Mirabeau, the chief of the “practical” men of the Revolution (as the
English language would render the most salient point in their political
attitude), needs a very particular examination. His influence upon the
early part of the Revolution was so considerable, the effect of his
death was so determinant and final, the speculation as to what _might_
have happened had he survived is so fruitful, so entertaining, and so
common, and the positive effect of his attitude upon the development of
the Revolution after his death was so wide, that to misunderstand
Mirabeau is in a large measure to misunderstand the whole movement; and
Mirabeau has unfortunately been ill or superficially understood by many
among now three generations of historians; for a comprehension of this
character is not a matter for research nor for accumulated historic
detail, but rather a task for sympathy.
Mirabeau was essentially an artist, with the powers and the frailties
which we properly associate with that term: that is, strong emotion
appealed to him both internally and externally. He loved to enjoy it
himself, he loved to create it in others. He studied, therefore, and was
a master of, the material by which such emotion may be created; he
himself yielded to strong emotion and sought it where it might be found.
It is foolish alike to belittle and to exaggerate this type of
temperament. Upon it or upon its admixture with other qualities is based
the music, the plastic art, and in a large measure the permanent
literature of the world. This aptitude for the enjoyment and for the
creation in others of emotion clothes intellectual work in a manner
which makes it permanent. This is what we mean when we say that _style_
is necessary to a book; that a great civilisation may partly be judged
by its architecture; that, as Plato says, music may be moral or immoral,
and so forth. The artist, though he is not at the root of human affairs,
is a necessary and proper ally in their development.
When I say that Mirabeau was an artist I mean that wherever his energies
might have found play he would there have desired to enjoy and to create
enjoyment through some definite medium. This medium was in part
literary, but much more largely oral expression. To be a _tribune_, that
is the voice of great numbers, to persuade, nay, to please by his very
accents and the very rhythm of his sentences, these things occupied the
man; but he also brought into his art that without which no great art
can exist: mere intellect.
He believed in the main principles at least which underlay the
revolutionary movement, he understood them and he was prepared to
propagate them; but his power over men was not due to this conviction:
his power over men was wholly that of the artist, and had he by some
accident been engaged in maintaining the attack against democracy, he
would have been nearly as famous as he became under the title of its
defender. We must then always consider Mirabeau as an orator, though an
orator endowed with a fine and clear intelligence and with no small
measure of reasoned faith.
Much else remains to be said of him.
He was a gentleman; that is, he both enjoyed and suffered the
consequences which attach to hereditary wealth and to the atmosphere
that surrounds its expenditure. On this account, he being personally
insufficiently provided with wealth, he was for ever in debt, and
regarded the sums necessary to his station in life and to his large
opportunities as things due to him, so to speak, from society. We are
right when we say that he took bribes, but wrong if we imagine that
those bribes bound him as they would bind a man meaner in character or
less lucky in his birth. He stooped as gentlemen will to all manner of
low intrigues, to obtain “the necessary and the wherewith”; that is,
money for his _rôle_. But there was a driving power behind him, bound up
with his whole character, which made it impossible for any such sums to
control his diction or to make of such a man a mere advocate. He was
never that dirtiest of political phenomena, the “party man.” He would
never have been, had he been born a hundred years later and thrust into
the nastiness of modern parliamentary life, “a parliamentary hand.”
Mirabeau had behind him a certain personal history which we must read in
connection with his temperament.
He had travelled widely, he knew Englishmen and Germans of the wealthier
classes well. The populace he knew ill even in his own country; abroad
he knew it not at all. He had suffered from his father’s dislike of him,
from the consequence of his own unbridled passions, also not a little
from mere accidental misfortune. Capable of prolonged and faithful
attachment to some woman, the opportunity for that attachment had never
been afforded him until the last few months before his death. Capable of
paying loyal and industrious service to some political system, no
political system had chosen him for its servant. It is a fruitful matter
of speculation to consider what he might have done for the French
monarchy had Fate put him early at Court and given him some voice in the
affairs of the French Executive before the Revolution broke out. As it
was, the Revolution provided him with his opportunity merely because it
broke down old barriers and conventions and was destructive of the
framework of the State in which he lived. He was compelled to enter the
Revolution as something of a destroyer, for by no other avenue could he
be given his chance; but by nature he detested destruction. I mean
(since this phrase is somewhat vague) he detested that spirit which will
disendow a nation of certain permanent institutions serving definite
ends, without a clear scheme of how those institutions should be
replaced by others to serve similar ends. It was on this account that he
was most genuinely and sincerely a defender of the monarchy: a permanent
institution serving the definite ends of national unity and the
repression of tendencies to oligarchy in the State.
