_THE BASTILLE_
_August 8, 1788, to September 30, 1789_
THE decision was taken. France was alive with the advent of the
States-General. The autumn of 1788 had come. Fersen was with the Queen.
It was more than fourteen years since, a boy of eighteen, Northern,
dignified, and grave, his large and steady brown eyes had met hers from
far off among the hundreds in the Masked Ball at the Opera. He was then
a child. She also was a child, pure, exiled, of an active timidity, and
not yet even Queen. I have written what happened then: the rare
occasions on which he had come and gone. Now he was here with her at
Versailles.
The something permanent which every human life has known had entered in
that moment of her girlhood and settled finally within her heart. The
accidents of living did little to disturb so silent and so secure a
thing. He had been but a chance visitor to Paris—a Swedish lad on his
Grand Tour—when they had thus met for ever; during the critical first
three years of her reign he had been away in his own country. He had
returned, as I have said, in the summer of 1778. The worst of her
torments was settled then: she was to be a mother; she might expect an
heir to the throne; the adventure, the successful adventure, of America
had begun. A position of womanhood and of rule, such dignities and such
repose, might have paled or rendered ridiculous the chance passion of
extreme youth: they did neither. Whether he came or went, his quiet
image—the one fixed thing she had known in a world she could not
know—remained. He had been received at once right into the tiny inner
circle of the Polignacs before he left for the American War. He had been
with the Queen continually, reserved and of that breeding which she
longed for, the unpassionate poise of the North. Her child, her
husband’s child, was born; ’79 and its war news came, and Fersen had
resolved at last to go. He also by that time, as has been read, knew
what had entered his life.
The Queen, as he inhabited the halls of Versailles during his farewells,
had followed him with her eyes, and very often they had filled with
tears. All the world saw the thing. He had gone off at last to America,
to wonder at the swamps and the bare landscape, the odd shuffling
fighting and the drag of an informal war. His English gave him work
enough interpreting between his own French Generals and Washington; he
wrote home from time to time to his father, he busied himself in
learning his military trade—but of Versailles or to Versailles there was
not a word. During all the three years, ’80-’83, that he suffered the
new countries, the Queen and he heard nothing the one of the other.
He had returned to Europe; but it was only the journey of his sovereign
Gustavus that kept him some months in France, though a colonelcy, more
or less honorary, and a pension of some hundreds had been given the
young man there. A wealthy marriage, long arranged in England for him,
he let slip without concern. The proposal (a year before the affair of
the necklace) that he should marry Necker’s ugly daughter he resigned at
once in favour of his friend, young Staël, his sovereign’s ambassador.
With a commission in Sweden as well as in France, it was his own country
he preferred. His moments at Versailles were rare, his visits very
brief—such as that in which he saw the Notables dissolved (of which
scene he records his judgment); in none did he more than appear, silent,
for a very few hours or days at Versailles. The girl who had met him, a
boy, in ’74, was now a woman of thirty and more; chance glimpses alone
had lit up the very long space of those years: she had suffered all the
business of the necklace, all the rising hatred of Paris, without any
too close a word from him; she was entering the Revolution and the way
to death when he reappeared: henceforward he did not leave her.
That bond, which time had neither increased nor diminished and which
permanent absence and silence had left unfalsified, now became a living
communion between them. He was never what is called her “lover”; the
whole sequence is that of a devotion as in a tale or a song, and yet
burning in living beings: a thing to the French incomprehensible, to men
of other countries, to Englishmen, for instance, comprehensible
enough—but, whether comprehensible or not, as rare as epic genius.
* * * * *
Brienne had fallen: the Queen, and the Queen alone, had put back Necker
in his place. Why had she done this? From a desire to rule, and an
opportunity for it.
There are those who discover in themselves the capacity to govern, that
is to organise the wills of men. Often great soldiers find this in
themselves, and are led to govern a whole State at last: such was
Napoleon.
There are others to whom cheating, intrigue and cunning are native: such
are, at bottom, however high their station, the slaves, not the
dictators or the helpers, of their fellow-beings; they have a keen nose
for the herd; they will always follow it, and it is their ambition to
fill posts where they can give favours and draw large salaries. Of this
sort are parliamentary politicians to-day: from such we draw our
Ministers. They have of poor human nature an expert knowledge such as
usurers have and panders; they are, therefore, not unsuited to choose
permanent officials or to recommend to others places of trust and power.
There is a third kind, and to this third kind Marie Antoinette
belonged—as many another woman and feminine man has belonged. It neither
organises nor intrigues; it desires to do neither, and is incapable of
both. All it desires is to be able to say “I govern.” The accident of
the last two years had permitted her to say this—but, having said it,
she could say nothing more. She knew the outcry against Calonne: she
undid him. She knew the reputation of Brienne: she made him. She saw
Brienne most evidently out of favour with opinion: she un-made him. She
heard shouts for Necker—and Necker was summoned to her little room, was
regally examined, graciously received and installed.
