_THE NOTABLES_
_August 15, 1785, to August 8, 1788_
FOR the Queen the decision to send the Cardinal to trial was a final
action. The thing was done—and, for that matter, nearly done with.
When she could find time in an interval of her occupations to write to
her brother Joseph—it was not till a fortnight later—the whole letter,
though it dealt in detail with the affair as one deserving a full
explanation, was written upon a tone of relief. It was tuned all of it
to one key-phrase: “I am delighted to think that we shall never hear of
this filthy business again.”
Hardly was that decisive act accomplished than there suddenly appeared
upon twenty points of the horizon, not only in frontal advance but upon
either flank and in either rear of the perilous position she occupied,
as many separate forces unconnected or but vaguely in touch with one
another; some directly antagonistic to others, but all having it in
common that the Queen was their objective, and that the trial of the
Cardinal had been their signal for mobilisation and the march.
It is in the character of unwisdom to analyse and to proceed upon the
results of analysis: in the character of wisdom to integrate the whole.
The analysis of the situation just before the Cardinal’s arrest showed
clearly one great factor of opposition—the Rohan clan. They were
everywhere in France contemporary and in France historical; they filled
Marie Antoinette’s generation and a hundred years. The sisters, cousins,
brothers-in-law were ubiquitous. Paris was conspicuous with their
palaces, the Court with their functions, the provinces with their loyal
dependants or necessary adherents. They were the nucleus of the
strongest group that remained to the wealthy nobility. The Guémenées,
the Soubises, even the Condés, were one with all the Rohans. A Rohan put
to open trial would have in that day the effect which a chief of our
modern financial gang put to open trial might have to-day. Imagine one
of our judges forced to try a Rothschild!
The Queen saw clearly—it is always easy to see one simple thing
clearly—that one Rohan force opposed to her; she determined to brave it;
but latent, unconscious of themselves until her own action called them
into being, how many other forces were there not!
There was no member of the higher nobility but to a greater or less
degree felt vaguely a right to immunity from such publicity—and this man
was of the highest of the nobility, a type. There was no member of the
clergy but could formulate a clear historical and legal right to the
exemption of a cleric from the judgment of a lay tribunal—and this man
was of the highest of the clergy.
Had he been Archbishop of Toulouse or Sens, or any wholly Gallic see
even, his case would have been simpler; he was Bishop of Strasburg and
his metropolitan was of Mainz: the Archbishop of Mainz was a conceivable
opponent.
He was a prince of the Church: Rome had a right to speak—and almost did.
He was a prince of the Empire: Vienna had a right to speak—and almost
did.
Austria and France had for now two years been at a strain: it was just
two years since Joseph had written his first serious letter upon the
Scheldt to his sister: the government of Austria was embittered, and had
for sovereign a man who would not refuse to trade upon the embarrassment
of Versailles. The last negotiations for indemnity against the opening
of the Scheldt were still pending. The moment was opportune.
The Cardinal could be judged by but one tribunal of the King’s, and that
a quasi-governmental body which had for a generation stood in increasing
opposition to the Crown—the Parlement. For them also the moment was
opportune.
He could be tried in but one town, and that town the capital, which had
now taken up such a definite position of hatred against the Queen; in
but one part of that town, in the Palais, right in the heart of Paris
upon which all the crowds of that unity so easily converge, and whose
towers were a perpetual symbol of the Monarchy which had deserted its
ancient seat for the isolated splendour of Versailles.
But of much more weight than even these considerable and separate bases
of resistance was that indefinitely large body of smaller and more
fluctuating dangers whose integration the Queen should have seized if
she was to save herself from destruction.
There are in politics, as in physics, conditions of unstable equilibrium
in which a mass of fragments, seemingly in repose, may at a shock be
exploded. Their energy lies ready to be released by the least
disturbance. It is the business of statesmanship to remove or to
dissolve such as these before large things are undertaken, lest a
violent motion explode them. A thousand such lay about the palace of
Versailles, threatening the Queen. Whatever particular grudges (even in
friends) had had time to grow, the memories of hatred in enemies, the
last of the Du Barry’s faction, the last of D’Aiguillon’s. The
suspicions of the devout against her frivolity, the contempt of the
philosophical for her religion, the irritation of the politician against
her presence at the Council, the necessary enmity of Calonne—all the
imperfect and capricious pleasures she had failed to pursue, all the
losses, dismissals, and humiliations rightly or wrongly laid to her
charge, were there, not consciously prepared, but fatally bound to
spring to life if once a body of action against her took visible form.
That form the trial of the Cardinal was to present. When such a body of
opposition was in motion all would attach themselves to it, each from an
aspect of its own. All the old dangers, as each appeared, made alliance
with the new and immediate perils.
Madame de La Motte was arrested three days after the Cardinal, in the
early hours of the 18th of August, just back at dawn in pomp from a
great provincial party in Champagne. Her husband fled to London, there
to meet a sympathy readily extended to such exiles, and to keep in touch
with those centres of enmity against the French Crown and religion with
which he was familiar. It was on the very day when Paris was in the
first busy rumour upon the whole matter—when it was learnt that the
Cardinal had been allowed to burn half his papers, that La Motte had got
away, that suspicion was permitted to attach to the Queen—it was upon
such a day, the 19th of August—that the Queen chose to re-open the
theatre at Trianon and to re-open it with a play of Beaumarchais’.
