ranks, and pressed the king to resist changes sure to be injurious to
them. They became a Conservative party. The court was on their side,
with the Count d'Artois at its head, and the queen and her immediate
circle.
The king remained firm in the belief that popularity is the best form
of authority, and he relied on the wholesome dread of democracy to
make the rich aristocrats yield to his wishes. As long as the Commons
exerted the inert pressure of delay, he watched the course of events.
When at the end of five tedious and unprofitable weeks they began
their attack, he was driven slowly, and without either confidence or
sympathy, to take his stand with the nobles, and to shrink from the
indefinite change that was impending.
When the Commons met to deliberate on the morning of the 6th of May,
the deputies were unknown to each other. It was necessary to proceed
with caution, and to occupy ground on which they could not be divided.
Their unanimity was out of danger so long as nothing more complex was
discussed than the verification of powers. The other orders resolved
at once that each should examine its own returns. But this vote, which
the nobles carried by a majority of 141, obtained in the clergy a
majority of only 19. It was evident at once that the party of
privilege was going asunder, and that the priests were nearly as well
inclined to the Commons as to the _noblesse_. It became advisable to
give them time, to discard violence until the arts of conciliation
were exhausted and the cause of united action had been pleaded in
vain. The policy of moderation was advocated by Malouet, a man of
practical insight and experience, who had grown grey in the service of
the State. It was said that he defended the slave trade; he attempted
to exclude the public from the debates; he even offered, in
unauthorised terms, to secure the claims, both real and formal, of the
upper classes. He soon lost the ear of the House. But he was a man of
great good sense, as free from ancient prejudice as from modern
theory, and he never lost sight of the public interest in favour of a
class. The most generous proposals on behalf of the poor afterwards
emanated from him, and parliamentary life in France began with his
motion for negotiation with the other orders.
He was supported by Mounier, one of the deepest minds of that day, and
the most popular of the deputies. He was a magistrate of Grenoble, and
had conducted the Estates of Dauphine with such consummate art and
wisdom that all ranks and all parties had worked in harmony. They had
demanded equal representation and the vote in common; they gave to
their deputies full powers instead of written instructions, only
requiring that they should obtain a free government to the best of
their ability; they resolved that the chartered rights of their
province should not be put in competition with the new and theoretic
rights of the nation. Under Mounier's controlling hand the prelate and
the noble united to declare that the essential liberties of men are
ensured to them by nature, and not by perishable title-deeds.
Travellers had initiated him in the working of English institutions,
and he represented the school of Montesquieu; but he was an
emancipated disciple and a discriminate admirer. He held Montesquieu
to be radically illiberal, and believed the famous theory which
divides powers without isolating them to be an old and a common
discovery. He thought that nations differ less in their character than
in their stage of progress, and that a Constitution like the
English applies not to a region, but to a time. He belonged to
that type of statesmanship which Washington had shown to be so
powerful--revolutionary doctrine in a conservative temper. In the
centre of affairs the powerful provincial betrayed a lack of sympathy
and attraction. He refused to meet Sieyes, and persistently denounced
and vilified Mirabeau. Influence and public esteem came to him at
once, and in the great constructive party he was a natural leader, and
predominated for a time. But at the encounter of defeat, his austere
and rigid character turned it into disaster; and as he possessed but
one line of defence, the failure of his tactics was the ruin of his
cause. Although he despaired prematurely, and was vociferously
repentant of his part in the great days of June, parading his
sackcloth before Europe, he never faltered in the conviction that the
interests of no class, of no family, of no man, can be preferred to
those of the nation. Napoleon once said with a sneer: "You are still
the man of 1789." Mounier replied: "Yes, sir. Principles are not
subject to the law of change."
He desired to adopt the English model, which meant: representation of
property; an upper house founded upon merit, not upon descent; royal
veto and right of dissolution. This could only be secured by active
co-operation on the part of all the conservative elements. To obtain
his majority he required that the other orders should come over, not
vanquished and reluctant, but under the influence of persuasion.
Mirabeau and his friends only wished to put the nobles in the wrong,
to expose their obstinacy and arrogance, and then to proceed without
them. The plan of Mounier depended on a real conciliation.
The clergy were ready for a conference; and by their intervention the
nobles were induced to take part in it. There, on May 23, the
Archbishop of Vienne, who was in the confidence of Mounier, declared
that the clergy recognised the duty of sharing taxes in equal
proportion. The Duke of Luxemburg, speaking for the nobles, made the
same declaration. The intention, he said, was irrevocable; but he
added that it would not be executed until the problem of the
Constitution was solved. The nobles declined to abandon the mode of
separate verification which had been practised formerly. And when the
Commons objected that what was good in times of civil dissension was
inapplicable to the Arcadian tranquillity of 1789, the others were
not to blame if they treated the argument with contempt.