Those who can govern through a period of peril (that is, those who can
organise the wills of men during the short and indeterminate time before
any resultant of clashing social forces has yet appeared) note, decide,
order, speak, and do—and when it is too late to act, their genius tells
them that it is too late. In the early winter of 1788 it was not yet too
late. What would one possessed of the power of government have done? In
the first place, such an one would have stated the evil publicly in
detail and with authority; in the next, chosen not one but a body of men
to deal with particular difficulties (as, for instance, a particular
_légiste_ for the troubles of that absurdity, the Common Law; a
particular soldier to suggest a reform of the army, &c.); in the third,
used as allies all the positive forces available, all the enthusiasms,
all the tide—to this force (by persuasion) how much may not be
harnessed? So Mirabeau would have done; so Napoleon did; so some ready
eye in 1788 might have planned. The States-General is the fever? You
shall have it: in Paris, with splendour. The Commons are the cry? They
shall be in full double number and with special new powers—a new dress,
perhaps, as well. The nation is crying out for Government? Give them the
Crown: the King on horseback day after day.
Had some such judgment controlled that moment, France would have
preserved the Monarchy, old institutions clothed in their old names
would have been squeezed and fitted into new moulds; France so changing,
there would have been some change in Europe—an episode well worthy of
memory and noted by special historians. The Bishops of the Church in
France would—to-day—have been what Rohan and Narbonne were then; the
Faith, already derelict, would by this time very probably have descended
to be a ritual for wealthy women or an opinion for a few valueless, weak
men: that self-praise and that divorce from reality which is the mark of
our backwaters in Europe and of the new countries everywhere would
(perhaps) have settled in the succeeding century upon all Europe, and,
for the first time in its long history, our civilisation would have
missed one of its due resurrections. As it was, God intended the
Revolution. Therefore, every error and insufficiency in those directing
its inception was permitted, and therefore, on account of such
insufficiency, the full force of a military people ran freely, as run
natural things, and achieved what we know.
The Queen had nominated Necker from a mere desire to rule, and had
therefore simply chosen the man most loudly called for. Necker, on his
side, was well worthy of so facile a judgment; he was all that is meant
by Geneva.
By his own standards, which were those of a company promoter, he was
just barely honest—by those of chivalric honour he was deplorably
tainted. Full of avarice, order and caution, a very Huguenot, he sought
everywhere an economic solution for political problems; unsoldierly, of
course, and in the presence of danger worthless, he was none the less
patient in detail and of a persevering kind; very vacillating in the
presence of fierce and conflicting desires around him, he was yet
tenacious of a general plan. To all these characters he added that kind
of ambition which is avid of popularity on condition that it shall face
no bodily risk and that it shall labour in words or on paper only. He
had his reward: his insignificant figure was for a year the symbol of
all the great ferment; his presence with, or absence from, the Council
was the test of advance or of retreat in the revolutionary movement. So
for one year—then for a few months he is forgotten; then he hears a mob
in the streets, and flies.
With such a man as figurehead it is not difficult to judge the obvious
development of the autumn and winter which produced the first great
Parliament of the Revolution. Opinion was invited: the pamphlets poured
in. On matters already fixed in public opinion Necker could be decisive,
as, for instance, that the Commons in the approaching Assembly should be
as numerous as the clergy and the nobles combined—for this was the
universal rule in provincial parliaments; but when (two days after
Christmas) this point (which had afforded food for violent writing but
was in reality certain to be conceded)—when, I say, this point was fixed
by King and Queen and Council, Necker so drafted the decision as to make
it appear all his own to the populace: while at Court the angry higher
nobility said it was all the Queen’s. A far more decisive matter—and one
that escaped the partisans—was whether the Nobles, Clergy, and Commons
should sit and vote together, as the necessity for a Popular Will—for
one voice—demanded, or should play the antique fool and, in a crisis so
actual and vivid, solemnly vote separately, checking each other’s
decisions, nullifying the public mandate—all for the sake of custom.
Here Necker _could_ have decided and changed history: but there was not
an opinion sufficiently unanimous to guide him in his nullity. He left
that essential piece of procedure to be settled by the Estates
themselves when they should have met; he thus (as will be seen) made of
the first and most necessary act of the States-General, the insistence
of the Commons that all should vote together, an illegal thing—and so
coloured all their succeeding action with the colour of rebellion. One
thing Necker had done of his own judgment, and it was idiotic. He had
summoned the Notables again for a month in the autumn—he was soon glad
to be rid of that folly: the decree I have mentioned followed, and in
February 1789—legally before the end of January—the elections to the
States-General began.
No such complete representation of a great nation has been attempted
since that day; no such experiment could be attempted save with
political energy at white heat and under the urgent necessity of a
secular charge. The confused noise which filled the rising spring of ’89
was, for once, the voice of all: thousands upon thousands of little
primary assemblies, of advisory letters, of plaints, of legal
suggestions, of strict orders and mandates to the elected (without which
no political freedom can exist), of corporate actions by guilds, by
townships, by chapters, by every form of political personality, filled
and augmented the life of France. So vast was the thing that to this
day, amid the libraries of monographs that seem to exhaust the
Revolution, all have shrunk from the delineation of this rising ocean of
men. There is no final work upon the elections of ’89. No one has dared.
