destroyed more solid structures than that unsubstantial phantom. The
plan was statesmanlike, and it marks the summit of Necker's career.
But he neglected to communicate with men whom he might well have
trusted, and the secret was fatal, for it was kept twelve hours too
long. As the princes had refused the use of their riding-school, there
were only three buildings dedicated to the States-General, instead of
four, and the Commons, by reason of their numbers, occupied the great
hall where the opening ceremony was held, and which had now to be made
ready for the royal sitting.
Very early in the morning of Saturday, June 20, the president of the
Assembly, the astronomer Bailly, received notice from the master of
ceremonies that the hall was wanted, in order to be prepared for
Monday, and that the meetings of the Commons were meanwhile suspended
for that day. Bailly was not taken by surprise, for a friend, who went
about with his eyes open, had warned him of what was going on. But the
Assembly had formally adjourned to that day, the members were
expecting the appointed meeting, and the message came too late. Bailly
deemed that it was a studied insult, the angry retort of Government,
and the penalty of the recent vote, and he inferred, most erroneously
as we know, that the coming speech from the throne would be hostile.
Therefore he gave all the solemnity he could to the famous scene that
ensued. Appearing at the head of the indignant deputies, he was denied
admission. The door was only opened that he might fetch his papers,
and the National Assembly that represented France found itself, by
royal command, standing outside on the pavement, at the hour fixed for
its deliberations.
At that instant the doubts and divisions provoked by the overriding
logic of Sieyes disappeared. Moderate and Revolutionist felt the same
resentment, and had the same sense of being opposed by a power that
was insane. There were some, and Sieyes among them, who proposed that
they should adjourn to Paris. But a home was found in the empty Tennis
Court hard by. There, with a view to baffle dangerous designs, and
also to retrieve his own waning influence, Mounier assumed the lead.
He moved that they should bind themselves by oath never to separate
until they had given a Constitution to France; and all the deputies
immediately swore it, save one, who added "Dissentient" to his name,
and who was hustled out by a backdoor, to save him from the fury of
his colleagues. This dramatic action added little to that which had
been done three days earlier. The deputies understood that a
Constituent Assembly must be single, that the legislative power had,
for the purpose, been transferred to them, and could not be restrained
or recalled. Their authority was not to be limited by an upper house,
for both upper houses were absorbed; nor by the king, for they
regarded neither his sanction nor his veto; nor by the nation itself,
for they refused, by their oath, to be dissolved.
The real event of the Tennis Court was to unite all parties against
the crown, and to make them adopt the new policy of radical and
indefinite change, outdoing what Sieyes himself had done. The
mismanagement of the court drove its friends into the van of the
movement. The last Royalist defender of safe measures had vanished
through the backdoor.
Malouet had tendered a clause saving the royal power; but it was
decided not to put it, lest it should be refused. Mirabeau, in whose
eyes the decree of the 17th portended civil war, now voted,
reluctantly, with the rest.
Whilst the Assembly held its improvised and informal meeting at
Versailles, the king sat in council at Marly on Necker's magnanimous
proposal. After a struggle, and with some damaging concessions, the
minister carried his main points. They were gathering their papers,
and making ready to disperse, when a private message was brought to
the king. He went out, desiring them to wait his return. Montmorin
turned to Necker and said, "It is the queen, and all is over." The
king came back, and adjourned the council to Monday at Versailles. And
it was in this way that the report of what had happened that morning
told upon the Government, and the enthusiasm of the Tennis Court
frustrated the pondered measures of the most liberal minister in
Europe. For it was, in truth, the queen, and in that brief interval it
was decreed that France, so near the goal in that month of June,
should wade to it through streams of blood during the twenty-five most
terrible years in the history of Christian nations.