The failure of the conference was followed by an event which confirmed
Necker in the belief that he was not waiting in vain. He received
overtures from Mirabeau. Until that time Mirabeau had been notorious
for the obtrusive scandal of his life, and the books he had written
under pressure of need did not restore his good name. People avoided
him, not because he was brutal and vicious like other men of his rank,
but because he was reputed a liar and a thief. During one of his
imprisonments he had obtained from Dupont de Nemours communication of
an important memoir embodying Turgot's ideas on local government. He
copied the manuscript, presented it to the minister as his own work,
and sold another copy to the booksellers as the work of Turgot.
Afterwards he offered to suppress his letters from Prussia if the
Government would buy them at the price he could obtain by publishing
them. Montmorin paid what he asked for, on condition that he renounced
his candidature in Provence. Mirabeau agreed, spent the money on his
canvass, and made more by printing what he had sold to the king.
During the contest, by his coolness, audacity, and resource, he soon
acquired ascendency. The nobles who rejected him were made to feel his
power. When tumults broke out, he appeased them by his presence, and
he moved from Marseilles to Aix escorted by a retinue of 200
carriages. Elected in both places by the Third Estate, he came to
Versailles hoping to repair his fortune. There it was soon apparent
that he possessed powers of mind equal to the baseness of his conduct.
He is described by Malouet as the only man who perceived from the
first where the Revolution was tending; and his enemy Mounier avows
that he never met a more intelligent politician. He was always ready
to speak, and always vigorous and adroit. His renowned orations were
often borrowed, for he surrounded himself with able men, mostly
Genevese, versed in civil strife, who supplied him with facts,
mediated with the public, and helped him in the press. Rivarol said
that his head was a gigantic sponge, swelled out with other men's
ideas. As extempore speaking was a new art, and the ablest men read
their speeches, Mirabeau was at once an effective debater--probably
the best debater, though not the most perfect orator, that has
appeared in the splendid record of parliamentary life in France. His
father was one of the most conspicuous economists, and he inherited
their belief in a popular and active monarchy, and their preference
for a single chamber.
In 1784 he visited London, frequented the Whigs, and supplied Burke
with a quotation. He did not love England, but he thought it a
convincing proof of the efficacy of paper Constitutions, that a few
laws for the protection of personal liberty should be sufficient to
make a corrupt and ignorant people prosper.
His keynote was to abandon privilege and to retain the prerogative;
for he aspired to sway the monarchy, and would not destroy the power
he was to wield. The king, he said, is the State, and can do no wrong.
Therefore he was at times the most violent and indiscreet of men, and
at times unaccountably moderate and reserved; and both parts were
carefully prepared. As he had a fixed purpose before him, but neither
principle nor scruple, no emergency found him at a loss, or
embarrassed by a cargo of consistent maxims. Incalculable, and unfit
to trust in daily life, at a crisis he was the surest and most
available force. From the first moment he came to the front. On the
opening day he was ready with a plan for a consultation in common,
before deciding whether they should act jointly or separately. The
next day he started a newspaper, in the shape of a report to his
constituents, and when the Government attempted to suppress it, he
succeeded, May 19, in establishing the liberty of the press.
The first political club, afterwards that of the Jacobins, was
founded, at his instigation, by men who did not know the meaning of a
club. For, he said to them, ten men acting together can make a hundred
thousand tremble apart from each other. Mirabeau began with caution,
for his materials were new and he had no friends. He believed that
the king was really identified with the magnates, and that the Commons
were totally unprepared to confront either the court or the
approaching Revolution. He thought it hopeless to negotiate with his
own doomed order, and meant to detach the king from them. When the
scheme of conciliation failed, his opportunity came. He requested
Malouet to bring him into communication with ministers. He told him
that he was seriously alarmed, that the nobles meant to push
resistance to extremity, and that his reliance was on the Crown. He
promised, if the Government would admit him to their confidence, to
support their policy with all his might. Montmorin refused to see him.
Necker reluctantly consented. He had a way of pointing his nose at the
ceiling, which was not conciliatory, and he received the hated visitor
with a request to know what proposals he had to make. Mirabeau, purple
with rage at this frigid treatment by the man he had come to save,
replied that he proposed to wish him good morning. To Malouet he said,
"Your friend is a fool, and he will soon have news of me." Necker
lived to regret that he had thrown such a chance away. At the time,
the interview only helped to persuade him that the Commons knew their
weakness, and felt the need of his succour.
Just then the expected appeal reached him from the ecclesiastical
quarter. When it was seen that the nobles could not be constrained by
fair words, the Commons made one more experiment with the clergy. On
May 27 they sent a numerous and weighty deputation to adjure them, in
the name of the God of peace and of the national welfare, not to
abandon the cause of united action. The clergy this time invoked the
interposition of Government.