April passed. The deputies began to stream into Paris. Paris, in the
last days of that month and the first of the next, began to overflow
into the royal town at its gates. Sunday, the 3rd of May, saw one long
procession of every kind and fortune pouring, in spite of the drenching
weather, from the capital up into the hills of Versailles. Upon the
morrow the opening religious ceremony of the Session was to be held.
* * * * *
At about six o’clock of the morning of Monday, the 4th of May, it was
still raining—not violently, but still raining; the dawn struggled in
wet clouds over the woods and the plain of Paris beyond, and the
pavements of Versailles were shining flat under the new day, with large
puddles in their worn places. As the light broadened the rain ceased.
The uniform and dull low sky began to break and gather: the innumerable
crowd moved. Some thousands were sodden after a night spent out of
doors; many thousands more, moving from their packed rooms, where a bed
was a guinea and the mere shelter of a roof a well-let thing, began to
crowd the pavements, the roofs, the cornices; as for the windows, every
window had its bouquet of heads at high price, well-dressed heads and
eager. The morning rose and grew warm.
The palace of Versailles looks east and north down towards the woods
that hide Paris; it looks down three broad, divergent avenues, spreading
like the fingers of a hand, and starting (as from the palm of such a
hand) from a wide space called the “Place d’Armes,” which forms a huger
outer court, as it were, to the huge Court of the Kings. To the right
and to the left of this main square and its avenues, as you look from
the palace, lie the two halves of the town: the northern, to the left,
has for its principal church Notre Dame; the southern, to the right, has
for its principal church St. Louis, which is now the Cathedral; each
building is by situation and plan the centre of its quarter. The way
from Notre Dame to St. Louis is up the Rue Dauphine, across the great
Place d’Armes, and then down the Rue Saborg—all in a straight line not
half a mile long, with the great Place taking up more than the middle
third. From the one church to the other was the processional way of
Versailles; it was chosen for that day. From seven onwards the
Parliament had been gathering in Notre Dame; not till ten did the royal
carriages arrive, all plumed and gilded, swung low and ridiculous: the
King and his household, the Queen and hers; the Princes of the Blood—but
as for Orleans he was already with the lords in the church, disdaining
his rank and making a show of humility. They all set out in procession
for St. Louis, the clergy of Versailles in a small surpliced body
leading, the dark Commons next, the embroidered and feathered Nobility,
the Priests, the Household, the music, the Bishop; then the Blessed
Sacrament in the Archbishop of Paris’ hands, with Monsieur and his
brother and two more of the Blood at the corners of the canopy; last of
all the Queen and her ladies—all in the order I have named; two thousand
and more four-front, the length of a brigade—and every one of them (save
the Archbishop who held the Monstrance) with a blessed candle in his or
her hand. By the time the head of the line was at St. Louis, the tail
had hardly left Notre Dame[9] and as each detachment took the line,
young Dreux Brézé, Master of Ceremonies, on foot since seven, ordered
them.
Footnote 9:
Carlyle, of course, puts one church for the other and makes the
procession walk wrong way about. The Cambridge history, however, is
accurate in this detail.
The myriads of people saw them go by. The sun was shining at last: all
could be seen, yet the cheers were pointed and full of meaning; the
silence also was full of meaning. They cheered the Commons as those six
hundred went by, in black without swords—all in black save for a Breton
amongst them. Some curiously picked out Mirabeau; they were silent at
the lords’ blaze of colour, half cheering only Orleans, his face such a
picture! the sacred candle flickering in his hands; they did not (as
would a modern crowd) all uncover to the Blessed Sacrament; they cheered
the King. Then, as the Queen passed, there passed with her a belt of
silence. As she went slowly with her ladies along that way silence went
with her; cheering went before and after. At one place only was that
silence broken, where a group of rough women suddenly shouted out as she
passed insulting _vivats_ for Orleans: it may be that she stumbled when
she heard them.
From the advanced colonnade of the great stables (where the sappers are
lodged to-day) upon the roof of the colonnade, there was a truckle-bed
and many cushions laid, and on it was lying the broken body of her son,
the Dauphin, who would not inherit all these things: he was very visibly
dying. His miserable little frame, all bent and careless, lay there at
its poor ease. His listless and veiled eyes watched the procession go
by. It is said that his mother, in that half-mile of ordeal, glanced up
to where he lay, and smiled.
The sun still shone upon the double row of soldiers—the blue of the
Gardes Françaises upon this side, the red of the Swiss upon that; the
crowd was in gaiety—the wet were now dry; the last of the line were now
gone and the doors of St. Louis had closed on them. It had been a great
show, and all the place and its pleasures were open to the people. Next
day the Session was opened in that same hall which had been raised two
years before for the Notables.
A member of the Commons, sitting in the back row of his order, would
have seen before him, rank upon rank, the dense mass of black uniform
menace which his six hundred presented, half-filling the floor of the
great oblong hall; to left of him, against a row of columns, the clergy
of every rank; to the right, against the opposite row of columns, the
blaze of the Nobles—among them Orleans, his face insolently set towards
the Throne. Far above and beyond them all, at the end of the hall, like
an altar raised upon its steps, was the last splendour of the Throne.
