_MIRABEAU_
_From April 1, 1790, to midnight of the 20th June 1791_
THERE existed in France at that moment one force which, in alliance with
the Government, could have preserved the continuity of institutions,
among other institutions of the Throne. That force resided in the
personality of Mirabeau.
Had he survived and so succeeded—for his failure was only possible with
death—the French nation might indeed have preserved all its forms and
would then have lost its principle and power. It might have been
transformed into something of lower vigour than itself, it might have
grown to forget action, and the nineteenth century, which was to see our
civilisation ploughed by the armies and sowed by the ideas of
Napoleon—so that it became a century enormous with French energy and has
left us to-day under a necessity still to persevere—might have been a
time of easy reaction: an Europe without Germany, without Italy: an
Europe having in its midst the vast lethargic body of the French
Monarchy and dominated wholly by the mercantile activity of England.
This, I say, might, or rather would, have been the fate of the
Revolution, and therefore of the world, with what further consequences
we cannot tell, had Mirabeau, once in alliance with the Court, survived;
for wherever in history the continuity of form has been preferred to a
spirit of renascence, such lethargy and such decline have succeeded. But
though an effect of this kind would have resulted for Christendom in
general, for the Queen and for her family the success of Mirabeau would
have been salvation. The air and the tradition of the palace would have
survived; she would have grown old beside her husband in a State
lessened but preserving many of the externals of power; her later years
wise, resigned, and probably magnificent. As it was, the alliance
between Mirabeau and the Court was made—but before the first year of its
effect had run, Mirabeau was dead: he dead, the slope of change led
Marie Antoinette, with rapid and direct insistence, to flight, to
imprisonment, and to the scaffold.
It is but very rarely that so much can be laid to the action of one
brain in history. What were the characters in Mirabeau’s position that
made it true of him in this spring of 1790? They were these: that he had
through certain qualities in him become accepted as the organ of a
popular movement; that, by other qualities more profoundly rooted in
him, he was determined upon order; and, finally, that an early maturity
of judgment—already hardened before his fortieth year—strong passions
often satisfied and their resulting fruit of deadness, much bitter
humiliation, the dreadful annealing of poverty working upon known and
vast capacity, had rendered him quite careless of those imaginary future
things the vision of which alone can support men in the work of
creation. He was now a man walking backwards, observing things known,
judging men, testing their actions and motives as one would test natural
and invariable forces, using the whole either to achieve some end which
had already been achieved elsewhere—which was in existence somewhere and
had reality—or to preserve things still standing around him, things
whose nature he knew. He would have preserved all and he would have
degraded his land. This most national of Frenchmen would have closed to
France her avenue of growth. He was “practical”: and the chief quality
of his people, which is the power most suddenly to evoke a corporate
will, he did not comprehend. It was a mystery, and therefore he ignored
it. Of things hidden he could divine nothing at all. The Faith, for
example, being then driven underground, he utterly despised.
His command of spoken speech, sonorous, incisive, revealing, dominating
by turns; his rapid concentration of phrase, his arrangement and
possession (through others) of innumerable details, were points that
made him the chief of a Parliament: his courage and advancing
presence—for he was a sort of lion—peculiarly suited him to the Gauls,
and his love of men, which was enormous, forbade the growth of those
feminine enmities which are the only perils of our vulgar politicians
to-day, and which sprouted from debate even in the high temper of the
Revolution, as they must sprout wherever talking and not fighting is the
game.
His travel, his wide reading, his communication throughout Europe and in
the greatest houses with numerous close, varied and admiring friends,
gave him that poise and that contempt for vision which made his
leadership, when once he led, secure.
With all this went the passion to administrate, to do, which months of
speeches and of opposition to the executive had but swollen. In April
his opportunity came.
It was the Queen who made this capital move.
For many months indeed he would have come in secret to the aid of the
Court. From the very meeting of the States-General the year before,
Mirabeau had known that his place was with Government rather than in the
tribune. His past of passion forbade him executive power. Necker, with
quite another past—a nasty financial past—had dared to insult him in the
early days of the Parliament. All the summer he had begged La Marck, his
friend, to speak for him to the Queen, to the Throne. La Marck, who was
very close to the Queen and was a companion since Trianon, had spoken,
but Mirabeau was still a voice only, and, to women, an unpleasant one.
In October he had directly attacked the Queen—she held him responsible
for the two dreadful days and the insults of the drag back to Paris. The
decrees in November which preserved the Assembly from decay by
forbidding its members to accept office had closed the Ministry to him:
in December he had tried to work a secret executive power through
Monsieur, and Marie Antoinette’s distrust of Monsieur had again foiled
him. La Marck had given up hope of helping his friend, the decrees and
the debates of the Assembly shook the Throne with increasing violence,
the King was counselless, when, after some long debate within herself,
of which, in the nature of the thing, we can have no hint or record, the
Queen, in the days when the preparation for her child’s sacrament was
her chief affair, and a fortnight or so before that communion,
determined to unite the brain of Mirabeau to the Crown.
She easily persuaded Louis. Before or after that persuasion she spoke to
Mercy, and Mercy wrote to that ancestral Belgic land whither La Marck,
certain that nothing could be done in Paris, and desiring to check the
effects of the revolt in the Austrian Netherlands upon his estates, had
betaken him three months before. La Marck at once returned; he crossed
the frontier, and in his private house, up along the Faubourg St.
