Composition of the New Assembly.--Rise of the Girondins,--Their Corruption
and Eventual Fate.--Vergniaud's Motions against the King.--Favorable
Reception of the King at the Assembly, and at the Opera.--Changes in the
Ministry.--The King's and Queen's Language to M. Bertrand de Moleville.--
The Count de Narbonne.--Pétion is elected Mayor of Paris.--Scarcity of
Money, and Great Hardships of the Royal Family.--Presents arrive from
Tippoo Sahib.--The Dauphin.--The Assembly passes Decrees against the
Priests and the Emigrants.--Misconduct of the Emigrants.--Louis refuses
his Assent to the Decrees.--He issues a Circular condemning Emigration.
The new Assembly met on the 1st of October, and its composition afforded
the Royalists, or even the Constitutionalists, the party that desired to
stand by the Constitution which had just been ratified, very little
prospect of a re-establishment of tranquillity. The mischievous effect of
the vote which excluded members of the last Assembly from election was
seen in the very lists of those who had been returned. In the whole number
there were scarcely a dozen members of noble or gentle birth; the number
of ecclesiastics was equally small; while property was as little
represented as the nobility or the Church. It was reckoned that of the
whole body scarcely fifty possessed two thousand francs a year. The
general youth of the members was as conspicuous as their poverty; half of
them had hardly attained middle age; a great many were little more than
boys. The Jacobins themselves, who, before the elections, had reckoned on
swaying their decisions by terror, could hardly have anticipated a result
which would place the entire body so wholly at their mercy.
But what was still move ominous of evil was the rise of a new party, known
as that of the Girondins, from the circumstance of some of its most
influential members coming from the Gironde, one of the departments which
the late Assembly had carved out of the old province of Gascony. It was
not absolutely a new party, since the foundations of it had been laid,
during the last two months of the old Assembly, by Pétion and a low-born
pamphleteer named Brissot, who, as editor of a newspaper to which he gave
the name of _Le Patriote Français_, rivaled the most blood-thirsty of the
Jacobins in exciting the worst passions of the populace. But Pétion and
Brissot had only sown the seeds. The opening of the new Assembly at once
gave it growth and vigor, when the deputies from the Gironde plunged into
the arena of debate, and showed an undeniable superiority in eloquence to
every other party. The chiefs, Vergniaud, Gensonné, and Gaudet, were
lawyers who had never obtained any practice. Isnard, the first man to make
an open profession of atheism in the Assembly, was the son of a perfumer
in Provence. They were adventurers as utterly without principle as without
resources. And their first thought appears to have been to make money of
the king's difficulties, and to sell themselves to him. They applied to
the Minister of the Interior, M. de Lessart, proposing to place the whole
of their influence at the service of the Government, on condition of his
securing each of them a pension of six thousand francs a month.[1] M. de
Lessart would not have objected to buy them, but he thought the price
which they set upon themselves too high; and as they adhered to their
demand, the negotiation went off, and they resolved to revenge themselves
on his royal master with all the malice of disappointed rapacity.
As none of them had any force of character, they fell under the influence
of the wife of one of their number, a small manufacturer, named Roland,
the same who, as we have already seen, was the first to raise the cry of
blood in France, and to recommend the assassination of the king and queen
while they were still in fancied security at Versailles. Under the
direction of this fierce woman, whose ferocity was rendered more
formidable by her undoubted talents, the Girondins began an internecine
war with the king, who had refused them the wages which they had asked.
They planned and carried out the sanguinary attacks on the palace in the
summer of the next year. They brought Louis to the scaffold by the
unanimity of their votes. Yet it would have been more fortunate for
themselves as well as for him had they been less exorbitant in their
demands, and had they connected themselves with the Government as they
desired. For though they succeeded in their treason, though Madame Roland
saw the accomplishment of her wish in the murder of the king and queen,
their success was equally fatal to themselves. Almost all of them perished
on the same scaffold to which they had consigned their virtuous
sovereigns, meeting a fate in one respect worse even than theirs, from the
infamy of the names which they have left behind them.
Yet for a few days it seemed as if their malignity would miss its aim.
They did not wait a single day before displaying it; but, at the
preliminary meeting of the Assembly, before it was opened for the dispatch
of business, Vergniaud proposed to declare it illegal to speak of the king
as his majesty, or to address him as "sire;" while another deputy, named
Couthon, who at first belonged to the same party, though he afterward
joined the Jacobins, carried a motion that, when Louis came to open the
Assembly, the president should occupy the place of honor, and the second
seat should be allotted to the sovereign.