On the 30th conferences were once more opened, and the ministers were
present. The discussion was as inconclusive as before, and, on June 4,
Necker produced a plan of his own. He proposed, in substance, separate
verification, the crown to decide in last instance. It was a solution
favourable to the privileged orders, one of which had appealed to him.
He wanted their money, not their power. The clergy agreed. The
Commons were embarrassed what to do, but were quickly relieved; for
the nobles replied that they had already decided simply to try their
own cases. By this act, on June 9, negotiations were broken off.
The decision had been taken in the apartments of the Duchess of
Polignac, the queen's familiar friend, and it made a breach between
the court and the minister at the first step he had taken since the
Assembly met. Up to this point the aristocracy were intelligible and
consistent. They would make no beginning of surrender until they knew
how far it would lead them, or put themselves at the mercy of a
hostile majority without any assurance for private rights. Malouet
offered them a guarantee, but he was disavowed by his colleagues in a
way that warned the nobles not to be too trusting.
Nobody could say how far the edifice of privilege was condemned to
crumble, or what nucleus of feudal property, however secured by
contract and prescription, would be suffered to remain. The nobles
felt justified in defending things which were their own by law, by
centuries of unquestioned possession, by purchase and inheritance, by
sanction of government, by the express will of their constituents. In
upholding the interest, and the very existence, of the class they
represented, they might well believe that they acted in the spirit of
true liberty, which depends on the multiplicity of checking forces,
and that they were saving the throne. From the engagement to renounce
fiscal exemption, and submit to the equal burden of taxation, they did
not recede, and they claimed the support of the king. Montlosier, who
belonged to their order, pronounced that their case was good and their
argument bad. Twice they gave the enemy an advantage. When they saw
the clergy waver, they resolved, by their usual majority of 197 to 44,
that each order possessed the right of nullification; so that they
would no more yield to the separate vote of the three Estates than to
their united vote. Evidently the country would support those who
denied the veto and were ready to overrule it, against those who gave
no hope that anything would be done. Again, when they declined the
Government proposals, they isolated themselves, and became an
obstruction. They had lost the clergy. They now repulsed the minister.
Nothing was left them except their hopes of the king. They ruined him
as well as themselves. It did not follow that, because they supported
the monarchy, they were sure of the monarch. And it was a graver
miscalculation to think that a regular army is stronger than an
undisciplined mob, and that the turbulent Parisians, eight miles off,
could not protect the deputies against regiments of horse and foot,
commanded by the gallant gentlemen of France, accustomed for centuries
to pay the tax of blood, and fighting now in their own cause.
There was nothing more to be done. The arts of peace were exhausted. A
deliberate breach with legality could alone fulfil the national
decree. The country had grown tired of dilatory tactics and prolonged
inaction. Conciliation, tried by the Commons, by the clergy, and by
the Government, had been vain. The point was reached where it was
necessary to choose between compulsion and surrender, and the Commons
must either employ the means at their command to overcome resistance,
or go away confessing that the great movement had broken down in their
hands, and that the people had elected the wrong men. Inaction and
delay had not been a policy, but the preliminary of a policy. It was
reasonable to say that they would try every possible effort before
resorting to aggression; but it would have been unmeaning to say that
they would begin by doing nothing, and that afterwards they would
continue to do nothing. Their enemy had been beforehand with them in
making mistakes. They might hazard something with less danger now.
Victory indeed was assured by the defection among the nobles and the
clergy. Near fifty of the one, and certainly more than one hundred of
the others, were ready to come over. Instead of being equal, the
parties were now two to one. Six hundred Commons could not control the
same number of the deputies of privilege. But eight hundred deputies
were more than a match for four hundred. Therefore, on June 10, the
Commons opened the attack and summoned the garrison. Mirabeau gave
notice that one of the Paris deputies had an important motion to
submit. The mover was more important than the motion, for this was the
apparition of Sieyes, the most original of the revolutionary
statesmen, who, within a fortnight of this, his maiden speech, laid
low the ancient monarchy of France. He was a new member, for the Paris
elections had been delayed, the forty deputies took their seats three
weeks after the opening, and Sieyes was the last deputy chosen. He
objected to the existing stagnation, believing that there was no duty
to the nobles that outweighed the duty to France. He proposed that the
other orders be formally invited to join, and that the House should
proceed to constitute itself, and to act with them if they came,
without them if they stayed away. The returns were accordingly
verified, and Sieyes then moved that they should declare themselves
the National Assembly, the proper name for that which they claimed to
be.
