attached
certain points of view and methods of action which the historian takes
for granted when he deals with the character of the man. As any one
thinking of a judge of some standing upon the English bench cannot but
believe that he is possessed of some learning or some gravity, etc.; as
any one hearing of a famous soldier cannot but believe that he has
certain qualities associated with the business of soldiering, so
historians tend to confuse the personality and character of Louis XVI
with that of his office; they either by contrast exaggerate his unkingly
defects or by sympathy exaggerate his kingly opposition to reform.
The student will do well to avoid this error and its source, and to
think of Louis as of a man who had been casually introduced, almost
without preparation, into the office which he held. In other words, the
student will do well, in his reading of the Revolution, to consider
Louis XVI simply as a man, and his character as a private character. For
this last of the long, unbroken line of Capetians possessed a character
essentially individual. It was of a type which, no matter what accidents
of fortune might have fallen upon its possessor, would have remained the
same. Nor was ever a man possessed of high office whom high office had
less moulded.
Men thus impervious to their environment are commonly so from two
causes: either from an intense and vivid personal initiative which may
border upon madness, or from something thick and heavy in their moral
accoutrement which defends against external action the inner personal
temperament. The latter was the case with Louis.
He was very slow of thought, and very slow of decision. His physical
movements were slow. The movement of his eyes was notably slow. He had a
way of falling asleep under the effort of fatigue at the most
incongruous moments. The things that amused him were of the largest and
most superficial kind. Horse-play, now and then a little touched with
eccentricity, and very plain but unexpected jokes. One may express him
from one aspect by saying that he was one of those men whom you could
never by any chance have hoped to convince of anything. The few things
which he accepted he accepted quite simply, and the process of reasoning
in the mouth of any who approached him was always too rapid for him to
follow. But it must not be imagined on this account that the moral
integument so described was wrapped about a void. On the contrary, it
enclosed a very definite character. Louis possessed a number of intimate
convictions upon which he was not to be shaken. He was profoundly
convinced of the existence and value of a certain corporate tradition in
the organism which he ruled: the French nation. He was national. In this
he differed from many a pedant, many a courtier, many an ecclesiastic,
and many a woman about him, especially his wife.
He was, again, possessed of all the elements of the Catholic faith.
It was, indeed, a singular thing for a man of his position at such a
time to hold intimately to religion, but Louis held to it. He confessed,
he communicated, he attended mass, he performed his ordinary
devotions--not by way of tradition or political duty, or State function,
to which religious performance was now reduced in the vast majority of
his wealthy contemporaries, but as an individual for whom these things
had a personal value. Had he, with precisely the same interior spirit,
woken in his bed some morning to find himself a country squire, and to
discover that all his past kingship had been a dream of the night, he
would have continued the practice of his religion as before.
Now this is a sufficiently remarkable point, for the country squire, the
noble, the lawyer, the university professor of the generation
immediately preceding the Revolution had, as a rule, no conception of
the Catholic Church. With them the faith was dead, save in the case of a
very few who made it, if one may say so without disrespect, a mania, and
in their exaggerations were themselves the proofs of the depth of decay
into which the Church of Gaul had fallen.
Louis XVI was possessed, then, of religion: it appeared in many of his
acts, in his hesitation to appoint not a few of the many atheist bishops
of the time, in his real agony of responsibility upon the Civil
Constitution of the clergy, and in nothing more than the peculiar
sobriety and solid ritual whereby he prepared for a tragic, sudden, and
ignominious death.
It is next to be observed that though he was a man not yet in middle
age, and though he was quite devoid of ardour in any form, he had from
the first matured a great basis of courage. It is well to admit that
this quality in him was connected with those slow processes of thought
and action which hampered him, but it is not to be explained by them. No
man yet has become brave through mere stupidity.
It was not only the accidents of the Revolution that proved this quality
in him: his physical habits proved it long before. He was a resolute and
capable rider of the horse: an aptitude in that exercise is impossible
to the coward. Again, in those by-products of courage which are
apparent, even where no physical danger threatens, he was conspicuous;
he had no hesitation in facing a number of men, and he had aptitude in a
mechanical trade--a business by no means unconnected with virility.