Many tragedies in history contain some such coincidences, but none so
many or so exact as those which accompany and determine the tragedy of
Marie Antoinette.
Consider the position: the legend of her extravagance has
re-arisen—unjustly. Trianon is—unjustly—the chief popular symbol of that
extravagance. The theatre of Trianon, the most in view, the most obvious
of its expenses, she had wisely suppressed during many months. The park
at St. Cloud, at the gates of Paris, is a further count in the
indictment against her. Her visit to Paris for her churching in May has
proved her grievously unpopular: the hated financial agreement with
Austria in regard to the Scheldt is developing, as it is believed (and
rightly believed), under her guidance. Upon all this comes the
thunder-clap of Rohan’s arrest—and just as men are beginning to
comprehend and to explain it, just as the public and foreign enmity
necessarily suggest her complicity, say that “there is more than meets
the eye,” that “you will see, the Queen will make victims of them all;
but she _is_ responsible for the purchase of the gems!” just as the
obvious lies were establishing themselves through the embryonic press of
those days and the café gossip—in that very Assumption week she chooses
to appear upon her stage at Trianon, dressed and painted for a part
written by whom? By the man Caron—Beaumarchais by purchase—whom all the
vulgar now associated with the most successful attack upon the existing
régime, whom the older and the higher world remembered as the associate
and perhaps the partner of the Jewish clique in London that had
published the first dirty lie against Marie Antoinette’s chastity when
she was as yet but a child of eighteen.
Why was such a folly committed? The answer to that question is all
around the reader to-day. That society did not know its doom. It was
“chic,” it was “the thing” for the ruling powers to read and to see
acted criticism upon themselves. The little spice of danger—they could
think it no more—was a piquant addition to jaded and well-known
pastimes. But the Queen! How terribly more great and more real the
living consequences were to be to _her_ than to any such abstraction as
“a régime”: _she_ was to see and to feel continued physical violence, to
be menaced with muskets, to be forced from her husband before his death,
to have her child dragged from her; she was to be wholly abandoned,
tortured silently by a subterranean silence, and at last publicly
killed.
To the coincidence of that piece of folly another was soon added. All
the succeeding month was full of the last negotiations with Austria: on
the 19th of September public discussion of the necklace had gone far
enough to move her to a long letter; she wrote and explained
disdainfully to her brother—on the 20th was definitely signed the
obligation on the part of France for half the Dutch indemnity. Austria
received—for no reason save the Queen’s pressure and an imaginary relief
from war—about a million pounds. With the public debt already a matter
for debate and about to become the critical matter for action, it was a
monstrous thing.
Budget for budget—stating the proportions in terms of modern revenue—it
corresponded to what a payment of between ten millions or twelve would
be to-day. Stated in terms of ease of payment, of ability to pay, it
represented far more than such a sum would represent in a modern
budget—and not a penny of that humiliating obligation need have been
incurred but for the Queen.
Those historians who regard as beneath discussion the great popular cry
of the Revolution that Marie Antoinette “sent money to Austria” are too
ready to neglect whatever is rhetorical. Tumbrils of gold did not
pass—as the populace believed—but this enormous obligation was incurred,
and incurred through her and in favour of her brother.
That autumn, winter, and spring the necklace was the theme. The confused
currents of opinion had this in common that all accused the Queen, just
as, in the great modern parallel of the Dreyfus case, the confused
currents of opinion, differing widely and sometimes in direct opposition
on vital points, had it all in common that Catholic society was the real
defendant throughout and the real villain of the piece. According to
some Rohan was the Queen’s lover, afraid to accuse her or perhaps too
fond—but at any rate he had purchased the necklace by her orders.
According to others the La Motte had been the Queen’s cat’s-paw in
tricking Rohan. According to others again, more extreme, the Queen had
been herself the actual agent throughout, and would now, by an official
pressure, procure a verdict against her lover and her friend in order to
whitewash her own character. In general the absurdity which took most
hold was nearer to the latter theory than to any other: it became a test
point simply whether Rohan would be acquitted or condemned. Rohan
acquitted, the Queen (by some wildly illogical process of general
opinion!) was supposed to be proved guilty of authorship in the whole
affair. Rohan condemned, she was equally guilty of authorship—only, in
that case the mob and the foreigner would say that wicked judges had
proved pliant to Court influence.
As in the modern trial which I have already quoted as the great historic
parallel to the trial of Rohan, no evidence could affect the minds of
those who had already concluded: to make their fixed conclusion fit in
with the facts any contradiction of human psychology and human
probabilities was admitted. Did some pornographer attack the Queen and
defend Rohan? Straightway he was a hero! Had there been a Pantheon he
would have had his burial there. Did some anonymous pamphleteer assert
his conviction of the Queen’s guilt? Straightway he was an authority.
Did some obscure and needy man take money to support the immense power
and fortunes of the Rohans against the impoverished crown? Straightway
(like those who supported Jewish finance in the modern parallel I have
quoted) he became a being full of self-sacrifice defending the weak and
the oppressed against haughty power. The document whereby the necklace
was ordered was signed “Marie Antoinette _de France_,” a signature quite
impossible in form and not even remotely resembling in handwriting that
of the Queen. No matter. It must be supposed, “for this occasion only,”
that she wrote thus—once at least. Or, if that lie was too hard to
swallow, then she had made Rohan sign thus, or get it signed thus,
precisely in order to cover her tracks by an improbable signature.