The golden threads of the lilies shone upon the vast canopy of purple
velvet that overshadowed it. Seated upon it, alone above his kingdom,
the last of the kings possessed a great majesty, in which the known
hesitation of his gait, the known lethargic character of his person,
were swallowed up in awe: an enormous diamond gleamed in the feather of
his hat. Below and around him were grouped the Princes of the Blood and
the great officers of State, and in front of the group in a long line
sat the Ministry. Necker among these—the only one dressed as the Commons
were dressed—appealed to the Commons; while at the foot of the throne,
in purple and silver white, a little diamond circlet and a heron’s
feather in her hair, stood the Queen.
This the Commons could see, under the light that fell from high windows
near the roof; it fell over two thousand of the public—guests chosen
rather than a true public; they filled the galleries above, they swarmed
in the dark aisles beneath, undivided from the three orders—a
familiarity shocking to our historians who, craning their necks, have
watched as a privilege and with respect the fag-end of the House of
Commons or the County Council from a pen.
To the command of Dreux Brézé all that great hall rose: the King rose
also, read his short speech in a firm voice, and put on his hat to sit
down. The Nobles covered themselves at the King’s gesture: among the
Commons there was confusion—they did not know the etiquette, or rather
some did, some did not. The incident was insignificant and comic: a
graver thing followed it. Barentin rose, the Keeper of the Seals; he
spoke for an hour. Had he spoken for three minutes and spoken but one
sentence it would have been all he had to do, for he was there to tell
them that _it was left to the Three Orders to sit separately or together
as they might choose_. All the Revolution was latent in that command.
The Nobles would vote to sit separate; possibly the clergy: the
“National Assembly”—as all thought of it, as all called it—would be
turned into a “Lords and Commons”—an absurd, complicated and do-nothing
machine with privileges and customs, quaintnesses and long
accommodations between this house and that; it would lose touch with the
general; the sap of national life would be cut off from it; it would not
be able to create; it would be the jest of that which really governed.
As in England to-day our various elected bodies are the jests of the
plutocracy, so in 1789 the “National Assembly,” tripartite, played upon
by vanity and ignorance, would have become the jest of the Crown. But in
France an institution, once unreal, disappears, and before July the
Assembly was, according to this plan, to disappear. It was deliberately
conceived as a means of nullifying and destroying the Parliament.
Necker spoke next. He spoke for three hours, and was listened to
throughout, for he dealt with finance. His speech was full of lies—but
his name had not yet lost the titular place of idolatry. When he had
ended his Genevese falsehoods, the ceremony was over and all were free
to dine. But with Barentin’s words the Revolution had begun.
All May Gaul worked and seethed. The instinct of numbers aimed straight
for the objective upon which all turned, and the Commons demanded the
accession to one corporate Assembly of the Nobles and Clergy. They
negotiated with the privileged houses; they affirmed the principle of
combined voting: Necker sent for soldiers. By the end of the month the
last attempt at some voluntary arrangement had failed. Meanwhile the
King, by some lethargy or through the intrigue of some cabal, had not
yet formally received a deputation of the Commons.
What did the Queen make of that May? The days seemed to her first an
ugly rumour throughout Versailles, buzzing round the palace—soon an
uproar. She stood with the few that actively maintained privilege
against the Commons; but, a trifle wiser than they, she conveyed their
counsels in a moderated form to the King. It was not enough: the troops
still came into Paris—Gaul still rose higher and higher; and through the
tumult something much more to her, more intimate, infinitely more acute
and true, ran and held her as a physical pain will pin the mind and hold
it during the playing of some loud and meaningless music: it was the
dying of her little son—he lay at Meudon dying.
The end of the French Monarchy was mirrored in the fate of the last
bodily forms that were to contain its Idea. The Bourbon heirs, one after
another, died before succession. Louis XV., a great-grandson, himself
delicate from birth, was succeeded by a grandson again, a boy painfully
saved by the doctors—a man throughout life partially infirm. The line
had come at last to this child, the Dauphin, whose advent had been the
opportunity for such strong joy throughout the country and in whom the
New Age was to find its first King. All the phases of doom had shown
themselves: first, the high promise, then the vague doubts, the
mysteries of a general disease; lastly, the despairs. For a month, ever
since the opening of the States-General, which he had languidly
witnessed, it had been but a question of the day on which the boy would
die. That day had come.
It was the 3rd of June at Meudon. The King and the Queen had come in
answer to sudden and graver news of their child; they reached the place
in the early afternoon—and they were implored to return. The boy was
within, at his agony. The King sank into a chair and cried that his son
was dead, and the poor lad’s mother, suddenly broken in the midst of so
many and such great public alarms, of her government, her resistance and
her perils, suddenly knelt down and cried wildly, rocking her head in
her hands, burying her face on Louis’ knees: she called out to God. They
were left thus together, and at one the next morning the Dauphin was
dead.