Honoré, Mirabeau and Mercy met upon an April evening. All was most
secretly done, so that none, not the populace, nor the Parliament, nor
the courtiers—nor even Necker—should know. These two very separate
abilities, Mercy and Mirabeau, recognised each other: for some days yet
the latter, and the greater, the storm-tossed one, doubted; he still
spoke of “an embassy” for his reward—he stooped to beg favour again of
La Fayette. At last he was convinced of the Court’s sincerity, and on
the 10th of May he wrote for the King—that is, for the Government (there
was no other)—that first admirable Letter of Advice, which remains the
chief monument of his genius. In one year he had proceeded from being an
Evil Reputation to be a Speechifier, from a Speechifier to a something
inspiring dread: now he was secretly in power; in half power; his was
one of the hands on the tiller. To himself that year had been but a year
of debt and makeshift; his principal relief at this vast change was a
relief of the purse.
Mirabeau wanted money. He was a gentleman and his honour wanted it. In
his appetite for it he did all a gentleman would do, sacrificing that
self-respect which men not gentlemen would not part with to save their
lives. He approached enemies and friends indifferently. La Fayette,
whose militia power offended him and whose nullity drove him wild, La
Fayette whom he had attacked and publicly jeered at, he quietly tapped
for £2000 and railed when that cautious Saviour of Two Worlds sent less
than half the sum. He had the gentleman’s morbid shame of old debts and
the gentleman’s carelessness in contracting new. He was of the sort that
kill themselves rather than finally default, and yet who take the road
that makes defaulting sure. To such a man, now rising on the
Revolutionary wave, entertaining, ordering secretarial work on every
side, playing the part of a public god, the offer of the Court was new
life. Yet here again some apology must be offered to the modern reader
for the pettiness of the sum which sufficed in those days to purchase so
much power upon such an occasion. For the salvation of the Monarchy
Mirabeau was to receive, upon the payment of his debts, not half the
income we give to a politician who has climbed on to the Front Bench:
when he had accomplished his task he was to receive, upon retirement, a
sum that would just purchase such a pension as we accord for life to a
nephew or a son-in-law fatigued by two years of the Board of Trade. He
accepted the terms: but for him and for those like him a wage, however
shameful or secret, is but an opportunity for intense and individual
action. He was the more himself and the less a servant when he had wages
to spend. He designed his campaign at once: to see the Queen upon whose
energy alone he relied and in whom—though he had never kissed her hand
or spoken to her face to face—he divined a corresponding courage; and
next, through her, while maintaining his demagogic power, to crush the
growth of anarchy by the welding of an army; and at last to restore the
Monarchy by a civil war. For order was, he imagined, the chief affair,
and anarchy was all that great brain could discover in the early ferment
of the time.
He was a man very capable of being a lover: he was an artist who
ardently desired an instrument: he trusted his capacity with women, and
he far over-priced the power in action though not the vigour of the
Queen. She upon her side dreaded the meeting and delayed it, though
Mercy himself and the new Archbishop of Toulouse, now her confessor,
urged it.
Upon the 4th of June the Court had left Paris for St. Cloud to spend,
within an hour of the capital and within sight of it, the months of
summer. That memorable anniversary of her son’s death isolated and
saddened the woman upon whom was thus thrown a responsibility too great
for her judgment. All the month she hesitated, while the notes from
Mirabeau in his new capacity as Counsellor of the Court, coming in
continually more insistent, more authoritative, and more wide, made the
meeting a necessity. At last, upon the 29th, she decided. A room was
chosen, “such that none could know;” he was to come upon Friday, July 3,
to the little back-door of the garden towards the park: there was a
further delay—he was put off to the morrow. He slept at his sister’s
house at Auteuil, and early on the Saturday morning, taking his sister’s
son with him for sole companion, disguised, he drove to the little
garden-door. Everything was silent about him in the summer morning as he
drove from Auteuil to St. Cloud, that nephew of his riding as his
postillion, and no one by. A certain suspicion weighed upon him. He
remembered the delays, the secrecy; he remembered that no friend loved
him as much as each loved or hated the Crown. Before he put his hand to
the latch he gave the boy a note and said: “If I am not returned within
three-quarters of an hour, give this to the Captain of the Militia,”
and, having said this, he went alone into the garden.
In France and throughout his world the event of those days was the
Federation. In ten days all the delegates would meet upon the Champ de
Mars for the anniversary of the Bastille: the change in men was to be
confirmed in a vast meeting of friendship: the King was to swear and a
world quite renewed was to arise. Even in London the blaze of the
triumph had struck the street, and the common shows were preparing
pictures and models of the feast. Upon this all Europe was turned as the
delegates came swarming daily into the simmering July of Paris and as
the altar rose upon the great open field by the river. For him, and now
for history also, a greater, what might, had Mirabeau lived, have been a
more enduring scene, was the secret morning meeting so prepared.
The Queen awaited him in a room apart, the King at her side. She awaited
with some hesitation the fierce step and the bold eye, the strong pitted
face of “the Monster,” but her rank and a long apprenticeship to
reception had taught her to receive. He came in and saw this woman whom
he had so much desired to see, he spoke with her for half-an-hour, and
as he left her he kissed her hand. Two things remained with him: the
moderation, the over-moderation of the King, but in her a sort of regal
determination which was half an illusion of his own, but which most
powerfully filled his spirit and which left him enfeoffed to the cause
he had so long chosen to serve. He came out to his nephew, where the
carriage waited, radiant, all his energy renewed. He had perhaps a clear
conception of the Queen in action supporting him, determining the King,
eagerly accepting his wisdom and his plans. In that he gave her far too
great a place; but great men impute greatness, and Mirabeau was too
great for women.