The council of ministers, which was adjourned in consequence of the
meeting in the Tennis Court, went over to the _noblesse_, and restored
in their interest the principles of the old regime. It resolved that
the king should rescind the recent acts of the Assembly; should
maintain inviolate the division of orders, allowing the option of
debate in common only in cases where neither privilege nor the
Constitution were affected; that he should confirm feudal rights and
even fiscal immunities, unless voluntarily abandoned, and should deny
admission to public employment irrespective of class. Necker's
adversaries prevailed, and the ancient bulwarks were set up again, in
favour of the aristocracy.
Still, a portion of the great scheme was preserved, and the
concessions on the part of the crown were such that some weeks earlier
they would have been hailed with enthusiasm, and the consistent logic
of free institutions exercises a coercive virtue that made many think
that the King's Speech of June 23 ought to have been accepted as the
greater charter of France. That was the opinion of Arthur Young; of
Gouverneur Morris, who had given the final touches to the American
Constitution; of Jefferson, the author of the _Declaration of
Independence_; and afterwards even of Sieyes himself.
On this account, Necker wavered to the last moment, and on the Tuesday
morning prepared to attend the king. His friends, his family, his
daughter, the wonder of the age, made him understand that he could not
sanction by his presence, at a solemn crisis, an act which reversed
one essential half of his policy. He dismissed his carriage, took off
his court suit, and left the vacant place to proclaim his fall. That
evening he sent in his resignation. His significant absence; the
peremptory language of the king; the abrogation of their decrees,
which was effectual and immediate, while the compensating promises
were eventual, and not yet equivalent to laws; the avowed resolve to
identify the Crown with the nobles, struck the Assembly with
consternation. The removal of the constitutional question to the list
of matters to be debated separately was, in the existing conditions
of antagonism, the end of free government. And indeed the position
occupied by the king was untenable, because the division of orders
into three Houses had already come to an end. For on Monday the 22nd,
in the Church of St. Lewis, 149 ecclesiastical deputies, the
Archbishops of Bordeaux and Vienne at their head, had joined the
Commons. It was a step which they were legally authorised and
competent to take, and the Revolution now had a majority not only of
individual votes, but of orders. It was a forlorn hope, therefore, to
separate them by compulsion.
Lewis XVI. ended by declaring that he was determined to accomplish the
happiness of his people, and that if the deputies refused to
co-operate he would accomplish it alone; and he charged them to
withdraw. The Commons were in their own House, and, with the majority
of the clergy, they resumed their seats, uncertain of the future.
Their uncertainty was all at once auspiciously relieved. Dreux Breze,
the master of ceremonies, reappeared, and as he brought a message from
the king he wore his plumed hat upon his head. With clamorous outcries
he was told to uncover, and he uttered a reply so insolent that his
son, describing the scene in public after many years, declined to
repeat his words. Therefore, when he asked whether they had heard the
king's order to depart, he received a memorable lesson. Mirabeau
exclaimed, "Yes, but if we are to be expelled, we shall yield only to
force." Breze answered, correctly, that he did not recognise Mirabeau
as the organ of the Assembly, and he turned to the president. But
Bailly rose above Mirabeau, and said, "The nation is assembled here,
and receives no orders." At these words the master of ceremonies, as
if suddenly aware of the presence of majesty, retired, walking
backwards to the door. It was at that moment that the old order
changed and made place for the new. For Sieyes, who possessed the good
gift of putting a keen edge to his thoughts, who had begun his career
in Parliament ten days before by saying, "It is time to cut the
cables," now spoke, and with superb simplicity thus defined the
position: "What you were yesterday you are now. Let us pass to the
order of the day." In this way the monarchy, as a force distinct from
a form, was not assailed, or abolished, or condemned, but passed over.
Assault, abolition, condemnation were to follow, and already there
were penetrating eyes that caught, in the distance, the first gleam of
the axe. "The king," said Mirabeau, "has taken the road to the
scaffold."
