_From June 1791 to September 1792._
To understand the capital effect both of this flight and of its failure,
we must once more insist upon the supreme position of the monarchy in
the traditions and instinct of French polity. The unwisdom of the flight
it would be difficult to exaggerate: it is impossible to exaggerate the
moral revolution caused by its failure. It was regarded as virtually an
abdication. The strong body of provincial, silent, and moderate opinion,
which still centred on the King and regarded it as his function to lead
and to govern, was bewildered, and in the main divorced, in the future,
from the Crown.
It is an excellent proof of what the monarchy had for so long been to
France, that even in such a crisis barely the name of “a republic” was
mentioned, and that only in the intellectual circles in Paris. All the
constitutional and standing forces of society conspired to preserve the
monarchy at the expense of no matter what fictions. The middle class
Militia Guard under La Fayette repressed, in what is known as the
Massacre of the Champ-de-Mars, the beginnings of a popular movement. The
more Radical leaders (among whom was Danton) fled abroad or hid. The
Duke of Orleans utterly failed to take advantage of the moment, or to
get himself proclaimed regent: the monarchical tradition was too strong.
Immediately after the second anniversary of the taking of the Bastille,
in July, the decrees of Parliament created the fiction that the King was
not responsible for the flight, that he “had been carried off,” and in
the following September, though until then suspended from executive
power, the King, on taking the oath to the Constitution, was once more
at the head of all the forces of the nation.
But all this patching and reparation of the façade of constitutional
monarchy (a fiction whose tawdriness is more offensive to the French
temper than its falsehood) had come too late. Already the Queen had
written to her brother, the Emperor of Austria, suggesting the
mobilisation of a considerable force, and its encampment on the
frontier, to overawe the revolutionary movement. Her action coincided
within a few days with the end of that great Parliament, which had been
chosen on the most democratic suffrage, and which had transformed the
whole of society and laid the basis of the revolutionary Constitution.
With the meeting of the National Assembly’s successor on the 1st of
October, 1791, war was already possible; that possibility was to be
transformed very soon into probability, and at last into actuality.
In the new Parliament the weight, not of numbers but of leadership, fell
to a group of enthusiastic and eloquent men who, from the fact that
certain of their principal members came from the Gironde, were called
_The Girondins_. They represented the purest and the most enthusiastic
ideal of democracy, less national, perhaps, than that advocated by men
more extreme than they, but of a sort which, from that time to this, has
been able to rouse the enthusiasm of historians.
Vergniaud and Isnard were their great orators, Brissot was their
intellectual intriguer, and the wife of Roland, one of their members,
was, as it were, the soul of the whole group. It was the fact that these
men desired war which made war certain, once the temper of this new
second Assembly should be felt.
The extremists over against them, to whom I have alluded (known as “the
Mountain”), were especially Parisian in character. Robespierre, who had
been first an obscure, and later a sectarian orator of the National
Assembly, though not sitting in this second Parliament, was perhaps the
most prominent figure in that group, for he was the public orator of
Paris; and indeed the Mountain was Paris; Paris, whether inside or
outside the Parliament; Paris acting as the responsible brain of France.
Later, it was the Mountain (that had first opposed the war) which was to
ensure the success of the French arms by a rigidity and despotism in
action such as the purer and less practical minds of the Girondins
abhorred.
On the 3rd of December, 1791 (to quote a fundamental date in the rapid
progress towards the war which was to transform the Revolution), the
King--writing in a manner which betrays dictation by his wife--begged
the King of Prussia (as _she_ had begged the Emperor) to mobilise an
armed force, and with it to back a Congress that should have for its
object the prevention of the spread of the Revolution. That letter was
typical of the moment. From both sides tension was rapidly proceeding to
the breaking point. Nor was the tension merely upon generalities. The
Revolution had broken a European treaty in the annexation of the Papal
State of Avignon, and it had broken European conventions when it had
abolished in Alsace feudal rights that were possessed by the princes of
the empire. It was as though some State to-day, attempting Collectivism,
should confiscate, along with other property, securities lying in its
banks, but held by the nationals of a foreign State.
On the revolutionary side also there was a definite point at issue,
which was the permission accorded within the empire for the emigrants to
meet in arms and to threaten the French frontier.