The show of the Federation passed, gloriously; the life of the nation
rose to passion and broke bounds. In the matter of the army, by which
alone Authority could live, Mirabeau saw its strength dissolved. The
melting of society had destroyed that discipline, the hardest, the most
necessary and the least explicable bond among men: the frontier mutinied
for arrears of pay, and with the first days of August it was evident
that neither for defence nor for the re-establishment of law would the
army be available. The army, that one solid weapon of the Monarchy, was
now cracked all down the blade. The Army of the East, long, as I have
said, the chief resource of the executive, was affected like the rest of
the service. There Bouillé, a trained and careful man, wealthy, noble,
of course, Whiggish in politics, and of middle age, held the command and
saw from one day to another in all the garrisons of his command the
method of soldiers failing. One mutiny followed another; regimental
chests were seized for arrears of pay; the non-commissioned officers
were no longer with the _cadre_ in spirit; officers of the lower grades
had been insulted, of the higher reluctantly and more reluctantly
obeyed.
It was at this moment that Mirabeau saw fit to give that grave advice
for which posterity has judged him so hardly and which yet betrays the
decision of his soul. He determined upon civil war.
Many things might have saved him and the nation from such a policy:
notably La Fayette, a plaster head of the Militia might have been made a
reserve force behind the failing regulars; and it has been pretended
that La Fayette and Mirabeau were now quite separate, and the wealthy
young fellow useless to his elder the Statesman, because La Fayette, in
opposing Mirabeau’s presidency of the Assembly for the Federation, had
offended the vanity from which great orators suffer. The cause is
insufficient. Mirabeau had lost all hope that La Fayette could act. He
passed him by. What as a fact did prevent the immediate prosecution of
Mirabeau’s policy was the insufficiency of the Queen, and this it was
that saved the country and the memory of her adviser from a course that
would certainly have preserved the Throne.
Contrasted against the surroundings of her family and her Court, even of
her immediate enemies, her decision had shone: contrasted against
Mirabeau’s will it was pale. She preferred, she even attempted to foist
upon him, that project of foreign intervention which, three years later,
killed her; and his famous words in his Advice of August 13 seemed to
her rhetoric or worse. Its style was “extraordinary”: he was “mad.”
“Four enemies are at the charge,” he had written, “the taxes,
repudiation, the army, and winter”—she could not bear the style: but he
was right. The harvest was in—it was not sufficient; a new and vast
increase of assignats was voted—Mirabeau himself most urgently advising
it—and on all this, at the end of August, came Nancy.
The chief and the last foundation of force for the King were the Swiss
regiments. Those of the Guard in the last supreme moment of the Monarchy
all but saved it. At Nancy in that August of 1790 three regiments were
quartered, two French, one Swiss, that called “Château Vieux.” They
mutinied, mainly for pay; after scenes which do not concern this book,
they were broken—upon the last day of the month, with a loss to the
still disciplined troops opposing them of forty officers and ten times
that number of men. The gravity of that day was of a kind we also know,
when, in some crisis (with us such crisis has been for generations
foreign, not domestic) a much graver thing, a much louder noise, brings
to a pitch emotion ready for violence and suddenly presents as a reality
what all had desired or feared. Of such are the first shots of a war,
the first news of a fatal illness. The French mutineers were disbanded.
The opinion of the moment would have tolerated no course more severe:
but—and this was the wedge that struck into the heart of the time and
clove men asunder—the Swiss were made such an example of old things as
the whole Revolution had come to sweep away. True, their own rich
officers were the judges of the Swiss; what was done did not then lie
and does not lie to-day on the conscience of the French people; but when
of these foreign peasants, driven by poverty to a foreign service and
maddened to mutiny by the fraudulent retaining of their pay, _one-half_
were made the subjects of a public horror, the country gasped. The town
of Nancy, a town of great beauty, the flower of Lorraine, had fought
with and had supported the mutineers. It suffered the sight of _half_ of
the whole Swiss regiment marched out for punishment, half sent to
barracks and then reserved for some obscurer fate. Of those so publicly
destroyed, two-thirds were for the galleys, near a third were hanged on
high gallows before all, to turn the stomachs of the new Citizens for a
free state; one was broken on a wheel with clubs, his bones crushed to
satisfy the privileged in a social order already infamous, his blood
spattered on the pavement of a town which had befriended him. It was an
anomaly of hell fallen in the midst of the new hopes and within six
weeks of that clamour of goodwill upon the Champ de Mars when all such
nightmares were to have been buried for ever.
The Assembly voted its thanks for the restoration of order: the vote was
moved by Mirabeau. Bouillé commanded an army now silent, and the thing
was done. But the minority of wealthy men that had thus dared applaud
the executions at Nancy was now cut off from fellowship with the nation,
and the civil war which Mirabeau desired was come in spirit—for the
Government, the only possible executive, the Crown, was with that
minority.
Necker, lost in public opinion, defeated in finance, thoroughly
terrified at the sound of arms, was off across the frontier for ever to
Geneva, his Bible and his money-bags. For a few months Mirabeau’s
strength was to remain increasing, the one central thing—but secretly
his power of action was marred, for, while the Court listened and heard
him, it did not move. He would have seen the Queen—she would not see
him. Already his complicity was guessed by a few—it had been denounced
frenziedly amid parliamentary jeers and laughter by one young man, since
dead: but the rumour had terrified the palace. Mirabeau, still taking
the palace’s pay, still pouring in upon it Advices which he desired to
be commands—(and yet still refused so much as a Royal audience)—grew
continually upon the Parliament.