It was as though two majesties or angels challenged each other in those
days: the majesty which reigns inwardly and which everywhere makes of a
son’s death the supreme agony of the world, though sons die hourly; the
majesty which reigns outwardly and which commands, once in a thousand
years, the passing of societies and kingdoms. For while this death was
doing at Meudon, in the Commonwealth the last decisions also were at
hand. Two days after the sad procession of ranks and delegates had done
honour to the dead child, the Commons summoned for the last time the
Clergy and the Lords to join them and form one body to mirror the
nation. It was but three days after the little body had been taken to
lie at St. Denis among the kings that the next step was taken. The
Revolution broke with law—it now first began to be the Revolution and to
do. The Commons declared themselves to be no longer the “Commons,”
but—with all of the privileged orders who would join them—they declared
themselves to be the “National Assembly”: those who would not join them
were no part of the body which was to remake the world: their legality
was not to avail them: the Commons had “made act of sovereignty,” and
the strain between two centres of authority, the Crown and the
Representatives, had begun.
It was this that the Queen must watch and parry and try to understand,
now, when the first part of her flesh had gone down into the grave, and
her brain, shaken with despairs, must attempt to control and to
comprehend the wave; and her eyes, weary of weeping, to read orders, to
note faces, and her voice, with which she could no longer call her son,
to command. She was in the centre of the resistance for a month, and it
failed.
For a few days, in spite of the call for troops which had been heard—and
the troops were coming—for a few days more, speech was still formidable,
and every phase of the debate ringing through the great shed of the
Menus was a further affirmation of the new and violent sovereignty of
those usurpers, the Assembly. In twenty-four hours a decision was taken
by the Crown.
To the assumption of sovereignty by the Commons the Court replied. There
was to be a Royal Session on the Monday following, the King present, and
all the division between the orders settled by his final voice—as to the
Commons declaration it was ignored.
And meanwhile Speech was silenced. Barentin, Keeper of the Seals, had
seen to that. He wrote to the King that it was _imperative_ the Commons
should be silenced until the Royal Session was held. He wrote: “Coupez
Court.” Have done with the business! A simple way to silence the Commons
was found.
It was upon Friday the 19th of June that Barentin had written his letter
to the King. Upon the Saturday morning, the 20th, the weather having
turned to rain and the streets being deserted, the first stray members
of the Commons came up to the door of the Menus to resume their debates.
No notice had reached them, nor even their elected Speaker, Bailly, the
worthy astronomer. They came with umbrellas dripping above them, the mud
splashing their black stockings and black knee-breeches, the rain
driving in upon their black Court coats. They tried the door; it was
locked, and a sentry came forward. They saw, streaked under the rain, a
little scrap of writing nailed to the door. The Hall was “closed by
royal order,” and, within, the sound of hammering marked the carpenters
at work preparing for Monday’s ceremonial. They wondered: others came;
the group grew until at last many hundreds of the Commons stood there
without, upon the pavement of the wide-planted avenue. Mirabeau was
there and Robespierre was there, Sieyès, Bailly—all the Commons. Up at
the end of the way the King’s great palace lay silent and, as it were,
empty under the rain. No one crossed its vast open courtyard; its shut
streaming windows stared dully at the town. The Commons moved away in a
herd, leaving the sentry and his comrade to pace and be drenched, and
the little scrap of writing to be washed and blurred on the locked door.
As they moved off the noise of hammering within grew fainter till they
heard it no more.
That very middle-class sight, a great mob of umbrellas wandering in the
streets, was full of will: wandering from one place to another they
landed at last in a tennis court which was free, just where a narrow
side-street of the southern town makes an elbow. Into that shelter they
poured: and over against them, watching all they did from above, from
his home just across the lane, was Barentin, Keeper of the Seals. He saw
the umbrellas folded at the door, the hundreds pressing in, damply; he
saw through the lights of the Court their damp foot-prints on the
concrete of the hall—a table brought: Bailly, the president, standing
upon it above the throng and reading out the oath that they “_would not
disperse till they had given the nation a constitution_”—then he saw the
press of men signing that declaration one by one.
He heard the mob gathering outside and filling the street. Among them at
least one witness has left a record of what could be heard through the
open doors—how Mirabeau reluctantly signed, pleading popular pressure;
how one man only refused to sign, thinking it, what it was, rebellion.
He was Martin, of Auch.
It was the summer solstice, a date unlucky to the Bourbons.
The King heard all these things—but there was nothing to be done. Sunday
passed, and Monday—the Royal Session was postponed. It was not till
Tuesday morning, the 23rd, at ten that the procession formed and that
Louis prepared to attend it. It was still raining.
All the pomp that could be gathered had been gathered for that occasion,
though the very skies were against it. Four thousand men stood to arms
lining that less than half a mile from the palace to the Menus. Hidden
in the woods beyond, camped up on Satory and dispersed in the suburbs
around, six regiments more were ready. A vast crowd, wholly silent,
watched the Court go by. The Queen unbroken (but carrying such recent
agony!), Artois vivacious and trim, the Ministers hurried, Louis
somewhat bent, fat, suffering.
A man who saw that sight has written that he thought to see some great
funeral go by: he was right. Of the two million dead which the
Revolution demanded from Moscow to the Tagus, the first was passing in
the splendid coach of the kings—I mean, Unquestioned Security. That
fixity of political creed and that certitude in social structure, which
hitherto no wars had shaken in Europe for century upon century of
Christian order, had perished. Men cannot live or breathe without
political security, yet for now more than a hundred years Europe has in
vain awaited its return.