Still, for a moment it seemed as if they had overshot their mark, and as
if the more loyal party would be able to withstand and defeat them. The
Assembly itself was compelled to repeal its recent votes, since Louis,
whom indignation for once inspired with greater firmness than he usually
displayed, refused to open the new Assembly in person unless he were to be
received with the honors to which his rank entitled him. The offensive
resolutions were canceled; and, when he had therefore opened the session
in a dignified and conciliatory speech which was chiefly of his own
composition, the president, M. Pastoret, a member of the Constitutional
party, replied in a language which was not only respectful, but
affectionate. The Constitution, he said, had given the king friends in
those who were formerly only styled his subjects. The Assembly and the
nation felt the need of his love. As the Constitution had rendered him the
greatest monarch in the world, so his attachment to it would place him
among the kings most beloved by their people.
And it seemed as if the Parisians in general shared to the full the loyal
sentiments uttered by M. Pastoret. Writing the same week to her brother,
Marie Antoinette, with a confidence which could only spring from a sincere
attachment to the whole nation, reiterated her old opinion that "the good
citizens and good people had always in their hearts been friendly to the
king and herself;[2]" and expressed her belief that since the acceptance
of the Constitution the people "had again learned to trust them." She was
"far from giving herself up to a blind confidence. She knew that the
disaffected had not abandoned their treasonable purposes; but, as the king
and she herself were resolved to unite themselves in sincere good faith to
the people, it was impossible but that, when their real feelings were
known, the bulk of the people should return to them. The mischief was that
the well-meaning knew not how to act in concert."
It did seem as if she were correct in her estimate of the feelings of the
citizens, when, in the evening of the day on which Louis had opened the
Assembly, the whole royal family, including the two children, went to the
opera; and, as if with express design to ratify the loyal language of the
president of the Assembly, the whole audience greeted them with a most
enthusiastic reception. More than once they interrupted the performance
with loud cheers for both king and queen; and as the pleasure of children
is always an attractive sight, they sympathized especially with the
delight of the little dauphin, their future king, as they all then thought
him, who, being new to such a spectacle, only took his eyes off the stage
to imitate the gestures of the actors to his mother, and draw her
attention to them.
In more than one of her letters the queen had vehemently deplored the want
of a stronger ministry than of late had been in the king's service. It was
a natural complaint, though in fact the ability or want of ability
displayed by the ministers was a matter of but slight practical
importance, so completely had the Assembly engrossed the whole power of
the State; but in the course of the autumn some changes were made, one of
which for a time certainly added to the comfort of the sovereigns. M.
Montmorin retired; M. de Lessart was transferred to his office; and M.
Bertrand de Moleville, who was entirely new to official life, became the
minister of marine. The whole kingdom did not contain a man more attached
to the king and queen. But he combined statesman-like prudence with his
loyalty; and his conduct before he took office elicited a very remarkable
proof of the singleness of mind and purpose with which the king and queen
had accepted the Constitution. M. Bertrand had previously refused office,
and was very unwilling to take it now; and he frankly told Louis that he
could not hope to be of any real service to him unless he knew the plans
which the king might have formed with respect to the Constitution, and the
line of conduct which he desired his ministers to observe on the subject;
and Louis told him distinctly that though "he was far from regarding the
Constitution as a masterpiece, and though he thought it easy to reform it
advantageously in many particulars, yet he had sworn to observe it as it
was, and that he was bound to be, and resolved to be, strictly faithful to
his oath; the more so because it seemed to him that the most exact
observance of the Constitution was the surest method to lead the nation to
understand it in all its bearings; when the people themselves would
perceive the character of the changes in it which it was desirable to
make."
M. Bertrand expressed his warm approval of the wisdom of such a policy,
but thought it so important to know how far the queen coincided in her
husband's sentiments that he ventured to put the question to his majesty.
The king assured him that he had been speaking her sentiments as well as
his own, and that he should hear them from her own lips; and accordingly
the queen immediately granted the new minister an audience, in which,
after expressing, with her habitual grace and kindness, her feeling that,
by accepting office at such a time, he was laying both the king and
herself under a personal obligation, she added, "The king has explained to
you his intentions with respect to the Constitution; do not you think that
the only plan for him to follow is to be faithful to his oath?"