As his power over the Assembly increased, his fret against the
hesitation of the Court increased with it; it increased to desperation,
and that desperation was the more exasperated because a man of his
temper could not grasp—in the absence of personal interviews—what it was
that held back the Crown. Yet to a man of another temper the explanation
would have been easy. There was a conflict, not only of mediocrity with
genius, not only of two wills—the one accustomed to an inert command,
the other avid to exercise a vigorous one—but a conflict also of ends to
be attained; for that which Mirabeau desired—and which he thought the
King and Queen to desire—was a national thing, whereas what the King and
Queen now desired was a personal thing. He all the while was considering
the Monarchy, an institution necessary to his country: they thought more
and more daily of their individual selves: their habits, their wounded
right, their children—their religion.
In nothing did the friction of that new machine, the alliance between
Mirabeau and the Court, show more than in this matter of religion. To
Mirabeau, as to every vigorous spirit of that generation, the Faith was
inconceivable. How far, by an effort of fancy, he could picture minds
that held it one cannot tell, but one may be certain that he could not
but associate such minds with ineptitude. Now the business of 1790,
unknown to the men who most mixed in that business, was Religion. France
had of herself transformed herself in eighteen months. The Roman
conceptions had returned, the municipalities governed, the whole people
were moving in a stream together, equality had re-arisen to the surface
of things; war, if war came, would be a national thing—the life in each
had determined to be based upon a general will. At this overwhelming
change the Parliament had assisted; it was their function to express its
main features in new laws, and, as to details, to thresh them out in
debate and make them fit the new scheme: among these details was the
definition of the Clergy’s status. The Catholic Church was present—for
the peasants at least—and it must thus still be recognised, its powers
must be defined, the terms of its recognition must be formulated. These
cultivated men of the Parliament—and I include the bishops—had no
conception of Resurrection. The Church was an old thing, passive, woven
into the lower stuff of the State; it would not again be what a dim
tradition affirmed it once to have been. Let it die down quietly in its
villages and go. As for the _Institution_ of it, the higher-salaried
places—its use in Government—why, that was to be Gallican.
Just before the Federation in July the CIVIL CONSTITUTION OF THE CLERGY
had passed the House. Just before Nancy the King had assented, and it
was law.
To the men who spoke and legislated, it was a just and straightforward
law; to us who know a future they could not know, it is a monstrous
absurdity. Priests and bishops “elected”—not by enthusiasm or by clamour
or by a populace ardent, but by paper votes—as we elect our dunderheads
to Westminster! Unity, the prime test of life, secured by no more than a
letter to Rome announcing election and courteously admitting communion!
Every diocese and parish a new creation, created without any
consultation of Peter and his Authority! Yet such was the sleep of the
Faith a century ago that this incredible instrument provoked discussion
only; and such protests as came were not protests of laughter or even of
anger, but protests of argument—with after-thoughts of money. But the
King and the Queen believed.
Had she not suffered, this void of the century in matters of the soul
might have left Marie Antoinette indifferent. She had been indifferent
to that prig-brother of hers when he played the philosopher at Vienna
and the fool in the Netherlands. The populace, who guard the seeds of
religion, were unknown to her as to the King and to the Parliament. But
she had so suffered that she had concentrated upon the Creed: her
husband had always held it simply—he was a simple man. Now, when he
signed the Civil Constitution, and she knew of that act, it was proof
that they had done with the national ferment, that their concern was to
get away, to return, and to reconquer; that henceforward no public act
of theirs, no acceptation of any Reform, had in it or was meant to have
the least validity in conscience. She especially was quite cut off
henceforward from the crown she had worn—it was no longer a symbol of
her State for her; and if she had continued to wear it, as Mirabeau
desired, after a reconquest achieved through civil war, she would have
worn it contentedly over defeated subjects rather than over a nation.
All this Mirabeau saw as little as he saw the passion of the village
priests, the anger of the women in the country-sides. The resistance
(which immediately began) he thought purely political. Priests that
would not take the oath were Partisans of the old tyranny and breakdown;
the Pope, who was preparing his definite refusal, was a subtle Italian
whom he, Mirabeau, must meet by a Gallic brutality. To the King Mirabeau
secretly represented the Civil Constitution and the gathering revolt
against it as an excellent lever for recruiting the provinces and
raising that civil war of the Government against anarchy which was his
whole policy; but to the Assembly (and here it was most of himself that
appeared) he spoke against the Church’s refusal to accept with a
violence that astounded, and at times provoked to rebuke, his most
extreme admirers. All his spirit during that autumn and early winter of
1790-91 is one of diatribe and fury against the intangible foe he
himself had raised.
On the 26th of November he forced the Assembly to vote the prosecution
of priests who refused the oath; on the 4th of January he accused the
hierarchy of their old game—“too well known in our history”—of playing
for an “ultramontane” authority; ten days later, on the 14th, he broke
all bounds: swore that the priests cared little if religion died (and
much he cared for it!) so that their _power_ was saved. The priests
present left the hall. He continued with greater violence, and all the
Assembly protested. On the proposition of Camus (himself next-door to a
Huguenot) it was moved and carried that Mirabeau be no longer heard.
When, a bare week after all this, a Letter of Advice reached the King
from Mirabeau headed, “_On the Way to make use of the Civil
Constitution_,” how should the King not be bewildered?