Anything at all was said and believed—especially in foreign
countries—provided it implicated the Queen.
The preliminary stages of the trial were long. Oliva was not arrested
till late in the winter, at Brussels, fluttering and confused; Rétaux
not till the spring, at Geneva.
The Queen endured those months of increasing public insult and
increasing doubt. She was in her fourth pregnancy, and, what was more,
her character, to some extent her body, had aged somewhat. She had
passed that thirtieth year which her mother had foreseen to be critical
for her; she had come to what a superstition or a coincidence made her
regard as the beginning of bitter years.
Meanwhile in his room at the Bastille, where he was confined, the
Cardinal held his court, enjoyed his receptions, and continued to
impress the Parisians with all the pomp of his rank. It was not till the
end of May that he was taken to the Conciergerie—the last step before
the public trial; he went by night upon the 29th of the month. On the
next day, the 30th of May 1786, in the morning, the Parlement met in the
Grand Salle, the indictments were read, and the pleadings opened.
That trial has been described a thousand times. The Rohans of every
degree were packed at the doors of the court. The deference they met
with, the immense crowds which, during those long two days, awaited the
verdict, the anxiety at Versailles—all these are the theme of every book
that has dealt with this best known of historic trials: they need not be
repeated here. At the close of the proceedings came the significant
thing: the public prosecutor demanded no more than that the Cardinal
should apologise for having thought the Queen capable of such things,
and should resign the Grand Almonry—on that small point, the forty-nine
judges deliberated a whole day long.
It was dark, it was nine o’clock on the 31st of May when their
conclusion was announced: some would have condemned him to the mere
apology and resignation thus demanded, a few to apology but not to
resignation, the majority were simply for acquittal, and at last, by
_twenty-six_ votes to _twenty-three_, Rohan left the court completely
absolved. For the rest the La Motte was ordered to be flogged, branded,
and imprisoned at Salpetière. Her husband—in contumacy—to the galleys.
Rétaux to be transported. As for the Oliva, they declared her not to
fall under the matter they had to try—she was free.
In Paris the acquittal of the Cardinal (which meant to the mob simply
the condemnation of the Queen) caused an immediate popular outburst of
cheering and congratulation. They surrounded his palace. They demanded
and obtained its illumination. He was compelled to show himself and to
be acclaimed. Then, as must ever be the case with such false heroes, he
was completely dropped. Those who had done most to secure the verdict
were most in a position to know the perils of further ovation. When the
King had stripped him of every possible function and emolument and had
exiled him to the Velay, the Rohans themselves were the most assiduous
to impose silence upon him and to force him back into obscurity. He
lived, unnoticed and unremembered, remote in Strasburg; was advised, on
election to the States-General two years later, not to sit; sat, refused
the civil oath, emigrated, survived the Queen by some ten years, and
died, doing after that no more evil.
No public insult could more deeply have wounded the Queen than this
verdict and that demonstration. Her health was touched, but much more
her very self was overshadowed as she feared—and she was right—for ever.
She had not even, as have we, the resource of history. She did not know
how thoroughly history can deal with these Popish plots and Royal
Necklaces and Dreyfus Innocencies and the rest, nor how contemptuously
time and learning together expose at last every evil intrigue. She only
knew—and she was right—that in her time the calumny would never be set
right. And indeed this one of the great historical enthusiasms for
falsehood was not set right till our own time. Napoleon, musing years
after upon the verdict, called it, with his broad judgment and his
opportunities for comparison and knowledge, the beginning of the
Revolution, the gate of her tomb. Marie Antoinette was of no great
judgment—she was contemporary to it all; no experience or research, but
only instinct, could guide her—but some such dreadful presentiment of
the capital importance of the affair stood fast in her mind: in part it
greatly ripened her view of this bad world; much more it oppressed or
broke the springs of her spirit; and while there is henceforward in all
she did new tenacity and much calculation of effort, there is, much
more, an inner certitude of doom.
The King went off to Cherbourg, where Calonne, still seeking to
re-establish the finances by an extended public employment of labour and
by display, had achieved the first stage of that magnificent artificial
harbour, the model of all of its kind that were to follow in Europe and
on the Mediterranean. Everywhere Louis met with easy but fervid
acclamation. He had never seen the provinces before. He came back
radiant. The new warmth and zeal, which, under another aspect and
reacting against other stimuli, were so soon to produce the great
change, had already touched the people, and he had bathed, as it were,
in a public energy which, till then, cabined in Versailles or wearied by
the cliques of Paris, he had never known. All that enthusiasm, his and
his people’s, he communicated in many letters to the Queen; but she had
suffered her blow, and nothing now could undeceive her but that fate was
coming. Her relation the Archduke, the last of so many royal visitors at
Versailles, had gone. In July her fourth child was born—a girl; and that
same summer every stranger that passed through Paris noted the
beginnings of the storm. The pamphlets were awake; the press had risen
to a continuous pressure of suggestion, anecdote, and attack, and the
necessity for facing and solving the insistent fiscal problem was no
longer a theory to be discussed politically but a thing to be done.