But these precise and legal points were not the true causes of the war.
The true causes of the war were the desire of the unreformed European
Governments (notably those of Prussia and Austria) that the Revolution
should, in their own interests, be checked, and the conviction that
their armed forces were easily capable of effecting the destruction of
the new French _régime_.
The Court of Vienna refused to accept a just indemnity that was offered
the princes of the empire in Alsace for the loss of their old feudal
rights; Leopold, the emperor, who was one of the same generation as the
French King and Queen, died upon the 1st of March, 1792, and was
succeeded by a son only twenty-four years of age and easily persuaded to
war.
On the French side, with the exception of the Mountain and notably of
Robespierre, there was a curious coalition of opinion demanding war.
The Court and the reactionaries were sufficiently certain of the victory
of the Allies to find their salvation in war.
The revolutionary party, that is, the mass of public opinion and the
“patriots,” as they called themselves, the Girondins, also, and
especially, desired war as a sort of crusade for the Revolution; they
suffered grievous illusions, as enthusiasts always must, and believed
the French armed forces capable of sustaining the shock. The plans had
already been drawn up for the campaign (and promptly betrayed to the
enemy by the Queen); Dumouriez, an excellent soldier, had from the
middle of March 1792 been the chief person in the ministry, and the
director of foreign affairs, and a month later, on the 20th of April,
war was declared against Austria, or, to be accurate, against “the King
of Hungary and Bohemia.”
Such was still the official title of Marie Antoinette’s nephew, who,
though now succeeded to the empire, had not yet been crowned emperor. It
was hoped to confine the war to this monarch, and, indeed, the German
princes of the empire did not join him (the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel
was an exception). But the one German power that counted most, the
kingdom of Prussia, which Dumouriez had especially hoped to keep
neutral, joined forces with Austria. The royal letters had done their
work.
At this critical moment the French armed forces and the French
strongholds were at their worst. The discipline of the army was
deplorable. The regular soldiers of the old _régime_ had lost from six
to nine thousand officers by emigration, and mixed no better than water
and oil with the revolutionary volunteers who had been drafted (to the
number of over two hundred battalions) into the ranks of the army;
moreover, these volunteer battalions were for the most part ill
provided, far below their establishment, some only existed on paper;
none were trained as soldiers should be trained. In a more orderly time,
when the decrees of the Government corresponded with reality, four
hundred thousand men would have held the frontier; such a number was in
the estimates. As it was, from the Swiss mountains to the English
Channel, the French could count on no more than _one-fifth_ of that
number. Eighty thousand alone were under arms. The full Prussian army
was, alone, apart from its allies, close upon treble the size of this
disorganised and insufficient force.
Panics at once ludicrous and tragic opened the campaign upon the French
side. The King took advantage of them to dismiss his Girondin Ministry
and to form a reactionary Government. The Parliament replied by measures
useless to the conduct of war, and designed only to exasperate the
Crown, which was betraying the nation. It ordered the dismissal of the
royal Guard, the formation of a camp of revolutionary Federals outside
Paris, the transportation of the orthodox priests; in pursuit of the
Court’s determination to resist the Assembly and to await the victorious
allies, Louis vetoed the last two decrees. La Fayette, who was now in
command of the army of the centre, with his headquarters at Sedan, right
upon the route of the invasion, declared for the King.
Had the armies of Austria and Prussia moved with rapidity at this
moment, the Revolution was at an end. As it was, their mobilisation was
slow, and their march, though accurate, leisurely. It gave time for the
populace of Paris to demonstrate against the palace and the royal family
on the 20th of June. It was not until the first days of August that the
main force of the combined monarchs, under the generalship-in-chief of
the Duke of Brunswick (who had the reputation of being the best general
of his time), set out for the march on Paris. It was not until the 23rd
of August that the invaders took the first French frontier town, Longwy.
Meanwhile two very important things had lent to the French, in spite of
the wretched insufficiency of their armed force, an intensity of feeling
which did something to supply that insufficiency. In the first place,
the third anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille, the 14th of July, had
called to Paris deputations from all the provinces, many of them armed;
this gave the national feeling unity. In the second place, Brunswick had
issued from Coblentz, which was his base, upon the 25th of that same
month of July, a manifesto which was known in Paris three days later,
and which (though certain modern historians have questioned this)
undoubtedly set revolutionary opinion ablaze.