Now in mentioning his virility, it is of prime importance for the
student to remember, though the matter can be touched upon but lightly,
that Louis, in this department of physical life, suffered from a
mechanical impediment which gravely distorted the first years of his
marriage, which undoubtedly wounded his self-respect, and which was
perhaps the only thing that caused him permanent anxiety. He was cured
by medical aid in the summer of the year 1777, but he was already three
years a king and seven years a husband before that relief came to him.
The tragedy affected his whole life, and, I repeat, must never be
forgotten when one considers either him or Marie Antoinette in their
intimate character, and in their effect as actors in the great drama.
For the rest, the character of Louis betrayed certain ineptitudes (the
word ineptitude is far more accurate in this connection than the word
weakness), which ineptitudes were peculiarly fatal for the military
office which he held and for the belligerent crisis which he had to
meet.
Few men are possessed of the eye, the subtle sympathy, the very rapid
power of decision, and the comprehension of human contrasts and
differences which build up the apt leader of an armed force great or
small. Most men are mediocre in the combination of these qualities. But
Louis was quite exceptionally hopeless where they were concerned. He
could never have seen the simplest position nor have appreciated the
military aspects of any character or of any body of men. He could ride,
but he could not ride at the head of a column. He was not merely bad at
this trade, he was nul. Drafted as a private into a conscript army, he
would never have been entrusted with the duties of a corporal. He would
have been impossible as a sergeant; and, possessed of commissioned rank,
ridicule would have compelled him to take his discharge.
This lack did not only, or chiefly, betray itself in his inability to
meet personally the armed crisis of a revolution; it was not only, or
chiefly, apparent in his complete breakdown during the assault upon the
palace on the 10th of August: it was also, and much more, the disastrous
cause of his inability to oversee, or even to choose, military advisers.
Those who propose in the early part of the Revolution to check the mob
in Paris, are excellent commanders: but Louis does not know it. Those
who succeed each other at the Ministry of War, or at the head of the
armies during the active part of the revolution are various in the
extreme: but they all seem one to him. Between a fop like Narbonne and a
subtle, trained cavalry man like Dumouriez, Louis made no distinction.
The military qualities of La Fayette (which were not to be despised)
meant no more to him than does music, good or bad, to a deaf man. From
the beginning to the end of the movement, the whole of the military
problem escaped him.
Another hole in his character, which was of prime importance at such a
time, was his inability to grasp in a clear vision any general social
problem. Maps he could well comprehend, and he could well retain
statistics; but the landscape, as it were, of the Revolution his
protuberant and lethargic eyes completely missed. He was quite unable to
see where lay danger and where support, in what large masses such and
such forces were grouped, and the directions in which they were
advancing, or upon which they must retreat. In this matter he was, as
will be seen in a moment, the very opposite of Mirabeau, and it was on
account of this weakness, or rather this form of nullity, that all
Mirabeau’s vision was wasted upon Louis.
Finally, he had no working comprehension of Europe. He did not even
exaggerate the powers of the allies in the later phases of the
Revolution when they were marching upon France. He did not either
under-estimate or over-estimate the policy and naval force of Great
Britain, the military resources of his own subjects, the probable
sympathies of the Netherlands (anti-Austrian but Catholic), the decay of
Spain, the division and impotence of the Italian Peninsula. Louis saw
nothing of all these things.
One may conclude the picture (for the purposes of such a short study as
this) by saying that only one coincidence could have led him through the
labyrinth of the time with success. That coincidence would have been the
presence at his side of a friend fully trusted from childhood, loved, as
religious as himself, and yet possessing precisely those qualities which
he himself lacked. Had Louis found to hand such a lieutenant, the
qualities I have mentioned would have been a sort of keel and ballast
which would have secured the monarchy, for he was not weak, he was not
impulsive, he was not even foolish: he was only wretchedly alone in his
incapacities. Certainly such a nature could trust and rely upon no one
who was not of this intimate kind, and he possessed no such intimate,
let alone an intimate who could command the qualities I have suggested.
Being what he was, his character is among the half-dozen which
determined the Revolution to take the course which it did.