The abdication of prerogative, which the king offered on June 23, went
far; but the people demanded surrender in regard to privilege. The
Assembly, submitting to the geometrical reasoning of Sieyes and to the
surprise of the Tennis Court, had frightened him into an alliance with
the nobles, and he linked his cause to theirs. He elected to stand or
fall with interests not his own, with an order which was powerless to
help him, which could make no return for his sacrifice in their
behalf, which was unable for one hour to defend itself, and was about
to perish by its own hand. The failure of June 23 was immediately
apparent. The Assembly, having dismissed Dreux Breze, was not molested
further. Necker consented to resume office, with greatly increased
popularity. Under the influence of the royal declaration forty-seven
nobles, being a portion only of the Liberal minority, went over to the
Commons, and Talleyrand followed at the head of twenty-five prelates.
Then the king gave way. He instructed the resisting magnates to join
the National Assembly. In very sincere and solemn terms they warned
him that by such a surrender he was putting off his crown. The Count
d'Artois rejoined that the king's life would be in danger if they
persisted. There was one young nobleman rising rapidly to fame as a
gracious and impressive speaker, whom even this appeal to loyal hearts
failed to move. "Perish the monarch," cried Cazales, "but not the
monarchy!"
Lewis underwent the humiliation of revoking, on June 27, what he had
ceremoniously promulgated on the 23rd, because there was a fatal
secret. Paris was agitated, and the people promised the deputies to
stand by them at their need. But what could they effect at Versailles
against the master of so many legions? Just then a mutiny broke out in
the French guards, the most disciplined body of troops in the capital,
and betrayed the key to the hollow and unstable counsels of the
Government. The army could not be trusted. Necker suspected it as
early as February. In the last week of June, the English, Prussian,
and Venetian envoys report that the crown was disabled because it was
disarmed. The regiments at hand would not serve against the national
representatives. It was resolved to collect faithful bands of Swiss,
Alsatians, and Walloons. Ten foreign regiments, near 30,000 men in
all, were hurried to the scene. They were the last hope of royalism.
Trusty friends were informed that the surrender was only to last until
the frontier garrisons could be brought to Versailles. D'Artois
confided to one of them that many heads must fall. And he uttered the
sinister proverb which became historic in another tragedy: If you want
an omelette you must not be afraid of breaking eggs.
VI
THE FALL OF THE BASTILLE
After the dramatic intervention of the Marquis de Breze, the king's
speech of June 23 was never seriously considered by the Assembly. Yet
the concessions, which it made to the spirit of political progress,
satisfied philosophic observers, and there had been no time in English
history where changes so extensive, proceeding from the Crown, would
have failed to conciliate the people. It was a common belief in those
days, expressly sanctioned by the Economists, that secondary
liberties, carried far enough, are worth more than formal securities
for the principle of self-government. One is of daily use and
practical advantage; the other is of the domain of theory, dubiously
beneficial, and without assurance of enlightenment and justice. A
wise, honest, and intelligent administration gives more to men than
the established reign of uncertain opinion. These arguments had more
weight with philosophers than with the deputies, for it was already
decided that they must make the Constitution. All the king offered,
and a great deal more, they intended to take. Much that he insisted on
preserving they were resolved to destroy. The offer, at its best, was
vitiated by the alloy: for the most offensive privileges, immunities,
and emoluments of rank were to be perpetuated, and it was against
these that the fiercest force of the revolutionary movement was
beating. In order that they might be abolished, the nation tendered
its indefeasible support, its unconquerable power, to its
representatives.
If the Assembly, content with the advantage gained over the king, had
surrendered unconditionally to the nobles, and assented, for a few
political reforms, to the social degradation of the democracy, they
would have betrayed their constituents. On that consideration they
were compelled to act. They acted also on the principle, which was not
new, which came down indeed from mediaeval divines, but which was newly
invested with universal authority, that the law is not the will of the
sovereign that commands, but of the nation that obeys. It was the very
marrow of the doctrine that obstruction of liberty is crime, that
absolute authority is not a thing to be consulted, but a thing to be
removed, and that resistance to it is no affair of interest or
convenience, but of sacred obligation. Every drop of blood shed in the
American conflict was shed in a cause immeasurably inferior to theirs,
against a system more legitimate by far than that of June 23. Unless
Washington was an assassin, it was their duty to oppose, if it might
be, by policy, if it must be, by force, the mongrel measure of
concession and obstinacy which the Court had carried against the
proposals of Necker. That victory was reversed, and the success of the
Commons was complete. They had brought the three orders into one; they
had compelled the king to retract his declaration and to restore his
disgraced minister; they had exposed the weakness of their oppressors,
and they had the nation at their back.