"Undoubtedly, madame." "Well, you may depend upon it that nothing will
make us change. Have courage, M. Bertrand; I hope that, with patience,
firmness, and consistency, all is not yet lost.[3]"
Nor was M. Bertrand the only one of the ministers who received proofs of
the resolution of the queen to adhere steadily to the Constitution. There
was also a new minister of war, the Count de Narbonne, as firmly attached
to the persons of the sovereigns as M. Bertrand himself, though in
political principle more inclined to the views of the Constitutionalists
than to those of the extreme Royalists. He was likewise a man of
considerable capacity, eloquent and fertile in resources; but he was
ambitious and somewhat vain; and he was so elated at the approval
expressed by the Assembly of a report on the military resources of the
kingdom which he laid before it soon after his appointment, that he
obtained an audience of the queen, the object of which was to convince her
that the only means of saving the State was to confer on a man of talent,
energy, sagacity, and activity, who enjoyed the confidence of the Assembly
and of the nation, the post of prime minister; and he admitted that he
intended to designate himself by this description. Marie Antoinette,
though fully aware of the desirableness of having a single man of ability
and firmness at the head of the administration, was for a moment surprised
out of her habitual courtesy. She could not forbear a smile, and in plain
terms asked him "if he were crazy.[4]" But she proceeded with her usual
kindness to explain to him the impracticability of the scheme which he had
suggested, and the foundation of her argument was an explanation that such
an appointment would be a violation of the Constitution, which forbade the
king to create any new ministerial office. And the count deserves to have
it mentioned to his honor that the rebuff which he had received in no
degree cooled his attachment to the king and queen, or the zeal with which
he labored for their service.
We have no information how far the new minister coincided in a step which
the queen took in the course of November, and which is commonly ascribed
to her judgment alone. Before its dissolution, the late Assembly had
broken up the National Guard of Paris into separate legions, and had
suppressed the appointment of commander-in-chief of the forces; and La
Fayette, whom this measure had left without employment, feeling keenly the
diminution of his importance, and instigated by the restlessness common to
men of moderate capacity, conceived the hope of succeeding Bailly in the
mayoralty of Paris, which that magistrate was on the point of resigning.
It had become a post of great consequence, since the extent to which the
authority of the crown had been pared away tended to make the mayor the
absolute dictator of the capital; and consequently the Jacobins were
anxious to secure the office for one of the extreme Revolutionary party,
and set up Pétion as a rival candidate. The election belonged to the
citizens, and, as in the city the two parties possessed almost equal
strength, it was soon seen that the court, which had by no means lost its
influence among the tradesmen and shop-keepers, had the power of deciding
the contest in favor of the candidate for whom it should pronounce, Marie
Antoinette declared for Pétion. She knew him to be a Jacobin,[5] but he
was so devoid of any reputation for ability that she did not fear him.
Nor, except that he had behaved with boorish disrespect and ill-manners
during their melancholy return from Varennes, had she any reason for
suspecting him of any special enmity to the king.
But La Fayette, though always loud in his professions of loyalty, had
never lost an opportunity of offering personal insults to both the king
and herself. It was to his shameful neglect (to put his conduct in the
most favorable light) that she justly attributed the danger to which she
had been exposed at Versailles, and the compulsion which had been put upon
the king to take up his residence in Paris; and, not to mention a constant
series of petty insults which he had heaped on both Louis and herself, and
on the Royalists as a body, he had given unmistakable proofs of his
personal animosity toward the king by his conduct on the 21st of June, and
by the indecent rigor with which he treated them both after their return
from Varennes. Even when he was loudest in the profession of his desire
and power to influence the Assembly in the king's favor, one of his own
friends had told him to his face that he was insincere,[6] and that Louis
could not and ought not to trust his promises; and every part of his
conduct toward the royal pair was stamped with duplicity as well as with
ill-will. It was not strange, therefore, indeed it was fully consistent
with the honest openness of Marie Antoinette's own character, that she
should prefer an open enemy to a pretended friend. She even believed what,
from the very commencement of the Revolution, many had suspected, that La
Fayette cherished views of personal ambition, and aimed at reviving the
old authority of a Maire du Palais over a Roi Fainéant[7]. She therefore
directed her friends to throw their weight into the scale in favor of
Pétion, who was accordingly elected by a great majority, while the
marquis, greatly chagrined, retired for a time to his estate in Auvergne.
The victory, however, was an unfortunate one for the court. It contributed
to increase the confidence of its enemies; and, as their instinct showed
them that it was from the resolution of the queen that they had the most
formidable opposition to dread, it was against her that, from their first
entrance into the Assembly, Vergniaud and his friends specially exerted
themselves; Vergniaud openly contending that the inviolability of the
sovereign, which was an article of the new Constitution, applied only to
the king himself, and in no degree to his consort; while in the Jacobin
and Cordelier Clubs the coarsest libels were poured forth against her with
unremitting perseverance to stimulate and justify the most obscene and
ferocious threats. The coarsest ruffians in a street quarrel never used
fouler language of one another than these men of education applied to the
pure-minded and magnanimous lady whose sole offense was that she was the
wife of their kind-hearted king.