Mirabeau had none of the revolutionary Vision. In mind he was
prematurely aged, for his mind had worked very rapidly over a very
varied field of experience. The pure doctrine of democracy which was a
religion to many of his contemporaries, with all the consequences of a
religion, he had never thought of accepting. But certain consequences of
the proposed reforms strongly appealed to him. He loved to be rid of
meaningless and dead barriers, privileges which no longer corresponded
to real social differences, old traditions in the management of trade
which no longer corresponded to the economic circumstances of his time,
and (this is the pivotal point) the fossils of an old religious creed
which, like nearly all of his rank, he simply took for granted to be
dead: for Mirabeau was utterly divorced from the Catholic Church.
Much has been said and will be said in these pages concerning the
religious quarrel which, though men hardly knew it at the time, cut
right across the revolutionary effort, and was destined to form the
lasting line of cleavage in French life. There will be repeated again
and again what has already been written, that a reconciliation between
the Catholic Church and the reconstruction of democracy was, though men
did not know it, the chief temporal business of the time, and the reader
of these pages will be made well acquainted in them with the degradation
to which religion had fallen among the cultivated of that generation.
But in the case of Mirabeau this absence of religion must be
particularly insisted upon. It would no more have occurred to Mirabeau
that the Catholic Faith had a future than it could occur to (let us say)
an English politician of thirty years ago that the Irish might become a
wealthy community or that an English Government might within his own
lifetime find itself embarrassed for money. I use this parallel for the
sake of strengthening my contention, but it is indeed a weak parallel.
No contemporary parallel in our strange and rapidly changing times
corresponds to the fixed certitude which permeated the whole of the end
of the eighteenth century that the Catholic Faith was dead. Mirabeau had
perhaps never engaged in his life in intimate conversation a single man
who took the Catholic sacraments seriously, or suffered a moment’s
anxiety upon the tenets of the creed.
He knew, indeed, that certain women and a much smaller number of
insignificant men wrapped themselves up in old practices of an odd,
superstitious kind; he knew that great, dull areas of ignorant
peasantry, in proportion to their poverty and isolation, repeated by
rote the old formulae of the Faith. But of the Faith as a living thing
he could have no conception.
He saw on the one hand a clerical institution, economic in character,
providing places and revenues for men of his own rank; he met those men
and never discovered them to have any religion at all. He saw on the
other hand a proposed society in which such a fossil, unjust and
meaningless, must relinquish its grip upon those large revenues. But of
the Faith as a social force, as a thing able to revive, he could have
no conception. It would have seemed to him a mere folly to suggest that
the future might contain the possibility of such a resurrection. The
dissolution of the religious orders, which was largely his work, the
civil constitution of the clergy which he presided over, were to him the
most natural acts in the world. They were the mere sweeping away of a
quantity of inorganic stuff which cumbered the modern State. He felt of
them as we might feel of the purchase of waste spaces in our cities, of
the confiscation of some bad landlords’ property in them. The Church
served no kind of purpose, no one who counted believed in it, it was
defended only by people who enjoyed large revenues from the survival of
what had once been, but was now no longer, a living, social function.
In everything of the Revolution which he understood Mirabeau was upon
the side of caution. He was not oblivious to the conception of popular
government, he was not even mistrustful of it, but he could not conceive
of it save as acting through the established strength of the wealthier
classes. Of military power he judged very largely through Prussian eyes.
And in long and enthusiastic passages he described the Prussian army as
invincible. Had he lived to see the military enthusiasm of the
Republicans he would utterly have distrusted it. He favoured in his
heart an aristocratic machinery of society--though not an aristocratic
theory of the State; he was quite determined to preserve as a living
but diminished national organ the traditional monarchy of France; he was
curious upon a number of details which were present and close to his
eyes: methods of voting, constitutional checks, commercial codes and the
rest of it. The little equilibriums of diplomacy interested him also,
and the watching of men immediately under his eye in the Parliament.
It was in the Parliament that his whole activity lay, it was there that
he began to guide the Revolution, it was his absence from the Parliament
after his death that the Revolution most feels in the summer of 1791.
This very brief sketch does not present Mirabeau to the reader. He can
only be properly presented in his speeches and in the more rhetorical of
his documents. It is probable as time proceeds that his reputation in
this department will grow. His constitutional ideas, based as they were
upon foreign institutions, and especially upon the English of that time,
were not applicable to his own people and are now nearly forgotten: he
was wrong upon English politics as he was wrong upon the German armies,
but he had art over men and his personality endures and increases with
time.