This manifesto demanded, in the name of the Allied Army, a complete
restoration of the old _régime_, professed to treat the French and their
new authorities as rebels subject to military execution, and contained a
clause of peculiar gravity, which excited an immediate and exasperated
response from Paris. The authorship of this clause lay with Marie
Antoinette, and it threatened, if there were any attack upon the palace,
to give the capital over to military execution and total subversion.
Two days later the Federals from Marseilles, a middle-class body of
excellent citizens, though merely amateurs at soldiering and small in
numbers, marched into the city. Their marching song has become famous
under the title of the “Marseillaise.” They had accomplished the
astonishing feat of traversing France, drawing cannon with them, at the
rate of eighteen miles a day, in the height of a torrid summer, for
close upon a month on end. There is no parallel to such an effort in the
history of war, nor did contemporary opinion exaggerate when it saw in
the battalion of Marseilles the centre of the coming fight.
The shock between the palace and the populace was joined in the morning
of the 10th of August. The palace was held by about six thousand men,[3]
of whom some twelve hundred were regulars of the Swiss Guard. The palace
(the Tuileries) was, or should have been, impregnable. The popular
attack, we may be certain, would have been beaten back had the
connection between the Tuileries and the Louvre on the south been
properly cut. The flooring had indeed been removed at this point for
some distance, but either the gap was not wide enough or the post was
insufficiently guarded; the populace and the Federals, badly beaten in
their main attack upon the long front of the palace, succeeded in
turning its flank where it joined on to the Louvre; they thus enfiladed
the suites of rooms and utterly put an end to the resistance of its
garrison.
Meanwhile the King and Queen, the Dauphin and his little sister, with
others of the royal household, had taken refuge during the fighting in
the hall of the Parliament.
After the victory of the populace their fate was debated and decided
upon; they were imprisoned in the Tower of the Temple, a mediæval
fortress still standing in the north-east of Paris, and though monarchy
was not yet formally abolished, the most extreme spirits which the
Revolution then contained, and the most vigorous, stepped into the place
of the old Executive, with Danton at their head. With them appeared in
the seat of Government the spirit of military action, its contempt for
forms and its rapid decision. The known accomplices of the supporters of
the Court’s resistance and alliance with the invaders were arrested by
the hundred. The enrolment of volunteers, already enthusiastic
throughout France, was supported with the new vigour of official aid;
and the Revolution left at once all its old moorings to enter an extreme
phase. At the same moment the frontier was crossed and the national soil
invaded on the 19th of August.
It is possible that the delay of the Prussians until that moment had
been calculated, for the position in France was complicated and their
decision to fight had been tardily arrived at. It was the news of the
fall of the palace that seems to have decided them. The place, like the
date, of this grave event, deserves to be more famous than it is.
Brunswick touched what was then French soil, in that little triangle
where now German and French Lorraine and Luxembourg meet. The village is
called Redange: thence did the privileged of Europe set out to reach
Paris and to destroy democracy. The first task occupied them for full
twenty-two years, upon the latter they are still engaged.
What forces the French could there bring against Brunswick were
contemptuously brushed aside. Four days later he had, as we have seen,
taken the frontier stronghold of Longwy; within a week he was in front
of Verdun.
Verdun had no chance of resistance, no garrison to call a garrison, and
no opportunity for defence. The news that it must fall reached Paris on
the morning of a fatal date, the 2nd of September; after its fall there
would lie nothing between it and the capital; and from that moment the
whole nature of the Revolution is wholly transformed by the
psychological effect of war.