The King had reached his throne in the great shed of the Menus; the
Queen was beside him; the Orders, the Nobles and the Clergy stood ranked
on either side; then after some delay the Commons were permitted to
enter by a mean side-door and to fill the dark end of the place with
their dark numbers.... Where was Necker? The Symbol of the New Age was
not there; the fatuous Genevese had stayed at home. He had presided at
the Council which had drawn up the declaration the King was about to
read. He _may_ have suggested certain softenings of phrase in it; they
_may_ have been rejected by the Queen or another—but it was a document
the responsibility of which he, in duty, bore; it was for him to resign
or to be present: he hedged by his absence and let it be thought that he
protested.
With a rumble and a shuffling the twelve hundred of them sat down. When
they were all well sat down, Barentin in a loud voice proclaimed:
“Gentlemen, the King gives you leave to be seated!” The King turned to
the Queen upon his left and bade her also take her throne. She
courtesied with an exaggerated grandeur and chose to stand while the
whole long speech was delivered—a royal witness to the Crown of which
she was now much more the strength and principle than any other there.
The speech was decisive. It willed this and that in strong
imperatives—even the voice of the King, into whose mouth these words
were put, was firm: he willed very liberal and modern things—but no
divided authority—above all, no divided authority! The new and rival
sovereign, the Usurper, must resign. The Commons were but the Commons.
Of their recent claim no word, but, upon the contrary, an assertion that
the States-General might not, even were they to vote in common,
determine their own procedure.
As he read, here and there a man would applaud—even from among the
Commons.
“Remember, gentlemen, that none of your plans, none of your schemes can
become Law without _my_ express approval. It is _I_ that have, till now,
given my subjects all their happiness....” And the speech closed with:
“I command you, therefore, gentlemen, to _disperse at once_. _To-morrow_
you shall come each into the Hall _assigned_ to his order.”
When he had read these words the King sat down: the speech was ended.
There was but a moment between his ending and his rising again to go.
The Queen, very dignified, rose with him. Together, and followed by
their train, they left the hall. It was just noon.
The Nobles rose in their turn and left the building: the Bishops
preceded them, but of the lower clergy many—half perhaps—lingered. The
body of the Commons refused to move.
They sat massed, in silence, at the far end of the great gaudy shed.
Over against them, at the further end, the workmen had begun to take
down the scenery of that royal play; the curtains were being lowered,
the carpets rolled up, and there was hammering again. Across the empty
benches of the Nobles and the Hierarchy, in the empty middle of the
hall, every exclamation, however subdued, of the bewildered but
determined Commons echoed: but the background of that interval was
astonishment and silence.
This curious and dire silence, a silence of revolt, lasted perhaps
half-an-hour, when there entered into it the Master of the Ceremonies,
young Dreux Brézé.
He was little more than a boy, just married, of a refined and rather
whitened sort, tall, covered with cloth of gold. He was not ashamed to
stud his hands with diamonds, like an Oriental or a woman; he shone with
light against the dark mass of the Commons, and he alone wore a sword.
He bore no signed or sacred letter, and his mere office was not
awful.[10] He advanced, and in that slightly irritable but well-bred
drawl of his he muttered something as though ashamed. They cried, “Speak
up!” He spoke louder. “They had heard the King’s orders....” He repeated
the phrase. Various cries and exclamations arose. Then Mirabeau,
standing forward, said—What did he say? It is uncertain, and will always
be debated, but it was something like this: “We are here by the will of
the people, and only death can dismiss us.” Dreux Brézé walked out with
due ceremony, backwards.
Footnote 10:
It had originally been created to provide a salary for one, Pot, who
was further dignified with the title of Rhodes—names curiously
English.
* * * * *
Well, then, why was Death not brought in to sweep the Commons? Here were
soldiers all around—foreigners, Germans, and Swiss—in number a full
division: why was no shot fired? Because, although apparently no force
lay opposed to them save the mere will of less than a thousand unarmed
debaters, there did in fact lie opposed to them the potential force of
Paris. Close on a million souls, say two hundred thousand men, capable
of bearing arms, almost homogeneous in opinion, lay twelve miles down
the valley, as full of rumour as a hive—at the sound of a musket they
might rise and swarm. It was not a calculable thing; Paris _might_ after
half-an-hour of scuffle turn into a mere scattered crowd; there _might_
be a fierce resistance, prolonged, bleeding authority to death unless a
sufficient force contained Paris also, as the debaters at Versailles
were already contained. That force was summoned.
Thirty regiments moved. All the last days of June the great roads
sounded with their marching from every neighbouring garrison. The rattle
of new guns one morning woke from sleep the unknown Robespierre, who
watched them from his window passing interminably under the July dawn;
they baited their horses in the stables of the Queen. Of nearly all the
troops so gathering one little portion, the half-irregular militia body
(militia, but permanently armed) called “the French Guards,” was other
than foreign. The “French Guards” might not indeed be reliable; but, as
it was thought, they hardly counted. The rest were for the most part
German-speaking mercenaries, the solid weapon of the Crown: and still
they gathered.