And, in addition to this daily increase of their danger which such
denunciations could not fail to augment, the royal family were now
suffering inconveniences which even those whose measures had caused them
had never designed. They were in the most painful want of money. The
agitation of the last two years had rendered the treasury bankrupt. The
paper money, which now composed almost the whole circulation of the
country, was valueless. While, as it was in this paper money (assignats,
as the notes were called, as being professedly secured by assignments on
the royal domains and on the ecclesiastical property which had been
confiscated), that the king's civil list was paid, at the latter end of
each month it was not uncommon for him and the queen to be absolutely
destitute. It was with great reluctance that they accepted loans from
their loyal adherents, because they saw no prospect of being able to repay
them; but had they not availed themselves of this resource, they would at
times have wanted absolute necessaries.[8]
The royal couple still kept their health, the king's apathy being in this
respect as beneficial as the queen's courage: they still rode a great deal
when the weather was favorable; and on one occasion, at the beginning of
1792, the queen, with her sister-in-law and her daughter, went again to
the theatre. The opera was the same which had been performed at the visit
in October; but this time the Jacobins had not been forewarned so as to
pack the house, and Madame du Gazon's duet was received with enthusiasm.
Again, as she sung "Ah, que j'aime ma maîtresse!" she bowed to the royal
box, and the audience cheered. As if in reply to one verse, "Il faut les
rendre heureux," "Oui, oui!" with lively unanimity, came from all parts of
the house, and the singers were compelled to repeat the duet four times.
"It is a queer nation this of ours," says the Princess Elizabeth, in
relating the scene to one of her correspondents, "but we must allow that
it has very charming moments.[9]"
A somewhat curious episode to divert their minds from these domestic
anxieties was presented by an embassy from the brave and intriguing Sultan
of Mysore, the celebrated Tippoo Sahib, who sought to engage Louis to lend
him six thousand French troops, with whose aid he trusted to break down
the ascendency which England was rapidly establishing in India. Tippoo
backed his request, in the Oriental fashion, by presents, though not such
as, in the opinion of M. Bertrand, were quite worthy of the giver or of
the receiver. To the king he sent some diamonds, but they were yellow,
ill-cut, and ill-set; and the rest of the offering was composed of a few
pieces of embroidered silk, striped cloth, and cambric: while the queen's
present consisted of nothing more valuable than a few bottles of perfume
of no very exquisite quality, and a few boxes of powdered scents, pastils,
and matches. The king and queen gave nearly the whole present to M.
Bertrand for his grandchildren, the queen only reserving a bottle of attar
of rose and a couple of pieces of cambric; and that chiefly to afford a
pretext for seeing M. Bertrand once or twice, without his reception being
imputed to a desire to promote some Austrian intrigue; for the Jacobins
had lately revived the clamor against Austrian influence with greater
vehemence than ever.
As M. Bertrand had grandchildren, he could well appreciate the pleasure of
the queen at an incident which closed one of his audiences. While he was
thus receiving her commands, the little dauphin, "beautiful as an angel,"
as the minister describes him, was capering about the room in high
delight, brandishing a wooden sword, a new toy which had just been given
him. An attendant called him to go to supper; and he bounded toward the
door. "How is this, my boy?" said Marie Antoinette, calling him back; "are
you going off without making M. Bertrand a bow?" "Oh, mamma," said the
little prince, still skipping about, and smiling, "that is because I know
well that M. Bertrand is one of our friends.... Good-evening, M.
Bertrand." "Is not he a nice child?[10]" said the queen, after he had left
the room. "He is very happy to be so young. He does not feel what we
suffer, and his gayety does us good." Alas! that which was now perhaps her
only pleasure--the contemplation of her child's opening grace and
amiability--before long became even an addition to her affliction, as the
probabilities increased that the madness of the people and the wickedness
of their leaders would deprive him of the inheritance, to preserve which
to him was the principal object of all her cares and exertions.
But these moments of gratification were becoming fewer as time went on.
Each month, each week brought fresh and increasing anxieties to engross
all her thoughts. As the Girondin leaders began to feel their strength,
the votes of the Assembly became more violent. One day it passed a fresh
decree against the priests, depriving all who refused to take the oath to
the new ecclesiastical constitution of the stipends for which their former
preferments had been commuted, placing them under strict supervision, and
declaring them liable to instant banishment if they should venture to
exercise their functions in private. Another day it vented its wrath upon
the emigrants, summoning the Count de Provence by name to return at once
to France; and, with respect to the rest of the body, now very numerous,
declaring their conduct in being assembled on the frontier of the kingdom
in a state of readiness for war in itself an act of treason; and
condemning to death and confiscation of their estates all who should fail
to return to their native land before a stated day.