V
_From the invasion of September 1792 to the establishment of the
Committee of Public Safety, April 1793._
The fifth phase of the French Revolution may be said to date from these
first days of September 1792, when the news of the successful invasion
was maddening Paris, and when the revolutionary Executive, established
upon the ruins of the old dead monarchy and in its image, was firmly in
the saddle, up to the establishment of the yet more monarchical
“Committee of Public Safety,” seven months later. And these seven months
may be characterised as follows:--
They were a period during which it was attempted to carry on the
revolutionary war against the Governments of Europe upon democratic
principles. The attempt failed. In the place of discipline and
comprehension and foresight the rising and intense enthusiasm of the
moment was depended upon for victory. The pure ideal of the Girondin
faction, with the model republic which it hoped to establish, proved
wholly insufficient for the conduct of a war; and to save the nation
from foreign conquest and the great democratic experiment of the
Revolution from disaster, it was necessary that the military and
disciplined side of the French, with all the tyranny that accompanies
that aspect of their national genius, should undertake the completion of
the adventure.
This period opens with what are called the Massacres of September. I
have said upon a former page that “the known accomplices and supporters
of the Court’s alliance with the invaders were arrested by the hundred,”
upon the fall of the palace and the establishment of a revolutionary
Executive with Danton at its head.
These prisoners, massed in the jails of the city, were massacred to the
number of eleven hundred by a small but organised band of assassins
during the days when the news of the fall of Verdun was expected and
reached the capital. Such a crime appalled the public conscience of
Europe and of the French people. It must never be confused with the
judicial and military acts of the Terror, nor with the reprisals
undertaken against rebellion, nor with the gross excesses of mob
violence; for though votes in favour of the immediate execution of those
who had sided with the enemies of the country were passed in certain
primary assemblies, the act itself was the mechanical, deliberate and
voluntary choice of a few determined men. It had, therefore, a character
of its own, and that character made it stand out for its contemporaries
as it should stand out for us: it was murder.
The prisoners were unarmed--nay, though treasonable, they had not
actually taken arms; their destruction was inspired, in most of those
who ordered it, by mere hatred. Those who ordered it were a small
committee acting spontaneously, and Marat was their chief.[4]
It was under the impression of these massacres that the Deputies of the
new or third Assembly of the Revolution, known to history as _The
Convention_, met in Paris.
This Parliament was to be at first the actual, later the nominal
governing power in France during the three critical years that followed;
years which were the military salvation of the Revolution, and which
therefore permitted the establishment of the democratic experiment in
modern Europe.
It was on the 20th of September that the Convention met for its first
sitting, which was held in the palace of the Tuileries. During the hours
of that day, while it was electing its officials, choosing its Speaker
and the rest, the French Army upon the frontier, to its own astonishment
and to that of its enemy, managed to hold in check at the cannonade of
_Valmy_ the allied invaders.
Upon the morrow the new Assembly met in the riding school (the Manège),
where the two former Assemblies had also sat. It was about to separate
after that day’s sitting when one of the members proposed the abolition
of Royalty; the Convention voted the reform unanimously and dispersed.
On the third day, the 22nd of September, it was decreed that the public
documents should henceforward bear the date “First Year of the
Republic”; but there was no solemnity on the occasion; the idea of “No
King” was novel and untried; there was as yet no enthusiasm for any save
the monarchic form of government. It was not until the title “Republic”
began to connote in men’s minds political liberty, and had become also
the flag, as it were, for the victorious national defence, that the
Republican name acquired in our Europe, and from France, that strong and
almost religious force which it has since retained.
The check given to the invaders at Valmy (again to the astonishment of
both soldiers and statesmen!) determined the campaign. Sickness and the
difficulty of communications made the further advance of the invaders
impossible. They negotiated for and obtained an unmolested retreat, and
a few weeks later they had re-crossed the frontier.
Meanwhile, in Paris the great quarrel had begun between the Municipal
and the National Government, which, because Paris was more decided, more
revolutionary, and, above all, more military in temper than the
Parliament, was destined to terminate in the victory of the capital. The
Girondins still stood in the Assembly for an ideal republic; a republic
enjoying to the utmost limit individual liberty in its citizens and the
autonomy of local government in every city and parish; but opposed to
this ideal, and far more national, was that of the revolutionary
extremists, called in the Convention “the Mountain,” who had the support
of the Municipal Government of Paris (known as “the Commune”), and were
capable of French victories in the field. These stood for the old French
and soldierly conception of a strong central Government, wherewith to
carry on the life-and-death struggle into which the Revolution had now
entered: therefore they conquered.