The Court was brilliant in a last leaping flame. Fontainebleau that
autumn was glorious with colours and men; the balls at Versailles that
winter of ’86 shone with a peculiar and a memorable splendour—but it was
the end. There were to be no more glories: the last ball had been given,
the last progress made.
Calonne, whose French audacity might a little earlier have saved the
State, dared an experiment which failed—but which, from its nature and
the things it could but breed, led on to the Revolution. He determined
(and he persuaded the King) to summon, for consultation upon the
finances and the betterment of the realm, a council of all those who led
in the nobility, the Church, the Parlements, the Services, the great
municipalities. This convention was to be named, upon the parallel of
the last similar summons—now some two centuries old—an assembly of “the
Notables.” The Ministry were given the King’s decision suddenly, upon
the 29th of December. The Notables were to meet upon that day month.
More than one critic—especially among the aged—foresaw, the dyke once
opened, what a flood would follow; all, wise or unwise, felt that the
meeting would be the end of most that they had known and the beginning
of quite new perils and perhaps new energies or a new world.
Whether or no the Queen was hurt at a sudden determination in which she
had taken no part nor even had a voice, she very rapidly in the next six
months rose to hold the Government in her hands: thenceforward to the
meeting of the States-General and the opening of the Revolution, her
decision and her vigour take part in all those acts—a dozen at the
most—which proved ultimately the authors of her destruction.
The Notables met—or rather did not meet—upon the day named, the 29th of
January ’87. They came to Paris on the appointed day, they met in the
streets of Paris, in drawing-rooms and elsewhere; but those provincial
mayors, great judges, and members of the high nobility had to wait and
chafe for many days before they were legally convened. Criticism and
violence of tongue had time to grow; there was a sense of weakness, of
anarchy even, in the petty details of governmental action following on
such delay. When they did meet, before their debates had time to
develop, one event after another was transforming everything around the
Queen.
The Polignacs had quarrelled with her; Madame de Polignac, her life-long
friend, had threatened to retire from her post with the Children of
France. Many—most—had followed them; all whom the Polignacs had
benefited, through the Queen, for so many years. A last and new faction,
more intimate, more wounding, more in possession of her secrets, and
more dangerous than any other was thus formed.
Vergennes was just dead; the King, should Calonne fail in the great
business of Reform which the Assembly of Notables had opened, would be
left without a Chief Minister, and the Queen’s place was plainly ready
for her in his council-room.
More than these, the La Motte had escaped from prison, and had fled (of
course) to London.
There was not then, as there is to-day, in London a vast and organised
journalistic system by which news is afforded, withheld, or falsified at
will. Nay, even had there been such a monopoly, journals had not
one-hundredth of the power they have to-day. Again, those who governed
England then were usually well travelled and were acquainted with the
French tongue. Again, there existed, what has since failed us, strong
independent opinion and a cultivated middle class. The female La Motte
was, therefore, not welcomed in London with those transports of
affection or homage which she would receive to-day; but there was
already sufficient horror at continental procedure and sufficient
certitude in the baseness of all administration of justice abroad to
stand her in very good stead. The nourishment of the public conscience
upon the sins of foreigners had already begun. La Motte was something of
a martyr, and, as she seemed poor, could make some livelihood out of the
public folly. She began that series of pretended “Revelations” which
were in some few months to be among the principal torments of the Queen.
Whether (like Esterhazy by our Press in the parallel I have already
drawn) she was bribed to say such things, we have no record. At any rate
her publications paid her—for a time.
It has been said that Marie Antoinette helped the La Motte to fly from
prison. It may be so. When in a great public quarrel the innocent side
is blundering and unwise, its acts of unwisdom are incalculable. Marie
Antoinette had certainly sent to have the woman visited in prison. It is
possible that, as she had hoped a public trial could help her, so she
hoped now the La Motte loose would do less harm than the La Motte
imprisoned and gagged, with every rumour free to circulate. Perhaps she
was wholly ignorant of the whole matter. Anyhow the La Motte was
loose—and the flood of calumny springing from London flowed against the
Queen and did its work. She, at Versailles, grew every day to be more
and more absorbed in the crisis which was developing with such
rapidity—for it was already apparent as March proceeded that the
experiment of the Notables had failed. Calonne had still his native
courage and his peculiar rapidity of manœuvre; he fought his hand
hard—but the opposition was too plain, too large, and too strong for
him. His plan had been just—he had conceived the reformation of
lightening the worst taxes and of arranging a more equal redistribution
of the burdens upon land—a new redistribution in which no privilege
should exist of rank or custom—and, more daring, but still, in the
tradition of Turgot, he had planned an adumbration of the Revolution by
proposing provincial, local, and parochial assemblies.
Two currents of hostility met him: one that the Notables in the main
stood personally for privilege; the other that every one in France
desired more change, and, above all, more “democratisation” of the
centre of the national machinery.
There was an appetite for debate, for “facts”; a demand for exact
accounts and public audit and public consent to taxes.
These two currents gained their intensity, however, from the legend
which had gathered round Calonne, as the Financier of the Deficit and
the Adviser of the Throne. A symbolic character, which was never his but
which has endured almost to our own time, was popularly superimposed
upon him, a character of mere frivolity, of mere extravagance in time of
security, especially of subservience to fancied expensive whims of the
Queen.