But in these decrees the advocates of violence had for the moment gone too
far--they had outrun the feelings of the nation. The emigrants, indeed,
neither deserved nor found sympathy in any quarter. The main body of them
was at this time settled at Coblentz, where their conduct was such that it
is hard to say whether it were more offensive to their country, more
injurious to their king, or more discreditable to themselves. They could
not even act in harmony. The king's two brothers established rival courts,
with a mistress at the head of each. Madame de Balbi still ruled the Count
de Provence; Madame de Polastron was the presiding genius of the coterie
of the Count d'Artois. The two ladies, regarding each other with bitter
jealousy, agitated the whole town with their rivalries and wranglings, and
agreed in nothing but in their endeavors to excite some foreign sovereign
or other to make war upon their native land. It was in vain that Louis
himself first entreated them, and, when he found his entreaties were
disregarded, commanded his brothers to return. They positively refused
obedience to his order, telling him, in language which can only be
characterized as that of studied insult, that he was writing under
coercion; that his letter did not express his real views, and that "their
honor, their duty, even their affection for him, alike forbade them to
obey him.[11]" The queen could not command, but she wrote to them more
than one letter of most earnest entreaty, and, as the princes founded part
of their hopes on the co-operation of the Northern sovereigns, she wrote
also to the empress and to Gustavus, pressing both, and especially the
King of Sweden,[12] to restrain them; but they were too headstrong and
full of their own projects to listen to her entreaties any more than to
the king's commands, and did not even take the trouble to conceal their
negotiations with foreign powers, nor their object, which could be nothing
but war.
It was impossible that such conduct steadily pursued by the king's own
brothers could be any thing but most pernicious to his cause. It could not
fail to excite suspicions of his own good faith. It supplied the Jacobins
with pretexts for putting fresh restraints on his authority; and it
frightened even the Constitutionalists, since it was plain that civil war
must ensue, with, very probably, the addition of foreign war also, if
these machinations of the emigrants were not suppressed.
Still, these sweeping proscriptions of entire classes were not yet to the
taste of the nation. Petitions from the country, and even one from the
department of the Seine, were presented to Louis, begging him to refuse
his assent to the decree against the priests; and the feeling which they
represented was so strong, and the reputation of some of the petitioners
stood so high for ability and influence, that the ministers believed that
he could safely refuse his sanction to both the votes. Even without their
advice he would have rejected the decree against the priests, as one
absolutely incompatible with his reverence for religion and its ministers;
and his conduct on this subject supplies one more striking parallel to the
history of the great English rebellion; since there can hardly be a more
precise resemblance between events occurring in different ages and
different countries than is afforded by the resistance made by Charles to
the last vote of the London Parliament against the bishops, and this
resistance of Louis to the will of the Assembly on behalf of the priests,
and by the fatal effect which, in each case, their conscientious and
courageous determination had upon the fortunes of the two sovereigns.
Louis therefore put his veto on both the decrees, with the exception of
that clause in the act against the emigrants which summoned his brothers
to return to the kingdom. But, that no one might pretend to fancy that he
either approved of the conduct of the emigrants or sympathized with their
principles or designs, he issued a circular letter to the governors of the
different sea-ports, in which he remonstrated most earnestly with the
sailors, numbers of whom, as it was reported in Paris, were preparing to
follow their example. He pointed out in it that those who thus deserted
their country mistook their duty to that country, to him as their king,
and to themselves; that the present aspect of the nation, desirous to
return to order and to submission to the law, removed every pretext for
such conduct. He set before them his own example, and bid them remain at
their posts, as he was remaining at his; and, in language more impressive
than that of command, he exhorted them not to turn a deaf ear to his
prayers; and at the same time he addressed letters to the electors of
Trèves and Mayence, and to the other petty German princes whose
territories, bordering on the Rhine, were the principal resort of the
emigrants, requiring them to cease to give them shelter, and announcing
that if they should refuse to remove them from their dominions he should
consider their refusal a sufficient ground for war; while, to show that he
did not intend this menace to be a dead letter, he soon afterward
announced to the Assembly that he had ordered a powerful army of a hundred
and fifty thousand men to be moved toward the frontier, under the command
of Marshal Luckner, Marshal Rochambeau, and General La Fayette, and he
invited the members to vote a levy of fifty thousand more men to raise the
force of the nation to its full complement.