In spite of Malouet, and even of Mirabeau, on June 17 this motion was
carried by 491 to 90. All taxes became dependent on the Assembly. The
broad principle on which Sieyes acted was that the Commons were really
the nation. The upper classes were not an essential part of it. They
were not even a natural and normal growth, but an offending
excrescence, a negative quantity, to be subtracted, not to be added
up. That which ought not to exist ought not to be represented. The
deputies of the Third Estate appeared for the whole. Alone they were
sufficient to govern it, for alone they were identified with the
common interest.
Sieyes was not solicitous that his invitation should be obeyed, for
the accession of the other orders might displace the majority. Those
who possessed the plenitude of power were bound to employ it. By
axiomatic simplicity more than by sustained argument Sieyes mastered
his hearers.
V
THE TENNIS-COURT OATH
We saw last week that much time was spent in fruitless negotiation
which ended in a deadlock--the Commons refusing to act except in
conjunction with the other orders, and the others insisting on the
separate action which had been prescribed by their instructions and by
the king.
The Commons altered their policy under the influence of Sieyes, who
advised that they should not wait for the others, but should proceed
in their absence. In his famous pamphlet he had argued that they were
really the nation, and had the right on their side. And his theory was
converted into practice, because it now appeared that they had not
only the right, but the power. They knew it, because the clergy were
wavering. Thursday, June 18, the day after the proclamation of the
National Assembly, was a festival. On Friday the clergy divided on the
question of joining. The proposal was negatived, but twelve of its
opponents stated that they would be on the other side if the vote in
common extended only to the verification of returns. The minority at
once accepted the condition, and so became the majority. Others
thereupon acceded, and by six o'clock in the evening 149 ecclesiastics
recorded their votes for the Commons. That 19th of June is a decisive
date, for then the priests went over to the Revolution. The Commons,
by a questionable and audacious act, had put themselves wrong with
everybody when the inferior clergy abandoned the cause of privilege
and came to their rescue.
The dauphin had lately died, and the royal family were living in
retirement at Marly. At ten o'clock in the evening of the vote, the
Archbishops of Paris and Rouen arrived there, described the event to
the king, and comforted him by saying that the prelates, all but four,
had remained true to their order. They were followed by a very
different visitor, whom it behoved the king to hear, for he was a man
destined to hold the highest offices of State under many governments,
to be the foremost minister of the republic, the empire, and the
monarchy, to predominate over European sovereigns at Vienna, over
European statesmen in London, and to be universally feared, and hated,
and admired, as the most sagacious politician in the world.
Talleyrand came to Marly at dead of night, and begged a secret
audience of the king. He was not a favourite at court. He had obtained
the see of Autun only at the request of the assembled clergy of
France, and when the pope selected him for a cardinal's hat, Lewis
prevented his nomination. He now refused to see him, and sent him to
his brother. The Count d'Artois was in bed, but the bishop was his
friend, and was admitted. He said it was necessary that the Government
should act with vigour. The conduct of the Assembly was illegal and
foolish, and would ruin the monarchy unless the States-General were
dissolved. Talleyrand would undertake, with his friends, some of whom
came with him and were waiting below, to form a new administration.
The Assembly, compromised and discredited by the recent outbreak,
would be dismissed, a new one would be elected on an altered
franchise, and a sufficient display of force would prevent resistance.
Talleyrand proposed to reverse the policy of Necker, which he thought
feeble and vacillating, and which had thrown France into the hands of
Sieyes. With a stronger grasp he meant to restore the royal
initiative, in order to carry out the constitutional changes which the
nation expected.
The count put on his clothes, and carried the matter to the king. He
detested Necker with his concessions, and welcomed the prospect of
getting rid of him for a minister of his own making taken from his own
circle. He came back with a positive refusal. Then Talleyrand,
convinced that it was henceforth vain to serve the king, gave notice
that every man must be allowed to shift for himself; and the count
admitted that he was right. They remembered that interview after
twenty-five years of separation, when one of the two held in his hands
the crown of France, which the other, in the name of Lewis XVIII.,
came to receive from him.
The king repulsed Talleyrand because he had just taken a momentous
resolution. The time had arrived which Necker had waited for, the time
to interpose with a Constitution so largely conceived, so exactly
defined, so faithfully adapted to the deliberate wishes of the people,
as to supersede and overshadow the Assembly, with its perilous tumult
and its prolonged sterility. He had proposed some such measure early
in May, when it was rejected, and he did not insist. But now the
policy unwisely postponed was clearly opportune. Secret advice came
from liberal public men, urging the danger of the crisis, and the
certainty that the Assembly would soon hurry to extremes. Mirabeau
himself deplored its action, and Malouet had reason to expect a
stouter resistance to the revolutionary argument and the sudden
ascendency of Sieyes. The queen in person, and influential men at
court, entreated Necker to modify his constitutional scheme; but he
was unshaken, and the king stood by him. It was decided that the
comprehensive measure intended to distance and annul the Assembly
should be proclaimed from the throne on the following Monday.