On June 27, in the united Assembly, Mirabeau delivered an address of
mingled triumph and conciliation, which was his first act of
statesmanship. He said that the speech from the throne contained large
and generous views that proved the genuine liberality of the king. He
desired to receive them gratefully without the drawbacks imposed by
unthinking advisers, and to respect the just rights of the _noblesse_.
He took the good without the evil, extricating Lewis from his
entanglement, and tracing the line by which he might have advanced to
great results. "The past," he said, "has been the history of wild
beasts. We are inaugurating the history of men; for we have no weapon
but discussion, and no adversary but prejudice."
Their victory brought loss as well as gain to the Commons, and there
was reason to think that the counsel of Sieyes, to let the other
orders take their own separate course, was founded on wisdom. Their
opponents, joining under compulsion, had the means as well as the will
of doing them injury.
For the clergy there was a brief season of popular favour. The country
priests, sprung from the peasantry, and poorly off, shared many of
their feelings. The patronage of the State went to men of birth; and
one of these, the Archbishop of Aix, had proclaimed his belief that,
if anybody was to be exempt from taxation, it ought to be the
impoverished layman, not the wealthy ecclesiastic. When it chanced
that the Committee of Constitution was elected without any member of
the clergy upon it, the Commons raised a cry that they should be
introduced in their proportion. They, in a fraternal spirit, refused.
And the second Committee, the one that actually drew up the scheme,
was composed of three churchmen to five laymen. The nobles were not
reconciled, and refused to unite with men of English views in a Tory
party. To them, the separation of orders was a fundamental maxim of
security, which they had inherited, which they were bound to hand
down. They looked on debate in common as provisional, as an exception,
to be rectified as soon as might be. They kept up the practice of also
meeting separately. On July 3 there were one hundred and thirty-eight
present; and on the 11th there still were eighty. They refused to vote
in the divisions of the joint Assembly, because their instructions
forbade. The scruple was sincere, and was shared by Lafayette; but
others meant it as a protest that the Assembly was not lawfully
constituted. Therefore, July 7, Talleyrand moved to annul the
instructions. They could not be allowed to control the Assembly; they
ought not to influence individuals. The constituencies contribute to a
decision; they cannot resist it. Whatever the original wish of the
electors, the final act belonged to the legislature. The king himself,
on June 27, had declared the imperative mandates unconstitutional.
But the deputies, in declaring themselves permanent, had cut
themselves adrift from their constituents. The instructions had become
the sole security that the Constitution would remain within the limits
laid down by the nation, the sole assurance against indefinite change.
They alone determined the line of advance, and gave protection to
monarchy, property, religion, against the headlong rush of opinion,
and the exigencies of popular feeling.
Sieyes, who expected no good from the co-operation of the orders which
he condemned, and who thought a nobleman or prelate who did not vote
better than one who voted wrong, urged that the question did not
affect the Assembly, but the constituencies, and might be left to
them. He carried his amendment by seven hundred to twenty-eight.
Meantime the party that had prevailed on June 23 and had succumbed on
the 27th was at work to recover the lost position. Lewis had retained
the services of Necker, without dismissing the colleagues who baffled
him. He told him that he would not accept his resignation now, but
would choose the time for it. Necker had not the acuteness to
understand that he would be dismissed as soon as his enemies felt
strong enough to do without him. A king who deserted his friends and
reversed his accepted policy because there was no force he could
depend on, was a king with a short shrift before him. He became the
tool of men who did not love him, and who now despised him.