She, alas! thought to do a public service and a strong one by persuading
Louis to the dismissal of his Minister when his failure with the
Notables was proved. She won. On the 8th April 1787 Calonne fell, to be
exiled, to fly (of course) to London, and thence, only too probably, to
help swell that river of evil speaking and writing which, since her
thirtieth year, had flowed so regularly against the character of Marie
Antoinette; but which now broke all bounds and filled half the
pamphlets.
If in this she acted publicly, decidedly, and to her hurt, in her next
equally decisive step the Queen acted even more publicly, more
decisively, and more both to her own hurt and that of the alien populace
whom she already detested but desired, in such a crisis, to rule. After
some mention of Necker, she forced Loménie upon the King.
* * * * *
The writing of history, more than any other liberal occupation, suffers
from routine. I will not detain the reader of this chronicle with any
long digression upon the effect of the French Revolution, upon the
nature, the prodigious force and the universality of what may be called,
according to the taste of the scholar, the Catholic reaction or the
Catholic renaissance of our day. Still less would I disturb the progress
of my story with a divagation upon the ease with which our academies
here fall into every trap set them by the enemies of the Faith
abroad—whether those enemies be random politicians, high stoics,
sceptics of a noble temper, common usurers, or men fanatical against all
restriction of the senses. But I will so far delay the reader at this
moment as to state plainly a succession of undoubted historical and
contemporary truths in no particular order, and to beg him to reach a
conclusion by a comparison of them all.
It is in the routine of our universities to say that Catholicism was
struck to death by two great upheavals: the Reformation opened it to
attack; the Revolution dealt the mortal blow: it is now said to be
dying, and especially in France. This is the first truth: that our
universities say these things; some regret, some are pleased: but it is
believed and said in either camp. Next, it is true that Louis XVI.
practised his religion and believed in it. Next, it is true that his
Queen, never wholly abandoning the rule of religion—far from it—was now,
in 1787, particularly devoted and increasingly exact in her observance;
daily, as she daily suffered, more penetrated inwardly by the spirit of
the Church. A fourth truth is that no single man pretending to high
intelligence in that generation of Frenchmen believed in more than a
God: the only quarrel was between those who believed in such a Being and
those who denied this last of dogmas. The fifth truth is, that but
yesterday all the French hierarchy and all the 80,000 priests of the
Church—save, perhaps, three—suffered the loss of all corporate property
and all established income rather than vary in one detail from the
discipline of Rome. The sixth truth is that the prominent and
outstanding names of the French hierarchy or of the Church’s defenders
before and during this revolutionary crisis were: Rohan, an evil liver,
a cheat, a fool, and a blackguard; Talleyrand, something even lower in
morals than he was higher in wit; the Archbishop of Narbonne—living six
hundred miles from his See with his own niece for mistress; Grégoire, a
full schismatic and in his way an honest man; Maury, a vulgar
politician, like one of our own vulgar politicians to-day, a priest out
for a fortune, a sort of “Member of Parliament,” a petty persecutor of
the Pope in person and of the Papacy, in time a _Cardinal_—and this man
Loménie. The seventh truth is that Marie Antoinette (who practised her
religion) ardently supported Loménie and befriended him, and that,
therefore, Louis (who was devout) accepted him for Chief Minister.
Read these undoubted truths together and decide whether the Faith has
advanced or receded in a hundred years.
* * * * *
Who was Loménie de Brienne? He had had, these twenty years, a reputation
for what is vaguely called in aristocracies “ability.” He had presented
the address of the Clergy in the Coronation year. He was Archbishop of
Toulouse. He suited La Fayette’s idea of honesty. He had inordinate
passions. He was yet further and later Archbishop of Sens—for the sake
of the pickings. He had led with no scruple of honour the opposition to
Calonne in the Notables. Mercy favoured him. Vermond, the Queen’s old
tutor, who owed all to him, supported his claim, and Marie Antoinette
imposed him. But who was he?
He was an active, careful, and laborious atheist to whom the King, by a
scruple, refused the See of Paris, holding that the See of Paris was
peculiar and had always better be held by a man who believed in God. He
was a wit, he loved wealth inordinately—and that was all. He had his
reputation with the wealthy, but no action of his remains. Such was the
hierarchy that moment, and to a circle of such men was power restricted.
And Loménie de Brienne was made and put into his seat by the advice of
Vermond, Marie Antoinette’s old tutor, by the advice of Joseph II., a
protector of religious doubt; he repaid her by a constant devotion.
It was on May Day 1787 that this personage was put, with an inferior
title, at the head of the finances, a position which—now more than
ever—was necessarily the chief post in the French State. On the 25th the
Notables, from whom he came and whom he had led, were dissolved....
Fersen, eager to spend one last day in Versailles, had come for a few
flying hours. He watched their dissolution as a show ... he did not
return till the eve of the Revolution, and, once returned, he remained a
pledged sacrifice, a servant, to the end....
The Notables had done nothing, and Loménie himself proceeded to do much
the same; or rather to bring forward for the _third_ time as an active
proposition—for the millionth as a theory propounded—the scheme of
financial reform which every predecessor had, in one shape or another,
presented. The destruction of the fossil compartments—walls which
separated various antique forms of taxation, a larger total tax, a more
equitable distribution; the abolition of imposts uselessly vexatory;
_loans_ to oil the wheels of change.