The King read it; he found a stupefying series of counsels. How could so
simple a man as he understand the contradiction between Mirabeau’s
public speeches and secret executive advice? “No time” (he read in
Mirabeau’s private communication to the Crown)—“No time could be more
favourable for uniting all the malcontents, the most dangerous ones, and
raising his royal popularity to the detriment of the Assembly;” he was
to provoke resistance secretly, to refuse executive aid: to throw the
odium of the Civil Constitution _and_ of the priests’ resistance to it
on the Assembly. What could a man of Louis’ kind make of all this? Had
Marie Antoinette been a she-Mirabeau, as Mirabeau half-believed her to
be, _she_ might have followed the plan. Contrariwise, she was a
Christian mother, much too untaught and too devout by now to use
religion for political intrigue. To emphasise their bewilderment, this
Husband and Wife find that their late Confessor—whom they had
indignantly rejected for his schism—had taken the oath at the pressing
of Mirabeau himself.... It is not to be wondered at that Mirabeau’s
advice hung fire.
There were other glaring contrasts between his public and his private
view: there was Mirabeau’s high playing of the demagogue rôle. He must
roar with the Jacobins: that organisation, the “radical thousand” of
Paris, and a hundred and fifty societies at its back throughout France,
already directed the storm from the October of ’90. He mixed with it,
flattered it, became its powerful spokesman in the Assembly, was its
President by the end of November; and while he so marked and emphasised
with his voice and will almost every one of the succeeding steps that
led towards a pure democracy, he marvelled that the Court would not
accept his secret counsel and believe his support of the Crown to be his
true motive of action all the while. It was indeed his main motive; but
men of his stature also require applause, and the double part he filled
was acted too brilliantly upon its public side for his private
statesmanship—to which all his intellect and much of his heart was
really devoted—to obtain full weight at the palace. He was permanently
mistrusted, and he met that mistrust by chance phrases of contempt or
insult which he may or may not have intended to be repeated to the woman
and the office which he desired both to guide and to save.
In one thing, however, his influence still weighed: in that one thing it
would have sufficed, had he lived, to save the Queen. I mean in the
plan, still debated and still postponed, for the abandonment of Paris by
the Crown.
I have said that the main misunderstanding between the Queen and
Mirabeau lay in this, that for him a national, for her a domestic, end
was now in view. For months he had urged a public withdrawal from the
capital, a public appeal to the armed forces, a withdrawal to some near
and loyal town, a town with a palace and tradesmen dependent on it—to
Compiègne, for instance, a long day’s ride[18] away; thereafter an
appeal to the provinces and, if the extremists and Paris would fight,
then a civil war and a reconquest of power. He had talked of the Queen
on horseback with her son; he resurrected Maria Theresa and imagined
bold things. The Queen desired for her husband, herself, and her
children merely safety: but she would not leave the King.
Footnote 18:
To be accurate, a little less than fifty miles.
Once that summer the Queen and her children had driven out from St.
Cloud towards the western woods that overhang the Seine; the King and
his gentlemen had ridden westward also in the wooded plain below. Many
in either retinue had thought the moment come, but each party returned
at evening.
Returned to Paris in the autumn, the rising flood of public feeling made
a public appeal and a public withdrawal more difficult with every
succeeding month, and month after month it was postponed.
The foreigner, of whom the French had hardly thought during the first
months of their enthusiasm, now re-arose before them; many were already
anxious for the frontier, and already the irritant of German menace,
which was to lead at last from Valmy to Wattignies and from Wattignies
to Jena, had begun to chafe the military appetites of Paris. Were war to
break out with the spring of the next year—nay, were it only in the
air—the escape of the King from Paris would be more difficult than ever.
It was at the close of October,[19] before the Court had left St. Cloud
for Paris, that the plan for leaving Paris first took definite shape and
that Louis sent Parniers with a message to Bouillé at Metz.
Footnote 19:
Oct. 20, not the 23rd, a date accepted since the publication of
Bouillé’s Memoirs in 1833, but corrected by collation with the
original two years ago.
Mirabeau had pointed to Bouillé as the only general to defend that
march; not because Bouillé was on the frontier, but because Bouillé had
got his army in hand again, was very capable, did not intrigue. But
Bouillé, in Mirabeau’s design, was to come westward and to receive the
King at Compiègne. The General himself accepted such a plan and urged
it. The King still preferred a flight to the very frontier, Besançon for
choice, and it is impossible—when his reluctance to leave at all is
considered, his whole character, his wife’s counsel, and her previous
attitude in the letters and appeals of that summer—to doubt that the
Queen had moulded that decision. It was not a firm choice. Bouillé’s
son, coming at Christmas to Paris to sound people and things, found La
Fayette of very dubious loyalty, and he doubted the aid of the Militia.
He saw Fersen (the young fellow took for granted that Fersen was the
Queen’s lover); he saw him in Fersen’s own house in the Faubourg St.
Honoré. They discussed the rottenness of the army, the unlikeliness of
immediate foreign aid. It was decided to postpone the thing for three
months.
And meanwhile the Queen heard debated before her the alternatives of a
flight to the frontier and of a domestic rising nearer Paris in defence
of the Crown. She was by all her bent—and was increasingly to be—in
favour of foreign support; but Mirabeau’s counsel was something to her.