Neck to neck with the advance of that mobilisation the Assembly raced
for power; for every brigade appearing you may count a new claim. In the
first hours of their revolt, when Dreux Brézé had but just retired, they
proclaimed themselves “Inviolable”—that is, in their new sovereignty,
they declared an armed offence to that sovereignty to be treason.
The sight of Paris, heaving as for movement on the 24th of June,
Wednesday, when the news of the royal session and its sequel came,
determined the Duke of Orleans to take a line. He desired to profit by
the dissensions. He continually bribed and flattered and supported, by
his wealth and through his parasites, the vast and spontaneous surge of
opinion, adding perhaps a fraction to its power. He was among the
stupidest of the Bourbons, for he thought in his heart he might be King.
This null and dissipated fellow led a minority of the Nobles to the
Commons and declared their adhesion to the Assembly: that was the
Thursday, the 25th—the next day the Court itself, the King, deliberately
advised the union of all the orders!
The Court had yielded—for the moment. The Court thought it was better
so: the troops were gathering, soon a blow was to be struck, and the
less friction the better while it was preparing....
So, as the first week of July went by, everything was preparing: the
Electoral College of Paris had met and continued in session, forming
spontaneously a local executive for the capital; certain of the French
Guard in Paris had sworn to obey the Assembly only, had been imprisoned
... and released by popular force ... and pardoned. The last troops had
come in; the Assembly was finally formed. On the day when it named its
first Committee to discuss the new Constitution, the Queen and those
about the Queen had completed their plan, and the Crown was ready to
re-arise and to scatter its enemies.
There was in this crisis a military simplicity as behoved it, for it was
a military thing. No intriguing. Necker, the symbol of the new claims,
was to go—booted out at a moment’s notice, and over the frontier as
well. A man of the Queen’s, a man who had been ambassador at Vienna, a
very trusted servant of over fifty years continually with the Monarchy,
a man of energy, strong stepping, loud, Breteuil was in one sharp moment
to take his place. Old Broglie, brave and renowned, was to grasp the
army—and the thing was done: the Assembly gone to smoke: the debating
over: silence and ancient right restored. And as for the dependence on
opinion and on a parliamentary majority for money!... why, a bold
bankruptcy and begin again.
So the Queen saw the sharp issue, now that all the regiments were
assembled. A corps of German mercenaries were in the Park, encamped;
their officers were cherished in the rooms of the Polignacs: they were a
symbol of what was toward. Paris might or might not rise. If it rose,
there would be action; if not, none. In either case victory and a prize
worth all the miserable cajoling and submission to which the Court had
been compelled while the soldiers were still unready. They were ready
now. So the Queen.
On Saturday the 11th of July, at three in the afternoon, Necker was
sitting down with his wife and a certain friend to dinner: the excellent
dinner of a man worth four millions of money—doubtfully acquired. Ten
thousand men lay at arms within an hour of Versailles; at all the issues
of Paris were troops amounting to at least two divisions more—mainly
German cavalry: one regiment at Charente, Samade; one regiment at Ivry;
one, of German hussars, at the Champ de Mars; one, of Swiss infantry,
with a battery, at the Étoile (where is now the Arc de Triomphe). Two
more, German, south of the river; a whole camp at the northern gate—and
many others. No food could enter the city save by leave of that circle
of arms.... To Necker, so sitting there at table, was brought a note
from the King; he opened it: it told him he was ordered out of office
and ordered out of the kingdom too. He finished his dinner, and then
took horse and coach and drove away along the Brussels road.
There followed three days which very much resembled, to the Queen and
the General Staff of the Resistance, those days during which a general
action is proceeding at the front and a stream of accounts, true and
false, exaggerated, distorted, coming pell-mell and in the wrong order,
confuse rather than inform the anxious ears at headquarters far in the
rear. Men tore galloping to and fro continually up and down the twelve
miles of road between the palace and the gates of Paris. “Paris had
risen.” “No, only an unarmed mob parading the streets.” “Yes, there had
been a collision with Lambesc’s cavalry.”... On Sunday, late, a cloud of
dust was Lambesc’s orderly coming to Versailles with news: there had
been no bloodshed. Monday more rumours: “They are forging weapons.”...
“They cannot move: ... they lack ammunition.”... “They have formed
patrols: ... the streets are patrolled.” Then, at night, fires were
reflected on the cloudy sky down the valley—the populace were burning
the Octroi Barriers.
It was determined by the chiefs of the army to force the northern gate
of Paris and so to subdue the tumult—but there was neither fear nor
haste: the tumult was a mere civilian tumult: the thousands roaring in
Paris had no arms—and then what about organisation? How can a mob
organise? Tuesday came, the 14th of July, a memorable day, and in the
forenoon news or rumours reached Versailles that a stock of arms had
been sacked. It was the arsenal—no, this time came details; it was the
Invalides that had been sacked—twenty thousand muskets. More news:
powder had been found and seized by the mob; in the great square before
the Town Hall a jolly priest, sitting astride of a barrel, was seeing to
the serving out of powder and of ball—one almost heard the firing. “The
Bastille has most of the ammunition in Paris. No mob can take _that!_
the pieces have been trained on the street a whole fortnight since.”