The Notables had gone: but to register such decrees a power parallel to
that of the Throne must—as we saw in the case of Turgot—concur. The
permanent body of legal advisers to the Prince—a conception as old as
Rome and morally in continuity with the Empire—the body which had tried
Rohan—the Parlement—pleading the absence of a regular budget and of
public discussion, refused to register, and within three months of
Loménie de Brienne’s appointment, the Parlement in session had proceeded
from Sabattier’s famous pun[8] to affirm that _no permanent impost could
be levied upon the nation without the summons and consent of the
States-General_.
Footnote 8:
“Vous demandez l’état des recettes—ces sont les états generaux qu’il
nous faut.”
The reader should pause upon that phrase.
The conception that All should rule is coeval with society. But the
words so used by Sabattier were not a mere opinion nor a mere
reiteration of justice. They were spoken in that assembly of lawyers
which formed the chief body of the State, and once spoken in such an air
they were creative.
This memorable declaration of July 1787 launched the Revolution.
* * * * *
Nothing can reinvigorate itself or snatch itself from decay save by a
return upon itself and a recapture of its own past. To revive the
States-General was to bring back to life the vigour of the Middle Ages,
and to renew—at the close of this last long and glorious but exhausted
phase in the national life—the permanent energy of Gaul.
When in the eleventh century the great transition from the Dark Ages to
mediæval civilisation was accomplished, there came, along with the new
Gothic architecture and the new national tongues, as the last fruit of
that florescence, an institution known in each province of Christendom
by some local name (for the creation was local and spontaneous) but
everywhere bearing the same characters, in formation, object, and inner
nature. This Institution had for its purpose the affirmation of a
doctrine fundamental in the Faith, that sovereignty lies and can only
lie with the community. This Institution had for instrument wherewith to
enforce that right a conception at once as mystical and as plain as any
that the Faith has admitted or revealed in her strict dogmas, the
conception of _representation_: two men should speak for thousands; the
spirit of a community should enter and be seen through individuals who
should speak with the voice of districts; these representatives should
_be_ the very numbers for whom they stood: an institution as tangible,
as real, as visible as the Sacrament; as mysterious as the Presence of
the Lord. It was a miracle of faith, but it conquered; and even to-day,
woefully corrupt, there resides in Representation something of majesty
and a power in moments of great dangers or of great national desire to
gleam for a moment through the dead body of an Institution whose whole
principle of popular sanctity has been forgotten.
The theory of Representation sprang, I say, naturally from that young
and happy time when Europe arose from sleep: the century of the
Christian reaction against Asia.
The valleys of the Pyrenees, a scene of continual armed endeavours,
spurred on by the constant pressure of Islam, first organised the idea.
The cool and cleanly little town of Jaca—an outpost on the Roman road
into Spain that led down to the frontiers of the Moors—the little
frontier town of Jaca saw the first strict gathering of the kind in the
very first of the Crusades: but Jaca was not alone; it was throughout
Christendom a natural, a simultaneous growth. The southern cities of
Gaul, the great provinces, Languedoc, Bearn, distant and isolated
Brittany, the compact England of the thirteenth century, followed;
lastly, and not till the opening of the fourteenth century, a united and
majestic gathering of Representatives, designed to bring before the
Crown at Paris the voice, complaint, or will of all its subjects,
emerged.
These assemblies, a _Cortes_ in Spain, a _Parliament_ in England, were
in France called _Estates_—and that rare one which stood, not for one
province of Gaul, but for all combined, was known as the
_States-General_. Like every other institution of its kind it was alive
with the mediæval passion for Reality. Not abstract statistics nor some
crude numerical theory, but the facts of society were recognised in, or
rather everywhere translated into, these representative bodies. There
were corps of nobles—since the Middle Ages, descending from the Roman
centuries and their rich landed class, had nobles for a reality. The
priests were separate; the commoners. In some cases (notably in towns)
special corporations had special delegates; in all—especially in the
States-General of France—the various aspects of the State were present
in the shape of innumerable statements and mandates enforced upon the
Representatives (and therefore the servants) of clerical and commercial
corporations, of territorial units, of municipal authorities.
So long as the high attempt of the Middle Ages was maintained so long
these councils flourished. That attempt bent down and failed in the
sixteenth century—and with it declined, corrupted, or disappeared the
corporate assemblies which were to the political sincerity of the Middle
Ages what the universities were to its intellectual eagerness, the
Gothic to its majestic insistence upon eternal expression.
In certain places the advent of the Renaissance in the sixteenth century
closed the story of Representation; in others, under the influence of
the Reformation, it became a form. In the two chief centres of the West
two varied fortunes attached to the two failing branches of that great
mediæval scheme. In Protestant England the form of Representation
survived; in Catholic France the memory. By one of those ironies in
which History or Providence delights, the English oligarchy, which, in
the phrase of a principal English writer, “had risen upon the ruins of
Religion,” the Howards, the “Cromwells,” the Cecils, and the rest,
maintained the form of The House of “Commons.” The squires used that
organ in the seventeenth century to destroy the power of a Crown whose
own folly had, through the plunder of the Monasteries, led to its own
complete impoverishment and to the enrichment of the gentry. The squires
maintained that Crown but kept it as their salaried servant, and thus
throughout the eighteenth century the fossil of a representative system
was in England not only cherished but actively cherished to serve us as
the armour of privilege. Parliament remained intensely national, full of
sacred ceremonies and forms, and still using conveniently to the rich
some shadow of that theory of national sovereignty which, in breaking
with the Faith, the nation had broken with perhaps for ever: whether for
ever or not our own immediate future will show.