At the end of February it prevailed, and La Marck came to Bouillé at
Metz with the news that Mirabeau’s plan should be considered. Bouillé
agreed. There was to be no suggestion of flight: the Court’s choice of
the frontier was to be abandoned. Compiègne should be the goal of a
short and determined march. The soldier rejoiced, as did Mirabeau, that
a final decision had been made, that no near presence of foreign aid was
expected, and that the idea of a flight to the frontier was given up.
March, perhaps the close of it, was to see the thing done, and so with
the spring was to be issued the challenge to civil war: then and then
only, if necessary, might there follow a retirement upon a fortress.
The thing was dangerous and more dangerous. Mesdames, the King’s aunts,
had left their country house at great pains for Italy: the populace had
all but detained them. La Fayette, a month later, had disarmed certain
gentlemen of the palace and had insisted that his Militia alone mount
guard. It was certain, as March crept on, that the decision must soon be
taken, and that the double power of Mirabeau over Court and Parliament
could alone force the exit from Paris to a well-chosen town, and so
decide the issue of a Restoration of the Monarchy now so grievously
imperilled. Mirabeau still grew in power, still spoke in his loudest
tones, still watched, and drove all his team of political dupes and
Royal clients, still remained strongly double. Swearing to one that he
had all ready for the end of Monarchy if the King should fly; writing
continually (and more sincerely) to another his plans in aid of such a
flight; asking for yet more money (on the 2nd of March); urging a
further double-dealing with the Assembly in a secret and verbal message
to the King (on the 13th); betraying the Jacobins, his Jacobins, in a
private letter (on the 21st). Doing all this with his intrigue fully
formed, and the royal family already sheltered under the wing of that
intrigue, Fate entered.
It was on the 24th of March that Mirabeau wrote his last letter to La
Marck. His friend had mining rights in the kingdom: the new mining laws
were down for debate that week. He promised to speak, and on the morning
of the 27th he called on La Marck upon his way to the _manège_; he was
faint and compelled to rest awhile upon a couch there, but he rallied
and went on to the Parliament. It was Sunday. The streets were full of
people: he was recognised, followed, and cheered.
Upon that 27th of March he spoke more than once: his ill-ease was not
apparent. On the 28th he was struck. But even so lying in his bed, for
the next three days, in spite of an increasing agony, he made of his
moments of respite occasions for set words, usually well chosen, pagan,
proud, memorable, and a trifle affected. A crowd in the street without
kept guard and silence. A crowd was about his bed continually.
Talleyrand, reconciled, came; La Marck, who loved him, came
repeatedly—and a hundred others. He spoke, and they spoke, of Death, as
a matter for converse, often for jest. La Marck quizzed him: “Oh, you
connoisseur of great death-beds!” Talleyrand told him that he came,
“like the populace, to hear.” A man who loved him said well, “that he
acted death as a great actor upon a national stage.” Astounding courage,
and more astounding silence upon the thing he had never cared for or
believed: all the greatness and all the void of the eighteenth century
was here. He admitted God, however, and rallied his good doctor, a
materialist—as then were all, and still are most, experts in viscera:
the days were sun-lit, and the sun reminded him of God. So for four
days; upon the fifth day, the 2nd of April, at half-past eight in the
morning, those watching his last and silent agony saw that he was dead.
* * * * *
Many modern historians have said that the death of Mirabeau affected but
little the plans that had been made for flight.
It is an error. The death of Mirabeau changed all, and it was one more
of those hammer-blows of Fate exactly coincident with the sequence of
the Queen’s weird.
It is true that the flight was already long arranged. It is true that
its very details were planned for the most part long before Mirabeau
died. Nevertheless had Mirabeau lived the whole thing would have had a
different issue; and for this reason, that Mirabeau dominated all that
world—not only the world of the Court but also the world of Parliament,
and, in some indirect way, the world of Opinion as well—by Will. Any
action that the Court had taken with Mirabeau alive and active would
have been bent to Mirabeau’s plan, and even if the flight had been, not
(as he counselled) to Compiègne, but to Montmédy and the frontier,
Mirabeau would have forced at once its success and a consequent civil
war. He would have permitted no departure without being privy to it; he
would have sworn, shouted, cajoled and persuaded doubly upon either
side—for Mirabeau was a soldierly man; he had a plan and could use men
by ordering. He could use them for the achievement of a fixed end, which
was now the salvation of the Monarchy; for he believed the Monarchy to
be the skeleton and framework of France—this creative light of the
Revolution around him seemed to him a mere mist and dazzle. Great as he
was, I repeat it, the Revolution seemed to him to be drifting towards an
Anarchy. He was like a landsman who may be brave and domineering but who
shudders when he first comes across the temper of the sea.
But what might have happened is but hypothesis. For Mirabeau died; and
Mirabeau once dead it was necessarily certain that the Court, left to
itself, should attempt to preserve not Monarchy but merely the Court.
Mirabeau living, that determination of theirs to save their bodies would
have done no harm, and the eagerness of the Queen to get away to the
neighbourhood of friends would have been used as human intelligence uses
the instinct of animals. Mirabeau dead, that force ran ever along its
own blind line, attempting merely to save the persons of the King and
Queen and their children. Attempting so small a thing it happened to
fail: but on the failure or success of that attempt the largest things
depended.
It was, as we have seen, upon Saturday the 2nd of April that Mirabeau
died, and had said in dying that there went with him the last shreds of
the Monarchy.
The Sunday following his death was that upon which the Schismatic
Priests said their first Masses in every parish of the city.