All that autumn the quarrel between France and Europe remained doubtful,
for though the armies of the Republic under Dumouriez won the battle of
Jemappes, swept across the north-eastern frontier and occupied Belgium,
while to the south another French army swept right up to the Rhine,
Dumouriez himself knew well enough that a campaign undertaken merely
upon enthusiasm, and with troops so mixed in character and many of them
so undisciplined, would end fatally. But until the advent of the new
year public opinion was not instructed upon these lines, and the
revolutionary war seemed to have passed suddenly from the defence of the
national territory to a crusade against the kings and the aristocratic
Governments of Europe. Enthusiasm, and enthusiasm alone, was the force
of the moment. Violent decrees such as the Declaration of Fraternity
(which decreed an alliance with all people struggling to be free) and
the opening of the Scheldt (a direct violation of treaty rights to which
England, among other nations, was a partner) were characteristic of the
moment; chief act of all, the King was put upon his trial at the bar of
the Parliament.
It was upon the 4th of January, 1793 (the King had already made his will
upon Christmas Day), that the chief orator of the Girondins moved that
the sentence should be referred to the people for ratification. The fear
of civil war more than anything else forbade this just suggestion to
pass. Upon the 15th of January the question was put to the Parliament,
“whether the King had been guilty of conspiring against public liberty
and of attempting the general safety of the State.” Many were absent and
many abstained: none replied in the negative; the condemnation of Louis
was therefore technically almost a unanimous one.
The voting on these grave issues was what the French call “nominal”:
that is, each member was called upon “by name” to give his vote--and an
expression of opinion as well if he so chose. A second attempt to appeal
to the people was rejected by 424 to 283. On the third question, which
was the decisive one of the penalty, 721 only could be found to vote,
and of these a bare majority of 53 declared for death as against the
minority, of whom some voted for the death penalty “conditionally”--that
is, not at all--or voted against it. A respite was lost by a majority of
70; and on the 21st of January, 1793, at about ten in the morning, Louis
XVI was guillotined.
Then followed war with England, with Holland, and with Spain; and almost
at that moment began the inevitable reflux of the military tide. For the
French eruption up to the Rhine in the Low Countries and the Palatinate,
had no permanent military basis upon which to depend. Dumouriez began to
retreat a month after the King’s execution, and on the 18th of March
suffered a decisive defeat at Neerwinden. It was this retreat, followed
by that disaster, which decided the fate of the Girondin attempt to
found a republic ideally, individually, and locally free. Already,
before the battle of Neerwinden was fought, Danton, no longer a
minister, but still the most powerful orator in the Convention, proposed
a special court for trying cases of treason--a court which was later
called “the Revolutionary Tribunal.” The news of Neerwinden prepared the
way for a stronger measure and some exceptional form of government; a
special Parliamentary committee already formed for the control of
ministers was strengthened when, on the 5th of April, after some
negotiation and doubt, Dumouriez, despairing of the armies of the
Republic, thought to ally his forces with the invaders and to restore
order. His soldiers refused to follow him; his treason was apparent;
upon the morrow the Convention nominated that first “Committee of Public
Safety” which, with its successor of the same name, was henceforward the
true despotic and military centre of revolutionary government. It was
granted secrecy in deliberation, the virtual though not the theoretic
control of the Ministry, sums of money for secret expenditure, and, in a
word, all the machinery necessary to a military executive. Rousseau’s
_Dictator_ had appeared, the great mind which had given the _Contrat
Social_ to be the gospel of the Revolution had also foreseen one of the
necessary organs of democracy in its hardest trial; his theory had been
proved necessary and true in fact. Nine members formed this first
Committee: Barère, who may be called the clerk of it, Danton its genius,
and Cambon its financier, were the leading names.
With the establishment of this truly national and traditional thing,
whose form alone was novel, but whose power and method were native to
all the military tradition of Gaul, the Revolution was saved. We have
now chiefly to follow the way in which the Committee governed and in
which it directed affairs in the great crisis of the war. This sixth
phase lasts for nearly sixteen months, from the beginning of April 1793
to the 28th of July 1794, and it is convenient to divide those sixteen
months into two divisions.