For Europe the strange accident by which dry-bones Representation thus
survived in England was of vast consequence. This fossil bridged the
gulf between the living Parliaments of the Middle Ages and the advent of
modern democracy—and by a curious inquiry into the archæology and the
extinct functions of English public life, Catholic Europe has begun to
reconstruct its own past. For England the consequences of the survival
are known to all who have watched the complexion of the Commons and type
of membership that House to-day enjoys—and the strange mode of
recruitment of the Lords!
In France the fortunes of Representation, that mediæval thing, became,
from the moment when the Middle Ages failed, very different. The Gallic
States-General had stood by the side of, and nominally informing, a
Roman and centralised sovereignty: they were not, like the English
Parliament, an institution immixed in and at last identical with a
wealthy oligarchy; they were an institution that stood by the side of
and was at last suppressed by a national despotism. They ceased abruptly
(in 1614), but they never lost their soul. Should they hear the call to
resurrection they could rise whole and quick, a complete voice of the
nation to counsel or to command. In July 1787, with the protestation of
the _Parlement of Paris_ and its appeal to the past, that call had come,
and from that moment onward it was plain that all France would now soon
be found in action. Within two years the thing was decided.
* * * * *
What was the Queen’s position during those two years? She was in the
saddle. Her fulness of life, her firmness of purpose, had come upon her
quickly. She was already divorced from joy; she was already, and for the
first time, mixed constantly with public affairs. It is sometimes
written that Loménie de Brienne “gave her a place in the Council.” That
is nonsense. She chose to enter publicly what, in private, had been hers
since the March of 1787 at the latest: what had been partly hers long
before. Her strength of utterance, her now formative disillusions (for
disillusionment is formative in women), her apparent peril (for peril is
formative in those who desire to govern), her recent grievous
humiliation and suffering (for these are formative in all), formed her
and gave her fixed and constructive power. Her power was most
imperfectly, at moments disastrously, used; but if the reader would
understand the violent five years which follow this moment and culminate
in the crash of the throne, he must first seize the fact that, though
vast impersonal forces at issue were melting and recasting France, and
therefore Europe, the personality nearest the French Executive
throughout was that of Marie Antoinette.
In _her_ room at Versailles met the coming intriguers during the
struggle with the Parlement under Brienne. _She_ it was against whom the
dishonoured Orleans, with the instinct of a demagogue, intrigued and
whispered. She it was who spoke of “a necessary rigour” when the
fighting begun; she—we may presume or be certain—who forbade the King to
fly in the days of October; she certainly upon whom the great effort of
Mirabeau turned; she who planned or rather guided the escape to
Varennes; she who principally suffered from the recapture; she who
constantly and actively advised Vienna, Mercy, Fersen, Mallet, in the
perilous months that followed that failure; she who sustained the Court
after the 20th of June; she against whom Paris charged on the 10th of
August: hers was that power the memory of which exasperated the
Revolution and drove even its military advisers to useless reprisals,
and to her death at last.
I do not say that the powers of that awful time were personal or of this
world—far from it. Nor do I say that you will not find crowded into that
little æon of years a greater host of high and individual wills than a
century may count in meaner times—there were a regiment of active,
organising, and creative minds astir within a mile of Notre Dame. Still
less do I pretend that the Queen’s judgment, her rapidity, her energy,
and her certitude were comparable to any of a hundred or more in that
arena. She was nothing compared with their greatest, little compared
with their least. But I say that close to the _executive_—to that which,
until August ’92, could command soldiers, sign edicts, and, above all,
correspond with foreign Powers—its adviser, its constant moderator, at
times its very self, was the Queen.
Her last child, the baby of eleven months, was now in the July of 1787
dead. It was the second death of a thing loved that she had known—her
mother’s the first; it was the first death she had _seen_ of a thing
loved. In the desertion of her friends, the great part she had to play,
the open wound of the necklace verdict, she took that death as but one
more poignant sorrow. The little girl had been ailing for but four days:
Marie Antoinette shut herself up with her husband and his sister for one
day in Trianon to recover that shock. She returned to act.
She applauded and sustained her husband—or rather Brienne—during the
struggle with the Parlement all July. She heard (and despised) the call
for the States-General. When the _Lit de_ _Justice_, the solemn ceremony
by which the King could enforce the registration of his edicts in spite
of the Parlement’s refusal, was held on the 6th of August, it was held
at Versailles, as it were under the Queen’s eye: the Parlement replied
by refusing to admit the registration so made.
The Parisian crowd surrounded the Parlement in Paris and applauded: not
for this or that, nor for the nature of the taxes protested, nor for
anything but for that prime principle—that the _States-General_ should
be summoned. The Queen ordered economies: they came into force at once,
that very week. Those who lost their posts became new enemies of hers:
the economies were nothing to the crowd: she gained nothing with the
public: she lost more with Versailles. It was dangerous for her to
approach the capital.