* * * * *
I have not space to reiterate in this volume the vast issue involved. I
have sufficiently emphasised and shall further emphasise the profound
truth that every Civil Revolution is theological at bottom, because, at
bottom, it must be based upon a divergence of philosophy: a divergence
between the philosophies of the old order and the new. A chance test of
philosophy thrown at random into the Revolutionary movement had
separated men suddenly and was rifting the State asunder; for a
fortnight Paris raged upon the Nationalisation of the Church.
I will not detain the reader. There was here one of those double duties
where the wisest get most bewildered and the most sincere go the
furthest astray. Let the reader remember (difficult as it is to do so in
the religious atmosphere of our time) that with the educated of that day
Religion was dead—with the populace of Paris even more dead. The thing
was a mere emblem. Its last little flickering light (which we have since
seen to grow to so great a flame) was not comprehended, save as a
political institution, by the great bulk of the Parliament, by the
professions, by the workers; the very beggars in the street despised the
Faith, and the shrines were empty. You were a priest or one of the very
few Mass-goers? Then you were suspected of supporting the old forms of
civil polity! After the Civil Constitution of the Clergy you
deliberately refused to take a reasonable oath to the Constitution and
the new-born Liberty of Men? Then you were a traitor, and a silly
traitor at that. Let it be remembered that at this moment Religion had
no warriors. All the vast rally of the nineteenth century was undreamt
of. The bishops were place-hunters full of evil living;[20] the Creed an
empty historic formula: a convention like the conventions of “party” in
England to-day. The reader _must_ see this, in spite of all the
nineteenth century may have taught him to the contrary, or he will never
see the Revolution.
Footnote 20:
We have seen Mgr. of Narbonne. His mistress was his own niece.
In such a crisis two factors, quite uncomprehended, stood like
rocks—they were but small minorities: so are rocks small accidents in
the general sea. The one was that little group of people who still
practised the united Catholic Faith—and it just so happened that of
these the King was one, his sister another, and—from the beginning in
her light, easy way, latterly with increasing depth—his wife a third;
the other factor was the mass of the humbler Clergy. They felt as by an
instinct the note of unity; they refused to subscribe: to all, or nearly
all, the bishops it was—for the most part—a matter of rank and policy to
resist the _Bill_; to the two-thirds of the country Clergy to resist the
_Law_ was loyalty to our Lord.
What the King felt in that quarrel we all know. Marie Antoinette, in
spite of her devotion, was never able to neglect the human, the purely
temporal, the vulgarly political aspect of the quarrel. Her husband,
sincerely sympathetic though he was with the French temper, thought
mainly of the Divine interests in the matter; though he thought slowly
and badly, that was his thought. The populace, the politicians—all the
world—saw nothing whatsoever in the Catholic resistance but a dodge
devised by privilege to put a spoke in the wheel of the Revolution. And
Paris especially, having for so long abandoned religion, raged round the
refusal of the priests.
It is pitiful to read how small a rally the Faith could make! _One_
chapel in all Paris was hired for the true Mass to be said therein, and
handfuls here and there put forward a timid claim to approach the only
altar which Rome acknowledged. I say it for the third or for the fourth
time, to-day we cannot understand these things, for the Resurrection of
the Catholic Church stands between us and them; but to this Paris on
that Lenten Sunday, the 3rd of April 1791, the presence of the
Schismatic Clergy, each in his parish, was a plain challenge launched
against the Crown, and it was nothing more: the attachment of the Court
to the Roman Unity seemed to Paris a mere political intrigue, odious and
unnational and stinking of treason. For a fortnight the Parisian anger
raged, and the 17th of April was Palm Sunday.
It has become a rule for those who are in communion with the Catholic
Church that they should receive the Sacraments at least once a year, and
that at Easter or thereabouts; a rule defined, if I am not mistaken,
during the struggle with the Lutheran—that latest of the great heresies.
This rule the King had satisfied, and on that Palm Sunday had taken
Communion in his Chapel from a priest who had not sworn the Civic Oath.
All the customary talk of some religious necessity by which he was in
conscience compelled to leave Paris is balderdash. The attempt he made
the next day, the Monday, to leave the city in order to spend the Easter
days in the suburban palace of St. Cloud was purely political. Religion
had no part therein. It cannot be determined to-day—unless indeed
further evidence should come before us—how much the mere desire to prove
a liberty of action on the part of the Court, how much a sort of
challenge sure to be defeated, how much a hope that escape would be
easier from a suburban point, entered into this plan; but it is quite
certain that the Body of the Lord and His Resurrection had nothing
whatsoever to do with it. And when upon Monday of Holy Week, the 18th of
April, a little before noon, the royal family got into their carriage to
drive, as was their constitutional right, to the neighbouring palace
those few miles away where the populace could not surround them, a
crowd, organised as were these crowds of the Revolution, held them all
around. The scene has been repeated too often to be repeated here; one
character marks it—it is one of profound importance—for the first time
armed and disciplined force was wholly upon the side of the Revolution.
The Militia which La Fayette had formed were with the people, and the
common will of that great mob was present also in the men who bore arms.
It had not been so in any of the movements antecedent to this, unless we
admit the sharp national anger of the loose and almost civilian “French
Guards” against the hired German Cavalry in July 1789. Hitherto there
had been a distinction between the people at large and that portion of
the people which was armed and disciplined, a distinction which now
broke down because to the French temper on this Monday of Holy Week 1791
the issue was too grave for such distinctions. The national King must be
kept in Paris; the people would not let him leave, much as a man will
not let his money go out of his sight or out of his control.