“The Bastille has checked the mob.” “No, they have sacked that also,
with all its ammunition.” “They have captured artillery.” “Nonsense! a
mob cannot capture guns!” Then again, more definite and certain, longer
accounts, eye-witnesses, as the afternoon drew on to evening. One: “It
has fallen.” Another: “I saw the governor killed ... a thousand men in
the crowd were hit, but the crowd kept on.... How many dead? A hundred,
at least a hundred.” “They have cannon on Montmartre—the northern gate
cannot be forced.” Berthier wrote to the King alone: “To-night the
troops will master the streets.” And meanwhile, like a chorus of human
voices to all this roar of powder, the Assembly was pouring out
decisions and acting the moral sovereign manfully in the face of
material arms—sitting “permanently.” Even at midnight, when nearly all
was known and the popular victory assured, Bailly the Speaker was still
sitting there presiding after a sitting of seventy-two hours over the
drowsy Commons. And they had voted! They had voted regrets for Necker;
they had voted the responsibility of _all_ advisers of the King for
these calamities: they had voted bankruptcy “infamous.” So many moral
broadsides fired at the Queen.
The morning of the 15th dawned; the firing had ceased, the smoke had
rolled away, and with the new day the issue of the action lay plain.
Paris had conquered.
The King alone with his brother, unarmed, unguarded, walked to the
Parliament House and announced the withdrawal of the mercenaries; the
Queen—bitterness of irony!—had to stand smiling, with her children, at
the central balcony of the palace above the courtyard and to receive the
ardent homage of the people for the failure of her great design—in a few
months, in October, she was to stand on that balcony again.
All that day and the next the King sat anxiously with his Council
debating only one thing—Marie Antoinette’s purpose that he should fly.
She urged it with vehemence: her jewels were packed and ready—they would
fly to Metz and conquer in a civil war. But the majority outweighed her,
notably old Broglie, who feared the issue of German mercenaries against
French troops—and the King remained. She with angry tears gave way: it
was decided that the King should, upon the contrary, seek Paris on the
morrow, accept and legalise the acts of the city, its new popular armed
force, its new elected Mayoralty—La Fayette the chosen head of the one,
Bailly occupying the other.
[Illustration:
AUTOGRAPH NOTE OF LOUIS XVI, RECALLING NECKER,
ON THE 16TH OF JULY, AFTER THE FALL OF THE BASTILLE
]
The royal plan had failed: let the King accept the new conditions and
meet Paris half-way. Such were the decisions, and Louis wrote to Necker
recalling him—the abortive Ministry of the Resistance was ended.
But that night, in the dead darkness, Artois fled from the coming
terror; old Vermond also, the friend and tutor; Enghien, Condé, many
another; and the Queen, with passionate love, compelled one who was now
once more her friend to fly: the Madame de Polignac. She fled and was
saved, bearing with her two ill-spelt, blotted lines in Marie
Antoinette’s untrained and hurried hand: “Good-bye, dearest of my
friends; it is a dreadful and a necessary word. Good-bye!”
In this way did the Assembly enter into its sovereignty, and in this way
did Marie Antoinette first meet—though she never knew or grasped it—the
temper of the French people, who, perhaps alone in Europe, can organise
from below.
* * * * *
That creative summer of ’89, in which the Assembly now victorious began
its giant business, was in the Queen’s eyes nothing but a respite for
the Throne, or a halt in a retreat between one sharp action lost and the
next to be ventured later, when new troops should be at hand and a new
occasion serve. That these speech-makers hard by should declare a new
creed of Rights, should—in words—abolish Feudal Dues, should debate the
exact limits of the King’s power—all that was wind. Even the anarchy
coincident with that vast transition, powerfully as it affected her
spirit (and her letters show it) with horror, affected it still more
with hatred and with a determination so to hold or tame this wild beast,
her husband’s people, that her son should have his right at last, and
that she herself might be free from a ceaseless humiliation.
They were killing men everywhere: they had killed the offensive and
corrupt old Foulon in the streets of Paris—he and his powerful loathsome
son-in-law, Berthier: square-jawed, an oppressor grievous to God,
Berthier who, so lately, in those abortive three days of the Resistance,
had sat at the King’s elbow promising that Paris should be held;
Berthier had been clubbed to death and shot down as he swung a musket in
defence of his big body. In the provinces everywhere the country houses
burned.
The Queen waited. She wrote to her brother, to her dear friend Madame de
Polignac; she chose (in the absence of that friend) a new governess for
the Children of France, the worthy widow of Tourzel, a duchess for the
occasion. She waited and did nothing. All September was a wrangling over
the King’s Veto—his right to refuse a law: she may have known vaguely
that to her the nickname of “Veto” was thereby attached: she did not
heed it. In the last days of the month a vigorous attempt to persuade
the King to fly was once more made and once more failed. By October new
troops would have come—their numbers were to prove insufficient for
attack but fatally sufficient for enthusiasm, and that enthusiasm of
loyal courtiers (breaking out almost within earshot of a Paris fretting
at every delay, hungry, mystified) provoked the next disaster.
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