If she had hoped, by an economy that seemed to her so important, to
affect the Parlement, Marie Antoinette was in grievous error: in error
from that lack of perspective and of grip which her position, and above
all her character, had left in her. Within a week of it all the
Parlement had replied by a renewed refusal to register, a renewed demand
for the States-General, and was away at Troyes, exiled but sitting in
full power, deliberating and enthusiastically supported by Paris old and
new. At Versailles, Loménie de Brienne, the Queen’s man, demanded the
title, beyond the practical power, of Chief Minister: such a demand led
to the resignation of what little brains were left in the Council. In
September he compromised with the Parlement, and let it return.
Loménie next formulated decrees which proposed indeed to rely on
ordinary taxation—but to an extraordinary extent and on a novel
scheme—and to call the States-General _within five years_: he intended
(as did the Queen) to adjourn and surely to drop the meeting of the
States-General altogether. In November, when a majority in the Parlement
was secured by the absence of some, perhaps the purchase of others, he
caused the King to meet that body—and then raised its anger again by
registering without counting votes and, as it were, by the autocratic
power of the King. If, as is possible, the Queen did not advise or
countenance this last act, at any rate the whole tone of her
correspondence applauds the decision.
The consequences following on this error were immediate. Orleans, now
the Queen’s chief enemy, made himself a spokesman of discontent and was
exiled to the provinces; he attributed his disgrace to the Queen.
Sabattier and Tieteau de St. Just were arrested on the bench itself. The
States-General, precisely because it had been proposed to consider them
“in five years,” and because the Parlement had insisted on an earlier
date, were more in the public mouth than ever; and as the year closed,
Brienne, and all Brienne stood for, bethought them of some wide action
that should remove all this friction and leave government secure.
That action had the Queen for its authoress. It was an attempt at
despotic reform without representation, an Austrian model, and it was
named “The New Order.”
No year in Marie Antoinette’s life had more affected her experience, her
character, and her position in the State than this of 1787, her
thirty-second year, which now drew to an end. She had made a Ministry;
she had influenced, supported, in part created a policy; she had reaped
the full harvest of pain in the first death of a child, in the growing
illness of her eldest son, in the flood of calumny which had succeeded
the La Motte’s escape from prison. She had come rapidly to actual power,
she was exercising it with facility—and every act of hers led more
nearly and more directly to the cataclysm before her.
The public hatred of her had immensely grown—in intensity, in volume,
but especially in quality, since she had manifestly become the chief
adviser of her husband and the creator of a scheme of government. The
Polignacs, as I have said, had joined the enemy. Orleans was now
definitely the head of her bitter opponents. The drawing-rooms of Paris
had joined the populace against her. It had been actually proposed to
mock her effigy during the rejoicing at the return of the Parlement from
exile. The wits had renewed their nicknames: she was “Madame Deficit” as
well as “the Austrian” she had always been—and by the winter all the
quarrel in which the Parlement, the crowd, and nearly every permanent
force was now ranged against the Crown, saw in her the core of the
resistance and the personal object of attack.
The year 1788 at its very opening showed clearly how far the development
had gone. That system of “a new order”—a powerful, uncriticised Crown,
thorough reform, the negation of ideals—saw, risen up against such
feminine and practical conceptions, those much stronger things—dogmas.
The civic religion of the French and the creed of the era they were
framing emerged. Before Easter the Parlement had denied the right of the
executive to imprison at will, as also the right of the Prince to
assimilate his edict to a public law, and had demanded the complete
freedom of the three lawyers who had been arrested. But—an ominous
thing—the Parlement claimed no privileges. It demanded the release of
its members as _citizens_—and _of human right_ against the arbitrary
power of the Crown.
Against such a force as this—a creed—the only weapon that “The New
Order” and the Queen could imagine was a reform of machinery. In this,
as in so much else during the furious struggle of those eighteen months,
“The New Order” fore-planned much that the Revolution itself was to
achieve: it was modern, it was suited to circumstance, but lacking first
principles it was apparent and direct, but lacking nationality and being
opposed to the summoning of the States-General it was doomed. The scheme
of “The New Order” included a replacing of all this antique, corporate,
and privileged power of the Parlement by a High Court more fully
reflecting the governing classes of the nation. It was not unwise, and
Marie Antoinette—to judge again from her correspondence and from the
universal opinion of contemporaries—was largely its originator and
wholly its ally. It miserably failed.
The secret plan of it—surrounded with fantastic precautions—was
divulged. The threatened Parlement (and it had the whole nation behind
it) met at once, and D’Epresmenil explained the peril, and declared once
more, but far more directly than before, for the principles upon which
the Revolution was to turn, and especially the right of the
States-General alone—regularly and periodically summoned—to grant
supply. The arrests that followed—arrests which the Queen called with
quite singular blindness “acts of rigour”—perilous as she saw, but
necessary as she imagined—were the signal for an approach to civil war.
“The New Order” was resisted forcibly in the provinces by the
privileged, by custom, by the populace (who feared new taxes), by local
patriotism which feared the loss of local character and (what indeed so
soon did come) the merging of all in one homogeneous State. All the
troops were out; revolt had begun.
In June 1788 the Clergy—summoned to meet and grant an aid, as a last
desperate resource for means—replied by an assertion in turn of _their_
immutable custom and peculiar right. In July “The New Order” broke down.
The demand for the States-General was acceded to by the Crown and by the
Queen. On the 8th of August 1788 they were definitely summoned for the
May Day of the following year.
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