_From October 1789 to June 1791._
It is this which must explain all that followed in the succeeding phase,
which lasted from these early days of October 1789 to the last week of
June 1791. Throughout that period of twenty-one months the King is
letting the Revolution take its course, with the fixed idea of thwarting
it at last by flying from it, and perhaps conquering it by foreign aid.
But even this policy is not consecutively followed. The increasing
repugnance of the Court and of the King himself to the revolutionary
development forbids a consecutive and purely hypocritical acceptation of
the National Assembly’s decrees.
Deliberate and calculated intrigue might yet have saved the monarchy and
the persons of the royal family. Oddly enough, an ally in the struggle,
an excellent intriguer, a saviour of the monarchical institution and a
true defender of the royal persons was at hand: it was at hand in the
person of Mirabeau.
This man had more and more dominated the Assembly; he had been
conspicuous from its first opening days; he had been its very voice in
the resistance to the King at Versailles; it was he who had replied to
the Master of Ceremonies on June 23, that the Commons would not
disperse; it was he who had moved that the persons of the Commons were
privileged against arrest. He was of a family noble in station and
conspicuous before the people by the wealth and eccentricities of its
head, Mirabeau’s father. He himself was not unknown even before the
Revolution broke out, for his violence, his amours, his intelligence and
his debts. He was a few years older than the King and Queen: his
personality repelled them; none the less his desire to serve them was
sincere; and it was his plan, while retaining the great hold over the
National Assembly which his rhetoric and his use of men furnished him,
to give to the Court and in particular to the Queen, whom he very
greatly and almost reverently admired, such secret advice as might save
them. This advice, as we shall see in a moment, tended more and more to
be an advice for civil war. But Mirabeau’s death at the close of the
phase we are now entering (on April 2, 1791), and the increasing fears
of the King and Queen, between them prevented any statesmanship at all;
they prevented even the statesmanship of intrigue; and the period
became, on the side of the Revolution, a rapid and uncontrolled
development of its democratic theory (limited by the hesitation of the
middle class), and on the side of the Court an increasing demand for
mere physical security and flight, coupled with an increasing
determination to return, and to restore as a popular monarchy the scheme
of the past.
The eighteen months that intervened between the fixing of the Assembly
and the royal family in Paris, and the death of Mirabeau, are remarkable
for the following points, which must all be considered abreast, as it
were, if we are to understand their combined effects.
1. This was the period in which the constructive work of the National
Assembly was done, and in which the whole face of the nation was
changed. The advising bodies of lawyers called “Parliaments” were
abolished (eleven months after the King had come to Paris), the Modern
Departments were organised in the place of the old provinces, the old
national and provincial militia was destroyed; but (as it is very
important to remember) _the old regular army was left untouched_. A new
judicature and new rules of procedure were established. A new code
sketched out in the place of “Common Law” muddle. In a word, it was the
period during which most of those things which we regard as
characteristic of the revolutionary work were either brought to their
theoretic conclusion or given at least their main lines.
2. Among these constructive acts, but so important that it must be
regarded separately, was the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which
will be dealt with at length further in this book; it was the principal
work (and the principal error) of that year and a half.
3. The general spirit of the Revolution, more difficult to define than
its theory but easy to appreciate as one follows the development of the
movement, increased regularly and enormously in intensity during the
period. The power of the King, who was still at the head of the
Executive, acted more and more as an irritant against public opinion,
and--
4. That public opinion began to express itself in a centralised and
national fashion, of which the great federation of the 14th of July
1790, in Paris, on the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, was the
nucleus and also the symbol. This federation consisted in delegates from
the National Guard throughout the country, and it was of this capital
importance: that it introduced into the revolutionary movement a feature
of soldiery which made even the regular troops for the most part
sympathetic with the enthusiasm of the time.
5. These eighteen months were, again, filled with the movement of the
“Emigration.” That movement was, of course, the departure of many of the
more prominent of the privileged orders and of a crowd of humbler
nobles, as also of a few ecclesiastics, from France. The King’s brothers
(one fled at the beginning of the emigration, the younger, the Comte
d’Artois; the other, the elder, at its close, and coincidently with the
flight of the King) must especially be noted in this connection; they
formed in company with the more notable of the other emigrants a regular
political body, which intrigued continually beyond the frontiers, in
Germany and Italy, against the Revolution. And--
6. It was therefore during these months that the ultimate origins of the
large European war must be found. The armed body of the emigrants under
Condé formed an organised corps upon the Rhine, and though there was not
yet the semblance of an armed movement in Europe besides theirs against
the French, yet by the _émigrés_, as they were called, were sown the
seeds the harvest of which was to be the war of 1792.
I have said that during these months in which most of the constructive
work of the Revolution was done, in which the seeds of the great war
were sown, and in which the absolute position of the Crown as the head
of the Executive was increasingly irritating to the public opinion of
the French, and especially of the capital, Mirabeau was the one man who
might have preserved the continuity of national institutions by the
preservation of the monarchy. He received money from the Court and in
return gave it advice. The advice was the advice of genius, but it was
listened to less and less in proportion as it was more and more
practical. Mirabeau also favoured the abandonment of Paris by the King,
but he would have had the King leave Paris openly and with an armed
force, withdraw to a neighbouring and loyal centre such as Compiègne,
and thence depend upon the fortunes of civil war.
Meanwhile the Queen was determined upon a very different and much more
personal plan, into which no conception of statesmanship entered. She
was determined to save the persons of her children, herself and her
husband. Plans of flight were made, postponed and re-postponed. It was
already agreed at the Court that not Mirabeau’s plan should be followed,
but this plan of mere evasion. The army which Bouillé commanded upon the
frontier was to send small detachments along the great road from Paris
to the east; the first of these were to meet the royal fugitives a
little beyond Chalôns and to escort their carriage eastward; each armed
detachment in the chain, as the flight proceeded, was to fall in for its
defence, until, once the town of Varennes was reached, the King and
Queen should be in touch with the main body of the army.
What was then intended to follow remains obscure. It is fairly certain
that the King did not intend to pass the frontier but to take refuge at
Montmédy. The conflict that would have inevitably broken out could
hardly have been confined to a civil war: foreign armies and the German
mercenaries in the French service were presumably to be organised, in
case the flight succeeded, for a march upon Paris and the complete
restoration of the old state of affairs.
Had Mirabeau lived this rash and unstatesmanlike plan might yet have
been avoided; it so happened that he died upon April 2, 1791, and soon
after we enter the third phase of the Revolution, which is that leading
directly to the great war, and to the fall of the monarchy.
Shortly after Mirabeau’s death a tumult, which excessively frightened
the royal family, prevented the King and Queen from leaving the palace
and passing Easter at St. Cloud, in the suburbs. Though further
postponements of their flight followed, the evasion actually took place
in the night of the 20th to 21st of June. It very nearly succeeded, but
by a series of small accidents, the last of which, the famous ride of
Drouet to intercept the fugitives, is among the best-known episodes in
history, the King and Queen and their children were discovered and
arrested at Varennes, within a few hundred yards of safety, and were
brought back to Paris, surrounded by enormous and hostile crowds. With
the failure of this attempt at flight in the end of June 1791, ends the
third phase of the Revolution.