The resources wanting at the critical moment were, however, within
reach, and the scheme proposed to the Count d'Artois by the wily
bishop a few nights before was revived by less accomplished plotters.
On July 1 it became known that a camp of 25,000 men was to be formed
near Versailles under Marshal de Broglie, a veteran who gathered his
laurels in the Seven Years' War, and soon the Terrace was crowded with
officers from the north and east, who boasted that they had sharpened
their sabres, and meant to make short work of the ambitious lawyers,
the profligate noblemen, and unfrocked priests who were ruining the
country.
In adopting these measures the king did not regard himself as the
originator of violence. There had been disturbances in Paris, and at
Versailles the archbishop of Paris had been assaulted, and compelled
to promise that he would go over to the Assembly. The leader on the
other side, Champion de Cice, archbishop of Bordeaux, came to him, and
entreated him not to yield to faction, not to keep a promise extorted
by threats. He replied that he had given his word and meant to keep
it.
Forty years later Charles X. declared that his brother had mounted the
scaffold because, at this juncture, he would not mount his horse. In
truth Lewis believed that the deputies, cut off from Paris by visible
battalions, would be overawed, that the army of waverers would be
accessible to influence, to promises, remonstrances, and rewards, that
it would be safer to coerce the Assembly by intimidation than to
dissolve it. He had refused to listen to Talleyrand; he still rejected
the stronger part of his scheme. By judicious management he hoped that
the Assembly might be brought to undo its own usurping and unwarranted
work, and that he would be able to recover the position he had taken
up on June 23, the last day on which his policy had been that of a
free agent.
Necker knew no more than everybody else of the warlike array. On July
7 thirty regiments were concentrated; more were within a few days'
march, and the marshal, surrounded by an eager and hurried staff,
surveyed his maps of suburban Paris at his headquarters at Versailles.
The peril grew day by day, and it was time for the Assembly to act.
They were defenceless, but they relied on the people of Paris and on
the demoralisation of the army. Their friends had the command of
money, and large sums were spent in preparing the citizens for an
armed conflict. For the capitalists were on their side, looking to
them to prevent the national bankruptcy which the Court and the nobles
were bringing on. And the Palais Royal, the residence of the Duke of
Orleans, was the centre of an active organisation. Since the king had
proved himself incompetent, helpless, and insincere, men had looked to
the Duke as a popular prince of the Blood, who was also wealthy and
ambitious, and might avail to save the principle of monarchy, which
Lewis had discredited. His friends clung to the idea, and continued to
conspire in his interest after the rest of the world had been repelled
by the defects of his character. For a moment they thought of his son,
who was gifted for that dangerous part as perfectly as the father was
unfit, but his time was to be in a later generation.
The leading men in the Assembly knew their position with accuracy, and
did not exaggerate the danger they were in. On July 10 their shrewd
American adviser, Morris, wrote: "I think the crisis is past without
having been perceived; and now a free Constitution will be the certain
result." And yet there were 30,000 men, commanded by a marshal of
France, ready for action; and several regiments of Swiss, famed for
fidelity and valour, and destined, in the same cause, to become still
more famous, were massed in Paris itself under Besenval, the trusted
soldier of the Court.
On July 8, breaking through the order of debate, Mirabeau rose and the
action began--the action which changed the face of the world, and the
imperishable effects of which will be felt by every one of us, to the
last day of his life. He moved an address to the king, warning him
that, if he did not withdraw his troops, the streets of Paris would
run blood; and proposing that the preservation of order should be
committed to a civic guard. On the following day the Assembly voted
the address, and on the 10th the Count de Clermont Tonnerre, at the
head of a deputation, read it to the king. On the morning of Saturday,
11th, his reply was communicated to the Assembly. He had had three
days to hasten his military preparations. At Paris, the agitators and
organisers employed the time in arranging their counter measures.