Let it be noted that here, as is invariably the case throughout the
history of the French people, the general mass had easily learned a
secret thing: All the bamboozlement had failed—as it is failing to-day
in spite of the financial press of Paris, the Secret Societies, and
every other instrument of fraud. The vast crowd which hustled round the
King’s carriage knew and freely repeated his project of invasion which
had now been so carefully and, as it was thought, so secretly plotted
for six months.
The French people are accustomed to, and have, as it were, an appetite
for, duels in the dark where one of the two combatants must die. There
was determination upon the one side—without proof—that the King desired
to fly and must be restrained. There was determination upon the
other—accompanied by frequent denial—that the King should escape to the
French frontier and should be free.
Not the next day, but the day after, Wednesday in Holy Week, the Queen,
the Queen herself pulled the trigger. All that blind force of desire for
the mere personal safety of her family, which Mirabeau would have
controlled, but which in her unguided hands was an unreasoning torrent,
impelled her action. She wrote to Mercy that her very life was in danger
and that the business must be done with next month at the latest. She
mentioned the place of flight, Montmédy.
Eight weeks followed, during which every effort of the royal family was
directed to the achievement of a mere flight.
The limits of these pages do not permit me the many details which could
make of that early summer a long book of intrigue. When the thing had
failed each had his excuses, and Bouillé would have it that with a
docile obedience on the part of the Court he could have saved the Court.
It may be argued that if the King had gone by way of Rheims he would
have escaped. It may be argued that the delay of twenty-four hours
(which certainly did take place) made such and such a difference. All
these arguments fall to the ground when it is considered that the King
did escape from Paris, escaped easily along the road to the frontier,
was safe and trebly safe until, as will be seen, two accidents, wholly
incalculable and each a clear part of Fate, broke that immemorial Crown
of the French Monarchy. The first (as will be seen) was the error—if it
was an error—made by young Choiseul on the Chalons road—a mere
mechanical one; the second—much more miraculous—was the ride of Drouet,
galloping in a dark night under a covered moon wildly through the very
difficult ridgeway of Argonne, and even that miracle only just came off
by fifteen minutes. It was not delay, whether of twenty-four hours or of
a fortnight, which brought them back to Paris. It was that other force
for which we have no name, but which one may call if one likes Necessity
or Something Written.
* * * * *
[Illustration:
FACSIMILE OF THE FIRST PAGE OF THE ADDRESS TO THE FRENCH PEOPLE,
WRITTEN BY LOUIS XVI BEFORE HIS FLIGHT
]
Fersen, who loved the Queen and whom the Queen loved, had stood in the
centre of the plot, had seen all the conspirators, and brought to its
climax everything. He was now to risk his life. The great
travelling-carriage, called a berline (which easily held three people
upon either side), was waiting in its shed in the stables of the house
he had hired, as the summer solstice-a date fatal to the
Bourbons—approached. Fersen himself in disguise was to drive them,
disguised also, from their palace by night in a cab to where that
travelling-coach awaited them. Their passports were ready; the
children’s governess, the Duchess of Tourzel, was to play the part of
the chief personage and to be called the Baroness of Korff. The Queen
was to be the governess of her children, the King her valet, his sister
a maid; the children were to be Madame de Korff’s children, and the
Dauphin was dressed as a girl and called by a girl’s name.
* * * * *
There are a few square yards in Paris which should be famous in history.
Here Joan of Arc fell in her failure to force the western gate of the
city. Here to-day is the hotel called the Hôtel de Normandie, frequented
by foreigners, and opposite is a money-changer’s booth. Here the Rue St.
Honoré crosses the Rue de l’Echelle. There[21] at midnight of the 20th
of June, Fersen, dressed as a coachman, was waiting with his cab to
drive them to the travelling-coach which awaited them at the eastern
boundary of the city. He had already visited the palace to make all
sure. His disguise was good, his acting excellent. His love compelled
him. He took snuff with the other cabbies. He waited resignedly. The
lights went out, midnight approached, and first one, then another of
certain beings approached him down the dark alley that led from the
courtyards of the palace. The King came, and the royal children, their
governess, and the King’s sister. Last of all, and after some delay, the
Queen. All of them had escaped safely from what was the chief barrier
around them all—the Militia Guard. When they were well in their cab,
Fersen, that devoted man, drove them in a leisurely manner to the gates
of the city, found the berline drawn up on the high road, and with it
two Gentlemen of the Guard who had come, disguised in old yellow
liveries, to act as postillions, while a third had ridden on to the
post-house. Fersen had the berline driven by his servants, himself upon
the box, and so reached, in that earliest of all dawns of the year, the
first post and relay, the suburban post-house of Bondy.
Footnote 21:
To be accurate, the exact spot was a few steps to the south of the
present crossing or much about the middle of the modern Rue de
l’Echelle, and opposite No. 3 of that street.
There was light in the North. He saw before him at that hour the free
road to the frontier; the country and the simple minds of subjects; the
happy past returning; the end at last of all that Parisian fever, and
the chastisement perhaps of all that Parisian violence—at any rate, the
solution of the whole affair. His friend was free.
* * * * *
The King had but to reach the garrisons of the east and Austria would
move, the last of the regular French armies would advance: now that the
royal person was no more in danger from such a march, the march on Paris
would begin.
But it was the summer solstice, a moment ill-omened to the Bourbons.
[Illustration:
Map of the FLIGHT to VARENNES and the RETURN
]
------------------------------------------------------------------------